On June 10, 2009, an 88-year-old white supremacist named James W. von Brunn walked into the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and murdered Stephen T. Johns, 39, a black special police officer who politely opened the door shortly before Dunn shot him at point blank range. Though he was wounded by return fire, Brunn went on to live another six months in federal detention awaiting determination of his competency to stand trial before he died of natural causes in January 2010. Despite the lack of a full accounting of his mental status following the attack, Brunn’s existence as a Holocaust denier and avowed white supremacist was well known prior to his assault on the national conscience. In his car, authorities found a notebook in which he’d written “You want my weapons—this is how you'll get them. The Holocaust is a lie. Obama was created by Jews. Obama does what his Jew owners tell him to do. Jews captured America's money. Jews control the mass media. The 1st Amendment is abrogated henceforth."
Beyond this crazed mayhem, the museum shooting wasn’t Brunn’s first taste of domestic terrorism. He’d already served six years in federal prison after he was convicted for walking into the Federal Reserve with a handgun and threatening to take the members of its board of governors hostage in December 1981. His manifesto at the time revealed that he “hoped his actions would lead to the deportation of all Jews and black people from "the white nations" of the world”. Though his exact motives were never fully described before his death, Brunn’s attack on the Holocaust Museum came just five days after the newly inaugurated first black president visited the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany, becoming the first U.S. president to ever do so. Given his proudly stated ideology, it is hard to imagine that Brunn had any motive or agenda aside from terroristic violence in response to a world unfolding before him that didn’t fit his worldview.
As we stand on the precipice of the inauguration of a man who is actively filling his inner circle with white supremacists, anti-Semites, and Islamophobes, America is now faced with asking itself how it got itself into this mess—and not just how we got into it but whether it should be called “alt-right,” Nazism, or white nationalism when we discuss it, to be more precise. Despite the fact that hate groups have grown by 813 percent since the election of President Obama in 2008, and the reality that we are now more than seven times as likely to be killed by white right-wing extremists than ISIS, we remain paralytically apprehensive about discussing the propaganda that has wrought our current predicament.
If you haven't yet had the honor of visiting the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, I wholeheartedly suggest you take part in the pilgrimage. Words cannot capture the solemnity of the smell; the mere distillation of horror into such a serene space is eerily spiritual. It is designed in such a way that you learn the tragic history chronologically, from the rise of a tyrant to the genocide of millions. Long before you're faced with visual, tangible evidence of the atrocities, you're taken on a journey through the Nazi propaganda that built the pogrom that necessitated World War II. It is a lesson in the slow creep from soft bigotry and dog whistles, to the outright vilification and dehumanization required for approval and commission of the most heinous of inhumane acts.
It turns out that a visit to the Holocaust Museum isn't required for Americans to get a glimpse of propaganda-induced genocide. From the arrival of the Mayflower, to the Trail of Tears, to Wounded Knee, to the scourge of 400 years of slavery then lynchings and Jim Crow, to Japanese internment camps, Stonewall, Kent State, and Abu Ghraib: there is no shortage of terrorism committed in America’s name by white men. These atrocities were also done in white nationalism and white heterosexual male supremacy’s name, though we still continue to struggle at stating it explicitly. Perhaps we need a museum to tell that story.
Or perhaps we just need a competent media that is more beholden to the tragic lessons of history than the profit margin, or VIP access to the oppressive oligarchy. In the wake of 11/9, Beltway conventional wisdom now contends that fascism came to America like a thief in the night, on the wings of fake news and the lies of FBI director James Comey, not the racism and misogyny that have plagued us for centuries. Very little mind is paid to the fact that Republican and Russian propaganda were tailored specifically to white voters, who were the only demographic to have allegedly been manipulated enough by right-wing misinformation to vote in majority for Donald Trump and the cacophony of hatred riding his coattails.
Tampering aside, Trump launched his campaign by calling Mexican people rapists and threatening to ban Muslims from entering the U.S. He has also reinvigorated the Republican Southern Strategy by painting black Americans as “inner city” slum dwellers who are simply too ignorant to know what’s best for our own good. Though much of the press chooses to feign ignorance and lack of complicity in propagating propaganda after tragedy strikes, right-wing extremists like James von Brunn and Charleston shooter Dylann Roof hear the calls very clearly. In fact, since Election Day there have been more than 300 hate incidents reported, a rate much higher than was observed following 9/11.
Accordingly, on December 4, 2016, a 28-year-old white man named Edgar Maddison Welch drove to our nation’s capitol to fire shots at the famed Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in response to a conspiracy theory that has now been linked to the son of Trump’s pick for national security advisor, Gen. Michael Flynn. Per court documents, Welch “read online that the Comet restaurant was harboring child sex slaves” and he was “armed to help rescue them." He believed so fervently in the propaganda he was sold, that he was willing to take up arms and take lives in response to nothing more than pure lies. Though thankfully no lives were lost in this particular attack, as a nation we remain awash in a sea of propaganda, guns, ammo, and disgruntled white Americans who are disillusioned enough with social change to resort to violence.
Let us never forget that propaganda begets atrocity, or that the people and institutions who traffic in the former are also complicit in the latter. We can’t blame propaganda or fake news for our woes without also acknowledging the reality that misinformation thrives on the bigotry and ignorance of the people who willingly consume and sell it. History teaches us that those who fabricate reality often do so in service of remaking it in their own image or worldview. Donald Trump has shown us who and what he and his administration will be. If the extremist recipients of his propaganda have heard his message so loud and clear, why haven't we?
When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.
— Maya Angelou
