Patient zero
Donald Trump is patient zero* in an ongoing international “catastrophic trend”, the epidemic of violent white nationalist racism. The murderous attacks this weekend against two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, perpetrated by an Australian who praised Donald Trump as a champion of “white identity and purpose”, is the latest indication of the spread of the contagion.
A long, highly informative article that appeared in the New York Times Magazine on November 3, 2018, included a long list of acts of extremist violence. The common thread? They all took place after Donald Trump and his message of hatred burst onto the national political arena.
No doubt, similar incidents occurred before Trump. White supremacy is foundational to the United States, present since the creation. Like the flu, spasms of white supremacy have come and gone usually inflicting a limited number of casualties. Occasionally, a particularly virulent strain of the influence comes around bringing catastrophe. It last happened in 1917-1918; 50 million died worldwide and 650,000 in the United States.
Surges of white supremacy and xenophobia have a similar ebb and flow. The last big spike happened in 1924, when the National Quotas Immigration Act was passed. The purpose was to stop the immigration of non-Anglo Saxons cold, and it did that for more than four decades. It was the most successful anti-diversity program in American history, an experiment in ethnic cleansing lite. The percentage of foreign-born people in the United States plummeted and ethnic diversity declined.
That’s the model for the anti-immigration movement that supports Donald Trump. His agenda is entirely consistent with that of the organized xenophobes. But Trump’s purposes and tactics go beyond garden-variety anti-immigration advocacy. His modus operandi consists of agitation, incitement, and the celebration of violence. It bears all the marks of fascism. His racist attitudes are global, encompassing Haiti, the entire African continent, and numerous other “shithole countries.”
Donald Trump and his virulent administration of bigots, sycophants, opportunists, robber barons, and cowards is our 1924 moment and more. The emergence of Donald Trump, Patient 1 in my epidemiological model of the spread of white supremacist violence, was “the first incident in the onset of a catastrophic trend.” In this case the catastrophic trend is not the spread of HIV but the rise and growth of a loosely organized white supremacy International, like the kind of religion in which anyone can create his or her own church. There is no way to neutralize a many-headed movement by decapitating it.
This International lacks the discipline and coherence of the Soviet-led Communist International. On the other hand, it has access to the whole range of cutting-edge communications technology, from email to the capacity to show a massacre on social media as it is happening.
The violent right has another major advantage. The top lines in the NYT article referenced above explain it succinctly:
For two decades, domestic counterterrorism strategy has ignored the rising danger of far-right extremism. In the atmosphere of willful indifference, a virulent movement has grown and metastasized.
The following incident provides a closeup of what this law enforcement failure means on the ground.
“The first indication to Lt. Dan Stout that law enforcement’s handling of white supremacy was broken came in September 2017, as he was sitting in an emergency-operations center in Gainesville, Fla., preparing for the onslaught of Hurricane Irma and watching what felt like his thousandth YouTube video of the recent violence in Charlottesville, Va. Jesus Christ, he thought, studying the footage in which crowds of angry men, who had gathered to attend or protest the Unite the Right rally, set upon one another with sticks and flagpole spears and flame throwers and God knows what else…. The Virginia state troopers, inexplicably, stood by and watched. Stout fixated on this image, wondering what kind of organizational failure had led to the debacle. He had one month to ensure that the same thing didn’t happen in Gainesville.”
The Virginia state troopers impervious to the mayhem around them were following the example of a higher authority. On Saturday, speaking scant hours after the massacre in New Zealand where an Islamophobic extremist killed 49 people at two Mosques, President Donald Trump said he did not believe white nationalism was a growing global threat and dismissed it as the work a small group of individuals with serious problems. Asked whether she agreed with President Trump’s assessment, Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s Prime Minister said: “No.”
* “Patient Zero was used to refer to the supposed source of HIV outbreak in the United States, but the term has been expanded into general usage to refer to an individual identified as the first carrier of a communicable disease in a population (the primary case), or the first incident in the onset of a catastrophic trend.”
