Kathleen Belew > Quotes

“Violence meant to seize and shore up power—a claim to sovereignty through the violence of the mob—is fundamentally American.”
― Kathleen Belew, Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past

“Participants in a program of Leaderless Resistance through phantom cell or individual action must know exactly what they are doing, and how to do it. It becomes the responsibility of the individual to acquire the necessary skills and information as to what needs to be done … all members of phantom cells or individuals will need to react to objective events in the same way through usual tactics of resistance. Organs of information distribution such as newspapers, leaflets, computers, etc., which are widely available to all, keep each person informed of events, allowing for a planned response that will take many variations. No one need issue an order to anyone. Those idealist[s] truly committed to the cause of freedom will act when they feel the time is ripe, or will take their cue from others who precede them.… It goes almost without saying that Leaderless Resistance leads to very small or even one man cells of resistance.36 Cell”
― Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America

“This was, make no mistake, a domestic terror attack on U.S. democracy, aimed at derailing free elections through the use of violent force.”
― Kathleen Belew, A Field Guide to White Supremacy

“In most cases, the historian has neither the training nor the access to enter this discussion. However, one can grapple with the record of speech and action to offer an approximation of a historical actor’s motives and actions.”
― Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America

“The importance of the Buchanan campaign lies not in its capacity to win the nomination or the national election but in its organization of those forces into a coherent political coalition,” he wrote. “That coalition includes the remnants of the ‘Old Right,’ as well as various single-issue constituencies (pro-lifers, anti-immigration activists, protectionists) to which Buchanan is one of the few voices to speak.” For Francis, Buchanan had begun a process that would illuminate “new social forces that only now are forming a common political consciousness”
― Kathleen Belew, A Field Guide to White Supremacy

“White power should be recognized as something broader than the Klan, encompassing a wider range of ideologies and operating simultaneously in public and underground. Such an understanding is vital lest we erroneously equate white power with covert violence and thereby ignore its significant inroads into mainstream society, which hardly came under cover of night.”
― Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America

“Thus anti-immigrant rhetoric, like other GOP talking points, lost its use value for Republicans by the mid-1990s. As Clinton strategist Mark Penn explained about his candidate’s continued success, “We did this by co-opting the Republicans on all their issues—getting tough on welfare, tough on crime, balancing the budget, and cracking down on illegal immigration.”21 Nativist politics largely lay dormant”
― Kathleen Belew, A Field Guide to White Supremacy

“But at this moment in United States political history the coconstitution of nativism and populism, held together by racial demonology, props open a door between Far Right extremists and the mainstream of U.S. politics. The intensification of domestic and global wealth disparity, the growing dysfunction of U.S. political institutions, and the long-term effects of climate catastrophe which will continue to drive refugees across the U.S. border all provide fodder for nativist populism and justification of its brutality.”
― Kathleen Belew, A Field Guide to White Supremacy

“You are the organization. You alone. You with others. It all begins with you. You are the keystone, the nucleus and intersecting point in the web. You must plan, act and believe that it all now depends upon you. You alone can triumph. You alone can endure and survive.… Five kinsmen can be a highly efficient and effective intelligence team.31”
― Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America

“One was the idea that immigrants were a direct threat to jobs and wages, allowing racist populists to talk about the rights of American workers.”
― Kathleen Belew, A Field Guide to White Supremacy

“The culmination of the Trumpist GOP–Far Right alliance occurred on January 6, 2021, when hundreds of violent protestors stormed the U.S. Capitol to prevent the certification of the presidential election results.33 Trump mostly used populist performance in daily White House press briefings and on Twitter to rebuff expert knowledge and epidemiological protocols coming from the World Health Organization (WHO) or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (the U.S. agency primarily responsible for pandemic response), to tout untested treatments like the antimalarial drug Hydroxchloroquine, to refuse to wear a mask, to call for the “liberation” of states from lockdown orders, and to ratchet up nationalism and nativism.”
― Kathleen Belew, A Field Guide to White Supremacy

“A long summer of peaceful mass protests against racist policing and systemic racism followed, escalating into rioting and looting in some cities. At many of these riots, militant-right activists ranging from antigovernment to white power militants delivered bombs, incendiary devices, and weapons to escalate peaceful demonstrations into confrontation with the militarized police forces. They assassinated law enforcement officers, plotted attacks on civil protests, and launched a major and coordinated attack on American communities.”
― Kathleen Belew, A Field Guide to White Supremacy

“Institutional practice as well as individual prejudice continued to foster inequality. As historians have shown, the draft disproportionately targeted poor black communities, and was also used as a punitive measure to send black race rioters to war in order to quell domestic dissent.”
― Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America

“The founding documents of the United States promised life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness not for all, but for white, property-owning men.”
― Kathleen Belew, A Field Guide to White Supremacy

“People may hear ‘white nationalism’ and assume it to be adjacent with patriotism, or at the very least consider it as pro-American. But after 1983 the nation at the heart of white nationalism was not the United States but rather the Aryan nation, imagined as a transnational polity of white people who would need to be saved from extermination through race war and violence. This is a fundamentally more violent and radical position than that implied by ‘nationalism.”
― Kathleen Belew, Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past

“White supremacy is a complex web of ideology, systems, privileges, and personal beliefs that create unequal outcomes along racial lines across multiple categories of life including wealth, freedom, health, and happiness.”
― Kathleen Belew, A Field Guide to White Supremacy

“right-wing populist rhetoric, immigrants take jobs, opportunities, and basic social goods away from hardworking native-born white Americans.”
― Kathleen Belew, A Field Guide to White Supremacy

“They often described enemies and allies as indistinguishable”
― Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America

“included white power armed militants, disgruntled military veterans, QAnon conspiracy proponents, radical evangelicals, and fervent members of the Trump base, arrived by the thousands.”
― Kathleen Belew, A Field Guide to White Supremacy

“War is not neatly contained in the space and time legitimated by the state. It reverberates in other terrains and lasts long past armistice. It comes home in ways bloody and unexpected.”
― Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America

“House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home.”
― Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America

“Survey data at the time indicated that belief in birtherism correlates strongly with high levels of racial resentment. Even by the middle of his second term, up to a third of U.S. citizens believed that Obama either was born abroad or might have been.22 At the same moment, nativist populism”
― Kathleen Belew, A Field Guide to White Supremacy

“Although in this case it is an understandable, emotional reaction meant to decry antidemocratic violence, the notion that January 6 is 'not who we are' is one manifestation of what has become a regularly deployed Republican Party and right-wing media strategy: to deny the workings of overt and violent racist activism even when those actions threaten American citizens and democracy itself.”
― Kathleen Belew, Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past

“In the language of “Middle America” and the “Silent Majority,” Trump linked anti-immigrant politics to issues of middle- and working-class economic anxiety, deindustrialization, political powerlessness, and a sense of declining self-worth among white men.”
― Kathleen Belew, A Field Guide to White Supremacy

“is precisely the work of the historian to assemble an account based upon the information available, even if it is scattered, incomplete, and sometimes contradictory.”
― Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America

“The story of white power as a social movement exposes something broader about the enduring impact of state violence in America. It reveals one catastrophic ricochet of the Vietnam War, in the form of its paramilitary aftermath. It also reveals something important about war itself. War is not neatly contained in the space and time legitimated by the state. It reverberates in other terrains and lasts long past armistice. It comes home in ways bloody and unexpected.”
― Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America

“Immigrants were depicted as outside invaders assaulting American culture, language, and institutions. As such, nativism brought the issue of nationalism to the center of right-wing populism in a way that had not been present before. Domestically, it meant that the American nation had to defend itself and its borders from nonwhite others who would destroy it. Internationally, it meant isolationism and an embrace of nationalisms elsewhere.”
― Kathleen Belew, A Field Guide to White Supremacy

“The insurrection was meant not as a mass casualty attack, but as a show of force, to prove that a band of white self-proclaimed “patriots” could strike at the heart of democracy. As we untangle the relationships between groups and activists, between lawmakers and police who aided and abetted their cause, and between competing narratives of the event, our only hope of confronting this threat to the idea of America is in better understanding our history.”
― Kathleen Belew, A Field Guide to White Supremacy

“Trump wove together a vivid racialized and gendered conspiracy theory that links immigration, Islam, crime, socialism, and the Democratic Party in one associative chain. This demonization was not new. It fit squarely within what the late political theorist Michael Rogin called the “countersubversive tradition” in the United States—a persecutory fantasy centered on the imagined destructive power of women, immigrants, communists, and people of color that has been used to justify extraordinary violence and repression.31”
― Kathleen Belew, A Field Guide to White Supremacy