Monday, April 30, 2018

ANS -- he Corporate Plan to Groom U.S. Kids for Servitude by Wiping Out Public Schools

Most of us, most of the time, look at what is happening in front of us.  We don't see the big picture as readily.  This is about the big picture, that plan to return us to feudalism.  Yes, it's a deliberate plan (see Lewis Powell).  Power corrupts.  there's a good discussion in the comments about education.  
--Kim



The Corporate Plan to Groom U.S. Kids for Servitude by Wiping Out Public Schools


Training first-world children for a third-world life 

It was the strike heard 'round the country.

West Virginia's public school teachers had endured years of low pay, inadequate insurance, giant class sizes, and increasingly unlivable conditions—including attempts to force them to record private details of their health daily on a wellness app. Their governor, billionaire coal baron Jim Justice, pledged to allow them no more than an annual 1% raise—effectively a pay cut considering inflation—in a state where teacher salaries ranked 48th lowest out of 50 states. In February 2018, they finally revolted: In a tense, nine-day work stoppage, they managed to wrest a 5% pay increase from the state. Teachers in Oklahoma and Kentucky have now revolted in similar protests.

It's the latest battle in a contest between two countervailing forces: one bent on reengineering America for the benefit of the wealthy, the other struggling to preserve dignity and security for ordinary people.

If the story turns out the way the Jim Justices desire, the children of a first-world country will henceforth be groomed for a third-world life.

Gordon Lafer, Associate Professor at the Labor Education and Research Center at the University of Oregon, and Peter Temin, Professor Emeritus of Economics at MIT, help illuminate why this is happening, who is behind it, and what's at stake as the educational system that once united Americans and prepared them for a life of social and economic mobility is wiped out of existence.

The Plan: Lower People's Expectations

When Lafer began to study the tsunami of corporate-backed legislation that swept the country in early 2011 in the wake of Citizens United—the 2010 Supreme Court decision that gave corporations the green light to spend unlimited sums to influence the political system—he wasn't yet clear what was happening. In state after state, a pattern was emerging of highly coordinated campaigns to smash unions, shrink taxes for the wealthy, and cut public services. Headlines blamed globalization and technology for the squeeze on the majority of the population, but Lafer began to see something far more deliberate working behind the scenes: a hidden force that was well-funded, laser-focused, and astonishingly effective.

Lafer pored over the activities of business lobbying groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) – funded by giant corporations including Walmart, Amazon.com, and Bank of America—that produces "model legislation" in areas its conservative members use to promote privatization. He studied the Koch network, a constellation of groups affiliated with billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch. (Koch Industries is the country's second-largest private company with business including crude oil supply and refining and chemical production). Again and again, he found that corporate-backed lobbyists were able to subvert the clear preferences of the public and their elected representatives in both parties. Of all the areas these lobbyists were able to influence, the policy campaign that netted the most laws passed, featured the most big players, and boasted the most effective organizations was public education. For these U.S. corporations, undermining the public school system was the Holy Grail.

After five years of research and the publication of The One Percent Solution, Lafer concluded that by lobbying to make changes like increasing class sizes, pushing for online instruction, lowering accreditation requirements for teachers, replacing public schools with privately-run charters, getting rid of publicly elected school boards and a host of other tactics, Big Business was aiming to dismantle public education.  

The grand plan was even more ambitious. These titans of business wished to completely change the way Americans and their children viewed their life potential. Transforming education was the key.

The lobbyists and associations perfected cover stories to keep the public from knowing their real objectives.  Step one was to raise fears about an American educational crisisthat did not, in fact, exist. Lafer notes, for example, that the reading and math scores of American students have remained largely unchanged for forty years. Nonetheless, the corporate-backed alarmists worked to convince the public that the school system was in dire condition.

Step two was to claim that unproven reforms to fix the fictional crisis, like online learning, were sure to improve outcomes, despite the fact that such schemes go directly against hard evidence for what works in education and deny students the socialization that is crucial to a child's progress. Sometimes the reformers said the changes were needed because of budget deficits; other times, they claimed altruistic aims to improve the quality schools.

In Lafer's view, their strategy had little to do with either.

The Motivation: Keep the Masses Down as Inequality Rises

It's one thing for big businesses to be anti-worker and anti-union, but also anti-student? Why would business lobbies deliberately strive to create what amounts to widespread education failure?

It's not hard to see how certain sectors in the corporate world, like the producers of online learning platforms and content, could cash in. But it's harder to fathom why corporate leaders who don't stand to make money directly would devote so much time and attention to making sure, for example, that no public high school student in the state of Florida could take home a diploma without taking an online course. (Yes, that's now law in the Sunshine State).

It's about more than short-term cash. While Lafer acknowledges that there are legitimate debates among people with different ideological positions or pedagogical views, he thinks big corporations are actually more worried about something far more pragmatic: how to protect themselves from the masses as they engineer rising economic inequality.

"One of the ways I think that they try to avoid a populist backlash is by lowering everybody's expectations of what we have a right to demand as citizens," says Lafer. "When you think about what Americans think we have a right to, just by living here, it's really pretty little. Most people don't think you have a right to healthcare or a house. You don't necessarily have a right to food and water. But people think you have a right to have your kids get a decent education."

Not for long, if Big Business has its way. In President Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, they have dedicated partners in redirecting public resources to unregulated, privately owned and operated schools. Such privatization plans, many critics say, will reinforce and amplify America's economic inequality.

U.S. public schools, which became widespread in the 1800s, were promoted with the idea that putting students from families of different income levels together—though not black Americans and other racial minorities until the 1950s—would instill a common sense of citizenship and national identity. But today, large corporations are scoring huge successes in replacing this system with a two-tiered model and a whole new notion of identity.

Lafer explains that in the new system, the children of the wealthy will be taught a broad, rich curriculum in small classes led by experienced teachers. The kind of thing everybody wants for kids. But the majority of America's children will be consigned to a narrow curriculum delivered in large classes by inexperienced staff —or through digital platforms with no teachers at all.

Most kids will be trained for a life that is more circumscribed, less vibrant, and, quite literally, shorter, than what past generations have known. (Research shows that the lifespan gap between haves and have-nots is large and rapidly growing). They will be groomed for insecure service jobs that dull their minds and depress their spirits. In the words of Noam Chomsky, who recently spoke about education to the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), "students will be controlled and disciplined." Most will go to school without developing their creativity or experiencing doing things on their own.

The New Reality: Two Americas, Not One

Economist Peter Temin, former head of MIT's economics department and INET grantee, has written a book, The Vanishing Middle Class, which explains how conditions in America are becoming more like a third-world country for the bulk of its people. He agrees with Lafer that the corporate-driven war on public schools is not just about money, but also about a vision of society.

People like Betsy DeVos, he says, are following the thinking of earlier ideologues like James Buchanan, the Tennessee-born, Nobel Prize–winning economist who promoted current antigovernment politics in the 1970s. The "shut-the-government-down" obsession is really an extreme form of libertarianism, he says, if not anarchism.

Temin also agrees that shrinking the horizons of America's kids makes sense to people who follow this philosophy. "They want to exploit the lower members of the economy, and reducing their expectations makes them easier to manipulate," says Temin. "When they aren't able to go to college and get decent jobs, they become more susceptible to things like racist ideology."

In other words, dismantling the public schools is all about control.

Buchanan was an early proponent of school privatization, and while he echoed the fears and frustration many Americans felt concerning desegregation, he typically made a non-race-based case for preserving Jim Crow in a new form. He argued that the federal government should not be telling people what to do about schooling and suggested that citizens were being stripped of their freedom. But as Sam Tanenhaus points out in TheAtlantic, issues of race always lurked in the background of calls for educational freedom and "choice." In a paper he co-authored, Buchanan stated, "every individual should be free to associate with persons of his own choosing." Segregationists knew what that meant.

Policies that end up reducing educational opportunities for those who lack resources creates inequality, and economic inequality reduces support for public schools among the wealthy. It's a vicious feedback loop.

In his book, Temin describes a process that happens in countries that divide into "dual economies," a concept first outlined by West Indian economist W. Arthur Lewis, the only person of African descent to win a Nobel Prize in economics. Lewis studied developing countries where the rural population tends to serve as a reservoir of cheap labor for people in cities — a situation the top tier works very hard to maintain. Temin noticed that the Lewis model now fits the pattern emerging in the richest country in the world.

America, according to Temin, is clearly breaking down into two sectors: Roughly 20% of the population are members of what he calls the "FTE sector" (i.e., the finance, technology, and electronics sectors). These lucky people get college educations, land good jobs, enjoy social networks that enhance their success, and generally have access to enough money to meet most of life's challenges. The remaining 80% live in a world nothing like this; they live in different geographies and have different legal statuses, healthcare systems, and schools. This is the low-wage sector, where life is getting harder.

People in the low-wage sector carry debt. They worry about insecure jobs and unemployment. They get sick more often and die younger than previous generations had. If they are able go to college, they end up in debt. "While members of the first sector act," Temin has said, "these people are acted upon."

Temin traces the emergence of the U.S. dual economy to the 1970s and 80s, when civil rights advances were making a lot of Americans uneasy. People who had long been opposed to the New Deal began to find new ways to advance their agenda. The Nixon administration gave momentum to anti-government, free market fundamentalist ideologies, which gained even more support under Reagan. Gradually, as free-market programs became policy, the rich began to get richer and economic inequality began to rise. Economist Paul Krugman has called this phenomenon the "Great Divergence."

But it was still possible to move from the lower sector to the affluent sector. The path was tough, and much harder for women and people of color. Yet it existed. Through education and a bit of luck, you could develop the skills and acquire the social capital that could propel you out of the circumstances you were born into.

The dismantling of public education, as Temin sees it, will shut off that route for vastly more people. Like the privatization of prisons, which has increased incarceration rates and cut the mobility path off for more Americans, putting schools into private hands will land even more on the road to nowhere. Even those who were born into the middle class will increasingly get pushed back.

The Future: Mobilization or Bloodshed?

Temin relates that in human history, unitary economies are more the exception than the rule.

In the U.S., there was the Jim Crow era, the Gilded Age, and before that, slavery, which was an extreme form of dual economy. But from the end of WWII through the 1960s, the country began to develop a unitary economy. The idea that everybody should have opportunities became more and more widespread. But there was a backlash, and America still dealing with it.

In the Lewis model of the dual economy, there is still path to the upper sector, but Temin warns that America may be on the way to going one step further. "If you really prevent people from moving up, you get something that looks like Russia or Argentina," he says. In these two-tiered societies, life is difficult for most people. Life expectancies for all but the affluent go down.

Unfortunately, once you've developed a dual economy, getting out of it isn't pretty. Temin notes that it often happens through devastating wars. "Sometimes the kings who are all cousins turn on each other," he says. "Other times, the leaders sleepwalk into the war as Trump could possibly do with North Korea."

Such upheavals create instability that sometimes opens up the possibility of restructuring society for the benefit of more people. But it's a painful, bloody process. Political mobilization can work, but it's very hard to get various groups who are dissatisfied to join forces.

Lafer points out that we don't yet know how this story is going to turn out. "Politics remains forever contingent, never settled," he says. "The struggle between public interest and private power will continue to play out in cities and states across the country; even with the heightened influence of money in the era of Citizens United, the power of popular conviction should not be underestimated."

The teachers in West Virginia and now other states across the country have turned the anger fueled by the corporate vision of the future in a positive direction. They are fighting back, peacefully, and winning something—not just money, but a sense of dignity suited to the job of preparing the country's kids for life. It remains to be seen if the rights of the many can triumph over the selfishness of the few, and whether economic servitude will be the fate of the children of the wealthiest and most powerful country the world has ever seen.


Thursday, April 26, 2018

ANS -- Incel, the misogynist ideology that inspired the deadly Toronto attack, explained

This is something I didn't know about -- a new form of terrorism essentially.  It was behind the attack recently in Toronto that killed 10 and wounded more.  How can men who think they are owed sex accuse others of being "shallow"?
--Kim


Incel, the misogynist ideology that inspired the deadly Toronto attack, explained

Toronto attack: the scene of the crime.
 Cole Burston/Getty Images

Alek Minassian, the man who killed 10 people by driving a van down a busy street in Toronto on Monday, is a terrorist.

We know this because he told us so. On Tuesday afternoon, Facebook confirmed the authenticity of a post in his name, in which he pledged allegiance to something called the "Incel Rebellion." This is not an organized militant group but rather an ideal developed by the so-called "incel" movement — an online community of men united by their inability to convince women to have sex with them. ("Incel" stands for "involuntarily celibate.")

Some self-identified incels, as they call themselves, have developed an elaborate sociopolitical explanation for their sexual failures, one that centers on the idea that women are shallow, vicious, and only attracted to hyper-muscular men. They see this as a profound injustice against men like them, who suffer an inherent genetic disadvantage through no fault of their own. A small radical fringe believes that violence, especially against women, is an appropriate response — that an "Incel Rebellion" or "Beta [Male] Uprising" will eventually overturn the sexual status quo.

Minassian is not the first to turn these violent fantasies into reality. In 2014, a sexually frustrated man named Elliot Rodger killed six and wounded 14 in a shooting spree in Santa Barbara, California. He justified his actions in a lengthy and creepy manifesto sent to acquaintances and then widely shared online as retaliation against women as a group for refusing to provide him with the sex he is owed. This man has become a hero to many incels; the Toronto perpetrator praised him as the "Supreme Gentleman" (a term the California shooter coined for himself) in his Facebook post.

Only a tiny percentage of incels seem willing to turn to violence or terrorism, and the movement isn't a threat on the level of an al-Qaeda or ISIS. But it's a new kind of danger, a testament to the power of online communities to radicalize frustrated young men based on their most personal and painful grievances.

The Facebook post "situates the attack as extremist and terrorist," says J.M. Berger, an expert at the International Center for Counter-Terrorism in the Hague. "Misogyny isn't new, and ideological misogyny isn't new. Having a distinct movement that is primarily defined by misogyny is [fairly] novel."

Incel, explained

When we talk about "incels," we are not talking about all men who are not having sex. Instead, we are talking about a specific subculture of people in various internet forums — subreddits like r/braincels, the cruel troll chat forum 4chan, and dedicated websites like incels.me.

Beyond their shared frustration with not having sex, the incel community is not monolithic. Many of them are simply sad and lonely men, suffering from extreme social anxiety or deep depression. Some of these moderate incels actively police the extremists in their midst; in a sympathetic 2015 profile, the Washington Post's Caitlin Dewey reported that some incel forums were set up to automatically delete any posts referencing the California shooter.

But many incels have a much more sinister, and specific, worldview — one that the Southern Poverty Law Center sees as part of a dangerous trend toward male radicalization online. These incels post obsessively about so-called "Chads," meaning sexually successful and attractive men, and "Stacys," attractive, promiscuous women who sleep with the Chads. Both are positioned as unattainable: The Chad is the masculine ideal, one incel men cannot emulate for reasons of poor genetics, while the Stacy is whom every incel man wants to sleep with but cannot because they aren't a Chad.

It's this embrace of helplessness, of their certainty of their own sexual doom, that makes the more extreme incel communities so dangerous. Instead of trying to support each other and work through their issues as a group, the incels in certain communities allow their resentments to curdle. They see the world through the lens of entitlement: They are owed sex but cannot have it because women are shallow. This manifests in a deep and profound hatred for women as a group, which shows up on a very brief scan of some of the more extreme incel communities.

"I have sluts for managers," one poster on the incel.me forum wrote. "Flat bitch with no ass and loud ugly black landwhale somehow with no ass either ... both brag about all the dick they suck."

But it's not just individual women that these radical incels hate — it's society writ large, a society that allows their perceived sexual oppression to go on. The sexual revolution, in particular, comes in for hate: They believe women being freed to make their own sexual choices, rather than being married off to men and made subordinate, is the reason women can choose to sleep with attractive men and ignore the so-called incels.

This is how inceldom becomes a political doctrine: They see themselves as a class, oppressed by a social system that's rigged in favor of other men. One post on an incel subreddit compared their worldview to Marxism, with incels playing the part of the proletariat and Chad the bourgeoisie. The natural corollary of this idea is clear: If the root of the problem is an unfair social system, then there needs to be a revolution to change it.

This is where the idea of the "Incel Rebellion" that Minassian referenced comes from — sometimes called "Beta Uprising" on incel forums, a reference to beta males. There's no centralized planning, no incel equivalent to of Osama bin Laden. There are just men on various online forums celebrating violence and forming a mutually supportive echo chamber that justifies harming others, especially women, in the name of the incel uprising.

"I do not blame Alek Minassian for what he did," another poster on incels.me writes. "I blame society for treating low status men like garbage. There will always be more rampages because of the way society treats us."

Some of the reactions to the Toronto attack have been even more extreme. David Futrelle, a journalist who follows the incel movement on his site We Hunted the Mammoth, took screenshots of some of the most extreme pro-Minassian posts, in which posters call for more "ERs" (attacks like the California shooter's). Here's one of the worst ones (highlights by Futrelle):

David Futrelle

This is the stuff of terrorist incitement and recruitment. The appeal to male frustration in these communities serves, as my colleague Aja Romano has written, as a kind of gateway. Men log on to complain about their loneliness and dating failures and end up getting sucked into a community that encourages them to blame women and society for their problems. And eventually, some of them decide to do something about it.

This is a terrorist movement. What can be done about it?

Alek Minassian, toronto

Terrorism is a notoriously difficult concept to define, but the most widely accepted definition among scholars is that terrorism is a form of violence directed against civilians by a non-state actor with the goal of achieving some kind of political end. By that standard, there is no doubt that the Toronto attack fits the bill. The perpetrator wasn't taking revenge on a specific woman who wronged him; he wanted to instill terror in society writ large as a means of furthering the incel rebellion against the sexual status quo.

"Morally, it is important to recognize such acts as terrorism," Stephanie Carvin, a professor at Carleton University in Ottawa, tells me.

This is not a familiar type of terrorism. The groups we hear about the most tend to have more understandable political goals, like installing an Islamist regime or winning the right for their region to secede from a country. The incel rebellion has a much more amorphous endpoint; there's no worked-out vision for what success looks like, nor is there a chief ideologue working to come up with one. You just have a bunch of random internet forum posters pushing one another toward violence.

While extremist groups are quite commonly misogynistic and even recruit based on male sexual frustration, their ideologies almost never center on that fact. There have been mass acts of misogynistic violence before, as in the 1989 shooting at Montreal's École Polytechnique that claimed the lives of 14 women, but there wasn't a large online community providing an ideology that justified the killer's grievances. The incel turn toward violence is a unique phenomenon, at least in the modern era.

This creates a fairly difficult challenge for law enforcement agencies. On the one hand, there is a real terrorist threat from incel communities; it's clearly not all talk. On the other hand, there are serious risks that come along with having American and Canadian law enforcement officials trawling Reddit for people to arrest.

"I'm not sure national security agencies are best placed to handle places like 4chan," Carvin says. "We want to keep the law narrow enough that we aren't monitoring all different kinds of dissent."

There's also a serious identification challenge. Online communities are both full of empty talk and draped in irony, making it tough for social media companies and law enforcement officials to figure out who is a threat and who isn't.

"[The perpetrator's] post really highlights the challenges facing the social media companies. It read like a joke or nonsense," Berger, the terrorism expert, tells me. "How are you supposed to evaluate something like that?"

Does this mean we should just throw up our hands and say that the radicalization of some young men toward violent misogyny is inevitable? Of course not. Carvin suggests that social outreach programs, focusing on countering the sense of isolation that draws young men to these communities in the first place, might be a better idea than standing up a potential counter-incel task force at the FBI. (No such group is currently known to exist.)

But regardless of what the right solution is, we need to be clear-eyed about the type of challenge we're facing. The internet makes it easier than ever for sad and angry people to find each other and develop communities with weird and dangerous ideologies. What we're seeing right now is one of society's oldest hatreds, misogyny, being reworked in real time to fit a specific group of men's rage and pain.

And 10 people in Toronto just died as a result.


Monday, April 23, 2018

ANS -- The History of White Power

This is a moderately short article about the history of white terrorists in the US.  You need to know this stuff.  
--Kim



OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

The History of White Power

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The Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City after the bombing carried out in 1995 by Timothy McVeigh, an avowed white supremacist.CreditAssociated Press

When neo-Nazi and alt-right demonstrators attacked counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Va., last August, killing one and injuring several others, many Americans responded with surprise that white supremacists were suddenly in their midst. But white-power activism is not new, nor has it been part of an underground history. We knew. And we forgot.

Twenty-three years ago, on April 19, 1995, a Ryder rental truck filled with fertilizer exploded in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The bombing killed 168 people, including 19 children — the largest deliberate mass casualty event on American soil between Pearl Harbor and the Sept. 11 attacks.

And yet, in these 23 years, the bombing remains misunderstood as an example of "lone wolf" terrorism. People repeat the words of the bomber Timothy McVeigh, an avowed white-power advocate who before his execution pointed out how scary it was that one man could wreak "this kind of hell."

But in fact, the bombing was the outgrowth of decades of activism by the white-power movement, a coalition of Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, skinheads and militias, which aimed to organize a guerrilla war on the federal government and its other enemies.

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Its network of activists spanned regional, generational, gender and other divides. Membership numbers are hard to pin down, but scholars estimate that in the 1980s the movement included around 25,000 hard-core members, 160,000 more who bought white-power literature and attended movement events, and 450,000 who read the literature secondhand.

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Ku Klux Klan members in Houston in 1990.CreditBettmann Archive, via Getty Images

These hundreds of thousands of adherents were knit tightly together. As a historian of the movement, I have spent a decade connecting threads among thousands of documents, including original correspondence and ephemera of activists, government surveillance documents, court records and newspaper reports.

From the formal unification in 1979 of previously antagonistic groups under a white-power banner, through its revolutionary turn to declare war on the government in 1983, through its militia phase in the early 1990s, the white-power movement mobilized through a cohesive social network using commonly held beliefs. Its activists operated with discipline and clarity, training in paramilitary camps and undertaking assassinations, mercenary soldiering, armed robbery, counterfeiting and weapons trafficking.

White-power violence was discussed in major newspapers, on public access television, on talk shows and morning news shows, on the radio, and portrayed in television mini-series and movies. How, then, were white-power activists so misunderstood by so many Americans so that today we are once again stunned to find them marching in our streets?

One answer is Fort Smith, Ark. In 1987, prosecutors indicted 13 white supremacists on federal charges, including seditious conspiracy. Jurors heard testimony about 30 gallons of cyanide seized just before it could be used to poison the water of a major city; assassinations of a talk-radio personality, fellow group members and state troopers; and endless paramilitary training, parading and harassment of various enemies. They saw two huge laundry hampers of the movement's military-grade weapons pushed through the courtroom. Witnesses described how separatist compounds manufactured their own Claymore-style land mines and trained in urban warfare.

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But at the end of the Fort Smith trial, all 13 defendants were acquitted. Court records show that the weapons in the two laundry hampers were returned to them.

The trial was flawed from the start. Two jurors developed romantic pen-pal relationships with defendants, and one of those couples married after the trial. Large swaths of evidence were excluded, as were jurors familiar with white-power activity in the area, which had been widely reported. One juror later spoke of a belief that the Bible prohibited race mixing.

It was such an embarrassment that — along with the calamities that were also public relations disasters at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Tex., in the early 1990s — it clouded prosecutors' approach to Oklahoma City and other instances of white-power violence. Framing such acts as part of a movement, they decided, was too risky; easier to go after defendants individually.

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A car drove into counterprotesters, killing a woman, at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., last August.CreditRyan M. Kelly/The Daily Progress, via Associated Press

Indeed, the F.B.I. established a policy to pursue only individuals in white-power violence, with, according to F.B.I. internal documents, "no attempts to tie individual crimes to a broader movement." This strategy not only obscured the Oklahoma City bombing as part of a social movement but, in the years after McVeigh's execution, also effectively erased the movement itself from public awareness.

After a brief wave of copycat violence and subsequent small-scale crackdowns, white-power activism largely relocated to the internet. There, it gathered strength even as much of the country came to believe in a colorblind, multicultural or post-racial United States. But the white-power movement reveals a sustained current of overt racism and violence in the years we thought of as peaceful, one that is resurgent today.

White-power activity in the United States is not new, nor has it been as shadowy as we may have imagined. It was known and then forgotten. We must, collectively, recognize its strength and history, or our amnesia will make it impossible to respond to such activism and violence in the present.

Correction: 
An earlier version of this article misstated the month in which far-right protests took place in Charlottesville, Va. It was August 2017, not September 2017.

Kathleen Belew, an assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago, is the author of "Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America."

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A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A27 of the New York edition with the headline: White Power Never Disappeared. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe