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I’ve been reading this slowly, grateful for how deftly and clearly — not to mention empathically — you educate us.

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This is a really interesting take. Thank you for processing this book that the algorithms probably never would have served to me. Being the ignoramus that I am, I did not know that there was a link between Tacitus and Nazi/white supremacist storytelling. But, you know, the classics are irrelevant to what is Happening Now. This will be on my mind when I finally read Germania.

I think there is validity in the thread, but as with everything, there is nuance. The white America that we want to indict fought against itself to free black slaves, and fought against the Nazi vision of the future.

Also, from my experience, while I've never personally heard a white-supremacist argument for gun ownership and stand your ground doctrine (until this article), I've heard plenty of arguments straight out of the Hebrew Bible. The law portion of the Pentateuch is full of examples how to adjudicate adverse situations-if your axe head flies off the handle and kills your coworker, if your ox gores your neighbor, if your ox gores someone a second time, if you are attacked in daylight, if your home is invaded at night, etc. These are passages that get cited directly, and while the task of the historian is often to make sense of why we accept one thing and reject another (kill the intruder, turn the other cheek), in terms of direct influence, those are the texts that many evangelicals are looking at. I've lived my entire life around the 45th parallel, so maybe the influence this author is discussing is more overt elsewhere.

Another angle on your opening scene: The premillennial eschatology (rapture theology) your friend mentions is a credible influence in my mind. How strange that those who think they are going to be raptured out of the tribulations are so fearful of them. However another (again, more direct) take is that there is a sizable contingent of people who say they want to take away their guns. Politicians campaign promising it. Constituents elect on it. There are political organizations and PACs and lobbying groups devoted to it. There are states and municipalities that have presently banned gun ownership.

I'm not here to defend the stance one way or another, but that makes me confused why anyone would need another reason for the perpetual fear that "they're going to take my guns." Sure, some might say, "We just want to ban assault-style rifles," (whatever that means) but you don't need to introduce the slippery-slope argument to find the voices that explicitly say they want to end gun ownership in America. If people stopped saying they want to take them away, and people keep being afraid of it, then we can dissect the psyche further to figure out why.

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Jan 14, 2022Liked by Antonia Malchik

Thinking of how the right to property and life also manifests as the right to war. My brother and I watched the first 3 seasons of Peaky Blinders (and stopped for reasons unrelated to this tangent) and a big theme was how the horrors of WWI gave men a common language and a common trauma.

I found that very irksome, and in trying to figure out *why* I was so annoyed, I settled on this: White men, as a class, have to find war outside. They go looking abroad for enemies because they don’t face an existential threat in their communities.

The rest of us - the racialized minorities, and the white women who don’t want to be bartering chips - we’re at war at home. We’re not safe in our neighborhoods, our cities, or our own living rooms. But we are never, ever allowed to articulate these day-to-day threats as war. Because war implies that both sides have a right to retaliation and self-defense.

And that unspoken assumption is also part of why liberal white people are so easily swayed into “compromise”. Sure, they’ll agree that the alt-right is loud, violent, un-presidential, violent, embarrassing, VIOLENT. But the second a racial minority dares to suggest disruptive protest, that’s an inch too far. Self-defense can only be enacted if you have an individual and collective self to defend, and racial minorities are disbarred from that level of sentience.

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founding

I really like this: "Protecting the treasured property of whiteness is an overwhelming and centuries-long iteration of that war."

I used to think that once all the old white guys died off things would be better. But goddamn if the younger ones aren't even worse.

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