“The Temptation of our day is to accept the intolerable, for fear of still worse to come.”
—Hermann Rauschning, The Revolution of Nihilism: Warning to the West (1939)1placeholder
A White Supremacist Referendum
Despite the obvious white supremacist foundations of Trump’s campaign and the close affinity of his ideas with those of earlier racial nationalists, such as Lothrop Stoddard, neither the media nor the Democratic Party’s leadership sought to expose and combat the blatant and deadly white supremacism that was and is his main appeal.2placeholder Even now, when attempting to account for his victory media voices focus on Trump’s increased share among black and Hispanic voters. But while he won 13% of blacks and 46% of Hispanics these figures pale before his 57% of whites, including 53% of white women and 60% of white men a far larger group of voters and those who gave him his win in the battle ground states.3placeholder What needs explaining is not Trump’s increases among minorities but why a completely nihilistic man convicted of a felony, proclaiming racist beliefs discredited by scholars over a hundred years ago, whose proposed policies would directly undermine the economic and political power of the blue collar voters who supported him, erode the very democracy his MGA followers claim to defend and obliterate the progress blacks, other minorities, women and LBGTQ communities have made over the last sixty years would appeal to millions of white Americans. Answering this question requires understanding a fundamental dynamic of our American way of being.
The Perennial American Dilemma
The United States was birthed with a dual nature. Dedicated to the ideal of human equality, the new nation exterminated Native Americans, enslaved Africans and oppressed and exploited other people of color. Since its founding it has been divided between those who want to include the excluded and finally liberate the oppressed and those who regard every effort to do so as a threat to their individual rights and liberties, both of which are closely connected to their individual and collective racial identity as white. I designate these latter as white supremacists, by which I mean that they struggle overtly and covertly to preserve and extend the political, economic and cultural hegemony of white Americans, although this motivation may often, and even normally, be an unconscious reflex. The Donald Trump phenomenon is the mobilization of white supremacy as a demonic political force, which, for the time being, distinguishes demonic white supremacy from the more violent but politically less successful manifestations of white supremacy such as the Ku Klux Klan and the Aryan Nations.
The Demonic
The nineteenth century Christian philosopher Soren Kierkegaard developed a concept of the demonic which can be usefully applied in elucidating the Trump movement. Kierkegaard believed that each human person is a being “whose task is to become itself, which can be done only through the relationship to God.”4placeholder Beginning as “dreaming spirit” we each pursue the task of self-realization through the choices we make, in particular the crucial one between our awareness of the God given freedom to choose the good by willing to be one’s true self, a choice that is never attained by reasoned argument but by a “leap” of faith, or fleeing from that awareness by shutting one’s self up within one’s self. He defined the flight from freedom to choose the good as “anxiety about the good”, which he called demonic.5placeholder Kierkegaard’s notion of the demonic had nothing to do with demons or the supernatural as popularly conceived. “The demonic…manifests itself clearly only when it is in contact with the good”. A person became demonic by concealing the possibility of pursuing the good, which “signifies the restoration of freedom, redemption, salvation” with all of the inconvenience, anguish and self-overcoming that path entailed, because choosing the good brings the self into conflict with the world, including its own egoistic desires.6placeholder For example, Father Mapple in Moby Dick tells his Whaling Chapel congregation that Jonah fled the commands of God because he feared the worldly hostility his obedience would provoke.7placeholder His flight inclosed him in the belly of the whale. To avoid facing that choice, the demonic person enters “inclosing reserve”, sealing them self off from the open communication with others that is essential to growth, but which unsettles one’s fixed identity.8placeholder While freedom is always in communion “unfreedom becomes more and more inclosed…and does not want communication.”9placeholder But Kierkegaard tells us: “This, however, is and remains an impossibility.” Unfreedom “always retains a relation, and even when this has apparently disappeared altogether, it is nevertheless there”, producing anxiety when it comes into contact with freedom of the will to choose the good.10placeholder Alastair Hannay explains:
“The word ‘demonic’ in Kierkegaard’s vocabulary describes…fear of what is nevertheless acknowledged to be good. Demonic behaviour is behaviour that can be explained as a more or less, and even unconscious, shunning of some ideal which nevertheless cannot lose its hold.”11placeholder
Therefore, suppression of awareness must be constantly attended to and reinforced to secure “a world ex-clusively for itself”.12placeholder I will apply Kierkegaard’s concept of the demonic as inclosedness, coupled with my concept of the White Supremacist Collective Unconscious presented below, as my framework for explicating Trump’s Nihilistic White Supremacy.
In America, the original and continuing choice has been between unrestrained individual liberty to live one’s dream despite the costs to other peoples, such as Native Americans, Africans and Asians, other beings and the Earth, and the ideal of inclusion, equity, justice for all, and sustainable environmental practices. Pursuing the latter restricts the former making it a fearful and repugnant prospect to many Americans, including some people of color, who, as I will explain below, are also affected by the White Supremacist Collective Unconscious. Yet, as in the case of Kierkegaard’s demonic, the ideal of liberty, equality and equity for all persists in the American mind. Even as they rail against alleged “progressive” “socialist” “Marxist” or “leftist” distortions of American values Trump’s disciples cannot entirely free themselves from the ideal and promise of the American experiment without entirely contradicting their individual and collective identities. It lives within them. To avoid the burden of self renovation, and preserve the illusion of individual integrity they are left with the alternative of distorting the ideal, an act that relies heavily on insularity to avoid exposure of their self-deceit. The contemporary rejection of the choice of freedom by millions of Trump disciples who have effectively enslaved themselves to their master constitutes Demonic White Supremacy, which is their futile struggle to deny their continuing relationship with the blacks, Hispanics, brown aliens from the south, the LBGTQ communities, emancipated women, progressive whites, and the complexities of an increasingly interdependent world, as if they did not exist. Their effort, like Kierkegaard’s “inclosing reserve”, is ultimately impossible to sustain, and for that reason it is utterly destructive.
Trump As Demonic Leader
Donald Trump has encouraged, amplified and exploited demonic white supremacy for his own nihilistic antidemocratic purposes by nurturing the fears of whites that their individual and collective identities are under attack by government, academic, and business programs, policies and initiatives designed to empower blacks and other minorities. Increasingly, whites regard such reparative policies as discriminatory against them. Hence, a recent news poll found that Trump voters believe that racism against whites is a bigger problem than racism against blacks, and similar sentiments were reported by CNN in 2022 and by the Washington Post in 2017.13placeholder Many white Americans feel under siege in their own country a sentiment that Trump has tapped into by his evocation of an “enemy from within”, a term of fascistic pedigree that he sometimes applies to his imagined “deep state”, and sometimes leaves ambiguous inviting his followers to fill in the blank.14placeholder
After decades of feeling unfairly blamed for racist, patriarchal and homophobic attitudes and behavior they regarded as harmless, Trump’s variety of white Americans were rescued by a hero-candidate who proclaimed and performed many of those very same attitudes and behaviors as completely normal. Moreover, he promised to end the colored invasion from the south and roundup, incarcerate and expel those invaders already here. He would halt policies and initiatives such as Diversity, Equity and Inclusion based on a narrative of American history that revealed and condemned the genocide of Native Americans, slavery, Jim Crow, continued racial oppression, homophobia and misogynistic patriarchy.15placeholder He affirmed the purity and righteousness of his white followers’ individual and collective identities, declared that they were not and never had been the terrible people of leftist imagination, and vowed to pursue political, economic and cultural policies to protect them from the critical assessment and interference of a left leaning “deep state”.16placeholder Under his rule government agencies like the Department of Justice that had fought to extend the rights of oppressed minorities would be restrained and dismantled. He would defend them from massive protests like BLM movement during the pandemic by the aggressive use of the military.17placeholder Trump brought these promises closer to achievement when he declared he would nominate the far rightwing Trump loyalist Matt Gaetz to be Attorney General in order to end “weaponized government” and clean house.18placeholder In these ways he intensified the demonic “inclosing reserve” of his disciples against those whose welfare they choose to ignore.
The White Supremacist Collective Unconscious
To explain how Trump was able to perform Nihilistic Demonic White Supremacy, propose the subversion of American democracy and still win election to the presidency it is necessary to go into some degree of abstraction, beginning with the observation that “In varying degrees, all Americans are endowed with a virtually unalienable white supremacist collective unconscious (WSCU) that supports and is supported by autonomous individualism”.19placeholder The white supremacist collective unconscious is a cultural construct that has nothing to do with genes, heredity, race, ethnicity or innate disposition. It is created by experience, precept and proscription as we are socialized, in a manner similar to the formation of Sigmund Freud’s superego. Like Carl Jung’s concept of the Shadow it is a blacking out of what the white self does not want to face.20placeholder Henri Ellenberger describes the shadow as “the sum of those personal characteristics that the individual wishes to hide from the others and from himself.”21placeholder Ellenberger continues “the shadow can also be projected; then the individual sees his own dark features reflected in another person whom he may choose as a Scapegoat.”22placeholder The Afro-Caribbean intellectual and activist Frantz Fanon, articulated this point several decades earlier when he wrote that the “Negro” created by the European becomes the “symbol of sin”: “In the degree to which I find in myself something unheard-of, something reprehensible, only one solution remains for me: to get rid of it, to ascribe its origin to someone else.”23placeholder By casting their collective shadow onto blacks, whites protect their innocence. This ancient tool of self-deception features prominently in Trump’s demonization of illegal immigrants of color and his allusions to an “enemy from within”. Because blacks and other people of color are socialized in America, they too are imbued by the WSCU.
In America, what is suppressed into the collective unconscious is the cultural memory of white America’s responsibility for Native American genocide, the trauma of black slavery, the racial terror that suppressed and followed Reconstruction, the persistence of racism against people of color and America’s brutal wars abroad. White Americans do not perceive the white supremacist oppressions they have perpetrated historically and continue to perpetrate because they subconsciously hold off awareness of them, the way Freud’s superego represses negative urges of the Id, an action that produces the White Supremacist Collective Unconscious. This holding- off is accomplished by forestalling and foreclosing. Forestalling is warding off, and refusing to draw out and explore the implications of moods, inklings, intuitions, or nagging, unsettling feelings that might lead to an altered view of black people and of the American racial situation. Foreclosing is refusing to explore ideas, evidence, or alternative interpretations that one is fully conscious of. An example of the former would be a white person having an unsettled and inexplicable feeling of guilt when a jury fails to convict a white police officer who shot a fleeing unarmed black man ten times and claimed he was acting in fear of his life. Forestalling would suppress the unsettled feeling instead of exploring its implications, perhaps by projecting negative motivations onto the deceased black man. In the same case, foreclosing would come into play when one realizes the shooting was murder but stops thinking about it in order to preserve one’s peace of mind and avoid protesting. In both cases a white person could count on the likeminded affirmation of their white peers which the continued segregation of blacks and whites would insulate from critical scrutiny. Whites deploy those techniques similarly in similar circumstances as if they had made a conscious compact to do so. Of course, there is no such conscious agreement. Instead, there is a culturally set psychic reflex that alerts whites to when they should forestall and foreclose to screen out moods, feelings, ideas and thoughts that would tend to weaken the white cathexis on white superiority and innocence and undermine white supremacy. This reflex is a learned behavior assimilated as whites grow into adulthood and kept out of conscious thought. In America it is supported by several hundred years of white supremacist conditioning, traditions and taboos which help obscure its existence.
Because we are all socialized by cultural, social, political and economic forces dominated by and oriented towards whiteness, the WSCU exists in all Americans regardless of race. It is most entrenched in whites because they benefit from its workings, and normally do not experience the negative impacts of white supremacy that blacks and other people of color do, which helps to disrupt its effectiveness in them. Most of all the psychic and physical survival of blacks, and other racial minorities has depended on struggling against white supremacy. Fortunately, there are many whites whose vision of a democratic and inclusive American lead them commit them to dislodging white supremacy as an obstacle to achieving their vision. Not surprisingly, the accelerating efforts of blacks, other oppressed groups and whites to do so helps to explain the emergence of Trump and Nihilistic Demonic White Supremacy.
It is no coincidence that Trump’s demonic movement emerged precisely at a time when progressive forces were achieving successes in revealing some of what the WSCU works to keep hidden and crafting successful programs to remedy the damage done to oppressed populations by past traumas and oppressions. As in individual psychic life the more the repressed unconscious content emerges through therapy the stronger becomes the subconscious will to repress it rather than undertake the daunting work of psychic growth. This is what has happened in the United States. Trump rose to power by intercepting and disrupting the growth and healing processes by cultivating nihilistic tendencies that alleviated the pressure and need to engage in the painful process of self-discovery and transformation, but at the price of undermining democracy and the psychic health of all Americans.
The effectiveness of holding-off what we don’t want to know is tremendously augmented when activated in the context of a highly self-conscious politicized group like MAGA, galvanized by a charismatic leader. Close interaction over time, the intense emotional experience of mass political rallies, and constant haranguing by the leader creates an intuitive sensitivity so that members can anticipate what the group will approve or disapprove and more or less unthinkingly align themselves with its common sentiments. Moreover, Trump and other leaders constantly articulate what is and what is not appropriate by attacking alleged enemies and praising and rewarding loyal friends like Matt Gaetz. In doing so, Trump demonstrates for his followers that loyalty to the leader is the highest value, superior to truth, justice, equity and even loyalty to the Constitution. Worse still, under Trump’s guidance the movement has released normally suppressed content from the WSCU and projected it onto American society as if they were reading contemporary social reality objectively. They are able to do this without the guilt it might have provoked in the past because the leader, on whom they have conferred the magico-charismatic authority to affirm their sense of individual and collective identity and righteousness, and express their general will, absolves them from guilt. In this way, Trump has alleviated some of the tension of maintaining the WSCU, thereby making tremendous psycho-social energy available for political mobilization. This partial conversion of unconscious white supremacy into conscious self and collective validation is demonic because it seals white supremacists into a self-validating imaginary world, which has rejected all but the most solipsistic values, closing off the possibility of mutually constructive discourse with people of color and whites who do not share their fantasy world. This “inclosing” releases them from the guilt of rejecting the promise of America as implied in the Declaration of Independence, by replacing it with a white supremacist worldview that is nihilistic, despite its claim to resurrect traditional American values, because it is founded on lies and pretense so easily disproved that only their demonic seclusion, continually reinforced and amplified by the leader, whose loyalty is to his followers not to the nation, can protect them from the truth. From this perspective Trump is to the MAGA movement what Hitler was to National Socialism, when in the early days of his rise to power he called himself a “drummer and rallier”, a function he continued to develop and perform with ever increasing self-confidence at mass public events like the annual Nuremburg Party Rallies from 1933.24placeholder
Yet, for all their fantasizing, whites are not imagining that their liberty has been restricted. Over more than sixty years, we have been modifying our autonomy and limiting our freedom in order that civil rights might be extended to African Americans and other minorities, women and members of the LBGTQ communities. This necessary process derives from the original exclusion of Natives and blacks from the commonwealth. That is, American freedom, which was always conceived as first and foremost white freedom, was premised on the suppression of people of color, a situation Charles Mills designated “the racial contract” to qualify the famous “social contract” theory of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau.25placeholder Historically, white resistance to laws, policies and programs, such as school integration and Affirmative Action, designed to empower blacks and other minorities has been framed as the defense of liberty; which, in the tradition of American style autonomous individualism it is. For to desegregate lunch counters, schools, the housing market and open opportunities for minorities in employment white liberty to discriminate had to be restrained by law, sometimes at the point of a bayonet, as when President Eisenhower sent the national Guard to enforce school desegregation in Little Rock Arkansas.26placeholder Contrary to the white supremacists, the modification of unrestrained individual liberty on behalf of inclusiveness and equity has been beneficial to the welfare of the entire society.
The modification of unrestrained liberty accompanying any extension of civil rights is ongoing and has recently been extended to include censorship of speech, thought and action in regard to historically oppressed groups, a sensitivity that J. D. Vance rejected when he defended a racist joke delivered at the Madison Square Garden Trump rally with “We are not going to — we’re not going to restore the greatness of American civilization if we get offended at every little thing. Let’s have a sense of humor”, implying that securing the wellbeing of historically oppressed groups is an obstacle to achieving America’s future greatness. He reinforced this attitude by complaining: “I think that a lot of Americans are sick of the distractions and sick of the BS. They want our candidates to talk about how they’re going to solve the peoples’ problems, and that’s what we ought to do”, suggesting that the concerns of minorities are not among the “people’s problems”, which constitutes blacks and other minorities as outsiders who become something like an “enemy from within” when they protest.27placeholder Vance’s remarks are similar to those of Jason Aldean whose music video “Try That in a Small Town” set against the backdrop of the Maury County Courthouse in Tennessee where a black youth was lynched 1927 provoked an outcry, to which Aldean responded
“What I am is a proud American… I love our country. I want to see it restored to what it once was before all this bullshit started happening to us. I love my country. I love my family. And I will do anything to protect that”.28placeholder
Aldean’s comments illustrate the sense of being under siege from an enemy left vague by his passive voiced “all this bullshit started happening to us” but which his video suggests is partly black.
Vance’s “distractions”, distract because they limit the freedom of white Americans to pursue their personal and collective agendas oblivious to how their words and deeds impact `historically oppressed groups. The requirement that they must refrain from acting or speaking in ways that harm those groups, which they obviously do not consider part of their, or even the American, community is seen and felt as a violation of their liberty. The MAGA movement is largely about turning the clock back to an imaginary time when whites could act with greater disregard for those “others”. This is the definition of white privilege. But these “distractions” are exactly what we must pursue if we are to achieve a just, equitable and sustainable society and it is the process of liberty modification in pursuit of these goals that Trump’s followers experience as threatening on the individual and collective level. By concealing the reality that blacks and other minorities are authentic members of the national community fully deserving of support, and turning them into enemies within clamoring for special treatment, the WSCU allowed whites to vote for a man whose proposed agenda would undo much of the progress African Americans and other racially excluded groups have made since the Civil Rights Movement without recognizing that they were in fact protecting white supremacy. The negative political genius of Donald Trump perceived the working of the white racial unconscious, encouraged, fed and nurtured it into a powerful nihilistic demonic force committed to making him the autocratic ruler of a white man’s land, despite the fact that his advent will ultimately disempower the very people who adore him.
Towards A New Way Of Being
Demonic White supremacy as represented by Donald Trump and his right wing supporters like the America First Policy Institute and Project 2025 is the greatest threat to American democracy and to a sustainable, just and equitable future that we face. The magnitude of this danger is camouflaged and made difficult to combat by the workings of the WSCU and the demonic seclusion of white supremacists from free and open discourse. We cannot meet that threat if we persist in the illusion that it can be removed without making significant alterations in our entire way of being in America. Ironically, the right has grasped this truth prompting it to resist all progressive change as threatening. They perceive the connection between such conservative causes as the “right to life”, the unregulated right to bear arms, opposition to teaching of critical race theory and gender awareness in public schools and the defense of white supremacy. Their sensitivities reveal that their commitment to “liberty” and individual autonomy is contingent on how it impacts white supremacist patriarchy. Accordingly, the Trump movement is perfectly willing to end a woman’s freedom to choose abortion, a faculty members freedom to teach about race and gender, a librarian’s freedom to select controversial books for lending, a clinic’s freedom to provide gender affirming therapy, the freedom of citizens to protest peacefully, and a military officer’s freedom and duty to disobey unconstitutional or immoral orders, because they are liberties that might undermine white supremacist patriarchy.
Meeting the danger of demonic white supremacy demands an unrelenting and implacable exposure of the White Supremacist Collective Unconscious to disrupt and bring to conscious awareness all of its insidious and destructive workings, but that is only the beginning. The core of the Trump movement is the preaching of absolute selfish individualism and insular nationalism without regard to the suffering of others at home and abroad. To combat this nihilism we must uphold, emphasize and demonstrate, the ancient fundamental spiritual truth that all beings are connected, that what harms one harms all and that this ancient truth is of overwhelming importance in an acceleratingly mutually interdependent world. We must help people to understand that shutting ourselves off into racial and ethnic blocks at home, and inward facing nationalistic formations globally, can only lead to destructive conflict no matter how self-affirming and soothing they may feel in the short run. We must explain why the variety of autonomous individualism that we now practice, from which the Trump movement wants to remove all constraints, is untenable and unsustainable in a multiracial, multiethnic and multicultural nation and world and can only lead to political, economic and cultural disaster at home and abroad.
And this is really the crux of the problem. We have come to an impasse. To move ahead as a national community, we must transcend the mode of individualism that we have inherited, which is based on the notion that the self can be its own foundation, an illusion that is possible only when we demonically attempt to close ourselves off from the always, already myriad connections between us and everything else. In its place we must create a radically transformative vision of the self in relationship to other people, other beings, and to the natural and physical worlds that will militate against the exclusion and oppression of people of color and other minority groups, and create the spiritual basis for a sustainable national community able and willing to contribute cooperatively to the achievement of an equitable, just and peaceful world. Without such a deep and thoroughgoing transformation, we will never transcend white supremacy which will ultimately destroy this country and undermine global stability. But this is exactly the transformation that frightens Trump’s fearful followers. It also highlights his greatest betrayal of the nation, which is that instead of helping his fellow citizens make the necessary transition he has encouraged their fears and backward longing dreams for his own selfish purposes. Our task is to find ways to demonstrate the advantages of a new way of being human in America that may alleviate their fears. This is a work of transformation.
Like every such work this one is inherently political, yet it is not primarily about the search for power, office or public influence. That search must and will continue and there will be no lack of capable hands to pursue it. But more importantly we must labor wherever we find ourselves, in the school, in the university, at the workplace, in our churches, temples and mosques, in community organizations of all kinds to generate deep and extensive people-to-people local and transnational networks of love, nurture and understanding. This mission, for mission it is, must be waged on all fronts by a new breed of freedom fighters dedicated to living the new world into being by replacing our current destructive style of individual autonomy with a new self that is socially rather than individually autonomous, by building cooperative communities and organizations, whether secular or faith based, and by the indispensable, but often ignored and denigrated spiritual work of promoting altruism, compassion and empathy at home and abroad though they fly in the face of the callous policies of our momentary leaders and in these ways living a new world into being.29placeholder
Hermann Rauschning, The Revolution of Nihilism: Warning to the West (New York: Alliance Book Corporation, Longmans, Green & Company, 1939), p. xi.
Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color: The Threat Against White World-Supremacy.
Stoddard warned that global white supremacy was threatened by surging population growth in Asia and Africa. While recognizing the possibility of “colored” conquests of white lands he asserted in The Rising Tide of Color: The Threat Against White World-Supremacy that “colored triumphs of arms are less to be dreaded than more enduring conquests like migrations which would swamp whole populations and turn countries now white into colored man’s lands irretrievably lost to the white world” whose civilizations would be destroyed by the dark hordes. (Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1921), P. vii. Project Gutenberg ebook, Link) To combat this danger Stoddard urged white western nations to block nonwhite immigration and adopt racial segregation and eugenics to keep the colored races with their alien ideas from overpowering the white race. Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), Pp.394-396.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/results-nevada-exit-poll-us-presidential-election-2024-11-05/ ;
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/11/06/black-latino-voters-boost-donald-trump-election-victory/76084362007/ ;
https://www.newsweek.com/white-women-are-weak-sisters-voting-donald-trump-1982733 ;
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-election-results-map-shift-red/
Soren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 29-30,35.
Soren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), p.123.
Soren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), p.119.
Herman Melville, Moby Dick (New York: The Modern Library, 2000), pp.60, 67-69.
Soren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), p.123.
Soren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), p.124.
Soren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), p.123.
Alastair Hannay, Kierkegaard, A Biography ( Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), P.270.
Soren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), p.73.
“Poll: Trump voters say racism against white Americans is a bigger problem than racism against Black Americans”
https://news.yahoo.com/poll-trump-voters-racism-white-Americans-problem-black-reparations-politics-090038973.html, July 21, 2023;
“Led by Trump, GOP increasingly casts White people as racism’s victims” https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/06/politics/supreme-court-vacancy-white-grievance/ ;
“White Trump voters think they face more discrimination than blacks. The Trump administration is listening.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/08/02/white-trump-voters-think-they-face-more-discrimination-than-blacks-the-trump-administration-is-listening/
See also Richardson, Being in America, Chapter 30 “The White Supremacist Collective Unconscious”.
https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-enemies-from-within-5c4a34776469a55e71d3ba4d4e68cf62 ;
https://www.politifact.com/article/2024/oct/30/trump-is-talking-more-about-the-enemy-from-within/
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-nominates-maga-congressman-matt-204614802.html; https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/11/13/nation/trump-matt-gaetz-attorney-general/
Ronald Kent Richardson, Being-In-America: White Supremacy And the American Self (New York: Peter Lang, 2024), p.190; 191-217.
Carl G. Jung, Psychology and Religion (New York: Pantheon Books, 1958),76ff, and passim; Aion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1958), Chapter Two.
Henri Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1970), p.707.
Henri Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1970), p.707.
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967), p.190.
Quoted in Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2000), p.169.
Mills observes: “Henceforth, then, whether openly admitted or not, it is taken for granted that the grand ethical theories propounded in the development of Western moral and political thought are of restricted scope, explicitly or implicitly intended by their proponents to be restricted to persons, whites. The terms of the Racial Contract set the parameters for white morality as a whole, so that competing Lockean and Kantian contractarian theories of natural rights and duties, or later anticontractarian theories such as nineteenth-century utilitarianism, are all limited by its stipulations.” Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 17.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/vance-hinchcliffes-puerto-rico-joke-msg-trump-rally.html ;
Jason Aldean Rails Against “Cancel Culture,” Defends His Vigilante Anthem as Concert Crowd Chants “USA!”, https://www.aol.com/jason-aldean-rails-against-cancel-193800384.html
Richardson, Being-In-America, Chapter 31 “The Socially Autonomous Self and Anticipatory Connectivity”.