In 1969, Charles Manson convinced his followers to murder Sharon Tate and six others. Manson claimed to have heard messages in the Beatles’“Helter Skelter” (schizophrenic pareidolia?), and he had his followers butcher the fair, young, terribly talented and terribly pregnant actress, guessing—hoping—the barbarity of the act would spark a race war.
In 2015, Dylann Roof, by all accounts an apparent lone wolf, calmly inserted himself into the welcoming congregation of the Emanuel A.M.E. Church in South Carolina. He revealed his true intentions within minutes. He revealed a gun. Nine parishioners were mown down by this self-admitted admirer of the defunct nation of Rhodesia. Roof entered a house of worship and murdered in cold blood because he’d hoped to spark a race war.
Now comes Donald Trump, at a rally just this weekend, telling his followers they must be ready to lay down their lives in an upcoming battle over critical race theory.
He exhorted them to the ultimate sacrifice, evoking the destruction of their beloved country, much like he did on the Ellipse on January 6, 2021, when he told his devotees they might not have a country anymore.
He means to incite a race war.
Critical race theory, stretched like so much Silly Putty into absurd and impossible dimensions by Christopher Rufo and his band of detractors, has become an amorphous catch-all for all things contra-white. Not nonwhite, though that, too; not anti-white per se, though that, too. Contra-white: contrariwise to what those audience members believe to be their way of life. CRT has become loaded language, and now, to these people, it symbolizes an existential threat.
But CRT as its detractors have constructed it is utterly hollow, a paper tiger, and a Potemkin one at that. Tucker Carlson even admitted that he has never figured out what CRT is. And in a now-infamous clip of an in-the-field interview, a devout Trump supporter was asked why he so vehemently opposed CRT, and his face went blank.
His anger dried up in front of our eyes. The man honestly did not know, could not recall. He possessed an implacable hatred for an idea that was undefined, and there seemed to be no origin to that anger.
Who planted that seed of irrationality?
The call to self-sacrifice is well out of proportion to any supposed threat CRT might reflect, and it is this asymmetry that reveals Trump’s intentions. He gives away the game. Because even if CRT were some nefarious blueprint for transforming secondary education (which of course it is not), that would not justify an actual call to arms or an appeal to an expectation of bloodshed. Trump has asked all of these things of his supporters.
He’s speaking their language.
A friend of mine once told me of an encounter he had, sitting at a counter in a diner next to another White guy. They were just chit-chatting, passing time as strangers are wont to do; and my friend said there must have been some combination of words that he’d exchanged (he speculated he may have mentioned lower taxes or some signal of conservatism or libertarianism). The floodgates opened, he said. It was like my friend had stumbled upon a skeleton key, and what he’d unlocked was this vast store of abject racial derogation and slurs. Apparently, that stranger felt he’d found kindred.
It was code my friend didn’t know was code.
Trump is subterranean in his speech, and his followers know what he knows, because they believe what he believes. They can load their language in other avenues, in crevices of privacy, over cups of coffee, standing on a footrail at a diner; or in a church pew; or at a school board meeting.
“It’s true, but no one ever talks about it.” This statement, one of Tucker Carlson’s favorites, in itself is a dogwhistle. To rational folks, the people who speak aboveboard, this saying is glib and meaningless. To these subterranean speakers, it’s a fact of life. They “know” something—the doctrine of white supremacy—and everyone else “knows” it, too. But they can’t talk about it openly. For them, their truisms (white makes right) and catchphrases (that’s mighty white of you) can only be shared on the down-low, like a secret handshake.
Say the right words, and you’re in the club. You’ve gained admittance.
They load the language offsite and unveil it only in smoky terms. The haziness lends itself to plausible deniability later. But in the moment, the words are electric in their raw power, in their being fished from a dark pocket and exposed to the light.
There have been more atrocities. Elliott Rodgers, an incel, in 2014. The massacre at the Pulse nightclub in 2016. The slaughter at the Tree of Life synagogue, in 2018. The shooting in El Paso in 2019. The spa murders last year, where the targets were all female, all Asian.
Lay down your lives. Will it spark?