Fresno State prof: Moms and dads who back white nationalism more threat than KKK members

The attack on the Capitol was nothing less than horrifying. Some Americans sat in disbelief at the sight of costumed men desecrating the halls of democracy — even defecating in them — while others cringed at the vitriolic, hoarse-throated calls for blood. Blacks have expressed their dismay that the overwhelmed and understaffed Capitol police at times appeared to offer little resistance to the hoard’s surge, noting that law enforcement’s response to Black Lives Matter protests was far more vigilant.

For me, as a white American, one of the episode’s most unsettling elements was not the extremists decked out in anti-Semitic shirts or waving Confederate flags but the second — and larger — wave of self-styled “patriotic” rioters. This group seemed staid and suburban, like Midwestern tourists strolling through the apocalypse. Looking as ferocious as weekend golfers, these otherwise ordinary people posed the gravest menace to the Capitol since the War of 1812.

We should never forget the lunacy of the fringe, but we are also well-served to remember the threat of the common. It’s the ordinary who are the heart of white nationalism. Without the support of school board members, realtors, cops, and CEOs, neo-fascist groups like the Proud Boys would stand back, stand by, and return to intimidating art-school students.

Perhaps the best historical analogy to our current carnival of white nationalism is the 1920s Ku Klux Klan. Many Americans dismiss that era’s Klan as a gaggle of racist hillbillies patrolling the American South searching for the opportunity to kill and burn. While that fringe existed, the vast majority of Klansmen hailed from states beyond the South and in areas with few, if any, nonwhite residents. They were also oppressively ordinary.

Founded by Methodist preacher William Joseph Simmons, the second Klan billed itself as a patriotic Christian fraternal order with racial membership requirements similar to those of the Native Sons of the Golden West. In 1921, before Congress, Simmons proclaimed that the Klan was neither racist or violent — just misunderstood. His successor, retired dentist Hiram Wesley Evans, further promoted the kinder, gentler Klan. He advertised the invisible order as a benevolent society working to promote Americanism and Protestantism. It was to protect the virtue of women from the scourges of the modern age.

This strategy worked, albeit temporarily. By the mid-1920s, the Klan boasted 5 million members. Scores of women enlisted in the Ladies of the Invisible Empire, and children the Ku Klux Kiddies. In 1925, 30,000 white-robed Klansmen marched on Washington, D.C. with no incidents of violence reported. In politics, the Klan helped elect governors, mayors, and city councilmen across the nation. Klansmen in California dominated local offices in cities such as Anaheim and Brea, and card-carrying Klansmen could be found on nearly every police force in the state.

A year before the Klan’s Washington march, the Fresno Fairgrounds hosted the 10-day “Klan Fiesta.” Thousands flocked to hear sermons by Klan-affiliated Christian ministers, witness Klan marriage ceremonies, participate in dance contests, and gape in awe as an airplane flew overhead with lights gleaming in the shape of a fiery cross.

While Black newspapers sounded the alarm about Klan activities nationwide, white-owned papers were complacent. The Fresno Bee’s reports on the “Klan Fiesta” read like a weather report, rather than an expose of the local acceptance of the nation’s largest hate group.

Yet, despite its folkiness and positive marketing, the Klan was just that: an organization hell-bent on white supremacy through coercion. Beneath the patriotic musing resided an ideology of an aggrieved people who believed that America was becoming too ethnic, too socialistic, and too secular. If the government would not stem the tide of the modern world by law, the Klan would by force. In time, infighting, hypocrisy, scandal, and— one hopes — the realization that the Klan truly did espouse racist vigilantism, prompted a mass exodus of the ordinary, leaving only the unrepentant extreme.

Though current Klansmen certainly cheered the attack on Congress last week, the majority of participants bore no such affiliation and eschewed costume for casual wear. Moms and dads in blue jeans, T-shirts, and red-and-white MAGA baseball caps breached the Capitol’s perimeter with an air of exclusive ownership. In their minds — and in the opinion of many Americans — they did nothing wrong. “Can’t one walk into one’s own house?” they implicitly asked as they brushed past police officers.

Like their forebears, they, too, fear secularism, socialism, and demographic change. But unlike the robed marchers 100 years ago, Jan. 6’s rioters assaulted and vandalized the Capitol and American democracy itself in a way that even the Klan never dared.

Undoubtedly, our coming conversations will focus on the fringe: the pretend soldiers, the QAnon Shamen, and the Duck Dynasty renegades. This motley crew, while dangerous, retains little long-term mass sustainability. They will rise, fall, and repeat.

Our real reckoning with white nationalism won’t be with the costumed extremists, but with the common. We must reject white nationalism, even in its most pedestrian forms.