previous eight years, also more than doubled.
There were a number of reasons for these changes, but one sequence of news events in particular appears to have inspired this upswing: the announcement, in February 2007, by Barack Obama that he intended to run for the presidency of the United States, followed by his extraordinarily popular and successful campaign in the succeeding months.
Right from the start, the old racist right made clear its hatred of Obama. In June 2007, the grand dragon of the National Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Railston Loy, predicted, “Well, I’m not going to have to worry about him, because somebody else down South is going to take him out … If that man is elected president, he’ll be shot sure as hell.”
But as Obama’s candidacy advanced, old-line racists began facing the prospect of the election of a black man to the presidency—in so many ways another major defeat for their ideology. In short order they began changing their tune. In fact, they began claiming that the election of Barack Obama would be a good thing for them. August Kreis, the national director of the Aryan Nations, told an Associated Press reporter, “Obama’s done my group a lot of good. He’s polarizing Americans, black and white … Especially in Florida, affiliates have increased recently.”
Tom Prater, Florida spokesman for the white power group Euro, said, “I’ve gotten more calls in the last two months about interest in our organizations than I got in all the years in the past.”
Don Black, owner of the neo-Nazi website Stormfront, was optimistic when interviewed by the Washington Post about the opportunities offered by Obama’s candidacy: “I get nonstop e-mails and private messages from new people who are mad as hell about the possibility of Obama being elected,” Black said. “White people, for a long time, have thought of our government as being for us, and Obama is the best possible evidence that we’ve lost that. This is scaring a lot of people who maybe never considered themselves racists, and it’s bringing them over to our side.”
Mainstream conservatives chose to race-bait more subtly, through the use of “dog whistles”—code words that race-baiting politicians and pundits use to refer to red-meat issues for the rabid right, audible only to those who have ears already attuned to the frequency. Conservative pundits in short order began referring to Obama by his middle name, Hussein, in an attempt to emphasize his foreignness and also to create an association with the Iraqi dictator American forces had not so long ago toppled. Rush Limbaugh ran a ditty with the title “Barack the Magic Negro,” whose lyrics suggested his entire candidacy was built on a foundation of white guilt. In the Washington Times, the columnist Steve Sailer, who has often espoused eugenicist ideas, wrote, “While some whites envisage Mr. Obama as the Cure for White Guilt, blacks are in no hurry to grant the white race absolution for slavery and Jim Crow, since they benefit from compensatory programs like affirmative action.” In their eyes, Obama’s candidacy was all about race—and for the duration, that’s all it ever would be.
At mainstream news websites, things quickly became ugly. CBS. com had to shut down comments on any Obama story on its website because the stories inevitably attracted vicious race-baiters and death threats. In real life, matters were even worse; Obama’s campaign attracted so many threats he was assigned a Secret Service detail earlier in the campaign than any other candidate in history.
The intensity of the racial and ethnic animus directed at Obama picked up after he secured the Democratic Party nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, on August 28. An early warning sign that this might occur came on August 24, one day before the convention, when three men who turned out to have white-supremacist backgrounds were arrested in a nearby suburb for allegedly plotting to assassinate Obama (in the end no charges were brought).
Obama’s nomination probably influenced the outcome of the Republican National Convention, which took place a few days later in St. Paul, Minnesota, and the ensuing campaign. The Republican nominee, Senator John McCain of Arizona, selected as his running mate Alaska’s governor Sarah Palin, a populist bomb thrower popular with the religious right. Palin now entered the national stage as America’s newest right-wing heroine. Upon hitting the hustings the week after the convention, Palin began lobbing rhetorical grenades in Obama’s direction, accusing him of “palling around with terrorists,” a reference to his association with William Ayers, a onetime Weather Underground leader. She also emphasized that the difference between Barack Obama and John McCain—and herself, of course—was that they, being good Republicans, preferred to campaign in “pro-American places.” She didn’t hold back on rabble-rousing red meat meant to emphasize Obama’s foreignness and his supposed radicalism.
And the crowds responded, shouting out “terrorist” in reference to Obama and, at one rally, “Kill him!” in reference to Ayers. An Al-Jazeera camera crew caught the honest sentiments of many McCain-Palin supporters as they were leaving an Ohio rally—that Obama was anti-white, that he was a terrorist, or, more basically, that he was a black man:
“I’m afraid if he wins, the blacks will take over. He’s not a Christian! This is a Christian nation! What is our country gonna end up like?”
“When you got a Negra running for president, you need a first stringer. [McCain’s] definitely a second stringer.”
“He seems like a sheep—or a wolf in sheep’s clothing, to be honest with you. And I believe Palin—she’s filled with the Holy Spirit, and I believe she’s gonna bring honesty and integrity to the White House.”
“He’s related to a known terrorist.”
“He is friends with a terrorist of this country!”
“Just the whole, Muslim thing, and everything, and everybody’s still kinda—a lot of people have forgotten about 9/11, but … I dunno, it’s just kinda … a little unnerving.”
“Obama and his wife, I’m concerned that they could be anti-white. That he might hide that.”
“I don’t like the fact that he thinks us white people are trash … because we’re not!”
Such sentiments weren’t unique to Ohio. In Las Vegas, the videographer Matt Toplikar interviewed McCain-Palin supporters as they left a Palin rally. One camouflage-capped fellow captured the spirit of the event, declaring, “Obama wins, I’m gonna move to Alaska. Haven’t you ever heard that the United States is gonna be taken down from within?” he continued. “What better way to get taken down from within than having the president of the United States be the one that’s going to do it?”
Another man warned, “Don’t be afraid of me! Be afraid of Obama! Obama bin Laden, that’s what you should be afraid of!” When accused of being a racist, he responded, “Yes, I am a racist. If you consider me a racist, well [unintelligible]. Those Arabs are dirt-bags. They’re dirty people, they hate Americans, they hate my kids, they hate my grandkids.”
On Election Day, 2008, much of the nation celebrated the election of the first African American to the country’s highest office. John McCain’s supporters naturally felt the usual loser’s bitterness and disappointment.
For many Americans, however—especially those who had opposed Obama on racial grounds—the reaction went well beyond despair. For them, November 5, 2008, was the end of the world. Or at least, the end of America as they knew it, or thought they knew it.
So maybe it wasn’t such a surprise that they responded to that day with the special venom and violence peculiar to the American right.
In Texas, students at Baylor University in Waco discovered a noose hanging from a tree on campus the evening of Election Day. At a site nearby angry Republican students had gathered a bunch
