• amino@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    10 hours ago

    this is exactly why y’all get called blue MAGA. when your orgs lynch a Pacific Islander and barely miss their shot on a leftist Venezuelan, it’s a “good-will effort” to “prevent outside agitators”. literal KKK propaganda adapted for liberal sensibilities:

    The southern white defensive refrain of “outside-agitators” in the early Cold War years, as used by segregationists, merged traditional themes together with the politics of anti- Communism, thus taking the South’s regional ideology of xenophobia and connecting it with more mainstream American nationalistic impulses. Just as Lewis (2004) sees Cold War anti-Communism as a revitalizing force in the older tradition of states’ rights argumentation, he similarly describes the re-emergence of the white southern notion of “outside agitators” as becoming almost completely synonymous with the perceived foreign influence of Communist subversion.

    Most white Southerners were traditionally wary of “outsiders,” a term that they employed somewhat idiosyncratically to denote anyone unsympathetic to the regions racial practices. As outsiders, so it was argued, not only did agitators have no right to comment on the South’s racial situation, but they could also not hope to grasp its subtleties. Communists fitted the southern perception of “outsiders” perfectly and were depicted as intent on bringing racial tumult to the region to rival that wrought by Reconstruction. One of the most popular ways of attempting to retard such an upheaval, therefore, was to suggest that it was communist-inspired.