As Donald Trump gave his inaugural address on the steps of the Capitol, Black Lives Matter was far from the scene. Black Lives Matter was also surprisingly far from the center of discussions of race in America.
The organization had grown from a website and a hashtag into more than two dozen chapters in cities around the country. But the founders—Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi, and Patrisse Cullors—were no longer media darlings. As Trump dominated the airwaves, there was less demand to hear their speeches, to see them on television, or to hear them on radio shows. It was a near-total eclipse of the attention that shined on them after the Ferguson protests in 2014.
Cullors was asked why Black Lives Matter’s profile in American media had virtually disappeared since the election of Trump, having previously been on the cover of Time magazine and the front page of The New York Times, as well as dominating social media. “I don’t think we fully understood that the attention to our movement would just literally end” with the election of Trump, she said in an interview.1
It did not help that Black Lives Matter had no centralized leadership structure. The organization had no headquarters, no easily recognizable face, no single spokesperson—and yet the founders bristled when others tried to speak for them in the press. They remained insistent that the First Civil Rights Movement’s “great man” model of national leadership was out of touch with the new movement’s reality of how people freely shared opinions on social media.
“Why are we holding on to a trope about leadership that is older than me?” Garza said. “People are still looking for the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. when, actually, leadership of movements today looks more like Lena Waithe [a lesbian screenwriter, producer, and actress] and Laverne Cox [a transgender actress].”2
Instead of centralized male-dominated national leadership, the women of Black Lives Matter argued that a variety of new voices, including people from pop culture as well as grassroots organizers, had better instincts. They saw them as best able to face off with police departments and press city politicians in cases of police violence. The three founders remained reactive. They had no consistent set of responses and only an idealist agenda that called for utopian visions, such as “No More Jails” or “Defund the Police.” The “Defund” slogan was first heard in Minneapolis from a female-led group, “Black Visions Collective,” that had worked to cut the local police budget before George Floyd’s death. Doing away with jails and police was idealistic. But the ideas had no real impact on the immediate problems in Black America. That often led to disillusionment and left a bad taste of disappointment among people who had been excited by the possibility of new approaches to real-world problems.
The Black Lives Matter leadership never had much traction in Republican circles, but now they also lacked political allies among top Democrats. This estrangement was especially glaring with regard to the number-one Democrat in the country, Barack Obama. During Hillary Clinton’s losing presidential campaign, Obama constantly raised the alarm that Black Lives Matter was depressing voter turnout among young Black people with its refusal to back Clinton and energize its network to support voter registration efforts.
Obama showed his discontent during the spring of 2016. At an event in London, he gave credit to Black Lives Matter for bringing new attention to racial injustice. But pointing to his own work as a community organizer in Chicago, he argued that once the “spotlight” was on the problem, “you can’t just keep on yelling… you can’t refuse to meet because that might compromise the purity of your position.” Obama seemed disappointed by Black Lives Matter’s refusal to meet with him at the White House, as if he were the problem.3
Here again was a split that had been evident a generation earlier in the First Civil Rights Movement. The split then was between the nonviolent, compromising strategies of Dr. King versus the militant, “by any means necessary” demands of leaders like Malcolm X, SNCC, and groups like the Black Panthers. In the twenty-first-century’s Second Movement, the split became a canyon between Obama’s gradualist approach and BLM’s call for immediate action.
Obama kept up the criticism in a commencement speech a few weeks later at Howard University: “It’s thanks in large part to the activism of young people like many of you, from ‘Black Twitter’ to Black Lives Matter, that America’s eyes have been opened—white, black, Democrat, Republican—to the real problems, for example, in our criminal justice system,” Obama said. “But to bring about structural change, lasting change, awareness is not enough. It requires changes in law, changes in custom. Passion is vital, but you’ve got to have a strategy. And your plan better include voting… all the time.”4
But as far as Black Lives Matter was concerned, Clinton had never been their candidate. What some viewed as a stark contrast between a moderate Democrat and a racist Republican, they viewed as an insignificant distinction. In their eyes, it was a choice between an unappealing, white centrist version of Obama or excusing the explicit racism in Trump’s appeal to “Make America Great Again.” Alicia Garza later wrote that many activists “simply had no interest in getting involved in the election. Eight years of a Black president hadn’t brought as much hope and change to Black America as had been promised.” Black Lives Matter mocked the idea that Obama’s election was evidence of racial progress and dismissed all talk of a post-racial America.5
Black voter turnout in 2016 sank from a record high 66.6 percent four years earlier to just 59.6 percent. Young Black people between the ages of twenty and thirty-five turned out in small numbers, dropping from 55 percent to just over 50 percent.6 Garza accepted no blame for the weak turnout, instead pointing her finger at Clinton. “No candidate was able to meet the challenge of engaging and capturing the imagination of younger Black voters (and potential voters) who were in the midst of their own civil rights movement,” she later wrote. “Even though the movement was in full swing, no candidate could seem to talk about Black Lives Matter, or any policy solutions associated with it, without being forced to do so.”7
During the campaign, Black Lives Matter’s focus was on dismantling what it viewed as a racist American system oppressing Black people. It wanted to hold every candidate for every office “accountable.” That led many activists affiliated with the organization to disrupt political rallies. Even the most progressive white leaders in the Democratic Party came under attack. At a town hall on immigration in Phoenix featuring Senator Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter took over the stage. One member grabbed the microphone, demanding “concrete” policy proposals to address racial wrongs and to call out the names of Black people killed by police. Sanders became angry, saying: “I spent fifty years of my life fighting for civil rights.”8
Cullors later told reporters that Sanders’s claim to being a white “progressive is not enough—We need more.”9
“Agitating a perceived political ally to the Black community is strategic,” she later wrote in a Washington Post opinion column. “For far too long, the Democratic Party has milked the Black vote while creating policies that completely decimate Black communities. Once upon a time Bill Clinton was widely perceived as an ally and advocate for the needs of Black people. However, it is the Clinton administration’s [crime bill] that set the stage for the massive racial injustice we struggle with in law enforcement today.”
Cullors’s motivation in confronting politicians came from personal pain. She blamed Democratic Party policies, which she said had “destroyed my family,” as much as Republican policies. She said that her father had been repeatedly jailed on drug charges and her brother “inhumanely brutalized” by Los Angeles police. “The goal of Black Lives Matter,” she wrote, “is to transform America’s systemic hatred against Black people…. We are demanding… our right to life… dignity and respect.”10
But there was pushback to the insistent pressure, even among Democrats who supported Black Lives Matter. The Congressional Black Caucus endorsed Hillary Clinton early in the primaries. Urging Black Lives Matter to get behind her, the chair of the caucus, Representative G. K. Butterfield, argued that Clinton understood their plight. He said with “Black lives being lost on the streets of America because of police misconduct and gang violence… we must have a president [who] understands the racial divide.”11
Similarly, older civil rights activists and Black politicians did not have much use for Black Lives Matter if the organization was not helping them win votes or allies among white moderates. “So much is at stake, if not for them, for the masses of Black people,” Joyce Ladner, a former leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, told The Washington Post. “What is the substitute for not voting? They need to put forth an alternative political, social, or economic structure that delivers some relief to Black people…. To whom are the BLM folks accountable when they remove the vote from Black people?”12
With all its agitation, criticism of political candidates, and failure to mobilize voters, Black Lives Matter now had no base of electoral support, and the organization also lost the media’s attention with Trump in the White House. Garza’s earlier comment about needing “running shoes” if Trump were elected was glib. It now seemed that Black Lives Matter was in fact running off course.
Instead, America’s attention turned to the backlash, as the racist rhetoric of Trump’s campaign unleashed actual racist attacks. In one year alone, the FBI reported that hate crimes jumped from about six thousand in 2016 to more than seven thousand by the end of 2017. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups and their crimes around the nation, saw an immediate uptick in episodes of racial attacks the very day after Trump’s election. One SPLC staffer told the story of coming into the office after election day to find “a flood of voicemail and emails from people who had been victims of hate incidents or had witnessed them.”
“The calls came from all over the country,” according to the SPLC, “and seemed to represent every population Trump had attacked during the campaign…. A wave of hate was breaking over the country and we started to collect as much information as we could.”13
The prime platform for the white supremacist backlash was social media, the same internet that had bolstered Black Lives Matter’s activism. But this was a parallel universe, a funhouse mirror in which the growing alt-right used social media to organize itself and spread hate. Their ranks were led by men such as David Duke, the former Klan leader, and Jared Taylor, who founded the racist magazine American Renaissance. Their vitriol led to the creation of newer groups, including the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, which soon became household names. Beyond organized groups there was a proliferation of individuals who remained anonymous online as they posted hateful, racist comments.
The one common theme they used to draw an audience was to claim that white people were being “replaced” by Blacks and immigrants in a process orchestrated by Jews operating behind the scenes. This “replacement theory” suggested that whites were the victims of minorities who were feeding at the so-called welfare trough at the expense of hardworking white Americans. Polls found that more than 50 percent of whites felt that they were more likely to face discrimination than Blacks. Two thirds of Trump voters agreed with this statement.14
The online power of this new wave of racism had long been evident. In June 2015, on the day after Trump launched his presidential campaign, a nineteen-year-old white South Carolinian named Dylann Roof walked into the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston. After sitting down with a Bible study group, he pulled out a gun and killed nine Black people.
Roof had spent most of his time immersed in online hate, and his social media history included posting comments on alt-right sites. He found support for his racial rage when in the aftermath of the Trayvon Martin murder, he typed in the term “black on White crime.”
“I have never been the same since that day,” Roof later wrote in a manifesto that was discovered after the shooting. “The first website I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens. There were pages upon pages of these brutal black on White murders. I was in disbelief. At this moment I realized that something was very wrong.” Roof’s radicalization deepened, fueled by websites like the neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer, until he found himself with a gun in his hand at the Charleston church, trying to spark a race war.15
Roof’s access to extremist, racist material online was now increasingly common among young white men. In the early age of the internet, the Drudge Report was a pioneering platform for the concerns of the radical fringes among conservatives. It was now eclipsed by openly racist websites, including VDARE, Daily Stormer, and InfoWars.
Young white men were also going onto Discord, a social media network created in 2015 and heavily used among the video gaming community. It was infamous for tolerating memes of vulgar and racist tropes. These young men turned to Discord to avoid scrutiny by coming together anonymously in chat rooms to discuss their views and grievances, including their opposition to removal of Confederate statues and monuments around the country.
Their most notorious effort became the “Unite the Right” rally planned for Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017. The alt-right’s pretext for the march was to protest the Charlottesville City Council’s decision to remove the statues of two Confederate generals, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, from city parks near the University of Virginia. The statues were among some four hundred built in the first two decades of the twentieth century as part of a Jim Crow backlash to Black progress during Reconstruction. The City Council had acted out of concern that the statues celebrated slave owners, perpetuating racial divisions and hatred. But for the alt-right, the decision signaled a loss of “Southern tradition” and the rise of the political power of minorities.
The neo-Nazi leader Jason Kessler used Discord to bring together several different white nationalist groups, including David Duke and others among the alt-right, a term first used by Richard Spencer, the leader of a white supremacist organization called the National Policy Institute, to signify that it was distinct from mainstream conservatism. His group’s priority was dedicated to white identity, the protection of white “western civilization,” and other racist ideas.
On the night before the planned rally, young white men gathered on the campus of the University of Virginia. David Duke was there and told his supporters, “We’re going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump because he said he’s going to take our country back.”16 As a multiracial group of counter-protesters, including local Black Lives Matter activists, surrounded the base of a statue of Thomas Jefferson (which was not being removed), the alt-right members began chanting “White Lives Matter!” and making monkey noises. Shoving and fighting broke out with limited law enforcement presence, but the groups eventually separated.
Later that night, the alt-right protesters marched past the city’s lone synagogue with automatic rifles slung over their shoulders. The worshippers were forced to leave through the back door as the men paraded toward the statue of Robert E. Lee. They wore white polos and khaki pants; some also wore swastikas and chanted “Sieg Heil”—the Nazi salute. They bellowed in unison, “Blood and Soil!” and “Jews will not replace us!” as they marched.
The next morning, the scene became chaotic. To stop the alt-right activists from entering the park, counter-protesters threw bottles and rocks at the white supremacists, who were armed with clubs and shields. Even as the neo-Nazis dispersed, their presence provoked further confrontations. A Black woman yelled from her front porch: “Go the fuck home.” They responded by shouting: “Go the fuck back to Africa.” One man said, “Dylann Roof was a hero.”17
News of the violence went viral on social media. At 1:14 p.m., the city of Charlottesville’s Twitter account posted: “CPD & VSP [Charlottesville Police Department and Virginia State Police] response to a 3-vehicle crash at Water and 4th Streets. Several pedestrians struck. Multiple injuries.”18 A white nationalist had driven his car into a crowd, killing a counter-protester named Heather Heyer.
Heyer was a thirty-two-year-old paralegal who had been active on social media denouncing Trump. On Facebook she had expressed alarm at his election, posting, “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.” The writer and activist Shaun King posted after her killing: “She was not murdered by an immigrant or refugee or Muslim or Black man, but by a white supremacist—A true domestic terrorist.”19
President Trump initially responded to the violence with anodyne comments via Twitter: “We ALL must be united & condemn all that hate stands for. There is no place for this kind of violence in America. Lets come together as one!”20
The violence sparked heated, angry discussion on social media as to whether Trump’s words and actions had instigated the deadly scene in Charlottesville. When reporters asked Trump if he felt responsible for what happened, the president blamed his predecessor, saying there had been similar racial tension under Obama. Then Trump said there was “blame on both sides.” He argued that some people had joined the alt-right rally out of concern about “changing history… changing culture.”
He continued: “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists because they should be condemned totally.” Trying to make a distinction where none seemed to exist, Trump claimed to be talking about people who were “protesting very quietly” the removal of the Robert E. Lee statue, arguing that these were innocent, legal protests.
In fact, the march had been organized and led by white extremists. “They didn’t put themselves down as neo-Nazis,” Trump argued, contrary to the facts. “You had some very bad people in that group… you also had people that were very fine people on both sides.”21
Trump’s defense of the extremists drew furious responses, but many Republicans rallied to his defense. According to a Washington Post/ABC News poll after the incident, a surprising 35 percent of Americans believed Trump was not equating people opposed to the statues with neo-Nazis. Among his Republican base, over 60 percent approved of his response. Nonetheless, 42 percent of Americans said Trump was wrong to equate the white supremacists and the counter-protesters.22
Among the alt-right, Trump was unanimously cheered. “Thank you President Trump for your honesty & courage to tell the truth about #Charlottesville,” David Duke tweeted. “We are determined to take our country back. We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump. That’s what we believed in. That’s why we voted for Donald Trump, because he said he’s going to take our country back.”23
Richard Spencer was also gleeful when Trump initially avoided condemnation of white nationalists. On the Daily Stormer website, one commentator openly lauded the president’s response: “No condemnation at all. When asked to condemn, [Trump] just walked out of the room. Really, really good. God bless him.”24
The alt-right was not operating in isolation. The backlash against Black Lives Matter had tremendous support online and from a growing right-wing media that found it could generate profits from an audience attracted to depictions of people of color as the cause of crime and terrorism.
The biggest of these burgeoning alt-right sites was Breitbart, which featured conspiracies and white grievance, founded by the journalist Andrew Breitbart in 2005. After its founder’s death in 2012, the site was taken over by Steve Bannon, a Hollywood producer and former Goldman Sachs executive who had gone into the business of online video gaming. Bannon was acutely aware of the market potential of appealing to young male gamers.
Taking the site to new extremes with its conspiracies and stories of white racial rage, Bannon used marketing lessons from Hollywood and gaming to generate more clicks for Breitbart, whose monthly average audience had jumped to more than 64 million by 2016. By comparison, one of the largest mainstream conservative publications, National Review, received only around 10 million hits per month.25
Bannon’s use of extremist, right-wing political conspiracies had roots that stretched back to the John Birch Society in the 1950s. The Birch Society was founded on a strident “Anti” philosophy: Anti-communist, Anti–big government, Anti-Semitic, Anti-feminist, and Anti-immigration. Birchers were also a leading platform of opposition to the First Civil Rights Movement and supported Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, who had voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Breitbart also tapped into right-wing political populism that flowed from Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy” through Ronald Reagan’s focus on “states’ rights” and Pat Buchanan’s condemnation of racial diversity. Buchanan said in his 1992 presidential bid that diversity was diluting the nation’s heritage and dumping it into a “landfill called multiculturalism.” Buchanan was Trump before Trump, saying that Americans should “put the needs of Americans first”—meaning, of course, white Americans.26
Bannon pushed stories that painted white conservatives as the heirs to “western civilization” under assault from a multiracial liberal mob, and he increasingly promoted the Trump campaign. Both Bannon and Trump played to anxieties of their core audience—white men.
Trump was already a prominent part of this right-wing media chamber. He found great utility in rousing anger, particularly through his use of Twitter, trading in conspiracies, and spreading alarm over Barack Obama’s depiction of working-class whites clinging to “guns or religion” or Hillary Clinton’s description of Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables.” Hate groups, such as the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, found Breitbart’s and Trump’s messaging helpful to their recruiting efforts.
According to Ben Shapiro, until March 2016 the editor-at-large of Breitbart, “Under Bannon’s leadership, Breitbart openly embraced the White Supremacist Alt-Right.”27 That summer of 2016, as Trump was being nominated by the Republican Party, Bannon did away with any pretext of neutrality, admitting about Breitbart: “We are the platform of the alt-right.”28
The alt-right’s online success got a boost from Russia. President Vladimir Putin saw the racial division in the United States as an opportunity for his effort to destabilize American democracy. Even before the 2016 election, Russian troll farms—internet manipulation groups linked to military and intelligence services—began twisting American social media users. They created fake accounts to spread lies, conspiracies, and inflammatory language. The Senate Intelligence Committee found that these trolls had been mimicking Black Lives Matter online. On Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, with handles such as “Woke Blacks” and “Blacktivists,” they created an “expansive cross-platform media mirage targeting the Black community.” Then creating fake alt-right accounts, the trolls provoked clashes, both online and sometimes on the street, further dividing Americans by race.29
The alt-right shared with Putin a disdain for popular elections. They also had in common an opposition to racial diversity, gay rights, and feminism. Trump claimed that there had been no collusion between his campaign and Russian agents, even though the Mueller report documented scores of contacts.30 In one famous campaign speech, Trump even openly asked the Russians to use their social media operation to uncover damaging information about Hillary Clinton.
Several of Trump’s senior advisers had significant ties to Moscow and some also shared Putin’s disdain for racial justice. Michael Flynn, for example, who served briefly as Trump’s first national security adviser, was in frequent contact with the Russians during the 2016 campaign.
Stephen Miller was a senior adviser stoking racist fears. A former aide to Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, Miller had long promoted fears that immigrants were replacing white Americans. Miller sent emails to Breitbart and Bannon complaining that immigrants were hurting white Americans’ job prospects and draining social welfare. He was particularly concerned about the increasing number of public schools that taught English as a second language. “White youth population disappearing,” he wrote as a comment when sharing an article on increasing diversity in the country.31
Miller’s former boss, Sessions, a far-right Southerner, was known for his anti–civil rights and anti-immigrant positions. In 1986, when he was serving as a U.S. attorney, the Senate denied him a federal judgeship after Department of Justice attorneys told senators that Sessions had made racist comments. One Black assistant U.S. attorney noted that Sessions thought the Ku Klux Klan was “OK until I found out they smoked pot.”32
Despite this, Sessions was later elected as Alabama’s attorney general and later to the U.S. Senate. Given his extremist views, he gravitated to Trump and was the first U.S. senator to endorse his candidacy. Untroubled by the senator’s difficult racial past, Trump made Sessions an early cabinet selection as attorney general.
Another key player from the far right pulled into the Trump orbit was Mike Pompeo, who as a congressman was infamous for his anti-Muslim stances and conspiracy theories. He gained prominence in congressional hearings by attacking Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with charges that her neglect had allegedly led to the death of American diplomats in Benghazi, Libya. The charges went nowhere, but they produced sensational headlines and endless cable news show innuendo that dragged on for two years.
One of the strangest Trump advisers, Sebastian Gorka, was Breitbart’s national security editor. Even more unusual were the allegations concerning his long association with Hungarian far-right and anti-Semitic political groups. While he denied them, on the day of Trump’s inauguration, rather than wearing an American flag pin, Gorka wore a medal from Vitézi Rend, a Hungarian extremist group that had collaborated with Nazi Germany during World War II.
The KKK’s David Duke would call these Trump appointees “great.” The founder of the Daily Stormer, Andrew Anglin, wrote: “It’s like we’re going to get absolutely everything we wanted…. Basically we are looking at a Daily Stormer Dream Team in the Trump Administration.”33
Immediately, this alt-right “Dream Team” began pushing extremist policies on immigration and race. In Trump’s first week in office, Miller drafted an executive order to ban people from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States. The order prevented travel of all citizens from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Yemen, and even a close U.S. ally, Iraq. In addition, it suspended the resettlement of Syrian refugees and lowered the number of all refugees eligible for admission to the United States.
The “Muslim ban,” which Trump had promised on the campaign trail, was hastily thrown together with no consultation with the federal agencies that would have to enforce it. It was immediately challenged in federal court, which found the wording too broad and issued a restraining order preventing its implementation.
Trump’s team tried again in March 2017, but once again the order was found to be unconstitutional and halted by the courts. It was not until the third version included a few non-Muslim-majority countries with ties to “terrorist activity” (North Korea and Venezuela) while dropping Iraq and replacing Somalia with Chad that the Supreme Court upheld limitations on travel.
At the same time, Trump was also pursuing tougher laws to stop the flow of people from Latin America into the country. In that first week of his presidency, Trump signed executive orders to build a border wall separating the United States from Mexico. He also ordered the hiring of five thousand additional Border Patrol officers and a tripling of immigration agents to speed deportations of unauthorized immigrants already in the country. “Beginning today, the United States of America gets back control of its borders,” Trump said in a speech at the Department of Homeland Security.34
In addition to calling for the wall, he also proposed a cut in federal money for so-called sanctuary cities if they did not cooperate with his immigration efforts. Reaching back to the Kate Steinle case and his criticism of San Francisco, Trump lowered the standard for deportation to mere suspicion by immigration officials that a foreigner was “a risk to public safety or national security.”35
Months later, a San Francisco jury found that the shooting of Steinle was an accident and acquitted Jose Garcia Zarate of murder. Trump immediately took to Twitter blasting the ruling: “A disgraceful verdict in the Kate Steinle case! No wonder the people of our Country are so angry with Illegal Immigration.”36 Attorney General Sessions joined with the president in blaming sanctuary city policies for the young woman’s death. “San Francisco’s decision to protect criminal aliens led to the preventable and heartbreaking death of Kate Steinle,” he said in a statement.37
Sessions also reversed President Obama’s efforts to rein in abusive police behavior. He directly blamed an increase in shootings and gun-related deaths on Black Lives Matter. “If you want more shootings, more death, then listen to the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union], Antifa [antifascists], Black Lives Matter, and groups who do not know the reality of policing. If you want public safety, then listen to the police professionals who have been intensely studying this for decades,” he said, dismissing any complaints against law enforcement as unwarranted.38
Sessions limited the Department of Justice’s use of consent decrees to get local police departments to change their tactics. The Obama administration had used such agreements to gain greater oversight of policies on the use of force, as well as police hiring practices and training. Two of the most high-profile consent decree cases involved Ferguson and Baltimore, the latter of which was the site of Black Lives Matter protests in 2015 after another young Black man, Freddie Gray, died in police custody. Instead of issuing consent decrees, Sessions wanted to send this message to rank-and-file police: “We’re on your side. We’ve got your back, you got our thanks.”39
Sessions also wanted to reverse the Obama administration’s efforts to limit jail sentences. In 2010, Obama signed the Fair Sentencing Act, which ended the disparity in jail time between those individuals convicted of possession of crack, a heavily minority population, and lighter sentences for the mostly white people found with powder cocaine. Obama’s reform efforts had reduced the federal prison population for the first time since the mid-1970s.
Alicia Garza acknowledged that Obama had commuted the sentences of more than 1,700 people. “This makes him the only President in history to have granted as many second chances,” she said. But that had not been enough for her and her fellow Black Lives Matter activists, who continued to berate the first Black president for not doing more. Even after Trump’s election, she continued to criticize Obama. “The outcomes of the last eight years didn’t come to realize Obama’s promised vision of hope and change,” she wrote in Time magazine, describing his administration as a “disappointment” and calling out his failure to address the reality that “race and racism negatively impacts our society, our democracy and our economy.”40 She dismissively said that Obama was delusional in telling people that there was “an even and level playing field between black communities and law enforcement.”41
By sitting out the 2016 election and not seeing a difference between the Democrats and the Republicans on race, Black Lives Matter and Garza had helped open the door to Trump and an administration full of people diametrically opposed to police reform. While they carped on the sidelines about Obama, their absolutist ideology left them out of the conversation and gave them no relationship with the hardline conservatives now in the White House.
In retrospect, Garza acknowledged errors in not seeking opportunities to make progress through compromise with people in power. “It is hard to build a plane while you are flying it—while also under enemy fire,” she later wrote. Black Lives Matter members, she went on, “hadn’t learned to struggle together politically in ways that could help us get sharper and have more of a unified position. And as a result, we missed key opportunities to engage our communities and shift the balance of power.”42 Black Lives Matter had made the decision not to engage with Republicans because it was “faced with a new administration that is seemingly hell bent on rolling back nearly everything we’ve fought so hard for over the last forty years.”43
With Black Lives Matter out of the picture, The New York Times reported, Sessions pressed federal prosecutors to “put more people in prison for longer periods, adopting the mass incarceration strategy that helped flood prisons during the war on drugs during the 1980s and 1990s.”44
At the same time, and in spite of his social media support for white nationalists, Trump saw a political opportunity in the prison reform effort. He wanted the embrace of online influencers, celebrities like Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, who were advocating for people convicted of minor drug offenses, disproportionately minorities, to have their sentences reduced. Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, a man whose own father had gone to prison for tax fraud, also took a personal interest in prison reform. He began working with Van Jones, a former Obama official and TV personality, to slash the prison population in all fifty states.
Jones had been a longtime prison reform advocate. After graduating from Yale Law School, he focused on prison reform at a center for human rights. And with Black Lives Matter muted after Trump’s victory, Jones ironically found himself the leading Black voice heard inside the administration.
It was a surprise for many to see Jones working with Trump’s people. On election night, as a commentator for CNN, a distressed Jones had called Trump’s victory “a whitelash against a changing country.” He added that it was also a “whitelash against a Black president in part, and that’s the part where the pain comes.” Jones observed that white voters’ response to Obama was to back a candidate known for his unbridled harsh racial rhetoric.45
But Jones’s prominence as a TV personality attracted Kushner, who was trying to moderate Trump’s reputation as a racist. Jones’s engagement with Trump officials led to social media criticism by people affiliated with Black Lives Matter. Jones dismissed these influencers as “not kind” and “not strategic.” He felt that getting as many Black people as possible out of jail was a step forward, even if the precise method wasn’t the ideal and the legislation would be signed by President Trump.
“Do we want to lead everybody into freedom…. Or do you just want to be mad at injustice,” Jones said later of the widespread criticism from Black Lives Matter. He pointed out that there were 2.3 million African Americans behind bars and another 4.5 million on probation or parole. In total, more Blacks were part of the judicial system in the twenty-first century than had been enslaved in the nineteenth century.46
Patrisse Cullors disagreed with Jones’s pragmatism. “Many of us agreed that we would not have any negotiations under this presidency,” she stated, trashing these reform efforts as insufficient. “You don’t try to save a few people, you try to save everybody,” she pronounced.47
Online “cancel culture,” a slogan referring to sudden waves of calls to shun and exclude voices deemed damaging to liberal causes, was a sensation at the time. Now it surrounded Jones with efforts to depict him as unworthy of being taken seriously, especially after he appeared in a photograph with Kushner, Trump, and the far-right Black media personality Candace Owens. “I will take a picture with Trump every day, twice on Sunday to get 25,000 people out of prison,” Jones said four years later, offering a high-end projection of the number of prisoners that could be released under the administration’s plan.48
Jones and Kushner got bipartisan support in Congress for the first prison reform effort in nearly a decade, while neutralizing opposition from Attorney General Sessions and right-wing Republicans in the Senate. Even the Republican majority leader, Mitch McConnell, supported the legislation, and in December 2018 Trump signed the First Step Act, which reduced sentences on low-level drug offenses and allowed for immediate release of some older prisoners. The Sentencing Project, a major reform group, estimated that more than three thousand inmates, more than 90 percent of whom were Black, were released that first year.
Jones cheered Trump on Twitter, writing: “Give the man his due: @realDonaldTrump is on his way to becoming the uniter-in-Chief on an issue that has divided America for generations. Congrats to everyone on both sides who fought for this. #FIRSTSTEPact #CriminalJusticeSummit #CriminalJusticeReform #justicereform #Trump.”49 Established civil rights groups from the First Movement, like the NAACP and the National Urban League, agreed that the bill was a help.
This further isolated Black Lives Matter. They viewed it as a trifling achievement. Cullors went so far as to say she felt betrayed by Jones, accusing him of a flawed strategy that led to a “profoundly insensitive lauding of President Trump.”50 A Black Lives Matter press release dismissed the First Step Act for failing “to address the systemic issues and driving forces behind mass incarceration and, more disturbingly, it further invests in structural racism.” The organization claimed that the reform did nothing to repair “the decades of harm caused by their criminalization, and the irrevocable trauma caused to many Black families… the undocumented, and the refugee population.”51
His success on prison reform notwithstanding, Trump was seen as a chaotic president, often tweeting in the middle of the night and bullying his critics. Much of the country saw him as a racist, and even those who approved of his most hateful views recognized that he had not succeeded in building the wall and his ban on Muslims faced constant court challenges and was unpopular. Trump’s approval in polls, as the 2018 midterm elections approached, remained historically low, but he doubled down on the racial rhetoric as alt-right online conspiracy theories continued to flourish.
The hidden force behind these conspiracies was the contention that Jews, especially as political donors, but also as elites in Hollywood and on Wall Street, were diminishing the power of white Christians. Fringe websites pushing anti-Semitism proliferated. Message boards and apps like 4chan, 8chan, and Gab were among the leading purveyors of this hate speech. Even on mainstream platforms like Twitter and Instagram, white nationalist leaders such as David Duke and Andrew Anglin, and their trolls, used social media to belittle politicians, journalists, and academics as part of a Jewish conspiracy to replace white America with Blacks, immigrants, and other dark-skinned minorities.
According to the Anti-Defamation League, between July 2016 and January 2018 the use online of the terms Jew and kike, a slur for Jewish people, “more than doubled.” Likewise, the ADL noted a sharp rise in the use of those terms after Trump’s inauguration and the days surrounding the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville.52 The United States also saw a precipitous rise in violence against Jews, mirroring the rise of hate crimes against Blacks and Hispanics. The ADL recorded an almost 60 percent spike of physical attacks in 2017, describing it as the “largest single-year increase on record.”53 The Southern Poverty Law Center, also tracking a rise in neo-Nazi hate groups, found a 20 percent growth between 2016 and 2017.54
The most prevalent conspiracy theory centered on the billionaire George Soros, who was portrayed as the mastermind behind the “replacement theory.” Soros was one of the biggest Democratic Party fundraisers and had long been demonized by Republicans, who viewed him as a political rival. But now this partisan antagonism took on a new coloration, drawing on long-established anti-Semitic tropes.
The term “Soros-funded” became shorthand among far-right conservatives as a derisive dog whistle to describe anyone—or any program or group—who aided immigrants. Soros himself was an immigrant. He had survived the Holocaust, fled communist-controlled Hungary, and used his later wealth to promote democracy and support refugees around the world via his Open Society Foundations.
The antagonism to Soros, an international figure, created an unusual alliance of far-right groups in the U.S. and Europe. The American alt-right had noticed the early success of populist anti-immigrant voices in Europe, led by Hungarian president Viktor Orbán. He, too, made Soros a villain at a time of rising numbers of Muslims coming into Europe.
As the 2018 midterms approached, Trump escalated his own anti-immigrant remarks, warning of “migrant caravans” from Honduras that were about to invade the southern border. When asked if Soros was “funding” the caravans, Trump said he “wouldn’t be surprised.” His comments fed social media rumors, promoted on right-wing websites, about Soros encouraging “illegal” immigration to replace whites.55
One Republican congressman, Matt Gaetz, posted a video on Twitter of a hidden figure paying migrants to “storm the U.S. border.” He then asked: “Soros?”56
These conspiracies quickly spread to conservative talk radio and conservative news shows. The rage inside the conservative echo chamber was all about immigrants crossing the border, with the theory that Jews, specifically Soros, were facilitating their arrival to help Democrats win the midterm election.
This was no dog whistle. It was hostile and powerful and led to one of the bloodiest days in Jewish American history—October 27, 2018.
Robert Bowers, a man who lived in a small town in western Pennsylvania, had consumed extremist media for months, reposting viral images and comments about what he called a “third world caravan” of approaching “invaders.” He wrote that “Jews are the children of Satan” and demeaned Blacks as well, complaining that “Diversity means chasing down the last white person.” He expressed his support of Gavin McInnes, the leader of the Proud Boys, and frequently took aim at Soros and Jewish charity work.
On the morning of October 27, Bowers posted a message on Gab that was a hate-filled screed against HIAS, the Hebrew Immigration Aid Society: “HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.”57 HIAS, initially founded in 1881 to help Jewish refugees fleeing persecution in Europe, has become a leading agency supporting migrants. Working closely with the State Department, HIAS has been very active in supporting the resettlement of Muslim immigrants in the United States, especially those escaping persecution in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
After posting his final warning, Bowers drove half an hour on that rainy Saturday morning to Squirrel Hill, the neighborhood at the center of Jewish life in Pittsburgh. He entered the Tree of Life synagogue just before 10 a.m. as Shabbat services were beginning. Carrying three Glock pistols and an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, he went from the basement to the upper floor, firing all four weapons. According to worshippers who hid in closets, under pews, and fled through the back door, Bowers shouted: “All Jews must die!” He killed eleven people and injured six others before he was subdued and arrested. Officers later reported that he told them that Jews were committing genocide against white people.58
The murders made international headlines and prompted widespread words of sorrow and regret. President Trump joined the condemnation of the killings, but his sentiment turned in a different direction when he was pressed about whether his inflammatory political appeals had paved the way to this anti-Semitic violence. His response was to call for an increased use of guns to secure synagogues: “If they had some kind of [armed] protection inside the temple, maybe it could have been a much different situation.”59
A week later, when American voters went to the polls for the 2018 midterm election, it was clear that the white supremacist backlash to Black Lives Matter was facing a backlash of its own. In the highest voter turnout for any midterm election since 1914, the Democrats picked up forty-one congressional seats, with staggering losses for Trump’s party. The House of Representatives flipped to a Democratic majority, which would be led by the fiery former speaker, Nancy Pelosi.
A record number of women were elected to Congress—117, an unprecedented 23 percent of the House and Senate. Included in that trailblazing group were Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, the first Muslim women elected to the House. Among some of the other firsts were Ayanna Pressley, the first Black representative from Massachusetts, and the first Native American women, Kansas’s Sharice Davids and New Mexico’s Deb Haaland. A new generation of women of color also gained seats. Lauren Underwood of Illinois, thirty-two, became the youngest Black woman ever elected to Congress. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, at twenty-nine years of age, became the youngest female member of the House. Together, the group’s political identity was defined by their opposition to Trump. Ocasio-Cortez, Pressley, Tlaib, and Omar called themselves “the Squad,” and were immediately vilified in the conservative press.
The midterm election was a repudiation for a man who had campaigned on white grievance and played to a white male base. Trump would now face a more diverse Congress than ever as he continued to fight demographic and political shifts by defiantly flying his banner “Make America Great Again.”