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The White Power Movement After El Paso

Kathleen Belew on domestic terrorism and Davis Maraniss on HUAC.

Start Making Sense and Jon Wiener

August 29, 2019

People take part in a rally against hate a day after a mass shooting at a Walmart store, in El Paso, Texas, August 4. The placard reads, “This was caused by racism.”(Reuters / Jose Luis Gonzalez)

We’re still thinking about the terrorist attack in El Paso, where 22 people were killed at a Walmart and two dozen more were injured. Like almost all of these attacks, the El Paso killings have been treated as an isolated event carried out by a loner. But the attacks in Charleston, Charlottesville, Christchurch, El Paso, and elsewhere are connected; the perpetrators are all part of the White Power movement, with roots going back to the 1970s. That’s what Kathleen Belew says—she writes for the New York Times op-ed page, she teaches history at the University of Chicago, and she’s the author of the book Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America, it’s out now in paperback.

Also: HUAC is history; the heyday of the House Un-American Activities Committee was the 1950s. But we’re still concerned about government attacks on people, and groups, called “Un-American.” David Maraniss has been thinking about that history—his father was called before HUAC in 1952 and then blacklisted from his job as a newspaper editor. His new book is A Good American Family: The Red Scare and My Father.

 

Start Making SenseTwitterStart Making Sense is The Nation’s podcast, hosted by Jon Wiener and coproduced by the Los Angeles Review of Books. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts for new episodes each Thursday.  


Jon WienerTwitterJon Wiener is a contributing editor of The Nation and co-author (with Mike Davis) of Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties.


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