White Supremacy and the American Media by Sarah D. Nilsen Sarah E. Turner

Author:Sarah D. Nilsen, Sarah E. Turner [Sarah D. Nilsen, Sarah E. Turner]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781032100609
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2021-11-30T00:00:00+00:00

The intentional and widespread denial and erasure of white supremacism and white nationalism within US military forces by the Republican party that began after 9/11 has led to the widespread proliferation of white nationalism within the military. A poll conducted by the Military Times in 2019 found that nearly one in four troops had experienced white nationalism among their fellow service members; 36 percent had seen evidence of white supremacist and racist ideologies in the military, which was a significant rise from the year before [2018], when only 22 percent had reported the same (Shane III, 2017). The Trump administration’s amplification of white supremacist dog whistles was met with denial of the existence of the problem on the part of Republicans, coupled with claims of anti-patriotic behavior by Democrats who called for demands to address the serious threat of white nationalism within the US military. In 2019, the US military and naval academies launched internal investigations after cadets and midshipmen were captured on ESPN’s pre-game show for the Army–Navy game making a hand gesture that some interpreted as white nationalist. This followed soon after with the demands by the Republican-controlled Senate that the phrase “white nationalist” be cut from the National Defense Authorization Act (Cohen & Crawford, 2019). Following the documentation of the rise of white nationalism in all branches of the military, including the military academies, Trump’s Secretary of Defense Mark Esper immediately stated to the press that he did not believe white nationalism was a problem in the military (Cohen & Crawford, 2019). Soon after the attacks on the Capitol, Kash Patel,2 who was installed as chief of staff to acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller during the last days of the Trump presidency, appeared on FOX News arguing that the extremist position was a myth. “They [Democrats] have self-admitted that the problem doesn’t exist, to their knowledge, and that’s because it doesn’t,” Patel told FOX News’s Maria Bartiromo. “White supremacy is not rampant throughout the Department of Defense. That is offensive to our men and women in uniform.” Patel claimed that the Biden Pentagon was “trading in politics” instead of “logic and fact” (McIntrye, 2021). In fact, as attacks by far-right perpetrators quadrupled between 2016 and 2017, the Trump administration cut funding for the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention, which is dedicated to investigating extremism and domestic terrorism, by $21 million to $3 million and demanded instead surveillance and investigations into the Black Lives Matter protests following the killing of George Floyd.

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