The Great Whitening

Obama Derangement Syndrome

Before the second extrajudicial execution of an American citizen – shot in the back while on his knees – the saddest image out of America last week came from Philadelphia. On a bleak winter day, three white National Park Service workers carried out the sickening task of erasing history on orders of the Trump regime. Huddled together in the icy air, they unscrewed and chiseled away wall plaques memorializing the Black slaves in George Washington’s historic house.

Were they ashamed? Their backs are to the camera in the video. They don’t radiate pride.

For the last 16 years, millions of visitors to the Liberty Bell have been prompted – if they bothered to stop and read the signs – to think about nine humans (among millions) who were treated as property in America – and whose lived experience here was the exact opposite of “liberty.”

Buzzkill for snowflake white tourists. Why should we be made to feel bad about stuff that happened 200 years ago? Waaah!

The MAGA right coined a phrase for those who find their leader abhorrent: Trump Derangement Syndrome. Like so many of their accusations, the phrase is pure projection. In fact, the derangement is theirs. It dates back to November 2008, when Americans, by great majorities, elected a Black man with an African name to the presidency.

Millions of white Americans are still in the grip of a civic – and probably mental – disorder related to that election – and the global elation that followed it.

For the majority of Americans who elected him, and our allies around the world, the sight of an affable center-left Black man entering the White House signaled a monumental achievement: a huge step toward healing the open wound at the heart of our nation’s birth.

For the white supremacist minority, the panic was immediate and intense. I know people who, right after the election, started going to the firing range to train for a “Black uprising.” I’m working on a book right now about an American so deranged by the Obama presidency that he moved his family to a rugged tropical island and became a prepper. The inevitability of their shrinking power, symbolized by that election, chafes them still. And demographers have long predicted that the nation will become minority white by 2045 or 2050.

But for as much politics as I’ve covered and as many people as I have interviewed across the country, I never would have expected that so many Americans would be just fine with a poorly trained but well-equipped paramilitary force operating under the aegis of a rogue administration – discarding due process, engaging in racial profiling, dragging people out of cars and homes by their hair, and killing those who object.

Obama Derangement Syndrome has proved both virulent and lasting. How else can one explain the casual acceptance of blatant lies about broad-daylight, video-recorded murders, so easily disproven by visual evidence?

The Great Whitening started when the fake businessman first rolled down that escalator and blamed “Mexican rapists” for America’s unhappiness. Trump is a man for whom there is no bottom. He is an unplumbed abyss of amorality and vengeance. That abyss has attracted so many other bottom-dwellers and enabled men like Stephen Miller, Greg Bovino, and Corey Lewandowski – the real power behind Kristi Noem’s Mar-a-Lago faced Homeland Security.

The faction behind the masked Trump goons shares its worldview with ISIS, the Nazis, and the KKK. They consider mixed races mud people, and therefore, consider multi-ethnic, multi-racial America a mud place. Trump, during the 2024 campaign, crooned the same refrain from Boise to Reading, from Tulsa to Madison Square Garden: “They hate our country. They hate our country.”

He knew exactly who he was preaching to: the real America-haters.

Creating a white ethno-state out of a nation of immigrants was never going to be easy, culturally or legally. But what’s the point of power if you’re not going to abuse it?

Using lists of job-hunting MAGAs assembled before the 2024 election by the Heritage Foundation, supplemented by J6 pardonees, Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and every other SDE malcontent without military training but eager to play army in the woods, the regime has formed a cadre of masked goons to unleash on American cities in blue states.

After months of increasing brutality and lawlessness, and apparently too few bodies to pack into detention centers to show for it, the regime selected dead-of-winter Minneapolis as a petri dish for fascism.

And so: The Great Whitening.

This marks a critical phase in the spread and virulence of Obama Derangement Syndrome. A few Congressional Republicans have begun expressing tiny reservations. But the murders and accompanying violence have only inspired bloodlust among a not-insignificant number of our fellow Americans. The celebration of killings and violence across comments, podcasts, and social media are especially shocking as most of the contortionists claim to be Christian.

Behold Joel Webbon, a pipsqueak misogynist and “senior pastor,” tweeting: “ICE is doing Pretti Goode. But they must do far more.” This is a man who stands before a congregation at Covenant Bible Church in Georgetown, Texas, on Sundays and preaches the word of God.

How does the Holy Book not combust in his hands?

In his award-winning 2021 book White Too Long, Robert P. Jones examined the ways in which American Christian churches have upheld the framework of white supremacist thinking. The title comes from James Baldwin, writing not long after MLK was assassinated:

“I will flatly say that the bulk of this country’s white population impresses me, and has so impressed me for a very long time, as being beyond any conceivable hope of moral rehabilitation. They have been white, if I may so put it, too long; they have been married to the lie of white supremacy too long; the effect on their personalities, their lives, their grasp of reality, has been as devastating as the lava which so memorably immobilized the citizens of Pompeii. They are unable to conceive that their version of reality, which they want me to accept, is an insult to my history and a parody of theirs and an intolerable violation of myself.”

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