How to tell what's coming next.
Why would the biggest electric car manufacturer in the country join forces with drill-baby-drill Republicans?
1930s America provided a wealth of white supremacist organizations to choose from and plenty of style options to go right alongside them. For example, had you wanted a little panache with your prejudice, you could join the Silver Shirts who believed in the mental, moral and spiritual superiority of the Aryan race. Maybe you’re more of an emo kind of guy, making the Black Shirts the best choice with their belief in “patriotism” and “the leadership and supremacy of the White race”. For more professionalism in your white supremacy, you might go with the Khaki Shirts who required belief in “America for Americans” and a “white man’s god”. Of course, for the absolute classic look, there were the White Shirts, who not only had a Klansman for a VP, but also seemed to model their titular white shirt after a Klan robe.
These were all militias, largely offshoots of veterans’ groups and all boasted memberships in the tens of thousands. Notably, aside from devout racism and severely limited wardrobes, the groups didn’t have much else in common. The Black Shirts hated atheism. The Khakis wanted “freedom for the Philippines”. The founder of the White Shirts described himself as a communist and membership in the Silver Shirts meant getting into some weirdo pervert mysticism.
Now, if your racism manifested less militantly, not to worry! 1930s white supremacist fraternities weren’t just for the paramilitarily-minded! For example, if you considered yourself one of those big brain bigots, you could join Technocracy Incorporated. These Orwellian nightmares wanted to eliminate all North American borders and rename the entire continent the North American Technate. Their goal was to get rid of all democratic governments and replace them with a perpetual incumbency of intolerance led by only the best eugenics engineers.
While membership in Technocracy Inc. may not have offered such an amazing array of style options, it did come with travel opportunities and chances to schmooz with industry elites. With branches across the US led by Technocracy “mastermind” Howard Scott and even Canadian branches run loud and proud by Nazi apartheid enthusiast Joshua Haldeman, you’d be in regular communication with the top degenerates of the day!
Rich white supremacists weren’t left out, either! The American Liberty League included wealthy nepo babies like J. P. Morgan, Jr. and Irénée du Pont. Being born into affluence meant a lot of what they did was secret, but one thing these silver-spooned simpletons were very public about was their disgust with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
FDR’s New Deal was shifting a barely noticeable amount of their easily-inherited tax dollars into hard-working, impoverished Black hands, which obviously went against everything called the American Liberty League would stand for! They funded various colorful Shirt militias, published photos of Eleanor Roosevelt with Black people and articles calling the New Deal the “Jew Deal”. You get the idea.
Obviously, the fanatical bigotry of wealthy nepotists didn’t win over very many hearts or minds, so they put together a plan. They had the money, the Shirt militias had the muscle and Technocracy Inc. had the “brains”. It was entirely possible for the American Liberty League to take over the entire country. I mean, it had already kinda happened in France, so why not? But they needed someone at the helm, someone with the courage and know-how to champion their side of history…
Retired Marine Major General Smedley Darlington Butler was a celebrated war hero and a known critic of US policy—and just maybe the perfect leader for an insurrection! An American Liberty League representative approached Butler with their offer: Oust FDR and overthrow the United States government in exchange for an executive role in the North American Technate.
The thing about privilege is the more you have, the less capable you are and if you cross over a certain line, you’re bound to be stupid as shit. This is probably why no one at the American Liberty League could’ve possibly imagined that Butler would respond to their offer not by graciously accepting, but instead by reporting their coup attempt to the FBI. That led to FDR telling the old money insurrectionists that they could get either behind the New Deal or be executed for treason.
Executions were avoided, the New Deal continued, and the Shirt militias eventually fell into obscurity. Technocracy Incorporated also fell into obscurity in the US, but after declaring war on Germany in 1939, the Canadian government banned the Nazi-adjacent organization and prosecuted leader Joshua Haldeman. After the war, finding his Technocratic utopia, Haldeman moved himself and his family to South Africa to support apartheid.
Haldeman built as cruel and cliché a South African life as you might expect any wealthy colonizer to build. He flew around in his own plane, wrote about how lazy and stupid Black native folks were and documented his chiropractic experiments on them. His daughter even became a model and married an emerald mine owner, welcoming Haldeman’s grandson into the world in 1971 and naming him Elon Musk.
History doesn’t repeat itself. Not really. It doesn’t even rhyme. It’s just that in a closed system like white supremacy, there can only be so many outcomes. Being aware of the system makes potential problems pretty easy to predict. For example, if a group of billionaires, vigilantes and nerds once joined forces in a coup attempt for the sake of white supremacy—despite class differences and various conflicting goals—only the loudest alarms would go off when those forces began to converge again… Especially when the leader of the new group is the grandson of a leader of the previous group.
Of course, this time some things are different. The mass of restrictive voter laws and gerrymandered voter maps combined with a genocidal opposition party made winning an election much easier than attempting violence. Then you can purge the FBI instead of worrying about them stopping you.
So, what’s next for our democracy? I hate to tell you this, but our leadership isn’t behaving like we have a democracy, which I’m pretty sure means we don’t have one. What can you do? First, you should understand what Major General Smedley Darlington Butler understood when he said, “I served in all commissioned ranks from second lieutenant to Major General. And during that period I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism. I suspected I was just part of the racket all the time. Now I am sure of it.”
Second, accept the fact that while the main target of white supremacists is non-whites, they’re more than happy to destroy any number of their fellow whites along the way to that goal. This makes white supremacy everyone’s problem. And it’s a life-threatening one, so treat it that way.
And lastly, if you’re feeling hopeless, learn how to hope here.
https://ushistoryscene.com/article/william-dudley-pelley/
https://time.com/archive/6778735/races-shirt-business/
https://time.com/archive/6745811/races-blackshirts-v-blackmen/
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/general-motors-and-the-third-reich
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/11/trump-fdr-roosevelt-coup-attempt-1930s
https://www.templelawreview.org/lawreview/assets/uploads/2014/03/86-Temple-L-Rev-Goldstein-287.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6_February_1934_crisis
https://www.democracynow.org/2025/2/11/elon_musk_was_raised_under_racist
https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-leader-post-a-new-life-for-haldeman/101817586/
https://www.commondreams.org/news/harris-gaza
https://samuelj.substack.com/p/how-to-hope
https://samuelj.substack.com/p/why-we-dont-solve-the-homelessness
https://samuelj.substack.com/p/legally-black-illegally-black