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A White King and Myth Eaters:
The Capitol Siege in Historical Perspective
by Hettie V. Williams, PhD
A majority of white voters across every demographic including gender, age and class voted for Donald J. Trump in two presidential elections. He is their king. According to the Pew Research Center, an estimated 58 percent of all white voters selected Trump in 2016 (31 percent voted for Hillary), and more than 50 percent voted to reelect Trump in 2020. He is their white king. I wrote about white racial anxiety a few years ago in a Huffington Post article suggesting that this anxiety will only increase as the nation becomes characteristically more ethnically diverse — and noticeably less white. Race is power. And, the majority of white people (nearly 60 percent of active registered voters that is), regardless of how “woke” they claim to be, seek to preserve their power. This is illustrated in their votes for a man who did nothing to hide his racialist thinking, contempt for women, disdain for Black people, immigrants and the disabled. Don’t believe the hype about white wokeness.
The recent siege on the Capitol building of the United States government can only be framed historically as a white supremacist terrorist attack on the U.S. Capitol incited by a cast of characters who supported Donald J. Trump — the forty-fifth president of the United…