Every Silver Lining Has A Cloud

North Texas suburbs in turmoil after being identified as a hotbed of rightwing extremism: report https://t.co/WU14Zi7epY

— Raw Story (@RawStory) May 10, 2021

What is evident across this county — where in the 1970s the oilmen-rancher TV drama “Dallas” was filmed — is that extremism has gone mainstream in certain pockets of America. Hard-line sentiments that would have been whispered only years ago are now spoken unabashed. That worries Alonzo Tutson, a Black Independent, who said right-wing radicals here are everyday people who say “howdy to you at soccer practice. They just blend right in.”

I have to stop here and say:  "Yeah, well; same as it ever was."

In my junior year in high school, a year after the "black" schools in town were shut down to force integration with the much better funded/supported "white" schools, a small fight (we called it a riot at the time) broke out on campus.  Half the campus was involved, the other half was in class (it was during one of four lunch breaks every day). Some students joined despite the fact it wasn't their lunch break, so half is about right.  It was noisy but not really ugly.  I ended up leaving campus with my closest friends and my wife-to-be (then my girlfriend).  We were shaken and scared, but in the end the event came to nothing but early dismissal for the day for some of us.

It was the parents I encountered later that shook me.  I knew who the rednecks were (we didn't call them "racists" then.  We were all racists, actually, but some were more virulent about it than others.  The "rednecks" were the virulent ones) on campus; and who their parents were.  But I ran into a lot of adults, here and there, at school events later, like football games, or at church, or on weekends, who made it clear the blacks were the problem and while they couldn't go back to the schools they came from (and to be fair, many blacks resented losing their schools; especially the ones forced to my school, Robert E. Lee.  No wonder, huh?), they needed to be put in their place.

Until then, they had "just blend[ed] right in."  It was the beginning of a long education for me; but that's not the story here.  The story here is:  what's changed?

The article mentions "Dallas," but doesn't mention how Dallas proper (and suburbs, like McKinney) were a hotbed for TV evangelists in the '80's, alongside the eponymous prime-time soap opera.  TV evangelists weren't white supremacists, but neither were they advocates for social justice or radical change.  Their bread-and-butter was money and God's blessing on those who blessed the evangelists.  They made out pretty well until it became painfully obvious they were just con-men.  But they made out well in Dallas because they were all things the Reagan Era was:  preachers of money and conservatism and white people in charge.  It was never explicitly about race because it didn't have to be.  Now it is, because it does:

Texas was home to three dozen of the 377 alleged insurrectionists arrested in connection with the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, tied with Pennsylvania for the most of any state, according to a study by terror experts at the University of Chicago. Of Texans charged, 20 live in half a dozen rapidly diversifying blue counties around Houston and Dallas, including several in McKinney’s Collin County.

During the siege of the Capitol last Wednesday, Nick Ochs, left, and Dick NeCarlo, right, of the right-wing online streaming outlet Murder The Media pose in front of a message someone scrawled on a door. The pair insist they were covering the riot as independent reporters.

The study found that Texas’ rioters were older, more professional and had fewer ties to radical groups than past right-wing extremists. All came from counties that had lost white populations in recent years. Collin County’s white population has declined at a rate of 4.3% since 2015. The study’s authors cited increased fear among conservative whites that they would be overtaken by minorities in a “Great Replacement.”

“Now that Biden’s in office, a lot of people look to Texas as the counterpoint,” Paul Chabot, 47, a former San Bernardino reserve sheriff’s deputy, said last week at McKinney Coffee Company. He described the area as, “Living how America used to be.”

You don't need a dog to hear that whistle.  And apparently we have California to thank for this:

Chabot said Collin County resembles Orange County 20 years ago, before cities diversified and demographics shifted. The same Newport Beach-based architects who designed Woodbridge in Irvine in 1975 designed Stonebridge Ranch in McKinney in 1988, where Chabot’s relocation company helps resettle Californians, many of them conservatives.

And I have to include this, if only because I noted these people at the time of the insurrection in D.C.

Andrews and her friend Lee Jenkins, a hair stylist, said they joined the crowd “storming the Capitol” but insisted most protesters were peaceful and didn’t deserve to be charged. The women said they had considered entering the building too, but decided not to because they feared the tear gas would aggravate Jenkins’ asthma.

After they returned to Texas, Jenkins’ Twitter account was removed. FBI agents interviewed Andrews at her home several times, she said. Neither woman was charged.

Photos Andrews had posted online were circulated. Although Jenkins — whose business had just reopened after the pandemic lockdown — lost some liberal clients, she said she gained conservative ones, as did Andrews, who works as a dominatrix.

Something extremely conservative about that, it seems to me.

“It’s all tribalism, and it’s a cancer on our country. It’s destroying us,” [Stan Penn, a Trump supporter] said of the infighting among conservatives that’s proliferated online.

[George] Fuller ]Mayor of McKinney] agreed. He said the acrimony of the campaign marred his victory and split his family, including at least one sibling who is a QAnon believer. The bitterness in his family, in his state, is resonating nationally. That troubles him.

“I’m thoroughly concerned for our country,” he said. “We’re on a self-destructive path.”

Well, some of us are.  But it doesn't seem to be even the majority of McKinney, much less the country.  I came across a quote from P.J. O'Rourke recently:  "The internet--whose idea was it to put all the idiots on earth in touch with each other?"  The other side of that coin is:  they've always found ways to get in touch with each other.  Now we've made it possible for the rest of us to listen in.

Something to be said for that, too.