John:
If progressives don’t organize in rural areas, white supremacists will.
Small town America is facing a surge of white nationalist organizing--and Trump is egging on the racists.
The good news is, People’s Action is already fighting to out-organize them. Can you chip in $20 to help us defeat the white nationalist infiltration of our communities?
Last week in The New York Times, I wrote about how our organizers are finding evidence of white supremacist groups crawling back into public life in the Trump era:
Soon after the president was inaugurated, an organizer from North Carolina found a flyer and shared it with me. It offered support to people struggling with addiction: “We care about you. Let’s work together to stop this epidemic.” The sponsoring organization? The White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
This isn’t an isolated incident. According to the Anti-Defamation League, white supremacists tripled their propaganda distribution from 2017 to 2018, and the Southern Poverty Law Center reports a 30-percent increase in hate group growth following Trump’s campaign and election.
These racists are stepping into the very real vacuum in rural America. They see the pain, desperation, and anger in areas damaged and abandoned by corporations and a broken national politics as an opportunity to push their destructive agenda.
We are already taking the fight to these racists. We have knocked on thousands of doors to have deep conversations with everyday people about the problems they face. In all these conversations, people recognize that the enemy is not one another but the big corporations — driving up health care costs, taking away jobs, polluting air and water.
We’re taking what we’re learning from those conversations to develop a rural and small town organizing strategy that will target 15 key states and 100 counties, including 37 “pivot counties” that previously voted for Obama but voted for Trump in 2016. It’s a plan that can win. We saw it in the midterms: Single white rural women and young rural white people represent two of the greatest leftward swings in the 2018 midterms, moving 17 and 16 points respectively toward Democrats. We can do this--but it’s going to take all of us working together and contributing to it to make it work.
Please donate today to support our work organizing in these communities. It’s going to take all of us--rural, suburban, and urban--to knit this country back together. But if you’re with us, we’ve got a shot.
In solidary,
George Goehl
People’s Action
P.S. If you haven’t seen it yet, you can find my op-ed on out-organizing white supremacists at The New York Times, here.
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