The post-insurrection testimony of William Pitt Kellogg has…

He testified that Reconstruction had been manageable until "the race-issue was there placed in the foreground" by white conservatives.

White conservatives abandoned all other policy issues & "appealed editorially to white men to employ white labor for political reasons."

Their goal in this was to radicalize white workers—to ensure that they had a vested financial interest in attacking & murdering leftist politicians friendly to racial equality.

In practice, it also meant firing Black workers so that they & their families would starve to death.

To summarize, you have a conservative "white man's party" that's overtly abt killing their political opponents to create more white jobs.

Kellogg identifies two tactics that made this white conservative movement so deadly: a massive disinformation campaign & a related paramilitary wing.

Sound familiar? Yeah. Not good.

The disinformation network put out a Big Lie that there was a Black League about to massacre all white Louisianans. Kellogg wrote "Very many people, and well-disposed people, had believed that there was an organization of the blacks, and that they were aiming to arm themselves."

White elites went all in for "systematic effort to organize among the most intelligent people of the city the White League, and that its leaders must necessarily have known the fact that there was no such thing as the Black League, and that they were not furnished with arms."

Here's the worst part: After the disinformation was out, white Louisianans became "determin[ed] to organize a White League to overcome what they termed the dangers of African supremacy in the State, and that the government of the State was not a legal one."

The misinformation was simply impossible to overcome. Kellogg & friendly media outlets repeatedly said there was no evidence of a Black League. No evidence of fraud. It didn't matter.

I've read *thousands* of pages of testimony abt white supremacist violence & the thing that haunts me the most abt this one is that Kellogg knows that the misinformation undermined everything else.

The white supremacist misinformation led to the massacre of hundreds of Black Louisianans over the next two years, several coup attempts, & culminated in the destruction of interracial democracy in the state.

Oh, & do you know what facilitated all of this? The losing gubernatorial candidate refused to concede defeat & set up a shadow government.

This shit was a PROCESS, one that eventually succeeded bc those in power failed 1) to deliver severe consequences to insurrectionists & 2) failed to stop the flow of misinformation inspiring their paramilitary activities.

So I'm on here begging @SpeakerPelosi @SenSchumer to expel Republicans who helped incite the Capitol Insurrection. The history is clear. Failure to deliver severe consequences means inviting worsening white supremacist coup attempts & violence.

But @RepAdamSchiff must also open a full investigation as an issue of intelligence, bc the beating heart of the insurrectionists is the disinformation disseminated by Fox, Brietbart, OAN, & especially social media.

If we fail to address the disinformation issue, all our other efforts will be pointless & we will be unlikely to stop the white militants.

The post-insurrection testimony of William Pitt Kellogg has been haunting me lately. He survived several coups as governor of LA during Reconstruction & gave a sobering assessment of their causes.

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