White With Fear
Directed by Andrew Goldberg
Unrated
Runtime: 1 hour and 26 minutes
Philadelphia premiere 7PM Thursday March 20 at Landmark Ritz Five with director and producer Q&A after the film
Other screenings listed here

by Ryan Silberstein, Managing Editor

In the course of its runtime, White With Fear recaps the march of the conservative to activate and harness the power of racial resentment. Opening with Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign, which largely focused on “restoring law and order” in America’s cities and offering himself as a middle path between Hubert Humphrey and the segregationist George Wallace. Nixon did not carry the deep South; he was able to gain a decisive majority. While the events of 1968 are far too complicated for this review or documentary to unpack, the important point made in White With Fear is that Nixon was able to appear moderate by not endorsing segregation outright, but by hammering on the terms “law and order” and “urban crime,” he was still able to play on white unease while not overtly talking about race.

Johnson was the last Democratic president to receive a majority of white voters, as after 1968, the political parties realigned. Nixon’s talking points were at the core of Republicans’ Southern strategy, which broke through the traditional Democratic-voting South by using this kind of implicit racial anxieties. This kind of rhetoric is called a dog whistle, named after the kind of high frequency whistles used in dog training that are audible to canines but not able to be detected by the human ear. In political language, dog whistles are terms, like “law and order,” “crime,” “thug,” “welfare queen,” “gangbangers,” “states rights,” “forced bussing,” and others, which conjure scary images in the minds of middle and lower-class white Americans, making them think along racial lines without outright using racist language. While Nixon played on fear and anxiety, White With Fear shows how this has evolved over the last 50 years to shift from fear to rage.

White With Fear jumps ahead from Nixon to the founding of Fox News, through the anti-Muslim rhetoric used in the wake of 9/11 and into the “birtherism” movement against Barack Obama. All of these tactics played on white Americans’ fear and further othered non-white Americans. Around the same time, the U.S. Census Bureau began predicting that America would become a minority-majority (meaning white people would make up less than 50% of the population) by the middle of the century. After Mitt Romney’s defeat in 2012, the GOP Autopsy report stated the party should reduce focus on white Americans and diminish social conservatism and talk about immigration in order to reach the more ethnically diverse generation who were new or soon-to-be voters. However, Sean Trende’s article on RealClearPolitics.com called “The Case of the Missing White Voters” laid out a statistical argument that “the increased share of the minority vote as a percent of the total vote is not the result of a large increase in minorities in the numerator; it is a function of many fewer whites in the denominator.” And the result of that argument, intended or otherwise, gave Steve Bannon, using Breitbart as a news platform, Roger Ailes at Fox News, and Stephen Miller the path forward to coalesce all of their racial anxiety language and turn it into a movement with Trump at the head of it. You know the rest.

What makes White With Fear such a compelling documentary are the access filmmaker Andrew Goldberg had to people on both sides of these issues. Steve Bannon discusses these exact tactics in the film, as if what is being stated is the obvious, logical course of action. Former RNC and Jeb Bush campaign staffer Tim Miller discusses how the traditional Republican leadership, through either wishful thinking or willful ignorance, convinced themselves that the Tea Party had legitimate economic grievances, when the group really was entirely predicated upon activating whites who were “not ready for a Black president.” One of the most chilling interviews is with Sam Nunberg, who takes credit for some of Trump’s most outrageous claims–remember when Trump said Mexico would pay for the border wall? Nunberg says that was him–sounding like a true Roy Cohn acolyte. The interviews all seem to suggest that there is a mix of opportunism and true believers throughout the right wing currently, but, from my point of view, using these beliefs to attain power is no different from holding these beliefs.

Goldberg covers a lot of ground in a relatively short amount of runtime, but maintains a core throughline that makes the argument cogent and easy to follow for viewers. There is a lot of ground not covered, but the core idea I came away with is that everything that let these people attain power was based purely on emotions. Ailes and his descendants at Fox, Brietbart, and Newsmax certainly like to drum up facts and will seize on any random incident that seems to bolster their claims, but the core of this is all feelings. And that is why the left often struggles: the right can churn out hundreds of facts, each one taking up time and energy to debunk or rebuke, but the feelings in their base are activated long after those facts are proven false. You can’t fight feelings with facts.

White With Fear is like watching an avalanche form in slow motion, feeling helpless while it gathers enough rage to bury us all.

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