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Ever since I was a kid, my family had been telling paranoid stories of far-flung conspiracies, chief among them that a shadowy cabal had rigged the economic system and intentionally shortchanged my people, the working poor. They believed in smoke-filled rooms where the world’s rich and powerful met to conspire against them. To defend themselves, they bought overwhelming arsenals of guns and maintained veritable armories in their houses and garages in preparation for a long-rumored invasion of the United States by the combined forces of the New World Order and the United Nations. They horded supplies and prepped for the fall of America, a dystopic horror companies advertising gas masks and rations and gold coins were too happy to use to peddle their wares. Because of this irrational fear, many of my relatives and people like them were vulnerable to the manipulations of white supremacists. The election of Obama and the propagation of progressivism, including a vigorous fight for multiculturalism and equal rights, was seen as a scourge that threatened to undermine “traditional” American values.
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Jared Yates Sexton (The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore: A Story of American Rage)