AAPF’s Under the Blacklight series continues with a discussion about the legacies of the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol.

“The Never-Ending Insurrection” will examine not merely the details of the shocking effort to subvert democracy by the Trump administration, but also the key undercurrents of racial resentment and right-wing authoritarianism that fed into the attempted coup—along with the longstanding dogmas of permanent minority rule that supplied its strategy and tactics. Participants include AAPF Co-Founder and Executive Director Kimberle Crenshaw, New Republic Contributing Editor Osita Nwanevu, Los Angeles Times columnist Jean Guerrero, Atlantic Council Fellow Jared Holt and Real News Network Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez. AAPF’s Editor-in-Chief Chris Lehmann will moderate.

The keepers of consensus discourse have gone out of their way to normalize the January 6 insurrection and its aftermath, slow-walking legal proceedings and congressional investigations concerning the post-election putsch, while also seeking to dismiss it as the desperate last gasp of antidemocratic defiance by a lame-duck Trump White House. In truth, January 6 was not the end of something, but the beginning. It marks the initial and ominous installment of an extended and coordinated effort on the right to bypass and crush the bulwarks of representative democracy—beginning with the legitimacy of the electoral process itself. Weaponizing baseless claims of rampant election fraud and subversion, lawmakers and activists on the right have moved swiftly to enact voter suppression laws in state legislatures throughout the country, while also gerrymandering many competitive Democratic congressional districts out of existence. State legislatures also passed a bevy of new bills outlawing many of the organized protests that surged through the country in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, further extending the structural foundations of white herrenvolk rule.

Meanwhile, the kindred culture-war assault on critical race theory has kept the white nationalist base of the GOP eagerly mobilized for the marquee political conflicts to come. This coordinated racial backlash has merged with the mounting anti-vax appeals on the right to create an all-purpose and across-the-board repudiation of anything that could be read as a claim of legitimacy within the public sphere: Hence threats to assassinate Anthony Fauci, calls to level the public school system and banish instruction in our country’s racial past, efforts to stonewall Congress and the courts all form an indistinguishable and toxic mood of secession and violent reprisal, steeped in the bitter and all-too familiar organizing tropes of racial reaction.

Join us as we discuss these urgent challenges to our multiracial democracy—and look ahead to better prepare the beleaguered institutions of our public life to face down this rapidly spreading existential threat.

*Registration for this conversation is through Eventbrite. All registered attendees will receive a link to watch the day of the event.