Using Anti-communism to Discredit Black Protest


Devon Wright, Metropolitan State University of Denver

This research seeks to understand the propaganda media campaigns of two contemporaneous conservative rightwing social movement organizations (CRSMO) in the United States from the Cold War-civil rights decades, with slight but significant variation in the contours of their ideology concerning their opposition to Black protest against racial injustice. The segregationist Confederate nationalist, Citizen’s Councils of America (CCA), and the Americanist ultra-nationalist, John Birch Society (JBS), both anchored their distaste for racial egalitarianism to the politics of anti-communism and attempted to discredit Black liberation movements as a communist conspiracy against American freedom. Both CRSMOs had highly sophisticated propaganda media platforms aimed at swaying public opinion in the direction of their movement ideology. I contend it is worth comparing the propaganda media messaging of the CCA and JBS to understand changes and adaptations in conservative right-wing rhetoric against Black demands for racial justice to better make sense of current opposition to BLM and the recent hysteria in America over critical race theory (CRT), diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, and anti-racist efforts more broadly. No different from liberal progressive social movement organizations, CRSMOs engage in messaging campaigns for the purpose of increasing membership, garnering public support for their cause, gaining financial backing to sustain themselves, and influencing legislative outcomes in the direction of their preferred vision of society. Fundamental to these media campaigns is defining for the public the specific problem for which they offer their ideology as the solution. Both the CCA and JBS shared a culturally traditionalist vision of society under threat from an insidious foreign communist conspiracy aimed at unraveling civil order in America to usher in a new age of tyranny. Where the two differed in their anti-communist opposition to Black protest is the subject for examination here. I argue that the CCA’s use of anti-communism represented a declining conservative rightwing rhetorical strategy of using overt forms of anti-Black racism to defend its traditionalist vision of society while the JBS, not dedicated to the segregationist cause, displayed a form of anti-communist anti-Blackness more in line with conservative rightwing media today in their attempts to discredit the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement as anti-American through the use of the ‘Marxist’ label. Where the CCA’s Confederate nationalist anti-communism was defined by notions of inherent Black inferiority as a danger to be unleashed upon America if the communists were successful in their subversive goals, the JBS’s Americanist ultra nationalist anti-communism exhibited indirect, supposedly ‘race neutral’ rhetoric against Black protest, which reflects conservative rightwing messaging tactics against Black protest in the BLM era. Since both the CCA and JBS relied on what Noakes (2000:672 and 2005:106), refers to as the “counter subversive anticommunist frame,” I use social movement frame theory to develop a conceptual model of how conservative rightwing anti-racial egalitarian political philosophy has been shaped by anti-communism from the mid-20th century civil rights-Black Power movements to the current 21st century BLM period. In my theorization, I propose a concept I call, conservative rightwing countersubversive framing , a propaganda strategy by CRSMOs which sees any racial egalitarian efforts emerging as a force to be reckoned with, as fundamentally counter to dominant racial norms of systemic inequality and foundational anti-Blackness.

This paper will be presented at the following session: