White With Fear

There have been few periods in recent history when it has been easier to demonstrate that winning votes does not, for the most part, hinge on making the most reasonable case; rather, it’s about psychology. The average person doesn’t think much about politics until it’s time for an election, so they don’t have time to process all the arguments. Their decisions are heavily affected by emotion. In most circumstances, the most powerful human emotion is fear.

That this is a factor in public sentiment has been observed since Antiquity, but its influence on present day US politics is something that documentarian Andrew Goldberg pins on Richard Nixon. It was he, he argues, who defined the formula still used by the Republican Party to this day: scare white voters with the threat of crime committed by Black people, and they will vote for the supposed party of law and order over and over again. The deep association of crime with Black people in the white American imagination may not be immediately obvious to outsiders, but it’s not a difficult thing to explain, and Goldberg gets it out of the way quickly so that he can focus on illustrating how Nixon’s formula has been applied.

There are a lot of internationally famous faces here. Pat Buchanan pops up early on as the man who gave Nixon cover, and then there’s the development of Fox News, and Rupert Murdoch hiring Roger Ailes to do his dirty work. Figures like Ann Coulter and Steve Bannon also appear prominently. Some of what they have to say – and some of the comments made by successfully frightened voters – are deeply unpleasant, and this is not a film to watch when you’re feeling raw about racism. This material is probably necessary, however, to make the problem clear to white viewers who haven’t considered it before.

The monstering of Black people, of course, is not a tactic that exists in isolation. Using high profile interviewees and snippets of archie footage, Goldberg illustrates how the propaganda machine shifted its focus to Muslims in order to manufacture consent for George Bush Snr’s war on Iraq, and how this approach has continued to work for it since then, even at the cost of US Muslim lives (and the occasional Sikh, since racists have never been very good at making those distinctions). It looks at the viral claims that Barack Obama was Muslim, based largely on ignorant notions about his middle name, and how they were used to toxify Obamacare, which Rush Limbaugh then claimed (mixing up marginalised people once again) was a civil rights bill intended to introduce reparations by the back door.

Inevitably, we move on to the targeting of immigrants, depicted as terrorists, criminals or, in one telling moment, “the servant class.” Goldberg highlights the co-option of the Kate Steinle story, against the wishes of her family, to create a narrative about dangerous criminals entering the country and killing people. There is talk of the border wall and the reason why many voters believed Donald Trump when he said that Mexico would pay for it (hitherto a mystery to the rest of the world); of Tucker Carlson endorsing the innately racist great replacement theory; and of the cost of it all. Most of this is remembered through news footage. One man talks about losing his elderly mother in a shooting in Buffalo, New York. This decision to focus on a single account means that we have room to get a sense of who she was, and of the pain caused by her murder, which hits much harder than numbers ever could.

A similar approach is taken elsewhere. Rather than digging into every piece of dubious ‘news’, we hear from a single former Breitbart staffer who talks about receiving stories written by Republican advisor (and now White House deputy chief of staff) Stephen Miller, and being expected to run them with little alteration. We see video of Miller seeing what he could get away with in high school debates, with unflattering commentary by one of his then classmates. In another part of the film, another sometime Republican strategist speaks directly, saying that he lied to himself, that he thought of the Tea Party as trivial and not racist. Should we believe him? That’s open to question, but the fact that he feels the need to say this is revealing in itself.

The film ends on a troubling note. Given the demographic shifts occurring in the country – which would be happening even without immigration – the Nixon strategy is not going to keep on working for the Republicans. What will a desperate party with massive power currently at its disposal do now to try to secure its future? Goldberg doesn’t speculate, but provides enough glimpses into the country’s troubled history to worry even those who know little of it from elsewhere.

Should we be worried? Are we simply being lured into a different kind of manipulative fear? Does it make a difference, ethically, politically or practically, if what we fear is real or not? These questions also linger. It’s difficult to look at one party’s propaganda in a predominantly binary system without acknowledging issues on the other side, even when they’re less serious; but then again, Goldberg doesn’t deny them, and it’s difficult to see where he could find room for much more in what is already a crowded film. In light of the fact that many US citizens still don’t recognise or acknowledge the depth of their country’s race issues, there is enough work to be done in that area alone. The film handles it well, not getting too heavy handed but clarifying key issues and providing starter points from which viewers can explore for themselves.

Reviewed on: 26 Apr 2025