How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

by Jason F. Stanley

Fascist politics includes many distinct strategies: the mythic past, propaganda, anti-intellectualism, unreality, hierarchy, victimhood, law and order, sexual anxiety, appeals to the heartland, and a dismantling of public welfare and unity. Though a defense of certain elements is legitimate and sometimes warranted, there are times in history when they come together in one party or political movement. These are dangerous moments. In the United States today, Republican politicians employ these strategies with more and more frequency. Their increasing tendency to engage in this politics should give honest conservatives pause.

The dangers of fascist politics come from the particular way in which it dehumanizes segments of the population. By excluding these groups, it limits the capacity for empathy among other citizens, leading to the justification of inhumane treatment, from repression of freedom, mass imprisonment, and expulsion to, in extreme cases, mass extermination.

Genocides and campaigns of ethnic cleansing are regularly preceded by the kinds of political tactics described in this book. In the cases of Nazi Germany, Rwanda, and contemporary Myanmar, the victims of ethnic cleansing were subjected to vicious rhetorical attacks by leaders and in the press for months or years before the regime turned genocidal. With these precedents, it should concern all Americans that as a candidate and as president, Donald Trump has publicly and explicitly insulted immigrant groups.

Fascist politics can dehumanize minority groups even when an explicitly fascist state does not arise.3 By some measures, Myanmar is transitioning to a democracy. But five years of brutal rhetoric directed against the Rohingya Muslim population has nevertheless resulted i...

The most telling symptom of fascist politics is division. It aims to separate a population into an “us” and a “them.” Many kinds of political movements involve such a division; for example, Communist politics weaponizes class divisions. Giving a description of fascist politics involves describing the very specific way that fascist politics distinguishes “us” from “them,” appealing to ethnic, religious, or racial distinctions, and using this division to shape ideology and, ultimately, policy. Every mechanism of fascist politics works to create or solidify this distinction.

Fascist politicians justify their ideas by breaking down a common sense of history in creating a mythic past to support their vision for the present. They rewrite the population’s shared understanding of reality by twisting the language of ideals through propaganda and promoting anti-intellectualism, attacking universities and educational systems that might challenge their ideas. Eventually, with these techniques, fascist politics creates a state of unreality, in which conspiracy theories and fake news replace reasoned debate.

As the common understanding of reality crumbles, fascist politics makes room for dangerous and false beliefs to take root. First, fascist ideology seeks to naturalize group difference, thereby giving the appearance of natural, scientific support for a hierarchy of human worth. When social rankings and divisions solidify, fear fills in for understanding between groups. Any progress for a minority group stokes feelings of victimhood among the dominant population. Law and order politics has mass appeal, casting “us” as lawful citizens and “them,” by contrast, as lawless criminals whose behavior poses an existential threat to the manhood of the nation. Sexual anxiety is also typical of fascist politics as the patriarchal hierarchy is threatened by growing gender equity.

As the fear of “them” grows, “we” come to represent everything virtuous. “We” live in the rural heartland, where the pure values and traditions of the nation still miraculously exist despite the threat of cosmopolitanism from the nation’s cities, alongside the hordes of minorities who live there, emboldened by liberal tolerance. “We” are hardworking, and have earned our pride of place by struggle and merit. “They” are lazy, surviving off the goods we produce by exploiting the generosity of our welfare systems, or employing corrupt institutions, such as labor unions, meant to separate honest, hardworking citizens from their pay. “We” are makers; “they” are takers. Many people are not familiar with the ideological structure of fascism, that each mechanism of fascist politics tends to build on others. They do not recognize the interconnectedness of the political slogans they are asked to repeat.

Fascist politics invokes a pure mythic past tragically destroyed. Depending on how the nation is defined, the mythic past may be religiously pure, racially pure, culturally pure, or all of the above. But there is a common structure to all fascist mythologizing. In all fascist mythic pasts, an extreme version of the patriarchal family reigns supreme, even just a few generations ago. Further back in time, the mythic past was a time of glory of the nation, with wars of conquest led by patriotic generals, its armies filled with its countrymen, able-bodied, loyal warriors whose wives were at home raising the next generation. In the present, these myths become the basis of the nation’s identity under fascist politics.

In the rhetoric of extreme nationalists, such a glorious past has been lost by the humiliation brought on by globalism, liberal cosmopolitanism, and respect for “universal values” such as equality. These values are supposed to have made the nation weak in the face of real and threatening challenges to the nation’s existence.

These myths are generally based on fantasies of a nonexistent past uniformity, which survives in the traditions of the small towns and countrysides that remain relatively unpolluted by the liberal decadence of the cities. This uniformity—linguistic, religious, geographical, or ethnic—can be perfectly ordinary in some nationalist movements, but fascist myths distinguish themselves with the creation of a glorious national history in which the members of the chosen nation ruled over others, the result of conquests and civilization-building achievements.

the fascist mythic past is intentionally mythical. The function of the mythic past, in fascist politics, is to harness the emotion of nostalgia to the central tenets of fascist ideology—authoritarianism, hierarchy, purity, and struggle.

The fascist mythic past exists to aid in changing the present.

Political propaganda uses the language of virtuous ideals to unite people behind otherwise objectionable ends.

Corruption, to the fascist politician, is really about the corruption of purity rather than of law. Officially, the fascist politician’s denunciations of corruption sound like a denunciation of political corruption. But such talk is intended to evoke corruption in the sense of the usurpation of traditional order.

To many white Americans, President Obama must have been corrupt, because his very occupation of the White House was a kind of corruption of the traditional order. When women attain positions of political power usually reserved for men—or when Muslims, blacks, Jews, homosexuals, or “cosmopolitans” profit or even share the public goods of a democracy, such as healthcare—that is perceived as corruption.5 Fascist politicians know that their supporters will turn a blind eye to their own, true corruption since in their own case it is just a matter of members of the chosen nation taking what is rightfully theirs.

Fascist politics seeks to undermine public discourse by attacking and devaluing education, expertise, and language. Intelligent debate is impossible without an education with access to different perspectives, a respect for expertise when one’s own knowledge gives out, and a rich enough language to precisely describe reality. When education, expertise, and linguistic distinctions are undermined, there remains only power and tribal identity.

Within universities, fascist politicians target professors they deem too political—typically, too Marxist—and denounce entire areas of study. When fascist movements are under way in liberal democratic states, certain academic disciplines are singled out. Gender studies, for instance, comes under fire from far-right nationalist movements across the world. The professors and teachers in these fields are accused of disrespect to the traditions of the nation. Whenever fascism threatens, its representatives and facilitators denounce universities and schools as sources of “Marxist indoctrination,” the classic bogeyman of fascist politics. Typically used without any connection to Marx or Marxism, the expression is employed in fascist politics as a way to malign equality. That is why universities that seek to give some intellectual space to marginalized perspectives, however small, are subject to denunciation as hotbeds of “Marxism.” Fascism is about the dominant perspective, and so, during fascist moments, there is strong support for figures to denounce disciplines that teach perspectives other than the dominant ones—such as gender studies or, in the United States, African American studies or Middle Eastern studies. The dominant perspective is often misrepresented as the truth, the “real history,” and any attempt to allow a space for alternative perspectives is derided as “cultural Marxism.” Fascist opposition to gender studies, in particular, flows from its patriarchal ideology....

Fascist leaders are instead “men of action” with no use for consultation or deliberation. In his 1941 essay “The Rebirth of European Man,” the French fascist Pierre Drieu la Rochelle writes, “It is a type of man who rejects culture….It is a man who does not believe in ideas, and hence rejects doctrines. It is a man who only believes in acts and carries out these acts in line with a nebulous myth.”11 Once universities and experts have been delegitimized, fascist politicians are free to create their own realities, shaped by their own individual will. Limbaugh has been attacking science for many years, proclaiming that “science has become a home for displaced socialists and communists.” In the current moment in U.S. politics, when climate science is mocked and derided by Trump and his administration, we see the triumph of the disparagement of scientific expertise. By rejecting the value of expertise, fascist politicians also remove any requirement for sophisticated debate. Reality is always more complex than our means of representing it. Scientific language requires ever more complex terminology, to make distinctions that would be invisible without it. Social reality is at least as complex as the reality of physics. In a healthy liberal democracy, a public language with a rich and varied vocabulary to make distinctions is a vital democratic institution. Without it, healthy public discourse is impossible. Fascist politics seeks to degrade and debase the language of politics; f...

In a healthy liberal democracy, language is a tool of information. The goal of fascist propaganda is not merely to mock and sneer at robust and complex public debate about policy; it is to eliminate its possibility.

When propaganda succeeds at twisting ideals against themselves and universities are undermined and condemned as sources of bias, reality itself is cast into doubt. We can’t agree on truth. Fascist politics replaces reasoned debate with fear and anger. When it is successful, its audience is left with a destabilized sense of loss, and a well of mistrust and anger against those who it has been told are responsible for this loss.

Fascist politics exchanges reality for the pronouncements of a single individual, or perhaps a political party. Regular and repeated obvious lying is part of the process by which fascist politics destroys the information space. A fascist leader can replace truth with power, ultimately lying without consequence. By replacing the world with a person, fascist politics makes us unable to assess arguments by a common standard. The fascist politician possesses specific techniques to destroy information spaces and break down reality.

According to fascist ideology, by contrast, nature imposes hierarchies of power and dominance that are flatly inconsistent with the equality of respect presupposed by liberal democratic theory. Hierarchy is a kind of mass delusion, one readily exploited by fascist politics. A major branch of social psychology, Social Dominance Theory, pioneered by Jim Sidanius and Felicia Pratto, studies these delusions under the name of “legitimation myths.”1

Fascist ideology, then, takes advantage of a human tendency to organize society hierarchically, and fascist politicians represent the myths that legitimize their hierarchies as immutable facts. Their principle justification of hierarchy is nature itself. For the fascist, the principle of equality is a denial of natural law, which sets certain traditions, those of the more powerful, over others. The natural law allegedly places men over women, and members of the chosen nation of the fascist over other groupings.

When pressed by journalists to justify a distinction between the “deserving” and the “undeserving,” Americans who use such vocabulary reach in the first instance for the language of “hardworking” versus “lazy” rather than for the language of racial distinction. But this hardly justifies the division of fellow citizens into such categories. First, in the United States, racism has often taken the form of associating blackness with laziness. Such language has always been a code for division by racial hierarchy. Second, it betrays confusion about the concept of liberal democracy to measure worthiness by a supposed capacity for hard work. It is no part of liberal democratic theory that basic equal respect is won by hard work. The idea behind liberal democracy is that all of us are equally deserving of the basic goods of society.

Equality, according to the fascist, is the Trojan horse of liberalism. The part of Odysseus can be variously played—by Jews, by homosexuals, by Muslims, by non-whites, by feminists, etc. Anyone spreading the doctrine of liberal equality is either a dupe, “infected by the idea of freedom,” or an enemy of the nation who is spreading the ideals of liberalism only with devious and indeed illiberal aims.

The fascist project combines anxiety about loss of status for members of the true “nation,” with fear of equal recognition of hated minority groups. For the twentieth-century Ku Klux Klan, Jews were often perceived as the force behind black racial equality: Jews sought to advance black equality in order to dilute pure white blood and undermine the white Christian ethnostate.

According to fascists, liberals and Marxists (or “cultural Marxists”) advance the ideals of equality and liberty, spreading their ideas as “infections” to members of the dominant group which leads them to willingly hand over their power. In the case of women’s equality, acceptance of liberal ideals leads to the destruction of the virtuous patriarchal society that is the basis of fascist myth. Lindbergh’s America First movement repudiated liberal ideals as leading to the pollution of the “pure blood” of the white nation via immigration. In the case of contemporary Russia, and much of the U.S. Christian right, liberal democracy leads to the legitimation of immigration and the supposed introduction of mass rape by immigrants, and to the acceptance of homosexuality together with its supposedly attendant sin of “degeneracy.”

Hierarchy benefits fascist politics in another way: Those who are accustomed to its benefits can be easily led to view liberal equality as a source of victimization. Those who benefit from hierarchy will adopt a myth of their own superiority, which will occlude basic facts about social reality. They will distrust pleas for tolerance and inclusion made by liberals on the grounds that these pleas are masks for power grabs by other groups. Fascist politics feeds off the sense of aggrieved victimization caused by loss of hierarchal status.

Empires in decline are particularly susceptible to fascist politics because of this sense of loss. It is in the very nature of empire to create a hierarchy; empires legitimize their colonial enterprises by a myth of their own exceptionalism. In the course of decline, the population is easily led to a sense of national humiliation that can be mobilized in fascist politics to serve various purposes.

In “Why Now? It’s the Empire, Stupid,” a June 2016 article in The Nation, the NYU historian Greg Grandin argues that Donald Trump’s politics is effective in the context of the 2016 campaign because it comes at a time of decline for the American empire. We are witnessing the passing of the era after the end of the Cold War in which the United States reigned supreme in the world as the only remaining superpower. In the article, he argues that an empire gives rise among its citizens to a comforting myth of superiority, thereby concealing the various social and structural problems that otherwise would lead to political difficulties. With its demise, the citizens of a once powerful empire must confront the fact that their exceptionalism was a myth. Grandin writes that beginning in 2008—about when Barack Obama won the presidential election—“the safety valve of empire closed, gummed up by the catastrophic war in Iraq combined with the 2008 financial crisis….Because Obama came to power in the ruins of neoliberalism and neoconservatism, empire [was] no longer able to dilute the passions, satisfy the interests, and unify the divisions.”

When imperial hierarchy collapses and social reality is laid bare, hierarchical sentiment in the home country tends to arise as a mechanism to preserve the familiar and comforting illusion of superiority. Fascist politics thrives off the resulting sense of aggrieved loss and victimization that results from the ever more tenuous and difficult struggle to defend a sense of cultural, ethnic, religious, gendered, or national superiority.

In the face of discrimination, oppressed groups throughout history have risen up in movements that proclaimed pride for their endangered identities. In Western Europe, the Jewish nationalism of the Zionist movement arose as a response to toxic anti-Semitism. In the United States, black nationalism arose as a response to toxic racism. In their origins, these nationalist movements were responses to oppression. Anticolonialist struggles typically take place under the banner of nationalism; for example, Mahatma Gandhi employed Indian nationalism as a tool against British rule. This kind of nationalism, the nationalism that arises from oppression, is not fascist in origin. These forms of nationalism, in their original formations, are equality-driven nationalist movements.

The case is similar with the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States today. Its opponents try to represent the slogan as the illiberal nationalist claim that only black lives matter. But the slogan is hardly intended as a repudiation of the value of white lives in the United States. Rather, it intends to point out that in the United States, white lives have been taken to matter more than other lives. The point of the slogan Black Lives Matter is to call attention to a failure of equal respect. In its context, it means, “Black lives matter too.”

At the core of fascism is loyalty to tribe, ethnic identity, religion, tradition, or, in a word, nation. But, in stark contrast to a version of nationalism with equality as its goal, fascist nationalism is a repudiation of the liberal democratic ideal; it is nationalism in the service of domination, with the goal of preserving, maintaining, or gaining a position at the top of a hierarchy of power and status.

The difference between the nationalism motivated by oppression and nationalism for the sake of domination is clear when one reflects upon their respective relationships with equality. But that difference can be invisible from the inside. Whether or not the anguish that accompanies loss of privileged status is similar to the sense of oppression that accompanies genuine marginalization, it is anguish nevertheless. If I grew up in a country in which my religious holidays were the national holidays, it would feel like marginalization to have my children grow up in a more egalitarian country in which their religious holidays and traditions are just one of many. If I grew up in a society in which every character in the movies I see and the television programs I watch looked like me, it would feel like marginalization to see the occasional protagonist who does not. I would start to feel that my culture is no longer “for me.” If I grew up seeing men as heroes and women as passive objects who worship them, it would feel like oppression to be robbed of my felt birthright by having to regard women as equals in the workplace or on the battlefield. Rectifying unjust inequalities will always bring pain to those who benefited from such injustices. This pain will inevitably be experienced by some as oppression.

Fascist propaganda typically features aching hymns to the sense of anguish that accompanies loss of dominant status. This sense of loss, which is genuine, is manipulated in fascist politics into aggrieved victimhood and exploited to justify past, continuing, or new forms of oppression.

For a white working-class male who is no longer employed, for structural economic reasons, to be told to “check your privilege” may increase the likelihood that he might see a level playing field in the agenda of white supremacy. Fascist politics makes great sport of such earnest liberal injunctions. Inquiry into structural inequality requires collective public reflection on the strong evidence that reveals how race and gender-based status has given white males, and to a lesser degree white females, degrees of freedom never fully available to black citizens. “Check your privilege” is a call to whites to recognize the insulated social reality they navigate daily. However, the phrase is flung back into the public sphere as hypocrisy on the part of liberal elites, because white nationalist propaganda finds no racism against black citizens in 2017 America, but much against whites.

Fascist politics covers up structural inequality by attempting to invert, misrepresent, and subvert the long, hard effort to address it. Affirmative action at its best was designed to recognize and address structural inequality. But by falsely presenting affirmative action as uncoupled from individual merit, some of its detractors recast advocates of affirmative action as pursuing their own race- or gender-based “nationalism” to the detriment of hardworking white Americans, regardless of evidence. The experience of losing a once...

Promulgating a mythical hierarchal past works to create unreasonable expectations. When these expectations are not met, it feels like victimhood.8

Those who employ fascist political tactics deliberately take advantage of this emotion, manufacturing a sense of aggrieved victimization among the majority population, directing it at a group that is not responsible for it and promising to alleviate the feeling of victimization by punishing that group. In her book Down Girl, Kate Manne illustrates this by drawing a distinction between patriarchy and misogyny. Patriarchy, according to Manne, is the hierarchal ideology that engenders the unreasonable expectations of high status. Misogyny is what faces women who are blamed when patriarchal expectations are left unfulfilled. The logic of fascist politics has a vivid model in Manne’s logic of misogyny.

Victimhood is an overwhelming emotion that also conceals the contradiction between equality-driven and domination-driven nationalist movements. When groups in power use the mask of nationalism of the oppressed, or of genuine oppression in the past, to advance their own hegemony, they are using it to undermine equality. When the Israeli right uses the unquestioned history of Jewish oppression to assert Jewish dominance over Palestinian lands and lives, they are relying on the sense of victimization to obscure the contradiction between a struggle for equal respect and a struggle for dominance. Oppression is a powerful motivation for action, but the questions of who is wielding it when, under what context and against whom, remain eternally crucial.

Nationalism is at the core of fascism. The fascist leader employs a sense of collective victimhood to create a sense of group identity that is by its nature opposed to the cosmopolitan ethos and individualism of liberal democracy. The group identity can be variously based—on skin color, on religion, on tradition, on ethnic origin. But it is always contrasted with a perceived other against whom the nation is to be defined. Fascist nationalism creates a dangerous “them” to guard against, at times to battle with, to control, in order to restore group dignity.

A healthy democratic state is governed by laws that treat all citizens equally and justly, supported by bonds of mutual respect between people, including those tasked with policing them. Fascist law-and-order rhetoric is explicitly meant to divide citizens into two classes: those of the chosen nation, who are lawful by nature, and those who are not, who are inherently lawless. In fascist politics, women who do not fit traditional gender roles, nonwhites, homosexuals, immigrants, “decadent cosmopolitans,” those who do not have the dominant religion, are in their very existence violations of law and order. By describing black Americans as a threat to law and order, demagogues in the United States have been able to create a strong sense of white national identity that requires protection from the nonwhite “threat.” A similar tactic is used internationally now to create friend-enemy distinctions based on fear in order to unify populations against immigrants.

When a community has a particularly high crime rate, there is clearly a social problem requiring empathy and understanding, and an urgent need for policies that address underlying structural causes. The more important question is then: What is the source of widespread lack of empathy for this group? Pause for a moment in this context to consider the empathy in play when the contemporary “opiate crisis” is covered in the U.S. media. The opiate crisis is not depicted as driven by vicious and terrifying “opiate rings.” Nor are those addicted to opiates defined as criminals. If anything, the media, politicians, social commentary, the medical community, and even President Trump address opiate addiction, yes, as a crisis, but as a public health epidemic and not as an issue directly tied to law and order. The opiate crisis is not associated with African American citizens; rather, it is associated with Trump’s base, rural whites and displaced white industrial workers. In short, a complicated and compassionate public analysis of opiate addiction is in play in U.S. public discourse, and federal and state initiatives are focused on prevention and treatment. If only such an analysis had been applied to African American citizens when drug addiction appeared to be associated with them. The addiction of citizens of all races, classes, and groups should be addressed with compassion, empathy, and the liberal values of shared human dignity and equality.

In 1896, Frederick L. Hoffman published the book Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro, which the historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad describes as “arguably the most influential race and crime study of the first half of the twentieth century.” Its thesis is that black Americans are uniquely violent, lazy, and prone to disease. In 1996, William J. Bennett, John J. DiIulio, Jr., and John P. Walters published the book Body Count: Moral Poverty…and How to Win America’s War Against Crime and Drugs. Its thesis is that America faces a unique threat from a new generation of young men, a large percentage of whom are black, who are especially prone to cruel, violent acts and incapable of honest work; these young men they call “super-predators.” The book warns of a coming wave of youth violence by these “super-predators” (the wave of course did not materialize; violent crime plummeted in subsequent years, rather than sharply rising). These two works bookend a century of pseudoscience forging a link in the American consciousness between criminality and Americans who descended from enslaved Africans. Despite the century-long gap between them, the two books are remarkably similar: Both employ the sober language of statistics to raise moral panic about a coming wave of racialized violence (Body Count, unlike Hoffman’s book, grounds its false predictions in claims about the “moral poverty” of “inner-city culture,” rather than genetics).

Fascist propaganda does not, of course, merely present members of targeted groups as criminals. To ensure the right kind of moral panic about these groups, its members are represented as particular kinds of threats to the fascist nation—most important, and most typical, a threat to its purity. Consequently, fascist politics also emphasizes one kind of crime. The basic threat that fascist propaganda uses to raise fear is that members of the targeted group will rape members of the chosen nation, thereby polluting its “blood.” The threat of mass rape is simultaneously intended as a threat to the patriarchal norms of the fascist state, to the “manhood” of the nation. The crime of rape is basic to fascist politics because it raises sexual anxiety, and an attendant need for protection of the nation’s manhood by the fascist authority.

If the demagogue is the father of the nation, then any threat to patriarchal manhood and the traditional family undermines the fascist vision of strength. These threats include the crimes of rape and assault, as well as so-called sexual deviance. The politics of sexual anxiety is particularly effective when traditional male roles, such as that of family provider, are already under threat by economic forces. Fascist propaganda promotes fear of interbreeding and race mixing, of corrupting the pure nation with, in the words of Charles Lindbergh, speaking for the America First movement, “inferior blood.” Fascist propaganda characteristically magnifies this fear by sexualizing the threat of the other. Since fascist politics has, at its basis, the traditional patriarchal family, it is characteristically accompanied by panic about deviations from it. Transgender individuals and homosexuals are used to heighten anxiety and panic about the threat to traditional male gender roles.

The pervasive sense that city dwellers in Minnesota were living off the taxes of the hardworking rural population of Minnesota was a powerful force in the Minnesota Republican triumph in 2014. (“We pay taxes too,” Cordon quotes a rural Minnesota resident as saying, “but we see a lot of our tax dollars going to urban development in the metro area. We’d like to see some of that share. We’d like to have nice roads too.”) And yet, as is typical in politics that exacerbates the rural-urban divide during times of globalization, the perception was mythical—in Minnesota, as in many places in the globalized economy, it is the metro areas that are “the state’s economic engine, generating tax dollars that flow outward to every corner of the state.”

Cities were thriving; the “millennial generation” in the United States tended to prefer urban to suburban areas, and urban areas were experiencing a tremendous revival. Many areas that in the 1970s and 1980s were the paradigm of blighted urban ghettos, such as Harlem, had experienced, for good or for ill, tremendous gentrification and steeply escalating housing prices. Despite this, U.S. president Donald Trump, during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign and afterward, regularly spoke of American cities as sites of carnage and blight. For example, in a tweet on January 14, 2017, then president-elect Trump spoke of “burning and crime-infested inner cities of the U.S.” Despite remarkable gentrification in American cities, Trump regularly speaks of cities as containing ghettos filled with black people (who, he implies, are likely criminals). A typical line from one of his campaign speeches was “Our African-American communities are absolutely in the worst shape that they’ve ever been in before, ever, ever, ever. You take a look at the inner cities, you get no education, you get no jobs, you get shot walking down the street.” And yet during this time, cities in the United States were enjoying their lowest rates of crime in generations and record low unemployment. Trump’s rhetoric about cities makes sense in the context of a more general fascist politics, in which cities are seen as centers of disease and pestilence, containing squalid ghettos filled with despised minority groups...