Author: Scot Nakagawa

Scot Nakagawa is a political strategist and writer who has spent more than four decades exploring questions of structural racism, white supremacy, and social justice. Scot’s primary work has been in the fight against authoritarianism, white nationalism, and Christian nationalism. Currently, Scot is co-lead of the 22nd Century Initiative, a project to build the field of resistance to authoritarianism in the U.S.

Scot is a past Alston/Bannerman Fellow, an Open Society Foundations Fellow, and a recipient of the Association of Asian American Studies Community Leader Award. His writings have been included in Race, Gender, and Class in the United States: An Integrated Study, 9th Edition,  and Killing Trayvons: An Anthology of American Violence.

Scot's political essays, briefings, and other educational media can be found at his newsletter, We Fight the Right at scotnakagawa@substack.com. He is a sought after public speaker and educator who provides consultation on campaign and communications strategy, and fundraising.

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Is Hillary Clinton the Anti-Christ? Only if You Believe in Demons

I’ve been seeing Facebook posts by Leftists getting the vote out for Hillary Clinton popping up. The first think I thought of as I saw them was, wow, that’s brave. Then it occurred to me that my thinking that says everything about this time in our politics. How the hell did we get to the point where committed, true-believer Left leaders making an appeal against what might be fascism, and on Facebook, a social media platform in which you “friend” people, is brave?

Anti-Clinton forces on the Left have made a lot of important points we should remember when … Read more “Is Hillary Clinton the Anti-Christ? Only if You Believe in Demons”

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Clinton v. Trump: What If & What Do We Do?

There’s been a lot of speculation about what will happen if Trump is elected. Less discussed, but no less consequential is what will happen if Clinton is elected. This past summer, a group of progressive activists were gathered from across the country at White Salmon, Washington by ChangeLab, a national racial justice thought laboratory, to discuss the implications of the Trump and Clinton candidacies. This article is based on that discussion and subsequent observation and analysis of the odd, frankly frightening, events that have unfolded in this election season since then:

One popular thread suggests that if Trump is elected … Read more “Clinton v. Trump: What If & What Do We Do?”

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What the Bundy Acquittal Can Teach Us About Race

Some days it’s hard to be an Oregonian. Yesterday became one of those days when an all-white jury in Portland, the whitest major city in the U.S., acquitted the Bundy militia, the group that staged an armed takeover and illegal occupation of a federal wildlife refugee in Burns, Oregon last winter. The Bundy militia became political martyrs of a growing white nationalist paramilitary movement in the U.S. when they were arrested and charged. Now they’re likely to become a beacon of hope to the white right.

But all of the above has already been said repeatedly since the acquittal. The … Read more “What the Bundy Acquittal Can Teach Us About Race”

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We Need to be Prophets of the World As it Should Be

At the second presidential debate, after a weekend of scandalous news, Donald Trump spent the night flicking shit at the pundit class in order to create a distraction. The pundits duly responded, and…you know how this goes from here.

Don’t let the scandals distract you. This election should be understood in a much broader, world historical context: We are in a time when old norms are falling and new ones are being established, and through a multidimensional fight in which all sides appear to be attacking the middle.

The right wing has gone off the rails. Years of attacking liberalism, … Read more “We Need to be Prophets of the World As it Should Be”

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The Rise of the Right Isn’t All Just About Class

You know how everybody and her sister are saying that Trumpism (not to mention Palinism and Buchananism, etc.), white nationalism, and the rise of authoritarian movements on the right is all about class? They want us to believe that the racism of the right is just a ruse, that their real agenda is a class agenda, and responding to it as racism is just hollow liberalism.

Don’t listen. They don’t have their eyes on the long game.

Right wing movements have powerful class implications. We should be concerned about those class implications. In fact, politics should be understood as the … Read more “The Rise of the Right Isn’t All Just About Class”

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#snowblindness

I highly recommend this feature in the Atlantic – The Racist History of Portland, the Whitest City in America. We can learn a lot about racism by looking at those places that are the whitest.

In Portland, the belief that we are “post-racial” is largely unopposed, and those who point out problems of racial injustice are often treated as if they are just seeing things, as delusional or “divisive.”

In Portland, the city I’ve often referred to as Whitelandia over the 30 years since I first moved here in 1986, there is very little to contradict these ideas and,

… Read more “#snowblindness”
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Identity Politics, the Brexit Vote, and the American Election

What went down in England yesterday was a surprise to a whole lot of pundits and political analysts. Many of them missed the mark, believing the Leave side of the Brexit vote would fail. Obviously, it didn’t.

Why the surprise? I think they underestimated the power of identity politics.

All politics is identity politics. Identity is the beating heart of every social movement and the ticking time bomb of governance in the modern nation-state system, a system that too often attempts to marginalize ethnicity and other identity markers in support of singularizing national narratives. To understand what I mean by … Read more “Identity Politics, the Brexit Vote, and the American Election”

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That Was Then, This Is Now: No on 9, No on Trump

Way back in the way back, in 1992, an evangelical right wing group called the Oregon Citizens’ Alliance (OCA) circulated a petition called the Abnormal Behaviors Initiative. That initiative proposed to amend the Oregon constitution to ban civil rights protections for LGBTQ people while also labeling us “abnormal, wrong, unnatural, and perverse.” The initiative language lumped LGBTQ people in with pedophiles and those who commit acts of necrophilia and bestiality, making it seem almost laughable until it received the required number of signatures to qualify for the ballot in near record time. The initiative became Oregon Ballot Measure 9.… Read more “That Was Then, This Is Now: No on 9, No on Trump”

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About the Stereotype Busting High Median Incomes of Trump Voters

Nate Silver’s findings regarding the median incomes of Trump supporters are worth taking a look at as what he has found busts the frankly offensive stereotype of the Trump supporter as a working class rube.

When trying to defeat a bigot, one would do best not to fall prey to bigotry. Doing so just polarizes an already dangerously polarized situation, and all while failing to address what may, in fact, be one of the most important bits of knowledge necessary to effectively fight the right: in order to beat right wing movements, you have to separate the leaders from their … Read more “About the Stereotype Busting High Median Incomes of Trump Voters”

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#makeinjusticevisible

I was looking around online for information about marital rape exceptions. I know that may sound odd, but I was thinking of writing an article about marriage equality as a follow up to a piece I wrote a few years ago about same sex marriage that caused a minor pile up on the information super highway. I wanted to know, just how equal are we in marriage?

Here’s what I found. There have been prohibitions against marital rape in all 50 U.S. states since 1993. That means that up until just 23 years ago, it was legal for a man … Read more “#makeinjusticevisible”