Conservatives may claim to care about policies and principles—you know, stuff that makes them seem decent—but their movement is, at its core, about preserving American racial hierarchy. And as recent years have shown, the greater their dominance, the deeper their sense of grievance.

While Donald Trump’s renewed attacks on Black civil rights may provide them with a bit of abstract satisfaction, what they really want is to flex the power of whiteness interpersonally. That is, the ability to publicly humiliate, dominate, and instill fear in Black folks, without consequence. Emboldened by the white supremacist accelerationism of this administration, conservatives are shedding old pretenses of respectability and civility, and making clear how much their identity depends on the right to put others “in their place.” And that includes being able to say the word “nigger” publicly and out loud again.

The response to Shiloh Hendrix, a grown white woman and mother from Minnesota, is instructive. Earlier this month, Hendrix called a 5-year-old Black boy a “nigger” on a Minnesota playground. She then repeated the slur while admitting to using it when a bystander began filming. When the footage went viral, Hendrix adopted a pose of victimhood, asking the public for money, and raised nearly $800,000. (Hendrix claimed in the video that the boy was rifling through her child’s diaper bag with the intent to steal; in her fundraising appeal, she wrote he actually stole from the bag, though she has yet to name what was allegedly taken.)

Hendrix declared in her fundraiser that she had been doxxed, though the only evidence for this remains the word of Hendrix herself, a woman whose outsize character flaws include screaming racist slurs in children’s faces. Her “two small children…do not deserve this,” she pleaded—taking as an apparent given that only Black kids deserve to be treated so inhumanely.

Many donors to Hendrix’s fundraiser, posted to GiveSendGochose, displayed racist usernames—“Nate Higgers,” “ItsAllNonsAndTheJews,” “kill all jews Andblacks”—and the site’s owners told Newsweek they they disabled comments because of the sheer “volume and intensity of racial and offensive language.” GiveSendGo, which positions itself as a Christian platform spreading “the Hope of Jesus through crowdfunding,” has already hosted so many racist fundraisers that a 2023 Rolling Stone article focused on its “white-power problem.” But the site couldn’t have been legitimately surprised, nor should anyone else be. White racists, after all, have always rushed to fund those whose sole claim to fame is hurting Black people.

Historically, that money has more often been given in support of slaughter rather than slurs. Tens of thousands of dollars were raised for the white men who lynched Emmett Till in 1955, the assassin of Medger Evers in 1964, the killer of Trayvon Martin in 2012, and the Ferguson cop who shot Michael Brown in 2014. The two men who murdered Ahmaud Arbery in 2020 and the ex-marine who choked Jordan Neely to death on a subway in 2023 saw their GoSendMe’s attract both high-profile white supremacists and GOP sympathizers, including Vivek Ramaswamy and Ron DeSantis. Hell, Kyle Rittenhouse proved you can even kill white folks—provided they’re suspected of standing with Black lives—and walk away with a cool $2 million.

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Maybe the only thing more predictable than the success of Hendrix’s fundraiser is the self-pitying victimology of her defenders. MAGA influencer Tim Pool—whom the Justice Department found has been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by Russia to spread Kremlin propaganda—said the Hendrix case “sends a message to other white people: Stop taking racial abuse.” Right-wing podcaster Matt Walsh hailed Hendrix as a sign that white people will finally “start swinging back” at “a system that’s rigged against them.” River Page, writing for Bari Weiss’s rag The Free Press, claimed that the whole story is “a decade in the making”—not because of the increase in white supremacist fundraisers, nor the mainstreaming of the openly racist MAGA, alt-right, and Tea Party movements since the first Black presidency. Instead, Page blames “the zealotry of the left, not the right” for breeding “a new, identity politics–obsessed far-right.”

Imagine writing an article that blames Black Lives Matter for forcing white people to choose Nazism, and then signing your real name to it. As if white identity politics and anti-Black racism haven’t always formed the connective tissue of the right’s various throngs. Nearly 20 years ago, George Lipsitz noted that “the neoracism of contemporary conservatism…functions as an important unifying symbol for a disparate and sometimes antagonistic coalition.” (And that’s not just me or him talking. Aspiring tradwife grifter Lilly Gaddis openly admitted to dropping n-bombs online in the hope of launching her career as a right-wing influencer.) You sound historically illiterate and ridiculous, River.

The fact is, white conservatives have been claiming to be oppressed—and defending the most horrific acts of white terror committed against Black folks—since Reconstruction, when freedmen’s getting the vote was cast as “Negro tyranny” and “Negro supremacy.” In 1964, two months after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, a majority of white New Yorkers complained to The New York Times about “reverse discrimination.” Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner had just been murdered in Mississippi that summer, for God’s sake. And white mothers have been filmed and photographed screaming racist slurs at Black children, often as they tried to attend school, for damn near 70 years now.

But let there never be a moment when white racial resentment doesn’t masquerade as righteous victimhood. It’s a tradition that clearly marches on.

There simply is no “free speech” principle at issue here. This is about having the power to dehumanize and destroy—about who is allowed to wield violence and who must absorb it. It is not incidental that racist murderer Travis McMichael stood over Ahmaud Arbery’s body as the life bled out of it and made sure the last words he heard were “fucking nigger.” Or that moments before a white stranger murdered James Rone Jr. in 2023, the killer used the word “nigger.” As Deryl Dedmon beat James Anderson, and before killing him by running him over with his truck, he would repeatedly call him a “stupid nigger.” That word has been a prelude to every act of white supremacist violence. When white racists use that word, even when the stakes are merely abusive and not lethal, they do so knowingly—recognizing it as a blood-soaked word with a violent history.

Hendrix’s supporters, anonymous online donors and right-wing pillars alike, also know this. That history is the source of the word’s power. MAGA is a movement fueled by hatred and cruelty, inhumanity and petty retribution. Freedom, for the worst people in the world, means being able to make other people feel bad. People literally voted for that. Like the banker who told the Financial Times that he felt “liberated” by Trump’s reelection: “We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting canceled…it’s a new dawn.”

The goal has long been not just to say the word “nigger” out loud, but to say it proudly, dare Black folks to be offended, and then mislabel that criticism as anti-white oppression. (Seriously. In the lead up to the 2024 election, Walsh tried to turn a Tim Walz joke about cooking “white guy tacos” into a white-on-white hate crime.) To incite rage and then call it courage, like the innumerable commenters on Hendrix’s fundraiser who thank her for being “brave” for cursing at a 5-year-old. They have spent the last few years cycling through other stand-ins for Blackness—“thug,” “woke,” “CRT, ”and most recently, “DEI”—and decided none carried the historical weight of cruelty like the original. Following Elon Musk’s lead, they have already revived the “r-word.” After Musk used the r-slur in January, a Montclair University study found a “207.5 percent increase in posts containing the r-word on X” in the days that followed. They’re going to push for the n-word to be next.

Even while the country teeters on the precipice of a recession, white racists couldn’t open their wallets fast enough for Hendrix, who quietly upped her goal from $20,000 to $1 million once she saw how easily the money was rolling in. Meanwhile, after the NAACP set up a fundraiser for the actual victim here, who suffers from autism, his parents asked that it be shut down after it garnered over $350K in three days.

The times and technology have evolved, but white racists stay predictably the same. More than 60 years ago, an ex-president opined that if you can soothe the status anxieties of a white racist with even the thinnest gesture of anti-Blackness, he’ll give you his last dollar and thank you for taking it—blind to the hand picking his pocket in the name of race.

That remains true.