Update: Following this report on a group of wealthy, prominent Memphians that took a private jet to Washington, D.C., to attend the “Stop the Steal” rally on January 6, 2021, a deluge of tips and responses flooded this reporter’s inbox. They included the name of a previously unidentified passenger on the jet, Timothy Curran, as well as an additional photograph that seems to place the group proceeding toward the Capitol after the rally. Read the story here.
At 12:11 p.m. on January 5, an eight-seat Bombardier Challenger 300 jet took off from Memphis International Airport. A little over an hour and a half and one time zone later, it touched down at Dulles, just outside of Washington, D.C. The following day a seditious horde of Donald Trump supporters, unapologetically encouraged by him, mounted an insurrection to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory. “After this we’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you,” the 45th president told attendees of the “Stop the Steal” rally gathered at the Ellipse, a park a little over one mile from the Hill. At 2:11 p.m. the first of the mob had breached the Capitol on the west side of the building, near the Senate chamber. At 5:34 p.m. the sergeant at arms informed lawmakers that the Capitol was secure. At 6:39 p.m. the Challenger was wheels-up, an hour behind schedule, according to flight data. It touched down in Memphis at 7:25 p.m., back in central time.
As the dust settled in the capital city, the aperture of the moment largely focused on the most violent (the ones with zip ties and stun guns) and the most outrageous (the shirtless QAnon shaman). And while lawmakers reckoned with what would come next—would Vice President Mike Pence invoke the 25th Amendment? Would the inauguration bring more violence?—a murmur began to bubble among Memphis’s lily white country-club elite. Did you hear John Dobbs flew his buddies to the capital on his private jet? A photo posted to the Instagram account of George Zanone III features the lineup: Dobbs, Zanone, Carter Campbell Sr., Vince Smith and his wife, Kaki Valerius Smith, brothers Dan and Bob McEwan, and one unidentified man mug against the backdrop of the nose of a private jet alongside the caption, “Go follow @memphispatriots,” plus a Washington, D.C., location tag. The photo disappeared from Zanone’s social media grid, otherwise a memorial to dead ducks and deer, but not before a few quietly horrified members of local society could screenshot it. As for the Bombardier Challenger? It is registered to Baron Partners, a limited liability company that shares the same address, down to the suite number, with John Hull Dobbs Jr.’s eponymous investment firm, Dobbs Equity Partners.
Cumulatively, the individuals in the photograph with the plane are worth millions and millions of dollars, with business interests that span the southeast: sizable stakes in auto dealerships, financial firms whose earnings rival those of Wall Street shops, a chunk of the Corky’s BBQ chain, major real estate developments, hospitality services with clients including Marriott and Hilton hotels, and registered “plantations,” which are used as hunt clubs. Their cohort is emblematic of a certain segment of rich, white American society where the so-called quiet part is cacophonous background noise—private schools, booster clubs, country clubs. In Memphis there is a black-tie ball and festival where men and women, including Dobbs, dress up as royalty and anoint one another “queens,” “princesses,” and “kings.” This society is for the manor-born, and the conservatives among it have little to do with the caricature of the down-on-their-luck, economically anxious Trump voter of media lore. To wit: In the aftermath of the “Stop the Steal” rally and Capitol riot, a two-time Olympic gold medalist, a state lawmaker, and a successful Texas real estate agent were among those swept up by law enforcement for their involvement.
When Vanity Fair asked Dobbs about the “Stop the Steal” rally on January 6, he initially denied knowledge of it. “I don’t know anything about a rally like that,” he said in a phone conversation, suggesting that Vanity Fair might have meant to contact John Dobbs Sr., his father. Dobbs Jr. said he was about to board a plane—at the time of the call, the Bombardier Challenger 300 registered to Baron Partners was in Colorado—and ended the conversation, but he did not hang up his phone for several minutes. During this period Dobbs could be heard discussing the phone call from Vanity Fair. When an unidentified person suggested somebody was “messing with” Dobbs, he dismissed the notion. “Were you there at Coca-Cola Woods when they called me?” Dobbs said. “They called me; The Commercial Appeal [a Memphis newspaper] was going to do an article, and it was going to be publicized. It was going to be all over, you know, Gwinnett [Editor’s note: He likely meant Gannett, the largest U.S. newspaper publisher, which owns The Commercial Appeal] was going to pick it up.” The unidentified individual responded, “No comment.” Dobbs then said, “Well, I told ’em, I said, I don’t know what you’re talking about”—laughed—“You must be talking about my dad or something.” Then, “God, the last thing I want to do is talk to them.” When the unidentified individual said, “As your part-time spiritual adviser, do not talk to them,” Dobbs responded, “It wouldn’t be as bad now. I don’t know why, why is it still—why is it still a story for them?”
None of the individuals in the photo responded to the question of whether they had approached or entered the Capitol. But the rally, which Trump promised beforehand would “be wild,” was an amuse-bouche, and flying a private jet to attend it is not an example of passive politics. As court documents and Justice Department indictments reveal, for many alleged insurrectionists, it was Trump’s rhetoric leading up to and during the “Stop the Steal” rally that motivated them, a dark reality that ultimately laid the foundation for his impeachment. It’s hard to say what being identified might mean for the people in the picture. Do they regret having gone to the rally? If so, they did not take the opportunity to tell Vanity Fair that. Neither did they embrace their leader. So what is the culture that cradles such individuals? And what happens in the communities where they live, work, and wield influence? (Dobbs did not respond to subsequent requests for comment. Dan McEwan declined to speak to the magazine when reached by phone and did not respond to further questions sent via email. Campbell, Bob McEwan, and the Smiths did not respond to multiple requests for comment from Vanity Fair. Zanone died unexpectedly on February 26.)
“You guys are relative masters of the universe yet you feel the need to be up there and participate in this coup,” says one Memphis-born source who is younger but knows a number of the private-jet playgroup members through various social connections. “What happened that you decided not only this is your guy, but that you’re gonna hop on a private jet and go up there and participate in this?”
A TALE OF TWO CITIES
Donald Trump handily won Tennessee in the 2020 election with 61% of the vote. But in Shelby County, which encompasses Memphis, the results were the inverse: Joe Biden won 64%. Traditionally, the city, 64% Black and 29% white, is a blue stronghold in a sea of red. People from various backgrounds who have lived there describe a segregated world, one steeped in a rich culture but ever tiptoeing around that tension. It’s the home of Sun Studio, where B.B. King and Elvis Presley recorded, and Stax Records, the label of Otis Redding and Booker T & the M.G.’s. Tourists flock to Beale Street, Graceland, and the National Civil Rights Museum. But as that museum—itself built around the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated—showcases, Memphis suffers from a persistent struggle with race and power. Last year Shelby County commissioners declared racism a public health crisis.
“Memphis has had this complicated relationship with race in the South. It has wanted always to be better, but has always struggled to figure out how to do that. One of the ways you can see this is for years, there were two separate school systems,” says Jesse Holland, an assistant professor at George Washington University’s School of Media & Public Affairs, pointing to the differences between the county school system of mostly white kids, “who wanted for nothing,” and the city system of mostly Black kids, who “wanted for everything.” Growing up in the 1970s, Holland, as part of a school-integration effort in Memphis, was bussed to the Colonial Acres neighborhood to attend Sea Isle Elementary instead of the Hanley Elementary in his neighborhood of Orange Mound, the first neighborhood in America that was built for African Americans by African Americans. “Just like many other places in the South, when the schools were desegregated, the affluent whites, the ones who could afford to, ran away to the private school system.”
Poplar Avenue stretches the entirety of Memphis. Its root at the edge of the Mississippi River downtown is the oldest part of the city, a working-class enclave that cradles the seat of the city government and the Walter L. Bailey Jr. Criminal Justice Center. As you head east, there is a noticeable shift. Fast-food restaurants and bail-bond joints give way to a large Catholic school, a Presbyterian church, and Rhodes College, due north. Once you reach Midtown, “you’ll start to see a really solid enclave of solidly middle-class and upper-class homes,” says Charles McKinney, an associate professor of history and the Neville Frierson Bryan chair of Africana studies at Rhodes College. When you get to Chickasaw Gardens, “it just gets whiter and whiter and whiter.” Continuing east on Poplar, past Chickasaw Gardens, is River Oaks, where Dobbs grew up on Shady Grove Road, in a mansion with a lake. Between the two neighborhoods is Belle Meade, where he and his wife, Katherine, live today, in an 11,500-square-foot house that Zillow values at $2.3 million.
Southwest of Chickasaw Gardens is Orange Mound, the neighborhood where Holland grew up. “As a child, you were warned, ‘These are places you can go; these are places you can’t go; you are to stay within the boundaries of Orange Mound.’ I understand why parents and adults would tell you this as a young Black child, because there are areas in Memphis that you could go into that they were afraid you would never come back from,” says Holland. “Still to this day, I don’t go to Chickasaw Gardens.”
Last June, just months into the COVID-19 pandemic—which has disproportionately impacted communities of color—and as the George Floyd and Black Lives Matter protests reached a crescendo across the country, Shelby County commissioners approved a resolution that declared racism a “pandemic,” too, and committed to policies “that unequivocally defend minorities and aim to eradicate the effects of systemic racism affecting Black people and other minorities.” The overall poverty rate in Memphis, according to a 2020 report from University of Memphis researchers—with data that predates the pandemic—is 21.7%. Broken down by race, gulfs in prosperity come into focus. Among Blacks and Hispanics/Latinos, the poverty rates were, respectively, 26.1% and 29.2%. In contrast the poverty rate among non-Hispanic whites in Memphis was in the single digits at 9.3%. Similarly, for non-Hispanic white Memphians the median household income was $69,395 relative to $35,668 for Black households and $38,864 for Hispanic/Latino households.
“The differences between the poverty rates of minority groups and non-Hispanic Whites are striking,” the authors of the study wrote, pointing out that Memphis ranks second for child poverty and is the second-poorest metro area with a population greater than 1 million. “The disparities between non-Hispanic Whites and Blacks are much more severe than nationally,” they emphasized, “and this is cause for great concern.”
The stratification within Memphis is layered—as one Memphis native puts it, there’s a “big city, small town” feel—within which the worlds get even smaller. “You’re either in the Memphis country club or you’re just kind of not,” says a source who is the same generation as Dobbs and grew up with him in Memphis, among the elite. “And the Memphis country club is sort of a nexus of this white privilege for generations and generations.” This is the world of Dobbs et al.; a world where guest lists are never unfamiliar, one of charity boards and church, of golfing and hunting, of naming your sons iterations of Jrs and IIIs.
MONEY GROWN ON A TREE
The family wealth goes back generations, according to a humble origin story on the Dobbs Equity Partners website: “In 1921, James K. Dobbs took out a $25,000 loan and opened his first Ford auto dealership, alongside business partner Horace Hull. After just three years, the dealership was grossing over $1.25 million”—approximately $19 million in 2021—“and within ten years, Dobbs sold that dealership for ten times the loan value. Thus, began the Dobbs family’s three generations of successful investment in private companies.” The family expanded into the restaurant and airline catering business. In 1998, Dobbs Automotive Group offloaded its 22 dealerships—a total that reportedly made it the third-largest automotive retailer in the country at the time—to AutoNation for more than $200 million in stock. “It takes acumen, persistence, planning, and some luck to build a successful business, but all of these, and some incredible timing, combined in spades to grow the Dobbs family dynasty,” reads a 2014 story in the Memphis Business Journal. “Most Memphians have heard of the Dobbs family.” (Barry Pelts, the co-owner of Corky’s BBQ, which Dobbs Equity Partners began investing in in 2018, declined to comment for this story.)
Among his cohort, John Dobbs Jr.’s résumé is a study in predictability. He graduated from the prestigious all-boys Memphis University School in 1985, then went to Duke University, where he majored in political science, and closed the loop with a master’s degree in business administration from the University of North Carolina. Now he boasts membership in the Young Presidents’ Organization—for, yes, young presidents of businesses—and the International Order of St. Hubertus, a “knightly order” for hunters and conservationists. (Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia had been among a conclave of the men-only fraternity when he died of natural causes in 2016.) The Children’s Museum of Memphis campus became the Katherine & John Dobbs Family Center after the couple donated “the largest single gift in the history of the museum”—a gift that coincided with Dobbs’s reign as “King John.”
Carnival Memphis, his dominion, is a centerpiece of Memphis privilege, variously described to me as “Mardi Gras lite” and “just a lot of pomp and circumstance.” Previously the “Cotton Carnival,” it began in 1931 to “promote business and draw attention to cotton”—which is still one of the region’s cash crops, and forever linked to the legacy of slavery. The carnival now is pitched as a philanthropic event to raise money for three local children’s charities; the website boasts that it has hauled in “more than $3.2 million with matching funds” since 1999. (Or roughly one seventh the cost of a Bombardier Challenger 300, which retails for about $24 million.) Two of the three of the charities it supports, according to executive director Ed Galfsky, are in part dedicated to children who live in Orange Mound. Carnival Memphis also appears to be a fantastic opportunity for white Memphians to cosplay as royalty. Every year a Memphis business tycoon is crowned king and paired with a young queen, typically a college-age woman, who is therefore decades the king’s junior. For a week they rule—but not before ponying up thousands of dollars for the honor.
According to the July 2011 issue of RSVP magazine, the coronation of Dobbs went as follows:
“It’s pretend aristocracy,” says a source. “It’s not like your average person in Memphis is coming out for the parade.” A scroll through the names of past royals is a codex to Memphis’s oldest and wealthiest families, and the Dobbses make many appearances. “As Carnival Memphis celebrates our 80th Anniversary, John Hull Dobbs, Jr. has been chosen to reign as King to honor a very important industry in the Mid-South—The Health Care industry which is an integral part of the area’s economic base,” reads John Dobb Jr.’s king announcement from 2011. “King John and his family have a great history with Carnival as well. His cousin, John C. Dobbs also served as King of Carnival in 1984. Our King is a long-time member of the Grand Krewe of Osiris and has stayed involved with the organization over the years. King John Dobbs started his Carnival involvement at a young age when he was a Carnival Page in 1976 during the reign of King M. Carter Stovall and Queen Dorothy Dunavant. King John was the Prince of the Memphis Country Club in 1986. His father, John H. Dobbs, Sr. was the recipient of the Cook Halle Award at last year’s Business & Industry Salute.” In 2017, Edward Johnstone Dobbs, John Jr.’s brother, was king.
Despite the projected grandeur, sources paint a picture of a weeklong country-club bacchanal, during which men dressed as boll weevils—an insect parasitic to cotton—run around causing mischief. “The Secret Order of Boll Weevils was founded in 1966 as a secret society. The initial mission was to have mischievous fun with the Memphis Cotton Carnival elite, crash their parties, and make Memphis Cotton Carnival a little more colorful experience (much like real life boll weevils creating mayhem on cotton crops),” the Carnival Memphis website reads. Though the Boll Weevils, too, have apparently “evolved into a support group for what is known today as Carnival Memphis. Most importantly though, today’s Boll Weevil group is a community service group for the mid-south. Donned with green capes and masks, they travel throughout the city on a green bus and a 1941 green fire truck with anonymity. Led by their Evil Eminence, Todd Brown, they visit retirement homes, hospitals, the less fortunate, those with disabilities and many other facilities helping spread joy and financial support wherever they go.” But one former Memphis resident has a different take: “You can’t see their faces. They’re drunk for a week. They pinch girls’ butts. They grab you. They’re just nasty.” Another younger Memphis native whose family still participates in Carnival Memphis echoes the sentiment. “You literally see these men trashed, preying on these young princesses. You’re just keeping all of these misogynistic and racist traditions alive.”
The whiteness is overwhelming. “I can sympathize with people who have a sanitized view of the past and want to celebrate what they considered to be the heyday of the Old South,” says Holland. “But when you think about what it took for that heyday to come about—why would anyone whose families had to sweat and bleed for their heyday come about, want to celebrate it with them?
“Many of those celebrations in the South, many African Americans won’t get anywhere close to,” he continues. “Because it’s not celebrating anything that we are proud of. It’s only celebrating the destruction of African American families; it is only celebrating the slavery that happened in the South; it’s only celebrating those who profited from it.”
There has never been a Black king or queen of Carnival Memphis, according to several people. When asked whether this was true—among specific questions regarding the connotations of cotton and boll weevils, the diversity of the organization, and certain carnival revelers’ “Stop the Steal” attendance—Galfsky did not address the inquiries directly but pointed to the organization’s charitable work, adding, “Carnival Memphis is not a political organization, has no political leanings, makes no political contributions, and has no political affiliations.”
“We welcome people of all races, religions, sexual orientation, and backgrounds who share in that dedication to promoting the Mid-South as a great place to live and raising funds to better the lives of children in this community. If those who do not understand this mission want to criticize us, that is their business,” Galfsky says. “As an organization dedicated to fostering understanding, enjoyment, and involvement of the Memphis area’s diverse population, we do not in any way condone violence or lawlessness or harassment of any kind.”
As McKinney notes, Memphis, on the banks of the Mississippi, “cut its teeth as a distribution center,” but it also functioned as major hub for selling people into slavery. (Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate Army general and the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, was a Memphis alderman and slave trader whose remains are only set to be removed later this winter from a city park that once bore his name in honor.) “Those two things come together to shape the dynamics of race and power in Memphis,” McKinnney explains. The largest employer in Memphis is Federal Express, which reinforces that dynamic in a sense, McKinney argues. “We need low-wage workers. We need Black people; we need Black people encased in a lower socioeconomic caste,” he says. “That also puts the brakes on any sort of overly transformative evolution of racial dynamics in the city, since the need for labor in 2021 is really similar to the need for particular types of labor from 1921.”
This is the throwback that Carnival Memphis celebrates—a #tbt to the days when white men ruled and Black people picked cotton. “It’s not unique to Memphis. A lot of Southern cities are trying to make this move,” McKinney says. “‘We’ll try to erase these dynamics of race and power; we’ll try to erase segregation and slavery and say this is a celebration of cotton, a celebration of culture, a celebration of the region, a celebration of whatever.’
“There’s this veneer of inclusion, this veneer of civility, this veneer of ‘this is an opportunity for us,’ in air quotes, ‘to come together and celebrate our city, celebrate the region,’ but if you scratch the surface: No, it’s not, right?”
‘MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE’
On the whole, Dobbs’s plane gang, as pictured in Zanone’s since-deleted Instagram post, is made up of “very charismatic people,” says a source who has various social connections to the individuals and is white. “You would meet them and think, like, Wow, that’s a great person—as long as you didn’t delve too deep into anything.”
A third-generation “George,” Zanone had a family farm in Horseshoe Lake, Arkansas—a literal plantation—and a business entity called Zanone Plantation LLC, per court documents. According to an obituary, his father, George Zanone Jr., “held considerable influence in his community” and “was also known for his generous Southern hospitality, always welcoming friends to the lake house and hosting impromptu parties and dinners.” A trail of legal documents shows that George III earned a living operating hunting clubs. Per one such document, “appellees George Zanone, III; Zanone Plantation, J.V.; Zanone Properties, LLC; Zanone-Pitts, LLC; Leatherman Farms, LLC; Shea Leatherman; William Leatherman; and Irwin Leatherman” controlled “approximately 7,100 acres of land in eastern Arkansas. Prior to 1998, George Zanone, III, operated a duck-hunting club on these lands under the name of Green River Gun Club. Later that year, Zanone’s family wanted him to become more involved in the family farming business as farm manager,” at which point he sought out Rinaldo “Ronnie” Grisanti “to discuss the future of the club hunting on this property”—an arrangement that ultimately ended in a years-long legal battle, which Zanone lost in 2009.
Vince Smith has established himself as one of the most prominent residential developers in the Memphis area. As of April 2020, he had three major projects underway in Lakeland and downtown and midtown Memphis. On its website, one of them, Museum Lofts promotes proximity to the National Civil Rights Museum as an amenity. The biggest of the three, according to an article in the Memphis Business Journal, is Lakeland Commons, which “is set to cost $42 million and include 150 residences and 21,000 square feet of retail.” For at least a period, his wife, Kaki Valerius Smith, also pictured, dabbled in millinery after “her fascination with headgear began with an article she saved about making hats,” per an article in Memphis magazine. While an apparent eponymous website is defunct, and her Etsy portal lists only one sale of a hat listed on the storefront back in June 2010, “she has designed hats for weddings and Kentucky Derby parties, and even put together a giant poppy flower hat for a flower show gala.”
Like Dobbs, Carter Campbell and the McEwan brothers have all gone into some variation of finance or investment. Campbell founded National Property Concepts “to optimize bank branch properties with innovative solutions”—like plopping a Starbucks inside a bank as brick-and-mortar banking becomes increasingly obsolete. “Essentially, what we have done here is create almost an in-store footprint for the bank inside of the branch,” Campbell told the Memphis Business Journal. Campbell sits on the board of trustees of Memphis’s Presbyterian Day School, which “strives to glorify God by developing boys in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and man.” (“We have no information regarding the issue or incident,” a spokesperson for the Presbyterian Day School said in response to a request for comment on Campbell and the rally.)
After stints with investment and development firms, Dan McEwan founded Maximum Hospitality, which “manages upscale, urban and boutique hotel properties with an obsession for maximum return on investment,” according to the website. (A spokesperson for Marriott declined to comment. A representative for Hilton told Vanity Fair that the Home2 property associated with McEwan’s firm, in Lubbock, Texas, is operated by a separate individual or entity.) His older brother, Bob, rose through the ranks at Raymond James after the $1.2 billion acquisition of a smaller investment firm, Morgan Keegan, in 2012, “creating one of the country’s largest full-service wealth management and capital markets firms not headquartered on Wall Street.” At the time of acquisition, Raymond James announced, “Bob McEwan is sales manager of the rookie sales program.” (Raymond James did not respond to a request for comment.) More recently Bob was listed as the managing director of the company’s fixed-income capital market in a press release naming him as a member of the chancellor-search committee at the University of Mississippi. On Instagram, Bob follows a mix of Trump fan pages—even those dedicated to figures like Kayleigh McEnany and Candace Owens—and PAC pages, such as @americafirstgop; mixed in is a sprinkling of accounts featuring semi-nude women, such as “Hotties Boating.” On Twitter on January 13, he liked a missive from the account of Conrad Black that read, “This will be the second impeachment proceeding where a full transcript exists exonerating the president.” A day earlier he did that same with a Nick Adams tweet that read, “There is no Republican Party without Donald J. Trump!” And he recently retweeted this from the account of @ramzpaul: “Amy Coney Barrett raped me.”
“THEY FELT CALLED”
When Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016, many—mostly white—pundits tried to explain away his victory as a consequence of economic anxiety—perhaps an easier pill to swallow than the reality that his outwardly racist appeals had found an audience, one motivated to go to the polls. The “Trump voter in a diner” tropes became parody over Trump’s four years in office, but even in the weeks following the January 6 Capitol attack, economic anxiety was trotted out as an explanation. “A majority of the people arrested for Capitol riot had a history of financial trouble,” headlined an exclusive from The Washington Post: “Trail of bankruptcies, tax problems, and bad debts raises questions for researchers trying to understand motivations for attack.” While this may be true, it was surely not economic anxiety that prompted Dobbs Jr. and his crew to hop on his private jet and fly to Washington, D.C., the night before the “Stop the Steal” rally. Lined up against the nose of that jet, mask-less, in finance-bro regalia, the group seems far from money woes. “Clearly they went up there because they felt called,” a current Memphis resident in the same social circle says. But called for what exactly?
Something about Trump resonated with Dobbs Jr. enough for him to fuel up the jet. One source who knows Dobbs muses, “They want you to think that they’re a bigger deal than they are.” Another says, “As a human being, I would say, honestly, [Dobbs is] very Trumpy. He’s into his brand. He’s into wanting to be noticed. He wants to think that he’s very attractive. He wants to be known.”
Holland, who does not know the people in the photograph personally, takes a broader view: “The difference between racists in the South and racists in the North is that racists in the North will stab you in the front; racists in the South will stab you in the back and smile while doing it. The Southern genteel attitude is just a facade for a lot of people...That’s one of the things that we’ve had to deal with in the South a lot, the presentation versus the reality.” The 45th president has emboldened people who previously felt they had to “mute their true feelings about race,” as McKinney, who also doesn’t know those pictured, puts it.
As for why someone initially sent the picture to Vanity Fair, and what the fallout may mean for the group, the answers come down to a desire to address systemic inequity. One person sums it up thusly: “No one wants to rock the boat ever—even if it’s not to be malicious or get back at someone, if it’s just simply to hold people accountable for their behavior that they’ve perpetuated for decades.”
Club clout may be the best way to understand the type of “economic anxiety” that Dobbs and his planeload suffer from, one defined not by credit card payments and water bills, but by the status quo and the systems of inequity that undergird affluence and privilege. The type of people who attended the “Stop the Steal” rally, says McKinney, did not go about life “in some sort of benign, neutral, and benevolent way and then on January 5, they suddenly lost their minds. January 6 was an opportunity for them to articulate frustration with the loss of their racist president.
“But it was also a moment, of sort, of affirmation and convention. It was a moment of congregation of like-minded people who have been engaged very explicitly in the work of subordination.”
“Just like Memphis, the U.S. Capitol was built on the backs of African slavery. It is the highest disrespect to see insurrectionists damage and destroy historical buildings that would not be there without the effort, the sweat, and the blood of African slaves,” says Holland. “They showed no respect for the government for which they claim they are part of, and they’re definitely not showing the respect for the efforts and the labor of the people who were forced to work on that building. Just like they very rarely show respect for the people who built Memphis into the way it is today.”
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