The most laughable thing about the far-right’s way to achieve power for years – not just in America but everywhere else – has been by convincing the majority that the minorities will take over. The saddest part, even in 2026, this rulebook, or this roleplay, still works. Written, produced, and directed by Andrew Goldberg, “White with Fear” is an intense and urgent look at how political strategies from the times of Richard Nixon to the current president, Donald Trump, have blatantly weaponized white fear to gain and regain power and control over the conservative side. A side that can be easily swayed by lies and manipulation to believe that they are under threat.
As a documentary, there’s nothing new that Emmy Award winner Andrew Goldberg is able to offer here. However, the fluidity with which he is able to trace conservative America and the political ideologies that have overpowered it is commendable. Goldberg’s investigation is familiar, yes, but it’s also pretty clear-eyed, sharp in it’s critic and unbiased in its presentation. This is, eventually, a deep-dive into how race-based division has shaped the dictatorship playbook for years.
Looking back at Richard Nixon and his infamous “Southern Strategy,” the film, with numerous interviews with well-known talking heads like Steve Bannon, Hillary Clinton, former Fox News reporter Carl Cameron, The Lincoln Project founder Stuart Stevens, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Rick Gates, former Breitbart writer Katie McHugh, goes back to the way the former president of the United States used his campaign to scare white people about how a different race can take away their personal previlage whilst hiding the racist underpinings of that claim in disguise.
This strategy sounds complicated on paper, but the experts in the documentary essentially break it down really well. If you divide the country in half and end up with the bigger half, chances are your power will be intact. Essentially, the tracing of this ideology started with putting black people under the microscope, essentially blaming them for all major ‘reported crimes’ against whites, to spread a sense of fear. This fear was not just well-timed, but carefully maneuvered in a way that it harked back to white people’s privilege while being tied down to them being American and everyone else being an ‘illegal alien.’
This political strategy worked for years, until it didn’t. However, when 9/11 happened, President George W. Bush gave a slight reworking to it. Now, the racial politics and fear-mongering weren’t just about black people being a threat; it also seeped and shaped into blatant islamophobia – using the collective trauma that the country faced to raise an alarm that White People need to take up gun control in their hands. It’s sickening not just to see such a vile use of this divide-and-rule policy, but also to see how fragile and easy it is to divide people based on race.
The biggest strength of the documentary isn’t just how it pinpoints these things, but how it draws parallels with the now-in-power Trump administration. Keeping the scum-on-earth Fox News as the central narrative thread, “White with Fear” points to the use of media to deliberate and execute these said strategies. The key points that the film makes are how the rulebook always came in handy for all these political leaders who did not have anything better, like development and peace in their outlook. Using racial grievances to first ignite a cultural war and then deploying more subtle and disturbing tactics like taking Critical Race Theory out of the school syllabus to annihilate any chance of empathy to seep through is alarming. Someone in the documentary correctly points out that “Good propaganda is always wrapped in a seat of truth,” and the vileness of that act can be seen in every move that Donald Trump and his allies have made ever since their campaign in 2016.
Deploying versions of the same fear to actually instigate an invisible sense of security for the masses has always been the bedrock of dictatorship, and while “White with Fear” does not offer any countermeasures, it lays down the sequence just in the right way and right words that even those blinded by hate can understand.
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