The insurrection is just the latest (and predictable) white supremacist backlash to multiculturalism.

I was disgusted and horrified, but unsurprised by the MAGA attack on Congress on Jan. 6. From the moment Barack Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States, this shameful day was inevitable. White terror of sharing power with Blacks remains the primary source of this nation’s political and cultural turmoil.

At the so-called “Save America March,” the White Supremacist-in-Chief told his mob-in-waiting, “Fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

He’s right. We do have to fight like hell. Or we won’t have a country anymore.

The fight is not between Blacks and whites. In fact, a race war is precisely what the insurrectionists want. It is a fight to determine if the United States of America shall remain a multiracial democratic republic or finally become a white supremacist autocracy.

Nothing could be so emblematic of this fact as the sight of the Confederate flag parading through the halls of Congress. The insurrection on Capitol Hill was just the latest in a series of backlashes that occur every time the cause of white supremacy is set back. Some examples:

1) Losing the Civil War led to the immediate development of the Ku Klux Klan.

2) The Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act led to the great migration of southern segregationists from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party.

3) The election of Barack Obama led to unprecedented Republican obstructionism, the rise of voter suppression, and the escalation of killings of Black people and the rise of Black Lives Matter.

4) The defeat of Donald Trump led to a deadly attack on Congress.

White supremacists find it intolerable that their leader has lost to a white man, Joe Biden, who has now wonthreeraces on a presidential ticket with a Black person.

As with the pardoning of Richard Nixon, there will be calls to “let bygones be bygones” and get on with attending to the nation’s business rather than getting bogged down in divisiveness over the pursuit of criminal charges against the treasonous 45th president. But in this, we must heed the repeated lesson of history and the words of that disgraced president: “Fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

Primary tasks for the Biden administration and the 11th Congress must be to hold Trump and the insurrectionists criminally responsible and the passage of theJohn Lewis Voting Rights Act, which would restore the protections of the original Voting Rights Act.

Make no mistake about it, the white supremacists who have infiltrated and nearly taken over the Republican Party will use the Big Lie about voting fraud as the rationale for more voter suppression and an unprecedented attack on voting rights and as the principal means of achieving their ultimate aim to Make America White Again.

STEVEN GOINGS is a National Coalition Building Institute diversity trainer and executive committee member of the Monterey County branch of NAACP.