White supremacists frame themselves as persecuted underdog martyrs

Evidence

Sometimes I feel like one of the early Christians in the Roman Empire. Like us they had to sneak around, underground, preaching their message with the constant fear of being caught out and fed to the lions. I wonder if the people in this movement will be looked back on as the saviours of the white race in another 2,000 years, or just a bunch of paronoid outcasts. — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 981

Categorization

• XREF: This self-constructed underdog martyr narrative is a textbook example of ‘white victimhood’ framing studied in critical whiteness literature — parallels studies of perceived group threat and relative deprivation.
• DEEPTHINKING: A movement that in reality holds structural power models itself on persecuted early Christians — the narrative machinery that lets the powerful see themselves as the oppressed is dense and worth sitting with.