A Bigot Occupies Our White House

 From Robert Reich:

This week’s shooting of two National Guard members by a gunman identified by the authorities as an Afghan national was horrific. 

But Trump’s response has been disproportionate and bigoted. He vows to “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries.” He intends to deport legal immigrants born in countries the White House deems “high risk.” 

He threatens to strip U.S. citizenship from naturalized migrants “who undermine domestic tranquillity.” He plans to deport foreigners deemed to be “non-compatible with Western Civilization.” He wants to detain even more migrants in jail — in the U.S. or in other countries — without due process. 

In addition to the unconstitutionality of such actions, these threats stir up the worst nativist impulses in America — blaming and scapegoating entire groups of people for the act of one gunman. 

Apart from Native Americans, we are all immigrants — all descended from “foreigners.” Some of our ancestors came here eagerly; some came because they were no longer safe in their homelands; some came enslaved. 

Almost all of us are mongrels — of mixed nationalities, mixed ethnicities, mixed races, mixed creeds. While we maintain our own traditions, we also embrace the ideals of this nation.

 

Here’s how Ronald Reagan put it in a 1988 speech, in which he explained: 

“I received a letter not long ago from a man who said, ‘You can go to Japan to live, but you cannot become Japanese. You can go to France to live and not become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey, and you won’t become a German or a Turk.’ But then he added, ‘Anybody from any corner of the world can come to America to live and become an American.’”

A person becomes an American by adopting America’s principles, especially those principles summarized in the “self-evident truths” of the Declaration of Independence, such as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Carl Friedrich wrote that “To be an American is an ideal, while to be a Frenchman is a fact.”

As an immigrant friend once put it to me: “I was always an American; I was just born in the wrong country.”

I don’t think I’ve ever quoted Reagan before. He was wrong about so many things. Yet Reagan understood something fundamental to this nation that Trump doesn’t have a clue about: America is an idea — a set of aspirations and ideals — more than a nationality. 

The only thing Trump knows is that he needs to fuel bigotry. His Straight White Male Christian Nationalism requires prejudice against anyone who’s not. 

Like dictators before him, Trump’s road to tyranny is paved with stones hurled at “them.” His entire project depends on hate.

 

America is better than this. 

We won’t buy Trump’s hate. To the contrary, we’ll call out bigots. We won’t tolerate intolerance. We’ll protect hardworking members of our community. We’ll alert them when ICE is lurking. 

We will not succumb to the ravings of a venomous president who wants us to hate each other.

Trump Resorts To Bigotry In His Desperation

Trump thought he could disguise his bigotry in an interview with Black journalists, but he didn't fare well. They asked him the hard questions that his friends at Fox would not ask. Robert Reich reports on how it came out:

Yesterday, in an interview with three women journalists at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Chicago, Trump wondered aloud about Harris’s race: 

“Is she Indian or is she Black?” he asked, quickly adding, “I respect either one, but she obviously doesn’t. Because she was Indian all the way and then all of a sudden she made a turn and she went, she became a Black person. I think somebody should look into that.” 

It was as bizarre attack. Harris has always embraced her Blackness. She attended Howard University, a historically Black university. 

Cornered by his naked bigotry, Trump shifted to naked pander. He said he loves “the Black population” of this country, and declared himself the “best president for the Black population since Abraham Lincoln” — to which Rachel Scott of ABC News rightly replied, “Better than President Johnson, who signed the Voting Rights Act?”

Trump has always found ways to attack his opponents — through ridicule, nastiness, and outright lies. But with Kamala Harris, everything he tries comes back at him, revealing him to be the bigot he has always been. 

On Tuesday, Trump said Kamala Harris “doesn't like Jewish people,” and agreed with his rightwing radio host that her husband is a “crappy Jew.”

 

Trump then reiterated his criticism of Jewish voters who support Democrats, declaring that they "should have their head examined" and labeling them "fools" for their political choices.

We all know Trump is a racist, misogynist, and an antisemite. But in past years he’s expressed such bigotry just enough to excite his base while covering himself with “I was just being sarcastic,” or “it was taken out of context.” And the media allowed him to get away with it. 

No longer. Now that he’s running for president against a Black woman, the media isn’t buying it. At yesterday’s convention of Black journalists, ABC’s Rachel Scott led off the questions with this: 

“A lot of people did not think it was appropriate for you to be here today. You have pushed false claims about some of your rivals, from Nikki Haley to former President Barack Obama, saying that they were not born in the United States; that’s not true. 

You have told four congresswomen of color who are American citizens to go back to where they came from.

You have used words like “animal” and “rabbit” to describe Black district attorneys.

You’ve attacked Black journalists, calling them a loser, saying the questions that they ask are stupid and racist. 

You’ve had dinner with a white supremacist at your Mar-a-Lago resort. So my question, sir, now that you are asking Black supporters to vote for you: Why should Black voters trust you after you have used language like that?”

Instead of answering Scott, Trump did what he always does when cornered — he attacked her, calling her “rude” for asking it. “First of all, I don’t think I’ve ever been asked a question in such a horrible manner,” he hissed. “The first question. You don’t even say hello, ‘hello, how are you?’ Are you with ABC? Because I think they’re a fake news network, a terrible network.”

Last night, Harris responded to Trump’s charges about her denying her Black identity during remarks at the annual gathering of the historically Black Sigma Gamma Rho sorority. She characterized Trump’s claim as “the same old show — the divisiveness and the disrespect.” She continued: 

“The American people deserve a leader who tells the truth. A leader who doesn’t respond with hostility and anger when presented with the facts. We deserve a leader who understands that our differences do not divide us. They are an essential source of our strength.”

Exactly.

 

Trump is clearly rattled by the seeming audacity of Black people, of women, of Jews who don’t support him, of hard questions from the media — indeed, of anyone in America who finds him appalling, which is most of us.

 

Not knowing how to attack a Kamala Harris, Trump appears to be melting down.

Why Are White Evangelicals Eager To Endorse GOP Bigotry?

 

Have you wondered why white evangelicals, who profess to follow the teachings of Jesus, are so accepting of the Republican Party's growing bigotry? Robert P. Jones, CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), has an answer. He says:

White evangelicalism, with its strong emphasis on personal salvation, has always had a weakly developed and myopic political ethic. It developed a theology obsessed with personal (especially sexual) morality, which largely screened out concerns about social or structural injustice outside the church. This was by design, given that for most of its existence, it required a theology that was externally compatible with slavery and segregation — in short, with white supremacy. More recently, White evangelicals faced a crossroads when [Donald] Trump entered the political scene in the Republican Party, the party to which they fled in the 1970s and 1980s in the wake of the Democratic Party’s support for the civil rights movement.

Given that history, with the vast majority of White evangelicals supporting and blessing segregationist leaders just a generation ago, I wouldn’t characterize the current state of White evangelical responses, or lack of responses, as wildly inconsistent with this past. But the way White evangelicals have overtly given themselves over, not just to one political party but to one authoritarian personality, is deeply troubling.

On these questions, there is one public opinion survey question I keep coming back to, which gets to the heart of this continued White evangelical acquiescence of moral judgment and political responsibility. In 2011, PRRI asked whether people thought an elected official who committed an immoral act “can still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life.” While just 30 percent of White evangelicals said such a candidate could fulfill their duties in 2011, that number jumped to 72 percent in 2016 when Trump was at the top of the ticket, and it remains at 68 percent today.

In short, White evangelicals have never had a robust political ethic based on rigorously developed principles but rather an ends-justify-the-means approach to politics that starts with support for outcomes that are perceived to serve their interests and then marshals theology as backfill.

Right-Wingers Blame Trans Woman For Uvalde Murders

 

Right-wingers don't want to admit that this country has too many guns and gun laws that are far too lax, so they look for other excuses. Sadly, they have now decided to blame transgendered people. It's a stupid and bigoted theory, but any conspiracy theory is better for these nuts that facing the truth.

The following is part of an op-ed at MSNBC.com by Katelyn Burns:

It didn’t take long after an 18-year-old brutally murdered 19 schoolchildren and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, before the internet misinformation machine cranked into action. Starting on 4chan, a false rumor began to spread that the school shooter was a trans woman named Sam. Right-wing troll Candace Owens continued to push the false narrative long after it had been disproved. The online chatter even grew to the point where far-right Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona claimed the shooter was trans in a since-deleted tweet.

The woman targeted by the false accusation eventually had to post a photo of herself holding a sign with the date, which was after the shooter had died by police fire during the attack, to prove she was not the shooter. Later that evening, a teenage trans girl in El Paso was accosted by a group of men who taunted her with the internet rumor, insisting the Uvalde shooter was one of her “sisters.”

This is not the first time a false narrative that a shooter was a trans woman has quickly taken hold following a mass murder. In 2015, a Planned Parenthood facility in Colorado Springs, Colorado, was shot up by a gunman who killed three people and injured nine. Not long after the shooting, the far right Gateway Pundit reported that the shooter was registered as female on his voter registration card, and an internet conspiracy theory was born. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz repeated the rumor in a statement to the press, claiming the shooter was a “transgendered leftist.”

In 2018, a cisgender woman carried out a shooting at YouTube’s headquarters in San Bruno, California, wounding three people before dying by suicide. The internet transphobia mob quickly sprang into action, falsely claiming that cis women aren’t capable of perpetrating violence on that scale and concluding that the shooter must have been trans.

They pored over hours of her videos, picking apart her Persian appearance and voice and deeming both to be inadequately feminine to belong to someone born female. This conspiracy theory gained much traction on gender-critical and far-right Twitter, reaching higher profile figures like far-right activist Laura Loomer, who then spread the false rumor to their followers. After a deep investigation that involved speaking with San Bernardino police and the coroner’s office, and obtaining the shooter’s immigration documents, I could conclude that she was not transgender at all.

And now the Uvalde school shooting can be added to a — growing, if we are to be realistic — list of gun atrocities falsely attributed to a trans person.

This keeps happening over and over again because of the larger project of monstering trans people, particularly trans women, that much of the far right and its gender-critical allies have engaged in for the past several years. . . .

The rhetoric has only increased over the past several years. In 2018, gender-critical feminist Sheila Jeffreys told a U.K. Parliament panel that trans women were “parasites.” As the outrageous claims built, some American conservative politicians decided to take action. In Texas, where this week’s shooting occurred, Gov. Gregg Abbott and his attorney general Ken Paxton have sought to essentially make it illegal to be a trans kid or teenager. They’ve deemed providing a trans minor with trans health care a form of child abuse, meaning loving parents who support their children’s well-being can have their kids taken from their homes by the state as a result.

The El Paso teen trans girl who was assaulted by a group of grown men on Tuesday tried to report the incident to her local police department, but the police refused to file an assault report. The 17-year-old tried to contact a local LGBTQ support center but was turned away because the center had stopped providing services to trans people; it became too risky after Abbott’s bill went into effect. She was eventually forced to contact an Indiana-based LGBTQ support line, which also tried to help her report the assault to the police, who again declined to take a report.

The hostile environment against trans people, so often fostered in far-right chat rooms and social media platforms, is amplified largely by right-wing and centrist media. It’s helped create fertile ground for open transphobia, where trans people are easily blamed for every societal ill, even a deadly school shooting. You don’t get to this place where trans people are consistently falsely slandered and denied legal and emotional support through civilized or informed debate. You get here by demonizing a tiny, near powerless minority.

That’s been the endgame for most of the media makers who push these ridiculous transphobic narratives. Let’s keep that in mind the next time you hear some outrageous story about something a trans person allegedly did.

The Racist Theory That Can Be Used Against Any Group

The following is by Cynthia Miller-Idriss at MSNBC.com:

The 18-year-old accused of shooting 13 people, 10 fatally, at a Buffalo, New York, grocery store Saturday was, according to a manifesto he appears to have written, motivated by a global white supremacist extremist conspiracy theory called the “great replacement.” The theory falsely argues that global elites are orchestrating demographic changes via immigration in order to consolidate power and replace white populations with multicultural societies.

Authorities say he researched ZIP codes in his state with a high percentage of Black residents, and officials said he drove hours to Buffalo to execute his plot, which he livestreamed on a gaming platform.

Black shoppers and employees mostly were killed and injuredin the shooting, part of a wave of violence rooted in that same conspiracy theory that has terrorized members of historically marginalized communities globally for over a decade. The attack followed mass shootings targeting Jews, Muslims and Latinos across the country and world that were motivated by a belief in the “great replacement.”

The ease with which this single conspiracy theory has been mobilized against a wide range of victims and targeted groups — Muslims, Jews, Latinos and, now, Black Americans — demonstrates just how many people feel threatened by demographic change and are easily persuaded by manipulative rhetoric about it.

In the U.S., antisemitic and white supremacist claims had long warned of an impending, orchestrated “white genocide” rooted in manipulative rhetoric about low white birth rates, immigration, abortion and false statistics about violence against white people. In Europe, a conspiracy theory called “Eurabia” falsely suggested that Muslim elites were trying to expand the caliphate through immigration and demographic change, warning that Muslims will eventually force Christians to convert or assume subservient roles.

Now together under the overarching framework of the “great replacement,” this unifying conspiracy falsely claims there is a global, elitist plot to eradicate white, Christian civilizations that will lead to whites’ extinction or loss of power. In online spaces, the conspiracy circulates widely in the form of text-based chats, memes, videos and other propaganda, often using scientific racism — which uses false data on issues like IQ or poverty rates to make eugenicist arguments about racial differences or “population quality” — and dehumanizing anti-immigrant rhetoric to call for a violent defense against a dystopian future. In these calls, mass violence is seen not only as means to an end, but a preferred solution. Violent actors who take up the cause are celebrated in white supremacist extremist circles as heroic martyrs who will inspire others to act — to preserve and defend whiteness against an invasion of immigrants, Muslims or Jews who they claim will eradicate or replace white nationals, Christians, Americans or Europeans.

The conspiracy theory is so powerful as a mobilizer of violence in part because it can easily be directed toward any demographic group seen as a threat to white people. I’ve previously written about how the theory has led to killings in Norway, Pittsburgh; Christchurch, New Zealand; Poway, California; and El Paso, Texas. The Buffalo shooting appears to be the latest in a series of such attacks motivated by conspiracy theories falsely arguing that global elites are deliberately replacing white people with racial and ethnic minorities and immigrants.

Make no mistake: The "great replacement" is not a conspiracy theory that lives only in the dark underbelly of the internet. It has been widely shared and touted by mainstream politicians and by personalities such as Fox News’ Tucker Carlson. As I described in a recent column, Carlson alludes to that conspiracy when he says Democrats are orchestrating “demographic replacement” to gain political power. A French presidential candidate and a U.S. member of Congress have also recently publicly referred to replacement.

In the days to come, we will see a lot of finger-pointing: at the shooter’s parents, at law enforcement, at the social media companies that host and amplify hate and propaganda, and at the pundits and politicians who mainstream it. There will be calls for better content moderation on social media, for digital literacy tools to reduce vulnerability to propaganda and disinformation, for better investments in prevention and preparedness.

We need all of this, and more. But none of it will matter if we ignore the racist, dehumanizing and white supremacist belief systems that enable people to embrace “great replacement” conspiracy theories in the first place. Our failure to address the foundational nature of white supremacy here and internationally ensures that the next attack motivated by the “great replacement” is already a foregone conclusion.

The GOP Has Morphed Into The Party Of Bigotry And Hate

A few days ago, the House of Representatives voted to censure Paul Gosar (and remove him from his committee assignments for publishing a cartoon in which he killed a fellow representative (a woman of color). His Republican cohorts in the House voted overwhelmingly against censuring him. Threatening a fellow member is OK with them -- as long as it's a woman, a minority, and a Democrat.

And Gosar is not the only member to commit hateful acts. Recently, Lauren Robert joked to an audience about Democrat Ilhan Omar being a terrorist. Will congressional Republicans take her to task for her reprehensible statement? Not likely. There has been silence so far from Republican leaders and members of Congress. The GOP has, in essence, become the party of racism, bigotry, and hate. And they will continue that, because it is what a significant majority of their base wants of them.

How did the Republican Party get itself in such a mess? It started in the mid to late 1960's, when President Johnson, a Democrat, got three civil rights bills through Congress and signed them into law. This angered millions of racists, especially in the South, and they abandoned the Democratic Party in droves. The Republicans happily accepted these racists, because it made them the majority party in almost every Southern state.

They were joined by white evangelicals, who opposed equal rights for women and the LGBT community. And Republicans roped in many white workers by making them fear immigrants.

The Republican leaders thought they would be able to control this union of haters -- appealing to them at election time to win, and then go back to their regular brand of conservatism. They were wrong.

With the election Of President Obama, America's first black president, the haters began to coalesce under the banner of the Tea Party. And in just a few years, they had seized control of the Republican Party. Now they make up a majority of the party, and demand that their leaders reflect their lack of values. And those leaders now do that -- afraid they will be primaries or just kicked out of the party.

It has become so bad that there are virtually no moderates left in the party -- and the conservatives must go along with cultural hatreds of the base or be branded as RINO's (Republican In Name Only) and driven from the party.

This is sad, because the country needs at least two powerful parties to provide balance and make sure neither the right or the left goes too far. But with the right abandoning their principles and catering to the hate and bigotry, that balance is thrown off. They no longer can negotiate with Democrats for the good of the country, and will vote against any measure that Democrats propose or which disagrees even slightly with their hate.

This is beyond sad, because it also poses a danger to our democracy as the haters support autocracy more and more -- and it poses a danger to American lives as they have started to believe in violence to achieve their goal of domination.

There is only one way out of this mess the GOP has created. They must be voted out of power so completely that they reorganize with decent values (or cease to exist, and are replaced with a decent version of conservatism).

Republican Party - The Party Of Bigotry And Autocracy

The Republican Party used to have principles and ideals. I did not agree with much of what they believed, especially when it came to economic policy, but their conservative philosophy made an effective alternative to the progressive policies of the Democratic Party -- and through debate and negotiation, the two parties usually came up with a compromise to move the country forward.

But that is no longer true. The Republicans no longer have an effective conservative philosophy. They have jettisoned those beliefs in favor a bigotry and autocracy. They are now the party of hate, and are unwilling to debate, negotiate, or compromise.

The post below is from former Labor Secretary Robert Reich from his own blog. He writes:

Republicans are outraged – outraged! – at the surge of migrants at the southern border. The House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, declares it a “crisis … created by the presidential policies of this new administration.” The Arizona congressman Andy Biggs claims “we go through some periods where we have these surges, but right now is probably the most dramatic that I’ve seen at the border in my lifetime.”

Donald Trump demands the Biden administration “immediately complete the wall, which can be done in a matter of weeks — they should never have stopped it. They are causing death and human tragedy.” 

“Our country is being destroyed!” he adds. 

In fact, there’s no surge of migrants at the border. 

U.S. Customs and Border Protection apprehended 28 percent more migrants from January to February this year than in previous months. But this was largely seasonal. Two years ago, apprehensions increased 31 percent during the same period. Three years ago, it was about 25 percent from February to March. Migrants start coming when winter ends and the weather gets a bit warmer, then stop coming in the hotter summer months when the desert is deadly. 

To be sure, there is a humanitarian crisis of children detained in overcrowded border facilities. And an even worse humanitarian tragedy in the violence and political oppression in Central America, worsened by U.S. policies over the years, that’s driving migration in the first place. 

But the “surge” has been fabricated by Republicans in order to stoke fear – and, not incidentally, to justify changes in laws they say are necessary to prevent non-citizens from voting. 

Republicans continue to allege – without proof – that the 2020 election was rife with fraudulent ballots, many from undocumented immigrants. Over the past six weeks they’ve introduced 250 bills in 43 states designed to make it harder for people to vote – especially the young, the poor, Black people, and Hispanic-Americans, all of whom are likely to vote for Democrats – by eliminating mail-in ballots, reducing times for voting, decreasing the number of drop-off boxes, demanding proof of citizenship, even making it a crime to give water to people waiting in line to vote.

To stop this, Democrats are trying to enact a sweeping voting rights bill called the For the People Act, which protects voting, ends partisan gerrymandering, and keeps dark money out of elections. It already passed the House but Republicans in the Senate are fighting it with more lies. 

On Wednesday, the Texas Republican senator Ted Cruz falsely claimed the new bill would register millions of undocumented immigrants to vote and accused Democrats of wanting the most violent criminals to cast ballots too. 

The core message of the Republican party now consists of lies about a “crisis” of violent immigrants crossing the border, lies that they’re voting illegally, and blatantly anti-democratic restrictions on voting to counter these trumped-up crises. 

The party that once championed lower taxes, smaller government, states’ rights and a strong national defense now has more in common with anti-democratic regimes and racist-nationalist political movements around the world than with America’s avowed ideals of democracy, rule of law, and human rights. 

Donald Trump isn’t single-handedly responsible for this, but he demonstrated to the GOP the political potency of bigotry and the GOP has taken him up on it. 

This transformation in one of America’s two eminent political parties has shocking implications, not just for the future of American democracy but for the future of democracy everywhere.  

“I predict to you, your children or grandchildren are going to be doing their doctoral thesis on the issue of who succeeded: autocracy or democracy?” Joe Biden opined at his news conference on Thursday. 

In his maiden speech at the State Department on March 4, Antony Blinken conceded that the erosion of democracy around the world is “also happening here in the United States.” 

The secretary of state didn’t explicitly talk about the Republican Party, but there was no mistaking his subject. 

“When democracies are weak … they become more vulnerable to extremist movements from the inside and to interference from the outside,” he warned. 

People around the world witnessing the fragility of American democracy “want to see whether our democracy is resilient, whether we can rise to the challenge here at home. That will be the foundation for our legitimacy in defending democracy around the world for years to come.” 

That resilience and legitimacy will depend in large part on whether Republicans or Democrats prevail on voting rights. 

Not since the years leading up to the Civil War has the clash between the nation’s two major parties so clearly defined the core challenge facing American democracy. 

Most Americans Like Diversity (And That's Bad For Trump)

The charts above reflects the results of the latest Economist / YouGov Poll -- done between August 23rd and 25th of a national sample of 1,244 registered voters, with a 3.6 point margin of error.

The United States has always been a nation of diverse colors, ethnicities, and religions. It hasn't always treated the non-whites and non-christians as equals, but they have always been here. And the nations is becoming more diverse all the time.

That no longer bothers a majority of Americans. About 51% say diversity makes the country a better place to live, while only 11% say it makes it worse. And 76% say it is at least somewhat important for a political party to promote diversity, while only 24% say it is not.

This is not good for Trump, because most Americans see him as a racist and a divider. And it has become apparent that Trump wants to appeal to only whites, and suppress the votes of minorities (of color, ethnicity, and religion). I don't think that's going to work this time. Too many Americans are tired of the racial divisions in this country, which Trump is promoting. They want a better country -- not a divided one.

Most see the Democratic Party as the party most likely to promote diversity. About 54% say the Democrats are excellent or fairly good at that, while only 35% say they are not. The Republican Party is not trusted on diversity. Only 41% say they are good at promoting diversity, while 50% say they are not.

At the Republican convention, Trump and the Republicans tried to scare whites by talking about "lawless protests". It was a move to justify their own divisive politics. I don't think it will work. I think most voters will reject the racist and bigoted politics of Trump and the GOP next November.

Trump's Policy Is To Only Accept Rich And White Immigrants

Trump has wanted to change immigration (and refugee) policy since he was sworn into office. He wants a "merit-based" immigration policy. That's code-speak for rich and white.

He wasn't able to get Congress to do his bidding, so now he is changing the rules himself. His new immigration rules make it harder for the poor and brown-skinned people to enter the U.S. -- or to stay even after they have been allowed to enter. The new policy will go into effect on October 15th.

Understand this. These new rules apply to legal immigrants (not the undocumented, who he has always wanted to block and deport).

Here's what Colby Itkowitz and Felicia Sommez wrote about the new policy (as introduced by Ken Cuccinelli, acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services) in The Washington Post:

Ken Cuccinelli, acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, said Tuesday that the poem etched on the Statue of Liberty welcoming immigrants to America should include a line qualifying that they be able to “stand on their own two feet.”

Cuccinelli made the comments while defending the Trump administration’s announcement Monday that the government would consider an immigrant’s use of social safety net programs, like Medicaid or food stamps, when deciding their permanent legal status.

The famous words on the pedestal of the State of Liberty, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” were written by Emma Lazarus in 1883. In recent years, it’s taken on new meaning as a rallying cry against President Trump’s immigration policies.

Cuccinelli, during an interview with NPR, argued it’s the “American tradition” that immigrants welcomed into the country be those who are “self-sufficient, can pull themselves up from their bootstraps.”

“Would you also agree that Emma Lazarus’s words etched on the Statue of Liberty, ‘Give me your tired, give me your poor,’ are also a part of the American ethos?” NPR’s Rachel Martin asked Cuccinelli.

“They certainly are: ‘Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet and who will not become a public charge,’ ” Cuccinelli said. . . .

Later Tuesday, in an interview on CNN, Cuccinelli was asked to clarify his remarks. He said he “wasn’t writing poetry” and accused anchor Erin Burnett of “twisting this like everybody else on the left has done all day today.”

“Wretched, poor refuse. Right?” Burnett said, referring to Lazarus’s poem. “That’s what the poem says America’s supposed to stand for. So, what do you think America stands for?”

Cuccinelli responded by pointing to the historical context of the poem.

“Well, of course, that poem was referring back to people coming from Europe, where they had class-based societies, where people were considered wretched if they weren’t in the right class,” he said.

Historical White American Christianity Is Not Biblical

Regular readers of this blog will know that I am an open atheist, and I have been for more than four decades. But it was not always so. I was raised in a fundamentalist christian church, and actually want to a religious college to become a minister. But the more I studied that religion, the less I could believe it, and making things worse was the fact that many (if not most) christians did not follow biblical teachings. Instead they perverted them to justify their own bigotry and beliefs.

And since the election of Donald Trump, it has become even worse. Christians, especially fundamentalists, praise Trump -- a man who has broken nearly every christian value and teaching. The church has been taken over by right-wing politics, and values those politics over biblical values.

Sadly though, as I learned as a young man, this is not new. While it may have become worse with Trump, too many American christians (especially whites) have used their religion to justify their bigotry.

The following is an excellent examination of the failure of white American christians. It was written by Stephen Mattson at Sojourner. It's worth reading.

Following Jesus is political by nature, but maybe no religious group has been more influenced — and co-opted — by political power than white, conservative Christians in America. It’s no surprise that a ruling government set up by and for white Christians retains much of the religion that helped put it into power, but the extremes to which the “Christianity” of white Americans has transformed into a political mouthpiece is alarming.

Although Christians across the political spectrum have all committed wrongdoings, much of conservative white American Christianity has reached a point where the pastors, theologians, and leaders are mercilessly opposed to helping refugees, immigrants, Muslims, women, children, the sick, the poor, LGBTQ individuals, and those suffering in other countries — all for the sake of political control. The apathy, opposition, and even aggressive attacks are an abandonment of Jesus’s commands.

This is not entirely new. During the brutal colonization of this land, most white people who claimed Christianity ruthlessly enforced their power using violence and dehumanization, politically and spiritually rationalizing everything as part of “manifest destiny.”

Later, slave owners would manipulate the Bible to mandate subservience, and white Christendom would continue to apply a mixture of scripture and theology — heavily reinforced with brutality — to maintain control of their financial, political, and social rule.

We don’t need more evidence that shows white conservative Christendom — especially the kind that is built on nationalistic and patriarchal structures — is oppressive. It attacks, silences, and diminishes opposing opinions while simultaneously promoting a nationalistic type of Christianity. White conservative Christianity selfishly prioritizes partisan platforms that favor an oppressive agenda over following Jesus. They forget that Christianity isn’t meant to be exclusively white, male, or American.

“Christian America” was established by those who were almost exclusively white, male, and Christian. It was simultaneously used as a tool to eliminate and subjugate people of color and those who were not white, male, American, or Christian.

Although there were a few exceptions, this kind of Christianity was used as a weapon to maintain dominance over anyone who attempted to upset the status quo. In this way, their Christianity maintained a white supremacist view of humanity where white people were set up to rule.

Hate and racism were so embedded within this religion that the KKK was marketed as a Christian institution, and segregation was endorsed by countless white pastors and their congregations. It’s still so prevalent within white Christianity today that many still refuse to acknowledge systemic racism as a problem. They happily support a president who continually spews racist and xenophobic vitriol, and support policies that continue to be racist and evil.

This false and idolatrous narrative of “American Christianity” is still prevalent today. But the good news is that American white males don’t own Christianity and never will. The message of Jesus — an ethnic minority who was unfairly arrested, incarcerated, and murdered by a ruling empire — is that the love and power of Christ is meant for everyone.

This is why throughout history, despite the horrors committed in Christ’s name, people of every race, gender, and creed have emulated the life of Jesus by loving those around them, freeing them from bondage, righting injustice, empowering the downtrodden, and loving their neighbor as themselves. This is the very essence of Christianity that Westernized Christendom has utterly failed at: loving your neighbor.