"Democracy Cannot Coexist With White Supremacy"

The following is just part of an excellent post by Thom Hartmann (The Hartmann Report) on Trump's attempt to rewrite U.S. history to support white supremacy:

Democracy, real democracy, cannot coexist with white supremacy. The two are fundamentally opposed. 

Democracy requires inclusion, the recognition that every person’s voice and dignity matter. Diversity is not a “side issue” or a “political correctness” distraction; it is — as Ronald Reagan pointed out (ironically) — the very mechanism that keeps democracy alive. . . .

A government that silences or excludes women, Black people, immigrants, and other marginalized voices is no longer democratic and no longer looking or striving toward the future. It is frozen, stale, hierarchical, authoritarian, and fragile.

When the Trump administration erases diversity from its institutions — by firing people of color, ending DEI programs, banning the celebration of women’s history or Black soldiers’ sacrifices — it is not just discriminating. It is redefining the nation’s soul.

 

It is saying: only white male Americans count. Only they deserve to be remembered. Only they deserve to hold power, control wealth, and lead.

That is a true danger. 

It’s an attempt to create a pseudo-democracy that exists in name only, one that maintains the trappings of elections and laws but has hollowed out the moral core of equality beneath them that upholds and sustains our republican system. 

If this continues unchecked, we won’t simply be facing a rollback of rights; we’ll be watching the slow, deliberate dismantling of this noble 249-year democratic experiment itself.

And so, we must fight, not just for memory, but for meaning. We must insist that our national story remain whole and honest. We must demand that the sacrifices of every American — Black, brown, white, female, queer, immigrant — are honored, taught, and celebrated. 

Because democracy without diversity is tyranny in disguise.

All Americans of conscience and goodwill must demand an end to these purges of women and minorities in memorials, jobs, the military, and civil service. 

We must demand that our politicians stand up to Trump and his white supremacist lickspittle’s while insisting on a return to our foundational promise: equality, equal opportunity, and recognition for every person who serves and sacrifices. 

Because if we don’t stop them now, the erasures become the new normal and our children will wake up in a country that no longer remembers it ever stood for freedom at all.

26 Republicans Publicly Side With White Supremacists

 

A few days ago, Democrats on the House Oversight and Accountability Committee asked the Republicans on the committee to join them in signing a pledge to oppose "white nationalism and white supremacy". All 26 Republicans on the committee refused to do so.

This is shocking. One would think that all of our elected officials would oppose hate -- would support equal rights and opportunities for ALL Americans. 

When it comes to hate, there is no middle ground. You either support the haters or you oppose them -- and silence only supports the hate. Silence means you don't oppose the hate.

What excuse did the Republicans give for refusing to oppose white supremacy? They said it was a distraction from the Biden's administration's border policy. That's one of the most pathetic excuses I've ever heard. Are they unable to walk and chew gum at the same time. Why couldn't they both oppose white supremacy and Biden's border policy? Of course they could!

These 26 Republicans are white supremacists. Their action defines them as such. They are haters who want whites to retain all power, and nonwhites to be second-class citizens.

Here are those 26 white supremacists Republicans:

James Comer KY-01

Jim Jordan OH-04

Mike Turner OH-10

Paul Gosar AZ-09

Virginia Foxx NC-05

Glenn Grothman WI-06

Gary Palmer AL-06

Clay Higgins LA-03

Pete Sessions TX-17

Andy Biggs AZ-05

Nancy Mace SC-01

Jake LaTurner KS-02

Pat Fallon TX-04

Byron Donalds FL-19

Kelly Armstrong ND

Scott Perry PA-10

William Timmons SC-04

Tim Burchett TN-02

Marjorie Taylor Greene GA-14

Lisa McClain MI-09

Lauren Boebert CO-03

Russell Fry SC-7

Anna Paulina Luna FL-13

Chuck Edwards NC-11

Nick Langworthy NY-23

Eric Burlison MO-07

H. Walker Being Used By GOP To Protect White Supremacy

 

The following is part of an essay in The New York Times by writer Dante Stewart:

Mr. Walker is part of a long tradition of Black people willing to distance themselves from the humanity and dreams of their community in exchange for white praise and white power. Black people betraying Black people has a legacy stretching from the plantation to today. Mr. Walker has willingly, as he did in the N.F.L., taken the handoff from the likes of Mr. Trump, Ron DeSantis and Lindsey Graham, shucked and juked and jived over Black people’s real needs, just to hit the end zone and win at the white man’s game. . . .

No matter how perfect or upstanding we are or how well Black people lead our state, white people seem to always become indifferent when we shout: This is not good for us! Once again Black people have to prove that we are trustworthy and that Senator Warnock is the best choice not just for us, but for America.

Politics aside, positions aside, I have to wonder: what is it that so many white people see as desirable in Herschel? A recent letter to the editor in the Los Angeles Times suggested that it was the power of “celebrity” — that there was something alluring about Mr. Walker dancing his way to the end zone before winning a Heisman Trophy. For others, Mr. Walker is someone who represents Republican exhaustion with what Democrats have to offer. But it is not just celebrity or exhaustion. The race and runoff is a reflection of who white people believe is best for Black people and the nation. Herschel Walker is a very visible and violent symbol of just how far many white people in America will go to preserve a dying world of whiteness they refuse to let go of.

What a sad thing it is to watch a man’s and a people’s desire to destroy even themselves in an attempt to control what America is, means and can become. It is not just white supremacy. It is not just white hatred. It is white ingratitude.

White ingratitude is bent on breaking people’s hearts. It is white ingratitude that refuses to appreciate what Senator Warnock means to Georgia and this country and forces him to prove himself once again. It is white ingratitude that desires the stereotype of the ignorant charismatic Black athlete. It is white ingratitude that disrespects and disregards the Black tradition of faith that wants to both heal the soul and save society. It is white ingratitude that refuses to acknowledge just how deeply racist a vote for Mr. Walker actually is. White ingratitude is not just about open hatred and violence, it is also the everyday ways many white people make life so much harder for those who don’t look like them.

White ingratitude is very real and it is the heart of white power and white supremacy. If you are ungrateful for another person’s humanity and freedom, then you will do all types of things to devalue and disrupt it. Many white people are ungrateful for what Black people mean to America, what we have been, what we have done, what we have given them and what we have endured.

It seems that Reinhold Niebuhr’s words from “Moral Man and Immoral Society,” published in 1932, still ring true: “However large the number of individual white men who do and who will identify themselves completely with the Negro cause, the white race in America will not admit the Negro to equal rights if it is not forced to do so.”

We have done the forcing, again and again. And now what we are left with is not just rage, but the sadness associated with exhaustion. An exhaustion that none of us deserves.

Senator Warnock just might win. The celebration will ensue. A sigh of relief will be had. People will dance and declare how this country “works.” And yet, he just might lose. That is life, American life, American fragility.

No matter what happens the ingratitude and grief will still remain.

And I want America free of both.

The U.S. Must Own Up To Its White Supremacy Problem

The following is part of an op-ed by Colbert I. King in The Washington Post. He has a valid point! 

President Biden visited Buffalo this week. There he declared, “In America, evil will not win, I promise you. Hate will not prevail. White supremacy will not have the last word.”

Well, Mr. President, as I stand in the autumn years of my life and look around, white supremacy seems to be doing all right for itself.

The racially stratified Buffalo that I occasionally visited during the early ’60s when on leave from my Fort Niagara military post has now taken its place on the listed sites of atrocities in Black American history.

“This is not who we are,” Biden has said many times. Oh, no?

Lest we forget:

• Colfax, La., where in 1873 more than 60 Black men were killed trying to vote.
• Aug. 14 to 16, 1908, when a mob of 5,000 descended upon Black people in Springfield, Ill.
• July 29 and 30, 1910, and the massacre in the small, predominantly Black town of Slocum, Tex.
• July 19, 1919, when White mobs here in D.C. attacked Black soldiers returning from World War I.

“Not who we are”?

How about the Elaine Massacre of Black farmers in Arkansas on Sept. 30 and Oct. 1, 1919? The Nov. 2, 1920, Ocoee Massacre of Blacks going to vote in Florida?

Remember the May 31 and June 1, 1921, Tulsa Massacre that destroyed a thriving Black community in Oklahoma?

Are we to forget the 1923 Rosewood Massacre, the 1968 Orangeburg Massacre, the 1979 Greensboro Massacre, the 2012 Sikh Temple of Wisconsin Massacre, the deadly hate crimes against Blacks in Kentucky and Jews in Pittsburgh in October 2018?

So no, I’m not moved in the least by Biden’s argument that such attacks are the handiwork of people who “are just deranged, who are susceptible, who are — who are just lost and don’t know what to do, and they’re easily taken — they’re easily sucked in.”

There are too many of them, and all were motivated by one single thing: racial hatred.

Own that reality.

And remember: Racial resentment also prompted the owners of Glen Echo amusement park in Maryland to keep people of color on the outside looking in until 1961.

Disgust with Black faces is what prompted the good White leaders in Ocean City, Md., and other Eastern Shore beaches to enact laws prescribing where Black people couldn’t set foot.

Disdain for Black people produced racially restricted swimming pools, hotels, shops, restaurants, bars, theaters and schools — all part of my upbringing.

White loathing of Black people was at the heart of legal and de facto segregation — including the voter suppression schemes now being crafted in states across this country.

National Urban League president Marc Morial’s plea that Biden use “the bully pulpit and moral power of the presidency” to bring down white supremacy has a nice ring to it. But that burden is not Biden’s alone.

White supremacy is America’s burden. You know it. I know it. Millions more Americans know it, too.

Own up and get on it. Or keep sending ambulances, and building makeshift memorials.

Replacement Theory = White Supremacy = Republicanism

The cartoon above (by Ed hall at Artizans.com) shows a reality.

The shooter who killed 10 innocent Black citizens in Buffalo made his reason clear. He was a believer in "replacement theory" -- the idea that Democrats are trying to replace white heterosexual citizens with others (Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Lesbians, Gays, Muslims, etc.) to keep the Republicans from ever winning elections (especially on a national basis).

Where does replacement theory come from? It was originally a fringe idea embraced by white supremacists (and other racists). It is no longer a fringe idea. The Republican propaganda organ (Fox News) has several of their hosts pushing the theory now. And many elected Republicans are openly embracing the theory. Even those Republicans who don't preach it are reluctant to condemn it.

Republicans will try to tell you the shooter was just mentally ill. But mentally ill or not, the ideas he was expressing (and carrying out with his murderous rampage) are now a part of mainstream Republican beliefs. 

How did a once proud political party sink to such racist depths? It began in the 1960's when Democratic president Lyndon Johnson piloted three civil rights bills through Congress and signed them into law. This caused millions of racists to abandon the party (especially in the South). Republicans saw an opportunity to seize power in the South, so they embraced these racists, appealing to them with racist dog whistles.

The Republican leaders thought they could control this racist element -- using them to win elections. But it didn't work out that way. The racists proved to be numerous, and unwilling to be controlled. They have seized control of the party. Now a Republican can't get elected with accepting the sick beliefs of these racists. The Republican Party has become the party of bigotry -- particularly when it comes to white supremacy, anti-immigrant sentiment, and christian fundamentalism.

Add in the conspiracy theorists (like Q-anon) and an irrational loyalty to Donald Trump, and it's easy to see that the lunatics are now running the party. 

They are no longer a mainstream party, but a party of radical fringe ideas.

White Supremacy Is To Blame For The Murders In Buffalo

 

The following op-ed is by Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post. I agree with every word he has written!

Do not dare look away from the bloody horror that left 10 dead in Buffalo. Do not dare write off the shooter as somehow uniquely “troubled.” Those Black victims were murdered by white supremacy, which grows today in fertile soil nourished not just by fringe-dwelling racists but by politicians and other opportunists who call themselves mainstream.

The 18-year-old White man suspected of gunning down Black people at a supermarket in a Black neighborhood was reportedly a believer in “replacement theory” — the notion of a vast conspiracy by Democrats and/or Jews to achieve dominance by “importing” people of color to diminish the political power of White people.

The idea is laughable on its face — but do not laugh. This paranoid fantasy killed nine Black worshipers at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., in 2015. It killed 11 Jewish worshipers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018. It killed 23 people, mostly Latinos, at a Walmart in El Paso in 2019. And now we have the carnage in Buffalo.

Political leaders and commentators from far left to far right will denounce Saturday’s massacre. We will have the customary arguments about the need for sensible gun control and the need to focus on mental health. Gradually, the arguments will peter out. Nothing meaningful will change.

What we need to talk about is how politicians and thought leaders on the right are using the vile poison of replacement theory to further their own selfish ends — garnering campaign donations and votes, boosting television ratings, achieving fame. And we need to talk about how most of this demagoguery is coming from people who should know, and probably do know, that what they are telling potential killers, such as Payton Gendron, the man in custody after the Buffalo shooting, is complete fiction.

“Now, I know that the left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term ‘replacement,’ if you suggest that the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World,” Fox News host Tucker Carlson said last year. “But they become hysterical because that’s what’s happening actually. Let’s just say it: That’s true.”

I know Carlson. I was a frequent guest on his low-rated show on MSNBC years ago. He is smart enough and well-educated enough to know that there is no cabal plotting to “replace the current electorate.” But by playing with this racist dynamite, he has made his nightly show the highest-rated on cable television by far.

J.D. Vance, the Republican candidate for Senate in Ohio, claims on the campaign trail that Democrats are trying to import enough voters so that “Republicans would never win a national election in this country ever again.” Vance is a best-selling author and a graduate of Yale Law School.

Blake Masters, a Stanford-educated venture capitalist who is seeking the Arizona GOP nomination for U.S. Senate, said recently on a podcast: “If you connect the dots as a candidate for office and say, ‘Look, obviously the Democrats, they hope to just change the demographics of our country, they hope to import an entirely new electorate,’ man, they call you a racist and a bigot.”

Yes. That’s exactly what I call those who spread such trash.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who is running for reelection this year, also flirts with replacement theory. Last month, in criticizing President Biden’s immigration policies as too lenient, he posed his answer in the form of a question: Is it really that “they want to remake the demographics of America to ensure that they stay in power forever?”

A poll this month by the Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that nearly half of Republicans agree at least to some extent with the proposition that there is “a group of people in this country who are trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants who agree with their political views.” This isn’t fringe stuff anymore. It’s becoming central to the modern GOP’s worldview.

The replacement-theory grifters know that they are stoking the anxieties some White people feel about the nation’s increasing diversity. They also know that they are playing with tropes that have long been popular among unapologetic white supremacists, including those who infamously marched through Charlottesville bearing torches. And they must realize by now that some impressionable White people will take this rhetoric seriously — and act on it.

The accused Buffalo killer took pains to choose a location where he knew the victims would be people of color. Blame him for what he did. But also blame the prominent right-wing voices that egged him on.

Conservatives Disingenuously Use MLK To Justify Racism

Conservatives hated Martin Luther King, Jr. They even tried to stop the holiday in his honor. But they're smart enough to realize that most people consider him a hero, so they have started to use him to justify their own racism and white supremacy. The either misquote him, or take his quotes out of context, but honesty is not one of their values.

The following is an op-ed by Jarvis DeBerry at MSNBC.com about this right-wing abomination by a Republican running for the Senate:

Josh Mandel, a conservative Republican and Marine veteran running for the U.S. Senate in Ohio, began running an ad this week that opens with an Ohio woman stating, “Critical race theory is crap!” before cutting to the candidate standing on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. That's the bridge where, in 1965, state troopers with clubs and tear gas set upon a group of voting rights activists led by a young John Lewis. Two weeks later, federal authorities stood guard as Martin Luther King Jr. led activists across.

Desecrating the site of one of the most spectacularly violent attacks on civil rights protesters by using it as a prop in an ad that denounces critical race theory was bad enough. But, then, in a move that was exponentially more audacious and disrespectful, Mandel accused Bernice King of being ignorant of her assassinated father’s politics.

The affront is a poignant example of the phoniness of conservatives’ invocations of Martin Luther King Jr. in their ongoing project to co-opt his legacy. It’s an example of the way white conservatives mention him not in any sincere effort toward racial healing or reconciliation but to feed other white conservatives’ insatiable desire to put Black people in their place.

“Martin Luther King marched right here,” Mandel says in the ad, “so skin color wouldn't matter.” Then the ad cuts to photos of Mandel, who is white, posing with Black Marines in Iraq during America’s unjustified occupation of that country. “I didn't do two tours in Anbar Province, fighting alongside Marines of every color, to come home and be called a racist,” he said. “There's nothing racist about stopping critical race theory and loving America.”

Then a voiceover comes in: “Josh Mandel — pro-God, pro-gun, pro-Trump.”

It dishonors the memories of Lewis and King to promote an agenda that will bring nothing but more harm to Black people at a site where they struggled for Black people’s advancement.

It’s also illogical to pick a site where the law was so violently used to hold back Black people to dismiss a discipline that investigates the innumerable ways the law has done just that. On top of that, King, who won a Nobel Peace Prize, abhorred war for its destructiveness and because, he said, money spent on war is money that doesn’t get spent helping the poor. Calling out his name in a proudly militaristic ad that idolizes guns and former President Donald Trump is an abomination.

And there’s no reason to believe that it wasn’t a calculated abomination. Because Mandel wasn’t done giving offense.

He posted the video to Twitter, tagged Bernice King and claimed that a visit to Atlanta’s King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, where King is CEO, had inspired his ad. When she correctly questioned his understanding of her father’s beliefs, the 44-year-old Mandel argued back that Martin Luther King Jr. “knew the importance of the Second Amendment” and told the 59-year-old Bernice King: “Study your history better.”

You won’t find any better evidence of the white American belief that Martin Luther King Jr. belongs to them, that he would approve of them more than he would approve of Black people and that white people, the authorities on what Martin Luther King Jr. believed, can invoke his name to scold Black people. Bernice King’s twitter feed is filled with such arrogance: Random people contradicting her about her father and arguing that he’d take their side, not hers.

Given that Bernice King politely corrected a tweet from Mandel in September when he equated supporting critical race theory to “stomping on the grave of Martin Luther King,” the probability that he tagged her Tuesday with a plan to talk down to her is about 100 percent. Because, in today’s Republican universe, being ugly and racist and disrespectful is celebrated as being the sign of a fighter. “You want a fighter,” Mandel says at the end of his ad, “send in a Marine.” Mandel used the “stomping on the grave of Martin Luther King” language in a March 13 interview, a full six months after the man’s daughter politely asked that he not “use my father or his grave to increase fear regarding CRT.”

After that September exchange with the candidate, Bernice King tweeted: “So many people who furiously and erroneously tell me what my father believed absolutely refuse to study his teachings beyond a few quotes. That’s very telling and extremely unfortunate.”

Bernice King didn’t have to explain where the loud and wrong get their quotes. Most of America knows only one part of one Martin Luther King Jr. speech: the unwritten, unplanned coda to the political manifesto he presented at the March on Washington in 1963. And many white people misinterpret that segment as his opposition to seeing or mentioning race. 

Opposing Critical Race Theory Is Support For Racism

The racist right has been using "critical race theory" as a tool to promote white supremacy. They are lying about it, and telling Americans that it is being taught in schools across the nation and making white students ashamed of their history. Of course, that is nonsense. It is a college level course that attempts to find solutions to the racial inequality in our institutions -- and it is NOT being taught in any middle school or high school anywhere in the United States.

We must fight back against this revival of racism. The following is an op-ed by Jamelle Bouie on this issue in The New York Times:

With the Republican crusade against critical race theory still on full blast in states and localities across the country, I thought it was worth sharing the results of a new CBS poll on race and education that sheds a good deal of light on where the public actually stands on these issues. 

The survey, conducted this month, asked respondents to weigh in on the impact of teaching about race. When asked if “teaching about race in America makes students understand what others went through,” 68 percent of Americans said yes. When asked if this teaching made students “feel guilty about past generations,” 23 percent agreed. Just 16 percent of respondents said that teaching about race makes current students “less racially tolerant.”

When asked if books should ever be banned for “discussing race” or “depicting slavery,” an overwhelming 87 percent of Americans said no. A similarly large percentage said no when asked if books should be banned for “criticizing U.S. history” or sharing “political ideas you disagree with.” And 58 percent of Americans, including 52 percent of white Americans, say that racism is a “major problem” in America today.

Among the most notable results in the poll is the fact that most Americans — 65 percent — have heard either “a little” or “nothing” about critical race theory. Among those with an opinion on the matter, 49 percent hold a very or somewhat favorable view versus 51 percent with a very or somewhat unfavorable view.

The upshot of all of this, as far as I can tell, is that Republicans aren’t capturing the public mood on this issue as much as they are successfully using it to mobilize their supporters and send them to the voting booth. This is what appears to have happened in Virginia, where Glenn Youngkin, the Republican candidate for governor, rode conservative backlash to C.R.T. to a narrow victory. But most Virginians aren’t on board with this cultural agenda. As a result, after one month in office, Youngkin is underwater with Virginians, who oppose his effort to ban critical race theory.

For Democrats, then, this is a culture war they can win. They just have to fight it.

The Right-Wing Attempt To Propagandize K-12 Students

 

In a blatant attempt to play to his right-wing Republican base, Governor Abbott has announced a criminal probe into whether there is pornography in high school libraries in Texas. Real pornography doesn't exist in those school libraries, but you can bet he'll find some. That's because the definition of pornography for right-wingers is anything that doesn't agree with their view of the world (anything that doesn't promote their views on race, science, history, government, or sexuality).

They don't want to teach students to think. They want to propagandize the students into accepting the right-wing version of the world. They want a whitewashed version of history, a religious version of science, an unrealistic version of government, and a prudish version of sexuality (or nothing about it) taught.

They seem to think students are not very smart, and will just accept whatever they are told in school. They are wrong!

What they want has already been tried. In the 1950's, this same kind of propaganda was fed to students. But it only resulted in a student backlash in the 1960's. It started with the Free Speech movement, and then spread to all aspects of our society. An underground culture was born and the spread throughout society.

With the internet so easily available to almost everyone in the U.S., the effort to propagandize young people has even less a chance to succeed. The truth is available to anyone -- whether you teach it in the schools or not. And today's youth -- already more liberal than the youth of the 1950's -- are not about to return to a time when white men ruled and everyone else was a second-class citizen.

The effort to return to a society of white privilege and patriarchy is doomed to fail. This is just the dying gasp of the white patriarchy -- the final effort of a failed system to survive. 

White Evangelicals: White Supremacy "Trumps" Their Religion

It has always been strange that white evangelicals embraced Donald Trump, even after it became common knowledge that he abused women, made fun of disabled people, and showed little respect for marriage and morality. After his failed first term, they remained with him in an incredibly large percentage. Why?

The answer is that they liked his views on race and white supremacy, which parallel their own views. It has become obvious that their fear of losing their white privilege is stronger than their religious beliefs.

The following is part of an op-ed by Jennifer Rubin in The Washington Post:

A decade or two ago, no one had trouble figuring out what White evangelical Christians wanted from the federal government. Alongside supply-siders and national security hawks, they made up the triumvirate of the GOP base and were willing to embrace their allies’ economic and foreign policy positions to ensure support for abortion restrictions and anti-gay policies. (During the Cold War, they were enthusiastic partners with national security hawks in the battle against godless communism.)

But social policy is no longer at the heart of the agenda of the demographic. Instead, it has become nearly indistinguishable from the MAGA movement.

Conservative commentator and evangelical Christian David A. French acknowledges in a piece for the Dispatch: “We know that opposition to abortion rights motivates white Evangelicals far less than their leaders’ rhetoric would suggest. Eastern Illinois University’s Ryan Burge, one of the nation’s leading statisticians of American religion, has noted, for example, that immigration drove Evangelical support for [Donald] Trump more than abortion.”

As for gay rights, the Public Religion Research Institute’s annual values survey shows a majority of White evangelical Christians still oppose gay marriage, but that “substantial majorities in every major religious group favor nondiscrimination laws that protect LGBTQ people, ranging from 59% among white evangelical Protestants to 92% among religiously unaffiliated Americans.” Moreover, even opposition to gay marriage is declining because of a massive generational divide on the issue between older evangelicals and more tolerant millennials and Generation Xers.

So what, then, do these voters want? Many essentially see politics as a great battle between White, Christian America and the multiracial, religiously diverse reality of 21st century America. They want someone to help them win that existential fight. Government is there not to produce legislative fixes to real-world problems but to engage their enemies on behalf of White Christianity. . . .

The fixation with defining the United States as a White Christian nation is on full display nightly on Fox News, where replacement theory — not abortion or gay rights — drives so much more of the conversation. 

In this context, White evangelical Christians’ attraction to the thrice-married philanderer Trump is understandable, as is their support for the cruelest immigration policies (e.g., child separation) and the anti-Muslim travel ban. It’s all about race and religious identity, not policies founded in Christian values and certainly not about finding a role model for civic virtues. Trump was determined to protect White evangelicals against people of color and the decline in Christian identification; that was all they could hope for in a politician.

For these voters, government is a means of enforcing (they would say “preserving”) domination of Whites and Christianity as essential to America’s identity. That’s why they support politicians who demonize Black Lives Matter, demand that corporations meekly accept voter suppression, express outrage over a publisher’s decision about Dr. Seuss titles or fixate on saying “Merry Christmas.” It’s also why insurrectionists marauded through the Capitol on Jan. 6 bearing Confederate flags and wearing T-shirts mocking the Holocaust. They keep telling us who they are and what they want, but well-meaning Americans and the media often refuse to accept that their fellow Americans’ motives are so antithetical to American values. . . .

The fixation on race and Christian nationalism has serious ramifications for American political life. First, White evangelical Christians are fighting an impossible crusade against demographic inevitability (their minority status is what has fueled the MAGA movement). Because they can never win (at least in a democracy with free and accurate elections), their political venom will not abate.

Second, the aims of White evangelicals run smack into the American ideal that “all men are created equal” and constitutional protections that allow no bias against any particular religion or racial group. In that regard, they have become deeply antidemocratic.

Finally, a Democratic Party committed to social justice and racial tolerance is never going to win over the hardcore White evangelical base of the GOP. There is nothing Democrats can “give” them (e.g., jobs, cheaper health care) to satisfy their need for White Christian ascendency.