Tag Archives: racism

Bring Me A Pitchfork

A recent, lengthy screed from Lincoln Square argued that voters in 2024 had “signed up for the myth of the businessman president,” an assertion with which I take issue. I do, however, agree with the ensuing observation that what those voters got was the guy who “bankrupted casinos and decided the solution for a hurting country was to blow up the economy for a jacked-up economic theory from the 17th century, build a ballroom, and hide the books.”

I also agree that Trump’s economic incompetence is enraging voters, and that “None of the culture war crap, the performative yelping about the Deep State, the liberal media, or whatever else tickles MAGA Twitter’s happy place” will save Republicans in 2026, when they will encounter “the oldest rule in politics and business: eventually, the mark realizes he has been conned.”

And when that happens, it is not just the con man who pays the price. It is everyone foolish enough to stand next to him when the lights come up, and the check arrives.

Trump is too old to pay that bill…and doesn’t pay his bills in any case.

But the MAGA GOP sure as hell will. That sound they hear in the distance is a mob, hungry and furious, approaching their palace.

With pitchforks…

I am increasingly convinced that the author is correct about voters’ current fury, but I am equally confident that Trump’s narrow victory in 2024 was not founded on his economic promises. Political science research overwhelmingly points to a different–and very depressing–reason people voted for Trump: racism.

Adam Serwer addressed that racism in the Atlantic, in an article titled “Why Doesn’t Trump Pay a Political Price for His Racism?” The article was triggered by Trump’s publicized rant, during a Cabinet meeting, calling Somali immigrants “garbage” that we don’t want in our country. Serwer noted that no one in the Cabinet reacted negatively to this latest expression of gutter racism, and worse, that “Vice President J. D. Vance enthusiastically banged on the table.”

This expression of animus toward all Somali immigrants came in response to the shooting of two National Guard officers by a Somali, and a fraudulent episode involving some Somalis living in Minneapolis. Rather than decrying the criminal actions of those individuals, Trump reacted with his usual racist stereotyping.

Serwer points to the obvious: we don’t hold White Americans as a whole responsible for Trump’s dismantling of the federal  capacity to fight white-collar crime and corruption, for his “doling out of pardons for people who donate money or commit crimes on his behalf, or his scandalous profiteering.” Most Americans don’t look at Donald Trump or the collection of clowns and grifters with whom he’s surrounded himself and conclude that their behaviors are due to something inherent in White culture. We simply–accurately–see them as reprehensible individuals.

Watching Trump’s repeated attacks on Somalians—the latest group of Black immigrants to be targeted by the president—I can’t avoid the conclusion that the government of the United States of America is in the hands of people who believe that they can apply a genetic hierarchy to humanity, and that American laws and customs should recognize and serve that hierarchy…

The logic of this racism is relatively simple—the individual bears the guilt of the whole, and the whole bears the imprint of some alleged crime that deserves collective punishment. Blaming the egregious behavior of men such as Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on their German or Norwegian backgrounds would sound comical to the same people who treat the president vomiting out similar generalizations about Somalis as sound observation.

This reaction is consistent with Trump’s constant Hitler-like accusation that immigrants with “bad genes” are “poisoning the blood” of the nation. As Serwer concludes, the fact that he’s paid virtually no electoral price for his very overt racism says something shameful about today’s America.

The U.S. abolished immigration restrictions based on nationality in 1965, recognizing that such restrictions were inconsistent with who we purport to be as a country. Until that change, promising scientists from Asia would be rejected in favor of illiterate farmers from Germany, because immigration laws considered race, national origin and culture to be immutable traits inherent in the populations of entire countries. Accordingly, entire (usually non-White) nationalities were deemed unfit for American citizenship.

Trump wants these racist (and ridiculous) assumptions to once again govern U.S. immigration policy, and his MAGA voters enthusiastically agree.

I’m ready to buy my pitchfork and march on the castle. Metaphorically speaking, of course…

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Heritage, Again

As Trump continues to disintegrate before our eyes, and special elections confirm what the polls have been telling us, I think Americans can begin to breathe again. Granted, this evil and incompetent administration will continue to wreak havoc for three more years, but there’s reason to believe that the midterms will put a halt to much of the destruction, and that the political pendulum will swing back from Trump’s gulag to support of something more closely resembling the America we thought we inhabited.

What happens then, however, will depend upon what we’ve learned from this horrifying episode. What rot within the body politic allowed the ascent of people so morally and intellectually unfit for public office? I think there are three interrelated answers to that question. An unfair, “gilded age” economy and a fragmented, politicised media landscape have combined to facilitate the re-emergence of bigotries that had been suppressed but obviously not eliminated.

Research has confirmed that the single most potent predictor of support for MAGA and Trump is racial resentment. But racism is almost always accompanied by other hatreds: of women, of Jews, of Muslims, of immigrants (at least those with Black or Brown skin). Those attitudes haven’t just been fostered and encouraged by “Christian” nationalist churches, publications and social media posts, but also by (mis-named) think tanks. The election of America’s first Black President lit the flame of the rancid ideology they had carefully nurtured during more civil times.

And that brings me to the Heritage Foundation.

With the publication of Project 2025, Heritage shed its disguise as a research institution, and identified itself as a purely ideological enterprise, intent upon remaking American society into one dominated by White Christian males. Minorities aren’t the only elements of the population who would lose status should its fever dream be realized–women would be returned to subservient status too.

The Atlantic has recently documented Heritage’s misogyny. As the article noted, Heritage’s current unmasking may have begun with Kevin Roberts’ defense of anti-Semitism, but disclosure of the nature of the “Heritage” it is trying to protect includes the recent decision to hire Scott Yenor to lead its Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies. The author says the choice “poses serious questions about the institution’s beliefs concerning the equality of women in the workplace and perhaps even as citizens.”

In a 2021 speech at the National Conservatism Conference, Yenor labeled professional women “medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome.” He frequently uses the term AWFLs (short for “affluent white female liberals”). He was ejected from a position as chair of the University of West Florida’s board of trustees when even Florida’s MAGA Republican-controlled state Senate wouldn’t confirm him.

Yenor believes that employers should be legally permitted to discriminate against women in the workplace, and has advocated for legal changes that would allow businesses “to support traditional family life by hiring only male heads of households, or by paying a family wage”—that is, denying women jobs solely on the basis of their sex or paying men more for performing the same job as women. He also believes that “governments should be allowed to prepare men for leadership and responsible provision, while preparing women for domestic management and family care.”

Yenor’s ideas are rather obviously outside both the American and conservative mainstreams–and not just his opinions on employment discrimination. He has also dismissed women’s suffrage as “a feat of social engineering.” Feminism, he has asserted, weakens the all-important institution of marriage–a situation that calls out for policy change.

So Heritage now faces an uncomfortable question: Does it agree with its new director of American studies?

What makes the question particularly pressing is Heritage’s “one voice” policy. “While other organizations may have experts advocating contradictory points of view,” the institution explains, “Heritage employees are always rowing in the same direction.” If this is Yenor’s view, and he’s now a Heritage director, does that make it Heritage’s official view?

Heritage was founded in 1973 by Edwin J. Feulner, Jr., Joseph Coors, and Paul Weyrich. Despite the obvious political ambitions of those founders, until very recently the media has portrayed it as a legitimate, albeit Right-wing, think tank. And that brings me to the role played by the media in MAGA’s capture of our government.

One of the thorniest problems we will face as we try to repair the systemic flaws that allowed bigotry and misogyny to drive  political behavior will be what to do about a media landscape that abets false equivalences–a landscape that allows Americans to avoid “inconvenient” realities and  choose “news” that confirms their biases.

I have no idea what we do about that.

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Trashing The First Amendment

Ten months into the Trump administration, the outlines of America’s cold civil war have become too stark to miss. MAGA is determined to remake the United States into a nation where White Christian Nationalists are legally privileged and in control. And they’re making progress.

The evidence is overwhelming. Masked ICE agents focus on people of color. Trump reportedly wants to “revamp” immigration rules in order to make it easier for Whites and harder for others to enter the country. From day one, the administration has pursued an all-out war on “DEI”–insisting that any effort to level the playing field for previously marginalized folks is really anti-White discrimination. Aided and abetted by a thoroughly corrupted Supreme Court majority, the hits have kept coming: universities prevented from continuing programs even slightly resembling affirmative action, the continued gutting of the Voting Rights Act…

And as we’ve recently seen, the racism motivating MAGA isn’t diminishing; it infuses the GOP’s young activists.

I have previously written about the faux-Christianity that motivates much of this. I particularly recommend Tim Alberta’s book, “The Kingdom, The Power and the Glory.” Alberta is a genuine Christian Evangelical, and his critique is informed by his own deep religiosity. More recently, David French–another committed Evangelical– has described what is happening in thousands of churches as a religious “revolution”–not to be confused with a true revival. In his telling, America is close to a religious revolution, and the difference between that revolution and a true religious revival is immensely important for both church and state.

Decades of scholarship, very much including scholarship by religious organizations, have attributed America’s religiosity–far greater than in other Western Democratic countries–to the fact that the First Amendment requires the separation of church and state. That understanding fails to persuade the MAGA folks who’ve turned religion into a political identity.

The Christian Nationalists who dominate Red state governments reject the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. They intend to indoctrinate the nation’s schoolchildren, and they aren’t satisfied with mandates to post the Ten Commandments in classrooms. In Texas, they’ve introduced a “revised” and bible-infused English curriculum.

A new state-sponsored English curriculum infused with lessons about the Bible and Christianity could reach tens of thousands of Texas schoolchildren this year.

More than 300 of the state’s roughly 1,200 districts signed up to use the English language arts lessons, according to data obtained by The New York Times through a public records request. Many are rural, and relatively small.

The curriculum was created as several states, including Oklahoma and Louisiana, fought to bring prayer or religious texts like the Ten Commandments into public school classrooms, blurring the line between church and state.

According to the analysis done by the New York Times, the Texas curriculum features content on Christianity, the bible and the life of Jesus. Lessons include the Biblical story of his birth in a Bethlehem manger, New Testament accounts of the angel who described him as the Messiah, and even stories about the miracles he was purported to perform.

Fifth graders examine a psalm in a poetry unit. First-grade students discuss the parable of the prodigal son alongside stories like “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” Kindergarten children learn in depth about the Book of Genesis in a lesson on art exploration that notes that “many artists have found inspiration for creating art from the words in creation stories in religious books.”

The Times analysis found that Christianity was heavily favored in the lessons. In the materials used in the second grade, for example, “Christianity, the Bible and Jesus are referenced about 110 times. By contrast, Islam, Muslims, the Quran and the Prophet Muhammad are mentioned roughly 31 times in lessons spanning from kindergarten to fifth grade.”

The Times article has much more detail, and it is worth clicking through and reading. The curricular changes were summed up in a quote by David R. Brockman, a Christian theologian and religious studies scholar at Rice University. After he reviewed all of the Texas materials, Brockman concluded that the lessons amounted to Bible study in a public school curriculum, and he worried that the state’s adaptation of its curriculum would send an implicit message to children “that Christianity is the only important religion.”

Well, duh! Of course that’s the message, and it’s intended. In MAGA’s America–a country distant from the one occupied by the rest of us–the only real Americans are lily-White and “Christian.” The rest of us–including genuine Christians–are intruders.

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I Told You So

Who really hates America?

In the run-up to No Kings Day, Republican leaders hysterically described participants as terrorists–as people who “hate America.” Those charges were never particularly effective; the first No Kings protest had brought out a cross-section of citizens who very clearly loved the America of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and who were prepared to defend it against the real “enemy within.” Grandmothers and veterans joined young and middle-aged people in an affirmance of genuine patriotism.

If there was any confusion about who loves and who hates the America envisioned by the Founders, it came just a couple of days before the second No Kings Day, in an expose from Politico.

Here’s the lede:

Leaders of Young Republican groups throughout the country worried what would happen if their Telegram chat ever got leaked, but they kept typing anyway.

They referred to Black people as monkeys and “the watermelon people” and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping their enemies and driving them to suicide and lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery.

Politico obtained 2,900 pages of Telegram chats–representing 28,000 messages– reflecting conversations among the leaders of national Young Republican groups. The chats  spanned more than seven months, and included Young Republicans from New York, Kansas, Arizona and Vermont. As the report summed up the discovery, the contents offered “an unfiltered look at how a new generation of GOP activists talk when they think no one is listening.”

And the way they talk is both horrifying and profoundly unAmerican.

Together, the messages reveal a culture where racist, antisemitic and violent rhetoric circulate freely — and where the Trump-era loosening of political norms has made such talk feel less taboo among those positioning themselves as the party’s next leaders…

The group chat members spoke freely about the pressure to cow to Trump to avoid being called a RINO, the love of Nazis within their party’s right wing and the president’s alleged work to suppress documents related to wealthy financier Jeffrey Epstein’s child sex crimes.

As Politico pointed out, the disgusting rhetoric employed by these Young Republican “leaders” reflects a widespread coarsening of political discourse and the increasing use of incendiary and racially offensive tropes. That coarsening comes straight from the top. The article referenced Trump’s post of an artificial intelligence-generated video portraying House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries in a sombrero, while Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer proposed trading free health care for immigrant votes. Offensive as that post was, it was only the latest of a long string of repellant social media outbursts from the senile and wildly unPresidential occupant of the Oval Office.

In his 2024 campaign, Trump spread false reports of Haitian migrants eating pets and, at one of his rallies, welcomed comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” and joked about Black people “carving watermelons” on Halloween.

As the article quite accurately notes, the chat rhetoric, which spared few minority groups, essentially mirrored a number of popular conservative political commentators, podcasters and comedians, all of whom have participated in the erosion of what was previously considered acceptable discourse. It quoted a political science professor who attributed the increasing use of racist and anti-Semitic rhetoric to Trump’s “persistent use of hostile, often inflammatory language.”

In one astonishing exchange, a suggestion that they tie an opponent to neo-Nazi groups was discarded because participants noted that it might hurt more than help–because such ties would be viewed positively by their own voters. 

There is much, much more in the linked article, and it is sickening. It is also profoundly inconsistent with what I call the American Idea–the philosophy that permeates the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. It is an example–as if one were needed–of what the participants in protests like No Kings oppose.

Compare the disgusting, hateful, pro-Nazi comments in the chat (including one that “loved Hitler”) with the sentiments on the signs at the No Kings events, and draw your own conclusions about who the patriots truly are.

The Young Republicans who participated in this disgusting chat truly do hate the America that is trying to live up to its original ideals. And despite the pro-forma claims of elected Republicans trying to distance themselves from this filth, we know where they learned both the language and the sentiments.

 

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An Insider Analysis

America’s “chattering classes”–to use Molly Ivins’ apt phrase for the pundits who pontificate on our social and governmental aches and pains–come in two broad categories: inside and outside.  Commentary by members of both groups ranges from puerile to perceptive, but I think there is a special value in the observations and regrets of former Republicans who belong to the “old too soon, wise too late” category.

Stuart Stevens is one of the “Never Trump” Republicans who have reacted to the current assault on constitutional democracy by reassessing their own complicity with the darker elements of the party’s history. Stevens published a recent essay in Lincoln Square that confronted today’s realities with insights derived from his years as a GOP strategist, and several of those insights speak to many of us who once believed the party’s rhetoric.

Stevens began by posing a question we’ve all asked: How did this happen? How did we get to a place where a major American political party is controlled by one man–a man who doesn’t have to worry about Republicans in Congress exercising their governing prerogatives?

To call it partisanship is to call Ebola an airborne virus like the flu. It’s both true and woefully inadequate. The level of subservience in the Republican Party is unlike anything we’ve known in American politics. Running for office is often humiliating, inevitably exhausting, rarely enjoyable. You must suffer fools to an enormous degree and do so while feigning interest and appreciation. All of these Republican Senators and Congressmen endured the dehumanizing gauntlet of election only to come to Washington and do what? Whatever it is Donald Trump requires.

Stevens looks back at the devolution of the GOP over the decades, and finds a system that increasingly “rewarded compliance and punished independence. The path to advancement was to go along, to wait your turn.” And he acknowledges the party’s growing reliance on racism.

Since the 1960s, the Republican Party has operated as a homogenous white party, with non-college-educated white voters the dominant subgroup…. To win an election, you had one simple task: appeal to white voters. Consider this under-appreciated fact: Over the last fifty years, no Republican has been elected to the House of Representatives, Senate, or won a governor’s race who did not win the majority of the white vote.

One of Stevens’ most perceptive observations is aimed at the numerous pundits and political operatives who constantly bemoan what they see as the Democratic Party’s lack of messaging savvy. As he notes, it’s much easier to message to a monolithic base than to the wildly diverse voters who range from disaffected Republicans to Democratic socialists.

It’s often said that Republicans are better at messaging, but it’s a false standard. It’s easy to stage a successful concert for an audience that likes the same kind of music. It’s much more difficult to do the same for a crowd that enjoys very different types of music.

That homogeneity has allowed the GOP to create what Stevens calls “a top-down hierarchy.”

Like a corporate headquarters laying out a marketing strategy for regional offices, a political party that needed to appeal to the same demographic for victory gave candidates no reason not to echo its message. You were graded within the party on your ability to articulate the proscribed message and penalized for being “off message.”

That process, Stevens writes, “curates a particular kind of candidate.” Those who advance are those who are willing to follow and conform. Deviation was punished.

And what about the values the GOP extolled? Free trade. The importance of character. Family values. A muscular foreign policy. Personal responsibility.

As Stevens and many others have concluded,  those supposed bedrock values turned out to be nothing more than marketing slogans.

When Donald Trump looked at the Republican Party, he saw through the artifice of values and understood it was a party of followers. The soul of the party was conformity, not values. The “family values” party would embrace a three-time married casino owner who talked in public about dating his daughter if he could give them power. The most “conservative” element of the party that was the fiercest opponent to the Soviet Union and an expansive Russian Federation would become the beating heart of the pro-Putin movement in American politics.

So here we are. The GOP has been bleeding non-racists and non-conformists for at least two decades. It is now–as Stevens notes–a homogeneous White cult. The problem is, in a system that privileges two major parties, the intellectual and moral collapse of one of those parties is a big problem.

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