Christian Nationalism is not Republicanism but is a euphemism for white supremacy

Echo editorial guest opinion published in The New York Times by Susan Stubson a Wyoming Republican.

MSNBC "Christian nationalists have hijacked both my Republican Party and my faith community by blurring the lines between church and government and in the process rebranding our state’s identity," writes Wyoming Republican Party member.

CASPER, Wyoming — I first saw it while working the rope line at a monster-truck rally during the 2016, campaign by my husband, Tim, for Wyoming’s lone congressional seat. As Tim and I and our boys made our way down the line, shaking hands and passing out campaign material, a burly man wearing a “God bless America” T-shirt and a cross around his neck said something like, “He’s got my vote if he keeps those [epithet] out of office,” using a racial slur. What followed was an uncomfortable master class in racism and xenophobia as the man decanted the reasons our country is going down the tubes. God bless America.

I now understand the ugliness I heard was part of a current of Christian nationalism fomenting beneath the surface. It had been there all the time. The rope line rant was a mission statement for the disaffected, the overlooked, the frightened. It was also an expression of solidarity with a candidate like Donald Trump who gave a name to a perceived enemy: people who do not look like us or share our beliefs. Immigrants are taking our guns. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. You are not safe in your home. Religious freedom is on the gallows. Vote for me.Christi

Christian Nationalism: White supremacy, racism and segregation.

The messages worked. And in large part, it’s my faith community — white, rural and conservative — that got them there. 

I am a white conservative woman in rural America. 

Raised Catholic, I found that my faith deepened after I married and joined an evangelical church. As my faith grew, so did Tim’s political career in the Wyoming Legislature. (He served in the House from 2008 to 2017.) I’ve straddled both worlds, faith and politics, my entire adultlife. Often there was very little daylight between the two, one informing the other.

What’s changed is the rise of Christian nationalism — the belief, as recently described by the Georgetown University professor and author Paul D. Miller, that “America is a ‘Christian nation’ and that the government should keep it that way.” 

Gone are the days when a lawmaker might be circumspect about using his or her faith as a vehicle to garner votes. It’s been a drastic and destructive departure from the boring, substantive lawmaking to which I was accustomed. Christian nationalists have hijacked both my Republican Party and my faith community by blurring the lines between church and government and in the process rebranding our state’s identity.

How Christian Nationalism Betrays the Gospel and Threatens the Church

Wyoming is a “you do you” state. When it’s a blinding snowstorm, the tractor’s in a ditch and we need a neighbor with a winch, our differences disappear. We don’t care what you look like or who you love. Keep a clean fence line and show up during calving season, and we’re good.

But new sheriffs in town are very much up in their neighbor’s beeswax. Legislation they have proposed seems intent on stripping us of our autonomy and our ability to make decisions for ourselves, all in the name of morality, the definition of which is unclear.

Rural states are particularly vulnerable to the promise of Christian nationalism. In Wyoming, we are white (more than 92 percent) and love God (71 percent identified as Christian in 2014, according to the Pew Research Center) and Mr. Trump (seven in 10 voters picked him in 2020).

The result is bad church and bad law. “God, guns and Trump” is an omnipresent bumper sticker here, the new trinity. The evangelical church has proved to be a supplicating audience for the Christian nationalist roadshow. Indeed, it is unclear to me many Sundays whether we are hearing a sermon or a stump speech.

Christians electing candidates who reflect godly values is a good thing. Tim, who ran against Liz Cheney in the 2016 Republican primary, has no doubt been a recipient of votes from our friends in the faith community. 

Yet Christian nationalism has nothing to do with Christianity and everything to do with control.

In last year’s elections, candidates running on a Christian nationalist platform used fear plus the promise of power to attract votes. Their ads warned about government overreach, religious persecution, mask mandates, threats from immigrants and election fraud. 

A candidate for secretary of state, an election denier named Chuck Gray, hosted at least one free screening in a church of the roundly debunked film “2,000 Mules,” about alleged voter fraud in the 2020, presidential election. (He won the general election unopposed and is now next in line to the governorship.)

None of those concerns were real. Our schools largely remained open during the pandemic. Businesses remained open. The border is an almost 1,000-mile drive from my home in Casper, and the foreign-born population in the state is only 3 percent. Wyoming’s violent crime rate is the lowest of any state in the West. 

Wyoming’s electoral process is incredibly safe. So what are we afraid of?

Yet fear (and loathing for Ms. Cheney, who voted to impeach Mr. Trump and dared to call him “unfit for office”) led to a record voter turnout in the August primary. The Trumpist candidate, Harriet Hageman, trounced Ms. Cheney. Almost half of the Wyoming House members were new. At least one-third of them align with the Freedom Caucus, a noisy group unafraid to manipulate Scripture for political gain under a banner of preserving a godly nation.

The impact of this new breed of lawmakers has been swift. Wyomingites got a very real preview this past legislative session of the hazards of one-size-fits-all nationalized policies that ignore the nuances of our state. ‌Last year, maternity wards closed in two sparsely populated communities, further expanding our maternity desert. Yet in debating a bill to provide some relief to new moms by extending Medicaid’s postpartum coverage, a freshman member of the State House, Jeanette Ward, invoked a brutally narrow view of the Bible. “Cain commented to God, ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’” she said. “The obvious answer is no. No, I am not my brother’s keeper. But just don’t kill him.”

This confusing ‌mash-up‌ of Scripture (Ms. Ward got it wrong: The answer is yes, I am my brother’s keeper) is emblematic of a Christian nationalist who weaponizes God’s word to promote the agenda du jour. We should expect candidates who identify as followers of Christ to model some concern for other people.

Rhetoric like Ms. Ward’s can have devastating implications when it results in policy change. Even though the Medicaid bill became law, the hospital in Rawlins no longer delivers babies, meaning Wyomingites about to give birth must now travel 100 miles over one of the nation’s most treacherous stretches of Interstate. 

Woe to those with a winter due date.

I am adrift in this unnamed sea, untethered from both my faith community and my political party as I try to reconcile evangelicals’ repeated endorsements of candidates who thumb their noses at the least of us. Christians are called to serve God, not a political party, to put our faith in a higher power, not in human beings. We’re taught not to bow to false idols. Yet idolatry is increasingly prominent and our foundational principles — humility, kindness and compassion — in short supply.

“It was a great day!” one of our pastors proclaimed on social media last year when Mr. Trump came to town to campaign against Ms. Cheney. Though many agreed with him, some of his pastoral colleagues grieved, traumatized by the hard right turn in their congregations.

I recently attended a conference devoted to spiritual maturity. Of the attendees, a large percentage were pastors. Some had flown in, seeking anonymity for fear of job loss or reprisal. Many had dared to raise hard questions, challenging their congregation to think deeply about immigration, puzzle through the church’s treatment of the L.G.B.T.Q. community, to dive into Scripture and to find answers.

For some, just making the suggestion had put their neck on the line. One pastor was recently fired. Another, who was nearing the end of his career, lamented: Where did I go wrong in my teaching? Am I complicit in this movement? Have I created this monster? I have failed my flock.

I can think of no better illustration of the calamitous force of Christian nationalism than a room full of faith leaders, regret lined deep in their brows, expressing shame and disappointment in those they were called to lead.

In February, Gov. Mark Gordon hosted a prayer breakfast, a tradition in the Wyoming Legislature in which leaders come together, read Scripture and listen to an inspirational message. The breakfast came toward the end of the Legislature’s session, one pockmarked with ugly exchanges between the Freedom Caucus and other right-wing legislators and the moderates, a house more divided than ever.

The Senate president, Ogden Driskill, and the House speaker, Albert Sommers, were each invited to read a passage from the Bible. They carried the shrapnel of the session in their slumped shoulders as they approached the dais. They were tired. Weary. Both are veteran legislators, throwbacks to a time when lawmakers disagreed, then shared a drink at the end of the day. This session was different. Meaner.

Mr. Sommers is the quieter of the two. Before reading, he said he was not the best versed in the Bible but spoke of his experience finding faith and said he viewed his prayer and relationship with God as largely private. Mr. Driskill was equally humble: If anyone ever told me I would be in this position, standing in a room packed with political and business leaders, he said, I never would have believed it. And yet here I am.

Both leaders have deep roots in the state. Mr. Driskill and Mr. Sommers are the faces of my beloved Wyoming, a place so intent on preserving our live-and-let-live cowboy culture, we enshrined it in our state code, Section 8-3-123. They are earnest public servants who choose service over self, who love the state and are willing to make unpopular decisions at the risk of their political futures, who think nothing of leaving their homes to travel hundreds of miles across the state for a steak dinner and a reasoned discussion on carbon capture.

This is the state I cannot quit. I rely on those gritty and courageous leaders who hold tight to our rural values. They are the Davids in the fight against the Philistines. They are our brother’s keeper.

Susan Stubson (@wyorodeoqueen) is a pianist, lawyer and member of the Wyoming Republican Party.

Rudy Giuliani booked in Fulton County Jail charged with the same RICO crimes as he prosecuted in NYC

James Comey revealed his experience with Rudy Giuliani in his book, "A Higher Loyalty".  Early in his development as a prosecutor, Comey admired the New York City Police Commissioner Giuliani from afar, being how, at the time, he was his subordinate. This naivety turned to cynicism as Comey became familiar with Giuliani's puffed up management style. (page 19-22 in hard cover).  This learning curve was realized when he attended a press conference with Giuliani, where he was told to stand still, not move and be quiet because, "The most dangerous place in New York is between Rudy and a microphone."

Rudy Giuliani's mug shot released by the Fulton County Sheriff's Office, confirming that the former New York City mayor had a booking photo taken after surrendering to face charges related to his and others' alleged efforts to overturn Georgia's 2020 election results.

Rudy Giuliani Was Always Like This.

Reported in The New York Times opinion by Jamelle Bouie: Giuliani is charged with 13 felony counts, including racketeering (violating the Georgia RICO Act) and false statements and writings.

Rudy Giuliani was indicted in Georgia for his role in what prosecutors called a conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020, presidential election in that state.

The district attorney for Fulton County, Fani Willis, charged Giuliani with 13 counts related to election tampering, including “solicitation of violation of oath by public officer” and “conspiracy to commit forgery in the first degree.” The indictment names 18 other defendants, including former president Donald Trump, who have each been charged under Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (or RICO) Act. 

Of course, the irony is that Giuliani made his name as a U.S. attorney using the federal RICO Act to undermine and dismantle the mob.

It is not hard to find commentators asking a simple question about the events of the past few years: What happened to Rudy Giuliani? How did “America’s mayor” — the man who rocketed to national fame after the Sept. 11 attacks — come to disgrace and debase himself in defense of Donald Trump? 

Why would Giuliani, the archetypal tough-on-crime and law-and-order politician, embrace a lawless effort to “stop the steal”?

It’s an understandable question, but it starts from a mistaken premise. It assumes there’s something different about Giuliani — that there was, at some point, a decisive break in Giuliani’s personality or political beliefs that placed him on his current trajectory. But there wasn’t. The line from “America’s mayor” to indicted co-conspirator is a straight one. The answer to "What happened to Rudy Giuliani?" is Nothing happened. He is the same man he’s always been.

Just look at one of the formative moments of Giuliani’s political career. On Sept. 16, 1992, thousands of off-duty police officers crowded in front of New York’s City Hall to protest against Mayor David Dinkins. “The cops held up several of the most crude drawings of Dinkins, black, performing perverted sex acts,” Jimmy Breslin, the Newsday columnist, who was present at the riot, wrote. “‘Now you got a n****r right inside City Hall,’ one officer reportedly said,” Breslin continued. “‘How do you like that? A n****r mayor.’” Other officers chanted slogans like “Dinkins gotta go!” and “The mayor’s on crack!”

The cops were there to oppose a bill that would have removed the police from the city’s Civilian Complaint Review Board, an oversight body that handled allegations of police misconduct, and, crucially, would have made it independent of the Police Department itself. Faced with the prospect of potentially greater civilian accountability, New York City police officers took their anger to the streets.

Tensions were already high in the city — earlier in the summer, an officer had killed Jose Garcia, a young undocumented immigrant from the Dominican Republic, leading to protests and rioting — and fanning the flames on this particular day was none other than Rudy Giuliani, who had lost to Dinkins in the 1989 New York mayoral election.

Giuliani, the author Andrew Kirtzman recounts in “Giuliani: The Rise and Tragic Fall of America’s Mayor,” “walked to the flatbed truck outside the perimeter of the building, where thousands were gathered, and hopped up to the makeshift stage. After a handful of other politicians delivered their speeches, Giuliani took the mic and the crowd roared. Shedding his suit jacket and rolling up the sleeves of his white button shirt, he ripped into Dinkins.”

“The mayor doesn’t know why the morale of the New York City Police Department is so low,” he said, jabbing his finger in the air. “He blames it on me, he blames it on you. The reason the morale of the Police Department of the City of New York is so low is one reason and one reason alone: David Dinkins!”

Giuliani never acknowledged or condemned the racism of the police riot. And why would he? His performance galvanized supporters and almost certainly contributed to his narrow victory over Dinkins in his rematch with the incumbent mayor in 1993.

What does any of this have to do with the Rudy Giuliani of 2023? Well, if we think of Giuliani as the personification of American resilience in the face of terrorism, then his turn against democracy and the rule of law is bewildering and inexplicable. 

But, if we think of Giuliani as the scowling demagogue who stoked the flames of chauvinism and racial hatred against New York’s first Black mayor for his own gain, then there’s little other than his carefully crafted image in the press that separates the Giuliani of ’92 from the Giuliani of ’23.

And that’s the point. Even at the moment of his greatest political triumph, Giuliani was a fraught and divisive figure. 

It was the press that labeled him “America’s mayor.” That the epithet continued to stick through the subsequent decade, in the face of scandal and political failure, is only a testament to the persistence of myth in American political coverage, because it is only after internalizing the myth of Giuliani that anyone could be shocked by his steadfast allegiance to Trump.

With clear eyes, it is easy to see that the two men are of a type. They share the same demagogic instincts, the same boundless resentment, the same authoritarian manner — it is not for nothing that Giuliani reportedly tried to get the 2001 mayoral election canceled so that he could stay in office beyond the limit on his term — and the same willingness to indulge in racism and use it for their own political purposes.

If there is a question to ask in the wake of Giuliani’s indictment, it isn’t What happened to Rudy? but rather, why was it so hard for so many people to see the truth of who, and what, he always was?

Free speech does not exist in Florida. Big Brother Governor Ron DeSantis will decide what is legally "free speech"

America, Right-Wing Censors and the ‘Battle for the Next Century, echo essay published in The New York Times, by Charles M. Blow.

Christopher Rufo, the man who orchestrated the attack on critical race theory, underscored a new focus this month. Unfortunately, he is best known for his activism against critical race theory,

“Conservatives must move the fight from ideology to bureaucracy,” he tweeted. “We’ve won the debate against CRT; now it’s time to dismantle DEI.”

D.E.I. stands for diversity, equity and inclusion, a concept that goes far beyond just the racial prism of critical race theory and moves into the worlds of ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, age and class.

What Rufo is proposing is the distorting and demonizing of legitimate practices and areas of academic inquiry. He admitted as much in a 2021 tweet, back when he was still focused primarily on critical race theory: “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory,’” he wrote. “We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.”

Republicans who are elected officials are quick to “amen” Rufo’s talking points. Representative Chip Roy of Texas, for instance, amplified Rufo’s tweet this month about moving on from fighting “ideology” to taking on the entire bureaucracy. Rufo, Roy said, was “speaking my language.”

This is the same Roy who voted against the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act, one of only 14 members of the House to do so, on the grounds that it created “a separate Independence Day based on the color of one’s skin.”

This is the same Roy who, during a congressional hearing a few years ago, referred to an “old saying” that seemed to be celebrating lynching: “Find all the rope in Texas and get a tall oak tree.”

OMG! Christopher Rufo is a right wing extremist prominent advocate for bans on teachers discussing LGBTQ issues in classrooms.

This is the same Roy who was one of only three representatives to vote against the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act, saying that the legislation “simply raises the punishment” for offenses that are already federal crimes “in an effort to advance a woke agenda under the guise of correcting racial injustice.”

Meanwhile, Roy has been pushing his Restoring Military Focus Act, a bill he first introduced two years ago that would, if passed, eliminate the Department of Defense’s chief diversity and inclusion officer.

In 2022, Senator Marco Rubio introduced companion legislation in the Senate, and together, the two men released a report on political influences in the military titled “Woke Warfighters.”

The report, which featured on its cover six cartridges strapped to the back of a helmet, each one carrying a rainbow-colored bullet, repeatedly invoked the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as it railed against the Pentagon’s attempts to deal with racism within its ranks.

The report also focused on trans people serving in the military and receiving gender-affirming care, as well as what it called the military’s promotion of “individual identity and self-actualization in recruitment and retention efforts, particularly for the L.G.B.T.Q.+ community.”

This year, just a week before Roy responded to Rufo’s tweet, he reintroduced the bill, this time to a House that Republicans controlled.

This fight against D.E.I. isn’t confined to public institutions and bureaucracies. As the leader of this movement, Rufo has set his sights on corporate America as well. In July he published what he called a survey of the “programming” of every Fortune 100 company and found they had all adopted D.E.I. programs, including those that “promote the most virulent strands of critical race theory and gender ideology.”

When Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida signed a law limiting D.E.I. in the workplace last April, Rufo likened him to Teddy Roosevelt and praised his “muscular” strategy for combating “corporate malfeasance.” “Conservatives,” he wrote, “need to build on these efforts by developing a comprehensive agenda for pushing back against left-wing ideology in corporate America.”

In fact, Rufo sees Florida as the seeding ground for his censorship, where it can take root and spread, and Texas has already followed suit. This month, just a few days after DeSantis announced plans to block state colleges from having programs on D.E.I., the office of the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, issued a memo warning state agency and public university leaders that the use of D.E.I. in hiring was illegal.

This was precisely the worry of Kimberlé Crenshaw, a law professor at U.C.L.A. and Columbia, who played a leading role in developing critical race theory into a discipline, when I spoke with her recently.

She said: “They started with C.R.T. They moved to ‘Don’t Say Gay.’ Now they’re moving to all of Black studies. It’s not going to be long before they include all ethnic studies. We’ve already seen they’re attacking diversity, equity and inclusion in higher education. 

Ron DeSantis wants to outlaw free speech.  Is this issue destined to the Supreme Court?

And the real thing, Charles, is going to be when they come for diversity, equity and inclusion in corporations.”

This is the New Right’s strategic plan: a relentless push to re-establish and strengthen the straight, cis, patriarchal, white supremacist power structure. And, Crenshaw said, “this thing will not be satisfied by one victory. This is just one skirmish, in a wider, broader battle to make racism unspeakable and basically to contain the power of Black folks, queer folks, women and pretty much everybody else who doesn’t agree to the agenda of reclaiming this country that the MAGA group claims.”

In fact, every perceived win will only embolden the extremists. The objective is to win the war against progress and to freeze America in a yesteryear image of itself. This is a swing-for-the-fences play. They are seeking to widen the conservative aperture in their quest to suppress and reverse, to promote a universal vision on oppression, to apply uniform pressure.

As Crenshaw put it, “I believe that this is the battle for the next century.”

Critical Race Theory is a dog whistle issue to stir up white supremacy

"Slavery was real!"- Political conservatives have used Critical Race Theory (aka #DRT) with incredible effectiveness to cause anxiety, to get people angry, and then get them to the polls, says Rutgers University President Jonathan Holloway.

Critical Race Theory

Interesting Q&A with an expert published in NewJersey.com:

Rutgers' President reports to the Star-Ledger, "What’s all this buzz about critical race theory?"

A Republican just got himself elected governor of Virginia by vowing to ban the teaching of critical race theory. Yet most people don’t even know what that term means – including the folks who hyped it up.

We asked Rutgers President Jonathan Holloway, a leading scholar of Black history and the author of The Cause of Freedom. Below is an edited transcript of his conversation with Star-Ledger Editorial Board Member Julie O’Connor.

Q. What is critical race theory?

A. Critical race theory has its roots in a concept taught in law school. The idea is that racism is systemic: Housing policy and lending practices are prime examples of government-sanctioned actions that have led to exacerbating race-based inequalities for generations of Americans. Such policies have reinforced prejudice and disparities along racial lines for centuries, and continue to do so today.

Look at redlining. Banks drew red lines around certain areas where you couldn’t get mortgages, or you’d get horrible mortgages. If you look at where Black and Brown folks could live because of discriminatory housing practices, those were redlined districts.

Redlining was made illegal in 1968, but these practices have continued with shocking consistency to the present day with segregated housing, which determines where you go to school, and a system that depends on tax receipts, which makes for poorer schools. It has this snowball effect. So, if you bring the lens of critical race theory to this, you could say, there’s a whole structure around how people live their lives – literally, where they live – that has been articulated through racialized policies.

Q. How did this obscure subject become a (wrong-minded!) central issue on the right?

A. That is the question. When I started hearing, say, six months ago, some reference to critical race theory as a divisive issue, I was like, 'wait a second' – who outside of academia is talking about critical race theory? Since then, I’ve watched it used. And it’s what you’d call ‘dog whistle politics,’ where you use certain key words that get people worked up and define them in ways so stripped of context and nuance that it becomes bastardized. It’s no longer what critical race theory is. It has now become this tool. Political conservatives have used this with incredible effectiveness to cause anxiety, to get people angry, and then get them to the polls.

Q. Do you think the meaning of critical race theory has evolved? It also seems like a vague, catch-all term now for what some people view as the excesses of wokeness.

“I’ve never figured out what ‘critical race theory’ is, to be totally honest, after a year of talking about it,” Fox News’ Tucker Carlson recently admitted. So what is it, and why is it so important?

A. Yes, it has become that. Look at the language we’re using now, in terms of trying to describe ourselves and our country: ‘Excesses of wokeness.’ Wow, how did we get to this place?

Really serious ideas in higher education do eventually go down through k-12 spaces, that’s just called education. But talking about critical race theory in the k-12 space, that’s extremely rare. Frankly, it’s something one might find in very fancy, elite private schools. It’s like one of these things that’s being passed off as a threat, that doesn’t exist. That’s what’s so frustrating. Critical race theory has become a stand-in for anxiety, for frustration, for feelings of being left behind, whether real or imagined.

Q. Seven states have already outlawed teaching critical race theory, and 13 others are considering similar bills. Does that concern you?

A. Absolutely. And it’s not about outlawing critical race theory – the fact that legislatures are outlawing what can be taught, period, is extremely unsetting. The whole point of education is to discover and test new ideas and see what shakes out. Evolution was once declared illegal to be taught. Years ago, Arizona outlawed the teaching of ethnic studies in universities. Are you kidding me? It’s McCarthyism on a different topic: trumped-up anxieties over racial belonging or access to power along racial lines.

Q. In a CBS News survey in October, 62 percent of likely Virginia voters said 'school curriculums on race and history' were a major factor in their choice for governor – that’s a higher percentage than those who said taxes or mask-wearing, and it wasn’t far below crime or the economy. What do you make of that?

A. These attacks are working because they get to deep-seated anxieties about an individual’s place in society. There’s no doubt that people who have had a lot of unquestioned authority for a long time are now seeing that authority questioned. The mainstream is shifting, and certain ideas are not as revered as before.

Just in our lifetimes, the idea that people of the same gender could marry has gone from being absurd, to being weird, to being uncomfortable, to being, well, why is this an issue? That this happened within 20 years is astonishing.

But the fact that this stoking the flames of racial anxieties is happening yet again tells us that it gets to the roots of how this country was organized. Where those roots are threatened is where you see deep social anxiety. Do conservatives actually care about critical race theory? I don’t know, frankly. Are they aware of how manipulative they’re being? I would hazard a guess, and say yes.

Q. How do you think the Democrats should respond to these attacks over critical race theory? Should the Virginia election serve as a warning?

A. Oh, it’s absolutely a warning. Increasingly, we’re so polarized in this country, so it may be a Democratic issue. But I would love to have critical thinkers in our legislatures, nuanced thinkers, honest brokers; people running on issues of actual consequence, like vaccines, or in Texas, a woman’s right to have a choice over abortion. Or immigration, and so forth. Let’s have disagreements over real things, and not a bunch of pumped-up cultural anxieties. That’s what I would hope for.

Q. In New Jersey, Republican Jack Ciattarelli didn’t make critical race theory a central campaign issue, but did seem to allude to it: “I don’t think we should be teaching our students that white people perpetuate systemic racism,” he said. What’s your reaction?

A. It’s a politically savvy statement because it stokes the flames. We shouldn’t be teaching people that x or y person today is guilty for these things because of who they are. We should be teaching people the actual history. And the actual history is going to be very challenging. That’s not an invention of the political left, that’s how the past is treated by the present. The past rarely looks good. 

And there is structural racism in this country. To say there isn’t is utterly naïve.

Q. What are American kids missing today when it comes to our racial history?

A. They’re missing history. The people who criticize critical race theory for doing violence to the past need to look at what boards of education are doing right now. They are trying to change the literal terms about the way society was organized in the past, to serve a current agenda. Like Mississippi’s efforts to outlaw using the word “slave.”

Instead, it was supposed to be “laborer.” This was like, two years ago. That is insanity.

For decades, state boards of education or legislatures have banned the teaching of certain elements of the country’s past because it made their state or region look bad. If that’s your starting point, you’re going to retard the development of the people you’re educating. You’re not educating them, you’re indoctrinating them.

While history is constantly being reinterpreted, the fact is, these things happened. Slavery was real. And to suggest otherwise is to do a violence to the present, about how we understand ourselves.

Maine Writer post script- Critical Race Theory is racist fuel to white supremacists.  They finally found three words they know how to read. Unfortunately, the literal translation for this label is "racism" wrapped in a difficult to comprehend euphemism.

Evaluating Critical Race Theory beyond a racist slogan

Echo opinion by Jonah Goldberg published in TribLive.com:

Defenders and opponents of critical race theory are prone to exaggeration:

America's Original Sin: Slavery's legacy in the United States stems not only from the institution itself, but also from the system of white supremacy.

******************

Put aside what you may have heard — pro or con — about terms such as systemic racism or critical race theory (CRT) for a moment. 

There’s a lot of exaggeration out there among both defenders and critics.

Instead, let me tell you a story.

After the civil rights movement achieved its legislative goals in the 1960s, formal, legal racism was largely abolished. 

Yes, there was cleanup work to do in various states. But broadly speaking, deliberate discrimination was no longer protected by the law. There was still cultural racism, of course — and there still is. But looking at the big picture, the tumor of deliberate racism has shrunk on a staggering scale.

This was the result of a massive legal, social and educational effort. And it was a huge success that all Americans should take pride in. Racism isn’t an American phenomenon; it’s a human one that exists everywhere. But few societies have worked as hard to battle it as the United States has over the last half-century.

And yet, disparities persist. Black Americans comprise 13% of the population but fall short of that percentage in a number of important areas — the ranks of affluent, the college educated and a large number of professions we normally associate with affluence and education.

CRT, structural racism, institutional racism, etc., represent efforts to explain why.

It’s no accident that law schools and lawyers were at the vanguard. 

If you wanted to sue a business or agency for “disparate impacts” — e.g., the underrepresentation of minorities in certain jobs or unequal lending by banks — you needed to show that these disparities were the result of deliberately bigoted policies. The problem: Evidence of the disparities remained abundant while evidence of racist intent largely vanished.

Enter critical race theory, which looks for systemic problems that perpetuate disparities even when no one in power intends them. These structural policies could be legacies of decisions made long ago that had racist intent behind them, or they could simply be the unintended consequences of rules people thought were neutral.

For instance, in 2018, 1,197 people in America received a Ph.D. in economics. Of those, 18 were Black. I’m skeptical that attributing this underrepresentation to deliberate racism is a suitable explanation. Universities are almost as desperate to diversify their faculties as they are to diversify their student bodies. But the underrepresentation exists all the same. 

And it’s worth asking: Why?

I won’t try to answer the question here, but reasonable people can point to any number of plausible explanations. One involves systemic problems in the larger culture. And some of those problems have to do with the legacy of racism, slavery and Jim Crow. We can differ on how much weight to give those factors.

It’s also worth considering whether such underrepresentation is necessarily that big a problem. On one level, disparities by race, gender, religion and other categories have to do with individual choices. Nearly 84% of doctors specializing in obstetrics and gynecology are women, and roughly the same share of orthopedic surgeons are men. It’s not crazy to think this is largely the result of individual choices by individual women and only seems like a problem if you think the percentage should be perfectly proportionate to the share of women in the population. Forcing women into professions they don’t want to enter doesn’t strike me as a feminist victory.

None of this is to say that all is fine for Blacks in America. Black poverty rates are a serious problem, as are disparities in wealth, education, etc. To the extent that critical race theory looks for explanations and remedies to these problems, there’s nothing to object to as far as I can tell. I might disagree with the explanations and the remedies some theorists propose, but I’m at a loss to understand why the effort to find them is anything but laudable.

Here’s the problem: The stuff passing itself off as CRT in the national debate isn’t really that. An academic tool invented to help explain why racial problems endure, even when conscious racism is no longer pervasive, has morphed into a cudgel (aka "weapon") to accuse people of racism if they don’t agree with the proposed diagnosis or the cure.

Defenders of CRT are often right when they say opponents are distorting what it means. But those same people often pretend that America hasn’t made enormous strides in fighting racism and claim that racism today remains the only explanation for the problems created by racism of the past.

Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. 

President Joe Biden will end the reality show Trump

This is an excellent and expressive editorial in the Las Vegas Sun, in Nevada! 

President Elect Joe Biden and Vice-President Elect Kamala 

Harris have earned our support to lead the nation

Las Vegas Sun Editor’s note: The Sun wrote this endorsement prior to Donald Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis and hospitalization. (Updated by Maine Writer- Thank you "Sun"!)

On rare occasions, history offers us a clear choice that demands one, and only one, proper answer. This election is such a moment, and the proper answer is Joe Biden for president.

We have lived through the chaotic, traumatic and utterly debased Trump years. We have all the evidence we need from the damage he and his supporters have done to the beautiful idea that is America.

It is time to heal our nation. 

America needs Biden in ways that are as broad as protecting our future as a free people, and as personal as a grade-schooler getting enough to eat. They’re as broad as protecting the planet from the effects of global warming, as personal as every American’s ability to obtain affordable health care when we’re sick or injured. They’re as broad as overcoming the pandemic that has killed more than 200,000 of us, as personal as the treatment of any Black American in interactions with police.

We know it’s an election cliché to say that America needs (fill in the blank). But this year, with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris filling that blank, it couldn’t be more true.

A Biden/Harris administration brings an end to four years of sabotaging of our democratic foundations in pursuit of autocracy, of undermining our standing in the global community, of demeaning our allies while embracing despotic leaders, of vandalizing our civility and ethical standards, of trampling our American values of inclusion and equality, of encouraging racism and vigilantism by violent extremists, of rigging our election process with the goal of establishing minority rule, of vilifying immigrants and people of color, of tilting our economy to funnel more money to those at the very top of the income bracket, of using unmarked federal forces to conduct extrajudicial detainments of protesters, of turning back the clock on equal rights for women and minorities, and much more.

With Biden as president, adults will pry the steering wheel from a wild (spoiled, narcissistic) toddler. America would be led by a president with decades of effective leadership in Washington, who knows how to pull the levers of government as opposed to only knowing how to break them. 

President Elect Joe Biden and and Vice President Elect Kamala Harris will form the nucleus of a team of policy professionals with the experience, education and skills to address complex issues. 

Moreover, the revolving door of White House incompetents will stop.

President Elect Biden comes armed with a detailed array of strategies for leading Americans — all Americans — into a new era. He stood out among the Democratic candidates in large part because he developed a particularly impressive set of policies covering a huge array of issues critical to Americans — health care, climate, energy, infrastructure, gun violence, foreign policy, and more. Look on his website, (A President for All Americans!) and you’ll find detailed policies covering nearly 50 topics.

The America ushered in by these policies will be healthier, more prosperous, safer, greener, more just, more inclusive. The middle class will have a chance again and so will the environment. The bleak resurgent racism of the Trump years will be pushed back as America continues to work toward real equality. And American decency will flourish once more.

There is a narrative about true American greatness and hope found in these policies.

That’s leadership from someone who knows how government works. By contrast, Donald Trump’s campaign site offers practically nothing of a vision for a second term. Instead Trump presents a list of “promises kept.” Right (OMG!)— like building the wall and making Mexico pay for it? Promises like that? Let’s see, only about 300 miles of the 1,200-mile wall have been constructed, and much of that was replacement. And we’re still waiting for that check from Mexico.

Trump has never had an actual policy that wasn’t handed to him by (Moscow!) Mitch McConnell or Fox News (aka "right wing fake news!).

While Trump has no discernible policy, other than self-interest, he does have goals: He’s a stone-cold racist, a self-serving grifter and an aspiring dictator. We spent all of the 20th century fighting people like Trump at home and abroad, and now in this young century, by a confluence of cruel forces, America has endured his occupancy in the White House.

There would be an end to the exodus of government experts in science, health and other fields who have left the government in disgust or after being hounded out. There would also be an end to the attack on inspectors general, the watchdogs who help hold the presidency accountable.

In President Biden, America will have a president who listens to public health experts about the coronavirus pandemic, as opposed to disdaining them and refusing to follow their advice by even doing something so simple as routinely wearing a mask in public.

Biden provides essential leadership qualities that have been absent under the Trump administration — humility, empathy and honesty. He’s able to admit he’s wrong, and that he’s not the smartest person in every room on every topic. He’s opened himself to public scrutiny through his career in office and learned to face criticism.

He can admit he’s imperfect.

And let’s be clear, he is imperfect. Biden has notoriously been his own worst enemy due to lapses in judgment, including when he lost his temper at a couple of everyday Americans who challenged him during Q&A sessions on the campaign trail.

Yet Biden, unlike Trump, shows the character traits the nation desperately needs in our next leader.

Does anyone really believe Trump cares about a child who goes to school hungry? A woman who requires a health clinic for a pelvic exam? A Dreamer facing deportation? A Black man under the knee of the police? A Puerto Rican family recovering from a hurricane? A Mexican child? A peaceful protester for social justice? Young people growing up with an epidemic of gun violence? Anyone who loathes today’s tribalism?

Of course Trump doesn’t care! He has a narrow list of things he cares about: himself, primarily, then his family, golf, adulation and the odd cheeseburger or porn star. Oh, and Vladimir Putin.

With President Biden in the Oval Office, the reality show presidency of the past four years will end.

No more wanton perversion of our justice system. No encouragement of extremists like militias, the Proud Boys and Boogaloo Bois to commit violence against their fellow Americans. No insider reports about the president calling U.S. soldiers “losers” and “suckers.” No teargassing of peaceful protesters in order to conduct a photo op with an upside-down Bible.

A Biden presidency cuts the noise, replacing it with calm-headed, expert-guided leadership and a detailed policy blueprint for a better tomorrow.

Biden’s choice of running mate, Kamala Harris, is every bit as impressive as his other choices. Poised and brilliant by any measure, Harris is exceptionally well-equipped to help Biden guide the nation during the long and complicated process of repairing the damage of the Trump years. As a city prosecutor, state attorney general and U.S. senator, Harris understands the impact of government on people’s lives at all levels. In the event something horrible happens, Harris would be immediately ready to occupy the Oval Office. Adding to her spectacular qualifications there is this: It is high time for America to have a woman of color occupying the highest offices in the land.

Rarely has the country more desperately needed this type of even-handed leadership, with millions out of work due to the pandemic and far too many families either having faced the loss of loved ones or illness from the coronavirus themselves. Meanwhile, Trump has made it clear he’ll continue to fuel tensions between Black Lives Matter protesters and law enforcement, a cynical strategy to protect his own interests by claiming the clashes represent the future of the nation under Biden and Democratic leadership.

That’s not the case at all. Biden, unlike Trump, has clearly denounced violence in the protests on all sides, and has done nothing to encourage violence on anyone’s part.

This is what a president should do. This is what President Biden and Vice-President Harris will do.

Simply put, America needs a president and vice president who can lead all of us and know how to do that. We need them on a global level, on a national level and at a kitchen-table level.

This year, it’s no cliché. America needs President Joe Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris.

Pennsylvania echo about Trump's bone spurs and the inept White House administration

Donald Trump's weird reelection cupboard is bare! 

Echo opinion letter published in the Pennsylvania newspaper Press and Journal

Dear Editor:  Make no bones about it, Donald Trump’s presidency should be assigned to the dustbin of history!
Trump’s bones, indeed the bones in his skeleton, 

have already made history. Due to “bone spurs,” the young Trump was not able to join his peers in serving in the military. 

Now, Trump is declaring there isn’t a racist bone in his body! (Lies!) Remarkable! (Maine Writer- just read Trumpzi's weird comments about #BothSides, in the Charlottsville Virginia white supremacy rally!)

Trumpzi runs his inept administration with a skeleton staff. This is in part because there is a revolving door in the oval office with a steady stream of staffers coming and going (some to jail). Trump likes a skeleton staff because of an abiding suspicion of “the deep state” — staffers who have long served past administrations but, according to Trump, cannot be trusted.

They say, and I have heard it said, that the bones in Trump’s hands are small, perhaps indicating a smallness of other parts of him, the meanness of his character, or his diminished capacity for empathy.

To his faithful base, Trump throws red meat. He does this at taxpayer funded “rallies” that look a lot like campaign stops. To others, Trump throws mere bones, giving the appearance of a gift, but snatching it away later. Trump can rely on Moscow Mitch to block any provisions that might benefit the masses!

You cannot see the bones in Trump’s face, perhaps because it is puffed up with pride, or possibly Botox.

In Middletown, we had one of the biggest Trump signs in all of America. It was on the side of a house! The occupant also sported a T-shirt which said “Democratic Mayors for Trump”! Hilarious! What a conundrum! In fact, what an oxymoron!

You can read about the litany of Trump’s failures in all the mainstream media. Trump calls this “fake news.” He rails against “the failed New York Times” when in fact people are subscribing more than ever, supporting essential investigative reporting, which they must depend upon now that Trump has placed the Department of Justice in the hands of his own personal bodyguard and handler, William Barr.

The Trump family knows a gravy train when they see one! 

In fact, Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr. are ready to take over where Donald leaves off! Four more years could turn into eight or 12 or even 16 more years of the Trump dynasty!

I will close with the old nursery rhyme: Old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard to get her poor doggie a bone. But when she got there the cupboard was bare, and so the poor doggie got none.

Hermine Clouser  Middletown

El Paso was an outrage, and surely not the last. Americans need to react accordingly.- Indiana echo

An echo opinion published in the South Bend Tribune, an Indiana newspaper:

At some point, in the late 1960s, you could be forgiven for thinking that the FBI was in charge of the KKK. (KuKluxKlan)

It infiltrated, manipulated and ran the group into the ground. The name of the operation: COINTELPRO-White Hate. 

With violent white hate again on the rise, we should take some inspiration — even if the methods can’t be replicated — from the FBI’s past grappling with racist extremists.

If there were any doubt that the country has a white nationalist problem, the shocking attack on an El Paso, Texas, Walmart should remove it. These self-radicalizing freaks, a subset of the broader mass-shooting phenomenon, take inspiration from prior acts of vicious mayhem and cheer high body counts on internet message boards. They are domestic subversives and terrorists, and deserve to be treated as such.

There is no doubt that if we had suffered a string of massacres on our soil carried out by Islamic radicals, we’d do everything in our power to diminish and hopefully eradicate the danger — indeed, we have. The national response to racist extremists should show the same alacrity and resolve, while acknowledging that they represent a different, more-difficult-to-counter threat than the old Klan.

In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson told FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to go after the Klan as he had the Communists. Running until 1971 and involving 26 field offices, COINTELPRO-White Hate targeted groups and people deemed violent threats, not their ideology per se.

The effort was comprehensive and no-holds-barred. In his history of the FBI, Tim Weiner writes, “The FBI dangled small fortunes before potential KKK informers, offered outright bribes to Klansmen who could serve as double agents inside state and local police forces, planted bugs and wiretaps in Klaverns, carried out black-bag jobs to steal membership lists and (on at least one occasion) dynamite caches.”

In an article in the journal Social Science History, David Cunningham recounts how the FBI degraded, and came to effectively control, Klan groups.

The FBI acquired hundreds of Klan informants. According to one FBI official, “There would be a Klan meeting with 10 people there, and six of them would be reporting back the next day.” One informant even became the speechwriter for the leader of the United Klans of America, Robert Shelton.

The FBI worked to pre-empt violent acts, and gained an enormous influence over Klan groups. The New Orleans office was so successful at degrading the Louisiana chapter of the UKA that the office’s concern became propping the group up, lest its disintegration loosen the FBI’s control. The Charlotte office managed to decimate the violent North Carolina UKA and shift its membership to an alternative group under FBI influence.

Overall, Klan membership shrank from an estimated 14,000 members in 1964 to 4,300 in 1971. Per Shelton himself, “the FBI’s counterintelligence program hit us in membership and weakened us for about 10 years.”

Of course, the contemporary FBI obviously isn’t going to take over the “alt-right,” nor should we want it to. The abuses of the COINTELPRO programs — the FBI also targeted civil-rights groups and the New Left, among others — became notorious when they were exposed in the 1970s.

There are also practical obstacles to the FBI duplicating its anti-Klan work. The Klan was an organization, whereas today’s white supremacists are free-floating haters posting anonymously on the internet.

Yet the FBI needs to be intensely focused on this threat. The bureau should take an intelligence-based approach. It should monitor sewer message boards like 8chan, the forum for white-supremacist propaganda. Posters who cross from First Amendment-protected speech to incitement should be prosecuted. The FBI should interview anyone expressing sympathy with terrorism — just as it does with suspected Islamic extremists — and surveil such persons as appropriate and permitted under the law.

El Paso was an outrage, and surely not the last. We need to react accordingly.

Rich Lowry can be reached via email: comments.lowry@nationalreview.com.

Cliche ~ those who ignore history are doomed to repeat

Laurel Leff, author of an essay published in The Conversation ~ Associate Professor of Journalism, Northeastern University

The result of racism

Holocaust historians’ first impulse is to reject comparisons between those dark decades and our present. We don’t want to be perceived as abusing history for political purposes, or engaging in overly emotional analyses.

But then comes a moment when it’s not possible to avoid parallels.

For me, that moment came two weeks ago.

I study the American response to the Holocaust. 

I was preparing to deliver a conference paper on U.S. officials’ false claim that the nation’s inflexible immigration laws gave them no choice but to deny visas to hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees in the 1930s and early 1940s – and historians’ repetition of this false claim. 

From every media outlet came Trump administration officials spewing similar hollow arguments.

Wrong minded ~ The law made me do it!

During the Nazi era, the claim was based on the 1924 immigration law that set annual worldwide quotas, as well as country-by-country limits, on the number of immigrants to be admitted to the United States.

The problem with the claim, and the idea that U.S. officials had no choice but to follow the law and limit immigration, is that the quotas were never even close to being filled from 1933 to 1945, the 12 years of the Nazi regime.

About 200,000 refugees from Nazi Europe were admitted during that period to the U.S., while at least another 200,000 could have been under existing quotas. The quota for Germans of about 26,000 was filled in just one year, in 1939. In every other year, the quota ranged from 7 percent to 70 percent filled.

The law didn’t prevent U.S. officials from admitting more refugees. Officials chose to interpret and implement the nation’s immigration laws so as to exclude as many refugees from Nazi Europe as possible.

Yet at the time, and in many historical accounts, officials consistently blamed the law. That includes Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long, who explained why his administration could not help European Jews in 1943.

“American immigration policy was expressed [solely] in the laws enacted by Congress, which the executive branch had no power to alter,” said Long.

I intended at the conference to try to explain why so many historians cling to “the law-made-me-do-it” narrative, assuming that that narrative was all history.

It wasn’t.
History repeats

As criticism of the Trump administration’s policy of separating families at the border ramped up in mid-June, U.S. officials trotted out their version of Long’s argument – though in less elevated language.

Asked why the administration adopted the “zero tolerance” policy, which led to criminal prosecutions of all those crossing the border seemingly illegally, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said during a Thursday press conference, “because it’s the law, that’s what the law states.”

Pressed again, Sanders said, “Again, the laws are the one, the laws that have been on the books for over a decade and the president is enforcing them.”

Sanders wasn’t the first Trump administration official to blame “the law” for immigration policy.

“We don’t deport anyone,” John Kelly declared, when he was still Homeland Security secretary. “American law deports people.”

Nor has Sanders been the last.

Kelly’s successor, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the president have all said at various times – and then taken it back – that they had no choice.

Jobs and security

The Trump administration has justified its anti-immigrant policy as a way to help unemployed Americans. So did the Hoover administration and then the Roosevelt administration.

Faced with the Great Depression, Hoover decided in 1930 to limit the number of immigrants allowed into the country, because – supposedly – they would take Americans’ jobs.

Hoover did it by changing the interpretation of a decades-old provision that enabled officials to deny visas to those who were “likely to become a public charge.” Under the new interpretation, almost every applicant was found likely to become a public charge with no guidance or consistency in what that meant.
Immigration dropped 90 percent in the first five months.

From 1933 to 1945, the Roosevelt administration continued to use this interpretation of the likely-to-become-a-public-charge clause and other provisions to keep immigration under what the law allowed, even after the economy picked up.

The Trump administration has claimed immigrants are more likely to commit crimes and to be national security risks, using unrepresentative anecdotes and amorphous fears to justify its policy.

So did the Roosevelt administration. One State Department lawyer maintained that officials should deny visas to those who had criminal tendencies, even if they have no criminal record.

Government officials during the Roosevelt administration also assumed a large proportion of immigrants, particularly Jewish ones, were communists determined to subvert democracy. They denied visas on that basis.

Officials also assumed German Jewish refugees would be spies for the Third Reich. That was based upon the flimsiest of evidence: a Cuban ambassador’s claim some Jewish refugees celebrated the fall of Paris to the Nazis and a former U.S. ambassador to France’s allegation that German Jewish refugees made up half the 200 spies the French Army arrested.

“I believe you should instruct our counter-espionage services of all sorts to keep an especially vigilant eye on the Jewish refugees from Germany,” William Bullitt, the ex-ambassador, wrote Roosevelt. “Sad, isn’t it?’”

Jewish refugees didn’t turn out to be spies. Of the 23,000 “enemy aliens” who arrived in 1940, for example, fewer than one-half of 1 percent were taken into custody for questioning. Only a fraction of those were indicted – for violating immigration regulations, not for espionage.

Denials of visas based on national security concerns and other reasons, however, meant that just 21,000 refugees entered the United States between Pearl Harbor and the war’s end, with quotas from Axis-controlled countries only 10 percent filled. Historian David Wyman estimates that the U.S. could have saved nearly 200,000 victims of the Nazis by allowing them to enter the country.
Who gets to be American

Based on my research for a chapter I wrote in “Allied Powers’ Response to the Holocaust,” a forthcoming book edited by Alexander Groth and Tony Tanke, I have concluded that U.S. government officials’ fears about refugees from Nazism being public charges, criminals or security risks were primarily pretexts for their real concern. That concern was that allowing in too many refugees would fundamentally alter the nature of American society.

Many decision-makers, particularly in the State Department, hailed from the WASP elite and perceived ambitious Jews as threatening their exclusive domains. The fewer Jews in the United States, the greater the chance of preserving the country as it had been and as they wanted it to continue to be. These officials justified any position and tolerated any cruelty, including refusing to change immigration policies once it was known the Germans were exterminating all of Europe’s Jews.

Roosevelt administration officials turned out to be both right and wrong in their fears.

They were right that the European refugees who came before, during and after the war, though small in number, reshaped the world of higher education, the arts and the sciences and contributed to the rise of the postwar meritocracy. That postwar meritocracy broke down the class-based system that kept Jews and Italians and eventually blacks and Latinos out of elite institutions.

But they were wrong that these changes undermined American democracy or changed the country’s spirit.

The nation was better off letting in 200,000 refugees between 1933 and 1945. It would have been even better off filling the quotas and allowing in the additional 200,000 refugees. And it would have been better off still had the country admitted anyone in need and tried to save all those who were imperiled as the Holocaust unfolded.

Some might object, probably under their breath, that these refugees were different. They were “good” refugees.

But that is not how they were perceived at the time. And that is exactly the point and precisely the parallel.