The dictionary definition of “Anglo-Saxon” is “relating to or denoting the Germanic inhabitants of England from their arrival in the 5th century up to the Norman Conquest.”
The term evidently means something rather different to White nationalist Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar. As Talking Points Memo explains their recent “policy proposal,”
A new “policy platform” document sprinkled with nativist and white supremacist language emerged Friday from a newly launched far-right caucus linked to Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Paul Gosar (R-AZ). The group is, according to the document, pushing for “uniquely Anglo-Saxon political traditions” and new infrastructure that “befits the progeny of European architecture.”
The new caucus they are forming, called the “America First Caucus,” is intended “to follow in President Trump’s footsteps,” which pretty much tells you everything you need to know about it. But just in case following Trump isn’t explicit enough, the so-called “policies” advocated by the document leave little room for doubt.
It begins by describing the United States as a country “strengthened by a common respect for uniquely Anglo-Saxon political traditions.” Historically, Anglo-Saxon traditions were the result of interactions between incoming Germanic tribes with indigenous British groups. Over time, the two populations melded, creating a primarily Anglo-Saxon culture and language. Use of the term Anglo-Saxon today is associated with the establishment of England and the early adoption of Christianity.
The caucus supports a “pause” in immigration and decries immigrants who– the statement says– are “imported en-masse” and then “fail to contribute positively to the country.” (Evidently, only White Christians can “contribute positively.”)
In case there is any confusion over the identity of the immigrants being targeted by this language, the platform makes its White nationalism crystal clear. It opposes birthright citizenship and claims that immigrants who came to the United States before 1965 “were more educated, earned higher wages, and did not have an expansive welfare state to fall back on when they could not make it in America and thus did not stay in the country at the expense of the native-born.”
The caucus calls for roads, bridges and buildings that uphold “the architectural, engineering and aesthetic value that befits the progeny of European architecture, whereby public infrastructure must be utilitarian as well as stunningly, classically beautiful, befitting a world power and source of freedom.”
Pardon me while I upchuck…
Tellingly, the caucus also says it will fight against an education system that “has worked to actively undermine pride in America’s great history and is actively hostile to the civic and cultural assimilation necessary for a strong nation.” In other words, they will fight to retain mythology over accuracy.
Congressional supporters of this exercise belong in Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables.” In addition to Greene and Gosar, Louis Gohmert has signed on, which should signal the intellectual integrity of this effort–as I’ve previously noted, my favorite description of Gohmert is “the dumbest animal to enter a legislative chamber since Caligula’s horse.” Another sterling character who has indicated support for the Caucus is Matt Gaetz, who evidently took time away from defending himself against charges of sexual and other improprieties by tweeting Friday that he was “proud” to join the caucus.
In a nod to Trump’s election conspiracies, the seven-page document also promotes false claims about election fraud, citing rigged voting machines and manipulated election results.
The caucus pointed at mail-in voting as a prime target — making clear its intentions to advance restrictive voting laws that are already underway in a number of states.
“We will work towards an end to mail-in voting, implementation of national voter ID and substantive investigations into mass voter fraud perpetrated during the 2020 election,” it says.
A report by CBS News connects the none-too-obscure dots.
The focus on “Anglo-Saxon” and European terminology could be read as a veiled analogy for “White.” The term “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant,” or WASP, has traditionally been used in American culture to denote wealthy White families, typically with British ancestries. The Anglo-Saxons were a group who inhabited England prior to the Norman invasion of 1066.
American white nationalists have also relied heavily on medieval, viking and Anglo-Saxon imagery to justify their prejudice. During the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, some marchers carried banners with Anglo-Saxon runes, iconography that was also used by the Nazis.
They don’t even try to hide what they are…..The people who voted for them must be so proud…
I agree. The folks who voted for these morons ARE proud of them. This is who they are.
So we now see the creation of the Republican KKK Kaucus. No smoke and mirrors now. No more Dog Whistles. They are up front about it. I expect the Indiana Republicans to sign on as they seem to lean this way too.
Gohmert has a lot of competition for the title “the dumbest animal to enter a legislative chamber since Caligula’s horse”. Taylor-Green is probably taking that title away from him.
I’ve always said that Trump was a gift to our society because he was not a polished liar like most in Washington. We’ve always been a racist country, but it was hidden in our collective shadow, as Jung would say. Trump blew the door off the gate holding back the shadow, so now we get to address it.
I am grateful that many have learned the truth about our roots and the history of our racism which oligarchs and publishers have whitewashed since it was created by many of the ancestors—the history of Tulsa and how the US police evolved from slave patrols.
We are learning more about the indigenous brothers and sisters who were trampled and abused by the original Anglo-Saxons. We’ve even learned how Imperialists used Christianity to tame the heretics and pagans. “Make them civilized.”
As bad as Trump was for policy, his ugliness was America’s shadow. Many of us saw it surfacing with the Tea Party, but as Ian Haney Lopez wrote about, it was “dog-whistling.” It was bubbling up, but Obama to Trump brought it from our collective unconscious to our conscious, so now we have to deal with all of it. No more stuffing it down. We are a violent, hateful society founded on oppression and colonialism.
We the people was the greatest piece of propaganda ever written. Even the role of religion must be dealt with since that has become a major issue and our racism. The two go hand in hand with imperialism.
Some will address and deal with it, while others scurry around in denial, trying to stuff the ugliness back into the unconsciousness – the shadow.
This “America First Caucus” also has the stench of Nazi Germany in it. While this kind of racism has been re-emerging and growing in the country for some time now, the openly display of it in our government, military, and police is as shocking as it is horrifying.
No “stench”, Theresa. It is the full-blown resurrection of German Nazi-ism. Todd is quite correct in his entire rant this morning. But I would submit that EVERY nation on earth that tries to govern any sort of polyglot population exposes its bigotry and prejudices.
I hate to regress, but it is tribalism writ large in the 21st century. One of my most important influencers, Rebecca Costa, wrote a book that explains so much about why we simply cannot govern ourselves to the point that the 20% of Caligula’s horses keep promoting that primitive mind set. In “The Watchman’s Rattle”, she posits that because we have evolved so much quicker socially than we have biologically, that we are in danger of having that 20% cause the extinction of all of us.
Greene, Boebert, Gohmert, Gosar, Gaetz, et. al., really aren’t smart enough to grasp the threads of what they’re doing. They don’t know our history at all. They reject the fact that slavery built Washington, D.C.
These are really stupid and dangerous wretches. But their constituents keep voting in wretchdom.
Would someone like to sit this caucus down and teach them about federalism? It is one of our most important founding principles, but it didn’t come from the Anglo-Saxons. It came from the Iroquois Compact. That’s right. We didn’t just steal their land and try to wipe them off the face of the earth. We stole their best ideas of governance, as well. I know, it just goes to show what might have happened if the natives had had a better immigration policy.
Isn’t it fascinating that these wannabe Anglo-Saxons don’t seem to know that they are saying ‘Anglo-Saxon’ now includes African Americans? In actual fact, the ancestors of many African-Americans were brought here in 1619 by the Dutch, before any English white colony or culture was established except Jamestown.
And, for what it’s worth, most African Americans do have Anglo-Saxon ‘white blood’ coursing through their veins, due to the institution of slavery which encouraged the breeding of more slaves by white slave owners via their slave women. (Incidentally, this includes many black folks alive today who trace their ‘Anglo-Saxon roots’ back to Thomas Jefferson for that very reason.)
And as for what these mental midgets think our Anglo-Saxon heritage actually is, in actual fact, our institutions come down from The Plantagenets – a French, therefore Latin/Frankish tribe, and The Normans (French of Viking/Danish origin) who gave us Common Law, The Magna Carta, a Parliament, and the heritage of fighting wars of genocidal description that lasted up to 100 Years.
Our own contribution to self-government actually came down to us from The Enlightenment, which first was a product of Italian, French, and the Scottish thinkers before it ever got to the English.
Racism has many intellectual fathers and mothers, but ignorance is still ignorance whether the promoters are the inheritors of slave plantation thinking, or The Roman Consul Incitatus.
Right pout of Stalin’s playbook
Anglo-Saxon political values
What are Anglo-Saxon political values? Marjorie Taylor Greene and a couple of other dysfunctional morons announced they were holding an America First conference at which Anglo-Saxon political values would be celebrated. Later she announced that the conference had been scrubbed after Republican figures like Kevin McCarthy said that America is an inclusive society and that racist dog whistles are not welcome. But this won’t’ bother our Marjorie who is in contact with space lasers burning California’s forests manned by religious Jews. She will come up with some racist pro-gun project soon.
So I did my research and discovered some very interesting info about Anglo-Saxon political values. Here they are:
1: Guns are too cowardly for Anglo-Saxon warriors, only battle axes can insure victory and domination.
2: Anglo Saxons are obligated to take Yoga courses so when they go into battle they will have the strength and flexibility to successfully wield their battle axes.
3: Anglo Saxons may never eat chocolate ice cream because to do so would signal their brotherhood with black people.
4: Anglo Saxon men get bald very early in their lives and to hide this sign of weakness wear metal battle helmets 24 hours a day, even to bed.
5: Anglo-Saxons must eat their pastrami sandwiches on white wonder bread smeared with Mayonnaise.
6: Anglo Saxons’ favorite music is horror rock.
7: The two most famous Anglo-Saxon kings were Alfred the Great and Canute the Great so every Anglo-Saxon family must name at least one of their children after these two kings.
The Normans beat their ass in 1066. In other words, the second wave of immigrants whipped the first wave of immigrants. (Ignoring, of course, that Roman Britain period, where the Southern European immigrants had ALREADY whipped Anglo-Saxon ass.)
Fortunately it seems they’ve backed away from forming the Klan Caucus.
I agree with everything here. It confirms my opinion about William the Conqueror ending Anglo-Saxons in 1066.
Look at the ads on TV these days if they feature families. A large percentage of the couples are different races and their children are various shades of brown. To be sure, TV is not exactly reality but in a couple of generations most of the citizens of this country are going to be various shades of brown. The powers that be will still have caste and money to divide us. It is funny how the Anglo-Saxons became so sensitive about race because their real history suggests that they are truly mongrels.
Todd, you nailed it, hard!
Lorensacho, I love it!
Yes, apparently the caucus has left the house, literally. Oh, speak of being in, or leaving the house, Elvis had a jewish mother, who had a Jewish mother, and so on.
It is only by dint of the rea,l behind the scenes, voter fraud that these clowns are in office, in the first place.
Humanity is at a crossroads.
What ruled the world since WWII was economic expansion in Europe and North America. More lately it’s been economic expansion in Asia and South America and a different kind built on oil in the Middle East. With economic expansion came population and technological expansion. Good times for many.
Now all of that expansion has hit the limits of earth’s resources and has become not sustainable, which isn’t a choice to be made by humans but a fact determined by our limited planet. There are, however, human tribes who believe that if they wall off from the rest and maintain their perceived preeminence among humans they can continue to consume resources at the expense of everyone else. Growth will still be possible for them.
That’s a mighty heaping helping of self-centeredness which is not sustainable but apparently is satisfying among some.
What’s hanging in the balance is a near future of enlightened balance and orderly transition or one of chaotic power struggles to survive.
We have seen some of both right here in the US.
Some politicians choose to become identified as “leaders” for one side or the other but as usual, they are followers of the movement with more celeb than most.
The root problem is the people who hold to the beliefs of the movement.
This comparative civilization game that occured (and is still occurring per Greene and other such brilliant political scientists) ignores the real history of invaders and assimilators. Thus the Chinese regarded Europeans as uncivilized people who ran around wearing animal skins even before Marco Polo paid them a visit. Also, as set forth in the great book (1427) which I recommend reading, it was the Chinese who “discovered” America in 1427, not the European Columbus in 1492, as Eurocentric historians would have us believe.
Many such Chinese artifacts visible today were laid down on our now west coast during the Chinese discovery, which includes the west coast of British Columbia, but we best not suggest to the Greenes and Gohmerts of our world that we might have had a superior civilization in this country had it been the Chinese who subjugated the indigenous population rather than Europeans, a real possibility since it was the Chinese who invented gun powder, not the Europeans. Instead we later imported them to build our railroads and now harrass Asian Americans, telling them to “go back where you came from,” a suggestion such Asian Americans might well be telling Europeans today but for a quirk of history.
So here we are. Now what? We don’t really have the luxury of time while our planet is dying to give our attention and energy to such appeals from the uninformed for a radical change in our socioeconomic status based on a history that never was as grounds for some ill-defined change in how our society is to be governed, even though the present system is not without flaws. To do: Remove such radicals from power while saving the planet – and our democracy.
“G” whiz! Is it just coincidental that all the white supremacists behind the “uniquely Anglo-Saxon” movement have surnames beginning with “G”: Greene, Gosar, Gohmert, Gaetz? Maybe serial killer John Wayne Gacy, Muammar Gaddafi, Pussy Galore, Genghis Khan, Gingrich, Giuliana, Goebbels and Billy Graham would accept an invitation to add their names to this exclusive club.
Isn’t there some way we can lock MTG up for her own protection and to keep downtown Washington from exploding from gaslighting(if she is sane I am definitely addled)? Doesn’t it say something awful about the state of our nation if people like Greene and Gohmert and Gaetz can be elected to represent large blocks of people? These are merely puerile exhibitionists trying to draw attention by being wildly outrageous. We should not honor their goal by paying attention.
I apologize for omitting Lindsey Graham from the “G” list.
Wow, lot of off the wall comments about who discovered this or that. Who kicked ass and blah,blah, blah.
Great Britain and Ireland were invaded so many times, there no Anglo-Saxon purity. There was also peaceful immigration too.
The “America First Caucus” is just another one of those exclusive “clubs” designed to maintain Social-Cultural-Political dominance. I suppose the “America First Caucus” will take a page from the Tel-Evaniglists and start fleecing the flock with donations.
It will be interesting to read about how the “America First Caucus” intends to maintain purity.
AS I recall Hitler banned music that was other than German or Anglo-Saxon. You could not play American jazz and you could not dance to that music. I guess these idiots don’t like Gerry’s architecture or jazz or God forbid, the banjo which comes from Africa.
They really don’t understand that their caucus is already trying to violate free speech.
furthermore Anglo-Saxons are in the minority. Caucasians globally are in the minority. Asians dominate. I don’t know about the Latino versus African or Polynesian populations. And then we have people of mixed ethnicities.
I love cultural exchange. I am amazed and love all the diversity of music and the arts, and yes, architecture too.
OH and let me guess, they want to ban drag queens too.
Are solar panels and wind mills, Anglo-Saxon? How about geothermal energy systems?
Would they ban hunting whales? Or not? Hmm.
I guess they don’t understand that their caucus would inhibit entrepenuers.
Interesting thread today. I’m now thinking of Boadicea of the Iceni tribe in Britain. She was humiliated by her Roman captors and her daughters were raped by Roman soldiers but she recovered and went after the Romans with a vengeance. The Romans finally won, but Boadicea’s influence remained. The Romano-British culture that resulted brought us the stories of King Arthur. During WWII, we can only admire and thank Winston Churchill, who said, we will never surrender, never! Mix in the Viking spirit and the ferocious Scots, and there you have Anglo-Saxonism as it is today. It certainly isn’t “all white” or even “all anything.”
their statement is so illiterate, it must have been written either by Greene herself or by this year’s new intern.
“progeny of European architecture”???
Well, dear, when an office building and a hotel love each other very much, they . . .