Racial Equality – Sheila Kennedy

Forget The Dog Whistles

This political season, the racism is blatant and unembarrassed. For those of us who had naively thought America was emerging from that particular form of mental illness, the willingness to appeal for votes on the basis of bias–the number of MAGA political commercials identifying the candidate as an “out and proud” bigot–has been astounding.

And heartbreaking.

Here in Indiana, gubernatorial candidates have accused each other of–gasp!–sympathy for Black Lives Matter, which they insist has called for the killing of police. That accusation has been repeatedly debunked–but interestingly, none of the rebuttal ads have defended the organization. Mike Braun, who has been the target of most of those accusations has responded with ads highlighting his support from law enforcement organizations–not by defending the organization against a nasty and purposeful lie. The linked article from the BBC traces the origin of that lie to (where else?) Fox News, and reports on the response from Black Lives Matter:

“We’re targeting the brutal system of policing, not individual police,” the statement reads. “We seek a world in which ALL Black lives matter, and racial hierarchy no longer organizes our lives or yours. This is a vision of love. As Black survivors of White supremacy, our hearts go out to all victims of violence.”

Attacks on Black Lives Matter are, rather obviously, thinly-veiled efforts to paint all Black folks as murderous beasts–and a message to bigoted voters that the candidate making the accusation is one of them. But it isn’t simply the sudden willingness of MAGA candidates to shed any pretense of civility and/or anti-racism. It’s also the creepy identities of those providing the candidates with funds and other support.

Turning Point USA has been in the news several times; it is a far Right advocacy organization that has most recently been identified as a major supporter of Bernie Moreno, the MAGA nominee for U.S. Senate in Ohio.

Moreno wrote that he was “honored to be endorsed by Charlie Kirk and Turning Point Action.” Moreno said that “[f]ew have done more to fight back against the radical left than they have,” and he looks “forward to working with them to defend for our America First conservative values in the US Senate.”

In 2023, Kirk repeatedly featured Moreno as a guest on his popular podcast and consistently promoted Moreno’s candidacy to his 2.9 million followers on X. At the end of 2023, Kirk donated the maximum legal amount of $5,000 to Moreno’s campaign through the Turning Point PAC.

At the same time, Kirk, known for his embrace of fringe views and conspiracy theories, launched a sustained attack on Martin Luther King Jr.’s life and legacy. At a December 2023 convention hosted by Turning Point USA, Kirk said that King “was awful” and “not a good person.” Kirk’s critique extended not just to King himself but to the civil rights movement itself. “We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s,” Kirk declared, trashing the legislation that outlawed segregation in public places and many businesses.

In his convention speech, Kirk blasted the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as an effort to “re-found the county” and “get rid of the First Amendment.” He criticized courts for enforcing the law, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. “Federal courts just yield to the Civil Rights Act as if it’s the actual American Constitution,” Kirk complained.

The article continue with a description of Kirk’s continued and highly publicized crusade against King, against the MLK holiday, and against the 1964 Civil Rights Act. And this is the man and organization from which Moreno “proudly” accepted endorsement.

Turning Point’s crusade against King and the civil rights movement did not appear to impact his relationship with Moreno. On March 14, 2024, Turning Point Action donated $100,000 to the Buckeye Values PAC, Moreno’s Super PAC.

Nor is there any remaining question of Moreno’s own racial opinions:

Moreno himself has also had controversies involving racial issues. When he launched his campaign for Senate, Moreno floated the idea of reparations for white descendants of Union soldiers that were killed during the Civil War. “They talk about reparations. Where are the reparations for the people, for the North, who died to save the lives of Black people?” Moreno said. “I know it’s not politically correct to say that, but you know what, we’ve got to stop being politically correct.”

Bottom line: Every voter casting a ballot for a MAGA Republican this year is either explicitly endorsing racism or indicating that the voter does not consider the “out and proud” racism of the MAGA movement to be disqualifying.

They’re no longer hiding behind dog whistles.

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Never Thought I’d Live To See This…

One of the dubious benefits of living a long time is that you live through really striking cultural and institutional changes. During my lifetime, I’ve seen changes I consider very positive–the expansion of women’s rights, gay rights, civil rights, an internet connection to virtually all of human information, ease of global travel…I could go on and on.

But I’m also around to see the backlash to all of that. And even weirder, I’ve lived to see a Republican Party that once rabidly opposed Communism and “the evil empire” embrace authoritarianism and Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

A while back, I shared a folk song from the Sixties that made fun of the John Birch Society and its habit of seeing “commies” under every bush. (“If mommy is a commie then you’ve got to turn her in.”) Back then, the political Right was focused–frequently far too focused–on the dangers of totalitarianism and authoritarianism and government control of the economy.

If you had told me back then that the GOP would “evolve” into a party of pro-Russian apologists, I’d have asked you what you were smoking. But here we are.

A recent discussion at Persuasion was titled “When Hatred of the Left Becomes Love for Putin,” and contains the following observations:

According to Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orbán, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump will quickly end the war in Ukraine if he is elected, by refusing “a single penny” of aid and effectively forcing the country’s capitulation to Russia. The statement, which followed Orbán’s meeting with Trump last month, is a stark reminder of the extent to which the Trumpified GOP is becoming the anti-Ukraine party, a far cry from early bipartisan support for Ukraine’s fight against Russian aggression. And while opposition to aid to Ukraine doesn’t necessarily entail support for Vladimir Putin—common rationales include that the United States must focus on domestic problems or on the more dangerous threat from China, or that Ukraine can’t win and prolonging the war only means more death and suffering—Putin-friendly themes have been increasingly prominent on the right. At this point, pro-Putinism is no longer an undercurrent in right-wing rhetoric: it’s on the surface.

Granted, not all Putin-lovers are similarly motivated.

For some, their hatred of the American left overrides any feelings they have about Putin. Others are more ideological: they oppose the Western liberal project itself. Untangling these different strains is key to explaining why so many on today’s right embrace views that, until recently, would have gotten them branded Kremlin stooges by other conservatives.

The article references Tucker Carlson– his recent, adoring trip to Moscow and his fawning interview of Putin.

The interview was a two-hour lovefest in which Putin and his lies went unchallenged except for some polite pushback on Evan Gershkovich, the American journalist held in Russia on phony spying charges. Then, Carlson topped this with gushy videos extolling the wonders of the Soviet-built Moscow subway and of Russian supermarkets.

And it cited an article from the Federalist published the day after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine:

Author Christopher Bedford, former head of the Daily Caller News Foundation and a prolific contributor to right-of-center media, not only bluntly stated that “a lot of us hate our elites far more than we hate some foreign dictator” but admitted finding a lot to admire in said dictator—for instance, Putin’s unapologetic defense of Russia’s “religion, culture and history,” while Western elites denigrate and apologize for theirs.

Today’s GOP has abandoned even the remnants of genuine conservatism; today, the party is hysterically “anti-woke”–a cult focused on culture war efforts to return straight White Christian males to social dominance.

It’s hardly news by now that many American right-wingers see Putin’s Russia as the antithesis of Western “wokeness.” This is especially true with regard to sexual and gender norms: I noted the beginnings of this trend in 2013, when several right-wing groups and conservative pundits praised a Russian law censoring “propaganda” of homosexuality. Discussing the phenomenon recently in the context of the GOP’s anti-Ukraine turn, David French pointed to such examples as far-right strategist Steve Bannon’s praise for Putin’s “anti-woke” persona and Russia’s conservative gender politics, or psychologist Jordan Peterson’s suggestion that Russia’s war in Ukraine was partly self-defense against the decadence of “the pathological West.”…

The article notes that, for some Republicans, pro-Putin rhetoric indicates a radical rejection of liberalism, even the classical liberalism of John Locke and John Stuart Mill. It quotes the “near-panegyric” to Putin in a 2017 speech by Claremont Institute’s Christopher Caldwell at Hillsdale College, and notes that both Claremont and Hillsdale are “intellectual hubs of Trumpist national conservatism.”

Read the entire essay. This isn’t remotely the GOP of my youth…..and it’s scary.

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The “Great Replacement” Fixation

I first encountered the “Great Replacement” theory when I read about the neo-Nazi, “Unite the Right” march in Charlottesville. The marchers–bearing tiki torches–reportedly chanted “Jews will not replace us.” (Those chanting were subsequently called “very fine people” by then-President Donald Trump.)

Since I never watch Fox News, I’d missed Tucker Carlson’s full-throated endorsement of that particular conspiracy theory, but as time as passed, I’ve come to understand its roots, and the reason it appeals to White Americans terrified by the prospect of losing cultural dominance. America’s demographics are changing, and it is probable that Whites will be a minority population within a few years. Meanwhile, legal and cultural changes have allowed women and minority folks–Blacks, Jews, Latinos, LGBTQ+ citizens–to become more prominent. Television anchors, elected officials, movie stars and various other celebrities increasingly come from groups that have been previously marginalized.

It’s no longer possible to ignore these changes.

The result is a palpable panic on the part of those Whites–mostly men, but also some women–who believe that their rightful place in society has been usurped. And that fear of replacement, that realization that they will need to share status with people they disparage, requires a villain. It can’t simply be an accident that “those people” are gaining in numbers and influence. It must be a plot!!

Jamelle Bouie recently wrote about Elon Musk’s obvious fascination with and belief in the “Great Replacement Theory.” Musk recently elevated a slick propaganda film pushing the theory on X (formerly Twitter), confirming the devolution of that site into a cesspool of far-Right anti-Semitism and racism.

Musk is especially preoccupied with the racial makeup of the country and the alleged deficiency of nonwhites in important positions. He blames the recent problems at Boeing, for example, on its efforts to diversify its work force, despite easily accessible and widely publicized accounts of a dangerous culture of cost-cutting and profit-seeking at the company….

Is diversity the problem at Boeing, or is it a shortsighted obsession with maximizing shareholder value at the expense of quality and safety? Musk, a wealthy shareholder in various companies — including his own, Tesla, which is being sued by Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for allegedly allowing racist abuse of some of its Black employees — says it’s diversity.

Bouie goes on to discuss Musk’s “current obsession” with the “great replacement,” the far-right accusation that liberal elites are “deliberately opening the southern border to nonwhite immigration from Mexico, South and Central America in order to replace the nation’s white majority and secure permanent control of its political institutions.”

The “great replacement” was part of the centerpiece of Tucker Carlson’s message to viewers during his time on Fox News. It is touted by a number of anti-immigrant, white nationalist and white supremacist groups. It was featured prominently at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, where neo-Nazis chanted “Jews will not replace us.” And it has inspired at least four separate mass shootings, including the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh (11 killed), the 2019 Christchurch shootings in New Zealand (51 killed), the El Paso shooting the same year (23 killed) and the 2022 supermarket shooting in Buffalo (10 killed).

It should go without saying that the “great replacement” is idiotic. There is no “open border.” There is no effort to “replace” the white population of the United States. Racial diversity is not a plot against the nation’s political institutions. And the underlying assumption of the “great replacement” — that, until recently, the United States was a racially and culturally homogenous nation — is nonsense.

Not only does acceptance of the theory require people to ignore inconvenient facts, it rests–as Bouie points out–on a fundamental fallacy: that racial and ethnic identity also and inevitably translates into political identity. In other words, it assumes that Blacks and Latinos will always vote for Democrats.

I think Bouie has identified the most consequential flaw of today’s GOP.

Republicans used to understand that politics is the art of addition–that winning a political contest requires reaching out to independents and others–including minorities– who haven’t previously voted for you. Instead, MAGA Republicans are doubling down on subtraction; not only do they fail to reach out to members of minorities who might consider supporting their candidates (the Black community, for example, is overall fairly socially conservative), they are even doing their best to expel “RINOs” –including anyone who dares to criticize Trump– from what has become a defensive cult.

The irony is that the GOP is hastening the day when a replacement will actually occur–the replacement of the GOP with a sane center-Right political party.

A large enough defeat in November will speed that process.

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A Chilling, Albeit Correct, Diagnosis

I don’t know who Thomas Zimmer is, nor do I recall how I came to read his February 8th “Democracy Americana” newsletter.
It’s likely some reader shared it after one of my periodic rants about racism and MAGA’s takeover of the GOP, but that’s just a guess. The headline and subhead are pretty clear indications of the subject-matter: “Domination or Dissolution, Rule or Ruin: The Right is fantasizing about secession, ‘national divorce’ and civil war–because they will not, under any circumstances, accept pluralism.”

The article began by focusing on the Texas border standoff, and the growing divide between Red and Blue states.

The Right loves to talk about secession and civil war. And quite a lot of people on the center and on the Left seem to have come to the conclusion that “blue” America would indeed be better off if we severed all ties with “red” states and unburdened ourselves from the reactionaries who are evidently not on board with the idea of egalitarian multiracial pluralism. I get all the frustration and exasperation. But would you feel comfortable making this argument – let them go do their own thing! – to the tens of millions of people who happen to live in those Republican-led states, who want nothing to do with the reactionary project, but would suffer most under authoritarian white Christian patriarchal rule?

There really aren’t that many hard-core secessionists. Zimmer pointed to the much-hyped (at least on the Right) “Take Our Border Back” trucker convoy. Organizers of what they dubbed “God’s Army” predicted the participation of 700,000 trucks. They got about 100– “A sad, paltry contingent of hardcore MAGAs and White Christian nationalists. It’s hard sometimes not to dismiss the rightwing threat to democracy as just silly, pathetic cosplay from a bunch of grifters, buffoons, and lost souls.”

The situation is quite a bit more serious than that, unfortunately. Not only is there simply no guarantee that grifters and buffoons can’t bring down democratic self-government. The trucker convoy fiasco also doesn’t change the fact that the border standoff is acting as a catalyst for the pervasive lusting for civil war and ubiquitous fantasizing about secession on the Right. This isn’t confined to extremist online fringes either. South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, for instance, fabulated we would “have a war on our hands” were president Biden to federalize National Guard troops. Kevin Stitt, the Republican Governor of Oklahoma, argued that the Texas National Guard was merely “protecting their homeland” from the federal government. And Representative Clay Higgins posted on Ex-Twitter that “the feds are staging a civil war, and Texas should stand their ground.” These aren’t just outlier voices. Texas, with the explicit support from 25 Republican governors, is deploying precisely the argument slave states used to justify secession.

Zimmer delves into the history of the Civil War, and provides a great deal of context for the situation we face, but the essential point he makes is one that I have reluctantly concluded is at the very foundation of America’s current polarization: significant parts of the political Right steadfastly refuse to accept what he delicately calls “multiracial pluralism.”

In short, they’re committed racists.

At its base, the Rightwing populism that has largely displaced conventional conservatism is a creation of what Zimmer calls “a reactionary counter-revolution” by aggrieved defenders of “real America” against nefarious “woke, globalist elites.” One example he cites is the White Power movement of the early 1980s. Members embraced the ideas outlined in the “Turner Diaries,” a neo-Nazi novel published in 1978 that has served as a central reference point for the extreme Right ever since.

In the book, a small group of dedicated white supremacists manages to bring down the federal government and, ultimately, over the span of a little more than a century, restore white domination not only in America, but across the globe. Such ideas, as historian Kathleen Belew has emphasized, have influenced the tactics of fascistic militias like the Proud Boys that led the charge on January 6. And the white supremacists who regard the future depicted in the “Turner Diaries” not as a dystopian nightmare, but as an aspiration, have moved much closer to the center of conservative politics: On January 6, they stormed the Capitol literally in service of the man who is still, three years later, the leader of the Republican Party.

Zimmer provides a number of other examples, and the (lengthy) essay is worth reading in its entirety. I came away from it convinced of his central point: in November’s elections, both federal and down-ballot, too many voters will still be fighting America’s Civil War.

November’s elections will pit MAGA’s White Christian Nationalists against Americans who support pluralism, inclusion and the American ideal of civic equality. Pretty much everything else is window-dressing.

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Equal Protection? Or Discrimination?

Does the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment forbid the government to address problems caused by decades of unequal treatment? One off-the-tracks court apparently believes the answer is yes.

The Supreme Court has effectively ended most affirmative action programs, and now a federal judge has handed down what has been labeled a “White grievance ruling,” holding that the Minority Business Development Agency cannot focus on minorities, and must open its doors to every race–i.e., White guys.

I am not making this up.

U.S. District Court Judge Mark Pittman (a Trump appointee) ruled that the Minority Business Development Agency (which has been working with minority-owned businesses for 55 years) must open its doors to “every race,” in a case brought by a group of White plaintiffs who argued that the agency’s focus on minority businesses constituted discrimination against White people.

Pittman is the judge who killed Joe Biden’s student debt relief, and ruled that Texas couldn’t ban teenagers between 18-20 from carrying concealed weapons.

As one relatively intemperate pundit reported (no link available and “F bomb” omitted):

In his 93-page opinion… the judge ruled that the agency’s presumption that businesses owned by Black, Latino, and other minorities are inherently disadvantaged violates the Constitution’s equal protection clause. Further, he permanently prohibited the agency’s business centers from extending services based on an applicant’s race. In one truly infuriating passage, Pittman wrote: “If courts mean what they say when they ascribe supreme importance to constitutional rights, the federal government may not flagrantly violate such rights with impunity. The MBDA has done so for years. Time’s up.” Rarely does diction in a judicial ruling trigger a Looney Toons-style reaction complete with steam coming out of my ears and my face turning red with rage but wow! That did it!

This ruling is the latest in a string of judgments that have blown up federal affirmative action programs following the precedent set by the conservative-majority Supreme Court ruled against Harvard and the University of North Carolina using race-conscious admissions last June. The conservative public interest law firm Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, who represented the White plaintiffs, was naturally ecstatic about the ruling. One of the firm’s attorneys, Dan Lennington, said, while somehow keeping a straight face: “No longer can a federal agency only cater to certain races.” This man really said “cater”! About America’s relationship to minorities! I’m going to stop writing now before I have a stroke.

I’m not having a stroke, exactly, but it is clearly past time to address a profoundly important issue–does the Equal Protection Clause forbid lawmakers from trying to solve (or at least ameliorate) specific inequities?

Do government efforts to combat disease A constitute discrimination against diseases B and C? Was the (now eviscerated) Voting Rights Act unfair to the states required to get pre-clearances due to past misbehaviors, since states that hadn’t purposely prevented Black folks from voting weren’t required to get such permissions?

You can undoubtedly come up with other examples.

Do some efforts to address past inequities go too far? Absolutely. It is always appropriate to examine programs that are intended to remediate past misbehavior, to ensure that those programs aren’t themselves violating Equal Protection. There are lots of gray areas, lots of legitimate differences of opinion based upon the specifics of the program being examined.

But this opinion really does seem to be–in the words of the quoted pundit–an example of White grievance. How dare the government try to help minority businesses that have demonstrably been disadvantaged through slavery and Jim Crow? How dare the government concede the ongoing effects of years of White privilege, and try to even the playing field?

It is certainly possible that some aspects of the agency –some programs–go too far, but finding that the agency’s mission violates Equal Protection is–in my humble opinion–evidence of racism and a total lack of basic legal reasoning. (In law school, we learn that there is no right without a remedy...)

An old friend of mine–a Republican, from back in the days when “Republican” didn’t mean “member of a racist MAGA cult”–used a sports analogy to point out that government is supposed to be an umpire–not a player on the field. Umpires and referees are supposed to ensure fair play. I don’t know much about sports, but I’m pretty sure that in basketball, when a member of one team fouls a member of the other team, the one who was fouled gets a free throw or two. It’s an effort to compensate for harm done by the foul.

Judge Pittman would evidently label that free throw discriminatory …

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