bigotry – Sheila Kennedy

What It Was All About

Those of us who have taken the American Idea seriously have to face what has previously been unthinkable: the racism, anti-Semitism and misogyny weren’t bugs–they were features. As sick as it makes me to confront that truth, it’s inescapable: the bigotry (and the accompanying ignorance) were what most Trump voters were endorsing.

In case there is any doubt, Project 2025 will be the roadmap to a second Trump administration. In addition to what that will mean for women’s rights, for LGBTQ+ people and people of color, let me remind readers of its major “promises”–promises that will affect the entire world, not just the United States.

A Trump administration will ” Restore warfighting as the military’s sole mission” and end what it calls “the Left’s social experimentation in the military” by halting the admission of transgender individuals. It will increase the Army by 50,000, bring overseas troops home, grow the Navy and Air Force, and triple the number of nuclear weapons—while withdrawing America from all arms reduction treaties, and from NATO.

In other words, Trump will make the entire world unsafe (except, of course, for Putin and other autocrats).

USAID will defund women’s rights provisions in foreign aid initiatives, withdraw from all multi-lateral trade agreements, and stop providing financial aid to Ukraine, which will be gift-wrapped for Putin.

Trump wants to institute 60% tariffs on Chinese goods and 10% on all other imports. (Every reputable economist—conservative and liberal—has pointed out that tariffs are a tax on Americans, and that imposing them would cost American families thousands of dollars a year and throw the country into recession. The economy that President Biden has made the envy of the world will tank.

In order to destroy America’s fidelity to the rule of law, Trump plans to replace 50 thousand civil service employees with Trump loyalists. The Heritage Foundation is currently “vetting” individuals in order to facilitate that replacement.

The media has reported on the proposal to eliminate the Department of Education, Head Start, Title 1, & school lunch programs. The less-reported portions of their “education” policies are equally regressive: they would eliminate all diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, post the Ten Commandments in all school classrooms and eliminate any books addressing race or gender from the nation’s classrooms.

RNK, Jr isn’t the only medical moron likely to be dictating “health” measures; Project 2025 proposes to withdraw federal funding from any school requiring vaccinations. (Not sure how they’re going to remove flouride from the nation’s water supply, but reality hasn’t been a big part of Rightwing ideology.)

Kiss goodby to Medicare (they’d privatize it), the EPA, OSHA, the EEOC and the FDIC.

But it’s with the bigotries that we really see the animating message of the worldview.

Trump has echoed the Project’s promise of immediate mass deportation of (dark-skinned) undocumented persons, a massive effort that would wreak havoc with the economy. (Think groceries are high now? Watch what happens when there’s no one to pick crops.) The Project proposes internment camps and limiting lawful immigration to 20,000 annually. They’d also deport all the Dreamers (who came as children with their parents, and most of whom have never known another country. They want to ban Muslims and Haitians from entering the country, roll back gay rights, invalidate same-sex marriages, and outlaw both transgender rights and no-fault divorce.

Then there’s the effect on the already precarious environment.

Authors of the Project say—and I quote– the “climate is not changing and schools are not to teach that it is.” Since climate change is just a liberal myth, they would eliminate climate and environmental protections, eliminate the regulation of greenhouse gases, and defund FEMA. They’d dismantle the National Hurricane Center and the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, halt all climate research, revoke the Global Change Research Act of 1990, withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Accords, halt research into electrical vehicles and revoke tax incentives for clean energy.

That’s just a small part of what the bigots have voted for. Of course, courts would once have declared much of that roadmap blatantly unconstitutional, but Trump’s appointment of rogue Justices has removed that pesky impediment.

And of course, his election will allow the first convicted felon to be elected President to escape accountability for his crimes.

Welcome to the new Dark Ages.

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We’re Not Going Back

The Harris catch-phrase, “We’re not going back,” isn’t aspirational–it’s factual. Even if the unthinkable happens, and Trump ekes out a victory, the MAGA folks will be disappointed, because the cultural changes that anger and motivate them are highly unlikely to reverse.

I’m hardly the only observer who has pointed out that this is not an election based on policy differences. Instead, our political divisions are responses to the cultural shifts that have generated hate and hysteria from a sizable minority of the population. The Dobbs decision, the anti-woke fury, the authoritarian prescriptions in Project 2025…all are reactions to cultural shifts that anger and terrify that very vocal, regressive cohort.

An excellent illustration of that primal motivation is the eruption of anti-trans political ads in the last days of the election season. The number–and viciousness–of those ads tells us two things: first, it’s politically effective to focus on the smallest and least-understood sliver of the”different” people who symbolize unacceptable social change; and second, widespread acceptance of previously favored targets–like LGBTQ+ folks generally– is now baked into the culture.

The MAGA focus on trans people was the subject of a New York Times essay by a trans author, who put the attacks in cultural context. She began by noting that approximately half of today’s Americans consider gender transition immoral–or at least, not normal. But then she reminded readers that definitions of “normal” are subject to change–and in fact, have undergone considerable change over time.

And yet most notions of “normal” have rarely been fixed, even as there have always been those who insist they are immutable. Certainly gender may be one of the most fundamental — dare I say natural — ways we have organized societies. But history reminds us that all assumptions should always be questioned. Every significant challenge to the existing order, from the vote for women to interracial unions to marriage equality, has provoked strong reactions and, not uncommonly, hand-wringing about the downfall of civilization.

She pointed to interracial and same-sex marriages.

Race isn’t gender, and the comparisons aren’t perfect. And yet the arguments made against interracial unions like the Lovings’ in the 1950s and ’60s are eerily similar to those made against marriage equality a decade or two ago and against trans people today: We hear appeals to God, science, the well-being of children and the natural order, in efforts made to write out of existence trans people, our care and our place in public life. Those arguments resonated back then, as perhaps they do for some people now. In the 1960s a vast majority of Americans disapproved of interracial marriages (a majority didn’t approve until the 1990s), even if now few question whether people of different races should be allowed to marry….

The transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, mused during his stint onstage at the Democratic National Convention about the mundane and chaotic — and yet miraculous — daily routine of raising children with his husband: “This kind of life went from impossible to possible, from possible to real, from real to almost ordinary in less than half a lifetime.”

How did support for same-sex marriage go from just over a quarter of Americans near the end of President Bill Clinton’s first term to nearly 70 percent this May?

The author noted research showing that large numbers of people who changed their minds about marriage equality did so because they knew someone who was gay or lesbian. That means that acceptance of trans folks will be more difficult; polling suggests that barely 30 percent of Americans have friends, relatives or colleagues who are transgender, and although that number may grow, it won’t ever be very high, since research tells us that transgender folks are a very small sliver of society.

Since there aren’t very many of them, and they remain a largely unknown, vulnerable (and purportedly “non-normal”) segment of the population, the GOP figures it’s safe to attack them–just as it used to be safe to attack women’s suffrage, interracial and same-sex marriage, and gay people generally.

As the author wrote,

I can’t help thinking it’s worth reflecting on what the trial judge in the Loving case, who argued that allowing people of different races to marry would go against God’s will, and other right-thinking people of that era might make of the current political landscape. For all the polarization, misinformation and puerile attacks on candidates, being married to someone of another race simply isn’t part of the equation at all. It is, in fact, something … ordinary. Even normal.

MAGA is too late. Win or lose, Harris is right: we aren’t going back.

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The Difference Between Red And Blue

Sensible people who follow politics have abandoned what was–in more civil times–reasonable advice. We used to be urged to vote for individual candidates rather than voting a straight ticket based on party. When there was considerable overlap between Republicans and Democrats, and voters could anticipate bipartisan support for policies, voting for the person made some sense.

It no longer does.

Republican candidates today come in two flavors, and only two flavors: rabid MAGA White Supremacists and spineless suck-ups. Even if GOP candidate A seems less than enthusiastic about Christian Nationalism, there is zero likelihood that Candidate A will depart from the party line. Any vote for any Republican is a vote for MAGA, full stop.

Permit me to share two relevant examples.

At the very top of the GOP ticket we have Trump and his Vice-Presidential candidate, JD Vance. That Vice-Presidential choice is consequential, because Trump is old, and–in addition to his more and more obvious senility–clearly unhealthy. If he is elected, Vance, who has only a few months of experience in government, would likely become President.

And what do we know about him, other than his opposition to abortion for any reason and his disdain for childless cat ladies? Well, Talking Points Memo recently shared his cozy connection to Neo-Nazis.

Vance has had a six-figure stake in Rumble, an online video platform. The company has played host to Russian propaganda and to far-right personalities like Stew Peters and Tim Pool. It has also featured even more extreme content, including explicitly neo-Nazi images and themes like this song touting the “Reich” and calling for Jews to be placed in ovens from a “dissident rapper” with a dedicated page on the site. The site features a plethora of channels and videos dedicated to the concept of “white genocide,” which is a core belief for white supremacists. It also hosts channels for explicitly white supremacist organizations including VDare and Patriot Front, which has led masked demonstrations around the country.

Nice guy. Not. (And that lack of niceness–that weirdness— becomes especially obvious when contrasted with uber-nice coach Tim Walz.)

Here in Indiana, we have Micah Beckwith, self-identified Christian Nationalist, on a ticket with MAGA Mike Braun, fellow theocrat Jim Banks and far-right sleaze Todd Rokita. The entire ticket is terrifying, but–credit where “credit” is due–Beckwith is willing to put his bigotries front and center. On his website, he has posted a diatribe attacking both the LGBTQ+ community and those faux Christians who counsel acceptance of their gay neighbors.

The entire essay, titled HOMOSEXUALITY, MARRIAGE, AND SEXUAL IDENTITY, is breathtaking in its arrogance.

A reaffirmation of biblical teachings has become all the more urgent because writers sympathetic to the LGBT (Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender) communities have advanced revisionist interpretations of relevant biblical texts that are based upon biased exegesis and mistranslation. In effect, they seek to set aside almost two thousand years of Christian biblical interpretation and ethical teachings. We believe these efforts are reflective of the conditions described in 2 Timothy 4:3, “For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.”

In other words, if mainstream theologians disagree with those who wrote this, well, they’re clearly wrong! Only fundamentalists like Beckwith understand what God demands…The essay asserts that “there is abundant evidence that homosexual behavior, along with illicit heterosexual behavior, is immoral and comes under the judgment of God,” and it continues with several lengthy sections explaining why all gay people are disgusting sinners.

Beckwith has made clear his firm conviction that not only are his religious beliefs the only correct ones, they are beliefs that government must impose on the rest of us. During his brief “service” on a Hamilton County library board, he demanded that books portraying gay people be excluded from the collection, and that other materials in conflict with his rather peculiar notions of godliness be censored. Beckwith rejects the First Amendment’s Separation of Church and State.

Vance and Beckwith are entirely representative of today’s GOP.

The disclosure of Project 2025–produced by multiple Trump allies and lauded by Vance–opened a window into the GOP’s obsessions and hatreds. Forget e pluribus unum. Forget the Bill of Rights. These are people who firmly believe that American law should privilege their retrograde beliefs–and that anyone who isn’t a straight White “Christian” male should be excluded from the equal protection of the laws.

In November, voters will choose between the America envisioned by the Founders (Blue) and the theocratic fantasies of MAGA as exemplified by JD Vance and Micah Beckwith (Red).

Vote Blue.

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Bigotry And Business

Every day, I become more convinced that racism is the foundation of MAGA Republicanism. I do give grudging kudos to MAGA’s activism on behalf of its expansive hatreds–all evidence points to the minority status of these angry White Nationalists, but they are unrelenting–and frequently successful– in their efforts to combat any movement toward civility and inclusion.

Most of us are aware of MAGA’s successful efforts last year during Pride month to cow Target for having the temerity to carry Pride merchandise and thus mortally offending the “Christian” warriors. Those pious folks also rose up to attack Bud Light for working with a transgender person. (Somewhere, there must be an office of “watchers” ready to unleash the troops whenever some business has the nerve to market to “undesirable” folks….)

The most recent example of which I’m aware is a business called Tractor Supply.

Tractor Supply (with which I am wholly unfamiliar) sells animal feed, tractor parts and power tools. It has more than 2,230 stores nationwide, and has been recognized for its inclusiveness; Bloomberg praised it for promoting gender equality, while Newsweek called it one of the best U.S. companies for diversity.

Inclusion was evidently the company’s big sin. The haters came out in force.

The company came under scrutiny this month when conservative podcast host Robby Starbuck denounced Tractor Supply’s diversity and climate policies. An employee recently had messaged him to complain that the company was supporting LGBTQ+ groups, Starbuck told The Washington Post.

Starbuck visited Tractor Supply weekly to buy provisions for his farm in Franklin, Tenn., he said, but wasn’t comfortable with the company putting money toward inclusion programs.
“Start buying what you can from other places until Tractor Supply makes REAL changes,” he wrote on X on June 6.

Other customers responded to say they would join the boycott, and the company’s share price fell by 5 percent in the past month, according to the Financial Times.

Tractor Supply backed off, announcing that it will end all “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion” programs and will no longer support LGBTQ and global warming causes.

That, of course, enraged a different part of the customer base. A number of customers have indicated an intent to stop doing business with Tractor Supply, and several have issued statements indicating disappointment with the company’s willingness to buckle under. As one wrote, “Tractor Supply’s embarrassing capitulation to the petty whims of anti-LGBTQ extremists puts the company out of touch with the vast majority of Americans who support their LGBTQ friends, family, and neighbors.”

Tractor Supply is a predominantly rural enterprise, which means it faces a more formidable challenge than businesses that cater to a largely urban customer base. As a recent study has found, a growing aspect of rural identity has added to America’s political and cultural divide.

Jacobs and Shea pinpoint the 1980s as when this identity began to crystallize. In different regions, cost pressures on family farms and ranches, suburban sprawl, or water inaccessibility squeezed rural communities economically, which coincided with terrible depictions of country life in popular culture. Just as national news outlets emerged through cable and the internet, regional papers closed, and divisive national narratives enveloped local political context. Separate localized identities merged into a national common rural identity

Simultaneously, globalization shuttered small manufacturers central to communities’ economies, so younger generations moved to bigger cities, and social issues and addiction grew. For Cramer, a key component of this rural identity is a resentment from the perception of being overlooked by government. It has furthered party polarization as rural Americans increasingly vote Republican and see the world opposite from group identities associated with Democrats and vice versa.

Rural America is whiter, older, and more religious than urban America, but the researchers found that–even after controlling for those factors– living in rural America independently added to support for the Republican party.

One of the most conspicuous aspects of MAGA Republicanism has been the willingness of its adherents to “act out.” In addition to the more-or-less organized bands of truly dangerous crazies like the Proud Boys and other neo-fascist groups, members of groups like Moms for Liberty and the American Family Association have become increasingly belligerent, increasingly apt to insist that the schools, libraries and businesses they patronize privilege their particular bigotries. They are primarily active in the rural precincts where Republicanism is high and the fact that they don’t represent majority opinion even there is less obvious.

It’s hard not to feel some sympathy for the businesses caught in the middle–damned by MAGA if they stick to their purported principles, and shunned by tolerant Americans if they abandon them.

And we wonder why success in retail is so elusive…..

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My Mother Was Right…

As I used to tell my own children, you should always listen to your mother.

My sister and I were the products of a politically “mixed marriage.” Mother was a Republican and Dad was a Democrat, and they often ended up casting votes that cancelled each other out. There was a limit to our mother’s political conservatism, however–she was deeply suspicious of what she called the “fringe Right,” the Birchers and others who were then seen by the broad majority of the party as kooks and crazies.

Mother didn’t live long enough to see those kooks and crazies complete their takeover of the Republican Party and chase out the more moderate folks we used to lump together as “country club Republicans”– some who were philosophical conservatives and others whose business interests had turned them into anti-tax, “trickle-down” true believers.

Everything my mother thought about what was then the far-Right “fringe” has turned out to be correct. Only worse.

I was reminded of her long-ago criticisms when I read a recent article in Talking Points Memo. (Apologies if this is one of the articles behind the paywall for subscribers only.) The article began:

Whiplash-inducing breaks from long-held party positions have become the norm in today’s Republican Party.

From former president Donald Trump to emerging voices such as Senator J.D. Vance, presidential candidate Ron DeSantis, and North Carolina gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson, a wave of politicians and activists have signaled an abandonment of Republican orthodoxy on issues that once defined the party.

The party of free trade has become protectionist. The party of Cold Warriors has increasingly backed Russia and opposed aiding Ukraine. The party of less government has grown conflicted about where it stands on Social Security and Medicare.

How can not just a party, but its voters, suddenly change direction on so many bedrock issues?

Or have they?

Ben Bradford, who wrote the column, hosts a podcast series called “Landslide.” He proceeded to answer his own question, asserting that the current Republican Party does not, in fact, represent a change or reversal of course–rather, in his opinion, it represents an evolution. “What seems like a shift on fundamental issues” he says, “is the latest expression of the same underlying force that has propelled voters for nearly half a century.”

Bradford takes readers back fifty years, to the mid-1970s and the “New Right,” reminding us of their opposition to a “range of the era’s social and cultural changes: school integration, new textbooks, gun laws, the women’s rights movement, gay and lesbian rights, and — eventually — abortion.”

New Right organizations included Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum and the NRA’s further-right cousin, the Gun Owners of America. It also included many of the same conservative groups that push policy positions and drive national debates today: the Heritage Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and the National Right-to-Life Committee, to name just a handful. These groups shared many of the same founders. Harper’s Magazine described their organizational charts as “an octopus shaking hands with itself.”

Two things that were “new” about the New Right were direct-mail fundraising and–especially– culture war.

The New Right was organized around social and cultural backlash. It created a link between activists working for seemingly unrelated causes–for example, opponents of abortion and opponents of gun laws. Howard Phillips described the goal of the New Right as “organizing discontent.” At a time when the major political parties were still trying to downplay hot-button social and cultural issues, the New Right created a coalition based upon voters’ backlash to culture change.

The article argues that it was a tactic that changed the nature of American conservatism.

Bradford goes on to document how the New Right saved Ronald Reagan’s campaign–a campaign animated by a backlash against a changing culture.

The message of a better past endangered by a changing culture would not feel out of place coming from Republican candidates today. And, the issues they emphasize — opposing the contents of textbooks, the use of race in school admissions, and transgender rights, among others — are the modern descendants of those 50 years ago.

As my mother would have added, that “backlash” coalition wasn’t just angry about social change; it was also a hotbed of bigotry–it was racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, misogynistic. If it ever gained power, she warned us, Americans who weren’t straight White Christians would be endangered.

Well, they’ve gained power– and proved her point.

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