Tag Archives: racism

It’s All Out In The Open Now

We’ve come a long way, baby, from the days when our American bigots used to chafe at the “political correctness” that kept them from openly expressing their disdain for those despised “others.” As I have previously pointed out, the most consistent “through line” of America’s current, terrible administration has been its open assault on the civility that once kept people from broadcasting their hatreds; it has consistently conveyed its permission–indeed, encouragement–to voice them.

The Trump administration and Red state MAGA culture warriors enthusiastically attack anything that smacks of efforts to level the civic playing field–going after any program that hints of acceptance of diversity. At the federal level, Trump has fired talented and competent people of color and replaced them with wildly incompetent clowns whose most obvious (and often only) qualification for the job is White skin. Closer to home, our embarrassing and unethical Attorney General is harassing teachers and nonprofit organizations that display any concern for fair play or inclusion (one of the unfortunate teachers who made it onto Rokita’s threatening list of teachers he deems too liberal to be in a classroom is deemed guilty of being “unAmerican” because she included a rainbow flag in her room…).

Recently, media reports that the Trump administration has fired FBI agents who had the temerity to kneel in support of racial justice protests

WASHINGTON (AP) — The FBI has fired agents who were photographed kneeling during a racial justice protest in Washington that followed the 2020 death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers, three people familiar with the matter said Friday.

The bureau last spring had reassigned the agents but has since fired them, said the people, who insisted on anonymity to discuss personnel matters with The Associated Press.

The number of FBI employees terminated was not immediately clear, but two people said it was roughly 20…

The FBI Agents Association confirmed in a statement late Friday that more than a dozen agents had been fired, including military veterans with additional statutory protections, and condemned the move as unlawful. It called on Congress to investigate and said the firings were another indication of FBI Director Kash Patel’s disregard for the legal rights of bureau employees.

These firings follow others that targeted agents who investigated the January 6th insurrection, or who looked into Trump’s illegal retention of classified documents. Lawsuits stemming from those actions, which were patently illegal, allege that those dismissals are part of an ongoing effort to remove any FBI officers who investigated Trump or his cronies.

There is, rather clearly, also an effort to rid the FBI of officers who display support for racial justice.

In the short time Trump has been in office, he has gutted the Justice Department and turned the DOJ and FBI into compliant tools of his corrupt and lawless administration. Lawmakers and government lawyers have turned a blind eye to Trump’s multiple grifts, allowing him to run the administration like a Mafia boss, and rake in billions of dollars in what are outright bribes. Investigations of Trump allies have been dismissed, while efforts to take vengeance against those who have incurred Trump’s anger have ramped up, leading to meritless indictments (Comey) and invasive and publicized searches (Bolton).

Needless to say, these are the tactics of fascists and autocrats, not the proper activities of an American administration.

And that brings me back to what constitutes the underlying strength of this horrifying, unAmerican cabal: racism (with a side of misogyny). I cannot account for the corruption of the six “Conservative” justices on the Supreme Court, but it has become quite obvious that the Republicans in Congress are completely in thrall to the GOP’s MAGA base–the White supremacists who continue to support Trump because he’s making bigotry acceptable again.

Are groceries more expensive? Is health insurance becoming unaffordable again? Has America’s position and power in the world declined precipitously? Are masked thugs snatching people off the streets? Is public health declining? Is your city struggling due to the federal cutoff of previously authorized funds? Are free speech and the rule of law under attack? Has persistent incompetence and dysfunction caused a government shutdown?

None of that matters to MAGA folks so long as Trump gives them permission to express contempt for those detested “others.”

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Memorize This Paragraph!

A recent paragraph in a Lincoln Square newsletter really–really–struck me. Here’s that paragraph:

The Republican Party in 2025 is locked in a state of sycophantic paralysis. MAGA is not just Trump’s mood swings; it’s a tribal identity. Step out of line, and you get exiled. That’s why even senators with Ivy League résumés suddenly sound like they’re auditioning for a spot on a right-wing podcast — they’re terrified of losing the mob’s loyalty. And here’s the uncomfortable truth Democrats keep sidestepping: a huge chunk of MAGA voters are perfectly willing to suffer. They’ll put up with higher prices, worse health care, collapsing schools, potholes the size of moon craters — and they’ll smile through it — so long as the pain lands harder on someone they hate. Call it recreational spite or political CrossFit: the pain is the point, and the workout “counts” if the libs hurt more. That’s the dynamic behind why they support him.

There’s a substantial body of research confirming that puzzling observation. Illogical as it seems, people who harbor bigotries–people who hate those they label “other”–really are willing to overlook damage they suffer personally if they believe that “those people” are being hurt even more.

Bizarre as that finding is, it explains a lot.

The author quoted Lyndon Johnson, who made the statement as he was signing the Civil Rights Act. Johnson acknowledged that he was signing a measure that would cost Democrats the votes of much of the South (this was back when Southern Democrats were the racists; Democratic support for the Civil Rights Act probably was a factor in the defection of those racists from the party and their migration into today’s White Christian Nationalist cult, aka the GOP.) Johnson quite accurately noted that “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

As the author noted, “MAGA is basically the LBJ theorem in a red hat. The cruelty isn’t the glitch, it’s the subscription plan — the down payment on the fantasy that at least you’re not on the bottom rung.”

Philosophers and theologians, not to mention psychiatrists, can theorize over the deficits in personality and humanity that lead otherwise normal humans to detest those “others” to such a degree that they will accept considerable personal privation if only they can be convinced that those others are suffering more…

The essay referenced the psychological research that explores–but doesn’t explain–this phenomenon.

There’s actual scholarship that explains why this kind of thinking has such a grip. Relative deprivation theory tells us people don’t measure life by absolutes; they measure by comparisons. You’ll tolerate your own struggles as long as your neighbor isn’t doing better; the second you think they’re moving up, resentment flares. Then comes the darker twist. In 2009, Combs and colleagues documented partisan schadenfreude — the perverse pleasure people feel when the “other side” suffers, even if they’re collateral damage themselves. That’s the political equivalent of the Joker in The Dark Knight setting a mountain of his own stolen cash on fire just to watch Gotham panic. Or think of Cartman, South Park’s eternal bully, who will happily wreck his own life if it means making someone else miserable — and still ends up the kid everyone hates. That’s the mindset: voters cheering their own decline as long as someone they despise loses more.

Once I read this, I began to recognize how it works in Trumpland.

Are those tariffs making groceries and everyday items more expensive? Are even immigrants who are in the country legally terrified of the ICE masked bullies who are rounding up anyone with dark skin? Is the war being waged against science–very much including medical science–making it more likely that you will contract a disease, or that a cure for what ails you won’t be forthcoming? Those and other negative consequences of official corruption and stupidity are bearable, because Trump is keeping his promise to go after “those people.” If there has been one through-line in this administration, it has been the unremitting effort to stamp out the progress made by women, people of color and LGBTQ folks, and to elevate White psuedo-Christian males to their former (albeit unearned) social dominance.

File under “pathetic.”

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An Insider Analysis

Some of the most distressed observers of our national plunge into the very unAmerican, neo-fascist nightmare we’re experiencing are the political strategists who spent years working to elect Republicans. A number of them are now “Never Trumpers” who are wrestling with hard questions: how much of GOP rhetoric was simply PR? What was it in the GOP incentive structure that took the party down this disastrous path? What were the danger signals they failed to see?

One of those Never Trumpers is Stuart Stevens, and a while back, he wrote an essay in the Bulwark in which he tried to trace how the “law and order party had become the party of Jeffrey Epstein.” As he began,

Let me begin with a question that a lot of us are asking ourselves. How did we get here? How is it that right now, as we speak, there are American citizens that haven’t been charged with a crime, much less convicted, sitting in a concentration camp in Florida while one of the most notorious, evil, child sex traffickers of our time has cut some sweetheart deal so that she has been transferred from a prison in Florida to a Club Fed in Texas?

Stevens noted that Maxwell’s transfer violated clear Prison Bureau guidelines, and questioned how America had gotten to so lawless a place. “How did it happen? Well, the easy answer is that we elected Donald Trump. But that’s really a cop-out because it’s not just Donald Trump.”

When Trump first started to dominate the Republican Party, many of my Bush-era Republican friends talked about how Donald Trump had hijacked our party. This never made sense to me. The hijacker on the plane is not popular with the passengers. No one is thanking the hijacker for the chance to go to Cuba instead of grandma’s house. But Donald Trump quickly became the most popular figure in the Republican Party by a wide margin.

That, of course, is the question all sane Americans are constantly asking ourselves–especially those (like yours truly) who spent years in the Republican Party, assuming that the party’s political rhetoric accurately reflected its political and philosophical beliefs. As Stevens glumly concludes, “Trump didn’t hijack the Party, he revealed it.”

It’s hard to disagree with that conclusion; as Stevens writes, “People don’t abandon deeply held beliefs in a matter of months… What the party called ‘bedrock principles’ turned out to be nothing more than marketing slogans.”

As Stevens probes the reason for the GOP’s enthusiastic embrace of Trump, he comes to the same conclusion I did. It all goes back to America’s original sin: racism.  He points to the telling homogeneity of today’s Republican Party.

Race is the original sin of the modern Republican Party. This isn’t new to the Trump era. In 1956, Eisenhower got 39% of the Black vote. In 1964, Barry Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act and received 7% of the Black vote. In 2020, Trump got 12% of the Black vote, a number he improved to 13% in 2024. That’s a six-point increase in 60 years.

In the Bush 43 years, in what seems like a long time ago in a galaxy far away, the party admitted it had failed to attract Black voters and took responsibility for the failure. In 2005, the Chairman of the Republican Party, Ken Melman, gave a speech at the NAACP convention apologizing for the Southern Strategy, which leveraged white racist anger to maximize Republican votes. Does it mean anything that you apologized? I think it does. It’s an acknowledgement that what had happened is wrong and that the party had to endeavor to earn more Black support.

That all ended in 2016 with Donald Trump’s openly racist campaign.

Today’s parties have sorted themselves into White Nationalists versus everyone else.

As Stevens notes, the homogeneity of the Republican Party makes it much easier to message to core voters than it is to message to the far more diverse Democratic Party. And Stevens ties that observation to the fecklessness of Congressional Republicans, pointing out that a “party that spends 60 years relying on candidates who can win by maximizing white voters inevitably draws a different kind of candidate than a party that requires appealing to a more diverse electorate.” That observation goes a long way toward explaining the current Republican politicians who exhibit “a North Korean-style supplication to their leader.”

It’s hard to discount Stevens’ “insider analysis.”

His essay answers the persistent question–why on earth would anyone vote for a pathetic, delusional ignoramus in possession of not a single redeeming human quality? That answer is depressingly simple. For far too many voters, primal hatreds overcome humanity and rational self-interest.

But who knew there were so many of them?

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No More Dog Whistles

What has surprised me the most about America’s pell-mell plunge into autocracy and chaos under MAGA and Trump has been the rapidity with which the veil of civility has been discarded–how quickly a depressingly-large segment of our population has abandoned pretense and “dog whistles” and proudly paraded their racism. Even the pretense that DEI and “woke-ism” were really efforts at “reverse discrimination” has been so ludicrous it might as well have been delivered with a wink and a sneer.

We live in an ugly time–a time that has favored the emergence of some particularly ugly people. In a recent post, Charlie Sykes profiled one of them, an “out and proud” Nazi named Nick Fuentes. As he writes, “I confess, I still find it amazing — and deeply disturbing — that a Hitler-praising, crypto-Nazi troll has amassed a following in a movement already packed with cranks, bigots, and loons.”

Sykes quotes liberally from an Atlantic article that quite accurately notes, “Fuentes is not your garden variety racist — he serves it up in all its vile purity.”

Earlier this year, in yet another stream, Fuentes described Chicago as “n*gger hell.” He then laughed and added: “I just came up with that, just now. Isn’t that good?” Fuentes has also said that Hitler was “really fucking cool” and posited that “we need to go back to burning women alive.” (Fuentes did not respond to multiple requests for an interview.)

As Sykes observes, “this is shocking rhetoric even in 2025, when the far right has embraced race science and the federal government could be mistaken for pursuing the aims of the Proud Boys.”

And he quotes the Atlantic article for the observation that– in the deeply racist MAGA media ecosystem– “it’s working.”

Fuentes is among the most popular streamers on Rumble, a right-wing platform similar to YouTube; his videos regularly rack up hundreds of thousands of views. He’s gained more than 100,000 new followers on X since late June. The White House now posts on X in a gleefully cruel style that seems inspired by Fuentes’s followers, who call themselves “Groypers”—in fact, at the end of May, Trump posted a meme of himself that was first posted by a Groyper account. At least one Fuentes supporter, Paul Ingrassia, works in the administration as a liaison to the Department of Homeland Security. Ingrassia, who didn’t respond to an interview request, has also been nominated to lead the U.S. Office of Special Counsel. No matter how far Fuentes pushes his bigotry, his influence continues to rise.

Those of us who live in a very different world–a world where we recognize that humans come in assorted sizes and colors, a world where the mere fact of difference doesn’t translate to “existential threat”–can only be disheartened and baffled by these numbers. Yes, there have always been deeply disturbed individuals clinging to hateful ideologies that reassure them that they are blameless victims of one or another “Other.” But we are now seeing evidence that their numbers are far greater than most of us could have imagined.

When we look at the horrific damage being done to American government every day, when we see the corruption and self-dealing and kowtowing to the wealthy, it’s tempting to blame America’s plutocrats–the all-too-sleazy billionaires who surround our Mad King. And they certainly are not blameless. But their weapon–the appeal that allows MAGA to win elections and exercise power–is the viciousness and extent of racism and other assorted bigotries.

The public emergence and popularity of figures like Nick Fuentes is a sign of a deep social illness. I have no idea how to cure that illness, but I do know that we dismiss its significance at our peril. There are obviously millions of damaged, unhappy, resentful Americans–people who are desperate for someone to blame for their problems, desperate to identify some “Other” whose perfidy explains why their lives haven’t gone the way they wanted.

They are MAGA–and their version of a “great” America is terrifying.

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Calling It What it Is

When Trump won a first term in 2016, virtually all pundits and traditional media outlets bent over backwards to give his voters the benefit of the doubt. They mostly attributed his support to economic anxiety, despite the fact that a significant majority of poorer Americans had voted for Hillary Clinton. 

Research in the wake of that election pointed to a very different motive for those votes: racism. Over the intervening years, it has become abundantly clear that what scholars delicately refer to as “racial resentment” is the glue holding MAGA together–and yet, the legacy media still seems reluctant  to call it what it is.

Non-“legacy” sources, however, increasingly point to the elephant in the room. (Pun intended.)

Heather Cox Richardson recently took on Trump’s efforts to cow museums into an alternate view of history, writing

When Trump says that our history focuses too much on how bad slavery was, he is not simply downplaying the realities of human enslavement: he is advocating a world in which Black people, people of color, poor people, and women should let elite white men lead, and be grateful for that paternalism. It is the same argument elite enslavers made before the Civil War to defend their destruction of the idea of democracy to create an oligarchy. When Trump urges Republicans to slash voting rights to stop socialism and keep him in power, he makes the same argument former Confederates made after the war to keep those who would use the government for the public good from voting.

Talking Points Memo has been equally blunt. In a recent Morning Memo titled “Trump Pushes White Nationalist Agenda Across Multiple Fronts,” Josh Marshall wrote that Trump’s anti-immigrant animus is

fundamentally a story about racism, xenophobia, and othering. It’s about preying on our fears, differences, and prejudices to create a villainous foe whom he can easily vanquish in repeated set-pieces. It’s about letting loose the worst of our impulses to heighten and sustain divisions among us.

The mass deportation agenda is just one part of a larger agenda in which white Americans are fronted as the real America and everyone else is second-class, unless they individually demonstrate in lavish ways a high enough degree of fealty to Donald Trump.

And at Lincoln Square, Stuart Stevens was even more direct, writing that Trump is a racist and that fact needs to be called out.

After decades of evidence — the dog whistles, the calls for innocent black men to be executed, the bizarre fixation on the Confederacy, his alliance with known Nazis and White Christian Nationalists — saying these things, that Donald Trump is a fascist, that he is a racist, should be the least controversial thing to say about him….

For seven months, he’s rounded up brown people for deportation, imprisonment, or total disappearance. He’s attempting to convince his base that slavery wasn’t so bad, after all. Some in his orbit are echoing this sentiment, going so far as to claim we shouldn’t actually blame white people for slavery.

He doesn’t like Black or brown people. Nearly every action is motivated by that dislike. Every breath he takes is flush with a fear and hatred of people who are not white.

What would you call that?

Ever since 2016, Americans of goodwill have tied ourselves in knots trying to understand why any sentient person would vote for Donald Trump–an ignorant buffoon with a limited intellect and unlimited self-regard. The answer to that question has always been obvious, despite a well-meaning desire that it not be so. 

James Carville was wrong. It isn’t “the economy, stupid.” It’s the racism, stupid! As my youngest son observed, way back in 2016, only two kinds of people voted for Donald Trump: those who shared his racism, and those for whom it wasn’t disqualifying.

The civil war really never ended. It just morphed.

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