This might sound heretical to some of my politically obsessed fans, but I have a strong feeling that Donald Trump’s tenure as a potential returning presidential candidate is over. Even assuming that the myriad investigations and revelations don’t produce a flurry of criminal indictments, The Donald’s January 29th “I’ll pardon them” rally speech, reaffirmed even after of few bold elected Republicans who had voted not to convict him in the impeachment trials, probably was the nail in his electability coffin. Even with voter suppression and gerrymandering, his loyal evangelical base (My see my April 29, 2021 Rising Voters, Sinking Republicans blog) probably cannot save him.
Notwithstanding a smattering of Black faces at that rally, he could not resist a powerful racist fabrication: "The left is now rationing life-saving therapeutics based on race, discriminating against and denigrating, just denigrating white people to determine who lives and who dies… You get it based on race. In fact, in New York state, if you're white, you have to go to the back of the line to get medical help. If you're white, you go right to the back of the line." The sad reality is that the damage that Donald Trump has heaped on a now-failing democracy is already done. His street-fighting smarts alerted him to a “we just keep it to ourselves” undercurrent of white supremacy back in 2015, when he was forming his campaign. They don’t anymore.
The cornerstone of the Trump presidency has been embracing and legitimizing white Christian supremacy, heavily heterosexual male dominated and profoundly anti-science and well-educated “elites.” That constituency, well armed and extremely autocratic, was now free to express themselves, some even to march in uniformed military “stack” formation at the January 6th assault on the Capitol. Trump’s looming presence has redefined the Republican Party, and like an angry wolf charged with herding sheep, he has attacked those in his party willing to challenge his edicts. With primary victory at a state level a function of Trump loyalty these days, extremism seems to be the ticket to nomination for GOP candidates.
For those who feel that this “racism” (the expanded definition that also challenges non-Christian faiths, ethnic groups and non-purely “straight” people), Asians are still smarting from the “Chinese virus” epithet, Latinx are still “rapists and murderers,” and notwithstanding his daughter’s conversation to Judaism to marry and merge into another wealthy real estate family, Jews should remember those “fine people,” ”torch-carrying white nationalists at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 11, 2017 chanting “They shall not replace us!” The “They” were people of Jewish heritage.
We know about slavery and racism, the Jim Crow era, the now-repudiated “separate but equal” fallacy of the 1896 Supreme Court decision in Plessy vs Ferguson. We are aware of the exploitation of Indigenous Peoples well-entrenched beginning with the Spanish conquistadors and continued as white settlers simply took their land, killing any who got in the way. Throughout history, Jews have also faced horrific fates, like the Holocaust, is now mirror in a host of Swastikas and temple attacks across the United States. Black Americans know that, despite a few high-visibility police crimes recorded on smartphones, the criminal justice system is still laser-focused on their and the Latinx community. See my August 8, 2020 Driving While Black blog. Anti-LGBQT sentiments abound as well.
Non-linear sexual preferences have existed throughout history, reflecting what biohistorians believe has been a pretty consistent 10%-plus of the general population. “From the lyrics of same-sex desire inscribed by Sappho in the seventh century BCE to youths raised as the opposite sex in cultures ranging from Albania to Afghanistan; from the ‘female husbands’ of Kenya to the Native American ‘Two-Spirit,’ alternatives to the Western male-female and heterosexual binaries thrived across millennia and culture. These realities gradually became known to the West via travelers’ diaries, the church records of missionaries, diplomats’ journals, and in reports by medical anthropologists.” A 2009 publication by the American Psychological Association: History of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Social Movements. Yet being sexually different from mainstream evangelical values is a basis for discriminatory legislation and intensive personal bias in this country. Persecution has been the lot of too many.
The Supreme Court, in Holder vs Shelby County (2013), emasculated the Voting Rights Act – which had protected minority voting rights – claiming that since it was passed in 1965, it was no longer necessary or valid. The Court failed to take note that the statute had been reaffirmed and amended by Congress in 2006. Immediately that ruling, red state legislatures passed laws aimed at diminishing minority votes, making it easier for whites to maintain incumbent power. Per my Rising Voters blog above, this right-wing white voting bloc knows that it can no longer win national elections otherwise.
Despite the facts that two recent GOP presidents (Reagan and Trump) promised and then appointed two women to the US Supreme Court, the GOP white backlash against Biden’s intention to appoint a Black woman justice was fierce, present in an almost unanimous GOP Senate pledge to resist that appointment. Vanity Fair (February 2nd): “Ted Cruz insisted that, despite the long history of the Supreme Court being exclusively a club for white men, Biden’s pledge tells the majority of Americans, ‘I don’t give a damn about you,’ and is somehow ‘an insult to Black women.’ Mississippi Republican Roger Wicker claimed Biden’s ultimate pick will be a ‘beneficiary’ of affirmative action.
“Apparently not wanting to be left out, GOP Senator John Kennedy, a member of the Judiciary Committee, said on Tuesday [2/1], according to Politico: ‘No. 1, I want a nominee who knows a law book from a J.Crew catalog. No. 2, I want a nominee who’s not going to try to rewrite the Constitution every other Thursday to try to advance a ‘woke agenda.’’” Racism is so openly expressed these days. Reinforced with rising threats of gun violence.
Since Justice Antonin Scalia’s notorious and blatantly factually and legally incorrect ruling in the 2008 Supreme Court case of Heller vs District of Columbia (for detailed analysis, see my November 8, 2021 How Time and a Highly Politicized Supreme Court Repealed and Replaced the Second Amendment blog), which for the first time in our nation’s history established a ubiquitous right to gun ownership, including military assault weapons. But how far would that desperate white constituency go to enforce their vision of the Constitution, one which so many believe provides them with rights that simply do not exist? See my May 21, 2020 When Amateurs Believe They Are Qualified to Interpret the Constitution blog.
There are more than a few such “patriots” ready to force their way on everyone. For example, at a January 29th rally in support of his campaign for a seat in the Michigan state senate, candidate Mike Detmer was recorded openly saying: “The Second Amendment isn’t there for hunting rights or for self-defense; it’s there to protect all of the other constitutional rights. The right to bear arms tells the government the citizenry is armed… The ideal thing is to do this peacefully. That’s ideal. But the American people, at some point in time, if we can’t change the tide, which I believe we can, we need to be prepared to lock and load.” The constituency needing protection? White Christian voters.
What does all this have to do with the title premise of this blog? 19 states, embracing the “culture war” that has become a major issue for the GOP, have passed legislation taking negative historical realities in racial, gender, religious and ethnic studies out of public classrooms and some public libraries. See my December 4, 2021 Red State Ban of CRT vs Blue State Mandate for Ethnic Studies blog for a discussion of the battlelines. But what is the unifying theme in all of the sound and fury currently emanating from the Republican attacks and protests in all of the above. Christopher Wilson, for the February 1st YahooNews, decided to ask an expert: Emily Knox, an associate professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, author of the book “Book Banning in 21st Century America,” in addition to serving on the board for the National Coalition Against Censorship.
You can start with the books that have been banned as a result of the above critical race theory ban, spearheaded under a general notion that the past must be left in the past, and that racism in the United States ended with the civil rights case and legislation of the 1950s, 60s and 70s. Knox: “Conservative activists are spearheading many of the challenges, with the majority of the targeted books focusing on race, sexuality and gender… If you look at the ALA's [American Library Association’s] list, you'll see that over the past five years, the list of most challenged books has [included] mostly what we call ‘diverse books.’..
“I use the definition from We Need Diverse Books, a nonprofit that really works on making sure that the publishing industry publishes more diverse books and awards those books. [WNDB defines ‘diverse’ as ‘including (but not limited to) LGBTQIA, Native, people of color, gender diversity, people with disabilities, and ethnic, cultural, and religious minorities.’]..
“So with diverse books at the moment, [challengers] are saying things like, ‘Well, the book is racist,’ right? But what do they mean by that? What are they actually saying about the world as they wish it to be that this book is not reflecting? And often that is something like, ‘This book centers on people who are different from what I'm used to seeing,’ ‘This book actually shows how my community is maybe not as welcoming as I thought it was,’ or sometimes it's even like, ‘I just don't believe that these things happen to people.’…
“I really think what's happening now is that this is a response to several things: the protests after the George Floyd murder; just where we are with the pandemic; the backlash election [loss] of Donald Trump; and I think people are moving from federal elections and looking to see what they can do on their local level.”
In an ironic twist, sometimes book banning can be good for sales: ““Art Spiegelman’s [Pulitzer Prize winning] graphic novel ‘Maus,’ about his parents’ experiences during the Holocaust, have become bestsellers after being banned by a Tennessee school board earlier this month… ‘Maus,’ … is set in 1940s Poland during the Holocaust and chronicles his parents’ internment in Auschwitz. It depicts Nazis as cats and Jewish people as mice… The school board’s decision comes amid a wave of conservative-sponsored legislation and other actions to pull books from schools, with other banned works including Toni Morrison’s ‘The Bluest Eye’ and Harper Lee’s ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ AP reported.” Nardine Saad for the January 31st Los Angeles Times. The school board refused to recant. Indeed, Amazon posted record sales!
I’m Peter Dekom, and just look at one of the great culture wars, reflected in the above photograph from Nazi Germany… is this beginning to happen here?
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