Recycling History – White Christian Nationalists with European Roots Must Rule?

  

Recycling History – White Christian Nationalists with European Roots Must Rule?

Carefully and slowly, the Trump administration is actually removing “segregation” from Federal practices and rules where it can. The Department of Defense is removing evidence of heroics by non-whites in military conflicts, even winners of top medals, from their public displays and historical records. Military bases shorn of names based on Confederate heroes are watching those names restored. Courts from top to bottom are determining that diversity, equality and inclusion represents discrimination based on, among other criteria, race and religion… and whites are now the discriminated class. White employees and students are mounting successful claims against companies and colleges where Black students appear to be disproportionately represented or favored. Discrimination based on social class and race are the new American way.

Even Donald Trump’s Massive Malignant Money bill (miss-named his “Big Beautiful Bill”) rips away at survival programs (like Medicaid and SNAP) for our poorest Americans in order to throw cash and other benefits to the richest of the rich in the form of tax cuts and dissolving agencies charged with protecting the public against con men and corporate bullies. As killer heat waves sweep the nation, Trump’s bill trashes climate legislation and cheap alternative energy to foster expensive and highly polluting fossil fuels instead.

The United States refused to attend a 70-nation international conference in Barcelona, Spain to discuss the vast income disparity between rich countries, like the US, and nations comprised of mostly impoverished peoples. The United States, having shut down USAID and delighting in proposing extreme tariffs, is much more focused on how to use bullying to do what it does best these days: rob from the poor to give to the rich.

There should be little surprise that institutionalized racism rises openly with extreme measures in our midst. Does anyone really believe that all of these new Trump administration measures will improve the lot of most Americans? Even the value of the dollar, through all of this, has dropped to a low not seen in a quarter of a century, and as that Massive Malignant Money bill nears full passage, the huge increase to the deficit is paralleled by the highest interest rate on US treasuries than we have seen in decades.

Some of the Trump-driven extremists represent domestic terrorists training with military tactics and weapons like the easy-to-convert-to-fully-automatic AR-15, a rifle that was originally developed for Navy SEALs. Others are building communities where European white Christian nationalists are the only people allowed.

Writing for the June 30th The Forward, Hannah Feuer addresses one of the most segregated new communities in the land: “Nearly 60 years after the United States outlawed racial and religious discrimination in housing, one group in Arkansas is openly reviving it… ‘Return to the Land,’ a white supremacist group started in 2023, owns 160 acres in northeast Arkansas, according to the group’s website. [Parcel Map above] Jews and non-whites are explicitly banned from membership. Prospective residents must verify their ‘ancestral heritage’ in a written application and interview before becoming paying members and residing in the off-grid settlement, according to the group’s Substack.

“The organization hopes to replicate its whites-only settlements across the country, with the stated aim of ‘trying to put land back under the control of Europeans.’ Experts warn the group’s practices likely run afoul of anti-discrimination laws and express doubt about its long-term viability… Still, the group’s financial and legal infrastructure makes it one of the most established white supremacist residential communities in the United States today, according to Morgan Moon, an investigative researcher with the Anti-Defamation League’s Center for Extremism…

“In the 1970s and ‘80s, white supremacists urged like-minded racists to move to the Pacific Northwest with the goal of transforming the area into a white ethnostate. In recent years, similar attempts at forming remote enclaves have cropped up in Kentucky, North Dakota, and Maine… Such communities almost always fail to gain traction, Moon said, often due to financial troubles, infighting, or simply the difficulty of asking people to move to remote areas and uproot their lives.

“This isn’t the first time Arkansas has been the site of such a project. In 2012, Jason Barnwell, a member of the Aryan Terror Brigade, hoped to persuade white supremacists to relocate to the small town of Evening Shade, Arkansas, where he had purchased 12 acres, according to an ADL report. But the project soon fell apart after Barnwell and several others pleaded guilty to federal charges of firebombing an interracial couple’s home.

“The acreage owned by Return to the Land is near Ravenden, a town of fewer than 500 people in northeast Arkansas that’s more than 97% white. The bare-bones set-up consists of tiny homes with tents and outhouses at times. A few dozen people live on the property, where residents grow their own food, homeschool their children, and rely on well water for drinking.

“Though the Arkansas community may be small and remote, its founders are transparent about their ambitions to gain influence and expand beyond the region. According to Moon, the group’s leaders are part of the identitarian movement, a far-right ideology that believes white European identity is under threat from immigration and globalization. Their response is to create a parallel society of whites-only communities.” They might be shocked to learn that the founders of Christianity itself included no white Europeans!

There are “clever” provisions in the RTTL by-laws that try to sidestep covenants that bar homeowners from reselling their properties to excluded classes of buyers. Simply, the homeowners’ association has a first refusal to preempt a sale to an undesirable. If you are worried about this development selling out before you can snap up one of these residential lots, don’t worry, the owners are scouting sites for RTTL 2 right now. I used to believe that such racially excluded housing was illegal… but that was before Trump was elected President and the Supreme Court began dismantling the Constitution… Today anything is possible with Trump’s 6-3 MAGA tilted Court. 

I’m Peter Dekom, and while “Whites Only, No Jews Allowed” communities are unlikely to explode in popularity, that people believe this the viable way America should be “ruled” lurks in the heart of too many of us in this increasingly ungovernable nation.