Republished with permission from Thom Hartmann

Yesterday, Louise and I drove home from a ham radio convention in Seaside, Oregon and on the roughly 2-hour drive listened to rightwing radio. It was like stepping into a time machine tuned to the 1860s.

One host was pounding on how “our tax dollars” are being used to support “those dirty Somalis” in Minnesota who were committing “massive welfare fraud that’s just fine with Tim Walz and the Democrats.”

Louise and I were astonished as we heard another note that immigration across the Southern “open border” during the Obama and Biden administrations not only brought us “rapists and murderers,” but these (mostly Catholic) people carried a “dangerous ideology” to America. They were wiping out our healthcare system and depriving “good [white] Americans” of benefits through their “massive fraud.”

These Black and Brown people are even fraudulently voting, handing elections to Democrats, another ranted, lying that that’s “why Democrats always open the borders.”

Meanwhile, rightwing news sites brag that under Trump, Vance, and Miller, only white people have been legally admitted into the US during the last 6 months (true) because Trump is “protecting the [racial] integrity of America.” It echoed Trump’s false complaint that the white people of South Africa are experiencing a “genocide.”

And one host we heard proudly proclaimed he was an “evil, heartless bastard” for his opposition to social programs that may help minorities, particularly Black Somalis and Puerto Ricans. Callers to his show proudly proclaimed that they, too, were “evil heartless bastards.”

This is the modern version of the language of the white supremacist Confederacy, an oligarchic, fascist, race-based movement/government that had fully ended democracy in the South by the mid-1850s, seized control of the press, imprisoned its opponents, and then attacked the rest of America to end democracy nationally. (I write about this at length in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy.)

And what’s most astonishing is that our mainstream media, much like Confederate newspapers in the 1850s, never, ever call it what it is: racism.

It’s not like it’s not obvious. “Whiskey Pete” Hegseth fired Black and female flag officers and is blocking the promotions of Black and Hispanic officers, and on D-Day went to Normandy to lecture Europeans about the brown hordes they’re allowing to gain refugee status, claiming soldiers like my dad who volunteered for World War II were battling for white supremacy:

“It’s past time we remember what they [who fought at Normandy] knew. Their legacy demands far more than quiet reflection. it requires our active vigilance. Sadly, today, different European beaches are stormed by different, dangerous ideologies. Beaches in Spain, Italy, Greece and Bulgaria, boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion, or is it too late? I pray not, and I believe not.”

The Klan, like some rightwing groups today, described themselves as a Christian “political and social” society and justified their terror campaigns as “restoring order” against supposed Black lawlessness and had a famous slogan that “all Black men are potential rapists, all white women potential victims.”

Alexander Stephens, author of the infamous Cornerstone Speech that kicked off the Civil War, referred to the need to enslave Black people and prevent them from participating in society to “protect our form of civilization” because racial equality is “fundamentally wrong” and “a violation of the laws of nature,” sentiments with which Trump et al, appear to agree.

On March 21, 1861, three weeks before the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter, Stephens proclaimed that the idea of “Negro equality” and Blacks and whites living together was fundamentally wrong, both scientifically and morally:

“Our new [Confederate] government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

His “scientific truth” framing echoes how modern “conservative” movements launder bigotry as hard-nosed realism with only thinly concealed complaints about manufactured outrages including references to “low IQ individuals” (Trump’s favorite phrase for Black politicians and reporters) and lies like “they’re eating our cats and dogs”:

“This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science.”

He even explicitly listed Galileo, Adam Smith, and Harvey’s discovery of blood circulation as precedents, positioning racial hierarchy as a “scientific fact” that northern ideologues were trying to “suppress.” He also branded his white opponents as mentally defective zealots:

“Those at the North, who still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics. All fanaticism springs from an aberration of the mind from a defect in reasoning. It is a species of insanity.”

That last quote has a direct lineage to Trump’s constant slander of “deranged leftists” and “insane Democrats.” Speaking of Congresswomen Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, two women of color, he wrote on his failing, Nazi-infested social media site that the two:

“had the bulging, bloodshot eyes of crazy people, LUNATICS, mentally deranged and sick who, frankly, look like they should be institutionalized,” adding that they should be “sent back from where they came.”

The foundation of this GOP racism goes beyond skin-color-based tribalism; there’s a widespread belief across white supremacist movements that non-white people are genetically inferior to whites. Trump himself constantly refers to his own “great genes,” as if white racial superiority were a simple fact. As he told rightwing talk-show host Hugh Hewitt:

“We’ve got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”

The hosts we listened to yesterday echoed that language repeatedly albeit in a bit more subtle code than the use of the word “genes.”

As did JD Vance when he went to Germany to support the neo-Nazi-aligned Alternative For Germany (AfD) party there, condemning Germany’s laws against open Nazi symbolism and language and their condemnation of Musk’s Nazi salutes and white supremacist rhetoric:

“Speaking up and expressing opinions isn’t election interference, even when people express views outside your own country and even when those people are very influential. and trust me, I say this with all humor. If American democracy can survive ten years of Greta Thunberg scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk.

“But what German democracy—what no democracy, American, German or European—will survive is telling millions of voters that their thoughts and concerns [about whiteness in Europe], their aspirations, their pleas for relief, are invalid, or unworthy of even being considered. Democracy rests on the sacred principle that the voice of the people matters. there’s no room for firewalls.”

When Putin bombed the crap out of Syria to protect that nation’s dictator (who allowed Russia to use his deepwater ports) against a popular uprising, millions of brown-skinned Muslim refugees fled north into Europe.

Germany took in a million, and most other European countries took in hundreds of thousands as a humanitarian gesture. All those brown non-Christians, at first welcomed, have since become the rallying cry for Europe’s right, arguing that Europe was a white continent and must stay that way for its “civilization” to survive.

From Sweden to France to Germany to Hungary (where Orbán campaigned successfully for prime minister on the slogan of “build the wall” to keep them out), that wave of immigration has led directly to the rise of powerful, racist, rightwing movements across the continent.

Similarly, here in America there’s been a recent change in our racial composition. The 1924 Johnson-Reed Act used the census of 1890—one that preceded most all early 20th century non-white immigration, when America was nearly entirely white (except for “separate but equal” Blacks and Native Americans)—to set specific racial quotas for legal immigration, explicitly to ensure America would stay overwhelmingly majority-white.

In 1965, President Johnson and a mixed bag of northern Democrats and southern Republicans pushed through the Hart-Cellar Act that ended those quotas; it was followed by an explosion of immigration by Black, Hispanic, and Asian people.

Between then and now the racial composition of America has been so changed that nine states are now majority-minority (Hawaii–20.7% non-Hispanic white; California–32.6% white; New Mexico–35.1% white, Texas–37.8% white; Nevada–42.8% white; Maryland–45.3% white; Georgia–48.0% white; Florida–49.1% white; New Jersey–49.5% white), and the entire US is predicted to go that way within two decades.

This explains Trump’s, Vance’s, and Miller’s near-hysterical efforts to rid America of non-white people while they’re also blocking the entrance of anybody except whites. His opposition to birthright citizenship, which the Supreme Court will soon rule on, ties directly to his desire to denaturalize—strip of American citizenship—as many Black, Hispanic, and Asian people as possible.

Today there are an estimated 140 million non-white people in America, the vast majority first- and second-generation American citizens. Thus, Kristi Noem’s DHS’s official twitter feed calling for 100 million Americans to be deported—necessitating massive denaturalization, all to restore America to a supermajority of white people like in the 1890 census—makes a lot of sense to Republicans. Trump himself said:

“We have criminals that came into our country and they were naturalized maybe through [President Joe] Biden or somebody that didn’t know what they were doing… If I have the power to do it—I’m not sure that I do, but if I do—I would denaturalize, absolutely. We don’t want those people… they shouldn’t be in our country.”

This racist, white supremacist movement has even moved from the White House and Pentagon into our media, as Scott Pelley revealed last week that the new CBS News head, Bari Weiss, was demanding that the protesters against ICE treatment of non-white people be portrayed as more violent than they were and that CBS should report that Renee Good was trying to kill a cop when she was murdered. He told The New York Times:

“Two of the things in the email include, ‘Can we make the protesters look more violent?’ Now, I’m paraphrasing. I don’t have the quote, but that’s what was communicated to me. And the other thing, Renee Good’s car. You need to describe her as driving toward the officer.”

The common thread that runs through all of this is the racism that animated the Confederacy and has repeatedly torn this country apart over the centuries, now officially adopted by the Republican Party in their endorsement of Trump, ICE, detention centers, denaturalization, a freeze on all non-white immigration, and deportations. It’s now amplified by “conservative” media, much like the newspapers in the Confederacy prior to the Civil War.

It wouldn’t be a stretch to claim—as I’m doing here—that the Trump administration is trying to restore the Confederacy and this time have them finally defeat the United States’ democracy to replace it with a nationwide system of white supremacy using Christianity and “crime” as their foils.

As fascism scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat notes, their plan is explicitly for America to become “a White Christian Ethnostate.” Evil and heartless, in other words, as the talk show host so gleefully proclaimed.

The fact that our mainstream media and virtually ever elected Republican across the nation are afraid to explicitly name the racist foundation of so many of these actions, even as the Trump regime trumpets them and strips our history of references to the tribulations or contributions of Native, Black, Asian, and Hispanic people, is a deeply troubling sign that their campaign is succeeding.

So, the next time you see a media outlet whitewashing Trump’s racist behavior and comments, or those of his lickspittles, call them out. Our democracy depends on each us standing up for all of us.