Trump Speaks at NABJ Conference

Trump Speaks at NABJ Conference.

Trump accused Vice President Harris of not always claiming to be Black.

The 2024 Republican presidential nominee’s accusation came during a discussion with three journalists at the National Association of Black Journalists' convention held in Chicago. Former President Trump also criticized one of the reporter’s questions and proceeded to call her and her employer, ABC News, fake news. Other topics that came up during this face-to-face interview included Sen. JD Vance’s “childless cat ladies” comment, border security, and Mr. Trump’s age and health. The journalists interviewing him were Rachel Scott with ABC News, Kadia Goba with Semafor, and Harris Faulkner with Fox News.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?537472-1/president-trump-speaks-nabj-conference

In 2016 Donald J. Trump won the presidential election with overwhelming Christian evangelical support.

Commentators and pundits have struggled to explain how a president who seems to scorn traditional Christian values—as evident in his rumored affairs, his divorces, and his alleged sexual assaults and harassment—has garnered the devotion of a majority of evangelicals. The American Historian asked four historians of religion and politics for their analysis of evangelicals’ affinity for Trump and of their commitment to the conservative movement more broadly.

If The Robe Fits - Donald's Comments To Black Journalists.

OPERATION: JUST GIVE HIM A "PLATFORM" TO HANG HIMSELF FROM...

Populism is often criticized as an enemy of reliable, secular reason, a quasi-religious violator of rational government and dark political theology as inscrutable and suspect as a religion to which one doesn’t belong. In the U.S., current populism may be seen as a new messianic craze upending rational democratic processes – a view supported by findings that 60 percent of white working-class Americans, Donald Trump’s populist “base,” believe the country needs a leader who’ll “break the rules.”1 The inflammatory nature of his rhetoric against the “deep state” and other “enemies of the people” (immigrants, minorities, news media,) is also seen as signaling radical change or at least significant realignment in American politics. Democracy and reliable (secular) reason on one side of the barricades and populist faith in unreasoned beliefs on the other.

2 Timothy 3:6 - For among them are those who worm their way into homes and captivate the morally weak and spiritually-dwarfed, weighed down by [the burden of their] sins, easily swayed by various impulses.

Evangelicalism and White Politics.

Evangelicalism has been a significant force in American politics since at least the nineteenth century. However, the direction of this political force, as well as the media and scholarly attention it receives, has ebbed and flowed. In recent history, several critical turns and factors have led the overwhelming majority of white evangelicals to move towards the modern Republican party. One factor in this shift was the modern civil rights era and the black freedom struggle. The Brown v. Board Supreme Court decision outlawed the segregation of public schools. In turn, a number of white evangelical communities opened private schools as a way to oppose school desegregation, framing their hostility to Brown v. Board as an expression of religious freedom rather than a defense of racial segregation. Elementary and secondary schools such as Reverend Jerry Falwell’s Lynchburg Christian School and colleges such as Bob Jones University became known as “segregation academies.” In the wake of the passage of the Civil Rights Bill of 1964, the IRS threatened to revoke the tax-exempt status of these segregation academies unless they ceased their discriminatory admissions. This, coupled with President Johnson’s Great Society programs and the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, further altered the terrain of America’s legalized racial hierarchy. In all, school desegregation and busing, the outlawing of legalized racial discrimination and the threat it posed for white evangelical schools, the increased federal dollars for social welfare problems, and the sharp increase in black voters (largely for the Democratic party) changed America’s legalized racial structure. The federal government, white evangelical leaders such as Reverend Jerry Falwell and Paul Weyrich argued, was not only invading local autonomy, but was turning its back against whites and favoring African Americans and Latinos. The world, it seemed, was turning upside down.

Richard Nixon capitalized on this resentment. The 1960 Democratic presidential nomination of Catholic John F. Kennedy and the 1964 Republican nomination and endorsement of Barry Goldwater and his anti-civil rights platform had already intensified white southern evangelical interests in the Republican party. Coupled with anger over America’s changing legal racial structure, the south was prime for the taking. Nixon then employed a “southern strategy,” a campaign which harnessed this umbrage of white evangelicals specifically and whites more broadly who had formerly voted for the Democratic party. In this new world, the keys to political success, argued Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips in 1966, was to bring together the largest number of white ethnic prejudices into one party without fragmenting the existing coalition. “The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South,” Phillips noted, “the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become republicans.” However, Phillips warned, extreme racist language had to be avoided, especially when courting white converts outside the Deep South. “When you are after political converts, start with the less extreme and wait for the extremists to come into line when their alternatives collapse.” Winning Republican converts in the Sun Belt as well as the Midwest, then, required a tempered conservatism. They employed a language of morality and decency, law and order, normalcy, family values, and self-reliance: discourse white evangelicals understood as explicitly evangelical religious values. As the Democratic party came to be identified as the party of big government and minorities of color, white evangelicals began the process of almost exclusively identifying with the modern Republican party.

The political mobilization of white evangelicals—and we are mostly talking about “white” evangelicals when talking about the Religious Right—was decades in the making. About a generation ago, historians assumed that fundamentalists went “underground” after the Scopes trial (1925), but several important reassessments published around the 1990s made clear that this was not the case. Issues pertaining to gender roles and the sexual behavior of women have been potent mobilizing forces for a very long time, for Catholics as well as evangelicals, going back to the birth control movement and other controversies in the first half of the twentieth century. Opposition to sex education in the 1960s was a salient force in politicizing many folks, as well as creating collaborations across Catholic-evangelical divides; by the late 1970s, of course, abortion and homosexuality were highly effective issues that mobilized many Catholics and evangelicals. So opposition to feminism, broadly, has been a force to be reckoned with for decades, culminating in the real success, starting with Reagan’s election, of organizations such as the Concerned Women for America, the Moral Majority, the Christian Coalition, and more. Race, of course, has also been a galvanizing issue in many ways, and historians have analyzed the creation of “segregation academies” after public school systems were forced to racially integrate. But the strongest force mobilizing conservative evangelicals in politics seems to me to be antipathy to feminism, broadly conceived.

One element that is often under-represented in recent scholarship on the Religious Right is the lively and often fractious debate in many Christian denominations on issues including biblical inerrancy, the role of women in the church, and ecumenism through the 1960s and 1970s. These conflicts were part of a larger collection of debates about the role of the church in society (Engel v. Vitale, for example) and concern about adolescent rebellion, the emergence of second-wave feminism, and other developments. In some cases, these conflicts generated schisms that produced more ideologically homogeneous and polarized denominations. Denominational conservatives found common cause with like-minded evangelicals from outside more rigorous denominational traditions.

Racial concerns constituted another critical factor in generating an evangelical public simultaneously more shielded from the mainstream and more adept at generating political momentum. The emergence of private “Christian” schools in the South to counter desegregation ordinances, for example, contributed to the development of a Christian subculture conditioned to view itself as preserving Christian fundamentals from a hostile secular society. Not all evangelicals who joined and shared this emerging subculture did so for racially motivated reasons, but we cannot elide race from the origin story. New adherents helped bring issues ranging from concerns about law and order to abortion and the role of women in society into the movement. This subculture generated its own stable of media, organizational affiliations, and lobbying efforts to both disseminate political views and influence public policy.

While I recognize the significance of groups, institutions, and structures, however, my work as a historian has also led me to conclude that the actions of individuals may exert transformative sway in mobilizing, validating, and energizing movement forces. For example, I would argue that the significance of Jerry Falwell’s come-to-politics moment in 1979, when he declared he had been wrong to abstain from politics and instead jumped in with the both-feet maneuver of creating the Moral Majority, cannot be understated. A trusted leader—a man of God—stamped political activism with his reputational imprimatur. While evangelical politics did not start in 1979, Falwell’s move and the Moral Majority’s unapologetic activism were vital in establishing evangelicals as an enduring political force.

For much of the twentieth century, evangelicals leaned Republican. For example, during the 1950s, as Princeton historian Kevin Kruse has shown, white evangelicals gravitated toward the civil religion of Dwight Eisenhower and the postwar religious revival. During the 1960s, Richard Nixon used Billy Graham to help him win over white evangelicals. But it was not until the late 1970s and 1980s that white conservative evangelicalism became fused with the GOP. The result of this merger is what we call the “Christian” or “Religious” Right today. This political movement was born out of fear that the removal of prayer and Bible reading in schools, the growing diversity following the Immigration Act of 1965 (Hart-Celler Act), the intrusion of government (“big government”) into segregated Christian academies in the South, and the legalization of abortion were undermining America’s uniquely Christian identity. The leaders of the Christian Right believed the best way to “reclaim” or “restore” this identity was by gaining control of all three branches of government. Jimmy Carter, a self-proclaimed “born-again Christian,” was not championing these issues to the degree that many evangelical conservatives wished. As a result, white evangelicals gravitated to Ronald Reagan, a man who seemed to understand evangelical concerns, or was, at the very least, willing to placate evangelicals.

Deconstructing White Evangelical Politics

Where does theology end and culture and tradition begin?

One of the most important questions in American politics and culture is this: Is white Evangelical politics primarily a product of consistent theological conviction or primarily a product of culture, tradition, and history?

I single out white Evangelicals because they are both the most important constituency in Republican politics and increasingly outliers in their political views. If they’re outliers because of consistent theological conviction, then so be it. Their (increasingly) lonely stands become a collective version of Martin Luther’s famous declaration, “Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise.”

But what if the reality is otherwise? What if white Evangelicals are disproportionately flocking to outlier political positions because of a combination of factors that have little to do with theology at all? Instead, what if they’re shaped by far more mundane (though still quite powerful) cultural forces that ultimately have little to do with faith and then misinterpreting the cultural as theological?

Then both the nation and the church have a problem. The church’s problem is quite obvious—it misrepresents the nature and meaning of the Christian faith to the American people (and the world). It misrepresents the nature and meaning of the Christian faith to itself.

The nation’s problem is obvious as well. It’s forced to deal with a community that treats ideas and policies that are both highly debatable and culturally contingent as if they’re matters of fierce religious conviction. It’s one thing to discuss an issue with someone who understands their position is debatable. It’s another thing entirely to engage with a person or community who equates compromise with apostasy.

This isn’t a new debate. I’m an old-school religious conservative. I came of age politically during the era of the Moral Majority. I’ve been hearing sociological and historical critiques of Christian conservatism since college.

I’ve always recognized the flaws in the movement, and my response to the question of whether theology and doctrine were of primary importance to the movement was always the same—for all its flaws, Republican Christian conservatism is mainly driven by deeply rooted, theologically coherent faith convictions and not by the perhaps more deeply rooted “folkways” or customs of a disproportionately white, disproportionately rural, and disproportionately Southern American subculture.

I no longer believe this to be true. I now see that when theology and culture collide—or when theology and partisanship collide—a disturbing number of white Evangelicals will choose culture. But they’ll still believe they’re choosing faith, and that profound misunderstanding is contributing to a dynamic that is tearing this nation apart.

Why have I changed my mind? The answer is quite simple—the theological convictions of Christian conservatism were put to a profound stress test, and the convictions failed. Partisanship prevailed. Populism prevailed. In some ways, the South prevailed.

Let me put it another way. I’m old enough to remember the words and expressed beliefs of even some of the most enthusiastic Trumpist Evangelicals before they supported Trump, and this much I know: If I’d told them in December 2014 that white Evangelicals would shortly vote in overwhelming numbers for a thrice-married man who bragged about grabbing women by their genitals, appeared in a Playboy movie, paid hush money to cover up an affair with a porn star, and was facing multiple corroborated claims of sexual harassment and sexual assault, they’d say that only Democrats were that hypocritical.

Then, if I followed that up by saying that a disproportionate number of that same Evangelical community would shun pre-vaccine mask-wearing and social distancing in the midst of a deadly pandemic that would claim hundreds of thousands of American lives and then disproportionately reject life-saving vaccines, they’d think I was an anti-Christian bigot.

If I capped off my prophecy by noting that white Evangelicals would be far more likely than virtually any other American community to embrace wild election conspiracy theories and then a subset of that community would literally storm the Capitol with prayers on their lips, then their assessment of me would be clinched. They’d think I’d simply lost my mind. But that’s where we are. And don’t think for a minute that those views are the only Evangelical outliers. Here are some others.

On matters of race, for example, the disparities are just staggering. Last year, the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture documented an extraordinary gulf. There’s a 50-point gap between white Evangelicals and black Americans on the question of whether “racism—unequal treatment of whites and blacks—is a very serious threat.” There’s a 30-point gap between white Evangelicals and white non-Evangelicals.

There are similarly giant gaps on questions of police brutality and perceptions of American history. And if you think those gaps are mainly driven by theology, non-white Evangelicals are much closer to secular Americans in their perceptions of race problems in the United States. In addition, non-white Evangelicals are, “twice as likely as White Evangelicals to say that inequality and poverty are a very or extremely serious threat to the country.”

https://www.oah.org/tah/november-5/evangelicalism-and-politics/

https://thedispatch.com/newsletter/frenchpress/deconstructing-white-evangelical/

https://marciapally.com/why-is-populism-persuasive-populism-as-expression-of-religio-cultural-history-u-s-and-evangelicals-as-a-case-study/

EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN.

One leader even thought of a radical way to keep them out.

“Can we build a wall high enough around this country so as to keep out these cheaper races?” he asked. They started swarming across America’s border, millions of desperate families fleeing poverty or seeking political asylum.

https://conspiranon.blogspot.com/2024/07/everything-old-is-new-again.html

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The passing of the great race,, by Madison Grant

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.

“The Passing of the Great Race,” in its original form, was designed by the author to rouse his fellow-Americans to the overwhelming importance of race and to the folly of the “Melting Pot” theory, even at the expense of bitter controversy. This purpose has been accomplished thoroughly, and one of the most far-reaching effects of the doctrines enunciated in this volume and in the discussions that followed its publication was the decision of the Congress of the United States to adopt discriminatory and restrictive measures against the immigration of undesirable races and peoples.

Another of the results has been the publication in America and Europe of a series of books and articles more or less anthropological in character which have sustained or controverted its main theme. The new definition of race and the controlling rôle played by race in all the manifestations of what we call civilization are now generally accepted even by those whose political position depends upon popular favor.

It was to be expected that there would be bitter opposition to those definitions of race which are based on physical and psychical characters that are immutable, rather than upon those derived from language or political allegiance, that are easily altered.

To admit the unchangeable differentiation of race in its modern scientific meaning is to admit inevitably xxixthe existence of superiority in one race and of inferiority in another. Such an admission we can hardly expect from those of inferior races. These inferior races and classes are prompt to recognize in such an admission the very real danger to themselves of being relegated again to their former obscurity and subordinate position in society. The favorite defense of these inferior classes is an unqualified denial of the existence of fixed inherited qualities, either physical or spiritual, which cannot be obliterated or greatly modified by a change of environment. Failing in this, as they must necessarily fail, they point out the presence of mixed or intermediate types, and claim that in these mixtures, or blends as they choose to call them, the higher type tends to predominate. In fact, of course, the exact opposite is the case and it is scarcely necessary to cite the universal distrust, often contempt, that the half-breed between two sharply contrasted races inspires the world over. Belonging physically and spiritually to the lower race, but aspiring to recognition as one of the higher race, the unfortunate mongrel, in addition to a disharmonic physique, often inherits from one parent an unstable brain which is stimulated and at times overexcited by flashes of brilliancy from the other. The result is a total lack of continuity of purpose, an intermittent intellect goaded into spasmodic outbursts of energy. Physical and psychical disharmonies xxxare common among crosses between Indians, negroes and whites, but where the parents are more closely related racially we often obtain individuals occupying the border-land between genius and insanity.

The essential character of all these racial mixtures is a lack of harmony—both physical and mental—in the first few generations. Then, if the strain survives, it is by the slow reversion to one of the parent types—almost inevitably the lower.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/68185/68185-h/68185-h.htm