"A Time for Choosing" election speech October 27, 1964.

"You and I are told increasingly we have to choose between a left or right. Well I'd like to suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There's only an up or down - [up] man's old-aged dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order, or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism." Ronald Reagan.

Originally used by Ronald Reagan as a campaign slogan in his 1980 presidential campaign (Let's Make America Great Again), it has since been described as a loaded phrase. Multiple scholars, journalists, and commentators have called the slogan racist, regarding it as dog-whistle politics and coded language.

Ronald Reagan gave the Christian Right rhetorical support during his presidential campaigns and time in office, and he invited evangelical leaders such as Jerry Falwell and James Dobson to the White House, but he was unable to give the movement the legislation on school prayer and abortion that it wanted. The attention that Reagan gave the Christian Right increased the movement’s influence and solidified its ties to the Republican Party, but their lack of substantive legislative gains frustrated evangelical leaders. Christian Right leaders such as Falwell never wavered in their admiration for Reagan, and they supported his defense and fiscal policies, but they also wanted a leader who could deliver on their signature issues. By the end of Reagan’s presidency, the Christian Right had become more vocal in its opposition to abortion, more militant in its politics, and more determined than ever to recapture the country.

Ronald Reagan for President "Let's Make America Great Again" 1980.

Ronald Reagan, Speech to the National Association of Evangelicals (1983).

https://global.oup.com/us/companion.websites/fdscontent/uscompanion/us/static/companion.websites/9780199338863/whittington_updata/ch_11_reagan_remarks_at_the_national_association_of_evangelicals.pdf

A History of Private Schools and Race in the American South.

WHY ARE MAGA SUPPORTS SO DUMB? LET'S LOOK AT THEIR EDUCATION - AND WHERE THEY GOT IT...

The first segregation academies were created by white parents in the late 1950s in response to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education (1954),which required public school boards to eliminate segregation "with all deliberate speed" (Brown II).

At the time, segregation under Jim Crow laws was still widely enforced in the South, where most adult blacks were still disfranchised and excluded from politics.

The Brown ruling did not apply to private schools, so founding new academies gave white parents a way to continue to educate their children separately from blacks. In Virginia, the "massive resistance" campaign led Prince Edward County to close its public schools from 1959 to 1964; the only education in the county was a segregation academy, funded by state "tuition grants."

From 1950 to 1958, the South’s private school enrollment increased by more than 250,000 students; by 1965, nearly one million Southern students attended private schools. "This growth was catalyzed by Southern state legislatures, who enacted as many as 450 laws and resolutions between 1954 and 1964 attempting to block, postpone, limit, or evade the desegregation of public schools, many of which expressly authorized the systematic transfer of public assets and monies to private schools...While none of the new laws specifically mentioned 'race' or racial segregation, each had the effect of obstructing Black students from attending all-White public schools."

The underwriting of private schools undermined public schools. "What is notable is that taxpayer dollars financed these all-white schools at the cost of simultaneously creating poorly funded all-black public-school systems in the South. To put it simply, as the financial drain of taxpayer dollars from whites attending segregation academies decimated school systems educating black children, black communities, students and teachers paid a terribly high price to ensure that whites were educated with other whites," segregation researcher Noliwe Rooks wrote in 2018.

A 1972 report on school desegregation noted that segregation academies could usually be identified by the word "Christian" or "church" in the school's name. The report observed that while individual Protestant churches were often deeply involved in the establishment of segregation academies, Catholic dioceses often indicated that their schools were not meant to be havens from desegregation, which was buttressed by the reputation Catholic schools had in offering free or reduced tuition to children of color in order to afford them a parochial education. Many segregation academies claimed they were established to provide a "Christian education", but the sociologist Jennifer Dyer has argued that such claims were simply a "guise" for the schools' actual objective of allowing parents to avoid enrolling their children in racially integrated public schools.

The Religious Right is flexing its powerful muscles these days; in the last few months alone they have gained the right to prayers at school, forced public funding for religious institutions, and repealed a half-century-old right to choice for women. The tradition of separation of church and state espoused by our founding fathers seems to be in deep jeopardy. How have we arrived at this predicament? One of the most durable myths in recent history is the fiction that the Religious Right galvanized as a political movement in response to the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. Evangelicals, however, considered abortion a Catholic issue throughout the 1970s. Most evangelicals were silent when the Roe decision was handed down, and those who did comment actually applauded the ruling. The real origins of the Religious Right may surprise you. Prof. Randall Balmer, a world-renown authority on the subject explores the American Evangelical movement from the First Great Awakening till their last, and most ominous, reincarnation in the late 70s. Balmer discusses why the nature of their new rise to power should give all of us pause on what could be next.

University of Alabama Historian John Giggie said these kinds of private academies existed before desegregation occurred. He said in the beginning, the academies were either elite preparatory schools or religiously oriented. Their purpose changed during the civil rights movement.

“The segregation academy movement picked up steam and became explicitly about refusing to allow Black and white children to go to school together,” Giggie said.

First, it’s worth noting that the evangelical canopy has always been a broad and unwieldy one. Broad enough to include Anabaptists and Campbellites, Wesleyans and Presbyterians, Pentecostals and Lutherans—we should be leery of speaking of it in monolithic terms. But it does seem that in its most traditional forms, regardless of geography, evangelicals were often those not only skeptically removed from the civil rights movement, but directly opposed to it. There were notable exceptions, of course. And, as noted by historians such as David Swartz and Brantley Gasaway, there has always been a stream within the broader evangelical river that has prioritized social action and justice.

But it does seem self-evident that, in the main, white evangelicals—particularly those in the South—were deeply invested in efforts to either uphold Jim Crow or to try to slow down its dismantling.

A History of Private Schools and Race in the American South.

Private schools may have a long, honorable tradition in America that goes back to colonial times, but that tradition ended—at least in the American South—in the last half of the 20th century when they were used as safe havens for Southern Whites to escape the effects of the impending and ongoing desegregation mandates. This exodus from public schools began in the 1940s, when private school enrollment in the 15 states of the South rose by more than 125,000 students—roughly 43 percent—in response to U.S. Supreme Court decisions outlawing segregation in graduate and professional schools in the South. While the decisions only concerned institutions of higher education, it signaled to watchful Southern leaders that desegregation might soon spread to their public elementary and secondary schools, compelling them to react in ways to defend their way of life.

Private schools in the South were established, expanded, and supported to preserve the Southern tradition of racial segregation in the face of the federal courts’ dismantling of “separate but equal.” White students left public schools in droves to both traditional and newly formed private schools. From 1950 to 1965, private school enrollment grew at unprecedented rates all over the nation, with the South having the largest growth.

By 1958, the South’s private school enrollment had exploded, increasing by more than 250,000 students over an eight-year period, and boasting almost one million students in 1965. This growth was catalyzed by Southern state legislatures, who enacted as many as 450 laws and resolutions between 1954 and 1964 attempting to block, postpone, limit, or evade the desegregation of public schools, many of which expressly authorized the systematic transfer of public assets and monies to private schools. For example, in 1961, Georgia passed a bill to provide tax-funded scholarships and grants for students to attend any non-sectarian private school, doling out roughly $218,000 ($3.6 million in terms of relative income value in 2013) to finance the scholarships of more than 1,500 students in private schools. While none of the new laws specifically mentioned “race” or racial segregation, each had the effect of obstructing Black students from attending all-White public schools.

Eventually these enactments supporting private schools were invalidated by federal courts or abandoned by Southern states that faced likely court challenges because the bills were seen as indirect, covert efforts to evade or disrupt public school desegregation and “significantly encourage and involve the State in private discriminations.” But many still found ways to extract public dollars for private schools.

From the mid-1960s to 1980, as public schools in the Deep South began to slowly desegregate through federal court orders, private school enrollment increased by more than 200,000 students across the region—with about two-thirds of that growth occurring in six states: Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, and South Carolina.

During this time, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) vacillated in its allowance of tax deductions for private schools. In the early 1960s, facing growing backlash from civil rights organizations, the IRS temporarily suspended applications of avowed “segregation academies” for federal tax exemptions, a tax status permitting taxpayers in Southern states to reduce their federal taxable income when contributing to racially exclusionary private schools. But in 1967, it announced tax deductions for contributions to any segregated academy. This led to a Mississippi-based lawsuit against the IRS in 1969 in which federal courts issued a preliminary injunction denying exemption to private schools that were segregated by race. Following this court order, the IRS adopted a non-discrimination policy applying to private schools in 1970, though it took eight years to be implemented.

As the IRS trudged along with implementation of non-discrimination policies and went back-and-forth in a series of proposed administrative procedures and Congressional hearings, private school enrollment in the South continued to grow. What was once the South’s 11 percent share of the nation’s private school enrollment had reached 24 percent in 1980. The 11 Southern states of the old Confederacy enrolled between 675,000 and 750,000 White students in the early 1980s, and it is estimated that 65 to 75 percent of these students attended schools in which 90 percent or more of the student body was White.

Eventually, the IRS instituted its new policies but faced backlash from religious private schools in the South. This fight culminated in a 1983 U.S. Supreme Court case that upheld the application of the IRS ruling to religious schools in a case involving Bob Jones University, a fundamentalist Christian school in South Carolina.

As a result of the new IRS rules and the Bob Jones University case, all private schools in the South began publishing regular statements of non-discrimination in admission, and most began admitting at least a small number of Black students and other students of color. This marked what should have been the end of state-funded segregation in private schools and the beginning of a new era of integration. This was not the case.

Christians are more racist than non-Christians in America, according to research by the American author Robert P Jones. In his book "White Too Long", he suggests that Christians have been complicit in sustaining white supremacy through flawed theology. Expanding on his theme in a Religion Media Centre zoom briefing, he said white mainstream Protestants and Catholics are only marginally less racist than evangelicals and all need to take up “truth telling”. He believes that 2020 is the year of reckoning for US Christian white supremacy and this generation has the opportunity to weed it out of the faith.

https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1324&context=nulr_online

https://southerneducation.org/publications/history-of-private-schools-and-race-in-the-american-south/

https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/evangelical-history/a-conversation-with-four-historians-on-the-response-of-white-evangelicals-to-the-civil-rights-movement/

Eugenicists behind the U.S.’s forced sterilizations during the last century also wanted a border wall.

Mr Trump, A Century Ago, America Built Another Kind of Wall.

The Last Time the US Wanted a Wall, 70,000 People Were Sterilized.

Eugenicists behind the U.S.’s forced sterilizations during the last century also wanted a border wall.

https://truthout.org/articles/the-last-time-the-us-wanted-a-wall-70000-people-were-sterilized/

There was a time when even Ivy League scientists supported racial restrictions at the border.

It was an ugly time. The eugenics mania that swept the country in the late 19th and early 20th centuries led to forced sterilizations and the passage of laws in 27 states designed to limit the numbers of those considered genetically unfit: immigrants, Jews, African-Americans, the mentally ill and those deemed “morally delinquent.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2024/jul/29/abortion-laws-bans-by-state

This video covers the history of eugenics, or “racial hygiene,” in Germany and the United States throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The discussion between Dr. Patricia Heberer Rice (US Holocaust Memorial Museum) and Dr. Lutz Kaelber (University of Vermont) explores several sources that display how eugenic practices paved the way for sterilization, and in the case of Nazi Germany, murder, of those deemed “unfit” to reproduce. Ultimately, Dr. Heberer Rice and Dr. Kaelber expose the racism, antisemitism, and ableism that underpinned the eugenic practices that took place before, during, and after World War II.

It’s no surprise that complacently comfortable white folks conceived and promoted this scheme of biological discrimination. According to eugenicists, if you weren’t of Nordic or Anglo-Saxon heritage, your genes were second rate. Even if you were white, if you happened to be epileptic, mentally ill, illegitimate, unemployed, homeless, a sexually active single woman, an alcoholic, a convicted criminal, or a prostitute—all signs of “feeblemindedness” or “hereditary degeneracy”—you were a threat to the purity of the nation’s gene pool. Eugenicists advocated three ways of dealing with the perceived problem of bad genes: immigration restrictions, the prevention of “unfit” marriages, and involuntary sterilization of “defective” individuals in state care, chiefly mental patients and prison inmates.

In early 1921, an article in Good Housekeeping signaled the coming of a law that makes President Trump’s campaign for immigration restriction seem mild by comparison. (or - signs of things yet to come) “Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend,” it read. “The dead weight of alien accretion stifles national progress.” The author was Calvin Coolidge, about to be sworn in as vice president of the United States. Three years later, the most severe immigration law in American history entered the statute books, shepherded by believers in those “biological laws.”

The anti-immigrant fervor at the heart of current White House policymaking is not a new phenomenon, nor is the xenophobia that has infected the political mainstream. In fact, race-based nativism comes with an exalted pedigree — and that pedigree is something we all should remember as the Trump administration continues its assault on immigrants of specific nationalities.

https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/fact-sheets/Eugenics-and-Scientific-Racism

They started swarming across America’s border, millions of desperate families fleeing poverty or seeking political asylum.

But many people were repelled by their presence. Some warned that the country was facing a “genetic invasion” and that whites were “losing the demographic game.” Another said, “There will no longer be an America for Americans.”

But one leader (Charles Benedict Davenport - 1866 TO 1944) 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.

2 STEPS FORWARD - 3 STEPS BACK?

Donald Trump calls migrants 'animals' during US-Mexico border speech.

The country was gripped by a demographic panic. That fear, along with mounting anxieties about crime and poverty, led to one of the most shameful episodes in American history.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-united-states-independence-day-fear/

The negative approach to eugenics flourished in the United States thanks to the financial support of major philanthropic organizations such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Institution, as well as a pool of wealthy backers that included breakfast cereal tycoon John Kellogg and railroad fortune heiress Mary Harriman. Respected public figures the likes of Teddy Roosevelt and Alexander Graham Bell supported the aims of the American eugenics movement, and courses in the subject were taught at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, Columbia, and other top universities. (Many colleges adopted Charles Davenport’s 1911 textbook "Heredity in Relation to Eugenics," a book filled with inaccurate, oddball opinions about inherited traits within families.)

What’s indisputable about the eugenics movement in this country is that it was driven by racial and class prejudice. At the dawn of the twentieth century, white Protestant Americans feared being overrun by immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, people who traditionally had large families. Groups such as the Race Betterment Foundation and the American Eugenics Society stoked those fears by suggesting that the superior traits of industrious Anglo-Saxons were being undermined by the lazy, degenerate masses showing up on their shores. Charles Davenport articulated the goal of encouraging white Americans to have more children and stemming the invasion of undesirables in his “eugenics creed”.

Davenport’s weird doctrine was worthy of Jack D. Ripper, the mad general in Dr. Strangelove who raved about a communist conspiracy to pollute “our precious bodily fluids.”

https://www.salon.com/2014/03/23/hitlers_favorite_american_biological_fascism_in_the_shadow_of_new_york_city/

At first, Davenport only wished to bar the immigration of people afflicted by specific disorders — epileptics, the “feebleminded” and others of similarly troublesome (to Davenport) disability. But soon he was caught up in a racialist whirlwind initiated by “The Passing of the Great Race,” a book by Madison Grant, the founder of the Bronx Zoo and the era’s most prominent conservationist. A bilious stew of dubious history, bogus anthropology and completely unfounded genetic theory, Grant’s work persuaded Davenport and others that the American bloodstream was threatened not by suspect individuals, but by entire ethnic groups.

Davenport was president of the American Society of Zoologists in 1907 and 1929. In 1910 he founded the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, and he appointed Harry H. Laughlin to direct it.

We like to think that the eugenics movement is far behind us and a campaign only of Nazis. Not so. Rhetoric about immigrants "poisoning our blood" harks back to America's extremely popular eugenics movement of the early 1900s.

By the time eugenic sterilizations were phased out (most of the laws had either been repealed or were no longer being enforced by the 1970s), between forty thousand and seventy thousand Americans had been sterilized against their will. Roughly 40 percent of those sterilizations took place in California, where the eugenics movement had a cadre of rabid supporters, among them the first president of Stanford University and members of the University of California Board of Regents and the State Board of Charities and Corrections.

In addition to lobbying for forced sterilizations and strict immigration laws (such as the highly prejudicial Immigration Act of 1924), the eugenics movement advocated legal restrictions on interracial marriages. “Race mixing” was a perceived threat to the genetic purity of white America. True to form, Charles Davenport did all he could to convince the world that mixed marriages produced inferior offspring. In 1929, he published a book called "Race Crossing in Jamaica," a study of racial mixing and its supposedly negative effects. Now cited as a classic example of scientific racism—the attempt to prove racial superiority through pseudoscientific methods—the book drew numerous unfounded conclusions.

The Nazis based their own sterilization law partly on the sterilization laws passed by a majority of U.S. states, partly on model legislation crafted by American Harry Laughlin. Hitler called The Passing of the Great Race, by American Madison Grant, his "Bible." U.S. immigration restrictions of the time, which prevented many Jews caught in the Nazi scourge from finding refuge in America, were in part an outgrowth of the eugenics movement.

https://truthout.org/articles/the-last-time-the-us-wanted-a-wall-70000-people-were-sterilized/

https://ariarmstrong.com/colorado-eugenics.html

https://nautil.us/how-eugenics-shaped-statistics-238014/

"Most extreme white supremacists ever": Project 2025 contributors have a history of racism.

“One of the things that you see when you read Project 2025 is not just the racist dog whistles, but some ideas that were exactly lifted from some of the most extreme white supremacists ever,” author and historian Michael Harriott told USA Today.

"A Time for Choosing" election speech October 27, 1964.

"You and I are told increasingly we have to choose between a left or right. Well I'd like to suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There's only an up or down - [up] man's old-aged dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order, or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. Ronald Reagan.

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

An analysis from USA Today found that at least five of the manifesto’s contributors have made racist comments..

https://www.salon.com/2024/07/31/most-extreme-ever-project-2025-contributors-have-a-history-of/