The Far Right's White-Extinction Conspiracy Myth

In addition to depicting racial minorities as a physical threat to whites - e.g., Trump repeatedly saying that Hispanics are rapists and criminals - the far right and white supremacist politicians are sending a message, in some cases overtly and in others through dog whistle messaging, that whites in the USA and Europe face extinction and that drastic action is needed to stop the decline of the white race.  This was certainly true of the mass murderer in New Zealand who even cited Trump approvingly.   It was also the message of white supremacists in Charlottesville in 2017 who chanted "you will not replace us." A column in the New York Times looks at this false and dangerous myth being utilized to inflame hatred and to bolster support for Republican candidates.  Ironically, outside of the Old South where whiteness gave status to those deemed "poor white trash," this myth plays best in regions with few minorities and, of course, among white Christofascists who almost by definition are anti-minority. Here are column excerpts:

“The Great Replacement” is a racist and misogynistic conspiracy theory that holds that white people face existential decline, even extinction, because of rising immigration in the West and falling birthrates among white women (caused, of course, by feminism).

That’s pretty much the whole argument; as a bit of rhetoric, the theory is about as deep as the one pushed by flat-earthers, though without that group’s scientific rigor. White people are not going extinct. As a group, they are only maybe, possibly, becoming a smaller share of the population in the United States and Europe — but how much smaller is a wide-open question among demographers, because the future is unknowable and demography is an imprecise science.

But what “The Great Replacement” lacks in any factual basis it makes up for in digital branding appeal. The white-extinction theory plays well online. It has found its greatest purchase among a certain type of basement-dwelling incel edgelord, to whom it offers both an explanation for self-pitying personal circumstance and a set of convenient antagonists (roughly, the blame falls on race-betraying, sexually empowered women; immigrants; and the Jews said to control the whole system).

The theory has also found a foothold in more mainstream political circles. Donald Trump has flirted with Twitter users who espouse white-extinction theory, Tucker Carlson caresses it lovingly every now and then, and Steve King grabs it by the baby.

For white supremacists, the new term {Great Replacement] offers several branding advantages. First, it sounds kinda smart. The phrase was coined in 2012, as “le grand remplacement,” by the French writer Renaud Camus, giving the whole movement a patina of ivory tower intellectualism. “Replacement” is also more polite than “genocide,” which fits with a long-term effort among white supremacists to craft a cleaner-cut image for themselves. . . 

[W]hen a man killed 50 people in a mass shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand, last week, he called his loopy manifesto “The Great Replacement.”

“The attacker was structuring his manifesto not only to speak to audiences but to algorithms,” said Joan Donovan, director of the Technology and Social Change Research Project at Harvard. “‘The Great Replacement’ is a ‘data void,’ in the sense that it would be very easy to capture that space on the front page of Google.”

Research shows that when you present white people with facts that counter the white-extinction theory, they become less alarmed and anxious about demographic change. Racial categories are blurry, and there’s a big debate among demographers about how one of the fastest-growing racial groups — people of mixed-race who have one white parent — will identify in the future. It could be that they will not be thought of as “white.” It could also be that they will marry white people, have mostly white children, and generally become “absorbed” into mainstream white culture, which is what has happened with previous generations of immigrants who were not considered white (like Eastern and Southern Europeans). Under the most inclusive definitions of whiteness, America could remain a white-majority society indefinitely. [W]hite people are still by far the wealthiest Americans. The net worth of the median black American family is only around fifteen percent of that of the median white American family. While most other groups experienced a net decrease in wealth in the six years after the Great Recession, “white families' net worth was essentially unchanged,” according to government surveys. Whites are also less likely than people of other races to live in poverty, and they are more likely to be among the superrich. Just about every American chief executive, billionaire and large political donor is a white person. Sure, white political overrepresentation is likely to fall. But not quickly, and not drastically. According to one projection, in the 2036 election, 59 percent of voters will be white.

The Great Replacement is a lie. The country is becoming more diverse, but white people are not losing their grip on America, nor on the world, not by a long shot.

Study: Trump Voters Driven by Fear of Losing Status

Photo credit: Damon Winter/The New York Times.        

Personally, I never bought into the supposed explanation for working class whites moving to support Trump due to their "economic anxiety."  First, the economy had improved remarkably since the Great Recession, real estate prices had finally begun to rebound, and America enjoyed respect across most of the globe (travel abroad now, and you find yourself striving to explain that you were NOT a Trump voter).  Instead, I always believed that the real motivation was reaction to a perceived loss of white privilege or, stated another way, racism against minorities, particularly blacks and Hispanics.  Add to this the manufactured myth of Christian persecution disseminated by Christian "family values" organizations with roots tracing back to proponents of segregation and the fig leaf of economic anxiety as a primary motivating factor falls completely apart. Now, a new study further debunks the economic anxiety meme pushed by lazy and irresponsible journalist reluctant to call out the bigotry of Trump's base.   The New York Times looks at the study findings which are more or less an indictment of white, Christian, male voters in particular.  Here are highlights:

Ever since Donald J. Trump began his improbable political rise, many pundits have credited his appeal among white, Christian and male voters to “economic anxiety.” Hobbled by unemployment and locked out of the recovery, those voters turned out in force to send Mr. Trump, and a message, to Washington.

Or so that narrative goes.

A study published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences questions that explanation, the latest to suggest that Trump voters weren’t driven by anger over the past, but rather fear of what may come. White, Christian and male voters, the study suggests, turned to Mr. Trump because they felt their status was at risk.

“It’s much more of a symbolic threat that people feel,’’ said Diana C. Mutz, the author of the study and a political science and communications professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where she directs the Institute for the Study of Citizens and Politics. “It’s not a threat to their own economic well-being; it’s a threat to their group’s dominance in our country over all.”

The study is not the first to cast doubt on the prevailing economic anxiety theory. Last year, a Public Religion Research Institute survey of more than 3,000 people also found that Mr. Trump’s appeal could better be explained by a fear of cultural displacement.

In her study, Dr. Mutz sought to answer two questions: Is there evidence to support the economic anxiety argument, and did the fear of losing social dominance drive some voters to Mr. Trump? . . . . Dr. Mutz’s statistical analysis focused on those who bucked the trend, switching their support to the Republican candidate, Mr. Trump, in 2016.

Even before conducting her analysis, Dr. Mutz noted two reasons for skepticism of the economic anxiety, or “left behind,” theory. First, the economy was improving before the 2016 presidential campaign. Second, while research has suggested that voters are swayed by the economy, there is little evidence that their own financial situation similarly influences their choices at the ballot box.

The analysis offered even more reason for doubt.

Losing a job or income between 2012 and 2016 did not make a person any more likely to support Mr. Trump, Dr. Mutz found. Neither did the mere perception that one’s financial situation had worsened. A person’s opinion on how trade affected personal finances had little bearing on political preferences. Neither did unemployment or the density of manufacturing jobs in one’s area.

“It wasn’t people in those areas that were switching, those folks were already voting Republican,” Dr. Mutz said. . . . It showed that anxieties about retirement, education and medical bills also had little impact on whether a person supported Mr. Trump.

While economic anxiety did not explain Mr. Trump’s appeal, Dr. Mutz found reason instead to credit those whose thinking changed in ways that reflected a growing sense of racial or global threat. . . . the voters, in a defensive crouch, found themselves closer to Mr. Trump. . . . the findings revealed a fear that American global dominance was in danger, a belief that benefited Mr. Trump and the Republican Party.

“The shift toward an antitrade stance was a particularly effective strategy for capitalizing on a public experiencing status threat due to race as well as globalization,” Dr. Mutz wrote in the study.

Her survey also assessed “social dominance orientation,” a common psychological measure of a person’s belief in hierarchy as necessary and inherent to a society. People who exhibited a growing belief in such group dominance were also more likely to move toward Mr. Trump, Dr. Mutz found, reflecting their hope that the status quo be protected.

“It used to be a pretty good deal to be a white, Christian male in America, but things have changed and I think they do feel threatened,” Dr. Mutz said.

The other surveys supported the cultural anxiety explanation, too.

For example, Trump support was linked to a belief that high-status groups, such as whites, Christians or men, faced more discrimination than low-status groups, like minorities, Muslims or women . . .

If wrong, the prevailing economic theory lends unfounded virtue to his victory, crediting it to the disaffected masses, Dr. Mutz argues. More important, she said, it would teach the wrong lesson to elected officials, who often look to voting patterns in enacting new policy.

Once again, I ask my "friends" who voted for T rump to look at themselves in the mirror and admit what really motivated their vote.  Given the GOP/Trump tax bill, we know that references to supporting "fiscal conservatism" are complete bullshit.  Sorry, to be blunt, but it's time to be honest about people's motivations.

The Dangerous Rise Of Christian Nationalism

Trump minion Sebastian Gorka applauds as he campaigns for Republican Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore

In numerous posts I have noted the growing overlap between white supremacists and Christofascists.  True, the link has long been visible to anyone who has regularly followed "family values" organizations who claim to be Christian for any period of time.  Be it Family Research Council and its president, Tony Perkins, with well documented ties to white supremacist groups, or The Family Foundation based it Richmond which traces much of its linage back to segregationists who supported "Massive Resistance" and the closure of all public schools, beneath the surface a strong level of racism has been present.  Enter the Trump?pence campaign and its open call for racism and bigotry and what had once remained under the surface has flowed to the surface.  Worse yet, evangelical Christians are now openly aligning themselves with white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and white nationalist.  The result is a dangerous form of Christian nationalism that excludes more Americans than it accepts as legitimate citizens.   A piece in Huffington Post looks at this dangerous development.  Another piece in the Charlotte Observe looks at Franklin Graham who is openly embracing this toxic ideology.  First these highlights from Huffington Post:

Many have believed the accusations against Roy Moore of sexual assault and harassment against teen girls to be massively hypocritical since for years he’s presented himself as a hardcore evangelical man of faith, and he has a loyal white Christian evangelical following.

But what if Moore’s alleged actions actually meld with a religious belief among some evangelicals, even if the adherents won’t outright admit it?

Moore in fact represents an extremist wing of an already theocratic-leaning base of the GOP that believes all women must be subservient and submit ― as Mike Huckabee, who hasn’t pulled his full-throated endorsement of Moore, infamously once said of women with regard to their husbands, expressing his own “Handmaid’s Tale” dream come true ―  and that would no doubt include young women such as teen girls.

And since the advent of Donald Trump, this more extreme group of evengelicals has cleaved away from others and joined the alt-right and white nationalists, led by former Trump White House advisor Steve Bannon ― who is a front line warrior for Moore’s election campaign ― and which include white supremacists and racists like those we saw in Charlottesville. 

Jack Jenkins, senior religion reporter at Think Progress, has been charting the growth in the Trump era of Christian nationalism ―the melding of some evangelicals and their beliefs with nationalistic movements and ideologies ― in several excellent and important articles. He, too, puts Roy Moore at the nexis of the white nationalist movement and the extremist evangelical movement. 

As someone who has covered the Family Research Council’s annual Values Voters Summit (VVS) for years, I, along with other observers, saw a marked difference in the speakers and in the crowd this past October, . . . . Some long-time leaders like those from the Southern Baptist Convention ― whose Russell Moore is a Never Trumper ― were not there, along with their followers. They were replaced by Steve Bannon, Sebastian Gorka and other white nationalists and their followers who never had an interest in VVS and are far from what anyone would think of as devout Christians.

“White Nationalism and Christian Right Unite at Values Voter Summit,” was the headline of Adele Stan’s piece on Bill Moyers.com last month.

It’s no secret that the alt-right and white supremacists like those we saw in Charlottesville aren’t just about white supremacy; they’re about male supremacy as well, as we saw in their brutal, misogynistic attacks on Heather Heyer after her murder by a white supremacist. Let’s not forget last year’s headlines on Breitbart ― then and once again led by Steve Bannon ― from “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive And Crazy” to “Would You Rather Have Your Child Have Feminism or Cancer?”

The Moore evangelical defenders, and the politicians who pander to them, mostly claim that they do not believe the allegations from nine women to be true, and that the charges are part of some wide-ranging political hit job. Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas said the allegations were all concocted to destroy Bannon.

But Alabama GOP governor Kay Ivey actually admitted she has reason to believe the allegations but also believes it’s still important to elect a Republican and will vote for Moore. This no doubt reflects the belief of many Alabama voters who continue to support Moore in polls, and many evangelicals and white nationalists across the country who still support Moore ― and still support Donald Trump, who of course is an accused sexual assaulter as well. 

It’s becoming clear that, for many evangelicals and many in the alt-right and white nationalist movements, sexual assault against women and girls is not only not a deal-breaker for a candidate but is also perfectly acceptable, whether they want to admit this or not. The uniting of white nationalists and the religious right, and the rise of Christian nationalism, is premised not only on the false idea that people of color, LGBTQ people and other minorities are exerting too much control, but also very much so on the belief that women ― coming forward now and speaking out about sexual assault and demanding equality ― must be put in their place. 

The piece in the Charlotte Observer links Franklin Graham - who is someone in the Christian Right only because of his famous father - to this toxic trend.  Here are highlights:

Franklin Graham came under fire Friday when he took to Twitter to defend Roy Moore, the GOP’s embattled Alabama U.S. Senate hopeful who in recent weeks has had several women accuse him of sexual misconduct from decades ago when they were teenagers.

In a tweet that has been shared thousands of times, Graham slammed Moore’s critics and claimed some of Moore’s biggest detractors in Washington have done “much worse” things.

The Charlotte faith leader’s defense of Moore was met with criticism by many who saw the tweet as dismissive of the seriousness of child molestation. People wondered why Graham hadn’t alerted authorities if he is aware of Congress members who’ve done worse than what Moore is accused of.

“A reminder that Moore has been accused of sexually molesting a 14 year old girl and sexually assaulting a 16 year old girl,” CNN anchor Jake Tapper responded on Twitter. “Who’s guilty of ‘doing much worse than’ that, Reverend? Seriously, this is a matter for law enforcement.”

“You literally just defended sexual contact with minors,” Rick Wilson, a Republican political strategist, tweeted. “You're a brand, not a pastor.”  “You know you've gotten off mission when you’re defending allegations of sexual assault and molestation for the sake of a culture war,” writer David Roark responded.

A coalition of religious leaders in Alabama issued a letter in support of Moore and condemning the media for reporting the story, CBS News reported.

"We stand with Judge Roy Moore, a man of integrity who has never wavered from his valiant defense of the unborn, the Ten Commandments, and the Constitution. We are confident the voters of Alabama will not be fooled by suspiciously timed accusations without evidence and will reject the politics of personal destruction led by the Washington Post," the letter stated, referencing The Washington Post story that interviewed Moore’s initial accusers.

Meanwhile, other religious leaders were in Alabama on Saturday to oppose Moore’s run for congress.  The Rev. William Barber, former North Carolina NAACP leader, took aim at Moore’s values as a Christian, AL.com reported. “True evangelicalism is not what you say, but what you do and how you challenge the systems of the world,” Barber said.

Animus Towards Others - The Real Motivation of Trump's Base

Before the results from the elections on November 7, 2017, came in, Politico ran a piece that looked at Trump voters in southwest Pennsylvania and their continued allegiance to Trump despite the fact that Trump has to date delivered little if anything that is substantively making their lives better.  After some analysis, the piece gets down to what really continues to bind these voters to Trump: he displays animus towards the same people and ethnic groups that they despise.   The problem is, however, as Ed Gillespie discovered, on Tuesday, is that the animus that motivates Trump's base alienates a majority of voters.  A piece in Bear Drift, a conservative/GOP blog in Virginia looks at this other reality and the bind it will put on the GOP going forward.  First, here are excerpts from the Politico piece:

[P]olling continues to show that—in spite of unprecedented unpopularity—nearly all people who voted for Trump would do it again. But as I compared this year’s answers to last year’s responses it seemed clear that the basis of people’s support had morphed. Johnstown voters do not intend to hold the president accountable for the nonnegotiable pledges he made to them. It’s not that the people who made Trump president have generously moved the goalposts for him. It’s that they have eliminated the goalposts altogether.

This reality ought to get the attention of anyone who thinks they will win in 2018 or 2020 by running against Trump’s record. His supporters here, it turns out, are energized by his bombast and his animus more than any actual accomplishments. For them, it’s evidently not what he’s doing so much as it is the people he’s fighting. Trump is simply and unceasingly angry on their behalf, battling the people who vex them the worst—“obstructionist” Democrats, uncooperative establishment Republicans, the media, Black Lives Matter protesters and NFL players (boy oh boy do they hate kneeling NFL players) whom they see as ungrateful, disrespectful millionaires.  And they love him for this.

Del Signore said he’s been following politics far more than before because of Trump. Trump, he said, is just “more interesting.” So now he likes watching the news. “Ninety-nine percent of the time I watch Fox,” he said. “Sometimes I’ll be sitting there listening to all this Fox stuff, and I’ll say, ‘Maybe they aren’t right, maybe I’ll flip to CNN’—but every time I’ve found that Fox has been correct, and CNN is definitely fake news.”

There are some positives around here. Corsa Coal’s Acosta mine in neighboring Somerset County opened in June. So did Robindale Energy’s new Maple Springs mine. Rosebud Mining reportedly is working to reopen its facility in Cresson, but a company spokesman wouldn’t comment on the status of the project. The increased activity is largely the result of spiking Chinese demand. But even with potentially several hundred new jobs, the long-term outlook for coal is grim. An industry forecast last month from the BMI Mining Report projected coal production to grow by 6 percent and 2 percent this year and next year, respectively, but also noted: This “does not reflect an expectation for President Donald Trump to revive the sector and our longer-term view out to 2021 remains decidedly downbeat.”

But even this optimistic stance highlights some of the deep-seated troubles here. “Right now, if I could find 150 people, I’d put them to work,” Polacek said. He needs machinists. He needs welders. “But it’s hard to find people,” he said—people with the requisite skills, people who can pass a drug test.

“We just don’t have the workforce,” said Liston, the city manager. “If they are employable, and have a skill set, basically they already moved out of the area.”

Some of the later-in-life blue-collar workers who are still here can be loath to learn new trades. “We’ve heard when working with some of the miners that they are reluctant because they’re very accustomed to the mining industry,” said Linda Thomson, the president of JARI, a nonprofit economic development agency in Johnstown that provides precisely the kind of retraining, supported by a combination of private, state and federal funding, that could prepare somebody for a job in Polacek’s plant. “They really do want to go back into the mines. So we’ve seen resistance to some retraining.”

Johnstown and surrounding Cambria County, whiter, poorer and less educated than America overall, was famished for the message Trump delivered in person at War Memorial Arena last October. “Your government betrayed you, and I’m going to make it right,” he told them. . . . . It was what they so badly wanted to hear. On November 8, 2016, in Cambria County, Trump trounced Hillary Clinton by nearly 38 points.

By last week, though, John George told me that despite what they might have said, people here didn’t really believe Trump would make good on all his promises. “Deep down inside,” he said, “I don’t think anybody thought the steel mills were going to come back.”

Last week, he reported hearing for the past year at work, at Gautier Steel, exactly what I had been hearing in my conversations around town—a remarkable, undeniable, ongoing vehemence of support. . . . . So many people in so many other areas of the country watch with dismay and existential alarm Trump’s Twitter hijinks, his petty feuds, his penchant for butting into areas where the president has no explicit, policy-relevant role. All of that only animates his supporters here. For them, Trump is their megaphone. He is the scriptwriter. He is a singularly effective, intuitive creator of a limitless loop of grievance and discontent that keeps them in absolute lockstep.

More than anything, what seemed to upset the people I spoke with was the National Football League players who have knelt during the national anthem to protest police brutality and racial inequality.

“You’re not a fan of equality?” I asked.   “For people who deserve it and earn it,” he said. . . . . “Like NFL players?” I said. . . . . “Well,” Del Signore responded, “I hate to say what the majority of them are …” He stopped himself short of what I thought he was about to say. 

The NFL?  “Niggers for life,” Schilling said. “For life,” McCabe added.

Given this mind set, it is little wonder that new, forward thinking businesses have little desire to locate in Southwestern Pennsylvania.  That mindset is not limited to that region of Pennsylvania.  It is alive and well in Southwest Virginia.  The problem is that what animates the rural racist voters increasingly repels the majority of voters in the rest of Virginia.  Here are highlights from the Bearing Drift piece:

First, the Democrats did not win the election; the Republicans lost it.  As the Republican standard-bearer at the head of the ticket, Ed Gillespie committed three fatal errors.

·        He invited Trump to campaign for him, the President with the lowest approval rating in modern history after only ten months in office.  Trump’s low approval rating is not so much a result of his obnoxious personality, bullying, and lying, but because he has failed to deliver on any campaign promises, from building a southern border wall to repealing and replacing ObamaCare to returning manufacturing jobs to the U.S. from overseas. Ed bought into that failure when he invited Trump to appear with him at campaign rallies. By my observation, Gillespie started to decline in the polls after Trump came to Virginia to campaign for him.

·        Gillespie tried the old fear tactic of blaming illegal immigrant gang violence like MS-13 on “sanctuary city” Democratic politics.  The problem is that there are no sanctuary cities in Virginia.  A sanctuary city is one that has passed local laws that counter-act Federal laws on illegal immigrants, such as refusing ICE requests to detain illegals arrested for crimes.  A sanctuary city is not defined simply by the presence of immigrants, legal or illegal.

·        Gillespie bought into the failed Republican promise to repeal and replace ObamaCare.  Millions of Americans have entitlement benefits under the Affordable Health Care Act and, for all its faults, the Republicans have failed to propose an alternative entitlement. And once the government institutes an entitlement program, you cannot take it away without losing elections. Social Security is a case in point. It was launched in 1934 as a safety net for elderly poor.  Today it is a Federal pension program for the middle class.

“God, guns, and guts” plays well in the rural southside and southwest, but economic growth, traffic relief, and good public education is what excites voters in the voter-rich areas.  Cutting taxes for transportation improvements and diverting public school money to Christian academy school vouchers doesn’t get you votes there.

Third, the Republicans continue to send contradictory messages. Individual liberty and personal freedom are not enhanced by government restrictions on issues ranging from hunting on Sundays to having an abortion, the latter having been the law of the land for almost 50 years and continuing to be supported as such by the most conservative Supreme Court since the Great Depression.

Virginia is not so much turning blue as it is becoming anti-red. And that, along with Donald Trump in the White House, is why we had a record voter turn-out Tuesday despite awful weather conditions.

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Will the GOP learn that it needs to abandon the Trump base in many states if it hopes to win elections going forward?  I doubt it.  The Christofascists and white supremacists are now too entrenched in the party grassroots to be defied. 

GOP Voter Suppression Laws May Have Won Wisconsin for Trump

With their aging white, heterosexual, conservative Christian voter base literally dying off, Republican efforts around the country have shifted increasingly towards disenfranchising voters who they believe will vote against their agenda of tax cuts for the wealthy, special rights for Christofascists, emboldening white supremacists, and taking from the poor to give to the rich.  This effort takes many forms, but a favored method is to pass so-called voter ID laws under the guise of fighting non-existent voter fraud.  Other efforts include wrongfully purging voters from voter records and here in Virginia making it difficult for convicted felons who have served their time to regain their voting rights.  Hand in hand with this, of curse, is the disproportionate prosecution of minorities under Virginia's often very low threshold felony laws.  Now, a study suggests that these efforts bore fruit last year when Wisconsin's efforts to disenfranchise voters may have thrown Wisconsin to Trump.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at this disturbing situation which Republicans will no doubt seek to replicate in other states (Mother Jones also has coverage here).  Here are highlights: 

Close elections almost by definition conjure up countless explanations of what might have changed the result. As the fine voting-rights journalist Ari Berman notes, one of the more shocking and significant developments on November 8, 2016, was Donald Trump’s win in Wisconsin, a state that had not gone Republican in a presidential election since the 49-state Reagan landslide of 1984. Explanations were all over the place. . . .

Virtually no one, says Berman, talked about voter suppression, even though Scott Walker’s hyperpolarized state had enacted and fought successfully to preserve one of the nation’s strictest voter ID laws, expected and designed to reduce minority turnout.

Yet there is evidence, both anecdotal and academic, that voter suppression efforts had a lot to do with a sharp reduction in minority and student voting in Wisconsin.

After the election, registered voters in Milwaukee County and Madison’s Dane County were surveyed about why they didn’t cast a ballot. Eleven percent cited the voter ID law and said they didn’t have an acceptable ID; of those, more than half said the law was the “main reason” they didn’t vote. According to the study’s author, University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist Kenneth Mayer, that finding implies that between 12,000 and 23,000 registered voters in Madison and Milwaukee—and as many as 45,000 statewide—were deterred from voting by the ID law. “We have hard evidence there were tens of thousands of people who were unable to vote because of the voter ID law,” he says.

Trump carried the state by less than 23,000 votes.

Wisconsin’s voter ID law was designed to create complex hoops prospective voters had to jump through to secure an ID, particularly for those without driver’s licenses, and also for college students attending schools that did not issue the kind of IDs the law demanded. Berman found abundant evidence that election personnel in the state went beyond the letter of the law to discourage compliance.

And voter ID was just part of the arsenal of voter suppression techniques at the GOP’s disposal:

The voter ID law was one of 33 election changes passed in Wisconsin after Walker took office [in 2011], and it dovetailed with his signature push to dismantle unions, taking away his opponents’ most effective organizing tool. Wisconsin’s Legislature cut early voting from 30 days to 12, reduced early voting hours on nights and weekends, and restricted early voting to one location per county, hampering voters in large urban areas and sprawling rural ones. It also added new residency requirements for voter registration, eliminated staffers who led statewide registration drives, and made it harder to count absentee ballots.

It all added up, and for Republicans, it paid off handsomely in 2016.

One lesson of the Wisconsin saga is that control of the federal courts matters a great deal in vindicating voting rights and political representation; this is, after all, the state where a GOP gerrymander of the legislature was so overtly partisan that the U.S. Supreme Court may find it unconstitutional.

Republican-controlled statehouses have already passed more voting restrictions in 2017 than they did in 2016 and 2015 combined. Taken together, “there’s no doubt that these election changes affected the turnout among young voters, first-time voters, voters of color, and other members of the Obama coalition that overwhelmingly supported Hillary Clinton,” . . .

If you think of voting rights as a wonky “process” issue that’s less important than health care or the environment or avoiding war with North Korea, think again. It’s entirely possible we wouldn’t be dealing with a President Trump at all if voting rights were regarded as a fundamental right of citizenship that should be strongly and universally encouraged.

I only meet one of the GOP's preferred voter base of white, heterosexual, conservative Christians - Like author Anne Rice, I don't call myself Christian anymore given the hideousness that Christianity has taken on under the Christofascists.  What will the GOP try to come up with to disenfranchise people like me?  If Republicans win the Virginia statewide elections next month, expect a new wave of voter disenfranchisement in Virginia. Be very afraid. Get out and vote while you still can.