Saturday Morning Male Beauty

 

Alabama Exemplifies GOP Idiocy and Hypocrisy On Covid

I lived in Mobile, Alabama years ago and while conservative the state seemed to be trying to modernize and embrace science, knowledge and education albeit perhaps not at the pace of other states.  All these years later the state politically has become unrecognizable and the embrace of ignorance and utter disregard for facts and science now defines the state like many other Republican controlled states. With the lowest Covid vaccination rate in the nation, Alabama is seeing surging numbers of Covid cases and deaths Governor Kay Ivey - a dullard in my view who is pictured above - is belatedly bemoaning the fact that the majority of the residents of her state have not been/refused to get vaccinated. Indeed, she lashed out at the unvaccinated and stated that they are fueling the surge of Covid cases and and blamed them for the state's desperate situation.  What she failed to do is blame herself and the GOP controlled state legislature for their actions in aiding and abetting vaccine refusers and blocking business, schools and universities from requiring customers and students from being vaccinated. A false notion of "freedom" and an utter disregard for one's neighbors and family members my play well with the GOP's Christofascist/white supremacist base but it is literally killing people.   An op-ed at AL.com calls out Ivey and the GOP.  Here are excerpts:

An Alabama doctor vented her frustrations on Facebook and the world listened. A hospitalist at Grandview Medical Center, Dr. Brytney Cobia, shared what it’s like to tell desperate patients a vaccine couldn’t help them anymore.

“I hold their hand and tell them that I’m sorry, but it’s too late,” she wrote. And when those patients don’t make it, she tells their loved ones not to make the same mistake — to get vaccinated and get everyone else they can to do the same.

That message has now traveled around the world, read by millions. If only Alabama’s political leaders could speak so forcefully.

Governor Kay Ivey is finally trying. But her actions the last few months haven’t matched her words. The governor had just finished speaking at a Birmingham tech company’s grand opening Thursday, but in the press scrum afterward, the questions were about COVID. “Media, I want you to start reporting the facts,” a frustrated Kay Ivey said.

OK, governor. “The new cases of COVID are because of unvaccinated folks. Almost 100 percent of the new hospitalizations are unvaccinated folks.” Yes, and that includes children who aren’t eligible to get the vaccine, but we’ll get to that in a second. “And the deaths certainly are occurring with unvaccinated folks.” Fact.

“We’ve got to get folks to take the shot.” Ivey was mad, almost quivering, especially when a reporter asked what could be done to get more people to take the vaccine. “I don’t know,” she spat back. “You tell me.”

Ivey’s stern words Thursday said one thing, but her actions have sent a different message.

Two months ago, the Alabama Legislature passed a vaccine passport ban on the last day of its 2021 session. Lawmakers rammed the bill through so fast, not even the bill’s sponsor, state Sen. Arthur Orr, seemed to know what was in it. That bill prohibited schools and universities from requiring students to be vaccinated. That bill forced private businesses to accept customers who have refused to get vaccinated. Ivey signed that bill into law.

Two weeks ago, UAB’s leading infectious disease expert Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo warned that lagging vaccinations rates and rising COVID cases, mostly due to the Delta variant, could push Alabama back to government-mandated mitigation measures.

Ivey lashed out. “No one asked for my input for this story, and the headline is misleading. So, I’ll respond here,” she or someone on her staff wrote on the governor’s Facebook page. “Alabama is OPEN for business. Vaccines are readily available, and I encourage folks to get one. The state of emergency and health orders have expired. We are moving forward.”

Only Alabama wasn’t moving forward. Hardly 24 hours later, the CDC revealed that Alabama had fallen to dead-last among state vaccination rates. 

But Ivey didn’t learn.

A week later, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended students mask-up this fall in schools. But Ivey’s office said the governor wasn’t on board. “Governor Ivey believes students need to be in the classroom without any type of mask requirement,” a spokeswoman said.

When asked the same question Thursday, Ivey seemed less confident. “That’s left up to every school district to make that decision,” said the governor who also sits on the Alabama State Board of Education. That school board spent most of its last meeting debating how to ban critical race theory from schools.

When the Biden administration offered federal help for door-to-door outreach, Ivey’s administration said, no thanks.

“Governor Ivey has no plans to put in a request for government workers to knock on people’s doors here in Alabama,” her spokeswoman told Alabama Political Reporter.

But one thing is clear, almost every state has done better with vaccinations than Alabama and now Mississippi is ahead of us, too.

So what do we do about it? I’ll tell you, governor.

Alabama has to get vaccinated. You have to send them into churches, Rotary clubs and Kiwanis meetings. You have to make them take the message to anyone who will listen — like street preachers the last day before the Rapture.

And if those lawmakers won’t listen, tell them they’re welcome to come back to Montgomery for a special session, instead. If sitting in rows of desks and sharing stale air is fine for Alabama school children, it’s good enough for them, too.

Make them.

And you have to work it, too. No more ribbon cuttings. No more speeches at grand openings. You have to travel this state every day and let people see you — at doctors’ offices, community clinics and neighborhood drug stores. And if you’re really brave, COVID wards at hospitals. I bet Dr. Cobia would show you around.

Tell anyone who will listen. Hold their hands and tell them. It’s not too late.

Will Ivey and the Alabama GOP listen?  Probably not - even with Mississippi (the perennial rival) doing a better job on vaccinations.

Friday Morning Male Beauty

 

Glenn Youngkin Is Too Extreme for Virginia

If one watches Glenn Youngkin's political ads for his gubernatorial campaign they say little about what his policy positions would be if elected.  Rather, they only talk about him being a self made man  - and often make multiple references to "his faith," coded speech aimed at far right evangelicals and the Christofascists at The Family Foundation.  To find out Youngkin's real positions one must attend or see videos of Youngkin when he is speaking to closed audiences packed with far right extremists and Christofascists.  Only then do you discover just how extreme and out of the mainstream he is and how unfit he is to occupy the Executive mansion.  All of this, of course, explains why Youngkin is resisting having debates with Democrat candidate Terry McAuliffe where Youngkin would be forced to explain his positions and his extremism would be revealed.   An op-ed in the Virginian Pilot looks at one video that was obtained that shows Youngkin's extreme position on abortion.  It's a safe bet others exist which if they come to light will show he is anti-gay, anti-women's rights and would seek to disenfranchise many Virginians.  He needs to be soundly defeated in November.  Here are op-ed highlights:

After weeks of dodging questions about his support for Virginians’ reproductive freedom, Glenn Youngkin, the GOP nominee for Virginia governor, confirmed what we already knew: He’s ready to ban abortion, defund Planned Parenthood and send Virginia back in time.

And he’s willing to lie to voters so he can win in November and enact his far-right agenda from the governor’s desk.

At Planned Parenthood Advocates of Virginia, we were already skeptical of Youngkin’s claim to be a moderate. He’s previously said that he’s “unabashedly pro-life,” pledged to “protect the unborn” and has been endorsed by U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt — both supporters of regressive abortion bans in their own states.

But even I was shocked when a video released recently showed Youngkin admitting that he’s deceiving Virginians to get their votes, flip the legislature, and strip us of essential health care.

In the video, Youngkin tells supporters that Gov. Ralph Northam and the governor before Northam — Democratic Party gubernatorial nominee Terry McAuliffe — took Virginia “out of bounds” on abortion, enacting “radical abortion policies that Virginians don’t want.”

That’s just not true. Polling shows that 79% of Virginians support legal access to abortion and believe that the government should not prevent a woman from making her own health care decisions.

The reality is that Youngkin is out of touch with Virginians, and he’s been masquerading as a moderate in the hopes that we won’t notice.

We’ve already seen how this could play out. Just weeks ago, New Hampshire’s self-proclaimed “pro-choice” Republican Gov. Chris Sununu not only approved an abortion ban, but also a medically unnecessary ultrasound requirement similar to the one the Virginia General Assembly finally repealed last summer.

Clearly, we can’t trust that Youngkin won’t pull similar stunts once in office. In fact, he’s preparing to take us back to a time, not long ago, when Virginians faced an obstacle course of delays and restrictions to access abortion care. He wants to go even further, banning abortion before many women know they are pregnant, let alone make plans and secure funds for the procedure. But publicly, he’s going to keep hiding his real agenda, because he knows that Virginians will reject it, as they have again and again.

Virginians must vote as if their right to make decisions about their own body depends on it — because it does. The choice for Virginians is clear. Do we want to elect someone as dangerous as Youngkin, who’ll smile and lie to get your vote, while plotting to strip you of your rights?

Or would we rather have someone who shares our values and will continue moving Virginia forward?

Vote McAuliffe and a straight Democrat ticket in November and send Youngkin and his fellow GOP extremists down to defeat. Having followed The Family Foundation and GOP candidates like Youngkin for decades, no one is more willing to lie in order to dupe voters.   

Thursday Morning Male Beauty

 

Rural America Needs Immigrants

Rural areas of the country are seeing declines in population and economic stagnation - Southwest Virginia is a prime example.  In addition to a shrinking population as younger residents move to cities and suburban areas for better job prospects, the populations are aging as well, leaving a shrinking work force and a shrinking tax base.  As a guest column in The Atlantic argues there is a solution that could help the situation: immigrants.  For this solution to work, of course, Republicans need to stop demonizing immigrants and many rural residents need to put aside their bigotry and closed mindedness.  As this blog has often argued, rural residents are often their own worse enemies as they cling to reactionary form of extreme Christianity and basically tell non-white, non-heterosexual, and non-right wing individuals and businesses that they are not welcomed or create a social atmosphere those they most need to revitalize their communities find repellant.  Here are column highlights:

KNOXVILLE, Iowa — Rural America has a growth problem. Business and industry desperately need workers, but the domestic labor pool is shallow, and the nation’s birthrate is slowing.

There’s no better place to help expand our economy than in rural communities like ours. We need smart public policy for sustained growth — and immigration reform would be a big part of it.

The Iowa Business Council, a group made up of representatives of the largest corporations in the state, have been asking for immigration reform for years to help solve our labor woes.

Plenty of research shows that flexible visa programs run federally or by the states could address this problem quickly.

Help-wanted signs are up all around town. There are help-wanted ads playing on our local radio station, in our local newspapers and all over the internet. Listen to your favorite national podcast here and you just might hear a targeted help-wanted ad for our ZIP code. Our county, Marion, is blessed with a strong agricultural and manufacturing base and is doing relatively well. The median household income in the county is $61,038, just a notch below the state median of $62,843. About 8 percent of us live in poverty.

Dave Swenson, an economist at Iowa State University, agrees that the reason we have so many jobs open is that we don’t have enough people to fill them.

We simply don’t have enough people in our county or in the state to fill the open positions. Raising wages might bring some of those unemployed individuals back to work, but we still won’t have enough workers.

It is a conservative county (in 2020, Donald Trump won it with 66 percent of the vote). So if you ask around town why there are so many job openings, the answer is pretty much always the same — welfare is too easy to get, especially under President Biden, and people don’t want to work. They are lazy, on the dole.

This attitude is wrong. People want to work. Rejecting unemployment aid is, as Mr. Swenson called it, “legislative pain,” with a negative economic impact for the individuals and the states.

Sure, many immigrants will flock to our urban areas, but many others come from rural, agrarian backgrounds. They are familiar with many aspects of the work in rural areas: farming, food production and manufacturing.

We also lack affordable housing here for workers. Real estate is at a premium, and real estate agents are begging for inventory to sell. Mr. Biden has earmarked $213 billion for housing in his American Jobs Plan. All new housing developments in rural America probably need to be public-private partnerships. Because of the market, most builders are drawn more strongly to the rapidly growing Des Moines metropolitan area. Why build five houses in our rural communities when you can build 50 or more in the metro?

We do have local builders who prefer to work in town, but they can’t find enough labor. One local builder is booked a year out. The labor shortage is so serious here that it is difficult not only to find someone to build a house but also to find a plumber, a roofer or a handyman.

More immigrants will also increase our tax base and help stabilize Social Security. The immigrant population is already growing here, and they are successfully contributing.

Since Republicans have so demonized immigrants during the Trump administration, Democrats need to embrace the political leadership that empowers rural communities to break out of our stagnation and fuel growth in our communities.

Virginia has ranked as the best state for business for three years in a row - in part because both Governor Northam and his predecessor, Terry McAuliffe (who is running for governor again) have pursued a welcoming to all approach.  If you want talent and workers, you cannot say "not welcomed" to those who are not white, heterosexual right wing Christians and then whine about your economic plight.

More Wednesday Male Beauty

 

Pelosi Correctly Bars Trump Loyalists From Jan. 6 Inquiry Committee

After traveling to Trump National Golf Club Bedminster in New Jersey to engage in political fellatio of Donald Trump. a/k/a Der Trumpenfuhrer, House minority leader Kevin McCarthy - who is clearly the face of shameless political prostitutes - named five House Republicans to the House select committee to investigate the January 6, 2021, insurrection and assault on the U.S. Capitol.  Two, Jim Banks of Indiana and Jim Jordan of Ohio, have been ardent Trump supporters and by their statements and actions before, during and after the January 6, 2021, insurrection clearly have an agenda of sabotaging the commission hearings and may well yet be found to have ties to the insurrectionists.  Speaker Nancy Pelosi rejected the two which caused McCarthy to throw a lie-filled temper tantrum and say that no Republicans would participate.  McCarthy's statement deliberately overlooked Liz Cheney - already appointed by Pelosi - who not only will participate but also had some very strong words for McCarthy's disingenuous and obstructionist conduct (her comments can be found here).  The sad reality is that McCarthy and Republicans prostituting themselves to Trump do NOT want a fair and full investigation because such an investigation would likely (i) confirm that Trump incited the insurrection, and (ii) identify other Republicans who collaborated in the attack on the Capitol. These individuals simply do not want the American public to know the truth because it would damage both Trump and others within the GOP who aided and abetted sedition.  A piece in the New York Times looks at McCarthy's disingenuous theatrics.  Here are excerpts:

Speaker Nancy Pelosi moved on Wednesday to bar two of former President Donald J. Trump’s most vociferous Republican defenders in Congress from joining a select committee to investigate the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, saying their conduct suggested they could not be trusted to participate.

In an unusual move, Ms. Pelosi announced that she was rejecting Representatives Jim Banks of Indiana and Jim Jordan of Ohio, both of whom amplified Mr. Trump’s false claims of election fraud, joined their party’s efforts to challenge President Biden’s victory on Jan. 6 and have opposed efforts to investigate the assault on the Capitol by Trump supporters. She agreed to seat the other three Republicans who had been chosen for the panel.

But Ms. Pelosi said she could not allow the pair to take part, based on their actions around the riot and comments they had made undercutting the investigation. Mr. Banks, who has equated the deadly attack to unrest during the racial justice protests last summer, said the Jan. 6 inquiry was created to “malign conservatives and to justify the left’s authoritarian agenda.” Mr. Jordan, one of the biggest cheerleaders of Mr. Trump’s attempt to undermine the legitimacy of the 2020 election, pressed Mr. Trump’s false claims of election fraud on the House floor as protesters breached the Capitol, and has called the select committee “impeachment Round 3.”

The speaker’s decision drew an angry response from Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader, who announced that Republicans would boycott the panel altogether.

Many Democrats no longer wish to work with or hear from Republicans who helped spread Mr. Trump’s lie of a stolen election, especially those who led the effort and have sought to downplay the severity and significance of the assault that it inspired. Some said allowing two of the most prominent defenders to serve on a panel examining the attack was akin to allowing criminals to investigate their own crimes.

In a statement, Ms. Pelosi said she had rejected Mr. Banks and Mr. Jordan “with respect for the integrity of the investigation, with an insistence on the truth and with concern about statements made and actions taken by these members.”  “The unprecedented nature of Jan. 6 demands this unprecedented decision,” she added.

Mr. McCarthy, Mr. Banks and Mr. Jordan — appearing with the three other Republicans chosen to sit on the panel — sought to divert blame for the riot from Mr. Trump and their own political supporters who carried it out, instead faulting Democrats who they said had not adequately planned for the onslaught.

Democrats received high-profile backing from Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, Mr. McCarthy’s former No. 3 whom Ms. Pelosi appointed to the committee after she was ousted from her leadership position in May for criticizing Mr. Trump.

“The rhetoric that we have heard from the minority leader is disingenuous,” Ms. Cheney told reporters on the steps of the Capitol. “At every opportunity, the minority leader has attempted to prevent the American people from understanding what happened, to block this investigation.”

She said Ms. Pelosi had been right to bar Mr. Jordan and Mr. Banks from the panel, saying that Mr. Jordan was a potential “material witness” and Mr. Banks had “disqualified himself” with recent comments disparaging the committee’s work.

At the time of the attack, the House sergeant-at-arms, Paul D. Irving, had been on the job since 2012, when he was hired under Speaker John A. Boehner, Republican of Ohio. The Senate sergeant-at-arms at the time, Michael Stenger, was hired in 2018 when Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, led the chamber.

Ms. Cheney reportedly clashed with Mr. Jordan on the House floor on Jan. 6, blaming him for the riot, according to a new book by two reporters for The Washington Post.

Ms. Pelosi had said she would accept Mr. McCarthy’s three other nominees to the panel — Representative Rodney Davis of Illinois, Representative Kelly Armstrong of North Dakota and Representative Troy Nehls of Texas — and said she encouraged Mr. McCarthy to offer two new picks to replace Mr. Jordan and Mr. Banks. But following Mr. McCarthy’s lead, those three also said they would not participate.

McCarthy knows full well that Trump is guilty of inciting the insurrection and that a number of other Congressional Republicans likely aided and abetted the insurrectionists, some having given tours of the Capitol and laying out the floor plan just days prior to the assault.  Expect him to do anything he can to divert Americans from the real truth of what happened. Sadly, the GOP is now the party of sedition and treason.  

Wednesday Morning Male Beauty

 

Republicans Are Spouting Antebellum White Supremacist Rhetoric

If one knows accurate detailed history (something today's GOP does not want taught in public schools) - and the fact that human nature has some constants, some for good, some for evil  - it is of little surprise that divisive talking points and propaganda from the past get dredged up and recycled from time time and particularly when it comes to the issue of race in America.   Today's Republicans, Christofascist scamvangelists and talking heads at Fox News are all sadly recycling foul rhetoric with roots going back to white-supremacist rhetoric from before the Civil War and then again during the attacks on Reconstruction by southern whites which ultimately resulted in the Jim Crow laws and the disenfranchisement of black citizens.  A lengthy piece in The Atlantic by a professor of American history looks at these dredged up claims of white victimhood being used to justify racial bigotry and white supremacy.   Here are article highlights:

In the conservative world, the idea that white people in the United States are under siege has become doctrine. In recent weeks, three prominent figures have each offered their own versions of this tenet.

In June, Brian Kilmeade, one of the hosts of Fox & Friends, claimed that activists were “trying to take down white culture.”

Also in June, Tucker Carlson, speaking on his nightly show with an Anti-White Mania graphic in the background, implied that racial strife was imminent and asked: “How do we save this country before we become Rwanda?”

The same month, Pat Robertson, a former Republican presidential candidate and the host of the Christian Broadcasting Network’s flagship show, The 700 Club, said that militants are telling “people of color … to rise up and overtake their oppressors.” He worried that, “having gotten the whip handle—if I can use the term,” people of color were now in a position “to instruct their white neighbors how to behave.” Robertson warned that if this trend continues, “America is over. It is just that simple.”

Kilmeade, Carlson, and Robertson all blamed critical race theory, a school of legal thought developed in the 1980s that has become the latest fixation of the conservative outrage machine. But the panic they expressed has a much longer history, with roots going back to white-supremacist rhetoric from before the Civil War—and particularly apparent during the attack on Reconstruction, America’s experiment in interracial democracy that lasted from 1865 until 1877.

Indeed, each of the three pundits expressed a key strand of the rhetoric of racial reaction that was pervasive among critics of Reconstruction: Carlson deployed inversion, by which white people declare reverse racism or anti-whiteness to be the crucial problem of prejudice and white people to be uniquely oppressed as a result of excessive power granted to Black Americans; Robertson deployed projection, in which white people assert that they will be treated the way they treated Black people during the Jim Crow era; and Kilmeade deployed victimization, as when a white southerner in 1875 described his region as “stripped of her honors, her glory, her pride … trampled into dust” by recently enacted laws.

These tropes of inversion, projection, and victimization overlap. During the Reconstruction era, and long afterward, white reactionaries in both the South and the North projected that the movement for racial equality was animated by what the Confederate-nostalgic newspaper The Watchman and Southron called a “hatred of the white people of the South and a determination to humiliate them as much as possible.” Using the language of inversion and victimization in 1875, the Louisville Courier-Journal—which was associated with the anti-Reconstruction Democratic Party—described Reconstruction as a “scheme of upturning society and placing the bottom on top: an effort to legislate the African into an Anglo-Saxon.”

Rather than the future of “negro domination” many white southerners claimed to fear, the white supremacy they yearned for—and all its attendant violence—returned full throttle a little more than a decade after the end of Reconstruction. It was no longer underpinned by chattel slavery but by new relations of peonage, exploitation, legalized segregation, and disenfranchisement.

The enemies of Reconstruction described inclusive democracy as not just psychologically unsettling but illegitimate, what a letter writer to The Courier-Journal called in early 1868 an “inversion of … just and lawful relations.” The writer demanded a future in which “the white race would spring back to its position of natural supremacy, while the black race would fall back to its position of natural subordinacy.”

One term used to describe the process of the “inversion of … established order” —which the Charleston Mercury characterized in 1867 as “white slavery under negro rule” —was featured in Tucker Carlson’s graphic: anti-white. Historically, those who deployed inversion almost always paired anti-white with pro-negro. . . . In 1870, the strongly anti-Reconstruction Memphis Appeal described the Fifteenth Amendment, which guaranteed suffrage to all adult, male American citizens, as the “crowning victory” of Radical Republican “anti-white negroism.”

Pat Robertson’s language of Black Americans holding the “whip handle” previously gripped by the slaveholding class was also a popular metaphor a century and a half ago, when it was employed to advance the view that Black Americans had usurped coercive power rightly belonging to white people. In describing the soon-to-be eclipsed political dynamic of Reconstruction, in which white politicians had to attend to the concerns of all Americans rather than just their fellow white men, one commentator wrote in the Georgia Weekly Telegraph in 1874 that “the negroes feel they have the whip-hand.”

Barely two years after the close of the Civil War, Mississippi Governor Benjamin G. Humphreys announced that, if the Radical Republicans were to succeed, he and his fellow white citizens would “have to take back seats or be elevated at the end of a rope”—two instances of projection in one breath.

Not all projection involved the threat of racialized murder or violence. Much of it focused on being forcefully rendered powerless. White opponents of Reconstruction routinely claimed that “social equality” was being “crammed down our throats, with the aid of the brute force of the negro”; or that white people’s rights were being “trampled into the earth, in order that an aristocracy of four million negroes shall be established upon their graves”; or that Black “iron heels” were stepping on white necks to “crush out their last hope of liberty.” All of these images reversed the reality of power in the postbellum South.

Another way that opponents of Reconstruction projected the topsy-turvy world they claimed Radical Republican rule had created was to reverse the most infamous passage in the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford case. In what scholars have since described as the worst decision in American judicial history, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney wrote that Black Americans had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Ten years later, in 1867, a Virginia newspaper decrying “negro rule” claimed that Reconstruction was based on “the arrogant assumption that the true white men of the South have no rights which need to be respected.”

Many Democratic opponents of Radical Republicanism, echoing Johnson, claimed that white humiliation would inevitably set off a spate of extralegal violence, which they framed as fully justified. “If ever a people had a right to rebel against tyrannical Government,” said a Missouri newspaper editorial headlined “The Cost of Negro Government,” “the people of this country possess this right.” When the paper referred to the “people of this country,” it meant, of course, its white citizens.

The path from the backlash to Reconstruction and the civil-rights movement to Kilmeade’s, Carlson’s, and Robertson’s modern-day declarations did not follow a straight line, and claiming that the template for the 21st-century Republican Party was fully set during the 19th century would be reductionist. Yet the posture of resentment that once undergirded the reactionary response to Reconstruction continues to characterize an important tendency in the American right. According to a recent New York Times analysis, most people who participated in the Capitol insurrection of January 6 came from areas that are “awash in fears that the rights of minorities and immigrants were crowding out the rights of white people in American politics and culture.”

All of these rhetorical gestures boil down to one issue about America that remains as relevant today as it was in the 1860s and ’70s: Whose country is it? Who belongs here?

And it was this same conviction that led Tucker Carlson to claim, just this past April, “I have less political power because they’re importing a brand new electorate. Why should I sit back and take that?” Carlson was echoing the zero-sum logic that white reactionaries have spouted for more than a century.

One of the most telling moments of Donald Trump’s presidency, and our present political moment, came last December, after he was voted out of office but before the insurrection he fomented. “We’re all victims,” he told a crowd in Georgia. “Everybody here. All these thousands of people here tonight. They’re all victims. Every one of you.” Like the opponents of Reconstruction, Trump milked feelings of humiliation to authorize a politics of what President Johnson called “restoration”—the Reconstruction-era version of “Make America great again.”

The opponents of Reconstruction succeeded in their campaign against racial equality, setting the country on a path to great division and intolerable oppression. Those who traffic in these tropes continue to threaten to defer the promise of justice and democracy—yet again.