So this place is Satans temple, Dan Gookin said ironically. The cozy confines of the pub in downtown Coeur dAlene, Idaho dont bear any resemblance to a place for worshiping anything but a cold pint or bangers and mash.

Gookin explained that they used to have a poster for Menstruatin with Satan, a fundraiser for menstrual supplies organized by the Satanic Temple of Idaho. The Satanic Temple is a non-theistic organization that encourages benevolence and empathy, rejects tyranny, and advocates for bodily autonomy. In recent years, its become best known for fighting for reproductive freedom. Members dont worship or even believe in Satan.

Nevertheless, it drives conservative Christians wild.

Gookin has a frank manner and strong, clear voice. He tends to speak quickly with a serious delivery belied by the occasional flash of a dry wit. On an evening in late November, he said the poster convinced some local right-wingers that the pub is affiliated with the dark lord, a ridiculous, inaccurate assumption thats also convenient for his purposes. They wont step foot in the place.

We had campaign meetings here because we knew that there would be no spies, Gookin said. See, we can talk freely in here because we know there will never be a wacko anywhere near us.

The whackos are the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee (KCRCC) and their allies. Gookin, a conservative best known nationally for creating the For Dummies books, is a longtime city councilman and KCRCC member. These days hes persona non grata with the committee, not that he seems to mind.

They didnt count on me calling them out, Gookin said on a recent episode of his YouTube show, Kootenai Rants.

Idaho Republicans are in the midst of a civil war between the far-right wing and relative moderates like Gookin. In recent years, far-right extremists have moved to the heavily white and conservative state as part of an ideological migration that accelerated during the pandemic. Far-right comedian Owen Benjamin now lives about an hour-and-a-half north of Coeur dAlene.

Rather than reject the extremists, some powerful Republicans have embraced the Holocaust deniers and white nationalists whove made Idaho their home. This outrages many longtime locals of the county that famously defeated the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations decades ago. Gookin and other conservatives are fighting back in the press, election booth, and courts.

Its an uphill battle; the opposition is well-funded, organized, and willing to get its hands dirty. It even has a network of print and online publications steadily pumping propaganda into the information ecosystem.

This story is part of a series exploring far-right figures and groups impact on communities theyve relocated to in Idaho, West Virginia, Florida, and Maine; and what, if anything, those communities are doing about it. The Daily Dot spent the last several months visiting these communities, talking to locals, consulting historic and public records, and interviewing experts on extremism.

As the 2024 election approaches, the far-right will become more visible and vocal.

Former President Donald Trumps 2016 victory emboldened the neo-Nazis and white supremacists who coalesced at the deadly Unite the Right rally. His 2020 defeat inspired militias, conspiracy theorists, and hate groups to attack democracy. Both corresponded with increases in hate, antisemitism, and white supremacy that came screaming from the internet into the real world.

They may have failed on Jan. 6, 2021, but theyre back, mobilized, and ready to fight. Seizing control of places like Coeur dAlene is one of the ways theyre plotting their comeback.

Gookin isnt cowed. We need to fight this.

The week after Thanksgiving, Coeur dAlene was decked out in 1.5 million holiday lights sparkling off the lake and into the darkness beyond. Business was in full swing in the town of 55,000. Each night sold-out boats took excited children to see Santa Claus while adults packed into warm bars and restaurants for a bite and a bit to take the edge off.

Washington is less than an hour west and in another political world compared to Idaho, one of the most consistently Republican states in America. More Idahoans voted for Trump in 2020 than 2016. The state hasnt voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since Lyndon Johnson, and it chose Richard Nixon (R) over John F. Kennedy (D) in the election before that.

Its also a longtime harbor for racists.

From the mid-1970s to the turn of the century, the white supremacist Aryan Nations had a 20-acre compound in Kootenai County, which encompasses Coeur dAlene. Aryan Nations declared bankruptcy following a $6.3 million verdict against it in a case brought by a mother and son who were shot at and beaten by its security guards.

Fluffy white snow blanketed Coeur dAlene as Kate Bitz, 38, recalled hearing stories about all-ages punk shows turning into brawls when skinheads showed up and seeing news coverage of white supremacists marching down Sherman Avenue when she was growing up just across the border in Washington. On outings to Farragut State Park, theyd sometimes have to make a snap decision if the guys with the white power tattoos are showing up, do we leave and give them the whole beach, or stay.

Growing up in a hotbed of extremism led Bitz to a career opposing it. She works for the advocacy nonprofit Western States Center.

Bitz isnt surprised that the far-right is resurging. Idaho is the longtime home of a variety of extremists, ranging from evangelicals to neo-Nazis. People forget how multifaceted it was, she said, adding, This has all happened before in a different form.

Extremist groups have been active in Idaho for decades, Bitz said. For example, Northwest Front was described by Politico as Americas worst racists in 2015; racist mass murderer Dylann Roof highlighted the group in his manifesto. Northwest Front has been encouraging people to move to the Pacific Northwest to create a white ethno-state for years. American Redoubt, which has been described as white Christian nationalist (it identifies as a non-racist preparedness movement for Christian patriots), has been recruiting people to move to the area for over a decade. Idaho GOP Chair Dorothy Moon is a member of the far-right John Birch Society.

Now theres a new crop of extremists.

David Reilly and Vincent James Foxx are two of the most notorious newcomers in Idaho politics. Theyre part of far-right efforts to take control from the bottom up via the precinct strategy championed by Steve Bannon. Both are affiliated with white nationalist Nick Fuentes. Reilly has professed being a fan of Fuentes and reportedly attended his CPAC alternative, America First Political Action Conference. Foxx is the national treasurer of Fuentes America First organization.

Reilly became the focus of a scandal about his attendance of Unite the Right in 2017. He subsequently resigned from his fathers radio station where he was a host. InvestigateWest reports he sported a pin with the logo of the neo-Nazi Identity Evropa to the rally. In his resignation letter, Reilly denied being racist, white supremacist, or a neo-Nazi. A judge later threw out his lawsuit against a Pennsylvania-based news outlet and individuals he claimed had defamed him by calling him racist.

In recent years, Reilly called himself a Fuentes stan. Reilly is also purportedly an ally of the Unite the Right marcher best known for the catchphrase Hitler did nothing wrong. He has a lengthy history of antisemitic posts on X, formerly known as Twitter. Reilly did not respond to interview requests.

Reilly made his way to Idaho a few years ago.

In 2021, Reilly sought a seat on an Idaho school board, which he lost with 47% of the vote. (KCRCC endorsed him.) During the campaign, a group from his Pennsylvania hometown urged people to vote against him because of his involvement in Unite the Right.

When Reilly left our community, he acknowledged himself, not even McDonalds would hire [him]. Please consider if you, the voter, would want to hire Reilly to create policy for your schools, Bloomsburg Stand Against Hate wrote.

He didnt have as much trouble finding employment in Idaho.

During his failed 2022 gubernatorial campaign, anti-government militant Ammon Bundy paid $30,000 to a firm the Inlander reports was linked to Reilly. KCRCC also paid Reillys company $11,000 for videos.

Bitz said of KCRCC Chair Brent Regans association with the men, I think he sees Reilly and Vincent James as his pet white nationalists who he can push consulting money to during elections.

Regan did not respond to interview requests.

In December, InvestigateWest reported that Idaho Freedom Foundation (IFF), which Regan also chairs, employs Reilly to help with its communications strategy. The piece noted that Reilly has claimed Jews invented terrorism and control the media.

In response to the story, Regan penned an op-ed claiming he has no authority over IFFs hiring decisions and claiming its Jewish president, Wayne Hoffman, interviewed Reilly. I believe it is fair to say that Wayne Hoffmans sensitivity to anti-Semitism is greater than mine so that if he is okay with Reilly, so am I and so should you, Regan wrote. He also denied that Reilly is antisemitic or a white supremacist.

Regans editorial made no mention of Unite the Right.

Last week, amid rising criticism, IFF announced that Hoffman had been replaced with a far-right former lawmaker. It did not say if Hoffman quit or was fired.

Holocaust denier Foxx is another white nationalist who found more welcoming pastures in Idaho in recent years. In 2017, ProPublica described Foxx as a 31-year-old video blogger and livestreamer with a fondness for white supremacists and radical right-wing politics. It reported that Foxx was essentially an unofficial propagandist for Rise Above Movement (RAM), a violent, racist group at the center of much of the violence at Unite the Right. Three members were convicted for violence they committed at Unite the Right.

He didnt merely document RAMs violence, per ProPublica. The outlet reports that Foxx could be heard screaming, Get that f*cking cuck! in a YouTube video he posted of a RAM member and several others pummeling a man in California. Identity Evropa founder Nathan Damigo fought alongside RAM that day.

In 2021, Foxx moved from California to Idaho.

He was photographed with then-Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin (R); Media Matters for America reported he said he had deep connections to her. Last January, he gave a speech to a group of north Idaho Republicans in which the Southern Poverty Law Center reports he echoed the racist great replacement conspiracy theory that whites are being intentionally displaced by nonwhite immigrants. In September, a former school board member who was once a KCRCC committeewoman claimed he said political leaders convinced him to move there.

Since becoming an Idahoan, Foxx has continued to espouse white nationalist talking points. He did not respond to interview requests.

Foxx is the national treasurer of Fuentes America First organization. In 2022, Foxx gushed great clip!! of a video of Ye (formerly Kanye West) praising Hitler. After Fuentes infamously had dinner with Trump, Foxx bragged, We have in fact infiltrated the mainstream flank of the GOP. Just look at what Tucker Carlson is talking about lately. We have parts of the nation talking about secession, talking about banning gay marriage. Last month, Foxx posted a video of actor Michael Rapaport claiming people would be thrown off a building for asking where to find an LGBTQ business in Gaza. Foxx captioned it, Wait a minute. Do I love Gaza now??!

Right Wing Watch unearthed a video of him saying, We are the Christian Taliban and we will not stop until The Handmaids Tale is a reality and even worse than that.

Last year, Foxx ran for chair of the Idaho Young Republicans. In his pitch for votes, he advocated using the precinct strategy to install extremists in positions throughout the state.

He lost.

People agree that Foxx and Reilly are just the tip of the spear.

Sarah Lynch is the executive director of North Idaho Pride Alliance (NIPA). Over coffee at Evans Brothers Coffee, a cheerful space on the same street where white supremacists used to march during Aryan Nations heyday, Lynch said after she and her wife moved to the area, she noticed it was a weird mix of like Nazis and granola hippies.

The darker side of the picturesque town was front and center in June 2022 when 31 members of the white nationalist Patriot Front were arrested en route to Pride in the Park in Coeur dAlene.

The incident stunned the nation. Patriot Front is one of the most active white supremacist groups in America and it often posts photos of its activities in Idaho. But a few dozen men in riot gear in the back of a U-Haul is a significant escalation from sneaking around at night to spray paint stencils and hang banners, which the hate group usually sticks to.

All the men were charged with conspiracy to riot; many have been convicted or pled guilty since then. Charges were dismissed against Patriot Front leader Thomas Rousseau last fall.

Police officers were doxed and received death threats after the arrests. Police Chief Lee White told media that they got 100 calls afterwardhalf from supporters and half from critics.

While Patriot Front generated headlines and fear, Lynch said it couldve been much worse.

Despite all the hateful rhetoric that was going on last year, and despite the events that occurred, we still had our largest ever Pride in the Park. It was our first one back since COVID, there were over 2,500 people there, Lynch said.

Lynch, a retired veteran with a Ph.D. in public safety, said that theyd established a communication line with law enforcement before the event, which has strengthened with time. The arrests also spurred some local and state officials to publicly support LGBTQ equality. Mayor Jim Hammond (R) declared June as Pride Month. Weeks before Lynch sat down for coffee, Hammond was named a Pillar of Idaho for his public stance against extremism.

These developments may have some feeling optimistic, but it isnt all sunshine and rainbows in Kootenai County.

Lynch said some families with queer children have moved away; others have said their queer adult relatives wont even come home for Thanksgiving because they dont feel safe there.

She described the homophobic and transphobic segment of the extreme far-right as a very loud minority.

As long as nobody else stands up and says anything, then thats the only narrative thats heard, she said.

Several years ago, Army veteran Sam Rowland moved back to the area where he was born. Rowland, a musician, has a thick red beard and eyes that seem older than his 39 years. He did a couple tours in Iraq; he said Coeur dAlene reminded him of the small town in Saudi Arabia where he grew up.

Then 2020 happened and it exposed itself. He paused. It re-exposed itself.

During the civil rights protests inspired by George Floyds murder, people took to the streets of Coeur dAlene to protect the community from antifa. Photos from the publication that Reilly purportedly runs show heavily armed men, most of whom appear to be white, gathered on the sidewalk downtown.

Rowland said some wore insignias identifying themselves as members of militia-type groups like the III Percenters. Prominent white supremacists were out there, he said. I was followed home.

He and others said that churches in the area have become breeding grounds for extremism, with pastors making little to no effort to separate politics from theology.

Rowland sees whats happening in Coeur dAlene as part of a larger strategy. You have to take the little towns first, he said.

It appears that they would like to have it turned into a very conservative quasi-religious institution that still has the benefit of public funding.

A large Coeur dAlene rejects hate sign hangs in the window of Crown & Thistle Pub. Jennifer and Ben Drake spent years making plans for the British-style pub, which served its first half-pint in 2019. Every detail, from the cask ales to the 120-year-old bar and the menu, which includes bangers made by Ben and a delectable Guinness short rib pie, is designed to make you feel like youre steps away from London Bridge, albeit in a snug in northern Idaho. (A snug is an enclosed booth from when it was faux pas for women to be seen drinking alcohol in public.)

Jennifers family has been in Coeur dAlene for five generations. Running the Crown & Thistle in her hometown is the fulfillment of a dream first glimpsed attending the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Its come with nightmares that have nothing to do with Scotch eggs or ales.

Shes the type of person who stands up for what she thinks is right. Rejecting hate aligns with those values.

Over the din of the suppertime crowd on a snowy Friday night in December, Ben said they originally put up an 8 x 11 sign. Then, he said, We started getting hate mail.

They brushed it off, deciding to increase the size of the sign each time they received another hateful missive.

When she was a kid, Jen said the town was united against the Aryan Nations. Now theyre divided between people who fall in line and those who take a stand.

Both Drakes are Republicans. Yet theyve ended up on the opposite side of Regan and the partys radical flank.

Theyve infiltrated the community to the point that they say they are the community, Jen said.

The incidents, Jen said, escalated gradually. People call them liberals online. They dogpile the pub with one-star reviews. Insane misinformation floats from the internet to the streets.

They honestly think Im a Satan-worshiping communist witch, Jen said in a pained voice. And its too much for me. Im Lutheran. Im tired.

As chair of both IFF and KCRCC, Brent Regan is a powerful force in Idaho politics. IFF rates politicians based on their voting records; the more conservative, the higher the rating. KCRCC recruits and endorses candidates. These efforts have been effective. Various positions of power in Kootenai County are now held by people who score high on IFFs ideological purity tests and have the KCRCC stamp of approval.

Several people said that the candidates might check the right boxes, but they can struggle to govern effectively. They pointed to North Idaho College (NIC), whose board is under far-right control.

NIC has been hemorrhaging money since they took over. Worse, the 90-year-old community colleges accreditation is hanging by a thread.

A bust of Patrick Stewart circa Star Trek gazed down from the shelf in Dan Englishs office at Healing Hearts, the mental healthcare clinic he runs with his wife. A quilt hangs on the wall by his desk; English mentioned with endearing husbandly pride that his wife made it. Bagpipes softly played holiday music as English shared memories of the town where he was born and raised.

English, the lone Democrat on the city council, has been an elected official in Coeur dAlene for 30 years. He previously served on the school board and as clerk-auditor. He describes himself as an election geek who enjoys crunching data. The numbers from 2020 were extremely illuminating to him.

Eighty-five-plus [percent] had been a registered voter here less than like, you know, two years or four years or something. So its no wonder they have a hard time passing bonds for schools, he said.

English said that some of the transplants are from the extreme right and others are more traditional conservatives. The newcomers include a lot of retired police, so many from Los Angeles, in fact, that the area is sometimes called LAPD North. Theres also a contingent of liberals. The combination creates what he calls a weird melting pot.

It pains him to see his hometown torn apart by politics.

The sad part is how much time, energy, and financial resources is wasted over these ideology battles, or just peoples inflated ego, like the college, English said.

After the far-right took over NICs board, it fired the college president, who sued for wrongful termination and received a $500,000 settlement. NIC later put his replacement on leave; a court in a separate lawsuit determined this was without cause and ordered it to reinstate him and for the school to pay his attorneys fees.

Between litigation with the president it was deemed to have placed on leave without cause and a separate case the local newspaper brought over public records (NIC lost that too), attorneys fees, travel costs for officials from the accreditation agency, and training for the board itself, the Coeur dAlene Press reports that its spent $1.2 million. An Idaho Statesman columnist recently referred to this as an incompetence tax.

Now English says NIC cant afford the light bill to keep the library open a few extra hours on Sundays.

Its ironic that people get elected are a lot of those, anti-education, anti-science, and yet they want to be in positions of monitoring educators, he said. It appears that they would like to have it turned into a very conservative quasi-religious institution that still has the benefit of public funding.

Education has been thrust into the forefront of the conservative culture wars across the country.

KCRCC candidates won control of the library board last year by campaigning on reducing childrens access to sexually explicit books. During the campaign, KCRCC reportedly circulated a letter falsely accusing the incumbents of giving kids access to graphic books with text and pictures describing every imaginable sex act, books so explicit that if you were to give them to a child, you would be committing a crime.

They may have gone too far. The two women who allege they were smeareda lawyer and a longtime member of the library boardare suing Regan and KCRCC for defamation.

City councilman Gookin is also wrapped up in a defamation suit with KCRCC. Its suing him over what he characterizes as mean tweets. KCRCC claims that Regan has demonstrated profound ill will and malice toward many KCRCC officers and affiliated candidatesin particular, KCRCCs chairman, Brent Regan on his YouTube show, Kootenai Rants, and posts on X.

The KCRCC appreciates that Gookin is entitled to engage in speech that is protected by the First Amendment, the complaint states. However, his recent statements have crossed the line from protected speech into unprotected defamation because they accuse KCRCC of rigging its 2023 candidate rating and vetting process, perpetrating a fraud on its members, and violating campaign finance lawsthings which simply have not happened.

Gookin views their case as an attack on his free speech right to criticize them. He seems eager to have his day in court.

Its ping-pong time, he said in an email earlier this month.

Gookin describes the political migrants who are pushing Idaho further to the right as people who were p*ssed off living in more liberal areas. He said this migratory pattern accelerated during the pandemic because they thought theyd have more freedom there. (The libertarian Cato Institute actually ranks Idaho 49th in personal freedom.)

But it didnt absolve their anger.

They hate our governor. They hate our legislators. They hate elected officials like me, they hate people whove made it a conservative state, Gookin said. And they want to replace them with their own people who, like we see in Washington, D.C., are incompetent and incapable of governing.

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Idaho White Nationalism: Inside a New Class of Republican Power - The Daily Dot

A Fort Bragg soldier who allegedly sought to physically remove as many racial minorities from eastern North Carolina by whatever means need be pleaded guilty Tuesday to illegal possession of an unregistered short barrel rifle, the Justice Department announced Wednesday.

Noah Edwin Anthony, 23, was apprehended on March 3 after gate security personnel performing random vehicle inspections discovered a loaded 9mm Glock Like ghost gun a weapon with no serial number in the vehicles center console.

Military Police called to the scene when Anthony failed to furnish paperwork for the weapon searched the vehicle and found two extended magazines, ammunition, Nazi type patches and an American flag with a Swastika in place of the blue field and stars, according to the release.

The discovery prompted a subsequent search of Anthonys barracks room, where authorities found a 3D-printed FGC-9 rifle without a serial number, magazines for various firearms, a lower receiver, a trove of white supremacist paraphernalia and electronics that contained evidence of Anthonys self-titled operation to target minorities.

Personnel from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives determined the unserialized FGC-9 to be in violation of the National Firearms Act, which, beyond serial number legalities, mandates rifle barrels be no shorter than 16 inches.

Anthony, meanwhile, is the second Fort Bragg soldier to be investigated in recent months for ties to white nationalism. In August, Killian Mackeithan Ryan, a fire support specialist, was arrested and booted from the Army for serious misconduct after investigators discovered he was using numerous Instagram accounts associated with racially motivated extremism, according to court records.

In one particular Instagram post, Ryan claimed to have joined the military for combat experience so Im more proficient in killing Black people, investigators said.

Army Times request for comment from Fort Bragg has not been returned as of publication, though in an earlier statement provided to North Carolina news outlet WRAL a spokesperson at the installation said the service does not tolerate extremist ideologies, racism or hate.

We are a values-based organization and put the safety of our Paratroopers first, the spokesperson from the 82nd Airborne Division told WRAL. Any actions that detract from the good order and discipline of our unit are addressed in a swift and prudent manner.

Personnel from the FBI, Army Criminal Investigation Division and ATF are continuing to investigate the case.

Anthony is expected to be sentenced later this year. He faces up to 10 years in prison.

Jon Simkins is a writer and editor for Military Times, and a USMC veteran.

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Soldier with white nationalist ties pleads guilty to gun charges - ArmyTimes.com

Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Tucker Carlsons abrupt departure from Fox News has left millions of Americans asking one of the hosts favorite questions: What is going on?

Media reporters are currently chasing down the reasons for Carlsons absence, which was described by the network as a mutual agreement to part ways, even though he was under the impression he was going to host his show on Monday night. But with the landscape of conservative media shaken by the announcement, a look back at Carlsons career reveals a number of comments that would have gotten him fired or at least gotten him axed at a different network that cared about things like not promoting white nationalists. Below are some of the greatest worst hits of the networks most popular ex-host.

Carlson was co-hosting Fox & Friends Weekend in July 2013 when the network was discussing the killing of Trayvon Martin. After Geraldo Rivera called in to say that if you dress like a thug, people are going to treat you like a thug, Carlson declined to comment directly on the shooting of the Black 17-year-old but had something to say about two prominent civil-rights activists pushing for justice. I am positive that people like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton do not deserve to be called civil-rights leaders, Carlson said. They are not. They are hustlers and pimps who make a living off inflaming racial tensions. They know nothing about this.

A decade of conversation about race in America didnt appear to have much impact on Carlson. In April, after Tennessee lawmaker Justin Pearson was removed from the state legislature for demonstrating for gun reform, Carlson played two videos of Pearson speaking one from his time at Bowdoin College and another on the statehouse floor. After claiming Pearson only got into Bowdoin because he is Black, Carlson said that Pearson sounded like a crypto white kid in the first video. In the more recent clip of Pearson, he suggested the lawmaker was mimicking civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. because of the cadence of his speech. Carlson failed to note that Pearsons father was a pastor. He then suggested that Pearson sounded like a sharecropper compared to other civil-rights figures like Malcolm X.

Carlson was famous for xenophobia on his show, but one of the foulest comments he made condemning immigration came in December 2018, when he described how he thought migrants crossing the southern border affected the country:

We have a moral obligation to admit the worlds poor, they tell us, even if it makes our own country poorer and dirtier and more divided. Immigration is a form of atonement.

Carlson faced some advertising blowback for the comment, with 11 advertisers including Pacific Life and IHOP pulling their spots from his show. But it wasnt enough to make him reevaluate his opinion. A year later, he did not push back when a guest said that immigrants make New York City dirty.

Remember Bubba the Love Sponge the Florida radio host whose sex tape with Hulk Hogans wife took down Gawker? His conversations put Carlson in hot water, too, when Media Matters for America published clips of Carlson calling into his radio show between 2006 and 2011 saying some pretty horrific things. Iraq was a place filled semi-literate primitive monkeys where they did not know how to use utensils. He said everybody knows that Barack Obama would never have been elected to national office if he were white. He described white women with jungle fever as mudsharks.

On his show, Carlson has suggested that powerful women, like Vice-President Kamala Harris, have dated their way into their positions and claimed that women in the upper ranks of the armed forces have made a mockery of the U.S. military. But these on-air comments pale in comparison to the Bubba the Love Sponge recordings released the same week as the racist jokes above. During the same period between 2006 and 2011, Carlson called women extremely primitive. He called Britney Spears and Paris Hilton the biggest white whores in America. He said he felt sorry for Justice Elena Kagan because he feels sorry in general for unattractive women. He said that rape-shield laws should be banned. He imagined a scenario in which girls at his daughters girls-only boarding school were having sex with each other and said, If it werent my daughter, I would love that scenario.

For the past five years, Carlson has been airing segments on the racist conspiracy known as great-replacement theory the idea that an elite cabal (often Jewish) is pushing to increase immigration from nonwhite countries, which will ultimately result in a civilizational shift in majority-white nations like the United States when white people are no longer the dominant plurality. In one monologue from April 2021, he mentioned the idea by name:

I know that the left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term replacement, if you suggest that the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate the voters now casting ballots with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World. But they become hysterical because thats what happening, actually. Lets just say it. Thats true.

Carlson, who has called white nationalism a hoax, has repeated the idea hundreds of times, according to one count. And white nationalists have been thrilled that Carlson has been doing their work for them. In 2019, a leaked chat from the supremacist group Identity Evropa had messages saying Tuck was our guy, who has done more for our people than most of us could ever hope to. The same year, Derek Black, a man who renounced his prominent neo-Nazi family, said they used to sit around watching Carlson on replay because they feel that he is making the white nationalist talking points better than they have. Carlsons mention of the theory cooled off for a few months last year after a racist shooter cited it in his manifesto for killing ten people in a Buffalo supermarket. But a few months later, he was back on it, calling the great replacement an election strategy by Democrats, not a conspiracy theory.

As the COVID vaccine rollout gained momentum among the general public in spring 2021, Carlson aired a segment falsely claiming that more than 3,000 people had died after getting the shot. The actual number is almost certainly much higher than that, Carlson said, citing an open-source database compiledby anti-vaxx conspiracists. Perhaps vastly higher.

Carlson was way off: An extremely small number of people who received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine died from a rare blood-clotting syndrome. Hundreds of millions of Americans have been fully vaccinated.

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Tucker Carlson Should've Been Fired Years Ago - New York Magazine

Until his abrupt dismissal Monday morning, Tucker Carlson was Americas most racist news host. He was also the most popular anchor on all of cable television. For that reason, among others, Carlsons departure may not mark the end of Fox News foray into unabashed white nationalism.

Virtually all Fox News commentators speak to red Americas amygdala, cultivating fear and resentment of low-income Black communities, non-white immigrants, and rootless, godless liberal elites. But most try to maintain some distance between their demagogy and that found on neo-Nazi message boards, if only to retain the sponsorship of image-conscious advertisers.

Carlson did not. During his six years helming Fox News 8 p.m. hour, the host all but used Stormfront as an assignment editor. While other Fox News hosts demonized non-white criminals, Carlson described tens of millions of U.S. citizens as enemies of the people.

In April 2021, Carlson mocked Joe Biden for calling the January 6 insurrection the worst attack on democracy since the Civil War, countering that the Immigration Act of 1965 was a bigger affront to political liberty in the U.S.: That law completely changed the composition of Americas voter rolls, purely to benefit the Democratic Party. That seems like kind of an assault on democracy, a permanent one. Thus, by Carlsons logic, every American who secured access to this country as a result of Congresss repeal on racial quotas for immigration in 1965 is a de facto foot soldier in the Democratic Partys plot to permanently disenfranchise our nations longtime residents.

Variations on this theme were a staple of Carlsons commentary. In another diatribe against the 1965 immigration law last year, the host endorsed the great replacement conspiracy theory by name. That white-nationalist narrative holds that rootless cosmopolitan elites are deliberately replacing Americas white majority with multiethnic immigrants who will be easier for them to control. You cant just replace the electorate because you didnt like the last election outcomes, Carlson declared. That would be the definition of undermining democracy, changing the voters. But when it happens in this country, there is mandatory media-enforced silence and in fact, if you notice its happening, its your fault. (In reality, the authors of the 1965 Immigration Act did not expect the law to change the demographic composition of the nation nearly as much as it did and, as Ron DeSantiss recent landslide reelection in a state that is only about 50 percent non-Hispanic white showed, non-white immigrants are not actually automata programmed by George Soros.)

Perhaps, the most distinctive feature of Carlsons demagogy was his amplification of marginal stories that had previously captured the attention of virtually no one in the United States beyond white supremacists. South African land reform is not a subject that speaks to the typical Fox News viewer. In 2018, however, American racists eager to see confirmation of their prophecies of impending white genocide took keen interest in reforms enabling the South African government to expropriate landowners property without compensation. Specifically, white nationalists glommed onto a narrative propagated by far-right Afrikaners that Black mobs were murdering white farmers in South Africa in large numbers while their government worked to seize land from their surviving kin.

Its not hard to see the appeal of this story for white nationalists. Unlike in the United States, where fodder for white grievance is so limited that racially inclusive Cheerios commercials qualify as an affront, South Africas white population is a genuinely politically disempowered minority group (even as it continues to wield disproportionate economic power in the country). Place pogroms against white farmers against this backdrop, and you have Richard Spencers nightmares made real.

Or rather, you would have that, if such pogroms had actually existed at any substantial scale. In reality, murders on South African farms had been declining for decades and murder rates in white rural parts of South Africa remained far lower than in predominantly Black townships. Discrete anti-white hate crimes surely occurred. But white farmers remained unusually safe relative to the South African population as a whole. And the governments land reforms would have implicated Black and white South Africans alike.

But this did not stop Tucker Carlson from broadcasting white nationalists preferred version of events. At other points in his tenure, Carlson saw fit to portray gypsy refugees as filthy, unassimilable public defecators, or lambast Macys for selling hijabs.

Carlson might disavow the idea that his program promoted white nationalism. But white nationalists begged to differ.

All this led many Fox News employees to raise internal complaints about Carlsons program, and many big-name advertisers to pull their spots from the channels 8 p.m. hour.

Given the exceptional severity of Carlsons racism and its seemingly adverse implications for Foxs ad business, it is natural to assume that the hosts departure will render Americas most-watched cable news channel slightly less of a cancer on the body politic. We dont yet know why Fox fired Carlson. During last Fridays broadcast, the host appeared to have no inkling that the show would be his last. Its conceivable that his dismissal represents an editorial decision to pivot away from his brand of content. Regardless, it is certainly possible (perhaps, even probable) that Carlsons replacement will traffic in a subtler form of white grievance. But that is far from a certainty.

After all, Carlsons on-air persona was not born of any longtime, deep-seated ideological attachment to white-nationalist ideology. Before Carlson became a right-wing populist critic of cosmopolitan corporations, woke capitalism, and free markets, he was a laissez-faire-loving libertarian. Further, as messages unveiled by the Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit make clear, Carlsons televised pronouncements dont necessarily reflect his current beliefs. Even as Carlson comported himself as one of Donald Trumps most fervent cheerleaders, he told others privately that he hated the president passionately.

In truth, Carlsons incendiary content did not reflect his own idiosyncratic beliefs so much as his audiences revealed preferences. As the New York Times reported last year, the driving force behind Carslons far-right turn was minute-by-minutes ratings, data that tracks the size of a shows audience at 60-second intervals. Determined to avoid a reprise of his previous failures to retain a large audience at CNN and MSNBC, Carlson became one of his networks most avid consumers of minute-by-minutes. And when the host carefully studied which subjects actually held his audiences attention, it became clear that stories activating a perception of racialized threat did the trick. As one former Fox employee told the Times in 2022, He is going to double down on the white nationalism because the minute-by-minutes show that the audience eats it up.

To the extent that any personal quality informed the exceptional racism of Carlsons program, it seems to have been nihilistic ruthlessness. No sense of decency prevented Carlson from declaring white supremacy nonexistent days after a white-nationalist terrorist mass-murdered Hispanic Americans in El Paso, nor from stoking fears of a migrant invasion right after similar ideas inspired a neo-Nazi to shoot up a synagogue in Pittsburgh. If amorality enabled Carlson to fish in such waters, though, it was economic rationality that drew him there. When the host used George Floyds killing as an opportunity to assail the Black Lives Matter movement in terms that made Black colleagues uncomfortable, he posted the highest quarterly ratings of any cable-news show in history.

True, Carlsons approach cost him advertisers. But it did not cost his employer advertising revenue. As big brands fled, Fox filled the consequent gaps with spots for other Fox programming (thereby funneling Tuckers massive audience to other shows that such brands would patronize) and charged premium rates to the advertisers that remained. Trading respectability for maximum eyeballs proved lucrative. From 2018 through 2022, Tucker Carlson Tonight brought in more annual ad dollars than any other Fox show.

Further, as the Times reported last year, Carlsons strategy reflected an emerging editorial consensus at Fox News commanding heights. Fox Corporation CEO Lachlan Murdoch reportedly has even more sympathy for far-right politics than his father, Rupert. Meanwhile, Fox News vice-president Tom Lowell championed a Moneyball approach to programming: allowing the wisdom of the crowds (as discerned through minute-by-minute ratings) to determine editorial decisions. Combine an ideological openness to white revanchism with data demonstrating its efficacy for maximizing engagement, and you get Foxs recent rightward drift, in which its primetime propagandizing has suffused more and more of its ostensibly neutral daytime content.

Of course, just because there are economic incentives to emulate Carlson does not mean his successor will do so. Plenty of Fox News existing hosts have chosen to refrain from directly promulgating white-nationalist conspiracy theories, even as Carlson rode them to ratings supremacy. Nevertheless, the fact that Carlsons editorial line reflected a data-driven assessment of which subjects will keep Americas (disproportionately old and white) news viewers from changing channels should temper optimism for Foxs future. Tucker Carlson has left Americas most-watched news network. But its audiences appetite for White Nationalism Lite remains.

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Fox News Could Be Just as Racist Without Tucker Carlson - New York Magazine

WASHINGTON Today, President Biden announced his intent to appoint the following individuals to the Presidential Advisory Commission on Advancing Educational Equity, Excellence, and Economic Opportunity for Black Americans:

Presidential Advisory Commission on Advancing Educational Equity, Excellence, and Economic Opportunity for Black Americans

The Presidential Advisory Commission on Advancing Educational Equity, Excellence, and Economic Opportunity for Black Americans aids in developing, implementing, and coordinating educational programs and initiatives for agencies such as the Department of Education. Specifically, the Commission provides advice to the President through the Secretary of Education on matters pertaining to educational equity and economic opportunity for the Black community. The Commission primarily focuses on: 1) promoting career pathways for Black students through programs such as internships, apprenticeships and work-based learning initiatives, 2) increasing public awareness of the educational disparities Black Americans face and providing solutions to these problems, and 3) establishing local and national relationships with public, private, philanthropic, and nonprofit stakeholders to advance the mission of equity, excellence, and economic opportunity for Black Americans.

Malcolm Kenyatta, Chair

Representative Malcolm Kenyatta is a third-generation North Philadelphia native, thought leader, and legislator, currently serving in the Pennsylvania General Assembly. He earned his Bachelor of Arts in Public Communications with a minor in Political Science from Temple University and his Master of Science in Strategic and Digital Communications from Drexel University. Kenyatta also completed the Harvard Kennedy Schools Executives in State and Local Government Program. Kenyatta was chosen for multiple prestigious fellowships and international delegations, including the Bertelsmann Leadership Fellow in the Digital Economy, the bipartisan Hunt/Kean Leadership Fellow in Education, and the American Jewish Committee Project Interchange.

Kenyatta is a barrier-breaking public figure, becoming the first openly LGBTQ+ Person of Color and one of the youngest members elected to the PA General Assembly in 2018. In 2022, he became the first openly LGBTQ+ Person of Color to run for the U.S. Senate in American history. Kenyatta has been a vocal proponent of protecting workers rights, enacting common-sense gun safety policies, and rooting out government corruption and waste. He has multiple legislative leadership roles, serving as a Member of the State Government Committee with oversight on state agencies and elections, Chair of the Subcommittee on Campaign Finance and Elections, Chair of Automation and Technology in the Committee on Commerce, and Member of the Finance Committee. Since his election, he has served on Governor Tom Wolfs Suicide Prevention Task Force and has been a member of the Philadelphia Delegation leadership team.

Kenyatta lives in North Philadelphia with his husband Dr. Matthew Kenyatta and their dog Cleo.

Lezli Baskerville, Member

Attorney Lezli Baskerville, an Honors graduate of Howard University School of Law and a constitutional justice lawyer, is a Howard University School of Law Lifetime Achiever. She is an Honors graduate of Douglass College at Rutgers University and a Douglass Society inductee, which she received in recognition of her work on improving the quality of life for vulnerable populations. Baskerville is the CEO of the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education, the membership and advocacy association of richly diverse HBCUs and PBIs. Baskerville, a Harvard University Advanced Leadership Fellow, served in the Education Group/Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law on the NAACP Legislative Counsel, as a National Black Leadership Roundtable Chief, as a DC Administrative Appeals Judge, and as a senior executive staff for members and committees of Congress. Baskerville has directed 34 political campaigns, designed and directed public policy campaigns, and wrote articles in or edited 40 public policy documents credited with shaping public opinion on state, national, and global policy.

Baskerville is a Founding Investor and Member of the Board of ECRID, the first Black-Founded and controlled publicly traded credit bureau and lending corporation that offers a fix to FICO and credit access to a broader and more diverse applicant pool. Baskerville has been by the Higher Education Leadership Foundation as Woman of the Year, by STEMConnector as one of 100 Women Leaders in STEM, by Diverse Issues in Higher as one of 25Women Making a Difference, by AOL Black Voices as one of the Nations Top 10 Black Women in Higher Education, and by Ebony Magazine for six consecutive years as one of Americas Top 100 Most Influential Association Leaders. Baskerville is acknowledged in The History Makers as a distinguished lawmaker.

Marla Blunt-Carter, Member

Marla Blunt-Carter is an Associate Professor of Professional Practice at Rutgers University School of Social Work in New Brunswick, New Jersey. As a recipient of multiple teaching awards, she instructs graduate-level courses on social policy, community organizing, advocacy, and political social work. Blunt-Carter holds a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the University of Delaware and a Master of Social Work from Rutgers University. Blunt-Carter combines social work practice approaches and her extensive background in political and public policy work to provide a unique perspective to her teaching.

Blunt-Carters professional experience includes serving as Projects Manager and Director of Constituent Services for then-U.S. Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., Delaware State Director for the 2008 Obama-Biden Presidential Campaign, and Senior Agency Liaison in the Office of Presidential Correspondence for the Obama-Biden Administration. Blunt-Carter has also held positions as Senior Advisor and Communications Director for Delawares Insurance Commissioner and Director of Community Planning and Policy Development for the Delaware HIV Consortium.

In 2015, Blunt-Carter became the Senior Advisor and Political Strategist for Lisa Blunt Rochester, who became the first woman and Person of Color to represent Delaware in the U.S. House of Representatives. She continues to provide consultation to the Congresswoman and also provides assistance to other local officials in Delaware. Blunt-Carters exceptional ability to merge her experience in political and public policy with social work gives her a distinctive perspective, making her an outstanding educator and mentor to her students.

Stacy Brown-Philpot, Member

Stacy Brown-Philpot is Founder & Managing Partner at Cherryrock Capital, an early-stage venture firm focused on investing in Black and Latinx entrepreneurs. She is the former CEO of TaskRabbit, the leading task management network, which she led from a fast-growing startup into a global business, and eventually to its successful acquisition by the IKEA Group. Prior to that, Brown-Philpot spent over a decade with Google and Google Ventures where she lent strategic expertise, led global operations for key Google flagship products, and served as Head of Online Sales and Operations for Google India. Brown-Philpot also brings a background in finance from her experience at PricewaterhouseCoopers and Goldman Sachs.

Brown-Philpot is a founding member of SoftBanks $100mm Opportunity Fund, established to invest in Black and Latinx entrepreneurs. She is on the Board of Directors for HP Inc., Nordstrom, Noom, StockX, Joy, Black Girls Code, and The Urban Institute. She was named a 2016 Henry Crown Fellow with the Aspen Institute and has been ranked by Business Insider as one of the 46 Most Important Blacks in Technology. Originally from Detroit, where she developed a deep and abiding love for all things Motown, Brown-Philpot now resides in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and two daughters. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Economics from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and a Master of Business Administration from the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University.

Vilicia Cade, Member

Vilicia Cade, an accomplished educational leader, scholar, author, and social justice advocate, is the first Black female CEO and Superintendent of the Capital School District in Dover, Delaware. Cade is the only Black female Superintendent in the state, and she brings over three decades of improving outcomes for vulnerable children and adults to her current role. Her portfolio of public-private partnerships validates her track record in improving the quality of life and economic opportunities for her students. Cade is known for her inspired and innovative approaches to bolstering community, faith-based, and business partnerships interrupting the school-to-prison pipeline. Notably, she was a key administrator of the Brooklyn High Schools New Visions reform project, Co-Creator of the College Readiness Scholars Institute at the University of Delaware, and is credited for launching numerous parent empowerment programs.

Cade enthusiastically embraces her personal journey as a former ward of the State of New York, described in her debut bestseller If Not For Love. Her story resonates with many Black Americans illuminating the gaps in our child welfare system. Her childhood has established a firm foundation for resilience proving why empowering the disenfranchised is quintessential. Cade has served on boards such as Northeast Ohio Boys & Girls Club and United Way of Delaware. Cade earned her bachelors degree, three masters degrees, and doctorate from New York University. In 2020, she received the prestigious Zeta Phi Beta Sorority Inc. Education Advocate Centennial Dove Award. A radio personality on the Stellar Awarded WNZN in Lorain, Ohio, she uses urban inspiration to connect the significance of service, educational equity, and economic development.

Vincent Dorien Evans, Member

Vincent Evans serves as Executive Director of the Congressional Black Caucus. He oversees the legislative policy agenda, manages the external and political affairs of the Caucus, and provides strategic leadership for the Caucus 58 Members of Congress. Prior to this role, Evans served as the Deputy Director of the Office of Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs for Vice President Kamala Harris at the White House where he was responsible for creating and coordinating direct dialogue between the Biden-Harris administration and the diverse American public. He worked at the local, state, and national levels to ensure community leaders, diverse perspectives, and new voices all had the opportunity to inform the work of the President and Vice President. Evans served as Political Director to then-Senator Kamala Harris on the Biden-Harris Campaign during the general election and the campaigns Southern Political Director during the primary season. Prior to this, he served on the senior staff of U.S. Representative Al Lawson of Florida, with a portfolio that focused on state and local issues.

Before his role in the Congress, Evans worked as the Aide to Tallahassee City Commissioner Curtis Richardson after running Richards successful campaign. His experience includes working at a government relations firm focused on state legislative matters in the Florida Senate Democratic Caucus for Democratic Leader Nan Rich and later at a cabinet-level state agency. He managed or served in leadership roles on the campaigns of the two most recent Florida Democratic gubernatorial nominees and several local, state, and congressional races in Florida. In 2022, Evans was named a Young Black Changemaker by NextGen America, the Nations largest youth voter organization. Born and raised in Florida, Evans attended Florida A&M University.

Michael Anthony Holmes, Member

Michael A. Holmes currently serves as President and CEO of MD and Partners, a consulting firm that focuses on strategic community planning and program development, and Executive Director of the Black Community Provider Network, a collaboration of Community Based Organizations in Illinois. Holmes is the former Executive Director of the Illinois African American Family Commission. He has served as an administrator for more than 20 years in both the City of Chicago and State of Illinois. Holmes has also served as former Vice President of Operations for Westside Holistic Services and Statewide Quality Assurance Administrator for six regions in the State of Illinois. Over the last 15 years, Holmes has been actively involved in working with the State of Illinois General Assembly as Deputy and Associate Director of two State agencies. Holmes worked specifically with the Illinois Legislative Black Caucus to monitor and identify policies and legislation that affect the African American communities in the State of Illinois. As Executive Director of the Illinois African American Family Commission, Holmes developed the role of liaison to the Governors office and the States administration for the purpose of recommending State services and resources to communities.

Holmes is actively engaged in civic and community activities. He is currently a member of the Youth and Child Development Committee for Congressman Danny Davis of the 7th Congressional District, Chairman of the Country Club Hills Police and Fire Commission, former Chairman of the Country Club Hills Umbrella Project, and former Member of the Illinois Department of Human Services Child Care Advisory Council. Holmes has also served as Coach and League Coordinator for CHA Midnight Basketball, Coordinator of Chicago Housing Authority Biddy Basketball, Volunteer for Chicago Inner City Games, former Member of the child watch African American Family Commission, former Member of the Illinois Department of Human Services Statewide Advisory Committee, former Commissioner at the Country Club Hills Park District, Founding Member of the Department of Children and Family Services African American Advisory Council, and Member of the Statewide Foster Parent Recruitment and Retention Steering Committee.

As a Seaman in the United States Navy, Holmes completed his basic training at the Great Lakes Naval Base and completed eighteen months of military service at the Naval War College, an international military leadership training institute. As a result of his service at the College, Holmes became a computer operator, which enabled him to develop war strategy. He received an associates degree from Kennedy King Jr College and bachelors degree and masters degree in Inner City Studies from Northeastern Illinois University. Holmes has been married to his wife for 40 years and they have raised four sons in the Chicago land area.

Fedrick C. Ingram, Member

Fedrick C. Ingram is Secretary-Treasurer of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), serving 1.7 million members. Ingram is the immediate former President of the 140,000-member Florida Education Association. He served as Vice President of the AFTs Executive Council from 2014 to 2020 before getting elected as the AFTs Secretary-Treasurer. Ingram grew up in inner-city Miami where he attended public schools. Pursuing his love of music, he attended Bethune-Cookman University on a scholarship and became the first member of his family to earn a postsecondary degree in music education. In 2006, he was named the Francisco R. Walker Miami-Dade County Teacher of the Year. He was also a finalist for the state of Florida Teacher of the Year Award in 2006. In addition to his bachelors degree from Bethune-Cookman, Ingram earned a masters degree in educational leadership from Barry University and holds an honorary doctorate of Humane Letters from Florida Memorial University for a lifetime of work in education.

Lonnie L. Johnson, Member

Lonnie L. Johnson retired from Exxon Mobil Corporation in 2019 as Senior Counsel, Downstream Commercial Litigation. Prior to serving in that position, Lonnie served as Senior Director, Federal Relations at Exxon Mobil Corporation in Washington, DC. Lonnie received his J.D, with distinction, from The University of Iowa College of Law, where he served on the Iowa Law Review and was a member of the Phi Delta Phi Legal Fraternity. Johnson earned his Bachelor of Science from the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Johnson currently serves on the Board of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation and on the Tugaloo College Research Board. Johnson also serves on the Board of Silence the Shame, an organization dedicated to removing the stigma associated with mental illness and getting people the help they need. Johnson is a former member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Advisory Board and the Board of the National Democratic Club. He served on the Board of Council for Legal Education Opportunities for more than 10 years. Johnson is married to Eartha Jean Johnson and they have three children, Teiva Johnson Bell (Criminal District Court Judge, Harris County Texas), Tiera Johnson Williams (Prosecutor, Family Violence Cases, Harris County Texas), and Antuan Johnson (Criminal Defense Attorney, Houston Texas).

Chad Dion Lassiter, Member

Chad Dion Lassiter is a national expert in the field of American Race Relations. Lassiter has worked on race, peace, and poverty-related issues in the United States, Africa, Canada, Haiti, Israel, and Norway. Lassiter is the current Executive Director of the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission where he has developed and launched a No Hate in Our State Townhall to address the surge of White Nationalism in Pennsylvania, a Social Justice Lecture Series providing an outlet for communities to discuss imperative issues, and serves as a Racial Reduction Response team for those communities impacted by hatred. Lassiter has also developed programs such as the Global Social Justice Initiative, Black and Jewish Beloved Community Dialogue, and the College Race Dialogue Initiative.

Lassiter received his masters degree from the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Social Work, where he was the A. Phillip Randolph Award winner in 2001 and was the recipient of the prestigious Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Involvement Award in 2008.

Lassiter is the Co-Founder and current President of The Black Men at Penn School of Social Work, Inc., an organization within the School of Social Policy and Practice at the University of Pennsylvania, the first Ivy League Black male group of social workers. In 2019, he was inducted into the School of Social Policy and Practice Alumni Hall of Fame. Lassiter was recently chosen as the National Association of Social Workers Pennsylvania Chapters Social Worker of the Year for 2021 and was recognized by the Philadelphia Tribune as The Most Influential African American Leader from 2010-2022.

Adena Williams Loston, Member

Dr. Adena Williams Loston possesses over 40 years of professional leadership experience including spearheading a national agenda for education, engaging communities in addressing economic development issues, providing organizational and institutional leadership towards workforce readiness and academic preparation. She has served as the 14th President of St. Philips College, the Nations Historically Black College and Hispanic Serving Institution, since 2007 with responsibilities for 13,000 students including four early college high schools, programs at three military base sites and dual credit and P-TECH programs. Through her strategic leadership and management oversight in 2018, St. Philips College received the Governors Award for Performance Excellence and the national Malcolm Baldrige Award as one of the Alamo Colleges. She has instituted the Planning Budget and Assessment Cycle, Resource Allocation Process, Presidents Academy, Department Chair Academy, Good to Great Strategic Planning Process, and three Centers of Excellence. Loston also provides oversight for $400 Million in new and renovated facilities construction.

Loston previously served as the Chief Education Office for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in Washington DC, President of San Jacinto College South, and held administrative positions at Santa Monica College and the El Paso County Community College District. She has also served as an associate professor at George State University and instructor at Arkansas State University. Loston was a three-term appointee to the HBCU Capital Financing Committee. She graduated Alcorn State University with a bachelors degree in 1973 and received her M.Ed. and Ph.D. degrees from Bowling Green State University in 1974 and 1979.

William Billy Mitchell, Member

Representative William Billy Mitchell, a former public-school teacher, was previously elected to the City Council of the historic Stone Mountain in 1995. His colleagues then unanimously selected him to serve as Vice Mayor. Appointed Chair of the Finance Committee, he led the City to outstanding financial status, as reported by independent auditors. Among the ordinances he was most proud to author, Representative Mitchell granted the City the authority to erect the Freedom Bell in the middle of its downtown, commemorating Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.s call in his immortal I Have a Dream speech to let freedom ring, from Stone Mountain of Georgia!

A depended upon leader in the Georgia General Assembly, Mitchell has authored legislation signed into law every term he has served. His Caucus in the State Legislature selected him to receive their highest honor, the Legislator of the Year award, after only his second term. Mitchell earned his Bachelor of Science degree from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, his Masters of Arts degree from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and his Juris Doctor degree from Atlanta Law School. Mitchell has also been bestowed a Doctorate degree from the Trinity United School of Ambassadors. Elected by his colleagues, he currently serves as Chair of the Georgia House of Representatives Democratic Caucus. He was also elected by his nationwide peers to serve as President of the National Black Caucus of State Legislators (NBCSL) and now serves as President of the NBCSL Foundation. NBCSL members represent seventy million Americans, and former members of NBCSL include 40% of the current Congressional Black Caucus and the 44th U.S. President. Mitchell was also elected to serve on the Executive Committee of the National Conference of State Legislators, which is the worlds largest legislative organization serving legislators and legislative staff in all of Americas 50 states and territories.

Clarence A. Nesbitt, Jr., Member

Clarence A. Nesbitt is the Chief Legal Officer and Corporate Secretary of THINK450, the business, innovation, and partnership engine of the National Basketball Players Association (NBPA). In this role, Nesbitt serves as the principal legal advisor across THINK450s business units, working to propel the organizations next stage of growth by amplifying the value of the collective players rights, expanding commercial opportunities, and securing innovative deals in the business of basketball among other responsibilities. Prior to this role, Nesbitt has served as the NBPAs General Counsel where he led the legal and government affairs functions of the union, negotiated modifications to the collective bargaining agreement associated with the coronavirus pandemic, and led the successful voluntary recognition campaign to unionize the NBA G League players (the NextGen Basketball Players Association).

Nesbitt attended Florida A&M University, where he received a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration and a Masters Degree in Business Administration. Nesbitt went on to Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, DC for his Juris Doctor degree. Nesbitt currently serves on the Board of Trustees for the Central Park Conservancy and the Black Entertainment & Sports Lawyers Association.

Denise L. Pease, Member

Denise L. Pease has committed her dynamic career as a senior government executive to developing impactful and sustainable policies that improve the lives of people, particularly those living in low- and moderate-income communities, by providing greater access and opportunities. Her talent for identifying problems and finding viable solutions has gained her the respect of national and international government, business, and community leaders. Pease served as the Northeast and Caribbean Regional Administrator at the General Services Administration in the Obama-Biden Administration. Through her leadership, the region succeeded in increasing minority business participation, returning the federal government to the World Trade Center site, and reconstructing federal government facilities and services after Hurricane Sandy. She has also served as the New York State Deputy Superintendent of Banks and the New York City Assistant Comptroller for Commercial Banking. In both positions, she created and implemented policy initiatives that increased banking services to the un-banked and under-banked communities.

Denise is a disability advocate, having developed and advocated on behalf of those with epilepsy and as a breast cancer survivor. Denise earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Columbia Universitys School of General Studies. She has furthered her pursuit to develop innovative sustainable solutions to the economic disparity found in many communities through the completion of advanced studies at internationally renowned educational institution including Executive Management training at the European Institute of Business Administration (INSEAD) Paris Strategic Management of Financial Structures Programme. She has received numerous awards and recognition for her accomplishments including serving as a National Urban Fellow at the Bernard Baruch School of Public Administration and as a Charles H. Revson Fellow on the Future of New York at Columbia University.

Denise devotes her time to working with organizations to ensure that future generations have lives of endless possibilities, including her work with UN Women, the Disability Council of the DNC, the Greater Queens Chapter of the Links, Inc., and serving as a Life Member of NAACP and Heritage Member of the Claude B. Govan Chapter of Tuskegee Airmen, Inc.

Rebecca Becky Pringle, Member

National Education Association (NEA) President Becky Pringle is a fierce social justice warrior, defender of educator rights, unrelenting advocate for all students and communities of color, and valued and respected voice in the education arena.

A middle school science teacher with more than three decades of classroom experience, Pringle is singularly focused on uniting the members of the largest labor union with the Nation, and using that collective power to transform public education into a racially and socially just and equitable system that is designed to prepare every student to succeed in a diverse and interdependent world.

Pringles passion for students and educators, combined with her first-hand classroom experience, equip her to lead the movement to reclaim public education as a common good. Before assuming NEAs top post in 2020, Pringle served as NEA Vice President and before that as NEA Secretary-Treasurer. She directed NEAs work to combat institutional racism and spotlight systemic patterns of racism and educational injustice that impact students. Under Pringles guidance, NEA works to widen access and opportunity by demanding changes to policies, programs, and practices. The Associations goal is to ensure the systemic, fair treatment of people of all races so that equitable opportunities and outcomes are within reach for every student. This is why Pringle is a staunch advocate for students who have disabilities, identify as LGBTQ+, are immigrants, or English Language Learners.

Pringle is a passionate Philadelphia Eagles fan, loves anything purple, and is the Best Nana B ever for two special someones.

Marisa J. Richmond, Member

Marisa J. Richmond teaches history and womens and gender studies at Middle Tennessee State University. She previously taught at Tennessee State University, Vanderbilt University, and Nashville State Community College. She is the current President of the Tennessee Federation of Democratic Women, and a Co-Chair of the Transgender Advisory Committee of the Democratic National Committee. Locally, she is a member of the Metro Historical Commission, having previously served as a member, and Past Chair, of the Metro Human Relations Commission. She also served on the Mayors Council on the Status of Women and the Davidson County General Sessions Court Judicial Equity Collective. Previously, she served many years as the President and Lobbyist for the Tennessee Transgender Political Coalition.

Richmond is a prolific author and speaker on transgender rights, and has served on many boards at the local, state, and national levels. She has been recognized for her work with many awards. Richmond has three degrees, all in U.S. History. Her Bachelor of Arts is from Harvard University, her Master of Arts from the University of California, Berkeley, and her Ph.D. from George Washington University.

Bernice G. Scott, Member

Bernice G. Scott is a resident of Hopkins, South Carolina. She has 20 years of experience serving as a member of Richland County Council in South Carolina, including a tenure as Chairwoman. She has 15 years of experience working in county and state government, including service in Governor Jim Hodges administration. She is the founder of the nationally recognized grassroots political advocacy group, The Reckoning Crew. Since retiring from county government, she has been volunteering with the Tri-City Visionaries, Inc. to help senior citizens in rural and disadvantaged areas repair and secure their homes. She is the mother of two children, five grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren.

Richard Mouse Smith, Member

Richard Mouse Smith is a lifelong Delawarean his family has been in Delaware since the 1860s. Smith is the President of Delawares NAACP Coalition of Branches and he has been in the NAACP since 1959. He was a union president for eight years and worked at the Port of Wilmington for 42 years. Over the years, he has worked with seven Wilmington mayors and six Delaware governors. Smith helped establish the Delaware Rainbow Coalition with Jesse Jackson, which was part of the coalition to desegregate schools. Education has been integral in his life, and it is one of his main priorities for his community.

He has been friends with President Biden for over 50 years. The people and leadership of the City of Wilmington and State of Delaware made him who is today.

Joe Tate, Member

Representative Joe Tate is serving his third term and now represents Michigans 10th State House District, a diverse community that covers Detroits lower east side and the communities of the Village of Grosse Pointe Shores, Grosse Pointe Woods, Grosse Pointe Farms, Grosse Pointe City, and Grosse Pointe Park. Tate is Michigans first Black Speaker of the House, now holding the gavel and setting House priorities in a legislative term in which Democrats have the majority for the first time in over a decade. His policy priorities include uplifting Michigan families, protecting the rights of all people, ensuring workers are valued, and investing in a world-class education system, a strong infrastructure, and a thriving economy.

Tate decided to run for office as a part of his deep and lifelong commitment to public service. The value of service was taught to him by his parentsa teacher in the Detroit public school system and a Detroit firefighter. As a teenager, Tate earned a scholarship to play football at Michigan State University before joining the National Football League (NFL). After the NFL, he went on to serve in the U.S. Marine Corps, deploying twice to Afghanistan during Operation Enduring Freedom. After an honorable discharge from the Marine Corps, he earned both an MBA and a masters in environmental policy and planning from the University of Michigan. Before joining the Legislature, Tate helped small businesses grow their capacity as a program manager for the Detroit Economic Growth Corp.

Kenny D. Thompson, Jr., Member

Kenny Thompson, Jr. is the Chief Public Affairs Officer at Vail Resorts (NYSE: MTN) overseeing government relations, community relations, communications, sustainability, and the Companys social responsibility platform, EpicPromise. Vail Resorts is the leading global mountain resort operator with 41 resorts in 15 states and four countriesincluding some of the worlds most iconic destinations as well as travel-centric retail and hospitality businesses.

Prior to joining Vail Resorts, Thompson served as the Vice President of External Affairs, North America at PepsiCo. While at PepsiCo, he developed PepsiCos strategy for targeting, investing, cultivating, and maintaining partnerships with external stakeholders to support PepsiCos broader business goals. Before joining PepsiCo in 2013, Thompson held several positions in the Obama-Biden Administration, including Director of Message Events for then-Vice President Joe Biden, Senior Advisor to United States Trade Representative Ron Kirk, and Special Assistant and Advance Lead for President Barack Obama. In 2020, Thompson was selected to serve on the Biden-Harris Transition as the Private Sector Liaison where he provided strategic and management oversight of the interaction with the private sector while managing relationships with Fortune 500 CEOs, Wall Street firms, venture-backed enterprises, and industry groups.

A native Texan, Thompson completed his bachelors degree at Texas Christian University, where he was a member of the Horned Frog baseball team. He later earned a Master of Business Administration from Georgetown University. Currently, Thompson serves on the Board of Trustees at Texas Christian University and the Board of Directors at the Sandy Hook Promise Foundation.

Benaree Bennie Pratt Wiley, Member

Benaree Bennie Pratt Wiley is a Corporate Director and Trustee. For fifteen years, Wiley was the President and Chief Executive Officer of The Partnership, Inc., an organization that strengthened Greater Bostons capacity to attract, retain, and develop talented professionals of color. Wiley is currently a director on boards of the BNY Mellon Mutual Funds and CBIZ (NYSE: CBZ). She has served as the Chair of PepsiCos African American Advisory Board and formerly served on the boards of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts and First Albany (NASDAQ: FACT). Her civic activities include serving on the boards of Dress for Success Boston, Spaulding Hospital, and formerly Howard University where she served as Vice Chair. She is a frequent speaker on leadership, diversity, and professional development, and has been the recipient of numerous awards, honors, and four Honorary Doctorates including from Boston College and New England School of Law. Among her many honors are induction into the Academy of Distinguished Bostonians, the Pinnacle Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, and Harvard Business School Distinguished Alumni Award from the African American Student Union. Wiley also had the honor of being featured on the cover of Boston magazine as one of Bostons most powerful women and being the subject of a Harvard Business School case, Bennie Wiley and The Partnership.

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President Biden Announces Key Appointments to Boards and ... - The White House

Tucker Carlsons last hour as a Fox News hostlast as in most recent, and also, we now know, as in finalended with him sitting at a shiny white desk, a green-screened image of the Capitol behind him, eating a soggy, sad-looking slice of sausage-and-pineapple pizza. It is a disgusting order, he admitted. But I have no shame. He wore a Rolex, a repp tie, and a slightly manic grin; his hair, as usual, was jauntily mussed, as if hed just stepped off a catamaran. The segment seemed calculated to promote three things: Carlsons salt-of-the-earth charisma; the heroism of a particular Delaware County, Pennsylvania, pizza-delivery man, a ruggedly handsome white guy who had acted as a vigilante assistant to the local police; and a new special on his streaming show Tucker Carlson Originals,a half-hour documentary called Let Them Eat Bugs. (Could there really be a plan to make us all eat bugs? Carlson asked, in an ominous voice-over, followed by a guest providing a putative answer: Its a global agenda that is pushing all of these things.) In the studio, Carlson put down his slice. What a great way to end the week, he said, with a satisfied chuckle. Well be back on Monday.

In fact, late on Monday morning, Fox News announced, in a terse statement, that Carlson and the network had agreed to part ways. We still dont know why, although its hard to imagine that the timingwith one recently settled defamation lawsuit, another defamation suit in the offing, and one of Carlsons former producers sitting on a few undisclosed recordingsis a coincidence. The imagination runs wild: Was it workplace abuse? A private rant about how Kanye was right about the Jews? Was Carlson plotting a corporate coup, or perhaps an actual one? Well learn the details soon enough. For now, all that seems clear is that, after Carlsons years of impunity, despite various scandals and advertiser boycotts and mask-off moments, there must be something, in the end, that his bosses consider a fireable offense.

For the past six years or so, Carlson was the most influential voice in right-wing media, without a close second. Donald Trump had the raw power, but Carlson set the ideological agenda. And, beneath all the self-abasing, clickbait-ready antics, he did seem to have an ideological agenda. Consider the insects. Let Them Eat Bugs is not just a gross-out tour through the weird world of entomophagy; the documentary also makes an argument, in the mode of reactionary, conspiratorial nationalism. All of a sudden, the people in chargepoliticians, billionaire oligarchs, celebritiesare telling you you have to fight climate change by changing what you eat, Carlson said, in an introduction. You may not want to change what you eatno one ever voted on thatbut democracy doesnt matter when it comes to the food supply. (In Carlsons vocabulary, democracy is a floating signifier that may or may not overlap with the actual mechanisms of governance; the people in charge may refer to Kamala Harris, Nicole Kidman, an underpaid female journalist, or an Oberlin sophomore, but rarely to, say, a sitting Republican member of Congress, several of whom Carlson interviewed each week.) Let Them Eat Bugs is a pungent combination of obvious falsehoods (Davos executives are shoving crickets down your throat!) presented as truths, and obvious truths (climate change is upending the food supply) presented as falsehoods, or as a plot contrived by nefarious globalists, or both. In a sense, Carlson is simply dressing up the oldest, most rudimentary conservative laments in sleek, newfangled graphics. The climate is changing, but he doesnt want it to change; so, instead of finding a suitable target for his outrage (fossil-fuel companies, for example, or the political parties that subsidize them), he invents a more creative, convoluted way to stand athwart history, yelling StopNational Review by way of Infowars. He has both a brother and a son named Buckley. For the first half of his career, Tucker Carlson was a William F. Buckley, Jr.-style Beltway neoconservative, writing for the The Weekly Standard and appearing on C-SPAN and CNN. But the conservative coalition has changed, and Buckley has been dead for years. More recently, Carlson has been genuflecting before the MyPillow guy and texting with Alex Jones.

I have watched many hours of Tucker Carlson Tonight, Carlsons prime-time TV show, and of his two streaming shows, Tucker Carlson Today and Tucker Carlson Originals. I have been appalled; I have been amazed; I have shouted rejoinders, vainly, at the screen; but I have rarely been bored. A lot of his story lines, including the one about the bugs, seem to have been repurposed from the deepest recesses of the Internet. In the Tuckerite master narrative, the bad guys are usually the rootless cosmopolitan lites, and the heroes are the local traditionalists, Christian nationalists, not-gonna-take-it-anymore vigilantes, or all of the above. (In Let Them Eat Bugs, one of the main protagonists is Eva Vlaardingerbroek, a right-wing Dutch political commentator who refers to climate change as a so-called crisis and has called feminism one of the biggest shams of our time.) Upcoming Tucker Carlson Originals documentaries, assuming that Fox decides to release them as scheduled, will include one called Meet the Preppers, about the vindication of [disaster] prepping, and another about the total collapse of human rights in the nation of Canada. (Teasing the latter on his prime-time show, Carlson displayed a mockup of Justin Trudeaus face blended with Fidel Castrosan allusion, which any non-Internet-poisoned person would and should have overlooked, to an old urban legend that Castro is Trudeaus real father.) And who could forget the Tucker Carlson Originals special The End of Men, which introduced the world to bromeopathy, the patriotic practice of bathing ones testicles in red light? That special also featured hand-wringing about soy boys, paeans to raw-egg slonkers, and homoerotic montages, apparently filmed on Alex Joness bocce court, that looked like Abercrombie & Fitch ads directed by Leni Riefenstahl. Again, its easy to brush all this off as a campy, desperate ploy for attention, which it was. But The End of Men also made an argument: American men are being systematically emasculated by some sort of ill-defined global cabal, for the purpose of slowing down birth rates in the West; only well-ordered, disciplined groups of men, presumably after being armed and restored to testicular health, can restablish order and restore Western civilization. This is the sort of thing that seems funny until it doesnt.

Carlson may have saved some of the spicier visuals for Foxs streaming service, but the same ideological strands ran through his nightly TV show, which was, at various points, the highest-rated show in the history of cable news. During his six-year run, he chose to interview, as far as I can tell, exactly four sitting world leaders, apart from Donald Trump: Viktor Orbn, Jair Bolsonaro, Andrzej Duda, and Nayib Bukele. Among the nations that still bother to hold credible elections, these were, by most measures, some of the most autocratic leaders on Earth. Carlson often talked about democracy, but he did not define the concept the way that most contemporary political theorists do; his version seemed to mean something more like the will of the people, and not necessarily all the people. He is white, and hes a nationalist, but, of course, he has long denied being a white nationalistwhenever he was asked if he was a white supremacist, he would claim that he didnt even know what the term meant. He doesnt oppose immigrants; he simply opposes immigration, which, according to him, makes our country poor and dirtier and more divided. One of the few bromides that most Democrats and Republicans still agree on is that diversity is our strength, but Carlson dared, repeatedly, to just ask the question: What if its not? Once, on the radio, he referred to Iraqis as semiliterate, primitive monkeys. (To my knowledge, he never said the N-word in publicalthough who knows whats on those undisclosed recordings.) No matter how many racist things he said, his bosses and advertisers and fellow-travellers could keep denying that he was a racist, because he said so.

Retrain your mind to acknowledge the things that are right in front of you, that are obvious, Carlson said, in 2019. This was not a voice-over in an attention-grabbing documentary but a keynote speech at a conservative conference; he was, presumably, saying what he really believed. There are many downsides, I will say, to Trump, but one of the upsides is that the Trump election was so shocking, so unlikely... that it did cause some significant percentage of people to say, Wait a secondif that can happen, like, what else is true? One of the things that turned out to be true was that Tucker Carlson, known to a previous micro-generation as the guy in the bow tie who was once humiliated by Jon Stewart, could become, for a pivotal half decade, the most dominant and dangerous right-wing pundit in the country. Carlson, like Trump, was written off for years as a laughingstock, but he turned out to have a daunting set of skills. He was a cosseted lite, a coastal prep-school heir and a consummate creature of the D.C. swamp; but, like Trump, he was rhetorically slippery enough, despite all that, to take his place at the vanguard of an ostensibly populist movement. Unlike Trump, he is silver-tongued, industrious, and (as much as it pains me to admit it) a gifted writergifted enough that he can tell his audience pretty much anything, including the opposite of what he told them the previous night, and make it feel believable. He has lost the most powerful chair in conservative media, but he hasnt lost those skills. I dont think weve heard the last of him.

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The World According to Tucker Carlson - The New Yorker

So Tucker Carlson has finally bit the dust after years of spewing pro-fascist sentiments in which he encouraged white nationalism and supported fascist leaders.

His message has suddenly stopped resonating with his embattled employer, Fox News, which terminated his contract on Monday morning, finally signaling that theyve had enough of their home-grown fascist superstar no surprise there as Fox got whacked last week with a bill for $787 million, payable to Dominion Voting Systems, for smearing the company as supposedly complicit in 2020 election fraud.

There is a history of Tucker Carlsons in American media. It should be no surprise that another member of that evil tribe has risen, crashed, and burned in a pretty stunning fashion.

The closest comparison to him is Father Charles Coughlin, who in his heyday in the 1930s had 30 million listeners a week tuning in for his weekly pro-Nazi rant.

Coughlin was enormously powerful, so much so that his own church was terrified of dealing with him as the powers-that-be knew he had millions of followers who had the capacity to seriously damage the stature of the Catholic Church.

Coughlin was a demagogue who explained away the Nazi atrocities of the 1930s, saying, for instance, Kristallnacht happened because the Germans had been attacked. He was a dangerous, evil character who would have prospered enormously if Hitler had won.

But the goodwill of the American people towards Coughlin faded over time. As the Nazi atrocities unfolded, and amidst the revelation that Coughlin was being paid by the German Nazi party to broadcast his hate, his popularity soon plunged.

It is incredible to think now that Coughlin was a guest at the White House where he met with FDR and other leading American political figures who were seeking to blunt his extremism but did not want to face him head-on.

They initially failed in their effort and Coughlin went on to become the face of American Nazism. He even had his own version of the Proud Boys, a group he called the Christian Front whose members regularly attacked Jews and synagogues.

At his height, Coughlin signed a lucrative contract with CBS to expand his radio show which gave a massive boost to his listenership. With the Catholic Church refusing to step in, showing a moral cowardice that was all too evident in their dealings with Coughlin, it was left to FDR to take the vital step.

He announced that Coughlin was being barred from the airwaves and could no longer broadcast his extremist views. Unlike Germany, Coughlin never built a movement capable of sustaining an armed insurrection and he soon faded from history.

But now comes Carlson with his own brand of hatred for everything not white, his continued attacks from the far right on immigrants, and his support for the January 6 insurrectionists.

But now, even Fox News has had enough, and we were treated to the extraordinary spectacle of Carlson being booted out without even knowing his fate on Monday. And not a moment too soon.

Foxs house is far from clean, and there are a few more hosts who need to be shown the door and probably will be Judge Jeanine, anyone?

No doubt Carlson will eventually resurface and double down on his hate, and it will be fascinating to see what becomes of Fox News, purveyors of so much misinformation which theyll be paying more for in the days ahead as other defamation lawsuits work their way to the forefront.

So good riddance to Tucker Carlson. To most Americans, he wont be missed.

*This column first appeared in the April 26 edition of the weekly Irish Voice newspaper, sister publication to IrishCentral.

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Fox finally boots Tucker Carlson - IrishCentral

Title 42, a measure that prevents migrants from getting asylum in the U.S. due to COVID, is expected to end next month as the country lifts its national public health emergency.

Meanwhile, federal immigration agencies are ramping up severe immigration policies ahead of the policy ending on May 11.

Federal authorities expelled more than 235,000 asylum seekers in the first three months of 2023 under Title 42, according to government data. Since the start of Title 42 in March 2020, the U.S. has removed over 2.8 million asylum seekers.

That includes families, children and people traveling alone.

The premise of Title 42 was to increase COVID precautions. Health officials said that policy actually lacks public health reasoning.

Title 42 is a federal code that allows the federal government to expel migrants who have come from a country with a communicable disease. Ending the policy means the U.S. has to process migrants under typical immigration laws, allowing them again to seek asylum instead of deportation.

Sophia Genovese is an attorney at the New Mexico Immigrant Law Center. She said its likely a rush of asylum seekers will come to the U.S. when the policy lifts.

While its a good thing that Title 42 is ending, she said, there are still overly strict immigration policies in place.

In January, with the end of Title 42 in mind, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced a string of new, strict border enforcement measures. One measure proposes rapidly kicking migrants out of the U.S. known as expedited removal who arent eligible for Title 42 under Title 8 instead.

Under Title 8, if asylum officers determine that migrants dont have a credible fear back in their home country or migrants dont ask for asylum, the federal government can remove them from the country. Genovese said this is a big issue.

Were wasting a lot of money on expulsions and deportations, instead of being rational and recognizing that migration is normal, she said.

Genovese said there are expedited removal violations at the Torrance County Detention Center, one of three immigrant detention centers in New Mexico. It has a history of violating federal standards. Migrants have also repeatedly reported inhumane conditions, and one Brazilian asylum seeker being held at Torrance died by suicide last year.

Federal officials hold credible fear interviews to ensure that migrants have a reason to be afraid of returning to their home country. Genovese said some interviews at Torrance have been violating due process rights, with officers asking few questions in interviews, only asking yes-or-no questions when questions are supposed to be open-ended and speeding through interviews.

She said shes working with a migrant from Ecuador who speaks Kichwa and was forced to proceed with an interview in Spanish, despite not even speaking that language.

Genovese said the U.S. deportation exodus only creates a larger mess than what is necessary in the end.

No amount of border policies are going to limit migration, she said. What this causes instead is chaos, and it feels intentional.

Genovese pointed out that providing accessible services to migrants, such as legal help, is less costly than detaining them.

They are invested in the process, and simply need access to information and services to meaningfully participate in that process, she said.

Genovese said the New Mexico Immigrant Law Center wants to see alternatives to detention, like Immigrant Customs and Enforcement check-ins and community-based models of assistance.

People want to comply with court orders. They want to comply with the law, she said. People are here because they generally fear returning to their home countries, and they want whats best for them and their familys safety.

Immigration is ultimately up to the federal government. Genovese said the state government cant interfere with the enforcement of these policies.

However, New Mexico could show solidarity for migrants, she said, and employ strategies like welcoming centers. She brought up Portland, where an immigration welcome center provides access to legal services, food programs and language education.

How powerful would that be, if perhaps the City of Albuquerque did that, or other cities within the state supported by the state government are able to establish these welcoming centers, she said. So that people have the tools that they need to get through their asylum process.

One New Mexico representative is asking for the New Mexico National Guard to be sent to the southern border to help stem the flow of illegal activity.

Rep. Jenifer Jones (R-Deming) sent a letter to Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham last week referencing a conversation the two had during the Legislature about potential federal funds to send the New Mexico National Guard to the border. Jones said state funds could be used if theres no federal assistance.

Maddie Hayden, spokesperson for the governors office, said via email that the New Mexico National Guard is ready to assist with non-enforcement related work at the southern border, at the request of the federal government.

Congress ultimately bears responsibility for finding a solution on federal immigration policy, she wrote, but until Republicans recognize that border security and humanitarian aid are not mutually exclusive, this fundamentally federal issue will continue to fester without a solution in sight.

Hayden said Lujan Grisham agrees with Jones that public safety is paramount, including at the southern border. She added that the governor is committed to dedicating whatever resources are needed to keep New Mexicans safe.

New Mexico Senate allows immigration detention to continue

In the letter, Jones said the flow of illegal activity will likely increase when Title 42 lifts, worsening a crisis of illegal drugs coming across the southern border and the threat of human trafficking.

Genovese said Democrats cant fall victim to messages like the one from Jones and try to appease white nationalism.

Its fear-mongering by Republicans, predominantly, about the immigrants, the asylum seekers, the migrants, failures to recognize humanity in our neighbors, she said. Its completely racist and xenophobic.

She said Biden also shouldnt try to appease these Republicans. His administration has expelled more people under Title 42 than the Trump administration that enacted it, according to the government statistics. Genovese said too often, Democrats like Biden try to placate Republicans by showing force around the southern border.

Its caused a tremendous amount of chaos and more harm, she said.

Bidens stance on Title 42 has swayed over the years, with the administration often denouncing inhumane immigration policies while still keeping them in effect.

Congressional members pointed out Bidens mixed messages in January. They sent a letter to Biden arguing against the expansion of Title 42. New Mexicos U.S. Sen. Ben Ray Lujn and Rep. Teresa Leger Fernndez signed that letter along with 75 other officials.

The Biden administration as well as immigration advocacy centers have failed to end Title 42 numerous times.

As a result of that and Title 8 being in effect, Genovese said there have been and still are thousands upon thousands of migrants and asylum seekers waiting in Mexico. Many are often in very dangerous situations, she added.

When asylum seekers rush into the U.S. when Title 42 lifts, she said, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol wont have the capacity to hold everyone, meaning some will get through undetected and officials will just have to allow others through.

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Severe immigration policies intensify as Title 42 nears its end - Source New Mexico

A CLEARER understanding of faith in society would help the Government to tackle issues such as forced marriage, child safeguarding, radicalisation in prison, and faith-based extremism, an independent review has concluded.

Improved faith literacy in the public sector is key to this, it says.

The 165-page report Does government do God? An independent review into how government engages with faith was published on Wednesday, more than three years after it was commissioned by the Governments Levelling-Up department on the cusp of the pandemic.

It was written by Colin Bloom, a former director of the Conservative Christian Fellowship, who was appointed an independent faith engagement adviser by the Government in 2019 to explore the relationship between faith groups and public institutions in the UK. Its remit, Mr Bloom explains in the introduction to his report, does not extend to the ongoing challenges of religiously motivated hatred, including antisemitism or anti-Muslim hatred nor far-right or far-left political extremism.

His research is focused on what he calls true believers people who are true, sincere, and faithful with whom, he says, as with non-believers, the Government should work closely to improve society. This is opposed to the personal greed, ambition, and pride of what he calls make-believers.

More than 21,000 people responded to a public consultation (open for one month from 13 November 2020) for the review, which sets out 22 recommendations for the Government. These include:

The review found that most responders to its call for evidence (84 per cent) saw faith and religion as overall positive things for society. One respondent said: Faith is oxygen to many of us.

Yet 58 per cent of responders also agreed that freedom of religion or belief was under threat in the UK. This view was particularly strong among Christians (68 per cent), who cited high-profile cases of Christians being penalised for being open about their faith in public and at work.

In a press briefing on the report with the Religion Media Centre, Tim Farron MP, a former leader of the Liberal Democrats, said that this statistic was not surprising. To people who are not Christians, Christianity is the establishment; it is privileged. Christians, who, he argued, were a smaller group than the establishment portrayed, needed to understand how they were perceived, and faith literacy was part of that.

The Government will be really bad at diversity if it doesnt understand faith in a non-patronising way, he said. In turn, Christians and people of other faiths needed to understand better the cultural literacy of the world around them.

The report says that the Government should embrace the work that faith groups do within the community, while understanding, as one respondent put it, that this is merely an overflow from the core of their identity, not their actual identity. Greater engagement is needed from the Government to foster positive understanding while not shying away from tackling harmful practices.

A whole chapter in the report is dedicated to forms of faith extremism most extensively 11 pages on Sikh extremism, compared with between one page or a few paragraphs on Hindu nationalism, Islamist extremism, Neo-Nazi occultist groups, white supremacy, and other forms of extremist views.

Commenting on the disparity, Mr Bloom told the Religion Media Centre briefing that the Sikh community were outstanding contributors to UK society, but said that work had not been done before on extremism within this group to the same extent as others. One of his 22 recommendations is that the Government should take steps to develop a more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of subversive and sectarian Sikh extremist activity.

Another chapter focuses on faith and education, including a recommendation to ensure that out-of-school faith settings such as Jewish yeshivas and Muslim madrassas are registered and inspected. They should also ensure appropriate resources are allocated to meet childrens welfare and safeguarding requirements, the report says. It goes on to say that RE has become a Cinderella subject and that teaching of the subject should be improved.

While Mr Bloom accepted that there had been many previous reports on this topic with similar recommendations; but he argued that these had not been followed through. I just wish that either this Government, or whatever comes next, will be the Prince Charming that will take this Cinderella to the ball.

His report recommends the introduction of minimum standards regarding timetabling and resourcing to bring RE alongside other humanities subjects which would then be centrally inspected by Ofsted. It also recommends that religious studies is introduced into the GCSE English Baccalaureate, as well as outreach programmes to graduates of theology and RS to improve the quality of teaching.

The final chapter focuses on forced and coercive marriage, cases of which Mr Bloom considers to be underreported, with unacceptably low criminal conviction rates. The Forced Marriage Unit reports an average of just 1359 cases a year, he writes, and only six convictions were made in 2019-20 and 235 protection orders were issued by family courts in 2020.

Mr Bloom told the briefing that the Government had for too long ducked the issue. I know its sensitive, but nobody should be forced to be married against their will. And Im very angry that this Government has not done more despite its fine words . . . Theyve got to stop ducking it and address it.

His report recommends a redoubling of efforts by accepting the wider term forced and coercive marriage to cover the pressure imposed by some faith leaders on individuals to accept religious-only (non-legally binding) and arranged marriages.

Training should be provided to faith leaders to understand how to spot signs of coercive behaviour or control to facilitate a law-change, making it a criminal offence for faith leaders to conduct religious and civil weddings without ensuring both participants have willingly entered into the marriage. He does not say how this would be monitored or enforced.

The Forced Marriage Unit should be led by a Secretary of State and adequately resourced with both a operation and policy team, he adds. The Government should also record more data on forced and coercive marriage, including working more closely with social services and local councils as part of separate review.

Forced marriage is also the focus of reports conclusion. Mr Bloom writes: Some of the recommendations perhaps could have been bolder or more ambitious, but politics is the art of the possible. Every recommendation is within reach of this Government, and any future Government, if it wishes to grasp them.

Tackling faith literacy, UK Armed Forces recruitment, and prison chaplaincy are all important issues, but there is one burning injustice that this Government should not shrink from, which is the issue of forced and coercive marriages. . . If only one thing is achieved from this report, confronting the pernicious and unlawful practice of forced and coercive marriage once and for all should be the goal.

He adds: That said, without faith, places of worship and people of faith, this country would be poorer, blander, and less dynamic. Faith is a force for good, and the Government should do more to both understand and release the potential of this fantastic resource.

Responding to the review, the Church of Englands Director of Faith and Public Life, the Revd Dr Malcolm Brown, said: We welcome the recognition in the report of the need for religious literacy and a greater public understanding of the major world faiths. It is a fact that the majority of people in England Wales identify with a religion, so faith is not a minority pursuit.

Everyone has a belief-system which guides their lives so it is important to enhance understanding of religions without treating religious people as other. There is, of course, a huge diversity of faith in this country and faiths are not all the same.

We look forward to hearing how any training and education in the field of religious literacy can be done in partnership with religious communities and from a perspective that sees faiths in the round.

See the rest here:

Government-sponsored review finds religion a force for good in the UK - Church Times

On Oct. 27, 2018, New Light was about one week shy of its one-year anniversary in the building. That morning, New Light was just beginning its service in the basement, Tree of Life was in its second-floor sanctuary and Dor Hadash was meeting in a smaller room nearby.

When the gunman burst in, he shot and killed members of all three congregations Jerry Rabinowitz from Dor Hadash; Richard Gottfried, Melvin Wax and Dan Stein from New Light and Joyce Fienberg, Rose Mallinger, David and Cecil Rosenthal, Bernice and Sylvan Simon and Irving Younger from Tree of Life.

Tree of Life victims, from top, left to right: Richard Gottfried, Rose Mallinger, Jerry Rabinowitz, Cecil Rosenthal. Middle row: David Rosenthal, Joyce Fienberg, Daniel Stein. Bottom row: Melvin Wax, Irving Younger, Bernice Simon, Sylvan Simon.

The week after the shooting, all three congregations held a shabbat service together at Beth Shalom synagogue, Mr. Hausman said. From there, theyve taken separate paths. And from the same tragedy, theyve chosen different approaches to memorialization.

The Tree of Life congregation has temporarily moved into Rodef Shalom in Shadyside while members await the demolition and reconstruction of the Tree of Life building. We made a decision right away that we were going to return, said Mr. Hausman. If not, this bad guy wins, and that certainly is not going to happen.

But the building they return to will be far different in design, function and scope than the one they left.

What we are building will be a wholly new American Jewish institution, said Carole Zawatsky, chief executive officer of the new Tree of Life nonprofit.

Tree of Life has enlisted world-famous architect Daniel Libeskind, who has designed Jewish museums and Holocaust memorials all over the world, as well as the master plan for the redevelopment of the World Trade Center.

Not only will the building host Tree of Lifes religious services, it also will house the worlds only museum dedicated to antisemitism. Also in the plans are a memorial to those killed in the shooting, classrooms, offices, a social hall and a film screening room. The building also will serve as a space to host students and partner with universities, as well as become the new home for the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh.

The planning process was slow-going at first, as the congregation grappled with what seemed like an enormous task. The Tree of Life building, now beginning the demolition phase, is tentatively scheduled to re-open in early 2024.

Early on, we made the decision we were going to use this as a teaching moment we didnt really know how right away, said Mr. Hausman. Nothing like this fortunately had ever happened in the United States and there were no books, no guidelines. Im sure we made a ton of mistakes in the early going, but sometimes thats the best learning experience.

Ms. Zawatsky was in Washington, D.C., the day of the shooting, working as CEO of the Edlavitch Jewish Community Center. Even hundreds of miles away from Pittsburgh, her immediate response was concern for the safety of the congregations in D.C., feeling that all of Judaism was under attack. On the Monday morning following the shootings, she went to work with yahrzeit candles in her bag, lighting them with her staff to honor those killed in Pittsburgh.

As I sit here in this role, its so abundantly obvious that this is what had to happen, she said of the scope of the new Tree of Life building. That we are obligated to use this terrible moment as a beacon for the entire nation and world. Were not defined by our killers, but by what we create out of adversity and tragedy it couldnt have been anything else.

As for New Light, they also initially believed their new location would be temporary, a space in Congregation Beth Shalom in Squirrel Hill.

Even a year after the shooting, Mr. Cohen was confident they would return to the Tree of Life building. But as time passed, they not only became comfortable in their new space in the Helfant Chapel at Beth Shalom, but heard from members of their congregation who still cant drive by the building, much less see themselves inside it.

Initially, we thought we had an obligation to go back because it was such a horrible thing, we needed to make a statement by going back, said Mr. Cohen, sitting in their sanctuary at Beth Shalom. But too many people said I cant. How could they go to a place thats bullet-holed? And it doesnt matter that the bullet holes arent there anymore. And it doesnt matter that theres marble and glass and its beautiful and world famous.

The bullet holes are still there. Theyll always be there. And for some of our members who were most directly involved, thats the message that we as a congregation took. And thats why were here.

After they made the decision in 2020 to stay at Beth Shalom, they didnt want to wait any longer to create a space to mourn those who died, said Mr. Cohen.

Barbara Caplan looks at a list of the shooting victims on the wall of New Light Memorial Chapel in Shaler. (Lucy Schaly/Post-Gazette)

They worked closely with the families of the deceased to turn an open-air, dirt-floor garage on their cemetery property into a chapel, memorial and mini-museum. On a sunny day, colorful light streams through stained glass doors that depicts themes from Genesis 21:1-22:24, the Torah portion intended to be read the morning of Oct. 27, 2018.

Stored in a glass case are the shofar that Gottfried would blow at services, the small travel prayer book that Wax used throughout his life and a section from the Torah that the meticulously-organized Stein would read every year, the date that he did so handwritten on the side from February 1985 to February 2018.

At their hillside cemetery above the chapel, headstones are spaced close together, following the old Romanian custom not to leave space for the devil to get in between the graves, said co-president Barbara Caplan. New Light member Sophie Masloff is buried there, as are Wax and Gottfried their headstones overflowing with stones placed on top, as is Jewish custom.

Along the edge of a bluff in the cemetery, a large stone memorial shaped like a Torah honors Wax, Gottfriend and Stein as holy martyrs, with a Callery pear tree planted next to it that grew from the only tree to survive at the site of 9/11.

All of these things have really been designed to give comfort by something physical that people can relate to, said Mr. Cohen. Weve just felt that, the only way forward as an organization is we have to do something to remember and memorialize.

As for Dor Hadash, the congregation moved into Rodef Shalom after the shooting, and plans to stay there.

Our community has always looked at the community as having value, rather than the physical building, said Dana Kellerman, communications chair for Dor Hadash. Rodef Shalom has been a wonderful, welcoming congregation and while we have never regarded the physical building as an essential component of our congregation, the physical space works very well for us.

At the one-year anniversary of the synagogue shootings, a crowd stands for a moment of silence during an event called ''In Memoriam: Remember the Victims, Demand Stronger Gun Laws'' in 2019 at the North Shore Riverfront Park. (Post-Gazette)

While plans for a physical memorial are still being discussed, the congregation has thrown itself into a different sort of legacy advocacy for gun control and other issues they believe fulfill the Jewish principle of tikkun olam, or repairing the world.

Democracy and social justice are really foundational values for our congregation, said Dr. Kellerman. We have been doing our best, I think, since our founding, but certainly even more emphatically since the shooting.

Following the attack, members of the Dor Hadash Social Action Committee founded a nonprofit, Squirrel Hill Stands Against Gun Violence. The group lobbies legislators, endorses political candidates, raises money and marches at rallies. Following the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, they partnered with student group March for Our Lives Pittsburgh to hold a large rally in Schenley Park, including a speech by Miri Rabinowitz, whose husband, Jerry, died in the synagogue shooting.

The congregation also has continued its advocacy in support of refugees, including its longstanding work with Jewish refugee resettlement agency HIAS a group that was a repeated target of anti-Semitic online rants by Robert Bowers, the accused synagogue shooter. Dor Hadash, which has seen growth in membership since the shooting, also has a fresh focus on combating antisemitism.

We dont join with the advocacy organizations on either side. ... The purpose of our congregation is to praise God.

Stephen Cohen, co-president, New Light

We do recognize that we are going to be more visible because of the upcoming trial and we would like to use that visibility to also talk a little bit about anti-semitism and its tie-in to white nationalism and white supremacy, said Dr. Kellerman, sitting in the library at Rodef Shalom. We would really look to amplify our voice in a way that calls people to work for a world that is more inclusive, that is democratic, that pushes those anti-democratic, white supremacist, violent insurrectionist forces back under a rock where they belong.

The congregation also has taken a stand against the death penalty for the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter, writing a letter in June 2021 to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland asking that the government abandon its request for the death penalty, as well as a similar letter to then-Attorney General Bill Barr in 2019.

Both Tree of Life and New Light have chosen to remain staunchly apolitical. Its not our job as a congregation to develop a stand, said Mr. Hausman of Tree of Life.

For New Light, that decision came even before the shooting, when the congregation debated whether to take a position on gun control. There were vehement opinions on both sides, said Mr. Cohen, leading the congregation to decide to remain neutral. And its a viewpoint that has stuck.

We dont invite politicians to come talk to us, we dont sign petitions, we dont join with the advocacy organizations on either side. We just, we dont have an opinion. Our members represent a large spectrum of the American population and thats not the purpose of our congregation the purpose of our congregation is to praise God.

Individual members of each congregation of course are free to express their own views. Relatives of nine of the 10 people killed from the Tree of Life and New Light congregations expressed their wishes for the government to proceed with its death penalty case in a July 2021 letter to Mr. Garland.

As the trial nears, once again intertwining the three congregations, there will be more to navigate, any number of fresh decisions they wish they didnt have to confront.

Its something thats never been done before, said Mr. Hausman, so how do you do it?

Anya Sostek: asostek@post-gazette.com.

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Tree of Life trial starts as Pittsburgh synagogue congregations find ... - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

White nationalism is an active threat to the Canadian Armed Forces, a new report says, but the Forces counter-intelligence unit is under-resourced and unable to proactively deal with the issue.

In a report released Monday, the independent National Security and Intelligence Review Committee (NSIRA) said the Department of National Defence has known for years their internal counter-intelligence branch has been underfunded and hindered by policy constraints.

The report also found the counter-intelligence unit was unable to proactively address white nationalism within the ranks, an issue that the top brass in all three branches of the Canadian Armed Forces have identified as a threat.

White supremacist groups actively seek individuals with prior military training and experience, or conversely, encourage individuals to enlist in order to gain access to specialized training, tactics and equipment, the partially-censored NSIRA report read.

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As such, the CAF remains attractive to elements of the right-wing, with a series of internal reports having warned of white supremacist membership among the ranks.

It wasnt immediately clear what internal reports the NSIRA investigation was referencing. But concerns about extremist infiltration of law enforcement and military have been longstanding in both Canada and the U.S.

Organizations with access to training and weapons have long been a target for domestic extremists. In 2018, then Chief of Defence Staff Jonathan Vance said clearly right-wing extremism is here in the Canadian Armed Forces.

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More recently, a House of Commons committee concluded in June that the Canadian government must do more to understand the scale of extremist groups attempts to recruit from the Canadian Armed Forces and federal law enforcement.

The potential for these extremists to use the (Department of National Defence/Canadian Armed Forces) as a channel to conduct threat-related activities elsewhere should be of direct concern to senior leadership, especially in light of the DND/CAF mandate and the elite skills and training that DND/CAF members receive, the NSIRA report read.

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The NSIRA report also indicated that after the Canadian government listed the neo-Nazi group Blood and Honour as a terrorist organization, the Forces counter-intelligence unit conducted a review if any military personnel past or present were involved with the group. The findings of that review were censored from the public report.

The report also notes that when pressed publicly about how the Department of National Defence was addressing white supremacists within its ranks, the Forces counter-intelligence unit was often referenced as a safeguard.

Although NSIRA acknowledges that the responsibility for addressing this threat cannot fall uniquely on the shoulders of (the Canadian Forces National Counter-Intelligence Unit), the reviews multiple findings lead to a concern that the CFNCIU may not be fully (used) to proactively identify white supremacists across the DND/CAF, the report stated.

NSIRA said they will be playing close attention to how threats from ideologically-motivated extremists the Canadian governments preferred umbrella term for far-right, white nationalist and domestic extremist violence in future reviews.

© 2022 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.

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White nationalism a threat the Canadian Armed Forces arent equipped ...

President Donald Trump has a symbiotic relationship with white nationalists.

Its been a constant in nearly every element of his presidency: The white nationalist violence in the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, was followed by a pronouncement that there were some very fine people on both sides.

The election of Congresss most diverse class in 2018 ever was met with tweets demonizing women progressives of color, telling them to go back to the crime infested places from which they came. Even Covid-19, a disease spun out of the animal kingdom, has been cast as a foreign foe that was at best the fault of and, at worst, created by nonwhite people, with the president insisting on using racist language around it. And Trump arguably launched his political career by appearing on shows like Fox Newss The OReilly Factor in 2011 to speculate that maybe President Barack Obamas birth certificate says he is a Muslim.

As president, Trump energizes white nationalists on two levels: with his rhetoric and through his staffing and policy choices. In turn, many have given him their support. In doing so, Trump has given an overt platform to white nationalists in a way that is unprecedented in the modern political era.

The issue isnt just Trumps rhetoric. His administrations immigration policy has led to the separation of families, to children facing risk of exposure to disease like Covid-19 in detention facilities, and to the deaths of immigrants seeking asylum in the US. His criminal justice policy has led to a more punitive criminal justice system and to the weakening of police oversight, all of which disproportionately affect communities of color.

His economic policies have rewarded those already holding wealth (a mostly white group), and his much-vaunted greatest economy was not as great for people of color particularly Black Americans, whose unemployment rate has been at least 2 percentage points higher than the general unemployment rate for the entirety of Trumps tenure. In fact, a kinship with white nationalist ideas can be found in just about any part of the Trump administrations policy, from health care to foreign affairs.

All of this is not to say that the Trump administration has run the country exactly as the leader of a white nationalist group would. But they are doing a lot of things that are ideologically compatible, Kathleen Belew, a University of Chicago historian and author of Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America, told Vox. And I think it creates a road toward political action for a movement that might not have seen one in an earlier historical moment.

The white nationalist movement is a complex one, and it overlaps with other ideologies, particularly those of white power and white supremacy, that are brought up in discussions of racism, history, and the misguided belief that white people are superior to people of color. But the terms white nationalism, white power, and white supremacy each mean something different. And to understand how the Trump administration relates to white nationalism, its important to understand what white nationalism is and what it is not.

Nationalism typically refers to strong support for a country akin to patriotism, as in the nationalists who want to put America first. But nationalism can also refer to self-determination, such as the Scottish nationalists who want an independent Scottish state.

White nationalism has more in common with this latter form of nationalism: It advocates for a physical or spiritual white state.

The nation in white nationalism is imagined as the Aryan nation, Belew said. White nationalism is the idea that white people are going to unify together as one national polity either in a white homeland or a white nation or even in a white world through the violent killing or exclusion of other people.

There are many routes to accomplishing this vision, but Belew stressed white nationalists generally are not interested in the United States as a nation. Instead, they aspire to replace the United States with something like the white state imagined at the end of The Turner Diaries, a central white nationalist text describing a war against people of color.

This is why, Belew said, When we think about white nationalism, its important to remember that it is a deeply revolutionary and deeply anti-democratic project.

The overall white power movement, on the other hand, goes beyond questions of statehood and has little regard for borders. As Belew told my colleague Jane Coaston, it is what connects New Zealands Christchurch shooter to white nationalists in the United States, and is primarily a social, rather than strictly political, movement that she says is incredibly diverse in all ways other than race.

The white power movement is a broad-based social movement of interconnected groups of people that includes the Klan, Neo-Nazis, radical tax protesters; it includes some segments of boogaloo now; it includes some segments of militia groups, Belew said. Its all across the country: Its urban and suburban and rural; it has men and women and children in it, and people across class backgrounds.

As that list would suggest, white power is a movement that provides a home for white supremacists people who, as political scientists Tehama Lopez Bunyasi and Candis Watts Smith write in Stay Woke: A Peoples Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter, believe that white people are inherently superior to people of color and should dominate over people of color.

This definition, Lopez Bunyasi told Vox, captures the ideological portion of white supremacy, but she noted there is also a structural facet.

Structurally, Lopez Bunyasi and Smith write, white supremacy is the systematic provision of political, social, economic, and psychological benefits and advantages to whites, alongside the systematic provisions of burdens and disadvantages to people who are not white. White supremacy isnt just an ideology; it is an actual system that has been used to build government and create policy in the real world.

Its this sort of white supremacy, Stony Brook University sociology professor Crystal Fleming told Jene Desmond-Harris in a 2016 piece for Vox, that has been a constant throughout history. The concept provided for the enslavement of Black people, the genocide of Native Americans, and the overall allocation of resources in manners that benefit white Americans. And it is a system that still exists today, keeping people of color out of jobs, universities, and political power. Which means everyone regardless of whether one subscribes to white supremacist beliefs lives in a white supremacist system.

Trump has embraced this system and has glorified some of its uglier moments, like its production of the Confederate States of America. He does not advocate for the sort of white nationalism depicted in The Turner Diaries, but his rhetoric has certainly elevated white Americans and sometimes white supremacists and nationalists over Americans of color. And as Belew notes, when it comes to the idea of white power, there is a lot of very concerning evidence that, if not Trump himself, there are people in his administration who really do understand what it means.

Its not only Trump who gives a voice to white nationalists. Key people in his administration champion their beliefs. Chief among them is White House senior adviser Stephen Miller.

A trove of more than 900 emails Miller sent to the alt-right publication Breitbart in 2015 and 2016 both while an aide to then-Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) and a member of the Trump campaign suggests Miller has deep ties to the white nationalist movement.

The emails, which were analyzed by the Southern Poverty Law Center, touched on race or immigration. Some of the messages included links to white nationalist articles, while others included white nationalist slang. Miller also promoted The Camp of the Saints, a white supremacist book that casts immigrants of color as savages who subsist on feces, as well as praise for the nativist, hard-line immigration policies of the 1920s.

Those emails saw Miller citing in particular the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act. Historian and author of The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas Monica Muoz Martinez notes that act had quota systems to restrict immigration from nations deemed to have populations that were racially undesirable. Those quotas allowed more immigration of people from Western Europe and fewer people coming from other nations, while banning immigration from Asia. As Muoz Martinez explains, these policies were designed by eugenicists and are admired not only by Miller but by the Ku Klux Klan and Adolf Hitler.

Miller has emulated those eugenicists in his crafting of the Trump administrations immigration policy, and hes doing so with Trumps blessing. Muoz Martinez told Vox, One hundred years ago, Mexicans were called murderers and rapists and bandits, and now, Trump says Mexicans are murderers and rapists and drug dealers.

As Voxs Nicole Narea has explained, Miller designed the public charge rule that allows immigrants to be excluded from the US based on whether they are likely to end up relying on public benefits in the future.

More recently, Miller was reportedly involved in creating the executive order that froze certain green card applications and family reunification initiatives due to the coronavirus. That order was followed in June by another that blocked entry for a wider variety of foreign workers, as well as a Supreme Court decision allowing for expedited removal of immigrants seeking asylum.

But ties to white nationalism go beyond Miller to include figures like Steve Bannon, a former White House chief strategist and Trump campaign CEO who led Breitbart, described in 2016 by Voxs Zack Beauchamp as a leading light of Americas white nationalist movement accused of using misogynistic, anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic, and barely hidden racist language throughout his professional life.

Bannon was fired in August 2017, but in his brief tenure, he seeded the White House with his economic nationalism philosophy, which has been criticized as rebranded white nationalism. And he helped develop the policies that defined Trumps early days most notably the Muslim ban. Bannons ideas about immigration remain entrenched due to figures like Miller, and his divisive rhetoric on domestic and foreign policy continues to come out of Trumps mouth.

Bannons thoughts on matters like staffing still hold weight. For instance, he has helped usher in his ally Michael Pack to run the US governments global news agencies, which include Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. We are going hard on the charge, Bannon told Voxs Alex Ward.

Pack, Ward notes, began his tenure by firing four top officials (after two others quit to protest his hiring) and by mandating the agencies promote editorial content that reflects the presidents worldview, leading to fears his tenure will see official US news networks become mouthpieces for the sorts of white nationalist-adjacent content that populated Breitbart.

Bannon is not the only former official whose ideology remains influential. Perhaps no fired member of the administrations presence is still felt as strongly as that of Millers old boss, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, whose tenure atop the Justice Department was marked by the enactment of policies that spoke to the line of thought laid out in The Turner Diaries.

Pursuing a tough on crime approach, Sessions crafted policies that actively endangered the lives and liberty of Americans of color, particularly Black Americans. These included mandating federal prosecutors to push for maximum punishment for low-level drug crimes, which Black Americans are disproportionately more likely to be charged with. He also pushed a failed attempted to have federal prosecutors more aggressively pursue marijuana cases. Black Americans are more likely to be arrested for possession than white Americans nationally, again despite marijuana usage being about equal across racial groups.

Sessions successfully limited federal oversight of police departments found to have engaged in civil rights abuses as well as discriminatory and violent policing and, like Miller and Bannon, pursued an aggressively restrictive immigration policy.

He, too, has spoken fondly of the 1924 immigration act, in discussing increasing immigration with Bannon on Breitbart Radio in 2015 while still a senator, saying, it was good for America.

Once in the Trump administration, Sessions emulated the policies of the 1920s by using every power he possessed as attorney general to ensure that the scales of justice tip toward punishment of unauthorized immigrants as often as possible, as Dara Lind wrote for Vox.

As is the case with Miller, Sessionss policies have achieved exclusionary white supremacist aims and fed white supremacists narratives about the dangers of Black people. Through Miller and through other former allies still in the administration like Kathy Nuebel Kovarik, who is currently the chief of staff of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, Sessionss ideas live on in the administration despite his departure. His policies survive as well.

Trump tweeted that the phrase Black Lives Matter is a symbol of hate weeks after overseeing armed forces gassing peaceful protesters demanding equality for Black people and other people of color.

When these actions and all the other things Trump has done that align with white nationalist thought and values are taken together, the president begins to appear as someone able to unify traditional forms of white supremacy and more modern modes of white power and white nationalism.

The Klan would wrap themselves in Christianity, Nell Irvin Painter, a Princeton University historian and author of The History of White People, told Vox. (Painter is also a signee of a letter criticized, in part, because of its association with prominent anti-trans figures and themes.) And in the American flag as well. So they were patriots and they were Christians in their own eyes. I dont see any contradiction in Trumps embrace of Confederate monuments and his embrace literal of the American flag.

As the Klan did, the president has cloaked himself in the symbols of Christianity. He posed with the Bible. He highlighted virtual church services on Sundays throughout the pandemic. And he has endeavored to signal he is an ally to Christians across the nation, from promising to prioritize Christian refugees to taking strong positions on matters from the celebration of Christmas to abortion, even though he has few personal ties to Christianity or religion in general.

Similarly, Trump has worked to use the flag sometimes even hugging it as well as other American symbols like Mount Rushmore, to signal that his policies, white nationalist aligned or not, are American. And to argue criticism of those policies is anti-American.

Even the presidents rabid defense of Confederate statues many of which were erected during periods of Black activism and serve as warnings to people of color to stop striving for equality is revealing. This is not to say that Trump is using the monuments as part of a campaign of terror and intimidation. But positioning himself as a champion of America allows him to cast their concerns as unpatriotic extensions of a left-wing cultural revolution that wants to overthrow the American Revolution.

In connecting and conflating white men who tried to destroy the United States with prominent Revolutionary figures like Thomas Jefferson, the president highlights the thing that connects them: the barbaric ways they treated nonwhite people.

There is a kind of white nationalism thats about infusing whiteness into the nation, Belew said. For the activists that are taking to the streets and training in paramilitary camps, the nation isnt the United States; they are not at all interested in defending the United States. They want to defend the white nation. And they want to do that, often, by overthrowing the United States.

This impulse mirrors the goals of the radical white nationalists of the Confederate States of America and is reflected in the presidents policies particularly around immigration and in tendencies his critics would call anti-democratic. To the extent that that ideology has actually crept into governance, its shocking, Belew noted. Because its a revolutionary thing that is attempting to undo the very government where they sit.

Trumps immigration policy is notable not just for the ways it excludes people of color but for how it deems white immigrants the right type of immigrants.

In 2018, Trump said hed like the US to have fewer immigrants from shithole countries in Africa and the Caribbean instead, he wanted immigrants from the majority-white Norway. In practice, he has put up barriers to immigration for citizens from countries with majority people of color populations, including those with Muslim majorities, while casting them as some of the most vicious and dangerous people on earth.

In June, Trump announced a temporary ban on green cards and the suspension of several work visas that are often used by immigrants of color, particularly those from India. Other countries that have been especially affected by Trumps immigration policy include Vietnam, China, Mexico, and South Korea. Stuart Anderson, the founder of the immigration think tank National Foundation for American Policy, noted those four countries saw drastic reductions in immigration during Trumps first two years in office, with immigration from China falling about 21 percentage points in that period.

Amid these declines, Trump reportedly hoped to find ways to fast track immigration from Europe with former US Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland assigned in 2018 to work on the plan with Miller and Trumps son-in-law Jared Kushner.

Through exclusion and the push to recruit white immigrants, the Trump administration has advocated for a rigid border policy for nonwhite immigrants and a more porous, generous one for those who are white. This advances the aims of white nationalism that transcends border and that suggests the sovereignty of US borders matters less when the Trump administration is thinking of the role the country might play in advancing the global white nation than it does when thinking of the country as a discrete entity.

White nationalist goals can only be achieved by dismantling the US government, and there, too, Trump has appeared to align with a violent element, like when he called on armed groups to liberate their states.

There are countless other examples, but the point is, Trump has contributed to the political unraveling of the United States some modern white nationalists see as necessary to achieve their goals. He has not done so by violently overthrowing the government. But he has taken steps in the direction these white nationalists want to go.

As much as he has embraced it, Trump has made some attempts to distance himself from white supremacy and white nationalism. Following a racist mass shooting in El Paso (one perpetrated by a shooter whose manifesto mirrored some of Trumps rhetoric on Latinx immigration), Trump said, In one voice, our nation must condemn racism, bigotry, and white supremacy. These sinister ideologies must be defeated. Hate has no place in America.

But words like these are nothing more than language uttered in between statements hewing closely to white supremacist and white nationalist ideals.

Just weeks before the El Paso shooting, Trump called the majority-Black district of former lawmaker Rep. Elijah Cummings a dangerous & filthy place and a rat and rodent infested mess, adding, No human being would want to live there. Its language that mirrors the characterization of people of color in The Camp of the Saints, and it not only casts a popular Black leader as inept, it implies he and his constituents are somehow less than human.

In the weeks directly after, Trump tweeted a campaign video featuring a logo associated with the white supremacist group VDARE, employed the anti-Semitic dual-loyalties trope in speaking about the political opinions of Jewish Americans, and claimed at a rally that sanctuary cities were releasing hardened and horrible criminal aliens ... directly into your neighborhoods.

Just a little over a month after saying hate has no place in America, Trump said of the gang MS-13, which was started by Salvadoran immigrants: They take young women. They slice them up with a knife. They slice them up beautiful, young.

All these things, which happened in the span of less than two months, ticked many white supremacist and nationalist boxes Jewish people as untrustworthy, people of color as predators with a predilection for young women, and Black people as subhuman rendering the presidents rejections of various white power ideologies meaningless.

Its a cycle Trump has trapped himself in, and one that continues even now.

After these atrocities, like when the George Floyd video came out, he didnt say anything for a long time, Painter noted. I mean, he said, Oh that was terrible, and then in the next breath, he went back to his race-baiting.

And it is a cycle that is difficult to escape. As Muoz Martinez said, We are living in a nation that was inspired by the principles of white supremacy.

So ingrained are those ideas, she pointed out, that even the first presidential administration run by a Black American reflected them, particularly with respect to immigration, with policies that incarcerated children in harsh conditions that spawned lawsuits.

We have to remember that the policies that the Trump administration created, and the kind of inhumanity that we see, built upon the infrastructure that had already existed, Muoz Martinez said, adding that white nationalist and white supremacist ideals shaped our society and shaped our institutions, and shaped our public societies and laws, our policing mindset. And we havent replaced that.

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What is white nationalism? Take a look at Trumps agenda. - Vox

As one observer noted, the January 6 protesters seemed a motley crew: country club Republicans, well-dressed social conservatives, and white Evangelicals in Jesus capsshoulder to shoulder with QAnon cultists, Second Amendment cosplay commandos, and doughy, hardcore white nationalists. One group erected a giant cross, another a wooden gallows. Someone waved a Jesus Saves banner, while another sported a Camp Auschwitz hoodie.

But the closer you look, the murkier things become. Christians waved Trump flags. The Proud Boys kneeled and prayed. One man, decked out as a cosplay crusader, clutched a large leather Bible to his chest with skeleton gloves. What looked like apples and oranges turned out to be a fruit cocktail: white Christian nationalism.

White Christian nationalism (WCN) is, first of all, a story about America. It says: America was founded as a Christian nation, by (white) Christians; and its laws and institutions are based on Biblical (that is, Protestant) Christianity. This much is certain, though: America is divinely favored. Whence its enormous wealth and power. In exchange for these blessings, America has been given a mission: to spread religion, freedom, and civilizationby force, if necessary. But that mission is endangered by the growing presence of non-whites, non-Christians, and non-Americans on American soil. White Christians must therefore take back the country, their country.

WCN is not just a story. It is also a political vision. Violence and racial purity are central to that vision. As Samuel Perry and Andrew Whitehead have shown, white Christian nationalists tend to favor a strong military and capital punishment and oppose gun control. WCN is thus strongly correlated with opposition to interracial marriage, non-white immigration, and affirmative action.

To understand how American Christianity became so entangled with racism and violence, we first have to trace it back to its scriptural roots. Those roots are dual. It turns out that WCN is not just one story, but two. The first is a promised land story. The New England Puritans saw themselves as the heirs of the biblical Israelites. They imagined themselves as a chosen people, and they came to see the new world as their promised land. And as their relationship with the natives shifted from curiosity to hostility, they began to see the Indians as Canaanites, who had to be conquered.

The second story is an end times story. Most Christian theologians read Revelation in allegorical terms, as a depiction of the moral struggles within the believers heart. But some interpreted the text more literally, as a description of bloody struggles to come. That is how many Puritan radicals read it, and they exported those ideas to New England.

The two stories gradually fused together during the Puritans wars with the Indians. Cotton Mather came to believe that the New World would be the central battlefield in the final struggle between good and evil. He placed himself and his brethren on the side of the good, and the Catholic French and their native allies on the side of evil. He likened the Indians to demons and viewed the killing of Indians as a blood sacrifice to an angry God. It was war that welded Protestantism and Englishness together in the New World.

But how did Protestantism and Englishness get entangled with whiteness? To answer that question, we need to shift our focus to Virginia. There, and elsewhere, the most common justification for the enslavement of kidnapped Indians and Africans was that they were heathens. But this argument broke down in the late-seventeenth century as some enslaved persons converted to Christianity and some white Christians sought to evangelize them. The problem was initially resolved by shifting the legal basis of slavery from religion to color: Blacks could be slaves; whites could not. It was then more fully resolved by creating a new theological basis for slavery. Perhaps the most influential was the Curse of Ham. Blacks were the descendants of Noahs son, Ham, the argument went, and their color and enslavement were a result of the curse that Noah had called down on head.

It would be another century before WCN became American. Until the American Revolution, most colonists still considered themselves English. It was only after the Revolution that they began to think of themselves as American. Until that time, the term Americans was more often used to refer to the native peoples. So, one way that (white) Americans set themselves apart from their British cousins was by claiming to resemble (native) Americans. The American (man) was a little more savage, a little more violent than his English forebears. He was, in a sense, the true heir of the Indian who was (supposedly) disappearing, and the true inhabitant of the frontier. The white American had a trace of the red American in him.

WCN is what linguist George Lakoff calls a frame. A frame is like a bare-bones movie script. It has roles (like a cast of characters), relations between the roles, and scenarios carried out by those playing the roles. Like a movie, it can be made and remade, with new actors and modified scenarios. The frontiersman becomes an Indian fighter and then a cowboy. The scene shifts from Appalachia to Kentucky to Wyoming.

Trumpism is, among other things, the latest version of the WCN frame. Echoing the promised land story, Trump says he will take back the country from the outsiders and invaders who have taken controlimmigrants and secularists, Muslims and Mexicansand then restore it to its rightful owners: real (that is, white, Christian) Americans. Echoing the end times story, Trump paints the world in terms of us and them, good and evil, and hints at violent struggles to come. The first such struggle took place on January 6, 2021. It will not, I fear, be the last.

Editors Note: This piece is adapted from an essay originally published by ABC Religion & Ethics on January 13, 2021. It is republished here with permission.

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White Christian Nationalism: The Deep Story Behind the Capitol Insurrection

Unrest in Virginia

Clashes over a show of white nationalism in charlottesville turn deadly

Flowers and a photo of car-ramming victim Heather Heyer lie at a makeshift memorial on Aug. 13. Justin IdeReuters

Violence erupted in the college town of Charlottesville on Aug. 12 after hundreds of white nationalists and their supporters who gathered for a rally over plans to remove a Confederate statue were met by counter-protesters, leading Virginias governor to declare a state of emergency.

Clashes broke out between the white nationalists and counter-protesters; the Unite the Right rally at a park once named for Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee was deemed unlawful. At one point in the afternoon, a vehicle drove into a crowd of counter-protesters marching through the downtown area before speeding away, resulting in one death and leaving more than a dozen others injured. State police later reported the crash of a helicopter that was monitoring the events in Charlottesville, killing two troopers.

President Trump addressed the violence in televised remarks from New Jersey, condemning an egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides and calling for the swift restoration of law and order. Among his critics was Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon. What happened in Charlottesville is domestic terrorism, Wyden tweeted. The Presidents words only serve to offer cover for heinous acts.

The night before Saturdays violence, hundreds of white nationalists marched through the University of Virginia campus while carrying burning torches. Andrew Katz

Warning: Some of the following images are graphic and might be disturbing to some viewers.

Police and members of the National Guard patrol near where a car plowed into a crowd marching through Charlottesvilles downtown. Chip SomodevillaGetty Images

Rescue workers and volunteer medics tend to people who were injured after a car plowed through a crowd of counter-demonstrators. Chip SomodevillaGetty Images

A man embraces an injured woman after a car rammed into a crowd of anti-white nationalist protesters. Samuel CorumAnadolu Agency/Getty Images

A car plows into pedestrians and vehicles as anti-Unite the Right counter-protesters march through downtown Charlottesville. The driver backed up and fled the scene. Jeremiah KnuppSpecial to The News Leader-USA Today Network/Sipa USA

People fly into the air as a vehicle drives into a group of protesters demonstrating against a white nationalist rally. Ryan M. KellyThe Daily Progress/AP

A man attending the Unite the Right rally walks into the Park. Steve HelberAP

A counter-protester strikes a white nationalist with a baton. Samuel CorumAnadolu Agency/Getty Images

White nationalist Richard Spencer and supporters clash with state police in Lee Park after the Unite the Right rally was declared an unlawful gathering. Chip SomodevillaGetty Images

White nationalists are forced out of Lee Park after the Unite the Right rally was declared an unlawful gathering. Chip SomodevillaGetty Images

White nationalists clash with counter-protesters in Lee Park. Go NakamuraZUMA Wire

White nationalists attack a black man in a parking garage. Zach D. RobertsNurPhoto/ZUMA Press

A counter-protester uses a lighted spray can against a Unite the Right demonstrator at the entrance to Emancipation Park. Steve HelberAP

Unite the Right rally attendees gather near the Robert E. Lee statue in Lee Park. Joshua RobertsReuters

Counter-protesters against the white nationalists who gathered on the University of Virginia campus stand at the base of a Thomas Jefferson statue on Aug. 11. Andrew ShurtleffThe Daily Progress

White nationalists encircle counter-protestors at the base of a statue of Thomas Jefferson after marching through the University of Virginia campus with torches on Aug. 11. Zach D RobertsNurPhoto/Getty Images

White nationalists lead a torch march through the University of Virginia campus in Charlottesville, Va., on Aug. 11. Andrew ShurtleffThe Daily Progress

Andrew Katz, who edited this photo essay, is Times Senior Multimedia Editor. Follow him on Twitter @katz.

Correction: The original version of this article misstated the number of deaths that resulted from the car incident. One person died, not at least three people.

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Charlottesville: 'Unite the Right' Rally, State of Emergency - TIME.com

Christianity-affiliated religious nationalism

Christian nationalism is Christianity-affiliated religious nationalism.[1] Christian nationalists primarily focus on internal politics, such as passing laws that reflect their view of Christianity and its role in political and social life. In countries with a state Church, Christian nationalists, in seeking to preserve the status of a Christian state, uphold an antidisestablishmentarian position.[2][3][4]

Christian nationalists support the presence of Christian symbols and statuary in the public square, as well as state patronage for the display of religion, such as school prayer and the exhibition of nativity scenes during Christmastide or the Christian Cross on Good Friday.[5][6]

Christian nationalists draw support from the broader Christian right.[7]

The COVID-19 pandemic saw a rise in Christian nationalist activity with many groups using anti-lockdown sentiments to expand their reach to more people.[8] The group Liberty Coalition Canada has garnered support from many elected politicians across Canada.[9] In their founding documents they argue that "it is only in Christianized nations that religious freedom has ever flourished."[10] This group has garnered support from various groups, including supporters of far-right hate groups. Their rallies have attracted supporters of Alex Jones and Canada First, a spin-off of Nick Fuentes' group America First.[11] Many of Liberty Coalition Canada's leaders are pastors that have racked up millions in potential fines for violating COVID protocols and some of them express ultra-conservative views.[12]

The Lapua Movement and the Patriotic People's Movement (IKL) in Finland led by the Lutherans (krtti) Vihtori Kosola and Vilho Annala respectively. Pastor Elias Simojoki led the IKL's youth organization the Blue-and-Blacks.[13] Current Blue-and-Black Movement and Power Belongs to the People are far-right Christian nationalist parties active in Finland. The latter is connected to Russian neo-Nazi and Christian fundamentalist Russian Imperial Movement.[14][15][16][17][18]

President of Russia Vladimir Putin has been described as a global leader of the Christian nationalist and Christian right movements.[19][20] As President, Putin has increased the power of the Russian Orthodox Church and proclaimed his staunch belief in Eastern Orthodoxy,[21] as well as maintaining close contacts with Patriarchs of Moscow and all Rus' Alexy II and Kirill.

The Russian Imperial Movement is a prominent neo-Nazi Christian nationalist group that trains militants all over Europe and has recruited thousands of fighters for its paramilitary group, the Imperial Legion, which is participating in the war on Ukraine. The group also works with the Atomwaffen Division in order to network with and recruit extremists from the United States.[22][23]

In Scotland UK, the Scottish Family Party has been described as Christian nationalist. The party was formed as a push back movement, based on a rejection of LGBT+ topics being taught in schools, with the political party claiming it to be an overly sexualized topic and ideology. They believe it to be an attack on traditional Christian family values, promoted by the current Scottish government.[citation needed]

The Christian Liberty Party is a political party that sees the United States as a Christian country.[24]

Christian nationalists believe that the US is meant to be a Christian nation and want to "take back" the US for God.[25] Experts say that Christian-associated support for right-wing politicians and social policies, such as legislation which is related to immigration, gun control and poverty is best understood as Christian nationalism, rather than evangelicalism per se.[25][26] Some studies of white evangelicals show that, among people who self-identify as evangelical Christians, the more they attend church, the more they pray, and the more they read the Bible, the less support they have for nationalist (though not socially conservative) policies.[26] Non-nationalistic evangelicals ideologically agree with Christian nationalists in areas such as patriarchal policies, gender roles, and sexuality.[26]

A study which was conducted in May 2022 showed that the strongest base of support for Christian nationalism comes from Republicans who identify as Evangelical or born again Christians.[27][28] Of this demographic group, 78% are in favor of formally declaring the United States a Christian nation, versus only 48% of Republicans overall. Age is also a factor, with over 70% of Republicans from the Baby Boomer and Silent Generations in support of the United States officially becoming a Christian nation. According to Politico, the polling also found that sentiments of white grievance are highly correlated with Christian nationalism: "White respondents who say that members of their race have faced more discrimination than others are most likely to embrace a Christian America. Roughly 59% of all Americans who say white people have been discriminated against ... favor declaring the U.S. a Christian nation, compared to 38% of all Americans."[27][29]

Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has referred to herself as a Christian nationalist. Fellow congresswomen Lauren Boebert and Mary Miller have also expressed support for Christian nationalism.[30][31] Kris Kobach has described himself as a Christian nationalist. White nationalist Nick Fuentes has expressed support for Christian nationalism.[32] Florida governor Ron DeSantis has repeatedly invoked Christian nationalist talking points and rhetoric during speeches.[33][27] According to the Tampa Bay Times, DeSantis has also promoted a civics course for educators, which emphasized that "the nation's founders did not desire a strict separation of state and church"; the teacher training program also "pushed a judicial theory, favored by legal conservatives like DeSantis, that requires people to interpret the Constitution as the framers intended it, not as a living, evolving document".[34][35][36][28] Politician Doug Mastriano is a prominent figure in the fundamentalist Christian nationalist movement, and has called the separation of church and state a myth.[37][38] Andrew Torba, CEO of alt-tech platform Gab, supported Mastriano's failed 2022 bid for office,[39] in order to build a grass-roots Christian nationalist political movement to help "take back" government power for "the glory of god"; he has argued that "unapologetic Christian Nationalism is what will save the United States of America".[40][41] Torba is also a proponent of the great replacement conspiracy theory, and has said that "The best way to stop White genocide and White replacement, both of which are demonstrably and undeniably happening, is to get married to a White woman and have a lot of White babies".[40]

In the wake of the January 6 attack on the Capitol, the term "Christian nationalism" has become synonymous with white Christian identity politics, a belief system that asserts itself as an integral part of American identity overall.[40][42] The New York Times notes that historically, "Christian nationalism in America has ... encompassed extremist ideologies".[40][43] Critics have argued that Christian nationalism promotes racist tendencies, male violence, anti-democratic sentiment, and revisionist history.[44][45] Christian nationalism in the United States is also linked to political opposition to gun control laws and strong cultural support for the Second Amendment which protects the right to keep and bear arms.[46] Some Christian nationalists also engage in spiritual warfare and militarized forms of prayer to defend and advance their beliefs and political agenda.[47]

Political analyst Jared Yates Sexton has said: "Republicans recognize that QAnon and Christian nationalism are invaluable tools" and that these belief systems "legitimize antidemocratic actions, political violence, and widespread oppression", which he calls an "incredible threat" that extends beyond Trumpism.[48]

Responding to media analysis about the effects of Christian Trumpism and Christian nationalism following the 2020 presidential election, Professor Daniel Strand, writing for The American Conservative, said that there was a "superficially Christian presence at the January 6 protest" and he criticized claims that Christian nationalism played a central role in the attack on the Capitol. He cited a University of Chicago study which found that "those arrested on January 6 were motivated by the belief that the election was stolen and [influenced by] what they call 'the great replacement'" theory. Strand says the study failed to mention "any explicit religious motivation, let alone theological beliefs about America being a Christian nation".[49][50]

The fascist Yugoslav National Movement (193545) has been described as a Christian nationalist movement.[51][52]

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Christian nationalism - Wikipedia

The treasonous mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol Jan. 6 included a large cohort that hoisted Confederate battle flags and Trump banners. But mixed among those standards were other signs, ones bearing crosses and references to Christ. Its clear that for some of the insurrectionists, the attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election was a holy crusade.

These people soon attracted the attention of political commentators. In the wake of the failed coup, a spate of columns appeared in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Washington Post and other media outlets focusing on the role Christian nationalists played in the riot. A column in The Times by Thomas B. Edsell carried the blunt headline: The Capitol Insurrection Was As Christian Nationalist As It Gets.

Increasingly, members of the media, academics, Americans United and others are using the term Christian nationalism and often white Christian nationalism to describe a political movement that seeks to topple church-state separation and declare America a Christian nation with Christian in this case being far to the right and supremely fundamentalist.

While theyre sometimes openly aligned with racist movements, their ultimate goal is seen as a branch of white supremacy because it would result in a society governed by conservative white Christian men who would make decisions for everyone else.

The terminology is new, but the movement is not. Since the late 1970s, Americans United has been warning Americans about the machinations of the Religious Right, a religio-political force of extreme Christian fundamentalists who seek to tear down the church-state wall, Christianize public schools and other government institutions, roll back womens rights, strip LGBTQ Americans of basic freedoms and impose a theocratic state on the country.

Are Christian nationalists and the Religious Right just two different terms to describe the same movement? Some researchers say yes, while others feel there are important differences.

Sarah Posner, a freelance reporter who has tracked white Christian nationalists for decades, finds them to be one and the same; while Katherine Stewart, a researcher whose most recent book is The Power Worshippers: Inside the Rise of Religious Nationalism, said she uses the terms Religious Right and Christian nationalists but gravitates toward the latter as more descriptive.

Although I make use of both terms depending on context, I often think Christian nationalism is a more accurate term, Stewart said in an interview with Church & State. The term Religious Right suggests to mea social movement arising from the ground up, motivated by a narrow set of cultural and symbolic concerns, and operating within the norms and traditions of pluralistic, democratic politics in America. Christian nationalism makes clear that the thing that matters here is really a political movement, and that its politics are profoundly hostile to pluralism and democracy.

I also think that there is something not quite accurate about the right in Religious Right, Stewart continued. It suggests that this is a conservative movement. But it isnt. Christian nationalism is a radical movement, and as the Trump era made blindingly clear, it sometimes supports policies and practices that have little to do with traditional conservatism.

Scholar Andrew L. Whitehead, who, along with Samuel L. Perry, wrote the recent book Taking Back America for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States, notes the overlap between the two terms but sees important differences, too.

I think what we are identifying is the cultural framework that is broadly accepted by those who identify as part of the Religious Right, Whitehead said. Using data from 2007, 65% of those who say the Religious Right describes their religious identity very well are ambassadors of Christian nationalism, meaning those Americans who most strongly embrace Christian nationalism.

Added Whitehead, I see the Religious Right as more of a social movement made up of networks of religious leaders, politicians, congregations and organizations. Christian nationalism is the political theology that this social movement largely embraces in order to baptize their political ends with the support of the transcendent.

The researchers all agree that there is an important racial element to Christian nationalism.

Posner, whose most recent book is Unholy: Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump, says it is appropriate to include white before Christian nationalism even though, obviously, most white Americans dont support the movement or the groups that back it.

The American version of Christian nationalism grew out of a backlash to changes that took place over the course of the second half of the 20th century school desegregation and civil rights, increasing secularization and the Supreme Courts bolstering of church-state separation and the rise of feminism and LGBTQ rights, Posner told Church & State. All of these factors played a role, but its crucial to recognize how grievances driving the backlash were deeply rooted in the white supremacy many evangelicals and fundamentalists were taught to find in their Bibles. That in turn shaped their conception of America as a Christian nation that is, a white Christian nation.

Added Posner, Of course, over time the Religious Right sought to temper its reputation with efforts to engage in racial reconciliation and bring more minority worshippers into their churches and minority activists into their political organizations. But the movements decision to tether itself to Trump all the while still claiming it had many Black and Latino believers in its ranks laid bare the superficiality of those claims.

Indeed, the Trump presidency forced the issue of race front and center. For many years, white Christian nationalist groups could claim to be anti-racist, and during their conferences they would often highlight the handful of far-right Black, Latinx and Asian-American figures who back them. But Trump, whose racism was always thinly veiled at best, was a kind of test one these groups failed.

Early in 2018, Trump famously called Haiti, El Salvador and several African nations sh*thole countries and said he would like to see more immigration from Norway, a country that is 93 percent white. The remark led CNN anchor Don Lemon to begin his broadcast reporting this shameful presidential declaration with the words, This is CNN Tonight, Im Don Lemon. The president of the United States is racist. A lot of us already knew that.

Anderson Cooper, also a CNN anchor, followed up by saying, Not racial. Not racially charged. Racist. Lets not kid ourselves or dance around it. The sentiment the president expressed today is a racist sentiment.

Trump was also known for his attacks on Mexico and his claim during the 2016 campaign that Mexican men were prone to be rapists. His Muslim ban, which affected primarily nations from Africa and the Middle East, and his defense of Confederate monuments were seen as more evidence of his racism, as was his calling COVID-19 the China virus or even Kung Flu.

Through it all, white Christian nationalist groups either remained silent or came to Trumps defense.

In their book, Whitehead and Perry, who are sociology professors at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis and the University of Oklahoma respectively, define Christian nationalism as an ideology that idealizes and advocates a fusion of American civic life with a particular type of Christian identity and culture.

They also write that Christian nationalism includes assumptions of nativism, white supremacy, patriarchy and heteronormativity, along with divine sanction for authoritarian control and militarism. It is as ethnic and political as it is religious.

Whitehead told Church & State that he finds it useful to stress the whiteness of Christian nationalism.

Yes, I do think qualifying Christian nationalism white is important, he said. For many of the relationships we look at in the first two chapters of our book, there are times when Black Americans who embrace Christian nationalism are different from white Americans who embrace it. But for questions about gender and sexuality, Christian nationalism operates the same way for Black and white Americans. So for the most part, I think much of what were studying truly is white Christian nationalism.

Robert P. Jones, CEO of Public Religion Research Institute, found it significant that the crowd that assailed the Capitol on Jan. 6 was overwhelmingly white.

In a column published by Religion News Service on Jan. 7, Jones observed, This seditious mob was motivated not just by loyalty to Trump, but by an unholy amalgamation of white supremacy and Christianity that has plagued our nation since its inception and is still with us today. As I show in my book White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, there remains a disturbingly strong link between holding racist attitudes and identifying as a white Christian. (For instance, MSNBC commentator Lawrence ODonnell, in his news hour entitled The Last Word, once displayed a photo of an all-white Southern lynch mob and commented that every man in that mob would undoubtedly have called himself a Christian.)

Stewart, however, said she uses the qualifier white only in certain contexts.

There is no question that the Christian nationalist movement is deeply rooted in racism, but the relationship is complex, Stewart said. Christian nationalism does indeedpromotehighly racialized narratives about American heritage and culture. It has also thoroughly identified itself with a political party that has adopted race-based gerrymandering and voter suppression as a strategic imperative.

At the same time, added Stewart, there is a small but growing segment of the movement that is not white, including a subsection of leadership.Americas Christian nationalists also form alliances with religious nationalists in other parts of the world. While there is some overlap in people and purposes between Christian nationalist groups and white supremacist groups, I think it is still useful to distinguish between them.

The word Christian has also proved to be a flashpoint. Some on the far right, such as William Donohue of the Catholic League, have penned columns implying that groups like Americans United and others are smearing all Christians by using terms like white Christian nationalism. In fact, it should be pretty clear that just as not all white people embrace white Christian nationalism, nor do most Christians.

In fact, many Christian clergy and laypeople have assailed Christian nationalism as a corruption of their faith; and in light of recent events, their voices are getting louder. The Christian-based counteroffensive against white Christian nationalism got started in earnest in 2019 when the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty launched Christians Against Christian Nationalism, an effort to highlight faith voices opposed to the injudicious mixing of church and state, one that also singled out white Christian nationalisms racist undertones.

The groups statement reads in part, Christian nationalism seeks to merge Christian and American identities, distorting both the Christian faith and Americas constitutional democracy. Christian nationalism demands Christianity be privileged by the State and implies that to be a good American, one must be Christian. It often overlaps with and provides cover for white supremacy and racial subjugation. We reject this damaging political ideology and invite our Christian brothers and sisters to join us in opposing this threat to our faith and to our nation.

So far, more than 21,000 Christians have endorsed the statement.

Amanda Tyler, executive director of the BJC, told Church & State that the organization was motivated to act because many Christians view [Christian nationalism] as a distortion and perversion of Christianity and as anurgent threat to the health and vitality of the religion going forward.

Remarked Tyler, We believe that it is our responsibility as Christians to raise awareness of Christian nationalism, to understand how it operates in our communities and to work to root it out. From a theological perspective, Christian nationalism is idolatrous because it conflates God and country and leads to the suppression of theological convictions that conflict with political power.

More recently, a separate group of evangelicals issued an open letter condemning the role of Christian nationalism in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, which they labeled a violent, racist, anti-American insurrection.

Just as many Muslim leaders have felt the need to denounce distorted, violent versions of their faith, we feel the urgent need to denounce this violent mutation of our faith, the statement, which was released in late February, reads. What we saw manifest itself in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, is a threat to our democracy, but it is also a threat to orthodox Christian faith. The word Christian means Christ-like. As leaders in the Church, we do not agree on everything, but we can agree on this Christians should live in a way that honors Jesus, and reminds the world of Him.

Stewart points out that white Christian nationalism has more to do with ideology than religion.

Christian nationalism is not a religion, it is a political ideology, she said. There are two ways to make this point clear: One is to assert that the object of our concern is with the political agendas of Christian nationalism above all, its assault on pluralistic democracy and not with the religious ideas that it invokes to justify its positions. The other is to draw attention to the fact that many, if not most, American Christians take a very different view of both their religion and its alleged political imperatives. At least half of American Catholics, a fifth or so of white evangelicals, and the vast majority of black evangelicals were opposed to the movements favored political candidate in this last national election cycle.

As an organization that has monitored and responded to religious extremists for decades, Americans United has a special interest in the heightened attention white Christian nationalism is receiving.

On the day of the assault on the Capitol, Americans United President and CEO Rachel Laser issued a statement that didnt hesitate to call out the perpetrators.

Make no mistake: These rioters threaten every freedom we claim, including religious freedom, Laser said. The noose hung on the West Lawn of our Capitol and the signs calling on Jesus only re-emphasize the unholy alliance of this president with white Christian nationalists. The same people who profaned Black churches in Washington, D.C., three weeks ago are responsible for todays abhorrent actions with the blatant backing of the president they support.

Will the current moment lead Americans to finally come to grips with the anti-democratic extremists in our midst who yearn to merge their narrow interpretation of Christianity with government?

Whitehead said the ideology of Christian nationalism isnt going to fade away any time soon.

Its always tough to predict the future, he said. I am completely confident saying that Christian nationalism will be with us for decades to come and will continue to be a force in American politics. It will only be more salient to those Americans who embrace it, especially if they feel that they are becoming even more of a minority.

Added Whitehead, I sincerely hope that we are at a moment where people of faith, especially white Christians, begin to wrestle with Christian nationalism and the way it perverts democracy, as well as the global Christian faith. But this is an uphill battle because Christian nationalism is so widely embraced by religious Americans.

Posner echoed that view, but held out hope that the Trump years may have served as a wake-up call.

The Religious Right for many decades was variously portrayed as a political power broker, defender of sexual purity and unborn babies, promoter of Christianity or traditionalists with a legitimate gripe about having been left behind by massive social, legal and political change to protect the rights of previously marginalized groups, Posner said.

I think the failure to recognize how dangerous it is was driven in part by a complacency that because the movement represents a minority view in the United States, it would not be able to impose its beliefs because our democracy would hold, she added. The Trump era not only proved that our democracy held only by the barest of threads, but that white Christian nationalists were Trumps dedicated partners in his anti-democracy project.

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White Christian Nationalists: Who Are They? What Do They Want? Why ...

Top takeaways

The number of white nationalist groups continues to decline after their numbers peaked at 155 in 2019. Many nationwide networks have contracted or entirely fallen apart, marking a movement away from sprawling membership organizations to highly centralized ones. The founders of the podcast platform The Right Stuff, for example, once organized dozens of pool party groups around the country, but now focus their energy on the National Justice Party, a racist and antisemitic political party.

Many of the most prominent leaders in todays white nationalist movement define their primary goal as challenging what they call Conservatism, Inc. Such figures as Nick Fuentes, a livestreamer who was present outside the U.S. Capitol at the Jan. 6 insurrection, are trying to harness the grievances of Trump supporters into an openly ethnonationalist political movement one they hope will become the core of the Republican Party. Fuentes has made allies within the political mainstream, including Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., who spoke at Fuentes annual America First Political Action Conference in February 2021.

Overall, the movements energy has shifted into more mainstream spaces in the aftermath of Jan. 6. Ideas once confined to the organized white power movement are now openly discussed within the broader political right, disintegrating the boundary between them. The white supremacist great replacement conspiracy, which claims that white people are being systematically replaced across the Western world by multiculturalists and Jews, is now cited as a reality by some elected officials and cable news pundits, for example.

White nationalist Nick Fuentes livestreamed from outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, where he was surrounded by members of his America First movement. One rioter entered the Capitol draped in an America First flag. Less than two months later, Rep. Paul Gosar spoke at Fuentes America First Political Action Conference. In March, Fuentes announces he was forming the America First Foundation, devoted to finish[ing] what President Trump started in 2016.

The National Justice Party convened several meetings this year where white nationalist groups including Patriot Front, Media2Rise and Antelope Hill met to network. The largest of which, held in November, attracted roughly 150 participants. Patriot Front held its own demonstrations throughout the year, including ones in Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. Despite their disciplined public image, activists have continually penetrated the organization and leaked its internal communications. As a result, identities of many Patriot Front members have been made public.

In a major rebuke to racist right, the jury in Sines v. Kessler found that some of the most prominent figureheads and groups in the white nationalist movement conspired to intimidate, harass or commit harm during the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. In total, the jury awarded $26 million in damages.

While an accelerationist wing one singularly focused on bringing a fascist state into existence through violence continues to organize on places like Telegram, members of the white nationalist movement are placing much of their energy into harnessing the anger and resentment of Trump supporters into a broad authoritarian movement. They hope to convince white Americans that they are persecuted by anti-white ideas and policies, including the adoption of inclusive education in schools. This movement could cause further disruption and violence, especially as the country heads closer to the next election cycle.

The movement will also continue to focus on building a parallel society of white nationalist institutions, companies and online platforms a move that is, in part, a response to social media and tech companies efforts to deplatform extremists. Nick Fuentes now has his own platform that allows himself and other racist livestreamers to monetize their content. Andrew Torba, the Gab CEO who has partnered with Fuentes, is at the forefront of the push to create what he calls the parallel Christian economy. Torba is investing the companys resources into building a platform where white nationalists and antisemites will not only be able to make posts, but also monetize content, advertise goods and services, and process payments.

Adherents of white nationalistgroupsbelieve that white identity should be the organizing principle of the countries that make up Western civilization. White nationalists advocate for policies to reverse changing demographics and the loss of an absolute, white majority. Ending non-white immigration, both legal and illegal, is an urgent priority frequently elevated over other racist projects, such as ending multiculturalism and miscegenation for white nationalists seeking to preserve white, racial hegemony.

White nationalists seek to return to an America that predates the implementation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Both landmark pieces of legislation are cited as the harbingers of white dispossession and the so-called white genocide or great replacement the idea that whites in the United States are being systematically replaced and destroyed.

These racist aspirations are most commonly articulated as the desire to form a white ethnostate a calculated idiom white nationalists favor in order to obscure the inherent violence of such a radical project. Appeals for the white ethnostate are often disingenuously couched in proclamations of love for members of their own race, rather than hatred for others.

This platitude collapses under scrutiny. Two favorite animating myths of white nationalists are the victimhood narrative of black-on-white crime the idea that the dominant white majority is under assault by supposedly violent people of color and the deceptively titled human biodiversity, the pseudo-scientific ascription of human behaviors, in this case along racial lines, to non-negligible genetic difference among humans. Appeals to the empirical science of human biodiversity are frequently coupled with thinly veiled nods to white, racial superiority.

In addition to their obsession with declining white birth rates, these themes inspire some of the most powerful propaganda that animates and drives the white nationalist movement.

Adherents frequently citePat Buchanans2001 book,The Death of the West, which argues that these declining white birth rates and an immigrant invasion will transform the United States into a third world nation by 2050, as the text responsible for their awakening, or red pill.

White nationalists also frequently citeAmerican Renaissance,a pseudo-academic organization dedicated to spreading the myth of black criminality, scientific racism and eugenic theories. Its annual conference, a multi-day symposium with a suit-and-tie dress code, is a typical early stop for new white nationalists.

Antisemitism is deeply woven into the modern-day white nationalist movement, whose adherents use Jews as scapegoats for their perceived cultural and political grievances. White nationalists often argue that Jews are orchestrating the great replacement making people of color, who they believe to be less intelligent and more easy manipulated, into the numerical majority of Western countries in a bid to secure complete political control. Kevin MacDonald, the author ofThe Culture of Critique a trilogy of books alleging a Jewish control of culture and politics with evolutionary psychology has been cited by innumerable white nationalists as the person who introduced them to the idea of a Jewish conspiracy.

White nationalists also commonly pass throughpaleoconservatism an anti-interventionist strand of libertarianism that seeks to limit government, restrict immigration, reverse multicultural programs and deconstruct social welfare programs. Some of the most prominent voices in the movements recent history, includingRichard Spencer,Jared Taylor andPeter Brimelow,did stints atTakis Magazine, the most prominent paleoconservative journal.

Strategies for pursuing the white ethnostate fall into two major categories: mainstreaming and vanguardism. Mainstreamers believe that infiltrating and subverting the existing political institutions is the only realistic path to power. They aspire to convert disaffected normies to their politics and advocate for white nationalists to seek esteemed and influential positions in society where they can access resources otherwise unavailable to avowed racists.This path often requires white nationalists to disguise their politics and compromise on their most extreme positions. Mainstreaming allows those sympathetic to white nationalism to pursue or enact policies furthering white nationalist priorities. These policies arent always exclusive to white nationalism, such as immigration restriction or the elimination of social welfare programs.

Vanguardists believe that revolution is the only viable path toward a white ethnostate. They believe that reforming the system is impossible and therefore refuse to soften their rhetoric. They typically seek to reform what they believe to be an anti-white establishment through radical action and often openly advocate for the use of violence against the state and people they perceive to be their political enemies. Though acts of violence, they believe, they can further polarize politics and accelerate what they view as the inevitable collapse of America.

The racist so-called alt-right was the most prominent strand of the white nationalist movement during the 2016 presidential campaign and the first half of the Trump presidency a political moment that allowed activists to temporarily paint over cracks that have historically divided the movement. Composed of a broad coalition of far-right activists and groups, the alt-right hoped to push ethnonationalism into the political mainstream. But after the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, alliances faded into infighting when the movement came under intense public and legal scrutiny, including a civil suit that ultimately found many of the most prominent leaders and groups in the alt-right liable for $26 million in damages.

Growing disillusioned with trying to achieve their political goals through mainstream channels such as electoral politics and mass organizing, an accelerationist wing, focused on bringing about the collapse of society, has gained a prominent place within the movement. This violence-obsessed subset predominantly congregates on the messaging platform Telegram, as well as other alt-tech platforms that do not moderate users content. But, especially in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 insurrection, a large part of the white nationalist movement remains focused on bending the mainstream right toward open ethnonationalism. These actors want to build alliances with Republican elected officials, create their own political parties and institutions, and, especially, cultivate a cohort of young, radical activists within the GOP.

Groupslisted in a variety of other categories Ku Klux Klan,neo-Confederate,neo-Nazi,racist skinheadandChristian Identity can also be fairly described as white nationalist. As organizational loyalty has dwindled and the internet has become white nationalisms organizing principle, however, the ideology is best understood as a loose coalition of social networks orbiting online propaganda hubs and forums.

View all groups bystateand byideology.*Asterisk denotes headquarters.

Affirmative RightAtlanta, GA*

America First FoundationWestern Springs, IL*Saint Petersburg, FL

American Freedom NewsHampton Twp, PA*

American Freedom PartyLos Angeles, CA*New York, New York

American Patriots USADahlonega, GA*

American Renaissance/New Century FoundationOakton, VA

Antelope Hill PublishingQuakertown, PA*

Arktos MediaNew York, NY*

Bay State Active ClubMassachusetts

Blood River RadioBartlett, TN*

Christ the King Reformed ChurchCharlotte, MI*

Colchester Collection, TheMachias, ME*

Council of Conservative CitizensBlackwell, MO*

Counter-Currents PublishingSan Francisco, CA*

Cursus Honorum FoundationAustin, TX

Dominion Active ClubVirginia*

EvergreenBedford, PA*

Exodus/AmericanusFloyds Knobs, IN*

Fight White GenocideColumbia, SC*

Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation, TheVienna, VA*

Front Range Active ClubColorado

Full HausPurgitsville, WV*

Indiana Active ClubIndiana*

International Conservative MovementMassachusetts*Koschertified?San Marcos, CA*MannerbundNorwalk, CT*

National Justice PartyButler, PA*

National Reformation PartyCalifornia*

New Jersey European Heritage AssociationNew Jersey*

Northwest FrontSeattle, WA*

Occidental DissentEufaula, AL*

Occidental ObserverMedford, OR*

Patriot FrontTexas*ArizonaArkansasCaliforniaColoradoConnecticutDelawareWashingtonFloridaGeorgiaIdahoIllinoisIndianaKansasKentuckyLouisianaMaineMarylandMassachusettsMichiganMinnesotaMissouriNebraskaNevadaNew JerseyNew YorkNorth CarolinaOhioOklahomaOregonPennsylvaniaRhode IslandSouth CarolinaSouth DakotaTennesseeTexasUtahVermontVirginiaWashingtonWest VirginiaWisconsinWyoming

Patriotic FlagsSummerville, SC*

Political Cesspool, TheBartlett, TN*

Racial Nationalist party of AmericaLockport, NY*

Radix JournalAlexandria, VA*

Red IceHarrisonburg, VA*

Renaissance HorizonSummerville, SC*

Revolt Through TraditionMassachusetts*

School of the WestPage, AZ*

Scott-Townsend PublishersWashington, DC*

Shieldwall NetworkMountain View, AR*

StormfrontWest Palm Beach, FL*

The BaseWashington*IndianaWisconsin

The Right StuffPennsylvania*

VDARE FoundationBerkeley Springs, WV*

White Rabbit RadioDearborn Heights, MI*

Will2RiseLakeland, FL*

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White Nationalist | Southern Poverty Law Center

According to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the vast majority domestic terror incidents comes from so-called white nationalism because American apartheid has never fully healed.

AOC made the comments on MSNBCs All In while discussing the attack on Nancy Pelosis husband at his San Francisco home early Friday morning.

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Ocasio-Cortez said, Yeah, I think, you know, I think it is important to acknowledge the point that you said that political violence can come from all different parts of the political spectrum while also really having to acknowledge a very central fact that reporting from the FBI, and even in terms of Homeland Security, Jamie and I sit, and he is the chair, and Im the vice chair of the House Oversight Subcommittee on civil rights, and civil liberties.

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She continued:

We have held hearings on this, and there is absolutely no doubt that the data shows that the vast majority of incidents of domestic terror come from white nationalismAnd that we are really, truly facing the environment of fascism. And in the United States of America, this type of intimidation at the polls brings us to Jim Crow.

It brings us back and harkens back to a very unique form of American apartheid that is not that long passed ago, and we have never fully healed from that. And those wounds threatened to rip back open if we do not strongly defend democracy in the United States of America.

Read the rest here:

AOC: Vast Majority of Domestic Terror Comes From White Nationalism ...

Ideology that seeks to develop a black national identity

Black nationalism is a type of racial nationalism or pan-nationalism which espouses the belief that black people are a race, and which seeks to develop and maintain a black racial and national identity.[1][2] Black nationalist activism revolves around the social, political, and economic empowerment of black communities and people, especially to resist their assimilation into white culture (through integration or otherwise), and maintain a distinct black identity.[1]

Black nationalists often promote black separatism, which posits that black people should form territorially separate nation-states. Without achieving this goal, some black separatists employ a "nation within a nation" approach, advocating for various degrees of localized separation. Pan-African black nationalists variously advocate for continental African unity (aiming to eventually transition away from racial nationalism) or cultural unity among the African diaspora, which entails either a return to Africa or a sustained connection between African and American black nations. Rejecting black separatism, some US-based black nationalists conceive the black nation in cultural terms as part of American pluralism.[3][4] Some black nationalists promote black supremacy, which envisions black superiority over other racial groups. Black nationalists often reject the term and comparisons with white supremacists, characterizing their movement as an anti-racist reaction to white supremacy and colorblind white liberalism as racist.[5] Critics of black nationalism argue that it promotes violence, racial hostility, and other forms of discrimination.[6][7]

The movement arose within the African American community in the United States. In the early 20th century, Garveyism, which was promoted by the U.S.-based Marcus Garvey, furthered black nationalist ideas. Black nationalist ideas also proved to be an influence on the Black Islam movement, particularly on groups like the Nation of Islam, which was founded by Wallace Fard Muhammad. During the 1960s, black nationalism influenced the Black Panther Party and the broader Black Power movement.

Martin Delany (18121885), an African American abolitionist, was arguably the first proponent of black nationalism.[8][9] Delany is credited with the Pan-African slogan of "Africa for Africans."[10]

Inspired by the success of the Haitian Revolution, the origins of black and indigenous African nationalism in political thought lie in the 19th and early 20th centuries with people such as Marcus Garvey, Benjamin "Pap" Singleton, Henry McNeal Turner, Martin Delany, Henry Highland Garnet, Edward Wilmot Blyden, Paul Cuffe, and others. The repatriation of African-American slaves to Liberia or Sierra Leone was a common black nationalist theme in the 19th century. Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association of the 1910s and 1920s was the most powerful black nationalist movement to date, claiming millions of members. Garvey's movement was opposed by mainline black leaders, and crushed by government action. However, its many alumni remembered its inspiring rhetoric.[11]

According to Wilson Jeremiah Moses, black nationalism as a philosophy can be examined from three different periods, giving rise to various ideological perspectives for what we can today consider black nationalism.[12]

The first period of pre-classical black nationalism began when the first Africans were brought to the Americas as slaves through the American Revolutionary period.[13]

The second period of black nationalism began after the Revolutionary War. This period refers to the time when a sizeable number of educated Africans within the colonies (specifically within New England and Pennsylvania) had become disgusted with the social conditions that arose out of the Enlightenment's ideas.[clarification needed] From this way of thinking came the rise of individuals within the black community who sought to create organizations that would unite black people. The intention of these organizations was to group black people together so they could voice their concerns, and help their own community advance itself. This form of thinking can be found in historical personalities such as; Prince Hall, Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, James Forten, Cyrus Bustill, William Gray through their need to become founders of certain organizations such as African Masonic lodges, the Free African Society, and Church Institutions such as the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas. These institutions served as early foundations to developing independent and separate organizations for their own people. The goal was to create groups to include those who so many times had been excluded from exclusively white communities and government-funded organizations.[14]

The third period of black nationalism arose during the post-Reconstruction era, particularly among various African-American clergy circles. Separated circles were already established and accepted because African-Americans had long endured the oppression of slavery and Jim Crowism in the United States since its inception. The clerical phenomenon led to the birth of a modern form of black nationalism that stressed the need to separate blacks from non-blacks and build separate communities that would promote racial pride and collectivize resources. The new ideology became the philosophy of groups like the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam. By 1930, Wallace Fard Muhammad had founded the Nation of Islam. His method to spread information about the Nation of Islam used unconventional tactics to recruit individuals in Detroit, Michigan. Later on, Elijah Muhammad would lead the Nation of Islam and become a mentor to people like Malcolm X.[15] Although the 1960s brought a period of heightened religious, cultural and political nationalism, it was black nationalism that would lead the promotion of Afrocentrism.

Prince Hall was an important social leader of Boston following the Revolutionary War. He is well known for his contribution as the founder of Black Freemasonry. His life and past are unclear, but he is believed to have been a former slave freed after twenty one years of slavehood. In 1775 fifteen other black men along with Hall joined a freemason lodge of British soldiers, after the departure of the soldiers they created their own lodge African Lodge #1 and were granted full stature in 1784. Despite their stature other white freemason lodges in America did not treat them equal and so Hall began to help other black Masonic lodges across the country to help their own cause - to progress as a community together despite any difficulties brought to them by racists. Hall was best recognized for his contribution to the black community along with his petitions (many denied) in the name of black nationalism. In 1787 he unsuccessfully petitioned to the Massachusetts legislature to send blacks back to Africa (to obtain "complete" freedom from white supremacy). In 1788, Hall was a well known contributor to the passing of the legislation of the outlawing of the slave-trade and those involved. Hall continued his efforts to help his community, and in 1796 his petition for Boston to approve funding for black schools. Hall and other Black Bostonians wanted separate schools to distance themselves from White supremacy and create well-educated Black citizens.[16] Despite the city's inability to provide a building, Hall lent his building for the school to run from. Until his death in 1807, Hall continued to work for black rights in issues of abolition, civil rights and the advancement of the community overall.[17]

In 1787 Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, black ministers of Pennsylvania, formed the Free African Society of Pennsylvania. The goal of this organization was to create a church that was free of restrictions of only one form of religion, and to pave the way for the creation of a house of worship exclusive to their community. They were successful in doing this when they created the St. Thomas African Episcopal Church in 1793. The community included many members who were notably abolitionist men and former slaves. Allen, following his own beliefs that worship should be out loud and outspoken, left the organization two years later. He later received an opportunity to become the pastor of the church, but rejected the offer, leaving it to Jones. The society itself was a memorable charitable organization that allowed its members to socialize and network with other business partners, in an attempt to better their community. Its activity and open doors served as a motivational growth for the city, inspiring many other black mutual aid societies in the city to pop up. Additionally the society is well known for their aid during the yellow fever epidemic in 1793.[18]

The African Church or the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was founded in 1792 for those of African descent, as a foster church for the community with the goal to be interdenominational. In the beginning of the church's establishment its masses were held in homes and local schools. One of the founders of the Free African Society was also the first Episcopal priest of African American descent, Absalom Jones. The original church house was constructed at 5th and Adelphi Streets in Philadelphia, now St. James Place, and it was dedicated on July 17, 1794; other locations of the church included: 12th Street near Walnut, 57th and Pearl Streets, 52nd and Parrish Streets, and the current location, Overbrook and Lancaster Avenue in Philadelphia's historic Overbrook Farms neighborhood. The church is mostly African-American. The church and its members have played a key role in the abolition/anti-slavery and equal rights movement of the 1800s.[19]

"Since 1960 St. Thomas has been involved in the local and national civil rights movement through its work with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Union of Black Episcopalians, the Opportunities Industrialization Center (OIC), Philadelphia Interfaith Action, and The Episcopal Church Women. Most importantly, it has been in the forefront of the movement to uphold the knowledge and value of the black presence in the Episcopal Church. Today, that tradition continues with a still-growing membership through a host of ministries such as Christian Formation, the Chancel Choir, Gospel Choir, Jazz Ensemble, Mens Fellowship, Young Adult and Youth Ministries, a Church School, Health Ministry, Caring Ministry, and a Shepherding Program."[17]

Marcus Garvey encouraged African people around the world to be proud of their race and see beauty in their own kind. This form of black nationalism later became known as Garveyism. A central idea to Garveyism was that African people in every part of the world were one people and they would never advance if they did not put aside their cultural and ethnic differences and unite under their own shared history. He was heavily influenced by the earlier works of Booker T. Washington, Martin Delany, and Henry McNeal Turner.[20] Garvey used his own personal magnetism and the understanding of black psychology and the psychology of confrontation to create a movement that challenged bourgeois blacks for the minds and souls of African Americans. Marcus Garvey's return to America had to do with his desire to meet with the man who inspired him most, Booker T. Washington, however Garvey did not return in time to meet Washington. Despite this, Garvey moved forward with his efforts and two years later, a year after Washington's death, Garvey established a similar organization in America known as the United Negro Improvement Association otherwise known as the UNIA.[21] Garvey's beliefs are articulated in The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey as well as Message To The People: The Course of African Philosophy.

Wallace D. Fard founded the Nation of Islam in the 1930s. Fard took as his student Elijah (Poole) Muhammad, who later became the leader of the organization. The basis of the group was the belief that Christianity was exclusively a white man's religion forced on black people during slavery, preaching that Islam is the original religion of black people. Deviating from mainstream Islam, Elijah Muhammad taught that Fard was a Messiah and that he himself was sent by God to prepare black people for global supremacy and destruction of "the white devil."[22] The Nation of Islam promoted economic self-sufficiency for black people, seeking to establish a separate black nation in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi.[23]

The members of the Nation of Islam are known as Black Muslims. As the group became more and more prominent with public figures such as Malcolm X as its orators, it received increasing attention from outsiders. In 1959 the group was the subject of a documentary named The Hate that Hate Produced, drawing negative media attention.[citation needed] When Elijah Muhammad died, his son Warith succeeded him as the organization's leader. Influenced by Malcolm X's departure, he converted the Nation of Islam to orthodox Sunni Islam, renaming the organization as the World Community of al-Islam in the West and later the American Muslim Mission, eventually abandoning black nationalism and the Fard's cult of personality. In 1985, Mohammed formally resigned and dissolved the American Muslim Mission, leading his followers into mainstream Muslim organizations. Several former members of the Nation of Islam, including Silias Muhammad and Elijah Muhammad's brother John Muhammad, rejected the conversion to orthodoxy, forming two new organizations that retained the Nation of Islam's original name and teachings of Elijah Muhammad.[23][24]

Succeeding Malcolm X as leader of the New York Temple, Louis Farrakhan became the Nation of Islam's most prominent spokesperson, founding a third Nation of Islam in 1978. Beginning his organization with thousands of adherents, Farrakhan re-established its national prominence, eventually purchasing Elijah Muhammad's former mosque in Chicago to refurbish it as the organization's headquarters. Farrakhan expanded the organization internationally, opening chapters in England, France, Ghana, and the Caribbean islands, cultivating relations with foreign Muslim countries, and establishing a relationship with Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi. He bolstered his prominence by supporting Jesse Jackson's 1988 US presidential campaign, sponsoring the Million Man March in 1995, and promoting social reform in African-American communities. After a near-death experience in 2000, Farrakhan sought to strengthen relationships with other US racial minority groups and Warith Muhammed, eventually reducing his role within the Nation of Islam and embracing Dianetics, a practice of Scientology.[23][24]

The Southern Poverty Law Center classifies the Nation of Islam as a hate group, stating: "Its theology of innate black superiority over whites and the deeply racist, antisemitic and anti-LGBT rhetoric of its leaders have earned the NOI a prominent position in the ranks of organized hate."[25]

Between 1953 and 1964, while most African leaders worked in the civil rights movement to integrate African-American people into mainstream American life, Malcolm X was an avid advocate of black independence and the reclaiming of black pride and masculinity.[26] He maintained that there was hypocrisy in the purported values of Western culture from its Judeo-Christian religious traditions to American political and economic institutions and its inherently racist actions. He maintained that separatism and control of politics, and economics within its own community would serve blacks better than the tactics of civil rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and mainstream civil rights groups such as the SCLC, SNCC, NAACP, and CORE. MalcolmX declared that nonviolence was the "philosophy of the fool,"[27] and that to achieve anything, African Americans would have to reclaim their national identity, embrace the rights covered by the Second Amendment, and defend themselves from white hegemony and extrajudicial violence. In response to Rev. King's famous "I Have a Dream" speech, MalcolmX quipped, "While King was having a dream, the rest of us Negroes are having a nightmare."[28]

Prior to his pilgrimage to Mecca, Malcolm X believed that African Americans must develop their own society and ethical values, including the self-help, community-based enterprises, that the black Muslims supported. He also thought that African Americans should reject integration or cooperation with whites until they could achieve internal cooperation and unity. He prophetically believed that there "would be bloodshed" if the racism problem in America remained ignored, and he renounced "compromise" with whites. In April 1964, Malcolm X participated in a Hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca); Malcolm found himself restructuring his views and recanted several extremist opinions during his shift to mainstream Islam.[29]

Malcolm X returned from Mecca with moderate views that included an abandonment of his commitment to racial separatism. However, he still supported black nationalism and advocated that African Americans in the United States act proactively in their campaign for equal human rights, instead of relying on Caucasian citizens to change the laws that govern society. The tenets of Malcolm X's new philosophy are articulated in the charter of his Organization of Afro-American Unity (a secular Pan-Africanist group patterned after the Organization of African Unity), and he inspired some aspects of the future Black Panther movement.[30]

In 1965, Malcolm X expressed reservations about black nationalism, saying, I was alienating people who were true revolutionaries dedicated to overturning the system of exploitation that exists on this earth by any means necessary. So I had to do a lot of thinking and reappraising of my definition of black nationalism. Can we sum up the solution to the problems confronting our people as black nationalism? And if you notice, I havent been using the expression for several months."[31]

In the 1967 Black Power, Stokely Carmichael introduces black nationalism. He illustrates the prosperity of the black race in the United States as being dependent on the implementation of black sovereignty. Under his theory, black nationalism in the United States would allow Blacks to socially, economically and politically be empowered in a manner that has never been plausible in American history. A Black nation would work to reverse the exploitation of the Black race in America, as Blacks would intrinsically work to benefit their own state of affairs. African Americans would function in an environment of running their own businesses, banks, government, media, and so on. Black nationalism is the opposite of integration, and Carmichael contended integration is harmful to the black population. As blacks integrate to white communities they are perpetuating a system in which blacks are inferior to whites. Blacks would continue to function in an environment of being second class citizens, he believes, never reaching equity to white citizens. Carmichael therefore uses the concept of black nationalism to promote an equality that would begin to dismantle institutional racism.

While in France, Frantz Fanon wrote his first book, Black Skin, White Masks, an analysis of the impact of colonial subjugation on the African psyche. This book was a very personal account of Fanon's experience being black: as a man, an intellectual, and a party to a French education. Although Fanon wrote the book while still in France, most of his other work was written while in North Africa (in particular Algeria). It was during this time that he produced The Wretched of the Earth where Fanon analyzes the role of class, race, national culture and violence in the struggle for decolonization. In this work, Fanon expounded his views on the liberating role of violence for the colonized, as well as the general necessity of violence in the anti-colonial struggle. Both books established Fanon in the eyes of much of the Third World as one of the leading anti-colonial thinkers of the 20th century. In 1959 he compiled his essays on Algeria in a book called L'An Cinq: De la Rvolution Algrienne.[32]

Patrisse Cullors, a co-founder of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, has called for racial reparations in the form of "financial restitution, land redistribution, political self-determination, culturally relevant education programs, language recuperation, and the right to return (or repatriation)" and cited Frantz Fanon's work for "understanding the current global context for Black individuals on the African continent and in our multiple diasporas."[33]

The Not Fucking Around Coalition (NFAC) is a black nationalist organization in the United States. The group advocates for black liberation and separatism. It has been described by news outlets as a Black militia.[34][35] The NFAC gained prominence during the 20202021 United States racial unrest, making its first reported appearance at a May 12, 2020, protest near Brunswick, Georgia, over the February murder of Ahmaud Arbery,[36] though they were identified by local media as "Black Panthers".[37] Thomas Mockaitis, professor of history at DePaul University noted that "In one sense it (NFAC) echoes the Black Panthers but they are more heavily armed and more disciplined... So far, they've coordinated with police and avoided engaging with violence."[38]

John Fitzgerald Johnson, also known as Grand Master Jay and John Jay Fitzgerald Johnson, claims leadership of the group[38][39] and has stated that it is composed of "ex military shooters."[36] In 2019 Grand Master Jay told the Atlanta Black Star that the organization was formed to prevent another Greensboro Massacre.[40][41] Johnson expressed Black Nationalist views, putting forth the view that the United States should either hand the state of Texas over to African-Americans so that they may form an independent country, or allow African-Americans to depart the United States to another country that would provide land upon which to form an independent nation.[42][43]

In 2016, an investigation into the online activities of Micah Johnson, perpetrator of the 2016 shooting of Dallas police officers, uncovered his interest in Black nationalist groups.[44] The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and news outlets reported that Johnson "liked" the Facebook pages of Black nationalist organizations such as the New Black Panther Party (NBPP), Nation of Islam, and Black Riders Liberation Army, three groups which are listed by the SPLC as hate groups.[45]

In 2022, Frank James, suspect of the 2022 New York City Subway attack beliefs have been linked to black nationalism.[46][47]

Revolutionary Black nationalism is an ideology that combines cultural nationalism with scientific socialism in order to achieve Black self-determination. Proponents of the ideology argue that revolutionary Black nationalism is a movement that rejects all forms of oppression, including class based exploitation under capitalism.[48] Revolutionary Black nationalist organizations such as the Black Panther Party and the Revolutionary Action Movement also adopted a set of anti-colonialist politics inspired by the writings of notable revolutionary theorists including Frantz Fanon, Mao Zedong, and Kwame Nkrumah.[49] In the words of Ahmad Muhammad (formerly known as Max Stanford) the national field chairman of the Revolutionary Action Movement:

We are revolutionary black nationalist[s], not based on ideas of national superiority, but striving for justice and liberation of all the oppressed peoples of the world. . . . There can be no liberty as long as black people are oppressed and the peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America are oppressed by Yankee imperialism and neo-colonialism. After four hundred years of oppression, we realize that slavery, racism and imperialism are all interrelated and that liberty and justice for all cannot exist peacefully with imperialism.[50]

Professor and author Harold Cruse saw revolutionary Black nationalism as a necessary and logical progression from other leftist ideologies, as he believed that non-Black leftists could not properly assess the particular material conditions of the Black community and other colonized people:

Revolutionary nationalism has not waited for Western Marxian thought to catch up with the realities of the "underdeveloped" world...The liberation of the colonies before the socialist revolution in the West is not orthodox Marxism (although it might be called Maoism or Castroism). As long as American Marxists cannot deal with the implications of revolutionary nationalism, both abroad and at home, they will continue to play the role of revolutionaries by proxy."[51]

Some African countries encode race in their nationality and citizenship laws. Liberia and Sierra Leone afford birthright citizenship exclusively to black people. Circa 1992, Malawi required birth to a Malawian citizen "of African race" for birthright citizenship. Similarly, Mali used to attribute birthright nationality only to children with a parent "of African origin" born in the country.[52] Ghana provides the right of return for people of African descent. Ghana is the first African state to have enacted this policy, done via the Immigration Act 573 of 2000 in response to African-American immigrant lobbying.[53] Some private Afrocentric travel and genetic ancestry tracing companies have collaborated with the governments of Ghana and Sierra Leone to promote African diasporic toursim and immigration there.[54][55]

Robert Mugabe, former President and Prime Minister of Zimbabwe, encouraged the violent seizure of white-owned farmland, commenting that "[t]he white man is not indigenous to Africa. Africa is for Africans, Zimbabwe is for Zimbabweans."[56]

In his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King Jr. characterized black nationalism with "hatred and despair," writing that support for black nationalism "would inevitably lead to a frightening racial nightmare."[7]

Norm R. Allen Jr., former director of African Americans for Humanism, calls black nationalism a "strange mixture of profound thought and patent nonsense".

On the one hand, Reactionary Black Nationalists (RBNs) advocate self-love, self-respect, self-acceptance, self-help, pride, unity, and so forth - much like the right-wingers who promote "traditional family values." But - also like the holier-than-thou right-wingers - RBNs promote bigotry, intolerance, hatred, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, pseudo-science, irrationality, dogmatic historical revisionism, violence, and so forth.[57]

Tunde Adeleke, Nigerian-born professor of History and Director of the African American Studies program at the University of Montana, argues in his book UnAfrican Americans: Nineteenth-Century Black Nationalists and the Civilizing Mission that 19th-century African-American nationalism embodied the racist and paternalistic values of Euro-American culture and that black nationalist plans were not designed for the immediate benefit of Africans but to enhance their own fortunes.[58]

Black feminists in the U.S., such as Barbara Smith, Toni Cade Bambara, and Frances Beal, have also lodged sustained criticism of certain strands of black nationalism, particularly the political programs advocated by cultural nationalists. Black cultural nationalists envisioned black women only in the traditional heteronormative role of the idealized wife-mother figure. Patricia Hill Collins criticizes the limited imagining of black women in cultural nationalist projects, writing that black women "assumed a particular place in Black cultural nationalist efforts to reconstruct authentic Black culture, reconstitute Black identity, foster racial solidarity, and institute an ethic of service to the Black community."[59] A major example of black women as only the heterosexual wife and mother can be found in the philosophy and practice called Kawaida exercised by the Us Organization. Maulana Karenga established the political philosophy of Kawaida in 1965. Its doctrine prescribed distinct roles between black men and women. Specifically, the role of the black woman as "African Woman" was to "inspire her man, educate her children, and participate in social development."[60] Historian of black women's history and radical politics Ashley Farmer records a more comprehensive history of black women's resistance to sexism and patriarchy within black nationalist organizations, leading many Black Power era associations to support gender equality.[61]

Read more:

Black nationalism - Wikipedia

After the Jan. 6 insurrection, many wanted to understand how signs declaring Jesus Saves mixed with gallows and chants of hang Mike Pence! The answer, according to some sociologists and political analysts, was Christian nationalism.

Ever since Jan. 6, 2021, the term Christian nationalism has proliferated in discourse, but the precise definition is up for debate. Is Christian nationalism only applicable to those who welcome the label, like Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who sells Proud Christian nationalist t-shirts, and Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Al Mohler, who said he wasnt going to runfrom Christian nationalism on a recent podcast episode? Or can it be applied to hanging images of Jesusin congressional offices and the post-rapture book and movie series Left Behind?

In their latest book, The Flag and the Cross, sociologists Samuel L. Perry and Philip Gorski explain Christian nationalism as a constellation of beliefs that the founding of the United States was divinely inspired or that God is invested in the success of the U.S. that manifest in political goals.

Christian nationalism, they write, exists on a spectrum, measured by agreement with statements like, The federal government should declare the United States a Christian nation, or The federal government should allow the display of religious symbols in public spaces.

Strong agreement with these Christian nationalist statements, however, does not immediately manifest in the political goals that are a threat to democracy and pluralism; Gorski and Perry specifically identify white Christian nationalism as the threat. Christian nationalist beliefs alongside white racial identity creates the political vision that seeks hegemonic power for white people.

Gorski and Perry spoke with Sojourners associate news editor Mitchell Atencio to discuss critiques of their work, debates over terminology, and whether white Christian nationalism is solely a conservative ideology.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Mitchell Atencio, Sojourners: What is the importance of the term white Christian nationalism? Why not use more historically popular terms like white supremacy or Christo-fascism?

Philip Gorski: This is a question thats very much on Sams and my mind: Is white Christian nationalism just another way of saying fascism, American-style? Theres a quote, often misattributed to Sinclair Lewis, that If fascism ever comes to America, it will come draped in the flag and carrying the cross.

If you look at white supremacism historically, we tend to think of the Ku Klux Klan as an anti-Black organization which, of course, it was but it was also antisemitic, anti-Catholic, nativist. It was a white Christian nationalist organization. So its really tricky to think about this both analytically and politically. How should we talk about that? I dont have a settled opinion.

I do think that the one benefit of calling it white Christian nationalism has been that it has stimulated some productive and healthy debate among American Christians, connecting it to their faith traditions and making them think about whether or not there are assumptions theyve been carrying around or a pair of political glasses that theyve had on and helping them to maybe see that and reflect on that a little bit. I think that has been productive, but it still leaves a lot of open questions.

Samuel L. Perry: Im with Phil. I dont have a settled strong opinion on [the term] or some kind of stake in keeping the terminology as it is.

I think I have liked white Christian nationalism in that it allows these views to be considered as a spectrum of allegiance to this ideology that America is for people like us, meaning ethnically or culturally white conservative Christians.

I think people throw around the term, Christo-fascism, which, in my opinion, is rather unwieldy. Christo-fascism sounds ugly, and even broaching the topic of fascism is an immediate conversation stopper; it evokes the idea of literal Nazis. To try to ask somebody whether their political views or their cultural views approach fascism is a little bit different than saying white Christian nationalism can exist on a spectrum, and the more we move right on this spectrum of Christian nationalism, the more we approach something that we could call a nascent or proto fascism in that it links religion and nation and ethnicity in a very extreme way. I dont necessarily think we need to jettison the terminology yet, but Im not so wedded to it.

Early in the book you write that, White Christian nationalism is one of the oldest and most powerful currents in American politics. But until the insurrection, it was invisible to most Americans. As the term has become more visible, more popular, and more politicized, how do you hear folks misuse or abuse the term?

Samuel L. Perry: I think about this all the time. We have tried our best, honestly, to try to prevent [misuse.] We do this in a couple of ways.

First, I dont really like calling people Christian nationalists; I prefer to talk about the ideology itself, and somebody could be more or less adherent to it. Calling somebody a Christian nationalist is like calling somebody a racist or a fascist maybe its appropriate, and yet, at the same time, you better be ready for the conversation to stop there.

Ryan Burge, a political scientist, was bouncing around this tweetthe other day, looking at the popularity of the term. Since Marjorie Taylor Greene referenced it, searches for the term have gone up.

If youre left of center and you think anything on the right that smacks of authoritarianism or Christianity in politics is now Christian nationalism or white Christian nationalism, I think thats dangerous.

We have tried our best to indicate that it is something concrete, its not a slur to throw at people we disagree with, it is something that is actually influencing peoples beliefs, and it is embedded in the system in some ways.

[Abuse of the term] is a real danger. We are trying our best to make sure we are specific when we use that term and encouraging other people to do that as well.

Philip Gorski: Theres two dangers. The first danger is conceptual overreach, that it turns into an umbrella insult that you hurl at people you dont like like [how the right uses] socialism or woke.

The other danger is that the term gets used too narrowly, that it gets reserved for only the most extreme manifestation.

So you say, Christian nationalism, thats Doug Mastriano. Yes, but that is an extreme version of it. And, as Samuel emphasized, it is a spectrum. There are folks who might not hold views as extreme as Mastriano who are nevertheless nodding along when they hear him talking. If one danger is exaggerating the threat, the other is minimizing the threat.

Going forward not just for academic reasons, but for political reasons its gonna become important to start talking about kindred ideologies that are similar, but not identical to, Christian nationalism so that it doesnt become this catchall term for every variety of conservatism that a secular progressive doesnt like.

Is white Christian nationalism always conservative?

Philip Gorski: One of the interesting things that I discovered doing the research for this for [my previous book] American Covenant and The Flag and the Cross was that the big cheerleaders for Christian nationalism in the United States 100 to 150 years ago were not conservative Protestants; they were liberal Protestants.

I was reading about some of the debates within American Protestant denominations about Americas entry into World War I, and discovered that Shailer Mathews a prominent liberal Protestant theologian in the interwar years and dean of the University of Chicago Divinity School for several decades was on a barnstorming tour on behalf of Woodrow Wilson talking up American entry into the war. By the same token, some of the most vocal opponents of American engagement in World War I were conservative white evangelicals from the South, folks who were also proponents of the fundamentalist project that emerged during that period. So its not the case that [white Christian nationalism] has always been a conservative white evangelical thing.

Another kind of interesting figure in this regard is William Jennings Bryan, the three-time unsuccessful Democratic candidate for president who many also remember as the person who was a prosecution witness in the Scopes Monkey Trials. He was somebody who had very conservative theological beliefs, which we would now think of as fundamentalist or evangelical. And yet he was very progressive on many things with the very important exception of race.

How does that all get reshuffled in a way that Christian nationalism becomes not a liberal Protestant thing, but a conservative Protestant thing? How do conservative evangelicals become cheerleaders for America? How do they then reconcile that role with open support for white supremacism and Jim Crow and racial segregation?

Samuel L. Perry: We do find, in survey after survey, that Black Americans usually score just as high, if not sometimes higher, than white Americans on our indicators for Christian nationalism. But one of the things that is obvious as soon as you dig into the data is that those questions are interpreted differently for Black Americans compared to white Americans.

Black Americans tend to read questions on Christian nationalism through the lens of civil religion an aspirational ideal, a wouldnt it be great if America actually lived up to its professed values to be this kind of Christian nation. The kind of language, frankly, that you hear from Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. or Frederick Douglass. The aspirational language is accountability.

White Americans hear the language of Christian nationalism Christian nation, Christian heritage, or Christian values and they perceive a nostalgia, or it makes them think nostalgically for when people like us, held political and cultural influence. They think, Wouldnt it be great if we could go back to America as we knew it? It evokes this kind of idea that the right culture is losing and on the defensive and that we need to take something back to gain something that was lost. As far as the data suggests, I think theres a powerful difference between Christian nationalism as we see it manifested in historically disadvantaged minority groups versus in white Americans.

I dont like throwing around the term nationalism in a positive way because in most peoples minds it means our nation above all the others but there are positive manifestations of nationalism when it means people are advocating for their own liberty, freedom, and sovereignty over their own personhood.

Christian nationalism within a context of historically disadvantaged minority groups is more of that positive nationalism. Whereas, with white Americans, its more of an ethno-nationalism that is illiberal.

Part of what I hear you saying is that historically marginalized groups wouldnt see the Christian nationalist statements as about returning to a time where they had less rights, but rather as an aspiration.

Samuel L. Perry: Spot on. And Ill give you an example. My colleague Cyrus Schleifer and I were looking at some data that asked Americans if we should support our country even when its wrong.

And we found that the more white Americans subscribe to Christian nationalist ideology, the more likely they are to affirm that statement. So for them, Christian nationalism is about a country that is morally pure, sacred, and something that you defend as good. It has to be good because its our country.

African Americans and Latinos though, when they affirm Christian nationalist ideology, it doesnt make them any more likely to say we should support the country when its wrong. African Americans and Latinos/Hispanics dont equate Christian nationalism with the idea that my country has always been good, has always been a force for good, or always been on the side of good. They know thats not the case.

Are there any particularly good critiques of your work or of the book?

Samuel L. Perry: None that I can think of Im just kidding! This is a great thing to talk about. Academic books arent supposed to be Bibles where theyre the last word on a subject. Ideally academic works especially works of sociology are based in the best data that we have available, the best construction of concepts and arrangement of variables, and so on. And sometimes we get better data. Sometimes we get better measures. So I think its really important to acknowledge that we are watching change before our eyes. People are discussing this. We are going to look back at that book and say, Gosh, I wish we had given more attention to this or that. So thats a blanket statement I would say over any academic work.

Philip Gorski: The one point thats been raised to me a couple of times, most insightfully by Joseph Lowndes at the University of Oregon, of what to do with figures like Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.). [Lowndes has asked,] In what sense is white Christian nationalism white? Are you really sure that youve nailed that? Maybe its becoming something other than white.

Some believe white is people who identify as white and people who would be identified by others as white. And then, at the other end of the spectrum, there is thinking about whiteness as a culture or ideology. In that line of thought, a person of color could be white culturally; I dont think we really thought through that carefully enough.

I also wish we could gather more data on how the racial order is in flux right now. One question thats really on my mind is about Latinos particularly evangelical and Pentecostal Latinos. Latino itself is already a kind of problematic category because people come from all different countries, some peoples ancestors have been here 250 years, some have been here two and a half years, so why should we expect all those people to think the same? These questions are about whiteness and in what sense it is changing. Is Christian nationalism becoming color blind?

Samuel L. Perry: Another thing we would expand on, and this is something Im now turning my own work toward, is white Christian nationalism as a political strategy.

For example, Donald Trump wouldnt consider himself a white Christian nationalist in that he really believes those kinds of things. I dont think Trump believes in anything except winners and losers, victory, and ratings, but he sure as heck knows that white Christian nationalism is an effective strategy. He knows the rhetoric of Christian nationalism and a lot of Trump surrogates and copycat Republican progeny have embraced that rhetoric and language.

Often people are wondering, Hey, is this white Christian nationalism? when [politicians] seize upon religious rhetoric in a political context. And thats not exactly what we mean by white Christian nationalism. Were referring to the use of us versus them language to make a claim about a country that once was ours, that were trying to take back, that rightfully belongs to people like us.

All of that is to say: Its unfair, a mischaracterization, and really a dodge to look at the Black church and say, Oh, they do Christian nationalism all the time. Thats not really how were describing it. [The Black church] is not trying to go back to a time that they feel nostalgia for, a time where the right people were in power and they wanna take it back. They actually just want the country to live up to its supposed founding ideals. I dont think thats really in the proximate range of any kind of Christian nationalism.

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What Does White Christian Nationalism Even Mean, Anyway?