Trump, Fuentes, West, White Nationalists and Anti-Semites: "Don't Normalize This"

Merriam-Webster dictionary

Heather Cox Richardson, "Letter from an American, December 1, 2022": 

Today, Ye, also known as Kanye West, appeared with right-wing white supremacist Nick Fuentes on Alex Jones’s show InfoWars, and was so vile even Jones began to push back. Eventually, Ye praised Nazis and Adolf Hitler. Then, and only then, did the Twitter account of the Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee delete its tweet of October 6, 2022, that read: “Kanye. Elon. Trump.”

As a former U.S. president and now candidate for re-election dines with a white supremacist anti-Semite Holocaust denier: commentary

Right Wing Watch, 25 November 2022

As a former president and now candidate for re-election dines with a white supremacist anti-Semite Holocaust denier, enlightening commentary:

Journalist Michael Gerson, Who Died Yesterday, Writing About One of the "Worst Errors of Moral Judgment" He Made as a Columnist

Michael Gerson, 18 January 2014, photo by AvianMaid, at Wikimedia

Journalist Michael Gerson died yesterday. He was 58 years old and died of kidney cancer. 

Arwa Mahdawi on the White Female (Republican) Elephant in the Room as Americans Vote

Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields, The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics (NY: Oxford UP, 2019), p. 9

Arwa Mahdawi comments on polling showing white suburban women trending strongly Republican in these final days before the election:

Structural racism beliefs by party affiliation, 2022 PRRI American Values Survey

Philip Bump comments on an ad just released by Steven Miller’s America First political group. Miller was an official in the Trump administration who played a key role in some of its most savage anti-immigrant policies. America First's ad claims that racism against white Americans is a bigger concern than discrimination against racial minorities.

Latest PRRI American Values Survey: White Evangelicals, the GOP Base, Continue to Be Outliers

Jeff Brumley notes that, once again, white evangelicals turn out to be outliers on beliefs about race and American history in PRRI's latest American Values Survey. Brumley counts the ways:

In News: "Till" Film Released; True History and Actual True History; Rising Antisemitism; Twitter Takeover Consequences

Photo of stack of newspapers by Daniel R. Blume, Wikimedia Commons

This weekend, Chinonye Chukwu’s film "Till" has been released nationally after limited-viewing showings on 14 October. Join the Movement Toward Racial Justice summarizes why this film telling the story of the 1955 murder of 14-year-old African-American Emmett Till Jr. remains critically important for Americans to hear today:

Robert P. Jones on 2022 PRRI American Values Survey: White Christian Nationalist Beliefs Now Affirmed by Half of Republicans and Half of White Evangelicals

Robert P. Jones explains the significance of key findings of the latest American Values Survey, released this past week by his PRRI group: 

Ruth Krall's New Study Course "Black Lives Matter": A Valuable Educational Resource.

Ruth Krall

If Robert P. Jones is correct when he writes that white Christianity has served throughout American history as "the central source of moral legitimacy for a society explicitly built to value the lives of white people over Black people," then white American Christians would appear to have a massive educational challenge confronting them. White US Christians would seem urgently to need educational resources permitting them to begin to understand and come to terms with their cultural effect as a major sustainer of white supremacy. Jones makes the claim I've just cited in his new book White Too Long, where he writes, 

"We Need to Talk About the White People Who Voted for Donald Trump": "Only Group in Which a Majority Voted for Trump"

KOAT Albuqerque, "Native man goes viral with downtown celebration dance"

Brandon Tensley, "Millions of White voters are once again showing who they are":

One thing that this week has clarified is the lengths to which many White Americans are willing to go in order to protect their Whiteness, to centralize it, even after a summer that saw unprecedented support for the Black Lives Matter movement.  

National Catholic Reporter Review of Sarah Posner, Unholy — "Sarah Posner's 'Unholy' implicates Catholics as well as evangelicals"

Here's a review I wrote of Sarah Posner's Unholy: Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump, which appeared in the 2-15 October print edition of National Catholic Reporter and is now also online at the NCR website. It's entitled, "Sarah Posner's 'Unholy' implicates Catholics as well as evangelicals":

Valuable Recent Commentary about Link Between White Supremacy and White Christianity in the U.S.

I'm sorry to have been away for so long. As I noted in a posting some weeks back, we have been dealing with health challenges, and we're hoping that a surgical procedure today will put them behind us. 

Robert P. Jones's White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity — Excerpts Worth Noting

As I did recently with Sarah Posner's new book Unholy: Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump, I'd like to share with you some excerpts from Robert P. Jones's book White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity (NY: Simon & Schuster, 2020), which I recently read. This book is very important, as Jones's Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) issues a report today entitled, "Summer Unrest over Racial Injustice Moves the Country, But Not Republicans or White Evangelicals." This reports summarizes recent PRRI polling findings which show that, even as other white Americans are gradually coming to see and admit the depths of racial injustice everywhere in American society, Republicans and white evangelicals — who are to a great extent one and the same — refuse to budge. These groups continue to want to claim that white citizens are the real victims of injustice.

Robert P. Jones's Commentary on the "Historical Record of Lived Christianity in America," White Supremacy, and the Recent Sojourners Débacle

An important contribution (and subtext) of Robert P. Jones's new book White Too Long is its focus on how white Christianity is lived in the US — as opposed to what churches say about themselves or profess in their official statements. As Jones states,

The historical record of lived Christianity in America reveals that Christian theology and institutions have been the central cultural tent pole holding up the very idea of white supremacy (p. 6).

Sarah Posner's Unholy: Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump — Unholy Marriage of Alt- and Religious Right in the Trump Presidency

I recently read Sarah Posner's new book Unholy: Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump (NY: Penguin Random House, 2020). Reading it as Robert P. Jones's White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity comes out is in many ways a thoroughly depressing experience. I began reading Jones's book as I was finishing Posner's.

More Valuable Commentary about Robert P. Jones's White Too Long

New interviews with Robert P. Jones keep coming along after the recent publication of his book White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, about which I blogged a number of days ago. New interviews and commentary about the book, to which I will keep pointing you as I spot these pieces …. 

Valuable Commentary about Robert P. Jones's White Too Long

As a companion piece to my recent announcement of the publication of Robert P. Jones's book White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, here's some valuable commentary about the book, some of it by Robert P. Jones himself:

Robert P. Jones's White Too Long Published Today: A Must-Read Book about American Christianity and White Supremacy

No matter how distracted and enervated I may be at present as we cope with some health issues, I can't let today pass by without noting that a very important book is appearing in print today. This is Robert P. Jones's White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity. 

"Where is the Sense of Decency? What Does It Profit a Great Nation to Conquer the World, Only to Lose Its Soul?" — The Legacy of John Lewis

This interview with Congressman John Lewis -- in front of a live audience in Kentucky in October 2013 -- was one of the most memorable and moving experiences of my professional life.

It feels just impossible to lose him at a time when we need him so much.https://t.co/QO2kEwLVvz

— Rachel Maddow MSNBC (@maddow) July 18, 2020

News Commentary in Time of Plague: 43 Pages of Obituaries in Houston Today (and the Role Many US Christians Are Playing in the Pandemic)

OUR LOCAL PAPER: The Houston Chronicle
obituary section was 43 pages today.

Let that sink in.

— Rogelio Garcia Lawyer (@LawyerRogelio) July 13, 2020

(P.S. As Newsweek reports, this is a standalone section of obituaries for the year up to now. Read the Newsweek report, and you'll see a lot of commenters on social media are stating that it's likely a high percentage of those deaths are Covid deaths.)