The Trump movement has escalated its calls for violence. We're so enured to extreme political behaviors that we've hardly noticed.
Last week Donald Trump posted that Senator McConnell "must have a DEATH WISH!" (his caps), which is nothing but a death threat. As we've seen from folks who assaulted the Capitol on January 6, people take Trump's suggestions as orders. Vanishing few Republican politicians have the integrity to denounce this.
At a political rally Saturday night, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene declared, "Democrats want Republicans dead and they have already started the killings.”
Running for reelection, Rand Paul released an ad that intones, "It's clear that [his opponent] Charles Booker doesn't believe in civil discourse, only violence."
These are wildly dangerous things for politicians to say, especially so when social media references to civil war are spiking. Once we might have called them irresponsible. But let's be honest: these people know what they're doing. They're fascist.
Political violence is already a reality in this country. The January 6 insurrection brought it before our faces in a shocking way. Violent threats and intimidation of politicians have intensified dramatically since then. Although the threats target members of both parties, the escalation clearly points to Donald Trump.
In the five years after President Donald J. Trump was elected in 2016 following a campaign featuring a remarkable level of violent language,
the number of recorded threats against members of Congress increased
more than tenfold, to 9,625 in 2021, according to figures from the
Capitol Police, the federal law enforcement department that protects
Congress.
Violent rhetoric incites violent behavior.
Donald Trump has incited violence ever since he started campaigning. He encouraged police to bang people's heads against car doors as they shoved them in, evoked the old days when you could rough up protesters, boast that his supporters included the toughest people, and openly courted violent right wing militias. This is what fascists do.
I was privileged to join clergy from the Moravian Church, Northern Province, on a Pilgrimage toward Racial Justice and Healing September 13-16. I'm grateful to the Moravians for welcoming me. Their reputation for hospitality is not widely known but so well earned. And I want to acknowledge Lancaster Theological Seminary for supporting my participation.
In this post I'll get around to summarizing key points of the trip, but I think it's more important to share my own learning.
The tour made more acute my need for spiritual growth. We White people can
get weird around race, and I'm no exception. I'm no expert, but I know a fair amount about the basics of slavery, Jim Crow, migrations, and the Civil Rights Movement--less about mass incarceration. On too many
occasions I've been confronted with my own desire to be someone who
"knows" about race and racism, someone who gets it. As I experienced the trip, I realized that my sense of "knowing" is part of my White defense mechanism armor. If I can posture as knowing, maybe people will think I'm committed to justice. Maybe I won't come off as ignorant. Maybe I won't feel uncomfortable. Maybe... something.
I began to pray, as I am every morning still, to be a listener and a learner, not an evaluator. To pause my mind enough for my heart to catch up. I ask this of our seminarians who participate in learning opportunities like the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference: let's talk about what you saw and experienced, not so much what you liked or whether you agree or disagree. Let's be responders to the word, not thinkers only (James 1:22).
So I needed to retrace some old steps.
Our first day I took a long walk around the center of Montgomery. I was still all in my head, so I repeated the walk early the next morning. I was born and grew up in Alabama, but I have very little experience with Montgomery. I recall only one trip specifically to Montgomery. My high school sent me to a youth leadership conference after my sophomore year. The one outing I remember was to the Montgomery State Capitol, where we stopped on this spot. Here Jefferson Davis took his oath of office as president of the Confederacy. The Daughters of the Confederacy made sure to commemorate the spot. This is what they wanted us to see around 1980.
I vaguely remember that the Capitol looks down on Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King Jr was the new pastor during the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Sure enough, not only does the star on the Capitol steps look down on Dexter Avenue, a statue of Davis sits on the hill too. Still. Here's the view in both directions, though the elevation differential is hard to capture with a camera. The footsteps are right in front of the church, representing the end of the March from Selma.
That Wednesday morning walk showed that Montgomery is filled with historical markers to its haunted history. Markers address the slave trade, the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Jim Crow era, and the Civil Rights Movement.
Hank Williams too. There's a a little museum.
I began to wonder. Clearly Montgomery makes money off of its racist past. Given Alabama's brutally racist politics today--just watch political ads, you'll see--I wonder about motives. But I also know lots of people live in Montgomery and have influence there. Not just a lot of Black people but also some Whites of good will and some Whites who think they have good will. I just wonder what it means to market this history. History is complicated, and so are people. I'm glad the memorials and museums are there.
I encountered an oddity. Outside the Alabama Education Association building, offices of the state teachers' union, is a memorial pool dedicated to Alabama's educators. It was dry. I photographed a few plaques that resided side by side. Here they are in sequence.
King. von Braun. Keller. Carver. Wait a minute... von Braun was a Nazi! In school we learned how the United States had brought over von Braun and other Nazi scientists to develop our space program. He worked in Huntsville, where the Von Braun Center is, or was in my day, the major venue for concerts and similar events. I read a biography! I've heard that von Braun's life is complicated, so I'll move on. History is messy, and so are people. I hope he served the Nazis only under compulsion. I hope he resisted. I hope he changed. Whatever. It's just odd to find his name among these legitimate heroes.
On our first evening our hosts gave us little packets of Montgomery dirt, an experience that began to open my heart to the fullness of things. The dirt is a very dark brown. When I was in school, we all learned about Alabama's southern Black Belt: black because the dirt is black, and black because the population is heavily Black too. Black dirt was good for cotton farming, and slavery made cotton farmers rich.
This is what the Southern Black Belt looks like in racial politics: Blue for counties that vote Democrat. (Source.) See the blue? That's the Black Belt plus the Mississippi River valley.
I grew up in Florence, Alabama. My home county, Lauderdale, is in the absolute northwest corner. The dirt where I come from is not black, it is red clay. For most of my life, I grew up thinking we in North Alabama were "better" when it came to race because all the big Civil Rights news I knew came from Birmingham and further South. Only a few years ago I stopped to look up the percentage of Lauderdale County's population that was enslaved prior to the Civil War: not much different. But I had operated out of the assumption that my people were somehow less complicit, a little more sophisticated. That little packet of black dirt struck home.
Later in the trip we visited to the Equal Justice Initiative's National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which largely commemorates the lynchings that have been documented throughout the United States, especially concentrated in the South. The project has invited teams to collect soil from all those documented sites, and it represents them in glass jars labeled by county. Look at the varieties of dirt.
The Memorial was one of our final stops, and it is a profound experience. Each county where lynchings have been documented receives its own coffin-size pillar with the names and dates of victims engraved. Some rise from the floor. As you walk through, others hang from a high ceiling like bodies from a tree. Copies lie flat on the ground. I determined to find "my counties," especially Lauderdale and Colbert (home to my parents and grandparents), along with Shelby and Davidson counties in Tennessee (where I'd gone to school and taught), York County in South Carolina, and Pennsylvania (included among multiple states). Three documented lynchings in Lauderdale County, twelve in Colbert, and so on.
The experience somehow reminded me that I knew of two lynching adjacent stories as a child but had never framed them that way. Upon reflection, remarkable it is that White children of my generation knew such things but without coming to terms with them at all.
My Uncle Norman related a story from when he was about 10. That would be 1919 or so. He was walking around Leighton, Alabama with the sheriff when a black man rode into town, too well dressed and on too nice a wagon. The sheriff challenged the man and demanded identification. When the man reached into his pocket, presumably for papers, the sheriff emptied his revolver into the man's body. He later took my uncle to inspect the evidence of his good shooting.
It's a story I share rarely because it is so traumatic. But I don't remember trauma or outrage coming from my Uncle Norman, who was not overtly racist. I don't want to evaluate him: yes, his racism came through, but so did his attempts to overcome racism. He clearly told the story as something he'd witnessed that was wrong, evidence of the bad old days. But... he was 10 years old back then, and he later related the story as just something that happened. If I could ask him now....
I also checked out Thirteen Alabama Ghosts from the school library, the kind of book fifth graders just gobble up. It has the story of "The Face in the Courthouse Window." The legend is probably inaccurate, but it's based on a Black man who was killed by lightning inside the Carroll County courthouse as he awaited his lynching. I visited the site as a child! I only learned this in writing this account, but they still perform a drama about it every year in Pickens, Alabama. And it is in children's books.
I am overcome with sadness as I rehearse this to myself. What we learned as children. What we didn't learn. What we didn't feel.
Our first evening in Montgomery featured a presentation by the Rev. Dr. Frank Crouch, who has retired as Moravian Seminary's professor of New Testament and dean. Frank has been poring through Moravian archives, especially in Pennsylvania and North Carolina, in order to come to terms with the church's race history. He's discovered some hard things. Nicholas Zinzendorf himself, one of the great figures in Moravian history, endorsed slavery as biblical, God's punishment upon Black people. The Bethlehem (Pennsylvania) community purchased enslaved people as early as 1742. The Salem community in North Carolina did likewise, where over 200 graves of enslaved persons have been uncovered. Mary Prince, enslaved by Moravians in the West Indies, later narrated her story, published as The History of Mary Prince. She declared that "Slavery hardens White people's hearts toward the Blacks," and that "All slaves want to be free." Frank further documented Moravians' complicity with segregation and shared the story of Charles Martin, the first ordained Black Moravian pastor in the United States who served in New York from 1908-1942. Martin emerged as a civil rights leader in the city, co-leading a 1917 Negro Silent Protest Parade that gathered thousands of participants.
Wednesday revolved around an educational session with Dr. Catherine Meeks, Executive Director of the Absalom Jones Center for Racial Healing in Atlanta. The racial healing terminology is important to her because racism, like all diseases, requires daily attention. Dr. Meeks also asked pressing questions. For example, do we extend the same sympathy to all people, to include those who are homeless or incarcerated? Do we who are White recognize that we too have been wounded by racism? Do we truly desire to live in a world where everyone is free? Questions like these call us to take on real inner work.
Thursday we visited the Rosa Parks Museum, operated by Troy University, which tells the story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. That year is often cited as the unofficial beginning of the Civil Rights Movement. Facing terrific resistance, including losing their jobs and enduring bombings and other instances of violence, Black people in Montgomery walked to work or carpooled rather than take the bus for over a year. Whatever the weather. I had heard stories about White allies. And however this looks to you as a reader, I needed to connect with their stories somehow. Long ago I learned that White allies are never perfect, but I was moved in particular to be reminded of Robert Graetz, a White pastor of a Black Lutheran congregation who had his house bombed because he supported the boycott.
On the same day we visited the Rosa Parks Museum and the Memorial for Peace and Justice, we toured the Equal Justice Initiative's Legacy Museum, which chronicles Black history through slavery and the slave trade through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, lynchings, the Civil Rights Movement, and mass incarceration. I cannot recommend this museum enough. It combines multimedia art, places viewers in the middle of the experience from time to time, and combines video presentations with thick narrative. Take a look at the web site. I could have spent at least five hours there.
Several bits of information struck me powerfully in the Legacy Museum, but the main effects ran deeper than that. Over and over again, we saw how Whites committed violence against Black people only to keep them in submission: men lynched for growing prosperous, cities torched when Black populations moved toward self-sufficiency.
Lots of us stopped to view two video presentations: a map of the Atlantic that tracked the paths of slave trade ships year by year from the coast of Africa to North and South America and the Caribbean, and a map of the then-United States that reflected the migration of enslaved people year by year. Little dots crossing the maps. To Virginia, New York, and Boston, then to Charleston and New Orleans, and so forth. What struck me most was the flow of "dots" from Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania, and from Maryland and Virginia, down through to Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas after it became illegal to import enslaved people to the United States in 1808. That meant families split, harsher conditions, bigger labor camps, and untold additional misery.
Maybe you've read or heard of Douglas Blackmon's Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. The Museum impressed upon me the scale by which some states, particularly Alabama, jailed Black men in order to generate revenue. It really was a replacement for slavery. In 1898, 73% of Alabama's state revenue came from the convict leasing system. Of course, the incarcerated still work for no real pay. And we still have not accounted for the harm to Black communities, families, and individuals reverberates through our society to this day. We haven't even begun.
On my own journey, it seems like I'm beginning again over and over.
Caution is a good thing when it comes to news from Ukraine or Russia. Everybody has an agenda, and we here in the US read according to our values and desires.
But there's a substantial uptick in reporting of disarray within Russia.
There are reports of Russian units suffering frostbite at 50 percent rates, complaining that they're being forced to target civilians, and even in one case attacking a colonel. (Not that complaining among soldiers should be a surprise.)
Tens or hundreds of thousands of well-educated, well-employed Russians are fleeing the country, citing disgust over the war, fear of repression, or a mixture of the two. Maybe 250,000.
One such Russian is Anatoly Chubai, a special envoy to international organizations. He has resigned his position and left the country.
We, Russia’s officers, demand that the President of the Russian Federation reject the criminal policy of provoking a war in which Russia would find itself alone against the united forces of the West.
(For Gessen on the flight of Russian nationals, see this video.)
Putin the Menace
When the conversation concerns race, we should listen to those directly victimized by racism. When it comes to Russian aggression, we should listen to folks from the former Soviet Bloc. The Czech Republic's Prime Minister Petr Fiala
says that Russia will seek to retake its former territorial dominance: “If we don’t beat him [Putin], he will not stop in Ukraine. He will roll on and will recreate the USSR.”
Dog Whistles Everyone Can Hear
Republicans are trying to stick Ketanji Brown Jackson with the Critical Race Theory canard. Especially heinous is Ted Cruz, while Josh Hawley wins the prize for pressing her sentencing for child pornography offenders. His claims are all untrue or misleading, but that doesn't stop anything. (Link is to a piece by Ruth Marcus that lays it all out.)
That wonderful Christian (nationalist) Charlie Kirk commented: Ketanji Brown Jackson "is what your country looks like on critical race theory. Your children and your grandchildren are going to have to take orders from people like her. And what's amazing is that she kind of has an attitude too." (Per Media Matters.)
It's revealing: when they say you'll have to take orders, they mean they intend to give orders.
Bringing Russia to America
Paul Manafort was a key consultant to Ukraine's last pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych. Then he was campaign manager for Donald Trump. He lied repeatedly to the Mueller investigation after having (a) gotten support for Ukraine cut from the 2016 GOP platform, (b) coordinated a meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and Russian spies, (c) shared campaign polling data with Russian spies, and (d) Zeus knows what else. He went to jail, and Trump pardoned him.
On Sunday Manafort was removed from a flight headed to Dubai. His US passport has been revoked. But what, you wonder would Manafort be doing headed to Dubai? Nothing good, I promise.
According to multiple sources, on Tuesday Russia's central newspaper Pravda published the number of Russian casualties--9861 killed, 16,000 wounded--then removed it. These numbers are lower than Ukrainian estimates, but they're still shocking. According to some experts, a modern army cannot sustain an offensive with this rate of casualties.
So for the first time, lots of experts are beginning to believe Ukraine is actually winning this war. That's not necessarily good news if Vladimir Putin becomes desperate. A Russian cyber attack could wreck infrastructure, particularly in the US. And we don't want to contemplate him following up with his nuclear threats.
Acknowledging those legitimate dangers, we can also hope for Putin's reasoned decision to accept Ukraine's sovereignty and relinquish stolen territory. Here's Anne Applebaum:
The Ukrainians, and the democratic powers that support Ukraine, must work toward a goal. That goal should not be a truce, or a muddle, or a decision to maintain some kind of Ukrainian resistance over the next decade, or a vow to “bleed Russia dry,” or anything else that will prolong the fighting and the instability. That goal should be a Ukrainian victory.
Experts have been wrong about a lot of things in this war, but this outlook is a change.
Other Notes
I've just started reading Timothy Snyder's The Road to Unfreedom, which tracks the lines between authoritarianism in Russia and what's happening in the United States. A Yale historian, Snyder is a Ukraine specialist, so he knows exactly what he's talking about.
A big takeaway from Snyder: if somebody shows you their fascist tendencies, take them seriously. The signs are everywhere: book banning, don't say gay, voter suppression, you name it. Yesterday a United States senator actually said he'd be fine if the matter of interracial marriage were left up to the states.
I don't want to jump into the perpetual outrage machine, but I'm also alarmed how few Americans realize the danger we're in.
Although links get more views with individual posts, I think it's helpful just to keep things together. A couple of items got my attention over the weekend.
David French
Here's conservative commentator David French linking covid denial/vaccine refusal, January 6, and support for Russia all as a big middle finger to "the narrative" we encounter from experts and mainstream media. In "What the Russian Invasion Teaches Us about the Right," we find this brilliant line, "Contrarians aren’t critical thinkers. They’re gullible reactionaries, vulnerable to conspiracy theories."
French still lives in a very right wing world, or what used to be the right wing, but this piece is insightful. Why he wouldn't include climate change denial, I have no idea.
Russian Fascism and American Fascism
I grew up in the militarized, patriotic South, where we could valorize Stonewall Jackson and George Patton with no sense of contradiction. That was and is problematic, but we had a sense that democracy was worth defending. That's why I've been so troubled by Trumpist devotion to Russia and Hungary, not to mention US betrayal of our Kurdish, Afghan, Syrian, and Iraqi allies. But I digress.
What we're seeing is a form of globalized fascism, in which authoritarians look out for one another. That's why India and China are helping Putin despite his criminal actions in Ukraine. It's why Trump embraced every authoritarian under the sun.
In an 8-minute video Mehdi Hassan unpacks the philosophical underpinnings of Putin's philosophy. From what I'm reading, especially from historian Timothy Snyder, this analysis is spot on. Putin literally distributes books by a Russian one-time Nazi, Ivan Ilyan, once exile but now with a Putin-approved statue.
Kids these days. Recently I was in a conversation where some grumpy old men were grousing about immorality among the youth. I don't buy that line at all, especially since the generation my age and up has basically pillaged the planet and seems determined to keep it that way.
But we should all be concerned how little sex younger Americans are having. Today's more permissive sexual culture is not making people happier. In fact, it's leading to less sexual intimacy, even less solo sex, than used to be the case. In the New York TimesMichele Goldberg offers a sympathetic but critical read of Rethtinking Sex: A Provocation by Christine Emba that's worth a conversation. I'm not saying more sex is always a good thing, but loneliness sure isn't.
It's funny how often our conversations about sex and morality react against "traditional Christian values." But nobody's reading contemporary theological ethicists, who have lots of good things to say. I'll just note one contribution Christian ethics could make to our conversations about sex: sex is social and political as much as it is personal. Feminists used to say this a lot.
I've had a tendency to pepper social media with evidence of the danger our democracy faces, in large part because the Republican Party embraces radicalism and devalues human dignity and participatory democracy. Sometimes I just keep news links open to remind myself how ridiculous it's gotten.
Every once in awhile, it's time to vent. Some recent examples.
They Can't Freeze Out January 6
Generally speaking, the Republican Party would like simply to forget about January 6. So much so that the party that ran eight congressional investigations of the Benghazi disaster has disowned party members who participate in the House investigation.
But why? Because so much of their base wants revolt. The Party has been nurturing this sedition at least since armed Ammon Bundy and his group survived two armed standoffs with law enforcement officers. But a January poll indicated that 1 out of 5 Republican men believe violence against the government is justified right now.
Imagine where the Republicans would be without all those treasonous men. We even have a Supreme Court justice whose spouseattended January 6 events with the intention of cancelling the 2020 election results. Ginni Thomas denies having participated in the planning.
Embrace of Explicit Racists
It's no longer a problem when GOP politicians embrace white supremacists. Idaho Governor Janice McGeachin and Georgia US Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene have both appeared on platforms provided by explicit racist Nick Fuentes. Both Green and McGeachin denied knowing about Fuentes and his activities. Fuentes promotes the "Great Replacement Reality" on his talk show and has tweeted,
If you are a White male zoomer, remember that the people in power hate you and your unborn children and they will try to genocide you in your lifetime.
Now they’re going on about Russia and Vladimir Putin is Hitler—and they say that’s not a good thing.
Yet somehow these professional politicians know nothing about the guy who organized their appearances.
Government Overreach
The Republican Party has traditionally advocated limited government. But a wave of prohibitions involving education (books like Maus and Critical Race Theory) and aggressive anti-abortion and anti-queer legislation reveals that impulse has long since dissipated.
Just this week we learned that Texas will not do business with financial firms that boycott fossil fuels.
Senate Bill 13, which went into effect in September, prohibits the state from contracting with or investing in companies that divest from oil, natural gas and coal companies.
We don't know all the things about last year's January 6 assault on the Capitol. We don't know how many of the people who stormed the Capitol arrived in Washington with plans to do just that. We know some people planned the attack--I mean, you don't "just happen" to bring gallows to a peaceful demonstration--but we don't know how many. We know Donald Trump sat and watched things unfold, having stoked up the crowd and promised to march to the Capitol himself, we know Trump long cultivated a following among White supremacist terrorists, and we know that for hours he ignored pleas from his allies and his appointed officials to stop the violence, but we don't know whether he actually planned for the attack himself. We also don't know how many high level officials, some elected, or how many of Trump's close political advisors planned or facilitated the assault.
So there's a lot we don't know. But one thing we know absolutely and for sure: right-wing terrorists, many of them White nationalists, helped plan the attack and instigated it. As FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress last year, January 6 was a terrorist attack on the United States.
And let us not forget Donald Trump's role in convening those terrorists, working up the larger crowd, and legitimating their actions. His political allies were closely tied to extremists on and around January 6. Proud Boys provided security for Roger Stone. Pretorians guarded Michael Flynn. Nor may we forget the role of elected Republicans in trying to erase the memory of those events.
We need to better understand there right-wing movements. They are diverse. Some of them are accelerationist: they want to create escalating waves of violence that will lead to civil war. Some of them are conspiracy nuts. Many are overt White supremacists. All are authoritarians.
I'd like to share five thought pieces that provide a deeper dive into the threat, how it constantly evolves, and why we should be alarmed.
Clint Watts is a national security expert who's been testifying before Congress for quite some time. Here's his analysis of how domestic extremism has been evolving.
Here's a New York Times story concerning a militant group, the First Amendment Praetorians, I'd never even heard of that was also involved in January 6.
Here's a CBC (Canadian public broadcasting) podcast concerning how accelerationist groups recruit, plot, and adapt. White Hot Hate.
