Americans have become highly segregated into ideological silos. So much so that if they venture outside their comfort zone they feel endangered, queasy and agitated — as if they had strapped on a VR headset and were gazing into an unsettling virtual reality.

People on the Left and Center don’t spend a lot of time in right-wing virtual reality. And the reverse is true. The far-right certainly doesn’t place a high premium on science, verifiable fact or primary sources.

For example, you would be hard-pressed to find many Republicans who have actually read any of the authors of foundational texts on things they despise — like Critical Race Theory, for instance. Instead, they rely on a network of think tanks and crackpots to interpret and propagandize.

I mean, why read Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic — two of the founders of Critical Race Theory — when you can read the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo, who has a long history with far-right think tanks — and in one gig with the Discovery Institute promoted Creationism for a living?

Now, I am pretty sure my version of reality contains a bit more, well, reality than the right-wing’s virtual world. But it’s important to inform oneself. And not only do I trust primary sources over second-hand accounts, but I want to know what these people actually think, and why.

Just like liberals, the right-wing has its own news sources. FOX News may be the best-known, but any list should include Breitbart News, Epoch Times, WND, One America News, the Daily Signal, Daily Caller, Gateway Pundit, the Blaze, and a variety of Christian-ish news sources that offer everything from weather reports and dating advice to devotionals and End Times prophecy.

Then there are the social networks. Parenthetically, let me just say that it has been a huge mistake to “deplatform” right-wing crackpots by kicking them off Facebook and Twitter. These exiled “thought-leaders” have simply fled to right-wing social networks like Gab, Gettr, Parler, and Trump’s new (and still not working) Truth Social — dragging all their supporters with them, where they may be out of sight but are still very much out of their minds. Only, now it’s more difficult to track what they’re up to.

Platforms like Bitchute, Rumble, and PlayerFM host videos and podcasts that might not pass muster on mainstream media streaming services. The messaging program Telegram has also become a popular app for hosting far-right chat groups.

For those determined to keep a toe in the mainstream, YouTube is still an option for delivering content — unless the content creator is spreading COVID disinformation or raises some other flag. Some will just bite their tongues and show a little restraint in order to stay on Facebook and Twitter.

I signed up for Gettr, Parler, Truth Social and Telegram. Gab has been removed from both the Apple and Google stores so I couldn’t try it, and I was never able to actually use Truth Social because two months after signing up I’m still in a waiting queue.

Just like Facebook and Twitter, each turned out to be primarily an echo chamber for news and opinion pieces published elsewhere. The level of civility was no worse than on Facebook or Twitter. But far from being oases of free expression, right-wing social networks do censor liberal views. Trump Truth Social reportedly goes so far as to ban criticisms of Donald Trump.

I ultimately gave up on the right-wing social networks (as I did long ago with their mainstream cousins), instead turning my attention to news and opinion pieces from think tanks and news sources that manufacture (not simply echo) right-wing virtual reality and right-wing talking points.

One of these talking point on which I agree wholeheartedly is that social networks really do pose a problem to democracy with their censorship.

Not only have COVID disinformation spreaders and the most repellent of racists run afoul of censors, but so have socialists, commentators who may have appeared on Russian media at one time or another, foreign policy critics, supporters of the BDS movement, Israel critics, Russian artists and musicians, newspapers covering whatever there is to report on Hunter Biden’s laptop, and those now falling victim to American social media’s new mission as a partisan in the West’s sanctioning of Russia.

But let’s not blame any one party for this. Censorship and forced political and social exile has been a bipartisan phenomenon as long as I’ve lived — and that’s a life that includes the McCarthy era.

Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine — despicable as it is — has led to the West pulling out all the stops to ban Russian anything and even snatching internet domains. The almost McCarthyite frenzy which Putin’s invasion has unleashed serves to remind us that internet freedom exists only at the pleasure of Western governments and their digital gatekeepers.

The fact that corporations have now become deputized agents of state policy should also shock us. Because if there is no daylight between the media and the state, or if the media is deeply “embedded” with the state (a phenomenon that the Iraq War highlighted), then it’s ultimately the state itself that is engaged in censorship.

That said, the American Right has never been more dangerous than it is today. It is truly an enemy of democracy and tolerance, and a racist and misogynistic force of repression that hasn’t given up on the idea of erasing any separation of church and state. And today, while those of us on the Left and Center bicker, all the far-right’s moving parts are firing in synch like pistons in a well-tuned V8 engine.

The final layer of right-wing opinion-shaping is a stunningly vast network of right-wing think tanks and well-funded foundations which include ALEC, Christian Coalition, Civics Alliance, Claremont Institute, Colson Center, Coolidge Foundation, Eagle Forum, Family Research Council, Federalist, Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (!), FreedomWorks, Gingrich 360, Heritage Foundation, Hoover Institution, Manhattan Institute, National Association of Scholars, National Legal Foundation, Pioneer Institute — and hundreds (if not thousands) more.

But don’t take my word for any of this. Follow the American right-wing yourself. Feedly is a great tool for following RSS feeds. Whenever a new article from any one of the 70 right-wing media outlets I follow is published, it appears in Feedly. If you want to start with my list, you can download my OPML configuration and import it into your own Feedly account or most any RSS reader.

Thankfully, there are a number of organizations that also follow the American Right. Some of the best are the Southern Poverty Law Center, Right Wing Watch, Political Research Associates, the Anti-Defamation League, the Freedom from Religion Foundation, the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, the ACLU, and the NAACP.

Read them, donate to them, and take their warnings seriously. And — I won’t say “enjoy” — but good luck in your own explorations of right-wing virtual reality.

As I wrote in a previous post, many of the ideological battles we are having today were conceived in the war of words between abolitionists and apologists for the “peculiar institution” of slavery which raged in the decades before the outbreak of the Civil War.

Though they may be centuries apart, Republicans today share not only a similar world view but routinely employ polemics strangely similar to those of antebellum apologists for slavery.

Take, at random this Republican Party assessment of now-confirmed Supreme Court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson: “she will act as a Far-Left activist judge and a rubber stamp for Biden’s woke agenda if confirmed.”

If anything, this sounds more like typical snark from right-wing members of Congress. But if you dive a little deeper into the choice of words it’s not just McCarthyite or Bircher vocabulary that the GOP is using. It’s a way of communicating a certain world view.

Whether Ketanji Brown Jackson grew up a red diaper baby devouring the works of Marx and Lenin (which she didn’t) or began her career as a corporate lawyer (which she did) is immaterial. When Republicans say “far-left” Liberals hear the word and want to confront its literal meaning. When Evangelicals hear the word they know it’s code for “un-Christian.” Likewise, when Republicans use the words “woke” or “activist” they also know that Evangelicals will infer certain meanings from them.

The fact is, anyone to the left of Marjorie Taylor Green and her Proud Boyfriends is considered “far-left” (ie., infidel, atheist, socialist, communist) by today’s Republicans. And nobody in their right mind would deny that Republicans themselves are effective activists. But as the GOP increasingly adopts white Christian Nationalist language, their rhetoric increasingly mirrors arguments and phrases found in pro-slavery apologetics. One of the most often-cited examples of the latter is James Henley Thornwell’s sermon entitled “The Rights and Duties of Masters.”

Thornwell was a South Carolina Presbyterian minister, slave owner, and prolific slavery apologist. Disgusted with smug abolitionists calling slavery immoral, on May 26, 1850 he preached “The Rights and Duties of Masters” at the dedication of a church for slaves. Thornwell prefaced his remarks with a line from Colossians IV:1. Masters, give unto your servants that which is just and equal; knowing that ye also have a Master in heaven. He was reminding each member of the audience, Black and white, that the Confederate social order had been ordained by God.

Thornwell began by accusing abolitionists of “woke” hypocrisy and persecution:

The slave-holding States of this confederacy [this was 11 years before the Confederacy was actually created] have been placed under the ban of the publick opinion of the civilized world. The philanthropy of Christendom seems to have concentrated its sympathies upon us. We have been denounced with every epithet of vituperation and abuse, as conspirators against the dignity of man — traitors to our race, and rebels against God. Overlooking, with a rare expansion of benevolence, the evils which press around their own doors, the vices and crimes of their own neighbors and countrymen…

Then he accused the abolitionists of creating “divisiveness” and insurrection:

This insane fury of philanthropy has not been content with speculating upon our degradation and wretchedness at a distance. It has aimed at stirring up insurrection in our midst.

Thornwell implied that a smug little group of abolitionists actually presented an existential threat to the Confederate order established by God:

A spurious charity for a comparatively small class in the community, is dictating the subversion of the cherished institutions of our father, and the hopes of the human race — the utter ruin of this vast imperial Republick, is to be achieved as a trophy to the progress of human development.

Then he slammed Northern and European “liberal” values for the excesses of “unchecked democracy” and mad secular social scientist tinkerers. In fact, you can practically hear Thornwell railing against the “lawless” Black Lives Matter movement and its allies:

The agitations which are convulsing the kingdoms of Europe — the mad speculations of philosophers — the excesses of unchecked democracy, are working out some of the most difficult problems of political and social science; and when the tumult shall have subsided and reason resumed her ascendancy, it will be found that the very principles upon which we have been accustomed to justify Southern slavery, are the principles of regulated liberty — that in defending this institution we have really been upholding the civil interests of mankind — resisting alike the social anarchy of licentiousness — that we have been supporting representative, republican government against the despotism of masses on the one hand, and the supremacy of a single will on the other.

Ignoring the issue of slavery, Thornwell instead portrayed the conflict between Northern and Southern modernities as a “clash of civilizations.”

But that the world is now the theatre of an extraordinary conflict of great principles — that the foundations of society are about to be explored to their depths — and the sources of social and political prosperity laid bare; that the questions in dispute involve all this is dear and precious to man on earth — the most superficial observer cannot fail to perceive.

Then Thornwell named names of his enemies — leftists and atheists — again offering “regulated freedom” as the alternative. Thornwell predates right-wing critics of Critical Race Theory who object to an “oppressor-victim” dynamic and deplore secular tinkering with the order God has created:

The parties in this conflict are not merely Abolitionists and Slaveholders; they are Atheists, Socialists, Communists, Red Republicans, Jacobins on the one side, and the friends of order and regulated freedom on the other. In one word, the world is the battle ground, Christianity and Atheism the combatants, and the progress of humanity the stake. One party seems to regard society, with all its complicated interests, its divisions and subdivisions, as the machinery of man, which, as it has been invented and arranged by his ingenuity and skill, may be taken to pieces, reconstructed, altered or repaired, as experience shall indicate defects or confusion in the original plan. The other party beholds in it the ordinance of God; and contemplates ‘this little scene of human life’ as placed in the middle of a scheme, whose beginnings must be traced to the unfathomable depths of the past, and whose development and completion must be sought in the still more unfathomable depths of the future – a scheme, as Butler expresses it, ‘not fixed, but progressive, in every way incomprehensible;’ in which, consequently, irregularity is the confession of our ignorance, disorder the proof of our blindness, and with which it is as awful temerity to tamper as to sport with the name of God.

In the Confederate world any threat to the established order (one with plantation owners at the top, white sharecroppers in the middle, and slaves a the bottom) was an abomination. For Thornwell, any sort of “activist” was an enemy of “order and regulated freedom” — and that included not only Communists and Jacobins but “red” Republicans (the Mitt Romneys and Susan Collinses of their day).

The remainder of Thornwell’s long sermon is well worth reading. Highlights include: denying that slavery is the physical ownership of a person; that only a slave’s labor is property; that Paul of the Gospels was less concerned with slavery than a slave’s reverence toward his master, a reverence that reflects God’s order; that, far from denying a slave his humanity, slavery makes him an equal partner in God’s plan; … and the like. The sermon is so long, in fact, that Thornwell seems to have employed every pro-slavery argument he could think of and, in the process, made it a perfect exemplar for future study.

Because of its growing economic and political isolation, and because of the need to defend slavery from liberal criticism, the South slowly developed an alternative view of modernity that turned its back on liberal values that were at least given lip service in Europe and the North. And while one may be tempted to conflate the “Lost Cause” with slavery alone, the “Lost Cause” was the South’s alternative modernity, one that featured agrarian Capitalism based on chattel (not wage) slavery, “regulated freedom” (a high and very selective level of repression), a rigid hierarchical social order, a highly porous separation of church and state, and an ideologically and racially homogeneous citizenry.

Southern Christianity was also diverging from the North’s. For preachers and other apologists of slavery, their sermons increasingly focused exclusively on the life of the spirit rather than the temporal lives of slavers and their “property.” Working for social justice or calling for change to social structures defied the Southern social order established by God (in actuality the C.S.A.) and was therefore “un-Christian.”

Anthea Butler points out in “White Evangelical Racism” that many of these world views still exist in white American Evangelism — including in some cases the refusal to condemn slavery. One such apologist is John MacArthur, pastor of the Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California. While acknowledging the horrors of Roman slavery, MacArthur paints a rosy picture of biblical slavery and refuses to condemn the Southern Christian version, explaining that:

New Testament teaching does not focus on reforming and re structuring human systems, which are never the root cause of human problems. The issue is always the heart of man–which when wicked will corrupt the best of systems and when righteous will improve the worst. If men’s sinful hearts are not changed, they will find ways to oppress others regardless of whether or not there is actual slavery. On the other hand, Spirit-filled believers will have just and harmonious relationships with each other, no matter what system they live under. Man’s basic problems and needs are not political, social, or economic but spiritual ….

After Emancipation and well into the present day, this same religious justification continues to be used to wave away state and collective responsibility for current or historical racist oppression. The same religious justification has more recently become a convenient rationale for banning even the mention of racist systems of oppression or teaching about them. While we may be irked to hear Critical Race Theory reviled as a leftist plot, what is really jaw-dropping is to understand that, for Evangelicals, racism does not actually exist in society but instead exists only in the heart.

Using another pro-slavery argument based on the Southern Christian slave / master / God power structure, MacArthur reduces slavery to simply working for a living:

Throughout history, including in our own day, working people have been oppressed and abused by economic intimidation that amounts to virtual slavery–regardless of the particular economic, social, or political system.

For MacArthur resisting the oppression of slavery is “un-Christian” because it violates the power structure. Seen from the same perspective, any opposition to oppression must therefore be “un-Christian”:

Nowhere in Scripture is rebellion or revolution justified in order to gain freedom, opportunity, or economic, social, or political rights. The emphasis is rather on the responsibility of slaves to serve their human masters faithfully and fully, in order to reflect the transforming power of God in their lives. […] In his letter to the church at Ephesus, Paul wrote unambiguously, “Slaves, be obedient to those who are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in the sincerity of your heart, as to Christ; not by way of eye service, as men-pleasers, but as slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart” (Eph. 6:5–6).

Note that MacArthur uses precisely the same citation from Paul of the Gospels that Thornwell did in 1850. Note also that the Evangelical rejection of injustice in the real world is completely at odds with most of Judaism, mainstream Christianity, Catholic Liberation Theology, and the Black Church. In other words, for all their talk about so-called “Judeo-Christian” values, they don’t actually share critical understanding with Jews and other Christians.

It’s important to acknowledge that while some Evangelicals are white Christian Nationalists, not all are. A perfect illustration is the bitter fight that erupted within the Campus Crusade for Christ (now called “Cru”) when that organization recognized it had a racism problem and brought in diversity trainers. As you might imagine, the Christian Nationalists within Cru pushed back. Similarly, there are currently two different battles going on within the Southern Baptist Conference: one about Critical Race Theory and another about the Disney Corporation. And SBC nationalists use the same insulting rhetoric against their religious brethren that they use on their outside enemies.

The 179-page document that the SBC nationalists created provides an excellent overview of what white Christian Nationalists believe about subjects as far-ranging as the role of the church, social justice, race, sexuality, gender issues, and Critical Race Theory. It also contains well-organized tables listing think tanks and individuals who manufacture objections to Critical Race Theory, and each of their talking points.

If you want to understand how Christian Nationalists see race — at least within the Evangelical world — read Seeking Clarity and Unity.

Christian Nationalism has been with us almost from the founding of this country. And it has always combined the worst elements of national myth and religion.

The nation was barely a year old when the Articles of Confederation (1777) were written. A decade later the Articles were superseded by the Constitution of the United States (1787), a document drafted in secret sessions by land speculators, Federalists and creditors, and regarded by some today as somewhat of a counter-revolution.

Before ratification, the Federalists (mainly Alexander Hamilton and James Madison) sharpened their quills to sell their new form of government organization to the skeptics. Many of these documents were collected and are known as the Federalist Papers. Federal versus state rights arguments are nothing new.

No sooner was the ink dry on the Constitution than Americans lost their collective minds to the Second Great Awakening (1790-1840), another in a series of religious revivals that rejected many of the Constitution’s supposed democratic values (although not as resoundingly as the very fact of slavery).

The United States may have been born respecting the separation of Church and State, but religion had no respect for the laws of man and, almost from the beginning, began undermining secular law and government.

Barely half a century into the new experiment in government the United States was deeply divided, which led eventually to the Civil War. The South rejected even token Enlightenment values professed by Northerners and Europeans and ended up with its own concept of modernity. That modernity happened to include a romantic, chivalric, religious, deeply hierarchical and repressive culture, an agrarian economy based on slavery, with a national myth based on blood and soil. On the other side of the ocean a nationalist myth based on the same Blut und Boden was emerging in what would eventually become Germany.

Partly as a consequence of its defense of slavery but also due to growing economic and intellectual isolation, Southern Christianity soon diverged from that of Northern Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist churches. Because of the role imputed to Southern clergy in upholding social norms, the defense of slavery became their responsibility — one carried out with great enthusiasm and creativity. South Carolina Presbyterian minister James Henley Thornwell’s The Rights and Duties of Masters offers an example of the tortured logic found in many slavery apologetics.

As Stefan Roel Reyes points out, there were stunning similarities between the proto-fascism of post-Weimar Germany and the Confederate States of America. But there were equally stunning historical differences. In The Lost Cause Rides Again Ta-Nehisi Coates writes:

“The distinction matters. For while the Confederacy, as a political entity, was certainly defeated, and chattel slavery outlawed, the racist hierarchy which Lee and Davis sought to erect, lives on. It had to. The terms of the white South’s defeat were gentle. Having inaugurated a war which killed more Americans than all other American wars combined, the Confederacy’s leaders were back in the country’s political leadership within a decade. Within two, they had effectively retaken control of the South. […] Nazi Germany was also defeated. But while its surviving leadership was put on trial before the world, not one author of the Confederacy was convicted of treason. Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop was hanged at Nuremberg. Confederate General John B. Gordon became a senator. Germany has spent the decades since World War II in national penance for Nazi crimes. America spent the decades after the Civil War transforming Confederate crimes into virtues. It is illegal to fly the Nazi flag in Germany. The Confederate flag is enmeshed in the state flag of Mississippi.”

How the South lost the war but managed to preserve its “Lost Cause” has been a topic studied in depth. One excellent treatment is Charles Reagan Wilson’s Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920.

The amber that preserved the Lost Cause was Southern Christianity — a vessel which preserved not only the moral fervor and anti-secularism of the old-time religion but disgust for federalism and apologetics for repression and slavery.

It should be mentioned that the North and South each developed separate national myths and flavors of Christianity. Wilson notes that a “civil religion” reflects both the political and religious views of a nation:

“A civil religion, by definition, centers on the religious implications of a nation. The Southern public faith involved a nation — a dead one, which was perhaps the unique quality of this phenomenon. One of the central issues of the [Northern] American faith has been the relationship between church and state, but since the Confederate quest for political nationhood failed, the Southern faith has been less concerned with such political issues than with the cultural question of identity. Because it emerged from a heterogeneous immigrant society, the [Northern] American civil religion was especially significant in providing uprooted immigrants with a sense of belonging. Because of its origins in Confederate defeat, the Southern civil religion offered confused and suffering Southerners a sense of meaning, an identity in a precarious but distinct culture.”

Solemn quasi-religious rituals, often relating to the military, evolved in both North and South. In the North’s case, the Union was the Cause that Won. For the South, the Confederacy was the Lost Cause.

Let us now set the calendar ahead, only a few decades from the present, when thousands of Confederate monuments were erected to preserve the honor and nobility of Confederate generals (but so did the North). Almost all were dedicated with blessings from the clergy. And when the South embarked upon an orgy of lynchings, once again, many were carried out right after church for the convenience and enjoyment of white congregants. The terror of “Christian” KKK members and lynch mobs continued through the years with the bombings of Black churches, murders of Black ministers, and cross burnings.

Some Christian Nationalists are simply opportunists (Republicans) or extremists (neo-Nazis with their Aryan “churches”). But although white Christian Nationalism hardly represents the teachings of Christianity it is nevertheless found disproportionately within the Evangelical movement that formed it — even as many Evangelicals reject it.

Take Campus Crusade for Christ (now called “Cru”) for example. The Evangelical organization realized it had a race problem and brought in diversity trainers. The pushback from Cru’s more nationalist Evangelicals was swift and angry. Similarly, the Southern Baptist Conference is now divided into religious and nationalist factions over the issue of Critical Race Theory.

But for a “pro-life” community supposedly steeped in the love of Jesus, nationalist Evangelicals are known to be more antisemitic, Islamophobic, militaristic, anti-communist, anti-feminist, pro-capitalist, pro-gun, hyper-patriotic, anti-immigrant, and pro-death penalty than the average American.

Many of today’s culture wars have been launched by these followers of Jesus. But the version of Jesus they revere is not the man of miracles and multitudes who showed compassion for a woman about to be stoned to death. For Christian Nationalists the canonical Jesus is a lamentable “woke” sissy who would turn the other cheek, look for the best in people, oppose exploitation, and feed the hungry.

Instead, the version of Jesus best represented by Evangelical opinion polls is the vengeful killer from Revelations 19:13, riding in on a war horse, robe dripping with blood, eyes blazing with fury, sword slashing, bronze boots stomping to death anyone who ever got in his way.

Anthea Butler, a Black theologian, professor, and author of “White Evangelical Racism,” described in an interview with Political Research Associates how Evangelicals became politicized by religious crusades starting in the Forties:

“As early as the 1940s, Billy Graham had fused Christianity with patriotism and White supremacy. His goal was to make believers–including Black and Brown folks who had started to listen to him–conform to White, male, Western Christian ideals. He demonized Communists, Catholics, and immigrants. Interestingly, he got support from William Randolph Hearst’s Los Angeles Examiner, which gave these ideas added prominence. […] American exceptionalism–the idea that the U.S. is blessed by God–as well as Christian patriotism were used by Billy Graham, the Rev. Bob Jones, and other White male religious leaders of the mid-20th Century to put parameters around what it meant to be an American and a Christian. It does lead directly to MAGA.”

While overt expressions of racism may be out of fashion even as the nation has begun to acknowledge its own racist institutions, nationalist Evangelicals stubbornly deny the existence of racism and actively campaign to shut down any public discussion of it:

“Even though some White evangelicals have made statements about racial reconciliation, or even ‘color blindness,’ right now they’re fussing about having to discuss critical race theory. They’re upset about the 1619 Project’s focus on the racist underpinnings of the United States. And even though Southern Baptists apologized for slavery in 1995, they have not changed any of their behaviors so you can see through their statements and conclude that they’re posturing.”

In 2010 the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights with the assistance of the NAACP published Tea Party Nationalism. This was one of the first warnings about white supremacist, neo-Nazi, pro-KKK, and Christian Nationalist elements within several of the not-so-grassroots Republican groups. IREHR has a website that updates recent developments.

In 2011, Matt Barreto and others published The Tea Party in the Age of Obama: Mainstream Conservatism or Out-Group Anxiety? in Political Power and Social Theory. The paper made the case that the Tea Party had transitioned from pseudo-conservative to simply “paranoid,” that the movement harbored white nationalists, and that their concerns were mainly centered around changing American demographics.

In 2018 the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism published New Hate and Old: The Changing Face of American White Supremacy, which documented the rise of the Christian Identity movement, a good example of White Nationalism outside the Evangelical movement.

In February 2022 the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty (BJC) and the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) jointly published Christian Nationalism at the January 6, 2021, Insurrection. The authors described a long history of similar displays of white Christian nationalist power, starting with the 1925 KKK March in Washington, DC.

We have come a long way from antebellum Southern Christianity to the Evangelical Christianity that preserved the essence of the Lost Cause; from Billy Graham’s crusades to the Tea Party; from the emergence of white Christian Nationalism to Trump; and the metamorphosis of all this into today’s Republican Party.

And we’ve barely scratched the surface. The 1936 presidential election, for example, is worth looking at if you want to see how Christian Nationalism played out within several political parties and managed to attract real-life Nazis for the first time.

America’s illiberal impulses have had a long trajectory. It’s astonishing that the Party of Lincoln is now largely a bunch of white supremacists hiding behind a cross. But this is who they are and who we must fight.