Dog whistle not needed
Sometimes the mask slips – or, as a writer for The Atlantic puts it, “It’s not a dog whistle if everyone can hear it.”
A dog whistle, of course, is a coded communication. It sounds benign to outsiders, but to insiders its message is clear. These days, the message is always racist.
In recent days, the mask has come off for today’s Republicans, and the revelation is not pretty. The dog whistle is now something outsiders can hear as well as insiders.
Most recently, the Kansas chapter of Young Republicans was disbanded because some of its members made disgusting comments in a chat room.
Old Republicans acted outraged and tried to distance themselves from it all. But too many of the Young Republicans were too tightly plugged into the Old Republican power structure for the denials to ring true.
If you need more verification, consider the remarks made Sept. 2 by Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt at the fifth annual National Conservatism Conference in Washington.
“What is an American?” he asked. He said it's not a matter of citizenship. No, no. It’s a matter of race. A true American, Schmitt said, is white.
The white Europeans who settled America and conquered the West “believed they were forging a nation—a homeland for themselves and their descendants,” he said.
“They fought, they bled, they struggled, they died for us. They built this country for us. America, in all its glory, is their gift to us, handed down across the generations. It belongs to us. It’s our birthright, our heritage, our destiny. If America is everything and everyone, then it is nothing and no one at all.”
Immigration is wrong, he said, because it allows non-whites to share the birthright of the descendants of America’s original white Christian settlers.
“We Americans are the sons and daughters of the Christian pilgrims that poured out from Europe’s shores to baptize a new world in their ancient faith,” said Schmitt, who is of German ancestry.
“Our ancestors were driven here by destiny, possessed by urgent and fiery conviction, by burning belief, devoted to their cause and their God.”
The left, he said, is “turning the American tradition into a deracinated ideological creed,” an idea stripped of its proper racial foundation. It is stealing the country from the “real American nation” – that is, the pilgrims, the pioneers and the settlers who “repelled wave after wave of Indian war band attacks” to build this country.
Nonwhites are threats to the real America, he claimed. They are the people tearing down Confederate statues and removing Confederate names from buildings, streets, and forts, turning “yesterday’s heroes into today’s villains.”
They are the people behind what he called the “George Floyd riots.”
“When they tear down our statues and monuments, mock our history, and insult our traditions, they’re attacking our future as well as our past. By changing the stories we tell about ourselves, they believe they can build a new America, with the new myths of a new people. But America does not belong to them. It belongs to us. It’s our home. It’s a heritage entrusted to us by our ancestors. It is a way of life that is ours, and only ours, and if we disappear, then America, too, will cease to exist.”
Did I say that Schmitt is Republican? Did I have to?
Yes, it’s too bad. The party our parents knew is long gone. What has replaced it is vile – and, yes, not really American.