Author Frank Schaeffer and MSNBC's Joy Reid discuss the danger we're facing from the toxic mix of White Nationalism, Christian Nationalism, and danger it represents to our democracy in America.
September 14, 2023

Author Frank Schaeffer and MSNBC's Joy Reid discuss the danger we're facing from the toxic mix of White Nationalism, Christian Nationalism, and danger it represents to our democracy in America. Schaeffer has been sounding the alarm on the Republican party for some time now and sadly there aren't more like him in the media discussing the stakes involved if we don't put a stop to it.

Here's Schaeffer from this Tuesday on The ReidOut:

SCHAEFFER: What your listeners, what your viewers have to understand is that White Nationalism and Christian Nationalism have marched hand in hand since the 14th century into our world, and they have never stopped.

There are interregnums where there are pauses, but the American Christian Nationalists, the White Nationalists, this amalgam of the people who are now trying to stop the teaching of black history, roll back rights for women and gay folks, who are trying to put us back in a position of ignoring our own racist history, as if we can blot it out, are very much in line with the history of Christian conquests.

They are not the anomaly. They are the norm. What is the anomaly is the wonderful breathing space we were given by the Civil Rights movement. What is the anomaly is this idea that somehow equality and freedom should coexist.

You know, we're the only country on earth right now that has even attempted a truly multiracial, multicultural society built on our broken history of slavery, that we have tried to move beyond. And now these people, the Republican party, this week, Pray, Vote, Stand, if you go online and look at their website, it reads like a primer on how to strip American democracy away and replace it with Christian Nationalism, a theocracy that makes us far more akin to the church in Ghana built above the slave quarters than to anything we would recognize, indeed, much more akin to the women's fight in Iran against their government, where they're raped in police stations.

Let's just remember something. Viktor Orban, who is the friend of all these people, a big fan of Tucker Carlson, who quotes him all the time and invites him over, has started to move his country towards an authoritarian model that Fox News, Tucker Carlson, the Republican party, Donald Trump, all these others want to emulate here in America. And so sadly, and genuinely it breaks my heart.

When I was listening to you talking about your trip to Ghana, this is not past history. This is now. And it is going to repeat here in the United States unless we crush, and I choose that word advisedly, this snake in our midst of a combination of racism, white supremacy, which you pointed out so well in the segment before our little talk here, and the rise of Christian Nationalism.

This is all one and the same reactionary movement. These people are holding hands across the distance of history, which as you rightly point out is not so long ago, with the slave trade. They are rolling us back into an era where what was where what was unthinkable even 20 or 30 years ago in America is now becoming think-able.

It is no coincidence that there is also arise of antisemitism, that in Elon Musk for instance today, we have echoes of Henry Ford in 1920, who started an antisemitic newspaper railing against Jews. These things all go together.

White Nationalism, Christian Nationalism, antisemitism, this is the world the Republican trump cult has brought us, and every American who loves their country must stand up and fight these people with tooth and nail. It is a life and death struggle. This is a not a moment for faltering.

As Reid responded, "Amen" to that.

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