They stood in a starchy semicircle, posing, preening behind their role model.
They — Republican bigwigs including Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy — awash with pride and affirmation as the man they admired most said some of the vilest things ever uttered in the Oval Office.
It was about immigrants from Somalia.
“They have destroyed Minnesota,” the biggest wig said. “They have destroyed our country.”
Grins all around. Not a micron of embarrassment, except from Ben Franklin, averting his gaze from his bust beside the Resolute Desk.
When a reporter pointed out that Minneapolis’ mayor expressed pride at having the nation’s largest Somali population, the president replied, “Then he’s a fool.”
(At a subsequent rally in Pennsylvania, the “affordability” one, the president said the only thing Somalis are good for is “going after ships.” What an applause line.)
These ugly moments illustrate today what the White House says public school textbooks shouldn’t reveal about America’s yesterdays: systemic racism.
Welcome back, bigotry. You’re as ugly as ever. In our president, racism has a prolific 21st century exemplar — one part “Ge-aaage” Wallace, one part David Duke, one part Joseph Goebbels.
“The far right is suppressing the real history of structural racism,” writes the Center for Progressive Reform, while this president sets out to “copy from that history directly.”
A question for MAGA: If schools can’t teach history, can they teach current events?
In 2024, reporters from Politico covered 20 campaign speeches by this president.
They reported “a stark escalation” of “what some experts in political rhetoric, fascism and immigration say is a strong echo of authoritarians and Nazi ideology.”
When he called immigrants “vermin” and “animals,” however, it didn’t just sound like Nazism. It was right out of Hitler’s speeches.
Whites have “good genes.” Brown and black immigrants have “bad genes.”
So much for his words. Look at his deeds.
He has shut down all refugees except for – drum roll — white Afrikaners. He says they are victims of genocide at the hands of the black South African government. Surprisingly only a few have taken him up on the offer.
He says Somalis are “garbage,” that Hispanic judges and black election workers can’t be trusted, that Haitians eat pets, that Afghans are dangerous, that those apprehended by ICE are violent criminals – the “worst of the worst.”
The University of California-Berkeley’s Deportation Data Project says that’s bunk. ICE arrested roughly 75,000 people in this administration’s first nine months who had no criminal histories.
If the administration’s propaganda were true, ICE would be prioritizing apprehensions based on criminality. Instead, the administration sought Supreme Court permission to profile suspects by skin color.
Systemic racism. It is now as it was then. Let the record show.
What a slap in many faces when the Parks Service yanked MLK Day and Juneteenth from the list of free-access days in the national parks.
What a loss of leadership when the Pentagon purged blacks from the military’s highest ranks. All “DEI hires,” said our so-unqualified secretary of defense.
And there’s the purging of anything in social studies textbooks or history curricula deemed “woke” indoctrination – another word for “truth” – anything that might make white children uncomfortable.
To any culture warrior who denies that systemic racism was fundamental to the American experience: I dare you to read Isabella Wilkerson’s “Caste,” about the roots of this and the bogus artifices that underlie the whole concept of race.
Slavery was the biggest sticking point in the creation of this nation and in its bloody civil war. Discrimination was the American way long after the presumed demise of Jim Crow.
And so it continues. And the starchy semicircle nods.
Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.
