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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe Ku Klux Kaucus Will End in Tragedy
Well, now theyre just coming right out and saying it.
Several Southern Republican members of the House of Representatives have proposed a Ku Klux Kaucus that will adhere to Anglo-Saxon values and vigorously resist allowing any more people of color into America under any circumstances. Theyre officially calling it the America First Caucus.
The original America First movement started in the autumn of 1940, with open support for Adolf Hitler, loudly promoting their fear that white people in America were subject to being replaced by people of color into the fabric of our country. Those engineering this Great Replacement, America Firsters believed, were wealthy, media-connected Jews.
It also openly opposed America doing anything to stop Adolf Hitler after his 1939 invasion of Poland, and was particularly against our engaging in any kind of military action against Germanys leader.
At its peak, it had 800,000 members including future President Jerry Ford and future US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart. It was largely funded by the mind-bogglingly wealthy rightwing families who owned Sears Roebuck and the Chicago Tribune, the billionaires of their day.
Dr. Seuss, who seems to be making a bit of a comeback thanks to Republican hysteria, produced one of the most famous America First cartoons. It shows a kangaroo named America First with baby kangaroos in her pouch labeled Nazis, and Fascists.
The movements leader, Charles Lindbergh, addressed the Jews will not replace us issue in one of his most famous America First speeches when he said of Jewish Americans, Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.
Small wonder that Georgias Marjorie Taylor Greene and Arizonas Paul Gosar, apologists for the traitors who attacked our republic on January 6th and fellow travelers with uber-racist Donald Trump, are the founding members of this new Kaucus.
In their introductory documentation, they argue that theyre only interested in promoting or voting for infrastructure that befits the progeny of European architecture. It doesnt take a dog to figure out what that whistle means.
In fact, they are quite proud of the racism. According to a document obtained by Punchbowl News, the Kaucus main aim is to follow in President Trumps footsteps, and potentially step on some toes and sacrifice sacred cows for the good of the American nation.
And what sacred cows might those be?
[S]ocietal trust and political unity are threatened, they say, when foreign citizens are imported en masse into a country
As Donald Trump would say, theyre not talking about immigrants from Norway.
Republicans understand what the new Kaucus is all about, and a few who arent rushing to join are instead objecting to their racism and xenophobic hatred being so open and public.
Representative Liz Cheney, no shrinking violet but also apparently having a few scruples that mustve skipped the previous generation, tweeted about the new Kaucus without mentioning it by name:
Republicans believe in equal opportunity, freedom, and justice for all. We teach our children the values of tolerance, decency and moral courage. Racism, nativism, and anti-Semitism are evil. History teaches we all have an obligation to confront and reject such malicious hate.
Her opposition will probably cause a few hundred more Republicans to eagerly join the Kaucus.
State-by-state organizations havent been announced, but it wont be all that difficult for them to set them up and enlist members: all they have to do is buy the mailing lists for the existing Klan and White Citizens Council organizations in each of the Southern states.
Americas most horrific crimes and our deepest wounds have always involved race. The largest genocide in the history of the world is arguably the near-extermination of Native Americans by European invaders. The slave trade to this country turned the South into a violent ethnonationalist police state. Its Black residents lived in a state of terror that persists in many ways to this day.
We are still, this time by political proxy, fighting the Civil War, our nations bloodiest and most destructive conflict.
Greene, Gosar and others who are promoting this new Kaucus may think they are just conducting the most recent in a long line of racist GOP publicity stunts designed to raise their Fox News media profile and double down on the millions they raise every month promoting division and fear.
But, they are also giving aid and comfort to the traitors who attacked our Capitol on January 6th and tried, for the second time in Americas history, to end our democratic republican form of government.
Theyre contributing to the regional and racial hatred and fear that have, in the past, done so much damage to our republic and destroyed so many lives.
Weve seen politicians use cheap and rhetorical devices like this to promote hatred and division in other countries.
Without exception, it has ended in disaster.
America must learn the lessons of its past. If we fail to, as the old saying goes, we shall be doomed to repeat our most terrible mistakes.
Original post with hotlinks to sources: HartmannReport.com
uponit7771
(90,339 posts)... the right and make them the party of wrong.
The Magistrate
(95,247 posts)No reason to ever refer to this misbegotten crew as anything but that, anywhere.
onetexan
(13,041 posts)jmbar2
(4,886 posts)ms liberty
(8,574 posts)Ferrets are Cool
(21,106 posts)Wounded Bear
(58,654 posts)erronis
(15,257 posts)to inject vitriol into any discourse and energize their donors - both the low-scale $50 from social security and $50,000 from the people who don't care about $$s but do care about killing regulations.
So, once again, we are arguing about potato heads and pillow guys. We are fixating on rhetoric while the operators are working on destroying the underpinnings.
These stunts are done as random acts. These are feints and forays and media to be coerced.
bucolic_frolic
(43,161 posts)There were many locales of Bund activity in the 1930s. If researched online only a few articles remain. America does not look very closely at the strife over the decades of the 1900s to the 1960s even thought they included the decades of the Progressive Era, the labor strikes and strikebreakers, the Red Scare, Prohibition and its warring factions, the Bund, Civil Rights. It's like a safe mythology that is locked away and best not examined for public scrutiny.
lastlib
(23,227 posts)It's "Mein Kampf" without der Feuhrer......
KG
(28,751 posts)won't stop the changes ahead.
quakerboy
(13,920 posts)IronLionZion
(45,442 posts)Maybe they're not as "pure" as they think they are.
CTyankee
(63,912 posts)believe in science anyway, so why bother?
wryter2000
(46,045 posts)I don't think this caucus is going anywhere.
bdamomma
(63,849 posts)Thom Hartmann. Good post
George II
(67,782 posts)CaptainTruth
(6,591 posts)Well written as always!!!
Baked Potato
(7,733 posts)Republicans are trying to find the way to proceed to 2022.