The Racism Of White Evangelicals Unmasked

My *friend* [*used loose­ly] stopped by to see me yes­ter­day, I had not seen him in quite a while.
He has had some health issues, in fact, that was large­ly what we talked about. He told me his Doctors are sug­gest­ing a pace­mak­er to aug­ment the per­for­mance of his heart.
He lament­ed the fact that even if he was placed on a donor list he would like­ly die before he could receive a new heart.

He had been liv­ing a long time with a bad heart, it had been bad enough for his employ­ers to allow him to retire long before he was of the age to do so.
Additionally, he has been hav­ing mar­i­tal prob­lems, and to com­pound his woes, his only child a boy who just turned six­teen years old does not lis­ten to any­thing he says. These things he argues brings on an addi­tion­al lay­er of stress.

Wanting to take his mind off his prob­lems I asked so how do you think your pres­i­dent is doing?
It was small talk, just a fee­ble attempt to get his mind off what he is going through, at least for a minute or two.
My friend over the last sev­er­al years had also giv­en his life to Christ, [or so he says] and is now a devot­ed Seventh Day Adventist, * more to appease and change the atti­tude of his wife toward him, than any burn­ing reli­gious con­vic­tion he harbors*.

My com­ment was expect­ed to at least elic­it a snarl, a con­temp­tu­ous laugh at the prospect that he a black man born in England to Jamaican par­ents and a long-time immi­grant to the United States, would claim the present occu­pant of the White House as his president.
He quick­ly respond­ed, ” (mi vote fi him because mi wah him fi check de gay dem”!) my mouth fell open, this was news to me.

People are free to vote for whomev­er they chose, but wow! I was dumb­found­ed by his response.
And so my mind began to race. Ok, I get the idea that as a Christian he is opposed to homo­sex­u­al­i­ty, but what about the peo­ple them­selves, you know hate the sin but love the sin­ner? I guess not, “mi neva like di way dem a gi di gay dem sta­tus”, he dou­bled down.
It seems that as far as con­tem­po­rary Christian ortho­doxy goes these days there are some sins which are far more egre­gious than oth­ers, but that is way above my pay grade to decide.

(1)Donald Trump bragged about grab­bing women by the pussy.
(2) Donald Trump bragged about walk­ing in on young women while they were in a state of undress.
(3) Donald Trump bragged about just kiss­ing beau­ti­ful women, he talks about his inabil­i­ty to restrain him­self but tells Billy Bush that whey you are a star they let you do get away with it.
(4) Donald Trump spent hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars smear­ing the cen­tral park five and nev­er apologized.

(5) Donald Trump refused to rent to peo­ple of col­or and lied about it.
(6) Donald Trump had unpro­tect­ed sex with a porn star while his wife was at home with their four-month-old baby.
(7) Donald Trump lied in order to dodge the draft.
(8) Donald Trump said that there were decent peo­ple on both sides in response to the racist tiki-torch march in Chorletsville.
(9) Donald Trump has been accused of laun­der­ing Russian dirty money.

(10) Donald Trump and his cam­paign have been accused of con­spir­ing with a hos­tile for­eign pow­er to rig the American elections.
(11) Donald Trump went to Puerto Rico and threw paper tow­els at the peo­ple after the ordeal of the hurricane.
(12) Donald Trump rips chil­dren from their par­ents, deport the par­ents and keep the babies locked in cages, defy­ing court orders in the process.
(13) Donald Trump led a birther smear cam­paign against the nations first African-American President, only stat­ing that Obama was an American cit­i­zen just before the elec­tions of 2016.
(14) Donald Trump hates Blacks, Mexicans. oth­er Hispanics, Muslims, and every­one not a white male.

This list just begins to scratch the sur­face of the degen­er­a­tive char­ac­ter of Donald Trump, but my friend’s ani­mus against “the gays” [sic] far out­weighed all of them.
This is the men­tal rot which has tak­en over the mind of peo­ple through the vehi­cle of reli­gious indoctrination.
Let me be clear, I will not pur­port to know what God wants except my read­ing and under­stand­ing of what the Bible says.
If that is our guide­book which it is, then its rather dif­fi­cult to jus­ti­fy such ani­mus on one hand, while show­ing such tol­er­ance for a long litany of trans­gres­sions on the other.
Remarkably, the views expressed by my friend has been the dom­i­nant view which has come out of Trump’s base of support.

Many experts more qual­i­fied to speak on this sub­ject, than I ever could be, have labeled this kind of think­ing a“cult fol­low­ing.”
The argu­ments of Trump’s cultists hard­ly makes sense, will­ful igno­rance maybe, I have no idea? Yet it seems strange to hear them say “yes I know he did these things but the econ­o­my is good.” (nev­er mind that the econ­o­my has been on an upward trend since 2009 under President Obama and has seen high­er growth num­bers than any­thing which has hap­pened under Trump so far}.

For oth­ers, it’s “yes but he is putting judges on the courts” “yes but we don’t like abor­tion” “yes but he is send­ing home those ille­gals.”
It’s an insane sense of blind igno­rance and alle­giance to a deviant nar­cis­sis­tic liar, shroud­ed in a cloak of reli­gious apostasy.
It is a new order which rede­fines and changes tra­di­tion­al ideas of Christian prin­ci­ples, replac­ing them with a more elas­tic inter­pre­ta­tion, which san­i­tizes what­ev­er Trump does as long as he fights against the peo­ple they hate.

The cult fol­low­ing is prob­a­bly less about Donald Trump and more about pow­er. Who has the pow­er to take on the things they want to fight against?
The brown­ing of America has ini­ti­at­ed a freak out among the white polit­i­cal right. They see the fore­casts, peo­ple of col­or will become a major­i­ty of the American work­ing class by 2032. This esti­mate, based on long-term labor force pro­jec­tions from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and trends in col­lege com­ple­tion by race and eth­nic­i­ty, is 11 years soon­er than the Census Bureau pro­jec­tion for the over­all U.S. pop­u­la­tion, which becomes “major­i­ty-minor­i­ty” in 2043. According to the Economic Policy Institute.

So it is no acci­dent that even though Republican dar­ling, Ronald Reagan, grant­ed Amnesty to undoc­u­ment­ed immi­grants, the word “Amnesty” is now tan­ta­mount to trea­son in Republican cir­cles. In fact, based on their recent love fest with Russia trea­son is no longer a prob­lem for them.
Trump is not the prob­lem as Obama right­ly said, he is mere­ly a symp­tom of a deep­er prob­lem. Trump under­stood that there was a dis­af­fect­ed por­tion of the pop­u­la­tion which feels itself under-rep­re­sent­ed in today’s politics.

The medi­a’s char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of them over the years has evolved sub­stan­tial­ly. During the Reagan years, they were called “Reagan Democrats”, since then they have been known as “white work­ing class blue col­lar work­ers”, “The tea par­ty,” and now they are “Trumper’s”.
The sin­gle thread which runs through these so-called dis­af­fect­ed peo­ple is vic­tim­hood. Experts say they are for­got­ten peo­ple who have found it hard to fit into the eco­nom­ic boom of the last sev­er­al decades.
I call [BS], the vast major­i­ty of them are Racist under­achiev­ers who want to blame oth­ers for their own per­son­al failings.

They are old­er and less edu­cat­ed(Trump famous­ly said I love the poor­ly edu­cat­ed). These peo­ple have become his base, their dis­af­fec­tion, sense of vic­tim­hood and hatred, is the fuel to his ascen­den­cy to the presidency.
By appeal­ing to their Racism and fear, Trump has used dem­a­gog­ic rhetoric to stir up the hatred which was already with­in them. The kind of racial hatred only a few still alive has seen in their lifetime.
These Trump sup­port­ers may not all be racist loafers, but they damn sure aren’t demon­strat­ing the vaunt­ed can-do American spir­it we’ve heard so much about.

To sug­gest that one is from a long line of Miners and as such Government has a respon­si­bil­i­ty to ensure that coalmines stay open to facil­i­tate this gen­er­a­tion of min­ers is asinine.
If the world is evolv­ing from burn­ing dirty fos­sil fuels like oil, coal, and gas, to nuclear, wind and solar why would any intel­li­gent per­son refuse to adapt to the chang­ing times?

That is the essence of vic­tim­hood. Their atti­tude is that the times should stay still for them and if it does­n’t, those who have evolved through skills train­ing and aca­d­e­m­ic edu­ca­tion are either elit­ist if they are white, wor­thy of depor­ta­tion if they are peo­ple of color.
That is the ran­cid dis­af­fec­tion which runs through the entire Republican South, the Midwest and oth­er parts of the country.
In many instances, a look at the elec­toral map, [Republican in red], depicts where this mind­set is centered.
In these parts of the coun­try, there is more pover­ty despite the fact that they are heav­i­ly white and vote over­whelm­ing­ly Republican.

As a con­se­quence these peo­ple are gen­er­al­ly a drain on the Federal Government for goods and ser­vices, their states send less mon­ey to Washington than they receive.
Yet lis­ten­ing to them the peo­ple liv­ing in Democratic states are some­how depen­dent on the largess of the Government despite the facts, facts do not mat­ter to them.
Their sense of being left behind is not based on facts but on their own refusal to adapt to the chang­ing times.
And so they hitch their wag­ons to Donald Trump and here we are. A patho­log­i­cal lying nar­cis­sist is their sav­ior but wait he is bet­ter than “the gays”.[sic]
Right?