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A Klan rally in Tallahassee in 1977. (Robert Burke/Florida Memory)

By Diane Roberts

In a recent CNN interview (and on many previous occasions), Alabama U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville insisted that the phrase a white nationalist simply meant someone whos a good American.

When reporter Kaitlan Collins explained slowly that awhite nationalistis someone who believes that the white race is superior to other races, Tuberville huffed, Well, thats some peoples opinion.

Some people like, say, Tommy Tuberville? Or Ron DeSantis? Moms for Liberty? The congressional Freedom Caucus? The right-wing Supreme Court majority? All those angry (yet terrified) Caucasians watching what they always assumed was their country become more brown and less Christian?

Tuberville laterretreated a bitfrom what sounded like something Foghorn Leghorn would say at the monthly klavern barbecue, but no matter what language he and his fellow knuckle-draggers use, hes another example of how the Republican brand is no longer bigger business and smaller government.

Its white supremacy. Their platform? White supremacy. Their political and social goals? White supremacy.

The U.S. Supreme Court seems to share the Republicans obsession with making America white again. Gutting the Voting Rights Act in 2013 and striking downaffirmative actionin university admissions dismisses the institutional racism of centuries of oppression, favoring instead the pale and the privileged.

And speaking of pale and privileged, declaring opposition to multiculturalism and pledging to support Christian Nationalism across the country, theCollege Republicans the future of the party! have invited Nick Fuentes, the out and proud anti-Semite and racist who boasts hes just like Hitler, to this years national convention on July 30.

Fuentes, whose pals include neo-Confederates and Klan-adjacent types, is popular with certain congressional Republicans. Reps. Paul Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Greene made an appearance at his America First shindig last year.

A few alleged grown folks in the Republican Party actually condemned Gosar and Greene, shocked! shocked! that they would associate with anti-Semites (they werent so bothered about the racism).

Surely not that nice Paul Gosar, the one who posted a cheery video about murdering Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and employed an aide withties to neo-Nazis?

Or the lovely and talented MTG, she of the Jewish space lasers? She said she didnt even know who Fuentes was, or if she did, well, what matters is those Pharisees trying to destroy Jesus America: Were not going to be deterred by journalists and Washington insiders who fear the name of our Lord, she proclaimed, and relentlessly attack those of us who proclaim his name.

Greene was famously shunned by the insiders of her own party for a while, but shes now at the heart of congressional power, a close ally of Kevin McCarthy in a legislative body reluctant to condemn white supremacy and paranoid about an immigrant invasion designed to destroy American culture, engineered by nefarious non-Christian, un-American, crypto-Marxists from George Soros to Hillary Clinton to the Pentagon.

Not joking: Republicans have turned on the United States military.

Members of Congress who keep forgetting to get their rabies shots have worked themselves into a froth over gay soldiers, trans soldiers, diverse soldiers, and soldiers reading critical race theory.

You may recall that time in 2021 when U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz, Floridas Most Punchable person, tried to challenge the militarys diversity reading matter and Gen. Mark Milley took him down: Ive read Mao Zedong. Ive read Karl Marx. Ive read Lenin, Milley said. That doesnt make me a communist. So, what is wrong with understanding having some situational understanding about the country we are here to defend?

Now the Republican House wants the Pentagon to ban critical race theory as well as drag shows and women controlling their own reproduction. Oh, and do something about China, too, if theres time after trying to make the services whiter, maler, and straighter.

Tommy Tubervilles single-handedly holding up 265 promotions: Officers and their families have no idea where theyll be stationed or when, because ol Tommy objects to funding military womenfolk to get access toabortions.

Aint like theres any trouble brewing in Foreign Parts.

Not to be outdone, Floridas tantrum-prone governors hollering about wokeness, vowing that when hes in the White House, On Day 1, were ripping out all the Obama-Biden policies towoke-ify the military.

Thats just one component of DeSantis white supremacist agenda: Hes also trying to erase diversity as a goal in education and suppress learning about this countrys systemic racism. He wants to end birthright citizenship, too.

DeSantis conjures up images of alien hordes incentivized to get here by any means necessary so they can drop a baby on American soil and claim unearned American citizenship for that little freeloader.

He says he wants todefy the Fourteenth Amendment, which ensures that anyone born in the United States is entitled to equal protection under the law. It was passed right after the Civil War to give the formerly enslaved their rights or, at least, try to.

DeSantis prefers to think the Fourteenth Amendment doesnt actually say what it says.

Justice Clarence Thomas, his fellow irascible Ivy Leaguer, is also inclined to read the Fourteenth Amendment as somehowcolor-blind.

In Thomas concurring opinion in the courts dismantling of affirmative action, he argues that the amendment doesnt really have anything to do with race.

This might come as a surprise to descendants of slaves and veterans of the Civil Rights Movement.

Perhaps even more surprising is the fact that white supremacists arent always white.

They are, however, always hypocrites. Ron DeSantis is the great-great-grandchild ofLuigia Colluci, a woman who landed at Ellis Island on Feb. 21, 1917, with no visa, 16 days after Congress passed an immigration act designed to keep the likes of her out.

The law was aimed in particular at Asians, southern Europeans, and other undesirables, including idiots, imbeciles, poor, beggars, criminals, polygamists, anarchists, people with physical and mental disabilities, the sick, prostitutes, etc. a population that would not help keep America a white mans country.

Luigia Colluci was illiterate technically a disqualifier and pregnant with an anchor baby.

America let her in.

The rest as we know to our sorrow is history.

Diane Roberts is an 8th-generation Floridian, born and bred in Tallahassee. Educated at Florida State University and Oxford University in England, she has been writing for newspapers since 1983, when she began producing columns on the legislature for the Florida Flambeau. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Times of London, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Oxford American, and Flamingo. She has been a member of the Editorial Board of the St. Petersburg Timesback when that was the Tampa Bay Timess nameand a long-time columnist for the paper in both its iterations. She was a commentator on NPR for 22 years and continues to contribute radio essays and opinion pieces to the BBC. Roberts is also the author of four books.

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The Republican Brand Returns to White Supremacy - FlaglerLive.com