Op-Ed: Republicans Appalled After Journalist Calls Them ‘White Supremacists’— But Aren’t They?
Source: CNN / CNN
One of the most annoying things about modern white conservatives is the way they continuously use racist language, advocate for racist agendas, celebrate America’s racist history, and dehumanize ethnic groups in the most glaringly racist ways possible — then they act so appalled and flabbergasted whenever someone calls them racist.
Take, for example, a recent episode of CNN’s Newsnight, during which journalist Cari Champion got into it with white conservative talking heads who nearly blew a gasket when Champion insisted that what fueled President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign “was never about eggs, it was about race.”
From Raw Story:
“It’s not about eggs, it’s about making sure there is white supremacy in this country,” Champion said. “And if we’re honest, we will say that.”
That elicited verbal reactions from longtime GOP insider Scott Jennings and Rudy Guiliani’s attorney Arthur Aidala. But Jennings was first to pounce after being challenged on what diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, actually meant.
“I do want us to not get off the rails because…” CNN host Abby Phillip jumped in to say.
“She just said we’re all white supremacists,” Jennings said. “We’ve got to address this don’t we?”
Moments later, Scott Jennings complained about how MAGA supporters have been treated.
“We’re treated to similar comments to what Cari made tonight about race, white supremacy, all of Trump’s ideology and people and voters – it’s all about white supremacy – this was rejected in the election,” Jennings said.
“Democrats ran…this was the animating thing of the Harris campaign and it was rejected,” Jennings added.
First of all, Jennings is being disingenuous and annoying in the way he pretends Trump’s win proves the white supremacist GOP narrative was “rejected” by America. It was rejected by White America — the only racial demographic Republicans have been able to consistently win a majority vote from in the last 50 years — largely because Trump ran a campaign of white nationalism and white grievance.
“If you’re going to come out and call half the country a white supremacist, you’ve got to explain it,” Jennings told Champion.
Oh, word? As if MAGA Republicans don’t constantly make claims they don’t produce evidence of let alone “explain” in any transparent or comprehensive way.
MAGA Republicans went to war against Critical Race Theory without ever once demonstrating that they knew literally anything about the decades-old academic framework, which they constantly claim teaches that white people are inherently racist, which it does not. (Although, at this point, I’m not entirely sure it shouldn’t.) Trump went on a years-long propaganda campaign regarding fictional election interference in the 2020 presidential race and his party got right behind him even though he never presented a shred of evidence to support it, and the fact that virtually every election official and judge he brought cases before told him emphatically that there wasn’t true.
Trump has called every Black prosecutor and legal official to bring cases against him racist without even bothering to explain what any of them have said or done to be called racist — and no one in the MAGA world, including Scott Jennings, ever once challenged him to.
Hell, Republicans haven’t even provided a detailed justification for their war against diversity, equity and inclusion. They just keep insisting that qualified, able-bodied white men are being displaced in the workforce by unqualified Black people, women and disabled people. They’ve never once provided unambiguous evidence that DEI practices have lowered the standards of hiring practices. They just keep repeating that it’s anti-white discrimination, obfuscating or completely ignoring the fact that minority candidates still have to show the same credentials that white men have to show to prove they can do competent work, as well as the fact that DEI efforts were only necessary in the first place because America is historically and arguably presently a patriarchal white supremacist nation.
And that’s the thing: Why shouldn’t we call them white supremacists?
MAGA supporters and Republican officials watched as Trump stood on stage and compared South American migrants to Hannibal Lecter, and called them “animals” who are “not human.” They heard him dabble in eugenics-style scientific racism by suggesting migrants have “bad genes” that predispose them to commit violent crimes. They cheered him as he lied about migrants bringing “tremendous infectious disease” to the U.S. and said they are “poisoning the blood” of the country. They watched him and VP JD Vance spread hateful propaganda about pet-eating Haitian migrants, who Vance claimed without evidence caused a rise in HIV cases in Ohio.
They were present as Trump and his minions made Vice President Kamala Harris’ racial identity more of an issue than she ever did. They witnessed his inability to appeal to Black voters without leaning into anti-Black stereotypes. They were there when Trump exclusively targeted voting districts with large Black and Latino populations with his election fraud lie. Republican legislators used the momentum from that lie to pass vote suppression laws and redistrict their congressional maps with the expressed purpose of diluting Black voting power.
White MAGA conservatives witnessed all of this and their response was generally: No, this is fine.
Maybe fewer people would call Republicans racist if they didn’t consistently prove they’re unable to discuss the border crises without relentlessly and unapologetically using xenophobic and dehumanizing language against migrants. Maybe fewer people would call them racist if they didn’t fight tooth and nail to have Confederate leaders recognized and celebrated as American heroes. Maybe fewer people would call modern Republicans and white conservatives white supremacists if they weren’t promoters of the white nationalist Great Replacement Theory, which insists white people have an inherent right to dominate America.
The problem is it’s hard to “explain” all that in one short CNN segment. Of course, even if there were time, white conservatives would still respond by sitting there, mouth agape, clutching their white supremacist pearls.
So annoying.
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