Beliefs espoused by conservatives sound unbelievable but must be taken seriously

Wednesday, Dec. 20, 2023 | 2 a.m.

One of the most astonishing features of this political moment in America is that the far right is openly proclaiming horrific ideas and yet the public seems to shrug and act as if they are not to be taken seriously.

Former President Donald Trump has promised to round up Latinos into concentration camps and weaponize the justice system to persecute those who disagree with him. He uses direct Nazi quotes to talk about immigrants. He proudly announces his intention to be a dictator and yet the GOP, and too much of America, just looks the other way.

Expressing horrible thoughts about America and their fellow Americans is the overriding theme of today’s far right.

It’s long past the first time since Trump and his MAGA army showed us their hateful and backward-looking vision for America. But perhaps the reminder they gave us this week, at a gathering of self-proclaimed conservative “Christians” will adequately reinforce how dangerous the far right has become, who they really are and what they want to do to America.

In Phoenix, Turning Point USA, a conservative Christian political action group that focuses on recruiting college students into the movement for GOP politicians and policies, hosted “America Fest.” The group is closely aligned with Trump and at the event, numerous speakers took to the stage to tell the public exactly how they define what it means to make America great again.

The event opened with bigoted Holocaust denier Roseanne Barr accusing Democrats of being “Stalinist communists with a huge helping of Nazi fascists thrown in.”

It was a bizarre choice given that it was less than six months ago when Barr made national headlines for proclaiming that while “Nobody died in the Holocaust … It should happen. Six million Jews should die right now, ’cause they cause all the problems in the world.”

Consider that for a moment.

Despite the feigned concern by House Republicans about antisemitic statements by liberal college students, the GOP’s far right invited a woman who quite literally called for the genocide of 6 million Jews to be the opening speaker for a gathering of conservative college students. The hypocrisy of their actions betrays the hateful truth that the far right doesn’t care about antisemitism unless it plays into a liberal vs. conservative narrative.

Other speakers at the rally included Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who has blamed wildfires on a secret conspiracy of Jews using space lasers to murder innocent Republicans and burn their communities. And of course, she’s obsessed with the antisemitic trope that philanthropist George Soros is one of the ringleaders of a Jewish plot against America.

By Sunday night, America Fest had devolved into little more than a hoodless Klan rally, with hateful epithets being hurled at a Black and gay Republican who attended the event.

Despite his credentials as an Army combat veteran who served in Iraq and well-known conservative social-media influencer, Rob Smith said he was confronted by some white supremacists who don’t like gay or Black people in the Republican Party. They surrounded him and tried to intimidate him with shouts of racial and homophobic slurs.

Yet even with all that vitriol and hate wandering the halls for days, few observers were prepared for the proposals made by Jason Whitlock. The former Division I college football player, podcaster and self-proclaimed “MAGA guy” took to the stage Monday to advocate for male supremacy and the relegation of all other Americans to second-class status.

Whitlock, a Black man, painted elements of American history in which women and people of color were violently oppressed as fabrications designed to “destroy our family structure.”

He then told the women in the audience that they shouldn’t be allowed to vote or have jobs, that young people shouldn’t have a voice in their society and that people who don’t get married or have children aren’t God-fearing Americans at all.

We’re not exaggerating.

Whitlock described how, in the past, America was a culture that “really understood the natural order that God intended: man serving God, woman following man who serves God, man and woman developing and nurturing children.” Take note that in Whitlock’s order, women can only serve God by first serving men.

The audience applauded.

As if that weren’t enough, he went on to reaffirm his belief in the second-class status of women by explaining that the natural order he had just described meant that, “You only needed one vote per household because that vote was about the entire family.”

You read that correctly. One of the largest conservative political organizations in the country and a MAGA stronghold is advocating to strip women of the right to vote and let men cast a single vote that represents everyone in the family, wives and children alike.

By making such a proposal, Whitlock and Turning Point are also implying that people who are unmarried or don’t have children should be similarly stripped of their rights as Americans. Voting, according to Whitlock, is a right that should be exclusively reserved for men, because they are the only Americans capable of serving God.

Remember, these were not off-the-cuff remarks that might have been misspoken, they were prepared remarks by Whitlock, presumably with weeks of advance notice, for delivery at an event with thousands of attendees.

More disturbing, many of the event’s attendees were young women, being told by leaders within the conservative right that women are less than equal and immoral for having dreams or aspirations beyond that of sacrificial service to men and child-rearing.

Those are the words and values of self-proclaimed Christians in the MAGA movement. Not our interpretation of them, but their own words. They’ve told us what they intend to do and who they intend to victimize. We ignore them at our peril.