Two Excerpts from My Book – 2/2

In the meantime, below are a few samples of the most prominent sayings of the President’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, in terms of the three criteria of racism, White nationalism, and populism [We have already seen those of the President himself]. Bannon at present serves on America’s National Security Council and is the former executive chair of Breitbart News,[1] a network he had earlier described with great pride and without hesitation as “the platform for the alt-right” (Flegenheimer, 2016; Posner 2016).

1. “We don’t believe there is a functional conservative party in this country and we certainly don’t think the Republican Party is that. It’s going to be an insurgent, center-right populist movement that is virulently anti-establishment, and it’s going to hammer this city, both the progressive left and the institutional Republican Party” (Schultheis & Boccagno, 2016).
2. “I’m a Leninist. Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal, too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment” (Radosh, 2016).
3. “Let the grassroots turn on the hate because that’s the ONLY thing that will make them do their duty” (Victor & Stack, 2016).
4. “Two-thirds or three-quarters[2] of the C.E.O.’s in Silicon Valley are from South Asia or from Asia” (Shane, 2016).

It has in addition been reported that Bannon declared, “Maybe that’s not such a bad thing,” when a film colleague had both mused about limiting voting rights in the US to property owners and commented that such a measure “Would exclude a lot of African Americans” (ibid.).

A few samples of the most prominent sayings of Steven Miller – a senior political adviser to President Trump, White House policy director, and one of the prime architects of Protecting the Nation – are also given below in terms of the three aforementioned criteria:

1. “I can’t be your friend anymore because you are Latino” (Peinado, 2017).
2. “Everybody who stands against Donald Trump are the people who’ve been running this country into the ground . . . Everything that is wrong with this country today, the people opposing Donald J. Trump are responsible for” (Merica, 2017).
3. “Foreign workers . . . they’re competing against you, and your children, and your grandchildren, and your brothers, and sisters and neighbors for jobs. Low-wage foreign workers being brought in to take your place at less pay” (Miller, 2016).
4. “We could have lived with the Indians, learning how to finger paint and make tepees, excusing their scalping of frontiersmen as part of their culture . . . We do nothing for American holidays, but everything for Mexican holidays . . . That is why we invited a Muslim leader to the school to explain the splendor of Islam, but no such proclamation was ever made about America” (Miller, 1999).
5. “America without her culture is like a body without a soul – yet many of today’s youth see America as nothing but a meeting point for the cultures of other nations . . . We must come to the defense of our heritage . . . As we obsess over, adulate and extol the non-American cultures, we ignore the culture we all hold in common . . . our language and religious values were brought to us by those who settled and founded our nation” (Miller, 2006).

A Presidency of Hatred?

Each one of us is called to be an artisan of peace, by uniting and not dividing, by extinguishing hatred and not holding on to it, by opening paths to dialogue and not by constructing new walls! Pope Francis.[3]

Given all the above data – data interpreted within the context of US history as discussed before – that show, at the very least, more than significant contempt for the different other as manifested by the ongoing and, at times, longstanding patterns of stereotyping, sweeping generalizations, the prevalence of Manichean-based thinking, and incessant fear-mongering based on racism, either implicit or explicit; blatant White nationalism, equally blatant populism, and relentless demonization of the other based on religious biases, the following questions arise:

1. Is the current presidency of Donald John Trump a presidency that is run on the basis of the subjective emotion of hatred, implicit or explicit, rather than on the objective bases of neutrality, reason and evidence, despite all the political white-washing and repeated attempts at verbal rhetoric to the contrary?
2. If yes, what does that indicate about the underlying sentiments present in the hearts of 81% of White evangelical Christians and 52% of Catholics in America, who, in both essence and fact, elected the President to office and enabled his like-thinking strategists to become some of, if not the, most powerful influencers in the White House?
3. Again if yes, what made such a comparatively large number of Christians and Catholics – people and groups of people called to the higher standard of “love thy neighbor as thyself” (Mt 22:39) by the virtue of their baptism and their faith – decide to engage in what can now be considered in no other way than material, if not outright formal, cooperation in an electoral campaign – now, a presidency – that both was and seems to have remained characterized by such a degree of hatred toward the other; in particular the other who is non-White and/or non-Christian, whether local or foreign?
4. Is hatred an emotion that comes from God or from someone else?
5. How do the Christians and Catholics who elected the President justify their vote in face of the present charge of material, if not formal, cooperation?
6. Can such cooperation with this level of hatred ever be justified in accordance with the teachings of Jesus Christ, Christianity, and the Catholic Church?

[1] Breitbart has been described by the SPLC as part of “the extremist fringe of the conservative right. Racist ideas. Anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant ideas – all key tenets making up an emerging racist ideology known as ‘alt-right’” (Piggott, 2016).

[2] This figure was found to be inaccurate upon fact-checking.

[3] In Address (2013a).

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