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The stench of racism is emanating from Sen. Eric Schmitt’s office.
I wrote in June about the Missouri senator hiring Nathan Hochman, who was fired from Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign after he circulated a promotional video that included Nazi imagery. On Monday, Hochman posted on social media to tease what proved to be unmistakably white supremacist speech by Schmitt at Tuesday’s National Conservatism Conference, a gathering where Republicans have been known to commingle with avowed racists.
Schmitt unleashed a diatribe against nonwhite immigrants and depicted the United States as the rightful inheritance of descendants of European settlers. His speech — titled “What Is an American?” — articulated a political vision that’s not so far removed from that of racist organizations like Return to the Land, a white nationalist group that is trying to establish a whites-only community in Arkansas and has sought to expand its footprint to Schmitt’s home state.
The senator denounced fellow conservatives who support legal migration, accusing them of aiding immigrants who he baselessly claimed “take the jobs, salaries and futures that should belong to our own children.” Invoking the image of a violent mob, he claimed the MAGA movement is “a pitchfork revolution, driven by the millions of Americans who felt that they were turning into strangers in their own country.” He talked at various points about the U.S. being “our birthright,” as “a nation of settlers, explorers and pioneers”; about “the real American nation,” represented by Donald Trump and his movement; and about “we Americans … the sons and daughters of the Christian pilgrims that poured out from Europe’s shores to baptize a new world in their ancient faith.”
As writer Philip Bump explained with data in a recent blog post, this racist, whitewashed claim conveniently excludes non-European immigrants — both those who came voluntarily and those, like enslaved Africans, who did not — whose brilliance and backbreaking labor, along with those of Native tribes, literally built the United States.
The truth is that the U.S. has never been the homogenous white, European utopia Schmitt’s speech envisions. Since Day 1, the United States has not achieved lasting progress without contributions from the non-European immigrants whose Americanness the freshman senator from Missouri sees fit to question.
But Trump’s Republican Party has promoted and empowered unabashed white supremacists known to preach, as Schmitt did, about the purported superiority of white Europeans and their descendants. It’s a cynical play that aims to groom white Americans to believe they are at war in defense of a fictional history that exists only in their imagination.