Evangelical and MAGA Leaders Advocate Ethnic Cleansing
Certain MAGA leaders are openly advocating ethnic cleansing in the United States. I’m not exaggerating.
“My boys all look like me, and I want my children to grow up in a country where they’re not minorities,” William Wolfe said at an event hosted by True Texas Project. “I, unapologetically, and I’m sorry if this offends anybody here or anybody who listens to this, I am, actually … not sorry. I want my boys to grow up in a country where they don’t look like they’re the foreigners here.”
Wolfe is executive director of Center for Baptist Leadership, an organization that tries to steer the Southern Baptist Convention in a more MAGA direction. He previously worked in the first Trump administration and got his Master of Divinity from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
Desiring an ethnically homogenous nation is biblical, Wolfe claimed. “There’s nothing about my Christian faith that says I can’t want that or desire that for myself and for my children,” he said.
Wolfe’s remarks, including his whole speech, which you can view on Rumble, are both un-Christian and un-American. And he is not a lone Wolfe. More and more MAGA leaders have been openly advocating for turning our country into a white Christian ethno-religious state.
Congressman Andy Ogles, R-Tennessee, posted this week, “Muslims don’t belong in American society. Pluralism is a lie.”
Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Alabama, similarly posted this today:
More importantly, ethnic cleansing appears to be a primary motivation for our current executive branch’s immigration enforcement policies.
The Department of Homeland Security posted this to Instagram in December:
100 million people would be nearly 1/3 of the total population, and far more than the number of immigrants (both documented and undocumented) in the US today. This week I was reminded of this post when Sen. John Kennedy, R-Louisiana, accused David Bier, Director of Immigration Studies at the Cato Institute, of hyperbole for using the term “ethnic cleansing” in reference to the post. (Watch the exchange here.) Here is the definition of ethnic cleansing in the Merriam-Webster dictionary — “the expulsion, imprisonment, or killing of an ethnic minority by a dominant majority in order to achieve ethnic homogeneity.”
These messages aren’t fringe. Indeed, they’re an accurate reflection of the current administration which,
seeks to end birthright citizenship
talks a lot about “denaturalization,” or revoking citizenship (a word that Wolfe also used in his presentation)
uses racial profiling in its immigration enforcement
shut down nearly all refugee resettlement except for white South Africans.
God does not desire ethnic cleansing. Throughout the Old Testament, God reminds the nation of Israel that they were once foreigners in a strange land, and immigrants to a new land. God commands his followers to treat immigrants well. And in the New Testament, when Jesus is asked, “who is my neighbor?” He responds by telling the parable of the Good Samaritan. The moral of this story is that our neighbors are not just those who “look like me.” Everyone is my neighbor.
Ethnic cleansing is also antithetical to American values. Our Declaration of Independence declared the divine truth that we’re all “created equal,” and our First Amendment codifies pluralism and freedom of conscience. We haven’t always lived up to these ideals, so later leaders like Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Martin Luther King Jr. would help us more fully realize these ideals, and we passed laws like the 14th Amendment, which clearly stipulates birthright citizenship, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned laws separating us by race. American citizenship is not, and should never be, just a white thing.
What We’re Reading
Jonah Goldberg: “Cutting Off the Lunatic Fringe: It’s a problem when outliers become the core constituency.”
You know my basic view of both parties. They’re too internally democratic—TLDR: primaries suck—and they are too institutionally weak to do the admittedly hard, but obviously smart, thing: purge or marginalize their fringes in an unapologetic campaign to win over the voters in the middle.
As a purely political matter (we can leave policy and morality out of it for the moment), the reason such a purge would be smart for Democrats—or Republicans—is simply that there are more voters in the middle than there are on the fringes. Moreover, the more “normie” voters you get, the more fringy you make the other party look. Enduring majorities are built on this basic logic.
The main reason it’s hard is that those on the fringe—and the fringe-sympathetic—care more about politics and take politics more seriously than normal voters who, broadly speaking, have more important and rewarding things to do with their time and energy. (The suits at The Dispatch often call these normies, or “our audience.”) The fringers have more internal power within the parties and the network of institutions that fund and support them (with media coverage, donations, organization, and mobilization).
An additional challenge is negative polarization and hyper-partisanship. Attacking members of your own “team” outrages even very moderate members of your coalition. J.D. Vance’s anti-anti-Nazi schtick is one variant of this. The left’s longstanding love affair with popular frontism and its outrage at “hippie punching”—i.e., criticizing the left instead of aiming all hostilities rightward—is another. Lots of normie Democrats and Republicans simply hate the other party so much these days that they confuse internal hygiene and sanity with “divisiveness” and “cancel culture.” This logic is all very stupid, but its practitioners make it sound very sophisticated (charges of hypocrisy and double standards are a key tool for enforcing cohesion: “How dare they criticize our whack jobs when they don’t criticize their own! I won’t give them the satisfaction of denouncing someone on my team.”).
ABC News: “‘Everything gone’: Venezuelan family says they lost their home and jobs after being detained for 2 months”
Adriana Laya and Miguel Alberto Caicedo thought their worst nightmare was over when they were released with their two children from a family detention center in Dilley, Texas.
But when they returned to their home in Las Cruces, New Mexico, after being detained for two months, they faced a new nightmare. The family claims they were kicked out of their apartment during their detention and that their belongings -- including their life savings and their pet dog -- were taken.
“We started crying,” Laya told ABC News in Spanish. “My kids started crying over their pet, their clothes, their bed. We just held on to each other outside of the apartment.”
The family from Venezuela said they are now living in their car -- the only possession they were able to recover after it was left in a government parking lot outside of where they were detained.
Matthew Soerens: “Finding Common Ground on Immigration in a Polarized Moment”
If you’re like me, it’s been an exhausting month. Immigration enforcement operations – which already had been intense in places like Los Angeles, Charlotte and my home region of Chicagoland – have dominated national headlines as “Operation Metro Surge” hit Minnesota. Americans of all political orientations have been focused on the deaths of two U.S. citizens, the detention of large number of immigrants (including refugees and asylum seekers who are lawfully present and authorized to work in the United States), and the protests that have followed.
What’s struck me is how wildly far apart Christians of different political perspectives seem to be. We disagree not just over the best policy solution, but on the basic facts of what is happening. We watch the same videos but come to polar opposite conclusions.
And evangelical Christians – whom we would hope would be united by our commitment to the authority of Scripture over every aspect of our lives – often seem to be as divided as our society as a whole.
NYT: “Slurs Filled a Chat Created by a Republican Party Official in Florida”
A leaked group chat with numerous racist, antisemitic and misogynistic text messages among young conservatives engulfed the Miami-Dade County Republican Party in scandal on Thursday.
The WhatsApp chat, which the party secretary created last fall for students at Florida International University in Miami, quickly devolved into slurs against Black and Jewish people, The Miami Herald reported on Wednesday. Screenshots of some messages were also published by The Floridian, a conservative website. One of the students in the WhatsApp group verified the authenticity of the chat and messages to The New York Times.
The slur-laden chat includes a lengthy message about killing Black people and a separate warning about not getting sexually involved with a Jewish woman, according to the screenshots. The Herald also found messages referencing Hitler’s politics, insulting gay people and referring to women with offensive terms.
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