28 June 22
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From a declaration of “victory for white life” to what many have interpreted as a call to bring back racial segregation, GOP lawmakers are saying the quiet part out loud.
At a Saturday rally held by Donald Trump—i.e., a guy who kicked off his first bid for the White House by calling Mexicans rapists and criminals and whose entire brand is racism—Rep. Mary Miller said into the microphone: “President Trump, on behalf of all the MAGA patriots in America, I want to thank you for the historic victory for white life in the Supreme Court yesterday.” Then she clapped her hands as the audience cheered.
After an onslaught of condemnation, Miller’s spokesman insisted to the Associated Press that the congresswoman from Illinois had misread her remarks and meant to say the ruling was a victory for the “right to life.” Yet that explanation would be a lot more believable if Miller didn’t have a history of embracing the views of people who are famously about “white life.” At a Moms for America event last year, the lawmaker told the crowd that “Hitler was right on one thing. He said, ‘Whoever has the youth has the future.’” (She later issued a statement claiming she was “sincerely” sorry for “any harm” her words caused.) So you’ll have to forgive us if we find it hard to believe this was simply a slip of the tongue.
What’s more, Miller undoubtedly knew she was speaking before a group of people who would be receptive to such a point of view, given that Trump was headlining the event. While examples of the ex-president being an unabashed racist could fill several books (or Twitter timelines), a small representative sampling includes starting an entire movement around the lie that the country’s first Black president wasn’t born here; calling for the execution of five Black and Latino teenagers; telling four congresswomen of color to “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” despite the fact that three quarters of those women “came from” the U.S.; banning travelers from seven predominantly Muslim nations from entering the U.S.; pardoning a guy who the Justice Department said oversaw the worst pattern of racial profiling by a law enforcement agency in U.S. history; throwing a total shit fit over the removal of a statue of a Confederate general who thought Black people should be white people’s property; and reportedly calling white supremacists “my people.” As Ahmed Baba, a columnist for The Independent, tweeted on Saturday, “Whether it was a slip or not, the audience heard ‘white life’ and didn’t flinch. They applauded.”
Meanwhile, Miller wasn’t the only Republican lawmaker to put racism on full display this weekend. Also on Saturday, Republican Texas senator John Cornyn—in the view of many—called for the Supreme Court to reverse the ruling deeming racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional. After Barack Obama tweeted that the Supreme Court “not only reversed nearly 50 years of precedent, it relegated the most intensely personal decision someone can make to the whims of politicians and ideologues—attacking the essential freedoms of millions of Americans,” Cornyn quote-tweeted him and wrote: “Now do Plessy vs Ferguson/Brown vs Board of Education.” (Cornyn has since suggested he was merely noting the importance of long-standing precedent being overturned.)
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