On Tuesday night, Roy Moore won the Alabama GOP primary by trouncing his opponent, Luther Strange, in what may be a double-digit margin, but the truth is, this was never really much of an election.
Political pundits wanted you to believe that this race was a test for Donald Trump’s “brand.” Could Trump push an “establishment” candidate like Strange past a “Breitbart”-wing candidate like Moore? Would a Moore victory cost the Republicans a seat in Alabama? These were all false narratives created to build up excitement about an election in which the winner really didn’t matter.
Alabama Republican voters were choosing between two virulently bigoted, white-supremacist-sympathizing, Jeff Sessions-patterned candidates. They basically decided between Ku Klux and the Klan, and the only real question is just how much it harms America to put another terrorist sympathizer in Washington, D.C..
Tuesday’s special Senate election was set up to replace Sessions, who was promoted to chief whipping boy as Trump’s attorney general. Moore, who led most of the polls into the runoff, is a judge who was twice removed from office for refusing to enforce federal law and for encouraging other judges to violate the law. His opponent, Strange, was an Alabama state attorney who traded in his corruption investigation of the governor for an appointment to succeed Sessions.
Each candidate saw himself as similar in belief and temperament to Sessions. These factors alone should have required all narratives about this “election” to focus on the poor choices that most Americans have electorally. These men, however, are actually worse than their most recent résumés suggest.
Moore and Strange are card-carrying white supremacist sympathizers and white nationalists. I know that in our current political environment, center-left Democrats and right-wingers have come together to decry the use of these terms, and police them when they are used. As if somehow, identifying someone as a white supremacist or white nationalist sympathizer is a greater crime than actually being a white nationalist or white supremacist sympathizer.
Let’s go over this one more time for the people in the back with the white hoods:
A white supremacist is someone who thinks white people are generally better than anybody else. That can mean you hate your black neighbors, or you’re a social justice warrior who thinks the word “Becky” is just as bad as saying “nigger.” Anybody can be a white supremacist—white people, black people, Asian people—even if they don’t know it. White supremacy is like herpes: Everybody carries the virus; it’s just more active in some people than others.
A white nationalist believes that America is primarily a country for white Christians only. White nationalists believe that if they cannot physically remove nonwhite people from America, the next-best thing is to marginalize nonwhite political, economic and social power.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at the two men who were on the ballot in Alabama.
1. Both Luther Strange and Roy Moore favored Trump’s original “Muslim ban,” which would have kept people from seven non-majority-Christian nations from entering America (indefinitely).
White nationalist: check.
2. Moore and Strange both supported the Alabama Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act, which was basically a revamped slave-catching policy masquerading as … well, modern-day slave catching. The bill gave Alabama police the right to arrest anyone they suspected of not being an American citizen until that person could “prove” their citizenship.
White supremacist: check.
White nationalist: check.
3. Moore, as a sitting judge in Alabama, said that then-President Barack Obama wasn’t an American citizen and that Islam is a “false religion” that breeds terrorists (20 percent of American Muslims are African American).
White nationalist: check.
4. Both Moore and Strange thought that Trump’s statement that there were perfectly nice people on the side of white nationalists in Charlottesville, Va., were fine.
White supremacist: check.
White nationalist: check
5. Strange was supported by Trump—who, according to Time, The Economist, the New Yorker, ESPN’s Jemele Hill, Ta-Nehisi Coates, David Duke and just about everyone who’s ever met him who’s not Steve Harvey—is a white supremacist and a white nationalist.
Two checks with a twist.
6. Moore was supported by a wider and deeper bench of people who hate black people, including Steve Bannon, Sebastian Gorka and everyone’s favorite fried-chicken-establishment connoisseur, Dr. Ben Carson. To top it off, one of Moore’s biggest supporters is Nigel Farage, former leader of the UK Independence Party, which launched the Brexit vote specifically to keep nonwhite, non-Christian people out of England.
Check, please!
Have we not already seen the rise in hate crimes and terrorism across the nation since Trump got elected? Is it not abundantly clear that white nationalists and white nationalist sympathizers endanger not just black people but actually white people, too? While the Washington Post and Politico wanted to frame the Alabama race as an insider-vs.-outsider-vs.-establishment, revenge-of-Breitbart, palace-intrigue race, they all missed the real story here. The election of either of these men in the current environment empowers white nationalists. These candidates’ penchant for race-first policies is neither conservative nor libertarian; it is literally a danger to national security.
It never mattered which “side” of Trump’s merry band of bigots won. They could elect “Moore Strange Sessions” five times over; America still loses. Alabamans chose between Ku Klux and the Klan and don’t care if the nation burns in the aftermath.