I kid you not — this Republican just called the Constitution's foundation 'woke'

Missouri’s three most recent former attorneys general — all of whom claim to be “constitutional conservatives” — tripped over themselves to out-racism each other while auditioning for Trump.

This has not been good for Missouri. But it has worked out for the former AGs who have successfully used the office to get the hell out of Missouri and into federal office without having to pretend to do the work of being attorney general for too long (It’s a four-year term, but we’ve had four in six years).

When I wrote about the hateful and wasteful anti-diversity crusade of former-as-of-last-week Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, I wondered if I wasn’t whitewashing his efforts by avoiding using the more apt synonym for “anti-diversity,” which is “white supremacist.”

When U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley gave a speech last year in which he proudly proclaimed to be a “Christian Nationalist,” I thought the white supremacist dogwhistles couldn’t get any louder.

But Missouri’s junior senator and second most recent AG-for-a-minute, Eric Schmitt, yeeted the dogwhistles in a speech telling us exactly what he and the MAGA movement he has pledged allegiance to stand for: rewriting history to justify the dominance of white, purportedly Christian men.

Schmitt’s speech at the National Conservatism Conference followed one speaker who argued at length that America’s biggest problem is white guilt and another who insisted the U.S. is in a crisis that can only be resolved by becoming a Christian nation.

Schmitt went full blood and soil.

In the speech, titled “What Is an American,” he proclaimed that America is not “a proposition” or a shared set of values, rather it is a country for white people descended from European settlers, whose accomplishments should not be diminished by acknowledging the people that some of them enslaved, the Native Americans they killed, or anyone else denied equal rights at the founding.

Real Americans, in his view, can trace their ancestry to settlers. He frames his German ancestors as real Americans. He doesn’t call them “immigrants,” of course, instead contrasting them with other immigrants, Native Americans, and the enslaved people who long pre-dated his ancestors’ arrival. That requires either astounding ignorance or deliberate obfuscation of the fact that neither Germans nor Catholics were initially considered white or American.

Schmitt dismissed Americans’ outrage at the death of George Floyd and valorized Confederate generals.

Schmitt mocked the idea that “a poem on the Statute of Liberty” or “five words in the Declaration of Independence” define who is an American.

The five words he finds overemphasized and a tool of the woke: “all men are created equal.”

I kid you not. Read the speech.

Schmitt is peddling a perverse and revisionist originalism in which only the founders who won the debates of the time matter. He calls us back to when the Constitution was first signed — when it counted enslaved people as 3/5ths of a person to appease slaveowners.

He is rejecting the Constitution that the people of the U.S. amended with the 14th, 15th and 19th Amendments to include those of us who are not male or white.

Schmitt made repeated allusions to the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory. This is the increasingly widespread conspiracy theory that Jews are bringing non-white people into this country to replace its rightful white owners. That’s what the “good people on both sides” as Trump put it, who chanted “Jews will not replace us!” in Charlottesville were referring to.

Schmitt hired a staffer who was fired by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign for making a video containing Neo-Nazi imagery and has too many ties to white supremacists for me to detail here.

Schmitt’s proposition that certain people are entitled to rule based on ancestry or power, rather than required to convince voters of varying backgrounds to vote for them, is not just a horrifying thing to say outloud. It’s an ideology that underlies so many real world illegal power grabs — from Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election to Governor Mike Kehoe and Republican legislators’ effort to redistrict away Kansas City area citizens’ voting power.

Nevertheless, I take solace in the fact that — though truly horrific words came out of the mouth of our sitting senator — the video shows his speech was sparsely attended and everyone looked bored.

There are more of us than there are of them. Schmitt can try to rewrite our history and claim this country isn’t “based on a proposition,” but Lincoln was right. This nation was “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”