No, Sen. Schmitt. America belongs to all of us.
White Christian nationalism’s influence is growing, and it's not staying in the shadows anymore.
By Shalise Manza Young
“America does not belong to them. It belongs to us. It’s our home. It’s a heritage entrusted to us by our ancestors. It’s a way of life that is ours and only ours. If we disappear, then America, too, will cease to exist.”
Not long ago, maybe within the past three or four years, this kind of full-throated white nationalist invective would have been shared in a private setting, whether in a members-only corner of the internet or small-town hotel conference room. There was a public shaming that often came from making statements like this in front of cameras.
But those words were said by Eric Schmitt, a sitting member of the U.S. Senate representing the state of Missouri, earlier this month at the National Conservatism Conference held in Washington D.C.
I shouted a string of curse words to myself when I read the parts of Schmitt’s speech that made it to social media, but after all this time I should know better. Maybe my reaction was because those words came from a senator, and somewhere deep down, I still believe that a job held by just 100 Americans at any one time should require a level of dignity and a pretense of humanity. Maybe it was a sign that, despite all evidence to the contrary, I still believe that some MAGA politicians are just going along to get along—which, to be clear, is cowardly—and not completely invested in white supremacy.
“The Continental Army soldiers dying of frostbite at Valley Forge, the Pilgrims struggling to survive in the hard winter soil of Plymouth, the pioneers striking out from Missouri for the wild and dangerous frontier, the outnumbered Kentucky settlers repelling wave after wave of Indian war band attacks from behind the stockade walls—all of them would be astonished to hear that they were only fighting for a ‘proposition’,” Schmitt said.
“They believed they were fighting for a nation—a homeland for themselves and their descendants. They fought, they bled, they struggled, they died for us. They built this country for us.
“America, in all its glory, is their gift to us, handed down across the generations. It belongs to us. It’s our birthright, it’s our our heritage, our destiny.”
Those last couple of sentences are music to the ears of the people they were intended for, and the kind that would make former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke proud.
Though Schmitt’s words shock the system, he wasn’t an outlier at the conference. Far from it. The three-day event was a who’s who of Christian nationalists spewing hatred and lies, predictably attended by several members of the Trump regime, with sessions such as “The threat of Islamism in America” and requisite fear-mongering about New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, and repeated insistence that America was founded as a Christian country.
The Founding Fathers were pretty clear that it absolutely was not, but you know, po-tay-toe, po-tah-toe. These types of people aren’t really acquainted with or bothered by the truth.
Regardless, white Christian nationalism’s influence is growing, in large part because people at the very top of America’s political food chain—Vice President J.D Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth chief among them—are unabashed devotees of the movement.
They want you to believe that land that was violently stolen, violence Schmitt glorified, from the Native people and a country whose unprecedented economic growth was built, literally, by the hands and on the backs of Africans they kidnapped and Black people they forcibly bred and raped to grow the enslaved population belongs to white people and white people only.
Schmitt’s speech asked “What is an American?” and that is the answer he delivered.
Funny enough—and again, intellectual consistency is not a hallmark of white nationalists—Schmitt notes that his ancestors arrived in the United States in the 1840s, decades after the colonialists he reveres laid the groundwork for what would become the country he wants to lay exclusive claim to.
Playing Schmitt’s game is folly, but just for fun: My fifth great-grandfather was part of the Massachusetts line of the Continental Army; his wife was a full-blood Penobscot Indian born in what is now Maine. Their grandsons, Nahum and Oliver, fought for the Union as part of the all-Black 55th Regiment during the Civil War.
If we really want to judge “Americanness,” most people would say I have a greater claim to this country than Schmitt.
But that’s why his rhetoric is dangerous. No matter what Schmitt believes, we are both Americans, just as a child born here eight years ago to Venezuelan parents who fled Nicolás Maduro’s repressive regime is American.
If you haven’t started to fight yet, you must start now. When Schmitt says, “America does not belong to them,” he doesn’t just mean my family. He means yours, too.
Shalise Manza Young was most recently a columnist at Yahoo Sports, focusing on the intersection of race, gender and culture in sports. The Associated Press Sports Editors named her one of the 10 best columnists in the country in 2020. She has also written for the Boston Globe and Providence Journal. Find her on Bluesky @shalisemyoung.
The orange dump truck made spewing hatred 'acceptable' out in the open. The Republican cowards in Congress allow this to continue and escalate. I'm disgusted by what this country has become. However, we must NEVER GIVE UP THE FIGHT TO TAKE IT BACK!
I am glad to see this called out. I have dealt with Senator Schmitt when he was a state senator and he appeared to be a sane and reasonable person, capable of working for a positive bipartisan outcome. He normally does not come across as nutty like so many of these folks. But this screed is both appalling and nonsensical. As you note, he considers himself an heir to those "Christian" folks who came here in the 1600s, despite mentioning his actual ancestors came in the 1800s. He mentions the people who were actually here first only in terms of brave settlers fighting them to take their land. It is a little more coded than some stuff Herr Trumpf spouts: the throughline here is simply: the people who came to steal the land in the name of "religious freedom" were paler-skinned than either the people who were here first OR the people who came against their will *at the same time* and whose back breaking labor built the infrastructure at least (but not only) the south. I am trying to figure out how to elevate this information to the voters of Missouri, who are counted on to vote for these folks. Thus the compliant gerrymandering. No Missourian not living in an urban area will vote Democratic, is the expectation. What does it take to open people's eyes?