A thread on the #MAGA #insurrection, white #Evangelicals, and the calls for #unity coming from Trump's craven enablers in the #GOP.

On TV today @PatToomey & @MickMulvaney pretended they didn’t know who Trump was until 01/06/21. Everyone knew. @LindseyGrahamSC said it out loud in 2015 when he accurately described Trump as a "race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot."

That was before @LindseyGrahamSC and the entire #GOP started kissing Trump's . . . ring.

White #Evangelicals knew, too, and by a margin of 80%, they supported him, ignoring his endless, pathological lies, his prolificacy, the profanity of his character, his violent rhetoric, and the ugliness of his white nationalism and jingoism.

Historian Randall Balmer argues convincingly that the Religious Right's alliance with the #GOP was forged decades ago, not to oppose abortion, but to defend tax exemption for white #Evangelicals' segregated schools.

He's right, but the Southern white #Evangelical sense of grievance against government intervention has racist roots reaching back to Reconstruction.

I think that sense of grievance has been growing in #Evangelicalism for decades, expanding beyond the South, as white Evangelicals realized they were losing their positions of cultural #privilege in a nation growing more #diverse and less #Protestant.

It made them a perfect match for Trump's poisonous politics of #AmericanCarnage.

Some convinced themselves he was a latter-day #Cyrus, a pagan ruler chosen by God to deliver them, as the biblical Cyrus had delivered the Jews from Babylonian captivity and acted as their patron in rebuilding Jerusalem. With religious fervor, they declared undying loyalty.

Today, we are trying to pick up the pieces after an #insurrection in which four insurrectionists died & one LEO was beaten to death. Law and order? Patriotism? Trump's #AmericanCarnage perverted those concepts as white #Evangelicals invoked God's blessing.

There were some early attempts to blame the #insurrection on Antifa and BLM, but the evidence is clear. This is Trump's #AmericanCarnage. Trump's enablers and apologists are complicit in the attempt to overthrow Congress. The mob was hunting them!

Now, predictably, there are calls for "healing and unity" coming from the Right. They say it's time to move on. But, as every #Evangelical knows, reconciliation requires repentance. We must have a reckoning.

At long last, will white #Evangelicals deal honestly with the racism harbored in their tradition and the violence it has wrought?