Calling Bull-Schmitt

The Systematic Takedown of a MAGA "Thought Leader"

What is “America”?

Who gets to define what is “America”?

Is “America”:

1) A physical territory?

2) A nation state controlling that physical territory?

3) The political and legal institutions governing that nation state?

4) The people inhabiting and identifying with a physical territory?

5) The people inhabiting a physical territory who also identify with the nation state controlling that physical territory?

6) The people inhabiting a physical territory who also identify with the political institutions of that nation state?

7) The people who just happen to be living inside boundaries drawn by violent settler-colonialists many years ago?

8) Is America a culture, or an agglomeration of cultures?

9) Or is “America” a symbol, a cipher, for a set of ideas conjured utterly in the minds and imaginations of people with no real understanding of political history?

The truth is, “America” can be one or many of these things, depending upon who is answering the question, and whose answer gets to be broadcast most widely.

Wherever we choose to look in the historical record, whenever a rich person, an ideologue, a tyrant, or an autocrat is on the rise, that person will always, ALWAYS, attempt to conflate the definition of “The Nation” with their own self interest.

Greedy and rapacious men will swear that unbridled capitalism is not only good, they will claim it is THE AMERICAN WAY.

What’s more, greedy and rapacious men will say that they themselves are the very embodiment of THE AMERICAN WAY.

This is why I have never been the kind of person who wraps themselves in a flag, and says they “love America”.

As an observer of culture and history born in the 1960s, and as someone who has been lucky enough to travel and live in other countries, I have always been struck by the many contradictions at the heart of American identity.

Too many people claim this word “America”, and I don’t want MY America to be confused with the America of Ronald Reagan, Elon Musk, the KKK, George Armstrong Custer, Lindsey Graham, Andrew Jackson, Stephen Miller, J. Edgar Hoover, Jerry Falwell, the Peabody Coal Company, Pat Robertson, Wall Street, Texas Rangers, Richard Nixon, Jim Crow, Marlboro Man, Mormons, or a thousand other freaks and hypocrites who hoard and rage and lie and denigrate and call their personal inner dysfunction “America”.

And because of the stories I choose to tell, many people, including the authors of Project 2025 and the white evangelical Christian nationalists who support Donald Trump, will even presume that I “hate America”.

Which I of course do not, because to me America is not a system of government, an ideology, a “heroic project”, a “City on a Hill”, or a state “blessed by God” to fulfil a special role in the world.

America, like so many other places on this big blue marble in space, is not merely territory or “property” enclosed by a series of lines marked out by land surveyors, either.

America is its people.

And there are more good people than bad people in America, I’m sure of it.

But Houston, we have a problem.

The place called America has reached a critical inflection point.

On one side, we have people who live in what should still be called “objective reality”.

On the other side, we have people who live inside a conjured reality - a reality conjured within their own minds, or a reality conjured for them by bad faith actors.

The loudest cheerleaders for the MAGA project - men like Stephen Miller, Tom Cotton, and the subject of this article, Eric Schmitt - are given unlimited space by a supine (or actively complicit) legacy media ecosystem to propagate endless outright lies and propaganda.

Unchallenged.

To serve in the cabinet of an administration, or to serve as a US senator, should require a certain amount of gravitas.

At the bare minimum, a member of cabinet or a congressperson should possess a reasonable grasp of American history.

How can a person claim to speak for “America” and “Americans” if they don’t even know or understand what actually “made America”?

*****

The internal contradictions in the arguments of those who say “Make America Great Again” or “America First” are hilarious and legion.

If someone suggests that the nation state called the USA should make reparations to the descendants of people who were dispossessed and/or enslaved as recently as 4 generations ago, MAGA types will shriek “That is ancient history! I never killed an Indian, I never owned slaves, and I will be damned if I will let Big Government take a penny of my taxes to pay any form of redress or compensation”.

Yet these same people will speak with pride of “Pilgrim Fathers” and “The Founding Fathers”, as if actions taken by religious fanatics or wealthy slaveholding people living 8 or 9 generations ago still have a direct bearing on their own personal sense of identity.

Put even more bluntly, if something or someone in American history is perceived as good or “heroic”, people are happy and ready to claim a direct cultural inheritance.

If something in American history is perceived as something less than “heroic”, less than laudable, it then becomes something “we’ve moved on from”, and therefore has nothing to do with them.

What’s more, to even bring up the things “we’ve moved on from” is seen as limp-wristed wokery - or in the case of Black folks, it’s just them making excuses for their own cultural or genetic flaws and moral shortcomings.

I’m going to flog this dead horse to make sure the point is 100% clear.

Why is the current regime removing exhibitions and installations dealing with slavery and the genocide of Indigenous peoples from federally funded museums?

Why should MAGA types even care if other Americans today learn about and talk about what the MAGA movement likes to call “ancient history”?

If it’s so irrelevant, why should it matter SO DAMN MUCH today?

How can something be so unimportant, yet important enough to require erasure?

Oh wait.

The MAGA movement claims that to even mention history as seen through Black, Brown, or Indigenous eyes is “divisive”.

Because all any Trump voter ever wanted was for Black, Brown, Indigenous, and “white” people to live together in complete social equity and harmony, right?

Yeah right.

What MAGA supporters really want IS FOR OTHER PEOPLES’ OBJECTIVE HISTORIES AND REALITIES TO STOP INTRUDING UPON THEIR OWN CONJURED REALITY.

Telling someone their “reality” is unsustainable in the face of facts is the MAGA definition of “being divisive”.

Darwin’s well-evidenced, compelling and convincing theory of evolution intrudes upon evangelical MAGA’s conjured reality.

Atheism intrudes upon evangelical MAGA’s conjured reality.

American Indian genocide intrudes upon MAGA’s conjured reality.

The systemic racism and historical violence of American society intrudes upon MAGA’s conjured reality.

Put bluntly, MAGA are willing to control, coerce, and even hurt others in order to preserve the comfort of their own imaginary identity and reality.

*****

Imagine if your farmer grandfather had murdered his next door neighbor, burnt down his house, and stolen his livestock, leaving his neighbor’s widow and children living in tents on the road beside their old farm.

Forty years later, you drive down the road on your way to town, the lucky inheritor of your father’s farm. A grandchild of the man your grandfather murdered is hitch-hiking into town.

You do not stop for them. They should get their own car.

Besides, you don’t want them dirtying your upholstery. They wear tattered old clothes and live in tents, after all.

One day in a local town hall meeting, someone suggests doing something to help the family living on the side of the road.

They invite the great-grandmother to speak, and ask her to explain how her children and grandchildren came to be living in tents on the side of the road.

When she begins to speak, mentioning your grandfather, you get up and leave.

You didn’t personally burn down her house.

You find her words “divisive”.

You’ve worked hard all your life. Inheriting a farm wasn’t a ticket to riches.

The past is the past.

Nothing to do with you.

*****

Imagine lawmakers in Germany today trying to remove all mention of The Holocaust from German museums:

“The Holocaust is ancient history.”

“Almost no one alive today worked for the Nazis.”

“I never killed a Jew or Gypsy or homosexual.”

“It’s nothing to do with me.”

“We’ve moved on.”

“Mentioning World War II is divisive.”

“Let’s focus on the progress we’ve made.”

The thing always missing from these statements, whether applied to Germany or the USA, is the fact that there is never one single history.

There are many “histories”.

For the Lenape Indians, there is the time before Europeans > the time of smallpox > the time of resistance > the time of migration > more resistance > the times of forced removal > attempts at rebuilding

Every Indigenous tribe or nation has its own history.

Every region in America has its own Black histories.

Spanish and French parts of North America have separate but interconnected histories.

Mixed-ethnic Appalachians have a completely different history to New Englanders.

But for MAGA types, or White Christian Nationalists, there is only one story of America (and by extension the later USA), and it follows a clear trajectory:

Good Christian Settlers > Fighting Indians > Fighting British Tyranny > Fighting more Indians > Building a Nation > “Giving” Blacks their freedom > Everything is now cool, right?

This is why men like Eric Schmitt, Senator for Missouri and “white” nationalist, was able to keep a straight face while giving a speech called “What is an American?” at the National Conservative Conference in September last year...

I’m not going to reproduce the speech in full. Those who are interested may find a link to the full speech <here>.

I will pull a selection of the remarks he made - remarks which were offered as statements of fact, as part of his argument in favor of “blood and soil” white nationalism.

Under these “alternative facts” I will share some actual facts, based on verifiable evidence.

Remember that these are the words of a US senator, educated in political science at a Jesuit College.

These are the views and beliefs of someone who might be expected to have at least a rudimentary grasp of US history.

Note that Schmitt uses the term “National Conservatism” rather than “white Christian Nationalism”.

His own statements make clear what he actually means by “National Conservatism”.

*****

The first three pages of Schmitt’s speech can be summed up thus:

America is not a “project” or a “proposition”. It is not a lofty list of ideals. It is a physical place and a nation with a distinct “history, heritage, and interests”.

We begin to understand exactly whose “history, heritage, and interests” Schmitt means, when he begins to bemoan The Left’s “abolishing” of his “specific Western heritage”.

Schmitt rails against statues coming down, names being changed, heroes becoming villains, and “the story of the nation” being rewritten.

This is tired old “grandpa shaking his fist at the clouds” stuff.

This is also one historically privileged group demanding continued pride of place for their own origin myth, and calling the inclusion of other peoples’ real stories “rewriting history”.

Seven-eighths of Eric Schmitt’s ancestors arrived in the USA too late to experience or take part in the Civil War, never mind the War for Independence.

Yet many African-Americans who wish to see statues of enslavers pulled down are the descendants of Black people who had already been living in America two and a half centuries before the Civil War, and one and a half centuries before the War for Independence.

Who gets to tell the story of America then?

Many Mexicans do not see the slave traders who fought at The Alamo as heroes.

Those “Texians” are correctly seen as violent colonizers who arrived in Mexico - again - two and a half centuries AFTER the Spanish ancestors of Mexicans.

The Indigenous American ancestry of most Mexicans (and Indigenous peoples in general) goes back at least 14,000 years.

How do Eric Schmitt’s people, with their brief 100-150 years in America, get to define the distinct “history, heritage, and interests” of this “physical place and nation”?

How does Eric Schmitt presume to bewail the fate of “real Americans”, claiming that their neighborhoods are “transformed beyond recognition by immigration”, when virtually all of Eric Schmitt’s OWN family arrived in America as part of the final great waves of European immigration?

As Schmitt gets into his stride, his speech goes heavier and heavier on the anti-immigration theme, praising Donald Trump for standing-up to both neo-liberal conservatives and leftists as they conspire to allow waves of foreign immigrants and workers to take American jobs. Schmitt praises heartland Americans for stubbornly refusing to forget who they are, even as America is wrongfully transformed into something different to the country “that once belonged to them”.

No doubt the “white” nativist Protestants of Illinois and Missouri felt the same way when Schmitt’s brown and Catholic great-grandparents arrived in the American Midwest from Sicily!

In fact, Eric Schmitt’s great-grandfather Salvatore Vitale only took the oath of allegiance to the USA in 1943.

There can be little doubt that the welcome given to the Vitale family was complicated by their name being deeply associated with the Sicilian mob in St. Louis.

“Specific Western heritage”, indeed.

*****

Despite almost all of Eric Schmitt’s family having missed Jamestown, Plymouth Rock, Bacon’s Rebellion, the French and Indian War, Nat Turner’s Rebellion, the First and Second Great Awakenings, the War for Independence, the Whiskey Rebellion, the Cumberland Gap, Indian Removal, the Cherokee Land Lottery, the War of 1812, and the Civil War, he chooses to invoke many events in American/USA history as HIS history.

This bit is worth quoting at length:

“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 their stockade walls - all of them would be astonished to hear that they were only fighting for a ‘proposition’.

They believed they were forging 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, our heritage, our destiny.”

When all of those events were unfolding, almost all of Schmitt’s family were living in Germany, Prussia, Belgium, or Italy.

These latter-day “true Americans” like Schmitt who endlessly praise get-up-and-go capitalism as “The American Way” might also want to renounce some of their own relatively recent immigrant forebears.

Many, many of the German immigrants to places like Missouri during the mid- to late 1800s were “freethinkers”, anarchists, and proto-socialists, including the “48ers” who were European revolutionaries.

The modern “Kindergarten” movement in America was developed by one such German “48er” (Margarethe Schurz), while the first public Kindergarten in the USA (Gasp! Socialism!) opened in Schmitt’s hometown of St. Louis in 1873.

Many other “48ers” were active labor organizers (and vehemently anti-slavery), so Schmitt’s German roots are a little bit more “European leftist” than “Kentucky settlers behind their stockade walls”.

Perhaps most hilarious of all, of the one or two remote ancestors of Schmitt who WERE in America at the time of the War for Independence, one was a Virginia slaveholder, while the other, Johann Shellhorse (Schellhaas/Schellhausen), appears to have been a Hessian mercenary in the employ of the British army! A German with family members who went on to intermarry with the mixed-ethnic “Bunch” family - a family counting Lonnie Bunch, current head of The Smithsonian among its descendants. So when Eric Schmitt helps Trump and the MAGA movement to erase Black history, he is helping to erase his own family history.

Schmitt is right in one regard, though.

Almost none of the people he mentions as “struggling to survive in the hard winter soil of Plymouth” or “repelling wave after wave of Indian war band attacks” were fighting for a “proposition”.

But they also weren’t bleeding, struggling, or dying for “us”.

They were not building a country for “us”.

They were religious extremists, speculators, indentured servants, enslaved Black and Indigenous peoples, transported convicts, and thousands upon thousands of others, some driven by religious ideology, some by hopes of easy money, and many simply trying to survive.

Again, they were not building a country for “us”.

The USA came into being as a nation because a coterie of slaveholding men with money and property decided they could get even more money and property by not having to answer to the British government.

And they used propaganda, cash and promises of free land to get the underclasses to do most of the fighting.

*****

They say that every accusation hurled by MAGA at the Left is projection.

When MAGA got called out for their racism, misogyny, or homophobia, they screamed about “the woke Left” trying to interfere with free speech.

Yet when this “woke mob” points out that Charlie Kirk was racist (using his own words), or speaks out for Palestinian rights on university campuses, people literally get arrested or deported.

When conservatives repeat a myth, they are simply “telling their own history”.

When scholars correct this false mythology with evidence, they are accused of “wokery” or “rewriting history”.

And yet again, it is the Project 2025 and MAGA gangs who literally remove historical exhibitions and displays from public spaces when they dare to tell history from any viewpoint other than their own.

Eric Schmitt is right at the front of this battle against the forces of darkness, reminding MAGA that:

“America was settled, founded and built by the most adventurous, the most courageous, the most curious and innovative and risk-taking sons and daughters of the West.”

Furthermore:

“This...is why every great feat of the modern world bore American fingerprints.”

We won’t get into it here, the question of who actually “built” America. I’m sure the descendants of enslaved African-Americans have a word or two to say about that.

But Schmitt’s grandiose claims for American fingerprints being on “every great feat” is worth fact-checking.

“It was an American who created...the telephone...”

[Uh, Alexander Graham Bell was actually a Scotsman (educated in Scotland) who only later in life immigrated to the USA]

“It was an American who mapped the human genome...”

[Um, wasn’t that work actually initiated by Ronald Fisher, an Englishman?]

“It was an American who invented the microchip, the modern computer, and the internet...”

[Geez. I can give the American Jack Kilby the microchip, but the modern computer and the internet have to go to Charles Babbage/Alan Turing and Timothy John Berners-Lee, all Englishmen]

“It was an American who gave the world the airplane. And 24 years later, it was an American (from Missouri, I might add) who first traversed the Atlantic Ocean in a single solo flight...”

[Charles Lindbergh, white supremacist, was actually born in Michigan, raised in Minnesota and Washington, D. C. Lindbergh’s father was Swedish, while his mother was the daughter of a Canadian immigrant father and a mother whose parents were English. The indomitable American spirit is well summed-up by this Lindbergh quote: “We can have peace and security only so long as we band together to preserve that most priceless possession, our inheritance of European blood, only so long as we guard ourselves against attack by foreign armies and dilution by foreign races...”]

“It was an American who broke the sound barrier...”

[Chuck Yeager was indeed American, the descendant of mixed-ethnic West Virginian Melungeon mountain people like the Sizemore family, who are part Indigenous American, African, European, and likely part Jewish and Romani]

“It was an American who split the atom...”

[Damn. I was sure that was done by English physicist Sir John Douglas Cockcroft, Irish physicist Ernest Walton, and Ernest Rutherford of New Zealand]

“It was an American who built the first skyscraper...”

[William Le Baron Jenney of Massachusetts did indeed build the first skyscraper, after attending architectural college in...France, alongside Gustave Eiffel]

“It was an American - from Missouri, I might add again - who devised the Hubble Telescope...”

[I’m from Missouri, too. But this accolade is usually given to Nancy Grace Roman of Nashville, Tennessee]

*****

Schmitt goes on to riff on other aspects of American Exceptionalism, after his “hoo-ha” claims for American innovation:

“We Americans are the sons and daughters of the Christian pilgrims...”

[Uh, not YOUR family, bud]

“The people who built our country were not villains. They were heroes. We can no longer apologize for who we are.”

[No one ever suggested that Americans apologize for who they ARE, nor did anyone ever suggest that Americans apologize for who their ancestors WERE. Some of us do, however, demand the right to be taught real history, not propaganda told through a series of self-congratulatory vignettes scrubbed clean of unpleasant truths. Funny how you spend paragraphs taking pride in the achievements of others, as if their achievements reflect on YOU and your view of the world, but disavow, downplay, or minimalize genocide and slavery]

“I’m a Missouri boy, born and raised. I’m from the state where Lewis and Clark launched their expedition. Where Jesse James lived and Daniel Boone died. The state that launched a thousand wagon trails, carrying American pioneers west to find their destiny.”

[Um, sorry Schmitt. When Lewis and Clark set out on their expedition to the west, 14 of your 16 second great-grandparents were living somewhere other than America. There you go, taking credit for other peoples’ deeds again. And I’m not so sure that bragging about a Confederate bushwhacker and outlaw helps your whole “America is great” argument]

“My ancestors arrived [in Missouri] in the 1840s...back then Missouri was as far west as you could go...”

[Uh, no, Missouri wasn’t “as far west as you could go” between 1820 and 1840. In fact, Ste. Genevieve had been founded in Missouri by the French a whole century earlier, and that town was comprised of a mix of African-Americans, Indigenous Americans, French, and French Métis peoples. Stop pretending that the world didn’t exist before US citizens got there]

And here we go. No “white” American history is complete without exaggerated claims being made for the role played by Ulster folk, aka the “Scots-Irish”:

“Think about the kinds of people it takes to do that - to build a home at the edge of the known world. Those were the kinds of people our ancestors were.”

[Again, Missouri wasn’t the “edge of the known world”. The French and Spanish had been there since the 1600s. The Missouria tribe would also have been surprised to learn that they lived at the “edge of the known world”]

“The first settlers in my state were mostly Scots-Irish - a hard, proud, fiercely independent people, forged in the hills of Ulster and the backwoods of Appalachia, ideally suited to life on the edge of civilization. They were the ancestors - as it just so happens - of my friend and our vice president, JD Vance.”

[Except for the inconvenient fact that the Scots-Irish were NEVER the majority settler population of any county or state ANYWHERE during the age of settler-colonialism. Perhaps even more inconvenient, is the fact that J. D. Vance has absolutely ZERO documented “Scots-Irish” ancestry. He DOES have documented Black ancestry, though. Funny how he never seems to mention it]

“Now, just as a matter of historical record, the Indians were perfectly capable of invading, killing and enslaving each other all on their own for centuries before we got here.”

[Ah, the old “they were already fighting each other” chestnut. By that logic, if I hear a domestic disturbance next door, I have a right to smash through a window, join in the punching, kick them out of their house, and let my son and his wife move in]

“...the American settling of the frontier was an expression of something deeper in the soul of our people...American heritage is not a narrative of oppression and evil, but the unfolding story of our people’s pioneer spirit...We’re not sorry. Why would we be sorry?”

[Why does this sound suspiciously like modern Zionism? Because it’s the same self-exculpatory bullshit]

“America is the proudest and most magnificent heritage ever known to man.”

[A wise person once said “Self praise is no praise”. Nuff said]

*****

I’m going to finish this off with one more extended quote from the venerable Senator from Missouri:

“On July 4, 2020, as the George Floyd riots raged across our nation, President Trump traveled to Mount Rushmore to address the nation. On our nation’s anniversary, as anarchists looted and defaced and tore down statues and monuments all across the country, the president stood before the granite cliff face and declared: ‘This monument will never be desecrated, these heroes will never be defaced, their legacy will never, ever be destroyed’.

If you want to know who we are, look no further than the monument that stood behind him. Mount Rushmore took 14 years and hundreds of men to build. They climbed 700 stairs every day to be lowered down on ropes over the cliff face—sometimes in the blazing heat, sometimes in the bitter cold—to carve the faces of our heroes into the side of the great mountain.

There was no practical need for any of it. It’s just who we were. We were Americans. We did it because we could.

For decades, the people in power sought to turn our past into a repressed memory - something so awful that we would prefer to forget it altogether. They made self-hatred and shame our new civic religion.

Let me say this today, as clearly as I can: We are done being ashamed. We love our country, and we will never apologize for the great men who built it.”

[Schmitt’s attempt to invoke the righteous outrage caused by the all-too-common murder of Black Americans by law enforcement officers (as a counterpoint to “American pride”) is despicable.

No one should be surprised that a white nationalist would glorify Mount Rushmore, the ultimate visual and environmental imposition of colonialist hegemony upon any people displaced by “Manifest Destiny”. It is all too appropriate that this desecration of sacred Indian ground should be praised by Schmitt as a sign of “American” achievements and greatness. Not only because it underscores the coarse vulgarity of MAGA, but also because it reminds us of the ignorance at the heart of the current regime.

Mount Rushmore (Pahá Sápa) was carved by John Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum, the son of a Danish Mormon man (and erstwhile homeopathy practitioner) who was simultaneously married to two sisters.

Borglum was heavily involved in Ku Klux Klan politics during the 1920s, and was a rabid believer in Nordic “racial” superiority. How many Americans are aware that before his work at Mount Rushmore, Borglum was commissioned and began work on a giant carving of Confederate “heroes” at Stone Mountain, 15 miles east of Atlanta, Georgia? Technical disputes meant that he never finished the commission (it would be completed by others), but the backstory to the man who carved Mount Rushmore places it an entirely different light when we re-read the words of Eric Schmitt: “It’s just who we were. We were Americans. We did it because we could.”

Yes. It is just who we were. We did it because we could.]

*****

Postscript

None of us get a say in where we happen to be born.

This fact came to me as an epiphany at the age of 13, when I was locked in my bedroom for weeks on end by my nutty evangelical parents.

I cannot even remember the supposed infraction which led to this lengthy “grounding” or incarceration.

What I DO remember is having all of my books taken away, except for a brown faux leather King James Version Bible.

For Christmas that year I received a paint-by-numbers set of da Vinci’s “Last Supper”.

Between reading both the Old and New Testaments front to back (two or three times), and making a total dog’s dinner of the paint set, it occurred to me that if I had been born in India, I wouldn’t be saying The Pledge of Allegiance at school every morning.

If I had been born in China, my young mind wouldn’t have been programmed with visions of an impending Apocalypse and Rapture.

If I had been born in Iran, I would have US bombs raining down on my head right now.

If I had been born in Palestine, I would probably be dead under 80,000 tons of rubble.

None of us get a say in where we happen to be born.

It’s the people who came before us who robbed somebody’s land, drew some lines on a map and called it a new nation.

It’s the people who came before us who made up a story about the nation in which we were born - a story intended to obscure and bury the wicked deeds committed by so many of our forebears.

There are a lot of good people who just happened to be born inside the lines marking out a territory called the USA.

I’m on the side of those people.

And on the side of other good people, everywhere, who are being forced to live inside someone else’s “conjured reality”.