https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/december-12-2025
"Today former Alabama senator Doug Jones launched his campaign to become the
state’s next governor. He announced on November 24 that he would enter the
race, but said in a speech tonight that he chose today for the official launch
because the date marks exactly eight years since he won a 2017 special election
for the U.S. Senate. In that election, voters tapped Jones, a Democrat, to fill
the seat formerly held by Republican Jeff Sessions, who left the seat empty
when he went to Washington, D.C., to be President Donald J. Trump’s first
attorney general.
Jones’s election was an “earthquake,” Daniel Strauss of
Politico reported at
the time. For the first time in 25 years, the Senate seat Jones had won would
go to a Democrat in what Strauss called “a huge political setback” to Trump.
After he won, Jones told his supporters: “At the end of the day, this entire
race has been about dignity and respect. This campaign has been about the rule
of law. This campaign has been about common courtesy and decency.”
If Jones wins the Democratic primary for governor, he will likely face off for
the governorship against current Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville, a former
Auburn University football coach who beat Jones to win the Senate seat in 2020
after then-president Trump strongly backed him. During the January 6, 2021,
attack on the U.S. Capitol to prevent the counting of the certified electoral
votes that would make Democratic candidate Joe Biden president, both Trump and
his then-lawyer Rudy Giuliani called Tuberville to get him to delay the
counting of the votes.
Tuberville has remained a staunch Trump ally, embracing the increasing MAGA
emphasis on protecting “western culture,” insisting that undocumented
immigrants are, as Representative Michael Rulli (R-OH), said today,
“terrorizing our people,” “killing our children,” “raping our women, just like
they do in England,” and “destroying western culture.” That language is at the
heart of the administration’s recent
National Security Strategy, which
advanced the idea that the U.S. and Europe must protect a white, Christian,
“Western identity.” This week, Tuberville echoed it when he claimed that
Alabama’s Muslims embrace an “ideology…incompatible with our Western values.”
The MAGA claim that white Christians in the United States and Europe are
engaged in an existential fight to protect their superior race from being
overwhelmed by inferior racial stocks has roots in the U.S. that reach all the
way back to the fears of white southerners in the 1850s that if human
enslavement could not spread to the West, the growing population of Black
Americans in the South would overwhelm them, probably with violence.
The theory that race defined history got its major “scientific” examination in
the U.S. in 1916 with a book by lawyer Madison Grant titled
The Passing of the
Great Race: Or, The Racial Basis of European History. Grant’s book drew from
similar European works to argue that the “Nordic race,” from England, Scotland,
and the Netherlands, was superior to other races and accounted for the best of
human civilization. In the U.S., he claimed, that race was being overwhelmed by
immigrants from “inferior” white races who were bringing poverty, crime, and
corruption. To strengthen the Nordic race, Grant advocated, on the one hand,
for an end to immigration and for “selection through the elimination of those
who are weak or unfit” through sterilization, and on the other hand, “[e]fforts
to increase the birth rate of the genius producing classes.”
Grant’s ideas were instrumental in justifying state eugenics laws as well as
the 1924
Immigration Act establishing quotas for immigration from different
countries. But his ideas fell out of favor in the 1930s, especially after
Germany’s Adolf Hitler quoted often from Grant’s book in his speeches and wrote
to Grant describing the book as “my bible.”
In this era it is easy to see the strand of American history that informs the
worldview of someone like Tommy Tuberville. But Jones has also inherited a
strand of American history."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
