When torch-bearing white nationalists marched in Charlottesville chanting, “You will not replace us”; “Blood and soil”; and “The South will rise again”, America should have listened.

Charlottesville clearly was a harbinger of all that is currently happening in America. The North may have won the American Civil War militarily, but the ideology which provided the undergirding for the rebellion of the South was never vanquished. After the rebellion, America just simply went about its business as though the civil war had never occurred.

The post-slavery period in the US provided a brief window of opportunity for foundational blacks. During what is called the Reconstruction Era, foundational blacks made some significant strides towards racial equality. Blacks established their own schools and churches. They registered to vote and elected over 2,000 black officials, including the first black US senator. Blacks also bought land and improved their economic lot via the wages they earned from jobs acquired.

Reconstruction, which lasted from about 1865-1877, hit a snag after the contentious elections of 1876 which pitted Republican Rutherford B Hayes against Democrat Samuel J Tilden. The election was marred by widespread fraud, intimidation, disputed electoral votes, and competing claims of victory by both candidates. All these factors culminated to produce a constitutional crisis. Eventually, a special electoral commission called the election in favour of Republican Rutherford Hayes.

The election of 1876 led to what is called the Compromise of 1877. In an informal deal between President Hayes and Democrats, Hayes agreed to withdraw federal troops from the South. The withdrawal of federal troops from the South gave Southerners a freer hand to deal with their foundational black problem. The departure of federal troops from the South effectively ended the Reconstruction Era. White supremacists crawled out from their cesspools with a vendetta of racist, evil intentions, designed to crush foundational blacks in the South.

Voter suppression directed against foundational blacks and other people of colour in the US has its origin in this backlash by racist white Southerners. Black people were disenfranchised and became the victims of the white version of Isis and Al Qaeda. This white terrorist organisation, known to history as the Ku Klux Klan, terrorised foundational blacks in the South. Black bodies and property were exterminated and destroyed with extreme prejudice. Slavery was rebranded as share-cropping and tenant farming as the South returned to its pre-civil war status quo.

White Northerners, as admitted by Abraham Lincoln himself, fought the civil war to preserve the union of the United States. Close to 750,000 American and black lives were sacrificed to preserve the United States as one nation under their deity. Clearly, white people know something about integration that African and Caribbean leaders are yet to discover. The abolition of slavery in 1865 was simply a tactical move by Abraham Lincoln, who was no lover of the foundational blacks in his America.

It cannot be disputed that many decent white Americans in both the North and the South were sympathetic to the cause of foundational blacks. Regrettably, however, white America has never really been committed to crushing the virulent strain of white supremacy that pervades so much of American society. The demographic shift that is taking place in America, leading to a browning of that nation, has only served to further embolden many white Americans with an affinity for racism and white supremacy.

The growing popularity of replacement theory, antagonism against coloured immigrants, opposition to critical race theory, and the MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement are all symptoms of a deeper disease that has the potential to cripple the US. When white supremacists chanted that the South would rise again, the rest of white America should have listened, and they should have initiated the process of beating their ploughs into spears in preparation for war.

Project 2025 and Trump 2.0 are nothing short of a declaration of war against the American republic. Every principle that has helped the US to achieve its position of pre-eminence globally are about to be thrashed and repealed by a Government that is hell-bent on preserving the hegemony of white rule in America and around the world. Liberals in America have been lulled into thinking that this is simply just another chapter in the saga of party politics in the US. Liberals are, therefore, bringing knives to a gunfight which they are destined to lose.

When all the dust is settled, Americans will awake to a new America in which the torch of freedom has been extinguished. Many of the great principles of the republic will be repealed and replaced. Out of the ashes of this conflagration a new dystopian society will arise with theocrats controlling the levers of power. Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and its latest report Saving America by Saving the Family have gone so far as to agitate for the establishment of Sunday as a national day of rest.

Clearly the end goal of the Heritage Foundation and the MAGA movement is the creation of a white Christian version of America. Unfortunately, this supposed white Christian version of America will come with a double helping of white supremacy topped with copious amounts of anti-black racism. America is headed for its own version of the Handmaid’s Tale in which race will be a criterion for the kind of treatment receive. As in the Handmaid’s Tale, the children of Ham will be subject to plots to affect their removal back to their ancestral homeland in Africa.

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents (ICE) are currently busying themselves rounding up Hispanic, African, and Caribbean immigrants for deportation. Eventually, white supremacists in America will begin to craft a final solution for the foundational black problem in America. Foundational blacks may very well discover that they were never really counted as true Americans, leading in the near future to renewed efforts to expel them from the new Christo-fascist State into which America is evolving.

Lenrod Nzulu Baraka is the founder of Afro-Caribbean Spiritual Teaching Center and the author of At Hell’s Gates: The Catholic and Evangelical Takeover of America. Send comments to the Jamaica Observer or rodneynimrod2@gmail.com.

The Ku Klux Klan, the first known white supremacists organisation, terrorised blacks in the South.

White supremacists

Lenrod Nzulu Baraka