There are two types of articles whose Facebook comments I never bother reading: LGBTQ+ stories and race-related stories. All I need to know can be found by looking at the number of comments, which is often significantly higher than for any other kind of story.

I do not need to read a bunch of horrible comments to know they are there. The high number tells me enough. All those comments signal that there is a battle raging between hateful Republicans and the people fighting their hate.

Today is Juneteenth, so this week brought stories about the holiday. The comment numbers were high. I am sure there were plenty of people furious that there is a holiday commemorating the end of slavery in America. There always are.

Of course, it cannot be about race, because they are not racist, and nothing can ever be about race. That was the rule for quite a while, and even some Democrats followed it. They were the ones who were very careful to make sure you did not think they were too far left, so they could not bring themselves to believe that Republicans were racist. Bipartisanship and unity were the most important things, you see. Calling Republicans racist was polarization. Besides, Obama had been elected president. Never mind that Obama had to walk on eggshells regarding race, which itself was rarely discussed.

But in 2026, it cannot be denied that the Republican thesis is that white people should run everything because they are superior to non-white people. The same is true for men, because they are the superior gender. And, of course, the same is true for Christians, because Christianity is the only true religion.

We see this in how the conservative members of the Supreme Court have filleted the Voting Rights Act, and in how Republican governors immediately set about disenfranchising Black voters. But it is more than that. Jamelle Bouie, in The New York Times this week, pointed out that it also exists in Trump’s and other Republicans’ claims of voter fraud.

Bouie writes:

Recall that last year, Trump targeted Los Angeles with National Guard troops and agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection. And consider the regularity with which the president says things like, “if you import people from Third World Countries, you quickly become a Third World Country.” The logic is straightforward. A city of immigrants, like Los Angeles, must also be a city of voter fraud, even if those immigrants are legal voters, entitled to participate in the political process.

 

“Voter fraud” is not about fraud. It is about who votes and how. It is about the breadth and scope of the political community. It is, as with most MAGA obsessions, about who can call themselves Americans — entitled to govern as equals — and who are mere subjects. Trump’s obsession with voter fraud is just another expression of the reactionary populist belief that the people who inhabit a place are not equivalent to the people, who are entitled to rule.

Democrats got nonstop grief this decade for focusing too much on “identity politics,” as if the GOP was not doing the same thing, as if Straight Male White Christian Nationalist is not an identity of its own. A lot of Americans convinced themselves that real racists were slack-jawed goons screaming slurs while burning crosses, not people like John Roberts or JD Vance. Hell, the first trillionaire in the world, Elon Musk, is as racist as any Confederate flag-flying guy in a rural trailer park. That has become nearly impossible to deny.

It is also nearly impossible to deny that the Party of Lincoln has given itself fully over to White Christian Nationalism. To paraphrase the great James Baldwin, I do not know if an individual Republican is a racist, but I know their policies are racist. I do not know if an individual Republican is a homophobe, but I know that same-sex marriage is less safe than it once was because of Republicans.

I also know that many of the comments on Juneteenth stories come from curiously outraged people having a conniption over the fact that we have a holiday celebrating the end of slavery. They are mostly Republican, and the reason they are always like this is hard to ignore, even for those determined to ignore it.

The last word goes to Stevie Wonder, who performed this week at the opening of the Obama Presidential Center.