51ºÚÁÏ

An attorney who also happened to be a Republican state legislator, Barnes was representing a group of pastors known as the “Medicaid 23.�

The pastors from across Missouri, most of them Black, had been arrested in 2014 when they disrupted a state Senate proceeding by singing, chanting and praying in the gallery that overlooks the chambers. It was an act of civil disobedience to draw attention to the fact that Republican legislators were refusing to expand Medicaid in the state and bring healthcare to more poor people.

The Cole County prosecutor at the time, Mark Richardson, charged the pastors with two crimes: trespassing and obstructing a government proceeding.

“This case is a very big deal,� Barnes told the jurors during his closing argument, when the case finally came to trial in 2016. “This case is about what it means to be an American.�

In Barnes’ version of America, and the one of his fellow counsel, Rod Chapel, president of the Missouri NAACP, this country is a cornucopia of people from all walks of life — different faiths, colors and creeds. And all those people have rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, including the First Amendment right to free speech.

That vision of America was challenged this week by one of Barnes’ former legislative colleagues. When Barnes was in the Missouri House, fellow Republican Eric Schmitt served in the Missouri Senate. In some ways, the two men were similar back then. Both are attorneys. Both were considered moderates by people in the Missouri capital — lawmakers willing to work across the aisle to solve problems. They were not idealogues.

For Schmitt, now a U.S. Senator, that has changed. Over the past few years, he’s slowly crafted a new version of himself, unrecognizable to those who knew him early in his career. He has prostrated himself at the Church of Trump and last week, at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, Schmitt revealed the final transformation, with a speech titled

It cemented his white Christian nationalist, anti-immigrant version of America.

“If America is everything and everyone, then it is nothing and no one at all,� Schmitt said. “We Americans are the sons and daughters of the Christian pilgrims that poured out from Europe’s shores to baptize a new world in their ancient faith. Our ancestors were driven here by destiny, possessed by urgent and fiery conviction, by burning belief, devoted to their cause and their God.�

The speech, like many at the conference, suggested that only a certain kind of American — white Christians who immigrated from certain European countries — can truly claim America as their homeland.

“America does not belong to them,� Schmitt said, after referencing folks who protested Confederate monuments a few years ago. “It belongs to us. It’s our home. It’s a heritage entrusted to us by our ancestors. It is a way of life that is ours, and only ours, and if we disappear, then America, too, will cease to exist.�

In some ways, Seth Cotlar says, Schmitt’s speech is nothing new.

“The apocalyptic tenor of the speech is very resonant of the far-right fringes of American politics in the ‘50s and ‘60s,� Cotlar says.

Cotlar is a at Willamette University in Oregon. I first became aware of his work two years ago, when another senator from Missouri — Josh Hawley — attracted Cotlar’s attention. Hawley, who dabbles in his own version of Christian nationalism, had tweeted a quote he falsely attributed to Patrick Henry. In a series of replies about far-right rhetoric in America, Cotlar offered Hawley a history lesson.

This time, it’s Schmitt’s turn. The senator’s speech completely misunderstands history, Cotlar says, especially when Schmitt tries to tie his German ancestors who came to the United States in the 1800s to pilgrims and Puritans, many of whom held very anti-Catholic views. (Schmitt is Catholic).

“What he’s saying is simultaneously totally wrong, but it also echoes threads in American political culture that define American nationhood according to blood and soil,� Cotlar told me. “If he’s even remotely familiar with this history, then he’s knowingly lying … I don’t think Schmitt is aware of this history at all. But he’s playing into it. He’s fanning the flames by talking like this.�

There lies the big question with Schmitt and many of the other MAGA acolytes in elected office today. Do they really believe what they are saying, or are they merely acting?

In the end, it doesn’t really matter. Schmitt went to a conference that and features a version of America that doesn’t include people of different faiths and colors as fully fledged citizens in this melting pot of a country.

His speech harkens back to something else Barnes told that Medicaid 23 jury back in 2016: “There were times in the trial I felt like I was in a time machine,� Barnes said, “that the government lawyer was 50 years late in bringing this case.�

Barnes and his clients lost the battle — they were convicted of trespassing, though most were later pardoned — but they won the war. Missourians expanded Medicaid by popular vote in 2020.

Now Schmitt and Trump want to take America backward (including by cutting that Medicaid expansion), with a misunderstanding of this country’s historic commitment to equality.

Schmitt’s speech, which Cotlar says is “outside the mainstream of how Americans have historically understood ourselves as a country,� comes at a precarious time. Trump is using the levers of government to erase the country’s commitment to equality. Just a few days after Schmitt’s speech, in another in a long line of opinions issued with little explanation, the U.S. Supreme Court said it was OK for Trump’s immigration forces while conducting raids in Los Angeles.

“We don’t know what the future holds,� Cotlar says. “If history is any guide, when people in positions of political power start talking about nationhood as a racial and biological inheritance and start promoting a blood and soil version of nationhood, that has gone in bad directions.�