IndigenousNetwork was able to attend this week’s American Community Media national briefing on the mainstreaming of white supremacy in the United States, a conversation that felt uncomfortably close to the daily news agenda in Indigenous communities. While the panel focused on national trends in politics, religion and governance, much of what was described is already visible on tribal lands, at borders that cut through Native territories, in school boards deciding what children can learn about genocide and civil rights, and in statehouses where attacks on Native sovereignty often travel in the same bills as attacks on Black, immigrant, LGBTQ and Muslim communities.
Political scientist Sanford Schram, co author of Hard White: The Mainstreaming of Racism in American Politics, traced a straight line from late twentieth century dog whistle politics to the present moment. “The immediate cause was the election of the first non white president in U.S. history, Barack Obama,” he said, but he stressed that “white nationalism has a long lineage, but has become more prevalent in mainstream politics in the Trump era.” Schram described what he calls an “authoritarian ratchet,” in which racial resentment hardens into a broader “out group hostility,” and voters who feel white identity is threatened become more willing to tolerate anti democratic tactics if they believe it will restore their status. For Indigenous reporters, this lands in obvious places: violent border crackdowns that sweep up Indigenous migrants, state efforts to criminalize land defense, and renewed attempts to roll back voting rights in Native precincts.
Devin Burghart, president of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, has spent more than three decades tracking far right movements. Speaking from the office of his late mentor Leonard Zeskind, he underscored a point that should shape how Indigenous newsrooms frame these stories. “Movements matter,” he said. In the 1990s, he could count “around 25,000 hardcore individuals.” During the height of the pandemic, his team tracked 2.4 million people active in COVID denial and anti vaccine organizing, a milieu that overlapped heavily with racial resentment and conspiracy culture. In a 2022 report, his organization documented 875 state legislators with ties to militia groups, anti immigrant networks, QAnon inspired formations and similar organizations. That number climbed to nearly 1,000 by 2024. Those lawmakers do not just echo fringe ideas; they carry them into bills that target trans youth, gut public health, erase Black history and restrict what teachers can say about structural racism and colonization. Indigenous communities are often collateral damage in those projects, when “anti woke” legislation sweeps away truthful teaching about treaties, boarding schools and land theft.
Journalist and podcaster Heath Druzin, whose series Extremely American has followed militia culture and Christian nationalism up close, focused on what it feels like to watch the Overton window move. “There are an alarming number of people who are pretty fond of Hitler at the moment, and pretty okay saying it out loud,” he said. He argued that social media has taken ideas that once lived in obscure message boards and pushed them into mainstream feeds at high speed. Trump’s 2015 campaign launch speech, with the line “They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists,” is one example he cited of rhetoric that would once have ended a campaign but instead became a template. For Indigenous outlets that have been covering armed protests at reservation borders, outsider militias inserting themselves into local jurisdiction, and coordinated harassment of Native women leaders online, Druzin’s description of anonymous echo chambers and emboldened speech is less a warning than a familiar beat.
The briefing spent substantial time on Christian nationalism, not as a theological dispute but as a political project. Religious studies scholar Matthew D. Taylor, whose recent book The Violent Take It by Force examines charismatic Christian networks behind January 6, defined Christian nationalism as a “tendency, a habit of mind” that conflates Christian identity with American identity and treats the United States as a vessel for a Christian nation. In practice, he said, that often becomes white Christian nationalism, where “a kind of normative whiteness with a normative Christianity” is treated as the default American. Taylor described three strands of what he calls Christian supremacy, including a far right Catholic current around traditionalist networks, a Calvinist current anchored by figures like Idaho pastor Doug Wilson, and a fast growing independent charismatic current that has been central to Trump’s advisory orbit. That last strand, he noted, is multiethnic, which complicates simplistic racial narratives, but still carries a theology that elevates Christian power in law, foreign policy and domestic life.
Druzin offered a blunt, non academic definition that lines up with what many Indigenous communities have lived since the era of boarding schools and the Doctrine of Discovery. “If you’re a Christian nationalist, it means you want a theocracy in America, in some way, shape, or form,” he said. The key difference from ordinary religious conservatism, in his view, is that Christian nationalists “don’t simply want to be free to practice [their] religion, [they] want [their] religion to dominate government.” His reporting from Moscow, Idaho, where Wilson’s Christ Church is building what Druzin and his co reporter call a “Christian industrial complex,” shows how that looks on the ground: school networks, publishing arms, media channels and political influence that aim to reshape a town first, and then a country. For Indigenous nations that already navigate the legacies of missionization, forced conversion and Christian boarding schools, the idea of a revitalized Christian supremacy movement inside state power is not an abstraction. It touches child welfare, adoption, tribal courts, and ongoing fights over whether Christian groups can use religious freedom claims to override Native religious practices.
The panel also took questions about immigration, school curriculum fights and the role of media. Burghart urged journalists to recognize the white nationalist roots of “Great Replacement” rhetoric, which frames immigration as an intentional plot to “replace” white Americans and often carries an explicit or implied anti Jewish component. When that language shows up in hearings on the border or in local debates about sheltering migrants, he argued, it should be treated as a warning sign, not as neutral policy language. For Indigenous communities at the border, especially those whose traditional territories straddle the line between the United States and Mexico, this same narrative underpins calls for militarized walls that cut through sacred lands and for surveillance regimes that do not distinguish between long standing cross border kinship and recent arrivals.
Schramm warned that as white identity politics consolidates inside one party, it corrodes trust in democracy itself. His research, he said, shows that “people who have this higher levels of white outgroup hostility” are more willing to back an authoritarian leader if they believe that is the route to power. Taylor added a broader lens, noting that “majorities are never more dangerous than when they think that their majority is disappearing,” and that the current backlash in the United States fits a global pattern seen in India, Turkey and other countries where religious nationalism and ethnic majoritarianism have weakened democratic institutions. For Indigenous nations, whose existence has always challenged the fiction of a homogeneous American public, the stakes of that majoritarian panic are high. When leaders frame any assertion of tribal sovereignty as “special rights,” or when Native land defense is recast as terrorism, it happens inside that same story about a threatened white Christian nation.
The discussion did not offer easy optimism. Schramm argued that the most direct check on this politics is to make it lose, repeatedly, at the ballot box so that parties pay a real price for partnering with overt racists. Taylor called for the “biggest tent coalition” possible to defend pluralism, with disagreements deferred until the basic question of whether democracy survives is settled. Burghart returned to the importance of organized movements that can inoculate communities against recruitment and disinformation. Druzin reminded journalists that Christian nationalist and neo Nazi ideas remain “wildly unpopular” with most Americans when they are named plainly, which is one reason some leaders seek power through courts, gerrymandering and minoritarian institutions rather than through broad persuasion.
For Indigenous media, the briefing was less a revelation than a confirmation that the beats we are already covering, from school book bans that target Native history to anti protest laws aimed at pipeline resistance, sit inside a much larger realignment. White supremacy is no longer shy. Christian supremacy is no longer shy. Both are fluent in the language of parental rights, religious freedom and border security. The work now is to keep tracing the pipeline from fringe movement to policy, to document how these currents land in Native communities, and to keep centering Indigenous law, kinship and collective care as living alternatives. The speakers were clear on two points that matter for our readers. “Movements matter,” as Burghart said. Ideas matter as well. Indigenous journalism has a role in tracking both, and in making sure that our nations are not treated as an afterthought in a fight that is already unfolding on our lands.
