Disclaimer (snarky but legal): This is satire and opinionated theatrical ranting. If you’re thin-skinned, allergic to profanity, or wear a MAGA hat to bed, consider this your warning label. Nothing here is legal advice — just catharsis.

Jesus tap-dancing Christ on a podium — did Missouri just elect a Twitter troll with a Senate badge? Eric Schmitt strolls up to the mic and announces, loud and proud, that America “belongs to us.” Us. Not the folks who built the railroads, not the people whose sweat laid the bricks of the Capitol, not the Indigenous people who were here first. No — it belongs to them: the pale, the pious, the historically tone-deaf. He says it like it’s a compliment, like he’s discovered the secret menu at a colonial-era diner.

He stands there and valorizes settler violence like it’s a backyard story about mowing the lawn. “We tamed the continent,” he bellows, as if dispossession were a virtue and the people shoved aside were just props in a diorama he admires. That line — “we’re not sorry” — is the dogwhistle turned megaphone. It’s the political equivalent of carving a swastika into the picnic table and asking the rest of us to pass the potato salad.

This isn’t subtle dog-whistle shit anymore. They’ve moved on to stereophonic, stadium-grade white-nationalist elevator music. Josh Hawley hums the same hymn on Sundays, Kris Kobach keeps the immigration scare drumbeat steady, and the National Conservatism crew hands out talking points like prayer leaflets. They don’t even pretend anymore that their version of “heritage” includes everyone who actually lives in America. Diversity is “division,” multiculturalism is “chaos,” and white nationalism gets the sanitized label “heritage” so donors don’t have to feel gross at cocktail hour.

And make no mistake — this is dangerous theater with legislation waiting in the wings. You preach a homeland that “belongs to us,” you justify stripping voting access from people who are inconveniently the color of yesterday’s mud. You rewrite textbooks to omit inconvenient crimes, and suddenly a whole generation learns history as a highlight reel. You make immigration a moral failing instead of a policy debate, and you gaslight the country into thinking exclusion is patriotism. It’s fascism in a starched shirt and a PTA smile.

The laughable part? These guys swagger about building civilization and then can’t build a budget that doesn’t look like a wheeze. Eric Schmitt talking about taming the frontier is like a barista boasting about sailing the seven seas because he once steamed milk. The hypocrisy is so thick you could spread it on toast.

What they want, beneath the rhetoric, is control. Fear is their currency: fear of the other, fear of losing power, fear that the people who actually keep the lights on might think for themselves. Scare enough people, purge the rolls, normalize the exclusions, and you’ve turned democracy into membership by application. If you’re not in their “us,” you’re invisible. If you’re not invisible, you’re a problem to be managed.

So here’s the reply to his chest-thumping: America doesn’t belong to a single color, a single creed, or a single confession. It belongs to messy, loud, stubborn people — the cooks, the teachers, the immigrants, the kids who ask why history books skipped things, the elders who remember better than they let on. It belongs to all of us, whether Schmitt likes it or not. And if he wants a country built on exclusion, he can go start his own in a sandbox and put up a “no trespassing” sign. The rest of us will keep the real America — complicated, imperfect, and infinitely louder than his little speech.