The defeated-but-not-conceded Roy Moore released a video statement on Wednesday in which he portrayed his failed Senate campaign as a “very important battle for the future of our country.”
Moore’s rejection by Alabama voters has not diminished his sense of his own importance. In his remarks, he appropriated language from Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, the Declaration of Independence and the Bible to portray his campaign as part of a battle against spiritual forces of darkness and for the future of western civilization:
This particular race was watched not only by the people of this state, but by the entire nation, and many around the world.
Why? Because I believe the heart and soul of our country is at stake. …
The sacrifices of brave men and women throughout our history cry out to us, the living, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work for which many of them gave the ultimate sacrifice.
Moore implicitly compared his campaign to the World War II allies’ D-Day invasion by quoting nearly verbatim from the prayer President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave when announcing the operation. “We are indeed in a struggle to preserve our republic, our civilization, and our religion and to set free a suffering humanity,” Moore said, without mentioning the source of his quote, adding, “And the battle rages on.”
He complained about those who “do not share the vision of those who built this country”:
Today, we no longer recognize the universal truth that God is the author of our life and liberty.
Abortion, sodomy, and materialism have taken the place of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Moore closed by quoting Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, again without identifying it as such:
Let us here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth.
In between, he complained that the election had been “tainted” by “outside groups who want to retain power and their corrupt ideology.” He complained that there is “not a dime’s worth of difference” between Republicans and Democrats in the “Washington establishment.”
Moore didn’t say a word about the grassroots organizing or the high turnout and nearly universal rejection by Alabama’s African American voters that kept him out of the U.S. Senate. But he did give what sure sounds like one more dog-whistle to the neo-Confederates and Christian nationalists who rallied around his campaign, saying, “Together we must stand against those who would take from us our Country.”
