That’s a damn lie. It’s as big a lie as a lie can get. It’s ahistorical. It’s insulting. It’s not even in the ballpark of reality. And when civic and business leaders say that this nation was founded on such warm, fuzzy ideals and principles, it reveals many things — chief among them just how far we are from actually dismantling the systems of white supremacy and white privilege in this nation.

Before I was a journalist, I was a preacher in Georgia and Kentucky. From the pulpit I liked to use colorful metaphors to explain complex scriptures so that they made more sense for everyday people. If you don’t mind, I’d like to lean on that part of my history for a few moments.

Imagine you’re in your house and you smell a foul stench. You check your refrigerator and realize that you have some spoiled food in there. That must be it! You get ready to throw it away, open up the garbage can, then realize that something foul seems to be coming from there too. So you bag up the foul garbage with the spoiled food and take it out of the house — confident that you have solved the problem — only to come back inside to find it smelling worse than ever. You check the bathroom and flush the toilets in case that might be it. No matter what you do, the smell won’t go away. It’s getting so bad that you can hardly stand it. You are now feeling light-headed. Then, you notice on the television that people are evacuating their homes on a street that looks very, very familiar. It’s your street. On the television, you see a home that looks like your home and a car that looks like your car. On the television screen, smoke is enveloping the home and car that look like they are yours.

Charlottesville mayor says Trump campaign emboldened hate groups

The news caption reads, “Neighborhood built on toxic waste dump about to explode.”

The smell that you thought was leftovers in the fridge or fish in the garbage or a turd in the toilet — was none of those things. Your home is built on a ticking time bomb of toxic waste.

Ted Cruz and Orrin Hatch and Marco Rubio each spoke of white supremacy and neo-Nazism as if it could be easily flushed down the toilet with a tweet, wink and a nod. This is as dangerous a denial of the past, present and future of this country as we could ever have.

America was not built on kindness or the Christianity of Christ. It was not built on freedom or liberty. This nation was built on white supremacy. Its founders owned human beings that they worked to death and raped at will for sexual pleasure. The indigenous people were slaughtered and terrorized for land and profit. Not for years, or decades, but for centuries, this nation exploited and victimized every single person who was not a white man — denying them all the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — denying them all the right to vote, the right to safety, the right to dignity.

Jason Kessler shouted down at Charlottesville news conference

We have women in this nation who were born before women were allowed to vote. A black woman who voted in this past presidential election was the daughter of slaves! Donald Trump’s own father was reportedly arrested at a KKK rally 90 years ago this summer (something Donald Trump has refuted). Right here in New York City Nazis held a rally in Madison Square Garden.

So don’t tell me this nation was founded on faith and freedom. It was founded on oppression and violence. What we’re seeing in Charlottesville isn’t un-American. NO! That violence and bigotry are as American as it gets.