On Mon, 29 Jul 2024 14:05:10 -0000 (UTC), Reeves Bignell <X@Y.com>
wrote:

>
>
>It's No Mystery Why Racists Have Fallen in Love With Trump's Republican
>Party
>
>The KKK did not choose to support Donald Trump because he was a
>Republican—but because they agreed with the ideas that he and other far-
>right politicians spout.
>
>In 2020, The Daily Show ran a segment in which statements by Republican
>leaders, including Donald Trump, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-
>Ga.A), Senator Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), and various Fox News personalities were
>juxtaposed with those made by Ku Klux Klan leaders like former grand wizard
>David Duke and former imperial wizard Bill Wilkerson. Fired Fox News
>commentator Tucker Carson, for instance, screeches manically that, because
>of immigration, “eventually there will be no more native-born Americans.”
>Immediately following that comment comes former grand wizard Duke saying,
>“We’ve got to start protecting our race.”
>
>Donald Trump is then shown at a rally (with several Black people behind him
>wearing “Blacks for Trump” T-shirts) saying about Covid treatments, “If
>you’re white, you have to go to the back of the line. Discriminating
>against white people!” Again, there’s a cut to Duke stating, “There is
>racial discrimination going on right now in this country against massive
>numbers of white Americans.”
>
>All too sadly, it didn’t take much effort then, nor would it now, to
>demonstrate that the racist “great replacement theory” that contends white
>Americans are being radically displaced by immigrants underlies an ever-
>fiercer defense of so-called Christian nationalist identity. And in our
>time, that defense has been essential to the rise of what has become the
>Trumpublican Party and the fierce growth of white racism that’s gone with
>it.
>
>That Daily Show segment ended with the ultimate irony of Ted Cruz claiming
>that “the Democrats are the party of the Ku Klux Klan.”
>
>No surprise there. Despite the all-too-obvious convergence of the
>perspectives of the Republican far right and the white supremacists of the
>Klan, as well as other avowed racists, Republican party leaders continue to
>vehemently deny any identification with the KKK or its views. In the
>process, they regularly issue obligatory statements rejecting bigotry,
>racism, and anti-Semitism, while passionately disavowing Duke and others
>like him—all disingenuous and empty gestures of the first order.
>
>Recent Republican behavior paints a very different picture. Earlier this
>year, for instance, Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) got thoroughly
>twisted in knots trying to defend his statement that “my opinion of a white
>nationalist, if somebody wants to call them a white nationalist, to me, is
>an American.” Eventually, he had little choice but to (largely) retreat
>from that stance—at least officially.
>
>
>Typically though, whatever they may claim, Representatives Greene and Paul
>Gosar (R-AZ) had no problem hanging out with racists and neo-Nazis—until,
>at least, they got caught doing so. In February 2022, they both spoke at
>the America First Political Action Conference that brought together
>Islamophobes, hardline nativists, and others on the far right. The
>gathering was organized by prominent white nationalist and Holocaust denier
>Nick Fuentes.
>
>Yeah, the very same Fuentes who would have dinner with Donald Trump and
>Kanye “Ye” West at Mar-a-Lago that November.
>
>Like Trump after that feast, when busted, Greene stated, “I do not know
>Nick Fuentes. I have never heard him speak. I have never seen a video. I do
>not know what his views are, so I am not aligned with anything that is
>controversial.” Despite Trump’s dubious assertation that he didn’t know
>Fuentes either, he certainly knew his old pal Ye and the controversies
>generated by a number of his antisemitic statements.
>Endorsed by Duke
>
>In 2021, it was Gosar and Greene along with Representatives Matt Gaetz (R-
>Fla.) and Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) who attempted to launch an America First
>Caucus that would champion “uniquely Anglo-Saxon political traditions.” A
>secret paper, uncovered by Punchbowl News, discussed the forming of that
>caucus and the rationale behind it (addressing the supposed threat of “mass
>immigration” to “the long-term existential future of America as a unique
>country with a unique culture and a unique identity”). No need even to say
>“white,” of course. After the document was revealed and some Republican
>leaders criticized the initiative, all parties involved backed down (at
>least in public).
>
>
>Time after time, key Republican figures have leaned into the ethos and
>ideological aims of white nationalism. It’s no wonder that America’s
>racists, including the KKK, have fallen in love with the modern
>Trumpublican version of the Republican Party. Once upon a time, of course,
>and for decades thereafter, the Klan was deeply linked to the Southern wing
>of the Democratic Party—the Dixiecrats, as they were then known—but began
>to switch to the GOP as presidential candidate Barry Goldwater and then
>presidents Richard Nixon (with his infamous “Southern strategy”) and Ronald
>Reagan exploited white feelings of resentment toward the civil rights
>movement and the national Democratic Party’s support for racial equality.
>
>In a research paper published by the American Sociological Review, David
>Cunningham, Justin Farrell, and Rory McVeigh argue that the Klan played a
>small but meaningful role in the transition of the Democratic South from
>blue to red. In a number of areas, there was a correlation between the rise
>of Klan activity and the Southern shift to the Republican Party.
>
>
>
>It should be noted that, from 1989 to 1992, David Duke even served as a
>Republican in the Louisiana State Legislature. Like most white Southerners
>then, he had been a registered Democrat until, in the late 1980s, he joined
>a regional shift to the GOP. National party leaders did denounce Duke, but
>local Republicans were far more ambiguous in their dealings with him. He
>also ran for the U.S. Senate as a Republican and for president in the 1988
>campaign, first on the Democratic and then the Populist Party line. That
>year, he formally switched to the Republican Party, clearly showing which
>party at any moment best reflected his white nationalist ideology.
>
>The day after Donald Trump accepted the Republican nomination for president
>in 2016, Duke announced a run for the Senate in Louisiana, saying, “I
>believe my time has come. The people of this country, the patriotic,
>decent, God-fearing people of this country are now right with me.” He
>promptly also backed Trump, claiming that voting for anyone but him for
>president would be “treason to your heritage.” And Trump would prove to be
>in no rush to disavow him (though, in the end, he finally did).
>
>Duke’s time, of course, hadn’t come and he got few votes. Still, more
>recently, the Klan and the GOP got new life when Republican presidential
>candidate Vivek Ramaswamy thought it a good idea to liken African American
>Representative Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) and Black scholar Ibram Kendi to
>what he called “the modern grand wizards of the modern KKK.” Klan leaders,
>he added, would be “proud” of her. He claimed that all he wanted to do was
>“provoke an open and honest discussion in this country,” presumably about
>race, a subject in which he had previously never shown the slightest
>interest.
>
>Ramaswamy is Hindu and of Indian background. His color and his faith put
>him at odds with the hardcore evangelicals and white nationalists of the
>GOP base who have supported Trump. He has tried to argue, aware of that
>constituency’s prejudices, that he also adheres to Christian values and
>believes in Jesus.
>
>He now claims that he’s personally never met a white supremacist and that
>racism in the United States mainly comes from the political left. Like
>other conservatives, he contends that racism is an individual flaw, rather
>than systemic, structural, and institutional. Despite a plethora of public
>rallies by avowed racists, a horrifying series of racist-driven mass
>murders, and a Homeland Security Department report forecasting that white
>supremacist extremists “will remain the most persistent and lethal threat
>to the Homeland,” Ramaswamy dismisses the danger of white supremacy as a
>kind of myth. As he put it, “I’m sure the boogeyman white supremacist
>exists somewhere in America. I’ve just never met him. Never seen one, never
>met one in my life, right? Maybe I’ll meet a unicorn sooner. And maybe
>those exist, too.”
>
>Sorry, Vivek. For the Black people who were gunned down in Charleston,
>S.C., Buffalo, N.Y., and Jacksonville, Fla.; the Jews murdered in
>Pittsburgh, Pa.; and Latinos slaughtered in El Paso, Tex., white supremacy
>is no joke.
>
>While being roundly criticized by Democrats and civil rights leaders,
>Ramaswamy mostly heard crickets from fellow Republicans. In interviews, no
>one ever seems to have asked him about how his pledge to support Donald
>Trump, should the latter become the Republican presidential nominee, puts
>him in the position of offering his stamp of approval to a candidate who
>was actually endorsed by Duke (twice!).
>
>In 2016, Duke infamously announced his fierce support for just one
>presidential candidate—Donald Trump, of course. In a CNN interview with
>Jake Tapper on February 28, 2016, Trump initially pretended, all too
>unconvincingly, that he had never heard of him. (“I don’t know anything
>about David Duke.”) The next day, after coming under fire, he claimed that
>he had been wearing “a very bad earpiece” and had misheard the exchange. He
>then stated, “I disavowed David Duke.”
>
>Trump knew just who Duke was, having discussed him in other interviews in
>previous years. As early as 1991, he told CNN’s Larry King that support for
>Duke’s run for governor of Louisiana was “an angry vote,” even if he then
>failed to address the racism at the heart of Duke’s campaign. In 2000, he
>did call Duke “a bigot, a racist” on NBC. At the time, Trump was flirting
>with running for president on the ticket of the Reform Party but blanched
>when he decided it was too extremist for him to be successful. He clearly
>grasped that it was in his political interest to distance himself from
>Duke’s toxicity, but he’s never been aggressively challenged to explain why
>Duke would have endorsed him in the first place.
>“Some Very Fine People on Both Sides”
>
>In 2017, Duke was one of the star attendees of that infamous “Unite the
>Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., that brought together hundreds of
>neo-Nazis, white supremacists, anti-Semites, and far-right extremists from
>around the nation. The gathering, which turned violent, leading to the
>murder of protester Heather Heyer and injuries to many others, was
>initially called to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen.
>Robert E. Lee.
>
>Trump also opposed that statue’s removal. After Heyer’s murder by a white
>nationalist in a car, he was forced to make a statement in which he voiced
>distinctly contradictory views, both condemning and praising the
>extremists. The president famously denounced the “egregious display of
>hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides” and added that “you also had
>some very fine people on both sides.” By creating such a false equivalency,
>he clearly meant to assuage those in his base who also didn’t want
>monuments and memorials to Confederates removed.
>
>Duke was thrilled by Trump’s initial statements. He said that the president
>“was the only person in the entirety of the U.S. government who pointed out
>that all the fault was not with the people who came there to defend the
>Robert E. Lee statue, and those who came to defend the right and heritage
>of white people.”
>
>Duke also endorsed Trump in 2020 (and will likely do so in 2024). Perhaps
>predicting Trump’s future fallout with Vice President Mike Pence, and
>seeing Tucker Carlson for who he truly is, he tweeted, “Trump & Tucker is
>the only way to stop the commie Bolsheviks! It is the only path to beat
>them! #TrumpTucker2020.”
>
>Duke did not make a mistake. He took in Trump’s attacks on immigrants (of
>color) and his view that whites are victimized by racism. He undoubtedly
>felt all too comfortable with the president’s suggestions that Black-led
>cities are dirty and dangerous places. While Republicans might dance around
>or denounce the very idea that they were in any way linked to white
>supremacists, no less the Klan itself, those groups are all too clear on
>where they stand in relation to the two parties.
>
>Unfortunately for Trump, the party’s Klan troubles go further than just a
>rhetorical convergence. In August 2023, special counsel Jack Smith charged
>Trump with four counts related to the January 6th insurrection under a
>series of laws written during the post–Civil War Reconstruction
>era—specifically, Section 241 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code, which was
>originally adopted as part of the 1870 Enforcement Act to combat the Klan
>and other white terrorist organizations. Those laws were put in place to
>protect the voting rights and civil rights of newly free African Americans
>including, as Reuters reporter Hassan Kanu noted, “the right to have one’s
>vote counted,” the very right that Trump and his criminal enterprise sought
>to deny.
>
>In the end, the KKK did not choose to support Donald Trump because he was a
>Republican but because they agreed with the ideas that he (and other far-
>right Republicans) spout. It is finally time to face the rise in the
>twenty-first century of a new form of white nationalism and its alignment
>with many leaders of the Republican Party, including Trump.
>
>
>
>
> https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/racist-republicans-donald-
>trump/
>

Perhaps you've forgotten that it was the party of Lincoln who freed
the slaves. The Democrats were responsible for the bill that counted
negroes as 3/5 of a person. Who's the more racist?