May 8, 2018

Media: How The "Left" Enables GOP Tyranny - The Southern Strategy By The GOP Created Modern Politics But They Continuously Get Away With It!

Background:
1. Media: How The "Left" Enables GOP Tyranny - The Ongoing Iraq War Lies Coverup By Richard Engel & NBC
2. Media: How The "Left" Enables GOP Tyranny: The Paul Ryan Example, i.e. "Paul Ryan Is A Bad Person", So Why Won't The Media Tell The American People?
3. Is Kanye West A Black White Supremacist?

Southern Strategy is a tactic the GOP have been using for decades, though no one seems to have heard of it (a "fourth estate" responsibility). So first we start with a definition..

What was the Southern Strategy?


Articles related to the Southern Strategy that bring the information up to date can be found HERE.

What Trump did was take the "hints" by the right (GOP&Fox) to open conversation. Just like it was before the southern whites, who dominate GOP politics, started talking in code to 'avoid appearing to be racist' an attitude that still is allowed in politics today (most media is white so it doesn't bother them, they even play along as far as brown people are concerned). The following articles prove that the GOP and Trump can't be separated as the GOP created the environment for Trump to flourish and even used him to pass their bills and thus everything Trump is and has done should be seen as a shared accomplishment by Trump and the GOP and separating the two does an injustice to logic and history. Such injustice is actually normal in the media. that's how John McCain thinks its OK for him to ask Trump NOT to show up for his funeral despite Trump being the guy who is pushing standard GOP policies and passing standard GOP bills and pushing standard talking points that even John McCain has signed or used himself! Proofs...

Articles outlining GOP's decades of racist strategies that the media hasn't been covering...

Trump’s two-faced immigration strategy rides an ancient racist dichotomy New research shows how Trump rode a resurgence of old-school racism. He didn’t create it, and it’s not going away
As the drama around Dreamers and the government shutdown unfolded, Donald Trump’s racism was on full display for anyone not dedicated to denying it. Referring to African and Latin American countries as “shitholes” behind closed doors was just icing on the cake. Yet Trump also tossed out occasional claims about “love” that seemed utterly at odds with what one might expect from an overtly racist president — if you knew nothing about history.
In fact, neither Trump’s more explicit racism nor his mixing in seemingly contradictory statements here and there is nearly as surprising as most commentators take them to be. Two new papers about race-related attitudes show Trump to be a follower of mass political developments that have largely been ignored and denied, rather than a unique causative factor.
One forthcoming paper, “The Increasing Racialization of American Electoral Politics, 1988-2016,” by Adam Enders and Jamil Scott, previewed here in the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog, shows that racial resentment has steadily become more tightly linked to a broad range of political attitudes over the last few decades: Specifically, “a mix of context-dependent attitudes (candidate evaluations), deeply-held predispositions (partisan and ideological self-identifications), attitudes about general (services) and specific (health insurance) public policy issues, and actual political behaviors (vote choice).” 
“Racialization, like polarization, is a state and a process — it is a heightened connection between racial considerations and other seemingly non-racial political objects, and it is a process by which those connections strengthen over time,” the paper explains.
The racialization of healthcare under Obama, highlighted by Michael Tesler, is shown to be part of a much longer and broader process, and the increased racialization of politics with Donald Trump’s rhetoric in 2016 is part of the same pattern. Obama and Trump are significant figures, but far from the whole story in terms of reshaping our politics.
Every trend examined showed the same pattern of convergence, and all but one was statistically significant — that of candidate choice, which was not surprising, Enders told Salon, “Vote choice is so highly correlated with partisanship and self-reported ideology – both controlled for in the model – that there isn't a whole lot of unique, residual variation in vote choice for other variables, like racial resentment, to explain,” he said. In a sense, that fact only highlights how remarkable all the other correlations are.  Here is a summary chart:
The second paper, “The Changing Norms of Racial Political Rhetoric and the End of Racial Priming,” by Nicholas Valentino, Fabian Neuner and Matthew Vandenbroek, in the Journal of Politics, shows that the previously assumed penalty for explicit racist comments has evaporated, so that there’s no measurable difference between how implicit and explicit racist messages are perceived in a variety of realistic settings.
“Previous scholarship suggested that politicians had to use implicit racial rhetoric (such as the famous Willie Horton ad) to activate racial attitudes because explicitly hostile racial rhetoric would turn off both liberal and conservative voters,” Neuner told Salon. (This was known as "racial priming theory.") 
“Our research suggests this is no longer the case,” he said.  Contrary to past thinking, citizens no longer reject explicitly racial messaging more than they do implicit arguments. ... This can help explain why then candidate Trump was not punished electorally for utterances and behavior that seemed xenophobic and racist.”  
This was not a result of Trump, since the research was conducted before Trump began his presidential campaign in 2015. What’s more, Neuner added, “We once thought that calling out racially hostile rhetoric would neutralize it, but our new work suggests that this counterstrategy is no longer effective for large swaths of the American public.”

The Nation: Exclusive: Lee Atwater’s Infamous 1981 Interview on the Southern Strategy The forty-two-minute recording, acquired by James Carter IV, confirms Atwater’s incendiary remarks and places them in context.

It has become, for liberals and leftists enraged by the way Republicans never suffer the consequences for turning electoral politics into a cesspool, a kind of smoking gun. The late, legendarily brutal campaign consultant Lee Atwater explains how Republicans can win the vote of racists without sounding racist themselves:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”
The back-story goes like this. In 1981, Atwater, after a decade as South Carolina's most effective Republican operative, was working in Ronald Reagan's White House when he was interviewed by Alexander Lamis, a political scientist at Case Western Reserve University. Lamis published the interview without using Atwater's name in his 1984 book The Two-Party South. Fifteen years later—and eight years after Atwater passed away from cancer—Lamis republished the interview in another book using Atwater’s name. For seven years no one paid much attention. Then the New York Times' Bob Herbert, a bit of an Atwater obsessive, quoted it in an October 6, 2005 column—then five more times over the next four years.
Those words soon became legend—quoted in both screeds (The GOP-Haters Handbook, 2007) and scholarship (Corey Robin's 2011 classic work of political theory, The Reactionary Mind). Google Books records its use in ten books published so far this year alone. Curious about the remarks' context, Carter, who learned Lamis had died in 2012, asked his widow if she would consider releasing the audio of the interview, especially in light of the use of race-baiting dog-whistles (lies about Obama ending work requirements for welfare; "jokes" about his supposed Kenyan provenance) in the Romney presidential campaign. RenĂ©e Lamis, an Obama donor, agreed that very same night. For one thing she was “upset,” Carter told me, that “for some time, conservatives believed [her] husband made up the Atwater interview.” For another, she was eager to illustrate that her husband's use of the Atwater quote was scholarly, not political.
So what does the new contextual wrapping teach us? It vindicates Lamis, who indeed comes off as careful and scholarly. And no surprise, it shows Atwater acting yet again in bad faith.
In the lead-up to the infamous remarks, it is fascinating to witness the confidence with which Atwater believes himself to be establishing the racial innocence of latter-day Republican campaigning: “My generation,” he insists, “will be the first generation of Southerners that won’t be prejudiced.” He proceeds to develop the argument that by dropping talk about civil rights gains like the Voting Rights Act and sticking to the now-mainstream tropes of fiscal conservatism and national defense, consultants like him were proving “people in the South are just like any people in the history of the world.”
It is only upon Professor Lamis’s gently Socratic follow-ups, and those of a co-interviewer named “Saul” (Carter hasn't been able to confirm his identity, but suspects it was the late White House correspondent Saul Friedman), that Atwater begins to loosen up—prefacing his reflections, with a plainly guilty conscience, “Now, y’all aren't quoting me on this?” (Apparently , this is the reason why Atwater’s name wasn’t published in 1984 but was in 1999, after his death).
He then utters his infamous words. The interlocutors go on to kibitz about Huey Long and barbecue. Then Atwater, apparently satisfied that he'd absolved the Southern Republican Party of racism once and for all, follows up with a prediction based on a study he claims demonstrates that Strom Thurmond won 38 percent of South Carolina’s middle-class  black vote in his 1978 Senate campaign (run by Atwater).
“That voter, in my judgment,” he claims, “will be more likely to vote his economic interests than he will anything else. And that is the voter that I think through a fairly slow but very steady process, will go Republican.” Because race no longer matters: “In my judgment Karl Marx [is right]… the real issues ultimately will be the economic issues.” He continues, in words that uncannily echo the “47 percent tape” (nothing new under the wingnut sun), that “statistically, as the number of non-producers in the system moves toward fifty percent,” the conservative coalition cannot but expand. Voila: a new Republican majority. Racism won't have anything to do with it.
Not bloody likely. In 2005, the political scientists Nicholas Valentino and David Sears demonstrated that a Southern man holding conservative positions on issues other than race is no more likely than a conservative Northerner to vote for a Democrat. But when the relevant identifier is anti-black answers to survey questions—like whether one agrees “If blacks would only try harder they could be just as well off as whites”—white Southerners were twice as likely than white Northerners to refuse to vote Democratic. As another political scientist, Thomas Schaller, wrote in his 2006 book Whistling Past Dixie (which naturally quotes the infamous Atwater lines), “Despite the best efforts of Republican spinmeisters…the partisan impact of racial attitudes in the South is stronger today than in the past.”
Which one particular Republican spinmeister, when he wasn't preening before political scientists, knew fully well—which was why, seven years after that interview, in his stated goal to “rip the bark off the little bastard [Michael Dukakis]” on behalf of his candidate George H.W. Bush, Atwater ran the infamous ad blaming Dukakis for an escaped Massachusetts convict, Willie Horton, “repeatedly raping” an apparently white girl. Indeed, Atwater pledged to make "Willie Horton his running mate." The commercial was sponsored by a dummy outfit called the National Security Political Action Committee—which it is true, was a whole lot more abstract than saying "nigger, nigger, nigger."
Listen To The Full 42 Minute Interview HERE



Salon: They have not been the party of Lincoln for decades: Donald Trump exposes the truth about GOP racism that David Brooks keeps denying David Brooks keeps pretending his is the party of Lincoln. Sure, in 1864. Maybe he should catch up with reality
Donald Trump's win in Mississippi on March 8 completed his sweep of Deep South states, effectively destroying the myth that the GOP rise in the South was due to the embrace of "small government conservatism" rather than racism. It's a myth I've written about before, most recently here at Salon, first in the wake of Ferguson (here and here), then after Trump’s failed attempt to marshal a sizable group endorsement by black ministers. At that time, I wrote:
Trump’s situation is anything but unique—it’s just a bit more raw than it is with other Republicans. Ever since the 1960s, as Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy was being born, there’s been an ongoing dilemma (if not huge contradiction) for the erstwhile “Party of Lincoln” to manage: how to pander just enough to get the racist votes they need, without making it too difficult to deny that’s precisely what they’re doing.
Now, however, things have really come to a head. Trump's full-throated defense of Social Security and Medicare—plus his promise not to let people “die in the streets” for lack of health care coverage—put him directly at odds with “small government conservatism,” driving movement conservative leadership nuts, even as Southern whites formed the strongest core of his support. As Corey Robin explained here recently, that doesn't for a moment mean that Trump isn't a conservative, simply because he comes from outside their ranks and promotes some unorthodox views:  


Salon: How the GOP became the “White Man’s Party” From Nixon to Rand, Republicans have banked on the unerring support of Southern white men. Here’s how it came to be
The Rise of Racially Identified Parties
The Republican Party today, in its voters and in its elected officials, is almost all white. But it wasn’t always like that. Indeed, in the decades immediately before 1964, neither party was racially identified in the eyes of the American public. Even as the Democratic Party on the national level increasingly embraced civil rights, partly as a way to capture the growing political power of blacks who had migrated to Northern cities, Southern Democrats—like George Wallace— remained staunch defenders of Jim Crow. Meanwhile, among Republicans, the racial antipathies of the rightwing found little favor among many party leaders. To take an important example, Brown and its desegregation imperative were backed by Republicans: Chief Justice Earl Warren, who wrote the opinion, was a Republican, and the first troops ordered into the South in 1957 to protect black students attempting to integrate a white school were sent there by the Republican administration of Dwight Eisenhower and his vice president, Richard Nixon. Reflecting the roughly equal commitment of both parties to racial progress, even as late as 1962, the public perceived Republicans and Democrats to be similarly committed to racial justice. In that year, when asked which party “is more likely to see that Negroes get fair treatment in jobs and housing,” 22.7 percent of the public said Democrats and 21.3 percent said Republicans, while over half could perceive no difference between the two.
...
This racial plan riled more moderate members of the Republican establishment, such as New York senator Jacob Javits, who in the fall of 1963 may have been the first to refer to a “Southern Strategy” in the context of repudiating it. By then, however, the right wing of the party had won out. As the conservative journalist Robert Novak reported after attending a meeting of the Republican National Committee in Denver during the summer of 1963: “A good many, perhaps a majority of the party’s leadership, envision substantial political gold to be mined in the racial crisis by becoming in fact, though not in name, the White Man’s Party. ‘Remember,’ one astute party worker said quietly . . . ‘this isn’t South Africa. The white man outnumbers the Negro 9 to 1 in this country.’ ” The rise of a racially-identified GOP is not a tale of latent bigotry in that party. It is instead a story centered on the strategic decision to use racism to become “the White Man’s Party.”


NY Daily News (opinion): Nixon’s bigger crime: Southern strategy

Richard Nixon is not having an easy time of late. The Washington Post alone has run at least three opinion pieces reminding us all that Nixon was a skunk who 40 years ago this month resigned the presidency and flew off to a short-lived exile in California. There the story of Nixon's nefariousness supposedly ends. But it does not. He remains to this day a major political figure. It was Nixon who devised and pursued what came to be called the Southern strategy. This was, in the admirably concise wording of Wikipedia, an appeal "to racism against African-Americans." Nixon was hardly the first Republican to notice that Lyndon Johnson's civil rights legislation had alienated whites both in the South and elsewhere — Johnson himself had forecast that Southern whites would desert the Democratic Party.

But Nixon was the GOP's leader and, in January 1969, the President of the United States. The White House, it seemed, would not do a damned thing for African-Americans. Nixon was a complex figure — virtually a screaming liberal compared with today's Tea Party types. He was above all a pragmatic, cynical politician. Johnson and the Democrats had wooed the black vote; Nixon would do the same for the white vote.

Even-steven, you might say, except the Democrats were expanding rights while the Republicans wanted to narrow them or keep them restrictive. 

This realignment did not exactly start with Nixon or end with him. Barry Goldwater had voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act (although he had supported other civil rights bills), but the GOP in general then was unencumbered by a Southern constituency and its leadership often favored civil rights. After Nixon, though, there was no turning back. In 1980, Ronald Reagan — ever the innocent — went to Mississippi and the Neshoba County Fair to tastelessly proclaim his belief in "states' rights." Nearby, three civil rights worked had been killed just 16 years earlier, protesting one of those bogus rights — the right to segregate the races. Reagan never acknowledged any appeal to racism. Racists took it as a wink anyway. At one time, a good many African-Americans voted Republican — the party of Lincoln, after all. Jackie Robinson initially supported Nixon , as did Joe Louis. The former heavyweight champion had even supported a Republican in the 1946 congressional campaign against Rep. Helen Gahagan Douglas, a liberal civil rights advocate, whose California district was substantially black. 

As late as the 1970s, there were African-American enclaves in Maryland that voted Republican. The damage Nixon did to his own party, not to mention the rights of African-Americans and the cause of racial comity, has lasted long after the stench of Watergate has dispersed. It not only persuaded blacks that the Republican Party was inhospitable to them, but it in effect welcomed racists to the GOP fold. Dixiecrats moved smartly to the right. Excuse me for extrapolating, but segregationists are not merit scholarship winners. Racism is dumb, and so are racists. 

The Democratic Party showed racists the door. The GOP welcomed them and, of course, their fellow travelers — creationists, gun nuts, anti-abortion zealots, immigrant haters of all sorts and homophobes. Increasingly, the Republican Party has come to be defined by what it opposes and not what it proposes. Its abiding enemy is modernity.



Washington Post: How Donald Trump put an end to the GOP’s Southern strategy - Trading the dog-whistle for the bullhorn

Donald Trump is tossing out the Republican Party’s “Southern strategy.”
The Southern strategy required the subtle art of racial coding: appealing to white Southern racism without alienating white suburbanites who recoiled at overt racial language. But time and again, President Trump has opted for the bullhorn rather than the dog whistle, regularly hurling racially loaded bromides and insults.
There’s his nickname for Sen. Elizabeth Warren, “Pocahontas,” which he most recently wielded in the Oval Office during a ceremony to honor Navajo World War II veterans. Trump made the comment in the shadow of a portrait of President Andrew Jackson, who committed genocide against Native Americans by forcing the passage and implementation of the Indian Removal Act.
Then there was Trump’s recent visit to the opening of the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum. Republican Gov. Phil Bryant invited the president on a private tour of the new museum. Civil rights leaders declined to attend the museum’s opening, with Rep. John Lewis describing Trump’s attendance as a “mockery.” In Trump’s remarks at the museum, he called Gov. Bryant — who earlier this year proclaimed April to be Confederate Heritage Month — a “great governor.”
Trump’s attack on political correctness — which is a term that, for him, applies as much to the GOP’s coded language as to the inclusive language pioneered by the left — has profound consequences for politics that go beyond rhetoric, threatening to have an impact on policies such as immigration to the detriment of “dreamers” and race relations as a whole.
The strategy of using racially coded language is a relatively modern invention in American politics, where for much of the nation’s history, overtly racial rhetoric thrived. In the antebellum era between 1820 and 1860, Southern politicians shifted from the Founding Fathers’ acceptance of slavery as a “necessary evil” to actively promoting slavery as a “positive good,” part of a defensive reaction to perceived threats to slavery. Throughout the antebellum era, politicians wielded horribly bigoted rhetoric against African Americans and Native Americans.

Salon: Republicans hit peak racial hypocrisy: Their condemnation of white supremacy is laughable Leading Republicans have fled from Trump’s racism. But their party has been a white-identity club for 50 years
Racism calculus is not difficult. It is organized around several basic principles. They are:
Racists do racist things intentionally. They often do things that superficially appear to be "colorblind" or "race-neutral" but in practice lead to racist outcomes.

Racists support other racists. Racists believe that they are good people.
Racists think their attitudes and beliefs are "natural" and uncontroversial.
When confronted about their racism, racists often claim that they are the real "victims" whose "free speech" is being taken away.
Donald Trump is an honors student in racism and white supremacy. He is not a genius or a savant. Rather, Donald Trump is just very earnest and practices almost every chance he gets. Trump has many fellow students with whom to study and practice in the Republican Party.
To that end, his most recent efforts: Trump has apparently ended the DACA program (while sending deliberately mixed signals to different audiences), in order to punish Latino and Hispanic young people who were brought here as children and have spent most of their lives as Americans.
Donald Trump coddles and protects neo-Nazis and white supremacists -- a group he has insisted includes "very fine people." Trump has encouraged America's police to brutalize "suspects" (implicitly black and brown people). He has ordered the Department of Justice to investigate whether America's colleges and universities discriminate against white people.
Donald Trump is also leading a concerted effort to keep African-Americans and other nonwhites from voting.

In an effort to publicly distance themselves from Donald Trump's overt racism, leading Republicans have issued mealy-mouthed, half-hearted condemnations of his behavior.
After Donald Trump's defense of the neo-Nazis and white supremacists who rampaged in Charlottesville several weeks ago, the Republican National Committee issued a condemnation of those hate groups which read: "The racist beliefs of Nazis, the KKK, white supremacists and other like-minded groups are completely inconsistent with the Republican Party’s platform.” The resolution continued by claiming that “the view that the color of one’s skin determines or should determine one’s standing, rights, opportunities, or duties to others is not consistent with the philosophy of the Republican Party.” The RNC's statement added: “The racist beliefs of the Nazis, the KKK, white supremacists and others are repulsive, evil, and have no fruitful place in the United States.”
House Speaker Paul Ryan also attempted to condemn white supremacists. In response to the white supremacist terrorism in Charlottesville, he told the New York Times that:
This was a pure form of hatred, this notion that some human beings are intrinsically superior to others ... that whole concept is wrong, evil. We need to be very clear about that … I worry that we’re going to get this normalized in our society. We have to be outraged every single time, so they never occupy normal space in our civil dialogue or civil space in our country.
These are acts of political evasion. The Republican Party's supposed efforts to condemn racism and white supremacy are a preposterous, pathetic, dishonest, hypocritical joke. In reality, the Republican Party of the post-civil rights era is the United States' largest white supremacist and white identity organization. Its political currency is white grievance politics. For Republican politicians and strategists -- and for conservative leaders more generally -- racism is a version of Chekhov's gun that they cannot resist using at almost every opportunity. Consequently, the party of Abraham Lincoln is now the party of Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy. In 1981, leading Republican strategist Lee Atwater directly explained how this transformation took place:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger” — that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites. … “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”
In many ways, Donald Trump's racist and fascist presidency is neither an outlier nor result of an insurgent political campaign: It is the inevitable (and predictable) result of the Republican Party's long march toward white supremacy.
There have been many stops along that proverbial road. The Republican Party is waging a war against the freedom and equal citizenship rights of black and brown Americans. This assault includes voter suppression, gerrymandering and undermining (if not ending) the protections enacted as a result of the civil rights laws of the 1960s.
The Republican Party has widely embraced conspiracy theories such as "birtherism," which it used to weaponize racist attitudes in the service of obstructing the agenda of Barack Obama, the United States' first black president.
Almost all of the Republican Party's domestic policy proposals on issues ranging from taxes to the environment will have a disproportionately negative impact on African-Americans, Latinos, Native Americans and other nonwhites.
The Republican Party and right-wing policymakers have consistently supported immigration "reforms" -- such as those proposed by Donald Trump several weeks ago -- designed to ensure that America remains a majority white country into the indefinite future.
Elected officials take signals from their voters. As such, the Republican Party's racism is a reflection of the values held by its supporters. Oublic opinion and other polling data has consistently shown that Republican voters are more likely to be racist than Democratic voters. Republicans and other conservatives are also much more likely than Democrats (and the general population) to believe that black people are less intelligent, more violent and lazier than white people. Republican voters -- especially those who support Trump -- also widely believe that white people are victims of anti-white racism. Republican voters en masse possess high levels of hostility towards Muslims, Latinos and other groups they consider "un-American".
Ultimately, it should be no surprise that Donald Trump's campaign and (now) presidency have received overwhelming support from the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, and other domestic terrorist and hate groups.
Donald Trump's campaign slogan "America first" has historically been used by the KKK (and other anti-Semitic groups). Moreover, one cannot reasonably ignore how similar the Klan's political platform is to that of the Republican Party.
The Ku Klux Klan wants the following:
  1. The recognition that America was founded as a Christian nation.
  2. The recognition that America was founded as a White nation.
  3. Repeal the NAFTA and GATT treaties.
  4. Stop all Foreign Aid Immediately.
  5. Abolish ALL discriminatory affirmative action programs.
  6. Abolish all anti-gun laws and encourage every adult to own a weapon.
  7. Actively promote love and appreciation of our unique European (White) culture.
  8. Drug testing for welfare recipients.
  9. Balance the budget.
  10. Rehabilitate our public school system. We must remove the humanist influence in our schools and teach fact based curriculum to further the students knowledge not someone’s opinion. Parents should have the option of private or home schooling if they prefer and students should be free to practice their Christian faith in the classroom.
  11. A flat income tax should be introduced to allow for the funding of community, state and federal projects.
  12. Abortion should be outlawed except to save the mother’s life or in case of rape or incest.
  13. We support a national law against the practice of homosexuality.
  14. Restoring individual freedom to Christian America.
  15. Everyone who can work should work.
  16. We support state sovereignty resolutions.
This agenda is advocated for -- to a large extent, and in varying degrees -- by Donald Trump, the Republican Party, the right-wing media, and conservative policymakers in government as well as think tanks and interest groups. In total, the post-civil rights Republican Party shares many of the KKK's goals but has embraced other means of achieving them -- and in the age of Donald Trump the latter distinction is quickly eroding.
After the white supremacist terrorism in Charlottesville there was a moment of rare candor and truth-telling about the color line in America. Predictably, Trump bobbed and weaved before finally making excuses for the white supremacist mayhem that took place in that city. David Duke, the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, was quick to advise Donald Trump: "I would recommend you take a good look in the mirror & remember it was White Americans who put you in the presidency, not radical leftists."
Trump was brought to heel. He received Duke's message loud and clear, and proclaimed that there were "fine people" among the rioters and hate-mongers in Charlottesville. As Trump fights back against the Russia scandal and a general perception of his incompetence and stupidity, he has doubled down on his white supremacist policies in order to appease his most ardent supporters.
It is long overdue for today's Republican Party to drop the mask and put on their white sheets. To do that would be more honest and efficient than to go through the "post-racial," "colorblind" charade Republicans have been acting out for five decades. At least that con job has finally been exposed as such by the ascendancy of Donald Trump.

Salon: Donald Trump and Paul Manafort revived Nixon’s race-based hate strategy for the 21st centuryConservative politicians often use racist dog-whistles to get votes, power, and money

First is the matter of who paid for Dr. King’s assassination. None of the recent press coverage noted that an extensive congressional investigation of King’s murder “concluded that there was a likelihood of conspiracy” in King’s assassination, and that “financial gain was [James Earl] Ray’s primary motivation.” Newly released files — previously withheld by the FBI from Congress — now show who paid for King’s murder, and why.
The second major point overlooked by the press coverage is how Richard Nixon’s racially divisive “Southern Strategy” of 1968 led directly to and paved the way for Donald Trump’s successful racist campaign and governance strategy, with Paul Manafort being the surprising connection.

For two generations, conservative leaders — from politicians to billionaires to media figures — have used Nixon’s proven techniques of “Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry and Smear” (FIBS) to divide-and-conquer white working-class Americans and acquire political power. In the absence of our media calling them out for FIBS, Nixon’s strategy has repeatedly produced a Republican president and Congress, and held a right-wing Supreme Court.
But the most recent presidential race especially showcased the “Bigotry” part of Nixon’s successful formula, in particular his “Southern Strategy,” which allowed Nixon to use coded racist appeals designed to secure racist voters without turning off moderate voters.
For example, Nixon could avoid using the more direct racist appeals of a candidate like George Wallace by focusing instead on issues like his opposition to “forced busing” and his support for “preserving neighborhoods.”
Nixon could proclaim himself the “law and order” candidate in public, all while in private he was involved in shady real estate deals, getting huge sums (legal and illegal) from corporations and his wealthy supporters (including foreign dictators who funneled money to him personally and supported his campaigns), and even committing treason (sabotaging LBJ’s Vietnam peace deal in 1968) to win the election.
If those techniques sound familiar in the age of Trump, it’s no accident.
Paul Manafort — Trump’s longtime associate and former campaign manager — has a long history of helping conservative Republican presidential candidates effectively apply Nixon’s Southern Strategy.
In 1980, Manafort was the Southern campaign coordinator for candidate Ronald Reagan. In that capacity, Manafort had Reagan speak at a county fair in Mississippi just a few miles from where three Civil Rights workers (Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner) were murdered by racists in 1964.
Instead of using his speech to condemn those killings, Reagan instead spoke of his support for “states’ rights,” a term racist Southern politicians used in the 1960s to justify their discrimination and Jim Crow laws. (The term was so well known that the notorious white supremacist — and convicted church bomber — J. B. Stoner named his organization the National States’ Rights Party.)
After the notorious political hatchet man Lee Atwater joined Manafort’s firm, Atwater masterminded the infamous “Willie Horton” attack ad for George H. W. Bush that doomed Michael Dukakis’s race for the presidency.
Atwater summed up the Reagan/Bush version of Nixon’s Southern Strategy best, in 1981, when he pointed out to a group of Republican political operatives that, in the 1950s, white politicians could simply use the N-word, repeatedly.
“By 1968,” however, Atwater explained that instead of the N-word, white politicians instead used terms like “forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff,” including “economic things” like “cutting taxes… a byproduct of [which] is blacks get hurt worse than whites.”
When Paul Manafort moved from being Trump’s business associate to being his campaign manager, Trump began using more subtle racist appeals, straight out of Nixon’s Southern Strategy.
These include Trump echoing Nixon to the word, saying he’d protect (white) Americans from threats to “our way of life”; exploiting exaggerated fears of crime; and even proclaiming himself the “law and order” candidate, just like Nixon.
The result? Southern states provided more than half of Trump’s electoral votes, and he won white voters by 21 percent, according to Facing South (whose work by Facing South’s Sue Sturgis we’ve cited extensively).

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