If you are wondering why it seems Sen. Jeff Sessions can be confirmed by the Senate as the nation's next attorney general despite previously being rejected as a judge for racist statements and for a lifetime of being on the wrong side of American civil rights battles, it is the Republican Party is more eager to embrace racism now than it was during the 1980s.
Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) said accusations of racism against Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), President-elect Donald Trump's attorney general nominee, stem from Democrats’ ongoing “war on whites.”
“It’s really about political power and racial division and what I refer to, on occasion, as the ‘war on whites,’” he said on WBHP 800 Alabama radio, as first reported by CNN Wednesday. "And the Democrats are not shy about lying in order to achieve their political goals.”
You may recognize this batshit insane "war on whites" rhetoric from Rep. Brooks as one of the defining calls of the modern white nationalist movement, self-dubbed the "alt-right." They believe there is a "war on whites," and all the Americans who are not white are getting free stuff and free opportunities that White Folks Today aren't getting and that, therefore, we need another good solid round of putting white people in charge again so that non-white people can be put back in their place.
Rep. Mo Brooks is repeating this notion of minorities waging a "war on whites" on a radio show because, well, you can draw your own conclusions about that.
Brooks added Democrats use allegations of racism to unfairly unite African-American voters against Republicans.
“They are trying to motivate the African-American vote to vote-bloc for Democrats by using every Republican as a racist tool they can envision, even if they have to lie about it.”
You will note that back during the 1980s, the majority of Republicans were pretty clear that nobody was lying about Jeff Session's lifelong record, his record was his record. And Coretta Scott King wrote a letter condemning his nomination, and civil rights leaders blasted it, and people who knew Jeff Sessions came to testify back then, as now, on his record and his statements, and Republicans decided that he was not fit for the job. These days, however, Mo Brooks can't wrap his head around the same evidence and so therefore believes the opposition to Sessions is a war on white people.
Which is precisely what the white supremacists of the far-right, and people like the still-in-the-news Dylann Roof, have been screaming at Republicans like Mo Brooks for some time now. Apparently Brooks has found his base.