I've seen Republicans trying their hand at revisionist history and claim that it is the Democratic party that is racist. They point to President Lincoln being Republican. They point to racist Democratic leaders of the KKK in the 50's and 60's.
They say this so that they can sleep at night. They revise history to convince themselves of their righteous ness.
And yet here they stand, fighting to defend the very Confederate heritage that Lincoln waged war against. They defend keeping the statue of the Founder of the KKK on one hand, while deriding the KKK on the other.
It is this cognitive dissonance we are exposing in the Republican party with this debate. We are forcing the Republicans to confront their own racist core that they have swept under the rug.
By fighting this fight, we expose racists when they want to push their agenda as quietly as possible.
And that's just what happened.
The Southern Poverty Law Center reports that two Republican state Senators who voted to keep the South Carolina flag, Senator Lee Bright and Senator Danny Verdin III have racist ties.
In May, 2009, Bright spoke at a “Rally for Sovereignty” held at the state house, where he shared the dais with Roan Garcia-Quintana, a white nationalist...Bright’s perennial campaign manager, Christopher Sullivan, is very active in neo-Confederate circles, too. A former national commander of the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), a Confederate heritage organization, whose ranks have been infiltrated by racists for a number of years, Sullivan is also the former editor of the now defunct Southern Partisan, a controversial neo-Confederate magazine that once depicted antebellum slaves as happy and slave traders as benevolent.
In 2000, Verdin was one of the main speakers at a huge “Heritage Celebration” in Columbia, S.C., to defend the flag. At that celebration, Verdin shared the podium with several prominent neo-Confederate hate group leaders as well as white supremacist Kirk Lyons, a white supremacist lawyer who co-founded and serves as “the chief trial counsel” for the Southern Legal Resource Center.
As expected, their racism bleeds into real policy that affects real people. These same senators stoked fear when it came to Obamacare and undocumented immigrants. They talk about "self-deportation" as Mitt Romney did and insult them personally as Donald Trump did:
Verdin attacked undocumented immigrants, stating, “It’s just to be poisoned over time or to be sick over a long period of time or to have a sudden lethal dose of poison or something that brings on a calamity. In this case the malady can be cured. It’s not too late.”
Anyone surprised?