There’s a long, long history of accusations and counter accusation — usually involving race and bigotry that has dotted the political landscape for decades. This has been the case for many of the reasons outlined in the first four parts of his series involving the GOP’s efforts to suppressing the vote of “underdesireables” who may happen to be black or Hispanic Democrats, to use the mcguffin of “School Choice” and the overzealous backlash to Affirmative Action to accelerate re-segregation in education, and the false pyrite of tax cuts to increase and maintain income inequality for minorities.
For these reasons and others it has become fairly common for Democrats to often accuse Conservatives and Republicans of being “Racists and Bigots.” So common in fact that Conservatives have developed a name for it, “Playing the Race Card.” They claim this is only said to “stop the conversation” but with this counter accusation they have sought to delegitimize any claims of racism, sexism and xenophobia as if none were possible in today’s America.
This has become their go to response, but the fact is although there may sometimes be other legitimate motivations for policies that have a disparate result to different groups of people, it also true that sometimes it really is racism, bigotry, sexism, homophobia, islamacism and xenophobia and we need to be able to say so.
Since the first speech announcing his campaign Donald J. Trump has been wallowing in the deplorable.
When do we beat Mexico at the border? They’re laughing at us, at our stupidity. And now they are beating us economically. They are not our friend, believe me. But they’re killing us economically.
The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems.
Thank you. It’s true, and these are the best and the finest. When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.
But I speak to border guards and they tell us what we’re getting. And it only makes common sense. It only makes common sense. They’re sending us not the right people.
It’s coming from more than Mexico. It’s coming from all over South and Latin America, and it’s coming probably— probably— from the Middle East. But we don’t know. Because we have no protection and we have no competence, we don’t know what’s happening. And it’s got to stop and it’s got to stop fast.
Islamic terrorism is eating up large portions of the Middle East. They’ve become rich. I’m in competition with them.
Looking at any group of people and only seeing the worst among them, then exaggerating the number and influence of that subset of the worst examples in order to implement a massive policy of systematic bias is exactly deplorable, it is exactly bigotry, it is exactly racism.
And then he said that an American born judge with Mexican parents could judge his case fairly.
I’m gonna build a wall. He has Mexican Heritage.
Saying that a person, because of their parents, can’t think clearly or fairly even when that person had previously prosecuted Mexican cartels and they had put a price on his head for it, is exactly deplorable, it is exactly racism.
And this wasn’t the only time, he followed this with attacking a Muslim Gold Star family claiming that the mother couldn’t speak because her “religion wouldn’t let her”. not because she was overcome by terrible grief and that the father criticized him because he “sympathizes with radical Islam” — which would be the same people who killed his son.
Yes, that’s deplorable.
There are reporters who’ve followed the Trump campaign for the last 15 months and they’ve had a good look at the deplorables up close.
Henry Gomez, a political reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, has decided to share some of the truly deplorable messages he’s received from a certain basket of Trump voters over the past several months.
In particular, Gomez notes that many Trump supporters who email him point to his Hispanic heritage as a major reason why he shouldn’t be allowed to report on Trump’s campaign.
“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that, recently, readers have told me I should be ‘on the other side of the wall’ and that my background should ‘disqualify’ me from covering this election,” writes Gomez, whose father is of Mexican descent. “Some observers have suggested the Trump candidacy is like an online comments section come to life. But this was different. These came via email. From people using their real names.”
- “Just another liberal ass!!!!! u people should all be on the other side of the wall”
- ” Your obvious latino background (dark, short, fat) should preclude/disqualify you from the political scene in this presidential election.”
And we have video confirmation of this via the New York Times.
Build the Wall. Fuck those dirty beaners.
Fuck Political Correctness.
Fuck Islam, Fuck ‘em. God bless Donald Trump.
Muslim is not a religion, partner. It’s an ideology. You don’t come and talk about America when you’re supporting Muslims.
Sieg Heil.
Fuck that nigger [President Obama].
Get out of here you fag!
Send them bastards back, I’m sure that paperwork comes in Spanish.
Ignorance and Immigrants they mix together.
If you don’t speak english and don’t contribute, get out.
Hillary is a whore.
Hillary Clinton needs to get her ass spanked.
Hang the Bitch.
And yet Donald Trump now claims that Hillary saying this type of thing is deplorable is now a “vicious demonization”, that no ones ever heard anything like his. “This was the most explicit attack on portions of the American people by a major party candidate” he says on CNN talking to the National Guard as I type this.
“I was shocked to see Hillary Clinton attacks, smear, slander, demean that wonderful people who support me. She used these vile words to bully people out of seeking change. People who want to protect our borders are not bigots. People who want to fight radical islamic terrorism are not Islamaphobes. People who want to support our police are not racists.
Sure some of them aren’t, Hillary made that point too, but a lot of them actually are. And he’s said more. Much more.
“Isn’t it disgraceful that Hillary Clinton makes the worst mistake of the political season and instead of owning up to this grotesque attack on American voters, she tries to turn it around with a pathetic rehash of the words and insults used in her failing campaign?” Trump said in a statement. “For the first time in a long while, her true feelings came out, showing bigotry and hatred for millions of Americans.”
He’s even got an ad out about it.
You see that? Donald Trump who has himself been saying actual bigoted things for months now, while doing it has managed to attract violent mobs to his rallies, the support of former KKK grand wizard David Duke and many White Nationalist actually has the nerve to claim that Hillary is the bigot for pointing them out?
The effort to plant the seeds of white nationalism in the political mainstream, where they might blossom into pro-white political coalitions that appeal to a broader swath of Caucasian voters, will not be easy, according to the chairman of the American Nazi Party.
But Rocky Suhayda thinks there is one political figure who presents a “real opportunity” to lessen the load.
Who is it? Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president.
“Now, if Trump does win, okay, it’s going to be a real opportunity for people like white nationalists, acting intelligently to build upon that, and to go and start — you know how you have the black political caucus and what not in Congress and everything — to start building on something like that,” Suhayda declared on his radio program last month.
That’s how the race card gambit works. Somebody accuses you of bias, even if what their saying is absolutely true the best tactic is to counter-accuse them and we remain stalled in a stalemate.
This is exactly what Tea Party Leader Mark Williams responded to the NAACP when they pointed out various racist signs and messages at their rallies, counter claiming that they were the real racists.
Mark Williams, the flamethrower leading the battle against the Ground Zero mosque, was kicked out of the National Tea Party Federation Saturday for a racist blog post.
He shrugged off the diss, calling it "grandstanding" from a "minor player on the fringe."
A California radio host and leader of the Tea Party Express, Williams had labeled the Manhattan boro president a "Jewish Uncle Tom" and President Obama an "Indonesian Muslim turned welfare thug."
But when he posted a satirical letter supposedly from "the Colored People" to President Lincoln praising slavery, that apparently crossed the line.
And then you had Andrew Brietbart’s crusade against the NAACP by way of falsely accusing them of Racism using a video tape of former HUD staffer Shirley Sherrod.
Breitbart’s argument is simple and straightforward: Regardless of what else is in Sherrod’s speech, the first video BigGovernment.com features Sherrod telling a tale of racism that is received by the NAACP audience with laughter and cheers. They weren’t cheering redemption; they were cheering discrimination. Upon hearing the cheers, Sherrod fails to offer any immediate clarification and even smiles right along with them.
Breitbart’s main objective by releasing the video was to call out the NAACP, an organization who has recently gone to great lengths to condemn the Tea Party’s alleged racism, for sanctioning racism in it’s own organization. Sherrod immediately became the scapegoat for the embarrassed NAACP and USDA, but she was never the target, the NAACP itself was, and the delight the audience took in the racist part of Sherrod’s speech leaves them exposed.
Actually the point of Sherrod’s story was that the person who came to her for help was clearly a bigot by his own admission and actions, he was only there because he was so desperate and that’s why she initially chose not to help him and why the members of the NAACP cheered. She later changed her mind out of the goodness of her own heart and the desperation of his plight and eventually they became friends.
And then Trump goes and hires former Brietbarter and bigoted alt-right maven Steve Bannon as his campaign CEO.
White nationalists today invest a lot of energy worrying about growing Hispanic and Muslim populations in the U.S. Turns out, Breitbart News spends a lot of time worrying about those things, too. And in Bannon, they see a media-friendly, ethno-nationalist fellow traveler.
And finally we have Trump’s pathetically stereotyped insulting “appeal” to black voters.
“Poverty. Rejection. Horrible education. No housing. No homes. No ownership. Crime at levels nobody has seen,” said Trump, painting a dystopian picture of black life for rallygoers. “You can go to war zones in countries that we’re fighting and it’s safer than living in some of our inner cities. They’re run by the Democrats.”
Trump continued. “Look, it is a disaster the way African Americans are living,” he said, erroneously suggesting that most black Americans live in inner cities. “We’ll get rid of the crime. You’ll be able to walk down the street without getting shot. Right now, you walk down the street, you get shot.”
As big a problem as violent crime is in the nation’s most segregated and impoverished communities, the world Trump describes doesn’t exist for the vast majority of black Americans in 2016. For them, as for most Americans, crime is at historic lows, and cities are safer than they’ve ever been.
Despite this, Trump seems to envision an America where all blacks live in cities that are one part the Detroit riots of 1967, one part the Los Angeles riots of 1992, and one part John Carpenter’s Escape From New York.*
What we see here is a pattern of twisting bigotry into something else. Of making the people who call bigots out — into the the “real” bigots, of making the people who stand up against racism, into the racists. It’s somehow worse to point out bigotry than to actually be a bigot. It’s true orwellian double-think.
But in order for this to work in this case you have to ignore all the rest of what Clinton said in the second portion of her statement that many people supporting Trump had their own legitimate reasons for doing so, over the economy or many other issues.
"I know there are only 60 days left to make our case -- and don't get complacent, don't see the latest outrageous, offensive, inappropriate comment and think, well, he's done this time. We are living in a volatile political environment. You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic -- you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people -- now 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks -- they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.”
"But the other basket -- and I know this because I see friends from all over America here -- I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas -- as well as, you know, New York and California -- but that other basket of people are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they're just desperate for change. It doesn't really even matter where it comes from. They don't buy everything he says, but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won't wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they're in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well."
And the fact is that “half” — which is the only portion of her statement she’s apologized for — is probably low-baling it.
Co-host Joe Scarborough read what he called a “horrifying” a Public Policy Polling survey that outlined South Carolina Trump supporters. At the time the poll was taken, 80 percent wanted a ban on Muslims entering the U.S. Just over 30 percent wanted to ban homosexuals from coming into the U.S. Over 60 percent wanted a national database of all Muslims in the country. Frighteningly, 40 percent supported shutting down all mosques and 33 percent think the religion should be illegal.
Seriously. Ban all of them from the country, not just new ones coming in but all of them that are here already. Shut down the entire religion, make it illegal? How exactly is that not Islamaphobia?
“The Trump statement is very difficult to wrap my mind around,” said Eddie Glaude Jr., a religion and African-American studies professor at Princeton University. And I’ve been saying on this show for weeks now, what does this election say about the American electorate. And we do know this, 60 percent of Trump’s supporters believe or have a negative view of Islam. Seventy-six percent of his supporters believe that we should build a wall or ban Muslims from the country. Nearly 50 percent of Trump’s supporters have a negative view of African Americans. Over 40 percent think we’re lazy or we’re criminals.”
Numerically, the figures are not in Trump’s favor as RedState notes via Huffpo.
This is not exactly news to anyone who has spent more than about five minutes on Facebook or Twitter in the last year, but Trump's supporters are more likely to self-identify as racist, and a new poll proves it. Now, this is not a matter of saying, they say and think things that most reasonable people would agree are racist, this is a matter of saying they flat out told the pollster that they like white people way more than they like Hispanics or black people.
Overall, Trump supporters on average responded that they felt 75% warm or positive about whites (as opposed to 70% for all respondents), but only 60% warm about blacks (as opposed to 68% for other Republicans and 67% of all respondents total) and only 55% warm about Hispanics (as opposed to 69% of other Republicans and 67% overall). Here's the full survey results:
Listen, we can argue all day about what's racist, what isn't, but "I like whites more than blacks and a lot more than Hispanics" is 100% the dictionary definition of racist. If that's not racist, then there is no such thing as racist. And the fact that these people are willing to say it out loud pretty much hammers the point home with emphasis: they are racist and proud.
It is absolutely true that there are bigots among the Trump camp. No, it’s not all of them, it might not even be most of them in some cases because as I’ve said and Secretary Clinton has said there are people who may want to close the border and ban Muslims from entering the country without being bigots. They simply have common cause with bigots. There are people who are simply worried about America’s future and although we may disagree with their methods they don’t all deserve to have their motives impugned.
However, it is also clear that those who are racists, and are more than willing to admit it openly and loudly, are all on Donald Trump’s side. They are ALL IN and they’ve been in the GOP for decades, while the rest of the GOP has been covering for them, and attempting to pretend they don’t exist, but they do.
What’s worse than the racists themselves is the apology tour for them, and all this is the crazy pretense by Trump and his sycophants constantly playing a game of denial and diversion while David Duke and packs of White Nationalist along with the Alt-Right chortle up their sleeve as their causes and rationales are piped more and more directly into the mainstream and the ability to criticize them, or even identify them, is further and further diminished.
No, not all of the GOP are racists, but just about all the admitted racists are in the GOP.