.
Is this going to be the pattern from now till November 2020? "Amid Outcry, President Spends Weekend Tripling Down on Racist Tweets"?
— Julia Ioffe (@juliaioffe) July 28, 2019
1. In 1971, Richard Nixon got a call from Ronald Reagan, complaining about African delegates at the UN. "To see those, those monkeys from those African countries—damn them, they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes!” https://t.co/SZmPj8omUy
— Yoni Appelbaum (@YAppelbaum) July 30, 2019
I'd be interested to know what definition of "privacy" embraces "hiding the racist views of public figures" | "the racist portion was apparently withheld to protect Reagan’s privacy" https://t.co/ZPoAbe3pPD
— Eric Rauchway (@rauchway) July 31, 2019
Answer: A vestigial sense among the keepers of St. Ronnie’s legacy that the time for public celebration of blatant racism was not yet ripe.
Historical documentation is always nice, but anybody with the most nominal political awareness knew Ronald Reagan was a racist. He famously started his campaign in a Mississippi town best known for the KKK murder of civil-rights activists. It was widely reported during the campaign that his father-in-law’s John Bircher cronies deliberated groomed Reagan as a prettier, more trainable version of Pat Buchanan or Bill O’Reilly — the ‘old-fashioned blue-collar working-class guy’, aka, someone who’d promote racism as a public virtue.
By the time he was in the Oval Office, the openly racist ‘conservative’ media like National Review were publicly exulting that ‘Morning in America’ was code for ‘send the colored and their commie-liberal supporters back where they belong’, and the squishy-moderate publications like Fred Barnes’ New Republic were half-heartedly suggesting that Ronnie wasn’t *really* a racist, he just pretended to be one to please the ‘hardcore’ Republican voter.
Nixon’s infamous ‘Southern Strategy’ was the HIV infection of the Republican party; Reagan’s success, followed by the Bush terms, was the emergence of full-blown political AIDS; Trump is just the Kaposi’s sarcoma that announces the disease in the most public way possible.
Noteworthy: @WSJ has joined @washingtonpost in calling Trump’s “go back” tweets simply “racist.” Not “allegedly.” Not “opponents say.” Just, these are racist. pic.twitter.com/N4NI5ow1xX
— Jack Newsham (@TheNewsHam) July 28, 2019
It is also jarring to see @WSJ news stories call Trump’s tweets racist, without qualification, and for @WSJopinion to run things like this in the meantime: pic.twitter.com/akgrS5fLvP
— Jack Newsham (@TheNewsHam) July 28, 2019
******
Interesting. And why would overt racism be appealing to his base? https://t.co/r4zkAq3Icz
— Soledad O'Brien (@soledadobrien) July 27, 2019
Racism: The Very Gross Elephant in the GOP’s Room (Part I)Post + Comments (300)