Rightwing Politics

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Table of Contents

Southern Strategy
Dog Whistle Politics
Rightwing Media
The Religious Right
Tea Party
GOP Pathway to Trump
Trump
Trump’s Strategies
Trump White Supremacist Appointments
Trump Supporters
Modern GOP Issues
White Terrorism

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Southern Strategy

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1st pic: Nixon, one of the founders of the Southern Strategy at a campaign rally
2nd pic: “Solid South” or “Southern bloc” politically opposed all civil rights legislation and desegregation

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Over 50 Years of Southern Strategy

“In 2010, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, Michael Steele, acknowledged that “for the last 40-plus years we had a ‘Southern Strategy’ that alienated many minority voters by focusing on the white male vote in the South.”

Steele was echoing the remarks of another head of the Republican National Committee, Ken Mehlman. In 2005, he used a speech before the NAACP to admit that his party had exploited racial divisions, and had been wrong to do so. “By the seventies and into the eighties and nineties,” Mehlman said from a prepared text, “Republicans gave up on winning the African American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization. I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong.” Ian Haney Lopez – Dog Whistle Politics

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Vox: How the Republican Party went from Lincoln to Trump

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8VOM8ET1WU&t=192s

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Rise of Dixiecrats

“Solid South” or “Southern bloc” politically opposed all civil rights legislation and desegregation

• Redeemers (1870s to 1910)
  • After Reconstruction failed, white supremacist Democrats (many of them ex-confederates) took complete political control back in the Southern States through marginalizing and terrorizing black people
• Truman’s army desegregation and the Rise of the State’s Rights Party (1948)
  • President Truman’s desegregated the Army and voiced support for more desegregation
    • 35 southern delegates left the 1948 DNC Convention and formed the Dixiecrat “States Rights” Party
      • Platform focused on preserving segregation and opposing civil rights, including anti-lynching bills
        • They elected Strom Thurmond as their presidential candidate
        • Strom Thurmond was a South Carolina Senator from 1954 until 2003
• 1948 Election
  • The Dixiecrats won Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and South Carolina
    • Won 2.4% of the popular vote — more than 1.1 million votes nationwide
• Continued Platform in Democrat Party
  • After 1948 election majority of Dixiecrats returned to the Democrat party but maintained same agenda
    • “Virtually no desegregation occurred in any states of the former Confederacy until 1957, leading one black congressman to concede that the South had won “the first round in the battle for compliance” with Brown.” Equal Justice Initiative
    • They had an enormous support from southern white voters at a time when blacks were denied the right to vote
      • Which often gave them more representation power in congress and more electoral votes
• Continued Federal Desegregation
  • 1954 – Brown v. Board of Education ruled that segregation was unconstitutional.
  • 1956: -After Montgomery Bus Boycott, SCOTUS declared Alabama/Montgomery bus laws unconstitutional
  • 1960 – Boynton v. Virginia ruled segregated public buses were unconstitutional, launched Freedom Riders
  • 1964 – Civil Rights Act – outlaws discrimination and ended legal segregation
• After 1964 the “Solid South” would never vote for a Democrat president again

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Beginning of the Southern Strategy

• Southern strategy
  • GOP plan to win white voters by appealing to racism/resentment against black progress
    • Often using socially acceptable “coded” racism, like Dog Whistle Politics
      • During a time when “explicit” racism was becoming socially unacceptable
• George Wallace (1950-60s)
  • Transitioned “pro” to “anti” civil rights to win southern white votes
    • After losing 1958 AL Governor race from rejecting KKK endorsement/receiving NAACP endorsement
      • “I was out-niggered by John Patterson. I’ll tell you here and now, I will never be out-niggered again“ Wallace
• University of Alabama publicity stunt
  • Wallace stood in doorway against federally court ordered integration
  • On a televised speech he made it about “illegal usurpation of power by the Central Government” instead of white supremacy
    • Wallace received fan mail from 100,000s of white people all over the country (not just South)
  • Wallace realized 2 things
    • Overtures to racial resentment would resonate across the country
    • The key was to use seemingly non-racial language (dog whistle politics)
      • Stopped using socially unacceptable terms: segregation, Jim Crow, N-word
      • Started using socially acceptable terms: States rights, federal overreach, law and order
    • “Wallace pioneered a kind of soft porn racism in which fear and hate could be mobilized without mentioning race itself except to deny that one is a racist” Ian Haney Lopez – Dog Whistle Politics
• Wallace gave white people the ability to oppose black equality and integration
  • Without having to admit to others or even realize themselves, their racial attitudes
    • Made racism socially acceptable again

“you know, I started off talking about schools and highways and prisons and taxes—and I couldn’t make them listen. Then I began talking about niggers—and they stomped the floor.” George Wallace

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Voting Breakdown of 1964 Civil Rights Act

• Public perception in 1962
  • Perceived Republicans and Democrats to be similarly committed to racial justice
  • 1962 survey asked which party is more likely to see black people get fair treatment in jobs and housing
    • 7% of the public said Democrats
    • 3% said Republicans
    • While over half could perceive no difference between the two.
  • The 1964 presidential election marked the beginning of the realignment we live with today
    • 1964 study found
      • 60% of the public identified Democrats as more likely to pursue fair treatment
      • 7% who so identified the Republican Party
• South
  • 94 Southern Democrats in the House
    • 7 voted for the bill
  • 10 Southern Republicans in the House
    • Zero voted for the bill
  • 21 Southern Senators (Democrat or Republican)
    • Only 1 voted in favor of the Civil Rights Act (Texas Democrat)
  • 95% of Southern senators opposed it
• North
  • Northern House Democrats voted for the bill 145-9
  • Northern House Republicans voted for the bill 138-24
  • 90% of non-Southern senators supported

Majority of both parties supported except the South

“I think we just delivered the South to the Republican party for a long time to come.” Lyndon Johnson said after signing the 1964 Civil Rights Act

“He (LBJ) failed to anticipate that the GOP would purposefully construct a strategy around covert racial appeals that would encompass the whole country and would endure for more than half a century. Johnson himself won that Fall, but his 1964 election marked the last time a majority of whites voted for a Democratic presidential candidate. Republicans have carried white majorities in every presidential election since, typically by commanding margins.” Ian Haney Lopez – Dog Whistle Politics

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Rise of Southern Strategy

• Barry Goldwater in 1964 ran for presidency as the Republican candidate
  • Anti-New Deal and Anti-communism but at first didn’t oppose civil rights
    • In 1957 and again in 1960 he voted in favor of federal civil rights legislation
  • By 1961 decided the key to electoral success lay in winning southern white voters
    • By appealing to racist sentiments in white voters, even at the cost of black support
    • “We’re not going to get the Negro vote as a bloc in 1964 and 1968, so we ought to go hunting where the ducks are.” Barry Goldwater
• 1964 Civil Rights Act
  • Goldwater was 1 of 5 non southern senators to vote against it
  • Used his vote on the campaign as a stand in favor of “states’ rights” and “freedom of association”
    • Like Wallace, Goldwater learned how to talk about oppressing black people without ever mentioning race
• 1964 election results
  • Despite
    • Being from the party of Lincoln and Eisenhower’s forced integration
    • Campaigning against the new deal which helped the South more than most regions
  • Goldwater’s Southern Strategy won most of the South
    • The South chose the southern strategy over their own livelihoods
  • He didn’t do so well in the North and Lyndon Johnson won
• Consolidating white racist voters
  • The combination of
    • the 1964 Civil Rights Act coming from a Democrat President
    • Barry Goldwater’s anti-civil rights campaign coming from the GOP
  • Help steer white southerners to the GOP concentrating the nation’s most racist voters in one party

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Southern Strategy Wins its First Presidency

• Richard Nixon ran for the GOP presidency in 1968
  • Nixon at first had some “pro” civil rights platforms
    • Basic Universal Income Bill, suburb integration w/ HUD Secretary George Romney
  • George Wallace ran as an independent opponent using the Southern Strategy
  • During election Wallace polling more support in South than either candidate
• Nixon moves towards the Southern Strategy to win votes
  • With help of H. R. Haldeman (Nixon’s Chief of Staff), Harry Dent, Strom Thurmond, Nixon adopted the Southern Strategy
  • Used several dog whistle politics like:
    • “states rights” and “forced busing” to oppose federal desegregation
    • “law and order” to oppose/criminalize the civil rights movement
    • “[The whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognized this while not appearing to.” H.R. Haldeman – Nixon’s Chief Staff

“Dismissing these protesters as criminals shifted the issue from a defense of white supremacy to a more neutral-seeming concern with “order,” while simultaneously stripping the activists of moral stature…Ultimately, the language of law and order justified a more “quiet” form of violence in defense of the racial status quo, replacing lynchings with mass arrests for trespassing and delinquency…Exploiting the growing panic that equated social protest with social chaos, one of Nixon’s campaign commercials showed flashing images of demonstrations, riots, police, and violence, over which a deep voice intoned: “Let us recognize that the first right of every American is to be free from domestic violence. So I pledge to you, we shall have order in the United States.”” Ian Haney-Lopez – How the GOP became the “White Man’s Party”

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Southern Strategy in Nixon’s Presidency

• Nixon continued policies of racial division:
  • He abandoned his pursuit of a flat wealth transfer to the poor
  • Repeatedly emphasized law and order issues
  • Railed against forced busing in the North
  • Reversed federal government’s position on Southern school integration
  • Fought own HUD on desegregating the suburbs
• June 1971, President Nixon declared a “war on drugs”
  • Increased the size and presence of federal drug control agencies
    • Pushed through measures such as mandatory sentencing and no-knock warrants
  • A top Nixon aide, John Ehrlichman, later admitted:
    • “You want to know what this was really all about. The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying. We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
• In 1972 election, Nixon’s ran a full dog whistle campaign
  • Netted him 67% of the white vote against George McGovern.
  • Defeated by the Southern strategy, McGovern said this:
    • “What is the Southern Strategy? It is this. It says to the South: Let the poor stay poor, let your economy trail the nation, forget about decent homes and medical care for all your people, choose officials who will oppose every effort to benefit the many at the expense of the few—and in return, we will try to overlook the rights of the black man, appoint a few southerners to high office, and lift your spirits by attacking the ‘eastern establishment’ whose bank accounts we are filling with your labor and your industry.”

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Nixon’s Dog Whistle Strategy

“Nixon decided to appeal to these Wallace-type segregationists while also attracting all those Americans refusing to live in “dangerous” black neighborhoods, refusing to believe that black schools could be equal, refusing to accept busing initiatives to integrate schools, refusing to individualize black negativity, refusing to believe that black welfare mothers were deserving, and refusing to champion black power over majority black counties and cities, all those racist who refused to believe they were racist in 1968.

Nixon framed his campaign, as a close adviser explained, to allow a potential supporter to “avoid admitting to himself that he was attracted by racist appeal.” How would he do that? Easy. Demean black people and praise white people, without ever saying black people or white people. Historians have named this the “southern strategy”. In fact, it was, and remained over the next five decades, the national Republican strategy as the GOP tried to unite northern and southern anti-black racist, war hawks, and fiscal and social conservatives.” Ibram Kendi, Stamped From the Beginning

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Southern Strategy Solidifies into an Official GOP Policy

• Kevin Phillips
  • Leading Nixon strategist
• 1969 published “The Emerging Republican Majority”
  • Nearly 500 pages with 47 maps and 143 charts
    • Outlined Southern Strategy
  • Argued that most whites supporting New Deal progressivism
    • Would leave Dem Party as it identified with supporting black people
  • Argued GOP could capture the majority of voters for decades
    • If they went after white middle class racist vote in South, West and suburbia
      • Especially during civil rights struggles
    • Calculated GOP did need non-white votes to win
• 1970, Democrats “Real Majority”
  • Published by 2 Democrat pollsters
  • Argued that social issues and supporting civil rights
    • Now divides the party and loses white votes

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Modern Southern Strategy

• Lee Atwater
  • Political strategist for Ronald Reagan
  • Campaign manager for George H. W. Bush
  • 1981 Republican National Committee Chairman
• Explained evolution of the G.O.P.’s Southern Strategy in a 1981 interview
  • “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 forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.” Lee Atwater

Exclusive: Lee Atwater’s Infamous 1981 Interview on the Southern Strategy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_8E3ENrKrQ

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Modern Southern Strategy: Reagan

• Opposed Civil Rights Legislation
  • 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act
• Infamous Dog Whistle Politics
  • Welfare Queen
    • Implies black people are lazy and abusive with social programs like welfare
      • Implies gov assistance for black people makes them dependents
        • And wastes “hard-working” (white) Americans tax dollars
        • Same view is not applied to white (worthy) people receiving gov assistance
      • In reality today
        • White people make up 42% of poor, receive 69% of government benefits
        • Black people make up 22% of poor, receive 14% of government benefit
      • On the presidential campaign trail, Reagan shared the story of Chicago’s Linda Taylor, a Black woman charged with welfare fraud. “Her tax-free income is over $150,000,” Reagan liked to say. Actually, Taylor had been charged with defrauding the state of $8000, an exceptional amount for something that rarely happened. But truth did not matter to the Reagan campaign as much as feeding the White backlash to Black Power” Ibram Kendi, Stamped From the Beginning
  • States Rights, “Let’s Make America Great Again”, Reverse Racism
    • Attacks on affirmative action, civil rights bills, desegregation efforts, etc
  • Tough on crime, War on Drugs
    • Tough on black and Latinx communities
    • Used as a distraction for neoliberal policies
  • Cutting Taxes, Big Government
    • Drastically cut social safety net programs, HUD, public heath programs, etc.
      • Programs many white people falsely felt black people were abusing
    • Lowered the top tax rate from 70 to 28%

“Reagans’ campaign against welfare helped make the case for tax cuts by successfully using social programs like welfare, and its implicit connection to integration, to convince voters that the real danger in their lives, came from a looming, intrusive government…During the Reagan era, for the first time since the onset of the Great Depression, significant cultural space opened up to present government, rather than concentrated wealth, as the greatest threat to freedom face by the middle class.   In turn, massive tax cuts were sold as the appropriate way to restrain a looming, intrusive state… the point is not that Reagan or other republican administration have reduced the size of government (on the contrary, they’ve repeatedly vastly expanded federal power and dramatically increased the national debt, not least through unsustainable tax giveaways to the rich). The point rather, is that have sold tax cuts to the rich, and indeed the whole agenda of reduced regulation and slashed services, as an expression of hostility toward liberal government. “Ian Haney Lopez

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Reagan’s Dog Whistle Campaign

“To great effect Reagan echoed white frustration in race-neutral terms through implicit racial appeals. His “colorblind” rhetoric on crime, welfare, taxes and states’ rights was clearly understood by white (and black) voters as having a racial dimension, though claims to that effect were impossible to prove. The absence of explicitly racist rhetoric afforded the racial nature of his coded appeals a certain plausible deniability.

For example, when Reagan kicked off his presidential campaign at the annual Neshoba County Fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi, the town where three civil rights activists were murdered in 1964, he assured the crowd “I believe in states’ rights.” and promised to restore to states and local governments the power that properly belong to them.

His critics promptly alleged that he was signaling a racial message to his audience, suggesting allegiance with those who resisted desegregation, but Reagan firmly denied it, forcing liberals into a position that would soon become familiar arguing that something is racist but finding it impossible to prove in the absence of explicitly racist language” Michelle Alexander – The New Jim Crow

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Modern Southern Strategy: Bushes and Clinton

• George H. W. Bush
  • PC, Liberal Elite, Free Speech Dog Whistles
    • 1980s the Political Right created a national ant-PC/anti-free speech scare campaign
      • Used this myth to divide the working class from the Democrats “liberal elite”
    • GOP able to portray white people who were perpetuating systemic and implicit racism
      • As victims of the “thought police” whenever someone challenged them to be less racist
    • May 1991, President Bush gave a commencement speech at the University of Michigan.
      • “Ironically, on the 200th anniversary of our Bill of Rights, we find free speech under assault throughout the United States…The notion of political correctness has ignited controversy across the land…In their own Orwellian way, crusades that demand correct behavior crush diversity in the name of diversity.” Bush Senior
    • Tough on Crime, Willie Horton campaign ad
      • Willie Horton political ad turned 12% of the elective in 1 month to Bush in 1988 election
• Clinton
  • New Democrat, tough on crime, War on Drugs, anti-welfare, illegal aliens
    • Wanted to win back white swing voters by supporting conservative/neoliberal policies over civil rights
    • Staged a confrontation with Jessie Jackson, Ricky Rector execution
    • Significantly increased mass incarceration, created 3-stike rule, dismantle Welfare
      • Clinton policies on crime resulted in the largest increases in federal and state prison inmates ever
• Bush Jr
  • “Compassionate conservatism” until 9/11
  • War on Terror Dog Whistle
    • “The “terror” that many politicians want us to go to war against are actually people of Arab and Muslim descent, who “for no reason at all,” hate everything the US stands Proponents of fighting the “war on terror” often push for more military funding, invasions into other countries, and stricter immigration laws – all in the name of keeping (white) Americans safe from evil Arab and Muslim people” Jennifer Loubriel – Everyday Feminism

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Modern Southern Strategy: Romney and the Tea Party

• Romney
  • During the 2012 half of Romney’s advertising budget
    • Produced misleading welfare/big gov dog whistle ads
    • Despite a terrible campaign he still won 3 out of 5 white voters

• Tea Party
  • Big gov/wefare/bailouts
    • Meant liberals giving “white” money to “unworthy” minorities
      • Programs that helped “worthy” white people were okay
    • “Certainly some of the theme’s power came from its opposition to taxes, especially taxes presented as subsidizing “bad behavior”. This was the familiar dog whistle complaint that money from hardworking Americans was being siphoned off to reward minority freeloaders. A few months earlier, rightwing provocateur Ann Coulter had tied this theme directly to the foreclosure crisis, penning an article titled “They Gave Your Mortgage to a Less Qualified Minority” The right was building a narrative that blamed poor non whites, not powerful banks, for crashing the financial sector and Santelli was echoing this absurdity.” Ian Haney Lopez – Dog Whistle Politics
  • Immigration, Arab Muslims, Obama
  • Voter Fraud
    • Koch Brothers funded many tea party groups organized around fakevoter fraud
      • Went into black community voter booths and harassed black voters
    • Voter fraud became a dog whistle for black voters taking advantage of the system
      • Much like welfare

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Modern Southern Strategy: Trump

• Trump uses dog whistles but does not avoid explicit racism
  • “Trump turns GOP dog whistles into bullhorns” Editorial Board USA TODAY
• Trump’s Dog whistles
  • Anti-PC/pro free speech – supporting the right to racism
  • Inner city – Blacks and Hispanics live in dangerous, poor, crime ridden cities
  • Law and order – People of color and liberals are lawless.
  • Criminal illegal aliens/animals/infestation – Scary and dangerous undocumented brown people
  • Radical Islamic Terrorism/Sharia Law – Islamophobia
  • Welfare reform – black people take advantage of government assistance/white people’s hard earned money
  • Cutting Taxes – cutting social programs, especially communities of color
• Anti-democracy dog whistles
  • Voting is Rigged – pushing voter fraud myth
  • Fake Media – attack on his critics

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Saloon: How the GOP became the “White Man’s Party”

“Few names conjure the recalcitrant South, fighting integration with fire-breathing fury, like that of George Wallace. The central image of this “redneck poltergeist,” as one biographer referred to him, is of Wallace during his inauguration as governor of Alabama in January 1963, before waves of applause and the rapt attention of the national media, committing himself to the perpetual defense of segregation. Speaking on a cold day in Montgomery, Wallace thundered his infamous call to arms: “Today I have stood, where once Jefferson Davis stood, and took an oath to my people. It is very appropriate then that from this Cradle of the Confederacy, this very Heart of the Great Anglo-Saxon Southland … we sound the drum for freedom. … In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny . . . and I say … segregation now … segregation tomorrow … segregation forever!”

The story of dog whistle politics begins with George Wallace. But it does not start with Wallace as he stood that inauguration day. Rather, the story focuses on who Wallace was before, and on whom he quickly became.

Before that January day, Wallace had not been a rabid segregationist; indeed, by Southern standards, Wallace had been a racial moderate. He had sat on the board of trustees of a prominent black educational enterprise, the Tuskegee Institute. He had refused to join the walkout of Southern delegates from the 1948 Democratic convention when they protested the adoption of a civil rights platform. As a trial court judge, he earned a reputation for treating blacks civilly—a breach of racial etiquette so notable that decades later J.L. Chestnut, one of the very few black lawyers in Alabama at the time, would marvel that in 1958 “George Wallace was the first judge to call me ‘Mr.’ in a courtroom.” The custom had been instead to condescendingly refer to all blacks by their first name, whatever their age or station. When Wallace initially ran for governor in 1958, the NAACP endorsed him; his opponent had the blessing of the Ku Klux Klan.

In the fevered atmosphere of the South, roiled by the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision forbidding school segregation, the moderate Wallace lost in his first campaign for governor. Years later, the victor would reconstruct the campaign, distilling a simple lesson: the “primary reason I beat [Wallace] was because he was considered soft on the race question at the time. That’s the primary reason.”4 This lesson was not lost on Wallace, and in turn, would reshape American politics for the next half-century. On the night he lost the 1958 election, Wallace sat in a car with his cronies, smoking a cigar, rehashing the loss, and putting off his concession speech. Finally steeling himself, Wallace eased opened the car door to go inside and break the news to his glum supporters. He wasn’t just going to accept defeat, though, he was going to learn from it. As he snuffed out his cigar and stepped into the evening, he turned back: “Well, boys,” he vowed, “no other son-of-a-bitch will ever out-nigger me again.”

Four years later, Wallace ran as a racial reactionary, openly courting the support of the Klan and fiercely committing himself to the defense of segregation. It was as an arch-segregationist that Wallace won the right to stand for inauguration in January 1963, allowing him to proclaim segregation today, tomorrow, and forever. Summarizing his first two campaigns for governor of Alabama, Wallace would later recall, “you know, I started off talking about schools and highways and prisons and taxes—and I couldn’t make them listen. Then I began talking about niggers—and they stomped the floor.”

Wallace was far from the only Southern politician to veer to the right on race in the 1950s. The mounting pressure for black equality destabilized a quiescent political culture that had assumed white supremacy was unassailable, putting pressure on all public persons to stake out their position for or against integration. Wallace figures here for a different reason, one that becomes clear in how he upheld his promise to protect segregation.

During his campaign, Wallace had vowed to stand in schoolhouse doorways to personally bar the entrance of black students into white institutions.

In June 1963, he got his chance. The federal courts had ordered the integration of the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, and US Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach flew down from Washington, DC, to enforce the order. More than 200 national reporters and all three of the major broadcast networks were on hand for the promised confrontation. From behind a podium, Wallace stood in the June heat and raised his hand to peremptorily bar the approach of Katzenbach. Then he read a seven-minute peroration that avoided the red-meat language of racial supremacy and instead emphasized “the illegal usurpation of power by the Central Government.” In footage carried on all three networks, the nation watched as Wallace hectored Katzenbach, culminating with Wallace declaiming, “I do hereby denounce and forbid this illegal and unwarranted action by the Central Government.”8 It was pure theater, even down to white lines chalked on the ground to show where the respective thespians should stand (Katzenbach approached more closely than expected, but ultimately that only heightened the drama). Wallace knew from the start that he would back down, and after delivering his stem-winder, that is what he did. Within two hours, as expected, the University of Alabama’s first two black students were on campus.

Over the next week, the nation reacted. More than 100,000 telegrams and letters flooded the office of the Alabama governor. More than half of them were from outside of the South. Did they condemn him? Five out of every 100 did. The other 95 percent praised his brave stand in the schoolhouse doorway.

The nation’s reaction was an epiphany for Wallace, or perhaps better, three thunderbolts that together convinced Wallace to reinvent himself yet again. First, Wallace realized with a shock that hostility toward blacks was not confined to the South. “He had looked out upon those white Americans north of Alabama and suddenly been awakened by a blinding vision: ‘They all hate black people, all of them. They’re all afraid, all of them. Great god! That’s it! They’re all Southern. The whole United States is Southern.’” Wallace suddenly knew that overtures to racial resentment would resonate across the country.

His second startling realization was that he, George Wallace, had figured out how to exploit that pervasive animosity. The key lay in seemingly non-racial language. At his inauguration, Wallace had defended segregation and extolled the proud Anglo-Saxon Southland, thereby earning national ridicule as an unrepentant redneck. Six months later, talking not about stopping integration but about states’ rights and arrogant federal authority—and visually aided by footage showing him facing down a powerful Department of Justice official rather than vulnerable black students attired in their Sunday best—Wallace was a countrywide hero. “States’ rights” was a paper-thin abstraction from the days before the Civil War when it had meant the right of Southern states to continue slavery. Then, as a rejoinder to the demand for integration, it meant the right of Southern states to continue laws mandating racial segregation—a system of debasement so thorough that it “extended to churches and schools, to housing and jobs, to eating and drinking … to virtually all forms of public transportation, to sports and recreations, to hospitals, orphanages, prisons, and asylums, and ultimately to funeral homes, morgues, and cemeteries.” That’s what “states’ rights” defended, though in the language of state-federal relations rather than white supremacy. Yet this was enough of a fig leaf to allow persons queasy about black equality to oppose integration without having to admit, to others and perhaps even to themselves, their racial attitudes.

“Wallace pioneered a kind of soft porn racism in which fear and hate could be mobilized without mentioning race itself except to deny that one is a racist,” a Wallace biographer argues. The notion of “soft porn racism” ties directly to the thesis of “Dog Whistle Politics.” Wallace realized the need to simultaneously move away from supremacist language that was increasingly unacceptable, while articulating a new vocabulary that channeled old, bigoted ideas. He needed a new form of racism that stimulated the intended audience without overtly transgressing prescribed social limits. The congratulatory telegrams from across the nation revealed to Wallace that he had found the magic formula. Hardcore racism showed white supremacy in disquieting detail. In contrast, the new soft porn racism hid any direct references to race, even as it continued to trade on racial stimulation. As a contemporary of Wallace marveled, “he can use all the other issues—law and order, running your own schools, protecting property rights—and never mention race. But people will know he’s telling them ‘a nigger’s trying to get your job, trying to move into your neighborhood.’ What Wallace is doing is talking to them in a kind of shorthand, a kind of code.”

Finally, a third bolt of lightening struck Wallace: he could be the one! The governor’s mansion in Montgomery need not represent his final destination. He could ride the train of revamped race-baiting all the way to the White House. Wallace ran for president as a third-party candidate in 1964, and then again in 1968, 1972, and 1976. It’s his 1968 campaign that most concerns us, for there Wallace ran against a consummate politician who was quick to appreciate, and adopt, Wallace’s refashioned racial demagoguery: Richard Nixon. We’ll turn to the Wallace-Nixon race soon, but first, another set of weathered bones must be excavated—the remains of Barry Goldwater.

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.

The 1964 presidential election marked the beginning of the realignment we live with today. Where in 1962 both parties were perceived as equally, if tepidly, supportive of civil rights, two years later 60 percent of the public identified Democrats as more likely to pursue fair treatment, versus only 7 percent who so identified the Republican Party. What happened?

Groundwork for the shift was laid in the run-up to the 1964 election by rightwing elements in the Republican Party, which gained momentum from the loss of the then-moderate Nixon to John F. Kennedy in 1960. This faction of the party had never stopped warring against the New Deal. Its standard bearer was Barry Goldwater, a senator from Arizona and heir to a department store fortune. His pampered upbringing and wealth notwithstanding, Goldwater affected a cowboy’s rough-and-tumble persona in his dress and speech, casting himself as a walking embodiment of the Marlboro Man’s disdain for the nanny state. Goldwater and the reactionary stalwarts who rallied to him saw the Democratic Party as a mortal threat to the nation: domestically, because of the corrupting influence of a powerful central government deeply involved in regulating the marketplace and using taxes to reallocate wealth downward, and abroad in its willingness to compromise with communist countries instead of going to war against them. Goldwater himself, though, was no racial throwback. For instance, in 1957 and again in 1960 he voted in favor of federal civil rights legislation. By 1961, however, Goldwater and his partisans had become convinced that the key to electoral success lay in gaining ground in the South, and that in turn required appealing to racist sentiments in white voters, even at the cost of black support. As Goldwater drawled, “We’re not going to get the Negro vote as a bloc in 1964 and 1968, so we ought to go hunting where the ducks are.”

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.”

That same summer of 1963, as key Republican leaders strategized on how to shift their party to the far right racially, the Democrats began to lean in the other direction. Northern constituents were increasingly appalled by the violence, shown almost nightly on broadcast television, of Southern efforts to beat down civil rights protesters. Reacting to the growing clamor that something be done, President Kennedy introduced a sweeping civil rights bill that stirred the hopes of millions that segregation would soon be illegal in employment and at business places open to the public. Despite these hopes, however, prospects for the bill’s passage seemed dim, as the Southern Democrats were loath to support civil rights and retained sufficient power to bottle up the bill. Then on November 22, 1963, Kennedy was assassinated. His vice president, Lyndon Johnson, assumed the presidency vowing to make good on Kennedy’s priorities, chief among them civil rights. Only five days after Kennedy’s death, Johnson in his first address to Congress implored the assembly that “no memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long.” Even under these conditions, it took Johnson’s determined stewardship to overcome three months of dogged legislative stalling before Kennedy’s civil rights bill finally passed the next summer. Known popularly as the 1964 Civil Rights Act, it still stands as the greatest civil rights achievement of the era.

Indicating the persistence of the old, internally divided racial politics of both parties, the act passed with broad bipartisan support and against broad bipartisan opposition—the cleavage was regional, rather than in terms of party affiliation. Roughly 90 percent of non-Southern senators supported the bill, while 95 percent of Southern senators opposed it. Yet, heralding the incipient emergence of the new politics of party alignment along racial lines, Barry Goldwater also voted against the civil rights bill. He was one of only five senators from outside the South to do so. Goldwater claimed he saw a looming Orwellian state moving to coerce private citizens to spy on each other for telltale signs of racism. “To give genuine effect to the prohibitions of this bill,” Goldwater contended from the Senate floor, “bids fair to result in the development of an ‘informer’ psychology in great areas of our national life—neighbor spying on neighbor, workers spying on workers, businessmen spying on businessmen.” This all seemed a little hysterical. More calculatingly, it could not have escaped Goldwater’s attention that voting against a civil rights law associated with blacks, Kennedy, and Johnson would help him “go hunting where the ducks are.”

Running for president in 1964, the Arizonan strode across the South, hawking small-government bromides and racially coded appeals. In terms of the latter, he sold his vote against the 1964 Civil Rights Act as a bold stand in favor of “states’ rights” and “freedom of association.” States’ rights, Goldwater insisted, preserved state autonomy against intrusive meddling from a distant power—though obviously the burning issue of the day was the federal government’s efforts to limit state involvement in racial degradation and group oppression. Freedom of association, Goldwater explained, meant the right of individuals to be free from government coercion in choosing whom to let onto their property—but in the South this meant first and foremost the right of business owners to exclude blacks from hotels, restaurants, movie theaters, and retail establishments. Like Wallace, Goldwater had learned how to talk about blacks without ever mentioning race.

No less than Wallace, Goldwater also demonstrated a flair for political stagecraft. A reporter following Goldwater’s campaign through the South captured some of the spectacle: “to show the country the ‘lily-white’ character of Republicanism in Dixie,” party flaks filled the floor of the football stadium in Montgomery, Alabama, with “a great field of white lilies—living lilies, in perfect bloom, gorgeously arrayed.” To this tableau, the campaign added “seven hundred Alabama girls in long white gowns, all of a whiteness as impossible as the greenness of the field.” Onto this scene emerged Goldwater, first moving this way and then that way through “fifty or so yards of choice Southern womanhood,” before taking the stand to give his speech defending states’ rights and freedom of association. If these coded terms were too subtle for some, no one could fail to grasp the symbolism of the white lilies and the white-gowned women. Much of the emotional resistance to racial equality centered around the fear that black men would become intimate with white women. This scene represented “what the rest of his Southern troops—the thousands in the packed stands, the tens of thousands in Memphis and New Orleans and Atlanta and Shreveport and Greenville—passionately believed they were defending.” Goldwater made sure white Southerners understood he was fighting to protect them and their women against blacks.

How would Goldwater fare in the South? Beyond his racial pandering, that depended on how his anti-New Deal message was received. The Great Depression had devastated the region, which lagged behind the North in industry. Federal assistance to the poor as well as major infrastructure projects, such as the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) that brought electricity for the first time to millions, made Southerners among the New Deal’s staunchest supporters. Yet despite the New Deal’s popularity in the South, Goldwater campaigned against it. While he was willing to pander racially, Goldwater also prided himself on telling audiences what he thought they needed to hear, at least as far as the bracing virtues of rugged individualism were concerned. Thus he made clear, for instance, that he favored selling off the TVA, and also attacked other popular programs. As recounted by Rick Perlstein, a Goldwater political biographer, at one rally in West Virginia, Goldwater “called the War on Poverty ‘plainly and simply a war on your pocketbooks,’ a fraud because only ‘the vast resources of private business’ could produce the wealth to truly slay penury.” Perlstein singled out the tin-eared cruelty of this message: “In the land of the tar-paper shack, the gap-toothed smile, and the open sewer—where the ‘vast resources of private business’ were represented in the person of the coal barons who gave men black lung, then sent them off to die without pensions—the message just sounded perverse. As he left, lines of workmen jeered him.”

Another factor also worked against Goldwater: he was a Republican, and the South reviled the Party of Lincoln. If across the nation neither party was seen as more or less friendly toward civil rights, the South had its own views on the question. There, it was the local Democratic machine that represented white interests, while the GOP was seen as the proximate cause of the Civil War and as the party of the carpetbaggers who had peremptorily ruled the South during Reconstruction. The hostility of generations of white Southerners toward Republicans only intensified with the Republican Eisenhower’s decision to send in federal troops to enforce the Republican Warren’s ruling forbidding school segregation in Brown. Most white Southerners had never voted Republican in their lives, and had vowed—like their parents and grandparents before them— that they never would.

Ultimately, however, these handicaps barely impeded Goldwater’s performance in the South. He convinced many Southern voters to vote Republican for the first time ever, and in the Deep South, comprised of those five states with the highest black populations, Goldwater won outright. The anti-New Deal Republican carried Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina, states in which whites had never voted for a Republican president in more than miniscule numbers. This was a shocking transformation, one that can only be explained by Goldwater’s ability to transmit a set of codes that white voters readily understood as a promise to protect racial segregation. It seemed that voters simply ignored Goldwater’s philosophy of governance as well as his party affiliation and instead rewarded his hostility toward civil rights. In this sense, Goldwater’s conservatism operated in the South less like a genuine political ideology and more like Wallace’s soft porn racism: as a set of codes that voters readily understood as defending white supremacy. Goldwater didn’t win the South as a small-government libertarian, but rather as a racist.

If in the South race trumped anti-government politics, in the North Goldwater’s anti-civil rights attacks found much less traction. Opposing civil rights smacked too much of Southern intransigence, and while there was resistance to racial reform in the North, it had not yet become an overriding issue for many whites. That left Goldwater running on promises to end the New Deal, and this proved wildly unpopular. To campaign against liberalism in 1964 was to campaign against an activist government that had lifted the country out of the throes of a horrendous depression still squarely in the rear view mirror, and that had then launched millions into the middle class. More than that, though, to campaign against liberalism in 1964 was to attack government programs still largely aimed at whites—and that sort of welfare was broadly understood as legitimate and warranted Goldwater’s anti-welfare tirades produced a landslide victory, but for Lyndon Johnson. Voters crushed Goldwater’s last-gasp attack on the New Deal state. Outside of the South, he lost by overwhelming numbers in every state except his Arizona home. Voters were offended by his over-the-top attacks on popular New Deal programs as well as by his penchant for saber rattling when it came to foreign policy. Goldwater especially suffered after the release of “Daisy,” a Johnson campaign ad that juxtaposed a little girl picking the petals off a flower with footage of a spiraling mushroom cloud, sending the message that Goldwater’s militarism threatened nuclear Armageddon. In the end, the Democrats succeeded in making Goldwater look like a loon. “To the Goldwater slogan ‘In Your Heart, You Know He’s Right,’ the Democrats shot back, ‘In Your Guts, You Know He’s Nuts.’ ” The country as a whole, it seemed, had solidly allied itself with progressive governance, and big-money/small-government conservatism was finally, utterly dead.

Or at least, this was the lesson most people took from the 1964 election. But like the clang of a distant alarm barely perceptible against the buzzing din of consensus, a warning was rising from the South: racial entreaties had convinced even the staunchest Democrats to abandon New Deal liberalism. If race-baiting had won over Southern whites to anti-government politics, could the same work across the country?

Richard Nixon

Notwithstanding the emerging racial strategy initiated by Goldwater, when Richard Nixon secured the Republican nomination in 1968, the new racial politics of his party had not yet gelled, either within the party generally, or in Nixon himself. Indeed, the moderate Nixon’s emergence as the party’s presidential candidate reflected the extent to which the Goldwater faction had lost credibility in the wake of their champion’s disastrous drubbing. Nevertheless, the dynamics of the presidential race would quickly push Nixon toward race-baiting. Nixon’s principal opponent in 1968 was Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey. But running as an independent candidate, George Wallace was flanking Nixon on the right. By October 1, just a month before the election, Wallace was polling more support in the South than either Humphrey or Nixon. Nor was his support limited to that region. Wallace was siphoning crucial votes across the country, and staging massive rallies in ostensibly liberal strongholds, for instance drawing 20,000 partisans to Madison Square Garden in New York, and 70,000 faithful to the Boston Common—more than any rally ever held by the Kennedys, Wallace liked to crow. Republican operatives guessed that perhaps 80 percent of the Wallace voters in the South would otherwise support Nixon, and a near-majority in the North as well.

Late in the campaign, Nixon opted to publicly tack right on race. He had already reached a backroom deal with South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond— an arch-segregationist who had led the revolt against the Democratic Party in 1948 when it endorsed a modest civil rights plank, and who switched to become a Republican in 1964 to throw his weight behind Goldwater. Nixon bought Thurmond’s support during the primary season by secretly promising that he would restrict federal enforcement of school desegregation in the South. Now he would make this same promise to the nation. On October 7, Nixon came out against “forced busing,” an increasingly potent euphemism for the system of transporting students across the boundaries of segregated neighborhoods in order to integrate schools. Mary Frances Berry pierces the pretense that the issue was putting one’s child on a bus: “African-American attempts to desegregate schools were confronted by white flight and complaints that the problem was not desegregation, but busing, oftentimes by people who sent their children to school every day on buses, including mediocre white private academies established to avoid integration.” “Busing” offered a Northern analog to states’ rights. The language may have referred to transportation, but the emotional wallop came from defiance toward integration.

Nixon also began to hammer away at the issue of law and order. In doing so, he drew upon a rhetorical frame rooted in Southern resistance to civil rights. From the inception of the civil rights movement in the 1950s, Southern politicians had disparaged racial activists as “lawbreakers,” as indeed technically they were. In the Jim Crow regions, African Americans had long pressed basic equality demands precisely by breaking laws mandating segregation: sit-ins and freedom rides purposefully violated Jim Crow statutes in order to challenge white supremacist social norms. Dismissing these protesters as criminals shifted the issue from a defense of white supremacy to a more neutral-seeming concern with “order,” while simultaneously stripping the activists of moral stature. Demonstrators were no longer Americans willing to risk beatings and even death for a grand ideal, but rather criminal lowlifes disposed toward antisocial behavior. Ultimately, the language of law and order justified a more “quiet” form of violence in defense of the racial status quo, replacing lynchings with mass arrests for trespassing and delinquency.

By the mid-1960s, “law and order” had become a surrogate expression for concern about the civil rights movement. Illustrating this rhetoric’s increasingly national reach, in 1965 FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover denounced the advocacy of nonviolent civil disobedience by civil rights leaders as a catalyst for lawbreaking and even violent rioting: “‘Civil disobedience,’ a seditious slogan of gross irresponsibility, has captured the imagination of citizens. … I am greatly concerned that certain racial leaders are doing the civil rights movement a great disservice by suggesting that citizens need only obey the laws with which they agree. Such an attitude breeds disrespect for the law and even civil disorder and rioting.” This sense of growing disorder was accentuated by urban riots often involving protracted battles between the police and minority communities. In addition, large and increasingly angry protests against the Vietnam War also added to the fear of metastasizing social strife. Exploiting the growing panic that equated social protest with social chaos, one of Nixon’s campaign commercials showed flashing images of demonstrations, riots, police, and violence, over which a deep voice intoned: “Let us recognize that the first right of every American is to be free from domestic violence. So I pledge to you, we shall have order in the United States.” A caption stated boldly: “This time. . . . vote like your whole world depended on it … NIXON.”

Nixon had mastered Wallace’s dark art. Forced bussing, law and order, and security from unrest as the essential civil right of the majority—all of these were coded phrases that allowed Nixon to appeal to racial fears without overtly mentioning race at all. Yet race remained the indisputable, intentional subtext of the appeal. As Nixon exulted after watching one of his own commercials: “Yep, this hits it right on the nose . . . it’s all about law and order and the damn Negro-Puerto Rican groups out there.”

Nixon didn’t campaign exclusively on racial themes; notably, he also stressed his opposition to anti-war protesters, while simultaneously portraying himself as the candidate most likely to bring the war to an end. Nevertheless, racial appeals formed an essential element of Nixon’s ’68 campaign. Nixon’s special counsel, John Ehrlichman, bluntly summarized that year’s campaign strategy: “We’ll go after the racists.” According to Ehrlichman, the “subliminal appeal to the anti-black voter was always present in Nixon’s statements and speeches.”

Nixon’s Southern Strategy

Nixon barely won in 1968, edging Humphrey by less than one percent of the national vote. Wallace, meanwhile, had captured nearly 14 percent of the vote. Had Nixon’s coded race-baiting helped? Initially there was uncertainty, and in his first two years in office Nixon governed as if he still believed the federal government had some role to play in helping out nonwhites. For instance, Nixon came into office proposing the idea of a flat wealth transfer to the poor, which would have gone a long way toward breaking down racial inequalities. But over the course of those two years, a new understanding consolidated regarding the tidal shift that had occurred.

On the Democratic side, in 1970 two pollsters, Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg, published The Real Majority, cautioning their party that “Social Issues” now divided the base. “The machinist’s wife in Dayton may decide to leave the Democratic reservation in 1972 and vote for Nixon or Wallace or their ideological descendants,” Scammon and Wattenberg warned. “If she thinks the Democrats feel that she isn’t scared of crime but that she’s really a bigot, if she thinks that Democrats feel the police are Fascist pigs and the Black Panthers and the Weathermen are just poor, misunderstood, picked-upon kids, if she thinks that Democrats are for the hip drug culture and that she, the machinist’s wife, is not only a bigot, but a square, then good-bye lady—and good-bye Democrats.” How, then, could the party get ahead of these issues? Scammon and Wattenberg were frank: “The Democrats in the South were hurt by being perceived (correctly) as a pro-black national party.” The solution was clear: the Democratic Party had to temper its “pro-black stance.”

On the Republican side, a leading Nixon strategist had come to the same conclusion about race as a potential wedge issue—though, predictably, with a different prescription. In 1969, Kevin Phillips published The Emerging Republican Majority, arguing that because of racial resentments a historical realignment was underway that would cement a new Republican majority that would endure for decades. A young prodigy obsessed with politics, Phillips had worked out the details of his argument in the mid-1960s, and then had gone to work helping to elect Nixon. When the 1968 returns seemed to confirm his thesis, he published his research—nearly 500 pages, with 47 maps and 143 charts. Beneath the details, Phillips had a simple, even deterministic thesis: “Historically, our party system has reflected layer upon layer of group oppositions.” Politics, according to Phillips, turned principally on group animosity—“the prevailing cleavages in American voting behavior have been ethnic and cultural. Politically, at least, the United States has not been a very effective melting pot.”

As to what was driving the latest realignment, Phillips was blunt: “The Negro problem, having become a national rather than a local one, is the principal cause of the breakup of the New Deal coalition.” For Phillips, it was almost inevitable that most whites would abandon the Democratic Party once it became identified with blacks. “Ethnic and cultural division has so often shaped American politics that, given the immense midcentury impact of Negro enfranchisement and integration, reaction to this change almost inevitably had to result in political realignment.” Phillips saw his emerging Republican majority this way: “the nature of the majority—or potential majority—seems clear. It is largely white and middle class. It is concentrated in the South, the West, and suburbia.”

The number crunchers had spoken. The Southern strategy, incipient for a decade, had matured into a clear route to electoral dominance. The old Democratic alliance of Northeastern liberals, the white working class, Northern blacks, and Southern Democrats, could be riven by racial appeals. Beginning in 1970, Richard Nixon embraced the politics of racial division wholeheartedly. He abandoned the idea of a flat wealth transfer to the poor. Now, Nixon repeatedly emphasized law and order issues. He railed against forced busing in the North. He reversed the federal government’s position on Southern school integration, slowing the process down and making clear that the courts would have no help from his administration. But perhaps nothing symbolized the new Nixon more than his comments in December 1970. Reflecting his initially moderate position on domestic issues, early in his administration Nixon had appointed George Romney—a liberal Republican and, incidentally, Mitt Romney’s father—as his secretary of housing and urban development. In turn, Romney had made integration of the suburbs his special mission, even coming up with a plan to cut off federal funds to communities that refused to allow integrated housing. By late 1970, however, when these jurisdictions howled at the temerity, Nixon took their side, throwing his cabinet officer under the bus. In a public address, Nixon baldly stated: “I can assure you that it is not the policy of this government to use the power of the federal government . . . for forced integration of the suburbs. I believe that forced integration of the suburbs is not in the national interest.”41 That dog whistle blasted like the shriek of an onrushing train.

In 1963, Robert Novak had written that many Republican leaders were intent on converting the Party of Lincoln into the White Man’s Party. The following year, Goldwater went down in crushing defeat, winning only 36 percent of the white vote. Even so, less than a decade later, the racial transmogrification of the Republicans was well underway. In 1972, Nixon’s first full dog whistle campaign netted him 67 percent of the white vote, leaving his opponent, George McGovern, with support from less than one in three whites. Defeated by the Southern strategy, McGovern neatly summed it up:

“What is the Southern Strategy? It is this. It says to the South: Let the poor stay poor, let your economy trail the nation, forget about decent homes and medical care for all your people, choose officials who will oppose every effort to benefit the many at the expense of the few—and in return, we will try to overlook the rights of the black man, appoint a few southerners to high office, and lift your spirits by attacking the ‘eastern establishment’ whose bank accounts we are filling with your labor and your industry.”

McGovern erred in supposing that the Southern strategy pertained only to the South. Nixon had already learned from Wallace, and then later from the number crunchers, that coded racial appeals would work nationwide. Other than that, especially in its class and race dimensions, McGovern had dog whistle politics dead to rights.”

—

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva: Racism without Racists

“…Both the Nixon and Reagan administrations, with the support of he Burger and Rehnquist Supreme Courts, executed two significant tasks to crush the promise embedded in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The first was to redefine what the movement was really “about,” with centuries of oppression and brutality suddenly reduced to the harmless symbolism of a bus seat and a water fountain. Thus, when the COLORED ONLY signs went down, inequality had supposedly disappeared. By 1965, Richard Nixon asserted, “almost every legislative roadblock to equality of opportunity for education, jobs, and voting had been removed.” Also magically removed, by this interpretation, were up to twenty-four trillion dollars in multigenerational devastation that African Americans had suffered in lost wages, stolen land, educational impoverishment, and housing inequalities. All of that vanished, as if it had never happened.? Or, as Patrick Buchanan, adviser to Richard Nixon and presidential candidate himself would explain decades later: “America has been the best com for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.”8 Similarly chattel slavery, which built the United States’ inordinate wealth, molted into an institution in which few if any whites had ever benefit because their “families never owned slaves.”’ Once the need for the Civil Rights Movement was minimized and history rewritten, initiatives like President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and affirmative action, which were developed to ameliorate hundreds of years of violent and corrosive repression, were easily characterized as reverse discrimination against hardworking whites and a “government handout that lazy black people ‘choose’ to take rather than work.”10

The second key maneuver, which flowed naturally from the first, was to redefine racism itself. Confronted with civil rights headlines depicting unflattering portrayals of KKK rallies and jackbooted sheriffs, white authority transformed those damning images of white supremacy into the sole definition of racism. This simple but wickedly brilliant conceptual and linguistic shift served multiple purposes. First and foremost, it was conscience soothing. The whittling down of racism to sheet-wearing goons allowed a cloud of racial innocence to cover many whites who, although “resentful of black progress” and determined to ensure that racial inequality remained untouched, could see and project themselves as the “kind of upstanding white citizen[s]” who were “positively outraged at the tactics of the Ku Klux Klan.”ll The focus on the Klan also helped to designate racism as an individual aberration rather than something systemic, institutional, and pervasive.12 Moreover, isolating racism to only its most virulent and visible form allowed respectable politicians and judges to push for policies that ostensibly met the standard of America’s new civil rights norms while at the same time crafting the implementation of policies to undermine and destabilize these norms, all too often leaving black communities ravaged.

The objective was to contain and neutralize the victories of the Civil Rights Movement by painting a picture of a “colorblind,” equal opportunity society whose doors were now wide open, if only African Americans would take initiative and walk on through 13 Ronald Reagan breezily shared anecdotes about how Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society handed over hard-earned taxpayer dollars to a “slum dweller” to live in posh government-subsidized housing and provided food stamps for one “strapping young buck” to buy steak, while another used the change he received from purchasing an orange to pay for a bottle of vodka. He ridiculed Medicaid recipients as “a faceless mass, waiting for handouts.” The imagery was, by design, galling, and although the stories were far from the truth, they succeeded in tapping into a river of widespread resentment.14 Second and third-generation Polish Americans, Italian Americans, and other white ethnics seethed that, whereas their own immigrant fathers and grandfathers had had to work their way out of the ghetto, blacks were getting a government-sponsored free ride to the good life on the backs of honest, hardworking white Americans. Some Northern whites began to complain that civil rights apparently only applied to African Americans. One U.S. senator, who asked to remain anonymous, confided, “I’m getting mail from white people saying ‘Wait a minute, we’ve got some rights too.”

During his 1968 presidential bid, Alabama governor George Wallace understood this resentment. He had experienced a startling epiphany just a few years earlier after trying to block the enrollment of an African American student in the state’s flagship university at Tuscaloosa. For that act of defiance, the governor received more than one hundred thousand congratulatory telegrams, half of which came from north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Right then he had a revelation: “They all hate black people, all of them. They’re all afraid, all of them. Great God! That’s it! They’re all Southern! The whole United States is Southern!”l? But even then, he recognize, it couldn’t be business as usual. The Civil Rights Movement meant that “the days of respectable racism were over.”18 And so in his bed for the presidency, Wallace mastered the use of race neutral language to explain what was at stake for disgruntled working class whites, particularly those whose neighborhoods butted right against black enclaves. To the thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, who came to his campaign rallies in Detroit, Boston, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, and San Diego, he played on the ever-present fear that blacks were breaking out of crime-filled ghettos and moving “into our streets, our schools, our neighborhoods,” signaling in unmistakable but still-unspoken code that “a nigger’s trying to get your job, trying to move into your neighborhood.”19 For working-class whites whose hold on some semblance of the American dream was becoming increasingly tenuous as the economy buckled under pressure from financing both the Great Society and the Vietnam War (on a tax cut), this was naturally upsetting.20 Black gains, it was assumed, could come only at the expense of whites. – Not surprisingly, polls showed that as African Americans achieved greater access to their citizenship rights, white discomfort and unease mounted. By 1966, 85 percent of whites were certain that “the pace of civil rights progress was too fast.”22

Despite Wallace’s premise that “Negroes never had it so good,” by the mid-1960s African Americans’ median family income was only 55 percent that of whites, while the black unemployment rate was nearly twice as high. By 1965, just 27 percent of African American adults had completed four years of high school; whereas more than half of whites twenty-five years and over had achieved that basic threshold of education.24

African Americans simply refused to accept those disparities as natural. Refused to concede that a reality of just a quarter of black adults holding a high school diploma was as good as it was e going to get. Refused to believe that double-digit unemployment rates were just fine for people who actually wanted to work. Refused to tolerate a practice where their labor was worth only 55 percent of that of whites doing the same job. Instead, blacks insisted that inequality was the result of a series of public policies that must be changed. Therefore, they continued to file a series of lawsuits to equalized education. They used the courts to pry open closed labor unions. They elected black political leadership in numbers that hadn’t been seen since Reconstruction.

Their resolve to dismantle racial inequality led one white woman Dayton, Ohio, to assert, “Oh, they are so forward. If you give them your finger, they’ll take your hand.” The growing consensus was that blacks wanted too much too fast.28 White angst rose further with the more overtly militant shift in the Civil Rights Movement. More than a decade of being beaten, jailed, and sometimes killed while using methods of nonviolent protest had begun to wear thin, especially on the youth involved in the demonstrations. Nor had the initial Southern focus of the movement addressed the discrimination that millions of African Americans faced in the urban North, Midwest, and West. Thus, nonviolence gave way to an ethos of selfdefense, best articulated by the Black Panther Party, a group founded in 1966 which openly brandished guns and challenged the police. The goal of integration, so fundamental to the SCLC and the NAACP, was now forced to openly compete with the more sharply articulated demands of Black Nationalism and Black Power. Soon, in response to police brutality, rioting consumed wide swaths of Newark, Detroit, Los Angeles, and Cleveland, and this served way to intensify the white backlash that had begun with the second wave of the Great Migration during World War II, while also providing whites exasperated by what they perceived as threats to the status quo with the cover of “reasonableness” and “moderation.”29

Like Wallace, Richard Nixon tapped into this general resentment. The “Southern Strategy,” as his campaign handlers called it, was designed to pull into the GOP not only white Democratic voters from below the Mason-Dixon Line but also those aggrieved whites who lived in northern working-class neighborhoods. Using strategic dog-whistle appeals-crime, welfare, neighborhood schools- to trigger Pavlovian anti-black responses, Nixon succeeded in defining and maligning the Democrats as the party of African America without once having to actually say the words. That would be the “elephant in the room.”30 In fact, as H. R. Haldeman, one of the Republican candidate’s most trusted aides, later recalled, “He [Nixon) emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”31

Nixon, therefore, framed America’s issues as “excesses caused by … bleeding heart liberalism.” The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, he asserted, had removed the legal barriers to equality; they had also, he continued, raised unrealistic expectations in the black community. When equality didn’t immediately emerge, he explained, lawlessness and rioting soon followed. On the presidential campaign trail, Nixon’s basic mantra was that “it was both wrong and dangerous to make promises that cannot be fulfilled, or to raise hopes that come to nothing.” The point, therefore, was puncture blacks’ expectations.32

That downward thrust would come through the iron fist of law and order.33 Crime and blackness soon became synonymous in a carefully constructed way that played to the barely subliminal fears of darkened, frightening images flashing across the television screen 34 One of Nixon’s campaign ads, for example, carefully avoided using pictures of African Americans while at the same showing cities burning, grainy images of protesters out in the streets, blood flowing, chaos shaking the very foundation of society, and then silence, as the screen faded to black, emblazoned with white lettering: THIS TIME VOTE LIKE YOUR WHOLE WORLD DEPENDED ON IT: NIXON.

The point, longtime aide John Ehrlichman explained, was to present a position on crime, education, or public housing in such a way that a voter could “avoid admitting to himself that he was attracted by a racist appeal. Nixon after screening the ad, enthusiastically told his staff that the commercial “hits it right on the nose … It’s all about law and order and the damn Negro-Puerto Rican groups out there.”37 Yet, in the ad he didn’t have to say so explicitly. It was clear who was the threat just as it was clear whose world depended on Nixon for salvation.38

In the 1968 election against Vice President Hubert Humphrey, Nixon, in addition to playing on the growing disenchantment with the Vietnam War, won by making the unworthiness of blacks the subtext for his campaign. Following his inauguration, the president targeted “two of the civil rights movement’s greatest victories, Brown and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.939 This was more than a cynical political ploy to curry favor with a particular constituency.40 The Civil Rights Movement had raised the ante, because now, as in the years of Reconstruction, there appeared to be a strong Constitutional basis, in the newly invigorated Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, for African Americans’ claim to citizenship rights.

Given the landmines in the new post-civil-rights political terrain, outright opposition to the new statutes would have backfired. Thus, Nixon’s strategy-one that would play out well into the twentyfirst century-was to “weaken the enforcement of civil rights laws.”4l The Voting Rights Act in particular was the bête noire of the Republican Party’s new Southern wing, empowering African Americans as it did through the ballot box. The VRA, which was able to muster only enough votes for initial passage by carrying the unprecedented provision requiring renewal within five years, was set for what its opponents hoped would be its death knell in 1970…”

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NY Times: Impossible, Ridiculous, Repugnant

“Listen to the late Lee Atwater (political strategist for Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, chairman of the Republican National Committee in a 1981) interview explaining the evolution of the G.O.P.’s Southern strategy:

“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 forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.

And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger.”‘

The truth is that there was very little that was subconscious about the G.O.P.’s relentless appeal to racist whites. Tired of losing elections, it saw an opportunity to renew itself by opening its arms wide to white voters who could never forgive the Democratic Party for its support of civil rights and voting rights for blacks.

The payoff has been huge. Just as the Democratic Party would have been crippled in the old days without the support of the segregationist South, today’s Republicans would have only a fraction of their current political power without the near-solid support of voters who are hostile to blacks.

When Democrats revolted against racism, the G.O.P. rallied to its banner.

Ronald Reagan, the G.O.P.’s biggest hero, opposed both the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of the mid-1960’s. And he began his general election campaign in 1980 with a powerfully symbolic appearance in Philadelphia, Miss., where three young civil rights workers were murdered in the summer of 1964. He drove the crowd wild when he declared: “I believe in states’ rights.””

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Wikipedia: Southern strategy

“In American politics, the southern strategy was a Republican Party electoral strategy to increase political support among white voters in the South by appealing to racism against African Americans. As the Civil Rights Movement and dismantling of Jim Crow laws in the 1950s and 1960s visibly deepened existing racial tensions in much of the Southern United States, Republican politicians such as presidential candidate Richard Nixon and Senator Barry Goldwater developed strategies that successfully contributed to the political realignment of many white, conservative voters in the South that had traditionally supported the Democratic Party to the Republican Party.  It also helped push the Republican Party much more to the right…

…The perception that the Republican Party had served as the “vehicle of white supremacy in the South”, particularly during the Goldwater campaign and the presidential elections of 1968 and 1972, made it difficult for the Republican Party to win the support of black voters in the South in later years. In 2005, Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman formally apologized to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a national civil rights organization, for exploiting racial polarization to win elections and ignoring the black vote…

…From 1948 to 1984 the Southern states, for decades a stronghold for the Democrats, became key swing states, providing the popular vote margins in the 1960, 1968 and 1976 elections. During this era, several Republican candidates expressed support for states’ rights, a reversal of the position held by southern states prior to the Civil War. Some political analysts said this term was used in the 20th century as a “code word” to represent opposition to federal enforcement of civil rights for blacks and to federal intervention on their behalf; many individual southerners had opposed passage of the Voting Rights Act…

…In the 1948 election, after Harry Truman signed an Executive Order to desegregate the Army, a group of conservative Southern Democrats known as Dixiecrats split from the Democratic Party in reaction to the inclusion of a civil rights plank in the party’s platform. This followed a floor fight led by civil-rights activist, Minneapolis mayor (and soon-to-be senator) Hubert Humphrey. The disaffected conservative Democrats formed the States’ Rights Democratic, or Dixiecrat Party, and nominated Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina for president. Thurmond carried four Deep South states in the general election: South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. The main plank of the States’ Rights Democratic Party was maintaining segregation and Jim Crow in the South. The Dixiecrats, failing to deny the Democrats the presidency in 1948, soon dissolved, but the split lingered. In the fall of 1964, just a couple months after Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law, Thurmond was one of the first conservative Southern Democrats to switch to the Republican Party.

In addition to the splits in the Democratic Party, the population movements associated with World War II had a significant effect in changing the demographics of the South. More than 5 million African Americans migrated from the South to the North and West in the second Great Migration, lasting from 1940 to 1970. Starting before WWII, many had moved to California for jobs in the defense industry, as well as to major industrial cities of the Midwest…

Roots of the Southern strategy (1963–1972)

The “Year of Birmingham” in 1963 highlighted racial issues in Alabama. Through the spring, there were marches and demonstrations to end legal segregation. The Movement’s achievements in settlement with the local business class were overshadowed by bombings and murders by the Ku Klux Klan, most notoriously in the deaths of four girls in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing.

After the Democrat George Wallace was elected as Governor of Alabama, he emphasized the connection between states’ rights and segregation, both in speeches and by creating crises to provoke Federal intervention. He opposed integration at the University of Alabama, and collaborated with the Ku Klux Klan in 1963 in disrupting court-ordered integration of public schools in Birmingham.

Many of the states’ rights Democrats were attracted to the 1964 presidential campaign of conservative Republican Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona. Goldwater was notably more conservative than previous Republican nominees, such as Dwight D. Eisenhower. Goldwater’s principal opponent in the primary election, Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York, was widely seen as representing the more moderate, pro-Civil Rights Act, Northern wing of the party (see Rockefeller Republican, Goldwater Republican)

In the 1964 presidential campaign, Goldwater ran a conservative campaign that broadly opposed strong action by the federal government. Although he had supported all previous federal civil rights legislation, Goldwater decided to oppose the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He believed that this act was an intrusion of the federal government into the affairs of states and, second, that the Act interfered with the rights of private persons to do business, or not, with whomever they chose, even if the choice is based on racial discrimination.

Goldwater’s position appealed to white Southern Democrats, and Goldwater was the first Republican presidential candidate since Reconstruction to win the electoral votes of the Deep South states (Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina). Outside the South, Goldwater’s negative vote on the Civil Rights Act proved devastating to his campaign. The only other state he won was his home one of Arizona, and he suffered a landslide defeat. A Lyndon B. Johnson ad called “Confessions of a Republican“, which ran in the North, associated Goldwater with the Ku Klux Klan. At the same time, Johnson’s campaign in the Deep South publicized Goldwater’s support for pre-1964 civil rights legislation. In the end, Johnson swept the election.

At the time, Goldwater was at odds in his position with most of the prominent members of the Republican Party, dominated by so-called Eastern Establishment and Midwestern Progressives. A higher percentage of the Republican Party supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than did the Democratic Party, as they had on all previous Civil Rights legislation. The Southern Democrats mostly opposed the Northern Party members—and their presidents (Kennedy and Johnson)—on civil rights issues. At the same time, passage of the Civil Rights Act caused many black voters to join the Democratic Party, which moved the party and its nominees in a progressive direction.

Lyndon Johnson was concerned that his endorsement of Civil Rights legislation would endanger his party in the South. In the 1968 election, Richard Nixon saw the cracks in the Solid South as an opportunity to tap into a group of voters who had historically been beyond the reach of the Republican Party. George Wallace had exhibited a strong candidacy in that election, where he garnered 46 electoral votes and nearly 10 million popular votes, attracting mostly southern Democrats away from Hubert Humphrey.

The notion of Black Power advocated by SNCC leaders captured some of the frustrations of African Americans at the slow process of change in gaining civil rights and social justice. African Americans pushed for faster change, raising racial tensions. Journalists reporting about the demonstrations against the Vietnam War often featured young people engaging in violence or burning draft cards and American flags. Conservatives were also dismayed about the many young adults engaged in the drug culture and “free love” (sexual promiscuity), in what was called the “hippie” counter-culture. These actions scandalized many Americans and created a concern about law and order.

Nixon’s advisers recognized that they could not appeal directly to voters on issues of white supremacy or racism. White House Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman noted that Nixon “emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognized this while not appearing to.” With the aid of Harry Dent and South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, who had switched to the Republican Party in 1964, Richard Nixon ran his 1968 campaign on states’ rights and “law and order”. Liberal Northern Democrats accused Nixon of pandering to Southern whites, especially with regard to his “states’ rights” and “law and order” positions, which were widely understood by black leaders to symbolize southern resistance to civil rights. This tactic was described in 2007 by David Greenberg in Slate as “dog-whistle politics“. According to an article in The American Conservative, Nixon adviser and speechwriter Pat Buchanan disputed this characterization.

The independent candidacy of George Wallace, former Democratic governor of Alabama, partially negated Nixon’s Southern strategy. With a much more explicit attack on integration and black civil rights, Wallace won all of Goldwater’s states (except South Carolina), as well as Arkansas and one of North Carolina’s electoral votes. Nixon picked up Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina and Florida, while Democratic nominee Hubert Humphrey won only Texas in the South. Writer Jeffrey Hart, who worked on the Nixon campaign as a speechwriter, said in 2006 that Nixon did not have a “Southern Strategy” but “Border State Strategy”, as he said that the 1968 campaign ceded the Deep South to George Wallace. Hart suggested that the press called it a “Southern Strategy” as they are “very lazy”.

In the 1972 election, by contrast, Nixon won every state in the Union except Massachusetts, winning more than 70% of the popular vote in most of the Deep South (Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina) and 61% of the national vote. He won more than 65% of the votes in the other states of the former Confederacy. Nixon won 18% of the black vote nationwide. Despite his appeal to Southern whites, Nixon was widely perceived as a moderate outside the South and won African-American votes on that basis.

Glen Moore argues that in 1970, Nixon and the Republican Party developed a “Southern Strategy” for the midterm elections. The strategy involved depicting Democratic candidates as permissive liberals. Republicans thereby managed to unseat Albert Gore, Sr., of Tennessee, as well as Senator Joseph D. Tydings of Maryland. For the entire region, however, the net result was a small loss of seats for the Republican Party in the South.

Regional attention in 1970 focused on the Senate, when Nixon nominated Judge G. Harrold Carswell of Florida, a judge on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to the Supreme Court. A lawyer from north Florida, Carswell had a mediocre record, but Nixon needed a Southerner and a “strict constructionist,” to support his “southern strategy” of moving the region toward the GOP. Carswell was voted down by the liberal block in the Senate, causing a backlash that pushed many Southern Democrats into the Republican fold. The long-term result was a realization by both parties that nominations to the Supreme Court could have a major impact on political attitudes in the South.^…

…As civil rights grew more accepted throughout the nation, basing a general election strategy on appeals to “states’ rights”, which some would have believed opposed civil rights laws, would have resulted in a national backlash. The concept of “states’ rights” was considered by some to be subsumed within a broader meaning than simply a reference to civil rights laws. States rights became seen as encompassing a type of New Federalism that would return local control of race relations.

Republican strategist Lee Atwater discussed the Southern strategy in a 1981 interview later published in Southern Politics in the 1990s by Alexander P. Lamis.

Atwater: As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry Dent and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. Now [Reagan] doesn’t have to do that. All you have to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues he’s campaigned on since 1964 … and that’s fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster…

Questioner: But the fact is, isn’t it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps?

Atwater: 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 forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

In 1980, Republican candidate Ronald Reagan made a much-noted appearance at the Neshoba County Fair. His speech there contained the phrase “I believe in states’ rights” and was cited as evidence that the Republican Party was building upon the Southern strategy again.Reagan’s campaigns used racially coded rhetoric, making attacks on the “welfare state” and leveraging resentment towards affirmative action. Dan Carter explains “Reagan showed that he could use coded language with the best of them, lambasting welfare queens, busing, and affirmative action as the need arose.” During his 1976 and 1980 campaigns Reagan employed stereotypes of welfare recipients, often invoking the case of a “welfare queen” with a large house and a Cadillac using multiple names to collect over $150,000 in tax-free income. Aistrup described Reagan’s campaign statements as “seemingly race neutral” but explained how whites interpret this in a racial manner, citing a DNC funded study conducted by CRG Communications. Though Reagan did not overtly mention the race of the welfare recipient, the unstated impression in whites’ minds were black people and Reagan’s rhetoric resonated with Southern white perceptions of black people.

Aistrup argued that one example of Reagan field-testing coded language in the South was a reference to an unscrupulous man using food stamps as a “strapping young buck”. Reagan, when informed of the offensive connotations of the term, defended his actions as a nonracial term that was common in his Illinois hometown. Ultimately, Reagan never used that particular phrasing again.According to Ian Haney Lopez the “young buck” term changed into “young fellow” which was less overtly racist. “‘Some young fellow’ was less overtly racist and so carried less risk of censure, and worked just as well to provoke a sense of white victimization.”

During the 1988 U.S. presidential election, the Willie Horton attack ads run against Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis built upon the Southern strategy in a campaign that reinforced the notion that Republicans best represent conservative whites with traditional values. Lee Atwater and Roger Ailes worked on the campaign as George H. W. Bush‘s political strategists, and upon seeing a favorable New Jersey focus group response to the Horton strategy, Atwater recognized that an implicit racial appeal could work outside of the Southern states. The subsequent ads featured Horton’s mugshot and played on fears of black criminals. Atwater said of the strategy, “By the time we’re finished, they’re going to wonder whether Willie Horton is Dukakis’ running mate.” Al Gore was the first to use the Willie Horton prison furlough against Dukakis and, like the Bush campaign, would not mention race. The Bush campaign claimed they were initially made aware of the Horton issue via the Gore campaign’s use of the subject. Bush initially hesitated to use the Horton campaign strategy, but the campaign saw it as a wedge issue to harm Dukakis who was struggling against Democratic rival Jesse Jackson.

In addition to presidential campaigns, subsequent Republican campaigns for the House of Representatives and Senate in the South employed the Southern strategy. During his 1990 re-election campaign, Jesse Helms attacked his opponent’s alleged support of “racial quotas”, most notably through an ad in which a white person’s hands are seen crumpling a letter indicating that he was denied a job because of the color of his skin.

New York Times opinion columnist Bob Herbert wrote in 2005 that “The truth is that there was very little that was subconscious about the G.O.P.’s relentless appeal to racist whites. Tired of losing elections, it saw an opportunity to renew itself by opening its arms wide to white voters who could never forgive the Democratic Party for its support of civil rights and voting rights for blacks.” Aistrup described the transition of the Southern strategy saying that it has “evolved from a states’ rights, racially conservative message to one promoting in the Nixon years, vis-à-vis the courts, a racially conservative interpretation of civil rights laws—including opposition to busing. With the ascendancy of Reagan, the Southern Strategy became a national strategy that melded race, taxes, anticommunism, and religion.”

Some analysts viewed the 1990s as the apogee of Southernization or the Southern strategy, given that the Democratic president Bill Clinton and vice-president Al Gore were from the South, as were Congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle. During the end of Nixon’s presidency, the Senators representing the former Confederate states in the 93rd Congress were primarily Democrats. During the beginning of Bill Clinton’s, 20 years later in the 103rd Congress, this was still the case…

…Following Bush’s re-election, Ken Mehlman, Bush’s campaign manager and Chairman of the RNC, held several large meetings in 2005 with African-American business, community, and religious leaders. In his speeches, he apologized for his party’s use of the Southern Strategy in the past. When asked about the strategy of using race as an issue to build GOP dominance in the once-Democratic South, Mehlman replied,

Republican candidates often have prospered by ignoring black voters and even by exploiting racial tensions … by the ’70s and into the ’80s and ’90s, the Democratic Party solidified its gains in the African-American community, and we Republicans did not effectively reach out. Some Republicans gave up on winning the African-American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization. I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong.

Thomas Edge argues that the election of President Barack Obama saw a new type of Southern strategy emerge among conservative voters; they used his election as evidence of a post-racial era to deny the need of continued civil rights legislation, while simultaneously playing on racial tensions and marking him as a “racial bogeyman”. Edge described three parts to this phenomenon saying:

First, according to the arguments, a nation that has the ability to elect a Black president is completely free of racism. Second, attempts to continue the remedies enacted after the civil rights movement will only result in more racial discord, demagoguery, and racism against White Americans. Third, these tactics are used side-by-side with the veiled racism and coded language of the original Southern Strategy.”

 

 

Politifact: Candace Owens’ false statement that the Southern strategy is a myth

During a congressional hearing on hate crimes, conservative African American commentator Candace Owens said that the Republican Party never had a strategy of capitalizing on racism to lure voters.

Owens said that black conservatives face criticism from the left because they “have the audacity to think for ourselves and become educated about our history, and the myth of things, like the Southern switch and the Southern strategy, which never happened.”

The “Southern strategy” refers to efforts by the Republican Party to appeal to Southern white voters who were turned off by the Democratic Party advocating for civil rights.

Historians disputed her statement, including Cornell professor Lawrence Glickman and University of Arkansas professor Angie Maxwell. Princeton historian Kevin Kruse called Owens’ statements “utter nonsense.”

Owens is a spokesperson for the conservative nonprofit Turning Point USA and encourages black people to leave the Democratic Party (calling it “Blexit“).

Owens did not respond to our emailed request for comment. On Twitter, she said she was referring to the “myth” that the Republicans and Democrats in Congress switched parties.

Kruse challenged her explanation, saying, “Owens, predictably, points to the small number of congressmen who switched parties as ‘proof’ that the larger literature on the racial realignment is a myth — even though that isn’t actually something historians and political scientists emphasize in the work on this.”

The Republicans’ Southern strategy has been documented for decades — including by Republicans who were a part of it.

The facts about the Southern strategy

For this fact-check, we interviewed historians and reviewed news articles from the civil rights era.

Joseph Alsop, an influential syndicated newspaper columnist, called it “basically a segregationist strategy” in a 1962 column.

When Republican Barry Goldwater ran for president in 1964, his Southern surrogates played up the fact that he had just voted against the Civil Rights Act. That paid off in the Deep South where he won a handful of states, but he ultimately lost to Lyndon B. Johnson.

By 1968, the Republicans fine-tuned their approach and packaged it in a way they could win, said Maxwell, the Arkansas professor and an expert on southern politics.

Republican nominee Richard Nixon reached out to white Southerners by opposing school busing and promising that his administration would not “ram anything down your throats” and would appoint “strict constructionist” Supreme Court justices.

The strongest evidence of the Southern strategy comes directly from Republicans at the time.

That includes Clarence Townes, who served as director of the Minorities Division of the Republican National Committee in the 1960s. Harvard professor Leah Wright Rigueur wrote about Townes in her book “The Loneliness of the Black Republican.”

When Nixon disbanded the division, Townes told reporters in 1970, “There’s a total fear of what’s called the Southern strategy. Blacks understand that their wellbeing is being sacrificed to political gain. There has to be some moral leadership from the president on the race question, and there just hasn’t been any.”

In 1969, Nixon White House aide Lamar Alexander, who now represents Tennessee in the U.S. Senate, wrote about the Southern strategy in a memo following the unsuccessful Supreme Court nomination of Clement Haynsworth, who was opposed by civil rights groups.

“SOUTHERN STRATEGY — we flat out invited the kind of political battle that ultimately erupted when we named a Democrat-turned-Republican conservative from South Carolina. This confirmed the Southern strategy just at a time when it was being nationally debated,” Alexander wrote.

Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips openly discussed the Southern strategy in a newspaper article in 1973:

“If the New Washington liberal crowd could tear themselves away from Watergate ecstasy and the lionizing of Daniel Ellsberg for a little look-see below the Mason-Dixon line, they might glean a useful political insight, namely that the GOP ‘Southern Strategy’ seems to be rolling along — and rolling up local victories — just as if G. Gordon Liddy had never existed.” (Ellsberg released the Pentagon papers in 1971 while Liddy was an FBI agent convicted of illegal wiretapping.)

Phillips told the New York Times in 1970 that the Republicans were never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the “Negro vote and they don’t need any more than that.”

“The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans,” he wrote. “That’s where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.”

Ultimately, winning over white Southern voters required using coded language, as campaign consultant Lee Atwater, who worked on Reagan’s 1980 campaign, explained in an interview 1981. In audio, he can be heard describing how in 1954, a racial slur could be used to describe black Americans, but that “backfired” by 1968 — requiring a pivot to use more abstract language.

“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,” he said.

Reagan used language such as “states’ rights” and “welfare queens,” which critics said was coded racist language.

“The partisan shift in the South from the 1960s to George W. Bush is the greatest partisan shift in all of American history,” Maxwell said.

In 2005, Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman told the NAACP national convention in Milwaukee that using race as a wedge issue was “wrong.”

“By the ‘70s and into the ‘80s and ‘90s, the Democratic Party solidified its gains in the African American community, and we Republicans did not effectively reach out. Some Republicans gave up on winning the African American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization. I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong.”

Our ruling

Owens said the Southern strategy is a “myth” that “never happened.”

Efforts by the Republican Party starting in the 1960s to win over white Southern voters have been documented by scholars for decades.

The strongest evidence that it happened comes from the Republicans who were part of that strategy. There are numerous instances of them talking about the approach in documents or interviews.

We rate this statement False

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VOX: From white supremacy to Barack Obama: The history of the Democratic Party

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6R0NvVr164

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Further Readings

• Business Insider: Republicans would be screwed without racist voters
• Washington Post: How the Reagan administration stoked fears of anti-white racism
• Facing South: Paul Manafort’s role in the Republicans’ notorious ‘Southern Strategy’
• WP: How Donald Trump put an end to the GOP’s Southern strategy

• NY Times: The Real Problem With Trump’s Rallies

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Back to Top

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Dog Whistle Politics

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Move on: We Must Talk About Race to Fix Economic Inequality with your family and friends

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsw6e6GopSo

“Racial dog whistles are often sneakily used when politicians want to speak about race specifically to their target audience. The coded messages are used to reinforce racist ideas that the country’s societal and economic problems are because of undeserving, lazy, and violent people of color” Ian Haney Lopez – Washington Post

“Dog whistle politics explains how politicians backed by concentrated wealth manipulate racial appeals to win elections and support for regressive policies that help corporations and the super-rich, and in the process wreck the middle class.” Ian Haney Lopez – Dog Whistle Politics:

3 aspects involved when politicians use racial dog whistles

1. Push race into conversations through coded racist remarks against people of color
   • To produce white negative reactions
2. Deny accusations of racial pandering
   • Emphasizing the lack of any direct reference to a racial group or any use of a racist epithet
   • Helps to be offended about being associated to or personally judge as racist
3. Demonize critics for opportunistically alleging racial victimization, race card/baiting, etc.
   1. Mention colorblindness and post racial society

2 types of racial dog whistle support

1. Appealing to the explicit racism of supporters
2. Appealing to the implicit bias of supporters who never realize the racism behind it

“Ever since the Republican “Southern Strategy” of the 1960s, many politicians have used racial dog whistles to appeal to white Americans, regardless of their politics. Racial dog whistles have even worked on white liberal and moderate voters, who might consciously be “against” racism, but still hold implicit biases.” Jennifer Loubriel – Everyday Feminist

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Common Dog Whistles

• Law and Order/Tough on Crime
  • Implies people of color are inherently criminal and need harsher punishments
    • Including civil rights activists

• Welfare Queen/Welfare
  • Implies black people on welfare are lazy, dependent, manipulative
    • Taking advantage of white people’s hard earned money
• War on Terror/Sharia Law
  • Keeping (white) Americans safe from evil Arab Muslims
    • With more military funding, wars, and stricter immigration laws
• Inner City/Urban
  • Blacks and Hispanics living in dangerous, poor, crime ridden cities
• Illegal aliens/Illegals
  • Falsely implies being undocumented is a criminal, not civil offense
    • Implies Latin American immigrants are criminals and bad people
• Cutting Taxes
  • Liberal gov wastes white people’s money on undeserving minorities
    • Especially in the form of welfare, public education, mortgage relief, etc.
• States Rights
  • The ability of state gov to oppose federal civil rights mandates
• Thug
  • Criminalized black person
    • More acceptable version of the n-word
• Reverse racism
  • Used to attack any attempt to redress racial injustice, like affirmative action
    • Implies racism is over and claims of racial injustice is the fault of people of color
    • And any attempt to fix it will unfairly hurt white people
• Losing way of life
  • Nicer way to say losing the racial heirarchy of white supremacy
    • Through marginalized groups gaining rights and increased diversity

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Strategic Racism

• Strategic racism
  • Intentionally using racial animus as leverage to gain wealth, political power, heightened social standing
  • Wallace, Goldwater, Nixon were all strategic racists
    • Supported civil rights policies before realizing dog whistles could win more votes
  • Strategic racists don’t have to explicitly believe in racism
    • Clinton vs Nixon
• Outside of personal bigotry
  • “Equating dog whistling with personal bigotry minimizes the phenomenon. It’s not an expression of prejudice so much as a coldly calculated decision to seek advantage by manipulating the prejudice in others. Dog whistling is a strategy.” Ian Haney Lopez – Dog Whistle Politics
• Often used to attack New Deal liberal policies and push neo-liberal policies
  • “Nothing testifies to dog whistle racism’s transformation of American politics over the last half century so much as the recent willingness of 3 out of 5 white voters to support tax cuts for the super-rich, reduced social services for everyone, and a dramatic rollback of all government…dog whistle racism has helped convince many whites, arguably even a majority, that the greatest danger they face comes from a liberal government in hock to minorities, rather than from concentrated wealth and its plutocratic agenda. “Ian Haney Lopez – Dog Whistle Politics
• Since dog whistle politics
  • Wages have been stagnate since 70s, while CEO and hedge fund wages have increased over 300%
  • Wealth discrepancies haven’t been this bad since the Gilded Age
    • 1960-70, New Deal expanded into Great Society, # in poverty decline from 40 million to under 25 million
    • 1970s, Slow rise of dog whistle politics, # in poverty remained steady.
    • 1980s, Reagan and Bush, # in poverty raised to 35 million
    • 1990s, At end of Clinton’s second tem in 2000, # in poverty decline to 30 million.
    • 2008, After Great Recession at end of Bush’s presidency, # in poverty increased to 46 million

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Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Racism

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=22&v=chg2MNqg3mU

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Ian Haney López on the Dog Whistle Politics of Race (Full Interview)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=20&v=SnOGFdGY_vw

Click here for part 2

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Keith Boykin: Trading Hoods for Neckties

“Despite the progress of the past half century, the struggle continues. “The bigger difference is that back then they had hoods. Now they have neckties and starched shirts.” So said baseball hall of famer Hank Aaron in an interview with USA Today this week, in which he seemed to compare the racist klansmen of the 1960s with the supposedly post-racial cynics of our current generation.

You see, today’s racists don’t wear white hoods and scream the N-word. They wear dark suits and scream about government handouts. They don’t set up racist poll taxes to deter Blacks from voting. They set up voter ID laws to do the same thing. And they certainly don’t defend lynch mobs, which legitimize vigilante justice. Instead, they defend Stand Your Ground laws, which achieve the same purpose…

…The Republican Party has been playing with fire on these issues since the 1960s, when the GOP’s “southern strategy” began consciously deploying race as a tool to scare working-class whites. That’s how they convinced the very people whose lives depend on government benefits from Medicare, Social Security and the Veterans Administration to believe that government, as Ronald Reagan put it, is “the problem.”

Such cognitive dissonance enables white conservatives to see themselves as victims of the very government spending that supports their lifestyles. When they hear the word “government,” they don’t think of highways, bridges, food inspection, airline safety, home loan guarantees, mortgage interest deductions, or local public school teachers. Instead they imagine Black people in Harlem, Compton, and Atlanta with their hands out.

Nor do they see multinational corporations slashing their pay and outsourcing their jobs to low-wage countries while CEOs take home record salaries. Instead they see brown-skinned immigrants and black-skinned affirmative action hires as threatening their job security and their way of life. Color has also affected their view of capitalism.

This is the evil genius of modern racism. The pinstriped plutocrats have redirected the angst of many working-class whites away from the rich and powerful and toward the poor and powerless of color. Never mind that the richest 1 percent of Americans control 40 percent of the nation’s wealth. Never mind that the world’s 85 wealthiest people own as much as the 3.5 billion poorest. Instead, white working-class conservatives have been taught to focus their antipathy on African Americans, whose median household net worth was about $6,500 in 2011.”

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Racial Scapegoating

“…what’s economic and what’s social cannot be neatly separated. For instance explaining why white voters in the North might be open to racial appeals from Republicans, in 1963 political columnist Rowland Evans and Robert Novak offered this analysis,

“The white construction workers sees lowering the color bar in his Jim Crow union as a threat to his job. The lower middle class suburbanite, who has invested much of his savings in his home, sees the Negro who wants to live next door to him as a financial threat.”

…There are some actual interests – racial status, class status, and material losses, that may cause whites to support politicians who signal racial solidarity. But these interests are dwarfed by a racial imagination that often heaps blame on nonwhites for almost every reversal in the fortunes of the white middle class over the last 50 years. …Dog Whistles politics has convinced a number of whites to vote their fears about minorities, and yet, for those prone to do so most aggressively, their fears have little basis in the reality of their segregated lives.

Many whites blame minorities fro much of the hardship in their lives. Integration began in earnest in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as one of the longest sustained periods of economic growth in the United States slowed and the dislocating forces of globalization and deindustrialization gathered speed. In these years, whites began to suffer a number of shocks to their livelihood: factory closings, stagnating wages, increasing inflation, and eroding pensions. These economic challenges have only increase over the last 40 years, including during the recession in the late 1980s and in the great Recession of 2008…

In this vacuum, nonwhites-relatively powerless and widely demeaned, though also steadily increasing in numbers, became a convenient scapegoat. Many whites came to attribute job losses, shrinking savings, and declining opportunities to integration specifically and non whites generally.” Ian Haney Lopez – Dog Whistle Politics

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Further Readings

Washington Post: How the Reagan administration stoked fears of anti-white racism

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Back to Top

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Rightwing Media

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Table of Sub-Contents

FCC Fairness Doctrine

Fox News

Rush Limbaugh

Brebarit and Infor Wars

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FCC Fairness Doctrine

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Washington Post: Everything you need to know about the Fairness Doctrine in one post

What it was: The Fairness Doctrine, as initially laid out in the report, ”In the Matter of Editorializing by Broadcast Licensees,” required that TV and radio stations holding FCC-issued broadcast licenses to (a) devote some of their programming to controversial issues of public importance and (b) allow the airing of opposing views on those issues. This meant that programs on politics were required to include opposing opinions on the topic under discussion. Broadcasters had an active duty to determine the spectrum of views on a given issue and include those people best suited to representing those views in their programming.Additionally, the rule mandated that broadcasters alert anyone subject to a personal attack in their programming and give them a chance to respond, and required any broadcasters who endorse political candidates to invite other candidates to respond. However, the Fairness Doctrine is different from the Equal Time rule, which is still in force and requires equal time be given to legally qualified political candidates.

How it came about: In the Radio Act of 1927, Congress dictated that the FCC (and its predecessor, the Federal Radio Commission) should only issue broadcast licenses when doing so serves the public interest. In 1949, the FCC interpreted this more strictly to mean that licensees should include discussions of matters of public importance in their broadcasts, and that they should do so in a fair manner. It issued “In the Matter of Editorializing by Broadcast Licensees,” which announced the Fairness Doctrine, and began enforcing it.

How it was ended: The Fairness Doctrine sustained a number of challenges over the years. A lawsuit challenging the doctrine on First Amendment grounds, Red Lion Broadcasting Co., Inc. v. Federal Communications Commission , reached the Supreme Court in 1969. The Court ruled unanimously that while broadcasters have First Amendment speech rights, the fact that the spectrum is owned by the government and merely leased to broadcasters gives the FCC the right to regulate news content. However, First Amendment jurisprudence after Red Lion started to allow more speech rights to broadcasters, and put the constitutionality of the Fairness Doctrine in question.

In response, the FCC began to reconsider the rule in the mid-80s, and ultimately revoked it in 1987, after Congress passed a resolution instructing the commission to study the issue. The decision has been credited with the explosion of conservative talk radio in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. While the FCC has not enforced the rule in nearly a quarter century, it remains technically on the books. As a part of the Obama administration’s broader efforts to overhaul federal regulation, the FCC is finally scrapping the rule once and for all.

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Time: A Brief History Of The Fairness Doctrine

The act is rooted in the media world of 1949, when lawmakers became concerned that by virtue of their near-stranglehold on nationwide TV broadcasting, the three main television networks — NBC, ABC and CBS — could misuse their broadcast licenses to set a biased public agenda. The Fairness Doctrine, which mandated that broadcast networks devote time to contrasting views on issues of public importance, was meant to level the playing field. Congress backed the policy in 1954, and by the 1970s the FCC called the doctrine the “single most important requirement of operation in the public interest — the sine qua non for grant of a renewal of license.” (See 25 people to blame for the financial crisis.)

The Supreme Court proved willing to uphold the doctrine, eking out space for it alongside the First Amendment. In 1969’s Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC, journalist Fred Cook sued a Pennsylvania Christian Crusade radio program after a radio host attacked him on air. In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court upheld Cook’s right to an on-air response under the Fairness Doctrine, arguing that nothing in the First Amendment gives a broadcast license holder the exclusive right to the airwaves they operate on. But when Florida tried to hold newspapers to a similar standard in 1974’s Miami Herald Publishing Co. V. Tornillo, the Supreme Court was less receptive. Justices agreed that newspapers — which don’t require licenses or airwaves to operate — face theoretically unlimited competition, making the protection of the Fairness Doctrine unneeded.

The doctrine stayed in effect, and was enforced until FCC chairman Mark Fowler began rolling it back during Reagan’s second term — despite complaints from some in the Administration that it was all that kept broadcast journalists from thoroughly lambasting Reagan’s policies on air. In 1987, the FCC panel repealed the Fairness Doctrine altogether with a 4-0 vote.

—

Further Readings

Snopes: Did Ronald Reagan Pave the Way for Fox News?

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Fox News

—

Ted Koppel on why he thinks Sean Hannity is bad for America

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmaKl0Zm2c4

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Fox News is Extremely Racist

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owcUci6Z18w

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Fox News Rankings as of January 2018

• Most watched cable news channel
  • For 16 straight years
• Fox News Channel most-watched basic cable channel
  • For the 19th straight month
    • Prime time (Mon-Sun): 2,456,000 total viewers
    • Total Day (Mon-Sun): 1,494,000 total viewers
• In 2018
  • Fox News had 15 of top 20 most-watched cable news shows
  • Sean Hannity was the most-watched cable news show
  • Tucker Carlson Tonight has the most 8 p.m. total viewers
  • The Ingraham Angle has the most 10pm total viewers

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Now This Politics: Fox News’ Latest Disturbing Anti-Immigrant Rant

https://youtu.be/eAcvPw1A8vE

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Media Matters: Fox News is Mainstreaming White Supremacists and Neo-Nazis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOq0Qact29A

Fox News has been trying to normalize white supremacy for years. But since Donald Trump’s election, hosts, guests, and contributors on Fox are now openly defending white supremacists and neo-Nazis.

Everyone is well aware that Trump has been continually signaling his support to white supremacists since the 2016 presidential campaign. He retweets them, refuses to immediately disavow them, and even defends them. And Fox News is right there to validate him at every turn.

Fox News personalities repeat his talking points without question (and he repeats theirs). They claim that Trump has done everything he can to condemn these groups and everyone should accept it. They tell viewers to be more understanding of where neo-Nazis are coming from, but don’t extend the same empathy to NFL athletes who have been peacefully protesting racial injustice by taking the knee during the pre-game national anthem. They praise Trump for not jumping to any conclusions. They make ridiculous comparisons that falsely equate white supremacists with minority groups fighting for equal rights. Fox host Tucker Carlson has even promoted a social media app that’s been called “a haven for white nationalists.”

When white supremacists hear the White House and a major news network repeating and amplifying their ideas, they rejoice because, according to Heidi Beirich at the Southern Poverty Law Center, “It builds their ranks … because instead of being considered racist kooks by the majority of people, if their ideas are verified in places like Fox News or places like Breitbart, whatever the case might be, they have something to point to say I’m not extreme.” Beirich has called Fox News “the biggest mainstreamer of extremist ideas” and explained that “the horror of this is that people turn on their TV they go to cable, [they] assume this has got to be mainstream,” but “what you find is radical right ideas being pushed on Fox.”

Since white supremacists and neo-Nazis “are deeply involved in politics, [and] are a constituency that is being pandered to at the highest level of political office,” and because Fox News is elevating their movement, Beirich urges mainstream outlets to “talk about their ideas, … to talk about the domestic terrorism that’s inspired by white supremacy, and … about hate crimes.”

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Business Insider: STUDY: Watching Only Fox News Makes You Less Informed Than Watching No News At All

Media outlets such as Fox News and MSNBC have a negative impact on people’s current events knowledge while NPR and Sunday morning political talk shows are the most informative sources of news, according to Fairleigh Dickinson University’s newest PublicMind survey.

Researchers asked 1,185 random nationwide respondents what news sources they had consumed in the past week and then asked them questions about events in the U.S. and abroad.

On average, people correctly answered 1.6 of 5 questions about domestic affairs.

Because the aim of the study was to isolate the effects of each type of news source, they then controlled for variables such as other news sources, partisanship, education and other demographic factors.

They found that someone who watched only Fox News would be expected to answer 1.04 domestic questions correctly compared to 1.22 for those who watched no news at all. Those watching only “ The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” answered 1.42 questions correctly and people who only listened to NPR or only watched Sunday morning political talk shows answered 1.51 questions correctly.

Fairleigh Dickinson University

In terms of international news, people correctly answered an average of 1.8 of 4 questions.

With all else being equal, people who watched no news were expected to answer 1.28 correctly; those watching only Sunday morning shows figured at 1.52; those watching only “The Daily Show“ figured at 1.60; and those just listening to NPR were expected to correctly answer 1.97 international questions.

 

Those watching only MSNBC were expected to correctly answer only 1.23 out of 4, while viewers of only Fox News figured at 1.08. The study noted that the effects of Fox News, MSNBC and talk radio depended on the ideology of the consumer.

“Ideological news sources, like Fox and MSNBC, are really just talking to one audience,” Political scientist and poll analyst Dan Cassino said in a press release. “This is solid evidence that if you’re not in that audience, you’re not going to get anything out of watching them.”

Fairleigh Dickinson University

Thus, those who watched no news—answering questions by guessing or relying on existing knowledge—fared much better than those who watched the most popular 24-hour cable news network (i.e. Fox News).

Cassino concluded that “the most popular of the national media sources—Fox, CNN, MSNBC—seem to be the least informative.”

It is a follow-up to a 2011 survey of 612 New Jerseyans that found, among other things, that those who watched Fox News were 18 points less likely to know that Egyptians overthrew their government than those who watch no news at all.

Business Insider: STUDY: Watching Only Fox News Makes You Less Informed Than Watching No News At All

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Vox: Why White Supremacists Love Tucker Carlson

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkQKVMYyPoM

—

Act.tv: Tucker’s White Panic TV

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVkloev4U28

—

—

The Root: Tucker Carlson Explains Why White People Aren’t ‘Designed’ to Live Around Immigrants

On Tuesday night, the Great Value Eddie Haskell (you’re too young … Google it) did a segment on a recent National Geographic article about how white people felt “left behind” by America’s changing demographics. The article tries to explain white America’s anxiety about losing its “culture” (which—as far as I can tell—is wholly made up of hacky sack, the most boring versions of church hymns and craft beer) by focusing on the coal town of Hazelton, Pa.

Tucker sums up the piece by explaining how Hazelton was 2.5 percent Hispanic in 2000 but that now the population is majority Hispanic.

“That’s a lot of change,” Carlson explained. “It’s happening all over the country. No nation, no society has ever changed this much, this fast,” said Carlson, conveniently forgetting about the colonization of South America, the rape of Africa and this little-known place called the United fucking States of America.

But this dumb motherTucker continued:

Before you call anyone bigoted, consider—and be honest—how would you feel if that happened in your neighborhood? It doesn’t matter how nice the immigrants are. They probably are nice. Most immigrants are nice! That’s not the point.

The point is: This is more change than human beings are designed to digest. This pace of change makes societies volatile. Really volatile, just as ours has become volatile. And notice where this change is not happening: Any place our leaders live. They caused all of this with their reckless immigration policies, yet their own neighborhoods are basically unchanged. They look like it’s 1960! No demographic change at all!

 

Here we should point out that Hispanic immigrants have not pushed out Hazelton’s white population. There are just as many, or more, white people in Hazelton as there have always been. There are just more Hispanics now. Hazelton just grew. Hazelton’s white residents are free to have as many white friends as they have always had. For them, absolutely nothing has changed except that they are now outnumbered. There’s a name for people who want to hold on to that kind of society:

White supremacists.

Carlson’s entire argument is based on the fact that he doesn’t want to live around brown people. More pointedly, he doesn’t want to be a minority. But if—as Tucker often claims—he’s not a bigot and racism is overblown, why would he have any problem being a minority? After all, he’d still be white.

 

But now that I think about it, I’m with Tucker Carlson. He’s identified the centuries-old problem and cured racism. It all makes sense now:

White people have a design flaw.

Lastly, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that, as he rails against “our leaders,” Tucker Carlson lives in a home reportedly worth about $3.85 million in Washington, D.C.’s Kent suburb. A few weeks ago he told the American Conservative: “My neighborhood is great,” adding, “Our neighborhood looks exactly like it did in 1955.”

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The Daily Show Capturing O’Reilly’s Racism on Air

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nIlIPjUsuA

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Bill O’Reilly: A timeline of the controversy surrounding the Fox News host

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How Fox News Talks About African-Americans When It’s Not Black History Month

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fELYbr72GA

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What If Fox News Covered Trump the Way It Covered Obama? | NowThis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-cZG81-MPQ

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Laura Ingraham’s history of racist, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ attacks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSa3jAYCkk4

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More Videos on Laura Ingraham

• Hasan Piker: viral fox rant attacking lebron exposes how stupid racism is
• Max on Fox News host criticism of LeBron James: I’m not surprised by it | First Take | ESPN
• Stephen A. reveals issue in Fox News host’s LeBron James criticism | Final Take | First Take | ESPN

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The Daily Show: Mighty Morphin Position Changers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0i8-ZNLEeag

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NY Mag: What I’ve Learned From Collecting Stories of People Whose Loved Ones Were Transformed by Fox News

It was somewhere around the 100th response that my brain turned to mush.

Last week, I devoted an installment of my newsletter Welcome to Hell World to a dozen stories from people who, like me, had close relationships that had been strained or ruined by family members who’d become obsessed with Fox News.

I asked a bunch of people how it felt watching their family members be stolen from them by Fox News over the years and it doesn’t feel great it turns out. https://t.co/usVIJWsfIo

— luke oneil (@lukeoneil47) April 5, 2019

No matter where the stories came from they all featured a few familiar beats: A loved one seemed to have changed over time. Maybe that person was already somewhat conservative to start. Maybe they were apolitical. But at one point or another, they sat down in front of Fox News, found some kind of deep, addictive comfort in the anger and paranoia, and became a different person — someone difficult, if not impossible, to spend time with. The fallout led to failed marriages and estranged parental relationships. For at least one person, it marks the final memory he’ll ever have of his father: “When I found my dad dead in his armchair, fucking Fox News was on the TV,” this reader told me. “It’s likely the last thing he saw. I hate what that channel and conservative talk radio did to my funny, compassionate dad. He spent the last years of his life increasingly angry, bigoted, and paranoid.”

Something about the piece struck a chord. It had gone viral, and wave after wave of frustrated and saddened Fox News orphans began to commiserate with me and with each other on Twitter and in my messages. Others wrote of similar phenomenon in Australia with the television channel Sky or in the U.K. with the tabloid Daily Mail. I heard from more than a hundred people who felt like they could relate to what they all seemed to think of as a kind of ideological brain poisoning. They chose Fox News over their family, people told me. They chose Fox News over me.

There was the one reader who wrote of his Puerto Rican uncle becoming a Fox News junkie, and turning on his own people, as he put it, in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. “He was literally sitting in the dark and still defending Trump,” he said, which seemed a metaphor almost too on the nose. Hearing stories like that over and over again all weekend wasn’t pretty.

As some critics of the piece pointed out, it seems a bit silly, if not stupid, to scapegoat a cable-news network for our family members’ interpersonal shortcomings. I get that. I don’t have an empirical way to assign blame or figure out causality. Maybe Fox News causes some people to turn toward hard-right conservatism; maybe it’s merely a precipitating factor; maybe it’s neither, and for most people, change in political attitudes came from elsewhere. In requesting stories about family members and Fox News, I wasn’t undertaking a scientific experiment — merely seeking to see if there are other people who had the same experiences I had, and felt the same way I did.

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What I learned is that there are. Whatever the actual direction of causality, there are many, many Americans who blame Fox News for changes in their loved ones, and many people out there who feel as though their friends and family members have been lost to a 24/7 stream of right-wing propaganda.

Dozens who responded to my piece talked about the sad lonely twilight of their parents’ or grandparents’ lives, having been spurned by, or having disowned much of their families over political disagreements. Older people, recent studies have shown, are much more likely to share misleading information online, but the anecdotes I was hearing seemed to indicate this behavior wasn’t limited to the internet. Young parents wrote that they don’t want to bring their children to visit aging Fox-brainers. “The worst is when my children go to spend time with their grandparents and come home with Fox News talking points coming out of their mouths,” one told me. “I have to decontaminate them every time.”

I heard from several people that Fox News was a key factor in a divorce. One reader told me about his father, a one-time Trump skeptic turned believer. “He and my mom separated last November. There were other reasons but one of the big ones was his Fox addiction,” he wrote. “I went down to help him get set up in a new apartment. He cried a lot. We found an apartment and furniture and I got the utilities set up but I did not sign up for cable TV. He did that after I left, before he got a job.”

Another person told me that Rush Limbaugh sent his father on the path to isolation before eventually mainlining Fox News on a regular basis. Eventually, out of the blue, his mother filed for divorce. “He was crushed, couldn’t understand why, and took comfort in drinking while watching his friends on TV. She is happier than I have ever seen her and he is sad and angry living in the basement of a rented house, still watching The Five, Tucker Carlson, Jeanine Pirro, etc.”

For some, the Fox-driven political affiliations of family members represent a deep betrayal. A son wrote to me of his widowed father choosing Fox News over the well-being of him and his wife, both of whom are disabled. “He is aware that the GOP wants to take away health care and he still voted for Trump. He still likes Trump.”

If I had to pinpoint the most common reaction to all the thousands of replies to the story, I’d say it was one of exasperation — and desperation. I didn’t realize so many other people were dealing with this, many said. “Does anyone know an online support group for people going through this to share tips on deprogramming and/or surviving these relationships?” one asked. “If not … would anyone be interested in starting one?” It’s not the worst idea. The most positive story I heard came from a woman who brought her brother back from the edge with persistent and careful and sustained bridge-building work, showing him the error of his paranoid conspiracy thinking.

One problem is that once someone gets pulled into the Fox News vortex it naturally leads to other scummier enterprises. You might start out signing up for a Fox email list or one from the president then quickly find your email being sold far and wide to increasingly less reputable charlatans. “The thing that makes me maddest about this is that it’s about money,” one correspondent said. His dad had been diagnosed with prostate cancer a year ago. “I guess Mike Huckabee has been selling his email to fucking everybody, including one list I noticed when I was getting his email set up called Beyond Chemo. They are selling him his own anger and a bunch of mushroom pills for all the money he doesn’t have anymore,” he said. “He’s gonna die destitute because of this shit and people belong in prison for seeing this as a business opportunity.”

Those who hadn’t yet broken off with family said maintaining the relationship with a person they love is exceptionally difficult, and requires all manner of safeguards. “I’ve been on eggshells with my dad for half my life now,” one wrote. “It really hurts having a father who is kind and smart but has Fox News brain worms. I can only talk to my dad about the weather. Anything else will set him off, even football …”

To be fair, there is a rough analog on the other side of the political spectrum, even if it seems, anecdotally, relatively muted. More than a few readers wrote to say this all made them thankful they merely had to contend with Dem-Boomer family who had gone mad for Maddow and Russiagate. “My grandma is a huge Maddow person and operates the same way as Fox News brained people,” one wrote me. “The signaling she gets and reiterates from MSNBC happens in the same sort of ‘brain rot’ way. Like, she heard something on there, or on Facebook, that was about how Trump is about to get impeached — and every day I talk to her and she repeats that.”

“I love her, and she’s bright and it’s obviously less offensive” than Fox News, the reader continued, “but the whole fucking garbage corporate 24 hour news model is insidious and so so fucking bad.”

The unfortunate familial balancing act is one I know well from my own family, where an argument, even among people who have explicitly agreed to avoid politics altogether, can erupt at any time. (Many people insisted, like I do myself, that their Trump-kissing parents are the kindest, sweetest people in the world and it makes no sense they would be Fox News viewers.) But it’s one thing to have grown up a liberal in a conservative family, and learned how to navigate difficult political conversations your entire life — even if those conversations have only gotten more difficult. But many of the people I heard from talked about a transformation, whether gradual or sudden.

One woman told me about her mother, who has stopped talking to her since becoming convinced Democrats are murdering children. It wasn’t always this way, she explained. Her mother had been a Democrat until 2008, and then something switched.

A lot of the stories echoed that turning point. There was something about Obama that seemed to make a lot of previously apolitical or moderate family members lose their minds. Gosh — what could it have possibly been?

This is, I think, where the channel’s genius lies. Any salesperson or con artist will tell you that you can’t incept a thought in a mark’s mind out of nowhere. You have to find the hook that’s already there — fear, or desire — and exploit it. When it comes to exacerbating and honing the anxieties of aging Americans you can’t do much better (or worse) than race and immigration.

Because the truth is, Fox News didn’t invent racism, and many of our family members would’ve believed in it on their own. This may have been the hardest thing I learned from the stories I heard: Fox didn’t necessarily change anyone’s mind, so much as it seems to have supercharged and weaponized a politics that was otherwise easy for white Americans to overlook in their loved ones. “Maybe he was always like this, but lacked the exhaust chamber to say out loud what he was thinking. I’ll never know,” one person told me. “It just sucks because I know the people he hates so much are basically the same people as me.”

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Now This: How Fox News and Right-Wing Media Brainwashed This Dad and Destroyed a Family | Opinions | NowThis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4UOsPoPMjA

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VOX: The Trump-Fox & Friends feedback loop, explained

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1d7UvKWh6M

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Vox: The hack gap: how and why conservative nonsense dominates American politics

Republicans have a huge strategic advantage in shaping the news.

In the fall of 2016, Hillary Clinton, asked at a fundraiser how she explained the political appeal of Donald Trump, said that “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, Islamophobic — you name it.”

The rest, she allowed, were fundamentally good people, pushed by circumstance into embracing Trump, and she was hoping to win them over.

Insulting rank-and-file Republicans (even if it was only about half of them) was treated as a huge national scandal. Republican Party politicians and conservative pundits harped on the line, providing a point of party unity at a time when many party and movement stalwarts were reluctant to actually praise Trump. The mainstream press covered the controversy intensively, and left-of-center pundits weighed in with a range of takes, including one from yours truly, which concluded that Clinton really had messed up by violating “the norm against attacking the other party’s constituents” rather than its politicians.

This past Friday, meanwhile, President Trump said that 100 percent of people planning to vote Democratic in the upcoming midterms — a majority of the electorate, in other words — are “crazy.” Nobody cared and almost nobody even noticed.

Hillary Clinton: “you can put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables.”

Trump tonight: “Anybody who votes for a Democrat now is crazy.”

Deplorable is more evocative. Anybody is much more than half.

— Jonathan Allen (@jonallendc) October 20, 2018

The reason is something I’ve dubbed “the hack gap” over the years, and it’s one of the most fundamental asymmetries shaping American politics. While conservatives obsess over the (accurate) observation that the average straight news reporter has policy views that are closer to the Democratic Party than the Republican Party, the hack gap fundamentally does more to structure political discourse.

The hack gap explains why Clinton’s email server received more television news coverage than all policy issues combined in the 2016 election. It explains why Republicans can hope to get away with dishonest spin about preexisting conditions. It’s why Democrats are terrified that Elizabeth Warren’s past statements about Native American heritage could be general election poison in 2020, and it’s why an internecine debate about civility has been roiling progressive circles for nearly two years even while the president of the United States openly praises assaulting journalists.

The hack gap has two core pillars. One is the constellation of conservative media outlets — led by Fox News and other Rupert Murdoch properties like the Wall Street Journal editorial page, but also including Sinclair Broadcasting in local television, much of AM talk radio, and new media offerings such as Breitbart and the Daily Caller — that simply abjure anything resembling journalism in favor of propaganda.

The other is that the self-consciousness journalists at legacy outlets have about accusations of liberal bias leads them to bend over backward to allow the leading conservative gripes of the day to dominate the news agenda. Television producers who would never dream of assigning segments where talking heads debate whether it’s bad that the richest country on earth also has millions of children growing up in dire poverty think nothing of chasing random conservative shiny objects, from “Fast & Furious” (remember that one?) to Benghazi to the migrant caravan.

And more than Citizens United or even gerrymandering, it’s a huge constant thumb on the scale in favor of the political right in America.

The hack gap, explained

The essence of the Clinton email scandal wasn’t the claim that she’d done something wrong — everyone, including Clinton herself, agreed that it was inappropriate to violate State Department email policy and that she should not have done that.

The essence was, rather, the bizarre and obviously false claim that the Clinton email scandal was important.

The argument around this score became in most respects circular. As a CNN explainer on the controversy concluded, the scandal mattered politically because “among Clinton’s biggest challenges in the presidential race is demonstrating her authenticity — and part of that is showing voters she’s trustworthy. Increasingly, though, voters say they distrust Clinton. The numbers have shifted dramatically since news of her private email server was first reported in March.”

But, of course, the only reason the email controversy so thoroughly dominated perceptions of Clinton was it dominated coverage of Clinton — coverage that was justified with reference to its importance in driving perception.

You can tell that it wasn’t actually important because the people most invested in pretending it was important — Republicans — clearly do not actually think government email protocol or Freedom of Information Act compliance are important issues. Have you seen any Fox News segments about email protocol adherence or Freedom of Information Act compliance in the Trump administration? Have congressional Republicans held any hearings about the subject? Have muckraking right-wingers launched any investigations? Of course not.

When the New York Times reported that Trump White House staffers were using personal email accounts, the conservative movement shrugged. When Trump’s use of an insecure cellphone for sensitive communications was revealed, Congress didn’t care.

There’s hypocrisy in this, of course. But politics is full of hypocrisy.

The essence of the hack gap is that when Clinton was in the crosshairs, conservative media made a huge show of being sincerely outraged by her misconduct, which forced the topic onto the national media agenda.

Reporters, meanwhile, simply tend not to jump on left-wing talking points. And progressive media is more infused with the values of actual journalism, and pretending to think something unimportant is actually critical is not journalism. Consequently, while many left-of-center pundits, including me, have noted the Trump email issue, we normally do it in an ironic or second-order way. We’re outraged by the lack of outrage or, rather, still bitter about the amount of faux-outrage over emails that was allowed to dominate campaign 2016. Meanwhile, there is simply no institution on the left that has anywhere near the institutional clout — to say nothing of the value system — of conservative broadcast media.

Conservative propaganda television matters

Since there are exactly two significant political parties in the United States, it’s natural to think of them as essentially mirror images of each other.

But they’re not, and one critical difference is that the Republican Party benefits from the operation of mass-market propaganda broadcasts that completely abjure the principles of journalism. Sheelah Kolhatkar’s recent New Yorker report on Sinclair Broadcasting, America’s largest chain of local television news franchises, says that “the company orders them to air biased political segments produced by the corporate news division, including editorials by the conservative commentator Mark Hyman, and that it feeds interviewers questions intended to favor Republicans.”

Sinclair doesn’t follow journalistic norms for the very good reason that its strategy wasn’t designed by a journalist, similar to how the architect of Fox News, Roger Ailes, came to cable news from a background as a communications strategist for Richard Nixon rather than a journalist.

And it shows. Research from Emory University political scientists Gregory Martin and Josh McCrain found that when Sinclair buys a local station, its local news program begin to cover more national and less local politics, the coverage becomes more conservative, and viewership actually falls — suggesting that the rightward tilt isn’t enacted as a strategy to win more viewers but as part of a persuasion effort. A separate study by Martin and Stanford economist Ali Yurukoglu estimates that watching Fox News translates into a significantly greater willingness to vote for Republican candidates.

Specifically, by exploiting semi-random variation in Fox viewership driven by changes in the assignment of channel numbers, they find that if Fox News hadn’t existed, the Republican presidential candidate’s share of the two-party vote would have been 3.59 points lower in 2004 and 6.34 points lower in 2008. Without Fox, in other words, the GOP’s only popular vote win since the 1980s would have been reversed and the 2008 election would have been an extinction-level landslide. And that’s only measuring the direct impact of the Fox cable network. If you consider the supplemental effect of Sinclair’s local news broadcast, the AM radio shows of Fox personalities like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, and the broader constellation of right-wing punditry, the effect would surely be larger.

Of course, to view this as saying that absent right-wing propaganda media, the Republican Party would lose every election is misleading. What would happen in the real world is that the GOP would adjust to a less propaganda-filled landscape by altering its positions on issues. Rather than pretending to support affordable health care for people with preexisting medical conditions, for example, they might actually adopt the position they pretend to have, joining conservative political parties in Canada, the UK, Germany, and essentially every other country in embracing a large state role in the financing and provision of health insurance.

Ditching unpopular positions in favor of popular ones is, after all, a time-honored way to win elections. But thanks to the hack gap, Republicans can count on flimflam instead.

The hack gap gives Republicans tactical flexibility

One of the more remarkable things happening in American politics right now is that after House and Senate Republicans both embraced multiple versions of Affordable Care Act legislation that would remove regulations requiring insurance companies to avoid discriminating against patients with preexisting health conditions, Republican politicians up and down the ballot are now pretending to support the Obama-era rules.

Even more remarkably, this issue is essentially nonexistent in conservative media, where the biggest issues of the day are some random protesters being mean to Mitch McConnell in a restaurant and whether or not Elizabeth Warren inappropriately claimed Native American heritage.

If Democrats began to loudly insist that they’d abandoned a longstanding progressive stance on an issue in favor of a new, more conservative one, they’d get grief about it from left-wing pundits. Then if they were really only pretending to have changed positions through a rhetorical sleight of hand, new takes would come out defending Democrats against the charge of ideological betrayal. But, of course, the defenses would undercut the original goal of portraying the party as having changed position.

This basic cycle played out time and again in the 2016 campaign when Clinton’s effort to reach out to Republicans alienated by Trump’s bizarre behavior was inevitably met with a progressive backlash that, in turn, required her campaign to reiterate the inconvenient reality that she was actually running on a very progressive platform that lifelong Republicans wouldn’t like very much. She benefited, as all politicians of both parties do, from some ideologically sympathetic media coverage.

But Trump had — and has — at his disposal something that Democrats simply don’t: organized, systematic propaganda broadcasters. Fox, Sinclair, and much of the rest of conservative media simply do not exist to inform a conservative audience about what Republican Party politicians are up to and how it conforms to the tenets of conservative ideology or the preferences of Republican Party voters. Aware that cultural issues unite the GOP base while economic issues divide it, Fox and its cohorts fan the culture war flames while papering over — and often actively misleading about — the nature of the concrete Republican policy agenda.

Silly stuff can be a powerful tool

A classic example of an “imagine if Obama did it” situation arose last week when the current president of the United States, who cools his heels almost every weekend at one of his many golf resorts and has been staging multiple campaign-style rallies per week, claimed to be too “busy” to visit the troops. Obviously, if Obama had said something like that, the conservative punditry would be frothing at the mouth with rage. But rather than raging at Trump, liberals are outraged by the hypothetical outrage that Obama would have faced.

I think if Obama had proclaimed himself too “busy” to visit troops in the field we would have heard a thing or two in the media about his golfing. pic.twitter.com/UVV792yKWz

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) October 17, 2018

Democratic Party politicians’ statements about troops and other matters touching on patriotism are hyper-policed by easily triggered conservative snowflakes, whose mass panics easily come to dominate the national political agenda. And it is frustrating for liberals to watch this happen when Republican Party politicians are able to skate by with little scrutiny.

But here’s the critical thing: Even though plenty of liberals are happy to be mad about the double standard, nobody important in progressive political commentary is actually mad about Trump’s troop visiting schedule. We’re mad that Trump is destroying financial and environmental regulation while trying to screw poor people out of health care and nutrition assistance, all while imprisoning children seeking asylum and undermining the international order. That’s important stuff, while Trump’s golfing — like Clinton’s emails — fundamentally isn’t.

And yet elections are swung, almost by definition, not by the majority of people who correctly see the scope of the differences and pick a side but by the minority of people for whom the important divisions in US partisan politics aren’t decisive. Consequently, the issues that matter most electorally are the ones that matter least to partisans. Things like email protocol compliance that neither liberals nor conservatives care about even slightly can be a powerful electoral tool because the decisive voters are the ones who don’t care about the epic ideological clash of left and right.

But journalists take their cues about what’s important from partisan media outlets and partisan social media.

Thus, the frenzies of partisan attention around “deplorables” and “lock her up” served to focus on controversies that, while not objectively significant. are perhaps particularly resonant to people who don’t have firm ideological convictions.

Meanwhile, similar policy-neutral issues like Trump’s insecure cellphone, his preposterous claim to be too busy to visit the troops, or even his apparent track record of tax fraud don’t get progressives worked into a lather in the same way.

This is a natural tactical advantage that, moreover, serves a particular strategic advantage given the Republican Party’s devotion to plutocratic principles on taxation and health insurance that have only a very meager constituency among the mass public.

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VOX: You’re watching Fox News. You just don’t know it. (Hack Gap)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzoZf4IAfAc&t=1s

—

“UNIVERSALLY ACCEPTED FACT: Grass is green.

TRUMP: *tweets* Grass iz purpil.

EVERYONE WHO HAS EYES: Is he saying that grass is purple? Um, no it’s not. It’s green.

FOX NEWS: Grass is purple.

CNN: Breaking news: New debate rages about whether grass is green or purple.

EVERYONE: I’m sorry, what? Grass is green. There’s no debate.

CNN: Well we have to be fair and legitimize both sides.

EVERYONE: Grass is green. There is no other side.

TRUMP: *addresses news media on White House lawn*

REPORTER: What about the green grass that you’re literally standing on?

TRUMP: You’re very rude. The fake news media is very unfair to me!

TRUMP BASE: *chanting* Grass is purple! Grass is purple!

KELLYANNE: The democrats are trying to shove green grass down your throats because they’re all SOCIALISTS.

RUSSIAN TROLL ONLINE: Hillary Clinton has child slaves underneath a pizza parlor in Queens stealing everyone’s purple grass and painting it green.

TRUMP: *retweets Russian troll*

NEWS MEDIA: *legitimizes retweet by airing footage of it all day*

TUCKER: The Democrats are coming for your grass! 2nd amendment!!!

JIM JORDAN: *screaming* THEY HAVE NO PROOF WHATSOEVER THAT GRASS IS GREEN! NONE!

SCIENTISTS: Um, actually, we have irrefutable scientific proo…

JIM JORDAN: *screaming louder than all the scientists* NONE!!

HANNITY: Anybody that tells you grass is green is part of the deep state.

YOU: But grass IS green.

YOUR GRANDMOTHER AT THANKSGIVING DINNER: Are you part of the deep stage?

YOUR COUSIN IN PENSACOLA: *posts Breitbart meme on Facebook of cartoon frog smoking purple grass*

TRUMP: *tweets* Deep state! Socialists! 2nd amendment! I saw green grass the other day but it was artificial turf! That’s proof that all green grass is FAKE!

NEW YORK TIMES HEADLINE: Grass still green.

NOBODY: *reads newspapers*

RNC: *already mass producing purple hats with clever 2020 re-election slogan all made in China*

CHINA: *laughing in Chinese* Americans are assholes.

BARR: The report states that Trump is totally exonerated.

EVERYONE: There is no report.

LANDSCAPER IN INDIANA: It’s against my religious beliefs to plant green grass.

TRUMP: *already onto the next scandal*

EVERYONE: Oh for fucks sake. Sure. Grass is purple. This is too fucking exhausting. Who cares anymore.

UNIVERSALLY ACCEPTED FACT: Grass is now both green and purple at the exact same time.

PLANET EARTH: *heats up to the point where grass no longer exists*

.

.

 

© 2019 James Tabeek

COVID Politcal Right Coverage

• Washington Post: New research explores how conservative media misinformation may have intensified the severity of the pandemic

Further Readings

• Rolling Stones: How Roger Ailes Built the Fox News Fear Factory
• VOX: Fox News analyst quits, rips network as a “propaganda machine” in letter to colleagues
• CNN: Lawsuit: Fox News concocted Seth Rich story with oversight from White House
• The New York Mag: Third Black Employee Sues Fox News for Racial Discrimination
• Wikipedia: List of Sexual Harassment from Roger Ailes
• Mother Jones: Sean Hannity Is Now a Favorite Weapon of Russian Trolls Attacking America
• The Guardian: Donald Trump and Rupert Murdoch: inside the billionaire bromance
• Media Matters: “Fair and balanced” Fox News aggressively promotes “tea party” protests
• Vox: We analyzed 17 months of Fox & Friends transcripts. It’s far weirder than state-run media
• John Oliver: Fox & Friends know Trump is watching them
• Fox News vs. North Korean State TV | The Daily Show
• Responsible Consumer: Fox News
• Branded: So *that’s* how Breitbart is still making money

—

Rush Limbaugh and AM Conservative Talk Radio

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Rush Limbaugh’s Every Racist Moment

Rush Limbaugh’s show has been the number one commercial talk show since at least 1987 when record keeping began

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=182&v=NPxQ1gb9apM

—

Wikipedia: Conservative talk radio

Conservative talk radio is a talk radio format in the United States and other countries devoted to expressing conservative viewpoints of issues, as opposed to progressive talk radio. The definition of conservative talk is generally broad enough that libertarian talk show hosts are also included in the definition. The format has become the dominant form of talk radio in the United States since the 1987 abandonment of the Fairness Doctrine.^[1]

Early years

Notable early conservatives in talk radio ranged from commentators such as Paul Harvey and Fulton Lewis (later succeeded by Lewis’s son, Fulton Lewis III) to long-form shows hosted by Clarence Manion, Bob Grant, Alan Burke, Barry Farber and Joe Pyne. Because of the Fairness Doctrine, a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) policy requiring controversial viewpoints to be balanced by opposing opinions on air, conservative talk did not have the hegemony it would have in later years, and liberal hosts were as common on radio as conservative ones. Furthermore, the threat of the Fairness Doctrine discouraged many radio stations from hiring controversial hosts.

By the 1980s, AM radio was in severe decline. Top 40 radio had already migrated to the higher fidelity of FM, and the few remaining AM formats, particularly country music, were headed in the same direction or, in the case of formats such as MOR, falling out of favor entirely. Talk radio, not needing the high fidelity that music does, became an attractive format for AM radio station operators. However, in order to capitalize on this, operators needed compelling content.

Deregulation of talk radio

Conservative talk radio did not experience its significant growth until 1987, when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) stopped enforcing the Fairness Doctrine. The Fairness Doctrine had previously required radio stations to present contrasting views. Subsequent to the FCCs decision to stop using the rule, radio stations could then choose to be either solely conservative or entirely liberal.^[2]

Another form of deregulation from the American government came from the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which allowed companies to own more radio stations and for some shows to become nationally syndicated. Before the deregulation, radio stations were predominantly owned by local community leaders.^[2] In 1999, following the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, more than 25% of US Radio stations had been sold, with many more being sold each day. As of 2011, Clear Channel Communications (now iHeartMedia), an industry giant owns over 800 radio stations across the United States, and its largest contract is with Rush Limbaugh, worth $400 million over a span of 8 years.^[3] Clear Channel Communications rose to become a major figure in talk radio in the United States; although it only owned one major “flagship” caliber radio station (KFI Los Angeles), Clear Channel owned a large number of key AM stations in other large markets, allowing it to establish a national presence.^[3] Thus, the deregulation from the abolishment of the Fairness Doctrine and the institution of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 have assisted conservative talk radio as a whole gain popularity throughout the United States.

The rise of conservative talk radio

Within the next decade, conservative talk radio became the dominant form of commercial talk radio in the United States; those stations that had homogenized to an all-conservative format soon came to garner more listeners than those that followed the older full-service model (at the time, progressive talk radio did not have enough hosts for a station to field an all-liberal lineup). By 1991, Limbaugh had become the number one most syndicated radio host and AM radio had been revived.

With multiple large-market stations now owned by a small number of companies, syndicated programs could be disseminated more easily than before. During the late 1990s, political t radio (other than Limbaugh) was still only a portion of the talk radio environment; other subgenres such as lifestyle talk (Laura Schlessinger), truck talk (Bill Mack, Dale Sommers) or paranormal talk (Art Bell‘s Coast to Coast AM) and general interest political interviews and talk (Jim Bohannon, Joey Reynolds) generally made up AM talk station’s lineup.

The September 11, 2001 attacks brought on a wave of nationalism and a desire to rally around the United States and its government, which was led at the time by the Republican Party. This environment led to a large increase in national conservative talk radio hosts: The Glenn Beck Program, The Sean Hannity Show, The Laura Ingraham Show, Batchelor and Alexander and The Radio Factor all launched into national syndication at this time;Global Spiritual Revolution Radio With Bishop Larry Gaiters The Savage Nation, which had launched nationwide a year prior, saw a large increase in syndication around this time as well.^{[citation needed]}

The popularity of conservative talk radio led to attempts to imitate its success with progressive talk radio in the mid-2000s, led by the launch of Air America Radio. Air America did not have the success that conservative talk had, due in part to weaker stations and management that was inexperienced with the radio medium and a political message that was not well received^{[citation needed]} by the public. Air America ceased operations in 2010. As of 2016, conservative syndicated talk shows far outnumber their progressive counterparts; while usually only one progressive talk channel can be found in most markets (with Westwood One the predominant syndicator), at least two and often three conservative talk stations (one local, the rest mostly syndicated) can be found.

Audience and advertising

Sean Hannity was part of the early 2000s wave of new national conservative talkers.

Listeners of conservative talk radio in the United States have predominantly been white and religious Americans as they are more prone to being ideological conservatives.^[4] Furthermore, men were more likely to be listeners of conservative talk radio than women. Recent Arbitron polls have shown that the vast majority of conservative talk radio station listeners are males over the age of 54, with less than 10 percent of the listener base aged 35 to 54. It is also shown that less than one tenth of one percent of conservative talk radio listeners participate (or call in) to the hosts to make comments.^[5] This specific knowledge of the audience assists advertisers in their goal to attract potential customers, and the stations found that listeners of conservative talk radio are more involved and responsive in AM radio in comparison to music listeners of FM radio.^[2] Talk radio programs allow for a more personal approach to their shows, which helped contribute to the rise of revenue and popularity of conservative talk radio stations:^[2]

“Glenn Beck’s relationship with Goldline International is illustrative. When he tells listeners to his radio program that these perilous times make gold an attractive investment, it helps Goldline’s potential investors overcome concerns about the wisdom of moving into a market they likely have little understanding of. If Glenn Beck says gold is a good investment, many in Beck’s audience are going to feel that he is giving trustworthy advice. Because the host is already talking, the segue into or out of a commercial can be relatively seamless.”^[2]

Thus, advertisers have found that AM listeners have more trust in the radio personality and use that to their advantage.

Internet Broadcasting

A few conservative talk radio hosts also syndicate their shows on the internet. In 2011, Glenn Beck started his own television channel initially through Viacom networks, however as of 2014 Suddenlink Communications is the outlet for the channel. TheBlaze, which also has an internet-radio component on their website employs Beck and many other hosts on their shows.^[10] The radio channel, TheBlaze Radio Network broadcasts on the internet as well as on satellite radio, Sirius XM.^{[citation needed]} Rush Limbaugh’s radio show is also streamed on the internet through iHeartRadio, which ClearChannel Communications owns as well.^[11][12]

Future

 

There has been a relative dearth of new radio hosts launched into national syndication since the late 2000s, in part due to personnel declines at local talk stations; most new national hosts have jumped to talk radio from other media (examples include Dennis Miller, a stand-up comic; Fred Thompson, Herman Cain and Mike Huckabee, all former Republican Presidential candidates; the late Jerry Doyle, an actor; and Erick Erickson, a professional blogger). This has also opened up opportunities for less orthodox hosts than were common in the 1990s and 2000s; civil libertarian/nationalist Alex Jones, who spent most of the 2000s as a radio host heard primarily on shortwave, began securing syndication deals with mainstream conservative-talk radio stations during the presidency of Barack Obama.

The genre has also lost ground in listenership. By 2014, at which point Limbaugh had been moved to less-listened-to stations in a number of major markets including New York, Los Angeles and Boston, Limbaugh was no longer the most-listened-to radio host in the United States as he had been for over a decade prior; by this point, classic hits disc jockey Tom Kent had surpassed Limbaugh, estimating his listenership as having nearly 10 million more listeners across his numerous programs (unlike Limbaugh, Kent hosts multiple shows, tallying at least 50 hours a week on air, spanning numerous formats from classic hits to top-40 radio, as opposed to Limbaugh’s singular three-hour daily program).^[13] NPR‘s drive–time programs, Morning Edition and All Things Considered, surpassed Limbaugh in 2016.^[14]

—

Center for American Progress: Talk Radio by the Numbers

Broadcast radio may seem like the wave of the past, but radio remains a strong force in American media with over 90 percent of Americans ages 12 or older still tuning in each week. Yet a startling percentage of the political and talk radio broadcast each day is conservative—91 percent.

This dominance, according to the recent Center for American Progress report “The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio,” is due to structural imbalances—not popular demand. The complete breakdown of the public trustee concept of broadcast, the elimination of clear public interest requirements, and the relaxation of ownership rules have tipped the scales against localism and allowed the few to indoctrinate the many.

CAP suggests three ways to increase localism and diversify radio station ownership to better meet local and community needs:

• Restore local and national caps on the ownership of commercial radio stations.
• Ensure greater local accountability over radio licensing.
• Require commercial owners who fail to abide by enforceable public interest obligations to pay a fee to support public broadcasting.

Here’s a look at the state of talk radio by the numbers.

Still Rockin’

90: Percentage of Americans ages 12 or older who listen to the radio each week.

1,700: Number of commercial talk radio stations nationwide.

50 million: Number of listeners who tune into news/talk radio each week.

Conservative Dominance

257: Number of news/talk stations owned by the top five companies.

2,570: Hours of conservative talk broadcast by those radio stations each day.

254: Hours of progressive talk broadcast by those stations each day.

92: Percentage of those stations (236 out of 257) that broadcast no progressive programming.

91: Percentage of total weekday talk programming that is conservative.

100: Percentage of news/talk radio in Dallas, Houston, and Philadelphia that is conservative.

69: Percent of news/talk radio in L.A. and San Francisco that is conservative.

—

Atlantic: They Just Wanted to Entertain

AM stations mainly wanted to keep listeners engaged—but ended up remaking the Republican Party.

No one set out to turn the airwaves into a political weapon—much less deputize talk-radio hosts as the ideological enforcers of a major American political party. Instead the story of how the GOP establishment lost its power over the Republican message—and eventually the party itself—begins with frantic AM radio executives and a former Top 40 disc jockey, Rush Limbaugh.

In the late 1980s, AM radio was desperate for new content. Listeners had migrated to FM because music sounded better on there, and advertising dollars had followed. Talk-radio formats offered a lifeline—unique programming that FM didn’t have. And on August 1, 1988, Limbaugh debuted nationally. At the outset, Limbaugh wasn’t angling to become a political force—he was there to entertain and make money. Limbaugh’s show departed from the staid, largely nonpartisan, interview and caller-based programs that were the norm in earlier talk radio. Instead, Limbaugh was a consummate showman who excited listeners by being zany and fun and obliterating boundaries, offering up something the likes of which many Americans had never heard before.

Limbaugh conveyed his politics through everything from soap-opera teasers complete with humorous casting choices—in one titled Gulf War Won, Betty White drew the assignment of the first lady Barbara Bush, while Limbaugh cast James Earl Jones as General Colin Powell—and gags like “caller abortions,” in which screaming and vacuum-cleaner sounds drowned out the voice on the other end of the phone.

Noting Limbaugh’s success, radio executives started hiring conservative hosts—first local personalities, and then later national names like G. Gordon Liddy and Michael Reagan—to fill time slots on an expanding number of talk stations.

Although leading Republicans were slow to catch on to the political potential of the medium, by the mid-1990s, talk radio was an integral element of GOP communications strategies. It provided a boost for Republicans as they pushed to enact an agenda and worked to win elections. Republicans, including House Speaker Newt Gingrich, pumped information to hosts, chatted with them regularly, and generally saw talk radio as an ideal way to reach their base with a message and learn how voters around the country felt about key issues.

Many on the left surmised that the hosts were puppets, plugging whichever policies Gingrich and others wanted them to. But selling the GOP message was never the hosts’ top priority. In my research into the history of conservative talk radio, the executives, producers, and hosts whom I interviewed told me over and over that their main goal was to produce the best radio show each day, one that could command the largest audience possible that tuned in for the longest possible time.

Over time, this focus on the commercial imperatives of AM radio would transform politics. To keep audiences engaged and entertained, hosts grew more and more strident as the years passed, depicting politics as warfare—and started targeting moderates in the Republican Party.

In its early phases, conservative talk radio had exhibited a pragmatic streak that would sound foreign today. In 1994, Limbaugh cautioned against single- issue voting. He advised television viewers—he had a TV program from 1992 to 1996—not to oppose Mitt Romney, the Republican then running as a moderate against the liberal senator Ted Kennedy in Massachusetts. As Limbaugh explained, electing Romney, despite his lack of conservative fervor, would be a step “in the right direction.”

Hosts never loved moderates, and never hesitated to criticize them for actions out of step with hosts’ vision for the country. But they understood that such figures were crucial to securing a majority, without which their preferred agenda had no shot.

But this detente started to break down as the 2000s progressed. In one 2005 harangue prompted by Republicans who voted against oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Limbaugh declared, “There’s no such thing as a moderate. A moderate is just a liberal disguise, and they are doing everything they can to derail the conservative agenda.” He deemed such behavior “unacceptable” and read listeners the names of those Republicans voting no. Even so, Limbaugh still crucially refrained from calling for those Republicans to lose.

Read: How conservatives awoke to the dangers of Sean Hannity

A year later, Sean Hannity demonstrated that things were shifting further during a conversation with a caller who was fuming at Republican-in-name-only, or RINO, senators. Hannity agreed, and it wasn’t just moderate senators who aroused their ire: Hannity explicitly included Senators John McCain, Chuck Hagel, and Lindsey Graham, all of whom were generally conservative but who had departed from the party line on several significant issues. (Sherwood Boehlert, a true Republican moderate, quipped to me in an interview that “McCain is no more moderate than I am a Communist.”)

As the number of ideological moderates declined, the definition of RINOism expanded. Any Republican who sought out compromise or who rejected political warfare found him or herself a target of conservative media. This would only intensify with each passing year—and not just for political reasons. Hosts, buffeted by ever fiercer competition for the conservative audience, as right-wing digital outlets like RedState and Breitbart proliferated, had to perform before millions of frustrated and fickle listeners.

In the fight for a devoted audience, allies became foes. Former House Speaker John Boehner explained what that meant for Republicans, telling Politico, “‘I always liked Rush [Limbaugh]. When I went to Palm Beach I would always meet with Rush and we’d go play golf. But you know, who was that right-wing guy, [Mark] Levin?”—Levin launched in New York in 2002 and entered national syndication in 2006—“He went really crazy right and got a big audience, and he dragged [Sean] Hannity to the dark side. He dragged Rush to the dark side. And these guys—I used to talk to them all the time. And suddenly they’re beating the living shit out of me.”

And by 2009, a rubicon had been crossed: Limbaugh called for the defeat of eight House Republicans who voted for a carbon cap-and-trade system, even though more hard-line conservatives likely could not win their seats. Indeed, in 2010 and 2012, conservative media largely supported upstart conservative primary challenges against Representative Mike Castle of Delaware (in a Senate race) and Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana—both of whom were heavy favorites to win the general election. Instead, both fell in primaries, with their more conservative, talk-radio-preferred opponents losing to Democrats.

That was a price worth paying for conservative hosts. Having a party that stood for something and was willing to fight for it was far more important than a few seats here or there. Turning politics into a blood sport, and kicking moderates off the team, made for good, passionate radio and meshed with listeners’ frustrations. Crucially, because hosts had no responsibility to govern, they didn’t have to worry about the policy or electoral consequences of such a stance.

Even so, hosts had amassed enough power that elected Republicans had to pay attention to their demands. Many listeners spent more time with their favorite hosts than they did with their spouses; so when a host touted a primary challenger or denounced someone as a RINO, listeners took it as advice from a friend. In low-turnout primaries, where information was often scarce, conservative media could help decide the race.

In the 2010s, talk radio’s business needs further upended the traditional political hierarchy. With moderates virtually extinct, the war against RINOs often focused on Republican leaders like Boehner whose sin was simply not being willing to adopt the strident tactics that hosts demanded. Hosts blasted them with increasing regularity, while praising a new group of political superstars, largely backbenchers with minimal power on Capitol Hill. But they were perfect for talk radio: They spewed extreme rhetoric, saw the world in black-and-white terms, and advocated for the most extreme tactics possible. Figures like Representative Mark Meadows, Representative Jim Jordan, and Senator Ted Cruz became the heroes in the soap opera that talk radio had always been—and RINOs and the Republican leadership were as much the villains as Democrats or the mainstream media.

The new political landscape has hamstrung the ability of Republican leaders to legislate, leading to constant brinkmanship epitomized by the longest government shutdown in history in the winter of 2018–19, when President Donald Trump heeded the calls of Limbaugh and others to fight, even though there really wasn’t a viable path to victory.

This episode has unfortunately illustrated the new reality for the Republican Party: Over three decades, the titans of talk have remade the party in their own image, with elected Republicans now sounding more like commentators on the AM dial—or its cable equivalent, the Fox News Channel, where Hannity has hosted a show since 1996—than what used to be heard in the halls of Congress. While this made for gripping radio and TV, it left a more and more extreme party, with little capacity to govern and little appeal in the suburbs or with young and nonwhite voters.

Trump’s presidency is the ultimate testament to the power of talk-radio conservatism. In one week last month, the president not only called in to Hannity’s show, but on a separate night tweeted, “Oh well, we still have the great  @seanhannity who I hear has a really strong show tonight. 9:00 P.M.” He reportedly talks regularly with Hannity as well. And last winter, when Trump reversed course after the uprising on the right, it was Limbaugh to whom the president pledged that he would shut the government down if he didn’t get enough funds for his border wall.

The power of these hosts would’ve been unthinkable when Limbaugh took the national airwaves by storm in 1988. But over three decades, hosts have used the special bond they’ve forged with their audiences to reshape the Republican Party in their image. For millions of listeners, the change has been electrifying. For excommunicated moderates, this show hasn’t been entertaining in the least.

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Buzzfeed: The Real Media Machine Behind Trump: Conservative Talk Radio

If you’re one of the millions listening to talk radio, you can almost listen to pro-Trump news all day. Is it pure fandom, a conduit for talking about immigration, or a means to give people what they want to stay relevant?

WASHINGTON — “I’m for Trump,” conservative talk radio host Michael Savage told listeners last month. “Point blank, best choice we have.”

Right now, the lead video on the radio host’s YouTube channel is an “exciting, must-see compilation set to music” of Trump moments from this summer.

The symbiotic relationship between Donald Trump and cable news is well established. But what’s gotten less attention this summer beyond frustrated conservative circles online is another media engine driving Trump: good old-fashioned talk radio.

For weeks, some of the biggest names in conservative talk radio — Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, and Savage — have praised Trump and his bashing of the politically correct left and Republican establishment.

But the conservative talkers are also pushing his rhetoric on immigration and his vow to revoke birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants — and delivering that content straight to their millions of listeners.

Unlike cable news, conservative talk radio speaks directly to the disaffected conservative base fueling Trump’s rise. Rush Limbaugh’s is still the most-listened-to talk radio program in the country, pulling in 13 and a quarter million weekly listeners, according to estimates in Talkers magazine, an industry publication (Limbaugh himself has estimated it in the past at 20 million). Talkers puts Sean Hannity in second, with 12.5 million. Mark Levin ties with Glenn Beck (a Trump critic) for fourth, with 7 million. Savage has more than 5 million, according to Talkers’ estimates.

And if you’re someone who listens to a lot of talk radio, you can go from Ingraham to Limbaugh to Hannity or Savage to Levin in a day and hear nary a word of displeasure with Trump.

“I liken the bond between hosts and their listeners to a friendship,” said Brian Rosenwald, a University of Pennsylvania professor who has studied conservative talk radio. “Politically, the result of this bond is that when hosts talk to listeners about a candidate or bill it’s like having your brother-in-law or best friend tell you about the candidate or bill.”

Though many hosts have avoided a formal endorsement, they’ve heaped praise on the candidate and signaled to their listeners that Trump is their guy.

“I’m not endorsing anybody as you well know, but the fact of the matter is I like the way this guy talks,” Levin said this week on Hannity’s Fox News show. Ingraham has framed her posture towards Trump as “analyzing Trump’s appeal.”

The praise is often couched as praise of Trump’s supporters and of Trump’s connection with them.

“I watched this thing last night,” Limbaugh said on Wednesday’s program. “I happened to get on the airplane to catch maybe the last 30 minutes of it on the way home, and the last 10 minutes of what Trump did last night sealed the deal,” Limbaugh said, referring to Trump’s appearance in Dubuque, Iowa.

“I mean, the sincerity, the appreciation for the audience that showed up. He gave every indication. He left no doubt how much he loved those people that showed up, how much he respects them, how much their presence means to him. All the braggadocio aside, all of the showmanship and the flamboyance, all of that aside, Donald Trump let them know at the end of everything else he said how deeply touched and moved he is by their support, by their belief in him.”

It’s hard to tell whether the hosts actually really like Trump, whose conservative bona fides fall apart the minute the discussion goes beyond immigration, or whether they’re more concerned with pleasing their audience and with keeping the focus on the immigration debate that fires up the base. Trump, after all, has supported many positions antithetical to conservative orthodoxy over the years — universal health care, a pro-choice approach to abortion (since reversed), banning assault weapons, and so forth.

That inconsistency hasn’t gone unnoticed in conservative circles, where it’s vexed the vocal Trump opposition.

Rick Wilson, a Republican strategist who has come under attack from fellow conservatives for opposing Trump, said that he thought conservative talk radio’s focus on Trump is a ploy to please listeners and keep them tuned in. The conservative media is more crowded than ever with sources of information, and though they still command large audiences, talkers don’t have the same kind of hegemony they once did.

“The get out of jail free card of ‘I’m not with Trump but isn’t he awesome about The Wall/Those Damn Dirty Mexicans/Bush/Megyn Kelly/the media/topic du jour’ is a mighty tiny fig leaf,” Wilson said. “Of course, they’re in the phase where they’ve monetized Trump mania, so they have to keep stoking the story and stirring their audiences with ever-more-grandiose paeans to Trump’s godhood.”

“Fealty to Trump demands the broadcasters fully buy in to the Trump Reality Distortion Field, or be cast into the outer darkness,” Wilson said. “I mean, this isn’t a new observation, but Fox News is no longer conservative enough in their eyes. I heard a Newsmax promo this week that said, ‘Tune in to Newsmax TV to get the real story from Ted Cruz… without the Fox News filter.’”

Fox News has been supplanted as the voice of the base, if it ever was. For all the hemming and hawing in recent years about talk radio’s supposed decline in influence, there’s still no purer media ecosystem for the ideas that animate conservatives. If Rush Limbaugh or Mark Levin or Sean Hannity or Laura Ingraham decide that birthright citizenship is going to be a big issue, then lo, it becomes the issue of the week, or month. Ingraham was one of the biggest voices championing Rep. David Brat before his upset win over Eric Cantor. Limbaugh especially has a proven record of this; in a New York Times story in 2008, Karl Rove said he thought Limbaugh’s “Operation Chaos” may actually have tipped the Texas primary Hillary Clinton’s way.

And Limbaugh positions himself as no unaware actor. On his program on Aug. 18, he gave a representative précis of the talk radio position in response to a caller who called in and implied that Limbaugh is supporting Trump:

“Do you understand that I always have a purpose?” Limbaugh said. “Do you realize nothing is haphazard? You’re wondering why I’m supporting Trump. Who says I am? Have I announced specifically that I am, or are you perceiving it? A better question would be: If you think that, why? And I can’t go any further. I did with my brother last night. It’s on record, if I have to go back and prove this, and I told Snerdley this morning about this. But I can’t go any further here. It is what it is. I know it’s a cliche.”

Limbaugh’s show is less generation of the policies themselves than a mechanism for spreading the ideas far and wide. “In truth, Limbaugh is less a theoretician than a popularizer of what he regards as the correct conservative responses to contemporary issues,” that same 2008 Times story, by Limbaugh and Roger Ailes biographer Zev Chafets, argued.

And right now, Trump’s embrace of hardline immigration ideas like ending birthright citizenship matches up perfectly with the policies that some of these hosts have been promoting for some time. The Trump-inspired debate over immigration is allowing them to mainstream ideas that once didn’t have much purchase, the birthright citizenship question being a notable recent example. Both Levin and Limbaugh have seized on a quote by Sen. Jacob Howard, the original sponsor of the Citizenship Clause, that they’re using to bolster their case that the 14th amendment doesn’t guarantee citizenship to the children of people in the country illegally. Laura Ingraham has also referenced it.

Talk radio hasn’t totally been a monolith for Trump. Several of the major hosts, most notably Glenn Beck, have been either skeptical or downright hostile to the frontrunner. Beck in particular has gone after Trump early and often, calling him a “flaming body part” after his announcement and a “son of a bitch” after the first primary debate earlier this month in Cleveland. Beck has also criticized his peers in the conservative media for supporting Trump.

“Why are big name ‘conservatives’ supporting him?” Beck asked on his Facebook page earlier this month. “I am not talking about the average Joe, I am talking about Sean Hannity or Ann Colter [sic]. How about Savage or Rush? These are smart people. What am I missing? Just based on his favorability ratings he could never win in a general. Research shows that he may be near his ceiling now. Are they just trying to hold on to those disenfranchised republicans and keep them in the fold?”

And for Hannity, the situation has been complicated by Trump’s war with Fox News following the Fox moderators’ tough questioning of him in the debate. Though Hannity is positive on Trump, he’s stood up for his colleague Megyn Kelly who has borne the brunt of Trump’s attacks. He told his “friend” Trump to “leave Megyn Kelly alone” on Twitter this week and later expanded on the criticism, saying on his radio show on Tuesday that Trump needs to focus more on the issues.

There’s also a case to be made that Trump is famous enough that he didn’t need talk radio in the first place. Hugh Hewitt, who has been skeptical of Trump and asked him tough questions but hasn’t declared war like Beck, said he thought that Trump would have reached this level even without talk radio’s help.

“Donald Trump is a ratings phenomenon that would exist even if every talker in America suddenly went silent for the next year,” Hewitt said. “He has a built-in audience by virtue of his decades in the spotlight, his television and publishing success, and of course his overall profile as a deal-making maestro. Yes, we all talk about him — I’d gladly open every show with him if he was available, and all four times he has appeared with me have been great — but his appeal is independent of talk radio.”

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Washignton Examiner: How political talk radio’s rise led to President Trump: Book Review

As Rosenwald’s title (Talk Radio’s America: How an Industry Took Over a Political Party That Took Over the United States) suggests, talk radio has disproportionately benefited populist conservatives over the past three-plus decades — leading to the election of Donald Trump in 2016 in one of the nation’s biggest political upsets.

The author expertly shows how disparate strands in the American political landscape converged in the late 1980s to help make talk radio the potent political force it would become.

One was the seemingly permanent minority status of House Republicans, out of power since early January 1955. A backbencher from Georgia, Rep. Newt Gingrich sought to shed the House GOP’s “lovable loser” image embodied by the longtime House minority leader, Rep. Robert Michel of Illinois, an old-school pol who thought it unseemly to challenge ruling Democrats in stark and personal terms.

But Gingrich and his House GOP minions saw it differently. They sensed vast opportunity in talk radio’s potential to persuade the listening masses about the merits of what they dubbed a “conservative opportunity society” — an implicit contrast to welfare state Democrats that had ruled the House for more than 30 years, in ever imperious fashion.

Then there was the singular talent of a Missouri college dropout with an undeniable ability to command an audience for three hours, Rush Limbaugh. Immodestly citing his own “talent on loan from God,” Limbaugh’s biting humor in filleting Democrats over any trending news story provided political comfort food to conservative listeners, what they considered a necessary counterbalance to pervasive liberal media bias.

“August 1, 1988, marked the beginning of the long road to President Donald Trump,” writes Rosenwald. On that otherwise inauspicious summer date, “a failed disc jockey and former Kansas City Royals executive named Rush Hudson Limbaugh III made his national radio debut.”

Additionally, repeal of a longtime radio regulation made for a trifecta of events that further enabled the rise of conservative talk radio.

“The wall-to-wall conservative political talk stations that dominate the AM airwaves today were impossible until 1987, thanks to a regulation called the fairness doctrine. That year, however, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) eliminated the policy, which required broadcasters of opinionated programming on controversial issues to offer an array of viewpoints,” writes Rosenwald, an editor of the Washington Post’s “Made By History” section, and scholar-in-residence at the Partnership for Effective Public Administration and Leadership at the University of Pennsylvania.

Over the ensuring decades, conservative radio talkers commanded increasingly larger audiences, including many high-propensity voters. The 1994 GOP revolution, when the party won majorities in the House and Senate and cleaned up in down ballot races nationwide, showed the power of talk radio in full force. Limbaugh had spent the prior two years lambasting President Bill Clinton, and his message stuck on the right. Leaders of the new House Republican majority named Limbaugh an honorary member.

Conservative talk radio, though, was never about propping up Republican establishment leaders. Rather, it always had a particular populist bent, which is where Trump comes in. Long before the one-time real estate developer, casino owner and Apprentice star strode down Trump Tower’s gold-plated escalator, he mouthed off on issues that were regular talk radio fodder. Concerns over illegal immigration were talk radio staple for decades. A broader concern about “elites” telling average Americans what to do also appealed to listeners’ sensibilities. Trump, a self-proclaimed billionaire, exploited this endlessly with rants over international trade deals he claimed meant the U.S. continually lost jobs and international standing, to Mexico, China, and any number of other bogeyman, real or perceived.

Talk Radio’s America further shows how some of the biggest names in the industry now set a precedent for Trump’s rise and appeal.

“Trump owes his political career to the likes of Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, and to conservative social media. They gave him a platform, and, if his rhetoric is any indication, trained him in political oratory. His election is the purest product of the revolution Limbaugh began,” writes Rosenwald, a prolific tweeter about American political history, Philadelphia Phillies baseball, and other topics…

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How Rush Limbaugh in 1988 propelled Trump’s 2016 win

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NY Times: Bob Grant, a Combative Personality on New York Talk Radio, Dies at 84

 

Mr. Grant had hosted radio and television talks shows in Los Angeles when he arrived in New York in 1970 to work at WMCA, a major radio station in the region. He left WMCA for another competitor, WOR, in a contract dispute shortly afterward and joined WABC in 1984.

By then his arch disdain for liberals, prominent black people, welfare recipients, feminists, gay people and anyone who disagreed with him was familiar to his listeners. The white supremacist David Duke had been a frequent guest on his show in the 1970s.

In 1986, Mr. Grant conducted the first live radio interview with Bernard Goetz, the white vigilante who shot and wounded four black youths on a subway train. Congratulating Mr. Goetz, who said the youths had harassed him and were getting ready to rob him, Mr. Grant lamented only that he had not “finished the job by killing them all.”

Mr. Grant was among the first radio hosts to take full advantage of the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987; as part of the Reagan administration’s drive for large-scale federal deregulation, the repeal essentially freed broadcasters to vent political views without having to present opposing perspectives.

He became openly partisan, friendly to Republicans like Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and Gov. George E. Pataki and hostile to Democrats like Gov. Mario M. Cuomo (whom he called “Il Duce”) and Senator Frank R. Lautenberg (“Senator Loussenberg”). He also became less constrained in talking about race.

 

“You can talk all you want about ‘minorities’ rights,’ but heaven forbid you talk about white rights,” he said on WABC in 1989. “I see a very bleak future for this country, simply because the quality of the citizenry seems to be heading down.”

The country was being overrun, he said in 1991, by “millions of subhumanoids, savages, who really would feel more at home careening along the sands of the Kalahari or the dry deserts of eastern Kenya.”

In a May 1993 broadcast, Mr. Grant referred to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as “that slimeball” and “this bum, this womanizer, this liar, this fake, this phony.”

Civil rights leaders and media watchdog groups complained about Mr. Grant, but the attention seemed only to enlarge his political influence. His studio was a must-stop for candidates for Congress, mayor and governor. Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Pataki each publicly thanked him for his support after winning their first elections to high office, saying they would not have won without it.

Part of Mr. Grant’s appeal was a Dirty Harry persona, expressed in outbursts of impatience with callers. He dispatched them profligately — sometimes for disagreeing with him, sometimes for agreeing too obsequiously, and sometimes, it seemed, just because he could. “Get off my phone, you creep!” was his signature shout.

Off the air Mr. Grant was courtly and polite; on the air, he articulated the frustrations of “the working stiff — the guy who pays $4 a day in bridge tolls just to go to and from work,” the WABC program director Mark Mason said in 1988.

Fans said Mr. Grant hated and baited everyone, noting that he also railed against “subhumanoid” whites. He was like a pro wrestler, they said — all bluster and choreography.

 

But Michael Harrison, founder of the talk radio monthly and online journal Talkers, said Mr. Grant believed every word he said — though like any performer, he added, Mr. Grant had created a persona as a vehicle for his views.

“He was an artist — a shock jock in a sense people hadn’t heard of before,” Mr. Harrison said. “ ‘Shock’ originally meant ‘dirty talk.’ Bob Grant pioneered shock radio in the political sense.”

Mr. Grant always denied being a racist. The civil rights activist Roy Innis, Justice Clarence Thomas and the columnist Thomas Sowell, all of them black, were among the conservatives he admired most, he said. “I’m no more racist than you are” was his standard reply to a question he considered insulting.

But civil rights leaders heard more than cranky misanthropy when Mr. Grant referred to Haitian boat refugees as “subhuman scum,” or said that David N. Dinkins, the first black mayor of New York, reminded him of “the men’s room attendant” at his favorite restaurant, or proposed that people having children while receiving welfare benefits should be forced into the “Bob Grant Mandatory Sterilization Program.”

The Rev. Jesse Jackson and the Rev. Al Sharpton organized advertiser boycotts, and the liberal-leaning watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting publicized his remarks.

Probably none of those comments received more publicity than the one he made about Secretary Brown, who was aboard an Air Force plane that crashed in Croatia on April 3, 1996. Amid early reports of a lone survivor, Mr. Grant said: “My hunch is that he is the one survivor. I just have that hunch. Maybe it’s because, at heart, I’m a pessimist.”

The Walt Disney Company, the parent company of WABC, fired Mr. Grant.

He was back on the air two weeks later in a return to WOR. But his ratings never again rose to the No. 1 spot he had held for most of a decade.

 

Mr. Grant stayed at WOR until 2006. A year later he returned briefly to WABC before leaving to host an Internet radio show, “Straight Ahead!” He was back at WABC again in September 2009 as the host of a Sunday talk show. He retired in 2012.

Accusations of racism dogged Mr. Grant for years. In 2008, the trade publication Radio and Records planned to give him its annual lifetime achievement award but reversed itself amid a firestorm of protest. The magazine’s editors said a closer look at Mr. Grant’s “body of work” revealed that some comments he had made “contradict our values.”

At its peak, Mr. Grant’s power dazzled a younger generation of conservative syndicated talk-radio hosts. Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, who came to his defense during the 2008 controversy, considered him a founding father of their radio format.

“Bob, you are a man who has paved the way for others to come along and do it,” Mr. Limbaugh said in 1991 at a testimonial event for Mr. Grant. “I am grateful to you.”

Bob Grant was born Robert Ciro Gigante on March 14, 1929, in Chicago. His parents were Pasquale and Mary Gigante. His Italian immigrant family, he wrote in his autobiography, “Let’s Be Heard” (1996), was politically divided: His mother loved President Franklin D. Roosevelt, while his father, a violinist, hated Roosevelt. (Bob adopted his father’s view.)

After graduating from the University of Illinois, Mr. Grant was a radio reporter in Chicago and a talk-show host on local television in Los Angeles. In 1964, he began hosting a radio call-in show, filling in for Joe Pyne, a pioneer of right-wing radio, who became a mentor. He was a divorced father of four in 1970 when he left Los Angeles for New York.

Mr. Grant is survived by his companion, Josephine Saracco; his sons, Jeff and Chris Grant; his daughters, Alisa Mingus and Cynthia Gaydosh; eight grandchildren; two great-grandchildren; and his sister, Ann Ryan.

 

Asked once by an interviewer to characterize his political views, Mr. Grant replied almost wistfully. “My basic problem stems from the fact that I am an idealist,” he said. “I want a tidy world, but I know we will never get a tidy world. Perhaps what I want is a contradiction in terms: a benevolent dictatorship that would allow many different flowers to bloom.”

After a pause, he added, “I think I would make rather a good dictator.”

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Extremist Rightwing Media

Brebarit, Infor Wars, Shapiro

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Vice: Breitbart, Stormfront, and Shapiro: How Man Convicted of Painting Swastikas on Synagogue Says He Got Radicalized

He and his wife drove 50 miles across Indiana to paint huge swastikas on a synagogue and scorch its grounds.

A 21-year-old man from Indiana said that his road to radicalization began when his wife fed him articles by Fox News, Breitbart, and right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro — and ended when he drove 50 miles across the state to paint huge swastikas on a synagogue and scorch its grounds.

Nolan Brewer, who pleaded guilty to conspiring to violate the civil rights of the Shaarey Tefilla Congregation in Carmel, Indiana, was sentenced to three years in federal prison earlier this month. But documents filed by his lawyers offer some clues as to how Brewer went from a “fastidious rule follower” and “kind-hearted” young man to someone who admired Hitler and wore Nazi paraphernalia.

In the early hours of June 28, 2018, Brewer and his wife, Kiyomi (who was 17 at the time), drove from their home in Eminence to the Shaarey Tefilla congregation with explosive devices, napalm, and spray paint. Prosecutors said the couple had originally plotted to firebomb the synagogue but couldn’t break in. Instead, they painted two huge swastikas and two iron crosses on the property and burned the grounds with napalm.

Prosecutors called the crimes “yet another reminder of the genocide the Jewish people suffered during the Holocaust.”

Brewer’s lawyer, Samuel Ansell, conceded that he bought into the propaganda “to please his new wife” but that Kiyomi was the instigator of the crime. She had a troubled upbringing, Ansell said, and was raised “in an unhealthy environment and was taught to consider other races as inferior.”

After Kiyomi moved in with Brewer and his parents, she started spending several hours a day hanging out in white supremacist and radical right-wing forums on Discord, a server popular with gamers and the far right.

“Kiyomi found pseudo-academic propaganda that purported to prove her white supremacist beliefs,” Ansell wrote. “Every evening, Kiyomi would share her views with Nolan and ask him to read articles she had found.”

But Kiyomi didn’t start with the hardcore stuff right away.

“She began with right-wing yet mainstream views such as those presented on Fox,” Ansell said. “She then moved on to writings by Ben Shapiro and articles on Breitbart which bridged the gap to the notorious white supremacist and anti-Semitic propaganda site Stormfront.”

Shapiro did not respond to a request for comment, but his name has come up in conjunction with acts of far-right extremism in the past. Prosecutors in Canada said a man who killed six people at a mosque in Quebec City in 2017 regularly checked the Twitter feeds of mainstream conservative figures including President Donald Trump, Shapiro, and Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

Ansell, who unsuccessfully sought a lighter sentence for his client, said that Nolan’s interview with the FBI suggested that his belief in Nazism was “intellectually-based rather than emotionally-based” and “born of pseudo-academic misinformation.”

“It is clear that he has adopted beliefs based on “alt-right” or white nationalist propaganda,” Ansell wrote.

Brewer told the FBI that he and Kiyomi were communicating online with a Romanian “Identitarian” — a sanitized term for white nationalist — who called himself “Asbestos Peter.” Brewer said he sent Peter photos of the vandalism, at his request. He said he wanted to publish them online to inspire similar acts.

“It was mainly trying to rile up — rally up people,” Brewer told the FBI. “Just to see if something could come of it and people would become more active.”

Brewer also told the FBI that the attack on the synagogue was Peter’s idea — but prosecutors said they found text messages between Brewer and Kiyomi suggesting the plan was in the works before they started chatting online to Peter.

Brewer’s sentencing comes alongside a series of acts of vandalism targeting houses of worship, including synagogues. Last week, Chicago police found molotov cocktails outside a synagogue, and police in Massachusetts said three fires at Jewish centers were “intentionally set.”

Just last month, a shooting at a synagogue in Poway, California, also left one dead, seven months after a shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh left 11 dead.

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The Direct Line Between Ben Shapiro And Anti-Semitic Hate

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mt-EvLeE4Fo&fbclid=IwAR1JSpFPsIGiSpa1yX3N_EID6iypxlYg4oj17L8xFwrIVANtVsgjBeF5Y34

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Vox: Pizzagate, the fake news conspiracy theory that led a gunman to DC’s Comet Ping Pong, explained

The scene, thankfully, was not another example of a mass shooting — no one was injured or killed. Instead, it was the result of a fake news story about Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign that proliferated on social media in the weeks before Election Day.

The totally false conspiracy theory claims that Hillary Clinton and her former campaign chair, John Podesta, ran a child sex ring at the basement of a pizzeria in DC, Comet Ping Pong (which doesn’t even have a basement). Over the past few weeks, Donald Trump supporters and white supremacists on social media have pushed the conspiracy theory — leading to headlines like “Pizzagate: How 4Chan Uncovered the Sick World of Washington’s Occult Elite” on fake news websites.

The Sunday shooting was far from the beginning of threats that Comet Ping Pong has faced over the past few weeks. Cecilia Kang reported at the New York Times that the restaurant’s staff and its owner, James Alefantis, have faced a barrage of abuse and death threats on social media as a result of the conspiracy theory. Things have gotten so bad that the general manager’s wife asked him to quit. Alefantis has worked to get the FBI and local police involved in an investigation to stop the conspiracy theory’s spread, and requested that social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit take down messages and pictures related to the false conspiracy theory.

But it has persisted. Bryce Reh, Comet’s general manager, characterized trying to take down the conspiracy theory online as “trying to shoot a swarm of bees with one gun.” Yet as Pizzagate continues spreading online, it becomes more and more clear just how big of a problem fake news now poses — and how difficult it may be to address.

Pizzagate has been pushed by Trump supporters and white supremacists

Really love that this #pizzagate infographic bothers to say “it’s not actually that crazy” pic.twitter.com/AcZBC2SR0Q

— Nick Wing (@nickpwing) December 5, 2016

Like many ridiculous things on the internet, Pizzagate appears to have begun on the troll haven and message board 4chan. After Podesta’s emails were hacked (likely by Russian agents) and WikiLeaks published them, 4chan users in October found emails between Podesta and Alefantis about a Clinton fundraiser that happened early in the campaign.

From there, people began speculating without any evidence that the restaurant was part of a broader child trafficking ring run by the Democratic Party — a popular but entirely false conspiracy theory on the fringes of conservative media. The conspiracy theories jumped over to Reddit, where the popular Trump subreddit r/The_Donald championed it; Twitter, where pro-Trump tweeters (including the son of Trump’s pick for national security adviser) have continued to promote it; and Facebook, where fake news outlets have written and shared articles about it.

And Alex Jones, the head of the fake news InfoWars who once argued that President Barack Obama and Clinton are literally demons, also boosted the conspiracy theory, saying on his show (in a video that was published in early November but later taken down) that “Hillary Clinton has personally murdered children.” That video earned more than 420,000 videos before it was removed.

Here is one example of a fake news outlet promoting the conspiracy theories behind Pizzagate, keeping in mind that the story is entirely false and the FBI has not confirmed anything about Pizzagate or related conspiracy theories because they’re all wrong:

Craig Silverman at BuzzFeed has an exhaustive report on how these ridiculous conspiracy theories got so big.

They appeared to really take off after a white supremacist Twitter account (which uses an avatar of a Jewish lawyer in New York) propped them up. The tweet pointed to a Facebook post that claimed a likely nonexistent “NYPD source” confirmed that police had found evidence on former Rep. Anthony Weiner’s devices that the Clinton campaign ran an international child enslavement ring. Again, there’s absolutely no evidence for any of this — but the tweet, which is still up, quickly got thousands of retweets and favorites.

Rumors stirring in the NYPD that Huma’s emails point to a pedophila ring and @HillaryClinton is at the center. #GoHillary #PodestaEmails23 pic.twitter.com/gkEH5oL269

— David Goldberg (@DavidGoldbergNY) October 30, 2016

With that, fake news outlets like Your News Wire pushed the story more broadly just days before Election Day. One of the stories even claimed, “IT’S OVER: NYPD Just Raided Hillary’s Property! What They Found Will RUIN HER LIFE.” New York police officers did not raid Clinton’s property, but the story quickly got more than 100,000 engagements — shares, reactions, and comments — on Facebook, and it was quickly plagiarized by multiple fake news outlets to get hundreds of thousands more engagements on social media.

The nonsense just kept building and building, with fake news outlets running more and more false details about this false conspiracy theory — typically alleging that police, particularly the NYPD and FBI, had uncovered even more evidence of this international child abuse ring, even though no such thing had happened.

As all of this spread, pro-Trump supporters went back to the Podesta emails published by WikiLeaks to find more “clues” for Pizzagate and other conspiracy theories. Without any evidence or cause, they quickly began to interpret basic food items as code words for this supposed sex ring. Through this new ridiculous “discovery,” Trump supporters on social media linked even more emails to Pizzagate, which grew from a conspiracy theory about a DC pizzeria to one about a fictitious international child sex ring.

Search all Podesta emails for these keywords. We are uncovering a child sex ring.#PodestaEmails28 pic.twitter.com/h6N6O76sAw

— Jared Wyand (@JaredWyand) November 3, 2016

But communications between the Clinton campaign and Comet Ping Pong’s Alefantis were the original source of the Pizzagate speculation. And the allegations were further emboldened by the pizzeria’s ties to the Clinton campaign, including Alefantis’s former relationship with David Brock, who founded the liberal media watchdog group Media Matters and publicly supported Clinton.

So the DC pizzeria bore the brunt of the damage that came from these widespread conspiracy theories. Starting the weekend before Election Day, the restaurant and its staff got hundreds of death threats on their phones and social media — including one that read, “I will kill you personally.” People also began showing up at Comet Ping Pong to investigate. Some people alleged Comet was working with nearby businesses to maintain the nonexistent child sex ring. Then, on Sunday, Edgar Maddison Welch, a 28-year-old from North Carolina, armed himself with an assault rifle and fired at least one shot in the restaurant while investigating the conspiracy theory.

After the latest scare, Alefantis asked people on Sunday to stop spreading all this nonsense about his pizzeria: “I really hope that all of these people fanning the flames of this conspiracy would take a moment to contemplate what has gone on here today and maybe to stop.”

Welch, for his part, told the New York Times that he now regrets what he did. “I just wanted to do some good and went about it the wrong way,” he said. “I regret how I handled the situation.”

But ultimately, this is about much more than one pizzeria and conspiracy theory.

Fake news has become a big problem on social media

While Pizzagate has quickly become the most high-profile example of fake news going seriously wrong, it is part of a much broader problem with fake news that has quickly become widely recognized in the aftermath of the 2016 election.

Here’s one example of just how widespread fake news is: Over at BuzzFeed, Craig Silverman pit Facebook engagement for the top 20 fake news stories — like “Pope Francis shocks world, endorses Donald Trump for president” (he did not) and “FBI agent suspected in Hillary email leaks found dead in apartment in murder-suicide” (this did not happen) — against the top 20 legitimate news stories, from outlets like the New York Times and Huffington Post. In the last three months of the election, the fake news stories got more Facebook engagements than the legitimate news outlets.

So why did these outlets suddenly pop up and push fake news in time for the election? Some of it is political: Some people are willing to do anything they can, including lie, to make sure their candidate wins.

But there’s also a financial interest in fake news. A BuzzFeed investigation found that many of the big fake news stories originated from a tiny Macedonian town known as Veles. There, young Macedonians have embraced “a digital gold rush” by setting up fake news sites and using Facebook as a platform to push their false stories, reaping the advertising dollars that come with the clicks and sharing.

Silverman and Lawrence Alexander wrote for BuzzFeed, “Several teens and young men who run these sites told BuzzFeed News that they learned the best way to generate traffic is to get their politics stories to spread on Facebook — and the best way to generate shares on Facebook is to publish sensationalist and often false content that caters to Trump supporters.”

There’s a reason these websites have a partisan, pro-Trump bent: At least in the 2016 election cycle, fake news took off much more with conservatives than with liberals. Laura Sydell reported at NPR the experience of one fake news purveyor, 40-year-old Jestin Coler in California:

During the run-up to the presidential election, fake news really took off. “It was just anybody with a blog can get on there and find a big, huge Facebook group of kind of rabid Trump supporters just waiting to eat up this red meat that they’re about to get served,” Coler says. “It caused an explosion in the number of sites. I mean, my gosh, the number of just fake accounts on Facebook exploded during the Trump election.”

Coler says his writers have tried to write fake news for liberals — but they just never take the bait.

Why is this the case? Coler suggested that it has to do with Trump and conservative media outlets discrediting mainstream news, pushing conservatives to look for other outlets for their information: “This is a right-wing issue. Sarah Palin’s famous blasting of the lamestream media is kind of record and testament to the rise of these kinds of people. The post-fact era is what I would refer to it as. This isn’t something that started with Trump. This is something that’s been in the works for a while. His whole campaign was this thing of discrediting mainstream media sources, which is one of those dog whistles to his supporters.”

 

Welch, the man who investigated Comet Ping Pong, echoed this kind of sentiment. Adam Goldman reported for the New York Times: “He said he did not like the term fake news, believing it was meant to diminish stories outside the mainstream media, which he does not completely trust.” But Welch also claimed that he wasn’t political: He said he didn’t vote for Trump or Clinton, although he was once registered Republican.

Not all fake news is geared toward conservatives. Jeremy Stahl at Slate pointed out that some liberals have seized on a few false stories, including those that hyped up Bernie Sanders’s chances in the Democratic primary and blamed his loss on widespread voter suppression. But it does seem like the biggest fake news hits of the 2016 election were by and large geared for Trump supporters, with headlines like “IT’S OVER: Hillary’s ISIS Email Just Leaked & It’s Worse Than Anyone Could Have Imagined” and “Just Read the Law: Hillary Is Disqualified From Holding Any Federal Office” dominating the most shared fake news stories of the last three months of the election.

Wherever it lands on the political spectrum, all of this fake news has created a big problem: Many people are now getting completely false information from fake news outlets that pose as legitimate, making it hard for readers to know if the information is legitimate.

So the rapid spread of fake news has led people to demand that social media platforms, particularly Facebook, and Google do something to halt the spread of fake news.

Google responded in November, announcing that it was cutting off fake news sites from its huge advertising network. Facebook followed suit by vowing to block fake news outlets within its own ad network.

Still, Facebook has at times been resistant to do much more — like making sure that fake news doesn’t pop up in someone’s Facebook feed in the first place. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, for example, suggested that fake news wasn’t much of an issue to begin with, writing in a Facebook post (without evidence for his numbers) that “more than 99% of what people see [on Facebook] is authentic. Only a very small amount is fake news and hoaxes.”

But Facebook now seems to be acknowledging that it needs to do something.

“For so long, we had resisted having standards about whether something’s newsworthy because we did not consider ourselves a service that was predominantly for the distribution of news. And that was wrong,” Facebook executive Elliot Schrage said at a panel in Massachusetts last week. “We have a responsibility here. I think we recognize that. This has been a learning for us.”

“We have a responsibility here. I think we recognize that. This has been a learning for us.”

The bad news: Facebook doesn’t seem to have an idea about what it will do yet. The big problem seems to be that the social media platform just doesn’t want to get into heavily policing people’s own posts and feeds, especially in a way that could come off as partisan or as censorship.

But Facebook is also now the main way many Americans and people around the world share and read the news. That has led to a democratization of media, which means that new legitimate news sites like Vox can build a big audience and even compete with established outlets like the New York Times, but also that a fake news site can as well.

As Tim Lee explained for Vox, “Stories like this thrive on Facebook because Facebook’s algorithm prioritizes ‘engagement’ — and a reliable way to get readers to engage is by making up outrageous nonsense about politicians they don’t like.”

So the platform needs to take some more responsibility for what it’s doing.

Ultimately, Facebook seems to be coming around to some sort of system that would nudge users to act differently without actively blacklisting or favoring certain sites. “We’re in the business of giving users the power to share. Part of that is helping them share thoughtfully and responsibly, and consume thoughtfully and responsibly,” Schrage said, offering few details for how exactly this would work.

Whatever Facebook and others do, some of it will come too late. Not only did fake news appear to convince a gunman to fire off bullets at a DC pizzeria, but the rise of fake news prior to Election Day suggests it may have helped Trump get elected.

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Further Readings

SPLC: Breitbart exposé confirms: far-right news site a platform for the white nationalist “alt-right”

Buzzfeed: Here’s How Breitbart And Milo Smuggled White Nationalism Into The Mainstream

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Back to Top

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The Religious Right

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2018 American Values Survey by the Public Religion Research Institute

Examined 2500 adult voter attitudes about current issues

• Found the following information about white evangelical views
  • Only religious group with more than half (54%) believing that the U.S. becoming a “majority of minorities” in racial diversity by 2045 is a negative thing
    • 2/3 of all Americans say this is a good thing
  • Only religious group w/ majority (51%) favoring law preventing refugees from entering
    • Only 37% of the country supports this
  • Only religious group w/ majority (57%) saying immigrants threaten US customs/ values
    • Hispanic & black Christians, as well as religiously unaffiliated, say immigrants strengthen society
  • Display strongest support (70%) for a travel ban of those from some Muslim countries
    • While the country is evenly divided
  • Only religious group saying that churches are handling issues of sexual harassment well
  • Most likely group to say killing of black men by police are isolated incidents (70%)
    • While only 32% of Hispanic protestants and 15% of black protestants agree.
  • Least likely (26%) to think Trump’s words/actions encouraged white supremacist groups
    • While 54% of all Americans and 75% of black Protestants believe that is the case.
  • Less than half of white evangelicals think Trump has damaged dignity of the presidency
    • Compared to 2/3 of other religious groups and 70% of the country at large.

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How The Religious Right Became A Political Force | AJ+

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcC53j32BW4

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Pre-Civil War Southern Denominations

“What today we call “evangelical Christianity,” is the product of centuries of conditioning, in which religious practices were adapted to nurture a slave economy. The calloused insensitivity of modern white evangelicals was shaped by the economic and cultural priorities that forged their theology over centuries.” Chris Ladd – Forbes

• Pre-Civil War Southern churches faced social/political pressure from slave owners
  • Public dissent on slavery was outlawed and often a death sentence
    • Ministers who rejected slavery often had to flee and a few were lynched
• Southern religion was tailored to meet the needs of a slave state
  • Removed lessons on social justice, courage, love, compassion, and service to others
    • “Messages which might have questioned the inherent superiority of the white race, constrained the authority of property owners, or inspired some interest in the poor or less fortunate could not be taught from a pulpit.” Chris Ladd – Forbes
  • Reinterpreted Bible to support slavery and encouraged paternalism by slaveholders
    • Preached to slaves to accept their places and obey their masters
• Stripped of its compassion and integrity, little remained of the Christian message
  • “What survived was a perverse emphasis on sexual purity as the sole expression of righteousness, along with a creepy obsession with the unquestionable sexual authority of white men.” Chris Ladd – Forbes
  • Guarding women’s sexual purity meant guarding the purity of the white race
    • There was no higher moral demand.

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Post-Civil War Southern Denominations

• Changes brought by the Civil War increased the need to protect white racial superiority
  • Churches were often justifications and encouragements for segregation, lynchings and white supremacy
    • Protecting purity of white women, white purity, white Christianity, and moral contamination
      • from unholy, immoral, criminal, savage people of color

“Christianity was the primary lens through which most southerners conceptualized and made sense of suffering and death of any sort…It would be inconceivable that they could inflict pain and torment on the bodies of black men without imagining that violence as a religious act, laden with Christian symbolism and significance.” historian Amy Louise Wood in Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940

“Religion permeated communal lynching because the act occurred within the context of a sacred order designed to sustain holiness.” The “sacred order” was white supremacy and the “holiness” was white virtue.” UNC–Chapel Hill Professor Emeritus Donald G. Mathews – Journal of Southern Religion

“The God of the white South demanded purity—embodied by the white woman. White southerners would build the barrier with segregation. But when it was breached, lynching was the way they would mend the fence and affirm their freedom from the moral contamination, represented by blacks and black men in particular. The perceived breach was frequently sexual, defined by the myth of the black rapist, a “demon” and “beast” who set out to defile the Christian purity of white womanhood…we can’t deny that lynching—in all of its grotesque brutality—was an act of religious significance justified by the Christianity of the day. ” Jamelle Bouie – Slate

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Southern Baptist Church

• 1845 Southern Baptist Convention Split
  • Southern Baptist church created by splitting from Northern Baptists church over issue of slavery
    • Specifically whether Southern slave owners could serve as missionaries in Africa
    • Baptist for the most part supported or were neutral with the institution of slavery
  • Baptist churches were segregated.
    • After the Civil War black people set up their own independent black churches in the 1860s
    • This was MLK jr. Church, who was only allowed to preach at black Baptist churches
• Paster W.A. Criswell – Dallas Baptist Church
  • In 1956, W. A. Criswell addressed the South Carolina Baptist evangelism conference
    • Pastor of largest congregation in the Southern Baptist Convention and one of the most popular Baptist preachers

“Criswell segued into a heated attack on the forces of desegregration…True ministers, he argued must passionately resist government mandated desegregation because it is “a denial of all that we believe.”…He denounced as “foolishness” and “idiocy” the recent ruling of the Supreme Court that was meant to ram integration down the collective thraot of the South. Irritated with the carpet bagging supporters of civil rights, he exclaimed: “Let them integrate. Let them sit up there in their dirty shirts and make all their fine speeches. But they are all a bunch of infideals, dying from the neck up.”…Criswell argued, was that forced desegregation was fundamentally undemocratic and unchristian…He explained that he tried to segregate his daughter “from people that are iniquitous and vile and dirty and low down.” “Curtis W. Freeman – Duke Divinity School

• Right to oppress others becomes religious right protected by First Amendment
  • “Criswell’s bizarre formula, as it metastasized and took hold elsewhere, could allow white nationalists to continue their campaign as a “culture war” long after the battle to protect segregated institutions had been lost.” Chris Ladd – Forbes
• Southern Baptist Convention Apologizes in 1995 (150^th anniversary)
  • Southern Baptist Convention apologized for its historic defense of slavery, segregation, white supremacy

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Southern Evangelical Christianity

• “We’ve lost the South for a generation.”
  • President Johnson, after signing the 1964 Civil Rights Act
    • 1950s-70s Southern Dixiecrats left the Democrat party for the Republican party
    • This move was assisted by Southern churches

“Southern churches, warped by generations of theological evolution necessary to accommodate slavery and segregation, were all too willing to offer their political assistance to a white nationalist program. Southern religious institutions would lead a wave of political activism that helped keep white nationalism alive inside an increasingly unfriendly national climate…

…Spirituality may be personal, but organized religion, like race, is a cultural construct. When you’ve lost the ability to mobilize supporters based on race, religion will serve as a capable proxy. What was lost under the banner of “segregation forever” has been tenuously preserved through a continuing “culture war.” A fight for white nationalism and white cultural supremacy has in some ways been more successful after its transformation into an expressly religious, rather than merely racist crusade.” Chris Ladd – Forbes

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The Rise of the Religious Right

• What is the Religious Right?
  • “Christian right or religious right is a term used mainly in the US to label conservative Christian political factions that are characterized by their strong support of socially conservative policies.” Wikipedia
  • Informal coalition of evangelical Protestants and Roman Catholics
    • Some conservative mainline Protestants, Jews, and Mormons.

Birth of the Religious Right

• 1940-60s – Pasters began mixing religion, patriotism, neo-liberalism
  • James W. Fifield Jr – combined anti-new deal and capitalism with religion
  • Billy Graham – combined anti-communism and patriotism with religion
  • 1950s “Under God” inserted on currency, pledge of allegiance, gov buildings
• 1950-60s – Private religious “white only” schools spread across nation
  • Way to escape desegregation
    • Also a growing source of recruitment and revenue
  • Tax-exempt status remained a matter of contention for many years
    • Climaxed in 1978 while Carter Admin attempted to remove exemption
    • Religious Right developed in opposition

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Jerry Falwel

• Segregationist
  • “The true Negro does not want integration…. He realizes his potential is far better among his own race…integration will destroy our race eventually” Falwel about the 1954 Brown vs Board of Education decision
• Anti-civil rights
  • Publicly denounced the 1964 Civil Rights Act as “civil wrongs”
  • Enlisted with J. Edgar Hoover to distribute FBI propaganda against MLK Jr.
    • “[I question] the sincerity and intentions of some civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Mr. James Farmer, and others, who are known to have left-wing associations. It is very obvious that the Communists, as they do in all parts of the world, are taking advantage of a tense situation in our land, and are exploiting every incident to bring about violence and bloodshed…” Jerry Falwel
• Began many white only church academies
  • including Liberty University

“The most pervasive mistake I have made was in believing that because our cause was just, we could be sure that the white ministers of the South, once their Christian consciences were challenged, would rise to our aid. I felt that white ministers would take our cause to the white power structure. I ended up, of course, chastened and disillusioned. As our movement unfolded, and direct appeals were made to white ministers, most folded their hands — and some even took stands against us.” Martin Luther King Jr., 1965

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The Rise of the Religious Right

1970s – Jerry Falwell, Bob Jones, Pat Robertson join Religious Right

• Myth that Roe vs Wade (1973) cause it all
  • Few Evangelicals (outside of Catholics) cared about the subject in the 70’s.
    • The Southern Baptist Convention expressed support for laws liberalizing abortion access in 1971
    • Criswell supported Roe vs Wade , believed life began at birth, not conception
    • The denomination did not adopt a firm pro-life stance until 1980
  • Many Catholic leaders failed to recruit Evangelical leaders to Religious Right before 1978
• Motivation came from protecting tax emption status for segregated private church schools
  • Jerry Falwell preached adamantly against desegregation early in his church
    • Started white only Christian schools as a way to continue segregated schools
  • 1971 Supreme Court Green v. Connally revoked tax-exemption of segregated schools
    • A federal court forced the Carter administration to propose tougher enforcement rules in 1978
  • Falwell first sermon against abortion was 1978 (months after Carter enforcement and 5 years after Roe v Wade)
• Abortion as a political strategy
  • The issue of racial segregation wasn’t a motivating issue for evangelicals
  • Religious Right leaders used the issue of “abortion” and later “family values” instead
    • Rallied Evangelicals to vote for Reagan to overturn Roe vs Wade and protect family values
      • Reagan wasn’t very religious or prolife, but believed in tax exemption and talked a “religious good game”
    • Evangelical ministers launched a massive wave of activism in Southern pews in support of the Reagan campaign
  • 1982 Reagan banned the IRS from denying schools tax exemption based on racial discrimination
    • He never took outlawing abortion seriously despite this campaign promises
    • 1983, the Supreme Court overruled Reagan and banned tax exemptions for schools that racially discriminate
• Motivated by 1980 success, Religious Right movement worked to get GOP elected on all levels
  • Late 80’s religious activists like Stephen Hotze spread nationally propaganda like 1990, “Restoring America” video
    • which included instructions for taking control of Republican precinct and county organizations
  • Religious nationalists began to purge traditional Republicans from the region’s few GOP institutions

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Cultural War

• Cultural War (1990s – present)
  • Collapse of USSR stop the ability to accuse liberals of being apart of communist plots
    • Conservatives found other ways to label the left as radical extremist threatening the US
      • One way was to label civil rights as a culture war that was decaying America
    • Pat Buchanan during 1992 RNC Convention speech,
      • “There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America,” Buchanan said in his nationally televised address. “It is a cultural war, as critical to the nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself.”
    • Cultural War was basis of Clinton hatred phenomenon in the 1990s and in 2016 focused on Hillary Clinton
      • “With Clinton offering real policy conciliations to conservatives, the easiest way to maintain energetic opposition was to construct a narrative of criminality and anti-American perfidy that must be countered at all costs.” David A. Walsh
• Current Religious Right issues
  • school prayer, intelligent design, stem cell research, homosexuality, euthanasia, contraception, abortion, and pornography
• Coalition groups
  • Moral Majority, Christian Coalition, Focus on the Family, Family Research Council

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Religious Right Today

• Criswell’s Dallas megachurch is pastored by one of his followers, Robert Jeffress
  • Stated Obama was sent to pave the way for the Antichrist
  • Relentlessly preaches against homosexuality and gay marriage
  • Supporter of Donald Trump
• Billy Graham’s son, Franklin, retooled the ministry he inherited
  • Earns more than $800,000 a year as the head of his inherited charity
  • Made anti-Muslim rhetoric a centerpiece of his ministry
  • In response to the Black Lives Matter movement, Graham explained that black people can solve the problem of police violence if they teach their children “respect for authority and obedience”
  • Franklin Graham enthusiastically supports Donald Trump
• Jerry Falwell’s son inherited family business, serving as president of Liberty University
  • Strong Trump supporter
    • spoke in support of Trump at the Republican National Convention saying he was. “one of the greatest visionaries of our time”
  • Falwell stated after the 2015 San Bernardino attack, “some of those people had got what I have in my back pocket right now,” that it would not have happened. He said that he was astounded that President Barack Obama’s answer to the problem was more gun control. He “always thought that, if more good people had concealed-carry permits, then we could end those Muslims before they walked in and killed them.”
  • In August, following a white supremacist terror attack in Charlottesville, Falwell defended President Trump, saying that the President doesn’t have “a racist bone in his body,” adding that the president is being attacked by “thin-skinned Americans”

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Using Romans 13 to Justify White Supremacy

“Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation. For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil. Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? Do that which is good, and thou shalt have praise of the same. —A Letter to the Roman Church From the Apostle Paul, Chapter 13, Verses

This verse suggests its God’s will to follow the laws of the land

• Pre-Civil War
  • Southern churches used verse to justify laws of slavery and white supremacy
• Civil Rights Era
  • Churches used this verse to demonize civil rights efforts as against God’s will
• Today
  • Used to disparage the Black Lives Matter movements
    • “Despite the fact that Micah Johnson, who killed five Dallas police officers in 2016, was never connected to any organizations, Robert Jeffress, condemned Black Lives Matter and said that he was sick of preachers disrespecting police because “the New Testament says in Romans 13:4 that law enforcement officers are ministers of God sent by God to punish evildoers.” Michael Harriot – Root
  • AG Jefferson Sessions quoted the verse to explain the Trump admin policy of separating babies from their mothers and children detention

“[A]s I said to the Philippian Christians, “Ye are a colony of heaven.” This means that although you live in the colony of time, your ultimate allegiance is to the empire of eternity. You have a dual citizenry. You live both in time and eternity; both in heaven and earth. Therefore, your ultimate allegiance is not to the government, not to the state, not to nation, not to any man-made institution. The Christian owes his ultimate allegiance to God, and if any earthly institution conflicts with God’s will, it is your Christian duty to take a stand against it [emphasis mine]. You must never allow the transitory evanescent demands of man-made institutions to take precedence over the eternal demands of the Almighty God.” MLK jr

“In the famous 1950s Presbyterian article “How to Detect a Liberal in the Pulpit,” the eventual formation of the segregationist Presbyterian Church in America was foreshadowed when the writer explained that liberal ministers “will be frequently found leading racial demonstrations, supporting workers in a strike … supporting the right of the Communist Party to engage in its activity in this country, and in giving his approval to the decision of the Supreme Court removing the Bible and other Christian influences from the schools of the nation.”” Michael Harriot – Root

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Wikipedia:  Christian Right

“Christian right or religious right is a term used mainly in the United States to label conservative Christian political factions that are characterized by their strong support of socially conservative policies. Christian conservatives principally seek to apply their understanding of the teachings of Christianity to politics and to public policy by proclaiming the value of those teachings or by seeking to use those teachings to influence law and public policy.

In the United States, the Christian right is an informal coalition formed around a core of evangelical Protestants and Roman Catholics. The Christian right draws additional support from politically conservative mainline Protestants, Jews, and Mormons. The movement has its roots in American politics going back as far as the 1940s and has been especially influential since the 1970s.  Its influence draws, in part, from grassroots activism as well as from focus on social issues and from the ability to motivate the electorate around those issues. The Christian right is notable today for advancing socially conservative positions on issues including school prayer, intelligent design, embryonic stem cell research, homosexuality,  euthanasia, contraception, abortion,  and pornography…

…Patricia Miller states that the “alliance between evangelical leaders and the Catholic bishops has been a cornerstone of the Christian Right for nearly twenty years”. Since the late 1970s, the Christian right has been a notable force in both the Republican party and American politics when Baptist pastor Jerry Falwell and other Christian leaders began to urge conservative Christians to involve themselves in the political process. In response to the rise of the Christian right, the 1980 Republican Party platform assumed a number of its positions, including dropping support for the Equal Rights Amendment and adding support for a restoration of school prayer. The past two decades have been an important time in the political debates and in the same time frame religious citizens became more politically active in a time period labeled the New Christian Right. While the platform also opposed abortion and leaned towards restricting taxpayer funding for abortions and passing a constitutional amendment which would restore protection of the right to life for unborn children, it also accepted that many Americans, including fellow Republicans, were divided on the issue.  Since about 1980, the Christian right has been associated with several institutions including the Moral Majority, the Christian Coalition, Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council.^“

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HuffPost: Jimmy Carter and the Evangelical Divide

“…The brief resurgence of progressive evangelicalism in the mid-1970s helped propel Carter to the White House. But almost immediately another group of evangelicals, who eventually coalesced into a movement known as the Religious Right, began agitating to deny Carter, their fellow evangelical, a second term.

The standard narrative surrounding the genesis of the Religious Right is that preachers like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson were so outraged by the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973 that they resolved to organize politically to overturn legalized abortion. This abortion myth, however, is utter fiction. For most of the 1970s, evangelicals were at best indifferent to abortion, considering it a Catholic issue. Several prominent evangelicals, in fact, praised the Roe decision as marking an appropriate distinction between personal morality and public policy.

Instead, Falwell and others, at the encouragement of conservative activist Paul Weyrich, organized politically to defend the tax exemptions of so-called segregation academies, many of them church-affiliated (such as Falwell’s Lynchburg Christian Academy) that sprouted up after the Supreme Court mandated the desegregation of public schools. As the Internal Revenue Service began rescinding the tax exemptions of segregated schools, including the notorious Bob Jones University, evangelical preachers were furious. Falwell famously complained that it was easier to open a massage parlor in some states than a “Christian” school.

The origins of the Religious Right, then, lie in the defense of racial segregation rather than defense of the unborn. (Falwell, by his own account, didn’t preach a sermon against abortion until 1978.) But Weyrich, having kindled the ire of Falwell and other evangelical preachers against the IRS, still needed to persuade ordinary evangelical voters to organize politically. Agitating in favor of racial segregation was a tough sell; he needed a secondary issue to pique their interest.

For Weyrich and other leaders of the Religious Right the 1978 bi-elections demonstrated that abortion might work as an issue to galvanize grassroots evangelical voters. During that election cycle, pro-life Republicans in Iowa and Minnesota won three Senate seats and the governor’s mansion. The Sunday before Election Day pro-life activists (primarily Roman Catholics) leafleted church parking lots, and two days later, in elections with a very low turnout, the Democratic candidates went down to defeat.

As I was conducting research in Weyrich’s papers at the University of Wyoming, the correspondence surrounding the 1978 election fairly crackled with excitement. Finally, Weyrich had stumbled on the issue—abortion—that would motivate politically conservative evangelical voters. As the 1980 presidential election approached, Weyrich and leaders of the Religious Right hammered away at the abortion issue in an attempt to galvanize evangelical voters against Carter in favor of the Republican nominee, Ronald Reagan.

But therein lies yet another paradox. Whereas Reagan, as governor of California in 1967, had signed into law the most liberal abortion bill in the nation, Carter had a long history of opposition to abortion and had sought, both as governor and president, to limit its incidence. Nevertheless, leaders of the Religious Right, seeking a pretext to oust a fellow evangelical, one they regarded as too liberal, decided that Carter’s refusal to seek a constitutional amendment was an unpardonable sin.

Jimmy Carter’s defeat in 1980 not only deprived him of a second term and ended his political career, it signaled the demise of progressive evangelicalism on the national scene. Evangelical voters traded Carter’s military restraint and attention to the plight of the poor, women and minorities for a candidate who, whatever his other qualities, advocated military swagger, favored tax cuts for the affluent, ridiculed welfare recipients and suggested that homelessness was a choice. Reagan had opposed both the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act as well as the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, whereas Carter regarded his failure to secure ratification of the ERA among the bitterest disappointments of his presidency.

Carter and other progressive evangelicals, drawing on the tradition of nineteenth-century evangelical activism that cared for those on the margins of society, enjoyed a brief resurgence in the mid-1970s. But that surge was short-lived. Politically conservative evangelicals, led by Falwell and coordinated by Weyrich, forged the Religious Right to ensure that Carter, himself an evangelical, would be denied a second term.

Evangelical politics has never been the same.”

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The Nation: Agent of Intolerance

Jerry Falwell is best known for crusading against abortion and homosexuality. But early on, he skillfully used race to galvanize the Christian right.

“Falwell uttered countless epithets over his long life–in 1999 he warned that Tinky Winky, a character on the children’s show Teletubbies, might be gay–but his most infamous remark arrived on the morning of 9/11, after the terrorist attacks, when he proclaimed, “I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen.’”…

…But for Falwell, the “questions of the day” did not always relate to abortion and homosexuality–nor did they begin there. Decades before the forces that now make up the Christian right declared their culture war, Falwell was a rabid segregationist who railed against the civil rights movement from the pulpit of the abandoned backwater bottling plant he converted into Thomas Road Baptist Church. This opening episode of Falwell’s life, studiously overlooked by his friends, naïvely unacknowledged by many of his chroniclers, and puzzlingly and glaringly omitted in the obituaries of the Washington Post and New York Times, is essential to understanding his historical significance in galvanizing the Christian right. Indeed, it was race–not abortion or the attendant suite of so-called “values” issues–that propelled Falwell and his evangelical allies into political activism.

As with his positions on abortion and homosexuality, the basso profondo preacher’s own words on race stand as vivid documents of his legacy. Falwell launched on the warpath against civil rights four years after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision to desegregate public schools with a sermon titled “Segregation or Integration: Which?”

“If Chief Justice Warren and his associates had known God’s word and had desired to do the Lord’s will, I am quite confident that the 1954 decision would never have been made,” Falwell boomed from above his congregation in Lynchburg. “The facilities should be separate. When God has drawn a line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line.”

Falwell’s jeremiad continued: “The true Negro does not want integration…. He realizes his potential is far better among his own race.” Falwell went on to announce that integration “will destroy our race eventually. In one northern city,” he warned, “a pastor friend of mine tells me that a couple of opposite race live next door to his church as man and wife.”

As pressure from the civil rights movement built during the early 1960s, and President Lyndon Johnson introduced sweeping civil rights legislation, Falwell grew increasingly conspiratorial. He enlisted with J. Edgar Hoover to distribute FBI manufactured propaganda against the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and publicly denounced the 1964 Civil Rights Act as “civil wrongs.”

In a 1964 sermon, “Ministers and Marchers,” Falwell attacked King as a Communist subversive. After questioning “the sincerity and intentions of some civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Mr. James Farmer, and others, who are known to have left-wing associations,” Falwell declared, “It is very obvious that the Communists, as they do in all parts of the world, are taking advantage of a tense situation in our land, and are exploiting every incident to bring about violence and bloodshed.”

Falwell concluded, “Preachers are not called to be politicians, but soul winners.”

Then, for a time, Falwell appeared to follow his own advice. He retreated from massive resistance and founded the Lynchburg Christian Academy, an institution described by the Lynchburg News in 1966 as “a private school for white students.” It was one among many so-called “seg academies” created in the South to avoid integrated public schools.

For Falwell and his brethren, private Christian schools were the last redoubt. Rather than continue a hopeless struggle against the inevitable, through their schools they could circumvent the integration entirely. Five years later, Falwell christened Liberty University, a college that today funnels a steady stream of dedicated young cadres into Republican Congressional offices and conservative think tanks. (Tony Perkins is among Falwell’s Christian soldiers.)

In a recent interview broadcast on CNN the day of his death, Falwell offered his version of the Christian right’s genesis: “We were simply driven into the process by Roe v. Wade and earlier than that, the expulsion of God from the public square.” But his account was fuzzy revisionism at best. By 1973, when the Supreme Court ruled on Roe, the antiabortion movement was almost exclusively Catholic. While various Catholic cardinals condemned the Court’s ruling, W.A. Criswell, the fundamentalist former president of America’s largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, casually endorsed it. (Falwell, an independent Baptist for forty years, joined the SBC in 1996.) “I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person,” Criswell exclaimed, “and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.” A year before Roe, the SBC had resolved to press for legislation allowing for abortion in limited cases.

While abortion clinics sprung up across the United States during the early 1970s, evangelicals did little. No pastors invoked the Dred Scott decision to undermine the legal justification for abortion. There were no clinic blockades, no passionate cries to liberate the “pre-born.” For Falwell and his allies, the true impetus for political action came when the Supreme Court ruled in Green v. Connally to revoke the tax-exempt status of racially discriminatory private schools in 1971. At about the same time, the Internal Revenue Service moved to revoke the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University, which forbade interracial dating. (Blacks were denied entry until 1971.) Falwell was furious, complaining, “In some states it’s easier to open a massage parlor than to open a Christian school.”

Seeking to capitalize on mounting evangelical discontent, a right-wing Washington operative and anti-Vatican II Catholic named Paul Weyrich took a series of trips down South to meet with Falwell and other evangelical leaders. Weyrich hoped to produce a well-funded evangelical lobbying outfit that could lend grassroots muscle to the top-heavy Republican Party and effectively mobilize the vanquished forces of massive resistance into a new political bloc. In discussions with Falwell, Weyrich cited various social ills that necessitated evangelical involvement in politics, particularly abortion, school prayer and the rise of feminism. His pleas initially fell on deaf ears.

“I was trying to get those people interested in those issues and I utterly failed,” Weyrich recalled in an interview in the early 1990s. “What changed their mind was Jimmy Carter’s intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation.”

In 1979, at Weyrich’s behest, Falwell founded a group that he called the Moral Majority. Along with a vanguard of evangelical icons including D. James Kennedy, Pat Robertson and Tim LaHaye, Falwell’s organization hoisted the banner of the “pro-family” movement, declaring war on abortion and homosexuality. But were it not for the federal government’s attempts to enable little black boys and black girls to go to school with little white boys and white girls, the Christian right’s culture war would likely never have come into being. “The Religious New Right did not start because of a concern about abortion,” former Falwell ally Ed Dobson told author Randall Balmer in 1990. “I sat in the non-smoke-filled back room with the Moral Majority, and I frankly do not remember abortion ever being mentioned as a reason why we ought to do something.”

As the Christian right gradually transmuted its racial resentment into sexual politics, Liberty University began enrolling nonwhite students and Thomas Road Baptist Church integrated. In the irony of ironies in 2006, at Justice Sunday III, a rally for the confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito, a man who belonged to a white-only “eating club” at Princeton University, Falwell haltingly rose to sing “We Shall Overcome.” Beside him stood Martin Luther King Jr.’s niece, Alveda King, an evangelical antiabortion activist.

On the day of Falwell’s death, Republican presidential frontrunners fell over one another to memorialize him. Arizona Senator John McCain, who in the 2000 presidential campaign had called Falwell an “agent of intolerance,” then spoke at the 2006 graduation ceremony at Liberty University, praising Falwell as “a man of distinguished accomplishment who devoted his life to serving his faith and country.”

Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor whose Mormon faith is listed as a cult by Falwell’s Southern Baptist Convention, hailed him as “an American who built and led a movement based on strong principles and strong faith…. The legacy of his important work will continue through his many ministries where he put his faith into action.”

Rudy Giuliani, the thrice-married prochoice former New York City mayor, gay rights advocate and erstwhile cross-dresser, was also profuse in his praise of Falwell. “He was a man who set a direction,” Giuliani said. “He was someone who was not afraid to speak his mind. We all have great respect for him.”

The gushing eulogies of Falwell by leading GOP presidential hopefuls demonstrated the preacher’s earthly limitations and his enduring influence. Under Falwell’s guidance, the Christian right subsumed much of the Republican apparatus and now holds the key to the presidential nominating process. McCain, Romney and Giuliani may never see eye-to-eye with Falwell, even in heaven, but in the end they paid fealty at his grave.

They’re all Jerry’s kids now.”

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Medium: MLK, Jerry Falwell and History

“Martin Luther King Jr., 1965:

[T]he most pervasive mistake I have made was in believing that because our cause was just, we could be sure that the white ministers of the South, once their Christian consciences were challenged, would rise to our aid. I felt that white ministers would take our cause to the white power structure. I ended up, of course, chastened and disillusioned. As our movement unfolded, and direct appeals were made to white ministers, most folded their hands — and some even took stands against us.

Jerry Falwell on integration, 1958:

The true Negro does not want integration…. He realizes his potential is far better among his own race… It will destroy our race eventually. In one northern city, a pastor friend of mine tells me that a couple of opposite race live next door to his church as man and wife.

“[Falwell] enlisted with J. Edgar Hoover to distribute FBI manufactured propaganda against the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and publicly denounced the 1964 Civil Rights Act as ‘civil wrongs,’”

— Max Blumenthal, The Nation

Falwell on civil rights leaders, 1964:

[I question] the sincerity and intentions of some civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Mr. James Farmer, and others, who are known to have left-wing associations. It is very obvious that the Communists, as they do in all parts of the world, are taking advantage of a tense situation in our land, and are exploiting every incident to bring about violence and bloodshed…

Preachers are not called to be politicians, but soul winners.”

Three years later he opened Lynchburg (later Liberty) Christian Academy as a (segregated) private school for white children.

On MLK Day, 2016, Liberty University hosted Donald Trump (who, has been sued for housing discrimination, and just days ago, attacked civil rights icon John Lewis for being “all talk”). Over the last year, Jerry Falwell Jr. has been a faithful supporter (read: surrogate) of Trump, appearing on network news programs and even going so far as to get into petty arguments with anti-Trump LU students.”

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Governing America: The Revival of Political History

Rethinking the History of American Conservatism

“…Although there were multiple arenas where conservatism took hold, these historians attempted to discern single casual arguments about the specific actors and organizations they were examining. One cohort emphasized the importance of a racial backlash against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the black power movement. Implicitly or explicitly, race played a central role in defining conservative objectives and in explaining their electoral appeal. Much of this work stressed the South, looing at the shift of formerly Democratic voters into Republican camp (thus confirming the “Southern Strategy”)

But Younger Southern historians such as Matthew Lassiter, Kevin Kruse, and Joseph Crispin objected to claims about Southern Exceptionalism while agreeing on the centrality of a racial backlash. Turning away from an emphasis on racial extremists in the South and looking instead at moderate suburban voters in the region, this group found that conservatives in cities such as Atlanta and Charlotte abandoned explicit racial appeals and refocused their attention on issues such as suburban rights, local taxation, neighborhood schooling, and residential zoning. By protecting the structure of suburbs, moderates in fact defended racial stratification because of the multiple barriers that hampered African American mobility. Rejecting the concept of a difference between “de facto” and “de jure” segregation, their work contended that the same kinds of policies that motivated conservatives in the South also influenced them in the North, Midwest, and West. Their findings fit with Thomas Sugrue’s work on racial stratification and conservative backlash in Detroit. The suburbs, from which most African Americans were excluded, became neighborhoods that were protected by public policy under the guise of neutral homeowner rights. In an interview, Lassiter explained that “when you look at suburbs and middle class, then you start getting a national story. White suburbs outside Charlotte are reacting the same as white suburbs outside Los Angeles or in New Jersey”

A different cohort of scholars emphasized the importance of anticommunism. Harvard historian Lisa McGirr documented the history of Orange County, California, to understand what stimulated average American men and women in these communities to join local conservative organizations in the 1960s and 1970s. Rather than finding citizens who were on the fringe of American society, she discovered mainstream middle-class suburbanites who were disaffected from the political and cultural arguments they heard from Democrats. There were a number of issues that shaped their politics, according to McGirr. The economic importance of the defense industry and military bases in Orange County fed anticommunist sentiment. Migrants from southern regions of the country, moreover, arrived with culturally conservative beliefs, while libertarians and antigovernment values had deep roots with California natives, especially those involved in small businesses and ranching. Her book shows that anticommunism was the glue that held conservatives together until the 1970s and that, after a period of searching for a new overriding issue following the turmoil over Vietnam, they settled on a style of populist conservatism centered on the protection of communities and families.

Still other scholars have looked at the central role played by evangelical religious leaders who entered the political realm and successfully tapped into vast membership groups in churches. Jerry Falwell, Donald Wildmon, James Dobson, and other leaders created an infrastructure of television shows, publications, and radio shows that were crucial to the Right. When the IRS in 1978 attempted to end the tax exemptions offered to Christians schools, civil rights organizations accused the latter of being primarily white institutions created with the purpose of avoiding racial integration. Thereafter, conservative Christian organizations mobilized politically. They focused on a “pro-family” agenda that criticized feminism, gay activism, and secularized, liberalized cultural norms as eroding the strength of the nuclear family.

There have been many other causal arguments put forth in recent years. Shane Hamilton has stressed economic libertarianism with a book showing how agribusiness took advantage of the technology of trucking to avoid federal regulations and union labor. Agribusiness played an important role in the success of the conservative movement because it brought low-cost food to consumers around the country, thereby reducing demand for unions or federal programs to improve purchasing power. Elizabeth Shermer explained the roots of Senator Barry Goldwater’s career by discussing the corporate mobilization of business against organized labor and the government policies that supported unions. A recent article of the journal of American History put the spotlight on anti-environmental sentiment in response to the protection of public lands.

There has also been extensive work on the tactics employed by conservatives that cold account for the movement’s success. The political scientist Steve Teles explored the campaign by conservative activists to reshape the legal profession. Tales examined how conservatives in the 1970s and 1980s created a network that promoted conservative legal ideas and university courses, and nurtured future justices with a variety of strategies. These included the establishment of philanthropic foundations, the founding of fellowship and professorships, and the formation of professional organizations. Rick Pearlstein, a journalist with impeccable skills as a historian, wrote about eh small group of activist behind Barry Goldwater’s campaign in 1964. Although their candidate lost the election in a landslide, they left behind a vibrant network, and they had established tactical precedents for future campaigns. Jonathan Schoenwalk produced an account of how elements of extremist conservatism in the early 1960s were gradually co-opted by the mainstream of the Republican Party. Alice O’Conner’s recent work has looked at the philanthropists who funded conservative think tanks and candidates during the 1970s; while Kimberly Phillip-Fein, in her 2009 book, took a longer view and wrote about a small group of businessmen, mostly concerned with fighting against government economic regulations and high rates of taxation, who since the New Deal were instrumental as the money-men of the Right.

Regardless of the motivation behind conservatism, there is agreement among these scholars about the basic story. Namely, there was a backlash against New Deal and Great Society liberalism that enabled conservative activists, who had been slower coalescing since the early Cold War battles, to produce an important realignment in American politics.   Through the Republican Party and its capture of the South, the conservative movement offered a new set of ideas and policies, won control of the White house and Congress (first the Senate from 1981 to 1986 and then both houses for the most of the period between 1995 and 2007), and prevent liberalism from rebounding.”

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NY Times: How Liberty University Built a Billion-Dollar Empire Online

“…Liberty has also played a significant role in the rise of Donald Trump. Falwell was an early supporter of the reality-TV-star candidate, staying loyal through the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape and giving Trump a crucial imprimatur with white evangelical voters, who widely supported him at the polls. “The evangelicals were so great to me,” Trump said in an interview last year. The first commencement speech he gave as president, last spring, was at Liberty. And in August, Falwell stood by Trump following his much-criticized remarks on the violent rally by white supremacists in Charlottesville, declaring on “Fox & Friends” that “President Donald Trump does not have a racist bone in his body…

…Liberty, too, was hugely reliant on federal money, in the form of Pell grants, Department of Veterans Affairs benefits and federally subsidized loans. By 2010, it had more than 50,000 students enrolled and was pulling in more than $420 million annually. But because Liberty was technically not for-profit, it was spared many of the administration’s new regulations, including its requirement that a certain threshold of graduates be able to attain “gainful employment,” which was designed to hit for-profit colleges much harder. It was also spared from the pre-existing rule that for-profit colleges could get no more than 90 percent of their revenue from federal sources…

…Liberty’s ability to distance itself from for-profit colleges was especially notable given that, by several key metrics, it resembled them more closely than the private nonprofits it was grouped with. The rate of Liberty graduates who default on their loans within three years of graduating is 9.9 percent, several points higher than the average for nonprofit colleges, though still below that for for-profit colleges. Most striking, though, is how little the university spends on actual instruction. It does not report separate figures for spending on the online school and the traditional college. But according to its most recent figures, from 2016, the university reports spending only $2,609 on instruction per full-time equivalent student across both categories. That is a fraction of what traditional private universities spend (Notre Dame’s equivalent figure is $27,391) but also well behind even University of Phoenix, which spends more than $4,000 per student in many states. It is also behind other hybrid online-traditional nonprofit religious colleges like Ohio Christian University, which spends about $4,500. In 2013, according to an audited financial statement I obtained, Liberty received $749 million in tuition and fees but spent only $260 million on instruction, academic support and student services.

By 2016, Liberty’s net assets had crossed the $1.6 billion mark, up more than tenfold from a decade earlier. Thanks to its low spending on instruction, its net income was an astonishing $215 million on nearly $1 billion in revenue, according to its tax filing — making it one of the most lucrative nonprofits in the country, based simply on the difference between its operating revenue and expenses, in a league with some of the largest nonprofit hospital systems…

…The Trump-Falwell bond has if anything grown even stronger in recent months. In October, Falwell Jr. told Breitbart News that Trump could “be the greatest president since Abraham Lincoln” and urged an evangelical army to rise up against the “fake Republicans” standing in his way. In December, he joined Trump in promoting Roy Moore’s Senate candidacy, quoting the song “Sweet Home Alabama” in a tweet on the eve of Election Day: “AL voters are too smart to let the media & Estab Repubs & Dems tell them how to vote. I hope the spirit of Lynyrd Skynyrd is alive/well in AL. ‘A southern man don’t need them around anyhow & Watergate does not bother me, does your conscience bother you, tell me true?’ ” In late February, he joined in on Trump’s mau-mauing of Jeff Sessions, calling the attorney general a “coward” in a tweet for his handling of the Russia investigation…

…A relationship with Trump could benefit Falwell Jr. and Liberty in other ways too. One of the top orders of business for Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos, has been to roll back Obama-era regulations on online-degree providers. She named a former official from for-profit DeVry University to lead the D.O.E. unit that polices fraud in higher education. Claims for student-debt relief under the Borrower Defense program are being considered at a far slower rate under DeVos, who is delaying by two years an Obama rule that would make it easier to file debt-relief claims. And DeVos is expected shortly to roll back several key regulations geared toward online providers: ones giving states regulatory powers over distance-learning programs, establishing clear standards for a credit-hour and requiring “regular and substantive” interactions between online instructors and students. Falwell told me that Liberty officials have had a major hand in some of DeVos’s actions: “A lot of what we sent them is actually what got implemented,” he said.

After the convocation on the first weekend in November, I met with Dustin Wahl in Liberty’s student center, overlooking the campus quad. He said that the unbridled success of the online program couldn’t help putting him in mind of the profit-seeking tradition within American Christianity, which is closely aligned with evangelical Christianity’s prosperity gospel — the notion that financial success, far from distracting us from the higher values, is an affirmation of godliness. Wahl told me he’d frequently heard people justify the school’s new wealth in these terms. “A lot of people just talk about it generally, how God has blessed us,” he said.”

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Politico: How Corporate America Invented Christian America

Inside one reverend’s big business-backed 1940s crusade to make the country conservative again.

“In December 1940, as America was emerging from the Great Depression, more than 5,000 industrialists from across the nation made their yearly pilgrimage to the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City, convening for the annual meeting of the National Association of Manufacturers. The program promised an impressive slate of speakers: titans at General Motors, General Electric, Standard Oil, Mutual Life, and Sears, Roebuck; popular lecturers such as etiquette expert Emily Post and renowned philosopher-historian Will Durant; even FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. Tucked away near the end of the program was a name few knew initially, but one everyone would be talking about by the convention’s end: Reverend James W. Fifield Jr.

Handsome, tall, and somewhat gangly, the 41-year-old Congregationalist minister bore more than a passing resemblance to Jimmy Stewart. Addressing the crowd of business leaders, Fifield delivered a passionate defense of the American system of free enterprise and a withering assault on its perceived enemies in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration. Decrying the New Deal’s “encroachment upon our American freedoms,” the minister listed a litany of sins committed by the Democratic government, ranging from its devaluation of currency to its disrespect for the Supreme Court. Singling out the regulatory state for condemnation, he denounced “the multitude of federal agencies attached to the executive branch” and warned ominously of “the menace of autocracy approaching through bureaucracy.”

 

It all sounds familiar enough today, but Fifield’s audience of executives was stunned. Over the preceding decade, as America first descended into and then crawled its way out of the Great Depression, these titans of industry had been told, time and time again, that they were to blame for the nation’s downfall. Fifield, in contrast, insisted that they were the source of its salvation.

They just needed to do one thing: Get religion.

Fifield told the industrialists that clergymen would be crucial in regaining the upper hand in their war with Roosevelt. As men of God, ministers could voice the same conservative complaints as business leaders, but without any suspicion that they were motivated solely by self-interest. They could push back against claims, made often by Roosevelt and his allies, that business had somehow sinned and the welfare state was doing God’s work. The assembled industrialists gave a rousing amen. “When he had finished,” a journalist noted, “rumors report that the N.A.M. applause could be heard in Hoboken.”

It was a watershed moment—the beginning of a movement that would advance over the 1940s and early 1950s a new blend of conservative religion, economics and politics that one observer aptly anointed “Christian libertarianism.” Fifield and like-minded ministers saw Christianity and capitalism as inextricably intertwined, and argued that spreading the gospel of one required spreading the gospel of the other. The two systems had been linked before, of course, but always in terms of their shared social characteristics. Fifield’s innovation was his insistence that Christianity and capitalism were political soul mates, first and foremost.

Before the New Deal, the government had never loomed quite so large over business and, as a result, it had never loomed large in Americans’ thinking about the relationship between Christianity and capitalism. But in Fifield’s vision, it now cast a long and ominous shadow.He and his colleagues devoted themselves to fighting the government forces they believed were threatening capitalism and, by extension, Christianity. And their activities helped build a foundation for a new vision of America in which businessmen would no longer suffer under the rule of Roosevelt but instead thrive—in a phrase they popularized—in a nation “under God.” In many ways, the marriage of corporate and Christian interests that has recently dominated the news—from the Hobby Lobby case to controversies over state-level versions of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act—is not that new at all.

***

For much of the 1930s, organizations such as the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) had been searching in vain for ways to rehabilitate a public image that had been destroyed in the Great Depression and defamed by the New Deal. In 1934, a new generation of conservative industrialists took over NAM with a promise to “serve the purposes of business salvation.” The organization rededicated itself to spreading the gospel of free enterprise, vastly expanding its expenditures in the field. As late as 1934, NAM spent a paltry $36,000 on public relations. Three years later, it devoted $793,043 to the cause, more than half its total income. NAM now promoted capitalism through a wide array of films, radio programs, advertisements, direct mail, a speakers bureau and a press service that provided ready-made editorials and news stories for 7,500 local newspapers.

Ultimately, though, industry’s self-promotion was seen as precisely that. Jim Farley, chairman of the Democratic Party, joked that another group involved in this public relations campaign—the American Liberty League—really should have been called the “American Cellophane League.” “First, it’s a DuPont product,” Farley quipped, “And second, you can see right through it.” Even President Franklin D. Roosevelt took his shots. “It has been said that there are two great Commandments—one is to love God, and the other to love your neighbor,” he noted soon after the Liberty League’s creation. “The two particular tenets of this new organization say you shall love God and then forget your neighbor.” Off the record, he joked that the name of the god they worshiped seemed to be “Property.”

As Roosevelt’s quips made clear, the president shrewdly used spiritual language for political ends. In the judgment of his biographer James MacGregor Burns, “probably no American politician has given so many speeches that were essentially sermons rather than statements of policy.” His first inaugural address was so laden with references to Scripture that the National Bible Press published an extensive chart linking his text with the “Corresponding Biblical Quotations.” In a memorable passage, Roosevelt reassured the nation that “the money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore the temple to the ancient truths.”

When Roosevelt launched the New Deal, politically liberal clergymen echoed his arguments, championing his proposal for a vast welfare state as simply the Christian thing to do. The head of the Federal Council of Churches, for instance, claimed the New Deal embodied basic Christian principles such as the “significance of daily bread, shelter, and security.” When businessmen realized their economic arguments were no match for Roosevelt’s religious ones, they decided to beat him at his own game.”

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Church and State: How corporate America invented ‘Christian America’ to fight the New Deal

The 2016 annual meeting for the Organization of American Historians (OAH) will feature a session focusing upon the provocative book One Nation Under God by Princeton history professor Keven M. Kruse. In One Nation Under God, Kruse argues that the idea of the United States as a Christian nation does not find its origins with the founding of the United States or the writing of the Constitution. Rather, the notion of America as specifically consecrated by God to be a beacon for liberty was the work of corporate and religious figures opposed to New Deal statism and interference with free enterprise. The political conflict found in this concept of Christian libertarianism was modified by President Dwight Eisenhower who advocated a more civic religion of “one nation under God” to which both liberals and conservatives might subscribe.

Kruse concludes that with the polarization of America in the 1960s over such issues such as school prayer and the war in Vietnam, politicians such as Richard Nixon abandoned the more inclusive civic religion of the Eisenhower era. Kruse writes that by the 1970s “the rhetoric of ‘one nation under God’ no longer brought Americans together; it only reminded them how divided they had become” (274). Arguing that public religion is a modern invention that has little to do with America’s origins, Kruse maintains that contemporary political discourse needs to better recognize the political ideology being perpetuated by the advocates of America as a Christian nation. Needless to say, Kruse’s arguments will antagonize many on the Christian right, as well as many on the left who have employed Christianity as the means through which to implement principles of equality and opportunity as extolled by Jesus of Nazareth, the working-class carpenter.

Drawing upon extensive archival research, the first part of Kruse’s book documents the alliance between religious leaders such as Congregationalist minister James W. Fifield Jr. and businessman J. Howard Pew Jr., president of Sun Oil and a major figure with the National Association of Manufacturers. Working out of his affluent Los Angeles community and congregation, Fifield formed a national organization called Spiritual Mobilization that attracted the support of big business while embracing unfettered capitalist traditions threatened by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal policies. The fertile ground plowed by Spiritual Mobilization and Fifield prepared the way for the influential prayer breakfasts of Methodist minister Abraham Vereide and the crusades of evangelist Billy Graham. While the insecurities of the Cold War contributed to the growth of postwar religious fervor, Kruse insists that the prayer movement and Graham “effectively harnessed Cold War anxieties for an already established campaign against the New Deal” (36).

The prayers of the Christian libertarians were answered with the ascendancy of Dwight Eisenhower to the Presidency. While Graham was given a cold shoulder by Harry Truman, the evangelist was welcomed to the White House by Eisenhower, who also supported the prayer breakfast movement bringing together Congressional leaders and members of the business community. While he lacked allegiance to any specific denomination, Eisenhower was a devout Christian who opened cabinet meetings with prayer. Kruse argues that the President endorsed a rather general sense of Christian principles that would unite the nation under a common understanding of its religious heritage. Thus, Eisenhower supported Congressional legislation that added the phrase “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance while also embracing “In God We Trust” as the nation’s official motto that was included on the nation’s money supply. The Eisenhower administration also endorsed the National Association of Evangelicals call for a July 4, 1953 March of Freedom declaring that the American government was based upon Biblical principles. The concept of “One Nation Under God” was also championed in the popular culture by the creation of Disneyland and Cecil B. DeMille’s film epic The Ten Commandments (1956), while the National Council for Advertising championed Madison Avenue techniques that would bring the concept of God and free enterprise to all Americans on the local level.

Eisenhower’s rather vague notion of a Christian America, however, did not quite coincide with the ideology of Christian libertarianism. Instead, Kruse suggests that actions such as adding “under God” to the pledge were examples of ceremonial Deism; establishing the idea that the First Amendment mandated the separation of church and state but not the separation of religion and politics. Thus, general support for the sacred was acceptable, but not active government intervention that might advance a particular sect. In addition, Eisenhower did not move to dismantle the New Deal; accepting programs such as Social Security and expanding government activity with legislation such as the Interstate Highway Act. Kruse, writes, “Unlike Christian libertarians, who had long presented God and government as rivals, Eisenhower had managed to merge the two into a wholesome ‘government under God.’ In doing so, he ironically undercut the key segment of many of his earlier backers, making their old claims about the ‘pagan’ origins of statism seems suddenly obsolete” (87). Here, Kruse seems to imply Eisenhower had inadvertently sanctified the state and government. Therefore, to criticize the government was both anti-patriotic and anti-religious. This is a fascinating argument, with considerable implications for contemporary politics, but Kruse fails to tease out this idea before moving on to other issues.

Kruse maintains that the religious unity sought by Eisenhower was challenged in the late 1950s and the 1960s as various faiths worried that state advocacy of religion might trample on traditional beliefs and practices. One of the most contentious issues was school-mandated prayer which was deemed unconstitutional in the Engel v. Vitale (1962) decision. Nevertheless, in his majority opinion, Justice Hugo Black insisted that ceremonial Deism, such as prayer before Congressional sessions, chaplains in the military, and “under God” in the pledge, was protected. To the surprise of many church members, a number of religious leaders and the National Council of Churches came to support the prayer decision as a means through which to protect religious traditions from state interference. This approach, however, led to considerable division between leadership and laity; undermining the concept of “one nation under God.”

Seeking to mount a conservative movement against the religious establishment, evangelists such as Billy Graham joined forces with the administration of Richard Nixon to promote a religious perspective that would divide rather than unify Americans. Holding White House religious services officiated by leading evangelical ministers and sponsoring events such as the 1970 Fourth of July “Honor America Day,” featuring a religious service at the Lincoln Memorial led by Graham, Nixon attempted to employ religious nationalism as a means through which to brand those opposing his administration or the war in Vietnam as attacks upon American Christian values. Although Kruse includes an epilogue offering an overview of religion and American politics from the 1980s to the Obama Presidency, he assigns Nixon, rather than Ronald Reagan, primary responsibility for using religion to divide rather than bring Americans together.

One Nation under God is a provocative piece of historical scholarship that will be sure to engender considerable debate at the OAH. It is a work that will antagonize those on the political right who perceive American exceptionalism as a gift from God bestowed upon the framers of the Constitution, while those who embrace the opposing tradition of the social gospel and Christian socialism may also take offense. Religion has played an important role in American history, and some critics will make the case that Kruse downplays the role of the sacred in American life. However, Kruse makes a major scholarly contribution in his examination of how ministers cooperated with big business to formulate an ideology that the New Deal was a threat to traditional American Christian values of free enterprise and individualism while promoting the false pagan deity of statism. As Kruse moves into a discussions of ceremonial Deism with the Eisenhower administration and consideration of how Nixon employed religion to divide rather than unify, Kruse’s thesis regarding the role assigned to corporate America in creating a Christian America becomes somewhat lost, and this ambitious study may take on too much by attempting to survey the relationship between American politics and religion from the New Deal to the modern age.

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PBS: God In America: Episode 5 (Billy Graham)

PBS: God in America: Episode 6 (Political Right)

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Counter Punch: The Preacher and Vietnam: When Billy Graham Urged Nixon to Kill One Million People

“Back in April, 1989, a Graham memo to Nixon was made public. It took the form of a secret letter from Graham, dated April 15, 1969, drafted after Graham met in Bangkok with missionaries from Vietnam. These men of God said that if the peace talks in Paris were to fail, Nixon should step up the war and bomb the dikes. Such an act, Graham wrote excitedly, “could overnight destroy the economy of North Vietnam”.

Graham lent his imprimatur to this recommendation. Thus the preacher was advocating a policy to the US Commander in Chief that on Nixon’s own estimate would have killed a million people. The German high commissioner in occupied Holland, Seyss-Inquart, was sentenced to death at Nuremberg for breaching dikes in Holland in World War Two. (His execution did not deter the USAF from destroying the Toksan dam in North Korea, in 1953, thus deliberately wrecking the system that irrigated 75 per cent of North Korea’s rice farms.)

This disclosure of Graham as an aspirant war criminal did not excite any commotion when it became public in 1989, twenty years after it was written. No one thought to chide Graham or even question him on the matter. Very different has been the reception of a new tape revealing Graham, Nixon and Haldeman palavering about Jewish domination of the media and Graham invoking the “stranglehold” Jews have on the media.

On the account of James Warren in the Chicago Tribune, who has filed excellent stories down the years on Nixon’s tapes, in this 1972 Oval Office session between Nixon, Haldeman and Graham, the President raises a topic about which “we can’t talk about it publicly,” namely Jewish influence in Hollywood and the media.

Nixon cites Paul Keyes, a political conservative who was executive producer of the NBC hit, “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In,” as telling him that “11 of the 12 writers are Jewish.”

“That right?” says Graham, prompting Nixon to claim that Life magazine, Newsweek, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and others, are “totally dominated by the Jews.”

Nixon says network TV anchors Howard K. Smith, David Brinkley and Walter Cronkite “front men who may not be of that persuasion,” but that their writers are “95 percent Jewish.”

“This stranglehold has got to be broken or the country’s going down the drain,” the nation’s best-known preacher declares.

“You believe that?” Nixon says.

“Yes, sir,” Graham says.

“Oh, boy,” replies Nixon.

“So do I. I can’t ever say that but I believe it.”

“No, but if you get elected a second time, then we might be able to do something,” Graham replies.

Magnanimously Nixon concedes that this does not mean “that all the Jews are bad,” but that most are left-wing radicals who want “peace at any price except where support for Israel is concerned. The best Jews are actually the Israeli Jews.”

“That’s right,” agrees Graham, who later concurs with a Nixon assertion that a “powerful bloc” of Jews confronts Nixon in the media.

“And they’re the ones putting out the pornographic stuff,” Graham adds.

Later Graham says that “a lot of the Jews are great friends of mine. They swarm around me and are friendly to me. Because they know I am friendly to Israel and so forth. They don’t know how I really feel about what they’re doing to this country.”

After Graham’s departure Nixon says to Haldeman, “You know it was good we got this point about the Jews across.”

“It’s a shocking point,” Haldeman replies.

“Well,” says Nixon, “It’s also, the Jews are irreligious, atheistic, immoral bunch of bastards.”

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Forbes: Pastors, Not Politicians, Turned Dixie Republican

““White Democrats will desert their party in droves the minute it becomes a black party.”

Kevin Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority, 1969

Thirty years ago, archconservative Rick Perry was a Democrat and liberal icon Elizabeth Warren was a Republican. Back then there were a few Republican Congressmen and Senators from Southern states, but state and local politics in the South was still dominated by Democrats. By 2014 that had changed entirely as the last of the Deep South states completed their transition from single-party Democratic rule to single party rule under Republicans. The flight of the Dixiecrats was complete.

Reasons for the switch are not so hard to understand. Legend has it that President Johnson, after signing the 1964 Civil Rights Act, mourned “we’ve lost the South for a generation.” That quote might be apocryphal, but it accurately reflects contemporary opinion. Fiery segregationist George Wallace would carry five Southern states in his third party run for President in 1968. Southern anger over the Democratic Party’s embrace of civil rights reforms was no secret and no surprise.

While the “why” behind the flight of the Dixiecrats is obvious, the “how” is more difficult to establish, shrouded in myths and half-truths. Analysts often explain the great exodus of Southern conservatives from the Democratic Party by referencing the Southern Strategy, a cynical campaign ploy supposedly executed by Richard Nixon in his ’68 and ’72 Presidential campaigns, but that explanation falls flat. Though the Southern backlash against the Civil Rights Acts showed up immediately at the top of the ticket, Republicans farther down the ballot gained very little ground in the South between ’68 and ’84. Democrats there occasionally chose Republican candidates for positions in Washington, but they stuck with Democrats for local offices.

Crediting the Nixon campaign with the flight of Southern conservatives from the Democratic Party dismisses the role Southerners themselves played in that transformation. In fact, Republicans had very little organizational infrastructure on the ground in the South before 1980, and never quite figured out how to build a persuasive appeal to voters there. Every cynical strategy cooked up in a Washington boardroom withered under local conditions. The flight of the Dixiecrats was ultimately conceived, planned, and executed by Southerners themselves, largely independent of, and sometimes at odds with, existing Republican leadership. It was a move that had less to do with politicos than with pastors.

Southern churches, warped by generations of theological evolution necessary to accommodate slavery and segregation, were all too willing to offer their political assistance to a white nationalist program. Southern religious institutions would lead a wave of political activism that helped keep white nationalism alive inside an increasingly unfriendly national climate. Forget about Goldwater, Nixon or Reagan. No one played as much of a role in turning the South red as the leaders of the Southern Baptist Church.

Jesus and Segregation

There is still today a Southern Baptist Church. More than a century and a half after the Civil War, and decades after the Methodists and Presbyterians reunited with their Yankee neighbors, America’s largest denomination remains defined, right down to the name over the door, by an 1845 split over slavery.

Spirituality may be personal, but organized religion, like race, is a cultural construct. When you’ve lost the ability to mobilize supporters based on race, religion will serve as a capable proxy. What was lost under the banner of “segregation forever” has been tenuously preserved through a continuing “culture war.” A fight for white nationalism and white cultural supremacy has in some ways been more successful after its transformation into an expressly religious, rather than merely racist crusade.

Religion is endlessly pliable. So long as pastors or priests (or in this case, televangelists) are willing to apply their theological creativity to serve political demands, religious institutions can be bent to advance any policy goal. With remarkably little prodding, Christian churches in Germany fanned the flames for Hitler. Liberation theology thrived alongside Communist activism in Latin America. The Southern Baptist Church was organized specifically to protect slavery and white supremacy from the influence of their brethren in the North, a role that has never ceased to distort its identity, beliefs and practices.

In 1956, the Supreme Court had recently struck down school segregation in the Brown v. Board of Education case. President Eisenhower had sponsored sweeping civil rights legislation. Dr. Martin Luther King was organizing bus boycotts in Montgomery. Pressure was building against segregation across the South. At that time, there may have been no more influential figure in the Southern Baptist Convention than W.A. Criswell, the pastor of the enormous First Baptist Church in Dallas.

At a convention in South Carolina, Criswell turned his popular fire and brimstone style on the “blasphemous and unbiblical” agitators who threatened the Southern way of life. Beyond all the boilerplate racist invective, Criswell outlined an eerily prescient rhetorical stance, a framework capable of outlasting Jim Crow. In a passage that managed to avoid explicit racism, he described what would become the primary political weapon of the culture wars:

Don’t force me by law, by statute, by Supreme Court decision…to cross over in those intimate things where I don’t want to go. Let me build my life. Let me have my church. Let me have my school. Let me have my friends. Let me have my home. Let me have my family. And what you give to me, give to every man in America and keep it like our glorious forefathers made – a land of the free and the home of the brave.

Long after the battle over whites’ only bathrooms had been lost, evangelical communities in Houston or Charlotte can continue the war over a “bathroom bill” using a rhetorical structure Criswell and others built. He had constructed a strangely circular, quasi-libertarian argument in which a right to oppress others becomes a fundamental right born of a religious imperative, protected by the First Amendment. Criswell’s bizarre formula, as it metastasized and took hold elsewhere, could allow white nationalists to continue their campaign as a “culture war” long after the battle to protect segregated institutions had been lost.

Southern Baptists remained at the vanguard of the fight to preserve Jim Crow until the fight was lost. A generation later you might hear Southern Baptists mention that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was a Baptist minister. They are less likely to explain that King was not permitted to worship in a Southern Baptist Church. African-American Baptists had their own parallel institutions, a structure that continues today.

Evangelical resistance to the civil rights movement was not uniform, but dissent was rare and muted. Southern Baptist superstar Billy Graham was cautiously sympathetic to King. Early in King’s career, in 1957, Graham once allowed King to lead a prayer from the pulpit in one of his campaigns in faraway New York City. Graham advised King and other civil rights leaders on organizational matters and offered considerable back-channel support to the movement. However, in public Graham was careful to keep a safe distance and avoided the kind of open displays of sympathy for civil rights that might have complicated his career.

King was once invited to speak at a Southern Baptist seminary in Louisville in 1961. Churches responded with a powerful backlash, slashing the seminary’s donations so steeply that it was forced to apologize for the move. Henlee Barnette, the Baptist professor responsible for King’s invitation at the seminary, nearly lost his job and became something of an outcast, a status he would retain until he was finally pressured to retire from teaching in 1977.

In 1965, after President Johnson’s second landmark Civil Rights Act was passed, the Southern Baptists formally abandoned the fight against segregation with a bland statement urging members to obey the law. In 1968, the Southern Baptist Convention formally endorsed desegregation. That same year, in a remarkably passive-aggressive counter to their apparent concession on civil rights, they elected W.A. Criswell to lead the denomination.

Onward, Christian Soldiers

Defeated and demoralized, segregationists in the 1970’s faced a frustrating problem – how to rebuild a white nationalist political program without using the discredited rhetoric of race. Religion would provide them their answer. Armed with the superficially race-neutral rhetorical formula Criswell had described, prominent Southern Baptist ministers like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson would emerge to take up the fight. All they needed was a spark to light a new wave of political activism.

In 1967, Mississippi began offering tuition grants to white students allowing them to attend private segregated schools. A federal court struck down the move two years later, but the tax-exempt status of these private, segregated schools remained a matter of contention for many years. Under that rubric, evangelical churches across the South led an explosion of new private schools, many of them explicitly segregated. Battles over the status of these institutions reached a climax when the Carter Administration in 1978 signaled its intention to press for their desegregation.

It was the status of these schools, a growing source of church recruitment and revenue, that finally stirred the grassroots to action. Televangelist Jerry Falwell would unite with a broader group of politically connected conservatives to form the Moral Majority in 1979. His partner in the effort, Paul Weyrich, made clear that it was the schools issue that launched the organization, an emphasis reflected in chain events across the 1980 Presidential campaign.

The rise of the religious right is usually credited to abortion activism, but few evangelicals cared about the subject in the 70’s. The Southern Baptist Convention expressed support for laws liberalizing abortion access in 1971. Criswell himself expressed support for the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe, taking the traditional theological position that life began at birth, not conception. The denomination did not adopt a firm pro-life stance until 1980.

In August of 1980, Criswell and other Southern Baptist leaders hosted Republican Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan for a rally in Dallas. Reagan in his speech never used the word “abortion,” but he enthusiastically and explicitly supported the ministers’ position on protecting private religious schools. That was what they needed to hear.

Evangelical ministers, previously reluctant to lend their pulpits to political activists, launched a massive wave of activism in Southern pews in support of the Reagan campaign. The new President would not forget their support. Less than a year into his Administration, Reagan officials pressed the IRS to drop its campaign to desegregate private schools.

In a casually triumphant moment in 1981, Reagan advisor Lee Atwater let down his guard, laying bare the racial logic behind the Republican campaigns in the South:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “N…r, n…r, n…r.” By 1968 you can’t say “n…r”—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 “N…r, n…r.”

For decades, men like Atwater had been searching for the perfect “abstract” phrasing, a magic political dog whistle that could communicate that “N…r, n…r” message behind a veneer of respectable language. Though quick to take credit for Reagan’s win, the truth was that Atwater and others like him had mostly failed. Their efforts to construct their dog whistle out of taxes and other traditional Republican talking points never quite connected on a deep enough emotional plane to turn the tide at the local level.

It was religious leaders in the South who solved the puzzle on Republicans’ behalf, converting white angst over lost cultural supremacy into a fresh language of piety and “religious liberty.” Southern conservatives discovered that they could preserve white nationalism through a proxy fight for Christian Nationalism. They came to recognize that a weak, largely empty Republican grassroots structure in the South was ripe for takeover and colonization.

Fired by the success of their efforts at the top of the ballot in 1980, newly activated congregations pressed further, launching organized efforts to move their members from pew to precinct, filling the largely empty Republican infrastructure in the South. By the late 80’s religious activists like Stephen Hotze in Houston were beginning to cut out the middleman, going around pastors to recruit political warriors in the pews. Hotze circulated a professionally rendered video in 1990, called “Restoring America,” that included step-by-step instructions for taking control of Republican precinct and county organizations. Religious nationalists began to purge traditional Republicans from the region’s few GOP institutions.

The Southern Strategy was not a successful Republican initiative. It was a delayed reaction by Republican operatives to events they neither precipitated nor fully understood. Republicans did not trigger the flight of the Dixiecrats, they were buried by it.

A young Texas legislator, Rick Perry, spent much of 1988 campaigning for his fellow Southern Democrat, Al Gore. In the crowded landscape of Texas Democratic politics, Perry showed little breakout potential, but he was aware of the activism that was sweeping Democratic Southern conservatives into empty Republican precincts all over the state. The next year Perry made a bold move, switching to the GOP and rising immediately to the front ranks as a potential statewide candidate.

It was in the 90’s, not the 70’s, that Southern conservatives at the local level finally took flight into the GOP. Armed with the strange, apparently race-neutral logic Reverend Criswell had laid out in the fight for Jim Crow, and organized by a new generation of religious leaders, an enormous wave of party-switching transformed grassroots politics in the South. Republicans seized control of the Texas state legislature in 2002 for the first time ever apart from Reconstruction. When Republicans took control of the Arkansas legislature in 2014, the flight of the Dixiecrats was over and Republicans controlled state government across all of the former Confederacy.

The Past Is Never Dead

 

Russell Moore became the President of the Southern Baptist Convention’s social outreach arm in 2013. In that capacity, he began to challenge many of the darker elements of the church’s history. From a post in the church traditionally dedicated to hand-wringing over gay rights and dirty movies, Moore criticized those who stirred up hatred against refugees and ignored matters of racial justice. He drew sharp criticism when he denounced the Confederate Flag, explaining, “The cross and the Confederate flag cannot co-exist without one setting the other on fire.”

The real fury came when Moore applied to Donald Trump the same standard of conduct Baptists had demanded of Bill Clinton. Southern Baptist leaders in the 90’s savaged President Clinton as the details of the Lewinski Affair began to surface. Moore drew the obvious comparison last year between Trump and Bill Clinton, urging voters to reject the 2016 Republican nominee. As religious leaders lined up solidly behind Trump last fall, Moore commented, “The religious right turns out to be the people the religious right warned us about.”

In the end, evangelical voters backed Donald Trump by a steeper margin than their support for Romney in ‘12.

Today, W.A. Criswell’s Dallas megachurch is pastored by Robert Jeffress, who has remained faithful to the most bigoted strains of the olde tyme religion. He has led an effort to withdraw funding for Russell Moore’s organization. Jeffress has called the Catholic Church “a Babylonian mystery religion.” He explained that Obama was sent to pave the way for the Antichrist. He has demogogued relentlessly on gay marriage. And naturally, he endorsed Donald Trump.

Billy Graham’s son, Franklin, retooled the ministry he inherited, turning it into something a civil rights era segregationist could love without reservation. Graham, who earns more than $800,000 a year as the head of his inherited charity, has made anti-Muslim rhetoric a centerpiece of his public profile and ministry. While his father quietly befriended Martin Luther King, the younger Graham has chosen a different path. In response to the Black Lives Matter movement, Graham explained that black people can solve the problem of police violence if they teach their children “respect for authority and obedience.” Franklin Graham enthusiastically supports Donald Trump.

Jerry Falwell’s son also inherited the family business, serving now as president of his father’s university. His support for Trump is less surprising than Graham’s, and far less of a departure from his father’s work. Falwell spoke in support of Trump at the Republican National Convention.

Russell Moore may envision an evangelical movement unhindered by racism and bigotry, but just like Henlee Barnette, the Baptist professor who invited King to speak at a Southern Baptist seminary, Moore is wrestling with a powerful heritage. For Jeffress, the heir to W.A. Criswell’s pulpit, to champion an effort to silence Moore, reflects the powerful persistence of an unacknowledged past. After being pressed into an apology for his “unnecessarily harsh” criticisms, Moore has been allowed to keep his job – for now.

Public perception that a “Southern strategy” conceived and initiated by clever Republicans turned the South red is worse than false. By deflecting responsibility onto some shadowy “other” it blocks us from reckoning with the past or changing our future. History is a powerful tide, especially when it runs unseen and concealed. A refusal to honestly confront our past leaves us to repeat our mistakes over and over again.

Texas House member Rick Perry was taking a chance in 1989, when he decided to leave the Democratic Party to become a Republican. He leaned heavily on the emerging religious right and their campaign to convert the state’s Democratic majority. His efforts were richly rewarded. Baptist mega-pastor Robert Jeffress was a major supporter along with other evangelical leaders. Now Perry, after becoming the longest-serving governor in Texas history, sits in Donald Trump’s cabinet as the Secretary of Energy.

No one needs to say “N..r, n..r” anymore. With help from evangelical pastors, this new generation of politicians has found a new political party and a fresh language with which to stir old grievances and feed their power. By merely refining their rhetoric and activating evangelical congregations, a new generation of Southern conservatives grow ever closer to winning a fight their forebears once thought was lost.”

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Forbes, “Why White Evangelicalism Is So Cruel”

“Robert Jeffress, Pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas and an avid supporter of Donald Trump, earned headlines this week for his defense of the president’s adultery with a porn star. Regarding the affair and subsequent financial payments, Jeffress explained, “Even if it’s true, it doesn’t matter.”

Such a casual attitude toward adultery and prostitution might seem odd from a guy who blamed 9/11 on America’s sinfulness. However, seen through the lens of white evangelicals’ real priorities, Jeffress’ disinterest in Trump’s sordid lifestyle makes sense. Religion is inseparable from culture, and culture is inseparable from history. Modern, white evangelicalism emerged from the interplay between race and religion in the slave states. What today we call “evangelical Christianity,” is the product of centuries of conditioning, in which religious practices were adapted to nurture a slave economy. The calloused insensitivity of modern white evangelicals was shaped by the economic and cultural priorities that forged their theology over centuries.

Many Christian movements take the title “evangelical,” including many African-American denominations. However, evangelicalism today has been coopted as a preferred description for Christians who were looking to shed an older, largely discredited title: Fundamentalist. A quick glance at a map showing concentrations of adherents and weekly church attendance reveals the evangelical movement’s center of gravity in the Old South. And among those evangelical churches, one denomination remains by far the leader in membership, theological pull, and political influence.

There is still today a Southern Baptist Church. More than a century and a half after the Civil War, and decades after the Methodists and Presbyterians reunited with their Yankee neighbors, America’s most powerful evangelical denomination remains defined, right down to the name over the door, by an 1845 split over slavery.

Southern denominations faced enormous social and political pressure from plantation owners. Public expressions of dissent on the subject of slavery in the South were not merely outlawed, they were a death sentence. Baptist ministers who rejected slavery, like South Carolina’s William Henry Brisbane, were forced to flee to the North. Otherwise, they would end up like Methodist minister Anthony Bewley, who was lynched in Texas in 1860, his bones left exposed at a local store to be played with by children. Whiteness offered protection from many of the South’s cruelties, but that protection stopped at the subject of race. No one who dared speak truth to power on the subject of slavery, or later Jim Crow, could expect protection.

Generation after generation, Southern pastors adapted their theology to thrive under a terrorist state. Principled critics were exiled or murdered, leaving voices of dissent few and scattered. Southern Christianity evolved in strange directions under ever-increasing isolation. Preachers learned to tailor their message to protect themselves. If all you knew about Christianity came from a close reading of the New Testament, you’d expect that Christians would be hostile to wealth, emphatic in protection of justice, sympathetic to the point of personal pain toward the sick, persecuted and the migrant, and almost socialist in their economic practices. None of these consistent Christian themes served the interests of slave owners, so pastors could either abandon them, obscure them, or flee.

What developed in the South was a theology carefully tailored to meet the needs of a slave state. Biblical emphasis on social justice was rendered miraculously invisible. A book constructed around the central metaphor of slaves finding their freedom was reinterpreted. Messages which might have questioned the inherent superiority of the white race, constrained the authority of property owners, or inspired some interest in the poor or less fortunate could not be taught from a pulpit. Any Christian suggestion of social justice was carefully and safely relegated to “the sweet by and by” where all would be made right at no cost to white worshippers. In the forge of slavery and Jim Crow, a Christian message of courage, love, compassion, and service to others was burned away.

Stripped of its compassion and integrity, little remained of the Christian message. What survived was a perverse emphasis on sexual purity as the sole expression of righteousness, along with a creepy obsession with the unquestionable sexual authority of white men. In a culture where race defined one’s claim to basic humanity, women took on a special religious interest. Christianity’s historic emphasis on sexual purity as a form of ascetic self-denial was transformed into an obsession with women and sex. For Southerners, righteousness had little meaning beyond sex, and sexual mores had far less importance for men than for women. Guarding women’s sexual purity meant guarding the purity of the white race. There was no higher moral demand.

Changes brought by the Civil War only heightened the need to protect white racial superiority. Churches were the lynchpin of Jim Crow. By the time the Civil Rights movement gained force in the South, Dallas’ First Baptist Church, where Jeffress is the pastor today, was a bulwark of segregation and white supremacy. As the wider culture nationally has struggled to free itself from the burdens of racism, white evangelicals have fought this development while the violence escalated. What happened to ministers who resisted slavery happened again to those who resisted segregation. White Episcopal Seminary student, Jonathan Daniels, went to Alabama in 1965 to support voting rights protests. After being released from jail, he was murdered by an off-duty sheriff’s deputy, who was acquitted by a jury. Dozens of white activists joined the innumerable black Americans murdered fighting for civil rights in the 60’s, but very few of them were Southern.

White Evangelical Christians opposed desegregation tooth and nail. Where pressed, they made cheap, cosmetic compromises, like Billy Graham’s concession to allow black worshipers at his crusades. Graham never made any difficult statements on race, never appeared on stage with his “black friend” Martin Luther King after 1957, and he never marched with King. When King delivered his “I Have a Dream Speech,” Graham responded with this passive-aggressive gem of Southern theology, “Only when Christ comes again will the little white children of Alabama walk hand in hand with little black children.” For white Southern evangelicals, justice and compassion belong only to the dead.

Churches like First Baptist in Dallas did not become stalwart defenders of segregation by accident. Like the wider white evangelical movement, it was then and remains today an obstacle to Christian notions of social justice thanks to a long, dismal heritage. There is no changing the white evangelical movement without a wholesale reconsideration of their theology. No sign of such a reckoning is apparent.

Those waiting to see the bottom of white evangelical cruelty have little source of optimism. Men like Pastor Jeffress can dismiss Trump’s racist abuses as easily as they dismiss his fondness for porn stars. When asked about Trump’s treatment of immigrants, Jeffress shared these comments:

Solving DACA without strengthening borders ignores the teachings of the Bible. In fact, Christians who support open borders, or blanket amnesty, are cherry-picking Scriptures to suit their own agendas.

For those unfamiliar with Christian scriptures, it might helpful to point out what Jesus reportedly said about this subject, and about the wider question of our compassion for the poor and the suffering:

Depart from Me, you cursed, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave Me no food; I was thirsty and you gave Me no drink; I was a stranger and you did not take Me in, naked and you did not clothe Me, sick and in prison and you did not visit Me.

What did Jesus say about abortion, the favorite subject of Jeffress and the rest of the evangelical movement? Nothing. What does the Bible say about abortion, a practice as old as civilization? Nothing. Not one word. The Bible’s exhortations to compassion for immigrants and the poor stretch long enough to comprise a sizeable book of their own, but no matter. White evangelicals will not let their political ambitions be constrained by something as pliable as scripture.

Why is the religious right obsessed with subjects like abortion while unmoved by the plight of immigrants, minorities, the poor, the uninsured, and those slaughtered in pointless gun violence? No white man has ever been denied an abortion. Few if any white men are affected by the deportation of migrants. White men are not kept from attending college by laws persecuting Dreamers. White evangelical Christianity has a bottomless well of compassion for the interests of straight white men, and not a drop to be spared for anyone else at their expense. The cruelty of white evangelical churches in politics, and in their treatment of their own gay or minority parishioners, is no accident. It is an institution born in slavery, tuned to serve the needs of Jim Crow, and entirely unwilling to confront either of those realities.

Men like Russell Moore, head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s public policy group, are trying to reform the Southern Baptist church in increments, much like Billy Graham before him. His statements on subjects like the Confederate Flag and sexual harassment are bold, but only relative to previous church proclamations. He’s still about three decades behind the rest of American culture in recognition of the basic human rights of the country’s non-white, non-male citizens. Resistance he is facing from evangelicals will continue so long as the theology informing white evangelical religion remains unconsidered and unchallenged.

While white evangelical religion remains dedicated to its roots, it will perpetuate its heritage. What this religious heritage produced in the 2016 election, when white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump by a record margin, is the truest expression of its moral character.

You will know a tree by its fruit.”

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The Maven: This is why white evangelicals do the opposite of what Jesus taught

Evangelical ‘Christian’ hypocricy and cruelty has a long history, literally rewriting the Bible to justify hanging up the dead bodies of preachers who disagreed with slavery. The callous immorality lives on in leaders like Robert Jeffress who preach that 911 happened because America was sinful, yet also says Trump’s affair with Porn Star Stormy Daniels “Doesn’t matter.”This can seem confusing to normal moral people, but looking at the historical roots of Southern Evangelicalism, which makes up the largest concentration of so called born agains, will quickly explain this paradox. Evangelicals are not a religion based on morality or the teachings of Jesus. They are a cruel political cult with the goal of upholding white male power. Case in point, Mr. Jeffress’ Church was a center of segregation after the Civil War.  To support the status quo of slavery, Southern Evangelicals needed to justify the abhorrent treatment of African people. They did so by rewriting entire biblical chapters and murdering uncooperative Preachers. Seriously. The whole story of the Jews escaping Egyptian slavery was just ‘reinterpreted.’ 

Pastors stripped away and minimized the numerous, kind, passionate missives Jesus spoke regarding healing the sick, helping the poor, and being kind to immigrants. Preachers who wouldn’t get on board were driven out or worse. One such preacher, Anthony Bewley, was chased across the country by a posse, then brought home and lynched for the crime of opposing slavery. His bones were hung at ‘Ephraim Daggett’s Storehouse’ in Texas, where little kids played with them. This really happened. With all reasonable voices chased out or murdered, Southern Evangelicals fermented in the swampy damp air of their own insular hatred. 

Today’s Evangelicals are the direct inheritance of this murderous and inbred twisting of Jesus. In the post segregation Evangelical vacuum of morality, a new focus was invented. Sexual purity with an emphasis on ‘white men know best.’ An obsession with protecting white women’s purity, and fear of racial mixing became the central idol in Jim Crow Christianity. Today that carries over to the focus on policing women’s reproduction and abortion, a practice that’s been around for thousands of years. Fun fact; abortion isn’t mentioned in the Magic Bible, no not once.  The aforementioned pro Trump pastor Jeffress is obsessed with abortion and bashing immigrants because it’s not popular to openly disparage black people anymore. Just like they did when justifying slavery, modern Evangelicals ignore the numerous passionate Bible verses about treating immigrants well. Jesus is just an inconvenient Commie.  “Depart from Me, you cursed, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave Me no food; I was thirsty and you gave Me no drink; I was a stranger and you did not take Me in, naked and you did not clothe Me, sick and in prison and you did not visit Me.” Interestingly, in a week in which a UN committee is pointing out deep racial inequity in America’s criminal justice system and squarely pointing blame on our history of slavery, Forbes magazine (yeah, FORBES) broke down the Evangelical Church’s roots in upholding slavery and Jim Crow segregation. With such prominent focus are we about to have an American Reckoning on race? No, not if the Southern Evangelical Christian crew can help it.”

 

Interestingly, in a week in which a UN committee is pointing out deep racial inequity in America’s criminal justice system and squarely pointing blame on our history of slavery, Forbes magazine (yeah, FORBES) broke down the Evangelical Church’s roots in upholding slavery and Jim Crow segregation. With such prominent focus are we about to have an American Reckoning on race? No, not if the Southern Evangelical Christian crew can help it.”

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Washington Post: Why Southern Baptists can’t shake their racist past

“Leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention struggled to denounce white nationalism at their annual gathering in Phoenix this week. The nation’s largest Protestant denomination, which was founded in 1845 over the issue of slavery and whose leaders once championed segregation and Jim Crow laws, has made significant strides in recent years to reform its image on such matters. But when it comes to the denomination’s race relations, the past is a ghost whose haunting seems unending.

The most recent problem began when Dwight McKissic, a prominent black Southern Baptist pastor, grew alarmed that white nationalist ideologies were gaining prominence in the U.S., even among some of his denominational colleagues. Rather than sit idly by, he drafted the “Resolution on the Condemnation of the ‘Alt-Right’ Movement and the Roots of White Supremacy” for consideration at the Phoenix meeting. The alt-right is a small, far-right movement that seeks a whites-only state.

[Southern Baptists vote overwhelmingly to condemn %u2018alt-right white supremacy%u2019]

“I believed this resolution would be a slam-dunk and a no-brainer. I was hopeful that we’d turned a corner on issues of racism,” McKissic said. “But I was in for a rude awakening.”

The resolutions committee declined to approve the resolution. The chairman of that committee, Barrett Duke, reportedly said the reason for the rejection was that the resolution “contained some significantly inflammatory language that we felt was over the bar.”

Indeed, the resolution did not mince words, calling the alt-right a “toxic menace” and urging the denomination to repudiate its “totalitarian impulses, xenophobic biases, and bigoted ideologies that infect the minds and actions of its violent disciples.”

But the committee’s reasoning still seems specious. The Southern Baptist Convention has never shied away from expressing strong opinions about political and theological matters. In 2008, for example, the denomination did not hesitate to pass a resolution denouncing Planned Parenthood, calling for the government to defund the organization, and suggesting that the group was guilty of “murder[ing] the innocent.” Southern Baptists then did not object to using inflammatory language regarding a divisive issue. So why are they hesitant when it comes to white nationalism?

McKissic went to the floor of the convention center to introduce a motion for reconsideration, but the motion failed. This unleashed an outpouring of protests from Southern Baptist leaders, particularly from African Americans. The chaos pressured leaders to move toward a vote on the resolution, and it passed on Wednesday. But the damage has been done.

From a public relations viewpoint, this is exactly the opposite of what the denomination needed. Leaders have worked hard to move beyond their racist past and increase denominational diversity. In 1995, they officially apologized for condoning and perpetuating racism in their past.

In recent years, they have sought to incorporate more African Americans into leadership, including electing Louisiana pastor Fred Luter Jr. as the first black SBC president in 2012. Next year, the denomination’s public policy arm will host a racial reconciliation conference in honor of the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s death.

But despite these efforts to mend race relations, Southern Baptists can’t seem to win for losing. In 2011, they considered changing their name in part to help the group open a new chapter untethered from their racist past. The name-change effort failed and Southern Baptists instead approved an optional alternate name: “Great Commission Baptists.” To date, very few churches if any are using the new label.

In 2012, the same year that Luter was elected, Southern Baptists’ chief lobbyist, Richard Land, incited controversy by saying on his radio show that it was “understandable” for white people to see young black men as threatening since they are “statistically more likely to do you harm than a white man.” In the same segment, he called African American leaders Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton “race mongers” and “racial ambulance chasers.” Land was formally reprimanded and eventually resigned, but the denomination did not immediately fire him over his comments.

At their annual gathering last year, Southern Baptists considered a motion renouncing the display of the Confederate flag. As with this year’s white nationalism resolution, it was met with fierce opposition from white Southern Baptists who celebrate their Southern heritage and find the symbol to be meaningful. After spirited debate, the resolution passed.

Luter rotated out as SBC president in 2014, and the convention elected another white man as its leader. To date, no major Southern Baptist agency is led by someone who is black. The SBC’s Executive Committee, which is a centralized governing board, has only one black member out of more than 60 potential positions.

So this year’s Southern Baptist Convention is, in the words of the late Yogi Berra, “like deja vu all over again.” Another effort to denounce racist ideologies and symbols, another wave of resistance from white leaders.

Right now, Southern Baptists are their own worst enemies, making strides and stepping backward by turns. Rather than reacting to the moment, leaders need to figure out how to get in front of these debates and lead prophetically and proactively.

“African American leaders in the Southern Baptist Convention are totally disheartened at this point,” McKissic told me. “I had to encourage others not to jump ship yesterday, reminding them that things are a lot better than they were in the 1950s when the first black churches began joining the denomination.”

When it comes to racial justice, the 1950s is a pretty low bar. Southern Baptists need a quantum leap into the 21st century if they hope to thrive in an era where racial tensions are strained and social awareness of such issues is high. If they don’t make this jump quickly, they’ll find themselves wrestling as much with race as their own irrelevance in the years to come.

—

Slate: Christian Soldiers

The lynching and torture of blacks in the Jim Crow South weren’t just acts of racism. They were religious rituals.

“The cliché is that Americans have a short memory, but since Saturday, a number of us have been arguing over medieval religious wars and whether they have any lessons for today’s violence in the Middle East.

For those still unaware, this debate comes after President Obama’s comments at the annual National Prayer Breakfast, where—after condemning Islamic radical group ISIS as a “death cult”—he offered a moderating thought. “Lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ … So this is not unique to one group or one religion. There is a tendency in us, a sinful tendency that can pervert and distort our faith.”

It’s a straightforward point—“no faith has a particular monopoly on religious arrogance”—that’s become a partisan flashpoint, as conservatives harangue the president for “equating” crusading Christians to Islamic radicals, accuse him of anti-Christian beliefs, and wonder why he would mention a centuries-old conflict, even if it has some analogies to the present day.

What we have missed in the argument over the Crusades, however, is Obama’s mention of slavery and Jim Crow. At the Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates puts his focus on religious justifications for American bondage, and it’s worth doing the same for its post-bellum successor. And since we’re thinking in terms of religious violence, our eyes should turn toward the most brutal spectacle of Jim Crow’s reign, the lynching.

We can’t deny that lynching—in all of its grotesque brutality—was an act of religious significance justified by the Christianity of the day.

For most of the century between the two Reconstructions, the bulk of the white South condoned and sanctioned terrorist violence against black Americans. In a new report, the Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative documents nearly 4,000 lynchings of black people in 12 Southern states—Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia—between 1877 and 1950, which the group notes is “at least 700 more lynchings in these states than previously reported.”

For his victims, “Judge Lynch”—journalist Ida B. Wells’ name for the lynch mob—was capricious, merciless, and barbaric. C.J. Miller, falsely accused of killing two teenaged white sisters in western Kentucky, was “dragged through the streets to a crude platform of old barrel staves and other kindling,” writes historian Philip Dray in At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America. His assailants hanged him from a telephone pole, and while “the first fall broke his neck … the body was repeatedly raised and lowered while the crowd peppered it with small-arms fire.” For two hours his corpse hung above the street, during which he was photographed and mutilated by onlookers. Finally, he was cut down and burned.

More savage was the lynching of Mary Turner and her unborn child, killed for protesting her husband’s murder. “[B]efore a crowd that included women and children,” writes Dray, “Mary was stripped, hung upside down by the ankles, soaked with gasoline, and roasted to death. In the midst of this torment, a white man opened her swollen belly with a hunting knife and her infant fell to the ground, gave a cry, and was stomped to death.”

These lynchings weren’t just vigilante punishments or, as the Equal Justice Initiative notes, “celebratory acts of racial control and domination.” They were rituals. And specifically, they were rituals of Southern evangelicalism and its then-dogma of purity, literalism, and white supremacy. “Christianity was the primary lens through which most southerners conceptualized and made sense of suffering and death of any sort,” writes historian Amy Louise Wood in Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940. “It would be inconceivable that they could inflict pain and torment on the bodies of black men without imagining that violence as a religious act, laden with Christian symbolism and significance.”

 

The God of the white South demanded purity—embodied by the white woman. White southerners would build the barrier with segregation. But when it was breached, lynching was the way they would mend the fence and affirm their freedom from the moral contamination, represented by blacks and black men in particular. (Although, not limited to them. Leo Frank, lynched in 1915, was Jewish.) The perceived breach was frequently sexual, defined by the myth of the black rapist, a “demon” and “beast” who set out to defile the Christian purity of white womanhood. In his narrative of the lynching of Henry Smith—killed for the alleged rape and murder of 3-year-old Myrtle Vance—writer P.L. James recounted how the energy of an entire city and country was turned toward the apprehension of the demon who had devastated a home and polluted an innocent life.”

James wasn’t alone. Many other defenders of lynching understood their acts as a Christian duty, consecrated as God’s will against racial transgression. “After Smith’s lynching,” Wood notes, “another defender wrote, ‘It was nothing but the vengeance of an outraged God, meted out to him, through the instrumentality of the people that caused the cremation.’ ” As UNC–Chapel Hill Professor Emeritus Donald G. Mathews writes in the Journal of Southern Religion, “Religion permeated communal lynching because the act occurred within the context of a sacred order designed to sustain holiness.” The “sacred order” was white supremacy and the “holiness” was white virtue.

I should emphasize that blacks of the era understood lynching as rooted in the Christian practice of white southerners. “It is exceedingly doubtful if lynching could possibly exist under any other religion than Christianity,” wrote NAACP leader Walter White in 1929, “No person who is familiar with the Bible-beating, acrobatic, fanatical preachers of hell-fire in the South, and who has seen the orgies of emotion created by them, can doubt for a moment that dangerous passions are released which contribute to emotional instability and play a part in lynching.” And while some church leaders condemned the practice as contrary to the Gospel of Christ—“Religion and lynching; Christianity and crushing, burning and blessing, savagery and national sanity cannot go together in this country,” declared one 1904 editorial—the overwhelming consent of the white South confirmed White’s view.

The only Southern Christianity united in its opposition to lynching was that of black Americans, who tried to recontextualize the onslaught as a kind of crucifixion and its victims as martyrs, flipping the script and making blacks the true inheritors of Christian salvation and redemption. It’s that last point which should highlight how none of this was intrinsic to Christianity: It was a question of power, and of the need of the powerful to sanctify their actions.

 

Still, we can’t deny that lynching—in all of its grotesque brutality—was an act of religious significance justified by the Christianity of the day. It was also political: an act of terror and social control, and the province of private citizens, public officials, and powerful lawmakers. Sen. Ben Tillman of South Carolina defended lynching on the floor of the U.S. Senate, and President Woodrow Wilson applauded a film that celebrated Judge Lynch and his disciples.

Which is all to say that President Obama was right. The vastly different environments of pre–civil rights America and the modern-day Middle East belies the substantive similarities between the fairly recent religious violence of our white supremacist forebears and that of our contemporary enemies. And the present divide between moderate Muslims and their fanatical opponents has an analogue in our past divide between northern Christianity and its southern counterpart.

This isn’t relativism as much as it’s a clear-eyed view of our common vulnerability, of the truth that the seeds of violence and autocracy can sprout anywhere, and of the fact that our present position on the moral high ground isn’t evidence of some intrinsic superiority.

—

The Root: A Brief History of People Using Romans 13 to Justify White Supremacy

“Around A.D. 49, the Roman emperor Claudius expelled the Jews from the city of Rome. Historians argue about the exact date and the reasons, but we know that Claudius did not want them holding office or bringing in more immigrants. Instead, he wrote that the Jews (pdf) “should rest content with what belongs to them by right and enjoy an abundance of all good things in a city which is not theirs. They must not bring in or invite Jews who sail in from Syria or Egypt; this is the sort of thing which will compel me to have my suspicions redoubled.” The Jews, according to Claudius, were running in gangs, opening the borders and taking the good jobs from the true Romans.

Sound familiar?

As this was happening, one of the early Jewish leaders of a new sect called “Christianity” was composing a letter to his church. In the epistle, he told his oppressed minority of followers to avoid causing trouble with the most powerful government in the world. He wrote:

Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation. For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil. Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? Do that which is good, and thou shalt have praise of the same. —A Letter to the Roman Church From the Apostle Paul, Chapter 13, Verses 1-3

 

If you have ever wondered why slaves adopted the religious philosophy of their slave masters, Romans 13 is your answer. If you wanted to know why slaves, who often outnumbered slave masters, rebelled so rarely, the answer lies in Romans 13. To understand why the Bible was the only book many slaves were allowed to own, read that verse again.

Christianity was adopted by people, rulers and governments all around the globe because it tells its followers to comply. It boasts of a benevolent God who knows best; even when you are the subject of brutality, the Bible tells you that this is what God wants. At the root of Romans 13 is an edict to obey authority.

The 13th chapter of Romans is white supremacy, explained.

Almost 2,000 years after Paul’s letter, the 13th chapter of Paul’s instruction to the Romans is still being used to silence, warn and squash minority populations. When U.S. Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III quoted the verse Thursday to explain the Trump administration’s gestapolike policy of ripping babies from the arms of their mothers and throwing the children into internment camps, he was simply the latest in a long line of white people who used that verse to justify white supremacy.

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In 1859, a U.S. marshal named Ezekiel Cox was brought before the Market Street Church of Zanesville, Ohio, where he had been a member for more than 20 years. Cox was standing before a committee that would decide whether to kick him out of the church for returning a slave to a slave master, which the church considered a sin.

As reported at the time by the Prairie News, Cox defended himself before the tribunal by explaining himself with the Holy Scriptures:

Mr. Cox showed that this fugitive, Charley, did not escape from idolatry to join himself to God and his people but ran away from a kind and humane master, stole a horse, saddle and bridle, and committed a criminal offence besides of the most ferocious character, with a poor, weak white girl. Yet, such a wretch, Mr. Cox stated, appeared to have enlisted the deepest sympathy of many of the leading members of the church, and that he was arraigned before it for no other cause than having performed his sworn duty as an officer of the United States in arresting such a miscreant who, he stated, was not fit to run at large, or for any society, save practical amalgamationists or ultra abolitionists.

… Surely, said he, no Christian of any pretensions to Intelligence will deny that Slavery was at least recognized and tolerated when Christ was on earth, and during apostolic times as well as under the Mosaic dispensation; and referred to Paul to Col: “Servants obey in all things your masters according to the flesh,”…

… Mr. Cox also referred the committee to Paul to the Romans—“Let every soul be subjected to the higher powers For there is no power but of God Whomsoever, therefore, resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God j and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation for rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil.. Wilt thou not then be afraid of the power? Do that which is good and thou shalt have praise of the same.” See 13th chapter, 1st, 2d and 3d verses.

Cox was excommunicated by a vote of 22-12, but thank God, Charley was back in chains.

One of the reasons the Confederate South thought it was entitled to its own country where slavery was legal was Romans 13. In the buildup to the Civil War, even non-slave-owning white Christians used the verse to justify their support of the Civil War and slavery. They believed that God ordained the institution and that Romans 13 was a warning from Jesus to the North not to violate the Constitution and the law by outlawing slave owning.

During the civil rights movement, Paul’s admonition echoed through white, Southern churches, especially those that split from their larger denominations to hold on to segregation.

In the famous 1950s Presbyterian article “How to Detect a Liberal in the Pulpit,” the eventual formation of the segregationist Presbyterian Church in America was foreshadowed when the writer explained that liberal ministers “will be frequently found leading racial demonstrations, supporting workers in a strike … supporting the right of the Communist Party to engage in its activity in this country, and in giving his approval to the decision of the Supreme Court removing the Bible and other Christian influences from the schools of the nation.”

In their opinion, sit-ins, protests and civil disobedience as a whole were explicitly against Paul’s instructions to Christians. Rosa Parks, the Freedom Riders and even participants in the Children’s March were all sinners in the eyes of an angry white God, according to Romans 13.

God is even given as a reason why black people should stop resisting when they are shot by corrupt cops. Recently, Romans, chapter 13, was used to disparage the Black Lives Matter movement.

Despite the fact that Micah Johnson, who killed five Dallas police officers in 2016, was never connected to any organizations, Robert Jeffress, the head of one of the largest congregations in the area, condemned Black Lives Matter and said that he was sick of preachers disrespecting police because “the New Testament says in Romans 13:4 that law enforcement officers are ministers of God sent by God to punish evildoers.” (Coincidentally, this is the same pastor who said that NFL players should be happy they weren’t shot in the head for kneeling during the national anthem.)

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White supremacists love Romans 13. They used it to justify apartheid, but surprisingly, they also used it to justify why they hated Barack Obama. Hitler used it to justify the Holocaust.

When defending this kind of justification, one should never offer other Bible verses to contradict Romans 13. That can lead to a circular argument in which no one gets his or her point across. But there is another way to make white people see the light. Aside from Jesus and Paul, who was ostensibly the first pope, there is another man whom white people love to quote.

If you are black and have ever said anything radical, instead of quoting the apostle Paul, wypipo will often contradict your pro-blackness by informing you what Martin Luther King Jr. would have wanted. When white people are taking their white-privilege classes in kindergarten, this is one thing they are universally taught. “What MLK would have wanted … ” is the Caucasian equivalent of black people’s “All the time!” response whenever anyone says, “God is good.”

Well, in 1956, King preached a sermon at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala., titled: “Paul’s Letter to American Christians” (pdf). In the sermon, King imagines what he would have told Christians during his time. King told the church:

[A]s I said to the Philippian Christians, “Ye are a colony of heaven.” This means that although you live in the colony of time, your ultimate allegiance is to the empire of eternity. You have a dual citizenry. You live both in time and eternity; both in heaven and earth. Therefore, your ultimate allegiance is not to the government, not to the state, not to nation, not to any man-made institution. The Christian owes his ultimate allegiance to God, and if any earthly institution conflicts with God’s will, it is your Christian duty to take a stand against it [emphasis mine]. You must never allow the transitory evanescent demands of man-made institutions to take precedence over the eternal demands of the Almighty God.

MLK said it. That’s that.

But the irony of Jeff Sessions’ statement and the predilection of white people for justifying white supremacy with a Bible verse is the fact that Paul was beheaded because he wouldn’t conform to the beliefs of the government.

According to most historians, the apostle Paul was executed by Nero, a crazy emperor known for his extravagance, public outbursts and fiddling like a fool while the place he ruled went down in flames.

Sound familiar?

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Challenging Christian Hegemony: Why Black Lives Haven’t Mattered: The Origins of Western Racism in Christian Hegemony

Dominant Christianity developed categories of people labeled “Other” going back to the year 381 C.E when the Roman Emperor Theodosius declared that Orthodox Christianity would be the only legitimate religion in the Roman Empire. At that point all pagans, Jews, and Christian heretics lost their civil rights and became targets of systematic violence. In the succeeding centuries, and especially after the first Crusades, able-bodied and healthy European heterosexual males with wealth developed a sense of themselves as the only fully legitimate Christians. Muslims, Jews, Pagans, women, homosexuals, people with disabilities, and the poor were relegated to the category of Other—inferior, polluting, dangerous, and capable of being used by the Devil to undermine God’s work in the world.[i] As historian Winthrop Jordan wrote, “Christianity was interwoven into [an Englishman’s] conception of his own nationality…. Being a Christian was not merely a matter of subscribing to certain doctrines; it was a quality inherent in oneself and in one’s society. It was interconnected with all the other attributes of normal and proper men.”[ii] The major division in the west was between legitimate Christians and others.

It was in Spain during the 14th and 15th centuries, because of concern about the sincerity of Jewish and Muslim conversos (former Jews or Muslims who were forced to converted to Catholicism), that the church developed a theory of biological purity defining who was Christian. For example, Marcos Garcia preached in 1449 that:

“All converts who belong to the Jewish race or those who have descended from  it – that is, who were born as Jews, or are sons, grandsons, great-grandsons, or great-great-grandsons of Jews who were baptized … including those [converts] who descended newly and recently from that most evil and damned stock, are presumed, according to the testimonies of the Scriptures, to be infidels, and suspect of the faith. From which follows that the vice of infidelity is not presumed to be purged until the fourth generation.”[iii]

The racialization of Jews and Muslims soon became legalized under the concept of limpieza de sangre (blood purity).[iv] Jews and Muslims were believed to be separate races than Christians. Even if they converted, the church claimed the taint of their Jewishness or Muslimness took generations to become diluted and to disappear. The policy of the Spanish crown eventually became the complete elimination of all Jews and Muslims, and even of Christians who had a drop of Jewish or Moorish blood in their veins. It was the task of the Inquisition to turn Spain into a pure Christian society by eliminating all inferior races.

Throughout Europe – not just isolated to Spain – the Inquisition became a popular phenomenon orchestrated and enforced by religious authority and state power and with widespread public participation. Crowds of thousands would turn out for hangings, burnings, beheadings and various forms of torture, much as crowds of white Christians turned out for lynchings in the US centuries later. Many times, mobs would apprehend people accused of heresy and murder them on the spot, sometimes destroying entire communities of Jews.

This theory of blood impurity/racial inferiority was subsequently used to justify the inferior treatment, murder and enslavement of Africans, indigenous peoples in the Western hemisphere. For example, after Bacon’s Rebellion when Virginia decreed in 1667 that converted slaves could be kept in bondage because they had heathen ancestry, the justification for Black servitude changed from religious status to a racialized one.²⁹

A series of Papal Bulls declared that Christian nations were free in law and by divine approval to lay claim to what were called unoccupied lands (terra nullius) or lands belonging to so-called heathens or pagans. Slavery was divinely sanctioned in these statements. Again the intertwined economic and religious motivation is clear. Slavery would be of economic benefit to the colonizers, but this was justified by their responsibility to convert and thereby civilize the enslaved people.

As Africans and Native Americans began to be converted to Christianity, such a simple distinction between Christian and non-Christian was no longer useful – at least as a legal and political difference. In addition, because Europeans, Native Americans and Africans often worked and lived together in similar circumstances of servitude, and resisted and rebelled together against the way they were treated, the landowning class began to implement policies to separate European workers from African and Native-American workers. Even in this early colonial period, racism was used to divide workers and make it easier for those in power to control working conditions. Drawing on already established popular classifications, whiteness, now somewhat separate from Christianity, was delineated more clearly as a legal category in the United States in the 17th century, and the concept of life-long servitude (slavery) was introduced from the West Indies and distinguished from various forms of shorter-term servitude (indenture). In response to Bacon’s rebellion and other uprisings, the ruling class, especially in the populous and dominant territory of Virginia, began to establish a clear racial hierarchy in the1660s and 70s.⁴ By the 1730s racial divisions were firmly in place legally and socially. Most blacks were enslaved and even free blacks had lost the right to vote, the right to bear arms and the right to bear witness. Blacks were also barred from participating in many trades during this period.

Meanwhile, whites had gained the right to corn, money, a gun, clothing and 50 acres of land at the end of indentureship. In other words, poor whites “gained legal, political, emotional, social, and financial status that was directly related to the concomitant degradation of Indians and Negroes.”[v]

Subsequently, slavery in the US became so widely accepted by Christian institutions, and so deeply intertwined with the economic interests of all whites, that for a long time it was dangerous to challenge. Few white Christians did so.

Some abolitionists used Christian texts to decry slavery, but they were countered by other texts sanctioning it, mostly written by ministers who, by one estimate, wrote nearly half of all pro-slavery tracts published in the US.[vi] Christian denominations, with only a few exceptions, supported slavery or claimed to be neutral.

Christianity blessed slavery at every step of the trade. For example, in present-day Ghana,a small church for baptizing Africans before they were taken onto ships was situated above Elmina Castle’s slave pens. Many of the ships had names such as Jesus, Good Ship Jesus, Angel, Grace of God,[vii] Christ the Redeemer, Blessed, John Evangelist, The Lord Our Savior and Trinity.[viii] In the early days of the slave trade the Portuguese branded every woman on her right arm with a cross.[ix] As Frederick Douglas so concisely explained:

“Revivals of religion and revivals in the slave-trade go hand in hand together. The slave prison and the church stand near each other. The clanking of fetters and the rattling of chains in the prison, and the pious psalm and solemn prayer in the church, may be heard at the same time. The dealer in the bodies and souls of men … gives his blood-stained gold to support the pulpit, and the pulpit, in return, covers his infernal business with the garb of Christianity.”[x]

Eventually more Christians, including some denominations as a whole, joined the struggle against slavery. But even today, the lack of acknowledgment of and reparations for slavery continues to plague US society and the integrity of dominant Christianity. While slavery ended as a legal system after the Civil War, the enslavement of African-Americans in the US continued by another name, Jim Crow: a system of legal, social and economic bondage violently enforced, most notoriously by chain gangs, white race riots and lynching.

During the post Civil War era incidents of racial violence were sometimes spontaneous actions carried out by small groups of people. However, in the tradition of the Inquisition, more often lynchings were deliberate, organized, public Christian spectacles lasting days or even weeks. Flyers were printed, newspapers advertised them, and thousands attended, bringing families and friends, picnic food, cameras and buying memorabilia and souvenirs. Businesses closed down, public officials and church leaders were present and local police kept order.[xi]

Lynchings, as well as the white riots that murdered African-Americans and destroyed their houses and businesses (especially when they thrived) were a form of collective terrorism occurring periodically throughout the US. Just like witch burnings and Christian riots against Jews centuries earlier, they served to bond white communities to white Christian supremacy, reminding them as well what might happen if they protested its norms.

White Christian men are still in control and state-sponsored and sanctioned racial violence continues today in the form of police murder of African Americans and others, the disproportionate incarceration of people of color, lack of access to health care, educational and work opportunities, land grabs, residential segregation and gentrification, the elimination of communities of color from areas that whites desire to live in. The roots of racial and other forms of exploitation, discrimination, and violence today lie in the centuries of demonization of all those considered Other by dominant Christianity. The assertion that Black Lives Matter by African Americans and their allies is one current and powerful attempt to disrupt business as usual and claim full participation in our society. Now is the time for each of us to challenge this dominant Christian narrative because truly silence equals complicity.

—

Frederick Douglass: Life of an American Slave

 I find, since reading over the foregoing Narrative, that I have, in several instances, spoken in such a tone and manner, respecting religion, as may possibly lead those unacquainted with my religious views to suppose me an opponent of all religion. To remove the liability of such misapprehension, I deem it proper to append the following brief explanation. What I have said respecting and against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the slaveholding religion of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper; for, between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference — so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity. I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels. Never was there a clearer case of “stealing the livery of the court of heaven to serve the devil in.” I am filled with unutterable loathing when I contemplate the religious pomp and show, together with the horrible inconsistencies, which every where surround me. We have men-stealers for ministers, women-whippers for missionaries, and cradle-plunderers for church members. The man who wields the blood-clotted cowskin during the week fills the pulpit on Sunday, and claims to be a minister of the meek and lowly Jesus. The man who robs me of my earnings at the end of each week meets me as a class-leader on Sunday morning, to show me the way of life, and the path of salvation. He who sells my sister, for purposes of prostitution, stands forth as the pious advocate of purity. He who proclaims it a religious duty to read the Bible denies me the right of learning to read the name of the God who made me. He who is the religious advocate of marriage robs whole millions of its sacred influence, and leaves them to the ravages of wholesale pollution. The warm defender of the sacredness of the family relation is the same that scatters whole families, — sundering husbands and wives, parents and children, sisters and brothers, — leaving the hut vacant, and the hearth desolate. We see the thief preaching against theft, and the adulterer against adultery. We have men sold to build churches, women sold to support the gospel, and babes sold to purchase Bibles for the poor heathen! all for the glory of God and the good of souls! The slave auctioneer’s bell and the church-going bell chime in with each other, and the bitter cries of the heart-broken slave are drowned in the religious shouts of his pious master. Revivals of religion and revivals in the slave-trade go hand in hand together. The slave prison and the church stand near each other. The clanking of fetters and the rattling of chains in the prison, and the pious psalm and solemn prayer in the church, may be heard at the same time. The dealers in the bodies and souls of men erect their stand in the presence of the pulpit, and they mutually help each other. The dealer gives his blood-stained gold to support the pulpit, and the pulpit, in return, covers his infernal business with the garb of Christianity. Here we have religion and robbery the allies of each other — devils dressed in angels’ robes, and hell presenting the semblance of paradise.

—

Further Readings

• David P. Gushee: White American Christianity Is Rooted in Colonial Empire-Building
• Challenging Christian Hegemony: Why Black Lives Haven’t Mattered: The Origins of Western Racism in Christian Hegemony
• Full Frontal Investigates: The Case of Jerry Falwell, Jr., the Pool Boy, Michael Cohen, & Tom Arnold
• Patheos: Christian Crowdfunding Site Raising Money For Kenosha Killer Kyle Rittenhouse

 

 

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Tea Party

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Tea Party

• Astroturf movement emerging after Obama’s inauguration
  • “Tea Party, a fast-spinning tornado of grass roots organizations, billionaire funders, and a partisan rightwing media juggernaut, Fox News.”
    • Claimed motivations were outrage at:
      • Deficit spending, stimulus package, national debt
    • Critics claimed their motivation really was about:
      • Outrage over liberal gov spending to assist poor communities of color and a black president
      • False narratives
        • Death Panel (2009 Politifact Lie of the Year), debt ceiling, black home owners responsible for recession, etc.
      • 95% of members are white
        • “Tea party fury may not have come from old-style, hate-every-black-person racism, but it nevertheless stemmed from the racial hostilities mobilized by dog whistle politics…they were persons stampeded by racial anxieties into fearing government and demonizing liberalism. “Ian Haney Lopez – Dog Whistle Politics
• Governmental Impact:
  • 2010 – 44 House, 5 Senate Tea Party candidates elected
  • 2012 – 4 Tea Party candidates won a seat on the Senate
  • 2014 – Huge gains in Texas, Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General
  • 2015 – 1 Governorship (Kentucky)
  • 2016 – 3 senators, a president
    • Many more state and local tea party politicians have been elected
    • Many moderate Republicans lost their seats in primaries for their bipartisanship

“The contradictions others have noted in the Tea Party, so difficult to resolve without reference to race, become intelligible when looked at through the lens of dog whistle politics. Tea Partiers could oppose big government yet insist that social security and Medicare were sacrosanct because they continued to see “welfare’ as something liberals doled out to lazy nonwhites. They weren’t hostile to the New Deal programs on which they relied; on the contrary, like generations before, they supported core New Deal values and many safety net programs. What they resented was the sense that their taxes were being wasted on underserving minorities. “Ian Haney Lopez – Dog Whistle Politics

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VOA: The Tea Party Movement

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4-c2SAjLFA

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4 Driving Factors of the Tea Party

“The Tea Partymovement reflected the confluence of four forces:

First, the anger and fear of everyday white folks, a few of them Goldwaterite holdovers or principled libertarians, but mot Reagan Democrats, person whose political conservatism was directly molded by racially infected fears of a liberal government run by a black president.

Second, opportunistic Republicans seeking a new label for a damaged brand.

Third, rightwing billionaires like the Koch brothers, with their well-funded propaganda machines, who saw in the fear and anger directed at Obama a new opportunity to case their agenda in populist terms.

Fourth, Fox News and the rightwing media machine more generally, promoted the movement and helped racially agitate and misinform its soldiers.

Reviewing all of this, we can now answer a basic question: was the Tea Party driven by conservatism or by race? The answer is emphatically yes…Inextricably combining conservatism and racism, the Tea Party was almost wholly a creature of rightwing dog whistle politics.” Ian Haney Lopez – Dog Whistle Politics

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The Newsroom – Tea Party is the American Taliban

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WVn2ubwIVM

 

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Vox: George H.W. Bush’s broken promise that changed the Republican Party

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TImO_RquoW8

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Voteview: Study shows how Parties have become more extreme overtime.  (0 being moderate) Conclusion: Republicans are becoming more extreme over time.

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Vox: How Southern racism found a home in the Tea Party

“Within days of President Obama’s inauguration seven and a half years ago, the Tea Party took national politics by storm. Sympathetic pundits and affiliated politicians claimed that the movement amounted to the formation of a new third party that represented widespread economic concerns, its motivation based on outrage over deficit spending, the stimulus package, and the national debt.

Yet coverage of Tea Party rallies also included images of protest signs covered with racist slogans such as ‘‘A Village in Kenya Is Missing Its Idiot: Deport Obama!’’ ‘‘Congress = Slave Owner; Taxpayer = N**gar,’’ and ‘‘Imam Obama Wants to Ban Pork: Don’t Let Him Steal Your Meat,’’ among other inflammatory proclamations.

Tea Party members argued that their opposition to Obama was based on differences over economic policies and not on racial animus – that those placards were extreme outliers. Yet scholarly debates continue over where Tea Partiers’ intolerance for government spending on, say, unemployment benefits for those deemed undeserving ends and racism begins.

Those debates remain significant in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election, as accusations of racism trail the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, Donald Trump. In other words, what can the Tea Party teach us about Trump’s ascension?

A tale of two Tea Parties

One overlooked aspect of the Tea Party is its strongly regional character. National survey data (2012) from the Blair Center of Southern Politics and Society at the University of Arkansas, including a robust oversample of Southerners, allows us to explore more fully this aspect of the movement.

First, the Southern Tea Party makes up a disproportionate amount of the Tea Party movement in general. Although the South, defined as the 11 states of the former Confederacy, constitutes only 31 percent of the American population, it is home to 56 percent of Tea Party members nationally. 

And the Southern Tea Party is a different beast from the Northern Tea Party. Our most striking finding in that 2012 data is that racism significantly predicts Tea Party membership in the South — and not just any kind of racism but “old-fashioned racism.” A high old-fashioned racism score means a respondent is willing to say on a survey that African Americans are lazy, untrustworthy, and unintelligent on a 7-point scale (meaning there is plenty of room for neutrality, room to hide one’s views).

Given today’s social norms, only the most defiant, the most willing to embrace racial stereotypes, will admit such prejudice, so researchers had in recent years largely abandoned such questions in favor of subtler measures of racial resentment (including, for instance, a strong denial of institutional racism). But anti-Obama sentiment among whites has brought old-fashioned racism back into the public arena, and the Tea Party in the South gave it a home.

Naturally, racism is far from the whole story of even the Southern Tea Party. Tea Partiers nationally viewed the stimulus package, spending on unemployment benefits, and the size of the budget deficit with more alarm than other Americans. Yet both nationally and in the South, the most significant predictor of Tea Party membership is disapproval of President Obama.

There are, of course, many reasons beyond racism that respondents could disapprove of Obama, including partisanship and ideological differences. Yet in the South, the dovetailing of racist sentiment and intense disdain for the nation’s first black president makes it hard to conclude that the Southern Tea Party is not substantially shaped by racial animus.

The history of slavery and Jim Crow, along with the longstanding tendency of white Southerners to define themselves racially as “us versus them” made the racist side of the Tea Party’s anti-Obama spirit all the more attractive

In the South: younger, more female, less educated

The Southern Tea Party has other distinctive demographic features that set it apart from its cousin beyond the Mason-Dixon Line. Tea Party members in the South are younger, less educated, and more likely to be women.

None of these differences are all that surprising to those who study the region and who know that white Southern women are as conservative as white Southern men (if not more so in some cases), and that the passage of generations have not necessarily eroded Southern racism, particularly in pockets of the region that remain segregated. And education, long considered the most powerful antidote to racism, still lags significantly in the South. All of these factors work in tandem.

Nationally, “core” Tea Partiers differ from sympathizers

But regional distinctiveness is not the only relevant lesson the Tea Party offers for the current political season. Related Blair Center data from 2010 helps illuminate another important feature of the Tea Party nationally — namely, the relationship between core members and fellow travelers or sympathizers.

As I’ve suggested, the Tea Party is not just a party; it is an idea, a force, an anti-Obama movement that appeals to nonmembers throughout the country. The Tea Party has become an amorphous symbol that can be adopted or lauded by anyone who opposes Obama.

In 2010, only 10 percent of Americans were members of Tea Party organizations. However, if you add in the frustrated Americans who admit feeling very warmly toward the Tea Party, the figure roughly doubles. This larger group includes people who would join the Tea Party if they could, but who live in communities that lack any formal organization to join, which is especially common in rural areas. This dynamic helps to explain why the Tea Party looms larger as an idea than it does as a political party.

In the 2010 data, we found that card-carrying Tea Partiers tend to be purists ideologically and more conservative than the larger sympathetic population. Those who have warm feelings about the Tea Party but are not official members manifested a greater degree of racism, not the bold old-fashioned racism we found in the South in 2012, but a less direct “symbolic racism.”

This measure of racism includes a series of questions that probe white resentment towards African-American advancement as well as the degree to which participants deny that black people in America face barriers to advancement that white people do not.

The different characteristics of these two groups may help explain why card-carrying Tea Partiers reject so vehemently the accusations of racism. That rejection reflects tension between the (purist) core and the (racist) periphery of the movement.

In sum, when Tea Party activists argue that they are motivated by economic concerns, these claims may be true — but largely in the non-South. In the South, the motivations for Tea Party membership continue to follow historic white animosity toward African Americans.

The common thread in these studies is that the Tea Party’s opposition to Obama empowered racist attitudes and brought them out of the woodwork, most dramatically among the party’s Southern members but also in the larger population who simply admired the Tea Party’s efforts — whether these racist attitudes were dormant, hidden, or coded.

The election of the first African-American president highlighted the country’s progress toward racial equality, which remains anathema to a minority of white voters. Nowhere was the response more reactionary than in the American South, where pockets of the region remain segregated even now — and in those pockets the idea of an African-American president seems impossible. That direct and vocal Southern white racism, while tainting the Tea Party’s economic message, appealed to a larger, but perhaps quieter, resentful American population.

Where will the racist anger go?

Perhaps the greatest test of Tea Party motivation nationwide comes now in 2016, when President Obama is no longer on the ballot. If the Tea Party is, in fact, an anti-Obama party, then when he goes so too should it.

Yet it’s also possible that the racism, distrust, and hate brought forth by Obama’s election has found a new outlet. Maybe this anti-Obama faction also wants to ban Muslims and build walls along the Mexican border. (Note that some Tea Party signs incorrectly yet viciously attacked President Obama’s supposed Muslim faith.)

Donald Trump’s campaign gained traction only when he won the early primary in South Carolina and when he dominated the new “SEC primary,” in which a group of Southern states collectively moved their primaries to Super Tuesday in the hopes of influencing the GOP nomination.

And influence they did. Without white Southern support, Trump might never have gained the momentum that has made him the presumptive nominee, defeating a crowded field of contenders.

The point is not that racism or xenophobia or an “us versus them” cosmology does not exist in the rest of the country. It’s that the Tea Party showed that politicians and political movements can still make direct racist appeals to white Southerners, and a substantial number of them, in the Republican Party’s largest geographic voting bloc, will still applaud. And that applause resonates nationally, falling on quite a few sympathetic ears.”

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Jamelle Bouie: America holds onto an undemocratic assumption from its founding: that some people deserve more power than others.

If you want to understand American politics in 2019 and the strain of reactionary extremism that has taken over the Republican Party, a good place to start is 2011: the year after a backlash to Barack Obama’s presidency swept Tea Party insurgents into Congress, flipping control of the House.

It was clear, at the start of that year, that Congress would have to lift the debt ceiling — the limit on bonds and other debt instruments the government issues when it doesn’t have the revenues to fulfill spending obligations. These votes were often opportunities for grandstanding and occasionally brinkmanship by politicians from both parties. But it was understood that, when push came to shove, Congress would lift the limit and the government would pay its obligations.

2011 was different. Congressional Republicans, led by the new Tea Party conservatives, wanted to repeal the Affordable Care Act and make other sharp cuts to the social safety net. But Democrats controlled the Senate and the White House. So House Republicans decided to take a hostage. “I’m asking you to look at a potential increase in the debt limit as a leverage moment when the White House and President Obama will have to deal with us,” said the incoming majority leader, Eric Cantor, at a closed-door retreat days before the session began, according to The Washington Post. Either the White House would agree to harsh austerity measures or Republicans would force the United States to default on its debt obligations, precipitating an economic crisis just as the country, and the world, was beginning to recover from the Great Recession.

The 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative. Read all the stories.

 

The debt-limit standoff was a case study of a fundamental change within the Republican Party after Obama took office in 2009. Republicans would either win total victory or they would wreck the system itself. The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, used a variety of procedural tactics to effectively nullify the president’s ability to nominate federal judges and fill vacancies in the executive branch. In the minority, he used the filibuster to an unprecedented degree. In the majority, after Republicans won the Senate in the 2014 midterm elections, he led an extraordinary blockade of the Supreme Court, stopping the Senate from even considering the president’s nominee for the bench.

Where did this destructive, sectarian style of partisan politics come from? Conventional wisdom traces its roots to the “Gingrich Revolution” of the 1990s, whose architect pioneered a hardball, insurgent style of political combat, undermining norms and dismantling congressional institutions for the sake of power. This is true enough, but the Republican Party of the Obama years didn’t just recycle its Gingrich-era excesses; it also pursued a policy of total opposition, not just blocking Obama but also casting him as fundamentally illegitimate and un-American. He may have been elected by a majority of the voting public, but that majority didn’t count. It didn’t represent the “real” America.

 

 

John C. Calhoun, perhaps the most prominent political theorist of the slaveholding South and an influence on modern right-wing thinking. From the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Obama’s election reignited a fight about democratic legitimacy — about who can claim the country as their own, and who has the right to act as a citizen — that is as old as American democracy itself. And the reactionary position in this conflict, which seeks to narrow the scope of participation and arrest the power of majorities beyond the limits of the Constitution, has its own peculiar history: not just in the ideological battles of the founding but also in the institution that defined the early American republic as much as any other.

The plantations that dotted the landscape of the antebellum South produced the commodities that fueled the nation’s early growth. Enslaved people working in glorified labor camps picked cotton, grew indigo, harvested resin from trees for turpentine and generated additional capital in the form of their children, bought, sold and securitized on the open market. But plantations didn’t just produce goods; they produced ideas too. Enslaved laborers developed an understanding of the society in which they lived. The people who enslaved them, likewise, constructed elaborate sets of beliefs, customs and ideologies meant to justify their positions in this economic and social hierarchy. Those ideas permeated the entire South, taking deepest root in places where slavery was most entrenched.

South Carolina was a paradigmatic slave state. Although the majority of enslavers resided in the “low country,” with its large rice and cotton plantations, nearly the entire state participated in plantation agriculture and the slave economy. By 1820 most South Carolinians were enslaved Africans. By midcentury, the historian Manisha Sinha notes in “The Counterrevolution of Slavery,” it was the first Southern state where a majority of the white population held slaves.

 

Not surprisingly, enslavers dominated the state’s political class. “Carolinian rice aristocrats and the cotton planters from the hinterland,” Sinha writes, “formed an intersectional ruling class, bound together by kinship, economic, political and cultural ties.” The government they built was the most undemocratic in the Union. The slave-rich districts of the coasts enjoyed nearly as much representation in the Legislature as more populous regions in the interior of the state. Statewide office was restricted to wealthy property owners. To even qualify for the governorship, you needed a large, debt-free estate. Rich enslavers were essentially the only people who could participate in the highest levels of government. To the extent that there were popular elections, they were for the lowest levels of government, because the State Legislature tended to decide most high-level offices.

But immense power at home could not compensate for declining power in national politics. The growth of the free Northwest threatened Southern dominance in Congress. And the slaveholding planter class would witness the rise of an organized movement to stop the expansion of slavery and curb the power enslavers held over key institutions like the Senate and the Supreme Court.

Out of this atmosphere of fear and insecurity came a number of thinkers and politicians who set their minds to protecting South Carolina and the rest of the slaveholding South from a hostile North. Arguably the most prominent and accomplished of these planter-politicians was John C. Calhoun. Vice president under John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, secretary of state under John Tyler and eventually a United States senator representing the state, Calhoun was a deep believer in the system of slavery — which he called a “positive good” that “forms the most solid and durable foundation on which to rear free and stable institutions”— and a committed advocate for the slave-owning planter class. He was an astute politician, but he made his most important mark as a theoretician of reaction: a man who, realizing that democracy could not protect slavery in perpetuity, set out to limit democracy.

Calhoun popularized the concept of “nullification”: the theory that any state subject to federal law was entitled to invalidate it. He first advanced the idea in an anonymous letter, written when he was vice president, protesting the Tariff of 1828, which sought to protect Northern industry and agriculture from foreign competitors. Calhoun condemned it as an unconstitutional piece of regional favoritism.

How Slavery Made Its Way West

By Tiya Miles

Slavery leapt out of the East and into the interior lands of the Old Southwest in the 1820s and 1830s. Cotton began to soar as the most lucrative product in the global marketplace just as the slaveholding societies of the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic were reaching limits in soil fertility. To land speculators, planters, ambitious settlers and Northern investors, the fertile lands to the west now looked irresistible.

The Native American nations that possessed the bulk of those lands stood in the way of this imagined progress. President Andrew Jackson, an enslaver from Tennessee famous for brutal “Indian” fighting in Georgia and Florida, swooped in on the side of fellow enslavers, championing the Indian Removal Act of 1830. When Congress passed the bill by a breathtakingly slim margin, Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws and Seminoles in the South as well as Potawatomis, Wyandots, Odawas, Delawares, Shawnees and Senecas in the Midwest were relocated to an uncharted space designated as Indian Territory (including present-day Oklahoma and Kansas). “Removal,” as the historian Claudio Saunt argues in a forthcoming book on the topic, was far too quiet a word to capture the violation of this mass “expulsion” of 80,000 people.

As new lands in the Old Southwest were pried open, white enslavers back east realized that their most profitable export was no longer tobacco or rice. A complex interstate slave trade became an industry of its own. This extractive system, together with enslavers moving west with human property, resulted in the relocation of approximately one million enslaved black people to a new region. The entrenched practice of buying, selling, owning, renting and mortgaging humans stretched into the American West along with the white settler-colonial population that now occupied former indigenous lands.

Slaveholding settlers who had pushed into Texas from the American South wanted to extend cotton agriculture and increase the numbers of white arrivals. “It was slavery that seemed to represent the soft underbelly of the Texas unrest,” the historian Steven Hahn asserts in “A Nation Without Borders.” Armed conflict between American-identified enslavers and a Mexican state that outlawed slavery in 1829 was among the causes of the Mexican-American War, which won for the United States much of the Southwest and California.

Texas became the West’s cotton slavery stronghold, with enslaved black people making up 30 percent of the state’s population in 1860. “Indian Territory” also held a large population of enslaved black people. Mormons, too, kept scores of enslaved laborers in Utah. The small number of black people who arrived in California, New Mexico and Oregon before midcentury usually came as property. Even as most Western states banned slavery in their new constitutions, individual enslavers held onto their property-in-people until the Civil War.

Enslaved men who had served in the Union Army were among the first wave of African-Americans to move west of their own free will. They served as soldiers, and together with wives and children they formed pocket communities in Montana, Colorado, New Mexico and Texas. It is a painful paradox that the work of black soldiers centered on what the historian Quintard Taylor has called “settler protection” in his classic 1998 study of African-Americans in the West, “In Search of the Racial Frontier.” Even while bearing slavery’s scars, black men found themselves carrying out orders to secure white residents of Western towns, track down “outlaws” (many of whom were people of color), police the federally imposed boundaries of Indian reservations and quell labor strikes. “This small group of black men,” Taylor observes, “paid a dear price in their bid to earn the respect of the nation.”

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The South may have been part of the pro-Andrew Jackson majorities in Congress, but that wasn’t enough for Calhoun, who wanted absolute security for the region and its economic interests. Demographic and political change doomed it to be a “permanent minority”: “Our geographical position, our industry, pursuits and institutions are all peculiar.” Against a domineering North, he argued, “representation affords not the slightest protection.”

“It is, indeed, high time for the people of the South to be roused to a sense of impending calamities — on an early and full knowledge of which their safety depends,” Calhoun wrote in an 1831 report to the South Carolina Legislature. “It is time that they should see and feel that … they are in a permanent and hopeless minority on the great and vital connected questions.”

His solution lay in the states. To Calhoun, there was no “union” per se. Instead, the United States was simply a compact among sovereigns with distinct, and often competing, sectional interests. This compact could only survive if all sides had equal say on the meaning of the Constitution and the shape and structure of the law. Individual states, Calhoun thought, should be able to veto federal laws if they thought the federal government was favoring one state or section over another. The union could only act with the assent of the entire whole — what Calhoun called “the concurrent majority” — as opposed to the Madisonian idea of rule by numerical majority, albeit mediated by compromise and consensus.

 

 

Southern college students at the Southern Democratic Convention in 1948, the year that segregationists began to break with the national Democratic Party over civil rights. From Bettmann/Getty Images

Calhoun initially lost the tariff fight, which pitted him against an obstinate Andrew Jackson, but he did not give up on nullification. He expanded on the theory at the end of his life, proposing an alternative system of government that gave political minorities a final say over majority action. In this “concurrent government,” each “interest or portion of the community” has an equal say in approving the actions of the state. Full agreement would be necessary to “put the government in motion.” Only through this, Calhoun argued, would the “different interests, orders, classes, or portions, into which the community may be divided, can be protected.”

 

The government Calhoun envisioned would protect “liberty”: not the liberty of the citizen but the liberty of the master, the liberty of those who claimed a right to property and a position at the top of a racial and economic hierarchy. This liberty, Calhoun stated, was “a reward to be earned, not a blessing to be gratuitously lavished on all alike — a reward reserved for the intelligent, the patriotic, the virtuous and deserving — and not a boon to be bestowed on a people too ignorant, degraded and vicious, to be capable either of appreciating or of enjoying it.” It is striking how much this echoes contemporary arguments against the expansion of democracy. In 2012, for example, a Tea Party congressional candidate from Florida said that voting is a “privilege” and seemed to endorse property requirements for participation.

Calhoun died in 1850. Ten years later, following the idea of nullification to its conclusion, the South seceded from the Union after Abraham Lincoln won the White House without a single Southern state. War came a few months later, and four years of fighting destroyed the system of slavery Calhoun fought to protect. But parts of his legacy survived. His deep suspicion of majoritarian democracy — his view that government must protect interests, defined by their unique geographic and economic characteristics, more than people — would inform the sectional politics of the South in the 20th century, where solid blocs of Southern lawmakers worked collectively to stifle any attempt to regulate the region.

Despite insurgencies at home — the Populist Party, for example, swept through Georgia and North Carolina in the 1890s — reactionary white leaders were able to maintain an iron grip on federal offices until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And even then, the last generation of segregationist senators held on through the 1960s into the early 2000s. United, like their predecessors, by geography and their stake in Jim Crow segregation, they were a powerful force in national politics, a bloc that vetoed anything that touched their regional prerogatives.

[To get updates on The 1619 Project, and for more on race from The New York Times, sign up for our weekly Race/Related newsletter.]

Anti-lynching laws and some pro-labor legislation died at the hands of lawmakers from the “Solid South” who took advantage of Senate rules like the filibuster to effectively enact Calhoun’s idea of a concurrent majority against legislation that threatened the Southern racial status quo; the spirit of nullification lived on. When Northern liberal Democrats added a civil rights plank to the party platform at the 1948 presidential convention, in an effort to break the Southern conservatives’ hold on the party, 35 delegates from Mississippi and Alabama walked out in protest: the prologue to the “Dixiecrat Revolt” that began the conservative migration into the eventual embrace of the Republican Party.

Calhoun’s idea that states could veto the federal government would return as well following the decision in Brown v. Board of Education, as segregationists announced “massive resistance” to federal desegregation mandates and sympathizers defended white Southern actions with ideas and arguments that cribbed from Calhoun and recapitulated enslaver ideology for modern American politics. “The central question that emerges,” the National Review founding editor William F. Buckley Jr. wrote in 1957, amid congressional debate over the first Civil Rights Act, “is whether the white community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is yes — the white community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.” He continued: “It is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority.”

It is a strikingly blunt defense of Jim Crow and affirmation of white supremacy from the father of the conservative movement. Conservatives drove the groundswell that made Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, an opponent of the Civil Rights Act, the 1964 Republican Party nominee for president. He lost in a landslide but won the Deep South (except for Florida), where the white people of the region — among the most conservative in the country, a direct legacy of slavery and the society it built — flocked to the candidate who stood against the constitutional demands of the black-freedom movement. Goldwater may have insisted that there are “some rights that are clearly protected by valid laws and are therefore ‘civil rights,’ ” but he also declared that “states’ rights” were “disappearing under the piling sands of absolutism” and called Brown v. Board an “unconstitutional trespass into the legislative sphere of government.” “I therefore support all efforts by the States, excluding violence, of course,” Goldwater wrote in “The Conscience of a Conservative,” “to preserve their rightful powers over education.”

Later, when key civil rights questions had been settled by law, Buckley would essentially renounce these views, praising the movement and criticizing race-baiting demagogues like George C. Wallace. Still, his initial impulse — to give political minorities a veto not just over policy but over democracy itself — reflected a tendency that would express itself again and again in the conservative politics he ushered into the mainstream, emerging when political, cultural and demographic change threatened a narrow, exclusionary vision of American democracy. Writing in the 1980s and ’90s, Samuel Francis — a polemicist who would eventually migrate to the very far right of American conservatism — identified this dynamic in the context of David Duke’s campaign for governor of Louisiana:

“Reagan conservatism, in its innermost meaning, had little to do with supply-side economics and spreading democracy. It had to do with the awakening of a people who face political, cultural and economic dispossession, who are slowly beginning to glimpse the fact of dispossession and what dispossession will mean for them and their descendants, and who also are starting to think about reversing the processes and powers responsible for their dispossession.”

There is a homegrown ideology of reaction in the United States, inextricably tied to our system of slavery. And while the racial content of that ideology has attenuated over time, the basic framework remains: fear of rival political majorities; of demographic “replacement”; of a government that threatens privilege and hierarchy.

 

 

 

Eric Cantor, a Virginia Republican who was then the House majority leader, speaks to reporters in April 2011 during the lead-up to a standoff with President Obama over raising the debt ceiling. Jonathan Ernst/Getty Images

The past 10 years of Republican extremism is emblematic. The Tea Party billed itself as a reaction to debt and spending, but a close look shows it was actually a reaction to an ascendant majority of black people, Latinos, Asian-Americans and liberal white people. In their survey-based study of the movement, the political scientists Christopher S. Parker and Matt A. Barreto show that Tea Party Republicans were motivated “by the fear and anxiety associated with the perception that ‘real’ Americans are losing their country.”

The scholars Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson came to a similar conclusion in their contemporaneous study of the movement, based on an ethnographic study of Tea Party activists across the country. “Tea Party resistance to giving more to categories of people deemed undeserving is more than just an argument about taxes and spending,” they note in “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism”; “it is a heartfelt cry about where they fear ‘their country’ may be headed.” And Tea Party adherents’ “worries about racial and ethnic minorities and overly entitled young people,” they write, “signal a larger fear about generational social change in America.”

To stop this change and its political consequences, right-wing conservatives have embarked on a project to nullify opponents and restrict the scope of democracy. Mitch McConnell’s hyper-obstructionist rule in the Senate is the most high-profile example of this strategy, but it’s far from the most egregious.

In 2012, North Carolina Republicans won legislative and executive power for the first time in more than a century. They used it to gerrymander the electoral map and impose new restrictions on voting, specifically aimed at the state’s African-American voters. One such restriction, a strict voter-identification law, was designed to target black North Carolinians with “almost surgical precision,” according to the federal judges who struck the law down. When, in 2016, Democrats overcame these obstacles to take back the governor’s mansion, the Republican-controlled Legislature tried to strip power from the office, to prevent Democrats from reversing their efforts to rig the game.

A similar thing happened in Wisconsin. Under Scott Walker, the governor at the time, Wisconsin Republicans gave themselves a structural advantage in the State Legislature through aggressive gerrymandering. After the Democratic candidate toppled Walker in the 2018 governor’s race, the Republican majority in the Legislature rapidly moved to limit the new governor’s power and weaken other statewide offices won by Democrats. They restricted the governor’s ability to run public-benefit programs and set rules on the implementation of state laws. And they robbed the governor and the attorney general of the power to continue, or end, legal action against the Affordable Care Act.

Michigan Republicans took an almost identical course of action after Democrats in that state managed to win executive office, using their gerrymandered legislative majority to weaken the new Democratic governor and attorney general. One proposed bill, for example, would have shifted oversight of campaign-finance law from the secretary of state to a six-person commission with members nominated by the state Republican and Democratic parties, a move designed to produce deadlock and keep elected Democrats from reversing previous decisions.

The Republican rationale for tilting the field in their permanent favor or, failing that, nullifying the results and limiting Democrats’ power as much as possible, has a familiar ring to it. “Citizens from every corner of Wisconsin deserve a strong legislative branch that stands on equal footing with an incoming administration that is based almost solely in Madison,” one Wisconsin Republican said following the party’s lame-duck power grab. The speaker of the State Assembly, Robin Vos, made his point more explicit. “If you took Madison and Milwaukee out of the state election formula, we would have a clear majority — we would have all five constitutional officers, and we would probably have many more seats in the Legislature.” The argument is straightforward: Some voters, their voters, count. Others — the liberals, black people and other people of color who live in cities — don’t.

Senate Republicans played with similar ideas just before the 2016 election, openly announcing their plans to block Hillary Clinton from nominating anyone to the Supreme Court, should she become president. “I promise you that we will be united against any Supreme Court nominee that Hillary Clinton, if she were president, would put up,” declared Senator John McCain of Arizona just weeks before voting. And President Trump, of course, has repeatedly and falsely denounced Clinton’s popular-vote victory as illegitimate, the product of fraud and illegal voting. “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide,” he declared on Twitter weeks after the election, “I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”

The larger implication is clear enough: A majority made up of liberals and people of color isn’t a real majority. And the solution is clear, too: to write those people out of the polity, to use every available tool to weaken their influence on American politics. The recent attempt to place a citizenship question on the census was an important part of this effort. By asking for this information, the administration would suppress the number of immigrant respondents, worsening their representation in the House and the Electoral College, reweighting power to the white, rural areas that back the president and the Republican Party.

You could make the case that none of this has anything to do with slavery and slaveholder ideology. You could argue that it has nothing to do with race at all, that it’s simply an aggressive effort to secure conservative victories. But the tenor of an argument, the shape and nature of an opposition movement — these things matter. The goals may be colorblind, but the methods of action — the attacks on the legitimacy of nonwhite political actors, the casting of rival political majorities as unrepresentative, the drive to nullify democratically elected governing coalitions — are clearly downstream of a style of extreme political combat that came to fruition in the defense of human bondage.

 

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GOP Pathway to Trump

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Conservative False Narratives and Racism

• Conservatives have a long history of pushing false narratives from the 1950s to Trump
  • Since the 1950s conservatives have justified bad policies by stating the other side is worse
    • Belief the left is depraved, corrupt, ruthless, communist, etc. has been an significant part of American conservatism
    • Conservatives see the “left” as monolithic and an existential threat to “western civilization” or “our way of life”
  • The conservative coalition is often held together in opposition to liberalism, socialism, and global communism and the suspicion there’s no difference

“Without the slippery slope argument, conservatism loses much of its rhetorical punch. Want Medicare? You’re secretly a commie. Support gay right? You hate the nuclear family! Support the rights of transgender people? There’s no biological truth anymore!” Seth Cotlar – Willamette University Professor

Examples in History

• McCarthyism (1950s)
  • Practice of making accusations of subversion or treason without proper regard for evidence
    • Almost every major conservative journalist and politician in the 1950s defended him, even after his death
    • Senator Barry Goldwater voted against McCarthy’s censure in 1954
  • “In 1950, Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy started leading a witch hunt for “Communist,” meaning virtually anyone critical of the dominant ideas of the day, such as capitalism, America’s per-colonial policy abroad, northern assimilation, and southern segregation.” Ibram Kendi, Stamped From the Beginning
• Jon Birch Society (1958- present)
  • Robert Welch, a right-wing activist, organized the John Birch Society in 1958
    • In 1963, Welch accused the civil rights movement of being a communist plot to create a “Soviet Negro Republic” in the South, with Martin Luther King Jr. as president, and blamed Brown v. Board of Education for poisoning race relations in America.
  • Organized chapters to distributed conservative, anti-communist propaganda
    • At its peak in the early 1960s the John Birch Society claimed around 100,000 members
• LP “Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine” (1961)
  • GOP and Reagan attacked Medicare and liberalism as dangerous socialism
    • That would curtail American freedom and destroy the American way of life

• Demonizing Civil Rights Activists (1950s – present)
  • Majority of conservative publications opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act
    • On the “pretense” that it was a federal overreach and dangerous socialism/communism
  • Labeled civil rights activists as communists, or dupes of communist conspiracy
    • Segregationist southerners won the support of conservative anti-communists
  • George Wallace, Barry Goldwater, GOP gain lots of support from this effort
• Demonizing Civil Rights Activists (1950s – present)
  • Majority of conservative publications opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act
    • On the “pretense” that it was a federal overreach and dangerous socialism/communism
  • Labeled civil rights activists as communists, or dupes of communist conspiracy
    • Segregationist southerners won the support of conservative anti-communists
  • George Wallace, Barry Goldwater, GOP gain lots of support from this effort
• Rise of the Religious Right (1970-present)
  • Some of the leaders
    • Evangelicals like Jerry Falwell, Francis Schaeffe, Catholics like Paul Weyrich, Mormons like W. Cleon Skousen
  • Conflated liberalism, socialism, communism under umbrella of “secularism”
  • Built alliances to fight to “secularism”
    • Falwell had been an outspoken opponent of the civil rights movement in the 1960s
    • Skousen was a key propagandist for the John Birch Society in the 1960s and early ’70s
    • In 1980, televangelist James Robison declared in a speech that he was “sick and tired of hearing about all of the radicals, and the perverts, and the liberals, and the leftists, and the communists coming out of the closet,” and called for “God’s people” to fight back.
• Neo-liberialism (1980s – present)
  • Milton Friedman’s neo-liberal “Chicago School” supported Reagan’s shift to laissez-faire economic policies
    • Justified shift to rescue “free enterprise system” from the clutches of liberalism, which would lead to communism
• Cultural War (1990s – present)
  • Collapse of Soviet Union made it no longer possible to accuse liberals of being apart of communist plots
    • Conservatives found other ways to label the left as radical extremist threatening the US
      • One way was to label civil rights as a culture war that was decaying America
    • Pat Buchanan during 1992 RNC Convention speech,
      • “There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America,” Buchanan said in his nationally televised address. “It is a cultural war, as critical to the nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself.”
    • Cultural War was basis of Clinton hatred phenomenon in the 1990s and in 2016 focused on Hillary Clinton
      • “With Clinton offering real policy conciliations to conservatives, the easiest way to maintain energetic opposition was to construct a narrative of criminality and anti-American perfidy that must be countered at all costs.” David A. Walsh
• Conservative Intellectuals of the 90s
  • Newt Gingrich
    • Gingrich, the speaker of the house from 1995-99, taught “Renewing American Civilization” at Kennesaw State College in Georgia
      • “The thesis of Gingrich’s course is that American history was an uninterrupted continuity of opportunity and progress from colonial times until what he calls the “breakdown” of 1965. If you read the papers, you know what comes next: That’s when the elite liberal state, aided by the counterculture, introduced the infections of dependency, bureaucracy, and failure.…Gingrich’s historical selectivity and outright errors are, well, revealing. He manages to get through the entire Civil War without ever mentioning slavery. Of the Declaration of Independence, he says “They originally wrote, ‘We are endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of property.”‘ Property? John Locke, yes.” Allan Lichtman – Washington Monthly
  • Dinesh D’Souza
    • Funded by anti-academic conservative networks to write rightwing propaganda books and movies
    • Defend Southern slave owners, colonialism, and blames civil rights activists and liberals for most problems today, including 9/11
      • “The cultural left in this country is responsible for causing 9/11 … Some leading figures in this group are Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy, Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer, George Soros, Michael Moore, Bill Moyers, and Noam Chomsky. Moreover the cultural left includes organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Organization for Women, People for the American Way, Planned Parenthood, Human Rights Watch, and moveon.org…In faulting the cultural left, I am not making the absurd accusation that this group blew up the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. I am saying that the cultural left and its allies in Congress, the media, Hollywood, the nonprofit sector, and the universities are the primary cause of the volcano of anger toward America that is erupting from the Islamic world … Without the cultural left, 9/11 would not have happened.” Dinesh D’Souza – The Enemy at Home

“So why are there so few conservative professors and intellectuals? In part because conservatism became so associated with jingoistic anti-intellectualism that it became nearly impossible for an educated person to defend it.” Seth Cotlar – professor of American history at Willamette University

• The Anti-PC Movement (1990s – present)
  • 1980-90s – networks of conservative donors (Koch, Olin , Scaife families) were financing think tanks, authors, networks to discredit the liberal academic world
    • In the hopes of separating the working class from a “liberal elite” Democrat party
    • They popularized “PC” as a label to exaggerate/demonize efforts to challenge systemic/implicit racism
      • PC was mainly used as satire before then
    • Political Right created false narratives around PC as a propaganda tool to divide working class from Democrats
      • False narratives around civil rights such as: thought control, language police, Liberal Elite, etc
    • 1991 – President George HW Bush gave a speech where he identified “PC” as a major danger to America
      • “Ironically, on the 200th anniversary of our Bill of Rights, we find free speech under assault throughout the United States. The notion of political correctness has ignited controversy across the land…In their own Orwellian way, crusades that demand correct behavior crush diversity in the name of diversity.” Bush

“If you search ProQuest, a digital database of US magazines and newspapers, you find that the phrase “politically correct” rarely appeared before 1990. That year, it turned up more than 700 times. In 1991, there are more than 2,500 instances. In 1992, it appeared more than 2,800 times. Like Indiana Jones movies, these pieces called up enemies from a melange of old wars: they compared the “thought police” spreading terror on university campuses to fascists, Stalinists, McCarthyites, “Hitler Youth”, Christian fundamentalists, Maoists and Marxists.” Moira Weigel – Guardian

• Cultural Marxism (2000s – present)
  • Mixing anti-communism, anti-Semitism, anti-PC narratives with anyone progressive or doing anti-racism work
  • ““Cultural Marxism…common snarl word used to paint anyone with progressive tendencies as a secret Communist. The term alludes to a conspiracy theory in which sinister left-wingers have infiltrated media, academia, and science and are engaged in a decades-long plot to undermine Western culture. Some variants of the conspiracy allege that basically all of modern social liberalism (rock’n’roll, Sixties counterculture, the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, homosexuality, modern feminism, etc) is, in fact, a Communist front group…It’s also the work of the Jews.” Rational Wiki
  • Conservative leaders such as Pat Buchannon, Paul Weyrich, Free Congress Foundation, Rightwing extremist groups start to spread the “Political Correctness/Cultural Marxism association
    • Conservative leaders such as Pat Buchannon, Paul Weyrich, Free Congress Foundation, Rightwing extremist groups start to spread the “Political Correctness/Cultural Marxism association

“The phrase (Cultural Marxism) refers to a kind of “political correctness” on steroids…Right-wing ideologues, racists and other extremists have jazzed up political correctness and repackaged it — in its most virulent form, as an anti-Semitic theory that identifies Jews in general and several Jewish intellectuals in particular as nefarious, communistic destroyers. These supposed originators of “cultural Marxism” are seen as conspiratorial plotters intent on making Americans feel guilty and thus subverting their Christian culture.” SPLC

Rise of AM Conservative Radio

• 1980s
  • Music left AM for FM
  • AM radio desperate for new content
• FCC voted to stop enforcing Fairness Doctrine (1987)
  • Federal Communications Commission (FCC) policy
    • Requiring controversial viewpoints to be balanced by opposing opinions on air
    • Also required people being attack to have the chance to defend themselves on the air
  • Once revoked it unleashed a flood of conservative talkshows
    • Allowed for shows to be conservative only instead of a balanced representation
    • 1988 Rush Limbaugh recruited for a conservative talk show
      • Became very popular encouraging stations to recruit more conservative hosts
      • Attracts 10-20 million viewers a week (white Christian men above 50 main demographic)
• Telecommunications Act of 1996
  • Allowed companies to own more radio stations and for some shows to become nationally syndicated
  • Before the deregulation, radio stations were predominantly owned by local community leaders
    • In 1999 more than 25% of US Radio stations had been sold to larger corporations like Clear Channel
      • As of 2011, Clear Channel Communications (now iHeartMedia) owns over 800 radio stations across the United States
      • Largest contract is with Rush Limbaugh, worth $400 million over a span of 8 years
      • Also hosts shows like Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, etc.
    • Conservative talk shows became the dominant national radio show on AM
      • Outcompeting progressive shows and offering in many locations, especially rural areas, only conservative shows were offered
    • GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich used AM conservative radio as main way to promote GOP policies
• September 11^, 2001
  • Due to Limbaugh’s success AM radio and the wave of nationalism after sept 11, more conservative hosts were recruited
    • Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Glenn Beck, Dan Savage, Laura Ingraham
    • More extreme/less moderate rhetoric got better ratings
  • Conservative hosts began to compete against each other to be the most extreme conservative
    • To win the conservative audience and better ratings
    • The more crazy, extreme, combative, and scapegoating of moderates
      • The bigger the audience and ratings
    • Extreme right-wing digital outlets emerge like Red State, Breitbart, Infowars
      • Pushes radio hosts and audiences even further extremist

“Turning politics into a blood sport, and kicking moderates off the team, made for good, passionate radio and meshed with listeners’ frustrations. Crucially, because hosts had no responsibility to govern, they didn’t have to worry about the policy or electoral consequences of such a stance” Brian Rosenwald, Talk Radio’s America: How an Industry Took Over a Political Party That Took Over the United States

Conservative Radio Extremism

• Obama 2008-2016
  • Attacked Obama and any GOP that worked with Obama
    • Called them RINOS (Republican in name only)
    • Supported Tea Party and the more extreme Conservative candidates
    • Spread a lot of false propaganda against Obama
    • Helped a lot of moderate Republicans lose elections
      • Created political gridlock and conservative extremism

“In the 2010s, talk radio’s business needs further upended the traditional political hierarchy. With moderates virtually extinct, the war against RINOs often focused on Republican leaders like Boehner whose sin was simply not being willing to adopt the strident tactics that hosts demanded. Hosts blasted them with increasing regularity, while praising a new group of political superstars, largely backbenchers with minimal power on Capitol Hill. But they were perfect for talk radio: They spewed extreme rhetoric, saw the world in black-and-white terms, and advocated for the most extreme tactics possible. Figures like Representative Mark Meadows, Representative Jim Jordan, and Senator Ted Cruz became the heroes in the soap opera that talk radio had always been—and RINOs and the Republican leadership were as much the villains as Democrats or the mainstream media.” Brian Rosenwald, Talk Radio’s America: How an Industry Took Over a Political Party That Took Over the United States

• Trump
  • Created his campaign around the most extreme rhetoric and racism from AM conservative Radio
    • Immigration (Wall and ending birthright citizenship), Islamophobia, Xenophobia, anti-Obama, anti-PC, etc.
  • As president Trump regularly promotes and talks on conservative extreme talk show like the Hannity Show
    • While adopting their extreme agenda from immigration to gov shutdown

“If you’re one of the millions listening to talk radio, you can almost listen to pro-Trump news all day. Is it pure fandom, a conduit for talking about immigration, or a means to give people what they want to stay relevant?” Rosie Gray, The Real Media Machine Behind Trump: Conservative Talk Radio

The Rise of Fox News and Modern Conservative Pundits

• 1990s was full of bitter partisan battles
  • That intensified trends that existed on political right since WW2
• Fox News was created in 1996
  • To continue conservative narratives, unchallenged, to millions of viewers 24 hours a day, 365 days a year
  • Conservative pundits repackaged old Cold War, anti-segregation, cultural war attacks against liberals
  • The message was enhanced through astroturf movements like the Tea Party

“Conservative pundits repackaged Cold War–era attacks equating liberals with communists during the Bush years. In 2003, Ann Coulter, a frequent Fox News talking head, published Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism, which was a full-throated defense of Joseph McCarthy that accused liberals of being, well, traitors who hated America. The book sold 500,000 copies in its first three weeks. Even the racially charged birther myth—that Barack Obama was not a U.S. citizen, and was a covert Muslim, to boot—was a riff on the old John Birch Society charge that liberals, including moderate Republicans like Dwight Eisenhower, were secret members of the international communist conspiracy.

The cry that Obama was a Marxist, Maoist, Muslim Kenyan socialist was almost interchangeable with right-wing attacks directed against the civil rights movement in the 1960s. And the idea that a vast left-liberal conspiracy was both undermining the country and using dirty, underhanded tactics to do so rhetorically justified an anything-goes strategy on the part of the right. Shutting down government. Refusing confirmation votes. Supporting Donald Trump for president.” David A. Walsh – Washington Monthly

• In may of 2019
  • Facebook revealed that it took down nearly as many fake Facebook accounts as there are real ones in the first three months of 2019
  • 41 billion “real” facebook accounts
• Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm
  • Decides which news stories to show users first
  • Based on personal data collected on user
    • Mainly shows articles user will engage in (agree with)
  • Can’t decipher from fake news
• 2019 Princeton/New York U. study on 2016 fake news sharing found
  • 5% of Facebook users shared fake news
    • Majority of those users were seniors and conservatives
    • 11% of people over age 65 shared links from fake news sites
      • Compared with 3% of those ages 18 to 29.
    • 18% of Republicans shared fake news
      • Compared with 3.5% of Democrats who did so
    • “Conservatives may have shared more fake news stories than liberals because most fake news sites offered pro-Trump or anti-Clinton content, aimed specifically at Republicans and conservatives,” Andy Guess, assistant professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton
• 2018 University of Warwick study on Germany’s with Facebook and violence
  • Found towns with higher Facebook users committed more violence against refugees
    • Held true in any sort of community
      • big city or small town; affluent or struggling; liberal haven or far-right stronghold
    • Wherever per-person Facebook use rose to one standard deviation above the national average
      • attacks on refugees increased by about 50 percent

“Facebook posts that over time achieve a critical mass that results in violence are implicit, not explicit. They are not users saying, “I hate refugees,” or using racial slurs, but users making comments about things like “slowing massive demographic change.” Brian Feldman: New Study: High Facebook Usage Linked to Violence

• 2019 a Twitter tech expert explain
  • Twitter can’t ban white nationalists in the same way it has removed ISIS-affiliated terrorists from the platform
  • Because doing so would affect the accounts of Republican politicians

“But the greatest facilitator of race-hatred against refugees isn’t a tabloid; it’s Facebook. Researchers at the University of Warwick recently studied every anti-refugee attack – 3,335, over two years – in Germany. They found that among the strongest predictors of the attacks was whether the attackers are on Facebook. The social network aids the dissemination of rumours, such as that all refugees are welfare cheats or rapists; and, unmediated by gatekeepers or editors, the rumours spread, and ordinary people are roused to violence. Wherever Facebook usage rose to one standard deviation above normal, the researchers found, attacks on refugees increased by 50%. When there were internet outages in areas with high Facebook usage, the attacks dropped significantly.” Suketu Mehta, Immigration panic: how the west fell for manufactured rage

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Alternet: The Disturbing Data on Republicans and Racism: Trump Backers Are the Most Bigoted Within the GOP

Presumptive 2016 Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is a bigot. He wants to ban Muslims from entering the United States, believes that Hispanic and Latino immigrants come to America in order to rape and kill white women, uses anti-Semitic imagery to slur Hillary Clinton, and has been endorsed by white supremacists.

At present, the Republican Party is the United States’ largest white identity organization. There is a mountain of evidence in support of this claim. The Republican Party nurtures and cultivates hostility towards non-whites among its voters for the purpose of electoral gain. What is known as “The Southern Strategy” of racist “coded appeals” against African-Americans and other people of color has dominated Republican politics since (at least) the end of the civil rights movement. And during the Age of Obama, American politics has been poisoned by racist conspiracy theories such as “Birtherism,” lies that Barack Obama is a type of Manchurian candidate who actually hates America and wants to destroy it from within, efforts to rollback the won in blood gains of the Black Freedom Struggle, as well as unprecedented efforts by the Republican Party to abandon its basic responsibilities of governance in order to delegitimize the country’s first black president.

Donald Trump is not an outlier or aberration. In many ways, he perfectly embodies the racist attitudes and beliefs of the Republican Party in the post civil rights era. Likewise, Donald Trump’s supporters have enthusiastically embraced the Republican Party’s racism towards people of color, in general, and against black Americans, in particular.

As reported by a recent Reuters/Ipsos public opinion poll, Donald Trump supporters possess extreme levels — even as compared to other Republicans — of antipathy towards African-Americans:

“Supporters of U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump are more likely to describe African Americans as “criminal,” “unintelligent,” “lazy” and “violent” than voters who backed some Republican rivals in the primaries or who support Democratic contender Hillary Clinton, according to a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll.

Ahead of the Nov. 8 election to replace Barack Obama, the first black U.S. president, the poll also showed significant numbers of Americans in both the Republican and Democratic parties view blacks more negatively than whites, harbor anxiety about living in diverse neighborhoods and are concerned that affirmative action policies discriminate against whites.

Republicans in the survey expressed these concerns to a greater degree than Democrats, with Trump supporters presenting the most critical views of blacks.

The poll, conducted between March and June, interviewed 16,000 Americans and included 21 questions on attitudes about race. It sought responses from voters who support Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee, and her rival U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders. It also surveyed supporters of U.S. Senator Ted Cruz and Ohio Governor John Kasich, the last two Republican candidates to drop out of the race…

To be sure, not all Trump supporters expressed negative attitudes about blacks. No more than 50 percent of his supporters rated blacks negatively, relative to whites, on any of the six character traits in the poll.

Yet when their answers to the poll questions were compared with responses from supporters of other candidates, Trump supporters were always more critical of blacks on personality traits, analysis of the results showed.

The trend was consistent in the data, even when the results were filtered to include only white respondents to remove any impact that a different racial mix between Clinton and Trump supporters might play in the poll.”

These findings are not surprising. They are but one more example of how the Republican Party and its voters have shifted farther to the right in the post civil rights era, as well as the deep connections between political polarization and white racism.

[African-Americans clearly understand the racist nature of Donald Trump’s campaign and his voters’ hostility towards people of color. To wit: As reported in a recentQuinnipiac University public opinion poll, only 1 percent of African-Americans support Donald Trump.]

For example, recent research by Michael Tesler has shown how “old fashioned racism”, what was once thought to be all but vanquished from American society, is resurgent among white voters in the Age of Obama. David Sears has also demonstrated how “modern racism” now predicts party identification for Republican voters in former Confederacy. Other researchers have shown that the Republican Party’s ostensibly “race neutral” talking points about “small government” and “personal responsibility” are in fact signals to white racial resentment.

In many ways, Donald Trump’s voters are the 2008 and 2012 Tea Party faction rebooted for the 2016 presidential election. Like the John Birch Society of the 1950s and 1960s, the Tea Party maintained its influence over the Republican Party while remaining under the radar of the so-called “liberal” corporate news media. As social scientists Christopher Parker, Eric Knowles, and others have extensively documented, Tea Party supporters possess high levels of racial hostility and antipathy towards people of color.

The finding by Reuters and Ipsos that “Nearly one-third of Clinton supporters described blacks as more “violent” and “criminal” than whites, and one-quarter described them as more “lazy” than whites” should also not be a surprise.

Political attitudes, values, and beliefs are often contradictory. While racial attitudes are often cited as an exception to this pattern (they are remarkably stable and consistent), the non-ideological nature of many voters in the American electorate can still help to explain why some Democrats may believe pernicious and ugly stereotypes about black people as a group, but still vote for Barack Obama, the individual.

In all, white supremacy is a feature of American society from before the Founding and through to the Age of Obama. Racism and white supremacy are a type of “changing same” in American life, culture, and politics. The election of a black man (twice) as President of the United States is a type of symbolic progress. However, what was in 2008 a heretofore unprecedented event, by itself, does little to correct the impact of centuries of interpersonal and institutional racism against people of color.

Ultimately, the new Reuters/Ipsos poll is a reminder that not all Republicans are racist. However, racists are more likely to be Republicans…and the most extreme among them are Donald Trump supporters.

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Washington Monthly: How the Right Wing Convinces Itself That Liberals Are Evil

Since the 1950s, the conservative movement has justified bad behavior—including supporting Donald Trump—by persuading itself that the left is worse.

“If you spend any time consuming right-wing media in America, you quickly learn the following: Liberals are responsible for racism, slavery, and the Ku Klux Klan. They admire Mussolini and Hitler, and modern liberalism is little different from fascism or, even worse, communism. The mainstream media and academia cannot be trusted because of the pervasive, totalitarian nature of liberal culture.

This belief in a broad liberal conspiracy is standard in the highest echelons of the conservative establishment and right-wing media. The Russia investigation is dismissed, from the president on down, as a politicized witch hunt. George Soros supposedly paid $300 to each participant in the “March for Our Lives” in March. (Disclosure: I marched that day, and I’m still awaiting my check.) What is less well appreciated by liberals is that the language of conspiracy is often used to justify similar behavior on the right. The Russia investigation is not just a witch hunt, it’s the product of the real scandal, which is Hillary-Russia-Obama-FBI collusion, so we must investigate that. Soros funds paid campus protestors, so Turning Point USA needs millions of dollars from Republican donors to win university elections. The liberal academic establishment prevents conservative voices from getting plum faculty jobs, so the Koch Foundation needs to give millions of dollars to universities with strings very much attached.

This did not begin with Donald Trump. The modern Republican Party may be particularly apt to push conspiracy theories to rationalize its complicity with a staggeringly corrupt administration, but this is an extension of, not a break from, a much longer history. Since its very beginning, in the 1950s, members of the modern conservative movement have justified bad behavior by convincing themselves that the other side is worse. One of the binding agents holding the conservative coalition together over the course of the past half century has been an opposition to liberalism, socialism, and global communism built on the suspicion, sometimes made explicit, that there’s no real difference among them.

In 1961, the American Medical Association produced an LP in which an actor opened a broadside against the proposed Medicare program by attributing to Norman Thomas, a six-time Socialist Party candidate for president, a made-up quote that “under the name of liberalism the American people will adopt every fragment of the socialist program.” Because these ideologies were so interchangeable in the imaginations of many conservatives—and were covertly collaborating to enact their nefarious agenda—this meant that it was both important and necessary to fight back through equally underhanded means.

The title of that LP? Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine. The American left is used to waiting for liberals to finally get ruthless. Through the eyes of the right, they always have been.

Long before Fox News, conservatives began forming their own explicitly right-wing media landscape. Supporters of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal dominated the “mainstream” press, which meant that conservative dissidents needed a home. The conservative magazine Human Events was launched in 1944 as an alternative to what its cofounder, Felix Morley, believed was a stifling conformity in the American press. The same was true of the American Mercury in 1950, when under the ownership of William Bradford Huie the formerly social-democratic magazine moved to the right. “There is now far too much ‘tolerance’ in America,” Huie declared in the first issue of the new Mercury. “We shall cry a new crusade of intolerance . . . the intolerance of bores, morons, world-savers, and damn fools.”

Both Morley and Huie felt victimized by a liberal press establishment that stifled alternative voices—and, after all, liberals had the New Republic and leftists the Nation as journals of opinion—but their charge of mainstream “bias” was more complicated. One of the largest newspapers in the United States, the Chicago Tribune, owned by conservative businessman Robert McCormick, had militantly opposed the New Deal and American entry into World War II. Fulton Lewis Jr., a Washington, D.C.–based political journalist who was, by 1950, one of Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy’s biggest supporters, had one of the most listened-to radio programs in the country. And both Morley and Huie had had illustrious careers before launching their magazines. Morley won a Pulitzer Prize when he edited the Washington Post in the 1930s; Huie had a solid reputation as a freelance journalist. But they clung to the belief that dissenters from the liberal orthodoxy were being hounded out of media, which more than justified questionable acts, particularly on Huie’s part. Desperate to keep his magazine afloat, Huie sold the American Mercury in 1952 to far-right businessman Russell Maguire, who was closely tied to prominent anti-Semites and was one himself. Huie told a reporter at Time that he knew all about Maguire’s unsavory views, but believed his financial backing was necessary in order to ensure a conservative voice in American letters. “If I suddenly heard Adolf Hitler was alive in South America and wanted to give a million dollars to the American Mercury, I would go down and get it.”

Even more alarming to conservatives than the bias of the mainstream press was the number of liberals, radicals, and communists alleged to be in higher education. In a 1952 American Mercury article, a twenty-seven-year-old William F. Buckley accused liberal historians of a “conspiracy against giving the American people the facts” about Franklin Roosevelt, and claimed that they thus “betrayed the American people.” In his debut book, God and Man at Yale, published the year before, Buckley had dismissed academic freedom as a cynical shield wielded by left-wing faculty to protect themselves from the political consequences of their views; he advocated using the threat of withholding alumni donations as a weapon against the liberalism and leftism running amok in the academy. Buckley would soon become the gatekeeper of “respectable” conservatism by pushing back against the conspiratorial excesses of the John Birch Society. But he began his career by indulging in some of those rhetorical flourishes himself, along with a plan of action on how to fight back against the stranglehold of leftists on the academy.

Buckley was also one of McCarthy’s most vociferous defenders. Although popularly remembered today as a drunken punch line discredited by crusading journalists like Edward R. Murrow in the 1950s, McCarthy is actually an important figure in the development of American conservatism. Almost every major conservative journalist and politician in the 1950s defended him. Senator Barry Goldwater voted against McCarthy’s censure in 1954. Conservative radio pundit Fulton Lewis defended McCarthyism in his broadcasts even after the senator’s death. William F. Buckley was no exception: he went to the bat for McCarthy in the 1954 book McCarthy and His Enemies. Buckley applauded McCarthy for recognizing that “coercive measures” were necessary to enforce a new anticommunist “conformity.” While Buckley—unlike many of his peers—did distinguish between “the Liberals” and “the Communists,” he suggested that “atheistic, soft-headed, anti-anti-Communist liberals” were ultimately little better than communists, and by far a greater danger to American democracy than any supposed excesses of McCarthyism. And indeed, Buckley never abandoned his defense of McCarthy and repeatedly attempted to rehabilitate the senator in the eyes of the broader public. In 1999 he published a pro-McCarthy novel, The Redhunter, which incorporated large swaths of McCarthy and His Enemies almost verbatim.

Still, Buckley was comparatively moderate next to other conservatives, who suggested that the answer to the communist threat might be to adopt the communists’ own tactics. Fred Schwarz, an Australian-born doctor who founded the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade in 1953, wrote in his book You Can Trust the Communists (to be Communists) that liberals were effectively “protectors and runners of interference for the Communist conspirators.” Why? Because liberals resisted efforts to purge communists and their sympathizers from schools and universities, and insisted on pesky legal technicalities like the Fifth Amendment. “[O]rganization is the genius of Communism,” Schwarz continued, and so “an anti-Communist program needs organization.” Just as communists “operate through a great number of front organizations, each of which is tuned to some specific motivating dynamic,” so must “every religious, professional, economic, and cultural group” adopt this model to “organize an anti-Communist program.”

A full-blown Leninist approach was tempting, Schwarz wrote, but he preferred a decentralized organization based on “voluntary choice and free will.” Not all on the anticommunist right were so circumspect. Robert Welch, a wealthy retired candy manufacturer and right-wing activist, organized the John Birch Society in 1958 explicitly along the lines of what he called “international communism.” Welch wrote in the society’s founding document, The Blue Book, that this was simply a savvy political decision: the communist conspiracy was, after all, “incredibly well organized,” and “so well financed that it has billions of dollars annually just to spend on propaganda.” The Birchers would, like the communists, organize themselves into cells (or, as Welch preferred to call them, “chapters”), set up front organizations, and distribute propaganda (by which Welch meant conservative magazines and journals, including National Review, Human Events, and his own American Opinion). The goal was not to become a mere “organization” like the Democratic or Republican Parties, but to become a movement, in the same sense as communism or its close ideological ally, organized labor. And indeed, at its peak in the early 1960s the John Birch Society claimed around 100,000 members, more than the Communist Party USA at its height in the 1940s, easily making it the largest and best-organized group on the right. The Birchers’ on-the-ground presence certainly dwarfed the reach of the National Review, which in 1961 counted only 29,000 weekly subscribers.

One of the Birchers’ most prominent campaigns was a drive to impeach Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, who had presided over a Court that made dramatic rulings in favor of civil rights, ranging from establishing a right to birth control to abolishing mandatory school prayer to the greatest sin of all, desegregating public schools. In August 1963, Welch accused the civil rights movement of being a communist plot to create a “Soviet Negro Republic” in the South, with Martin Luther King Jr. as president, and blamed Brown v. Board of Education for poisoning race relations in America. “What we want to do,” Welch wrote in the Birch Society’s bulletin, “is to concentrate the whole opposition to what is happening in the South, and resentment of it, into one course of action: The Movement to Impeach Earl Warren.”

The conflation of communism and the NAACP was not accidental. Of all of the supposedly communistic liberal front groups, none drew conservative scorn more fiercely than the civil rights movement. William F. Buckley, who opposed the impeachment as a tactic against the Warren Court, nonetheless infamously wrote in 1957 that the “advanced” white race in the South was justified in taking “such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally,” in areas where “it does not predominate numerically.” His magazine, National Review, repeatedly suggested that the civil rights movement was communist inspired, riddled by communist infiltration, or composed of communist front organizations. Martin Luther King himself was suspect—National Review called him the “source of violence in others” in 1965.

King was far more radical than his sanitized popular memory today—he spoke out against American imperialism in Vietnam, called for a guaranteed basic income, and was murdered while visiting Memphis to support a strike by public-sector sanitation workers—but he was no doctrinaire Marxist-Leninist. “Communism forgets that life is individual,” he said in a 1967 speech, while also condemning capitalism for forgetting “that life is social.” These distinctions were lost on the civil rights movement’s right-wing opponents. By painting civil rights activists as communists, or at the minimum dupes of an international communist conspiracy, segregationist southerners were making a bid for the support of conservative anticommunists elsewhere in the country.

They got it. Barry Goldwater, whose anti-liberal and anticommunist political bona fides were so secure he could get away with criticizing the John Birch Society without losing the support of its members, voted against the Civil Rights Act in 1964. The vast majority of conservative publications opposed the bill’s passage, on the grounds both that it was an unacceptable expansion of federal power and that the “mobocratic” and “unruly” civil rights agitators were in effect advocating for socialism. George Wallace, the hyper-segregationist governor of Alabama, recognized the potency of this conspiratorial rhetoric during his third-party run for president in 1968. Shunned by Buckley and the conservative establishment on the basis of his sympathy for New Deal–style welfare programs, Wallace was embraced by the Birchers because of his unwavering opposition to the “communists,” “radicals,” and “agitators” in the civil rights movement.

The rise in prominence of the religious right in the 1970s and ’80s did little to tamp down paranoid political rhetoric. Evangelicals like Jerry Falwell and Francis Schaeffer—as well as Catholics like Paul Weyrich and Mormons like W. Cleon Skousen—conflated liberalism, socialism, and communism under the broader umbrella of “secularism” and built alliances with one another to combat this scourge. Often, this merely meant consolidating preexisting activism: Falwell had been an outspoken opponent of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, and Skousen was a key propagandist for the John Birch Society in the 1960s and early ’70s before penning in 1981 The 5,000 Year Leap, a book that codified many of the shibboleths of the religious right to the present day. The evangelicals and their allies in other denominations were united in their opposition to abortion, gay rights, and feminism—the tangible realities of the nefarious left-liberal agenda.

Anti-Clinton paranoia may have been a necessity for Republicans who yearned to regain power in the 1990s. With relatively little substantive disagreement on policy, the easiest way to maintain energetic opposition was to construct a narrative of criminality and anti-American perfidy that must be countered at all costs.

Increasingly, the communist fingerprints to be found on these cultural changes were not to be found in an overarching conspiracy directed from Moscow—after all, the sexual politics of radical American feminists were hardly those of Leonid Brezhnev—but from a more nebulous grouping of student radicals, intellectuals, and activists. Although the term “cultural Marxism” would not be used to describe this new, somewhat murkier conspiracy until the 2000s, the outlines of the charge were already evident by the late 1970s. In 1980, televangelist James Robison declared in a speech that he was “sick and tired of hearing about all of the radicals, and the perverts, and the liberals, and the leftists, and the communists coming out of the closet,” and called for “God’s people” to fight back.

The collapse of the Soviet Union accelerated these trends. It was no longer possible to accuse liberals and remnants of the left of being in Moscow’s pocket, but this did not stop conservatives from invoking the specter of left-wing radicalism to rally support and justify extremism. It just took more creativity. Pat Buchanan deftly shifted midsentence in his infamous 1992 speech at the Republican National Convention from the Cold War to the “cultural war,” the “religious war . . . for the soul of America,” suggesting that the fight against liberalism, feminism, and the “gay agenda” was not just the equivalent, but in fact the continuation, of the Cold War itself.

The “culture war” was the basis of the Clinton hatred phenomenon in the 1990s, which—as in 2016—was particularly focused on Hillary Clinton. She was the worst of all possible worlds: an elitist big-government liberal with degrees from Wellesley and Yale Law, a feminist who initially refused to change her name after marrying Bill, declined to embrace the image of a mother and housewife in the White House, and was rumored to be the real powerhouse next to her husband.

Bill Clinton had run in 1992 as a “different kind of Democrat,” and after losing Congress in 1994 tacked even more to the right. Clinton embraced financial deregulation, effectively abolished the existing welfare program, and even signaled his openness to partially privatizing Social Security and Medicare. Yet Clinton’s policy concessions to conservatives won him little goodwill from across the aisle. Congressional Republicans embraced scorched-earth legislative tactics under firebrand House Speaker Newt Gingrich, including the 1995 government shutdown, a preview of the right’s nihilistic resistance to Barack Obama over a decade later.Gingrich was a veteran partisan bruiser—as House minority whip he led the successful effort to oust Texas Democrat Jim Wright as speaker for minor ethics infractions in 1989, suggesting for good measure that Wright and other Democrats harbored socialist sympathies given their willingness to negotiate with the Sandinista government to end the Nicaraguan civil war.

But in another sense, the fervid anti-Clinton paranoia may have been a psychic and political necessity for Republicans who yearned to regain power. With Clinton offering real policy conciliations to conservatives, the easiest way to maintain energetic opposition was to construct a narrative of criminality and anti-American perfidy that must be countered at all costs. Right-wing attacks against the Clintons could and did backfire—the president’s approval ratings actually rose during his impeachment—and accusations against Bill Clinton for affairs, sexual harassment, and even rape were easier to dismiss as part of a “vast right-wing conspiracy,” as Hillary Clinton put it, when right-wing magazines were also accusing her of murder. Bill Clinton weathered the Monica Lewinsky scandal, but Clinton hatred never went away. It reappeared with a vengeance in 2016.

The bitter partisan battles of the 1990s intensified trends that had existed on the political right since World War II. Indeed, the creation of Fox News in 1996 was a supercharged throwback to the days of Human Events and the American Mercury. Fox News was necessary, the argument went, because conservative journalists and conservative perspectives were shut out of mainstream broadcasters. Never mind that even Bill O’Reilly had enjoyed a career at CBS and ABC before joining Fox News in its debut year. But while conservative media in the 1950s and ’60s either had a limited reach—the National Review in 1960 had less than a tenth as many subscribers as Time—or were counterbalanced by the FCC’s fairness doctrine, which was on the books between 1949 and 1987, Fox News presented an unchallenged right-wing worldview to millions of viewers twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year.

Conservative pundits repackaged Cold War–era attacks equating liberals with communists during the Bush years. In 2003, Ann Coulter, a frequent Fox News talking head, published Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism, which was a full-throated defense of Joseph McCarthy that accused liberals of being, well, traitors who hated America. The book sold 500,000 copies in its first three weeks. Even the racially charged birther myth—that Barack Obama was not a U.S. citizen, and was a covert Muslim, to boot—was a riff on the old John Birch Society charge that liberals, including moderate Republicans like Dwight Eisenhower, were secret members of the international communist conspiracy. The cry that Obama was a Marxist, Maoist, Muslim Kenyan socialist was almost interchangeable with right-wing attacks directed against the civil rights movement in the 1960s. And the idea that a vast left-liberal conspiracy was both undermining the country and using dirty, underhanded tactics to do so rhetorically justified an anything-goes strategy on the part of the right. Shutting down government. Refusing confirmation votes. Supporting Donald Trump for president.

So-called Never Trump conservatives lament that the Republican Party and, indeed, the conservative movement have ceased to be about ideas beyond slavish devotion to Trump’s cult of personality. But this critique ignores the centrality of the idea of liberal nefariousness even in the self-consciously intellectual corners of the conservative movement. Jonah Goldberg, who has been affiliated with National Review for twenty years, has called for a revived conservative intellectual vigor to tackle the policy challenges of the twenty-first century. He was also the author, in 2008, of the book Liberal Fascism, which—until a last-minute change by Goldberg—bore the subtitle The Totalitarian Temptation from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton.

Even the theory-heavy Chicago School movement that undergirded the post-Reagan shift to laissez-faire economic policy derived its momentum from the perceived need to rescue the “free enterprise system” from the clutches of liberalism, which would otherwise inevitably lead to communism. Robert Bork, the academic, judge, and Nixon administration official who was perhaps the preeminent ideological conduit between academia and government—and whose 1996 book Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline is exactly what it sounds like—described his antitrust theories as an antidote to the “reckless and primitive egalitarianism” of the Warren Court.

Trump is, in many ways, the ultimate embodiment of this long-standing tendency on the right. His transformation from New York Democrat to Republican Party celebrity began by embracing the birther conspiracy; he even took credit for Obama’s eventual decision to release his long-form birth certificate. As president, he has wondered aloud why Attorney General Jeff Sessions hasn’t personally defended him from the Russia investigation in the same way that, in Trump’s Fox News–fueled fantasies, Eric Holder once shielded Obama from “scandals” like “Fast and Furious.”

The idea that the left is depraved, corrupt, and ruthless has been an important strain of American conservatism since the movement began. But in the Trump era, it has metastasized. Right-wing policy ideas have been so thoroughly discredited—does anyone even argue anymore that trickle-down economics will ensure mass prosperity?—that the only apparent reason for conservatism’s existence is to fight back against evil liberals. This is, of course, not the sign of a healthy political movement. The right’s support for McCarthy has been a long-standing embarrassment for American conservatism. Its embrace of Trump may be history repeating itself.

—

Housten Chronicle: How Democrats and Republicans switched beliefs

Strangely, over a century, America’s two major political parties gradually reversed identities, like the magnetic poles of Planet Earth switching direction.

When the Republican Party was formed in 1856, it was fiercely liberal, opposing the expansion of slavery, calling for more spending on public education, seeking more open immigration and the like. Compassionate Abraham Lincoln suited the new party’s progressive agenda.

In that era, Democrats were conservatives, partly dominated by the slave-holding South. Those old-style Democrats generally opposed any government action to create jobs or help underdogs.

Through the latter half of the 19th century, the pattern of Republicans as liberals, Democrats as conservatives, generally held true. In 1888, the GOP elected President Benjamin Harrison (1833-1901) on a liberal platform seeking more social services.

Then in 1896, a reversal began when Democrats nominated populist firebrand William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925), “the Great Commoner.”

“He was the first liberal to win the Democratic Party presidential nomination,” political scholar Rich Rubino wrote. “This represented a radical departure from the conservative roots of the Democratic Party.”

Meanwhile, the GOP began shifting to conservative. Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) – a vice president who took the top office after William McKinley was assassinated in 1901 – was a Republican liberal who supported a “Square Deal” for working families. He broke up monopolistic trusts of rich corporations. He championed pure food and drugs. He created national parks and forests for the enjoyment of everyone. He won the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize for helping end war between Russia and Japan.

 

After leaving office, Roosevelt felt that his successor, William Howard Taft (1857-1930), was leading America too far to the right. So T.R. challenged Taft for the GOP nomination in 1912, and lost. In rebellion, Roosevelt gathered his liberal delegates and formed the Progressive Party, with a bold platform bordering on socialism.

The new-formed party called for universal medical care under a National Health Service. It sought government pensions for retirees, plus compensation for the jobless and disabled. It demanded an eight-hour workday and a minimum wage for women. It sought a constitutional amendment to allow a federal income tax. It supported voting by women, more freedom for workers to organize and strike, inheritance tax on rich estates, worker’s compensation for on-the-job injuries, and many other left-wing goals.

The Progressive platform attacked big-money influence in politics, vowing “to destroy this invisible government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics.”

Roosevelt was a fiery orator and writer, saying: “I believe that there should be a very much heavier progressive tax on very large incomes, a tax which should increase in a very marked fashion for the gigantic incomes.”

While Roosevelt was campaigning in Milwaukee in 1912, a crazed assassin, John Schrank – who claimed that the ghost of William McKinley asked him to avenge McKinley’s death by killing Roosevelt – shot the Progressive candidate in the chest. The bullet was partly deflected by Roosevelt’s 50-page speech and his steel eyeglasses case, but wounded him nonetheless. Bleeding, he continued to orate unfazed.

Later, when reporters asked if the wounding would deter his campaign, Roosevelt replied that he was “fit as a bull moose.” Thereafter, his party was dubbed the Bull Moose Party.

Progressives won about one-fourth of the 1912 popular vote, and Democrat Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924) attained the presidency. In 1916, Roosevelt declined the Progressive nomination, and the liberal party he created soon disintegrated.

In a sense, Teddy Roosevelt was the last major Republican liberal. Ensuing decades saw the GOP grow steadily more conservative, and Democrats acquire the liberal mantle. When the Great Depression struck, the “New Deal” of Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945), Theodore’s nephew-in-law, achieved landmark progressive reforms.

In the 1960s, the “Great Society” of Democrat Lyndon Johnson (1908- 1973) vastly expanded the public safety net and gave legal equality to African-Americans – driving racist Dixie out of the Democratic Party, into the GOP.

Then Republican President Ronald Reagan (1911-2004) mobilized the “religious right” of white evangelicals for his party. Later, extreme white conservatives calling themselves “tea party” militants emerged in the GOP.

All this outlines America’s political flipflop – how the liberal Republican Party turned conservative, and the conservative Democratic Party turned liberal. It was a fascinating transition.

—

Vox: A historian explains how mainstream conservatives made Trump

“Is President Donald Trump a perversion of the American conservative movement — or simply an honest reflection of what it’s been for decades?

Ever since Trump’s victory in the Republican primary, this has been one of the big questions hanging over American politics. If Trump’s anti-intellectual and race-baiting brand of politics is a parasite on the American right, then it’s possible the Republican Party can be cleaned up after him. That’s the premise of the so-called Never Trump movement, a small group of Republican elites and conservative intellectuals who have denounced the president and his allies in no uncertain terms.

But it’s possible the Never Trumpers are wrong. It could be that they’re the ones who have been deluding themselves into thinking that the conservative movement is a higher intellectual calling, when in fact it’s been a cover for a shallow and vicious brand of white identity politics for decades. If that’s true, then there’s no coming back from Trumpism. The conservative movement and its core institutions need to be radically reformed, if not outright abolished and rebuilt.

One of the most prominent Never Trumpers, former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum, posed precisely this question at the end of an Atlantic essay on conservative polemicist and convicted felon Dinesh D’Souza. “Did they really change so much?” Frum muses about his Trump supporting allies, “Or did I?” Seth Cotlar, a professor of American history at Willamette University, set out to answer Frum’s question in a lengthy and extremely worthwhile Twitter thread — and suggested an answer the Never Trumper won’t like.

Cotlar, who grew up in a right-leaning community and teaches a course on the history of American conservatism, suggests that Frum is, in fact, the one who changed. He claims that for at least two decades, back when Frum was a mainstream conservative in good standing, the Republican Party and the conservative movement were already in the grips of a kind of proto-Trumpism. Here’s Cotlar’s argument, which I encourage you to read in full:

1. I would love to read a sympathetic (yet critical) essay that assessed a central claim made by Never Trumpers like @davidfrum–that conservatism today is an embarrassing bastardization of what conservatism once was. https://t.co/PpTn36jfT9

— Seth Cotlar (@SethCotlar) August 12, 2018

2. Let me start by saying that I take Frum and other Never Trumpers to be acting in good faith. I appreciate and respect the principled stand they have taken against Trumpist conservatism. But I have questions.

— Seth Cotlar (@SethCotlar) August 12, 2018

3. First, the declensionist narrative. “Once conservatism was an intellectually robust political phenomenon, but now it is anti-intellectual pap.” I’m willing to be convinced of this…but it’s going to take some work. pic.twitter.com/uuZM8BVjB0

— Seth Cotlar (@SethCotlar) August 12, 2018

4. For example, let’s rewind to the early 1990s, a time when today’s Never Trumpers were unapologetic conservatives, and a time when a brash young Congressman from Georgia, Newt Gingrich (PhD in History), carried the mantle of “the conservative politician with the big ideas.”

— Seth Cotlar (@SethCotlar) August 12, 2018

5. In 1995 Newt taught a course called “Renewing American Civilization,” a mix of history, sociology, and politics designed to chart a course forward for the @gop and the nation. It was a shambolic mess, to put it politely. https://t.co/uwydnftXQ9

— Seth Cotlar (@SethCotlar) August 12, 2018

6. In 1995 I was a graduate student in American history and was curious what one of our major political leaders thought about the subject, so I opened up Netscape and downloaded the full text of Newt’s lectures via 56K modem. They’re still accessible at https://t.co/Uv3C7fLmHv

— Seth Cotlar (@SethCotlar) August 12, 2018

7. They read like the transcript of a Trump campaign rally, only with a 12th grade vocabulary instead of a 5th grade vocab. It’s stream of consciousness gobbledygook. Like this gem. No one w/ a rudimentary knowledge of American History or social science could take Newt seriously. pic.twitter.com/FDF07qWjgc

— Seth Cotlar (@SethCotlar) August 12, 2018

8. Looking back at Newt’s 1995 lectures from the vantage point of 2018, it’s easy to see many of the building blocks of Trumpism–the disdain for elites, the faux populism, the culture war BS, etc. “2018 Trumpist Newt” doesn’t seem like a departure from “1995 galaxy brain Newt.”

— Seth Cotlar (@SethCotlar) August 12, 2018

9. In the 1990s I was no “raving leftist.” I had two Republican voting grandparents and was educated in public schools in a conservative small town where my parents were small business owners.

— Seth Cotlar (@SethCotlar) August 12, 2018

10. Sure, I went to Brown for college, but my primary US history prof was Gordon Wood, a man known to dine with Antonin Scalia. Despite that background, in 1995, at the age of 27, it only took me about 20 minutes to figure out Newt was full of sh*t. Because I had read some books.

— Seth Cotlar (@SethCotlar) August 12, 2018

11. Newt is full of the same anti-intellectual sh*t today as he was in 1995, when he was the conservative “man of the hour.” So I ask (& I really do mean this as an open question despite my snarky tone)…what did Frum et. al. see in Newt ca. 1995 that is unlike Trump ca. 2018?

— Seth Cotlar (@SethCotlar) August 12, 2018

12. The other great conservative “intellectual” of the early 1990s was Dinesh D’Souza. The Never Trumper declensionist narrative rests upon the distinction between the once respectable Dinesh and the now clownish Dinesh. pic.twitter.com/LBiiETnrVi

— Seth Cotlar (@SethCotlar) August 12, 2018

13. I will grant that D’Souza’s 1991 book “Illiberal Education” is a less ludicrously clownish book than his most recent productions. But that would be akin to saying that the comedy stylings of Chevy Chase were more intellectually robust than those of Adam Sandler. True, but…

— Seth Cotlar (@SethCotlar) August 12, 2018

14. Illiberal Education benefited from a few generous reviews written by credentialed but curmodgeonly white male academics like C. Vann Woodward. Woodward’s peers took him to task at the time. https://t.co/1P8vAKWcTb

— Seth Cotlar (@SethCotlar) August 12, 2018

15. The scholarly work that D’Souza (and Woodward) pilloried in the early 90’s has stood the test of time. The 1990s work of D’Souza’s reactionary defenders like Eugene Genovese and Woodward, however, has fared less well.

— Seth Cotlar (@SethCotlar) August 12, 2018

16. Like Gingrich’s lectures, D’Souza’s Illiberal Education was a laughing stock amongst those who actually knew the universities and scholarly fields he claimed to expose. His stock and trade then was reactionary oversimplification. Same goes for today.

— Seth Cotlar (@SethCotlar) August 12, 2018

17. Can we also just recall some of the greatest hits of Reaganite conservatism? Like the Laffer curve? Or EPA director James Watt, who thought we needn’t protect the environment because the rapture was imminent? Or super-patriot Ollie North?

— Seth Cotlar (@SethCotlar) August 12, 2018

18. Voodoo economics is alive and well in Trumpist conservatism, Scott Pruitt was like James Watt redux, climate change denial is the 2018 version of the @gop‘s anti-science foot dragging on tobacco regulation, and Ollie North is back as the head of the GOP’s favorite gun club.

— Seth Cotlar (@SethCotlar) August 12, 2018

19. We might also remember that Dick Cheney and other “serious conservatives” defended our support of apartheid South Africa, and Reagan was pretty tolerant of dictators like Pinochet. More than a few echoes of Trumpian foreign policy here. https://t.co/VQTx18W1bh

— Seth Cotlar (@SethCotlar) August 12, 2018

20. When Never Trumpers express shock and dismay at what Trump has made of the Republican Party, it’s hard for me not to wonder “how can this come as a surprise to you?”

— Seth Cotlar (@SethCotlar) August 12, 2018

21. As this excellent thread shows, the progressives of the mid-90s called much of this. They saw the embryo of Trumpism lurking within 90s conservatism. Yet at the time, conservative “intellectuals” supercilliously dismissed such critiques as hysterical. https://t.co/s4KLVUQRsc

— Seth Cotlar (@SethCotlar) August 12, 2018

22. Apologies if this has come off as “I told you so-ism.” That’s not how I mean it. I guess I just want to read a few articles that are less “I’m shocked, shocked that the @gop has become authoritarian & racist” and more “here’s how I regretfully helped build this.”

— Seth Cotlar (@SethCotlar) August 12, 2018

23. The Never Trumpers are important voices in our national conversation. They can grant us an insiders’ perspective on how Trump was so easily able to co-opt the conservative movement. If there is truly daylight between Trumpism and conservatism, they can help us see it.

— Seth Cotlar (@SethCotlar) August 12, 2018

24. Progressives will just say “see, Trumpism is what conservatism was all along. It’s just now shown its true face.” I suspect most Never Trumpers would disagree with that. So please, show us the receipts!

— Seth Cotlar (@SethCotlar) August 12, 2018

25. Speaking as someone who teaches a course on the history of conservatism that tries to treat that history on its own terms and with respect, I’d love to see a Never Trumper memoir or essay that started from the presumption that Trump is not a black swan, not an alien invasion.

— Seth Cotlar (@SethCotlar) August 12, 2018

26. Wow, this thread has blown up far more than I expected it would. Upon reading some of the responses, I have just a few more take aways.

— Seth Cotlar (@SethCotlar) August 12, 2018

27. First, if people wonder why there are so few conservatives in the academy, just read Gingrich’s lectures and then compare them with some of Robert Reich’s writings. Reich was arguably the Democrats’ intellectual answer to Gingrich in the 90s.

— Seth Cotlar (@SethCotlar) August 12, 2018

28. It’s not that Reich was correct on everything. But he was a genuine intellectual, someone who cared about evidence & argumentation. It was pretty inconceivable in the 90s that a rigorous intellectual could stomach Gingrich. That’s Gingrich’s fault, not the academy’s.

— Seth Cotlar (@SethCotlar) August 12, 2018

29. So why are there so few conservative professors and intellectuals? In part because conservatism became so associated with jingoistic anti-intellectualism that it became nearly impossible for an educated person to defend it.

— Seth Cotlar (@SethCotlar) August 12, 2018

30. This points to another thread in the history of conservatism that dates all the way back to Bill Buckley…conservatism has often defined itself largely AGAINST a phantom “left” that doesn’t really exist as they think it does.

— Seth Cotlar (@SethCotlar) August 12, 2018

31. Not only do conservatives tend to see that “left” as monolithic, they also see it as posing an existential threat to “western civilization” or “our way of life.”

— Seth Cotlar (@SethCotlar) August 12, 2018

32. Without the slippery slope argument, conservatism loses much of its rhetorical punch. Want Medicare? You’re secretly a commie. Support gay right? You hate the nuclear family! Support the rights of transgender people? There’s no biological truth anymore!

— Seth Cotlar (@SethCotlar) August 12, 2018

33. This is not just a rhetorical device conservative politicians deployed to gin up votes. It’s also been an essential piece of conservative intellectual thought as well. “Standing athwart history yelling stop,” and such.

— Seth Cotlar (@SethCotlar) August 12, 2018

34. We see both of these tendencies in Trumpism–from Michael Anton’s “Flight 93 election” essay to TPUSA’s dire warnings about the communist brainwashing that happens on college campuses. Without a scary, phantom “left” to bash, conservatives wouldn’t have much to talk about.

— Seth Cotlar (@SethCotlar) August 12, 2018

35. For a fuller explication of this argument about how the right, from the beginning, has defined itself against a phantom, monstrous “left,” read this article. h/t @DavidAstinWalsh https://t.co/2F2DPXKZuX

— Seth Cotlar (@SethCotlar) August 12, 2018

Perhaps Frum and his fellow travelers in the Never Trump movement have compelling answers to Cotlar’s critique. But it’s one they need to grapple with if they hope to pull the Republican Party back from the abyss.

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Washington Post: The new Reagan tapes are ugly, but not surprising, to a lot of black Americans

When politicos on both sides of the aisle are bemoaning our current political climate, they often point back to previous eras when the president displayed decorum they believe was befitting of the Oval Office.

President Ronald Reagan has been among those cited by those noting just how unorthodox President Trump and the current Republican Party is in worldview, demeanor and action. But new audiotapes remind us that the Reagan many Americans romanticize was a very different person in the eyes of many black Americans.

An October 1971 exchange between a then-current and future Republican presidents is a reminder that an Oval Office occupant using language suggesting black people are inferior and subhuman is not new.

[Reagan called President Nixon to slur Africans as ‘monkeys.’]

Tim Naftali, a history professor at New York University, wrote about and posted audio of a conversation taped by President Richard Nixon where Reagan, then the governor of California, used racially offensive tropes to refer to United Nations delegates from African countries. Reagan expressed his frustration with African delegates siding against the United States in a vote to recognize the People’s Republic of China.

 

“Last night, I tell you, to watch that thing on television as I did . . . To see those, those monkeys from those African countries — damn them, they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes!” Reagan told Nixon.

Nixon laughed, wrote Naftali, a former director of the Nixon Presidential Library. But that initial conversation furthered an anger in Nixon that helped shape his already prejudiced views toward black people, Naftali wrote:

“Nixon’s anger at the U.N. delegations from African nations for the loss was misplaced. His own State Department blamed factors other than African voting, including maneuvering by the British and French behind the scenes, for the loss. But Nixon would have none of it. The Africans were to blame.”

Previous tapes had already revealed the extent of Nixon’s racist views, but the tape represented a more blatant example of Reagan’s willingness to traffic in stereotypes than we have previously seen. But many people were less than shocked to hear it.

B/c when we reached the obvious conclusions about Reagan from the Neshoba County, MS “states rights” speech to kick-off the campaign, the stand against sanctions for apartheid South Africa, the “welfare queen” remarks & the anti-civil rts agenda, we were imagining things. https://t.co/lHp6TOXoY7

— Sherrilyn Ifill (@Sifill_LDF) July 31, 2019

Reagan is largely credited with amplifying the stereotype of black women being “welfare queens” abusing tax payer dollars to support lazy and promiscuous lifestyles. Historians and lawmakers point to policies disproportionately harming people of color as being the foundation of his “War on Drugs.” Acts like these have been far more instrumental in shaping Reagan’s legacy with black Americans than those often highlighted by conservatives.

So perhaps it should be of little surprise that Trump — who 51 percent of voters believe is racist, according to a recent Quinnipiac poll — shares a slogan, “Make America Great Again,” Reagan used in his 1980 campaign. (Trump says he did not know about Reagan’s use of it)

Trump has been accused by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), among others, of adopting the slogan to covertly say “Make America White Again” — something critics say Reagan more discreetly communicated to the white working-class voters who delivered the White House to him.

The history of the presidency shows there have been numerous racists — from both parties — to occupy the Oval Office, but since the civil rights movement, expressing racist views in public is a political liability.

The current debate, of course, has arisen in the wake of Trump’s Twitter attacks on four minority congresswomen, and the city of Baltimore and Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.). Trump has repeatedly defended his statements, tweeting, “I don’t have a Racist bone in my body!”

As Naftali wrote: “The most novel aspect of President Donald Trump’s racist gibes isn’t that he said them, but that he said them in public.”

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Atlantic: They Just Wanted to Entertain

AM stations mainly wanted to keep listeners engaged—but ended up remaking the Republican Party.

No one set out to turn the airwaves into a political weapon—much less deputize talk-radio hosts as the ideological enforcers of a major American political party. Instead the story of how the GOP establishment lost its power over the Republican message—and eventually the party itself—begins with frantic AM radio executives and a former Top 40 disc jockey, Rush Limbaugh.

In the late 1980s, AM radio was desperate for new content. Listeners had migrated to FM because music sounded better on there, and advertising dollars had followed. Talk-radio formats offered a lifeline—unique programming that FM didn’t have. And on August 1, 1988, Limbaugh debuted nationally. At the outset, Limbaugh wasn’t angling to become a political force—he was there to entertain and make money. Limbaugh’s show departed from the staid, largely nonpartisan, interview and caller-based programs that were the norm in earlier talk radio. Instead, Limbaugh was a consummate showman who excited listeners by being zany and fun and obliterating boundaries, offering up something the likes of which many Americans had never heard before.

Limbaugh conveyed his politics through everything from soap-opera teasers complete with humorous casting choices—in one titled Gulf War Won, Betty White drew the assignment of the first lady Barbara Bush, while Limbaugh cast James Earl Jones as General Colin Powell—and gags like “caller abortions,” in which screaming and vacuum-cleaner sounds drowned out the voice on the other end of the phone.

Noting Limbaugh’s success, radio executives started hiring conservative hosts—first local personalities, and then later national names like G. Gordon Liddy and Michael Reagan—to fill time slots on an expanding number of talk stations.

Although leading Republicans were slow to catch on to the political potential of the medium, by the mid-1990s, talk radio was an integral element of GOP communications strategies. It provided a boost for Republicans as they pushed to enact an agenda and worked to win elections. Republicans, including House Speaker Newt Gingrich, pumped information to hosts, chatted with them regularly, and generally saw talk radio as an ideal way to reach their base with a message and learn how voters around the country felt about key issues.

Many on the left surmised that the hosts were puppets, plugging whichever policies Gingrich and others wanted them to. But selling the GOP message was never the hosts’ top priority. In my research into the history of conservative talk radio, the executives, producers, and hosts whom I interviewed told me over and over that their main goal was to produce the best radio show each day, one that could command the largest audience possible that tuned in for the longest possible time.

Over time, this focus on the commercial imperatives of AM radio would transform politics. To keep audiences engaged and entertained, hosts grew more and more strident as the years passed, depicting politics as warfare—and started targeting moderates in the Republican Party.

In its early phases, conservative talk radio had exhibited a pragmatic streak that would sound foreign today. In 1994, Limbaugh cautioned against single- issue voting. He advised television viewers—he had a TV program from 1992 to 1996—not to oppose Mitt Romney, the Republican then running as a moderate against the liberal senator Ted Kennedy in Massachusetts. As Limbaugh explained, electing Romney, despite his lack of conservative fervor, would be a step “in the right direction.”

Hosts never loved moderates, and never hesitated to criticize them for actions out of step with hosts’ vision for the country. But they understood that such figures were crucial to securing a majority, without which their preferred agenda had no shot.

But this detente started to break down as the 2000s progressed. In one 2005 harangue prompted by Republicans who voted against oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Limbaugh declared, “There’s no such thing as a moderate. A moderate is just a liberal disguise, and they are doing everything they can to derail the conservative agenda.” He deemed such behavior “unacceptable” and read listeners the names of those Republicans voting no. Even so, Limbaugh still crucially refrained from calling for those Republicans to lose.

Read: How conservatives awoke to the dangers of Sean Hannity

A year later, Sean Hannity demonstrated that things were shifting further during a conversation with a caller who was fuming at Republican-in-name-only, or RINO, senators. Hannity agreed, and it wasn’t just moderate senators who aroused their ire: Hannity explicitly included Senators John McCain, Chuck Hagel, and Lindsey Graham, all of whom were generally conservative but who had departed from the party line on several significant issues. (Sherwood Boehlert, a true Republican moderate, quipped to me in an interview that “McCain is no more moderate than I am a Communist.”)

As the number of ideological moderates declined, the definition of RINOism expanded. Any Republican who sought out compromise or who rejected political warfare found him or herself a target of conservative media. This would only intensify with each passing year—and not just for political reasons. Hosts, buffeted by ever fiercer competition for the conservative audience, as right-wing digital outlets like RedState and Breitbart proliferated, had to perform before millions of frustrated and fickle listeners.

In the fight for a devoted audience, allies became foes. Former House Speaker John Boehner explained what that meant for Republicans, telling Politico, “‘I always liked Rush [Limbaugh]. When I went to Palm Beach I would always meet with Rush and we’d go play golf. But you know, who was that right-wing guy, [Mark] Levin?”—Levin launched in New York in 2002 and entered national syndication in 2006—“He went really crazy right and got a big audience, and he dragged [Sean] Hannity to the dark side. He dragged Rush to the dark side. And these guys—I used to talk to them all the time. And suddenly they’re beating the living shit out of me.”

And by 2009, a rubicon had been crossed: Limbaugh called for the defeat of eight House Republicans who voted for a carbon cap-and-trade system, even though more hard-line conservatives likely could not win their seats. Indeed, in 2010 and 2012, conservative media largely supported upstart conservative primary challenges against Representative Mike Castle of Delaware (in a Senate race) and Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana—both of whom were heavy favorites to win the general election. Instead, both fell in primaries, with their more conservative, talk-radio-preferred opponents losing to Democrats.

That was a price worth paying for conservative hosts. Having a party that stood for something and was willing to fight for it was far more important than a few seats here or there. Turning politics into a blood sport, and kicking moderates off the team, made for good, passionate radio and meshed with listeners’ frustrations. Crucially, because hosts had no responsibility to govern, they didn’t have to worry about the policy or electoral consequences of such a stance.

Even so, hosts had amassed enough power that elected Republicans had to pay attention to their demands. Many listeners spent more time with their favorite hosts than they did with their spouses; so when a host touted a primary challenger or denounced someone as a RINO, listeners took it as advice from a friend. In low-turnout primaries, where information was often scarce, conservative media could help decide the race.

In the 2010s, talk radio’s business needs further upended the traditional political hierarchy. With moderates virtually extinct, the war against RINOs often focused on Republican leaders like Boehner whose sin was simply not being willing to adopt the strident tactics that hosts demanded. Hosts blasted them with increasing regularity, while praising a new group of political superstars, largely backbenchers with minimal power on Capitol Hill. But they were perfect for talk radio: They spewed extreme rhetoric, saw the world in black-and-white terms, and advocated for the most extreme tactics possible. Figures like Representative Mark Meadows, Representative Jim Jordan, and Senator Ted Cruz became the heroes in the soap opera that talk radio had always been—and RINOs and the Republican leadership were as much the villains as Democrats or the mainstream media.

The new political landscape has hamstrung the ability of Republican leaders to legislate, leading to constant brinkmanship epitomized by the longest government shutdown in history in the winter of 2018–19, when President Donald Trump heeded the calls of Limbaugh and others to fight, even though there really wasn’t a viable path to victory.

This episode has unfortunately illustrated the new reality for the Republican Party: Over three decades, the titans of talk have remade the party in their own image, with elected Republicans now sounding more like commentators on the AM dial—or its cable equivalent, the Fox News Channel, where Hannity has hosted a show since 1996—than what used to be heard in the halls of Congress. While this made for gripping radio and TV, it left a more and more extreme party, with little capacity to govern and little appeal in the suburbs or with young and nonwhite voters.

Trump’s presidency is the ultimate testament to the power of talk-radio conservatism. In one week last month, the president not only called in to Hannity’s show, but on a separate night tweeted, “Oh well, we still have the great  @seanhannity who I hear has a really strong show tonight. 9:00 P.M.” He reportedly talks regularly with Hannity as well. And last winter, when Trump reversed course after the uprising on the right, it was Limbaugh to whom the president pledged that he would shut the government down if he didn’t get enough funds for his border wall.

The power of these hosts would’ve been unthinkable when Limbaugh took the national airwaves by storm in 1988. But over three decades, hosts have used the special bond they’ve forged with their audiences to reshape the Republican Party in their image. For millions of listeners, the change has been electrifying. For excommunicated moderates, this show hasn’t been entertaining in the least.

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Washington Post: Everything you need to know about the Fairness Doctrine in one post

What it was: The Fairness Doctrine, as initially laid out in the report, ”In the Matter of Editorializing by Broadcast Licensees,” required that TV and radio stations holding FCC-issued broadcast licenses to (a) devote some of their programming to controversial issues of public importance and (b) allow the airing of opposing views on those issues. This meant that programs on politics were required to include opposing opinions on the topic under discussion. Broadcasters had an active duty to determine the spectrum of views on a given issue and include those people best suited to representing those views in their programming.

Additionally, the rule mandated that broadcasters alert anyone subject to a personal attack in their programming and give them a chance to respond, and required any broadcasters who endorse political candidates to invite other candidates to respond. However, the Fairness Doctrine is different from the Equal Time rule, which is still in force and requires equal time be given to legally qualified political candidates.

How it came about: In the Radio Act of 1927, Congress dictated that the FCC (and its predecessor, the Federal Radio Commission) should only issue broadcast licenses when doing so serves the public interest. In 1949, the FCC interpreted this more strictly to mean that licensees should include discussions of matters of public importance in their broadcasts, and that they should do so in a fair manner. It issued “In the Matter of Editorializing by Broadcast Licensees,” which announced the Fairness Doctrine, and began enforcing it.

How it was ended: The Fairness Doctrine sustained a number of challenges over the years. A lawsuit challenging the doctrine on First Amendment grounds, Red Lion Broadcasting Co., Inc. v. Federal Communications Commission , reached the Supreme Court in 1969. The Court ruled unanimously that while broadcasters have First Amendment speech rights, the fact that the spectrum is owned by the government and merely leased to broadcasters gives the FCC the right to regulate news content. However, First Amendment jurisprudence after Red Lion started to allow more speech rights to broadcasters, and put the constitutionality of the Fairness Doctrine in question.

In response, the FCC began to reconsider the rule in the mid-80s, and ultimately revoked it in 1987, after Congress passed a resolution instructing the commission to study the issue. The decision has been credited with the explosion of conservative talk radio in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. While the FCC has not enforced the rule in nearly a quarter century, it remains technically on the books. As a part of the Obama administration’s broader efforts to overhaul federal regulation, the FCC is finally scrapping the rule once and for all.

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Jacobin: Getting to Know the Conservative Enemy

The history of American conservatism is the journey of a dissident political tendency from the margins to the mainstream. That’s why socialists should study it closely.

aving defied long-held assumptions about the nature of the Republican Party and the conservative movement, the Trump era has undoubtedly given birth to renewed discussions about the character of the American right in the political mainstream. Much of the ensuing discourse has, however, proven frustratingly inadequate and incomplete: treating Trumpism as an aberration from earlier forms of conservatism or focusing on personality to the exclusion of the conservative project as a whole. Some liberals, for their part, now even express nostalgia for earlier incarnations of the Republican Party and hope to see some version of it restored.

In response, some on the Left may be tempted to reject critical engagement with the conservative movement out of hand. But understanding its history and ideas remains a crucial task — particularly in the Trump era — and may even yield valuable insights for socialists looking to roll back its political hegemony for good.

Know Your Enemy, a new podcast hosted by Dissent, grapples with conservatism from the left. Its hosts — Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell — joined Jacobin for a wide-ranging conversation on the history and ideology of the American right.

---

LS

American conservatism has looked very different depending on the particular social or historical context and has at times been animated by radically different causes and concerns: Cold War anti-communism; reaction against emancipatory social movements like feminism and civil rights; an obsession with markets as the bulwark of individual liberty. What do both of you see as the nucleus of conservatism? What is its primary animating energy?

MS

This is something I’ve probably changed my mind on a bit over the last few years. What we think of as modern American conservatism, which you might date to Bill Buckley founding National Review in the 1950s, often is portrayed as a coherent ideological project. They might have had to piece it all together, but they did the theoretical work — a guy like Frank Meyer in his book In Defense of Freedom, for example, would try to explain why moral traditionalists and libertarian economics, and even the Cold War element — how all that fit together. The term given to that is “fusionism,” which was basically what Ronald Reagan was offering when he won the presidency in 1980.

When I say I’ve changed my mind, what I’m getting at is that I had viewed the modern American conservatism that began in the 1950s as a fixed thing, as a static set of principles. And I think the emergence of Trump has actually made me much more sympathetic to Corey Robin’s definition of conservatism as being a reaction against a progressive movement of some kind: feminism, the civil rights movement, labour unions, the move for a more equitable economic system, or whatever it might be — the idea that conservatism might superficially change its form or shift rhetorical emphases or the particular issues that get underscored depending on historical circumstances, but underlying it all is a defence of existing hierarchies. That’s an approach I’ve become much more sympathetic to, in part because the conservative movement that I grew up in (I’m an ex-conservative) was that fusionist, National Review, Reaganite gloss on what “conservatism” meant. And I think as I moved away from movement conservatism, I became skeptical of the National Review–centric story of American conservatism and also saw how someone like Trump could push different buttons, and this, again, has made me more sympathetic to Robin’s definition, which better accounts for both the continuities and change in American conservatism.

 

SAB

I came into this project with Robin’s thesis in The Reactionary Mind orienting me toward thinking about conservatism and its intellectual history. It’s useful for our purposes that Matt was steeped in the way conservatives talked about themselves — what they emphasize, what they leave out. Conservatives tend to have this whiggish history of America and of the conservative movement — a fairly clean history of progress. Lots of energy is spent talking about guardrails and how Bill Buckley, to some degree, controlled who was considered a conservative and tried to exclude figures that were more explicitly racist, antisemitic, or misogynist — that’s the story conservatives tell about themselves. But that story also isn’t really true. There are all these salient examples where the guardrails didn’t really function, or where there’s since been a retconning of the history to suggest that “actually, we always knew that this person was not okay.”

LS

The British conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott once defined conservatism as follows:

To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.

A definition of conservatism like this — moderate, reasonable, empirically minded — is difficult to reconcile with the reality of conservatism, which has been prone to all kinds of utopianism, ideological fervor, and violent adventurism. Clearly the disjuncture between conservative realities and conservatism’s self-image poses some problems of interpretation, and I’m wondering, how exactly you think those should be approached?

SAB

Robin’s hermeneutic approach is helpful to us, but it’s not the only way to approach these ideas. If there’s a sense of tension in our podcast, it’s often over this question of how much generosity and good-faith interpretation to exercise when approaching the arguments that conservatives make about themselves and their intellectual commitments, i.e., when to doubt the sincerity of these commitments or interpret them simply through the lens of ideology. Incidentally, we’ve talked about Michael Oakeshott once or twice, and I think that something we do butt up against when we’re looking at the history is moments where conservatism really does speak to people’s genuine anxieties, needs, desires, and fears. Matt has talked about the ways in which conservatism “goes with the grain” of certain human instincts, especially the instincts of humans who are relatively privileged. The fact that conservatism genuinely has spoken to their felt needs, anxieties, and fears at various moments — more effectively than liberals or the Left was able to do — is something we do try to give credence to and understand.

MS

Oakeshott is actually someone I’ve spent a lot of time reading and thinking about, but it’s worth emphasizing that he’s British. And I do think with American conservatism — as it was constituted in the 1950s, in the postwar era — one of the major debates they had was about what it meant to be a conservative in a revolutionary country.

So you had someone like Russell Kirk writing The Conservative Mind, which begins with these paeans to Edmund Burke, and you had other conservatives saying, “That’s just not going to do in America, it’s just not the same here.” And so some of the best, most important debates in the early days of modern American conservatism were over, say, the nature and character of the Declaration of Independence — what that document meant — and you have some conservatives saying in effect that when it referred to “equality,” it just meant Americans were equal to the British and therefore had the same right to govern themselves. They disagreed with Abraham Lincoln’s reading of the Declaration that equality meant something about individual rights or the nature of human equality as such. I sometimes wonder if American conservatism kind of deserves to be thought of on its own terms, because it’s really not the same as throne-and-altar European conservatism.

And that Oakeshottian preference for the near and the dear, the tried and the true — that’s not something that really exists in American conservatism. The figures who were most like that (say, Russell Kirk or Peter Viereck) were outliers in the conservative movement. There is something more revolutionary and almost constructive about the American right that I think is different in the European context. So that’s just adding a wrinkle to this question about the character and nature of American conservatism — especially the fact that it doesn’t always seem very conservative.

SAB

We did two episodes early on loosely following the trajectory in Sam Tanenhaus’s book The Death of Conservatism, laying out a history of conservatism in America. And one of the things we talked about a lot was a contest between the Burkean ideal of governance as this force for moderation — the sort of conservatism also associated with Oakeshott — and the militant conservatism that really does seem to embody stuff like early National Review and the kind of radical movement whose purpose is to mainstream previously fringe ideas and ultimately instantiate a government in power that implements those ideas. The figures who fit the Burkean ideal of conservatism — and Tanenhaus talks about this — they’re not really partisan. I think, for example, that Obama is a truly Burkean figure in so many ways: he had a certain kind of utopian, revolutionary rhetoric at times during the campaigns, but ultimately he governed by treating compromise as a central, normative value wherein small technocratic changes were supposed to lead to gradual change over time. That conception of politics feels closer to Burke than, say, the one held by George Bush or Trump or Reagan or other figures actually associated with movement conservatism.

LS

Some people on the left bristle at the idea of seriously engaging with conservatism and its ideas, or even at the notion that conservatism has any ideas to begin with. Since the face of the modern American conservative movement is now Donald Trump and patently ridiculous Astroturfed groups like Turning Point USA, some would make the case that there’s nothing much to engage with in the realm of ideas. The title of your podcast, Know Your Enemy, makes explicit that you both think otherwise. So what does it mean to engage with conservatism from the left, and why is it an effort people should take more seriously?

MS

When you’re studying conservatism, you study the ideas and the rhetoric, but also the movement builders. I mean, the Left should hope for organizers as effective as Paul Weyrich or some of the Christians who formed the Moral Majority, like Ralph Reed. So, when we say “know your enemy,” we mean both the ideas and their popular expressions, but also the organizations and institutions that bridge that gap. I would also say that the first time I studied conservative history in an academic setting was with Dissent editor Michael Kazin in a grad seminar he taught on American conservatism. This was during the height of the Bush years, in 2005, and he sat down at the seminar table and said, “I’m not going to lie to you: I’m a card-carrying member of the American left, and I’m teaching this class in part to understand why we’re losing.”

 

SAB

In terms of the ideas, again following the Robin thesis, if conservatism is constituted by this fear and anxiety about mass movements that threaten existing hierarchies, what happens is that conservatives become uniquely sensitive to those movements and thoughtful about what they portend and what dangers they pose. So sometimes conservatives can be really helpful avenues for understanding what’s going on on the Left, and what in particular is making them afraid and causing them to elaborate new ideas to justify or re-justify existing structures of domination, exploitation, and oppression.

There’s also, as Matt mentioned, the organizational strategies. One thing we’ve talked about on the podcast is the Goldwater campaign — which, in the popular imagination, represents the epic failure of right-wing ideas and organizers. In fact, if you look closely at it, what happens with the Goldwater campaign, it isn’t entirely a failure. Rather, its supporters take over the Republican Party, both during and in the aftermath of that historic defeat. It’s the moment at which the conservative movement decides that the Republican Party itself is going to be the vehicle to instantiate its ideas — which was not inevitable. And there is something I think the Left has to learn from those experiences: i.e., how you turn a defeat into a future victory. Somebody, I can’t remember who, said, “Goldwater won the election, the votes just weren’t counted until 1980.” It’s something I’ve thought about in the context of Bernie. We lost in 2016, but in some ways we won. The rising left tendency in the Democratic Party increasingly sets the agenda. Looking closely at how it was that an ideologically committed insurgency took over the Republican Party and used it to its advantage is something we can learn from, too.

MS

Something I think a lot about is how much better the right is at understanding power, and that works on a few different levels. The late, great historian John Patrick Diggins wrote a book called The Rise and Fall of the American Left, and at the end, he has a line where he says something like, “The left needs to understand that power is not just used to oppress, power is used to achieve the things you want.” And I think that’s a lesson the Right has internalized more than the Left. So I look at the Right as a really interesting example of a relatively small group of people who sought influence and power and did really, eventually achieve it. For that reason alone, they’re worth studying. They’re very good at using power to make their continued exercise of power more likely.

Moreover, you need to understand these ideas if you want to defeat them. If you think politics is at some level about persuasion, I think you have to understand what you’re trying to counter or defeat in order to formulate the most effective response to it. And I think the popular lefty dunking on cartoonish right-wing figures who are Trump hangers-on — Astroturfed groups like Turning Point USA, as you mentioned — it’s very easy to dunk on some of these figures and these ideas. But in reality, I don’t think doing so gets you much beyond being a boost to people who already agree with you, a cathartic release of frustration and anger. It’s not actually that effective or even important most of the time.

SAB

One thing we’ve talked about is the Right’s effective use of particularism: of family and community and appeals to a sense of nearness, localism, and place. This allegiance to the family or the religious community can lead to really ugly, exclusionary, and oppressive policy commitments on the Right. But particularism is important, it can move people in a way abstract policy ideas do not. Many on the Left are good at speaking the language of community and place, but sometimes we aren’t. Sometimes we talk about our goals in such exclusively material terms that we lose sight of what kind of life we’re actually trying to enable people to live. The Left shouldn’t cede this ground to the Right, especially because there’s a great American leftist tradition of communitarianism, which we should never give up. Figures on the contemporary right like [Missouri] senator Josh Hawley and these new Trumpist right wingers or other post-libertarian conservatives claim the mantle of community as if they’re the only ones speaking that language, with a claim to that tradition.

LS

There’s a narrative about American conservatism that’s become ubiquitous, particularly in the Trump era, and which is very popular among liberals: that the Right used to be more respectable, ideas-driven, and rooted in a coherent intellectual tradition. This is the story peddled by people who harken back to the days when figures like William F. Buckley were the face of the conservative movement. The handful of right-wing writers and activists who have staged performative “exits” from conservatism in the wake of Trumpism are fond of this narrative, too. What, in your view, does this popular story of American conservatism get wrong?

MS

We talked about this at length in our second episode on Sam Tanenhaus’s book The Death of Conservatism, which is basically: Do we view Trump in terms of continuity or discontinuity relative to the conservative movement as it previously existed? And the answer I would give is that, at one level, Bill Buckley was a more sophisticated man than either Trump or his defenders. There’s no doubt that people like Buckley or his teacher at Yale, Willmoore Kendall, were genuinely more sophisticated than the people we see now.

But I still reject the good conservative/bad conservative dichotomy. Bill Buckley, for all his sophistication, wrote a book defending McCarthyism with his brother-in-law (who, incidentally, went on to become a defender of Franco’s Spain). Buckley wrote editorials defending segregation. Ronald Reagan began his 1980 presidential campaign near Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights activists were murdered and talked about states’ rights. The history of conservatism is ultimately much seedier and filled with nasty elements than the people who are the keepers of the official narrative want you to believe.

When Buckley kicks Ayn Rand out of the official conservative movement, or Joe Sobran — the antisemitic Catholic writer — is eventually dismissed from the pages of National Review, these people were there all along and they really had to cross major lines before they were kicked out. Modern American conservatism, from its beginnings, has been fueled by racist backlash and has played footsie with the most nasty populist elements in the country.

SAB

In many ways, it’s a very pernicious talking point, because it has the effect of rehabilitating people who even liberals before would have thought of as insidious actors. People now talk about George Bush as if he was the epitome of thoughtful, caring conservatism. They say things like, “After 9/11, George Bush went and spoke at a mosque.” Yeah, and then he created a law enforcement apparatus that associated Muslims with criminality to such a degree that it’s still with us — we still live in a society where being Muslim is something that in and of itself invites suspicion. He also waged the most deadly war of this generation. It’s important to reject the narrative of the “good conservative” because it’s wrong, but also because it’s an ideological move designed to reinterpret history in a way that’s sympathetic to some seriously nasty people.

MS

You can think it’s a really important distinction that George H. W. Bush merely hired Lee Atwater, who engineered the Willie Horton ad, compared to Trump, who basically says the Willie Horton ad out loud today. You can think that’s a really meaningful distinction that a lot hinges on, but I certainly don’t.

LS

Now that we’ve cleared the ground a bit, let’s get to the ideas that actually animate conservatism. One way of approaching these is to look at the particular ways conservatives argue — which is something you investigated on an early episode of Know Your Enemy.

 

MS

In his 1991 book The Rhetoric of Reaction, Albert O. Hirschman laid out three categories of conservative argument, which he called perversity, futility, and jeopardy. The perversity thesis basically says that if you try to make a progressive change, the opposite will happen, the problem you’re trying to solve will be exacerbated. The futility thesis more or less implies that you can’t change anything — that there are certain iron laws of economics or history that you simply can’t get around and which prevent real change from happening. Finally, the jeopardy thesis says that if you try to make progressive change, it will jeopardize some other deeply cherished good or value — i.e., you can’t do one thing without destroying something else. All of them amount to saying it’s just impossible to really change anything, and if you try, it’s likely you’ll not only fail but cause havoc and destruction in the process.

Once you see these arguments laid out, it’s impossible not to see them everywhere on the right — so many have made comments to that effect to us, that the episode on Hirschman’s book was revelatory for them. In that episode, we spent a fair amount of time discussing what those kinds of rhetorical moves can mean now in relation to stuff like evolutionary biology and Jordan Peterson or the general conservative attitude toward gender roles and sexuality, to take a few examples. Certain people on the Right, like Peterson or Rod Dreher, are so preoccupied with trans issues, what Dreher would call a “condensed symbol” of everything going wrong with the world. (Peterson first came to prominence, let’s recall, when he refused to use people’s preferred pronouns.) The arguments these people make are a good example of the futility thesis in action: the belief there are iron laws that cannot be transgressed, that doing so is a kind of madness that ultimately is, well, futile. If you fight “nature,” it fights back. But also, more generally, the perversity thesis is probably the most pervasive in terms of how the Right argues and is what’s lurking behind the rhetoric about how something like Medicare for All will inevitably become a complicated boondoggle that couldn’t possibly work.

SAB

The perversity thesis also has a quality that implies, say, providence laughing in the face of efforts to change things. Whatever you try to do, the opposite is going to happen — in essence, that you’ll be punished for trying. It’s a sort of looking-down-the-nose at anyone with the hubris to think they might actually be able to change anything. You hear that not only with the health-care stuff but also in relation to the minimum wage or innumerable other progressive reforms. The Left uses these strategies, too, particularly in its internecine debates. Revolutionary Marxists, for example, are often critical of reformists on the Left in ways that echo the perversity thesis: i.e., you’ll try to change things for the better but will end up further embedding the existing social order. These arguments are available, and anyone can use them. They’re effective rhetorical strategies.

LS

The conservative relationship with markets is fascinating. From the 1960s onward, the market strain in American conservatism increasingly became a dominant one, to the point of making the market into a kind of religion. On your show, you’ve talked about currents in conservatism less interested in markets — particularly from social conservatives who view the market as too atomizing to be a foundation for ordered political community. An obvious Trump-era example that comes to mind is some of the stuff Tucker Carlson has been pushing on his show, or the recent National Conservatism conference. To what extent is it even possible to envision a conservatism that’s less interested in markets at this point?

MS

It’s a good question, in part because we recently recorded an episode on the Koch brothers, right-wing funding, and some of the institutions that make up the conservative movement — and we used Jane Mayer’s book Dark Money as a jumping-off point. When you realize how much the Koch brothers have their tentacles in almost every nook and cranny of the Republican Party, it is hard to imagine that the entire party will adopt a completely different economic philosophy in the near future. That said, reading about the Koch brothers, one of the things you see is that they’re about much more than classical liberalism or abstract appeals to “free markets” — they want their businesses deregulated; they chafe at being held accountable for poisoning water or giving workers cancer; they actually don’t want competition but to crowd out anyone who might challenge them. They hire private investigators to destroy their critics.

Koch Industries made a lot of their early money from Hitler and Stalin and government contracts. A lot of these big fortunes on the Right owe a lot to the government.

Many on the Right, their commitment to capitalism and free markets is more contingent or provisional than you might think — an expression, in part, of their self-interest in a particular moment or historical period. So where I see things going is an approach to economic policy wherein if redistribution happens, it’ll happen for certain people: meaning mostly white people. That shift could be easier than we might think because, as we all know, all these people are hypocrites. None of them actually believe in a totally free market, or, rather, they only started believing in it once they gained a position of dominance within it. Many are just rich kids who pull the ladder up behind them. And even the National Conservatives, who are the ones ostensibly formulating more populist economic policies, are very careful to not talk like Bernie or Elizabeth Warren. They’re ultimately trying to carve out this space where they distinguish themselves from the Left while rhetorically updating their economic vision and adjusting to current realities, including the GOP’s increasing reliance on downscale white voters.

I think even plutocrats, if they have to pick, would prefer welfare chauvinism administered by Republicans to the real attacks on their wealth and power promised by the Left.

SAB

It’s worth noting that there’s always been a certain tendency in conservatism that’s suspicious of capitalism and markets in the sense that they don’t have a soul and undermine traditional values and local ideals like community. When conservatives criticize market fundamentalism, it’s not like Marx in the Communist Manifesto saying, “All that is solid melts into air,” but there’s nevertheless always been a somewhat analogous tendency on the Right.

Something I took away from our recent discussion of the Kochs and these other massive fortunes that have played such an important role in setting the policy agenda for the Republican Party is that, in some ways, their money has propped up a set of ideas that are deeply unpopular. Hardly any voters at all are people who are both socially conservative and market fundamentalist. Besides conservative intellectuals, the people in this category number very few. So, from a strategic, vote-getting perspective, moving in the direction of unapologetic social conservatism plus some amount of communitarian economics does seem wise.

The moment we’re in now is sort of a test for the idea that libertarianism is central to conservatism. It’s true that the Kochs never spend any money on reducing immigration, and in fact have always wanted there to be cheap immigrant labor flowing into the country for the purposes of corporate profits. I often wonder: Would the needs of global capital have been better served by a Hillary Clinton presidency or a Donald Trump presidency? And, in some ways, I’m not convinced it’s the latter. Capital hates Trump’s posture on trade, as do the Never Trumpers at the National Review. Because there is a set of priorities that the National Conservatives are identifying: namely, how to preserve an idea of America that will be undermined by more and more immigration, and, whether acknowledged or not, I think there’s an undercurrent of unconscious belief that there will be massive dislocation wrought by climate change even if we do the things we need to do very soon. Welfare chauvinism of a certain kind, which is already on the rise in Europe, makes a lot of sense for conservatives in America because it allows them to say, “Look, there’s an era of scarcity and statelessness coming, and what our party is offering you is that you, citizens, are going to be taken care of while the hordes of people at the gates don’t count as human beings.”

The reason conservative rhetoric is moving in this direction is that there are material conditions creating a necessity for a change and open borders, and the Koch-aligned preferences for open borders and immigration is not going to have much of a constituency, whereas redistribution for white people and people who count as “real Americans” might. That’s why a Trump presidency that had actually embraced Steve Bannon’s ideas and been able to implement them would have been far more dangerous.

LS

From being in the wilderness after the triumph of the New Deal consensus, the fringes of the conservative movement successfully rallied to redefine and realign American politics in the 1980s. That’s a recipe that socialists would very much like to repeat from the left. So what, if any, lessons can we learn from the Right’s success?

 

MS

One of the most important strategic decisions movement conservatism made was to actually try to acquire power through the vehicle of the Republican Party — in other words, they made a choice for power over purity. And I think the importance of that cannot be overstated. One thing the Right did really well was actually try to figure out how to not just bring different factions together, but also try to theorize how they could actually cohere in some way. Earlier, I mentioned Frank Meyer and his fusionist project, marrying anti-communism, free-market economics, and moral traditionalism — and I wonder if something like that is what the Left needs to think about, i.e., doing real work to figure out what the real points of commonality are and what the underlying theoretical coherence of a forceful but nonetheless ecumenical left might be. That’s something the Right did really well — they attempted to give reasons for why the various conservative factions should work together to seize power.

SAB

One thing the Right doesn’t do is leave potent symbolic language or powerful existing infrastructures on the table for their opponents to control. So the Goldwater conservatives looked at the Republican Party and recognized it was something they could use to instantiate their ideas. And I tend to think it would be very unwise of the nascent socialist left to look at the Democratic Party and not reach a similar conclusion. That’s not at all mutually exclusive with being primarily focused on things like trade unionism, and obviously we can’t just be the vanguard trying to take over the Democratic Party, because you ultimately need an organized constituency that’s sufficiently powerful. A lot of debates about electoralism on the Left present us with a false choice. One thing that the Right does well is simultaneously know where it’s going and what it wants to achieve, while also intervening and engaging with politics in the present with a view to changing conditions — so that its ultimate ideological goals can be fulfilled. In other words, keeping one eye on the ground and the other on the horizon. The Left can and should do the same.

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Forward: Twitter Won’t Ban White Nationalists Because It Would Also Affect Republicans

Twitter can’t ban white nationalists in the same way it has removed ISIS-affiliated terrorists from the platform because doing so would affect the accounts of Republican politicians, Vice reported Thursday, citing an internal all-hands meeting that occurred last month.

According to Vice, a technical employee explained to his peers at the meeting that any algorithms used to detect and remove white nationalist rhetoric would inevitably lead to automatic bans of GOP members.

Twitter told Vice that their account of the meeting was “not [an] accurate characterization of our policies or enforcement—on any level.” But experts interviewed by Vice agreed that the social media platform was in a difficult position.

“Most people can agree a beheading video or some kind of ISIS content should be proactively removed, but when we try to talk about the alt-right or white nationalism, we get into dangerous territory, where we’re talking about [Iowa Rep.] Steve King or maybe even some of Trump’s tweets, so it becomes hard for social media companies to say all of this ‘this content should be removed,’” extremism researcher Amarnath Amarasingam of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue told Vice.

King has repeatedly used his Twitter account to promote white nationalists, including retweeting a British neo-Nazi and writing an endorsement of Faith Goldy – who was herself banned from Facebook for white nationalism – in her quixotic quest to be elected mayor of Toronto.

President Trump, who met with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey at the White House earlier this week, has also spread white nationalist talking points on Twitter.

But while Trump, King and even white supremacist leader Richard Spencer have yet to be suspended from the service, others with less political power, such as anti-Semitic failed congressional candidate Paul Nehlen, have been. Currently, white nationalists are removed after a manual review process, not via algorithm.

Another researcher, JM Berger, pointed out to Vice that since so many white nationalists are supporters of President Trump, removing those accounts could lead conservatives to accuse the platform of anti-Republican bias.

Dorsey told Rolling Stone last month that people constantly tweet at him asking him to “get the Nazis off Twitter,” but the reason so many remain is that others fail to report them for violating the site’s terms of service.

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Intelligencer: New Study: High Facebook Usage Linked to Violence

Anyone who has spent a significant amount of time trapped in arguments on Facebook has probably surmised that the News Feed is, well, bad — for productivity, for mental health, and probably for society at large. By prioritizing engagement as a way of evaluating how to rank posts, it exacerbates anger, fear, and long-held biases in users, in a way that seems to almost distort reality.

“But,” you say, “how can we really know this? After all, everyone’s Facebook feed is different and every instance of Facebook-fueled rage is anecdotal.” Fair point. Luckily, a pair of researchers at the University of Warwick have come up with a compelling study, examining more than 3,000 instances of anti-refugee violence in Germany alongside the Facebook usage of the communities in which they occurred. The conclusion is not encouraging to say the least.

From the New York Times:

One thing stuck out. Towns where Facebook use was higher than average, like Altena, reliably experienced more attacks on refugees. That held true in virtually any sort of community — big city or small town; affluent or struggling; liberal haven or far-right stronghold — suggesting that the link applies universally.

Their reams of data converged on a breathtaking statistic: Wherever per-person Facebook use rose to one standard deviation above the national average, attacks on refugees increased by about 50 percent.

(It should be noted that an updated draft of the paper lowers the calculated increase in attacks to 35 percent.)

In addition, the increase in violence did not correlate with higher-than-average general web usage. It was Facebook-specific, regardless of the qualities of the community in which violence occurred. In a statement to the Times, Facebook said, “We’re working on it” (I’m paraphrasing).

The other wrinkle — the one that makes Facebook’s job of moderation pretty much impossible — is this: “Experts believe that much of the link to violence doesn’t come through overt hate speech, but rather through subtler and more pervasive ways that the platform distorts users’ picture of reality and social norms.”

In other words, the Facebook posts that over time achieve a critical mass that results in violence are implicit, not explicit. They are not users saying, “I hate refugees,” or using racial slurs, but users making comments about things like “slowing massive demographic change.”

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The conclusion to draw from this is that Facebook has two options, neither of which seem particularly palatable for the company. It can do more to limit user speech on posts that are not explicitly hateful but couched in the rhetoric of civil discussion — the types of posts that seem to fuel anti-refugee violence. Or it can tweak its distribution mechanisms to minimize overall user engagement with Facebook, which would also reduce the amount of ad money it collects.

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Further Readings on Social Media

• Vox: People over 65 are the most likely to share fake news on Facebook, study finds
• Vox: Facebook’s fake news problem, explained

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Further Reading

• Buzzfeed: The Real Media Machine Behind Trump: Conservative Talk Radio
• Truthout: Conservative Elites Are Fighting for “Values” Invented to Justify Slavery
• Intercept: National Review Is Trying to Rewrite Its Own Racist History
• Amir Fleischmann: The Myth of the Fiscal Conservative
• The Intercept: The Long, Sad, Corrupted Devolution of the GOP, From Eisenhower to Donald Trump
• Washington Post: Why Southern white women vote against feminism
• NY Times: The Real Problem With Trump’s Rallies
• Washington Monthly: How the Right Wing Convinces Itself That Liberals Are Evil
• Mark Davis: ‘Culture Is Inseparable from Race’: Culture Wars from Pat Buchanan to Milo Yiannopoulos

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Trump

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Now This: Donald Trump’s ‘Horrific’ Response to the Central Park Five Case | Opinions | NowThis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Paf8MPhSG08

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Ta-Nehisi Coates: ‘It’s Impossible to Imagine Trump Without the Force of Whiteness’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyiH3YcvRH0

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Trump’s Explicit Racism

• Pre-Election Racism
  • Repeatedly sued for Housing Discrimination/Not renting to black people
  • Bought full page ads asking for death penalty for Central Park 5
    • Who were innocent
  • One of the main supporters of the “Birther Movement” conspiracy
• Trump’s Racist Election Platform
  • Developed his taking points from Obama era racist talk shows
  • Banning Muslims immigrants/promoting national registry for Muslims
  • Call Latino immigrants rapists and drug dealers
  • Refused to condemn David Duke or other white nationalists
  • Used idea of a wall as a racial dog whistle against immigrants of color
  • He promised to institute a national “stop and frisk” policy
  • Amid heightened tension with police shootings of unarmed black people Trump decried a “war on police”
  • Painted a dark portrait of an America under assault by people of color through crime, immigration, and competition for jobs

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Trumps Election Platform: Frontline Divided States of America – Part  2

https://youtu.be/9L3QRSfD0so

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Trump’s Road to the White House (full film) | FRONTLINE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMwXKl0odq8&list=PL7UIsWY6b8bZtUg8KiQWU1eh1pnBsL8-K&index=4

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Trumps Racist Presidential Actions

• Islamophobia
  • Travel ban against 7 Muslim majority countries not tied to any terrorist attacks
  • Falsely pushes the narrative that Islamic Terrorism is worst than white terrorism
  • Retweeted misleading and inflammatory anti Muslim videos from a far right British extremist group
• White Nationalism
  • Defends White Nationalists and Nazis at Charlottesville from Unite the Right Rally
    • Helping white extremism grow in US
  • Defunded programs countering violent extremism on groups such as neo-Nazis and KKK
  • Appointed strong white nationalist as advisors (Steven Miller, Steve Bannon, Sebastian Gorka, etc)
• Racism towards Latin immigrants
  • Separated children from 1000s of immigrant parents
  • Targeting non-criminals for deportation
  • Dismantling DACA
  • Instead of helping dying Puerto Ricans he covered up their deaths
• Racism against black people
  • Leading the mischaracterization for NFL’s protest over police brutality of black people as hating the military
    • Call black players protesting SOBs
  • Encourages police brutality at a speech to law enforcement officers
  • DOJ stop investigation police brutality and started investigation white discrimination in colleges
• Racist Quotes
  • Hatians all have AIDS
  • Nigerians all live in huts
  • Haiti and African nations are shithole nations. He wants more immigrants from places like Norway
  • Call unathorized immigrants “animals”
  • Uses racists nicknames and imagery
    • Pocahontas, bad hombres, star of David

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The Root: Trump’s Most Racist Moments

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcWZ0GPrSkE

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NY Times: Donald Trump’s Racism: The Definitive List

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Rolling Stones: Trump’s Long History of Racism

“Trump gave a press conference (August 15, 2017 in response to the violence in the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” Rally) Tuesday during which he essentially unsaid all the good things he asserted in his speech Monday. While he claimed he still condemned neo-Nazis and white supremacists, he also said there were “many fine people” protesting alongside the people carrying swastika flags and shields bearing racist symbols. He expressed clearly his opposition to taking down Confederate monuments. He once again blamed both sides (white nationalists and their protestors) equally for the violence that broke out. He confirmed his complete inability to understand what systemic racism is and his own role in perpetuating it…

…The racists and Nazis and white supremacists of all stripes who carried that flag were heartened by Trump’s failure to denounce them or their ideology in the immediate aftermath of the violence in Charlottesville and the murder of Heather Heyer. And his tepid, reluctant, TelePrompTer-fed denunciation of racism days later appears to have done little to discourage their belief that he supports them in the deepest, darkest, most wizened recesses of his heart.

Though it’s technically true that no one but Donald Trump knows what’s in Donald Trump’s heart, he’s given us some pretty good clues. He likely thinks swastika-toting Nazis and hood-wearing KKK members are bad guys – those are the easy targets everyone knows we’re supposed to denounce – but the entitled, clean-cut, polo-wearing, torch-bearing racists chanting about how they won’t be replaced? Those are the people who put him into office. They’re his people. And they know he’s their leader because they know Donald Trump is, like they are, racist.

Oh, they wouldn’t put it that way. They think the real racism is the affirmative action that gives people of color a chance in a world that hands people who look like me privilege from birth. They believe the real racists are the ones who declare black lives matter. (“What, ours don’t?”) But like the president they cheer, they’re racist as hell.

You don’t even have to look into Trump’s heart to see his racism. You only have to look at all the things he’s done and said over the years – from the early Seventies, when he settled with the Justice Department over accusations of housing discrimination, to Monday, when just hours after his speech news broke he is considering pardoning anti-immigrant sheriff Joe Arpaio.

Arpaio was also Trump’s partner in crime in pushing the birther conspiracy that promulgated the ugly lie our first black president was born in Kenya. We’ve conveniently forgotten (if not forgiven) how Trump spent years – years! – pushing a conspiracy based on nothing more than the assumption that a black man with a funny name couldn’t possibly be a genuine American, not like we are.

Trump also has a weird obsession with the superiority of his own genes in the face of all evidence to the contrary. That may explain why racism so often seems like his default setting, like the time he took out a full-page ad demanding the execution of five kids of color accused of raping a jogger in Central Park. Even in 2016, years after they were proven innocent, Trump stood by his actions.

Last year was when Trump put his racism on full display for the country to see. From launching his campaign by calling Mexicans rapists, to going to war with the parents of a Muslim soldier killed in battle, to encouraging violence against minority protesters at his rally, to promising to build a wall and make Mexico pay for it, he built a presidential campaign on racial resentment and fear. Those were deliberate choices he made. His campaign stoked white entitlement and outrage at every turn, sending out dog whistles and sometimes glaring billboards that this was the campaign for angry white people…

…Racism isn’t limited to the thugs marching in Charlottesville. It pervades American culture like humidity in the D.C. summer air. You don’t get to say guys in hoods are bad and declare the job done. For white people, fighting racism (and all bigotry) must be a constant effort that includes self-reflection.

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The Atlantic: Hate Groups are Growing Under Trump

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4a-QwKMbqkM

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Saloon: Trump’s Department of Homeland Security is defunding an anti-Nazi program

“The program, called Life After Hate, tries to deradicalize neo-Nazis.  The Department of Homeland Security has inexplicably cut funds to a program intended to wean people off neo-Nazism. Life After Hate had been scheduled to receive $400,000 during the final days of President Barack Obama’s administration, according to a report by Politico. After President Donald Trump’s administration decided to review a $10 million grant for the “Countering Violent Extremism” program, the Trump team decided to drop funding for Life After Hate.

It is unclear what the rationale was for doing so, since the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to Politico’s inquiry for comment. That said, the organization’s founder Christian Picciolini indicated that his group has received a 20-fold increase in requests for help since Election Day, suggesting that it needs funding more than ever…

…Studies have found that racism, more than economic considerations or authoritarian tendencies, played a crucial role in Trump’s election victory in 2016.”

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Democracy Now: Trump Admin Disbanded Domestic Terror Unit Amid Rising Far-Right Violence

 

The latest white nationalist killing comes after the Department of Homeland Security disbanded its domestic terrorism unit last year, reassigning its analysts to other departments. DHS says the threat of “homegrown extremism” has been significantly reduced, but in a review of 50 murders committed by extremists in 2018, the Anti-Defamation League found 49 came at the hands of right-wing extremists, with white supremacists alone accounting for 39 of the murders.

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Democracy Now: Virginia Study Finds Increased School Bullying In Areas That Voted For Trump

Francis Huang of the University of Missouri and Dewey Cornell of the University of Virginia used data from a school climate survey taken by over 150,000 students across Virginia. They looked at student responses to questions about bullying and teasing from 2015 and 2017. Their findings were published Wednesday in Educational Researcher, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Educational Research Association.

In the 2017 responses, Huang and Cornell found higher rates of bullying and certain types of teasing in areas where voters favored Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.

Seventh- and eighth-graders in areas that favored Trump reported bullying rates in spring 2017 that were 18 percent higher than students living in areas that went for Clinton. They were also 9 percent more likely to report that kids at their schools were teased because of their race or ethnicity.

In the 2015 data, there were “no meaningful differences” in those findings across communities, the researchers wrote.

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Further Readings

• Politifact: Did counties hosting a Trump rally in 2016 see a 226% spike in hate crimes?
• Business Insider: Hate crimes increased 226% in places Trump held a campaign rally in 2016, study claims
• NY Times: Trump Pays $2 Million to 8 Charities for Misuse of Foundation

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Trump’s Strategies

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Source: George Lakoff

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Strategies from the Trump Presidency: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

Delegitimizing News, Whataboutism, Trolling

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZAPwfrtAFY

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CNN: A list of people and things Donald Trump tried to get canceled before he railed against ‘cancel culture’

President Donald Trump is now campaigning as a warrior against what he says is a left-wing “cancel culture” that seeks to get people punished or banished for supposedly objectionable words or acts.

“One of their political weapons is ‘cancel culture’ — driving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters and demanding total submission from anyone who disagrees. This is the very definition of totalitarianism, and it is completely alien to our culture and our values, and it has absolutely no place in the United States of America,” Trump said in a July 3 speech at Mount Rushmore.

This is a curious argument, to put it mildly, coming from Donald Trump.

Trump has long railed against “political correctness.” But he has also tried for years to get people and entities punished or banished for what he considers objectionable words and acts. Trump has explicitly advocated cancellations, boycotts and firings on numerous occasions — often simply because he doesn’t like something his target has said.

 

We made a list of such occasions. Don’t bother telling us it isn’t complete; there are so many examples of Trump playing canceler that we’re sure we missed some.

And we deliberately omitted cases in which Trump as President fired officials or called before his presidency for political officials to be fired for political reasons. Though definitions of supposed “cancel culture” vary, those cases, in our view, just don’t qualify. CNN holds elected officials and candidates accountable by pointing out what’s true and what’s not.

Here’s a look at our recent fact checks.

Here’s the list in chronological order.

August 2012: Trump says Black journalist Touré, then a co-host of the MSNBC show “The Cycle,” should be “forced to resign” for comments in which Touré uttered a variant of the N-word while arguing that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney was using racially coded language to try to make President Barack Obama seem frightening. (Touré had apologized before Trump’s demand.)

November 2012: Trump suggests the firing of then-MSNBC host Chris Matthews for saying, on the night of Obama’s victory, that he was “so glad” Hurricane Sandy had occurred, because of its political impact. (Matthews had apologized before Trump’s suggestion.)

December 2012: Trump calls for the firing of Vanity Fair magazine Editor Graydon Carter, with whom he had feuded for years, over what he declares the magazine’s “worst ever issue.”

December 2012: Trump says “Scots should boycott Glenfiddich garbage” because the whisky brand selected Michael Forbes, a farmer who refused to sell his land to make way for a Trump golf course, as “Top Scot” of the year.

March 2013: Trump says, “Everyone should cancel HBO until they fire low life dummy Bill Maher! Get going now and feel good about yourself!”

July 2013: Trump asks people to “boycott & cancel subscriptions” to Rolling Stone magazine because of a cover featuring Boston Marathon terrorist Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

October 2013: Trump urges “everybody possible” to “cancel their subscription” to New York Magazine over an insulting tweet about Trump’s marriage from Dan Amira, who was online editor at the time.

March 2014: After Trump is left off a CNBC list of the most influential business leaders, he says, “Stupid poll should be canceled—no credibility.”

May 2014: Trump calls for the firing of, or at least an apology from, the person at The Oklahoman newspaper who wrote a headline calling then-Oklahoma City Thunder NBA star Kevin Durant “Mr. Unreliable.” (The newspaper had already apologized.)

June 2014: Trump says people should “Boycott Mexico” until a Marine reservist who was jailed for crossing the border with loaded guns is released from prison. (He was released later in the year.)

April 2015: Trump suggests that conservative writer Jonah Goldberg, then a senior editor of National Review magazine, should be forced to resign for writing that Trump had been “tweeting like a 14-year-old girl” in response to another conservative writer calling Trump a clown. Trump also suggests Fox News anchor Bret Baier should stop having Goldberg on his show.

June 2015: When Spanish-language television network Univision severed its business relationship with Trump after his campaign launch speech, in which he labeled Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists, Trump tweets, “Anyone who wants strong borders and good trade deals for the US should boycott @Univision.”

July 2015: Trump calls for a boycott of Macy’s after Macy’s discontinued its business dealings with him over those same comments about people from Mexico. Trump also tweets “Great” when someone tells him that people are canceling their Macy’s credit cards.

August 2015: Trump calls for the firing of the late conservative writer and Fox News commentator Charles Krauthammer, a regular Trump critic.

September 2015: After National Review editor Rich Lowry argued on Fox News that rival Republican candidate Carly Fiorina had “cut off (Trump’s) balls with the precision of a surgeon” in a primary debate, Trump says: “Incompetent @RichLowry lost it tonight on @FoxNews. He should not be allowed on TV and the FCC should fine him!” (Lowry responds, “I love how Mr. Anti-PC now wants the FCC to fine me. #pathetic.”)

December 2015: Trump calls for the firing of then-CBS News journalist Sopan Deb and NBC/MSNBC journalist Katy Tur over reporting he disputed about how he handled protesters during a rally speech.

February 2016: Trump says people should “boycott all Apple products” until the company stops fighting a government request to break into the cell phone of a deceased California terrorist.

February 2016: Trump says Fox News should fire Republican strategist and commentator Karl Rove for being insufficiently positive about his victory in the Nevada caucuses.

February 2016: Trump calls on the Wall Street Journal to fire its editorial board, which had criticized him, and its pollster, which showed results he didn’t like.

March 2016: Trump proposes a boycott of Megyn Kelly’s Fox News show, complaining that it is too negative toward him.

September 2016: After the Dallas Morning News and Arizona Republic newspapers endorse Hillary Clinton for president and USA Today declares Trump unfit for the office, Trump says, “The people are really smart in cancelling subscriptions to the Dallas & Arizona papers & now USA Today will lose readers! The people get it!”

September 2017: Trump tweets that NFL players and other athletes who don’t stand for the National Anthem should be told, “YOU’RE FIRED.” He says in another tweet, “Fire or suspend!” And at a rally, he says, “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners when somebody disrespects our flag to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now, out, he’s fired, he’s fired.’ “

October 2017: Suggesting he could use the power of the state against media entities he dislikes, Trump muses about challenging the broadcast licenses of NBC and other networks over their news coverage. (He again broached the subject of reviewing NBC’s license in September 2018.)

November 2017: Trump calls for a boycott of CNN.

August 2018: Trump tweets, “Many @harleydavidson owners plan to boycott the company if manufacturing moves overseas. Great! Most other companies are coming in our direction, including Harley competitors.”

June 2019: Trump suggests people stop “using or subscribing” to AT&T to pressure the company to make changes at CNN, which it owns.

September 2019: Trump suggests that actress Debra Messing should be fired for calling on a news outlet to publish the names of people attending a Trump fundraiser and for a tweet promoting a church sign that said “a black vote for Trump is mental illness.” (Messing had apologized for the tweet about the church sign.)

January 2020: Trump says The New York Times should fire columnist Paul Krugman, a winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, for having incorrectly predicted a global recession after Trump’s victory in 2016.

May 2020: The day after Twitter appended a fact check link to dishonest Trump claims about mail-in voting, Trump threatens to shut down social media companies: “Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives voices. We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen.”

May 2020: Trump seeks the firing of Chuck Todd, host of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” for the show playing a misleadingly shortened clip of comments by Attorney General William Barr. (Todd apologized, saying it was an inadvertent mistake.) Again broaching the power of the state, Trump tags the accounts of the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates television, and its chairman, Ajit Pai.

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Trump White Supremacist Appointments

• Stephen Miller – Senior Advisor for Policy
  • Architect behind polices Muslim Ban and Child Separation
• Stephen Bannon – Chief Strategist (Dismissed)
  • former right-wing fake news media executive for Breitbart News, who created Breitbart into an online destination for white nationalism, anti-semitism, xenophobia, sexism, etc.
• Jeff Sessions – Head of Department of Justice
  • Rejected for a federal judgeship by fellow Republicans for a long history of racist behavior and beliefs
• Kris Kobach – Chairman of Commission on Election Integrity (disbanded)
  • Long history of disenfranchising voters of color, Interstate Crosscheck
• Sebastian Gorka – Counterterrorism Adviser (Dismissed)
  • Member of anti-Semitic, quasi-Nazi Hungarian nationalist group
• Julie Kirchner – Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman
  • former director of FAIR, an anti-immigration group with ties to eugenicis and white supremacist groups and listed as a hate group by the SLPC
• Jon Feere – Adviser to director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement
  • former legal policy analyst for Center for Immigration Studies, one of the many anti-immigration groups founded and funded by eugenicist John Tanton

Stephen Miller – Senior Advisor for Policy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tyum11z-qlY

NBC: Trump Cabinet officials voted in 2018 White House meeting to separate migrant children, say officials

“…At the meeting, Miller accused anyone opposing zero tolerance of being a lawbreaker and un-American, according to the two officials present.

“If we don’t enforce this, it is the end of our country as we know it,” Miller said, according to the two officials. It was not unusual for Miller to make claims like that, but this time he was adamant that the policy move forward, regardless of arguments about resources and logistics.

No one in the meeting made the case that separating families would be inhumane or immoral, the officials said. Any moral argument about immigration “fell on deaf ears” inside the White House, one of the officials said.

“Miller was tired of hearing about logistical problems,” one of the officials said. “It was just ‘Let’s move forward and staff will figure this out.'”

Frustrated, Miller accused Nielsen of stalling and demanded a show of hands. Who was in favor of moving forward? he asked.

A sea of hands went up. Nielsen kept hers down. It was clear she had been outvoted, according to the officials….”

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Stephen Bannon – Chief Strategist (Dismissed)

Stephen Bannon’s,  former right-wing fake news media executive for Breitbart News, created Breitbart into an online destination for white nationalism, anti semitism, xenophobia, sexism, the spreading of lies and conspiracy theories, and hateful rhetoric.  “Breibart” which he described in 2016 as “the platform for the alt-right”

Horrible Titles Steve Bannon Published at Briebart

Including

“Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy”

• “Bill Kristol: Republican Spoiler, Renegade Jew”

• “World Health Organization Report: Trannies 49 Xs Higher HIV Rate”

• “Roger Stone: Huma Abedin ‘Most Likely a Saudi Spy’ With ‘Deep, Inarguable

• “There’s No Hiring Bias Against Women in Tech, They Just Suck at Interviews”

• “Lesbian Bridezillas Bully Bridal Shop Owner Over Religious Beliefs”

• “The Solution to Online ‘Harassment’ Is Simple: Women Should Log Off”

In the August before the 2016 election became Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign manager.  After Trump won the election he made Bannon  his chief strategist, the highest advisor in the nation to the president.  Since then Bannon has pushed many far right policies and executive orders, including the one that put him on the National Security Council, which supposedly Trump didn’t even read before signing.  Bannon has since been removed from the council as a result of public outcry, but is still allowed to attend any meeting and does.  Below are different insights into the life and rise of Steve Bannon. 

History of Steve Bannon’s Ideology

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYhnnN1eLxM

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Learn about Steve Bannon’s history, views and financial backers

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Jeff Sessions – Head of Department of Justice

Jeff was rejected for a federal judgeship by fellow Republicans for a long history of racist behavior and beliefs, including saying the only problem with the Ku Klux Klan was marijuana use among members. He believes that the Voting Rights Act is “intrusive legislation,” allegedly claimed that he wished he could decline all civil rights cases, and openly opposes birthright citizenship.

Some things that Sessions has done as Attorney General right away

• revokes Obama-era directive to phase out private prisons

• enacts harsher sentencing and charges in criminal justice overhaul including low level drug charges

• Orders DOJ to stop civil rights investigations against police departments and to stop monitoring troubled police stations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtQDKZ3DllE

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Kris Kobach – Vice Chairman of  Trump’s Commission on Election Integrity

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88ShM3YJFj8

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Sebastian Gorka – Counterterrorism Adviser

The Forward reports Thursday that officers of Vitézi Rend, an anti-Semitic, quasi-Nazi Hungarian nationalist group, say Gorka is a sworn member. Gorka wore a medal typically worn by Vitézi Rend members during Trump’s inauguration ball, but said at the time that it was a gesture honoring his late father.  Gorka was previously national-security editor at Breitbart.  Gorka is known to be outspokenly anti-Islam.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=398HJb0_PFg

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Mark Morgan – Former Trump Picked ICE Director and current acting commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection

Politico: Trump’s pick for ICE director: I can tell which migrant children will become gang members by looking into their eyes

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Julie Kirchner – Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman

As the former director of FAIR, an anti-immigration group with ties to eugenicist and white supremacist groups (read more about FAIR) and listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SLPC), Kirchner advocated harsh restrictions on immigrants.  As the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman she is now in charge of providing immigrants assistance from handling a wide range of legal immigration matters, including applications for citizenship and green cards, granting legal status to those in extreme circumstances, such as refugees and asylum seekers and adjudicating applications from undocumented immigrants who were brought to the country illegally as children, sometimes referred to as “dreamers” or DACA recipients.  Immigrant advocates are very concern Kirchner will use this position, made to help immigrants, to instead hurt them.

Pro Publica: Former Director of Anti-Immigration Group Set to Be Named Ombudsman at U.S. Immigration Agency

SPLC: Federation for American Immigration Reform

SPLC: The Nativist Lobby: Three Faces of Intolerance

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Jon Feere – Adviser to Thomas D. Homan, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement

Feere was a former legal policy analyst for the Center for Immigration Studies, which is one of the many anti-immigration groups founded and funded by eugenicist John Tanton, who operates a racist publishing company and has written that to maintain American culture, “a European-American majority” is required.  Feere is also an advocate of ending birthright citizenship, a provision in the 14^th Amendment that states all born in the United States are automatically granted American citizenship.

SPLC: The Nativist Lobby: Three Faces of Intolerance

SPLC: Another Anti-Immigrant Extremist to Join the Trump Administration

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DailyMail: Trump intern flashes ‘alt-right’ symbol used by notorious extremists during group photo with the president

• Former White House intern Jack Breuer held up a ‘white power’ sign during a photo-op with President Trump and fellow interns in the East Room in November
• Breuer made the same gesture that alt-right protesters made at Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, along with Richard Spencer and Milo Yiannopoulos
• The sign only works if made with the right hand. It is said to depict the letter ‘W’ with the outstretched fingers, and a ‘P’ with the circle
• Together, ‘WP’ stands for White Power, and is seen in memes of Pepe the Frog
• A fellow intern told DailyMail.com: ‘Jack’s a good kid and is probably doing it as a joke. Some people do consider it a joke because it is the OK sign’
• Breuer, an Emory University alum in his early 20s, worked for Stephen Miller, the president’s senior advisor for policy for four months starting in September

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NPR: Trump’s Judicial Appointments Were Confirmed At Historic Pace In 2018

The Trump administration more than doubled the number of judges it confirmed to federal appeals courts in 2018, exceeding the pace of the last five presidents and stocking the courts with lifetime appointees who could have profound consequences for civil rights, the environment and government regulations.

A new analysis by Lambda Legal, which advocates for the LGBT community, reports that five of the country’s 12 circuit courts are now composed of more than 25 percent of Trump-appointed judges.

Trump Is Reshaping The Judiciary. A Breakdown By Race, Gender And Qualification

 

The report concludes that the 8th Circuit, which covers Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota, has experienced the “most significant transformation,” followed by the 7th Circuit across the U.S. Midwest and the 5th Circuit, which spans Texas, Mississippi and Louisiana.

Those courts play a major role in shaping the law, since they are often the destination of last resort. The Supreme Court agrees to hear only a small percentage of the petitions it reviews.

“Judges protect what we value most in society. No matter who you are, where you come from, what you look like, or who you love, we all deserve judges who can be fair and impartial,” said Sharon McGowan, legal director and chief strategy officer at Lambda Legal. “That’s why protecting our courts needs to be a two-party job. Democrats and Republicans alike owe it to the American people to ensure that the federal courts remain an impartial institution administering ‘equal justice for all,’ not just the wealthy and the powerful.”

Lambda Legal has closely followed the Trump judicial picks, because it argues the administration has been selecting candidates with a “hostility” toward LGBT people. That includes a judge who wrote that transgender people are “delusional,” and another who sat on the board of the Nebraska Family Alliance, which advocated for conversion therapy and against marriage equality.

To conservatives, the Trump approach to judges represents the administration’s most enduring legacy and a central reason he won the White House. Many of the Trump nominees are members of the Federalist Society, an elite group that has made a point of creating a pipeline of future judges.

Last year, at its annual gala, the group honored former Trump White House counsel Don McGahn and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell — a nod to their success in confirming federal judges. In a year-end fundraising letter for 2018, the Society reported that its network now numbers 75,000 people and “we are on the eve of closing a calendar year that was hardly imaginable in our early days.”

It continued: “Our members–students, lawyers, law professors, legislators, public officials and more–are filling key positions in state and federal governments, in academia, and the private sector.”

The trend on judges is likely to continue this year, since Republicans hold 53 seats in the Senate. McConnell often points to confirming judges as a key success of the GOP-controlled Senate since Trump was elected. It’s a message that may have boosted the enthusiasm of conservative voters in the midterm elections, particularly with the heated confirmation battle over Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh coming just weeks earlier.

Since Democrats won control of the House, effectively blocking the conservative legislative agenda for two years, confirming judges and other presidential appointees in the Senate is perhaps the clearest avenue for Trump to advance his agenda before facing re-election in 2020.

With that political reality in mind, left-leaning groups know they are facing an uphill battle in the judiciary.

Christopher Kang, chief counsel at the advocacy group Demand Justice, said he’s “heartened” that Senate Democrats refused to do a deal to confirm more Trump picks at the end of 2018.

But, he added, “it’s not enough for Democrats to simply stop fast-tracking Trump’s judges — we have been calling on them to oppose every one. Trump’s nominees are the most conservative in history, and Republicans have broken every rule, custom and norm possible to steamroll the Senate’s constitutional responsibly. It’s time for Democrats to do everything they can and unite in their opposition.”

Kang also pointed out that for all of Trump’s success in filling judicial vacancies, only one African-American and one Hispanic judge have won confirmation in the Trump era. NPR recently examined the way the White House has been reshaping the judiciary by race, gender and qualification.

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Trump Supporters

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• 2012 Election
  • 88% of GOP voters were white
  • 98% of GOP state voters were white

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2016 Exit Poll Data

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The Atlantic: The Nationalist’s Delusion

• 1990 David Duke, former KKK grand wizard almost won the Louisiana Senator election with 43% of the vote
  • The general media consensus was his support wasn’t racist but was from economic suffering
    • But the poorest counties, people facing the most economic suffering, supported his opponent
    • Duke picked up nearly 60 percent of the white vote on all economic levels
  • By accepting economic theory the media promoted the candidate’s own vision of himself as a savior of the working class
• 26 years later Trump ran for president on an explicitly racist campaign
  • His supporters, just like Duke’s supporters, believed they weren’t racist while supporting an openly racist candidate
  • Again general media consensus was support wasn’t racist but from economic suffering of the working classes. But again..
    • A 2017 Public Religion Research Institute study found white working-class voters who had “experienced a loss of social and economic standing were not any more likely to favor Trump than those whose status remained the same or improved.”
    • Overall, poor and working-class Americans did not support Trump
    • it was white Americans on all levels of the income spectrum who secured his victory.
  • Many studies found main factor for Trump support among white voters wasn’t education, income, but racial resentment

“Trump embodied his supporters’ most profound beliefs—combining an insistence that discriminatory policies were necessary with vehement denials that his policies would discriminate and absolute outrage that the question would even be asked. It was not just Trump’s supporters who were in denial about what they were voting for, but Americans across the political spectrum, who, as had been the case with those who had backed Duke, searched desperately for any alternative explanation—outsourcing, anti-Washington anger, economic anxiety—to the one staring them in the face…

These supporters will not change their minds, because this is what they always wanted: a president who embodies the rage they feel toward those they hate and fear, while reassuring them that that rage is nothing to be ashamed of…. The specific dissonance of Trumpism—advocacy for discriminatory, even cruel, policies combined with vehement denials that such policies are racially motivated—provides the emotional core of its appeal. It is the most recent manifestation of a contradiction as old as the United States, a society founded by slaveholders on the principle that all men are created equal…

Nearly a year into his presidency, Trump has reneged or faltered on many of his biggest campaign promises—on renegotiating NAFTA, punishing China, and replacing the Affordable Care Act with something that preserves all its popular provisions but with none of its drawbacks. But his commitment to endorsing state violence to remake the country into something resembling an idealized past has not wavered.” Adam Serwer – The Atlantic

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“First, the Democrats and the pollsters completely misunderstood white voters. Whites in almost all demographics voted for Trump. Only college educated white women voted for Clinton, but according to CNN exit polls, it was only by a seven-point margin. 159 The overwhelming white support for Trump represented the continuation of a decades-long trend that has largely gone unnoticed: white voters have been voting for Democrats in presidential election in smaller and smaller numbers since the 1990s. And, for the record, Clinton’s loss to Trump was not due to a gender backlash, that is, men voting against Clinton because she was a woman. Albeit men voted for Trump by a 12 percent margin this was similar to the margin that Bush got against Gore in 2000. And 54 percent of women voted for Clinton compared to 42 percent for Trump, a 12 percent margin in line with the 2012 and 2008 margins between Obama and McCain and Romney respectively. The biggest factor in this election was race as white men voted 62 to 31 for Trump and white women 52 to 43. And all nonwhite men voted for Clinton at a rate of 60 percent or higher.160 Race TRUMPED gender in this cycle, which, arguably, has been the case for a long time.161 Robert L. Reece, one of my former students, analyzed the Democrat’s decreasing share of the white vote for Scalawag magazine’s post-election coverage:

The percentage of White people voting for the modern Democratic party peaked at 44 percent in 1996 after the party’s neoliberal turn-after getting destroyed in the pre-Clinton elections. Since 1996, the percentage of White people voting Democrat has slowly declined each presidential election, dropping to 39 percent for Barack Obama in 2012. Hillary Clinton only won 37 percent of the White vote. … The Republican candidate won White people by 12 percentage points in 2008 and 20 percentage points in 2012, similar margins to the two previous Democratic candidates who lost to George W. Bush. The difference for was that he was able to garner record voter turnout numbers among people of color, particularly black people, to compensate for the gap in White votes.

Reece goes on to note that Hillary Clinton’s 37 percent was the lowest Democrat received since the party was consistently losing in landslides in the 1980s. This trend is borne out even more in a study by the Pew Research Center. They report that the gap between the percentage of white voters who identify as Republican and the percentage who identify as Democrat increased from seventeen points to twenty-nine points between 1992 and 2016. as white loyalty to the Democratic Party decreased rapidly. Moreover, the percentage of white voters identifying as Democrat decreased five points, from 44 percent to 39 percent, during Barack Obama’s presidency, while increasing from from 46 percent to 54 percent for Republicans.163 The Democrats failed to account for their steadily declining white support and mistakenly assumed that they could win some of it back.

Moreover, the percentage of white voters identifying as Democrat decreased Cue points, from 44 percent to 39 percent, during Barack Obama’s presidency, while increasing from 46 percent to 54 percent for Republicans.163 The Democrats failed to account for their steadily declining white support and mistakenly assumed that they could win some of it back.

While Trump’s erratic antics seemed as if they would alienate vote ularly liberal white voters, the Democrat’s reputation as the party of inclusion and diversity did little to capture those white voters. Even Trump supporters who were “normal” whites (not the people showed in the news and classified as “racists”) were apathetic regarding Trump’s explicitly racist agenda. For example, on CNN commentator Van Jones’s television show The Messy Truth he asks Trump supporters to elaborate on the reasons for their support. Many of them do not deny Trump’s very apparent bigotry. They simply feel as if other issues, such as his argument that he will make the economy “great again,” are more important.164 Interestingly, some of Jones’s respondents claimed they were former Obama supporters who found themselves more compelled to vote for Trump than Clinton, which leads to my next point that Hillary Clinton may have been a poor candidate.

Second, despite her strong support among the Democratic establishment, Clinton was never viewed particularly favorably among the electorate. Although she was a popular secretary of state, with approval ratings that peaked at about 67 percent in 2013, her popularity quickly waned as a presidential candidate. By the time the Democratic Party primary began in April 2015, her approval ratings had fallen to 45 percent. They bottomed out at 36 percent in May 2016, before rising to just over 39 percent as the Democratic National Convention (DNC) began in June.165 Her supporters fervently tried to explain away Clinton’s low approval ratings by claiming that the low ratings were the inevitable result of her lengthy political career. Analysts argued that Clinton had been “vetted” that the ratings were proof that all of her “dirty laundry” had been aired and there was nothing else her political opponents could levy against her. Paradoxically, according to them, low approval ratings were one of her political strengths, but they may have ultimately been her downfall as she could not rally enough voters to win and lost some states in seemingly odd ways. ” Eduardo Bonilla-Silva: Racism without Racists

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Economic Anxiety vs Racial Resentment

• By 2016 Obama had
  • Broke record for most consecutive months of job growth
    • 75 months of job growth
  • When Obama started the unemployment rate was 7.8% in the middle of the “Great Recession”
    • it peaked at 10% in 2009
    • Obama left office with a 4.8%
  • Obama added 11 million jobs
    • Recovering the 8.7 million jobs lost to the “Great Recession”
    • Bringing the economy close to “full employment”
    • Job growth only started to slow since Trump took over
• Despite these trends Trump voters felt bad about economy during Obama admin up until last month
  • Immediately felt better once Trump took over
    • despite no significant differences

Clinton voters’ view on economy stayed

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GOP Voters

• Trump supporters more likely to view blacks negatively
  • (Source: 2016 Reuters Poll)
• Economic concern not leading reason to vote for Trump
  • Growing minorities threatening dominate status groups
    • (white, male, Christians)
  • Believe high-status groups (whites, men, Christians) discriminated against
  • Fear of losing the “American way of life” to foreign influence
  • (Source: 2018 National Academy of Sciences Study)

“Instead of economic concerns, it was more about dominant groups that felt threatened by change and a candidate who took advantage of that trend. For the first time since Europeans arrived in this country, white Americans are being told that they will soon be a minority race.

When members of a historically dominant group feel threatened they go through some interesting psychological twists and turns to make themselves feel okay again. First, they get nostalgic and try to protect the status quo however they can. They defend their own group (“all lives matter”), they start behaving in more traditional ways, and they start to feel more negatively toward other groups.

This could be why in one study, whites who were presented with evidence of racial progress experienced lower self-esteem afterward. In another study, reminding whites who were high in “ethnic identification” that nonwhite groups will soon outnumber them revved up their support for Trump, their desire for anti-immigrant policies, and their opposition to political correctness.” Diana C. Mutz Penn political scientist

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Trump Supporters

• Pew Research
  • 83% of the registered voters who identify as Republican are non-Hispanic white
• Quinnipiac University poll
  • 79% of Republicans approve of the way the president handles race
• Kellog School of Management Study
  • 52% of Trump voters Trump in 2016 presidential election believed blacks are “less evolved” than whites
• 2018 YouGov poll,
  • 59% of Republicans agreed,
    • “If blacks would only try harder, they would be as well off as whites.”
  • 59% of self-identified Republicans believe blacks treated fairly by criminal justice system
  • 70% of Republicans agreed that increased diversity hurts whites
• Washington Post/University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center
  • 55% of white Republicans agreed “blacks have worse jobs, income and housing than white people” because “most just don’t have the motivation or willpower to pull themselves up out of poverty”
• NORC poll
  • 2x as many Republicans than Democrats (42% versus 24%) believe that blacks are lazier than whites

“Pundits blamed white working-class voters and their alleged “economic anxiety” for Trump’s win, seemingly because it was more enticing to focus on poor folks and raucous rally attendees than engage with the prevalence of racism, sexism, and xenophobia in America. In actuality, a significant amount of Trump voters were affluent— and the vast majority of Trump voters were not working class at all.” Kim Kelly – Teen Vogue

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PRRI/The Atlantic Report on 2016 Trump Voters

• Study on why white working-class voters support Trump on 2:1 margin
  • Identification with the Republican Party
    • Voters who identified as Republican were
      • 11x more likely to support Trump
    • Fears about cultural displacement
      • Voters who felt like a stranger in community/believe US needs protecting against foreign influence
        • 5x more likely to favor Trump
      • Support for deporting immigrants living in the country illegally
        • Voters who favored deporting immigrants living in US illegally
          • 3x more likely to support Trump
        • Economic fatalism
          • Voters who said that college education was not worth it
            • 2x as likely to support Trump
• Clinton Support
  • Economic hardship
    • People in fair or poor financial shape
      • 7x more likely to support Clinton, compared to richer people
• Study also provided an in-depth profile of white working-class Americans
  • 65%of white working-class believe American culture and way of life has deteriorated since the 1950s
  • 48% of white working-class say, “things have changed so much that I feel like a stranger in my country.”
  • 68% white working-class believe the American way of life needs to be protected from foreign influence.
  • 68% white working-class believe the U.S. is in danger of losing its culture and identity
  • 62% white working-class believe the growing number of foreign newcomers threatens American culture
  • 52% white working-class believe discrimination against whites is a bigger problem than against blacks
  • 27% White working-class reported their financial status has diminished while 29% said it has improved
  • 60% white working-class, compared to only 32% of white college-educated Americans say because things have gotten so far off track, we need a strong leader who is willing to break the rules.

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The Atlantic: Why Trump Supporters Believe He Is Not Corrupt

• Trump promised to “drain the swamp” in DC
  • 2016 Morning Consult study found
    • “Corruption” was second most common reason for disliking Hillary Clinton
  • Yet Trump supporters don’t seem to mind Trump’s mounting corruption
    • 2018 Morning Consult study found only 14% of GOP voters considered Trump corrupt

“Corruption, to the fascist politician, is really about the corruption of purity rather than of the law.” Jason Stanley – How Fascism Works

• For Trump and supporters, corruption means less violation of law
  • Than the violation of established hierarchies

“For many Republicans, Trump remains uncorrupt—indeed, anticorrupt—because what they fear most isn’t the corruption of American law; it’s the corruption of America’s traditional identity.” Peter Beinart – The Altantic

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Democracy Now: What Led to Trump’s Victory? From Racial Fear to Economic Populism

NIKOLE HANNAH–JONES: Yeah, I think that’s the narrative that media has been using to comfort itself over the last months of this campaign, is that this a problem of the backwards and racist white America that is not representative of white Americans overall. And we just know that that’s not true. We know that, at least with early numbers, that he was winning across the board—yes, he won a very high percentage of the white working-class vote, but if this were simply about economic anxieties, who has more economic anxieties than black Americans, whose unemployment rates are at disastrous levels even now, 12 percent unemployment rate, who have been hurt by these policies more than any other group? If you name the statistic, black Americans are at the bottom of that statistic. Yet they did not go for Trump, Latinos did not go for Trump, Asian Americans did not go for Trump. So I think that this is the—this is the myth that we need to tell ourselves, when really I think we were ignoring the extent of racial anxiety, racial fear, that was across the board in this country. And we do that to our peril.

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The Atlantic: People Voted for Trump Because They Were Anxious, Not Poor

A new study finds that Trump voters weren’t losing income or jobs. Instead, they were concerned about their place in the world.

“For the past 18 months, many political scientists have been seized by one question: Less-educated whites were President Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters. But why, exactly?

Was their vote some sort of cri de coeur about a changing economy that had left them behind? Or was the motivating sentiment something more complex and, frankly, something harder for policy makers to address?

After analyzing in-depth survey data from 2012 and 2016, the University of Pennsylvania political scientist Diana C. Mutz argues that it’s the latter. In a new article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, she added her conclusion to the growing body of evidence that the 2016 election was not about economic hardship.“Instead,” she writes, “it was about dominant groups that felt threatened by change and a candidate who took advantage of that trend.”“For the first time since Europeans arrived in this country,” Mutz notes, “white Americans are being told that they will soon be a minority race.” When members of a historically dominant group feel threatened, she explains, they go through some interesting psychological twists and turns to make themselves feel okay again. First, they get nostalgic and try to protect the status quo however they can. They defend their own group (“all lives matter”), they start behaving in more traditional ways, and they start to feel more negatively toward other groups.

 

This could be why in one study, whites who were presented with evidence of racial progress experienced lower self-esteem afterward. In another study, reminding whites who were high in “ethnic identification” that nonwhite groups will soon outnumber them revved up their support for Trump, their desire for anti-immigrant policies, and their opposition to political correctness.

 

 

Mutz also found that “half of Americans view trade as something that benefits job availability in other countries at the expense of jobs for Americans.”

Granted, most people just voted for the same party in both 2012 and 2016. However, between the two years, people—especially Republicans—developed a much more negative view toward international trade. In 2012, the two parties seemed roughly similar on trade, but in 2016, Hillary Clinton’s views on trade and on “China as a threat” were much further away from the views of the average American than were Trump’s.

Mutz examined voters whose incomes declined, or didn’t increase much, or who lost their jobs, or who were concerned about expenses, or who thought they had been personally hurt by trade. None of those things motivated people to switch from voting for Obama in 2012 to supporting Trump in 2016. Indeed, manufacturing employment in the United States has actually increased somewhat since 2010. And as my colleague Adam Serwer has pointed out, “Clinton defeated Trump handily among Americans making less than $50,000 a year.”

Meanwhile, a few things did correlate with support for Trump: a voter’s desire for their group to be dominant, as well as how much they disagreed with Clinton’s views on trade and China. Trump supporters were also more likely than Clinton voters to feel that “the American way of life is threatened,” and that high-status groups, like men, Christians, and whites, are discriminated against.

This unfounded sense of persecution is far from rare, and it seems to be heightened during moments of societal change. As my colleague Emma Green has written, white evangelicals see more discrimination against Christians than Muslims in the United States, and 79 percent of white working-class voters who had anxieties about the “American way of life” chose Trump over Clinton. As I pointed out in the fall of 2016, several surveys showed many men supported Trump because they felt their status in society was threatened, and that Trump would restore it. Even the education gap in support for Trump disappears, according to one analysis, if you account for the fact that non-college-educated whites are simply more likely to affirm racist views than those with college degrees. (At the most extreme end, white supremacists also use victimhood to further their cause.)

These why-did-people-vote-for-Trump studies are clarifying, but also a little bit unsatisfying, from the point of view of a politician. They dispel the fiction—to use another 2016 meme—that the majority of Trump supporters are disenfranchised victims of capitalism’s cruelties. At the same time, deep-seated psychological resentment is harder for policy makers to address than an overly meager disability check. You can teach out-of-work coal miners to code, but you may not be able to convince them to embrace changing racial and gender norms. You can offer universal basic incomes, but that won’t ameliorate resentment of demographic changes.

In other words, it’s now pretty clear that many Trump supporters feel threatened, frustrated, and marginalized—not on an economic, but on an existential level. Now what?”

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New York Times: Trump Voters Driven by Fear of Losing Status, Not Economic Anxiety, Study Finds

“Ever since Donald J. Trump began his improbable political rise, many pundits have credited his appeal among white, Christian and male voters to “economic anxiety.” Hobbled by unemployment and locked out of the recovery, those voters turned out in force to send Mr. Trump, and a message, to Washington.

Or so that narrative goes.

A study published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences questions that explanation, the latest to suggest that Trump voters weren’t driven by anger over the past, but rather fear of what may come. White, Christian and male voters, the study suggests, turned to Mr. Trump because they felt their status was at risk.

“It’s much more of a symbolic threat that people feel,’’ said Diana C. Mutz, the author of the study and a political science and communications professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where she directs the Institute for the Study of Citizens and Politics. “It’s not a threat to their own economic well-being; it’s a threat to their group’s dominance in our country over all.”

The study is not the first to cast doubt on the prevailing economic anxiety theory. Last year, a Public Religion Research Institute survey of more than 3,000 people also found that Mr. Trump’s appeal could better be explained by a fear of cultural displacement.

 

In her study, Dr. Mutz sought to answer two questions: Is there evidence to support the economic anxiety argument, and did the fear of losing social dominance drive some voters to Mr. Trump? To find answers, she analyzed survey data from a nationally representative group of about 1,200 voters polled in 2012 and 2016.

In both years, participants were asked the same wide-ranging set of questions. Party loyalty overwhelmingly explained how most people voted, but Dr. Mutz’s statistical analysis focused on those who bucked the trend, switching their support to the Republican candidate, Mr. Trump, in 2016.

Even before conducting her analysis, Dr. Mutz noted two reasons for skepticism of the economic anxiety, or “left behind,” theory. First, the economy was improving before the 2016 presidential campaign. Second, while research has suggested that voters are swayed by the economy, there is little evidence that their own financial situation similarly influences their choices at the ballot box.

The analysis offered even more reason for doubt.

Losing a job or income between 2012 and 2016 did not make a person any more likely to support Mr. Trump, Dr. Mutz found. Neither did the mere perception that one’s financial situation had worsened. A person’s opinion on how trade affected personal finances had little bearing on political preferences. Neither did unemployment or the density of manufacturing jobs in one’s area.

 

“It wasn’t people in those areas that were switching, those folks were already voting Republican,” Dr. Mutz said.

For further evidence, Dr. Mutz also analyzed a separate survey, conducted in 2016 by NORC at the University of Chicago, a research institution. It showed that anxieties about retirement, education and medical bills also had little impact on whether a person supported Mr. Trump.

Last year’s Public Religion Research Institute report went even further, finding a link, albeit a weak one, between poor white, working-class Americans and support for Hillary Clinton.

While economic anxiety did not explain Mr. Trump’s appeal, Dr. Mutz found reason instead to credit those whose thinking changed in ways that reflected a growing sense of racial or global threat.

In 2012, voters perceived little difference between themselves and the candidates on trade. But, by 2016, the voters had moved slightly right, while they perceived Mr. Trump as moving about as far right as Mrs. Clinton had moved left. As a result, the voters, in a defensive crouch, found themselves closer to Mr. Trump.

On the threat posed by China, voters hardly moved between 2012 and 2016, but while they perceived both presidential candidates as being to their left in 2012, they found Mr. Trump as having moved just to their right by 2016, again placing them closer to the Republican candidate than the Democratic one.

In both cases, the findings revealed a fear that American global dominance was in danger, a belief that benefited Mr. Trump and the Republican Party.

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“The shift toward an antitrade stance was a particularly effective strategy for capitalizing on a public experiencing status threat due to race as well as globalization,” Dr. Mutz wrote in the study.

Her survey also assessed “social dominance orientation,” a common psychological measure of a person’s belief in hierarchy as necessary and inherent to a society. People who exhibited a growing belief in such group dominance were also more likely to move toward Mr. Trump, Dr. Mutz found, reflecting their hope that the status quo be protected.

“It used to be a pretty good deal to be a white, Christian male in America, but things have changed and I think they do feel threatened,” Dr. Mutz said.

The other surveys supported the cultural anxiety explanation, too.

For example, Trump support was linked to a belief that high-status groups, such as whites, Christians or men, faced more discrimination than low-status groups, like minorities, Muslims or women, according to Dr. Mutz’s analysis of the NORC study.

What does it matter which kind of anxiety — cultural or economic — explains Mr. Trump’s appeal?

If wrong, the prevailing economic theory lends unfounded virtue to his victory, crediting it to the disaffected masses, Dr. Mutz argues. More important, she said, it would teach the wrong lesson to elected officials, who often look to voting patterns in enacting new policy.

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Saloon: Liberals were right: Racism played a larger role in Trump’s win than income and authoritarianism

“This year the American National Election Study included 1,200 participants. The publicly funded study has been conducted for each election since 1948 and offers historical perspective…

…The major narrative surrounding November’s historic election focused on voters’ racial attitudes, and for good reason. Trump supporters were relentlessly depicted as racists, and the study confirmed that suspicion.

“Since 1988, we’ve never seen such a clear correspondence between vote choice and racial perceptions,” Thomas Wood wrote in his Washington Post analysis. “The biggest movement was among those who voted for the Democrat, who were far less likely to agree with attitudes coded as more racially biased.”

The Post concluded, “Racial attitudes made a bigger difference in electing Trump than authoritarianism.””

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Washington Post: Economic anxiety isn’t driving racial resentment. Racial resentment is driving economic anxiety.

“Much debate continues about whether support for Donald Trump has more to do with racial or economic anxiety. A key question in this debate — explored by Wonkblog’s Jeff Guo — is whether economic anxiety may actually cause racism. Guo shows, for example, that Americans who think the economy is getting worse currently score highest in racial resentment.

So which is the chicken and which is the egg? The evidence suggests that racial resentment is driving economic anxiety, not the other way around.

One reason is that perceptions of the economy are often not objective and depend on people’s political leaning. A large body of research shows that party identification strongly colors people’s beliefs about how the economy is doing. Democrats and Republicans both think that the economy is performing better when one of their own is in the White House.

Partisan identities aren’t the only thing that matters. In my book, Post-Racial or Most-Racial?, I show that racial attitudes have increasingly structured public opinion about a wide array of positions connected to Barack Obama, including subjective perceptions of objective economic conditions.

For one, racially sympathetic white Americans were far more likely than racially resentful whites to correctly conclude that the unemployment rate was declining in the year leading up to the 2012 election. Before Obama’s presidency, racial attitudes were uncorrelated with perceptions of the election-year unemployment rate.

The comparison between 2004 and 2012 is especially informative. Both George W. Bush and Obama saw the unemployment rate rise by about two percentage points at various times during their first terms in office; both presidents then presided over drops in the unemployment rate during the year leading up to their reelections (about half a point for Bush and one point for Obama).

Yet the graph below shows that racial resentment had a much different impact on perceptions of the unemployment rate in 2004 and 2012. After accounting for partisanship and ideology, racial resentment had no effect whatsoever on perceptions of the unemployment rate in 2004. But in 2012, people who expressed more racial resentment were less likely to perceive that, in fact, the unemployment rate had improved.

Analysis limited to whites only. Predicted values calculated by setting party identification and ideological self-placement to the average white respondent. (Graphic by Michael Tesler) 

 

This suggests that the national economy’s association with Obama has made racial resentment a stronger determinant of gloomy economic perceptions than it was before his presidency. However, comparisons between 2012 and earlier years cannot conclusively resolve the chicken or egg question.

To do so, it’s important to have surveys of the exact same individuals before and after Obama became president. The 2007-2008-2012 Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project can do this by testing whether racial attitudes — measured before Obama became president — increasingly shaped economic perceptions during his presidency.

The results below show that this is precisely what happened.  Racial resentment was not related to whites’ perceptions of the economy in December 2007 after accounting for partisanship and ideology. When these same people were re-interviewed in July 2012, racial resentment was a powerful predictor of economic perceptions. Again, the greater someone’s level of racial resentment, the worse they believed the economy was doing.

Analysis limited to white panelists interviewed in both the December 2007 and July 2012 wave of the CCAP Re-Interviews. Predicted values calculated by setting party identification and ideological self-placement to the average white respondent. (Graphic by Michael Tesler)

Furthermore, additional analyses indicate that economic perceptions, whether measured in 2008 or even in 2012, did not cause people to change their underlying levels of racial resentment.

In fact, multiple studies, using several different surveys, have shown that overall levels of racial resentment were virtually unchanged by the economic crash of 2008. Some data even suggests that racial prejudice slightly declined during the height of economic collapse in the fall of 2008. The evidence is pretty clear, then, that economic concerns are not driving racial resentment in the Obama Era.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that economic anxiety has no influence on support for Trump. John Sides and I presented some preliminary evidence that economic insecurity was a factor in Trump’s rise.

Nor does it mean that racial resentment is the prime determinant of economic anxiety. It isn’t.

Nevertheless, in an era where racial attitudes have become increasingly associated with so many of the president’s positions, Obama’s race is largely responsible for the association between racial resentment and economic anxiety. And this racialized political environment undoubtedly aided Donald Trump’s rise to the top of the Republican Party.

Michael Tesler is associate professor of political science at the University of California, Irvine, and author of Post-Racial or Most-Racial? Race and Politics in the Obama Era.”

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The Source:  Pusha T Says ‘MAGA’ Hats Are This Generation’s Ku Klux Klan Hoods

“Pusha T has taken aim at Donald Trump‘s “Make America Great Again” hats, declaring in a new interview that they are “this generation’s Ku Klux Klan hood.”…

…Asked about his own views on Trump, Pusha asserted, “The ‘Make America Great Again’ hat is this generation’s Ku Klux hood. When was America so great anyways? Name that time period?” ”

When Was America Great? – 2016 RNC | The Daily Show

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Beyond Economics: Fears of Cultural Displacement Pushed the White Working Class to Trump | PRRI/The Atlantic Report

Executive Summary

 

 

Perhaps the most contested question from the 2016 presidential election is what factors motivated white working-class voters to support Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton by a margin of roughly two to one. New analysis by PRRI and The Atlantic, based on surveys conducted before and after the 2016 election, developed a model to test a variety of potential factors influencing support for Trump among white working-class voters. The model identifies five significant independent predictors of support for Trump among white working-class voters. No other factors were significant at conventional levels.

Overall, the model demonstrates that besides partisanship, fears about immigrants and cultural displacement were more powerful factors than economic concerns in predicting support for Trump among white working-class voters. Moreover, the effects of economic concerns were complex—with economic fatalism predicting support for Trump, but economic hardship predicting support for Clinton.

1. Identification with the Republican Party. Identifying as Republican, not surprisingly, was strongly predictive of Trump support. White working-class voters who identified as Republican were 11 times more likely to support Trump than those who did not identify as Republican. No other demographic attribute was significant.
2. Fears about cultural displacement. White working-class voters who say they often feel like a stranger in their own land and who believe the U.S. needs protecting against foreign influence were 3.5 times more likely to favor Trump than those who did not share these concerns.
3. Support for deporting immigrants living in the country illegally. White working-class voters who favored deporting immigrants living in the country illegally were 3.3 times more likely to express a preference for Trump than those who did not.
4. Economic fatalism. White working-class voters who said that college education is a gamble were almost twice as likely to express a preference for Trump as those who said it was an important investment in the future.
5. Economic hardship. Notably, while only marginally significant at conventional levels (P<0.1), being in fair or poor financial shape actually predicted support for Hillary Clinton among white working-class Americans, rather than support for Donald Trump. Those who reported being in fair or poor financial shape were 1.7 times more likely to support Clinton, compared to those who were in better financial shape.

It is notable that many attitudes and attributes identified as possible explanations for Trump’s support among white working-class voters were not significant independent predictors. Gender, age, region, and religious affiliation were not significant demographic factors in the model. Views about gender roles and attitudes about race were also not significant. It is also notable that neither measure of civic engagement—attendance at civic events or religious services—proved to be a significant independent predictor of support for Trump.

The report also provides an in-depth profile of white working-class Americans, along with analysis of this group’s world view, outlook, and attitudes about cultural change and policy:

• Nearly two-thirds (65%) of white working-class Americans believe American culture and way of life has deteriorated since the 1950s.
• Nearly half (48%) of white working-class Americans say, “things have changed so much that I often feel like a stranger in my own country.”
• Nearly seven in ten (68%) white working-class Americans believe the American way of life needs to be protected from foreign influence. In contrast, fewer than half (44%) of white college-educated Americans express this view.
• Nearly seven in ten (68%) white working-class Americans—along with a majority (55%) of the public overall—believe the U.S. is in danger of losing its culture and identity.
• More than six in ten (62%) white working-class Americans believe the growing number of newcomers from other countries threatens American culture, while three in ten (30%) say these newcomers strengthen society.
• Nearly six in ten (59%) white working-class Americans believe immigrants living in the country illegally should be allowed to become citizens provided they meet certain requirements, while 10% say they should be allowed to become permanent legal residents. More than one in four (27%) say we should identify and deport illegal immigrants. Notably, support for a path to citizenship is only slightly lower than support among the general public (63%).
• More than half (52%) of white working-class Americans believe discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities, while 70% of white college-educated Americans disagree.
• Fewer than four in ten white working-class Americans report they are in excellent (5%) or good shape (33%) financially, compared to six in ten who say they are in fair (35%) or poor shape (25%). White working-class Americans about as likely to say their financial situation has diminished (27%) as they are to say it has improved (29%). White college-educated Americans, in contrast, are about three times as likely to say their financial circumstances have gotten better than gotten worse (41% vs. 14%, respectively).
• A majority (54%) of the white working class view getting a college education as a risky gamble, while only 44% say it is a smart investment.
• Six in ten (60%) white working-class Americans, compared to only 32% of white college-educated Americans say because things have gotten so far off track, we need a strong leader who is willing to break the rules.

Click here to review the full report

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Washington Post: The education gap among whites this year wasn’t about education. It was about race.

“Election swings are usually pretty uniform. States tend to shift together from one presidential election year to the next. Most demographic groups do as well.

But there was one glaring exception this year: College-educated voters became a lot more Democratic and non-college educated voters became a lot more Republican.

These patterns were particularly pronounced among white voters. The right-hand side of the Pew Research Center’s graph below shows that college-educated whites were 10 percentage points more Democratic in 2016 than they were in 2012, while non-college whites were 14 percentage points more Republican. The upshot was a historic “diploma divide” in white support for Trump.

There are, of course, several plausible reasons for this growing education gap. No one factor explains everything.

That said, a major factor was racial attitudes. Here is the evidence.

Racial and ethnocentric attitudes were deeply implicated in Donald Trump’s remarkable rise to the White House.  Racial resentment, anti-Muslim attitudes, and white identity, were all much stronger predictors of support for Trump in the 2016 primaries than they were for prior Republican nominees.

Donald Trump made racial attitudes more important in the general election, too. I showed earlier that racial resentment, unfavorable opinions of African-Americans and ethnocentrism were significantly stronger predictors of whites’ preferences for Trump or Clinton than they were in hypothetical match-ups between Clinton and Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio.

Many of these same racial attitudes are also heavily influenced by education. College-educated whites and whites who live in highly educated areas of the country have long been much more racially tolerant than other white Americans.

It turns out that this relationship between education and racial attitudes explains a very large portion of the education gap in white support for Trump. Indeed, the graphs below show that the negative effects of education on white support for Trump vanishes after accounting for attitudes about both African Americans and immigrants.

Graph by Michael Tesler. Numbers at the bottom represent the sample sizes for each education category.

The left-hand graph is based on data from the September wave of RAND’s Presidential Election Panel Survey. The red line shows that whites who did not attend college were about 30 points more likely to support Trump than were whites with a college degree. But after controlling for both racial and immigrant resentment, though, the black line shows that less educated whites were no more likely to support Donald Trump than their better educated counterparts.

The exact same pattern occurred in YouGov’s 2016 Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project. The right-hand graph shows that the 25-point “diploma divide” in Trump support faded away after accounting for the fact that less educated whites tend to have more negative views of African-Americans and immigrants than better educated whites.

In fact, no other factor explained the education gap in white support for Trump as well as racial and ethnocentric attitudes — not partisanship, not ideology, not authoritarianism, not sexism, not income, not economic anxiety.

Simply put, the education divide in white support for Trump is largely a racial attitude gap.

Again, that doesn’t mean that race is the only reason for the education gap in white support for Trump. Factors that aren’t quantifiable in these two surveys — such as anti-elitism and rural resentment — likely contributed to the education gap as well.

Moreover, these same surveys show that education affected support for Trump in the Republican primary even after controlling for racial and immigrant resentment. In the primary, there was clearly more to Trump’s popularity among working-class whites than just race.

Nevertheless, race clearly has a starring role.

And it’s a starring role that began before Trump announced his presidential candidacy. In the next post, I will show that racially resentful whites who did not attend college were moving away from the Democratic Party in response to Barack Obama’s presidency even before Donald Trump burst onto the political scene.”

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The Atlantic: Why Trump Supporters Believe He Is Not Corrupt

On Wednesday morning, the lead story on FoxNews.com was not Michael Cohen’s admission that Donald Trump had instructed him to violate campaign-finance laws by paying hush money to two of Trump’s mistresses. It was the alleged murder of a white Iowa woman, Mollie Tibbetts, by an undocumented Latino immigrant, Cristhian Rivera.On their face, the two stories have little in common. Fox is simply covering the Iowa murder because it distracts attention from a revelation that makes Trump look bad. But dig deeper and the two stories are connected: They represent competing notions of what corruption is.Cohen’s admission highlights one of the enduring riddles of the Trump era. Trump’s supporters say they care about corruption. During the campaign, they cheered his vow to “drain the swamp” in Washington, D.C. When Morning Consult asked Americans in May 2016 to explain why they disliked Hillary Clinton, the second-most-common answer was that she was “corrupt.” And yet, Trump supporters appear largely unfazed by the mounting evidence that Trump is the least ethical president in modern American history. When asked last month whether they considered Trump corrupt, only 14 percent of Republicans said yes. Even Cohen’s allegation is unlikely to change that.

 

The answer may lie in how Trump and his supporters define corruption. In a forthcoming book titled How Fascism Works, the Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley makes an intriguing claim. “Corruption, to the fascist politician,” he suggests, “is really about the corruption of purity rather than of the law. Officially, the fascist politician’s denunciations of corruption sound like a denunciation of political corruption. But such talk is intended to evoke corruption in the sense of the usurpation of the traditional order.”

 

Fox’s decision to focus on the Iowa murder rather than Cohen’s guilty plea illustrates Stanley’s point. In the eyes of many Fox viewers, I suspect, the network isn’t ignoring corruption so much as highlighting the kind that really matters. When Trump instructed Cohen to pay off women with whom he’d had affairs, he may have been violating the law. But he was upholding traditional gender and class hierarchies. Since time immemorial, powerful men have been cheating on their wives and using their power to evade the consequences.The Iowa murder, by contrast, signifies the inversion—the corruption—of that “traditional order.” Throughout American history, few notions have been as sacrosanct as the belief that white women must be protected from nonwhite men. By allegedly murdering Tibbetts, Rivera did not merely violate the law. He did something more subversive: He violated America’s traditional racial and sexual norms.Once you grasp that for Trump and many of his supporters, corruption means less the violation of law than the violation of established hierarchies, their behavior makes more sense. Since 2014, Trump has employed the phrase rule of law nine times in tweets. Seven of them refer to illegal immigration.

 

Why were Trump’s supporters so convinced that Clinton was the more corrupt candidate even as reporters uncovered far more damning evidence about Trump’s foundation than they did about Clinton’s? Likely because Clinton’s candidacy threatened traditional gender roles. For many Americans, female ambition—especially in service of a feminist agenda—in and of itself represents a form of corruption. “When female politicians were described as power-seeking,” noted the Yale researchers Victoria Brescoll and Tyler Okimoto in a 2010 study, “participants experienced feelings of moral outrage (i.e., contempt, anger, and/or disgust).”

Cohen’s admission makes it harder for Republicans to claim that Trump didn’t violate the law. But it doesn’t really matter. For many Republicans, Trump remains uncorrupt—indeed, anticorrupt—because what they fear most isn’t the corruption of American law; it’s the corruption of America’s traditional identity. And in the struggle against that form of corruption—the kind embodied by Cristhian Rivera—Trump isn’t the problem. He’s the solution.”

Further Studies

Pacific Standard: A New Study Confirms (Again) That Race, Not Economics, Drove Former Democrats to Trump

NY Times: We Aren’t Seeing White Support for Trump for What It Is

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Pyshcology Today: A Complete Psychological Analysis of Trump’s Support

Whether we want to or not, we must try to understand the Donald Trump phenomenon, as it has completely swept the nation and also fiercely divided it. What is most baffling about it all is Trump’s apparent political invincibility. As he himself said even before he won the presidential election, “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” Unfortunately for the American people, this wild-sounding claim appears to be truer than not. It should also motivate us to explore the science underlying such peculiar human behavior, so we can learn from it, and potentially inoculate against it.

In all fairness, we should recognize that lying is sadly not uncommon for politicians on both sides of the political aisle, but the frequency and magnitude of the current president’s lies should have us all wondering why they haven’t destroyed his political career, and instead perhaps strengthened it. Similarly, we should be asking why his inflammatory rhetoric and numerous scandals haven’t sunk him. We are talking about a man who was caught on tape saying, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy.” Politically surviving that video is not normal, or anything close to it, and such a revelation would likely have been the end of Barack Obama or George Bush had it surfaced weeks before the election.

While dozens of psychologists have analyzed Trump, to explain the man’s political invincibility, it is more important to understand the minds of his staunch supporters. While various popular articles have illuminated a multitude of reasons for his unwavering support, there appears to be no comprehensive analysis that contains all of them. Since there seems to be a real demand for this information, I have tried to provide that analysis below.

Some of the explanations come from a 2017 review paper published in the Journal of Social and Political Psychology by the psychologist and UC Santa Cruz professor Thomas Pettigrew. Others have been put forth as far back as 2016, by me, in various articles and blog posts for publications like Psychology Today. A number of these were inspired by insights from psychologists like Sheldon Solomon, who laid the groundwork for the influential Terror Management Theory, and David Dunning, who did the same for the Dunning-Kruger effect.

This list will begin with the more benign reasons for Trump’s intransigent support. As the list goes on, the explanations become increasingly worrisome, and toward the end, border on the pathological. It should be strongly emphasized that not all Trump supporters are racist, mentally vulnerable, or fundamentally bad people. It can be detrimental to society when those with degrees and platforms try to demonize their political opponents or paint them as mentally ill when they are not. That being said, it is just as harmful to pretend that there are not clear psychological and neural factors that underlie much of Trump supporters’ unbridled allegiance.

The psychological phenomena described below mostly pertain to those supporters who would follow Trump off a cliff. These are the people who will stand by his side no matter what scandals come to light, or what sort of evidence for immoral and illegal behavior surfaces.

1. Practicality Trumps Morality

For some wealthy people, it’s simply a financial matter. Trump offers tax cuts for the rich and wants to do away with government regulation that gets in the way of businessmen making money, even when that regulation exists for the purpose of protecting the environment. Others, like blue-collared workers, like the fact that the president is trying to bring jobs back to America from places like China. Some people who genuinely are not racist (those who are will be discussed later) simply want stronger immigration laws because they know that a country with open borders is not sustainable. These people have put their practical concerns above their moral ones. To them, it does not make a difference if he’s a vagina-grabber, or if his campaign team colluded with Russia to help him defeat his political opponent. It is unknown whether these people are eternally bound to Trump in the way others are, but we may soon find out if the Mueller investigation is allowed to come to completion.

2. The Brain’s Attention System Is More Strongly Engaged by Trump

According to a study that monitored brain activity while participants watched 40 minutes of political ads and debate clips from the presidential candidates, Donald Trump is unique in his ability to keep the brain engaged. While Hillary Clinton could only hold attention for so long, Trump kept both attention and emotional arousal high throughout the viewing session. This pattern of activity was seen even when Trump made remarks that individuals didn’t necessarily agree with. His showmanship and simple language clearly resonate with some at a visceral level.

3. America’s Obsession with Entertainment and Celebrities

Essentially, the loyalty of Trump supporters may in part be explained by America’s addiction to entertainment and reality TV. To some, it doesn’t matter what Trump actually says because he’s so amusing to watch. With the Donald, you are always left wondering what outrageous thing he is going to say or do next. He keeps us on the edge of our seat, and for that reason, some Trump supporters will forgive anything he says. They are happy as long as they are kept entertained.

4. “Some Men Just Want to Watch the World Burn.”

Some people are supporting Trump simply to be rebellious or to introduce chaos into the political system. They may have such distaste for the establishment and democrats like Hillary Clinton that their support for Trump is a symbolic middle finger directed at Washington. These people may have other issues, like an innate desire to troll others or an obsession with schadenfreude.

5. The Fear Factor: Conservatives Are More Sensitive to Threat

Science has  shown that the conservative brain has an exaggerated fear response when faced with stimuli that may be perceived as threatening. A 2008 study in the journal Science found that conservatives have a stronger physiological reaction to startling noises and graphic images compared to liberals. A brain-imaging study published in Current Biology revealed that those who lean right politically tend to have a larger amygdala — a structure that is electrically active during states of fear and anxiety. And a 2014 fMRI study found that it is possible to predict whether someone is a liberal or conservative simply by looking at their brain activity while they view threatening or disgusting images, such as mutilated bodies. Specifically, the brains of self-identified conservatives generated more activity overall in response to the disturbing images.

These brain responses are automatic and not influenced by logic or reason. As long as Trump continues to portray Muslims and Hispanic immigrants as imminent threats, many conservative brains will involuntarily light up like light bulbs being controlled by a switch. Fear keeps his followers energized and focused on safety. And when you think you’ve found your protector, you become less concerned with offensive and divisive remarks.

6. The Power of Mortality Reminders and Perceived Existential Threat

A well-supported theory from social psychology, known as Terror Management Theory, explains why Trump’s fear mongering is doubly effective. The theory is based on the fact that humans have a unique awareness of their own mortality. The inevitably of one’s death creates existential terror and anxiety that is always residing below the surface. In order to manage this terror, humans adopt cultural worldviews — like religions, political ideologies, and national identities — that act as a buffer by instilling life with meaning and value.

Terror Management Theory predicts that when people are reminded of their own mortality, which happens with fear mongering, they will more strongly defend those who share their worldviews and national or ethnic identity, and act out more aggressively towards those who do not. Hundreds of studies have supported this hypothesis, and some have specifically shown that triggering thoughts of death tends to shift people towards the right.

Not only do death reminders increase nationalism, they may influence voting habits in favor of more conservative presidential candidates. And more disturbingly, in a study with American students, scientists found that making mortality salient increased support for extreme military interventions by American forces that could kill thousands of civilians overseas. Interestingly, the effect was present only in conservatives.

By constantly emphasizing existential threat, Trump may be creating a psychological condition that makes the brain respond positively rather than negatively to bigoted statements and divisive rhetoric.

In this video, I explain this in greater detail, and offer a potential solution to the problem.

7. The Dunning-Kruger Effect: Humans Often Overestimate Their Political Expertise

Some who support Donald Trump are under-informed or misinformed about the issues at hand. When Trump tells them that crime is skyrocketing in the United States, or that the economy is the worst it’s ever been, they simply take his word for it.

The Dunning-Kruger effect explains that the problem isn’t just that they are misinformed; it’s that they are completely unaware that they are misinformed, which creates a double burden.

Studies have shown that people who lack expertise in some area of knowledge often have a cognitive bias that prevents them from realizing that they lack expertise. As psychologist David Dunning puts it in an op-ed for Politico, “The knowledge and intelligence that are required to be good at a task are often the same qualities needed to recognize that one is not good at that task — and if one lacks such knowledge and intelligence, one remains ignorant that one is not good at the task. This includes political judgment.” These people cannot be reached because they mistakenly believe they are the ones who should be reaching others.

8. Relative Deprivation — A Misguided Sense of Entitlement

Relative deprivation refers to the experience of being deprived of something to which one believes they are entitled. It is the discontent felt when one compares their position in life to others who they feel are equal or inferior but have unfairly had more success than them.

Common explanations for Trump’s popularity among non-bigoted voters involve economics. There is no doubt that some Trump supporters are simply angry that American jobs are being lost to Mexico and China, which is certainly understandable, although these loyalists often ignore the fact that some of these careers are actually being lost due to the accelerating pace of automation.

These Trump supporters are experiencing relative deprivation, and are common among the swing states like Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. This kind of deprivation is specifically referred to as “relative,” as opposed to “absolute,” because the feeling is often based on a skewed perception of what one is entitled to.

9. Lack of Exposure to Dissimilar Others

Intergroup contact refers to contact with members of groups that are outside one’s own, which has been experimentally shown to reduce prejudice. As such, it’s important to note that there is growing evidence that Trump’s white supporters have experienced significantly less contact with minorities than other Americans. For example, a 2016 study found that “…the racial and ethnic isolation of Whites at the zip-code level is one of the strongest predictors of Trump support.” This correlation persisted while controlling for dozens of other variables. In agreement with this finding, the same researchers found that support for Trump increased with the voters’ physical distance from the Mexican border. These racial biases might be more implicit than explicit, the latter which is addressed in #14.

10. Trump’s Conspiracy Theories Target the Mentally Vulnerable

While the conspiracy theory crowd — who predominantly support Donald Trump and crackpot allies like Alex Jones and the shadowy QAnon — may appear to just be an odd quirk of modern society, some of them may suffer from psychological illnesses that involve paranoia and delusions, such as schizophrenia, or are at least vulnerable to them, like those with schizotypy personalities.

The link between schizotypy and belief in conspiracy theories is well-established, and a recent study published in the journal Psychiatry Research has demonstrated that it is still very prevalent in the population. The researchers found that those who were more likely to believe in outlandish conspiracy theories, such as the idea that the U.S. government created the AIDS epidemic, consistently scored high on measures of “odd beliefs and magical thinking.” One feature of magical thinking is a tendency to make connections between things that are actually unrelated in reality.

Donald Trump and media allies target these people directly. All one has to do is visit alt-right websites and discussion boards to see the evidence for such manipulation.

11. Trump Taps into the Nation’s Collective Narcissism

Collective narcissism is an unrealistic shared belief in the greatness of one’s national group. It often occurs when a group who believes it represents the ‘true identity’ of a nation — the ‘ingroup,’ in this case White Americans — perceives itself as being disadvantaged compared to outgroups who are getting ahead of them ‘unrightfully.’ This psychological phenomenon is related to relative deprivation (#6).

A study published last year in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science found a direct link between national collective narcissism and support for Donald Trump. This correlation was discovered by researchers at the University of Warsaw, who surveyed over 400 Americans with a series of questionnaires about political and social beliefs. Where individual narcissism causes aggressiveness toward other individuals, collective narcissism involves negative attitudes and aggression toward ‘outsider’ groups (outgroups), who are perceived as threats.

Donald Trump exacerbates collective narcissism with his anti-immigrant, anti-elitist, and strongly nationalistic rhetoric. By referring to his supporters, an overwhelmingly white group, as being “true patriots” or “real Americans,” he promotes a brand of populism that is the epitome of “identity politics,” a term that is usually associated with the political left. Left-wing identity politics, as misguided as they may sometimes be, are generally aimed at achieving equality, while the right-wing brand is based on a belief that one nationality or race is superior or entitled to success and wealth for no other reason than identity.

12. The Desire to Want to Dominate Others

Social dominance orientation (SDO) — which is distinct from but related to authoritarian personality (#13) — refers to people who have a preference for the societal hierarchy of groups, specifically with a structure in which the high-status groups have dominance over the low-status ones. Those with SDO are typically dominant, tough-minded, and driven by self-interest.

In Trump’s speeches, he appeals to those with SDO by repeatedly making a clear distinction between groups that have a generally higher status in society (White), and those groups that are typically thought of as belonging to a lower status (immigrants and minorities). A 2016 survey study of 406 American adults published last year in the journal Personality and Individual Differences found that those who scored high on both SDO and authoritarianism were more likely to vote for Trump in the election.

13. Authoritarian Personality 

Authoritarianism refers to the advocacy or enforcement of strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom, and is commonly associated with a lack of concern for the opinions or needs of others. Authoritarian personality is characterized by belief in total and complete obedience to authority. Those with this personality often display aggression toward outgroup members, submissiveness to authority, resistance to new experiences, and a rigid hierarchical view of society. Authoritarianism is often triggered by fear, making it easy for leaders who exaggerate threat or fear monger to gain their allegiance.

Although authoritarian personality is found among liberals, it is more common among the right-wing around the world. President Trump’s speeches, which are laced with absolutist terms like “losers” and “complete disasters,” are naturally appealing to those with such a personality.

While research showed that Republican voters in the U.S. scored higher than Democrats on measures of authoritarianism before Trump emerged on the political scene, a 2016 Politico survey found that high authoritarians greatly favored then-candidate Trump, which led to a correct prediction that he would win the election, despite the polls saying otherwise.

14. Racism and Bigotry

It would be grossly unfair and inaccurate to say that every one of Trump’s supporters have prejudice against ethnic and religious minorities, but it would be equally inaccurate to say that few do. The Republican party, going at least as far back to Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy,” has historically used tactics that appealed to bigotry, such as lacing speeches with “dog whistles” — code words that signaled prejudice toward minorities that were designed to be heard by racists but no one else.

While the dog whistles of the past were subtler, Trump’s signaling is sometimes shockingly direct. There’s no denying that he routinely appeals to racist and bigoted supporters when he calls Muslims “dangerous” and Mexican immigrants “rapists” and “murderers,” often in a blanketed fashion. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a recent study has shown that support for Trump is correlated with a standard scale of modern racism.

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The Atlantic: The Nationalist’s Delusion

Trump’s supporters backed a time-honored American political tradition, disavowing racism while promising to enact a broad agenda of discrimination

“THIRTY YEARS AGO, nearly half of Louisiana voted for a Klansman, and the media struggled to explain why.

It was 1990 and David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, astonished political observers when he came within striking distance of defeating incumbent Democratic U.S. Senator J. Bennett Johnston, earning 43 percent of the vote. If Johnston’s Republican rival hadn’t dropped out of the race and endorsed him at the last minute, the outcome might have been different.

Was it economic anxiety? The Washington Post reported that the state had “a large working class that has suffered through a long recession.” Was it a blow against the state’s hated political establishment? An editorial from United Press International explained, “Louisianans showed the nation by voting for Duke that they were mad as hell and not going to take it any more.” Was it anti-Washington rage? A Loyola University pollster argued, “There were the voters who liked Duke, those who hated J. Bennett Johnston, and those who just wanted to send a message to Washington.”

 

What message would those voters have been trying to send by putting a Klansman into office?

“There’s definitely a message bigger than Louisiana here,” Susan Howell, then the director of the Survey Research Center at the University of New Orleans, told the Los Angeles Times. “There is a tremendous amount of anger and frustration among working-class whites, particularly where there is an economic downturn. These people feel left out; they feel government is not responsive to them.”

Duke’s strong showing, however, wasn’t powered merely by poor or working-class whites—and the poorest demographic in the state, black voters, backed Johnston. Duke “clobbered Johnston in white working-class districts, ran even with him in predominantly white middle-class suburbs, and lost only because black Louisianans, representing one-quarter of the electorate, voted against him in overwhelming numbers,” The Washington Post reported in 1990. Duke picked up nearly 60 percent of the white vote. Faced with Duke’s popularity among whites of all income levels, the press framed his strong showing largely as the result of the economic suffering of the white working classes. Louisiana had “one of the least-educated electorates in the nation; and a large working class that has suffered through a long recession,” The Post stated.

By accepting the economic theory of Duke’s success, the media were buying into the candidate’s own vision of himself as a savior of the working class. He had appealed to voters in economic terms: He tore into welfare and foreign aid, affirmative action and outsourcing, and attacked political-action committees for subverting the interests of the common man. He even tried to appeal to black voters, buying a 30-minute ad in which he declared, “I’m not your enemy.”

 

Duke’s candidacy had initially seemed like a joke. He was a former Klan leader who had showed up to public events in a Nazi uniform and lied about having served in the Vietnam War, a cartoonishly vain supervillain whose belief in his own status as a genetic Übermensch was belied by his plastic surgeries. The joke soon soured, as many white Louisiana voters made clear that Duke’s past didn’t bother them.

Many of Duke’s voters steadfastly denied that the former Klan leader was a racist. The St. Petersburg Times reported in 1990 that Duke supporters “are likely to blame the media for making him look like a racist.” The paper quoted G. D. Miller, a “59-year-old oil-and-gas lease buyer,” who said, “The way I understood the Klan, it’s not anti-this or anti-that.”

Duke’s rejoinder to the ads framing him as a racist resonated with his supporters. “Remember,” he told them at rallies, “when they smear me, they are really smearing you.”

The economic explanation carried the day: Duke was a freak creature of the bayou who had managed to tap into the frustrations of a struggling sector of the Louisiana electorate with an abnormally high tolerance for racist messaging.

While the rest of the country gawked at Louisiana and the Duke fiasco, Walker Percy, a Louisiana author, gave a prophetic warning to The New York Times.

“Don’t make the mistake of thinking David Duke is a unique phenomenon confined to Louisiana rednecks and yahoos. He’s not,” Percy said. “He’s not just appealing to the old Klan constituency, he’s appealing to the white middle class. And don’t think that he or somebody like him won’t appeal to the white middle class of Chicago or Queens.”

 

A few days after Duke’s strong showing, the Queens-born businessman Donald Trump appeared on CNN’s Larry King Live.

“It’s anger. I mean, that’s an anger vote. People are angry about what’s happened. People are angry about the jobs. If you look at Louisiana, they’re really in deep trouble,” Trump told King.

Trump later predicted that Duke, if he ran for president, would siphon most of his votes away from the incumbent, George H. W. Bush—in the process revealing his own understanding of the effectiveness of white-nationalist appeals to the GOP base.

“Whether that be good or bad, David Duke is going to get a lot of votes. Pat Buchanan—who really has many of the same theories, except it’s in a better package—Pat Buchanan is going to take a lot of votes away from George Bush,” Trump said. “So if you have these two guys running, or even one of them running, I think George Bush could be in big trouble.” Little more than a year later, Buchanan embarrassed Bush by drawing 37 percent of the vote in New Hampshire’s Republican primary.

In February 2016, Trump was asked by a different CNN host about the former Klan leader’s endorsement of his Republican presidential bid.

“Well, just so you understand, I don’t know anything about David Duke. Okay?,” Trump said. “I don’t know anything about what you’re even talking about with white supremacy or white supremacists. So I don’t know.”

Less than three weeks before the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump declared himself “the least racist person you have ever met.”

 

Even before he won, the United States was consumed by a debate over the nature of his appeal. Was racism the driving force behind Trump’s candidacy? If so, how could Americans, the vast majority of whom say they oppose racism, back a racist candidate?

During the final few weeks of the campaign, I asked dozens of Trump supporters about their candidate’s remarks regarding Muslims and people of color. I wanted to understand how these average Republicans—those who would never read the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer or go to a Klan rally at a Confederate statue—had nevertheless embraced someone who demonized religious and ethnic minorities. What I found was that Trump embodied his supporters’ most profound beliefs—combining an insistence that discriminatory policies were necessary with vehement denials that his policies would discriminate and absolute outrage that the question would even be asked.

It was not just Trump’s supporters who were in denial about what they were voting for, but Americans across the political spectrum, who, as had been the case with those who had backed Duke, searched desperately for any alternative explanation—outsourcing, anti-Washington anger, economic anxiety—to the one staring them in the face. The frequent postelection media expeditions to Trump country to see whether the fever has broken, or whether Trump’s most ardent supporters have changed their minds, are a direct outgrowth of this mistake. These supporters will not change their minds, because this is what they always wanted: a president who embodies the rage they feel toward those they hate and fear, while reassuring them that that rage is nothing to be ashamed of.

 

“I believe that everybody has a right to be in the United States no matter what your color, no matter what your race, your religion, what sex you prefer to be with, so I’m not against that at all, but I think that some of us just say racial statements without even thinking about it,” a customer-care worker named Pam—who, like several people I spoke with, declined to give her last name—told me at a rally in Pennsylvania. However, she also defended Trump’s remarks on race and religion explicitly when I asked about them. “I think the other party likes to blow it out of proportion and kind of twist his words, but what he says is what he means, and it’s what a lot of us are thinking.”

Most Trump supporters I spoke with were not people who thought of themselves as racist. Rather, they saw themselves as antiracist, as people who held no hostility toward religious and ethnic minorities whatsoever—a sentiment they projected onto their candidate.

“I don’t feel like he’s racist. I don’t personally feel like anybody would have been able to do what he’s been able to do with his personal business if he were a horrible person,” Michelle, a stay-at-home mom in Virginia, told me.

Far more numerous and powerful than the extremists in Berkeley and Charlottesville who have drawn headlines since Trump’s election, these Americans, who would never think of themselves as possessing racial animus, voted for a candidate whose ideal vision of America excludes millions of fellow citizens because of their race or religion.

 

The specific dissonance of Trumpism—advocacy for discriminatory, even cruel, policies combined with vehement denials that such policies are racially motivated—provides the emotional core of its appeal. It is the most recent manifestation of a contradiction as old as the United States, a society founded by slaveholders on the principle that all men are created equal.

While other factors also led to Trump’s victory—the last-minute letter from former FBI Director James Comey, the sexism that rationalized supporting Trump despite his confession of sexual assault, Hillary Clinton’s neglect of the Midwest—had racism been toxic to the American electorate, Trump’s candidacy would not have been viable.

Nearly a year into his presidency, Trump has reneged or faltered on many of his biggest campaign promises—on renegotiating NAFTA, punishing China, and replacing the Affordable Care Act with something that preserves all its popular provisions but with none of its drawbacks. But his commitment to endorsing state violence to remake the country into something resembling an idealized past has not wavered.

He made a farce of his populist campaign by putting bankers in charge of the economy and industry insiders at the head of the federal agencies established to regulate their businesses. But other campaign promises have been more faithfully enacted: his ban on travelers from Muslim-majority countries; the unleashing of immigration-enforcement agencies against anyone in the country illegally regardless of whether he poses a danger; an attempt to cut legal immigration in half; and an abdication of the Justice Department’s constitutional responsibility to protect black Americans from corrupt or abusive police, discriminatory financial practices, and voter suppression. In his own stumbling manner, Trump has pursued the race-based agenda promoted during his campaign. As the president continues to pursue a program that places the social and political hegemony of white Christians at its core, his supporters have shown few signs of abandoning him.

 

One hundred thirty-nine years since Reconstruction, and half a century since the tail end of the civil-rights movement, a majority of white voters backed a candidate who explicitly pledged to use the power of the state against people of color and religious minorities, and stood by him as that pledge has been among the few to survive the first year of his presidency. Their support was enough to win the White House, and has solidified a return to a politics of white identity that has been one of the most destructive forces in American history. This all occurred before the eyes of a disbelieving press and political class, who plunged into fierce denial about how and why this had happened. That is the story of the 2016 election.

One of the first mentions of Trump in The New York Times was in 1973, as a result of a federal discrimination lawsuit against his buildings over his company’s refusal to rent to black tenants. In 1989, he took out a full-page newspaper ad suggesting that the Central Park Five, black and Latino youths accused of the assault and rape of a white jogger, should be put to death. They were later exonerated. His rise to prominence in Republican politics was first fueled by his embrace of the conspiracy theory that the first black president of the United States was not an American citizen. “I have people that have been studying [Obama’s birth certificate] and they cannot believe what they’re finding,” he said in 2011. “If he wasn’t born in this country, which is a real possibility … then he has pulled one of the great cons in the history of politics.”

 

Trump began his candidacy with a speech announcing that undocumented immigrants from Mexico were “bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” And “some,” he said, were “good people.” To keep them out, he proposed building a wall and humiliating Mexico for its citizens’ transgressions by forcing their government to pay for it. He vowed to ban Muslims from entering the United States. Amid heightened attention to fatal police shootings of unarmed black people and a subsequent cry for accountability, Trump decried a “war on police” while telling black Americans they lived in “war zones,” in communities that were in “the worst shape they’ve ever been in”—a remarkable claim to make in a country that once subjected black people to chattel slavery and Jim Crow. He promised to institute a national “stop and frisk” policy, a police tactic that turns black and Latino Americans into criminal suspects in their own neighborhoods, and which had recently been struck down in his native New York as unconstitutional.

Trump expanded on this vision in his 2016 Republican National Convention speech, which gestured toward the suffering of nonwhites and painted a dark portrait of an America under assault by people of color through crime, immigration, and competition for jobs. Trump promised, “The crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon come to an end,” citing “the president’s hometown of Chicago.” He warned that “180,000 illegal immigrants with criminal records, ordered deported from our country, are tonight roaming free to threaten peaceful citizens,” and said that Clinton was “calling for a radical 550 percent increase in Syrian refugees on top of existing massive refugee flows coming into our country under President Obama.”

 

A bleak vision, but one that any regular Fox News viewer would recognize.

The white-supremacist journal American Renaissance applauded Trump’s message. “Each political party proposes an implicit racial vision,” wrote one contributor. “A Trump Administration is a return to the America that won the West, landed on the moon, and built an economy and military that stunned the world. Non-whites can participate in this, but only if they accept the traditional (which is to say, white) norms of American culture.”

Most Trump supporters I spoke with denied that they endorsed this racial vision—even as they defended Trump’s rhetoric.

“Anytime that you disagree with someone’s point of view—if you say, ‘I don’t like Islam’—people say you’re an Islamophobe, or if you don’t like gay marriage, you’re a homophobe, and you’re hateful against the gays and Islam, or different things like that, where people are entitled to their opinion. But it doesn’t m