Friday, January 31, 2014

Definition of a "racist": a conservative winning an argument with a liberal

A short time ago I had a back-and-forth with a couple of liberals in the comments of a post here on Richard Nixon's admirable record on civil rights. I pointed out that the leftist "Southern Strategy"meme about Nixon and Republican political tactics-- the claim by Democrats that Republicans strategically gained support in the South from the 1960's onward by using racist code-words or dog-whistles to garner white racist votes-- is belied by the facts. Republicans have a long consistent history of support for civil rights. When the South was racist, it was a Democrat stronghold. When it ceased being racist, it
became a Republican stronghold.

President Nixon, allegedly the instigator of the "Southern Strategy", was a supporter of civil rights all his life, and immediately upon becoming president in 1969-- at the height of his mythical "Southern Strategy"-- he desegregated schools in the South and instituted Affirmative Action. Some appeal to "racism", huh? Southern"racists" elected Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Bill Clinton in 1992, and Southern "racists" continued to elect mostly Democrat congressmen and senators until 1996.

To bolster their claim of Republican codewords leveraging insidious racism in the South for the past half-century, my liberal interlocutors quoted snippets from Republican strategists Kevin Phillips in 1970 and Lee Atwater in 1981 that they claim suggest the use of such codewords for political purposes. Such quotes presumably compensate for the utter lack of evidence for racism in Republican policy and in actual elections in the South during the past fifty years.

But we need not harken back forty years to find explicit political use of racist codewords. Here's a remarkable example of a liberal journalist advocating the false charge of racism for political advantage from 2010.

JournoList is a private journalists'  list serve used by hundreds of liberal journalists (but I repeat myself) to discuss and coordinate their journalism. The emails were leaked in 2010, revealing extensive collusion on the part of liberal journalists to hype liberal views and smear conservatives in their ostensibly objective work as mainstream journalists. Participants included Time magazine's Joe Klein, the New Yorker's Jeffrey Toobin, New York Times' columnist Paul Krugman, the Nation's Chris Hayes, and folks from Newsweek, Politico, Huffington Post, the New Republic, and many others. Prominent among the exhortations to twist the news were extensive discussions as to how to spike the Reverend Jeremiah Wright story and protect Obama's candidacy.

Perhaps the most remarkable email was from Spencer Ackerman, a journalist who has worked at the New Republic, Wired, American Prospect, Talking Points Memo, among others.

Ackerman:
"What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. In other words, find a rightwinger's [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constand fear. Obviously I mean this rhetorically. 
[T]ake one of them-- Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares-- and call them racists. Ask: why do they have such a deep-seated problem with a black politician who unites the country? What lurks behind those problems? This makes *them* sputter with rage, which in turn kids to overreaction and self-destruction."
Here is a quote from a liberal journalist, colluding with other liberal journalists, not from 1970 or 1981 but from 2010, encouraging the use of false accusations of racism in mainstream news reports to slander and intimidate conservatives.

The charge of racism is incessantly used by liberals to intimidate and smear conservatives. It is a mainstream political tactic, used not only by Democrats but by ostensibly impartial journalists, to smother political debate in our country.

In fact, the accusation of racism against Republicans is probably the most common political tactic used by the left.

"Racism" is a liberal dog whistle, and it's been used shamelessly against the very people-- conservative Republicans-- who have been the tireless opponents of actual racism for the better part of two centuries.  It is precisely because the charge of racism against conservatives and Republicans is an inversion of the truth and is so vicious that it has proven to be so effective for liberals, who for two centuries embraced racism and collaborated with Southern segregationists and their modern-day race-baiting imitators.

24 comments:

  1. As a supporter of affirmative action, it's hard to call the man a supporter of equal rights. Forty years later and affirmative action has only grown bigger, which isn't what was supposed to happen. Equal rights does not mean preferential treatment for some supposedly maligned group. It's hard to call a group maligned when in fact they receive special treatment.

    But I do see your point. The tired old "Southern strategy" narrative posits that Nixon attempted to woo southern (white) racists away from the Democratic Party, their traditional home.

    How did he go about accomplishing that? Did he say that he was going to repeal the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965? No. Did he say that he was going to re-segregate the military? No. Did he say he was going re segregate the schools? No.

    What he said was that he was going to give minority contractors preference in federal contracts. And then he did it. As much as I don't like that, I don't think it was a calculated move intended to win over embittered old segregationists.

    The "switching sides" meme is rather ridiculous. The only people who switched sides were the Democrats (and Nixon), who switched from anti-black discrimination to anti-white discrimination.

    Ben

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    Replies
    1. I don't believe in affirmative action but I do think that black folks are maligned in many ways in some parts of this country.

      --Francisca S

      Delete
  2. The ex-Klansman and staunch segregationist Sen. Robert Byrd was a Democrat in good standing until his death in 2010. He'd still be a Democrat in good standing today if he were still alive.

    JQ

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    Replies
    1. Who is this Robert Byrd?

      --Francisca S.

      Delete
    2. Adm. G Boggs, Glenbeckistan NavyJanuary 31, 2014 at 7:13 AM

      Robert Byrd was the longest serving US Senator (WV) at the time of his death (2010), a Majority Leader of the Senate, a Democrat icon, former Klansman, and deep racist.

      Delete
  3. The journolist thing was just reporters talking the way we know reporters talk when they think no one is listening.

    --Francisca S.

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  4. No, we needn't go forty years back to find examples of racism among politicians. Here's one, quite recent.

    "This fellow here over here with the yellow shirt, Macaca, or whatever his name is. He's with my opponent... Let's give a welcome to Macaca, here. Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia."

    George Allen

    I'm sure this fellow is a southern Democrat.

    Hoo

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    Replies
    1. Adm. G Boggs, Glenbeckistan NavyJanuary 31, 2014 at 7:20 AM

      I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American [Barack Obama] who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.
      --- Joe Biden

      Yeah, Joe. He's the very first one that's not a dull, dirty ignoramus. Right? :-)

      By the way, Hoots, does Allen speak Portuguese?

      Delete
  5. Adm. G Boggs, Glenbeckistan NavyJanuary 31, 2014 at 7:32 AM

    [Journalists Mark Halperin and John Heilemann] quote [Harry] Reid as saying privately that Obama, as a black candidate, could be successful thanks, in part, to his 'light-skinned appearance and speaking patterns 'with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.'
    --- CNN

    I guess Harry believes the "light-skinned" ones aren't quite as... well, something.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Adm. G Boggs, Glenbeckistan NavyJanuary 31, 2014 at 7:55 AM

    BTW, who knew that white people hate biracial Cheerios commercials?

    Why, MSNBC knew!

    The tweet last night was outrageous and unacceptable. We immediately acknowledged that it was offensive and wrong, apologized, and deleted it. We have dismissed the person responsible for the tweet.
    --- MSNBC President, Phil Griffin

    Heh.

    ReplyDelete
  7. What really makes this ongoing “debate” laughable is that Egnor’s position flies in the face of virtually every American’s everyday experience. He seems to forget that the majority of us know and work with Republicans on a regular basis. We see the racist e-mails they share with each other, listen to their racist complaints, and read their racist tweets and blog comments, while their leaders are calling our President a “gangster” and a “Thug” who is living like a king on the public dole.

    Instead of confronting the fact of the pervasive racism in the conservative base Egnor plays racist apologist. He’s no better than the guy who forwards the picture of the watermelon patch on the Whitehouse lawn, and in many ways he’s worse. At least the guy forwarding the e-mail is being honest about what he really thinks.

    -KW

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    1. I've never seen a racist email from anyone. Racist blog comments etc cannot be ascribed to Republicans/conservatives unless the identity of the commentor is known, which is virtually never the case.

      There is an epidemic of "racist" fakery by liberals who pretend to be conservatives.

      What racism I do see-- where the source can be identified-- is overwhelming liberal (usually anti-white, sometimes anti-black).

      Liberals need racism. It is the cornerstone of their ideology, and often the cornerstone of their identity. Without the perception that racism is endemic, the Democrats would never win another national election.

      Delete
    2. Let's go to one of the sites featured on your blog roll, Mike, Vox Popoli. Its owner, Vox Day, doesn't hide his disdain for blacks and other minorities. Here is his recent post http://voxday.blogspot.com/2014/01/more-highly-evolved.html.

      Hoo

      Delete
    3. I reject Day's view, and there are some views expressed by Pat Buchanan and John Derbyshire that I reject as well.

      These views are certainly bumping up against racism, although they are couched in scientific or sociological terms.

      They are, of course, far less racist than views expressed by Democrat politicians, current and past. Biden's comments about Obama being a well-spoken black guy and Harry Reid's comment that Obama doesn't talk black to white audiences are far more racist than anything Day ever said. And of course the whole Democrat party is ground zero of racism in the US for 200 years. The current anti-white racism ascendant among the Left (Critical Race Theory, Affirmative Action, etc) is of course much more explicit than any of the other stuff.

      Republican racists have a few blogs and an occassional syndicated column. Democrat racists are elected vice-president and senate majority leader and appointed to Harvard professorships.

      Delete
    4. “I've never seen a racist email from anyone.”

      I just asked the Republican in the next office if he still gets those racist anti-Obama e-mails and he said “Of course, but not at work because I got in trouble for forwarding them to Janet” (one of our co-workers).I’m more than a little surprised by your claimed ignorance of these right-wing e-mail chains because they’ve been a phenomenon since e-mail was invented, but I’ll play along with your denial and ask him to add you to his distribution list if you would like to see what I’m talking about.

      “Racist blog comments etc cannot be ascribed to Republicans/conservatives unless the identity of the commentor is known, which is virtually never the case.”

      Do you honestly believe the vast majority of the racist comments on Breitbart, The Blaze, etc. are trolling Democrats? You would have to, because even if half where pretend right-wing racist trolls, that would still leave a huge number of genuine right wing racists. When someone calls out racism in those threads I suppose they must be conservatives pretending to be liberals for some bizarre reason, because no conservatives ever call them out.

      -KW

      Delete
    5. I have never seen a racist email. Obviously they happen (it's a big cyberspace). If I saw such, I would be one pissed off sonofabitch. It is personal-- I have a lot of dear friends of all races, and I despise racists.

      Regarding the identity of racist trolls, who the hell knows. What we do know is 1) there are millions of trolls 2) a few of them are gonna be racist, just by the odds 3) Liberals have a well-documented history of faking racist incidents to make conservatives look bad. The press is full of them, and in fact I'm hard pressed to think of a major racist incident in the recent past that was found to have a conservative culprit. Either the culprit is unknown, or it is a liberal faking it.

      Actually, KW, this is pretty pitiful. Is this all you have? A few anonymous trolls, a rare conservative blog post that skirts racism?

      Are Biden and Reid and the whole long list of Democrat assholes who have said horrendous things racists? Are critical race theorists racists? Are affirmative action supporters racist? Are Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton racists?

      You know the answer.

      Delete
    6. Just read the piece in Vox Day, Hooter. No disdain for blacks noted. You have very real issues with verbal comprehension my boy.

      Delete
  8. Adm. G Boggs, Glenbeckistan NavyJanuary 31, 2014 at 8:40 AM

    Ooooh. Just ran across this: beards are racist!

    Or so academic Sean Trainor tells us in The Atlantic...

    He's done the reeseerch.

    Beards are, I guess, a bat-whistle.

    ReplyDelete
  9. OT: "In fact, the accusation of racism against Republicans is probably the most common political tactic used by the left."

    It may not be the most common, but it certainly was one of the first. With A. Lincoln being accused by Democrates as being the "Black Republican" and all.

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    Replies
    1. And I’m a one-eyed one-horned flying purple people eater.

      -KW

      Delete
    2. KW:

      I suspected so.

      Delete
    3. Nephew, Hoo, according to the Darwinist view.

      Delete
    4. And an uncle, too.

      Think that through, Egnor.

      Hoo

      Delete
  10. The expression 'Magic Negro' was created by a black journalist writing for the L.A. Times. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magical_Negro
    The parody artist Shanklin did a bit with it using a Rev Al Sharpton voice complaining that Barrack got all the credit after he had done all the work. A very funny parody and not a bit racist.

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