Posted on 09/29/2015 2:01:53 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
It’s not just Trump. Cruz, Carson, others—it’s a festival of hate out there. And it’s only going to get worse, and worse.
It appears that the GOP has traded in its dog whistle for a bullhorn when it comes to bigotry in the 2016 race for president. It’s as if the Republican presidential candidates are regressing to a time long gone.
There was a time decades ago that conservatives, and even Democrats like George Wallace, could and would openly demonize minorities in the most vile terms to attract white voters. But soon they realized the need to be subtler because times were changing.
The late GOP strategist Lee Atwater summed it up as follows (and forgive me the blunt language, but it’s what he said): “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, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract.”
So began the racial “dog whistle,” or the politically acceptable way of telling white people in a coded message that we will keep you safe from blacks, immigrants, etc. The first Republican to utilize this is generally seen as Barry Goldwater during his run for president in 1964. Goldwater’s campaign sought to capitalize on the backlash among conservative whites to the recently enacted Civil Rights Act. One famous example came shortly after the July 1964 riots in Harlem when he stated, “Our wives, all women, feel unsafe on our streets.” The message being that blacks are coming to rape your women and I will protect you.
In 1968, Richard Nixon ushered in the Southern Strategy, which Nixon’s special counsel, John Ehrlichman, candidly summarized as, “We’ll go after the racists.”
Nixon used the dog whistle of opposing “forced busing” and promising “law and order,” which were polite ways to say he would slow down desegregation and protect white America from black criminals.
And it has gone on from there in varying degrees. There was Ronald Reagan’s invocation of “states rights” in his speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1980, and 1988 of course we had George H.W. Bush’s infamous Willie Horton campaign commercial.
Interestingly, during the 1996 presidential race, Bob Dole steered clear of dog whistles during his losing campaign. And George W. Bush, while supporting a constitutional amendment opposing gay marriage in 2004, refused to “kick gays” as some on the right urged him to do. Bush even rejected Muslim bashing after 9/11, instead making it clear that, “The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends.”
Now, there’s no longer a need to be politically correct when demonizing minorities. The GOP has gone full bigotry.
(VIDEO-AT-LINK)
GOP frontrunner Donald Trump appears to have cherry-picked the most effective dog whistles from past GOP campaigns and then injected them with steroids. Trump has plagiarized Nixon’s practice of appealing to the “silent majority” (white people) and promising “law and order.”
But he has gone much further. Trump not only released a Latino version of Bush’s Willie Horton ad which featured images of three scary-looking Latino men who had committed crimes, he has made stoking the flames of fear of Latino immigrants a central tenet of his campaign.
Trump told us in his very first speech as a presidential candidate that Mexico is “sending people” to America who “are bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” And on the campaign trail he has continued telling crowds that “illegals” had “raped, sodomized, tortured and killed” American women. (The GOP loves to invoke rape.)
Jeb Bush said over the weekend that Democrats lure black people to support them with the promise of “free stuff.” At least when Mitt Romney made his infamous comments that 47 percent of Americans support the Democrats because they “are dependent upon government,” he only implied it was minorities. But not Bush. (By the way, Goldwater made a similar remark in 1964 when he said, “We can’t out-promise the Democrats.”)
And Ted Cruz has unequivocally stoked the flames of hate versus the LGBT community with his recent remarks that the gay activists are waging a “jihad” against “people of faith who respect the biblical teaching that marriage is the union of one man and one woman.”
Then there’s Ben Carson, running neck and neck with Trump. Carson declared last week that Islam is incompatible with the Constitution and he would not support a Muslim American for president. On Sunday, Carson inadvertently summed up the GOP’s theme in 2016 when he told CNN’s Jake Tapper that only the media types are upset with these intolerant comments, “because the American people, the majority of them, agree and they understand exactly what I am saying.”
Yes, we do understand exactly what Carson and the other GOP candidates are saying. It’s no longer code; it’s now in our face. The GOP’s 2016 platform is that Latino immigrants are coming to rape you, blacks want handouts, gays are waging a holy war versus Christians, and Muslims are not loyal to America.
The scariest part of all this is that we are just a few months into the race. Who knows how much more ugly and hateful this campaign could get before November 8, 2016? But given the frontrunners in the GOP race, I would predict it might just become the most bigoted and vile campaign in the modern era of American politics.
If they don’t have the guts to run a comments section, I mark them off as cowards. I don’t deal with cowards.
Oh yeah the progressive liberal democrat socialists are feeling the heat.
Projection anyone?
The left can demonize anyone when they are allowed to re-define words, and to interpret their opponents motives, and have the strange ability to read minds to know what someone is really thinking.
Racist! Really, that is the best you can come up with. We have been called racist every since the Republican party forced civil rights on the Democrats. And just which politician was a member of the KKK? Hint, was not a Republican.
At last White people are starting to understood that racist, bigot, anti-Semite are just weapons of war that are only ever used against us. They mean nothing more than White people asserting their identity and interests.
The march of liberalism stops when those words no longer strike fear in our hearts. In this piece the weapon is yielded by a Pallie, in another it will be a Black, and yet another will feature a Jew. It will always be used to discourage White people from ever thinking they have a right (indeed a duty) to defend their interests, history, and culture.
It is a powerful weapon with one disadvantage: when you stop believing, it stops working. So here’s to a very ‘racist’ campaign.
All the left has is accusations that you’re a racist. They cannot defend their policies, so they scream racism. Everything they do turns to dust, but that’s because of racism. They are never, never responsible for anything. All problems on this earth are caused by racism. But at the end of the day, all those groups the left pretends to help have a harder and harder and harder time just getting by. The left uses and abuses minorities to get their vote, but how much does the left care? Not at all.
I always thought the superior Palestinians should be the ones to tell everyone how to be. : )
To these nimrods its always racist, bigotted, inequality, affirmative action, police brutality, social justice, humanitarian, a human right, old white men, white priviledge. Im sick of these idiots
Did Joe Biden call Ben Carson a “clean-looking black man?”
Well, he got this part right...
...Latino immigrants are coming to rape you, blacks want handouts, gays are waging a holy war versus Christians, and Muslims are not loyal to America.
Well, he is a comedian and much of his stuff, while pathetic, is funny.
I noticed the absence of a comments section too.
That’s a big yellow flag.
Oftentimes it is not the actual article from which I derive the bulk of info but the comments.
So he has an example of a racist democrat, the one that inspired the death of MLK, but no example of the ‘many racist conservatives’ of that era?
What a hack.
Yep. I often post an article and say, “The real story is in the comments.”
No comments...It’s because the people will not remain silent any longer, the narrative of the left is being called out.
You’re correct it is cowardness with an agenda to shame and silence the opposition. Shame on them, it’s not going to work this time.
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