Incisive editorial. Funny video.

--------------------------------------------
On Tue, 3/8/16, Don Wharton <[address removed]> wrote:

 Subject: [atheists-27] Dog Whistle Fail
 To: [address removed]
 Date: Tuesday, March 8, 2016, 4:15 PM

 We've discussed the concept of dog
 whistle politics here.  An essential feature of dog
 whistle politics is that the rest of society for whom the
 message is not intended do not hear the message. 
 Unfortunately for Trump he has failed miserably with this
 aspect of this political technique.  Saturday Night
 Live had a slick faux ad titled Racists for Trump.  It
 had me laughing out loud.
 http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/03/06/racists-for-trump-ad-parodies-the-donald-s-support-on-saturday-night-live.html

 And I missed this editorial in the New York Times:
 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/03/opinion/donald-trump-and-reconstruction-era-politics.html?_r=1

 [Don's comment-We are not mind readers.  I am not
 saying that we can know that Trump is racist.  In fact
 I have tried to make the point that the evil rests in the
 information of content of evil messages rather than the
 person himself.  However, that is almost beside the
 point when the NY TImes and SNL both are firmly labeling him
 racist.]


 Donald Trump and Reconstruction-Era Politics



                 Editorial
 Observer
     By


 BRENT
 STAPLES

                 MARCH 3, 2016















     Photo

                 A
 protester disrupted and was removed from a Trump rally in
 Virginia on Monday.

             Credit
             Damon Winter/The New York Times


 Donald
  Trump’s flirtation with the Ku Klux Klan should come as
 no surprise. He
  has functioned for years as a rallying point for
 “birthers,” conspiracy
  theorists, extremists and racists who are apoplectic about
 the fact
 that the country elected a black man president. These groups
 have driven
  the Republican Party steadily rightward, helping to create
 a national
 discourse that now permits a presidential candidate to court
 racist
 support without paying a political price.Every
  era of racial progress engenders a racist backlash. The one
 that is
 still unfolding in the wake of Barack Obama’s presidency
 bears a
 striking resemblance in tone to the reaction that swept the
 South after
 Reconstruction, the period after the Civil War when former
 slaves were
 granted constitutional rights and black Americans served in
 interracial
 governments that came to power in the former
 Confederacy.







 The
  sight of former slaves eagerly lining up to vote and
 electing their
 fellow citizens to public offices was anathema to
 Southerners who had
 justified slavery, and believed that Negroes were not fit to
 govern
 because they were not actually persons. And early historians
 of this
 period embraced the Southern view that Reconstruction
 governments were

 corrupt and incompetently run.But as the historian

 Eric Foner has
 written,
  Reconstruction was doomed by two developments:
 Washington’s decision to
  no longer enforce the rights of African-Americans in the
 South, and the
  rise of the Ku Klux Klan and related white supremacist
 groups that
 brought to bear “a campaign of murder, assault and arson
 that can only
 be described as homegrown American terrorism.”The
  Southern states subsequently wrote black citizens out of
 their
 constitutions and erected a system of civic apartheid,
 enforced by mob
 rule. The Southern fixation on denying African-Americans the
 right to
 vote was a direct response to the rise of black political
 power during
 Reconstruction. A similar backlash erupted during the modern
 civil
 rights movement.

 Reconstruction-era
  talk re-emerged after Mr. Obama was elected in 2008. Tea
 Party
 supporters and others responded to the extraordinary turnout
 among black
  voters by contending that the election had been
 “stolen.” Since then,
 most of the states that had the highest levels of black
 turnout have
 passed laws making it more difficult to vote. A 2013 study
 from The
 University of Massachusetts Boston concluded that these laws
 were
 debated and enacted in a “highly partisan, strategic and
 racialized”
 process.Antigovernment
  and militia groups have grown rapidly since 2008. Shortly
 after Mr.
 Obama’s election, the Southern Poverty Law Center, which
 monitors
 extremist groups, reported
  that the antigovernment militia movement had undergone a
 resurgence,
 fueled partly “by fears of a black man in the White
 House.” And for
 proof of violence like that of the Reconstruction era, look
 no further
 than the young white supremacist who is charged with
 murdering nine
 African-Americans at a church in Charleston, S.C., last

 summer.This is

 the backdrop against which Donald Trump blew a kiss to the
 white supremacist movement during a television interview by
 refusing
 to disavow
  the support of the white nationalist and former Ku Klux
 Klan leader
 David Duke. Republican Party leaders in Congress wagged
 their fingers
 and delivered pro forma denunciations. What they need to
 understand is
 this: Racial hatred is a threat to the country and their
 party’s leading
  candidate is doing everything he can to profit from
 it.








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