Contributors

Monday, June 22, 2015

Following the Money

A lot of Republicans had a hard time calling for the removal of the Confederate battle flag from South Carolina's capitol in the aftermath of the terrorist attack in Charleston, even as it became more and more obvious that Roof's motivations were linked to glorification of the Confederacy, white supremacy and slavery. 

Most said that taking the battle flag down was something that people should "begin discussing," though some -- like Mitt Romney, to his credit -- did quickly call for its banishment to the ash heap of history.

The question is, how can anyone possibly defend the Confederate flag, especially in light of the horrors of slavery and the treacheries of the Civil War that it invokes?

The answer's obvious: money.

It turns out that Republicans get a lot of money -- and votes -- from racists. The Guardian looked into this:
The leader of a rightwing group that Dylann Roof allegedly credits with helping to radicalise him against black people before the Charleston church massacre has donated tens of thousands of dollars to Republicans such as presidential candidates Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Rick Santorum.

Earl Holt has given $65,000 to Republican campaign funds in recent years while inflammatory remarks – including that black people were “the laziest, stupidest and most criminally-inclined race in the history of the world” – were posted online in his name.
Additionally:
Holt has since 2012 contributed $8,500 to Cruz, the Texas senator running for the Republican presidential nomination, and his Jobs, Growth and Freedom Fund political action committee, according to Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings. On some filings Holt’s occupation was listed as “slumlord”.
And it's not just presidents: Holt spent his cash affecting election outcomes across the country:
Holt has also distributed tens of thousands in campaign contributions among prominent Republicans in congress, such as Representative Steve King of Iowa ($2,000), Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas ($1,500) and Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona ($1,000). He also gave $3,200 to the former Minnesota congresswoman and presidential candidate Michele Bachmann.
Holt's website and its focus on the fiction of "huge numbers" of heretofore unknown black-on-white murders was what radicalized Roof.  Curiously, the signal event that started Roof down this path was the murder of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman.

What?! you say. How can that be? Well, following the lead of Fox News, in which whites and Christians are always the victim no matter who gets killed, racists like Holt twisted the killing of a black teenager walking home in the rain into a call to action for white supremacists. Roof's impressionable young mind was warped by Holt's propaganda, just like young Somali Americans whose minds are warped by Al Qaeda and ISIS propaganda on the Internet.

The constant refrain of conservatives is always, "We're the victims! We're the victims!" even when whites kill blacks. To distract from the injustice of Trayvon Martin's murder, racists like Holt manufactured a phony scandal that sucked Dylann Roof in.

Fox News and Republicans like Cruz, Bachmann, King, and Cotton all jumped on the Zimmerman bandwagon, repeat the same stupid chant, knowing that it's what angry racists in the South want to hear. It wasn't the exact same tune that Holt was pushing, but it was an accompanying melody, a sort of racist-light counterpoint that lent mainstream credibility to Holt's ridiculous claims.

Now, Republicans and most of their supporters in former slave holding states don't openly advocate the radical racist agenda of Holt and his ilk. But they use the code words and the dog whistles that let racists like Holt and Roof know where their sympathies really lie. They push policies in Congress -- privatizing Social Security and Medicare, cutting welfare, repealing the ACA -- that are calculated with the express intent to do maximal harm to minorities. This agenda was clearly described by Paul Krugman just today:
Only one former member of the Confederacy has expanded Medicaid, and while a few Northern states are also part of the movement, more than 80 percent of the population in Medicaid-refusing America lives in states that practiced slavery before the Civil War.

And it’s not just health reform: a history of slavery is a strong predictor of everything from gun control (or rather its absence), to low minimum wages and hostility to unions, to tax policy.

These policies are intended to keep black and other minorities on the lowest economic rungs of society. The downside is that with increasing income inequality, much of it due to jobs shipped overseas and union busting, more and more white Americans are falling into the same trap. But to Holt, that's a good thing: the poorer whites become, the more scared and pissed-off they get.

Holt wants white kids like Roof, now facing the same dismal prospects that blacks have faced for the last 150 years, to blame blacks for their problems. It's an easy sell in the South, where racism is always bubbling below the surface.

Now Cruz and the other Republicans are falling over themselves to return Holt's donations. But it's a sham. They'll keep the millions of dollars of donors who are smarter than Holt and don't put their racist rants online, couching them in gentler terms like "combating voter fraud," "states rights," "balanced budgets" and "tax reform" that have the ultimate goal of crushing minorities.

But everyone still knows who's calling the shots in the Republican Party.

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