Richard Nixon, from his infamous White House tapes:
We’re going to [put] more of these little Negro bastards on the welfare rolls at $2,400 a family … Work, work, throw 'em off the rolls. That’s the key … I have the greatest affection for them, but I know they’re not going to make it for 500 years. They aren’t. You know it, too.
The Mexicans are a different cup of tea. They have a heritage. At the present time they steal, they’re dishonest, but they do have some concept of family life. They don’t live like a bunch of dogs, which the Negroes do live like.
You know what happened to the Romans? The last six Roman emperors were fags … You know what happened to the popes? They were layin’ the nuns; that’s been goin’ on for years, centuries. But the Catholic Church went to hell three or four centuries ago. It was homosexual, and it had to be cleaned out.
Look at the strong societies. The Russians. Goddamn, they root 'em out. They don’t let 'em around at all. I don’t know what they do with them. Look at this country. You think the Russians allow dope? Homosexuality, dope, immorality, are the enemies of strong societies.
The upper class in San Francisco is that way. The Bohemian Grove, which I attend from time to time — it is the most faggy goddamned thing you could ever imagine, with that San Francisco crowd. I can’t shake hands with anybody from San Francisco!
Update: I posted my own contrast-enhanced version of the image, but for reasons I can’t explain it won’t display in this comment, so here is the link to the image page.
Yeah, who cares what happened in the past. History is irrelevant? /s
It matters because the self described moderate wing of the Republican Party today, the ones who allegedly can’t stand Trump, act like or outright state that Trump is some kind of outlier and usurper who has taken over and ruined the Republican Party, when the truth is that Trump is just the inevitable result of the Southern Strategy adopted by the GOP when Nixon was its figurehead. And that strategy was amplified and perfected under Reagan. Many centrist Democrats today speak of Reagan with reverence, as if he were the epitome of a “good Republican”, when the truth is that he was a racist, homophobic asshole, and just a less crude version of Trump.
Cast aside your doubts, he did a great job! For example, while he didn’t =create= homelessness in the US, he certainly did a great job of vastly expanding the number of folks in that category. He also very effectively hindered the CDC from doing much about the AIDS epidemic in the 80’s. And who can forget his unbelievable feat of winning the Grenada war against all odds in 1983?
It matters because there is an argument at a fundamental level in this country about racism and its place in our history (and, of course, our present). The standard position from folks like Nordlinger above is that overly-sensitive and mean liberals have cheapened the concept of “racism” because they’ve applied it to most definitely in no way racist people like him and GOP icons like Ronald Reagan.
Things like this demonstrate that GOP icons like Reagan were, in fact, racist to their core and that even the pretty face of the GOP is and has been solidly, undeniably racist for decades.
He did sign the EPA, affirmative action legislation, went to China, presided over Detente (the first SALT treaty, for one), and signed off on Earth Day… and as @Tamsin_Bailey noted, he died. So there’s that… But in addition to COINTELPRO, ramping up further the war in Vietnam before ending it, made a mess of our relations with the global south, did Watergate, and beat Pat…
Reagan’s big innovation to the “Southern Strategy” was the fact that his promise of “smaller government” was a Rorschach Test: Racists heard that as “Less federal intervention to enforce civil rights,” and the well heeled heard “Lower taxes.” Those two groups are NOT natural allies, but they both responded to the same dog whistle.
It’s worth talking about this because, bluntly, Trump is the ugly wallpaper in a burning house. If you don’t have Reagan, you don’t get Bush I or II; between the three of them, they did more damage to voting rights in America than anyone since the slave era (Citizen’s United, Ending the Southern Civil Rights Voting act) with judges and legislation. From a cause-and-effect level, you can (and I will) argue that Reagan has been America’s worst president. Unfortunately, Reagan is the political version of Clint Eastwood: A lot of dummies think he’s what’s right about America, when really, he’s what’s wrong about it, full stop.
You cannot understand Trump as an aberration of the system; Trump is, instead, the ultimate form of it. Reagan, Bush and Bush were the ones who created the road; Trump just drove down it, hard, because they had paved it for him.
