Revisionism and anti-Jewish rhetoric
Becket Adams
New York Times editorial board member Mara Gay is embarrassing her newspaper. Again.
The modern Republican Party, Gay argued this week, originates from the backlash to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. This would be insightful if it was true, which it is not.
“The Tea Party is now the base,” began MSNBC host Joy Reid. “These Tea Party people are now the fundamentals of the party. So, it’s not as if Trump is some sort of outlier.”
“I think that’s what we’re missing — is that Trump isn’t some freak who’s dragging the party to the right,” she added. “He represents the median belief system of many of the people who vote for him.”
Gay concurred.
“We have to kind of go back to the historical origins of the modern-day Republican Party,” the New York Times editorial board member said.
Gay continued [emphasis added], “[T]he origin of the Republican Party as we know it today really has to do with a backlash to civil rights. And, so, any understanding of the Republican Party without that historical backlash to civil rights is incomplete. … That thread has always been there, and there’s always been a tension between the ways it is expressed, [what’s] acceptable, what kind of language can we use around it, how close do you get to some of the grosser parts of that base versus just plain conservative economic agenda, and so that tension has always been there.”
Do any of these people know anything about recent U.S. history? As it turns out, infamous segregationists “Bull” Connor and George Wallace were not, in fact, Republicans. Yet, for some reason, people such as Gay and Reid are committed to the idea that Republicans are a product of the Democratic Party’s anti-segregation and anti-civil rights activity of the 1960s.
The Republican Party was, in fact, a driving force behind several major legislative victories for civil rights in the 1960s. In all but one case, higher percentages of Republican lawmakers in the House and the Senate voted in favor of such legislation than the Democrats. In fact, it was a group of Democratic lawmakers, including Sens. Richard Russell of Georgia, Strom Thurmond of South Carolina (who changed his party affiliation in September 1964 to Republican), Robert Byrd of West Virginia, William Fulbright of Arkansas, and Sam Ervin of North Carolina, who rather famously attempted to filibuster the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Russell even argued the measure would lead to the downfall of the South’s “two different social orders” and result in the “amalgamation and mongrelization of our people.”
When it was proposed originally in 1963, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed in the House with 78% of Republicans voting “yea” and a much smaller 60% of Democrats saying the same, according to an analysis done by the Daily Caller News Foundation. When the bill eventually passed the Senate, roughly 82% of Republicans voted in favor, while 69% of Democrats voted the same. The amended Senate bill passed the House, with support from 76% of Republicans and 60% of Democrats.
Earlier, in 1957, Congress passed a law protecting voting rights for black people. Eighty-four percent of House GOP lawmakers voted “yea,” while only 51% of Democratic representatives voted to support it. When the same bill eventually passed the Senate, it did so with 93% of Republicans voting “yea” and only 59% of Democrats supporting it.
There’s more where this comes from, but you get the picture. Yes, Democratic legislators played a key role in the passage of several civil rights bills, but the backlash at the time was not exactly Republican-driven. How, exactly, does one square where the civil rights backlash came from to where the GOP is now? Is this the old “the parties changed” canard?
The backlash is coming from inside the house!
Joy Reid and antisemitism
Of all the critics of former President Donald Trump’s idiotic and disqualifying meeting with outspoken antisemites Ye (formerly known as Kanye West) and Nick Fuentes, MSNBC’s Joy Reid is the least qualified to speak.
After all, Reid is herself known to dabble in racial supremacism and anti-Jewish “dog whistles,” as they call it at MSNBC.
“[T]here’s only a very small degree of difference” between the Republican Party and Fuentes, Reid alleged this week. “To me, it doesn’t sound much different than fundamentally what the party platform is.”
“They don’t believe in elections,” the host said. “They don’t necessarily like the idea of democracy. … They hate the culture. They are angry the culture is too friendly to LGBTQ people. I see a very small degree of difference between what [Fuentes] believes and what they believe.”
One could draw a clearer line from Fuentes to Reid, if one felt so inclined.
In 2006, Reid complained on her now-defunct blog that CNN’s Wolf Blitzer was too soft on the Jews.
Blitzer is a “former flak for the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC),” the MSNBC host wrote in 2006. “He doesn’t even try to hide his affinity for his Israeli guests, or his partisanship for their cause, while turning instantly to prosecutorial mode when questioning any guest who has the dumb luck to be an Arab or Muslim in King Blitzer’s court. It’s actually quite stunning how brazen Blitzer’s bias has become.”
Also in 2006, while commenting on then-President George W. Bush’s State of the Union address, Reid remarked, “You’ve got to love the ‘Jew cam’ that seeks out [Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut] like a laser-guided missile every time anyone mentions the word ‘Israel.’” She also mentioned a “black guy cam” and an “Obama ‘African-American-cam.’”
That same year, Reid promoted a blog that characterized Muslims as backwater savages, firing rifles “into the air” from the “garbage and sewage laden streets outside of their mud huts.”
Sounds kind of Fuentes-y.
Earlier, in 2005, Reid concurred with then-Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who argued the “Zionist regime” of Israel should be relocated to Europe.
“God is not a real estate broker,” Reid wrote. “He can’t just give you land 1,000 years ago that you can come back and claim today.”
She posited the theory that then-Florida Gov. Charlie Crist was secretly a gay man who married his wife only as a cover story.
“I can just see poor Charlie on the honeymoon, ogling the male waiters and thinking to himself, ‘god, do I actually have to see her naked…?” she wrote in 2008.
Reid likewise suggested right-wing author Ann Coulter was actually a man.
“[M]ost straight people cringe at the sight of two men kissing,” Reid wrote elsewhere, claiming that being gay was an “immoral” “lifestyle” choice.
To this day, Reid maintains she did not, in fact, write those blog posts herself. Rather, she maintains hackers infiltrated her now-defunct blog somehow and uploaded the offending posts in an effort to frame her.
Too much talking
One of the most fascinating and disturbing reoccurring characters in major media is the journalist who supports censorship, the one who believes there’s such a thing as too much free speech.
It’s as if these people believe only they should be allowed unfettered speech.
“Social media, the tools of gathering data on each of us, now has insidiously manipulated us,” journalist Maria Ressa said this week during an appearance on CNN. “It is at a point where journalism becomes nearly impossible because the distribution system actually rewards lies.”
CNN anchor Poppy Harlow asked Ressa whether more free speech could be the solution, referencing an argument made by Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis in 1927.
Ressa responded with a rhetorical question: “When did he say that?”
“That doesn’t work today,” she said. “Not in the age of exponential lies.”
For Ressa, the solution lies in additional government regulation.
“Information warfare uses free speech to stifle free speech,” she said. “You say a lie a million times, you pound someone into silence. We got to get through this time. But part of it also is the failure of democratic governments to put guardrails in place, legislation on social media.”
In 2021, Ressa won the Nobel Peace Prize in honor of being “a fearless defender of freedom of expression” and revealing former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s “abuse of power, use of violence and increasing authoritarianism.”