A Republican Problem

Click here for an NYT article by Timothy Egan entitled "A Refuge for Racists." The first paragraph:

In one of the little acts of subversion that creeps into “The Simpsons” every now and then ["The Simpsons" is a Fox show], a helicopter from Fox News was shown in 2010 with a logo, “Not Racist, But #1 With Racists.”

Republicans jump up and down and scream that their party is not racist, and yet the GOP harbors white supremacists and Stormfront members (believe me, no one in those two groups votes Democratic). Egan points out that Dylann Roof was inspired by the Council of Conservative Citizens. Here are the first few lines of the CCC (like KKK; get it?) entry in Wikipedia:

The CofCC was founded in 1988 in Atlanta, Georgia, and then relocated to St. Louis, Missouri. The CofCC was formed by various Republicans, conservative Democrats, and some former members of the Citizens' Councils of America, sometimes called the White Citizens Council, a segregationist organization that was prominent in the 1960s and 1970s. Lester Maddox, former governor of Georgia, was a charter member.

Here's the first paragraph of the Wikipedia entry on the above-mentioned White Citizens Council:

The Citizens' Councils (also referred to as White Citizens' Councils) were an associated network of white supremacist organizations in the United States, concentrated in the South. The first was formed on July 11, 1954[1] After 1956, it was known as the Citizens' Councils of America. With about 60,000 members across the United States,[2] mostly in the South, the groups were founded primarily to oppose racial integration of schools, but they also supported segregation of public facilities during the 1950s and 1960s. Members used severe intimidation tactics including economic boycotts, firing people from jobs, propaganda, and occasionally violence against civil-rights activists.

The article goes on to say:

Unlike the Ku Klux Klan, which had revived for a time, the WCC met openly and was seen as "pursuing the agenda of the Klan with the demeanor of the Rotary Club."

At a large Council meeting in Montgomery, Alabama, during the civil rights crisis of the 1960s, this mimeographed flyer was distributed:

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary to abolish the Negro race, proper methods should be used. Among these are guns, bows and arrows, sling shots and knives. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all whites are created equal with certain rights; among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of dead niggers.

Back to the Council of Conservative Citizens: Egan points out that its leader, Earl Holt III, has donated over 60,000 to at least (I think) 34 Republican politicians, including 2016 presidential hopefuls Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum and Rand Paul. Republican politicians were not ignorant of the open racism of the CCC when they accepted those donations; Holt's donations on behalf of the Council put him in the top 1% of Republican donors.

After Dylann Roof's slaughter of nine African-Americans in Charleston, South Carolina, Hillary Clinton gave a powerful speech excoriating the extreme racist element; you won't catch any of the Republican wannabes giving such a speech, because the hardcore Southern racists are a key part of their base.