The party’s three leading candidates are speaking about history and race in polarizing and provocative ways that sometimes diverge from or distort the facts, some political strategists, experts and civil rights leaders said
Former president Donald Trump uses dehumanizing rhetoric to describe undocumented immigrants before largely White audiences. The runaway GOP polling leader says they are “poisoning the blood of our country” — comments some experts have compared to Adolf Hitler’s writings on blood purity.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis defended part of his state’s African American history curriculum standards that claimed some enslaved people developed skills that “could be applied for their personal benefit.” And Nikki Haley omitted any mention of slavery when she was asked to explain the cause of the Civil War at a town hall event this past week. It wasn’t until the next day that Haley acknowledged the war was “about slavery.”
…
But their rhetoric is also appealing to many Americans who lean conservative, interviews with voters in Iowa and New Hampshire show, including some who reject the accusations that the statements are racially insensitive or worse. Many in the GOP are resentful of liberal leaders who they see as constantly pointing out or forcing the country to apologize for past atrocities, and some are angry about demographic and cultural shifts in America driven in part by immigration.
Many in the GOP are resentful of liberal leaders who they see as constantly pointing out or forcing the country to apologize for past atrocities
I FUCKING HATE our modern society where somehow apologizing for things is viewed as wrong in and of itself. Apologizing is the way to start righting a wrong.
I mean yeah, it starts at the top with Trump refusing to ever apologize for anything, but this is a pervasive idea across American culture. I don’t know when it started, I didn’t notice it starting, but it sure is here now and it’s so bad that we can’t even teach proper history anymore because someone might feel the need to say, “I’m sorry we did that to your people.”
It’s the conservatives that feel that way. They can’t ever admit to being wrong, or admit that the US has done wrong.
I wish it were just conservatives, but I have encountered multiple people on the left who have this same issue. It is so bothersome to me because, if anything, I apologize too much. It costs nothing to apologize and it might just end some bad feelings.
Conservatives have always chosen evil over good. It is who they are at their core.
Throughout history, they have always been racist, misogynist, homophobic, xenophobic, antisemitic bigots. We should never expect different from anyone who admits they are a conservative.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
He pointed to how Republican leaders targeted Colin Kaepernick, the biracial former NFL quarterback who took a knee during the national anthem to protest police brutality and social injustice, and tangled with NASCAR after it banned the Confederate flag at events.
The pattern of Republican leaders inflaming the debate over racial issues has played out in countless ways after America’s conversation about race was thrust to the forefront by the election of Barack Obama as the nation’s first Black president.
He accused an “unhinged left-wing mob” of trying to “vandalize our history, desecrate our monuments” and “demolish our heritage.” In 2021, Republican lawmakers in state legislatures across the country led campaigns against the teaching of critical race theory, an academic framework that holds that racism is systemic in America.
Over her career, Haley has spoken in high-profile ways about race, particularly when she made the decision to remove the Confederate flag from the State House grounds in South Carolina after the racist massacre at a Black church in Charleston in 2015.
After the fatal shooting of Walter Scott, a Black man who was shot in the back by a police officer after a traffic stop in 2015, Haley signed a bill requiring law enforcement to wear body cameras.
The Florida governor this year defended new African American history standards in his state that said students should learn “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit,” while discussing how they did work ranging from farming to blacksmithing.
The original article contains 2,729 words, the summary contains 253 words. Saved 91%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Can’t wait for the day all and any WWII-era people are gone…
Because that’ll mean the conservatives will be re-writing that bit of history as roots to justify their goals of making fascism the cool thing to have.
To be fair to DeSantis, slaves learned many menial skills that could be marketed absolutely nowhere because they were being held captive. Many states also passed laws making it illegal to teach slaves how to read, or anything else outside of religious instruction.
But sure, they were great at picking cotton and lying to their masters about how much they hate them. Those are basically the same as a college education by Florida standards.
