Think Progress

Sanford Predicts Stimulus Will Result In ‘A Thing Called Slavery’

Speaking to the Lexington County GOP last week, Gov. Mark Sanford (R-SC) lamented his defeat in his quest to reject American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds for schools, the unemployed, and for job creation and retention. On June 4, the South Carolina Supreme Court ordered Sanford to accept the $700 million in stimulus funds he had opposed.

To defend his grandstanding, Sanford has previously lashed out at his critics, saying it would be tantamount to “fiscal child abuse” to accept the federal money. He has also compared President Obama to Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, because of his fiscal policies. But now Sanford is taking his hyperbolic rhetoric to another level, claiming that the stimulus will result in “a thing called slavery”:

SANFORD: A guy from the northeast did a study on generational accounting. Generational accounting says what is the imputed tax for a young person born in America today? And remarkably, that number is 82, which at all ain’t that far from a thing called slavery. If you’re giving away 82% of every dollar you earn every day and every week and every month, A, it’s not a good deal, B, it collapses the capitalistic system because nobody has any initiative to work at that point, and C, it really isn’t that far from slavery. And what the Republic was originally set up was on the notion that was just talked about a moment ago, which is this larger notion of freedom. And economic freedom is a part of the larger notion of freedom.

Watch it:

Sanford’s comments echo the right-wing meme that nearly every policy President Obama pursues, whether it is the stimulus or his national service plan, is a covert plan to enslave Americans. President Bush’s $1.3 trillion — deficit enlarging — tax cut certainly did not elicit the same hysterical response from Sanford.

Sanford claimed that the nation was founded on “freedom” as opposed to slavery. But that view reveals either a profound ignorance of American and South Carolinian history, or, at worst, is an example of Sanford casually rewriting of the past.

Not only did the nation’s founding documents acknowledge and perpetuate slavery, but South Carolina has a particularly grisly record on the practice. Under the state Constitution of 1790, white men were required to own 500 acres of land and ten slaves to be eligible for the state House of Representatives, and double that to be eligible for the Senate. Author William Dusinberre has described South Carolina as a “charnel house” among other slave states, noting that over fifty five percent of slaves on rice plantations died before the age of fifteen. In addition to brutality from their masters, the deaths were a result of a combination of malaria and infants’ feebleness at birth, which was caused by the mothers’ own chronic malaria and their general exhaustion from rice cultivation during pregnancy.

Under Misspelled Banner, Buchanan And White Nationalist Brimelow Argue For English-Only Initiatives

On Saturday, Pat Buchanan hosted a conference to discuss how Republicans can regain a majority in America. During one discussion, panelists suggested supporting English-only initiatives as a prime way of attracting “working class white Democrats.” The discussion ridiculed Judge Sotomayor for the fact that she studied children’s classics to improve her grammar while attending college. The panelists also suggested that, without English as the official language, President Obama would force Americans to speak Spanish.

One salient feature of the event was the banner hanging over the English-only advocates. The word conference was spelled “Conferenece.” View it here:

The panelists pressed on with their anti-bilingualism diatribe without noting the irony of the obvious misspelling on the banner:

PAT BUCHANAN: Judge Sotomayor is up there at school in New York, she gets a scholarship to Princeton, she’s graduated with all these big honors and awards they said she never won. What’s she doing there in the summer? They said her adviser told her to read children’s classics so she can learn English better. How do you graduate number one in Princeton if you’re in the summer and you’re reading Rumpelstiltskin and Snow White? [laughter] [...]

PETER BRIMELOW: I really do recommend the language issue because you know that polls better than immigration and affirmative action. Eighty-five percent of Americans say they would favor official language policy. The wonderful thing about this issue if you look at what’s going to actually happen here is you’re going to find that the Obama administration is going to gradually institute institutional bilingualism in the country. It’s going to be required to speak Spanish in key positions, the police force and so on. This is a direct attack on the American working class because they are not going to be bilingual.

ThinkProgress attended the event and obtained audio of the panel. Listen here:

Mocking Sotomayor’s struggle to learn English has become a habit for Buchanan. On CSPAN a few weeks ago, Buchanan tried to undermine Sotomayor’s qualifications by saying she had read Pinocchio as a part of her “college work.” Buchanan was referencing a New York Times article, which talked about how hard Sotomayor had to work to graduate at the top of her class from Princeton. The article stated that she “spent summers reading children’s classics she had missed in a Spanish-speaking home and ‘re-teaching’ herself to write ‘proper English’ by reading elementary grammar books.” Sotomayor never read children’s books as part of her “college work” and the books consisted of classics such as “Huckleberry Finn” and “Pride and Prejudice” — not Snow White, as Buchanan contends.

Peter Brimelow, one of the panelists to the event, is the editor of Vdare.com. He has written extensively against immigration and has long advocated that the GOP must “appeal to its base: white Americans.” Brimelow has defended accusations that he writes and publishes white supremacist material by declaring his content to be merely “white nationalist.”

Copy Of Black’s ‘Strongly Worded Reprimand’ To Aide For Racist E-mail: ‘I Look Forward To Working Together’

Pressure has been building on Tennessee State Sen. Diane Black (R) to fire her aide, Sherri Goforth, who sent an e-mail with a racist image of President Obama. Today on CNN, for example, former Cheney aide Ron Christie said that “I think the appropriate course of action would be for this staffer to be dismissed.”

However, Black has dug in her heels. Yesterday, she told CNN that that although the e-mail “does not represent the beliefs or opinions of my office,” she decided to keep Goforth on:

When I did find out about the communication that was sent out, I immediately called the H.R. department and through their advice did what they told me needed to be done when there was a violation of an e-mail policy by the state. And so, therefore, as you have already stated, Miss Goforth did get a verbal reprimand as well as a very strongly worded reprimand written and it was put in her file that if this should ever occur again, that she should be immediately terminated.

As the Knoxville News Sentinel reports, the Tennessee Democratic Party has obtained a copy of this “strongly worded reprimand,” which is barely a slap on the wrist. Black advises Goforth not to send communications that are “derogatory regarding any minority” and adds, “I look forward to working together in the future within these guidelines.” The letter:

Goforth initially refused to apologize for the racist imagery, saying only that she sent it to the wrong list. (She eventually apologized for the “offensive nature” of her e-mail.)

Black has repeatedly insisted that Goforth’s e-mail did not “reflect any of my beliefs.” As proof she has cited her time as a nurse, “working with people with black skin who needed medical help” around the world.

Leading White Nationalist To Speak At Pat Buchanan’s American Cause Conference This Month

The Southern Poverty Law Center reports that MSNBC’s Pat Buchanan has invited the editor of a white nationalist, anti-immigrant website to speak at the upcoming conference for his group, the American Cause.

Peter Brimelow, editor of VDARE.com, has written numerous tracts railing against immigration. He has said that the Republican party must “appeal to its base: white Americans,” and noted that John McCain “easily carried the white a.k.a. American vote.” Hitting back at critics of his website, he defended the site’s “white nationalist” writers:

We also publish on VDARE.COM a few writers…whom I would regard as “white nationalist,” in the sense that they aim to defend the interests of American whites. … Get used to it. As immigration policy drives whites into a minority, this type of interest-group “white nationalism” will inexorably increase.

Other writers on the site are even more outspoken in their racism, particularly Steve Sailor:

[W]hat if there is disparate impact for a good reason that is unmentionable: that blacks, on average, aren’t as smart as whites? We are supposed to constantly act as if the racial gaps seen on the New Haven firefighters’ written test were surprising when they are exactly the same as those seen on, say, graduate and professional school exams. [LINK]

In other words, what Obama hasn’t figured out yet…is that Better Teachers means Whiter Teachers. [LINK]

It’s no surprise that Buchanan would invite such a hatemonger to his conference. Buchanan himself has appeared at least twice on a neo-Nazi radio show; one appearance was streamed live on Stormfront, one of the most prominent white supremacist online forums. More recently, Buchanan has led the far-right attack against Sonia Sotomayor and in supposed defense of white men, going to far as to claim that “what is happening now to white men right now is exactly what was done to black folks for years.”

As Media Matters’ Jamison Foser asked, what exactly would Pat Buchanan have to say or do to get himself fired from MSNBC?

In Wake Of Shootings, Conservatives Rush To Defend Disparagement Of DHS Report On Right-Wing Extremism

Following yesterday’s tragic shooting at the Holocaust Museum — reportedly carried out by white supremacist James von Brunn — two Fox News personalities, Shepard Smith and Catherine Herridge, suggested that critics of the Department of Homeland Security’s report on right-wing extremism should re-think their criticism. ” “The right went absolutely bonkers,” said Smith, adding that DHS was “warning us for a reason.”

But later on Fox, New York Post columnist Ralph Peters attacked Smith and Herridge for claiming that the shooting “validated” the DHS report. “It had nothing to do with the Department of Homeland Security report,” declared Peters. Watch it:

Though some conservatives have concluded that the recent string of right-wing violence has “vindicated” the DHS report, many others agree with Peters. Michelle Malkin, who led the charge against the DHS report, approvingly linked to a milblogger that called Smith and Herridge “pathetic” for reconsidering the report. Malkin’s Hot Air colleague, Ed Morrissey, defends the criticism of the report by claiming that it didn’t “mention anti-semitism at all.”

But as Huffington Post’s Sam Stein points out, the DHS report “warned specifically about an upswing of anti-Semitic behavior.” “Anti-Semitic extremists attribute these losses to a deliberate conspiracy conducted by a cabal of Jewish ‘financial elites,’” the report read. “These ‘accusatory’ tactics are employed to draw new recruits into right-wing extremist groups and further radicalize those already subscribing to extremist beliefs.”

Gingrich Shifts Rhetoric On Sotomayor, Calls Her A ‘Racialist’

Newt Gingrich attracted a great deal of attention for himself last month when he said that Judge Sonia Sotomayor should withdraw her nomination because she is a “Latina woman racist.”

That rhetoric proved too much for even right-wing Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Jeff Sessions (R-AL), both of whom distanced themselves from Gingrich.

So Gingrich pretended to back down. “The word ‘racist’ should not have been applied to Judge Sotomayor as a person, even if her words themselves are unacceptable,” he wrote.

But this morning on CBS’s Face the Nation, Gingrich again used the word “racist” but suggested that what he really meant is that Sotomayor is a “racialist”:

When I did a Twitter about her, having read what she said, I said that was racist — but I applied it to her as a person. And the truth is I don’t know her as a person. It’s clear that what she said was racist, and it’s clear — or as somebody wrote recently, “racialist” if you prefer.

Watch it:

A spokesman for Gingirch told Politico recently, “nothing has changed in the structure of his argument, he is just retracting the word racist.” And apparently replacing it with the word “racialist.”

White Supremacist Group Posts Doctored Photo Of Sotomayor With KKK Hood

John Aravosis at AMERICAblog notes that the Council of Conservative Citizens — a group the Southern Poverty Law Center calls a “brazenly racist group” — has put up a doctored photo of Supreme Court nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor. In the picture, Sotomayor is wearing a KKK-type hood. On her robe is a raised fist and the words “La Raza”:

The right wing has been outraged over the fact that Sotomayor is a member of the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), the nation’s largest Latino civil rights and advocacy organization. Last week, former Republican congressman Tom Tancredo made a similar smear against Sotomayor and the group, calling it a “a Latino KKK without the hoods or the nooses“:

If you belong to an organization called La Raza, in this case, which is, from my point of view anyway, nothing more than a Latino — it’s a counterpart — a Latino KKK without the hoods or the nooses. If you belong to something like that in a way that’s going to convince me and a lot of other people that it’s got nothing to do with race. Even though the logo of La Raza is “All for the race. Nothing for the rest.” What does that tell you?

“La Raza,” in fact, translates as “the people,” not “the race.” ThinkProgress also spoke to an NCLR spokesperson who confirmed that the logo in the CCC photo is not affiliated with the organization in any way.

CCC has been courted by prominent conservatives such as former Republican Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, who has since renounced the organization. As Tom Edsall wrote in the Washington Post on Dec. 16, 1998:

The CCC, which has strong ties to the old white Citizens Councils, is considered racist by conservatives and liberals. Many of the most prominent figures in the organization are proponents of preserving the white race and culture, which they see as under assault by immigration, intermarriage and growing numbers of Hispanic Americans.

In the spring 1992 newsletter, provided by a Dallas man, Ed Sebasta, who has followed the organization’s activities, Lott is pictured speaking to the group with its banner in the background.

In his speech, Lott, according to the newsletter, called the Citizen Informer, warns against the forces supporting government spending: “We need more meetings like this across the nation” to offset these liberal pressures. “The people in this room stand for the right principles and the right philosophy. Let’s take it in the right direction and our children will be the beneficiaries.”

Last week, former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke also embraced the position that Sotomayor is racist, while claiming that he, on the other hand, has “consistently supported true equal rights.”

Former Klansman David Duke Rips Limbaugh For ‘KKK’ Comparison, Says Sotomayor Is The Racist

On Friday, Rush Limbaugh said that Judge Sonia Sotomayor “brings a form of bigotry and racism to the court” akin to that embraced by former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke. Listen here:

Responding on his personal website, David Duke decried the comparison to Sotomayor. “Limbaugh, a recent addict to illegal drugs, has no business making personal attacks against me for my past,” Duke said. “I have consistently supported true equal rights, stating again and again that I support the best-qualified person regardless of race in hiring and promotions.”

But while rejecting Limbaugh on the one hand, Duke embraced the attacks against Sotomayor made last week by nativist former congressman Tom Tancredo, who said Sotomayor belongs to a “a Latino KKK without the hoods or the nooses.” From Duke’s site:

Dr. Duke, a PhD who lectures about half the year in Europe, also criticized Judge Sotomayor as an activist in the primarily Mexican organization, La Raza, which literally means “the race.” Duke says her racial bias can be seen in a statement she made in a speech delivered in 2001: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” [...]

Sotomayor, whose appointment has ignited a sustained controversy among both Democrats and Republicans, has long been an activist for radical-Left Mexican organizations and an enthusiastic proponent of racial discrimination against White people called affirmative action.

Elsewhere on his website, Duke claims that Sotomayor is part of a grand Jewish conspiracy to control “any person who is influential or who may at some point in the future become influential.” No word yet on whether the right-wing will also embrace this attack on Judge Sotomayor.