Why Are Black Pastors Water Carriers For Republicans Who Hate Them?

The very white GOP convention

Driving home from having dinner with friends I had on live coverage of the GOP convention on satellite radio and what do I hear?  Yet another black pastor carrying water for the Republican Party - I believe it was Pastor Darrell Scott of the New Spirit Revival Church in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.  The same party that has an national agenda of (i) enacting voter ID laws and other restrictions aimed at disenfranchising minority voter, (ii) opposing unions that might bring better pay to minority workers, (iii) cutting social safety net programs that aid countless minority voters, (iv) waveringly support police who kill black citizens, and (v) rolling back civil rights protections.  WTF is wrong with these black pastors?  We see a similar phenomenon here in Virginia where The Family Foundation, a hate group in all but formal designation with strong ties to white supremacists, manipulates black pastors as if they were trained circus dogs.  Do these pastors know nothing of the histories and agendas of those they are serving?  Does it take merely some short term flattery to get them to to betray the others members of their race?  Or is the promise of money what turns them into modern day Judas's?  I do not understand it.   They act akin to German Jews in 1930's Germany who would have support Adolph Hitler.  Are they really that stupid?  A piece in the New York Times looks at the reality of the GOP's lily white, anti-black convention.  Here are excerpts:

Mike Hill, a black Republican state representative in Florida, grew steadily more disheartened as he watched television clips of his party’s overwhelmingly white national convention lecturing African-Americans about the police and race relations.

There was Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, nearly shouting Monday night that the police only wanted to help people, regardless of race. A sea of white convention delegates, cheering wildly as two black speakers ridiculed the Black Lives Matter movement and unconditionally praised law enforcement officers. And a series of speakers pushing Donald J. Trump’s law-and-order message and arguing, as he has, that the United States had lost its way.

“When a lot of white Republicans get together and bring up race, even telling black people how they should see police and the world, it evokes the worst kind of emotion,” said Mr. Hill, who supports Mr. Trump but decided to skip the convention.

For many black Republicans, the party’s convention has veered unexpectedly and unhappily toward lecturing and moralizing on issues of race, an off-putting posture at a time when Mr. Trump is staggeringly unpopular with minority voters. He drew support from zero percent of African-Americans in recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal polls in Ohio and Pennsylvania, and he is struggling badly with Hispanics, partly because of his harsh language about Mexicans and immigrants.

In Cleveland, however, Mr. Trump and Republican Party leaders are focused on appealing to white voters, particularly white men who are critical to their electoral strategy in the Midwest and the South.

Black Republicans said they understood the thinking behind this, but argued that it was based on politics more than on helping people or strengthening the country.

And those who did speak from the podium seemed focused more on castigating black protesters, scolding other blacks for their behavior and exalting Mr. Trump than on trying to help Republicans make inroads with undecided or skeptical black voters.

This convention has fewer black delegates and speakers than any in two decades, according to several African-American Republicans who are regulars at party gatherings. The Republican National Committee could not provide definitive counts of delegates by race; one party official estimated that there were 80 black delegates, but that was based on an informal crowd count that might have included people on the convention floor who were not delegates. There are 2,472 delegates in all.

Some Republicans said privately that they were uncomfortable that convention planners had tapped black speakers to chastise black protesters in front of a mostly white crowd, which seemed to lap it up.

Other than the possible motivations noted above, the only other on I can think of is appeals to religion.  By definition, the deeply religious reject facts and objective reality in favor of belief in myths and legends. Perhaps these pastors are suckered by this ploy.  A last possibility is that the black pastors and Trump share a common trait- they are all con-artists who prey on the ignorant and gullible.  Perhaps they feel that Trump is a kindred spirit.