Republicans Whine Over Biden's Targeting of Racist Extremism

One day into the Biden/Harris administration and some Republicans, the usual talking heads at Fox News, a/k/a Faux News, and scamvangelist grifters like Franklin Graham and hate group leader Tony Perkins are whining that Joe Biden's inaugural address unjustly targeted them as racists.  The hypocrisy of these whiners is shocking.  Since Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy" the GOP has used dog whistle messaging to win the support of racists and segregationists. Under the Trump/Pence regime, dog whistle messaging was discarded and openly racist messaging became the norm.  While this occurred, congressional Republicans remained silent and became complicit in the racist messaging.  In the case of Perkins, he has documented links to white supremacy groups - a common trait of many self-styled evangelical leaders.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at this disingenuous whining.  Here are highlights:

President Biden’s words during his inaugural address were straightforward in their targets.

“The cry for survival comes from the planet itself, a cry that can’t be any more desperate or any more clear,” he said. “And now a rise of political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism that we must confront and we will defeat. To overcome these challenges, to restore the soul and secure the future of America requires so much more than words. It requires the most elusive of all things in a democracy: unity.”

National unity would be required to address climate change and the scourge of extremism, particularly racist extremism. Not anything terribly controversial on its face.

Yet some nonetheless managed to wring out some controversy.

“If you read his speech and listen to it carefully, much of it is thinly veiled innuendo,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said during an interview on Fox News, “calling us white supremacists, calling us racists, calling us every name in the book.”

Paul also apparently objected to Biden’s saying that “there is truth and there are lies, lies told for power and for profit.”

“Calling us people who don’t tell the truth,” Paul continued. “ ‘And going forward we’re not going to have manufactured or manipulated truth.’ That’s another way of saying ‘All of my opponents manufacture or manipulate the truth and are liars.’ ”

In that last sentence, Paul does explicitly what he did implicitly on the issue of race: conflate Biden’s constrained criticism with a broad attack on Republicans generally. Biden never specifically mentioned who was telling those lies, although the focus was obvious. He never even called out the extremism he was targeting as being right-wing. But for Paul, the implication was clear: Biden thinks Republicans are racist liars.

He’s not alone. Ever since coverage of the storming of the Capitol earlier this month noted that some participants were overt supporters of far-right or white nationalist groups, there has been an effort to suggest that this meant that all supporters of former president Donald Trump fall within that category — and will be targeted as a result.

One of the champions of this idea has been Fox News’s Tucker Carlson. For days, he has been claiming that criticism of the Capitol rioters amounted to criticism of the right broadly, and that the military presence at the inauguration was meant not to protect against stated threats from the far right but, instead, to maintain compliance.

On Wednesday night, Carlson, too, derided Biden’s call for combating extremism.

It’s all overwrought, particularly given what Biden actually said. Biden wasn’t looping Republicans generally in with white supremacists and extremists. Carlson is doing that. Paul is doing that.

But that, too, is part of an established tradition.

Remember in the 2016 campaign when Hillary Clinton described Trump supporters as “deplorable?” You certainly do; it was adopted with relish by Trump supporters. What most people don’t remember, though, is that Clinton wasn’t describing Trump supporters as deplorable in general, just a subset of them.

It’s clear that there is an element to much of the political right and Trump’s support that derives from specific concerns about race. Trump supporters and Republicans have repeatedly indicated that they are more concerned than most Americans about being the targets of “reverse racism”; that is, racism targeting White people. One of the predictors of Trump support before the 2016 election was a sense that Whites are losing out. White Republicans see Whites, Blacks and Hispanics as facing about the same levels of discrimination. The Trump administration overtly sought to address the idea that White Americans were being disadvantaged by immigration from largely non-White countries even as it often cast non-White people as dangerous.

It’s important to note that this is clearly not what Biden was talking about. He was talking about the rise of white nationalist extremism and violence of the sort that has been manifested occasionally in recent years and which the Department of Homeland Security (under Trump) identified as the most significant terrorism threat in the country. He was talking about the sort of extremism that contributed to what happened at the Capitol.

The part of Biden’s speech most directly targeting Carlson wasn’t the part about the white nationalists. It was the part about lies being told for power and profit. Carlson appears not to have heeded the message.

Even with Trump now gone from office - and hopefully about to face major legal issues - expect the usual suspects to continue to lie and pander to white supremacists who along with Christofascists are the twin pillars of the Republican Party base.