February 29, 2016

Jeffrey Lord is an ardent Donald Drumpf apologist and quite possibly more. What he really is, however, is a dishonest shill who tries to lie with Drumpf's ease and doesn't quite get away with it.

On CNN's New Day, he tried the new KKK spin out for viewers in an effort to pacify white supremacists while walking back his embrace of David Duke.

After his obligatory nod toward Saint Ronnie Reagan and his John Birch Society endorsement, Lord got down to business.

"Donald Trump isn't playing the game, although he certainly denounced him," Lord declared. "I mean, David Duke is a hardcore leftist. He's an anti-Semite."

"Yes, Margaret, the Ku Klux Klan is a function of the left. It was the military arm of the Democratic Party," he added.

This is the recycled garbage about Southern Democrats who actually left the Democratic Party 50 years ago as part of the Republican Party's Southern Strategy. The KKK hasn't voted Democrat in decades, but "analysts" like Lord really do take their viewers for fools.

Margaret Hoover called him out on it, too, reminding him that the KKK is a hate group, not a "leftist group," but to no avail.

Lord insisted, "Margaret, it is a racist hate group from the left. And that counts. That is important to understand. It is not conservative. It has nothing to do with conservatism. All of these Klan members who have been elected to Congress and U.S. Senate and governorships over the years, supporting Franklin Roosevelt because they like Social Security. Let's get our history straight."

Sarah Jones at PoliticusUSA addressed this years ago, so here's a history lesson for Mr. Lord:

Why did they do that? Many reasons, but we can attribute a lot of that shift to the Southern Strategy and to Atwater’s successful attempts to disguise the racism inherent in the strategy. He explained in an infamous interview that took place as he was serving under Reagan, “You start out in 1954 by saying, “Ni**er, ni**er, ni**er.” By 1968 you can’t say “ni**er”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract now; you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.”

It worked.

The base that slops up the coded racism that makes up the entire Southern Strategy knows exactly what it means because it gets their wee hearts pattering faster and faster to think of the non-white immigrants taking over the good jobs and the black people daring to vote. They are now on Twitter doing exactly what Atwater planned for them – denying the racism and accusing the other side of it if it’s pointed out. In other words, they are carrying out their racism under a disguise or a metaphorical hood.

This brings us back to my original point, because the KKK still exists, and it aligns with the Republican party issues-wise, even if its membership is somewhat pathetic compared to its glory days. Well, it seems the two organizations have that in common as well. To put this in terms and using logic Republicans can understand, you can’t spell KKK without the letters G-O-P.

The KKK has been empowered by Donald Trump, and will continue to feel empowered as long as he has a national stage and keeps winning. Jeffrey Lord can sit on CNN's airwaves all day long and insist otherwise, but he just looks as stupid as he is.

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