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Comment by GavinMcG | Hacker News Reader

No, though it's a better reply to my comment elsewhere in the thread where I said Trump doesn't actually condemn white supremacy.

The handful of examples in the video that are post-Charlottesville are a nice start, but they've clearly ended up being lip service. He says "I condemn white supremacy" and then goes back to race-baiting at his rally just days ago. [0]

Also, it doesn't kill the narrative. It's entirely consistent with the narrative that Trump lies when it's convenient.

[0] https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1311481175689568256?s=20

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See this is what I'm talking about. Can you not see your confirmation bias?

1. Ask for proof 2. Get proof 3. Call it "lip service"

This means that no matter what Trump says, you will say its disingenuous. Do you see how that can be problematic?

No, I can see what you mean. The problem is with your claim that no matter what he says I'll say it's disingenuous. That's not true.

I do have reasons to believe Trump is disingenuous. (And if you don't see those, that's your own confirmation bias at play.) But if Trump consistently refused to say racist things and proactively worked to address racial injustice, I'd absolutely believe those statements!

Instead, you've got a huge number of examples of Trump being racist and a handful of examples of him saying the words when a reporter presses him. But where's Trump's Philadelphia speech? What did he have to say about John Lewis's legacy? Where is his leadership on addressing the pain and poverty of Black families?

That's literally exactly what happened. Why even ask? What response could you have possibly gotten that would have changed your mind?

I have seen a ton of examples where people think trump is being racist, then I see them, and he's clearly not. I am 100% open to changing my mind, racism is terrible. Please provide specific and clear examples. Calling everything racism really weakens the argument.

You also provide another example of your clouded judgement: "and a handful of examples of him saying the words when a reporter presses him." This type of thinking shows that you just want to confirm your pre-existing idea that he is a racist. When he then says he is not, you say "oh he really is, he was just saying that because he had to". That means there is no possible thing he can do to change your mind.

As I said above, if someone can provide specific examples, and not just of behaviors they don't like but of how they are actually racist, I am more than happy to denounce him. Also, in case you missed it, under Trump (pre-Covid), black unemployment was at an all time low.

I did provide some examples at the end of the post. He could honor people doing racial justice work, rather than attacking them. He could stop stoking fear of immigrants and tell the truth about them, which is that they tend to be more educated and more determined than average. He could insist on full investigations of police violence toward black people, rather than equivocating. But he doesn't actually do substantive work on race.

So yeah, I call it lip service.

Thanks for the response! This really shows the lack of clarity in your thinking. We can review each item quickly:

1. He could honor people doing racial justice work - Does not doing this make someone a racist? Silly. Also, here is a direct quote from February 2020 (see how I use actual evidence) "We’re here with some of the black leaders of our country and — people that are highly respected and people that have done a fantastic job and, for the most part, have been working on this whole situation with me right from the beginning." Does that sound like something a racist would say?

2. He could stop stoking fear of immigrants - This is not a specific example.

3. He could insist on full investigations of police violence toward black people - This isn't the responsibility of the president. If he got involved in police business people would say he is overreaching. This is again a subjective thing you "feel" he could do. The agencies that are supposed to be involved are.

I try to stick with concrete facts to base my opinions on. This has been a great example where you really want to think he's racist because of what you see in the media but have so far provided 0 objective evidence for your claim.

Yes, it does sound like something many racists say. You treat "racist" like it only means someone who uses racial epithets. That's the tip of the iceberg. Looking at how people empower and disempower those of other races is the far more substantial and important measure.

I am laughing at your dismissal as "not a specific example". I linked to a very recent one upthread, and many many more are easily available and uncontroverted. He talked up a Muslim ban and campaigned on building a wall. You are being willfully blind on this one.

It absolutely is the responsibility of the president. He leads and sets the tone. He has influence over, for example, Daniel Cameron, and used it to encourage a lack of police accountability. He can control grant programs and discretionary spending in the area of policing. The DoJ can investigate police departments as part of their public integrity work, and has done historically little of that under this administration. And instead of calling Black Lives Matter a "symbol of hate" for reacting to a problem that his own Attorney General acknowledges (that there is systemic bias against black people in policing) he could press Congress and state leaders to address the issue.

The why ask him to denounce it?

Bingo. It doesn’t matter what he says, they just want to keep asking the question anyways to drive division to garner support.

I'm not sure, you'd have to ask someone who's asking Trump to denounce something he's clearly committed to.

I'm asking about conservative groups who have denounced it. I have some faith that conservatism is not aligned with Trumpery.

For godsakes the Republican party freed the slaves and voted for the civil rights act. It's the democrat party that should have to denounce it's history... except they let people like Ralph Northam continue to govern despite being photographed in a KKK hood. And before you start say "Oh the great switch" the part that's never explained by that bs theory is how one day people who had been fighting for civil right woke up and decided to undo everything they had fought for for the last 100 years. You're being taught to hate people that aren't hateful because then it makes it easier to justify the means of seizing power.

It's precisely because there was 100 years in between that no Reconstruction Republican woke up and voted for Goldwater. You think things can't change over that time frame you haven't been paying attention to the last fifty years, or even twenty.

So they started voting for the people responsible for the KKK and Jim Crow laws thinking they were going to making things better? Honest question, are you high or just incredibly naive? Secondly, in 1860s republicans freed the slaves and in 1960s they passed civil rights despite democrats voting against it. Thats 100 years of progress so what are you talking about? What did the democrats do other than burn crosses?

Edit: I love downvotes without a rebuttal because I know Ive won.

The idea of "winning" a conversation is screwed up from the get-go.

Kennedy and Johnson were Democrats. The House and Senate were both Democratically controlled.

Saying that Republicans passed civil rights because there were 18 Southern Bloc Democrats who fought it in the Senate is just lying about the facts.

Based on the percentages it's blatantly obvious which party was more in favor of civil rights for minorities, Republicans. So why would the Racist democrats, the ones that voted no, want to join the party that was much more unanimous than the party in which they currently reside? What you are saying is like Nancy Pelosi becoming a republican because Trump became a democrat. It's absurd. You've been taught a lie. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964

Okay... why did a Republican, nominee of the party "more in favor of civil rights for minorities," vote against the Civil Rights Act of 1964? And why did Nixon, a Republican, follow his lead in the following election, emphasizing law and order, an end to protests, and a war on drugs? Why did Strom Thurmond, a Democrat, join the Republican party?

You can't have it both ways!

> So they started voting for the people responsible for the KKK and Jim Crow laws

No, the people who still supported the KKK and the ideology behind Jim Crow laws switched major parties, if they were associated with a major party, from the Democrats to the Republicans between the late mid-1960s and the mid-1990s, because of disaffection with the Democrats (initially particularly President Johnson) backing civil rights, but also because the Republicans started actively campaigning to their racist interests to leverage their disaffection with the Democrats.

In some cases, the people switching parties were literally the same people who had bolted temporarily from the Democratic Party in the 1940s over Truman's integration policies, but who had come back because they had no other major party to go to, and their own separate party had failed. (Strom Thurmond, the Dixiecrat Presidential candidate in 1948, is a notable, highly-visible example.)

And as this process continued it was self-reinforcing, because the more White supremacists left the Democratic Party for the Republicans, the stronger the Democratic support for the interests White supremacists opposed could be.

This theory is garbage because it totally forgets that REPUBLICANS passed the civil rights act and were still overwhelmingly less racist than their democratic counterparts. What you are saying is the equivalent of AOC voting for Trump because the party isnt radical enough. It’s a lie. Its always been a lie. Thats why democrat run cities since that day are some of the most destitute for black people. Democrats use them and its sickening. I’m a republican and I abhor any sort of racism. There are a lot more of me than you think and well find-out in November. One thing is for sure, Stop fighting hate with hate

MLK was a Republican BTW.

That's not at all clear, historically speaking. Even if he were, that would make perfect sense as a Southerner. We think of politics these days as relatively nationally uniform, but then-Democrats were the racists that the Southern Strategy sought to woo.

https://time.com/5764282/martin-luther-king-jr-politics/

> MLK was a Republican BTW.

That's quite plausible. I'd expect that most American Southern Blacks (outside the South the parties were quite different and the issue is more complicated) that identified with a major party between the founding of the Republican Party and the Republican Southern Strategy of the late 1960s and beyond, which King was murdered too soon to be influenced by, were Republicans.

The parties of today, despite sharing the same names, aren't ideologically the same parties as when King was alive (or, a fortiori, any earlier time), though.

> For godsakes the Republican party freed the slaves and voted for the civil rights act.

Civil Rights Acts, many of them, starting in the 19th century; sure, and all that was great. But after that the Republican Party decided to seize on the rift created in the Democratic Party when LBJ also backed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which was essential to it being passed into law, because Republicans didn't have a veto-proof majority backing it) to subsequently, starting particularly in the 1968 Presidential election and continuing thereafter, to target the white racists (particularly concentrated in the South) that were disenchanted with the Democratic Party on that issue, in order to make sure that that split wasn't temporary as it was when the Dixiecrats revolted over Truman's integration of the military. And to do that, they started pandering, and have ever since, to the racism of the disaffected group they were courting.

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