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1. A short thread on Ronald Reagan, racism, and the way we've talked about Reagan and race since the end of his Presidency. It's inspired by a short interview that occurs at 17:30 of this excellent podcast episode. slate.com/news-and-polit…
2. The interview is with John Sears who served as Reagan's campaign manager in 1976 and then in 1980 until he was fired. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Sear…
3. In response to a question noting how Reagan deployed racially coded language about welfare cheats and "big strapping bucks," Sears says Reagan was more naive than racist. He just said what worked, and Sears himself claims to have abhorred such language.
4. You will be surprised to hear, I'm sure, that soon after he left the Reagan orbit Sears parlayed his GOP connections into a lucrative lobbying job. For the *South African apartheid gov't.* Indeed, he was the HIGHEST PAID consultant for that government. 
5. So when Sears claims that the rhetoric HIS CANDIDATE Ronald Reagan used in 1976 and 1980 about lazy welfare queens was not meant to be racist and that Sears himself disliked it because it was racist...well...I mean, come man, really???
6. But the Sears/South Africa story is not the final twist. As we learn in this 1985 WaPo article, Sears was joined in his pro-apartheid work by a young black GOP activist named William Keyes. washingtonpost.com/archive/politi…
7. Keyes went on to become the head of the Institute for Responsible Citizenship, which got this very favorable 2003 write up in the right wing magazine Human Events. humanevents.com/2003/09/30/con…
8. The explicit goal of Keyes's institution was to build a pipeline of young black conservative men. To send them to George Mason to learn proper, conservative economics, and to let a Reagan alum teach them about "the founders," with money raised mostly by GOP Senator Nickels.
9. Interestingly, William Keyes got a lovely write up in the NYTimes in 2013, focusing on his successful marriage, w/ no mention of his politics. The words Reagan, South Africa, or apartheid do not appear in that article. nytimes.com/2013/05/10/boo…
10. To circle back to Sears...knowing what we know about him...how seriously should we really take his disavowals of Reagan's (and his own) racism? Or, when such a person says Reagan wasn't a racist, do they mean the same thing by that word that we might?
11. Here's an earlier thread where I talked about the work that the "open and inclusive Reagan" narrative does for some Never Trump conservatives today. The conservative movement has much soul searching yet to do when it comes to race.
