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13 tweets,
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1. 17 years ago Trent Lott (R-MS) said this about his state: "When Strom Thurmond ran for president [in 1948], we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either.'' 
2. Within a few weeks he had lost his job as the Senate Majority Leader (thanks in great part to pressure from within his own GOP) and his once promising political career was basically ended. theguardian.com/world/2002/dec…
3. This episode gave a lot of people the false impression, I think, that the GOP was authentically coming to grips with its longtime complicity with racism. Trent Lott did a glaring racism, and he suffered the consequences. So we're good now, right? Well....
4. As I learned from the White Lies podcast, the white citizens of Selma paid for a bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest (a key figure in the early KKK) to be publicly displayed the same year Selma elected its first black mayor. latimes.com/archives/la-xp…
5. In 1994, the great year of GOP ascendancy when they swept into power with the Gingrich-led Contract with America, a host of Southern states (who had only recently started voting Republican consistently) instituted Confederate History Month. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confedera…
6. You know that vile viral video going around of that SC racist kid shooting at a box of Jordans? Well, his grandpa was a big time neo-Confederate Republican in South Carolina who was a close advisor to John McCain and Lindsey Graham. nytimes.com/2000/02/08/us/…
7. So yes, Trent Lott got the ax when he was caught saying something positive about segregation in 2002...but this was nothing more than a fig leaf, a pragmatic concession. The party was never serious about casting out the pro-confederate racists.
8. And it's THAT cowardice and cynical political calculation around racism...not an overabundance of liberal political correctness or wokeness...that gave us Donald Trump as the GOP nominee in 2016.
9. The GOP's greatest boondoggle was to get white liberals and the mainstream media to buy in to the idea that the banishment of Lott was indicative of a broader and principled rejection of racism within that party.
10. Apologies for bungling this in the earlier tweet. That Nathan Bedford Forrest bust that was erected in Selma as a protest against the city's first black mayor? That was in 2000, the year George Bush got about 75% of the state's white vote.
11. As a few folks have rightly pointed out. Lott got pushed out in favor of Bill Frist who was a favorite of the Bushes. To a great extent, the dustup around Lott's racist comment was a pretext for something many in the GOP wanted anyway. nytimes.com/2002/12/20/pol…
12. FWIW, this is how National Review writer John Derbyshire described the sorts of responses he was getting from NRO readers. Derbyshire was later fired from the National Review for being too racist. He then joined the white nationalists at VDare. h/t @edroso
@edroso 13. Here's a good piece from 2012 on the National Review's long running racism problem. I was reminded by this piece that Derbyshire and Peter Brimelow of the white nationalist group VDare spoke at the 2012 CPAC. But yes, the left is responsible for Trump. thenation.com/article/john-d…
