Nikki Haley, Tim Scott Hail Donald Trump’s Victory Over The Racism Joe Biden Unleashed On America

There are also five lights.

South Carolina Senator Tim Scott and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley freely surrendered what remained of their dignity and delivered lie-laced speeches during the first night of the Republican National Convention on Monday.

Haley and Scott were meant to appeal to the suburban whites who haven't completely abandoned the party and desperately want to believe the GOP isn't racist. It's a limited audience at this point.

Haley kicked things off with some soft-focus Reagan-era bullshit before she got around to claiming that “in much of the Democratic Party, it'snow fashionableto say that America is racist. That's a lie. America is not a racist country."

Lady, cops beating our asses isn't “fashionable." Jacob Blake getting shot in the back and paralyzed isn't the new boot-cut jeans.

She also said this during the same speech:

HALEY: My father wore a turban. My mother wore a sari. I was a brown girl in a Black and white world.

“But I kept dancing, dancing, dancing ..." (Really? I'm the only one who thought these were pop song lyrics?)

We faceddiscriminationand hardship, but my parents never gave in to grievance and hate.

Haley probably meant that America isn't collectively racist or racist by design. Or something else that means "discrimination" isn't "racist."

Haley promotes the model minority myth when she claims her parents “never gave in to grievance and hate" — of course not, they aren't white MAGA hat wearers at a Trump rally who blame minorities for all their problems. Pointing guns at protesters outside your house is giving in to “grievance and hate."

Conservatives like Haley ignore the reality that the GOP is a white grievance party and instead claim Black Lives Matter protesters are the “rabble rousers." They pulled this same crap with Martin Luther King, John Lewis, and other civil rights leaders during the 1960s.

HALEY: My dad taught 30 years at a historically Black college.

Why did historically Black colleges exist, Ms. Haley?

Haley went on to accuse Democrats of turning a “blind eye to riots and rage" without acknowledging why either of them exist. She doesn't mention the names Breonna Taylor or George Floyd or Jacob Blake. That makes me suspicious that she's truly interested in making America "even freer, fairer, and better for everyone."

But hey, she does believe Black lives matter! These are very specific Black lives, however.

HALEY: The Black cops who have been shot in the line of duty, they matter.

A Black cop's death would be investigated swiftly, and their assailants wouldn't receive taxpayer-funded vacations (except when the Black cop is actually shot by other cops). The Black cop wouldn't be blamed for their own death and their family could grieve as the country recognized them as a hero. A murdered Black cop's mother wouldn't have her parenting criticized.

White cops at least can also remove their uniforms at the end of a shift and not have other cops murder them in the street because they looked “suspicious." Black people wear our Blackness 24/7 and we don'treceive overtime. 

HALEY: The Black small business owners who have watched their life's work go up in flames, they matter.

It is grotesque to frame this solely in the context of “riots" and not note the history of state-sanctioned destruction of Black business and property. The president held one of his hate rallies in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and never once mentioned that it was the site of one the worst race massacres in history.

But Black people understand the difference between the loss of our property and the loss of our loved ones. My father has called me his “life's work," and I thought that was hokey until I had a son myself. You can rebuild buildings. You can't bring back George Floyd. Elijah McClain will never play the violin again.

My home state's former governor didn't mention the disproportionate number of Black South Carolinians who succumbed to COVID-19, but she does jump on Trump's xenophobic bandwagon.

HALEY: But President Trump is leading a new era of opportunity.Before Communist China gave us the coronavirus,we were breaking economic records left and right.

 Fuck you. Who's next? Oh, yeah, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, the evening's keynote speaker. The brother's speech was pretty good, because he pretended Donald Trump doesn't exist.

Because while this election is between Donald Trump and Joe Biden ... it is not solely about Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

Scott thinks this election is about Imaginary Socialist Joe Biden and a Donald Trump who Scott doesn't have to demand remove tweets where his supporters shout, “White power!" 

SCOTT: It's critical to paint a full picture of the records of Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

Joe Biden said if a Black man didn't vote for him, he wasn't truly Black.

Joe Biden said Black people are a monolithic community.

Joe Biden said poor kids can be just as smart as white kids.

OK, now let's list the six impossibly racist things Trump has said since breakfast.

Biden has apologized for most of these comments, which Scott states out of context. Trump has never apologized for calling Black NFL players who peacefully protest "sons of bitches."

SCOTT: And while his words are one thing, his actions take it to a whole new level.

 Jeff Sessions was Trump's attorney general (until he cancelled him). Stephen Miller is still slithering around in the White House.

SCOTT: In 1994, Biden led the charge on a crime bill that put millions of black Americans behind bars

Because they committed crimes, as the majority of Republicans who voted for the crime bill would say. C'mon, man! Republicans made the crime bill even worse. 

SCOTT: President Trump's criminal justice reform law fixed many of the disparities Biden created and made our system more fair and just for all Americans.

LOL. These are just lies. Sessions's and Bill Barr's records in the department of justice speak for themselves.

Trump's “strategy" is to argue that Biden spent most of his life locking up Black people but once he's president, he'll free them all to go burn down the suburbs. Sorry, Senator, but Biden isn't Hillary Clinton. Voters won't believe he's two contradictory bad things at once.

SCOTT: We don't give into cancel-culture, or the radical — and factually baseless — belief that things are worse today than in the 1860s or the 1960s.

Trump has personally cancelled members of his own party who disagreed with him publicly. Also, a major conservative argument is that “things are worse today" than in the 1860s and 1960s. The entire Trump presidency has been backward-looking. That was the whole point of “Make America Great Again." Trump wasn't trying to bring back parachute pants. He was specifically invoking nostalgia for the white male social hierarchy of the 1950s.

Scott has a compelling personal story that I'm sure your Tucker Carlson-watching, Rush Limbaugh-listening grandparents ate up like mushed-up bananas. Scott is every Trumpist's favorite Black person today. He's probably more popular than Dead MLK. That's a paltry honor.

[ The New York Times / CNN ]

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