President Trump traveled to Long Island to deliver a speech linking MS-13 gang violence to immigration policy, using the gang to justify harsh deportation policies. In his 2018 State of the Union, Trump highlighted the murders of teenagers Kayla Cuevas and Nisa Mickens, stating ‘Six members of …
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Donald Trump formally announced his presidential candidacy with a speech demonizing Mexican immigrants in explicitly racist terms. Trump declared: ‘When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re …
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After weeks of Donald Trump loudly questioning President Obama’s citizenship and claiming to have sent private investigators to Hawaii, Obama released his long-form birth certificate to address what he called ‘silliness.’ Trump had appeared on Good Morning America in March 2011 …
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Bill Clinton stunned Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition by using a speech to the civil rights organization to attack rapper/activist Sister Souljah, comparing her to white nationalist David Duke. Sister Souljah had been quoted in The Washington Post saying, in the aftermath of the LA riots, …
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In the final week of his Senate race against Harvey Gantt—the first African American major party Senate candidate in North Carolina—incumbent Republican Jesse Helms aired the notorious ‘Hands’ or ‘White Hands’ advertisement. The ad depicted white hands crumpling a job …
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The Americans for Bush arm of the National Security Political Action Committee, working with Bush campaign consultants, began running the infamous ‘Weekend Passes’ advertisement featuring William Horton, a Black prisoner who committed crimes while on furlough from a Massachusetts prison. …
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In a November 1981 anonymous interview with political scientist Alexander Lamis, Republican strategist Lee Atwater provided an extraordinarily candid explanation of how the GOP uses coded racial appeals. Atwater explained: ‘You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” …
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Ronald Reagan opened his general election campaign at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi—just seven miles from where Ku Klux Klan members had murdered civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in 1964. In his first major speech after the Republican …
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During his 1976 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan regularly told the story of a Chicago ‘welfare queen’ to attack social programs using racially coded language. At a campaign speech in Gilford, New Hampshire, Reagan declared: ‘In Chicago, they found a woman who holds the record. …
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Richard Nixon won the presidency with a strategy devised by political consultant Kevin Phillips that explicitly targeted white racial resentment to break up the New Deal coalition. Phillips, who worked on Nixon’s campaign, told journalists during the election that ’the whole secret of …
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