What CNN analyst Jeffrey Lord got very wrong in that KKK debate with Van Jones

[jpak]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/03/02/what-cnn-analyst-jeffrey-lord-got-very-wrong-in-that-kkk-debate-with-van-jones/

Many political junkies have seen it by now. The "it" here being the roughly five-minute exchange captured in the video above between Donald Trump supporter and former Reagan aide Jeffrey Lord and CNN analyst and former Obama administration official Van Jones.

While in a CNN studio to discuss Super Tuesday election results, the two men got into a debate about the essence of Trump's campaign and what has propelled him to indisputable GOP front-runner status, the history of racial oppression and public displays of bigotry in the United States and the ways in which related ideas continue to animate American politics today. Yes, all of that really happened on live TV. And if nothing else, this should make fully clear to every American just how central bigotry -- combating it, defending it, relabeling it and employing it -- has become to the 2016 presidential election.

There will be accounts of this race written in the future that will not likely miss or minimize the fact that this theme has emerged in the first presidential election after the nation's first African American president became ineligible to run again. Few of us will be alive in 100 years to justify all that has transpired. The historical record will speak for us. The facts. The details. The footage. Our nation's economic and social well-being data. They will tell our collective tale. And that's all worth considering in light of that exchange between Lord and Jones on Tuesday night.

Some people unquestionably viewed the exchange between the two men as a rational but heated airing of two very different and equally valid perspectives. The Fix's Callum Borchers made this point pretty convincingly here. Borchers called this exchange "earnest, substantive, respectful and important." That's one perspective. Another is this: Only that last adjective is true. Hiding within that mini-debate between Lord and Jones was one American determined to deploy a series of shop-worn political memes and claims with only a loose relationship to the factual truth in order to avoid a more substantive, essential and urgent conversation about what bigotry is, how it has and can be deployed as a voter-motivation-and-distraction tool, and how it can undergird actual domestic terrorism as well as more subtle but certainly life-distorting policy and political activity.

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[underpants]

1. Lord is full of crap. The southern Dems moved en masse to the Repubs in the 50's and 60's

It started with Massive Resistance after Brown v. Board and was complete (as LBJ predicted) after the Civil Rights Act passed. Republicans have been stirring these coals from Nixon to Reagan and, as the writer points out, today with obstacles to voting and the activist Supreme Court.

[Darb]

2. Exactly, the Dixiecrats, Lord should be called out for his utter bullshit.

LBJ called it. What was it, "the civil rights act will lose us the south for a generation"?