For a generation after Reconstruction’s end, these Southern state parties had a significant number of black Republicans in leadership positions. In Texas, for example, Norris Wright Cuney — a black man — was the state party “boss” between 1884 and 1896.

But over time, white-supremacist Republicans — known as the Lily-Whites — pushed black leaders like Cuney and their white allies — known as the Black-and-Tans — out of the party.

In some states — like North Carolina, Alabama and Virginia — the purge of black leaders was quick and lasting. Other states fended off the Lily-Whites for a time. Mississippi, for example, remained under the control of Perry Howard, a black man, until 1960 — and consistently sent majority black delegations to the GOP convention.

During Reconstruction, when black voters were the Republican Party’s core Southern constituency, a whiter party leadership resulted in the GOP losing votes. Black voters were paying attention and punished their state GOP if black leadership declined.

However, after Southern Democrats passed legislation to disenfranchise black voters, that switched. The whiter the party leadership was, the better the GOP did in elections — whether those were presidential, congressional or gubernatorial elections.

Although this fight was mostly over control of federal patronage, the Lily-Whites argued that the only way for the GOP to win elections in the region again was to become a “white” party and purge its black leaders. This was because black voters were largely disenfranchised and white Southern voters were unwilling to vote for a “Negro” party.

Many have noted that whiteness is a fundamental part of today’s Republican Party. Our results suggest that this is nothing new and show where it came from. The Southern GOP consciously decided in the early 20th century to make itself white by excluding blacks from the party leadership. This was a necessary condition for making the Southern Republican Party viable — and ultimately dominant — in elections in the late 20th century.

On Wednesday, McConnell argued that it’s “not at all clear” what good a January 6 commission could do. Thanks to McConnell, we may never know. And that’s great news for domestic terrorists.


[link:https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/05/19/when-next-attack-comes-blood-will-be-gops-hands/|

The first thing that jumps out, of course, is that sane white people in this country have nonwhite voters to thank for preventing America from already having turned into the Turd Reich. The headline number is that 58% of white America pulled the level for Trump in November — while he was literally in the midst of killing nearly a million Americans with his virus denialism, and just a few months before he would try to overthrow Congress in an attempted fascist coup.

[link:https://www.dailykos.com/story/2021/5/15/2030657/-How-White-America-Voted-in-2020-Fair-Warning-This-Map-Is-Full-of-Surprises-Scary-Depressing|

Trump senior advisor Jason Miller told the Post in a recent interview that the former president's political advisors have already begun to call contacts in Wyoming to field potential Republican primary challengers to Cheney.

Miller said defeating Cheney was "one of the highest priorities as far as primary endorsements go."

The Post also reported that Trump met with advisors in Florida earlier this week to review 2022 endorsements; the former president pledged to support one GOP challenger to avoid splitting the "anti-Cheney" vote in a divided field.
[link:https://www.businessinsider.com/jason-miller-liz-cheney-trump-endorsement-wyoming-republican-primary-2021-5|

Where did this theory—apparently of major concern for the Arizona auditors—that someone in Asia had sent 40,000 ballots to Maricopa County in order to sway the election for Joe Biden and against Donald Trump come from? It appears to have come from an election fraud gadfly named Jovan Pulitzer, who Slate’s Aaron Mak reported earlier this week is supporting the work of the Maricopa audit firm, Cyber Ninjas.

In addition to Pulitzer having claimed to invent a technology that would detect whether a ballot’s ink and folds might indicate forgery, Mak flags that back in December Pulitzer began to espouse a theory that China had imported ballots to tip the election to Biden and that he could detect such malfeasance by uncovering bamboo particles via “a forensic analysis.”
[link:https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/05/arizona-republican-audit-bamboo-ballots-china.html|