How Badly Did They Want to Say the N-Word? RNC, Day 1

Your nightly guide to racism at the Republican National Convention.

Tonight was the “I’m not racist, and my Black friend says so” portion of the RNC, featuring speeches from Tim Scott and Herschel Walker, among others, and a lot of predictable talk about “opportunity zones” and the Democratic “plantation.” For the hard stuff, we turn to the undercard. Here’s Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the St. Louis “gun couple” who famously mounted an armed defense of their topiary from Black Lives Matters protesters:

Check out Patricia, sounding a dogwhistle immediately discernible to suburban right-wingers (many of them Democrats in California!):

They are not satisfied with spreading the chaos and violence into our communities. They want to abolish the suburbs all together by ending single-family home zoning. This forced rezoning would bring crime, lawlessness, and low-quality apartments into now-thriving suburban neighborhoods. President Trump smartly ended this government overreach, but Joe Biden wants to bring it back.

And here’s Mark, pronouncing “Marxist” with a hard “r” at the end.

The Marxist, liberal activist leading the mob to our neighborhood stood outside our home with a bullhorn screaming, “You can’t stop the revolution.” Just weeks later, that same Marxist activist won the Democrat nomination to hold a seat in the US House of Representatives….That Marxist revolutionary is now going to be the congresswoman from the first district of Missouri.

(He’s talking about Cori Bush, by the way.)

Tonight’s RNC message: We love Black people so long as they’re nowhere near our front yard.

How badly did they want to say the n-word? On the strength of the McCloskeys’ appearance, we award Monday’s proceedings 10 out of a possible 10 Atwaters

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DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

Mother Jones was founded to do things differently in the aftermath of a political crisis: Watergate. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after, and go deep on, stories others don’t. And we’re a nonprofit newsroom because we knew corporations and billionaires would never fund the journalism we do. Our reporting makes a difference in policies and people’s lives changed.

And we need your support like never before to vigorously fight back against the existential threats American democracy and journalism face. We’re running behind our online fundraising targets and urgently need all hands on deck right now. We can’t afford to come up short—we have no cushion; we leave it all on the field.

Please help with a donation today if you can—even just a few bucks helps. Not ready to donate but interested in our work? Sign up for our Daily newsletter to stay well-informed—and see what makes our people-powered, not profit-driven, journalism special.

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