We are all from someplace else

To the editor:

It appears that the Republican Party under Donald Trump has gone from its history of dog whistle race baiting to outright racist bludgeoning. The President’s tweets and public remarks about four Democrat Congress women of color has increased the divisiveness he so relishes. While Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the House Republican leader, feigns indignation over the recent chanting in North Carolina Trump rally, he would like us to forget his party’s long history of “rallying the base” with some not so subtle racist activities. In last year’s midterm elections, Representative McCarthy’s National Republican Congressional Committee paid for a number of ads during John Faso’s failed reelection campaign that some in the press referred to as “overtly racist.”

The presidential campaigns of Nixon, Reagan and George H.W. Bush all made use of the divide and conquer approach to win election by disparaging “those people” who don’t share “our values” and vowing to “lock them up” for crimes real or imagined. Trump has brought this approach to an all time low by openly encouraging and inciting crowds to express their basest feelings about “the others.” Unlike Mr. Faso’s Bart Simpson “I didn’t do it” response to racist ads about his opponent, the President just outright lied about his complicity in the racially charged chants of his North Carolina audience.

Anyone with a sense of our country’s history and any sense of decency realizes that other than indigenous people we are all from someplace else. The greatness of America is in the diversity not only of its natural beauty, but more importantly, in the diversity of its people and the many contributions made by all of them over the last two hundred plus years.

William Mancini

Kinderhook