Schmidt on Barr: ‘A Stone Cold Racist Statement by One of the Most Prominent Public Supporters of a Racist President’

EXCERPT:

SCHMIDT: "And what we see now is a retrenchment, a pulling back from it. We’ve seen this play out in our history before. We saw it with African-Americans after the first World War where they fought valiantly in France and thought they would come to a country where they defended democracy abroad, that maybe this would be their hour. All these confederate statutes that went up in the 1920s went up not to celebrate civil war victories but to send a political message to African-Americans. What we see as this vile conduct by Roseanne Barr, it’s not a joke. It is a stone cold racist statement by one of the most prominent public supporters of a racist president, who time and time again has shown us his true colors and not for the first time at Charlottesville, where he lectures the country and he says there’s good Nazis out there. The one thing we should all be clear on, despite idealogical differences, there are no good Nazis, not there, not here, not back in those days and certainly not these days. And so we see the stirring of the race caldron by this president, part of a deliberate strategy to incite his base with conspiracy theories, with dishonesty, with lying, with race baiting. He is stirring up every worst toxin that's been buried in the ground in this country and bringing it back up to the surface, and he's doing it on purpose."