Tuesday, March 22, 2016

Nixon's War On Hippies And Negroes

John Ehrlichman, 1994: 
'“You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”'
 What a fucking surprise. (Huffington Post)

"...recruiting angry southern whites would not be enough for the Republicans to take the south. In many southern states more than 40% of potential voters were black. If they were allowed to vote, and if their votes were actually counted, all the reconstructed Democrat Party would need to hold the south would be a sliver of moderate white support. 
"That’s where the Drug War came in."
Columbus Free Press




On a related note, remember the day Elvis gave Nixon a pistol and Nixon gave Elvis a badge?
"The National Archives gets more requests for a copy of this photo of Richard Nixon and Elvis Presley posing in the Oval Office than for anything else in their archives — that includes the Bill of Rights and the Constitution."
Buzzfeed