Of critical importance is how i n response to the victories of the Civil Rights movement and Black Freedom Struggle, the Republican Party embraced what is known as the Southern Strategy, which involves racist "dog whistles" as well as more overt appeals to white racism and racial resentment as a way of winning over and keeping white voters. The Republican Party and Donald Trump benefit from the opposite dynamic, whereby a white person's hostility and antipathy towards Black and brown people is predictive of support. Moreover, social scientists have also shown that a given white person's feeling of warmth and closeness to Black and brown people is one of the defining factors that influence support for the Democratic Party. In reality, racism is a way of thinking and being in the world that has a profound influence, both consciously and subconsciously, across a range of behaviors. Public opinion research, for instance, has repeatedly shown that white racial resentment heavily influences support for Republican candidates. Racism is not some type of buffet to be picked and chosen from or a value and belief that can be siloed or neatly switched on and off when convenient. While extremism may have once been relegated to the fringes of American society, today it has found a political home in the Republican Party. Their responses included "silence, deflection, and rehashing old statements," generously summarized as "minimal outcry." Shortly thereafter, Business Insider contacted 38 Republicans, in and out of Congress, to ask why they have been unwilling to publicly reject antisemitism. We saw this after Trump's ominous warning to Jews in mid-October to "get their act together…before it's too late," which not one Republican condemned. Today's rise of antisemitism has been largely met with silence, or worse, an embrace or tacit acceptance by the Republican Party. Where antisemitic hate speech once triggered near-universal and immediate condemnation across the political spectrum, that is no longer the case. On this, Halie Soifer wrote in a 2022 essay at Haaretz that: This translates into a type of path dependency, if not inevitable outcome: As the "conservative" movement becomes increasingly racist and white supremacist, it then becomes increasingly antisemitic. As detailed in historian George Fredrickson's landmark book "Racism: A Short History," there is a complex and overlapping relationship between the "religious" antisemitism of the European Middle Ages, the racist and white supremacist project of white-on-black chattel slavery, colonialism, imperialism, and then the Nazism and racial antisemitism of the 20th century.
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