Corporate media had one helluva problem this week. Nelson Mandela opposed the apartheid system. In speech and with presidential acts, Ronald Reagan supported it.
They had to cover up for Ronald Reagan. With Nelson Mandela warm in the coffin, Reagan had done the most of any American president to support the Apartheid regime in South Africa.
The networks led off with apologists beginning at former Secretary of State James Baker. He told us how Ronald Reagan "regretted, surely regretted" vetoing the bipartisan Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986.
Ne'er a mention of Reagan appointing full on White supremacists to the Federal bench. Or what Reagan did to gut DoJ's Civil rights Division. No mention that first thing after the Republican National Convention in 1980, Ronald Reagan set out to Mississippi to launched a replay of Nixon's Southern Strategy.
Reagan pandered overtly to White supremacists. He did this hat in hand, defiling the memories of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. Reagan cozied up to the friends and neighbors and relatives of the eighteen men charged (and seven convicted) for lynching those boys. Never a mention of what had happened there, or the Klan, or Apartheid, or race.
Now, today, that speech at Philadelphia, Mississippi has disappeared from the corporatist rewrite to Reagan's career.
Fact is, Reagan wanted so-called "States Rights" votes. Contrary to what corporate television tells you, he got them.
Know Reagan by his acts; know him by his words. Remember him for Philadelphia, Mississippi. Remember him politically as one more round of Richard Nixon.
Full text of his great dog-whistle, his KKK Y'all Come speech, below the orange muffin: