Mitch, the Klan and David Duke are all in for The Donald
By BERRY CRAIG
AFT Local 1360
What do Sen. Mitch McConnell, an official Ku Klux Klan newspaper and onetime Klan leader David Duke have in common?
They’re in Donald Trump’s corner.
"We need a new president, Donald Trump, to be the most powerful Republican in America," McConnell said Wednesday. It was "his strongest statement yet on his party's presidential nominee," wrote Adam Beam of the Associated Press.
Duke, a white supremacist and Nazi sympathizer, is running for the senate as a Republican in Louisiana. He's been touting Trump "bigly."
"I will be Donald Trump's most loyal advocate," Duke vowed in a raucous debate Wednesday night.
“Voting against Donald Trump at this point, is really treason to your heritage,” he said another time, meaning white “heritage.”
A Klan rag called The Crusader is for Trump, The Washington Postreported.
“Under the banner ‘Make America Great Again,’ the entire front page of the paper's current issue is devoted to a lengthy defense of Trump’s message — an embrace some have labeled a de facto endorsement,’” wrote the Post’s Peter Holley.
He quoted the KKK’s Pastor Thomas Robb who wrote in The Crusader: “While Trump wants to make America great again, we have to ask ourselves, 'What made America great in the first place?' The short answer to that is simple. America was great not because of what our forefathers did — but because of who our forefathers were.
"America was founded as a White Christian Republic. And as a White Christian Republic it became great."
The other day, I heard former President Bill Clinton say that as a 70-year-old white Southerner, he knows what Trump means when he says he wants to make American great again.
This 67-year-old white Kentuckian does, too.
Trump, Holley added, disavowed the Klan support. He also disavows the support of Duke and other white supremacist and white nationalist groups.
But here’s a question this old reporter wishes some working reporter would ask Trump: “Why do you think all these avowed racists find you so appealing?”
If any newspaper scribe or TV journalist has popped that question, I’ve missed it.
Anyway, McConnell, the KKK and Duke have something else in common: they despise unions. In a union, everybody is equal.
Trump prefers "right to work" states to non-RTW states like Kentucky. He has battled tooth-and-nail to keep his Las Vegas hotel workers from having a union.
With President Obama we have a firewall against anti-union bills—a veto pen. Clinton would wield the same pen.
No doubt Trump would sign all the union-busting legislation that hits his desk, including a national "right to work" law that McConnell and Rand Paul, Kentucky’s junior senator, are gung-ho for.
We also have a firewall in Kentucky—that 53-47 Democratic-majority House. It’s all that stands between us and RTW, repeal of prevailing wage and a wipeout of every gain organized labor has made since the 1930s.
The Republicans have been sledgehammering that wall for a long time. Given Trump’s popularity in the state, the GOP figures to finally breach it Tuesday.
Meanwhile, we’re at “the most critical time of the Labor 2016 Campaign,” said Bill Londrigan, Kentucky State AFL-CIO president. “Never before have we witnessed such an onslaught of outside money to get control of the Kentucky House.”
Republicans from Trump and his new BFF McConnell on down expect to get their money’s worth Tuesday.
Ballots, of course, beat even big bucks. But they’ve got to be cast first and for the right candidates.
So one last time: Vote Tuesday like your union and your job depend on it because they do.