The Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) annual conference is typically a forum for the conservative wing of the Republican party. In recent years, its attendees and speakers, like the Republican party, seem to be redefining its views to be more reflective of the 19th Century than the 21st Century. No where was that more apparent than when a session was interrupted by an attendee advocating segregation and slavery. The session was sponsored by the Tea Party Patriots and it was called,“Trump The Race Card: Are You Sick And Tired Of Being Called A Racist When You Know You’re Not One?”

The session was led by a black conservative named K. Carl Smith. Smith calls himself a “Frederick Douglass Republican.” According to Smith, Douglass’s greatest accomplishment in life had nothing to do with his part in freeing Smith’s own ancestors. Douglass’s greatest accomplishment was to get rich. Here’s his homage to the great abolitionist:

At the conference, Smith instructed conservatives to identify with Douglass as a way of convincing people they weren’t racist. Then he accused Democrats of being the party of the Confederacy, which of course, they were, during the Confederacy. The Confederate Democrats quickly defected to the GOP Party once the Civil Rights Act was signed.





Somewhere during the revisionist history session, an attendee named Scott Terry, who was accompanied by a man wearing a Confederate flag t-shirt named Matthew Heimbach, complained that his people, (young, white males) were being systematically disenfranchised.

Terry took objection to the comparison to Frederick Douglass and asked instead why they couldn’t be more like “Booker T. Washington Republicans.” Booker T. Washington, in the name of compromise, was a segregationist.

Smith ran with the reference, noting that Washington had written a letter to his slave master forgiving him for all he had done.

Terry then responded with, (forgive him) “For what? For feeding him and housing him?” The audience responded with a mixture of shock and applause. Here’s the video from Think Progress:

Think Progress interviewed Terry after the session:

ThinkProgress spoke with Terry, who sported a Rick Santorum sticker and attended CPAC with a friend who wore a Confederate Flag-emblazoned t-shirt, about his views after the panel. Terry maintained that white people have been “systematically disenfranchised” by federal legislation. When asked by ThinkProgress if he’d accept a society where African-Americans were permanently subservient to whites, he said “I’d be fine with that.” He also claimed that African-Americans “should be allowed to vote in Africa,” and that “all the Tea Parties” were concerned with the same racial problems that he was. At one point, a woman challenged him on the Republican Party’s roots, to which Terry responded, “I didn’t know the legacy of the Republican Party included women correcting men in public.”

Even with discounting the out and out racists such as Terry and his friend Heimbach, it’s clear that conservatives have absolutely no idea how to address minorities. The weak attempt to associate themselves with the wealth of Frederick Douglass or the segregationist beliefs of Booker T. Washington don’t demonstrate a willingness to understand the needs of minorities. Instead, they are simply cherry-picking bits of history to turn historical figures into two dimensional mascots, just as they have done with the Founding Fathers. If CPAC is any indication, it will be a long time before the conservative Republican party will win a national election, unless of course, they are able to disenfranchise minority votes, which is a very real possibility.