A distinguished conservative professor says efforts to “delegitimize” Donald Trump with accusations of racism are just a repeat of the “Southern Strategy” myth she recently debunked.

In a video for PragerU, Dr. Carol Swain explains that the Southern Strategy myth was “fabricated by left-leaning academic elites and journalists” to falsely suggest that “Republicans couldn’t win a national election by appealing to the better nature of the country,” but “could only win by appealing to the worst.”

"The Democratic Party rarely comes up with anything new. You’ll see variations of the same strategy."

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“Attributed to Richard Nixon, the media’s all-purpose bad guy, this came to be known as the Southern Strategy,” she explains. “It was very simple: win elections by winning the South, and to win the South appeal to racists.”

Swain, however, claims that the narrative was based upon false premises from the start, noting that Nixon “lost the Deep South in 1968” and that “Republicans didn’t hold a majority of southern Congressional seats until 1994.”

Meanwhile, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton each won several key southern states in their presidential victories, replicating a feat that had been accomplished by Republicans Herbert Hoover and Dwight Eisenhower well before their party supposedly began catering to racists.

Now, in response to President Trump’s successful breach of the “Blue Wall” with victories in key Rust Belt states, Swain said the political left is attempting to craft a similar narrative, a development that Campus Reform has observed in the form of college professors crediting Trump’s win to working-class racism.

“The Democratic Party rarely comes up with anything new,” Swain told Campus Reform. “You’ll see variations of the same strategy.”

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Indeed, Swain pointed to comments such as those reported by Campus Reform as examples of a larger effort to “delegitimize” Trump’s victory, noting that “a lot of the people they were saying didn’t support Mr. Trump obviously did.”

As Swain suggests in her PragerU video, many of these false narratives are concocted by liberal elites in the academy, as she witnessed firsthand over the course of nearly 30 years as a professor at Vanderbilt University.

“A lot of the books that I read and taught out of preach the false narrative. You have to dig for yourself to find the truth of what happened,” she explained to Campus Reform, noting that she herself didn’t become a Republican until late in her career.

“The university is overwhelmingly stocked with liberal professors and they’re certainly not going to present any info freely that would weaken the stronghold Democrats have” on higher education, she continued, encouraging the brightest conservative minds to consider careers in higher education.

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“The best and brightest conservatives go into law. The most brilliant minds in the conservative world need to go into academia,” she proposed, saying one thing Republicans can learn from Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals is the importance of “infiltrating institutions.”

As opposed to other conservative academics Campus Reform has spoken with, who are generally pessimistic about the future of American universities, Swain tends to lean more optimistic.

“Win positions at top universities—that’s what we have to do. We don’t give up on the university. We go into the university,” she said. “We make them prove that they believe in diversity, inclusion, and free speech.”

Doing so, she speculated, could perhaps turn back the tide of socialism’s growing popularity among millennials, many of whom she believes have been “brainwashed into engaging in action against our own culture and also their own futures.”

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“They’re participating in the demise of a way of life that has been the envy of the world,” she continued, saying the first step in popularizing conservative ideas is to simply get students “to think.”

“Most of them who espouse a love for socialism have no idea what socialism is. They haven’t delved enough into history to understand what’s happening,” she concluded. “That’s one of the tragedies of what’s happening on college campuses.”

Follow the author of this article on Twitter: @AGockowski