New revelations about Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) made MSNBC host Rachel Maddow wonder Tuesday night if the Republican Party was really interested in becoming more than a “party of aggrieved white people.”

Maddow began by noting the Rand Paul’s father, former Texas Rep. Ron Paul (R), had published newsletters filled with racist sentiments, though he insisted he didn’t write them himself. However, he later appointed the person accused of writing the racist screeds to the advisory board of his new institute.

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“It is because all that has happened already that you might be forgiven today if today’s flurry of reporting about a Rand Paul Senate staffer felt a little bit like deja vu,” she remarked.

The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative publication, reported Tuesday that Rand Paul’s director of new media was an avid supporter of the Confederacy who celebrated John Wilkes Booth’s birthday. The aide, Jack Hunter, had served as a chairman for the League of the South and warned America would no longer be America if white people were not the racial majority.

The same aide was hired by former Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) to write a book. Maddow noted that DeMint was now head of the Heritage Institution, which faced criticism earlier this year after publishing a report on immigration that was co-authored by a man who believed Hispanic people were inherently less intelligent that white people.

“Should the Republican Party be just the party of aggrieved white people, even to the extent that it may stray occasionally into Confederate territory in order to do that?” Maddow wondered. “Do you want that in order to maximize every possible white vote you can get out of an electorate that is less and less white all the time?”

The other option was to become a multi-racial party. But Maddow observed that the conservative media appeared to be unanimous in its opinion: Stick with white voters.

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