


So the guy who sued to keep a monument to the racist Confederate States of America near the University of Louisville, and then called a leading opponent of the obelisk a “damn dirty black bastard,” really is a racist.

A full-blown "white-people shouldn’t intermarry with other races if they plan to have kids," "black people like to attack white people just because they’re white," "we need more white-people-friendly organizations," racist.

Why are we not surprised that Corley Everett, a past and current Republican state House candidate who has since changed his name to Everett Corley, appeared on a web broadcast in 2014 with an honest-to-God white nationalist and parroted the guy’s white supremacist views?

In the interview, conducted by William Johnson, a California racist who was briefly listed as a delegate for Donald Trump when he was still a candidate in 2016, the two talk about things like gerrymandering, racial unrest and even Sen. Mitch McConnell's marriage to Elaine Chao because he's of European descent and she's of Asian descent.

Related: Kentucky GOP candidate ripped minorities on a white nationalist show

We really should have seen this coming.

His support of the monument was one sign. His attack on University of Louisville professor Ricky Jones was another.

It’s not that everyone who wants to preserve Confederate monuments is a racist. Heavens, no.

Some are just really ignorant. There is a significant number of people out there who actually believe that the Confederacy had nothing to do with slavery. Heck, a couple of weeks ago, I had someone try to tell me that Abraham Lincoln concocted the whole issue of slavery because he wanted a war with the South.

I can’t make these things up.

But you have to admit, racists and Southern sympathizers seem to move in the same circles. The Confederate battle flag seems to go well with their sheets.

Kentucky Democrats want you to believe that the Confederate flag also goes well with elephants.

On Thursday, they sent out a press release headlined “The GOP has a widespread racism problem.”

To back that up, they included Corley’s appearance on the white nationalist’s web show, and they included the fact that U.S. Rep. Jamie Comer attended a fundraiser for Corley back in 2014.

They also included the fact that a former staffer for McConnell who now stars in a television ad for U.S. Rep. Andy Barr, once tweeted variations of the N-word and wrote that she hates Mexicans, and they accused state Rep. Phil Moffett of using a “dog whistle,” or code words designed to inflame racist feelings, on social media.

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It sent Kentucky Republicans into a tizzy trying to disavow some of the offenders. 

McConnell, through a spokesman, tried to distance himself from the former staffer, and McConnell personally went after Corley, who said McConnell’s marriage to Chao, who was born in Taiwan to Chinese parents and emigrated to the United States as a child, isn’t troubling only because they don't have children together.

And Comer said through a spokesman that he wouldn’t have attended the fundraising event for Corley had he known.

“Simply put, there is no place for it in our society or our party,” Republican chairman Mac Brown, said in a statement after the Democrats went on the offensive.

He went on to say that “ statements of a racist or offensive nature are, sadly, not a new thing in American politics. For the Kentucky Democratic Party to make this about any one political party or entity is to ignore facts and history.”  

Brown is right. There are Republicans who are racists and there are Democrats who are racists. And there are those in both parties who aren’t.

Southern Democrats, in fact, were the worst racists in the early 1960s. But that was a long time ago and party alignment has changed dramatically. Now, black Republicans are like hens' teeth. 

And under Brown’s leadership, the state GOP has responded appropriately when its candidates are caught doing overtly racist things, like when the late Dan Johnson was caught on social media comparing President Barack Obama to a monkey, and more recently when the Corley interview emerged.

Jefferson County GOP chairman Jim Stansbury also did right when he called on Corley to drop out of the race. 

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But the problem is that they leave themselves open to a charge like the Democrats made as long as they continue to favor chipping away at the voting rights act, favor voter ID laws that tend to discriminate against the poor and minorities and oppose affirmative action programs — and when people like Sen. Rand Paul say it was wrong to apply the Civil Rights Act to private businesses. 

They leave themselves open to such a charge when so much of their time and energy is spent trying to keep brown-skinned people out of the United States. 

They leave themselves open to such a charge when the president is slow to denounce former Klan leader David Duke.

And they leave themselves open to it when the president, the leader of their party, surveys what happened a year ago in Charlottesville, Virginia, and declares that there are “some very fine people on both sides.”

There weren't, at least there weren't some very fine people on the side of the white supremacists and neo-Nazis at Charlottesville.

Nor were any very fine people involved in the interview Corley did in 2014 with a outspoken white nationalist. 


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