When Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968, he was working on the Poor People's Campaign[0], an effort to alleviate poverty for all Americans. Meanwhile,

When Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968, he was working on the Poor People's Campaign[0], an effort to alleviate poverty for all Americans. Meanwhile, Richard Nixon was campaigning on "Law and Order" (ask yourself: what's the order?) in preparation for the War on Drugs as part of the Southern Strategy[1]: > Republican strategist Lee Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger." Ronald Reagan campaigned heavily against "welfare queens,"[2] associating poverty and government assistance with urban blacks. In so doing, he persuaded working class whites that cutting social programs and tax rates for the wealthy would benefit them. As a resident of West Virginia, I must express the deepest sympathies for the suffering of my neighbors. But I can't help but sigh when I see a Confederate flag or Make America Great Again sign. And I see many every day. Trump offers the poor whites of America nothing but relative status at the expense of others. Hackers should stand firmly against the sowing of tribal division. We understand that the strength of capitalism is that it's not a zero-sum ideology. We are enriched by imagination, creativity, production. We are impoverished by conflicts over the distribution of the pie as it is. Are poor whites worse off than poor blacks than poor hispanics than poor native Americans than poor Asians? What a distraction. This question serves Machiavellian leaders and sensationalist media whose power is dependent on everyone hating each other. How can we make America--and the entire world--prosperous for everyone? [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poor_People%27s_Campaign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poor_People%27s_Campaign [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_queen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_queen