G.O.A.T Tournament Day 2: The Influencers

It's day two of the tournament to crown the Greatest Oppressor of All Time.

It’s the second day of our journey to find the greatest racist in American history. On Tuesday, we witnessed a few thrilling upsets and a few blowouts as we focused on the political giants who embedded white supremacy into the fabric of our country.

Today, our single-elimination tournament focuses on the men behind the curtains, the grand wizards of Oz, the capitalists who profit from discrimination, and the hatemakers whose lives inspired more acts of bigotry than one individual racist could ever commit. If you missed the first round, here’s how this works:

A selection committee chose 64 competitors in four distinct divisions:

1. Politics and government: This includes elected officials, judges and appointees who served in local, state or federal government roles.

2. Organizations and companies: Corporations, civic organizations and any group that has an official membership.

3. Influencers: Media personalities who platform racists, billionaires who fund racism and the pioneers of racist movements.

4. Mobs and movements: Loosely defined racist campaigns, extremist movements and collectives that embody a racist ethos

Each day, we’ll focus on one division. Readers will have three days to vote on each matchup, and the winner will move on to the next round. At the end of the competition, we will crown the G.O.A.T. of white supremacy. You can see the whole bracket with updated scores here.

Here are the first-round matchups in the Influencers division:

Remember, only subscribers to ContrabandCamp can vote. And never forget what the Bible says about racism:

When you’re racist, you’re an oppressor for a day. When you teach racism …

You’re American.

— Two Corinthians 3:16, probably:

When Richard Nixon launched his 1968 campaign for president, the literal first person he hired was a 29-year-old virtually unknown writer. Patrick J. Buchanan would reshape American politics and almost singlehandedly make the GOP into the party of racism.

Pat Buchanan helped create the “Southern Strategy” that weaponized anti-Blackness to flip the political map that had existed for 100 years. He warned Nixon not to visit Coretta Scott King because it would “outrage” white Southerners. He told Nixon to burn the Watergate tapes and gave the term “welfare queen” to Reagan. His 1992 “Culture Wars” speech at the Republican National Convention introduced the term to the American vocabulary. He coined the term the “silent majority.” He pulled Nazis into the party by becoming the most prominent Holocaust denier. He co-founded the American Conservative magazine that popularized a book by a young author named J.D. Vance.

To be fair, before Buchanan, both parties tried to appeal to white Southern racists. There wasn’t a single Southern Republican in the House or Senate who voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. So Pat Buchanan did not make the Republican Party racist.

But he gave racists a party.

Elon Musk is not just the largest political donor in history, he is a "founding father" of a place that was literally found guilty of systemic racism. He got his wealth from Black people's labor. But because of whitewashed history, he pretends as if he pulled himself up by his bootstraps. He believes in white supremacist conspiracies about Black people having low IQ and uses the government to disparage anyone who fights for civil rights (He calls it DEI).
The pro-apartheid billionaire thinks Black people are taking and salutes Nazis but is worried about the “woke mind virus.”

Elon Musk isn’t racist.

He is the human embodiment of racism.

Most people know Nathan Bedford Forrest as the founding member and the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. But did you know he was one of the greatest human traffickers in history? No seriously, Forrest literally had slave trading franchises that he called “Negro Marts.” He was also a war criminal. During the 1864 Fort Pillow Massacre, Forrest massacred hundreds of Black Union soldiers after they surrendered. Aside from inspiring terrorists and mass murderers for more than a century, one of Forrest’s proudest accomplishments as a businessman was selling the child of a “free-nigger abolitionist”…

Frederick Douglass’ daughter.

Mildred Lewis Rutherford was the first Mom For Liberty.

Kinda.

Rutherford didn’t have children and she didn’t actually believe in liberty. But as an educator and an amateur historian, the heir to a slave-owning empire almost singlehandedly created the Lost Cause narrative. As general historian for the United Daughters of the Confederacy, her book, A Measuring Rod to Test Text Books, is still the gold standard for how white moms can influence the way history is taught in schools. She promoted the idea that white people never actually used the word “slave,” and she traveled the country promoting the idea that the KKK was “an absolute necessity” to protect white women from being raped by Black men. Fortunately, she came up with a way for her sisters to cement this legacy. Rutherford suggested that each UDC chapter sponsor a monument to honor their terrorist forefathers. This one organization is responsible for most Confederate monuments. But of course, Mildred’s was the biggest.

That’s why the Ku Klux Klan is carved into Stone Mountain — “the largest shrine to white supremacy in the history of the world.”

When Tucker Carlson was the biggest star on television’s whitest network, he helped mainstream one of the most popular white supremacist conspiracies —the “great replacement theory.” He attacked former MSNBC journalist Tiffany Cross until she was fired. He beefed with Joy Reid and a journalist named Michael Harriot. He promoted white xenophobia by saying that white people weren’t “designed” to live around immigrants. For more than a decade, he was the most racist person on the most racist channel that was watched by more white people than any other cable news network.

The Koch brothers funded the whitewashing of history. They started the anti-DEI sentiment and funded conferences to promote the white supremacist race science ideology. No one ever talked about critical race theory until the Koch brothers secretly funded a national anti-CRT movement. When Ron DeSantis purged the state institutions of its “woke” trustees, the Koch network promised they wouldn’t lose donors. Elected officials can boldly deny the science behind climate change because the Koch brothers told them to.

Joe Rogan is the most influential person in American media. No one else comes close.

The CEO of Disney has shareholders. Record labels are part of corporations. Apple doesn’t decide what goes on its podcasts. With 14 million listeners on Spotify and 19.5 million YouTube subscribers, he almost has more monthly listeners than all other podcasts combined (42 million). So no one can tell Joe Rogan what to do. He turned Elon Musk into a cult hero. He platformed Donald Trump and Peter Thiel and Bill Ackman and Holocaust denier Darryl Cooper and Christopher Rufo and Jordan Petersen and … well everybody. I can’t think of a single prominent white supremacist that hasn’t appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience. And in many cases, he introduced them to the world. He jumpstarted the trans women in sports debate more than a decade ago

But is Joe Rogan racist? Well, let me ask this question. If the U.S. military discovered a place that hosted members of ISIS, Hamas, Al-Qaeda and MS-13, but it also held comedy shows, what would they consider it a terrorist cell or a comedy club?

Peter Thiel began his attack on DEI 30 years ago. But since he’s so rich, he can publicly say that he believes “freedom and democracy are incompatible.” He can support the idea that dictatorship is good and some people shouldn’t be allowed to vote. He also promotes the idea that white people are generically superior when it comes to IQ. But Thiel’s biggest contribution to racism is in tech. He pioneered the technology that allows police to monitor Black activists and justify over-policing Black neighborhoods. Palantir makes the software that Immigration and Customs Enforcement uses to detain migrants and separate minors from their families.

He is a real-life supervillain.

This one is hard. Who one helped elevate Trump more?

OK, that’s too difficult to answer. But which one normalized white supremacist rhetoric more? Still too hard? Well, which one gave a voice to the alt-right ideology and pushed more racist propaganda? OK, which one helped election deniers spread conspiracy theories? Which one pushed more of an anti-Black agenda?

I give up. Just flip a coin.

Charles Murray is the most popular race scientist in American history. His debunked book The Bell Curve is still cited by stupid white supremacists who believe that “sub-Saharan Africans” have lower intelligence. His entire career is premised on the fact that non-white people are ruining America. Despite the fact that only racists defend him, his ideas have inspired three generations of white supremacists. The interesting thing about him is that, these people never read Murray. If they did, they’d know that Murray isn’t pro-white. His bigotry is hyper-focused on dark-skinned Black people.

What Charles Murray is for Black people, John Tanton is for immigrants. Unlike race scientists like Thiel and Musk, who believe white people need to have more babies, Tanton is a eugenicist who believes non-white people should be sterilized and only white people should be allowed into America. While Tanton’s fans include Ann Coulter, Tucker Carlson and Richard Spencer, his political philosophy can be whittled down to one mentor:

Adolph Hitler.

Jerry Falwell loved that George Wallace hated Martin Luther King Jr. He opposed integrated schools and pioneered segregation academies. He supported apartheid, and Pat Buchanan and hates Islam. But his legacy as the founder of the “moral majority” was to infuse segregationist politics into conservative politics as “patriotic.” He is the founder of the religious right and one of the co-founders of Christian nationalism.

Calling Thomas Hofeller a “political strategist” or a “political consultant” is like referring to Satan as an “ex-choir member” or “a former minister of music.” Long before Hofeller died in Aug 2018, he was hailed as the white supremacist Lex Luthor (not to say that Lex isn’t a bigot already; I wouldn’t want to ruin his street cred). Called the “master of modern Republican gerrymandering,” Hofeller pioneered using race to redraw political maps to hand electoral advantages to Republicans.

He is the greatest racial gerrymanderer in history.

Good luck!