Whenever I write about Roger Stone, I usually reference the fact that he was a Nixon-era Dirty Trickster, meaning that Stone was involved with all of Richard Nixon’s campaign shenanigans, CREEP, and the larger dirty tricks/criminal acts to get Nixon reelected. That’s Roger Stone’s political “pedigree” and he doesn’t see a difference between “breaking into the Democratic Party’s offices in Watergate” versus “acting as a middleman between Russian operatives, Wikileaks and the Trump campaign.” But something else we should also remember about Stone and his Nixon-era political education is that Nixon was gleefully racist – that was “the Southern strategy” and the “Silent Majority.” He appealed to aggrieved white people. That too is Stone’s pedigree. So, true story, Roger Stone dropped a racial slur on a radio show yesterday:

Roger Stone, the political operative who was spared a prison sentence this month by his friend President Trump, denied on Sunday that he had uttered a racial slur on a radio show the night before, calling the accusation a “smear” while also contending the word was not offensive. During a live interview on “The Mo’Kelly Show” on Saturday night, the host, Morris W. O’Kelly, who is Black, questioned the role that Mr. Stone’s relationship and proximity to the president played in the commutation of his sentence.

Mr. O’Kelly said: “There are thousands of people treated unfairly daily. How your number just happened to come up in the lottery — I am guessing it was more than just luck, Roger, right?” Mr. Stone, who was speaking by phone, responded by muttering words that sounded like “arguing with this Negro”; the beginning of his sentence was hard to hear. It sounded as if Mr. Stone was not speaking directly into the phone, but rather to himself or to someone in the room with him.

When Mr. O’Kelly asked him to repeat what he said, Mr. Stone let out a sigh, then remained silent for almost 40 seconds. Acting as if the connection had been severed, Mr. Stone vehemently denied that he used the slur. “I did not — you’re out of your mind,” Mr. Stone told the host.

On Sunday, in a statement sent by text message to The New York Times, Mr. Stone at various points appeared to acknowledge the slur had been used, blamed technical difficulties on the show’s part, denied he said the word and then argued it was not offensive. “Somebody can very clearly be heard using the alleged epitaph after he cut my sound feed off three times,” he wrote in the text message, apparently meaning “epithet.” Saying he supported affirmative action and opposed the war on drugs, Mr. Stone wrote that he was not racist and that the episode was “a smear designed to boost” Mr. O’Kelly’s ratings.

He also wrote: “Mr. O’Kelly needs a good peroxide cleaning of the wax in his ears because at no time did I call him a negro. That said, Mr. O’Kelly needs to spend a little more time studying black history and institutions.” The word, he continued, “is far from a slur.”

[From The NY Times]

What offends you more, what Stone originally said in the radio interview or what he texted to the Times after the fact? And now the man is free and clear, with his sentence commuted by Donald Trump. And yes, Roger Stone is racist. Not just racist in his actual life, thinking and saying racist sh-t. He’s politically racist, and he’s one of the politicos in Trump’s ear, telling him to double-down on racist sh-t constantly.

audio:

Roger Stone “I don’t feel like arguing with this negro…”

pic.twitter.com/c0KAMvnSAc

— Biden_Brigade (@biden_brigade) July 19, 2020

Black people know exactly what Roger Stone means when he uses the word "Negro" pic.twitter.com/uDiZemljus

— Alex Cole (@acnewsitics) July 19, 2020

Photos courtesy of Backgrid.