"Donald Trump's win tells people of color they aren't welcome in America," blared a headline at Vox.com the day after Trump's Nov. 8 election victory.
"Donald Trump's triumph is a victory for white supremacy," said Cosmpolitan.com.
"10 reasons why Trump's win is 'white supremacy's last stand in America,'" announced AlterNet.
Headlines like these popped up all over the Internet in the days and weeks after Trump scored perhaps the biggest upset ever in a U.S. presidential election.
But Indian-born filmmaker Dinesh D'Souza begs to differ.
As he demonstrated in his eye-opening book and documentary "Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party," such accusations of racism are being leveled at the wrong party.
It is the Democrats who have a problem with racism, he contended.
"The Democratic Party historically has been the party of white supremacy," D'Souza said in a recent appearance on Fox News' "Fox & Friends Weekend." "All the institutions of white supremacy, from slavery to segregation, the Ku Klux Klan, lynching – these were created and sustained by the Democratic Party. From the WikiLeaks revelations we see that Democrats even now talk privately about blacks, about Hispanics, even about Catholics in a way that you never see Republicans talk."
He was referring to the troves of emails from Democratic Party activists and operatives leaked during the campaign that painted a picture at odds with the party's image of inclusiveness. In one email, John Halpin, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, mocked media mogul Rupert Murdoch for raising his children to be Catholics, saying the most "powerful elements" in the conservative movement are all Catholic.
"It's an amazing bastardization of the faith," Halpin wrote. "They must be attracted to the systematic thought and severely backwards gender relations and must be totally unaware of Christian democracy."
In a leaked message from August 2015, Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta laid out a strategy for getting former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson – whom he referred to as a "d—k" – and other leading Hispanic Democrats on board with Hillary Clinton's presidential bid. Podesta's subject line was "Needy Latinos and 1 easy call."
Perhaps most damaging, though, was the leaked transcript of one of Hillary Clinton's Wall Street speeches in which she referred to blacks and Muslims as "professional never-do-wells."
Here is the relevant portion:
The main reason behind successful immigration should be painfully obvious to even the most dimwitted of observers: Some groups of people are almost always highly successful given only half of a chance (Jews*, Hindus/Sikhs and Chinese people, for example), while others (Muslims, blacks** and Roma***, for instance) fare badly almost irrespective of circumstances. The biggest group of humanity can be found somewhere between these two extremes – the perennial overachievers and the professional never-do-wells.
Like D'Souza, Ben Kinchlow, founder of Americans for Israel and longtime cohost of CBN's "The 700 Club," detailed the sordid history of the Democratic Party vis-à-vis race relations in his book "Black Yellowdogs."
Kinchlow noted the KKK was a significant Democratic Party constituency, helping to elect legislators, sheriffs, judges and mayors who went on to become Klan members. He also wrote the KKK targeted white Republicans for being "n---er" lovers.”
What’s more, Democrats never allowed a single federal anti-lynching measure to become law. They blocked all of them either by filibuster or committee. And when it came time to vote on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Republicans supported it at greater rates than Democrats did, both in the House and Senate.
On Fox News, D'Souza noted accusations of white supremacy are part of the modern Democratic Party playbook. He recalled that in 1980, critics confronted Ronald Reagan with white supremacists who had endorsed his presidential candidacy, but Reagan responded he had not endorsed them.
The filmmaker thinks Democrats are now struggling to explain how they lost the 2016 election, and allegations of white supremacy offer a convenient excuse.
"This is a scapegoat trying to explain an election result that is very embarrassing for the Democratic Party," D'Souza said. "They had more money, they had the organization, the Republican Party was divided, and still Trump won. That leaves these guys with a lot of explaining to do."
D'Souza appeared on Fox News with Richard Goodstein, a 2008 Clinton campaign adviser. Goodstein argued Democrats are the ones who have stood up for the interests of white working class voters over the years, but he believes Trump won over so many of those voters because Democrats simply had a messaging problem.
D'Souza countered that the Democrats’ problems with white blue-collar voters were about substance, not messaging.
"Remember that the reason we've seen this decimation of the white working class is due to the combined forces of technology, globalization, and immigration," he advised. "Trump was the only candidate directly addressing those issues. He said, 'I'll do something about immigration, I'll do something about trade.'
"Obama and Hillary have done nothing about these issues and essentially been blaming third parties: 'Oh, it's CEOs and corporate jets; that's why you don't have a job.' Trump was at least putting his finger on the right issue. You can't write it off to racism. It wasn't that at all."