A sickening man named George Will has just laundered the historical reputation of a monster. His new column affects to analyze the varieties of third party candidates in the wake of Michael Bloomberg’s suspected entrance into the presential race. Exhibit B: “A candidate can succeed in giving an aggrieved minority a voice—e.g., George Wallace, speaking for people furious about the ’60s tumults,” he writes.

Of course this is nonsense: the people he was giving voice to were an aggrieved majority–e.g., white people. Media Matters gives us the beginnings of an explanation, quoting Wallace organizer Tom Turnipseed–

Race and being opposed to the civil rights movement and all it meant was the very heart and soul of the Wallace campaign. I mean, that’s what it was all about.

But I’d like to fill in some details from Wallace’s 1968 campaign. Aggravation at those responsible for ’60s tumults was indeed part of the appeal. You know, the people who, “when someone goes out and burns down half a city and murders someone, swaydo-intellectuals explain it away by sayin’ the killer didn’t get any watermelons to eat when he was ten years old.”

Wallace’s proposed solution was to murder them.

In one of his applause lines, he brought up the story of the demonstrator who laid down in front of President Johnson’s limousines: “I tell you when November comes, the first time they lie down in front of my limousine, it’ll be the last one they’ll ever lay down in front of because their day is over!” This often got a standing ovation. He also addressed the subject of race riots: “We don’t have riots in Alabama. They start a riot down there, first one of ’em to pick up a brick gets a bullet in the brain, that’s all.” He suggested antiwar be forced into combat in Vietnam: “I wish they’d organize that brigade and get all the dirty beatniks that march in these shindigs and get ’em over there and let ’em do a little fightin’ and get rid of ’em.” He didn’t much care for professors, either: “I would drag some of these professors by their beards.” “Hell,” he would say, “we got too much dignity in government now. We need some meanness.”

Or, in other words, fascism. The New Republic described Wallaceites and anti-Wallaceites at a Madison Square Garden rally: “Never again will you read about Berlin in the ’30s without remembering wild confrontation of two irrational forces.”

So who were his supporters?

The Wallace campaign met with some of their organizers only at night, lest decent folks see who they were trucking with: Birchers, Klansmen, and worse. Many of the people who wrangled him his 66,059 ballot petition signatures in California – George Will seems nearly to rhapsodize over this accomplishment – were activists from the National States Rights Party, a neo-Nazi formation. But it wasn’t just Nazis and Klansmen. On September 4, 1968, two Black Panthers left the Brooklyn Criminal Court for a preliminary hearing on an assault charge, and off-duty police pulled blackjacks and billie clubs from undeneath their jackets and beat them. They chanted Wallace! Wallace! while they did it.

The “religious right” of the day dug him. “Outside of the visible return of Jesus Christ,” a Chattaooga minister proclaimed, “the only salvation of the country is the election of George Wallace”

Media Matters quotes Turnipseed in a PBS documentary telling the story of a Wallace supporter in Massachusetts who asked, “When Governor Wallace is elected president,” he said, “he’s going to line up all these niggers and shoot them, isn’t he?” There’s an even better version of the story, though, in Dan T. Carter’s biography The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics. When Turnipseed responds, “We’re just worried about some agitators. We’re not going to shoot anybody,” his host responds angrily: “Well, I don’t know whether I’m for him or not.”

Yeeee-ah. Giving “an aggrieved minority a voice.” Every time I think I’ve sounded the depths of conservative spokesmen’s moral bleaching of evil, I always find a deeper ring of hell to plumb.