I think it's important to know that this was explicitly designed to target black people, not an accidental overreaction of well-meaning but not-modern, not-PC white people to a terrible problem. If you take Nixon out, you don't have that.

A terrible fact is that elites still love Nixon. They don't want him brought up because he undermines them morally: they supported him at the time, and they still share his political outlook. He left so many candid recordings behind that there's no denying that he was a vicious, stupid, paranoid, superstitious man, and that the views of his contemporary detractors were more than completely confirmed (even they couldn't imagine that he was literally screaming about the niggers and the jews during policy discussions.)

Nixon created the strategy that has culminated in this Republican primary. Ignoring Nixon is a problem.