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August 20 - September 21, 2020
At the root of it is a deep condescension that they—the de facto White Party of America—know what is best for black folks, and it’s unfortunate these black folks don’t seem to get it but, you know, they are different and we have to talk to them in a language they can understand.
When Reagan attacked “welfare queens,” white voters heard it and understood the unspoken accusation just as they did when George Wallace did the same.
There is a small kernel of truth in it—the woman used four, not eighty names, and the total fraud was $8,000—but when four becomes eighty and $8,000 total becomes $150,000 a year, Reagan is just lying. The majority of all welfare goes to white Americans and always has, but the specificity of a woman in Chicago makes the racial appeal clear.
As Steve Clemons wrote in The Atlantic, when it comes to reducing the debt, “the big winner is Harry Truman, followed by Bill Clinton. Eisenhower is next, followed by Johnson and Nixon, Kennedy, and finally Jimmy Carter. All of these presidents reduced debt as a percent of GDP.”
For every dollar Mississippians pay in federal income tax, the state receives just over $3 back from the federal government. More than 40 percent of Mississippi’s entire budget comes from Washington.
“Welfare” is what the poor get because they are, well, poor, and being poor is a choice because in America anyone can succeed.
But “grants,” “tax breaks,” and “incentives” are the language businesses use to describe the corporate welfare they demand in exchange for doing what they usually have to do or want to do anyway, like build a new data center or factory or, in the case of sports, a new stadium.
Any pretense that the Republican Party, if only given complete control of all three chambers of power, would focus on the deficit was just one of the myths shattered in the first two years of the Trump presidency.
But how does a black person hear these same words, knowing that it took thirty thousand federal troops to force the University of Mississippi to accept one African American?9
Twenty years later, after eight years of an African American president and the longest bull market in U.S. history, the disparity between white and black economic realities is staggering:
“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”
What few people grasp—because they are outside the system and have normal lives to lead—is just how huge the machinery of deception is that the Republicans have erected and how long it has been in the making. Fox News is unique in American media history as serving more like the in-house propaganda arm of a strong-man dictator than operating by the accepted norms of professional journalism.
The 1987 FCC decision to stop enforcing the fairness doctrine supercharged conservative media into a billion-dollar industry. Now there was no need to be concerned with offering equal time or performing a news function.
But what is mainstream media? It’s the journalism that believes in standards, strives to report facts, and has a professional standard to correct errors.
The playing ground between “mainstream” media and the conservative alternatives is forever tilted against the side that has standards, because part of those standards is admitting mistakes and correcting them on the record. The result is a disproportionally long catalog of errors in the press with standards because, more often than not, there is little if any pressure within conservative journalism to admit errors, much less correct them.
The Trump era’s consistent denial that you did not hear what you heard and did not see what you saw has managed to make George Orwell one of the most relevant authors of the day.
Orwell’s 1984 is the perfect framework in which to understand his mentality: “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
while the Mueller Report did not charge Trump or his campaign with criminal conspiracy, it did uncover the largest effort in American history by a hostile foreign power to influence the selection of our commander in chief.
The simple reality is that the Republican Party was in business with Russian intelligence efforts, what used to be known as the KGB, and precious few leading the Republican Party seem to give a damn.
the Republican Party would not nominate someone who was a bankrupt casino owner who lost the Reform Party nomination for president to Pat Buchanan in 2000, was a maxed-out donor to Anthony Weiner, had attacked Republicans for being against abortion, had bragged that his building was now the tallest after the Twin Towers collapsed on 9/11, and who talked longingly in public about dating his daughter.
It seemed obvious that Trump as president would continue to be the same badly damaged, semiliterate, incurious, and maladjusted oddball he had always been.
Legitimizing hate is like a war: it is easier to begin than to stop.
Yes, a white nationalist who ran on a Muslim ban and calls Mexicans rapists, a man who has no sense of truth and little of right and wrong, a man who wrote hush-money checks for a porn star in the Oval Office is president, but, hey, we cut marginal tax rates for corporations.
four behavioral warning signs that can help us know an authoritarian when we see one. We should worry when a politician 1) rejects, in words or action, the democratic rules of the game, 2) denies the legitimacy of opponents, 3) tolerates or encourages violence, or 4) indicates a willingness to curtail the civil liberties of opponents, including the media.19
Trump, who went to great lengths to avoid serving in the military, where he might encounter actual violence, gleefully urges his supporters at rallies to “beat the crap out of” protesters, just “knock the hell…I promise you I will pay for the legal fees. I promise, I promise.”
Trump has launched an assault on the First Amendment unlike any president in history, threatening to use the power of the government to attack media he dislikes, from The Washington Post to CNN, as “the enemy of the people.”
In the Trump years, Republicans have sent a message that lying is useful and productive, racism is acceptable, the press is the enemy, and a strong-man authoritarian head of government is the ideal.
Barry Goldwater’s opposition to the Civil Rights Act, which made Jim Crow voter-suppression laws illegal, was the defining moment for the modern Republican Party.
The fraud is trying to convince the public there is voter fraud of any significance. I’ve worked in campaigns since 1978, and I don’t know of a single race in which illegal voters were remotely a factor.
But the looming threat of some socialist takeover of America or Sharia law becoming the new Supreme Court standard is all nonsense. And most Republican elected officials know it’s nonsense, just as they know Donald Trump is an unqualified idiot.
Trump’s Deep State is just a variation of Joe McCarthy’s mythical Communists infesting the State Department, the “enemies within.”
The difference between Joe McCarthy and Donald Trump is that in the 1950s there were those in the Republican Party who would stand up to McCarthy, while now there are few with the integrity to confront Donald Trump.
Labeling any media you don’t like as “fake news” is an all-encompassing conspiracy theory that makes truth an enemy.
What does a center-right party in America stand for? Once this was easy to answer: fiscal sanity, free trade, being strong on Russia, personal responsibility, the Constitution.
So I find myself in a very strange and uncomfortable position of looking out at the political landscape and seeing no reason for hope that the party I spent decades working for can be redeemed.