WEDGE1 bak

capt 6 25

WEDGE625

SEE TWO AND THREE

very belated? 5/20 neglected

see polarization

see troll caucus

merri ok

see grievance/ identity

see desantis

see bannon

see trump

see CRT

see hype fear anger

see moral panic teletubbies dr suess woke

CAPT 12 23

aha: note that this are rarely central practical importance but loaded with emotion? low logos/relevance but high pathos, so good to hype up base, direct mail fundraising and clickbait.  note also russian cointelpro disruption.

real polarization is 1% inequality, but useful diversion to divide a and conquer left-rt; cf beran something awful same root problem but opposite diagnosis and cures.

evangelicals often involved? anti-commie contributes to polarization?

when how did wedge issue --> own the libs? 4chan alt rt?

aha how much of this is just feeding soc media maw/ RW trumpista red meat?

orig i thot of wedge issue as one that riles but terribly important in Real world, but mask and climate matter

bak 11 21 html  Crary

wedge issue in politics is any issue used to create a division within a political party. These issues are usually employed as a tactic by a minority party against a governing majority party, with the aim of splitting the majority's electorate into two or more camps.\1]\2] Although any issue could potentially be used as a wedge, some of the most common examples are often concerned with social justice, such as abortion or civil rights.[3][4][5] Due to the prevalence of social justice issues as a wedge, the tactic is often most effectively employed by Conservative parties against Liberal parties. American political strategist [Lee Atwater (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Atwater) has been noted as an early champion of wedge issue politics during the [Reagan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Reagan) era.[6]

an 4 24

the culture wars now ripping through American politics — especially noticeable in before the last midterm elections, when Trump was trying to lay the groundwork for an authoritarian takeover — arguably began on May 8, 1970 in New York City.

That day happened to be the 25th anniversary of the Allied victory over Germany in World War II. It was also weeks after Richard Nixon expanded the Vietnam War into Cambodia. And it was just four days after Ohio National Guardsmen shot dead four students during antiwar protests at Kent State University.

I recall it vividly.

On May 8, 1970, a riot broke out in New York City.

READ:[From 'really rich' to begging: Inside Trump's U-turn on one of his first campaign lies

Around noon, near the intersection of Wall Street and Broad Street in Lower Manhattan, more than 400 construction workers — steamfitters, ironworkers, plumbers, and other laborers from nearby construction sites like the emerging World Trade Center — attacked around 1,000 student demonstrators (including two of my friends) protesting the Vietnam War and the May 4 Kent State shootings.

The workers carried U.S. flags and chanted “USA, All the way” and “America, love it or leave it.” They chased the students through the streets — attacking those who looked like hippies with hard hats and weapons, including tools and steel-toe boots.

I heard about it when several friends from New York who were active in the anti-Vietnam War movement phoned me later that day. To characterize them as upset understates their emotions.

As David Paul Kuhn reports in The Hardhat Riot, the police did little to stop the mayhem. Some even egged on the thuggery. When a group of hardhats moved menacingly toward a Wall Street plaza, a patrolman shouted: “Give ’em hell, boys. Give ’em one for me!”

The workers then stormed a barely-protected City Hall where the mayor’s staff, to the hardhats’ rage, had lowered the flag in honor of the Kent State dead. They pushed their way to the top of the steps and attempted to gain entrance, chanting “Hey, hey, whatcha say? We support the USA!”

Fearing the mob would break in, a person from the mayor’s staff raised the flag.

It was a small precursor to the attack on the U.S. Capitol more than a half-century later.

The workers ripped down the Red Cross flag that was hanging at nearby Trinity Church because they associated the flag with the anti-war protests. They stormed the newly built main Pace University building, smashing lobby windows and beating students and professors with their tools.

More than 100 people were wounded. The typical victim was a 22-year-old white male college student, though one in four was female. Seven police officers were also hurt. Most of the injured required hospital treatment. Six people were arrested, but only one construction worker.

My friends escaped injury but they were traumatized. I remember them describing the rioting construction workers as a “pack of animals.”

The hardhat riot had immediate political consequences. Richard Nixon exploited it for political advantage. It was the first salvo in America’s culture wars.

Nixon’s chief of staff H.R. Haldeman wrote in his diary: “The college demonstrators have overplayed their hands, evidence is the blue-collar group rising up against them, and [the] president can mobilize them.”

Patrick Buchanan, then a Nixon aide, wrote in a memo to his boss, saying “blue-collar Americans” are “our people now.”

Peter Brennan, then president of the Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York, claimed “the unions had nothing to do with” it — although just before the riot, Brennan had held a rally of construction workers to show support for Nixon’s Vietnam policies.

Brennan explained that workers were “fed up” with violence and flag desecration by anti-war demonstrators.

At Nixon’s invitation, Brennan then led a delegation of 22 union leaders, representing more than 300,000 tradesmen, to the White House. They presented Nixon with several hard hats and a flag pin, after which Nixon praised the “labor leaders and people from Middle America who still have character and guts and a bit of patriotism”.

After the 1972 election, Nixon appointed Brennan labor secretary. Brennan did not distinguish himself in that position. He strongly opposed affirmative action. He also prevented Labor Department officials from investigating allegations of corruption in the Teamsters Union and of its president, Frank Fitzsimmons, who had helped secure labor support for Nixon’s election.

The hardhat riot revealed a deep split in America’s left — in the coalition of workers and progressives that Franklin D. Roosevelt had knitted together in the 1930s, and the wished-for alliance of Blacks, liberals and blue-collar whites in the aftermath of Lyndon Johnson’s landslide 1964 re-election.

The riot’s class-based and race-based tensions would worsen over the next half century, as America’s upper-middle class and wealthy began pulling away from white Americans without college degrees.

The construction workers who attacked the demonstrators on May 8, 1970, and the police who egged them on, were more likely to have family and friends in Vietnam than the college students who demonstrated. Many were veterans of World War II and Korea. They also lived in the same working-class neighborhoods.

They despised the protesters as a bunch of pampered, longhaired, draft-dodging, flag-desecrating snots.

They felt abandoned by the middle class and the college-educated, stiffed by the clever kids with draft deferments, forced to bus their kids to Black neighborhoods they didn’t trust and accept Black kids into their schools, and burdened by an economy no longer delivering the possibility of upward mobility.

As the journalist Pete Hamill (http://www.petehamill.com/) observed at the time, the workingman “feels trapped and, even worse, in a society that purports to be democratic, ignored.”

The former Nixon aide Pat Buchanan, writing in 1988 about the future of the GOP, argued (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/08/opinion/pat-buchanan-donald-trump.html)that it should have embraced these growing working-class resentments.

The Republican moment slipped by, I believe, when the GOP refused to take up the challenge from the left on its chosen battleground: the politics of class, culture, religion, and race.”

Three years later, Buchanan openly questioned whether democracy was the best form of government. “The American press is infatuated to the point of intoxication with democracy,” he wrote (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/08/opinion/pat-buchanan-donald-trump.html), comparing the Marine Corps and corporations like IBM to the federal government. “Only the last is run on democratic, not autocratic principles. Yet who would choose the last as the superior institution?”

Buchanan sought the Republican presidential nomination in 1992, 1996, and 2000. He lost, of course. But over the course of the 1990s, his ideas began taking root in the GOP.

When I was secretary of labor, I spent much of my time in the Midwest and elsewhere around the country where workers felt abandoned in an economy taken over by Wall Street. I witnessed their anger and resentment. I heard their frustrations.

The nation could have responded, but did not.

NOW READ:[Busted: Paul Gosar campaign consultant linked to antisemitism and white nationalism

girl athletes  recall rt xian natl are fine with big gubmint to go after enemy or threat

https://www.alternet.org/2022/10/florida-history-of-mentrual-periods/

an ah 9 22

It won’t take a major red wave for Republicans to retake the U.S. House of Representatives in the 2022 midterms. Democrats have only a small House majority — definitely smaller than in 2019 or 2020 — and Republicans won’t need to flip a lot of Democrat-held seats to obtain a House majority.

House Republicans, in their “Commitment to America,” have discussed their plans for the House in 2023 if they become its majority party — and liberal Washington Post opinion column Eugene Robinson, in a biting September 26 column (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/26/commitment-to-america-revenge/), slams it as devoid of substance. Above all else, Robinson stresses, Republicans’ plans for the House are motivated by a desire for “revenge.”

“Pay no attention to the House Republicans’ substance-free ‘Commitment to America,’” Robinson argues. “The actual GOP plan, if the party takes control of the lower chamber in January, is a campaign of performative revenge.”

READ MORE: 'Fundraising difficulties' are 'alarming' the GOP as the midterms draw closer and closer: report (https://www.alternet.org/2022/09/fundraising-difficulties-are-alarming-the-gop-as-the-midterms-draw-closer-and-closer-report/)

Robinson, a frequent guest on MSNBC, continues, “Ginned-up investigations, cruel attacks on the marginalized, even a concocted impeachment of President Biden — that’s what the nation has to look forward to if Republicans win the House. Those are the only things the party agrees on, except fealty to Donald Trump and an all-consuming desire for power.”

The liberal columnist notes that although House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy “made a big deal” of the release of the “Commitment to America,” it was full of empty rhetoric calling for “a nation that’s safe” and “a future that’s built on freedom.”

“A Republican majority would disband the select committee investigating the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the Capitol, ending its important work,” Robinson notes. “Perhaps the Senate could try to take up the baton if Democrats retain control there. But it might be that the Justice Department is left on its own to finish writing the definitive story of what happened on that awful day and why. McCarthy and his committee chairs would also quickly launch a series ofshow-trial investigations. Think Benghazi after Benghazi after Benghazi.”

If McCarthy becomes House speaker, Robinson warns, anti-abortion bills are a possibility.

READ MORE: Lauren Boebert 'can go to Iran' if she wants religion directing the government: GOP strategist Rick Wilson (https://www.alternet.org/2022/09/lauren-boebert-go-to-iran/)

“On culture-war issues, how far the House would try to go under McCarthy would depend on how vulnerable he feels to the far-right wing of his caucus,” Robinson explains. “Opinion polls indicate, for example, that any attempt to pass a nationwide abortion ban would hurt the GOP among independent voters. But if enough House Republicans want to barrel down that road, McCarthy might be compelled to go along.”

READ MORE: Democrats need to adopt the GOP's ‘politics of fear’ to win 2022 midterms: journalist (https://www.alternet.org/2022/07/democrats-adopt-politics-of-fear/)

==

it's a spiritual/ culture war? kids are target?  hollywood limo liberals?

aha/hmmn gop /troll backlash against woke corps (nfl, sedition caucus) but mickey an odd enemy?  just recycle of smurf commie moral panic BS? the big lie relies on outragousness?  qanon cannibal pedophiles?  wedge issues pink pill work well 2022, all they have?

https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/ted-cruz-complains-lesbian-toys/

buzz disney

https://www.alternet.org/2022/05/robert-reich-gop-culture-wars/

Former United States Secretary of Labor Robert Reich posted a new video on Tuesday in which he enumerated the parallels between Russian President Vladimir Putin's propaganda and the messaging emanating from the GOP and its media pundits.

"Why do Putin and the Republican Party sound so much alike? Simple," Reich began. "Their culture wars have similar agendas. Both are trying to distract attention from the economic looting by their respective oligarchies."

Reich explained that figures like ex-President Donald Trump, Fox News stooge Tucker Carlson, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R), and the right-wing at large have a vested interest in keeping the American population divided because their ultimate collective goal is total economic domination.

"Sowing racism, homophobia, and transphobia creates life-or-death dangers for many people in our society. For both Putin and the American right, it serves to divert attention from the economic plunder by the ultra-rich," he said "They want people to fear one another rather than unite behind higher wages, better working conditions, and a fairer economy — and against authoritarianism."

Reich then offered some advice on what can be done about it.

"To fight back, we must fight widening inequality while defending marginalized communities from these demagogues’ attacks. The real threat is not diverse identities – it’s corporate greed and political corruption," Reich concluded. "We have to see the culture wars waged by Putin and America’s right for the cynical strategies they are, and build a future in which prosperity is widely shared."

Watch below: (https://youtu.be/_-nO8cBD79k)

https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/blackburn/

word salad rant transphobe, tex child prot, books banned

3 22 digby

no lnx

Former president Donald Trump had another of his interminable rallies this weekend. He said the usual things delighting his South Carolina crowd and boring the rest of us into a coma. This time, however, he did add one memorable new line to the script which got people's attention:

As we watch the horrific carnage unfolding in Ukraine and the repressive crack down in Russia, comments like that are all the more chilling. He truly does want to emulate Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong Un. As the Washington Post reported recently, he has repeated his earlier admiration for Kim's "total control" as well:

He espoused praise for North Korea's brutal leader, marveling at how Kim's generals and aides "cowered" when the dictator spoke to them. "Total control," Trump said of how Kim ran the country, describing generals snapping to attention and standing up on command. "His people were sitting at attention," he added. "I looked at my people and said I want my people to act like that."

I have little doubt that if he wins another term, he will be much worse than he was in the first. He won't make the mistake of hiring people who might stand in his way a second time.

However, as we know, Trump isn't really serious about governing and wouldn't know how to do it efficiently even if he were. It doesn't make him any less dangerous, of course. His chaotic narcissism can do as much damage as a serious ideological authoritarian could. But he's laid out a style template for someone who is serious, showing them exactly the attitude that appeals to the MAGA base. And nobody in GOP politics is as ready to seize the mantle as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Trump 2.0.

The personality and affect have been evident since DeSantis won the governor's seat back in 2018. The Trumpian pettiness, the contempt, the reflexive hostility seem to come naturally to him. He treats the press like dirt and thinks insults are the highest form of humor. If he has any personal warmth or human compassion it's certainly well hidden. He even gestures like Trump.

But with DeSantis, it's more than just style. He's got the Republicans in Florida working together like clockwork to enact the most authoritarian agenda in the country, calibrated perfectly to appeal to the base in advance of his re-election campaign --- and a potential presidential run in 2024.

Florida has been at the leading edge of COVID denialism from the very beginning, but in recent days DeSantis and his hand-picked science-denying surgeon general have taken it to a new level. They had already turned masks into a battleground with the governor taking it upon himself earlier this month to scold high school kids for wearing them in his presence, declaring that it's time to end the "COVID theatre." This was ironic since it turned out that many of the kids had been told by their parents to wear them and DeSantis' numerous assaults on education over the past year have been rationalized as a defense of "parental rights." Then last week the surgeon general went even further, defying the CDC and most physicians by recommending that kids not get vaccinated for COVID-19. DeSantis and his medical henchman seem determined to keep the virus circulating as long as they can.

Meanwhile, the legislative season just coming to a close has produced such an astonishing array of right-wing culture war victories delivering on Desantis' "anti-woke" agenda that it's hard to know where to start. Building on last year's education wrecking ball in which they banned Critical Race Theory from schools despite the fact that they were not teaching it, instituted a requirement that schools teach about the "evils of communism" and passed a higher education law that allows for budget cuts to colleges based on student and faculty surveys about "viewpoint diversity" (which DeSantis defines as "indoctrination") this year they took it to a whole new level. Salon's Amanda Marcotte offered this tart analysis of the "Stop WOKE Act" "

The legislature also passed the "Stop WOKE Act," which bars both schools and businesses from having any training or program that supposedly causes an "individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin." This has been largely covered as a ban on any kind of diversity training, but it's even more expansive than that. As I note in Friday's Standing Room Only newsletter, conservatives can also block anti-sexual harassment trainings by claiming it's guilt-tripping men to tell them that ass-pinching is not allowed in the workplace.

The "fuck your feelings" crowd sure are sensitive snowflakes, aren't they?

Maximum leader DeSantis also got his wish for a first in the nation election police force which will report directly to him. I've got a tip for them: it turns out that the Republican Party in south Florida changed the registrations of hundreds of Democrats to Republican without their permission. That's a crime. In fact, DeSantis might end up regretting this one. If the election police are on the level (which is unlikely, I know) it's almost certain they will be putting many more Republicans behind bars than Democrats. Even Trump's Chief of Staff just blatantly committed it in the last election.

And then there is the grotesque "Don't Say Gay" law which prohibits teachers from discussing the subject in grades K-3. But because it uses the new vigilante system of civil law harassment, and is written so poorly, it will result in a chilling effect on all school districts and will result in small kids with gay parents being treated like aliens and many LGBTQ kids being shoved in the closet. If you doubt their intentions, just listen to DeSantis' vile press secretary:

Those of you who are of a certain age will hear the echoes of one of Florida's original homophobic crusaders Anita Bryant whose "Save Our Children" campaign was based upon the noxious lie that gays were "recruiting" the nice Christian children of the sunshine state.

Under pressure, the CEO of Disney, the state's largest employer and a major DeSantis donor belatedly objected to the bill and spoke to the Governor about it. DeSantis didn't budge and Disney announced that they will be suspending all political donations in the state of Florida after which the governor had a full blown meltdown:

Florida Republicans believe these Commie Symp mega corporations have no right to criticize them.

There was a time when business property rights were sacrosanct in the GOP as a matter of principle. But in the new authoritarian right, if a business doesn't toe their bigoted line, the government "won't stand for it."

Donald Trump is still likely to get the nomination and we can only hope and pray he doesn't win. His dictatorial impulses are well known. But Ron DeSantis is the future of the Republican Party and he's figured out how to take all that right-wing hate and grievance and put it into practice. You don't want to know what he could do on a national level.

https://www.mediamatters.org/war-christmas/war-christmas-story-how-fox-news-built-dumbest-part-americas-culture-war}:

parker m

no lnx many 1 vid

On December 3, 2004, Fox News’ now-defunct The O’Reilly Factor debuted a recurring segment called “Christmas Under Siege.” Though Christmas was not and has never been “under siege” in any meaningful way, disgraced former host Bill O’Reilly and Fox were set on pushing this victimization narrative, laying the groundwork for what became known as the “War on Christmas.” In the 15 years since, onlookers watched the very concept of objective reality fracture along political lines. Consumers of conservative media drifted ever deeper into a world where a school’s nonexistent ban on red and green clothing became national news and paranoid delusions were freely floated about a future in which people may be prohibited from displaying Christmas decorations.

For 15 years, cable news Don Quixotes have battled these windmills, rejoicing in their victories and basking in their acts of bravery while warning their audiences to remain vigilant. Imaginary culture war issues like the War on Christmas make for good politics, as the people arguing that these are real issues can at any time simply dust off their hands, declare victory, and pat themselves on the back for a job well done. Like Lisa Simpson and her tiger-repelling rock, the protectors of Christmas are simply saving the holiday from nonexistent threats.

Deep down, they must know that there’s no actual “war” on Christmas, but it makes for good politics. Rather than having to address issues actually facing Americans -- such as health care, the economy, and climate change -- the fake battles in the fake War on Christmas give right-wing media a convenient way to manufacture divisions between the left and the right. The bombardment of misinformation playing up imaginary (or wildly overblown) examples of political correctness run amok are intended to scare and create a seeming sense of partisanship even on issues that are agreed upon nearly universally.

Of the many impacts of the War on Christmas, Donald Trump’s decision to run for president seems the most consequential.

In a 2016 interview, Eric Trump explained why his father ran for president (emphasis added):

:{:{}:

}:

He opens up the paper each morning and sees our nation’s leaders giving a hundred billion dollars to Iran, or he opens the paper and some new school district has just eliminated the ability for its students to say the Pledge of Allegiance, or some fire department in some town is ordered by the mayor to no longer fly the American flag on the back of a fire truck. Or, he sees the tree on the White House lawn has been renamed “holiday tree” instead of “Christmas tree.” I could go on and on for hours.Those are the very things that made my father run, and those are the very things he cares about.

:{:{}:

}:

Each of those claims is dubious at best, but the idea that the White House Christmas tree was renamed the “holiday tree” is flat-out false. 

Claims that Christmas traditions are being threatened date back nearly 100 years, and it’s remarkable how little the arguments have changed.

In 1921, industrialist and notorious anti-Semite Henry Ford published a piece decrying the secularization of Christian holidays like Christmas and Easter:

Last Christmas most people had a hard time finding Christmas cards that indicated in any way that Christmas commemorated Someone's Birth. Easter they will have the same difficulty in finding Easter cards that contain any suggestion that Easter commemorates a certain event. There will be rabbits and eggs and spring flowers, but a hint of the Resurrection will be hard to find.

Ford’s sentiment is quite similar to that of O’Reilly in 2004:

All over the country, Christmas is taking flak. In Denver this past weekend, no religious floats were permitted in the holiday parade there. In New York City, Mayor Bloomberg unveiled the holiday tree and no Christian Christmas symbols are allowed in the public schools. Federated Department Stores, [that's] Macy's, have done away with the Christmas greeting, “Merry Christmas.”

And to the claims in this piece from conservative columnist Jay Nordlinger in 2010:

Some have said, “You just can't find cards that say ‘Merry Christmas.’ It gets harder and harder.” I know. Kind of like trying to find products not made in China (for who's to say whether they come from laogai, the gulag?). I gave up on the China front long ago. Shameful, I know. But have you ever tried to buy an umbrella not made in China? Also, globalization has done wonders for the average Chinese, gulag or no gulag. Kind of a thorny, upsetting issue.

I gave up on the “Merry Christmas” front too, where cards are concerned. I just get a pretty card that says “Season’s Greetings” or “Whass Happenin' on the Holidays?” or whatever. Life's too short to hunt down “Merry Christmas.”

While O’Reilly’s frustrations were aired during an episode of The O’Reilly Factor and Nordlinger’s were published in the National Review, Ford’s came in the second volume of a collection titled The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem, hammering home what the War on Christmas was actually about for Ford: antisemitism and Christian supremacy.

In 1959, the right-wing John Birch Society published a pamphlet titled There Goes Christmas?! in which its authors argued that the United Nations and communists were trying to “take Christ out of Christmas.” In 2000, white nationalist blog VDare published what’s thought to be the first online mention of the “War Against Christmas,” warning that Amazon’s use of the phrase “Happy Holidays” in an email was symbolic of “the struggle to abolish America.”

an 12 21

Midterms are coming. In case that phrase doesn't already inspire enough dread, it looks like this particular round will be defined by an escalation of the already gross "woke wars" going on in the Democratic ranks.

A chorus of increasingly loud voices in the Democratic Party aren't focused on the threat of gerrymandering (https://www.salon.com/2021/11/16/already-has-enough-safe-seats--through-redistricting-alone--to-win-back-in-22/), voter suppression (https://www.salon.com/2021/03/27/conservative-groups-are-writing-gop-voter-suppression-bills---and-spending-millions-to-pass-them/), or that whole thing where Republicans plan to simply void elections when they don't like the results (https://www.salon.com/2021/06/14/its-not-voter-suppression-stupid-the-gops-new--and-old--weapon-is-vote-nullification/). Dealing with that problem is hard and requires serious actions like ending the Senate filibuster (https://www.salon.com/2021/06/22/manchin-and-sinema-make-their-choice-defend-the-filibuster-or-democracy/). So instead, the ire is being turned on a soft and easy target to blame: the small number of people in the Democratic caucus who use politically correct terms like "Latinx" and "pregnant people."

In a recent piece for the Atlantic (https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/12/democrats-lose-culture-war/620887/), Ronald Brownstein writes about centrist critics who argue that "Democrats have steered off track on cultural issues because the party is unduly influenced by the preferences of well-educated white liberals." (Its an argument that ignores that Black Lives Matter, the movement that most angers the cultural right, is spearheaded not by white liberals, but Black activists.) In a similar piece in the New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/08/opinion/trump-democrats-republicans.html), Thomas Edsall notes the evidence that "working-class defections (https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/06/the-tyranny-of-the-unwoke-white-swing-voter.html) from the Democratic Party are driven more by cultural, racial and gender issues (https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/10/30/democratic-party-culture-divide-wars-working-class-blue-collar-221913/) than by economics," and that many political strategists believe "Democrats should stand down on some of the more divisive cultural issues."

A particularly humorous example of the genre arrived this week from writer Zaid Jilani's newsletter (https://www.persuasion.community/p/progressives-need-to-focus), in which he chastised the AFL-CIO for sending out a tweet celebrating International Pronouns Day (https://twitter.com/AFLCIO/status/1450886988714987523?). "Most Americans are probably wondering what in the world International Pronoun Day has to do with wages, benefits, or conditions," he griped.

Most Americans?

The tweet in question, as of this writing, has 32 retweets on it and 35 likes. And that really underscores the major flaw of this argument: It presumes that right-wing anger at the left is an authentic and unmediated direct reaction to anything real-life Democrats are saying and doing in the world. And the evidence for that presumption is weak indeed.

None of this is to deny that the majority of white Americans, especially non-college-educated white Americans, are in a constant fit of outrage over "wokeness." I, too, have Facebook and two working eyeballs and can see that is true. But they're mostly not reacting to anything the Democrats are actually doing. No, mostly what gets white America going is bullshit, and lots and lots of it, being heaped out at an astounding rate from a well-funded GOP propaganda machine whose reach dramatically eclipses even the fondest dreams of any Democratic communications specialist. And that bullshit-generating engine doesn't need progressives to say a single, solitary word to keep their bullshit generation systems going. All progressives could shut up forever, and the right-wing noise machine wouldn't skip a beat.

Look, for instance, at what the two biggest news stories the shameless hucksters at Fox News are hyping right now: The Jussie Smollett (https://www.salon.com/2020/02/25/jussie-smollett-not-guilty-plea-trial/)guilty verdict and the arson of the Fox News Christmas tree (https://www.salon.com/2021/12/08/meghan-mccain-suggests-fox-christmas-tree-arson-is-worse-than-gops-on-democracy/). I would absolutely bet my life savings that both stories have a lot more Americans talking than the AFL-CIO's opinion on pronouns. And both are being hung by the propagandists around the necks of Democrats, even though Democrats have literally nothing to do with either crime.

Fox News is running with a bunch of "gotcha" attacks on prominent Democrats (https://www.foxnews.com/politics/flashback-biden-harris-led-frenzy-amplify-jussie-smollett-false-claims), such as Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, who initially supported Smollett in the days after he claimed, falsely, to be the victim of a hate crime. The bad faith of this is extreme, of course. Those folks are more properly understood as Smollett's victims because he took advantage of their generosity in order to perpetuate this hoax. But it doesn't matter to the liars of Fox News, because this one random man's bad actions are useful for perpetuating a hoax of their own: The claim that racism isn't real, and that it's just something Democrats make up to score political points.

The umbrage over Smollett's fake hate crime is particularly hypocritical, as Fox News is currently in the process of also falsifying a hate crime against themselves. The Christmas tree burning did happen, to be clear. But it is not a "hate crime," as multiple pundits at the network (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-uses-christmas-tree-fire-excuse-attack-political-opponents) falsely claimed. (Which is a designation they refused to acknowledge for the Charleston church shooting (https://twitter.com/LisPower1/status/1468941074538409991).) And it certainly isn't comparable to the bombing of Pearl Harbor (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-contributor-compares-christmas-tree-fire-bombing-pearl-harbor), as one Fox News yapper dramatically declared. It appears it was committed by a mentally ill homeless man who blamed the arson (https://www.yahoo.com/news/suspect-fox-news-christmas-tree-163332912.html) on "mothers who rape their daughters." But that didn't slow down the faux outrage or efforts to pin the blame on Democrats.

No doubt the right-wing propaganda machine went out of their way to make progressive Democrats like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York (https://www.salon.com/2021/02/02/mocking-alexandria-ocasio-cortezs-trauma-is-really-about-covering-for-trumps-violent-coup/) and Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota (https://www.salon.com/2021/11/29/ilhan-omar-hangs-up-on-lauren-boebert-after-anti-muslim/) national figures, but it's naive to think that it's really due to anything either of those women say or do. It's because both are good-looking young women of color, and because Omar wears a head covering. Just the look of them sets off all sorts of ugly instincts in some white men, instincts that are tied up with, let's face it, a gross mix of racism and sexual desire that produces some really nasty emotional reactions. That stuff is way more powerful than words can ever be, and the GOP propaganda machine shamelessly exploits that.

The bleeding of white working-class voters from the Democratic Party has been going on for a long time — indeed, the decline started before Ocasio-Cortez and Omar were literally born — and unsurprisingly, the loss of those voters correlates strongly with the rise of right-wing media empires (https://www.salon.com/2021/02/18/rush-limbaugh-captivated-dads-like-mine-and-created-the-modern-american-fascist-aesthetic/).

Which isn't to say that the audiences for the AM talkers and Fox News, much less the people who breathlessly share every bit of fake news generated by Russian bots they find on Facebook, are merely empty ciphers for this crap. There are very real changes going on in the United States. People of color are an ever-larger share of the population. Kids really are moving away from small towns and suburbs for college and never coming home. There's nothing that Democrats can or should do about that.

But the real problem here is a huge, well-funded machine on hand to tell aging white voters in rural and suburban areas that their resentment of these changes is justified, they are the real victims here, and they are right to be hiding in their homes, too afraid of the larger world to bother to get to know it.

Democrats can try to run away from the culture war all they like, but it won't work. It won't stop the two changes driving all of this white resentment. More importantly, it certainly won't stop the relentless churn of lies generated by Republican propagandists feeding people's worst instincts. Unfortunately, the only real way to deal with this culture war is to win it. Only by making a forceful case for progressive values and taking right-wing nonsense head-on is there any hope of defanging it.

We saw this most recently in Virginia, where a GOP hoax about "critical race theory" took over the gubernatorial race (https://www.salon.com/2021/11/05/democrats-can-win-the-culture--but-they-have-to-take-on-the-fight-early-and-often/), helping GOP candidate Glenn Youngkin defeat McAuliffe. "Critical race theory," at least how Republicans use it, is just a nonsense scare term. But with only a little digging, it was easy to discover that the right-wing agenda underneath all the hype (https://www.salon.com/2021/12/02/republicans-on-education-is-the-most-crucial-part-of-their-push-for-fascism/) — removing all negative portrayals of slavery and Jim Crow from public schools — is utterly indefensible. Sure enough, once liberals in the state finally started to push back against the book burning posse (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/11/19/spotsylvania-comes-its-senses-rescinds-order-banning-books-school-libraries/), the right lost the argument and the left won. But by then, it was too late to save McAuliffe's campaign.

Looking further back, we saw the same thing with the debate over same-sex marriage. Republicans leveraged lies about "threats to traditional marriage" for years as a wedge issue against Democrats. But when Democrats stopped running from the issue and instead decided to fight back — and win — they defanged it completely. Now most Americans support same-sex marriage (https://news.gallup.com/poll/350486/record-high-support-same-sex-marriage.aspx) and Republicans basically gave up talking about it.

Bashing progressives and telling them to shut up is always a temptation, not because it works, but because it feels easy. It's certainly easier to tell progressives to shut up than, say, pass the Build Back Better plan so Democrats have something to run on, other than a bipartisan roads-and-bridges bill that Republicans can also take credit for. And it's a whole lot easier to tell progressives to shut up than it is to build up the kind of media empire that could compete effectively with right-wing propaganda.

But just because it's easy doesn't mean it's effective. Time spent on pursuing easy-but-useless strategies instead of rolling up sleeves and starting in on the harder-but-more-effective solutions is just time wasted.

amanda 11 21

11 21

...

Plugged-in voters understand that the solution to this problem is to elect more Democrats, to create majorities strong enough that the Joe Manchins and Kyrsten Sinemas of the world can't derail the agenda. But low information voters, the kind who are most likely to tune out during an off-year, only see that Democrats can't get squat done and so they see no reason to vote. As one Democratic pollster told the Washington Post (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/10/12/more-women-are-tuning-out-politics-danger-sign-democrats-virginia-beyond/), voters are saying, "It doesn't matter who we elect, it's all the same."

Also predictable: That Republicans would fire up some nutty culture war lies and start a racist panic (to be dropped the second it is no longer useful). They do this every time,as those of us who remember long-forgotten issues like "the caravan (https://www.salon.com/2018/11/23/caravan-invasion-corporate-media-ignores-its-own-role-in-spreading-panic/)" and the "Ground Zero mosque (https://www.salon.com/2010/12/31/park_51_a_look_back/)," which were once treated by Republicans as the most pressing issues of our time. Republicans signaled for months ahead of time that they were going to make transphobic urban legends (https://www.salon.com/2021/03/04/mr-potato-head-dr-seuss-and-trans-kids-how-democrats-are-already-letting-republicans-win-in-2022/) and this bullshit about "critical race theory" (https://www.salon.com/2021/06/15/why-the-panic-over-critical-race-theory-is-the-perfect-right-wing-troll/)the center of the campaign. But instead of hitting back hard and fast, Democrats let the situation fester. It was only at the last minute that McAuliffe's campaign started pointing out that "critical race theory" is a pretext for what is outright government censorship, no different in its origins than the Nazi book burnings (https://mailchi.mp/salon.com/standing-room-only-the-coup-plotter-who-was-caught-on-camera?e=912ad27ec2). By then, however, it was a matter of too little, too late — the Republican spin already dominated the narrative.

There's a tendency in both the mainstream media and the hot take industry of social media to reduce the complex math of elections to simplistic narratives about voters "switching" sides. But that's really not how these things work. A bunch of Biden voters didn't see a few school board tantrums on the local news and suddenly become Tucker Carlson fans. The people who have always been bigots were hella fired up. A huge chunk of the "everyone else" category that constitutes the Democratic base is demoralized and checked out.

Getting racists to stop being fired up by race-baiting is probably a lost cause. So Democrats have to figure out how to outnumber them — and that requires getting their own people energized. The first step is to give would-be Democratic voters something to vote for,especially when there's no cartoon villains like Trump for people to vote against.

BOLD LOST?

a niche for anyone who has procreated?

https://www.mediamatters.org/critical-race-theory/professional-conservatives-find-path-victory-ginned-outrage-over-critical-race

Born in a constellation of right-wing think tanks, the outrage against “critical race theory” spent over a year (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-critical-race-theory-obsession) in the metastasizing embrace of right-wing media, churning up hatred against discussions of race in schools.

As this deceptive marketing reached a fever pitch, there was an explosion in Facebook (https://www.mediamatters.org/critical-race-theory/inside-right-wing-echo-chambers-attempt-use-facebook-gin-outrage-about) groups (https://www.mediamatters.org/education/no-left-turn-education-leading-anti-critical-race-theory-group-frequently-pushes-toxic) being formed or shifting their focus to opposing critical race theory in schools. These groups were a nexus for supporters to organize in-person disruptions (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/critical-race-theory-invades-school-boards-help-conservative-groups-n1270794) at school board meetings.

This astroturfed frenzy against supposed CRT in schools led to threats and harassment (https://www.npr.org/sections/back-to-school-live-updates/2021/08/30/1032417970/school-board-members-hostile-meetings-mask-mandates-politicized) against school board members nationwide, and, in Virginia, helped propel (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/03/us/elections/glenn-youngkin.html) Republican businessman Glenn Youngkin to the governor’s mansion.

Assigning national importance to a statewide election can be reckless; anti-CRT outrage did not (https://www.ydr.com/story/news/2021/11/03/voters-in-tense-york-suburban-race-reject-conservative-candidates-focused-on-masks-and-crt/6265407001/) prevail (https://madison.com/wsj/news/local/govt-and-politics/anti-critical-race-theory-focus-fails-in-wisconsin-school-board-recall-election/article_ae029169-38af-5b9e-a7ab-4df424b7d66e.html) everywhere (https://ctmirror.org/2021/11/02/critical-race-theory-divides-then-unifies-guilford-as-republican-school-board-candidates-are-defeated/) in the 2021 election. But for the effort and money that conservative activists and media put into defining the Virginia gubernatorial race with critical race theory, it is clear that these charlatans will attempt to export the Virginia playbook nationally in 2022 and beyond[twt.]

as Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher Rufo, who helped launch the campaign (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/right-wing-critical-race-theory-attacks-are-supercharging-racist-movement-undo-decades), has explained, the goal is to “put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category” so that people “read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’” Other right-wing institutions and groups, like the Heritage Foundation, joined in the fray with events (https://www.mediamatters.org/heritage-foundation/heritage-foundations-critical-race-theory-expert-extremist-who-thinks-women), activist toolkits (https://heritageaction.com/crtbook), model legislation (https://www.manhattan-institute.org/copland-critical-race-theory-model-legislation), and pushes (https://heritageaction.com/toolkit/rejectcrt) for bans made in concert with lawmakers.

From there, advocacy groups use this think tank framework to generate local outrage against critical race theory.\IT'S A FRANCHISE MODEL?! MLM?] According to an NBC News analysis (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/critical-race-theory-invades-school-boards-help-conservative-groups-n1270794), there are now “at least 165 local and national groups that aim to disrupt lessons on race and gender,” and several of the most prominent ones (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/foxs-anti-critical-race-theory-parents-are-also-gop-activists) are headed by Republican activists and strategists. These groups cram local controversies into the CRT framework established by Rufo and others, disrupt school board meetings, and place spokespeople in media appearances -- sometimes professional spokespeople, who are [instead described (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/foxs-anti-critical-race-theory-parents-are-also-gop-activists) as local parents.

The noise and attention from these professionally operated, think tank-inspired groups then generates coverage from an obsequious and obsessive (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-obsession-critical-race-theory-numbers) right-wing media, champing at the bit for any angle that will hurt Democrats and help Republicans. Empowered by the outrage suddenly all over TV -- to the tune of hundreds of Fox mentions per month (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-obsession-critical-race-theory-numbers), plus loads more from OAN and Newsmax -- GOP politicians find incentive to take legislative action to drastically limit (https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2021/07/02/why-are-states-banning-critical-race-theory/) the teaching of civil rights, sometimes even banning books (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/texas-schools-books-race-sexuality/2021/10/27/dcaa30c2-3738-11ec-8be3-e14aaacfa8ac_story.html) altogether. [AND WORDS]

This feedback loop (https://www.mediamatters.org/critical-race-theory/guide-right-wing-medias-critical-race-theory-strategy) is a concerted strategy whose first trial run (https://www.mediamatters.org/critical-race-theory/rights-cynical-critical-race-theory-obsession-breaks-through-va-gov-race) was the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial election. It is not a grassroots movement, it is not a natural response to alleged left-wing excesses, and it is not about what is best for children. It is a top-down attempt by professional political operatives to morph political landscapes to suit their racially regressive needs. And, at least in Virginia, it seems to have worked. [twt.]

as Rufo promised, the professional outrage against critical race theory has only just begun. As the next election looms, critical race theory (or similar dog whistles like “parents’ rights”) will suddenly get thousands (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-obsession-critical-race-theory-numbers) of TV mentions again, and professional GOP operatives will again call themselves mere concerned parents. Think tankers may even publicly discuss their exact plans again, because they know it won’t cause any harm; enough of (https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/11/virginia-election-shows-democrats-public-school-problem.html) the mainstream (https://www.reuters.com/business/cop/bidens-struggles-education-wars-propel-youngkins-virginia-victory-2021-11-03/) media (https://www.usnews.com/news/elections/articles/2021-10-26/youngkin-mcauliffe-tangle-over-education-in-bid-for-suburban-virginia-voters) will still cover these anti-CRT outrages as grassroots “education” issues, instead of what they are: a think tank astroturf project.

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-keeps-turning-vaccine-resisters-culture-war-heroes

https://open.spotify.com/episode/0H3vp2oz1tV3svXi2suaaZ

https://gimletmedia.com/shows/howtosaveaplanet/episodes

OCTOBER 1, 2020 (https://gimletmedia.com/shows/howtosaveaplanet/gmhwdon/making-republicans-environmentalists)

Making Republicans Environmentalists Again

HOW TO SAVE A PLANET

The Republican Party has been almost uniformly opposed to climate action for years – nobody more so than President Donald Trump. But it wasn’t always like this. On today’s episode, we look back at how conservatives came to see the denial of climate science as a kind of badge of honor – and we talk to two conservative activists who are trying to change that. (https://gimletmedia.com/shows/howtosaveaplanet/gmhwdon/making-republicans-environmentalists) rachael waldholtz (sp) 3 forks: #1 1980 RR ~ epa/ regs  #2 1988 hansen 1989 GCC, 1992 Rio supposed to do binding targets bush "pariah" 1998 smoking gun memo

read the full memo we mentioned in the episode - the Global Climate Science Communications Action Plan (http://www.climatefiles.com/trade-group/american-petroleum-institute/1998-global-climate-science-communications-team-action-plan/) (get ready to be mad)

#3 afp bus tour gas, heat house tired of al gore hypocrisy, "cap and Tax" --> policy fight to threat to your way of life;  kochs take advantage of crisis --> culture war /part of identity 2008 high tide of gov't distrust, so small am't of money (goes over sea wall and flooded agw action machinery metaphor Inglis;  [RepublicEN inglis talk to crazy uncle]

am conservation coalition  ACC10yo gop activist noted at cpacs nothing on envir except to trash/denial;  testimony w/ greta so press but he called out both side i call BS dems have not tried to work w/ gop [b/c preserve as an issue to beat up?] benjy backer

badge wedge issue?

lind graham

https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/absolutely-bizarre-lindsey-graham-torched-for-declaring-he-will-go-to-war-for-what-chick-fil-a-stands-for/

tx long req alamo praise?

https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/greg-abbott-2653567926/}:

https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/how-ron-desantis-has-positioned-himself-as-a-leading-maga-culture-warrior-conservative/

ah

although Florida is a swing state, Gov. Ron DeSantis has not governed as a moderate conservative like Maryland's Larry Hogan, Massachusetts' Charlie Baker or Vermont's Phil Scott. DeSantis has governed from the far right, making it abundantly clear that he is a Donald Trump loyalist through and through. Never Trump conservative Max Boot, in his June 22 column (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/06/22/ron-desantis-is-showing-trump-level-skill-waging-culture-war/) for the Washington Post, describes DeSantis as a strident culture warrior and lays out some of his possible political motivations for being so devoutly Trumpian.

"The winner of 'The Apprentice: Culture Warfare Edition,' so far, appears to be Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) of Trump's new home state of Florida," Boot explains. "He is setting himself up as Trump's running mate or successor by showing a genius for appealing to every disreputable prejudice of the GOP base. This man knows how to outrage Democrats and therefore, delight Republicans."

Some of the Republicans who were scathing Trump critics when they ran against him in the 2016 presidential race are now afraid to say one word against him — Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, for example. The problem with Rubio and Cruz, Boot argues, is that they come across as less "authentic" than DeSantis.

"Former President Donald Trump is America's premier culture warrior," Boot observes. "No other modern politician has displayed as much talent at dividing Americans, peddling disinformation, demonizing minorities and exacerbating social problems. Many have tried to imitate him only to fall short because their performances were inauthentic and unconvincing. I'm looking at you, Marco Rubio; you, too, Ted Cruz."

In 2020's presidential race, Boot was among the anti-Trump conservatives who endorsed now-President Joe Biden over Trump — and he was highly critical of the Trumpified Republicans who turned the coronavirus pandemic into a culture war battle. DeSantis, according to Boot, was more concerned about playing the MAGA card than dealing with the deadly realities of COVID-19.

"Other governors saw the COVID-19 pandemic as a public health crisis," Boot observes. "DeSantis, following Trump's lead, saw it as an opportunity to score populist points with the base. He was one of 16 governors never to issue a statewide mask mandate, and he banned municipalities from punishing people who refused to follow local mask orders. In September 2020, even while the pandemic continued to rage, he allowed restaurants and other businesses to reopen at full capacity."

Boot continues, "Last month, he signed an executive order and legislation preventing businesses from insisting that customers be vaccinated. This caused a showdown with cruise lines that want to use "vaccine passports" to lure travelers. DeSantis acts as if mask mandates and vaccination passports — both sensible precautions — are actually 'Deep State' plots that must be resisted at all costs."

In Florida's 2018 gubernatorial race, the far-right DeSantis narrowly defeated the liberal Democratic nominee: former Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum. But as close as that race was, DeSantis hasn't reached out to Democrats in his state — and he is still playing the MAGA card at every turn.

"Now, as the pandemic fades, DeSantis is scoring points on other issues of concern only to the Trumpist base," Boot observes. "Appealing to Trump voters who think that the 2020 election was rigged, DeSantis went on Fox News to sign a bill making it harder to vote in Florida. DeSantis won't say if he thinks President Biden won legitimately. Appealing to right-wingers mad that Trump has been kicked off Twitter and Facebook, DeSantis signed legislation that would fine social media companies that suspend state or local candidates close to an election and make it easier to sue tech companies."

It remains to be seen whether or not Trump will run for president in 2024. DeSantis is being mentioned as a possible running mate if Trump runs — or as someone Trump is likely to endorse if he stays out of the race.

Whatever happens in 2024, Boot emphasizes, DeSantis is making sure that MAGA voters know how much of a Trump loyalist he is.

"Mask mandates, vaccine passports, voter fraud, tech company censorship, transgender athletes, undocumented migrants, Critical Race Theory — DeSantis pushes every single right-wing hot-button issue," Boot writes. "He understands how to demonize and polarize for political advantage — and he doesn't care about how much collateral damage he inflicts. Little wonder he is being talked about as the front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination if Trump doesn't run — and maybe even if he does."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

This Trump supporter could be the first Floridian prosecuted under Ron DeSantis' new anti-protest law (https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/desantis-2653522421/)

but culture war eruption hysteria eg gay teletubbies

aha this kinda harkens back to cold war red scare blacklist commies tiring to brainwash, kids most vulnerable ; urban legend grounded in fear (of some new thing?)

hype fear anger emotion note pedophile was red pill entry drug for women into Qanon

chris h msnbc sez official that 2022? election will be cult war:

"woke" military aha last fed/gubmint institution to fall, once sacrosanct b/c manly, trad conservative and defend us from evil commies; god bless our troops almost secular so common?

https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/fox-news-2653517083/

gen milley vs gaetz "take their budget" [grn beret?]; i'm a wht guy want to understand rage; biggest 2 wars bloody ~ racist = nazi and csa/kkk? read mao and marx, not commie

dr suess, mr potatohead, smurfs commie; sesame str?

note biden bills popular so gotta go wedge:

https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/mitch-mcconnell/?rs=182

no lnx pix vid

'Behind us': Mitch McConnell giggles as he shares his extremely whitewashed version of US history

Walter Einenkel and Daily Kos June 03, 2021

The New York Times' 1619 Project was created in order to refocus American history on its story of race and economics. The 1619 date is a reminder of the first enslaved Africans brought by ship to the early European settlements in North and South America. This is history that has long been available to people to discover, but has also been ignored and frequently hidden or suppressed in our country's official retellings of our collective story. Conservatives across the country, bereft of any ideas since feudalism, are recasting the 1619 Project and other critical race theory educational initiatives as an attack on our country. In their estimation, only white males like themselves are allowed to feel persecuted, and any discussion of race and the moral anchor that systemic racism has moored our country's progress forward is an assault on their monopoly on power. They are right about the latter.

On Wednesday, Sen. McConnell took time away from never passing any legislation that wasn't voter suppression-related or a tax break for the richest amongst us, to speak at a press conference in the Citizens Union Bank in Shelbyville, Kentucky. McConnell's fellow Kentuckian Republican Rep. Joseph Fischer recently filed Bill Request 60, for the upcoming 2022 state legislature session that would limit how race and the history of racism in our country is taught.Here's an elementary school level bit of math for you: Kentucky + Republican Rep. + bill about the teaching of race and racism = X* Here's another equation for you math nerds: Mitch McConnell + statement about race and education + microphone = X

*Answer: Imaginably racist.

Answer: Very imaginably racist.

On Wednesday,McConnell told the press that the fact the world participated in slavery and the slave trade during the 17th century means that in America historians marking the first enslaved Africans brought to the Americas isn't important history. That's what he argued.

"Behind us?"

Man, turtles live a long time.

McConnell's answer came out of a question from The Courier Journal concerning his support or opposition to the kinds of constraints his fellow Republicans are trying to put on public school teachers and educators. He went on to say that the federal government shouldn't tell schools what to teach, and he also didn't seem to knock the fact that Republicans across the country are the only political group telling schools what they should teach.

Mitch McConnell has previously described the focus on the 1619 date in American history as an "exotic notion." He has also categorized any push for education curriculums to include more comprehensive teaching on systemic racism, "activist indoctrination." McConnell's intellectually dishonest angle on the 1619 date is that by calling attention to our country's founding dependence on cheap labor and the evolution of our nation's racism, we "denigrate and downgrade" other, more positive and less uncomfortable, achievements that our country has made.

It's a garbage argument as pointing out our country's systemic racism, and very specifically highlighting 1619 as a date, is clearly an important part of our nation's story. Millions of Americans of all races, cultures, and creeds have been directly affected, and continue to be affected, by those decisions. The Civil War that McConnell says put this sin "behind us," is only fought because of that date, and to deny it and the existence of its reach is incongruous with even the words coming out of the Kentucky senator's disingenuous yap.

McConnell's attempt at speaking out of both sides of his mouth included this statement: "I think trying to completely denigrate and downgrade American historical moments like 1776, 1787,1965—critical moments—is a mistake." If you want to know what truly denigrates and downgrades our country's history, and specifically what those dates mark, all you need to see are McConnell's own actions in orchestrating a filibuster of a commission into the events of Jan. 6—something that had the bipartisan support of his own constituents. As for the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Republican Party is in the middle of generating hundreds of voter suppression laws throughout the country.

Here's McConnell telling people that systemic racism and our country's use of slavery and racism as a controlling economic foundation is "exotic."

UofL VP of diversity and equity calls McConnell 1619 comments 'troubling'

The Senate Minority Leader said he disagreed with The New York Times' '1619 project.'

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

'What's going on?' Mitch McConnell refuses to explain to voters why ... ›

Mitch McConnell slammed for repeatedly sabotaging stimulus ... ›

A Senate insider has a dark warning about Mitch McConnell ... ›

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an 521

newsmax host loses it over Lucky Charms 'gay leprechaun' and Kellogg’s 'forcing kids to be confused about their gender' (https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/newsmax-host-loses-it-over-lucky-charms-gay-leprechaun-and-kellogs-forcing-kids-to-be-confused-about-their-gender/)

David Badash (https://www.alternet.org/author/david-badash) The New Civil Rights Movement (https://www.alternet.org/author/the-new-civil-rights-movement)

May 26, 2021

Newsmax host Grant Stinchfield had a homophobic Tuesday night freak out over kids' breakfast cereals.

After being strongly criticized two weeks ago for disgusting antisemitic remarks, Stinchfield is back to....

521 an

Texas House votes to remove state funding from sports teams that don't play national anthem at games

The Texas Tribune  May 25, 2021

"Texas House votes to yank state funding from sports teams that don't play national anthem at games" was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

Sign up for The Brief, our daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.

The Texas House gave preliminary approval on Monday to the so-called“Star Spangled Banner Protection Act," a conservative-backed bill that would require any professional sports teams with contracts with the Texas state government to play the national anthem before the start of a game.

Senate Bill 4 was passed on a voice vote, with no changes by the House. It is expected to receive a record vote and final passage on Tuesday and head to Gov. Greg Abbott's desk.

House Republicans defeated several proposed amendments along partisan lines, signaling more division on the issue in the lower chamber than was seen in the Senate, which passed the bill last month with overwhelming bipartisan support and only two votes against it.

Athletes protesting the national anthem has become a divisive and partisan issue since NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick began kneeling in 2016 to protest police brutality against Black Americans.

In February, Patrick named the bill one of his legislative priorities after Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, stopped playing the anthem before home games, which went largely unnoticed during the pandemic with no fans in the stands.

That decision quickly drew the ire of conservative lawmakers in the state.

“Sell the franchise & some Texas Patriots will buy it," Patrick said in a tweet at the time. “We ARE the land of free & the home of the brave."

In a public response to the outcry condemning his decision, Cuban expressed support for the anthem, but he said team executives “also loudly hear the voices of those who feel that the anthem does not represent them." The NBA later said all teams would play the anthem before games.

During Monday's debate on the House floor, opponents questioned the constitutionality of a law that they said ties funding to free speech by threatening negative action against sports teams that choose to express their opinions by declining to play the anthem.

“Once again, we're carrying legislation that is openly and aggressively unconstitutional," said state Rep. Gene Wu, a Houston Democrat who unsuccessfully tried to turn the bill into a resolution, allowing the House to take a stand in favor of the anthem without the force of law.

The bill's House sponsor, state Rep. Dustin Burrows, R-Lubbock, said the bill does not violate free speech because teams can still choose not to play the anthem and forgo the funding and business relationship with the state.

“It's very simple. If they do not want to play the national anthem, they don't take the tax dollars," Burrows said. “If we're going to go ahead and subsidize with hard-earned American dollars the sporting facilities and the teams in the different ways that I think is articulated in this bill, then this would apply."

Attempts by Democrats to require teams to play both the “Star-Spangled Banner" and “Lift Every Voice and Sing," or to choose between them, were shut down along partisan lines.

“Lift Every Voice and Sing" is commonly known as “the Black national anthem," said Rep. Jasmine Felicia Crockett, D-Dallas, who authored one of the amendments.

“I don't even understand why we would feel the need to force someone into singing any song," Crockett said. “But if we are going to force people to sing a song, we should at least be mindful of the people playing on these teams, the people that are actually in the stands supporting these teams."

Burrows opposed the amendments “with the deepest amount of respect to my friend and colleague" because he wanted to avoid any changes to the bill, which would slow its progress to the governor's desk during the final week of the legislative session.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2021/05/24/texas-house-national-anthem/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

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aha/hmmn pot and gay marriage lost status as wedge? how?

std boogie man roger stone dirty trick is to run fake/3rd cand to split vote, sometimes pick someoe w/ same name

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/gop-spolier-candidate/?rs=182

a blind veteran who ran for Congress in Minnesota last year under the Grassroots Legalize Cannabis Party now alleges he was tricked into running by a Republican Party operative to siphon votes from then-Democratic-Farmer-Labor Congressman Collin Peterson in Minnesota's 7th Congressional District, according (https://www.fox9.com/news/grassroots-or-astroturf-congressional-candidate-says-he-was-tricked-into-running-by-rnc-strategist) to local news outlet KMSP.

Kevin Ne Se Shores, said the report, "was surprised by the unsolicited call he got in June of 2020 from a man who encouraged him to run against Congressman Collin Peterson (D-MN) as a candidate for the Grassroots Legalize Cannabis Party. Shores, who suffers from Gulf War Illness, used cannabis to get off pain killers. He told the FOX 9 Investigators he assumed he was being recruited by a member of the Grassroots Legalize Cannabis Party. 'I was under the impression he was a part of that political party,' Shores said. 'That was my assumption.' He was wrong."

"Unknown to Shores, the man who called encouraging him to run was a Republican strategist, Kip Christianson, who at the time was on the payroll of the Republican National Committee, according to the Federal Election Commission," said the report. Shores also alleges that Christianson paid his $300 candidate filing fee, telling him, "Don't worry about it."

Shores only later became aware that Christianson was an RNC employee and 2016 Donald Trump delegate for Minnesota.

Ultimately, Shores lost the nomination (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/results-minnesota-house-district-7.html) for the third party to Rae Hart Anderson, and the combined 24,000 votes for the Grassroots Legalize Marijuana Party and the Legal Marijuana Now Party would not have been enough to secure re-election for Peterson, who lost to former GOP lieutenant governor Michelle Fischbach by 50,000 votes.

However, in races further down the ballot, GOP covert support for the Minnesota cannabis parties may have spoiled state Senate races, and may have been decisive (https://www.leafly.com/news/politics/did-minnesotas-marijuana-legalization-parties-kill-marijuana-legalization) in helping Republicans retain control of the chamber — which ironically makes cannabis legalization far less likely in the state.

Congressional candidate says he was tricked into running by RNC strategist | FOX 9 KMSP..[vid]

aha: answer to how do we get ppl to brk solidarity and vote against own interests [ eg fill in the public swimming pool in GA summer]

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/noam-chomsky-republican-party/

alexh

The United States has had 17 different presidents during Noam Chomsky's lifetime, from Calvin Coolidge to Joe Biden — and the left-wing author, now 92, has lived through major historical events including the Great Depression, Watergate, 9/11, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Chomsky discussed the challenges of the Biden era during a recent interview with author/journalist David Masciotra for the Los Angeles Review of Books (https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/dismantle-all-of-this-stuff-a-conversation-with-noam-chomsky/).

Chomsky discussed his most recent book, "Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance," in the interview with Masciotra, warning that people who are hurting economically can be manipulated by far-right extremists. Chomsky has been a blistering critic of neoliberal economics, which he said continues to fail millions of people in the United States.

"I've seen it over and over," Chomsky told Masciotra. "During the Kennedy and Johnson years, the technocratic and meritocratic elite, my colleagues from Harvard and MIT, were flocking down to Washington to show how the world should be run. Well, in Vietnam, we saw what came of that. It was not unpredictable. Those of us in the streets were warning of it all along. Now, it is the same. Neoliberalism, whatever is in the minds of people who advocate for it — maybe they don't even think about it — is an explicit effort…. to hand power to private institutions, which are dedicated to self-enrichment."

Neoliberalism, Chomsky added, only worsens the divide between the haves and the have-nots in the United States.

"The majority of the population gets by paycheck to paycheck," Chomsky told Masciotra. "Real wages have stagnated for 40 years. The gains of productivity growth concentrate in very few pockets. This leads to…. unfocused anger. Is it surprising? People aren't told what is really robbing them. Instead, they are told that it is immigrants, Blacks, some pedophiles from outer space, if you believe QAnon — anything but what is actually happening."

When economic conditions are unfavorable to the working class, Chomsky noted, Republicans try to distract their voters with "cultural issues."

"The Republicans, who are the party of the superrich, understood in the 1970s that you can't get votes by coming to people and saying, 'I want to rob you, and hand everything you have over to the rich and corporate sector,'" Chomsky explained. "Somehow, that doesn't work. You have to turn to what are called 'cultural issues,' meaning everything but what matters for your life. So, Paul Weyrich, one of the main Republican strategists, by the mid-1970s got a flash of insight and realized that if the Republicans pretend — stress 'pretend'— to be opposed to abortion, they'll pick up the evangelical vote and the northern Catholic vote."

Noting that the Republican Party is becoming "increasingly dangerous and brazenly antidemocratic," Masciotra asked Chomsky to discuss the political climate of 2021. And Chomsky agreed with his description of the modern GOP.

Chomsky said of the Republican Party, "They can mobilize the people they've turned into raging monsters, and get them to attack these communist rats who want the country flooded with rapists and murderers so that the White race suffers genocide. You know the whole story. That's the Republican Party. It's not a political party anymore. It's very dangerous."

The 92-year-old author added that scapegoating is an effective tool of the far right in 2021 just as it was when he was a kid during the 1930s and Jews were targeted by Nazis. He explained:

There are other parts of it that are just as dangerous. For example, just recently, Pew Research Center came out with one of its regular polls (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/07/14/as-the-u-s-copes-with-multiple-crises-partisans-disagree-sharply-on-severity-of-problems-facing-the-nation/ft_2020-07-14_nationalproblems_01/) on major issues facing the country. They had a choice of 15 major issues, and people were asked to rank them. It was divided between Republicans and Democrats. Take a look at Republicans. At the very bottom — 13 percent — the most important question that has ever arisen in human history:global warming. They don't call it that. They call it "climate change," which is more neutral. But only 13 percent think that is a major problem.It is only the most important problem that's ever arisen — the question of survival. Then you go to the problems they are most concerned about — illegal immigration, the deficit. This is the result of very effective propaganda. Imposing common sense, manufacturing consent, year after year — turning people into the kind of people that supported the Nazis. Going back to my childhood, I remember them right here in the United States. These were the people who wanted to get rid of the Jews, because "the Jews are destroying civilization."

"If people are isolated, atomized, with no support groups, no involvement in constructive activities, they are prey to this attack on their moral and intellectual integrity," Chomsky continued. "Go back to what I said, the Republican leadership is overjoyed at the moves toward some humane behavior on the part of Democrats. They know, especially with (former President Donald) Trump — who is a genius at this —that they can organize and mobilize crazed groups who really believe they need their guns to save the White race from genocide. You can drive people to that."

aha: echo escal: hype/ fear wedge

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/how-right-wing-lies-move-through-fox-cycle-biden-administration

matt g

fhe relentlessly dishonest right-wing press is spending the Biden administration whipping itself into a frenzy over its own lies, fabrications, and distortions. Every day seems to bring a new hysteria: Joe Biden wants to take your hamburger (https://www.mediamatters.org/climate-deniers/foxs-news-side-spreads-fake-story-biden-wants-ban-hamburgers)! The left has canceled (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-dr-seuss-obsession-reveals-dishonest-desperation-right-wing-war-cancel-culture) Dr. Seuss! The stories -- often total nonsense but touching on potent culture war fights (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/no-war-culture-war-why-right-wing-media-cant-stop-finding-things-be-outraged-over) -- burn through right-wing social and news media, turn into conservative canon, and are quickly replaced with fresh outrage.

Our late colleague Simon Maloy developed a concept (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-black-panthers-and-same-old-pattern) during the Obama years to explain how these sorts of bogus right-wing stories kept turning into national news. He called it “the Fox Cycle” (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-cycle-bogus-right-wing-attack-mainstream-news): The right-wing fever-swamps (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-cycle-blithering-nonsense-breaking-news) would generate a story; Fox News would give it copious, aggrieved coverage; the network would pressure mainstream news outlets to pick up the story; they would do so, even crediting Fox for being ahead of the curve; and the story would eventually be proved false or misleading -- but only long after the damage had been done. A few years ago, I pointed out (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/how-trump-fox-feedback-loop-nationalized-local-city-council-vote) that then-President Donald Trump’s habit of live-tweeting Fox supercharged that process: News outlets reporting on his angry responses to TV segments were bringing his Fox-fueled falsehoods to their own audiences.

With a new Democratic administration in office a decade after Simon’s posts, right-wing media are still furiously churning out bullshit that gets amplified by Fox. But the contours of the Fox cycle have shifted due to changes in the mainstream press, the right-wing media, and the Republican Party over the intervening years.

The Fox Cycle in the Biden years follows a pattern that is becoming increasingly familiar:

1. A right-wing outlet manufactures a bogus story.
2. The bogus story goes viral.
3. Fox News picks up the bogus story, reports on it incessantly.
4. Republican politicians promote the bogus story to attack Democrats.
5. Responsible news outlets debunk the bogus story.
6. Repeat.

What’s changed?

The distinction between right-wing media personality and Republican politician has increasingly dissolved (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/03/30/republican-politics-right-wing-media-continue-fuse/). \eg gaetz] The right-wing press celebrated (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/wallace-daniels-response-star-born) particularly (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-friends/fox-news-fawns-over-rock-star-paul-ryan) simpatico (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-friends/fox-friends-attempts-recruit-ben-carson-next-fox-candidate) GOP politicians throughout the Obama years -- none more so than [Trump himself (https://www.mediamatters.org/donald-trump/donald-trump-fox-news-timeline-relationship). But now, prominent GOP legislators seem driven to build their brands and their power within the party by spending their days trying to create viral content on Twitter and then going on Fox to talk about their posts. Some even have their own podcasts, or openly aspire to right-wing TV gigs. They are incentivized to comment on whatever is stirring up the right-wing press that day, which in turn gives the story more velocity.

Responsible news outlets are now more wary of falling for these bogus stories, and they produce reports debunking them far more quickly than they did a decade ago. Reporters used to interpret incessant Fox coverage as a signal that they were missing out on an important story; now, they seem more likely to correctly view that coverage as a sign to look deeper and figure out how the right-wing press is misleading its audiences.

But thanks to the increasingly impermeable bubble that the right-wing press has created for those audiences, they are unlikely to see those mainstream media debunks. Right-wing outlets may be shamed into pulling down (https://www.thedailybeast.com/new-york-post-pulls-down-debunked-reports-that-kamala-harris-book-was-given-to-migrant-kids?via=twitter_page) their false stories or offering half-hearted corrections (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/04/27/when-reality-conflicts-with-culture-wars-fox-news-can-struggle-pick-side/?itid=ap_philipbump), but by then misinformation has already become conservative canon.

And as my colleague Parker Molloypointed out (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/right-wing-media-invented-biden-ban-meat-because-theyre-incentivized-lie) yesterday, the more responsible news outlets seem unable or unwilling to impose real consequences on the perpetrators. No one is losing their seat on a Sunday show for repeatedly promoting lies or conspiracy theories. Everyone just moves on, and the cycle continues.

Here are three case studies from the last week where this pattern played out over a matter of days.

The lie about Biden banning burgers

trms? notes that gop not about ideas or even policy, just own the libs eg matt gaetz angling for some fox pundit talk radio gig before scandal? cruz and hawley trump mini-me's, trump kid general in meme war

literally red meat for the base: gubmint gonna take your guns, burgers, gasoline...

https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/how-larry-kudlow-set-off-a-right-wing-anti-biden-smear-campaign/

How Larry Kudlow set off a right-wing anti-Biden smear campaign

Jon Skolnik and Salon April 26, 2021

Fox News host and former economic Trump adviser Larry Kudlow set off something of a right-wing smear campaign over the weekend when he went on a tirade against President Joe Biden's nonexistent plan to force "plant-based beer" upon the American public, calling Biden an "ideological zealot" intent on scrapping America's most cherished tradition of meat-eating.

In a Fox News interview on Thursday, Kudlow erroneously attacked Biden for putting forth a climate plan that calls for the elimination of meat, eggs, and dairy from the American diet. "There's a study coming out of the University of Michigan which says that to meet the Biden Green New Deal targets, America has to…stop eating poultry and fish, seafood, eggs, dairy, and animal-based fats," he started. "Ok, got that? No burger on July 4. No steaks on the barbecue. I'm sure Middle America is just going to love that. Can you grill those Brussels sprouts?"

Kudlow, notably livid over the thought grilling vegetables –– let alone foreign ones –– continued to rail against Biden's new climate action plan.

"You can throw back a plant-based beer with your grilled Brussels sprouts and wave your American flag. Call it July 4th Green. Now, I'm making fun of this because I intend to make fun of it. This kind of thing is stupid. It comes from a bunch of ideological zealots who don't care one whit about America's well-being. Not one whit."

It should be noted that beer, generally made from water, grain, hops, and yeast, and barley malt, is already, in fact, plant-based. Furthermore, nothing in President Biden's plan so far calls for a prohibition on meat consumption. The original culprit of this misinformation, a Thursday Daily Mail article headlined "How Biden's climate plan could limit you to eat just one burger a MONTH," speculated that Biden intends on "cutting red meat consumption by 90% and animal products by 50%."

The article, quickly feasted upon by Kudlow and amplified Fox News without the slightest fact-check, was then picked up by Republicans in government, including Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbott, Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., who spread the lies to their voting bases.

"Joe Biden's climate plan includes cutting 90% of red meat from our diets by 2030. They want to limit us to about four pounds a year," tweeted Boebert. "Why doesn't Joe stay out of my kitchen?"

"Not gonna happen in Texas!" Gov. Abbott tweeted, with a screenshot of Kudlow's broadcast.

Greene, posting a picture of Biden eating a hamburger with others a table, echoed: "The Hamburglar. No burgers for thee, but just for me."

The misinformation also came into the good graces of Donald Trump Jr., who declared most proudly, "I'm pretty sure I ate 4 pounds of red meat yesterday. That's going to be a hard NO from me."

On Saturday, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman explained how Kudlow's remarks planted the seeds for a concerted misinformation campaign.

"If you read what Kudlow actually said,'' Krugman argued on Twitter, "he's cagey — doesn't say that Biden proposed this, only that some people say this is what would happen. But Fox viewers won't notice, which is the intention. This is what right-wing politics is down to. It's all false claims about evil liberals, which the base is expected to believe because it's primed to believe in liberal villainy. They're not even trying to engage on actual issues."

The White House has thus far released scant information about any formal plan to address emissions. According to the Washington Post, on Thursday, the President made vague remarks about investing in "American infrastructure and American innovation" in order to build "a critical infrastructure to produce and deploy clean technology."

The right's outrage was widely mocked online by the left, who were quick to point out that Biden's apparent political aversion to meat has no factual or historical basis at all. On Sunday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., took a jab at his conservative colleagues . "Excited to be watching the Oscars with an ice cold plant-based beer," he tweeted, with a picture of himself holding a beer while watching the Oscars. "Thanks Joe Biden."

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common dr 421

...Oh, for a simpler, saner time – and I don't mean that white American idyll that never was, a rightwing fever dream in which all is falsely remembered as sunshine, jellybeans and petroleum products burnt without a care. Rather, as columnist Frida Ghitis notes, "It wasn't very long ago that the country had two reality-based, generally centrist parties. Democrats and Republicans, with different philosophies, debated the merits of their ideas, in search of a workable compromise.

But then, bit by bit, the GOP started veering in a different direction. By the time Trump became president, the maximalist, nativist, conspiracy-driven, scandal-manufacturing, hate-stoking wing was already ascendant, propelled by the engines of Fox News and other far-right provocateurs. Trump's victory was the coup that toppled the old GOP and turned it into the extremist MAGA machine.

And now, what's left? A handful of old-fashioned, conservative Republicans in Congress and their supporters who apparently still believe in some semblance of democracy and the republic that gave their party its name. But they're overwhelmed by a crowd of fanatics and sycophants: men and women, in Frida Ghitis' words, busily "promoting the delegitimization of America's duly elected president, people who are endorsing or refusing to rectify dangerous lies."

You know who they are: Cruz, Hawley, Graham, Jordan, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, et al. They include, of course, Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, "rewarded by recklessness," to use campaign strategist Rick Wilson's phrase, and as of this moment still standing, despite more and more evidence of his misogyny and possible abusive behavior, sexual and otherwise.

Like so many among these ranks, Trump fanboy Gaetz is one of the smarmy, privileged, attenuated frat boys who refuse to believe that rules and norms apply to them – much like the man who was their president and would be forever more if the rest of us become indifferent and lower our guard. Gaetz cares about his job title only as far as it gets him booked on talk shows and the lecture circuit – so far, he has failed to sponsor a single piece of significant legislation.

In his new memoir, former Republican House Speaker John Boehner describes these types of Republican rabblerousers as "the chaos caucus," not caring about the country but only about their power base and appearances on Fox News and right wing talk radio: "They didn't really want legislative victories," Boehner writes. "They wanted wedge issues and conspiracies and crusades."

Not that Boehner is blameless. He and so many Republican colleagues let themselves be bullied, then acquiesced to our current dilemma, yielding to those pledged to lunacy and a lemming-like fealty to a president as bereft of thought and feeling as they are. You see the results: a shattered party not of ideas and programs, but only insults and bogus intrigues. No wonder the Biden infrastructure proposals infuriate them; they have nothing to offer in return.(Remember Trump's Infrastructure Week, always imminent but never occurring over the whole four years of his presidency?)

They fear any and all success during Biden's first term. Think back to 1993, when now anti-Trumpist conservative Bill Kristol advised Republicans to shun any healthcare plan from Bill and Hillary Clinton. In a memo—Kristol was then head of the Project for the Republican Future—he warned his colleagues, "It will revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests. And it will at the same time strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle class by restraining government."...

an 221

Although Texas can be very Democratic in its large urban centers — from Houston to Dallas to El Paso to Austin — Republicans have maintained control of the state government. And many of them are the type of far-right Republicans who push Culture War themes and use dumb phrases like "owning the liberals." But San Antonio-based journalist Adam Serwer, in an article published by The Atlantic (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/02/texas-pays-price-culture-war/618107/) on February 22, argues that fighting the Culture War didn't prevent Texans from freezing in their homes without electricity, heat and running water during a recent cold snap.

Texas recently suffered snowy, icy winter weather and freezing temperatures that are more typical of Pittsburgh or Boston than Houston, Austin or San Antonio. Tragically, Texas' power grid couldn't handle the increased demand for electricity, and millions of Texans lost power and were unable to heat their homes during the frigid weather.

"Many Texans were without power, water, or both for days, left to choose between the risk of contracting COVID-19 at a shelter and the danger of freezing in their home," Serwer explains. "I consider us fortunate….. Our roof did not collapse. Our home did not catch fire and burn down, as nearby firefighters struggled with empty fire hydrants. We did not run out of food. We were lucky."

twt]

serwer goes on to say that all the misery in Texas could have been avoided if Republicans in the state government had spent more time worrying about good governance and less time obsessing over the Culture War.

"The crisis in Texas was preceded by more than a decade of Republican control of state government, as politicians focused on Culture War grievances rather than the nuts and bolts of governance," Serwer argues. "After the near collapse of the power grid exposed its failures, the state's political leadership attempted to cover for those failures by doubling down on those same grievances."

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, Fox News' Tucker Carlson (https://www.thedailybeast.com/seth-meyers-debunks-tucker-carlsons-insanely-obvious-texas-lies) and others on the far right have been claiming that green energy is responsible for Texas' electricity woes, which is total nonsense. Carlson made the idiotic claim that in Texas, wind turbines were too delicate to handle severe cold. First, Texas is much more reliant on fossil fuels than wind turbines. Second, European countries like Denmark and Sweden — which are known for cold, snowy winters — do fine with green energy in January and February because their systems are adequately winterized. Texas Republicans failed to winterize, and its power grid suffered an across-the-board failure.

Serwer writes, "I doubt that 'We'd freeze to death to own the libs' is a popular sentiment in Texas, but drawing that impression is easy if you're outside the state, listening to its Republican officials. As the journalist Brian Kahn noted on Twitter, when California was struggling with much smaller blackouts in late 2020, ambitious Texas Republicans were sneering at the state on social media…. Texas politicians were so interested in California's struggles last year because California is an easy conservative shorthand for liberalism, and what ambitious Republicans have discerned from the success of Donald Trump is that the best way to attract conservative support is to show that they, too, enjoy it when liberals suffer."

But during the recent cold snap, Serwer adds, Texans have been the ones suffering.

"Texas has trended blue in recent years, but the Texas GOP remains ruthlessly competent at the work of winning elections even as it fails at governing," Serwer explains. "That absence of political competition breeds complacency….. In the contemporary Republican Party, governance has taken a back seat to waging the Culture War. Whether you are a competent public official who serves your constituents well matters less than your ability to illustrate your contempt for the rival party's constituency in word and deed."

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/tracing-the-roots-of-city-boy-trumps-racist-suburban-dream-nonsense-all-the-way-to-rush-limbaugh

no lnx twt many

It’s no surprise that the current occupant of the White House is running for reelection on racism. Given his track record, it would be a surprise if he weren’t. Donald Trump’s racist rhetoric has always centered on fearmongering around crime, going back not just to the start of his presidential campaign in 2015, but back to the 1980s. Now he’s at it again, this time with a focus on the suburbs and, in anachronistic language that evokes June Cleaver or Carol Brady, ”suburban housewives.”

Based on his rambling, Trump seems to think the suburbs are still filled with white women in aprons making their kids PB&J on Wonder BreadTM with the crusts cut off, dutifully fixing after-work martinis for their husbands. Trump thinks he can scare those white-lady aprons right off with tales of Black and brown criminals descending upon their neighborhoods, and present himself as the white (orange?) savior who will keep their neighborhoods safe by keeping them white. This particular dog whistle is not one Trump invented, of course. Among others, Rush Limbaugh has been blowing it for years.

Let’s start with Trump’s current campaign. On June 30, President Shitgibbon tweeted that he was “studying the AFFH housing regulation that is having a devastating impact” on the suburbs. He also claimed that his opponent, former vice president Joe Biden, wants to make things “much worse”—correction: “MUCH WORSE.” Trump added that he “may END!” the AFFH.

The AFFH refers to the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, enacted in 2015, under the Obama-Biden administration. Barack Obama’s AFFH rule updated a previous regulation governing discrimination in housing and real estate, which wasn’t doing what it was supposed to do as required by the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

What Obama did was mandate that local governments that received federal money to build housing must “identify and address patterns of racial segregation outlawed under the Fair Housing Act of 1968 by creating detailed corrective plans.” In other words, he simply wanted to make sure that cities and towns followed existing law. Radical, I know. To clarify, the AFFH would not destroy, abolish, or even fundamentally alter the nature of housing in the suburbs. It’s just a boogeyman Trump’s using because he thinks it will scare the white ladies of Westchester County and beyond into voting for him.

A few weeks after the initial tweet, on July 23, this appeared on Herr Twitler’s feed.

Less than a week later, on July 29, the White House announced that it was revoking the AFFH. This formal revocation came on top of action Trump took in January 2018, which de facto blocked the rule from taking effect by pushing back its effective start date to at least November 1, 2020. The Trump administration has taken numerous other steps to hamstring the federal government’s efforts to enforce fair housing and desegregate neighborhoods.

The same day the rule’s revocation was made public, Trump followed up with a tweet that, as many have noted, said the quiet part out loud.

That same day, Trump echoed his tweet in remarks to an audience in Midland, Texas. “There will be no more low-income housing forced into the suburbs,” he declared, adding that “it’s been going on for years. I’ve seen conflict for years. It’s been hell for suburbia.”

Whereas Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Ben Carson and his minions have portrayed the gutting of Obama’s fair housing rules as merely making things simpler by reducing unnecessary paperwork, President Charlottesville just came right out and revealed the real motivation for these changes. He’s vowing to make sure the people he considers undesirable from “low-income housing” projects can’t move in next door—and assuming it’s an effective strategy.

Apparently, Trump convinced himself that his previous tweets were too subtle. He decided that it would help if he named someone who would supposedly help Joe Biden take aim at the suburbs if he was elected. Since President Barack Obama is no longer on the ticket, the Orange Julius Caesar must have figured he needed a substitute of a similar hue.

[twt]

When pressed on what he meant by that tweet, Trump, as The New York Times put it, “told on himself.”

“They’re going to, in my opinion, destroy suburbia, And just so you understand, 30 percent-plus of the people living in suburbia are minorities,” Trump rambled. “African-American, Asian-American, Hispanic American—they’re minorities. Thirty percent. The number is even higher, it’s—they say 35, but I like to cut it a little bit lower. You know why? That way I can never get myself in too much trouble with the fake news.”

Women of all races have been calling Trump out on this hate-filled nonsense. “I think people may make assumptions,” one white Kentucky stay-at-home mother of three told the Daily Beast. “And I think that’s something the president has done, unfortunately, is make assumptions that all white women are going to support him. And we’re not.”

Writer Ally Henny, on the other hand, was explicit in her explanation of why Trump is choosing his words so carefully.

Most recently, perhaps having decided that race-baiting the suburbs from Trump’s own mouth and tweets needed some fleshing out as a campaign strategy, the impeached president and his HUD secretary “wrote” an op-ed piece, placed behind The Wall Street Journal paywall. It’s a bit more subtle, and makes passing mention of Americans of color also living in the suburbs, but this slick product can’t unsay what the racist-in-chief already put out there.

As Media Matters laid out, Trump’s racist suburban shtick strongly echoes the work of right-wing author and commentator Stanley Kurtz. In 2012, Kurtz published a book called Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities. If you’re wondering whether Kurtz has spent a lifetime studying housing policy, don’t bother. His previous book was 2010’s Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism. There is something that is definitely not “expertise in housing policy” running through both tomes.

Back to 2020. On the morning of June 30, Kurtz published a National Review piece claiming that if Biden won the presidency, he would go beyond the AFFH and adopt a policy advocated by Cory (not “Corey”) Booker; he further asserted that Biden’s true intention is to “abolish the suburbs.” Trump’s tweet saying the same went live about 12 hours later. Media Matters’ Bobby Lewis pointed out the connection between Kurtz’s article and the Trump tweet.

Stanley Kurtz leads us to the other right-wing blowhard mentioned at the beginning of this post, namely the man with whom Trump defiled the Medal of Freedom: Rush Limbaugh. In doing research for my recent book, I analyzed multiple examples of Limbaugh slamming Obama over his policies regarding the suburbs—most of the time citing Kurtz. A week before Kurtz’s book came out in 2012, Limbaugh started talking about it, quoting from it, and using it to paint President Obama as anti-suburban and, in so many words, anti-white. This went on for the remainder of Obama’s time in office.

On July 26, 2012, Limbaugh offered lengthy quotations from the Kurtz book, which regaled its readers with lies about Obama’s “lifelong hostility to the suburbs.” The 44th president apparently had it in for suburb dwellers, whom he supposedly believed “were just greedy racists who didn’t want to share their tax money with the urban poor.” We know exactly which group of people Limbaugh means when he talks about “the suburbs,” and who he means when he talks about “the urban poor.” This is the very same dog whistle Trump is blowing now, eight years later, when he’s fighting to keep the presidency.

Limbaugh did this over and over again. The next day he claimed that suburbanites were Obama’s “real enemies,” and six days after that, Limbaugh predicted that the first Black president would “abolish” the suburbs. In September 2013, the racist host said that President Obama would “destroy the suburbs,” and in July 2014, Limbaugh spouted off about “Obama’s war on the suburbs”—during a segment where he specifically went after the AFFH rule Trump so desperately hates, which was then under consideration. In a July 2015 master class on race-baiting, the host tied his suburbia-based attacks on Obama to “forced busing,” as well as to “attacks on the South” and “attacks on the Confederate flag.”

This went on and on. In addition to the examples above, Limbaugh threw out similar suburban dog whistles during the Obama presidency here, here, here, here, here, and here—each “here” represents a different day’s broadcast. And of course, Limbaugh is still at it in 2020. He even blew his dog whistle during his reaction to Rep. John Lewis’s funeral.

Thanks to reporting from New York Magazine’s Gabriel Sherman, we know that Trump got many of the specific topics for his race-baiting rhetoric from talk radio. In the run-up to the 2016 campaign, onetime top Trump aide Sam Nunberg did a “deep dive into talk radio”—listening for “thousands of hours” and then giving “reports” to Trump on what was really motivating the right-wing base. Limbaugh has the largest audience in talk radio, and has for as long as such ratings have been measured. Trump’s recent dog whistles on the suburbs and Biden are wholly unoriginal: They’re virtually a carbon copy of Limbaugh’s language on the suburbs and Obama—language which itself was cribbed from Stanley Kurtz.

When it comes to the suburbs, and other policies that relate to race and economics more broadly, Limbaugh and Trump have sought to win over middle- and working-class white Americans by falsely claiming that former President Obama and future President Biden want nothing more than to take away what they have earned—whether it’s money or safe neighborhoods—and give it to Black and Latino Americans who supposedly don’t deserve it.

Playing to racial anxieties and ginning up fear and hatred are the only ways the Limbaugh-Trump Republican Party can get the support of those voters, given that GOP policies actively work against their economic interests while favoring those of the real elites—the top 1%. To defeat Trump and the Republican Party made in his image, Democrats must help these voters recognize that Republicans are spewing hate in order to keep white Americans and Americans of color from coming together on the basis of shared interests.

One way to do so is to point out what the Trump party actually does when it gains power. The Trump presidency’s singular legislative accomplishment is a multibillion dollar tax giveaway to millionaires and billionaires, that does little to nothing for the average American of any race. The other major legislative effort undertaken by Trump & Co. was repealing the Affordable Care Act, which expanded coverage to tens of millions of Americans. Thankfully, that effort failed, but it too would have mostly helped the wealthy by giving them a tax cut, and harmed the folks—again, Americans of every race—earning around or just below the national median income who had gained coverage.

Republicans can’t sell their economic policies to middle- and working-class white voters, so all they have left to peddle is hate. That’s why Trump is now trying to scare white suburbanites with tall tales about poor people moving in from cities, or, as he did just a few days ago, revisiting some of his worst rhetoric from the 2016 campaign about immigrants and crime.

When thinking about where Trump comes from, most people associate him with the city. Trump Tower, his erstwhile home, sits in midtown Manhattan. He claims to have “built” skyscrapers, but mostly he just got paid to place his name on other people’s buildings. However, he grew up in 1950s Jamaica Estates, a neighborhood that, although it was located in Queens, New York City, much more resembled a wealthy suburban enclave. It was, according to a New York Times article, “an exclusive and nearly all-white place, resistant to outsiders and largely impenetrable to minorities.” Trump himself described it as “safe” and “an oasis” when compared to other parts of Queens, which he viewed as “rough.”

This mindset—the idea of a suburban environment as a place where white people with enough money to escape the inner city’s poor neighborhoods of color, as well as enough power to keep non-whites from moving in—is at the core of Trump’s race-baiting on the suburbs. Trump understands, and hopes to exploit in this year’s election the very racist fears that once motivated the white flight from American cities in the 1950s and ‘60s. So does Rush Limbaugh, whose racist rhetoric throughout the Obama presidency laid out the blueprint that Trump is now using to attack Joe Biden.

Two months before Election Day, it appears that the white suburban women who elected Trump in 2016 (and to whom Trump thinks this hate-filled nonsense will appeal) are not responding to his dog whistle, at least not in large enough numbers to reelect him. Perhaps they’ve evolved in terms of their fears and prejudices. Or perhaps they’ve simply come to realize that The Man Who Lost The Popular Vote poses a far greater danger because of his manifest unfitness to lead our country.

Making sure they remember that and come out to vote for the Biden-Harris ticket is one thing we can all help to make happen.

Ian Reifowitz is the author of The Tribalization of Politics: How Rush Limbaugh’s Race-Baiting Rhetoric on the Obama Presidency Paved the Way for Trump (Foreword by Markos Moulitsas)

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// Lib U ex jock uses homophobe as wedge issue to flank conserv senate; wedge issue --> fear/ anger hype?

6/20  aha big ramp up on militarization and criminalization eg

omg in wake of milley and sec at st john 180, this pow #3?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/trump-nominee-for-key-pentagon-position-accused-is-an-islamophobic-conspiracy-theorist-who-called-obama-a-terrorist-leader/

trump nominee for key Pentagon position accused is ‘an Islamophobic conspiracy theorist who called Obama a terrorist leader’

Written by Alex Henderson June 16, 2020

President Donald Trump has nominated retired Army Brig. Gen. Anthony J. Tata for a key position in the Pentagon, but Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee, according to CNN, have vowed to oppose the nomination in light of Tata’s history of hateful anti-Islam rants.That includes Rhode Island Sen. Jack Reed, the leading Democrat on the SASC.

In 2018, CNN reported, Tata described Islam as the “most oppressive violent religion I know of” and called former President Barack Obama as a “terrorist leader” for — as he saw it — being overly pro-Islam. Tata was vehemently critical of the Obama Administration’s deal with Iran and claimed that it came about because ofObama’s “Islamic roots.” Obama, Tata claimed, did more to “help Islamic countries than any president in history.”

Anthony J. Tata

@ajtata

If true, and it appears to be, #Obama and #Clinton are guilty of sedition and/or treason 18 U.S. Code 2384 #MAGA #trump2020 #ComeyMemos #Kanye2024 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2384 … https://twitter.com/_vachellindsay_/status/988616258022076416 …

8:31 PM - Apr 23, 2018

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In addition to Reed, Senate Democrats who have told CNN they will oppose Tata’s nomination include Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Gary Peters of Michigan. Warren told CNN, “An Islamophobic conspiracy theorist who called President Obama a ‘terrorist leader’ should not be #3 at the Pentagon. Anthony Tata is by far Trump’s most unqualified and ill-suited senior defense nominee.”

In May 2018, Tata attacked former CIA Director John Brennan and tweeted, “Might be a good time to pick your poison: firing squad, public hanging, life sentence as prison b*tch, or just suck on your pistol. Your call. #Treason #Sedition #crossfirehurricane #Obamagate.”

andrew kaczynski??

@KFILE

17h

Replying to @KFILE

The "Manchurian candidate" Obama conspiracy article shared and endorsed by Tata claimed that Obama let ISIS grow on purpose in Iraq and Libya, saying the "deviousness of the Obama sedition runs deep."https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/15/politics/tata-pentagon-nominee-kfile/index.html …

Democrats on key Senate committee oppose Pentagon pick as more inflammatory tweets emerge

Several Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee said Monday that they would oppose the nomination of retired Army Brig. Gen. Anthony Tata to oversee the Pentagon's policy shop.

cnn.com

andrew kaczynski??

@KFILE

Tata accused Obama administration remembers of treason several times, saying former CIA chief John Brennan should "pick your poison: firing squad, public hanging, life sentence as prison b*tch, or just suck on your pistol. Your call."https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/15/politics/tata-pentagon-nominee-kfile/index.html …

View image on TwitterView image on Twitter...

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aha: this has existed for a while as dirty tricks tactic (us vs them enemies; dirty germy foreigners; we are victims? amplifty and acclerate by trump and soc med echo escalator post truth

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/trump-uses-his-weird-grip-on-republicans-to-stoke-a-nihilistic-culture-war/

no lnx pix

trump uses his weird grip on Republicans to stoke a nihilistic culture war

Donald J. Trump holding a rally in Panama City Beach, Florida, on May 8, 2019 // Office of the President of the United States/Donald J. Trump

Written by Heather Digby Parton / Salon May 29, 2020

I don’t think there’s ever been a U.S. president with more influence with his political base that Donald Trump. All presidents are defended by those who support them, of course. Even the most unpopular failures have diehard fans who stick with them to the bitter end.

But Trump is unusual in that he has only ever attempted to govern on behalf of the people who support him and has no feeling of responsibility toward any other citizens. He has taken the already polarized Republican Party and turned it into a cult of personality. His influence over the 40 to 45% of the population who seem to idolize him is immense.

Perhaps it’s because Trump was a celebrity with a TV show long before he entered politics that makes his fans love him so unconditionally. Whatever it is, Trump and his supporters have an unusually personal and almost intimate bond. It’s clear after three and a half tumultuous years that they will follow his lead no matter what.

The political implications of this are profound. This weird relationship between president and base now completely dominates the Republican Party, apparently making it impossible for any prominent national figure in the party to allow even the smallest daylight between himself or herself and Trump. (Frankly, very few even seem to be trying.)

The red MAGA hat serves as an official symbol of Trump loyalty, and there is a certain part of his following that uses it as a tool of intimidation. Even more disturbing, there has been a spate of mass shootings and other acts of violence by people who have named Trump or his ideas as motivation.

In order to maintain his supporters’ devotion, Trump has stoked the culture wars at every turn, ruthlessly dividing the country in order to keep his fans engaged. They receive such hypocritical gestures of solidarity as his newfound “pro-life” zealotry with enthusiastic gratitude — but what they really love are his brutal assaults on those they consider their political and cultural enemies. In that, Trump and his base are one.

So it should come as no surprise that when Trump faced the first crisis of his presidency that was not of his own making — and failed to meet the challenge — he would reflexively fall back on culture-war tactics to reinforce his base. His response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been abysmal, with the death toll now over 100,000 and the economy in dire straits. After bungling the response so badly that it will be studied by historians for centuries as an example of poor leadership, Trump is returning to his original instinct, which was simply to deny that the whole thing mattered, or was even happening.

His supporters have eagerly followed his lead, defying public health guidelines and demanding that their governors “reopen” immediately (or in Trump’s own words of incitement, that they “liberate” their states.) Trump clearly believes that he can wish away the virus — or at least people’s concern about the virus — by pretending that the crisis is over and that we can go back to normal.

As we speak, he’s arguing with the state government of North Carolina about the Republican National Convention, which is scheduled for late August in Charlotte. Republican officials had reportedly been discussing how they could stage the event while observing CDC social distancing guidelines, and everything had been going smoothly. Trump, however, wants his big party, and wants it to be crammed with people screaming ecstatically at his every word. What he doesn’t want is anyone wearing masks.

In fact, wearing a mask, or rather not wearing one, is fast becoming as much of a symbol of Trump fealty as those red MAGA hats. Trump’s allies on Fox News have pushed it hard among the faithful (with the unexpected exception of Sean Hannity.)

Acyn Torabi

@Acyn

Laura’s war against masks continues

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As Salon’s Igor Derysh reports, studies show that people who watch Fox are far more inclined to defy public health guidelines. But really, it’s Trump himself who has turned masks into a culture-war symbol by ostentatiously refusing to wear one.

This makes little sense, of course, if he genuinely wants to reopen the country in a way that allows workers and consumers to feel safe going about their business. Masks and social distancing are common-sense ways to begin doing that, and normalizing that behavior will bring back the economy more quickly. But Trump has decided to pretend that the crisis is over, as I said earlier, and mask-wearing and social distancing don’t exactly send that message.

I also suspect that his resistance is largely due to vanity. The man truly believes that wearing one will make him look foolish (which can only be described as amazing) and he may also have concerns about the mask rubbing off his thick orange makeup.

All of this comes as he’s also implying it’s somehow weak, unmanly and un-American to wear one. In fact, he’s seized upon this as a new attack line against Joe Biden:

Judd Legum

@JuddLegum

New Trump ads on Facebook mock Biden for wearing a mask

View image on Twitter

Some Republicans are actually pushing back on this, notably state governors who will have to deal with the resurgence of cases if people follow Trump’s dangerous example. Even Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has urged people to wear them. It’s hard to know why these dissenters are stepping up now, but maybe it’s because they see something really dark and ugly taking hold among the Trump faithful.

For instance, Republicans in the Pennsylvania legislature who have been railing against public health measures turned out to have concealed the fact that one of their own members had contracted the virus. They quarantined themselves but never told their Democratic colleagues, allowing them to potentially expose their family members and loved ones without knowing it.

According to the Washington Post, there are businesses in various parts of the country now barring customers from wearing masks in their establishments. This was from an interview with Kevin Smith, proprietor of the Liberty Tree Tavern in Elgin, Texas:

“If we’re only allowed to be at 25 percent capacity, I want them to be the 25 percent of people that aren’t p—–, that aren’t sheep,” Smith told The Washington Post. “Being scared all the time isn’t good for your health. It suppresses your immune system.”

Trump posted this tweet yesterday, cutely pretending that he was just making an observation:

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

So many different viewpoints! https://twitter.com/leesmithdc/status/1265629746450358273 …

Lee Smith

@LeeSmithDC

Terrific ?@molmccann? piece in ?@FDRLST? — masks aren’t about public health but social control. Image of Biden in black mask endorses culture of silence, slavery, and social death.  https://thefederalist.com/2020/05/27/mandatory-masks-arent-about-safety-theyre-about-social-control/ …

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The science is clear on this: Masks work. If everyone wore them when they were out in public it would make a significant difference in slowing the transmission of the virus. These people are pretending to be tough, but in reality they’re just following the example of the president and living in denial.

Imagine a world where, instead of behaving so foolishly, Trump modeled sensible behavior by wearing a mask and social distancing and encouraging businesses to open up responsibly? His followers would buy red MAGA masks by the truckload and turn social distancing into the mark of macho American individualism. But he can’t do that, of course, because stoking the culture war is literally his last hope of winning re-election.

==

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/never-trump-conservatives-like-meghan-mccain-are-trying-to-whitewash-sarah-palins-role-as-the-proto-trump-dont-let-them

no lnx vid twtr

'Never Trump’ conservatives like Meghan McCain are trying to whitewash Sarah Palin’s role as the proto-Trump. Don’t let them

Image via Shutterstock.

Written by David Neiwert / Daily Kos May 26, 2020

Like many of the so-called #NeverTrump crowd, Meghan McCain would like to airbrush history when it comes to explaining how and why Donald Trump came to be the bullying, dominating leader of the Republican Party—to paint Trump as an aberration who seized control of the party from the outside. Recently, she even tried to blame Barack Obama for the Trump phenomenon: “The culture war that I believe is real, and is raging in this country, I believe was ushered in with his administration,” she said, “and then exacerbated in the Trump administration.”

That, of course, is not what happened. The culture wars are a strategy that had its beginning during the Reagan Administration and were cooked into a concrete form by GOP “thinkers” like Patrick Buchanan and Newt Gingrich, but completely consumed the party beginning in 2008, when McCain’s father, John, selected Sarah Palin as his running mate. So I wrote a Twitter thread replying to McCain, laying out this history with video documentation.

Here’s the thread. So far, unfortunately, McCain hasn’t responded. Other “NeverTrumpers”—with similar ties to the 2008 McCain campaign—have in fact contacted me, and I hope to have a fuller report on their responses soon. In the meantime, enjoy the links and the videos.

David Neiwert

@DavidNeiwert

1) A thread about Sarah Palin, who in many ways was the key figure in the transformation of the Republican Party into the know-nothing, anti-science, conspiracy-theory-loving, cultishly authoritarian Party of Trump it is today. W/ video.

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David Neiwert

@DavidNeiwert

· May 20, 2020

Replying to @DavidNeiwert

2) I've been thinking a lot about Palin in no small part because of the way Trump-hating Republicans like @MeghanMcCain are rewriting history by trying to blame Barack Obama for Trump, because apparently he, not the GOP, stoked America's culture wars when he was president.

View image on TwitterView image on Twitter

David Neiwert

@DavidNeiwert

3) Let's be clear: the GOP has been stoking these culture wars as a means of winning election since at least the days of Ronald Reagan and his presidency. But they embraced it openly beginning in 1992 with Pat Buchanan's "cultural war" speech.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2olwuAy3_og …

YouTube ?@YouTube

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David Neiwert

@DavidNeiwert

Replying to @DavidNeiwert

4) This M.O. never ceased configuring Republican politics in the ensuing years, notably during the Bush years. But unquestionably the person who most made these culture the entire raison d'être of the GOP was John McCain's 2008 running mate, Sarah Palin.https://www.journalism.org/2008/11/20/sarah-palin-and-the-culture-wars/ …

Sarah Palin and the “Culture Wars”

A distinguishing feature of the coverage of the race was how – with the notable exception of abortion – there was little discussion of the

journalism.org

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David Neiwert

@DavidNeiwert

· May 20, 2020

Replying to @DavidNeiwert

5) I became intimately familiar while on assignment in Alaska to examine Palin's connections to the extremist right, mainly the "Patriot"/militia movement, during her time on the Wasilla city council and then as the city's mayor. She had a fondness for the John Birch Society.

View image on Twitter

David Neiwert

@DavidNeiwert

6) Our story ran in early October, but it unfortunately didn't make it onto the radar of the national media. Still, it remained a solid story that revealed a great deal about the political creature McCain and his campaign had unleashed.https://www.salon.com/2008/10/10/palin_chryson/ …

Meet Sarah Palin's radical right-wing pals

Extremists Mark Chryson and Steve Stoll helped launch Palin's political career in Alaska, and in return had influence over policy. "Her door was open," says Chryson -- and still is.

salon.com

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David Neiwert

@DavidNeiwert

· May 20, 2020

Replying to @DavidNeiwert

7) It emerged later that Palin had watched my appearance on CNN to promote the piece and had gone nuts, creating a huge fight within the campaign that she lost, thereby inspiring her to infamously 'go rogue' for the duration. Guess I did my part.https://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/how-i-helped-drive-sarah-palin-crazy …

How I Helped Drive Sarah Palin Crazy By Digging Into Her Past

My first week on the job here at Crooks and Liars, I went on CNN Newsroom with Rick Sanchez to talk about an investigative piece co-written with Max B

crooksandliars.com

David Neiwert

@DavidNeiwert

8) However, this extremism had of course already bubbled up during the campaign -- reflected not just in her red-meat speeches but in the effect she had on crowds. This report from Al Jazeera still haunts me.

Embedded video

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David Neiwert

@DavidNeiwert

· May 20, 2020

Replying to @DavidNeiwert

9) The key here is that after the election, Palin didn't tone down the extremism, but rather stepped it up. She was one of the first figures from the GOP establishment to embrace the "Birther" conspiracy theories.

Embedded video

David Neiwert

@DavidNeiwert

10) Of course, we also know who not only followed suit, but launched his entire political career on the back of this fraudulent and racist conspiracy theory.

Embedded video

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David Neiwert

@DavidNeiwert

· May 20, 2020

Replying to @DavidNeiwert

11) Palin also played a key role in the increasing radicalization of the GOP, particularly through her connections to the Tea Party, which quickly became a major conduit for "Patriot"-style and Christian nationalist extremism.http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2010/04/video-sarah-palins-speech-to-women-of.html?m=0 …

David Neiwert

@DavidNeiwert

12) Palin also did a lot to pave the way for the gobbledygook word-salad rhetorical style that has been Trump's hallmark.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/sheriffs-salon-owners-and-fox-news-desperate-attempt-turn-pandemic-latest

Right-wing media personalities have long struggled to find a conservative hero in their culture war, someone to serve as an ideological martyr for their cause -- and they’ve made some pretty ridiculous attempts to force it along the way.

Gun owners? Rosa Parks (https://www.mediamatters.org/ted-nugent/ted-nugent-calls-gun-owners-next-rosa-parks). A police officer who arrested a Black man for breaking into his own home? Rosa Parks with a badge (https://www.mediamatters.org/breitbart-news/wash-times-column-breitbart-declares-officer-gates-arrest-rosa-parks-rush-judgment?redirect_source=/blog/2009/07/27/in-wash-times-column-breitbart-declares-officer/152489). Rogue rancher Cliven Bundy? Rosa Parks on the open range (https://www.mediamatters.org/kevin-williamson/allies-repeatedly-compared-racist-rancher-civil-rights-figures). If only conservative media were more interested in Rosa Parks herself (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-nation/rosa-parkss-memorial-received-scant-coverage-fox-news), maybe they’d understand why those comparisons are ludicrous. But that hasn’t stopped conservative media figures from continuing to draw parallels (https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/05/shelley_luther_is_americas_new_rosa_parks.html) between civil rights activism and a new front in the right-wing culture war: opposition to stay-at-home orders during the coronavirus pandemic.

Weeks after the network began hyping protests against the coronavirus safety measures, Fox News has found a folk hero in Texas salon owner Shelley Luther (https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/05/06/dallas-salon-owner-jailed-coronavirus/), who defied the state’s stay-at-home order to reopen her salon and refused to comply in a court appearance. The network — unlike conservative commentator and former Rep. Allen West (https://twitter.com/AllenWest/status/1257787179172007936) — hasn’t made explicit comparisons between Luther and Parks just yet. But Fox has used its platform to promote local sheriffs and business owners who are defying lockdown orders. And it's made Luther into the de facto face of the anti-lockdown movement against big, overreaching government, utilizing an old playbook to turn a public health emergency into a battle in the culture war.

Fox News worked to portray Luther as a martyr to stay-at-home orders.

Luther reopened her salon on April 24 in defiance of the state’s stay-at-home order. On April 28, District Judge Eric Moyé issued a temporary restraining order (https://www.dallasnews.com/news/public-health/2020/04/28/judge-orders-dallas-salon-to-close-after-owner-refused-to-follow-emergency-orders/) against Luther. On May 5, after she refused to follow that order, Moyé found Luther in contempt of court and sentenced her (https://www.texastribune.org/2020/05/05/dallas-salon-owner-jail-sentence-reopening-shelley-luther-coronavirus/) to seven days in jail, though she would be released (https://www.texastribune.org/2020/05/07/texas-dallas-salon-owner-coronavirus/) less than 48 hours later.

The order Luther violated was issued by Texas’ Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and came with a maximum penalty of $1,000 in fines and 180 days in jail (https://gov.texas.gov/uploads/files/press/EO-GA-14_Statewide_Essential_Service_and_Activity_COVID-19_IMAGE_03-31-2020.pdf). Moyé offered Luther the opportunity to avoid jail time (https://texasscorecard.com/metroplex/dallas-salon-owner-shelley-luther-fined-and-jailed/) if she would acknowledge that she had broken the order and agree to shut down her salon until the stay-at-home order was lifted, but she refused. Luther claimed that she needed to keep her salon open to feed her kids, even though she had applied for and received $18,000 in financial aid (https://twitter.com/justinbaragona/status/1259869380781002752) through the federal government’s Paycheck Protection Program. And given that a GoFundMe page (https://www.texasmonthly.com/news/dallas-salon-arrest-gofundme/) had been set up for her a day before she first reopened, it’s hard to see this as anything other than a public relations stunt; thanks to Fox News, it would be a very successful one.

Abbott, along with Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, criticized the judge (https://www.dallasnews.com/news/politics/2020/05/06/straight-up-wrong-texas-conservatives-defend-dallas-salon-owner-jailed-for-keeping-open-business-amid-coronavirus/) for enforcing Abbott’s own executive order. Fox News quickly hosted Patrick multiple (https://www.foxnews.com/media/dan-patrick-defends-shelley-luther-not-what-america-is-about) times (https://www.foxnews.com/media/texas-lt-gov-dan-patrick-defends-jailed-salon-owner-she-should-be-home-for-mothers-day) on the network (https://video.foxnews.com/v/6155033090001#sp=show-clips), (https://www.foxnews.com/media/texas-lt-gov-dan-patrick-defends-jailed-salon-owner-she-should-be-home-for-mothers-day) where he advocated for Luther and accused Moyé of making “a giant overreach.” (Luther, for her part, has advocated for (https://youtu.be/Yh17eh0kO1Q) who is up for reelection this year.)

On May 6 (https://www.foxnews.com/media/boyfriend-jailed-dallas-salon-owner-hannity), Fox prime-time host Sean Hannity interviewed Luther’s boyfriend, Tim Georgeff, and compared Luther’s punishment to the Mel Gibson character's execution for treason in the movie Braveheart. Prime-time host Tucker Carlson invited Luther’s attorney Warren Norred to appear on Tucker Carlson Tonight (https://www.foxnews.com/media/shelley-luther-lawyer-dallas-judge-bend-knee) the same day and said that he hopes Luther’s story “awakens people.” In the interview, Norred criticized “tiny tyrants” in government and complained that the judge treated Luther as a “heretic” and demanded that she “bend the knee.” Luther herself appeared on the May 8 (https://video.foxnews.com/v/6155128906001#sp=show-clips) edition of Hannity after she was released, and Hannity again compared her ordeal to that of William Wallace in Braveheart.

Fox News (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-covered-jailed-salon-owner-over-7-times-more-ahmaud-arbery) devoted 2 hours and 48 minutes of coverage to Luther’s story between May 5 and 2 p.m. EDT May 8. To put this in context, Fox News covered the high-profile killing of Ahmaud Arbery, a Black man shot in Georgia while out for a jog, for only 47 minutes between May 3 and 2 p.m. EDT May 8.

Fox News is using an old playbook to turn a public health emergency into a battle in the culture war.

For years, Fox News has propped up conservative figures as heroes in a war against big government. In 2014, Fox went all-in (https://www.mediamatters.org/sean-hannity/fox-news-carnival-barkers-gin-range-war?redirect_source=/blog/2014/04/18/fox-news-carnival-barkers-gin-up-a-range-war/198946) on Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy (https://www.mediamatters.org/sean-hannity/conservative-media-who-brought-you-cliven-bundy) and his protests that led to an armed standoff with the federal government. Fox did the same in 2014 as it worked to portray Duck Dynasty star Phil Robertson (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/how-fox-news-helped-make-duck-dynastys-phil-robertson-conservative-media-darling) as a martyr when A&E temporarily put the show on hiatus after he made anti-LGBTQ comments. Similarly, in 2015, Fox News and other right-wing media outlets rallied around Kim Davis (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-nation/conservative-pundits-invoke-civil-rights-icons-defend-anti-lgbt-county-clerk-kim-davis), the Kentucky county clerk who refused to issue marriage certificates for same-sex couples.

The strategy of portraying conservatives as the victims of liberal policies -- even when, as was the case for Luther, the policy being violated was implemented by a Republican -- makes sense as part of Fox’s political messaging, as it furthers a narrative of conservative oppression.

In addition to Luther, Fox has recently taken to elevating other anti-lockdown activists. An Arizona sheriff named (https://youtu.be/XxLgH9W4OqI) appeared onTucker Carlson Tonight to discuss his decision not to enforce the state’s stay-at-home order. Sheriff Chad Bianco of Riverside County, California, appeared on Fox & Friends (https://www.foxnews.com/media/ca-sheriff-refuses-to-enforce-states-stay-at-home-orders). Three other sheriffs (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-cheering-rogue-sheriffs-connected-extremist-group) who’ve made recent Fox News appearances to decry stay-at-home orders have ties to the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, an extremist group. Business owners Eliot Rabin (https://www.foxnews.com/media/eliot-rabin-nyc-tailor-reopens-coronavirus-defiance), Juan Desmarais (https://video.foxnews.com/v/6153574855001#sp=show-clips), and Rick Savage (https://video.foxnews.com/v/6153312167001#sp=show-clips) have all appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight to discuss their decisions to defy stay-at-home orders by keeping their businesses open.

In April, Fox News helped uplift the anti-lockdown protests with an overwhelming amount of coverage. In just over one week, Fox News ran 91 segments (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/promotion-praise-and-ton-coverage-how-fox-news-embraced-protests-against-coronavirus) about those protests, amounting to roughly six hours of programming. As the pandemic stretched into May, Fox began attempting to shift focus away from the mounting death toll and the president’s lagging approval ratings on his handling of the disaster, limiting what pandemic-related stories it aired to pieces about conservatives who were supposedly harmed by stay-at-home orders. The raging pandemic is starting (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/coronavirus-death-toll-rises-fox-hosts-agree-crisis-over-even-if-they-cant-agree-why) to become an afterthought (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/month-month-fox-news-coronavirus-coverage-has-dropped-more-20) on the network, and Fox is moving on to topics like the Department of Justice’s decision to drop charges against former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn (https://www.mediamatters.org/michael-flynn/fox-news-laid-groundwork-department-justices-decision-drop-charges-against-michael) and the phony “Obamagate (https://www.mediamatters.org/trumprussia/fox-news-why-trump-thinks-he-can-get-away-nixonian-corruption-barrs-doj)” scandal. With its coverage of Luther’s case, Fox has found a way to portray conservatives as the real victims in this public health crisis.

Conservatives keep fighting their culture war amid a deadly pandemic.

While a certain intellectual gladiator of the right (https://twitter.com/benshapiro/status/695638866993115136) may claim that “facts don’t care about your feelings,” Fox News knows this isn’t quite right. The network needs to downplay the pandemic to protect President Donald Trump. But you can't convince an audience that a deadly pandemic is just an acceptable fact of life with #facts and #logic; you need to sell them on it by playing to their emotions, giving them a hero to cheer for and a villain to rage against.

Taking Luther’s story as an example, a rational analysis of what happened would show her as a person who didn’t think the law the rest of us are expected to follow should apply to her, who was given an opportunity to avoid jail after violating the law and refused, who applied for and received government assistance, and who raised nearly $500,000 (https://www.gofundme.com/f/shelley-luther-fund?utm_source=widget&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=p_cp+share-sheet) from a GoFundMe page started before reopening the business. To convince an audience that the victim in this situation is the salon owner -- especially an audience that likes to think of itself as supporting “law and order” -- you have to appeal to their emotions to override the massive amounts of cognitive dissonance involved.

A pandemic is no time for culture war gamesmanship, but as Fox News’ latest cavalcade of conservative martyrs shows, it’s the only game the network knows how to play.

==

==

1/20

aha_let: all these pols may not be bigots at heart, but anti-gay is culture war wedge issue, big w/ evangelicals, so mostly freebie nobrainer upside?

PLUS these hot-button issues are great to generate FEAR thus great for direct mail fundraising (also email) and mebbe GOTV

don jr calls himself the general of the meme /info wars

==

// to GND no more cheeseburgers

Fox News is now blasting the liberal ‘War on Thanksgiving’ (https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/fox-news-is-now-blasting-the-liberal-war-on-thanksgiving/)

Aldous J. Pennyfarthing (https://www.alternet.org/author/aldousjpennyfarthing/) / Daily Kos (https://www.alternet.org/author/daily-kos/)

==

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/trump-and-the-culture-wars-here-are-the-divisive-themes-trump-will-focus-on-as-his-economic-policies-crumble/

no lnx

Trump and the culture wars: Here are the divisive themes the president will focus on as his economic policies crumble

Written by Alex Henderson August 19, 2019

President Donald Trump, in recent weeks, has been stressing both economic themes and culture war themes. The economic themes were evident during a rally in Manchester, New Hampshire on August 15, when Trump tried to frighten 401(k) owners into reelecting him and insisted, “You have no choice but to vote for me because your 401(k), everything is going to be down the tubes (under a Democratic president). So whether you love me or hate me, you’ve got to vote for me.” But if the U.S. does go into a recession in the months ahead, Trump will have a harder time selling himself as the salvation of the American economy — in which case, he would likely become even more aggressive in pushing divisive culture war themes.

Although Trump is wildly unpopular in heavily Democratic areas of the U.S., he is still quite popular among his hardcore base — and one saw that playing out in the 2018 midterms. Democrats enjoyed a net gain of 40 seats in the House of Representatives, but Republicans slightly increased their majority in the Senate thanks, in part, to Trump’s ability to rally his base in conservative areas. And Trump’s rally-the-base approach has been painfully evident in recent weeks.

When Trump told four congresswomen of color to go back to the countries they originally came from — even though three of them (Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rep. Rashida Tlaib and Rep. Ayanna Pressley) were born and raised in the U.S. — it was a rally-the-base move. When he tried to discredit Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings by describing Baltimore (a predominantly African-American city) as a “rat- and rodent-infested mess,” he was clearly trying to rally his base. But when he was discussing 401(k) plans in New Hampshire, Trump appeared to be trying to expand his base and convince non-culture warriors to vote for him.

The harder it becomes for Trump to campaign on the economy in the months ahead, the more important culture war issues and rally-the-base moves will become for him. It isn’t inconceivable that Trump could pull off a narrow Electoral College victory in 2020 even if the U.S. goes into a recession, but doing do would mean firing up his base as much as possible and benefitting from a low Democratic turnout — and there are many culture war and nativist themes that could become even more important to Trump if the economy declines.

Abortion is at the top of the list. When he was a Blue Dog Democrat back in the 1990s, Trump was highly critical of abortion yet reluctantly pro-choice; these days, he is vehemently anti-choice and has vowed to only nominate severe social conservatives and “pro-life” zealots to the U.S. Supreme Court. So far, he has made good on that promise with Justice Neil Gorsuch and Justice Brett Kavanaugh — and he has made it abundantly clear that if he is reelected and more seats become available on the Supreme Court, he will continue to do so and make the Court even more socially conservative.

As it stands now, Roe v. Wade is likely to be overturned. But that possibility will become even stronger if Trump has a chance to nominate more Supreme Court justices.

Trump, in the months ahead, is also likely to fan the flames of the Culture War by reminding the Christian right that Supreme Court justices aren’t the only people he would be nominating for the federal judiciary in 2021 and beyond. During a second term, he could nominate more far-right social conservatives to the lower federal courts as well.

The Christian right, as journalist Chris Hedges has often stressed, is not only a fundamentalist religious movement — it is also a movement with severe nativist and white nationalist tendencies. And Trump can rally his Christian Right supporters not only with abortion or school prayer, but also, with nativism and anti-immigrant rhetoric. The worse the U.S. economy becomes for Trump, the more important issues like immigration and building a U.S./Mexico border wall become to his 2020 campaign.

The Department of Labor, under Trump, has proposed rolling back Obama-era protections against anti-gay discrimination in the workplace and allowing companies with government contracts to discriminate against those who offend a contractor’s religious views. Christian Right groups like the Family Research Council and Liberty Counsel are applauding the move, which gives Trump yet another thing to campaign on when he is pursuing Culture War votes in 2020.

Anti-Islam extremism is another issue Trump will likely pander to in 2020. Even President George W. Bush was careful to draw a distinction between radical jihadist Islam and non-radical Islam; Trump’s Christian Right and anti-Islam supporters draw no such distinction.

Christian fundamentalist support for Israel is another Culture War issue for Trump to campaign on. Bizarrely, the Christian Right believes that Jews are doomed to hell unless they convert to fundamentalist Christianity, yet consider themselves stridently pro-Israel — and claiming that Democrats could never love Israel as much as he does is a way for Trump to rally his far-right base.

If the U.S. economy goes south, that doesn’t make Trump any less dangerous; if anything, it makes him even more dangerous and more desperate to fire up extremists in his base. And whether he is ranting about abortion, illegal immigration, a U.S./Mexico border wall, Islam, or countries with predominantly non-white populations, Trump will have many ways to pander to his supporters’ worst instincts in the 2020 election.

==

If you had told me last week that the conservative movement would soon be outraged about a shoe that never went on the market, I might have thought you were joking. But it’s not a joke, and the dustup reveals a depressing truth about the conservative movement.

Many prominent conservative thinkers, writers, and politicians have expressed their outrage this week about Nike’s decision not to sell a shoe it had originally designed with an image of the so-called “Betsy Ross flag,” an older version of the American flag with 13 stars arranged in a circle, representing the original 13 colonies. What made this decision particularly explosive, it seems, is that Nike made this decision after hearing from NFL star and activist Colin Kaepernick. He partnered with the company after sparking controversy for refusing to kneel during the national anthem at football games in protest of racism, and the Wall Street Journal reported Monday that he told Nike “it shouldn’t sell a shoe with a symbol that he and others consider offensive.”

Cue the overwrought fulmination from the right wing.

Arizona Governor Doug Ducey started early by injecting his absurdly excessive reactions, saying, “Words cannot express my disappointment at this terrible decision. I am embarrassed for Nike.” And Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), chimed in as well,  saying the “decision to cancel Betsy Ross shoe is ridiculous.” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) made a comment that I still haven’t entirely deciphered yet:

It’s a good thing @Nike only wants to sell sneakers to people who hate the American flag.... @NFL #HappyFourth https://twitter.com/WSJ/status/1145838971731226624 …

The Wall Street Journal

Nike is yanking a sneaker featuring the "Betsy Ross flag" after Colin Kaepernick said he and others consider the symbol to be offensive https://on.wsj.com/2Nr3xJB**

31.9K

5:31 PM - Jul 1, 2019

Twitter Ads info and privacy

16.1K people are talking about this

Naturally, a boycott was triggered by conservatives now calling on people not to buy Nike shoes because Nike decided not to sell a particular kind of shoe. No word yet on whether boycotts are coming for every other company not selling items with the Betsy Ross flag on them.

And it wasn’t just politicians looking to pander to right-wing outrage. Fox News, Breitbart, Twitchy, and other conservative outlets got in on the controversy.When presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke made a mild comment about having “respect” for Nike’s decision, Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro said, “I hope every Democrat candidate jumps on this idiotic bandwagon,” suggesting that this controversy might have an impact on the 2020 election. (It won’t.)

My intention isn’t to defend Nike’s decision. I don’t really have much to say about a shoemakers’ decision not to sell a shoe. While symbols are important and matter in society, the more interesting fact about the whole affair is that the right wing ate the story up.

Conservative writer Bret Stephens at the New York Times placed the incident in a list of other bizarre controversies that soaked up far more oxygen than they ever deserved, saying that it showed a capitulation to “Woke culture.” He argued that such incidents somehow show a troubling trend in American society. “The story has resonated widely not because it’s outrageous, but because it’s predictable,” he said.

In other words, it played into the pre-existing narrative that conservatives have cooked up to inflame the masses.

Meanwhile, if you look at the issue that has outraged Democratic leaders and voters in recent weeks, you’d find that they’re focused on the abuse and treatment of immigrants held in abusive conditions by the Trump administration. Of course, the right wing thinks these complaints are overblown or misplaced, but they are about actual human being suffering at the hands of the administration. The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general has even found that Custom and Border Patrol’s treatment of migrants actually violates its own standards and policies.

But the right wing is concerned with shoes that were never even sold in the first place.

It’s not that every issue that grips the public and the commentariat’s attention has to be the most pressing issue of the day. But it should be at least about something. And yet the Betsy Ross flag isn’t being banned, and nobody is being punished for wearing it or displaying it. No one is even burning it(!). A company simply made a decision that, on reflection, it wanted to avoid sending a message that it worried might be misinterpreted. Cautious companies make these decisions all the time.

Seeing this as a threat to American patriotism, or perhaps more accurately, to conservative identity, is just absurd. It’s reminiscent of the entirely incomprehensible debates about Starbucks holiday cups, which some see as part of the imaginary “War on Christmas.”

But prominent figures on the right love to stir up these controversies over non-events because they know their base and viewers are so easily riled. They display the traits they say they most despise among liberals and Democrats: oversensitivity, excessive attention to trivia, overblown outrage. They were the “snowflakes” all along.

And yet while the controversy itself doesn’t matter, it’s grip over the conservative mind does. It reveals how the movement’s ideology distracts from issues that matter — inequality, poverty, racism, environmental degradation, corruption — and encourages its followers to waste their energies on irrelevancies. It convinces right-wing voters that their identity is under attack by liberals, the elite, the media (but not conservative media), so that they don’t care when these groups expose and draw attention to the actual dangers of unregulated industry or the abuses of immigrants at the border. The migrants, after all, aren’t the real victims; the real victims are the people who don’t get to wear Betsy Ross flag shoes.

==

aha: eternal question of why (poor white? ) ppl vote against their own interest: they get distracted by wedge:

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/they-cannot-get-votes-their-actual-policies-noam-chomsky-explains-how-republican

"They Cannot Get Votes on Their Actual Policies': Noam Chomsky Explains How the Republican Party Is Rotten to the Core

"It’s an intriguing spectacle, and not a little worrisome."

By Cody Fenwick / AlterNet July 6, 2018, 7:04 AM GMT

In a recent interview with Truthout, renowned MIT professor Noam Chomsky gave an incisive explanation of the current state of American politics, touching on the failures of President Barack Obama and the rise of President Donald Trump.

Chomsky argued that contrary to many narratives, Trump was a natural outgrowth of a rightward shift in political currents.

TheGOP's "dedication to wealth and corporate power is so extreme that they cannot get votes on their actual policies — which are now being revealed to us daily — and so have had to mobilize a voting base on issues unrelated to their service to their actual constituency," he explained. "These includereligious fundamentalism — a major phenomenon in the US unlike other developed societies —white supremacy, xenophobiaand other latent anti-social attitudes that tend to break through to the surface during periods of disillusionment and distress. This is partly a matter of 'search for scapegoats,' the actual sources concealed in the usual manner of propaganda; thus, the public vastly exaggerates the number of immigrants, even more than in Europe.

Disaffection began with Obama's insufficient response to the 2008 financial crisis, he said, and racial animus to his presidency also boosted the Republican Party.

==

wow, hard to beleive this was a wedge!

https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/how-southern-white-women-drove-the-gop-to-donald-trump/

no lnx

How southern white women drove the GOP to Donald Trump

written by Paul Rosenberg / Salon July 1, 2019

“The Long Southern Strategy,” a new book by political scientists Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields, first caught my eye because there’s a long history of denialism surrounding the “Southern strategy.” People sometimes claim that it’s a liberal myth or that it’s ancient history, or that wasn’t the real reason for the Southern realignment in American politics. That denialism has only intensified and grown more significant since the election of Donald Trump.

But Maxwell and Shields’ book turns out to be more than just well-timed, as its subtitle suggests: “How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics.” Rather than simply showing that the Southern strategy was a long-term phenomenon, the book shows that it was a continuously reshaped and evolving strategy, that it was multifaceted — involving gender and religion as crucially as race — and that in remaking the Republican Party and the South, it remade American politics as well. “The Long Southern Strategy” explains this reshaping process remaking better than anything else I’ve read, and does so via a compelling multi-disciplinary combination of history, cultural criticism and social science.

In “The Reactionary Mind” (Salon review here), political theorist Corey Robin argued that conservative politics “speak to and for people who have lost something. It may be a landed estate or the privileges of white skin, the unquestioned authority of a husband or the untrammeled rights of a factory owner.” Conservatives may have balked at Robin’s argument, but “The Long Southern Strategy” convincingly describes the specific combination of such losses on which Republicans have played, and the specific form of conservatism that resulted.

The building blocks aren’t old-fashioned racism, sexism and religious fundamentalism — all have been reshaped into new forms, making new arguments for halting progress and turning back the clock, which is also a part of the book’s story. For example, as co-author Angie Maxwell told me, “Modern sexism describes feelings of resentment and distrust towards feminists and working women. Rather than believing that a woman cannot do a particular job, folks who express Modern sexism resents a woman for wanting to do that job.”

“The Long Southern Strategy” also explains why Donald Trump is not such an anomaly after all, but rather the culmination of where the GOP has been headed for the past 50-plus years. “I gave a series of lectures the year before the election, called ‘The Inevitability of Donald Trump,'” Maxwell told me — but even she thought Trump would make it no further than the Republican nomination. She was concerned, however, about how close the election was going to be, because she had applied “modern sexism measures” to national polling in 2012, and found alarmingly high numbers. “I was worried we were not accounting for that effect,” she said. Perhaps not.

So I thought Maxwell would be a perfect interview subject as the 2020 campaign begins in earnest. It’s an invaluable guide for making sense of what’s about to unfold, as well as how we got here. This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

First I want to ask about the need to understand the Southern strategy as something long-term and continuing or evolving, not just a one-time event.

In short, with the Southern strategy, the story we tell is that after the Civil Rights Act, first Barry Goldwater and then Richard Nixon really played to white racial angst, and the South flipped to red. But when you start looking at not just the electoral map, but voting trends, the South goes pretty heavily back to Jimmy Carter in 1976. And most Southern politicians don’t change their party IDs during that period of time. You see from archival work and other scholarship how worried the GOP was post-Watergate that the inroads they made in the South they were going to lose. And sure enough, they do.

Now, if they were so adamant on a backlash to civil rights, then why pick Carter? But there this notion that Carter’s one of them — he shares their Southern identity, they understand him, he’s a born-again Christian. So the South kind of goes back [to the Democrats]. Then the Reagan folks in 1980 dropped the Equal Rights Amendment from their platform. This to me is the bridge. In 1980, the Republicans are trying again to win those Southern voters back, because they’ve really based their electoral map on that. They took that fork in the road in the late ’60s, and it’s kind of hard, once you set your strategy, to say, “Oh, let’s just pick a new one.” So they dropped the ERA.

This was a radical thing to do because the Equal Rights Amendment — and second-wave feminism in general — was a completely bipartisan effort. There were legions of Republican women feminists. In fact, they were some of the leaders in the movement. At the 1977 National Women’s Convention, the only national women’s convention we’ve ever had, every living first lady of both parties was there.. All the major congresswomen from both parties were there. What happened then was Phyllis Schlafly’s effort — she had written the book [A Choice, Not An Echo] that kind of inspired Goldwater to run years before — she started an anti-feminism counter rally, also in Houston, and had massive attendance at that, and their slogan was “family values.”

The GOP took notice. Schlafly was hoping it would get her a cabinet position, which it didn’t. But then the Reagan administration polls 40,000 women, an effort headed up by Richard Wirthlin, with Elizabeth Dole, and they classified American women into 64 types. They called them Nancys, Bettys — they give them names —and they realized that there were a whole lot more antifeminists out there than they realized, people who really wanted these traditional gender roles. I call them “antifeminist” because that is what they were calling themselves, a lot of times. Particularly in the South, among white women. And so that move [dropping the ERA] helped Reagan to secure a lot of those Southern white women. And that’s when you actually see people start changing their voter ID....

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/noam-chomsky-democrats-may-have-handed-trump-the-2020-election/

As  Attorney General William Barr releases Robert Mueller’s long-anticipated report into Russian interference in the 2016 election, we speak with world-renowned political dissident, linguist and author Noam Chomsky about what he sees as the political perils of “Russiagate.”

AMY GOODMAN: Can you share your analysis of President Trump? You have lived through so many presidents. Explain President Trump to us and assess the massive response to him.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, Trump is—you know, I think there are a number of illusions about Trump. If you take a look at the Trump phenomenon, it’s not very surprising. Think back for the last 10 or 15 years over Republican Party primaries, and remember what happened during the primaries. Each primary, when some candidate rose from the base, they were so outlandish that the Republican establishment tried to crush them and succeeded in doing it—Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Rick Santorum. Anyone who was coming out of the base was totally unacceptable to the establishment. The change in 2016 is they couldn’t crush him.

But the interesting question is: Why was this happening? Why, in election after election, was the voting base producing a candidate utterly intolerable to the establishment? And the answer to that is—if you think about that, the answer is not very hard to discover. During the—since the 1970s, during this neoliberal period, both of the political parties have shifted to the right. The Democrats, by the 1970s, had pretty much abandoned the working class. I mean, the last gasp of more or less progressive Democratic Party legislative proposals was the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act in 1978, which Carter watered down so that it had no teeth, just became voluntary. But the Democrats had pretty much abandoned the working class. They became pretty much what used to be called moderate Republicans. Meanwhile, the Republicans shifted so far to the right that they went completely off the spectrum. Two of the leading political analysts of the American Enterprise Institute, Thomas Mann, Norman Ornstein, about five or 10 years ago, described the Republican Party as what they called a “radical insurgency” that has abandoned parliamentary politics.

Well, why did that happen? It happened because the Republicans face a difficult problem. They have a primary constituency, a real constituency: extreme wealth and corporate power. That’s who they have to serve. That’s their constituency. You can’t get votes that way, so you have to do something else to get votes. What do you do to get votes? This was begun by Richard Nixon with the Southern strategy: try to pick up racists in the South. The mid-1970s, Paul Weyrich, one of the Republican strategists, hit on a brilliant idea. Northern Catholics voted Democratic, tended to vote Democratic, a lot of them working-class. The Republicans could pick up that vote by pretending—crucially, “pretending”—to be opposed to abortion. By the same pretense, they could pick up the evangelical vote. Those are big votes—evangelicals, northern Catholics. Notice the word “pretense.” It’s crucial. You go back to the 1960s, every leading Republican figure was strongly, what we call now, pro-choice. The Republican Party position was—that’s Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, all the leadership—their position was: Abortion is not the government’s business; it’s private business—government has nothing to say about it. They turned almost on a dime in order to try to pick up a voting base on what are called cultural issues. Same with gun rights. Gun rights become a matter of holy writ because you can pick up part of the population that way. In fact, what they’ve done is put together a coalition of voters based on issues that are basically, you know, tolerable to the establishment, but they don’t like it. OK? And they’ve got to hold that, those two constituencies, together. The real constituency of wealth and corporate power, they’re taken care of by the actual legislation.

So, if you look at the legislation under Trump, it’s just lavish gifts to the wealth and the corporate sector—the tax bill, the deregulation, you know, every case in point. That’s kind of the job of Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, those guys. They serve the real constituency. Meanwhile, Trump has to maintain the voting constituency, with one outrageous position after another that appeals to some sector of the voting base. And he’s doing it very skillfully. As just as a political manipulation, it’s skillful. Work for the rich and the powerful, shaft everybody else, but get their votes—that’s not an easy trick. And he’s carrying it off.

...

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WIKI

Wedge issue - Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedge_issue)

A wedge issue is a political or social issue (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_issue), often of a controversial or divisive nature, which splits apart a demographic or population group. Wedge issues can be advertised or publicly aired in an attempt to weaken the unity of a population, with the goal of enticing polarized (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_polarization) individuals to give support to an opponent or to withdraw their support entirely out of disillusionment. The use of wedge issues gives rise to wedge politics. Wedge issues are also known as hot button (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politicized_issue) or third rail (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_rail_of_politics) issues.

Political campaigns use wedge issues to exploit tension within a targeted population. A wedge issue may often be a point of internal dissent within an opposing party, which that party attempts to suppress or ignore discussing because it divides "the base". Typically, wedge issues have a cultural or populist theme, relating to matters such as crime (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime), national security (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security), sexuality (e.g. gay marriage (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_marriage)), or race (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_%28human_classification%29). A party may introduce a wedge issue to an opposing population, while aligning itself with the dissenting faction of the opposition. A wedge issue, when introduced, is intended to bring about such things as:

A debate, often vitriolic, within the opposing party, giving the public a perception of disarray.

The defection of supporters of the opposing party's minority faction to the other party (or independent parties) if they lose the debate.

The legitimising of sentiment which, while perhaps popularly held, is usually considered inappropriate or politically incorrect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_correctness); criticisms from the opposition then make it appear beholden to special interests or fringe ideology.

In an extreme case, a wedge issue might contribute to the actual fracture of the opposing party as another party spins off, taking voters with it.

To prevent these consequences from occurring, the opposing party may attempt to take a "pragmatic" stand and officially endorse the views of its minority faction. However, this can lead to the defection of supporters of the opposing party's majority faction to a third party, should they lose the debate.

1Examples

1.1Australia

1.2United States (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedge_issue#United_States)

2See also

3References

Examples

Australia

See also: Tampa affair (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tampa_affair)

In Australia, "wedge politics" may sometimes be known as dog whistle politics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics), due to the practice of selective targeting so that only certain people will hear the message being pitched.[citation ^needed]

A case study of the use of wedge issues in practice comes from the 2001 federal election campaign in Australia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia). In early and mid-2001, a great deal of public attention was focused on boat people (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boat_people) (asylum seekers arriving on unauthorised vessels), there having been several widely publicised landings of hundreds of people. On August 24, 2001, a ship illegally bearing 460 such people became distressed, and its passengers were picked up by the Norwegian (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norway) cargo vessel MV Tampa (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Tampa).

The governing Liberal Party of Australia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_Party_of_Australia) took the opportunity to appear tough on asylum seekers. The opposition (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opposition_%28Australia%29) Australian Labor Party (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Labor_Party) (ALP) had a slight majority of people strongly favouring more sympathetic treatment, and was hence perceived as internally split. This provoked a fierce debate within the ALP on the relative merits of siding with national opinion (in favour of the Government's actions) or standing on party principle (opposing). But with over 90% of some television polls supporting the government's stance, the leader of the ALP Kim Beazley (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Beazley) chose to silence the majority and agree to the tougher policy—though it ended up opposing certain elements of proposed legislation, which the Liberal Party blasted as "weak on border security".

The damage was done, with the party appearing inconsistent and divided. The Liberal Party campaigned largely on a platform of border security and increased its support at the federal election (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_federal_election,_2001) that November despite being the incumbent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incumbent). Some who would typically vote Labor voted instead for the Greens (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Greens) and the Democrats (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Democrats) in protest against what they saw as the ALP's complicity.

It was later claimed that the controversial campaign strategists Lynton Crosby (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynton_Crosby) and Mark Textor (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mark_Textor&action=edit&redlink=1) had an active role in making the Tampa incident a wedge issue for Howard to exploit.[1]

United States

For example, some Republican strategists have hoped that African Americans (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Americans), a traditionally Democratic voting bloc, yet also one that possesses some of the most conservative views on matters of homosexuality, may be more inclined to vote for the Republican Party because of their opposition to gay marriage (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_the_Republican_Party#LGBT_issues). In 2012, internal National Organization for Marriage (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Organization_for_Marriage) memos dating to 2009 were released that stated that they sought "to drive a wedge between gays and blacks" by promoting "African American spokespeople for marriage", thus provoking same-sex marriage supporters into "denouncing these spokesmen and women as bigots", and to "interrupt" the "assimilation" of Latinos into "dominant Anglo culture" by making the stance against same-sex marriage "a key badge of Latino identity".[2][3]

Likewise, Democratic strategists have hoped that the issue of stem cell research could be used as a wedge issue against the right, since some Republicans support the research while others are morally opposed to the use of embryonic cells in research. The well known mantra "God, guns and gays" typifies Republican wedge strategy crafted along other famous wedge issues beginning in the Nixon era which aided winning the South from the Democrats.

Reform of the laws regarding illegal immigration to the United States (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_immigration_to_the_United_States) operated as a wedge issue in 2007. Some Republican legislators, with the backing of President George W. Bush, sought to address the dual issues of ongoing illegal immigration to the United States and the illegal status of an estimated 12 million people currently living in America. Other Republicans bitterly opposed any "amnesty" for illegal immigrants, out of fear that their constituents were unsupportive of immigration reform. Some Democrats pitched in to keep the issue alive as they recognized the issue was deeply dividing the Republican party between advocates of reform and advocates of the status quo. The result was a bitter division in Republican ranks and a stalled bill in Congress; columnist Peggy Noonan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peggy_Noonan) wrote in January 2008 that President Bush had "destroyed the Republican Party, by which I mean he sundered it, broke its constituent pieces apart and set them against each other", by pushing immigration reform, as well as other wedge issues for the Republicans.

See also

Attack ad (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_ad)

Divide and rule (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divide_and_rule)

Dog-whistle politics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics)

Negative campaigning (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_campaigning)

Push poll (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Push_poll)

References

1. Jump up "National silent on strategists, claims Clark" (http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10519252). The New Zealand Herald (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Zealand_Herald). NZPA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NZPA). July 1, 2008. Retrieved December 2, 2011.
2. Jump up Portero, Ashley (March 27, 2012). "National Organization For Marriage Memos Reveal Plan to Drive 'Wedge' Between Black, Gay Communities" (http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/320313/20120327/national-organization-marriage-exposed-wedge-black-gay.htm). International Business Times. Retrieved March 28, 2012.
3. Jump up Crary, David (March 27, 2012). "Gay-Marriage Foes Sought to Split Gays and Blacks" (http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/gay-marriage-foes-sought-split-gays-blacks-article-1.1051913). New York Daily News. Associated Press. Retrieved March 28, 2012.

Media manipulation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_manipulation)

Categories (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Category):

Political terminology (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Political_terminology)

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An important moment in the life of millennials (https://www.rawstory.com/2018/04/millennials-fleeing-organized-religion-christian-hypocrisy-becomes-impossible-ignore/) came during the 2004 election, when Karl Rove and the right-wing collaborated to put nearly a dozen initiatives (https://www.nbcnews.com/id/6383353/ns/politics/t/voters-pass-all-bans-gay-marriage/#.WyXkHRJKjXE) on the ballot to outlaw same-sex marriage during the 2004 election. It mobilized 10 million evangelicals to the polls and ushered in a wave of Republicans (https://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/04/politics/campaign/samesex-marriage-issue-key-to-some-gop-races.html). Churches across the country railed against the immorality of homosexuality, bumping up against pop-culture icons coming out of the closet and anti-bullying campaigns aimed at teens.

White evangelicals have coopted mainstream Christianity, and an entire generation has never lived in an world without hypocritical pastors worshiping the almighty dollar and begging the poor to send Jesus their retirement funds.

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