While our media tries to pretend racism is limited to a “fringe” made up of “outliers” like Fuentes, the reality is much closer to the mainstream base of the GOP than most are willing to admit
My theory is the increased openness to racism is due to the Citizen's United decision. The flow of dark money into politics has disrupted the country. This not only directly buys politicians, it fuels social media ads and fuels 'social influencers' to amplify the messages and to rile up the mob. We know much clearer now how it was used for 6 Jan to organize mob action.
Racism is one of the key messages being used to agitate the mob. Dark money is provided to openly racist politicians (MTG for example) as well as to the 'wink, wink, nod, nod' politicians (Cornyn for example). The politicians open the doors for ads and social influencers to follow. Ads and social influencers are expensive - but effective. PACs are essential to hide the dark money flow which is used to transition passive racism to active racism. It is similar to a chemical reaction which occurs only when a catalyst has been added to the equation.
LBJ knew he was going to lose the Southern Democrats when he signed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. He said something to the effect that those racists would never again vote for a Democrat.
Ironically, Sen. Cornyn is on the Senate floor right now talking about "bright lines", defying common sense, and oaths to uphold the law. If only he could apply that to Trump. He seems to be all for accountability for everyone but that psychopath.
Nature, nurture? No matter what it is from, we all have prejudice and after a certain age we are accountable for what we do and think concerning it. Collectively as a country, we are doing better at recognizing racism, so no excuses, no passes, we must fight it on every level.
Republicans have chosen to embrace the racists even though many of them would not take them to dinner. But that's the deal for them, isn't it? Just let America live as it has, because it's working for THEM. Meanwhile, Trump is sucking the money and life out of their party. Demographics will eventually do the rest.
Won't it be heaven when people are so mixed racially, there will be no boxes to check on the forms. Give it a few centuries.
In case you are wondering, Cornyn was talking about the border.
I'm a bit perplexed as to why there aren't more genecists and biologists being consulted and invited on news and talk shows to articulate the science on the question of race. Race is merely a cultural category. Genetically, the differences are insignificant or irrelevant. This has been known for decades. I was only able to catch a short portion of today's show, but the discussion, which included something about a movie about Jewish identity or something caused me to pull a book off the shelf. The book is "What it Means to be 98% Chimpanzee", by Jonathan Marks, Univ. of CA Press, 2002. I won't try to summarize the message of the book here except to say all this ludicrous discrimination and fear on the far right (and that does include about half of white Americans or more) is meaningless nonsense derived from abject ignorance. I will quote from the book. "What we get from all this is that the quest for human nature is itself an illusion, the result of an antiquated way of thinking about humans scientifically --with culture as a veneer overlying nature." (page 178). "...racial problems are not racial." "...a deflection away from the real issues." (page 94-95).
Those who fund the Republican Party are opposed to being part of a progressive income tax system that would require them to pay a tax based upon a substantial share of the range of their vast wealth and compensation, allow environmental and corporate regulation, and live in a democracy they can't fully control. They want to be free to plunder, pollute, and corrupt our government until it functions almost exclusively to their benefit. I'm referring to many of the 10% of Americans who own 90% of America's corporate wealth, and the relatively few billionaires and multi-millionaires who fund and control the R Party. When you realize the 2017 Republican Tax Act is still in place, and the radical, undemocratic, legislative function of the Republican majority on the Supreme Court over the last few decades, they are closing in on achieving their objectives, even with the Dems currently controlling the the top three branches of our government. Gutting existing voting laws, State voter suppression, and gerrymandering, and the Electoral Collage are hard to overcome, despite Dem consistently winning the popular vote over the last 20 years.
Which brings us to the nature and composition of the R Party or why Republicans have more recently focused on detailed group and individual data targeting of religious and racial populations, fictional school grievances, totalitarian social control solutions like book banning and burning, and autocracy over democracy, rather than lower taxes, a balanced budget, and the size of government issues. Most Americans would agree that Trump's promise of a middle-class tax cut that would hurt the wealthy, cause unrealistic growth, pay for itself, and eliminate the Fed debt and the deficits was a lie of equal magnitude to the lie he won the election. Moreover, the R Party is on record as the party that underfunds education and views a well-educated and informed society as a threat to their autocratic goal. Their interest in education is limited to a trained workforce for business, downplaying the the importance of a liberal education, stratifying educational opportunity, and profiting from education.
Despite Republican ideology, tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations have no relationship to economic growth and always end in a range of corporate welfare programs, higher debt, inflation, recession, widening income and wealth gaps, and unaddressed or under addressed critical challenges such as infrastructure investment, climate change remediation, and immigration, the three issues we need to address for a thriving and sustainable economy. The failure to address these critical issues should be quantified and factored into our Federal debt total so we would have a better idea of our direction, progress, and the quality of the leaders we are electing, rather than judging them by their bluster. There's a reason Trump put his school records, business failures, and taxes under legal lock and key and it wasn't because he was proud of them. Clearly, any business success he experienced was the result of his vast inheritance, inflation, and money laundering.
As Thom pointed out there are many reasons for the Republican embrace of racism, anti-Semitism, and what ever anti-ism Republican politicians think will fly. However, in all cases their prejudices are rewarded by their sponsors and utilized in place of constructive policies because if they told the truth about who they represent they would have no chance of being elected. When a politician doesn't address major issues and/or calls them hoaxes it is their tell that their agenda is to ignore the interests of America, by appealing to our worst instincts and low information. Trump created 10 trillion of new debt without addressing our critical challenges, undercutting our allies, breaking our treaties, trying to hide a Pandemic, and appeasing Russia. It required another 10 trillion Fed "backstop" to avoid a Great Depression, in just four years of his reign. Then there is the mess and division he left. For example, Russia wouldn't have pursued a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, if Trump had not Putin given a free pass in the Middle East and control over the global oil price:
Yes they are, while Democrats get away with "polite denial" of their own militarism, corporatism and partnership with apartheid and genocide because they are so much "better" than Republicans. A "pro-labor" president who considers a contract without a single day (or subsequently a single day) of paid sick leave a "good deal" for rail workers? A party that "follows the science" stating that the pandemic is over and dropping federal mask mandates for health care facilities? A party that strides hand-in-hand with dictatorships and totalitarian states around the world such as Isreal, Saudi Arabia and Egypt to name a few then mobilizes its base for a perpetual proxy war with Putin? A party that represents black America yet sloganizes "funding the police" by adding 100,000 police to a force that occupies black and brown communities? Our media, including you Thom, have enabled the Democratic Party to shift rightwards without accountability. Their abject failure, including that of "progressive" (your words) House leader Nancy Pelosi have ushered in the era of Trumpism, and all you can do is obsess about Republicans who now are criticizing the Biden administration for its paltry offerings to rail workers! This is what we get when "Team Blue" and "Team Red" take precedence over "Team Humanity." Or honesty for that matter.
Concise and appropriate. It will be interesting to see how the new Democratic Congressional Minority Leadership takes all of this into account in formulating strategy and opposition.
My theory is the increased openness to racism is due to the Citizen's United decision. The flow of dark money into politics has disrupted the country. This not only directly buys politicians, it fuels social media ads and fuels 'social influencers' to amplify the messages and to rile up the mob. We know much clearer now how it was used for 6 Jan to organize mob action.
Racism is one of the key messages being used to agitate the mob. Dark money is provided to openly racist politicians (MTG for example) as well as to the 'wink, wink, nod, nod' politicians (Cornyn for example). The politicians open the doors for ads and social influencers to follow. Ads and social influencers are expensive - but effective. PACs are essential to hide the dark money flow which is used to transition passive racism to active racism. It is similar to a chemical reaction which occurs only when a catalyst has been added to the equation.
LBJ knew he was going to lose the Southern Democrats when he signed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. He said something to the effect that those racists would never again vote for a Democrat.
He was right.
Ironically, Sen. Cornyn is on the Senate floor right now talking about "bright lines", defying common sense, and oaths to uphold the law. If only he could apply that to Trump. He seems to be all for accountability for everyone but that psychopath.
Nature, nurture? No matter what it is from, we all have prejudice and after a certain age we are accountable for what we do and think concerning it. Collectively as a country, we are doing better at recognizing racism, so no excuses, no passes, we must fight it on every level.
Republicans have chosen to embrace the racists even though many of them would not take them to dinner. But that's the deal for them, isn't it? Just let America live as it has, because it's working for THEM. Meanwhile, Trump is sucking the money and life out of their party. Demographics will eventually do the rest.
Won't it be heaven when people are so mixed racially, there will be no boxes to check on the forms. Give it a few centuries.
In case you are wondering, Cornyn was talking about the border.
I'm a bit perplexed as to why there aren't more genecists and biologists being consulted and invited on news and talk shows to articulate the science on the question of race. Race is merely a cultural category. Genetically, the differences are insignificant or irrelevant. This has been known for decades. I was only able to catch a short portion of today's show, but the discussion, which included something about a movie about Jewish identity or something caused me to pull a book off the shelf. The book is "What it Means to be 98% Chimpanzee", by Jonathan Marks, Univ. of CA Press, 2002. I won't try to summarize the message of the book here except to say all this ludicrous discrimination and fear on the far right (and that does include about half of white Americans or more) is meaningless nonsense derived from abject ignorance. I will quote from the book. "What we get from all this is that the quest for human nature is itself an illusion, the result of an antiquated way of thinking about humans scientifically --with culture as a veneer overlying nature." (page 178). "...racial problems are not racial." "...a deflection away from the real issues." (page 94-95).
Those who fund the Republican Party are opposed to being part of a progressive income tax system that would require them to pay a tax based upon a substantial share of the range of their vast wealth and compensation, allow environmental and corporate regulation, and live in a democracy they can't fully control. They want to be free to plunder, pollute, and corrupt our government until it functions almost exclusively to their benefit. I'm referring to many of the 10% of Americans who own 90% of America's corporate wealth, and the relatively few billionaires and multi-millionaires who fund and control the R Party. When you realize the 2017 Republican Tax Act is still in place, and the radical, undemocratic, legislative function of the Republican majority on the Supreme Court over the last few decades, they are closing in on achieving their objectives, even with the Dems currently controlling the the top three branches of our government. Gutting existing voting laws, State voter suppression, and gerrymandering, and the Electoral Collage are hard to overcome, despite Dem consistently winning the popular vote over the last 20 years.
Which brings us to the nature and composition of the R Party or why Republicans have more recently focused on detailed group and individual data targeting of religious and racial populations, fictional school grievances, totalitarian social control solutions like book banning and burning, and autocracy over democracy, rather than lower taxes, a balanced budget, and the size of government issues. Most Americans would agree that Trump's promise of a middle-class tax cut that would hurt the wealthy, cause unrealistic growth, pay for itself, and eliminate the Fed debt and the deficits was a lie of equal magnitude to the lie he won the election. Moreover, the R Party is on record as the party that underfunds education and views a well-educated and informed society as a threat to their autocratic goal. Their interest in education is limited to a trained workforce for business, downplaying the the importance of a liberal education, stratifying educational opportunity, and profiting from education.
Despite Republican ideology, tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations have no relationship to economic growth and always end in a range of corporate welfare programs, higher debt, inflation, recession, widening income and wealth gaps, and unaddressed or under addressed critical challenges such as infrastructure investment, climate change remediation, and immigration, the three issues we need to address for a thriving and sustainable economy. The failure to address these critical issues should be quantified and factored into our Federal debt total so we would have a better idea of our direction, progress, and the quality of the leaders we are electing, rather than judging them by their bluster. There's a reason Trump put his school records, business failures, and taxes under legal lock and key and it wasn't because he was proud of them. Clearly, any business success he experienced was the result of his vast inheritance, inflation, and money laundering.
As Thom pointed out there are many reasons for the Republican embrace of racism, anti-Semitism, and what ever anti-ism Republican politicians think will fly. However, in all cases their prejudices are rewarded by their sponsors and utilized in place of constructive policies because if they told the truth about who they represent they would have no chance of being elected. When a politician doesn't address major issues and/or calls them hoaxes it is their tell that their agenda is to ignore the interests of America, by appealing to our worst instincts and low information. Trump created 10 trillion of new debt without addressing our critical challenges, undercutting our allies, breaking our treaties, trying to hide a Pandemic, and appeasing Russia. It required another 10 trillion Fed "backstop" to avoid a Great Depression, in just four years of his reign. Then there is the mess and division he left. For example, Russia wouldn't have pursued a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, if Trump had not Putin given a free pass in the Middle East and control over the global oil price:
https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/07/08/wagner-group-libya-oil-russia-war/
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/10/17/donald-trumps-betrayal-of-the-kurds-is-a-blow-to-americas-credibility
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/trump-betrayed-us-fleeing-kurds-condemn-u-s-decision-to-leave-syria
https://www.chicagotribune.com/columns/steve-chapman/ct-column-trump-oil-deal-gas-pricesi-chapman-20200415-iwwn3cpegngo5krsm6tfdycqvy-story.html
Yes they are, while Democrats get away with "polite denial" of their own militarism, corporatism and partnership with apartheid and genocide because they are so much "better" than Republicans. A "pro-labor" president who considers a contract without a single day (or subsequently a single day) of paid sick leave a "good deal" for rail workers? A party that "follows the science" stating that the pandemic is over and dropping federal mask mandates for health care facilities? A party that strides hand-in-hand with dictatorships and totalitarian states around the world such as Isreal, Saudi Arabia and Egypt to name a few then mobilizes its base for a perpetual proxy war with Putin? A party that represents black America yet sloganizes "funding the police" by adding 100,000 police to a force that occupies black and brown communities? Our media, including you Thom, have enabled the Democratic Party to shift rightwards without accountability. Their abject failure, including that of "progressive" (your words) House leader Nancy Pelosi have ushered in the era of Trumpism, and all you can do is obsess about Republicans who now are criticizing the Biden administration for its paltry offerings to rail workers! This is what we get when "Team Blue" and "Team Red" take precedence over "Team Humanity." Or honesty for that matter.
Concise and appropriate. It will be interesting to see how the new Democratic Congressional Minority Leadership takes all of this into account in formulating strategy and opposition.
Worser and worser. How can Democracy survive