2021 American Political Scene

[Officer of Engineers]

By all means tell the truth about American history, but tell the truth. Truth is not what the Left is pushing. They are using a false narrative about race

It is impossible to discuss history without a political bias. There is at least two sides to every story but more often than not, at least 5 sides to the story. It is damned near impossible to understand every side so we pick a side and study it to death but that certainly means that we have not taken every significant nuiance that shaped that history into account.

Race certainly come into play in American history. The ACW is testament to that. How far reaching into modern history can be debated until the sun goes nova.

[Albany Rifles]

A false narrative about race. When was the last time you heard about Union dead, Freedom Riders, the Arkansas Peace Society, lynched Republicans, that most white people in American are not descended from slave owners, that every single major piece of racist law making was Democrat and every major civil rights advanced was enabled by the GoP. That the founder of PP wanted to control black reproduction, that Jim Crow was my ade nationwide by NE Progressives Wilson and FDR.

The Left's narrative is ahistorical and promotes tribalism based on color. We should be past color but instead it is of increasing importance and our society is segregating and divided.

Hell when was the last time you saw anything mainstream about black success that wasn't related to entertainment or sports, black contributions to our history etc. It's all negative all the time.

Well as an historian of the 19th & 20th Century America I have heard....and taught all of the events you are talking about. Hell, Ken Burns even covered Confederate Unionists in his Civil War series all the way back in the early 1990s.

And while you are absolutely correct that the Democratic Party was guilty of many of those things you highlight. Absolutely...it is undeniable. But what is also undeniable is the parties flipped starting with Truman (and a case could be made with FDR and the New Deal) and running through Johnson's Great Society. And yes, he needed the Northern moderate Republicans to help pass it. But the Southern Democrats who opposed all switched parties to the GOP...it was Nixon's Southern Strategy.

Here is an excellent analysis.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlo...hern-strategy/

What we get wrong about the Southern strategy

It took much longer — and went much further — than we think.


By Angie Maxwell
Angie Maxwell is the Diane D. Blair Endowed Chair in Southern studies, and associate professor of political science at the University of Arkansas. She is coauthor of "The Long Southern Strategy."

July 26, 2019


Most Americans have heard the story of the “Southern strategy”: The Republican Party, in the wake of the civil rights movement, decided to court Southern white voters by capitalizing on their racial fears. Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater first wielded this strategy in 1964 and Richard Nixon perfected it in 1968 and 1972, turning the solidly Democratic South into a bastion of Republicanism.
But this oversimplified version of the Southern strategy has a number of problems. It overstates how quickly party change occurred, limits the strategy solely to racial appeals, ignores how it evolved and distorts our understanding of politics today.

In reality, the South swung back and forth in presidential elections for four decades following 1964. Moreover, Republicans didn’t win the South solely by capitalizing on white racial angst. That decision was but one in a series of decisions the party made not just on race but on feminism and religion as well. The GOP successfully fused ideas about the role of government in the economy, women’s place in society, white evangelical Christianity and white racial grievance, in what became a “long Southern strategy” that extended well past the days of Goldwater and Nixon.


Over the course of 40 years, Republicans fine-tuned their pitch and won the allegiance of Southern whites (and their sympathizers nationwide) by remaking their party in the Southern white image.

Goldwater’s campaign did launch the Southern strategy, originally called “Operation Dixie,” by directly and aggressively championing his vote against the 1964 Civil Rights Act. As a result, the senator won five Deep South states, including 87 percent of the vote in Mississippi. But this blunt appeal may have done more harm than good, because, other than his native Arizona, these were the only states Goldwater won.

Four years later, understanding the risks of such an overt campaign against civil rights, Nixon’s team instead coded their racial appeals. The “silent majority” of white Southerners that the candidate needed to attract understood that Nixon’s call for the restoration of “law and order,” for example, was a dog whistle, signaling his support for an end to protests, marches and boycotts, while his “war on drugs” played on racialized fears about crime. Nixon also adopted a stance of “benign neglect” on civil rights enforcement, a message that his advocates, such as Democrat-turned-Republican Sen. Strom Thurmond, bluntly conveyed to Southern whites on his behalf. As Thurmond put it, “If Nixon becomes president, he has promised that he won’t enforce either the Civil Rights or the Voting Rights Acts. Stick with him.”


The strategy worked — but only temporarily. Nixon did not lock the region down permanently for Republicans, as the traditional Southern strategy narrative asserts. Instead, in 1976, Jimmy Carter, a white, born-again Southern Baptist peanut farmer, recaptured the region for Democrats. While white Southerners were attracted to the GOP’s new racially coded message, Carter had a trump card with these voters: He was authentically one of them. To overcome this identity-based appeal, Republicans needed to resurrect old threats and manufacture news ones. They did both.

During his 1980 presidential bid, Ronald Reagan expanded Nixon’s racial code to “colorblind” appeals for economic justice. He encouraged Americans to move past race, but also invoked the image of the “welfare queen,” a black woman whom Reagan described as having “80 names, 30 addresses, [and] 12 Social Security cards,” resulting in a tax-free income of $150,000. In doing so, he portrayed racial minorities as undeserving “takers,” while erasing the institutional racism at the heart of economic inequity. The message to Southern white voters was both that African Americans were to blame for their own standing in society and that government programs aimed at alleviating racial inequities would disadvantage white Americans.

The GOP also pounced on another emerging wedge issue provoking anxiety among white Southerners. Both Republicans and Democrats had long supported the Equal Rights Amendment. The 1977 National Women’s Conference in Houston, organized to push for ratification, featured former Republican first lady Betty Ford and Democratic first lady Rosalyn Carter. But bipartisanship couldn’t shield the ERA from a growing backlash on the right driven by Phyllis Schlafly’s organization, STOP ERA, which stood for Stop Taking Our Privileges. Schlafly misleadingly and ominously insisted that the ERA would force women to put their newborns in government-run day care, serve on the front lines of combat, embrace lesbianism and enter the workplace.


This portrayal resonated deeply with female voters trying to live up to the ideals of “Southern white womanhood.” This construct, which had been manufactured in the Antebellum era to justify the South’s racial hierarchy, asserted that white women were delicate and fragile and needed constant protection from black males. Over time, it cast white supremacy as chivalry while relegating Southern white women to a distant pedestal in the home where they could be taken care of by men. According to Schlafly, the ERA would destroy Southern white women’s way of life.

The resonance of Schlafly’s message provoked an enormous response. The activist and her allies attracted an audience of 20,000 for a “pro-family” counter-rally opposite the National Women’s Conference. The Republican establishment took notice, reimagining the party’s agenda to secure the support of these Southern white women. In 1980, after 40 years of support for the ERA, the GOP dropped it from its platform. Republicans also began championing traditional gender roles, politicizing abortion and gay rights (both of which anti-feminists associated with feminism) and redirecting their anti-big-government rhetoric toward the ERA’s federal enforcement clauses.

Though Republicans survived the internal threat posed by Pat Robertson’s 1988 presidential campaign, their relationship with Southern white voters remained vulnerable. In both 1992 and 1996, Democrat Bill Clinton captured five Southern states by capitalizing, as Carter had, on his insider status as both a Southerner and a Southern Baptist.


Once again, the GOP recognized that it needed a new appeal, one that portrayed Democrats as a threat to the brand of Christian values Republicans had been championing for two decades. This time the party worked to reframe its positions on a host of domestic issues, ranging from health care to foreign policy, into matters of religious belief. By making the full spectrum of political debates about fundamental values, Republicans forged an unbreakable bond with Southern white evangelical voters, who went from social conservatives to all-out Republicans by the 2000s.

The long Southern strategy had finally come to fruition, and it is still working today. The GOP’s partisan conversion of Southern white evangelicals is so complete that no longer must a Republican candidate hold authentic religious beliefs to secure their support. Nowhere is this clearer than in Southern white evangelical support for Donald Trump. Indeed, only 38 percent of white evangelicals living in the South identified Trump as a Christian, but 84 percent of them still voted for him.

Similarly, despite the long-standing national gender gap, where more women vote for the Democratic Party than men, Southern white women remain firmly in the Republican camp. In 2016, while Hillary Clinton captured the support of white women outside of the South 52 to 48, Trump bested her among white women who live in the South, 64 percent to 36 percent. And this result was not unusual: In 2018, only 25 percent of white women voted for Democrat Stacey Abrams in Georgia’s gubernatorial race.


Understanding the full range of the GOP’s efforts in the South since Nixon clears up any confusion as to how Trump, a man whose personal life seems to violate every moral precept avowed by most Southern white conservatives, secured their unyielding allegiance. Trump has wielded the GOP’s Southern playbook with precision: defending Confederate monuments, eulogizing Schlafly at her funeral and even hiring Reagan’s Southern campaign manager, Paul Manafort. Trump, in many ways, is no anomaly. He is the very culmination of the GOP’s long Southern strategy.

While the roots of the Republican party back in 1856 was a lose organization of Whigs, Know Nothings, Wide Awakes and Abolitionists. But with the success of the US in Civil War the Republicans became the party of business. The Democrats remained the party of the farmer and working class. The Grange Movement and the Progressives were a manifestation of the party.

Again, there is no denying the Democratic Party's roll in the racist policies as they represented the working class White man and Blacks were seen as a threat to their livelihood. But what started to break down these thoughts was the ways the African American populace came forward in 2 different wars to aid the country which rarely returned the love.

But all of that said there is no denying that the Democratic Party of the 21st Century is nothing like the Democratic Party of the early 20th Century...and the same could be said for the Republican Party.


And if you sat through my American History 102 at ST Leo's University or US History 2 at John Tyler Community College you would be taught all of this in my classroom.

And for me the shift in the parties was current events for me growing up in the 60s & 70s and coming of age in the 80s and seeing all of this happen in real time.

[zraver]

It is impossible to discuss history without a political bias. There is at least two sides to every story but more often than not, at least 5 sides to the story. It is damned near impossible to understand every side so we pick a side and study it to death but that certainly means that we have not taken every significant nuiance that shaped that history into account.

Race certainly come into play in American history. The ACW is testament to that. How far reaching into modern history can be debated until the sun goes nova.

My point is the narrative is divisive not cohesive and that it is being pushed deliberately. No one not seeking political power and princely wealth is helped by fostering tribalism.

[TopHatter]

'I Don't Want to Die for It': School Board Members Face Rising Threats

It was only days after Sami Al-Abdrabbuh was reelected to the school board in Corvallis, Oregon, that the text messages arrived.

The first, he said, was a photograph taken at a shooting range. It showed one of his campaign’s lawn signs — “Re-Elect Sami” — riddled with bullet holes.

The second was a warning from a friend. This one said that one of their neighbors was looking for Al-Abdrabbuh. The neighbor was threatening to kill him.

Like many school board races this year, the one in May in Corvallis, a left-leaning college town in the northwest corner of the state, was especially contentious, swirling around concerns not only about the coronavirus pandemic but also the teaching of what Al-Abdrabbuh called the “dark history” of America’s struggle with race. Even months later, Al-Abdrabbuh, chair of the school board, is still taking precautions. He regularly speaks to police and scans his driveway in the morning before walking to his car. He often mixes up his daily route to work.

“I love serving on the school board,” he said. “But I don’t want to die for it.”

Al-Abdrabbuh is not alone. Since the spring, a steady tide of school board members across the country have nervously come forward with accounts of threats they have received from enraged local parents. At first, the grievances mainly centered on concerns about the way their children were being taught about race and racism. Now, parents are more often infuriated by COVID-19 restrictions like mask mandates in classrooms.

It is an echo of what happened when those faithful to the Tea Party stormed Obamacare town halls across the country more than a decade ago. In recent months, there have been Nazi salutes at school board meetings and emails threatening rape. Obscenities have been hurled — or burned into people’s lawns with weed spray.

In one extreme case, in suburban San Diego, a group of people protesting mask mandates disrupted a school board meeting in September. After taking an unauthorized vote, they summarily installed themselves as the district’s new board.

While there has not been serious violence yet, there have been a handful of arrests for charges such as assault and disorderly conduct. The National School Boards Association has likened some of these incidents to domestic terrorism, though the group eventually walked back that claim after it triggered a backlash from its state member organizations.

Sitting at the intersection of parenting and policy, local school boards have always been a place where passions run high and politics get personal. Especially since the nationwide protests over the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, many boards have struggled with the question of how to include the subject of race in their curricula.

Some protesters who have caused a stir at school board meetings in recent months have defended themselves by saying that they were merely exercising their First Amendment rights and that schools are better when parents are involved, arguments echoed by Republicans in Congress and in statehouse races.

Parents who have been vocal in their opposition to the Corvallis school board said they were unaware of any threats against Al-Abdrabbuh or other board members.

They said it would be counterproductive to their cause to threaten violence because it would allow school officials to paint dissenting parents as hateful bigots. They said their frustrations, however, were legitimate and stemmed from the board’s lack of transparency.

“I would definitely say there is brewing tension, but I’m not at that place; that’s not in line with my character,” Alisha Carlson, 36, a life coach with two children in the local schools, said of the threats. “I’m not going to personally attack or assault somebody, whether that’s verbally or physically. I don’t think that’s going to create long-term, lasting change.”

Becky Dubrasich, 41, an emergency-room nurse with three children in the district, said she was so concerned about the board requiring vaccinations that she has been sending a daily email to school officials voicing her opposition.

“I don’t think they are taking it in or really listening to us,” Dubrasich, who joined an informal parents group called Stand Together Corvallis Parents, said of the board. “They’re nonresponsive and nontransparent.” But, she added, “Our group of 50 of us are very reasonable.”

While acknowledging that parents have a right to be heard, Al-Abdrabbuh and other school board members have argued that the recent rash of menacing disruptions is different from the occasionally heated conversations that have long marked the relationship between school board officials seeking to set rules and people looking out for their children.

“What’s happening now and what has been happening,” Al-Abdrabbuh said, “is much more serious than simply listening to excited parents who want what’s best for their kids.”

The federal government apparently agrees.

In early October, Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a memo announcing that the Department of Justice would respond to what he called “a disturbing spike of harassment, intimidation and threats of violence” against school board members and administrators. In the memo, Garland ordered the FBI and federal prosecutors to work with local law enforcement officers to monitor threats against people working in the nation’s 14,000 public school districts.

The memo suggested that federal officials saw the issue as the latest example of a troubling trend: ordinary people using threats of violence to express their politics. This summer, seeking to counter a similar problem, the Justice Department established a task force to curb attacks against election workers.

But far from calming the situation, the school board initiative by the Department of Justice was seized upon by Republican officials as a political issue.

Republican attorneys general in 17 states published a memo of their own, describing the proposal to monitor threats against school officials as a threat itself. Whatever problems were taking place at school board meetings were best handled by local law enforcement, they said, and bringing in federal authorities could result in “intimidating parents away from raising concerns about the education of their children.”

Republicans in both houses of Congress have also attacked Garland’s plans, accusing him of treating parents like terrorists, though his memo mentioned neither terrorism nor parents.

Yet those who have been the targets of harassment and vandalism have applauded the move by the Department of Justice. Jennifer Jenkins, a school board official in Brevard County, Florida, said she had suffered months of threats, beginning last year when she unseated an incumbent member of her school board.

At first, Jenkins said, parents angered by the district’s transgender bathroom policy began to appear at board meetings, waving Trump flags and calling members “pedophiles.” But that soon escalated, she said, to angry groups of people shouting on the street outside her home.

Then in July, after the district put in place a mask mandate for students, a Republican state lawmaker posted Jenkins’ cellphone number on his Facebook page, and her voicemail filled with hateful messages. Not long after, she said, someone burned the letters “FU” into her lawn with weed killer and chopped down the bushes in front of her house.

“It’s gotten really, really crazy here,” she said. “There’s just been a whole other level of rage and anger ignited in our community.”

In California, school board members have received so many threats that Vernon M. Billy, executive director of the state School Boards Association, wrote a letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom asking for help. Near Sacramento, he wrote, one entire school board had to flee its chamber after protesters accosted the members.

Al-Abdrabbuh’s school board race in Corvallis this spring came almost exactly a year after the pandemic and the nationwide reckoning on race roiled American politics. In online forums and debates, he said, he found himself defending the effectiveness of vaccines, a curriculum that focused on racial equity and a policy of allowing transgender students to participate in school sports.

His opponent, Bryce Cleary, a local doctor, often complained that conservative voices were not being heard by board members, some of whom, he said, were “pushing political agendas.” At one candidate forum, Cleary argued that the board under Al-Abdrabbuh’s leadership had spent more time on inclusion and diversity than on math and science.

“The problem is our schools are not doing what they’re supposed to do,” Cleary said.

As far as Al-Abdrabbuh was concerned, Cleary’s arguments were politics as usual. Once the text messages arrived after the election, however, he said he realized something much more serious was going on. Even now, he keeps hearing stories from colleagues who are devising personal safety plans or installing security cameras at their homes.

“I tell myself that none of this is actually about me,” Al-Abdrabbuh said. “It’s about what’s best for the kids.”
____________

NSBA should never have "walked back" that comment. This is domestic terrorism, pure and simple. The goal of these animals is to terrorize and intimidate.

[Parihaka]

What news network did you watch on election night? Thankfully we all had plenty of options. There was CNN, where John King’s magic wall grows ever more granular: “we’re moving the Kelleher household into the leans-Republican column, Wolf, though their dog remains undecided. Now next door to the Smiths…” There was Fox News, where loud people shout at each other until Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum finally pull over the car and tell everyone to knock it off.

And then there was MSNBC. Oh, Lord, was there MSNBC. There did we find Nicolle Wallace, one of the network’s fastidiously objective anchors, declaring that Virginia governor-elect Glenn Youngkin “worshipped at the altar of Donald Trump.” The lefty Wallace continued, “I think that the real ominous thing is that critical race theory, which isn’t real, turned the suburbs 15 points to the Trump-insurrection-endorsed Republican.”

So for those keeping track at home, we’ve gone from “critical race theory should be taught in schools” to “critical race theory isn’t being taught in schools” to “critical race theory isn’t real.” Not only is Wallace’s comment patently false, it was contradicted by none other than Terry McAuliffe himself. Back when he was governor, his Virginia Department of Education website declared that teachers should “embrace Critical Race Theory” in order to “re-engineer attitudes and belief systems.”

Also contradicting Wallace is a gusher of evidence from school systems across the United States that CRT has very much wormed its way into their curricula. But then MSNBC was never aiming for the truth uprights. Up next on their airwaves was Joy Reid, who declared that Republicans like Youngkin are “dangerous to our national security, because stoking that kind of soft white nationalism eventually leads to the hardcore stuff. It leads to the January 6 stuff.” And then over to Van Jones, who was on CNN but a couple channels up in spirit when he suggested that Youngkin’s victory could be the “Delta variant of Trumpism.”

If Youngkin is like the coronavirus, then watching MSNBC is like dumping generic-brand bleach down your throat in hope of a cure. Jones, who is a more insightful commentator than his periodic use of imagery would suggest, later made a more reasonable observation. “The whole idea of the ‘anti-Trump resistance’ being the only rationale for us to be a party is over,” he tweeted. And clearly he’s right about that much, given that the McAuliffe strategy of tying Youngkin to Trump didn’t work.

But the problem, I would argue, runs deeper. The Resistance needs to get past not just Trump, but the notion that it’s the only thing standing between this country and a Lion King-style stampede of white supremacists. Because the reaction to Youngkin’s victory on the left more broadly has been largely the same as on cable news: it’s the racism. Maybe a little mumbling about the dysfunction on Capitol Hill. But mostly racism. The point is that you’re a racist, and if you so much as argue back, that makes you a racist.

It isn’t just that none of this is true; it’s that it’s insulting to the very voters Democrats need to sway. To say nothing of it being a flip desecration of the actual problem of racism in America. It is also deeply boring. Ian McEwan, in his novel Solar, defines the “essence of a crank” as “first, to believe that all the world’s problems could be reduced to one and solved. And second, to go on about it nonstop.” I would quibble only with the first part, since the whole point of a crank is that his problem never be solved. If it were, the raison d’être for his crankery would abscond, leaving him with nothing to do.

So too with the left’s obsession with white nationalism. There can never be any outcome other than racism everywhere, and especially on the Republican right where it’s been mass-mobilized. Otherwise they would lose their present rationale for politics. This isn’t about to stop, even if it is terrible politics. Not when even the ostensible moderates like McAuliffe have latched onto it as a strategy. Not when even a geeky dad on a Cub Scout hike like Glenn Youngkin gets tagged as a bigot.
As it happens, I have another theory as to why Youngkin won. It’s a bit counterintuitive, but bear with me here. It goes like this: critical race theory in schools is real and so is inflation. Glenn Youngkin addressed both of these concerns with policy proposals, while Terry McAuliffe shadowboxed Donald Trump and staged a fake white supremacist rally. So voters elected Youngkin. They’re not stupid or delusional. They know what’s going on in their children’s schools better than some talking-head torture enthusiast. They were looking for a governor, not an MSNBC night at the 92Y.

Then again, maybe I should just keep my mouth shut. I am a conservative, after all. And far be it from me to stand in the way of Democrats’ crackerjack strategy to call the very voters they need to win over racists. Just pretend this column, like CRT itself, doesn’t really exist.

yup. As an aside, Virginia bureaucracy talking about the introduction of CRT into their schools.

[Parihaka]

The Woke Meet Their Match: Parents

The best news from Tuesday’s smattering of elections was what didn’t happen. Despite several pre-election bids to gin up skepticism about the integrity of the electoral system, the results, even in very close races, were broadly accepted as legit. Yes, the New Jersey result is super-close and the Republican Jack Ciattarelli may yet seek a recount, as would be his right. But here is his message: “I don’t want people falling victim to wild conspiracy theories or online rumors. While consideration is paid to any and all credible reports, please don’t believe everything you see or read online.”

This is a problem for Trump. He is obsessed with the invented “steal” of 2020, and has argued that every election in this country is rigged, even when he wins. It’s his core 2024 campaign theme (because he’s not psychologically well). Yet Republicans this week did remarkably well everywhere; turnout in Virginia was the highest for an off-year election ever; and today we are not in a constitutional crisis, or brimming with violence, because of a political leader’s malignant narcissism.

This, as my shrink used to say, is a gain.

Now observe how governor-elect Youngkin appeared on TV alongside the outgoing governor, Northam, and announced a “new friendship” between them, as he sought his predecessor’s advice in the future. I know it’s an incredibly low bar, and if the Dems had won, we might have returned to Bannonland, but still. A peaceful, sane transfer of power? At this point, I’ll take it. A GOP victory with Trump off-stage? Every one counts. You have to repair norms bit by bit.

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Part of what the American voters had wanted from Biden was congenial, bipartisan normalcy. But the left mugged him. Youngkin had a chance to fill that abandoned moderate space in our politics — and grasped it. Then, there’s just his affect: it’s almost the opposite of Trump’s. A financial money-maker in a vest, with a Brooks Brothers haircut, Youngkin seemed like an old school Republican, spoke in reasoned language, did not resort to vile insults, proposed massive spending on education; promised to end a grocery tax; and took the 2008 moderate Obama position on race and history.

Parts of the presser were cringe. Youngkin even hauled out the old “I married up” line. Parts were cowardly, but shrewd. He somehow managed neither to attack nor condone Trump. But overall, Youngkin managed to propose a conservatism that kept the rural whites motivated and brought back the moderate suburbs, especially parents. What he showed is that, as in 2020, Trumpism without Trump has a potent future — if the nasty nutcase who ironically helped bring it about can somehow be ushered off the stage. Which is, of course, a big if.

Now check out Youngkin’s messaging on education. “One of the first things we hammered on — was that the Thomas Jefferson School in Northern Virginia had lowered their academic standards,” Youngkin strategist Jeff Roe told Ryan Lizza. “It was then literally the first stop.” Later, at his last rally in Loudoun County, Youngkin put it this way regarding CRT:

We all know education starts with curriculum. We will teach all history, the good and the bad. America has fabulous chapters and it’s the greatest country in the world, but we also have some abhorrent chapters in our history, we must teach them. We can’t know where we are going if we don’t know where we came from.

But let me be clear: what we won’t do is teach our children to view everything through the lens of race, where we divide them into buckets; one group’s an oppressor and another group is the victim; and we pitch them against each other … We know it’s not right. We know in our hearts it’s wrong. We are all created equal and we’re trying so hard to live up to those immortal words of Martin Luther King Jr., who implored us to be better than we are; to judge one another based on the content of our character and not the color of our skin.

This approach, we are told, is an expression of the darkest strain of racism, a nasty “dog-whistle,” a reboot of the Atwater strategy. Or as the Atlantic’s Jemele Hill explained the results: “This country simply loves white supremacy.” Really? To me, Youngkin’s rhetoric sounds like … well, to be honest, Barack Obama, in its balance. (Maybe Ibram X Kendi is right that “the most threatening racist movement is not the alt-right’s unlikely drive for a White ethno-state, but the regular American’s drive for a ‘race-neutral’ one.”) Youngkin is therefore more politically dangerous than Trump, because he defuses all the reactivity of Trump and exposes the left’s weakness — which is that they have drifted far, far to the left, and lost the middle and the plot. Biden was the Dems’ opportunity to occupy the vacant center, and they blew it. Youngkin is now a model for the GOP’s version of the same.

Here’s how that Youngkin strategist put it to Lizza:

The Democrats are radicalizing, and they’re reacting to their base of their party and it is their base of the base. And because they live on Twitter and on the lightly watched cable news shows at night, they’re believing their own press releases and they’re putting themselves in their own bunker. And they will not be able to get out of it.

And if the culture war is fought explicitly on the terms laid out by the Kendi left and the Youngkin right, and the culture war is what determines political outcomes, then the GOP will always win. Most Americans, black and white, simply don’t share the critique of America as essentially a force for oppression, or want its constitution and laws and free enterprise “dismantled” in order to enforced racial “equity.” They understand the evil of racism, they know how shameful the past has been, but they’re still down with Youngkin’s Obama-‘08 impression over McAuliffe’s condescending denials and the left’s increasingly hysterical race extremism.

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Look at recent polling. A big survey from the Manhattan Institute of the 20 biggest metropolitan areas found that the public, 54-29, wants to remove CRT concepts such as “white privilege” or “systemic racism” from K-12 education. That includes black parents by a margin of 54-38. And that’s in big cities. A new Harris poll asked, “Do you think the schools should promote the idea that people are victims and oppressors based on their race or should they teach children to ignore race in all decisions to judge people by their character?” Americans favored the latter 63-37.

And when the Democrats and the mainstream media insist that CRT is not being taught in high schools, they’re being way too cute. Of course K-12 kids in Virginia’s public schools are not explicitly reading the collected works of Derrick Bell or Richard Delgado — no more than Catholic school kids in third grade are studying critiques of Aquinas. But they are being taught in a school system now thoroughly committed to the ideology and worldview of CRT, by teachers who have been marinated in it, and whose unions have championed it.

And in Virginia, this is very much the case. The state’s Department of Education embraced CRT in 2015, arguing for the need to “re-engineer attitudes and belief systems” in education. In 2019, the department sent out a memothat explicitly endorsed critical race and queer theory as essential tools for teaching high school. Check out the VA DOE’s “Road Map to Equity,” where it argues that “courageous conversation” on “social justice, systemic inequity, disparate student outcomes and racism in our school communities is our responsibility and professional obligation. Now is the time to double down on equity strategies.” (My itals.) Check out the Youtube site for Virginia’s virtual 2020 summit on equity in education, where Governor Northam endorsed “antiracist school communities,” using Kendi’s language.

Matt Taibbi found Virginia voters miffed by “the existence of a closed Facebook group — the ‘Anti-Racist Parents of Loudoun County’ — that contains six school board members and apparently compiled a list of parents deemed insufficiently supportive of ‘racial equity efforts.’” He found Indian and South Asian parents worried about the abolition of testing standards, as well they might be. And at school board meetings, in a fraught Covid era of kids-at-home, parents have been treated with, at best, condescension; and at worst, contempt. Remember how the National School Boards Association wanted the feds to designate some protests from these angry parents as “a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes” — and then withdrew that request?

And during Covid, with nerves frayed by zoom-schooling, many parents have had their eyes opened about teachers’ unions. No surprise that one of the last campaigners for McAuliffe was Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers. At the AFT 2021 Conference, guess who was the keynote speaker? Ibram X Kendi! The other big teachers’ union, the National Education Association, has explicitly called for teaching children CRT, pledging to publicize “an already-created, in-depth study that critiques white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, racism, patriarchy … capitalism … and other forms of power and oppression.” They back The 1619 Project as a teaching tool. So all the unions, the governor, the Virginia education department, the paper of record, and the federal government think CRT is obligatory for teaching children. But absolutely none of that ever, ever reaches into the classroom. Please.

Of course it does. To use a term the woke might understand, it is, in fact, structural. In Virginia, the goal is not to make obscure CRT texts mandatory in a course curriculum; it is to filter all education first and foremost through the CRT lens of race and identity; to “interrogate” mathematics, literature, philosophy, and science not as fields of study, but as suspect products of “white supremacy”; to remember “positionality” before you even speak; to grade and discipline so as to remove any group differences; to abolish standardized tests, because there are different group outcomes; to end gifted education, because it’s allegedly racist; to hire and fire on identity grounds; to teach children that sex is not binary and can be chosen; to open restrooms and locker rooms to both sexes; and, most of all, to keep parents at bay and in the dark about all of it.

What has happened this past week, I suspect, is that the woke revolution has finally met its match: educated parents. People can tolerate sitting through compulsory “social justice” seminars, struggle sessions, pronoun rituals, and the rest as adults, if they have to as a condition of employment. But when they see this ideology being foisted on their children as young as six, they draw a line.

And when the public authorities try to disguise this, when a governor says that parents should not decide what is taught in public schools, when the parents are scorned as “white supremacists” for wanting their children to be taught math that doesn’t take a position on racism, and when the media reflexively calls them liars, they are going to get mad enough to vote Republican again. I don’t blame them.

And when the public better understands the sheer scope of this mandatory top-down social justice revolution, and when the specter of Trump is at a greater distance, the center ground of American politics could become wide open for a sane GOP, energized by the backlash to this left over-reach, yet calm and moderate enough to keep the anxious, increasingly red-pilled suburbanites on board.

Impossible? Well, in one particular state, it just happened. Culturally moderate, economically populist, optimistic and focused on the broad center the Democrats have abandoned, this Youngkin version of Republicanism is a real moment. I hope it lasts. If it does, it’s electoral dynamite.

[Parihaka]

Open Letter to Former President George W. Bush re Washington Scandals November 8, 2021

Since you left the presidency on January 20, 2009, you have used your voice sparingly in support of or in opposition to your successors or on other national or international issues. As a result, many Americans see you as a voice of reason in our hyper-partisan world. Given you and your family’s understood disdain for former Republican President Donald Trump, it would be an enormous shock if you said anything beneficial to Trump. That fact makes it all the more critical that you use your voice on an issue that may seem supportive of Trump, but, in reality, is really focused on the credibility of the federal government, the neutrality of our intelligence agencies, and the integrity of our elections. Many seasoned veterans from prior presidential administrations and the intelligence community improperly used their voices over the last five years to undermine Trump and damage his chance of winning the 2016 and 2020 elections, as well as aid Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden in their quest for the presidency. Having had the honor of working for you from March 2004 to May 2006 (and volunteering for your dad in 1992), I know personally how much you value the importance of doing the right thing.
Because of the gross bias of the media and Big Tech through which many Americans get their news and the nonstop lies emanating from the Democratic Party, too many Americans don’t truly appreciate the dangerous turn our country took beginning in 2016.
Thanks to the collective efforts of Inspector General Michael Horowitz; U.S. Attorney John Durham; former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe; several intrepid reporters like Mollie Hemingway, Eric Felten, John Sperry, Jerry Dunleavy, and John Solomon; and a few transparency non-profits that secured documents through the Freedom of Information Act, we now know several key indisputable facts we didn’t know over the last few years.

These facts include:
• The Trump-Russian collusion claim was little more than a hoax designed by the Clinton Campaign;
• That hoax involved foreign actors, including recently indicted Russian Igor Danchenko, and long-time Clinton acolytes like Charles Dolan who literally made-up stories to impact a U.S. election and harm a presidential administration;
• The Clinton Campaign violated federal election laws by hiding its involvement in that hoax by improperly shielding its role using the attorney-client privilege via Perkins Coie partners Marc Elias and recently indicted Michael Sussman;
• Elias and Sussman hired Fusion GPS, foreign national Christopher Steele, and Crowdstrike to execute the hoax and illegally used Clinton Campaign funds to pay those entities;
• Elias and Sussman used their long-term relationships within the intelligence community to get elements within the intelligence community to launch investigations of Trump;
• Elias and Sussman then used the existence of those investigations to get the media to write false stories about those investigations;
• Multiple members of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), including Director James Comey and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, used their positions to engage in improper activity, including leaking to the media, lying to the FISA court, spying on the Trump campaign/transition team/administration, and withholding exculpatory information;
• The media failed in its responsibility to ensure its stories were well-sourced and accurate;
• Former members of presidential administrations, including yours, and the intelligence community improperly lent their voices on issues which they clearly didn’t possess accurate information ranging from multiple Trump allegations to the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s laptop;
• Despite far more evidence of malfeasance, the FBI and the intelligence community failed to investigate the credible allegations against Hunter Biden and Joe Biden related to selling access/influence to Joe Biden while he was Vice President;
• The media again failed in its responsibility when it didn’t investigate the credible Biden family corruption allegations in order to help Biden defeat Trump;
• Social media companies improperly censored legitimate and well-sourced news stories related to Biden family corruption in order to help Biden defeat Trump; and
• In an unprecedented manner and clearly as an in-kind contribution to the Democratic Party, left-wing Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg spent nearly $500 million to essentially privatize government election activities in heavily Democratic cities in key swing states to ensure Biden and other Democrats won.

Again, these facts are now well-established and documented. Sadly, with the Danchenko indictment, it is clear former Director of the FBI Robert Mueller, who likely suffers from dementia, and his special counsel investigation were deeply compromised by the highly-partisan Democrat lawyers working for him led by lead prosecutor Andrew Weissmann.
It appears Weissmann took advantage of Mueller’s cognitive decline given the trust Mueller had in him after working together for years. After all, it is simply not credible that the Mueller investigation didn’t discover the facts laid out by U.S. Attorney Durham in the Danchenko indictment.
The problem is many Americans don’t know the above facts because the media, Big Tech, and Democrats have successfully suppressed or twisted the facts to sow confusion and doubt.
Why does this matter? It matters because, regardless of how these acts impacted Trump, Americans have increasingly lost trust in their government and now assume “everyone” is lying. This outcome is a serious problem in our republican form of government.
You won’t convince hardened Democrats, but you will sway moderates and independents that what happened over the last five years was simply wrong and should never happen again. It frankly was worse than the Watergate scandal, as this scandal involved far more elements of the federal government, including Obama Administration officials and Democrat members of Congress such as Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell.
As is often the case, the cure (actions above) was worse than the perceived disease (Trump). Someone has to break through the cacophony of noise surrounding these issues. Your judicious use of your voice over the years married with your known dislike of Trump lends you the credibility to speak loudly and clearly on this vital issue.
You dealt with a political smear by the media during your 2004 run for re-election. Let me pose a question to you: what if what happened to Trump had happened to you in 2000? Had he been healthy, would you have wanted President Ronald Reagan to remain silent, or would you have wanted him to speak out against these scandals?
With the passing of your dad, you are the only living president who isn’t compromised by these events. Barack Obama and his administration were involved in it; Bill Clinton’s wife’s campaign orchestrated it; and Jimmy Carter is simply too old and out-of-touch to have any real sway.
Silence really isn’t an option, as it indicates you consent to what transpired. I know that cannot be the case. Thus, I implore you to use your powerful voice to condemn what happened and demand reform. If you don’t, our country will continue to fragment and will eventually result in widespread revolts and, God forbid, another civil war.
Though certainly in no way excusing their conduct, it would be utterly naïve not to acknowledge that what wrongfully happened to Trump beginning in the summer of 2016 didn’t play a significant role in the frustration and violence that occurred on January 6, 2021, by his supporters. As Sir Isaac Newton observed, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Someone must lower the ever-increasing political temperature. It is a decision point time, President Bush. If you won’t speak up, who will?

Matt A. Mayer (@ohiomatt) Former Senior Official, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Presidency of George W. Bush Dublin, Ohio

[TopHatter]

Rep. Liz Cheney says Trump is at war ‘with the rule of law’

MANCHESTER, N.H. (AP) — Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming said Tuesday that former President Donald Trump is at war “with the rule of law and the Constitution” and that GOP lawmakers who sit by silently are aiding his efforts.

Cheney, a Trump critic who is vice chair of a congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, said the challenge now is whether citizens will do their duty and “defend the Constitution and stand for truth.”

“Will we put duty to our oath above partisan politics or will we look away from the danger and the threat, embrace the lies and enable the liar?” Cheney asked, speaking at a First Amendment event in New Hampshire. “There is no gray area when it comes to that question, when it comes to this moment. There is no middle ground.”

Cheney was one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump on a charge of inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection. Hundreds of Trump’s supporters violently pushed past police, broke into the U.S. Capitol building and interrupted the certification of Joe Biden’s presidential election victory in a futile bid to keep Trump in office.

Her fierce criticism of Trump and her insistence that Congress investigate the Capitol attack resulted in her being removed from her position as GOP conference chair and led to a serious primary challenge back home. Cheney, a daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, has framed Trump and the Jan. 6 insurrection as an existential fight for the Republican Party and for democracy itself.

“This nation needs a Republican Party that is based on truth,” she told the crowd at the Nackey S. Loeb School of Communications’ First Amendment Awards event at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics in Manchester. The crowd greeted her with polite applause and there were no protesters outside the event.

She called for a Republican Party “that puts forward our ideals and our policies based on substance, one that is willing to reject the former president’s lies. One that is willing to tell the truth that millions of Americans have been tragically misled by former President Trump, who continues to this day to use language that he knows provoked violence on January 6.”

Cheney said she has heard about people who downplay the Jan. 6 insurrection and say “it wasn’t that big of a deal because our institutions held.”

“To those people I say, our institutions do not defend themselves. We, the people, defend them,” she said. “Our institutions held on January 6th because there were brave men and women, elected officials at every level of our government who did their duty, who stood up for what was right, who resisted pressure to do otherwise.”

Some Republican Party officials in Wyoming announced in August they will no longer recognize Cheney as a party member because of her vote to impeach Trump. Several have also announced plans to challenge Cheney next year. Trump has endorsed Wyoming attorney Harriet Hageman for the seat.

Cheney, for her part, has reported record fundraising, far exceeding the amount raised by her competitors.

On Tuesday, the Jan. 6 House committee issued subpoenas to 10 more former officials who worked for Trump at the end of his presidency, including press secretary Kayleigh McEnany and senior adviser Stephen Miller.
_____

And that is how you get thrown out of the Republican Party....

[zraver]

Prosecutions case vs Rittenhouse seems to have imploded. Now it's the Defense's turn. From asking witnesses to change testimony to the Star witness admitting he was pointing a gun at Kyle the case has gone off the rails.

[TopHatter]

Prepare for the Shock Troops
What happens when gun culture merges with a nationalist personality cult?


A supporter of President Donald Trump holds a up a flag during a protest outside the Clark County Election Department on November 7, 2020 in North Las Vegas, Nevada. Around the country, supporters of presidential candidate Joe Biden are taking to the streets to celebrate after news outlets have declared Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden winner over President Donald Trump in the U.S. Presidential race. (Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images)


“When can we use the guns?” The question hung in the air just long enough for some in the crowd to begin cheering. “That’s not a joke,” the man added. ”How many elections are they gonna steal before we kill these people?”

The question, posed on October 25 during Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA event in Idaho, made it clear that this man, and others like him, are hoping for a signal.

I’ve met men like this before. I worked in the firearms industry as a sales executive for a long time and beginning during the Obama presidency, gun business leaders like me, who helped build the nation’s top gun companies, noticed this disturbing chatter from gun owners at firearms trade shows. Many in the industry dismissed these threats. I didn’t. And now we hear them from gun owners across the country who dream of deploying their arsenals to kill fellow citizens.

It’s tempting to wish these people away. It’s a big country and there will always be malcontents and criminals. If you wanted to see the glass as half full, you could say that Charlie Kirk denounced the call to violence. Though to be honest, Kirk’s disavowal didn’t inspire much confidence. He rejected the call to murder not because it was wrong but because it would “play into all their plans”—you can guess who “they” are here. And Kirk then qualified this by saying that “we must exhaust every single peaceful means possible”—which sure seems to leave open the question of what to do after all of the peaceful means have been exhausted.

And the glass-half-empty view seems pretty convincing. America has a rapidly growing authoritarian army comprised of thousands of men like that fellow in Idaho. They have been groomed by Trump acolytes such as Kirk and Steve Bannon. They have also been developed as avatar customers by the gun industry, meaning that they are well armed.

But what non-gun owners may not understand is that these men are not your average gun-owning Americans. They are people who have fallen into a cult where it is normal to organize your entire culture around weapons of war. Some make it official by claiming membership in the Oath Keepers or Three Percenters. Some are just average suburban dads who’ve been radicalized. They laugh at “Let’s Go Brandon” chants, drink Black Rifle Coffee, and wave “Come and Take It” flags at political rallies.

Last year I watched as one of these armed men verbally attacked my own young son at a peaceful protest. The man was wearing a MAGA hat and had come to a local BLM rally with more than a hundred like-minded fellows claiming to be on guard against Antifa and serving as self-appointed “Second Amendment patriots.” But as the guy began shoving his finger into my son’s chest in a fit of rage it became clear that they were really there to intimidate citizens who, like us, were alarmed by the frightening rightward lurch of our country.

These cosplay soldiers are kept at a high state of readiness by OAN, Fox News, and various right-wing conspiracy theorists. Watch that video one more time. Do you doubt that if Donald Trump gave the command, that man in Idaho would be part of an armed mob rushing out to kill? These people have already shown us who they are. How many more times until we believe them?

Armed men in Georgia pursued and killed Ahmaud Arbery believing that they were justified in making a “citizen’s arrest.” In Illinois, a 17-year old boy was inspired to grab his AR-15, drive to a neighboring state, and take the law—and the lives of others—into his own hands. At which point Kyle Rittenhouse was viewed on the right not as a cautionary tale, but a hero. Conservative media personalities celebrated that he had “a couple of pelts on the wall” and was “gonna have to fight off conservative chicks with a bat.”

Where do people get these ideas? Perhaps they were following the NRA’s call to deliver a “clenched fist of truth.”

Like so many things in modern politics, this toxic culture was developed and normalized by external forces—in this case, the NRA and the gun industry. I had a front-row seat to the scores of fetishized firearms media campaigns over the last 15 years. I watched as people like Rittenhouse were held up as the ideal gun customer: young, bold, determined, and well-armed. Young men were even encouraged to be the aggressors by predictive campaigns like the Spike’s Tactical advertisement in which heavily armed men heroically wade into protests with their loaded rifles. Advertising works.

There was a time when few Americans would have supported racist vigilantes—a time when most gun owners would have used Kyle Rittenhouse as a way to scare young people into being responsible with firearms. But there was also a time—not long ago—when self-appointed militiamen who believed in QAnon conspiracies were the stuff of fiction. Today they’re running for office.

What we are seeing is nothing less than the normalization of early-stage authoritarianism.

Trump adviser Steve Bannon recently bragged about developing more than 20,000 “shock troops” for the next election. We’ve been seeing these troops in action, in isolated incidents for four years. We saw them collectively on January 6. We’ve read the reports from their think tanks planning for violence. They’re asking, right now, “When can we use the guns?”

After four years of chaos, Americans would rather get back to their lives believing that the crisis has passed. But it hasn’t.

The lights are still flashing red.
_________

Praetorian Guard anyone? Revolutions and praetorians both tend to eat their creators as readily as their victims.

[TopHatter]

A Capitol police officer wished a 'Happy Veterans Day' to all who served - except those who were involved in the Capitol attack

A Capitol Police officer delivered a pointed message to Capitol rioters in his seemingly innocuous Veterans Day tweet Thursday.

"Happy Veterans Day to all the vets of this nation!!! You are all appreciated more than you know, your dedication is the catalyst we need to make this country great," officer Harry A. Dunn wrote to start.

"EXCEPT THOSE WHO WERE INVOLVED IN THE JANUARY 6TH INSURRECTION," Dunn clarified in a further addendum to his tweet.

Dunn made headlines earlier this year after delivering emotional testimony about his experience during the deadly Capitol riot before the House Select Committee amid its investigation into the insurrection.

The Capitol police officer, who is Black, said he was called the n-word during the siege and faced an onslaught of racist abuse online following the attack. Dunn told lawmakers it was the first time he was called the slur while in uniform, and said the name-calling followed his admission to a group of rioters that he voted for President Joe Biden.

"You hear that, guys, this n----r voted for Joe Biden!" he said a woman in a pink "MAGA" shirt told the crowd. "Boo! Fucking n----r!" he said the crowd began to chant.

Dunn, who is a 13-year veteran of the force, announced earlier this week that he will run for head of the Capitol Police in the force's upcoming November 18 election, as first reported by Roll Call. Dunn is challenging five-year incumbent Gus Papathanasiou as the battered force looks toward the future following a tough year that left two officers dead following the January 6 riot and another officer dead after a car attack on Capitol premises this spring.

"Simply and quite frankly, it's time for not only a change, but a transformation," Dunn wrote in his candidate statement, reviewed by Politico. "This is a big moment that we are in, and we need to change the way the Capitol Police Union is not only viewed, but more importantly operated."

On Tuesday, Dunn quote-tweeted an announcement of his candidacy with the statement: "How much complaining can you do if you're not trying to be a part of the solution..."

The officer did not immediately return Insider's request for comment regarding his Veterans Day tweet.
___________

[JRT]

Liberal Hypocrisy is Fueling American Inequality. Here’s How. | NYT Opinion

The New York Times
09 November 2021

Liberal Hypocrisy is Fueling American Inequality. Here’s How. | NYT Opinion
The New York Times2,609,513 viewsNov 9, 2021
It’s easy to blame the other side. And for many Democrats, it’s obvious that Republicans are thwarting progress toward a more equal society.

But what happens when Republicans aren’t standing in the way?

In many states — including California, New York and Illinois — Democrats control all the levers of power. They run the government. They write the laws. And as we explore in the video above, they often aren’t living up to their values.

In key respects, many blue states are actually doing worse than red states. It is in the blue states where affordable housing is often hardest to find, there are some of the most acute disparities in education funding and economic inequality is increasing most quickly.

Instead of asking, “What’s the matter with Kansas?” Democrats need to spend more time pondering, “What’s the matter with California?”

.

...

[TopHatter]

Trump's defense secretary says his goal was to stop him from using the military against Americans in 'the days before, the day of, and the days after the election:' book

As President Donald Trump's secretary of defense at the time of the 2020 presidential election, Mark Esper spent his final months in the administration working to make sure that Trump did not use the country's armed forces against its own citizens.

That is according to ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl who talked to Esper for his forthcoming book, "Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show," a copy of which was obtained by Insider in advance of its Tuesday release.

"His goal, he told me, was to prevent the use of the military against American citizens during 'the days before, the day of, and the days after the election,'" Karl wrote, quoting Esper.

Esper's efforts are consistent with more public actions taken in summer 2020, when there were serious concerns Trump would use the military to respond to nationwide unrest following the murder of George Floyd by a Minnesota police officer.

Trump suggested he would use the Insurrection Act to send active-duty military personnel to respond to protests in a tough speech in the Rose Garden on June 1, 2020, saying if state or local officials failed to protect their communities "then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them."

The 214-year-old Insurrection Act is an exception to the Posse Comitatus Act barring federal troops from engaging in domestic law enforcement operations. It permits the president to deploy US forces inside the US in response to domestic insurrections beyond the capabilities of regular law enforcement.

President George H.W. Bush took this drastic step in 1992, deploying roughly 4,000 Marines and soldiers to assist National Guardsmen to quell the Los Angeles riots in the wake of the acquittal of four police officers in the beating of Rodney King. One of the Marine commanders was John Kelly, who decades later would become Trump's White House chief of staff until his removal in 2019.

Concerns that Trump would take such a step in response to ongoing protests were exacerbated by the movement of 1,600 active-duty soldiers to areas just outside in Washington, DC the next day. These troops were ultimately never deployed to the capital.

Two days after Trump made his speech at the White House warning that he might send in the military, Esper publicly addressed reporters at the Pentagon, telling them that "the option to use active-duty forces in a law enforcement role should only be used as a matter of last resort and only in the most urgent and dire of situations."

"We are not in one of those situations now," he said, adding, "I do not support invoking the Insurrection Act."

Esper's remarks, which broke with those of the president, infuriated the Trump White House and sparked speculation that Esper would be fired. The former defense secretary acknowledged to Karl that he even thought he'd be fired.

Asked about what might have happened had he and others, including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, not pushed back, Esper told Karl that he thinks "we would have had active-duty troops on the streets, you know, with rifles and bayonets."

"He wanted 10,000 active-duty troops in DC and then to prepare to use them across the country to deal with the violence and the protests," he said, referring to Trump. "It was that simple."

Esper told Karl that after that June incident, he was determined to remain in the job through election, which many anticipated might be contested, raising concerns about the military's role.

In the weeks leading up to the election, as concerns grew, Milley stressed that there is "no role" for the military in presidential elections.

"We have established a very long 240-year tradition of an apolitical military that does not get involved in domestic politics," he told NPR a few weeks before Election Day.

Esper held his position as the defense secretary through the election, but only just. He was "terminated" by the former president just two days after most major news organizations declared Joe Biden the winner of the 2020 presidential election.

Insider reached out to Esper about the reporting in Karl's book but has not yet received a response.
____________

Well, at least Esperanto came through in the clutch. Trump certainly had no problem turning the might of the U.S. military on American citizens...god knows there was plenty of Trump's Praetorian Guard "standing down and standing by"

[GVChamp]

Well as an historian of the 19th & 20th Century America I have heard....and taught all of the events you are talking about. Hell, Ken Burns even covered Confederate Unionists in his Civil War series all the way back in the early 1990s.

And while you are absolutely correct that the Democratic Party was guilty of many of those things you highlight. Absolutely...it is undeniable. But what is also undeniable is the parties flipped starting with Truman (and a case could be made with FDR and the New Deal) and running through Johnson's Great Society. And yes, he needed the Northern moderate Republicans to help pass it. But the Southern Democrats who opposed all switched parties to the GOP...it was Nixon's Southern Strategy.

Here is an excellent analysis.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlo...hern-strategy/



While the roots of the Republican party back in 1856 was a lose organization of Whigs, Know Nothings, Wide Awakes and Abolitionists. But with the success of the US in Civil War the Republicans became the party of business. The Democrats remained the party of the farmer and working class. The Grange Movement and the Progressives were a manifestation of the party.

Again, there is no denying the Democratic Party's roll in the racist policies as they represented the working class White man and Blacks were seen as a threat to their livelihood. But what started to break down these thoughts was the ways the African American populace came forward in 2 different wars to aid the country which rarely returned the love.

But all of that said there is no denying that the Democratic Party of the 21st Century is nothing like the Democratic Party of the early 20th Century...and the same could be said for the Republican Party.


And if you sat through my American History 102 at ST Leo's University or US History 2 at John Tyler Community College you would be taught all of this in my classroom.

And for me the shift in the parties was current events for me growing up in the 60s & 70s and coming of age in the 80s and seeing all of this happen in real time.

The problem is "Nixon's Southern Strategy" (at least at a national level) did not produce disproportionate or necessary EVs to sway elections. Nixon destroyed McGovern, Ford LOST the South, Reagan/Bush destroyed all comers...it's not really until the 90s when the GOP starts getting disproportionate votes in the South (at the national level).

At that point, you're literally talking about different generations. The electorates of the 1990s are not the electorates of the 1960s, and especially not the 1940s when the New Deal coalition started to crack.

That's leaving aside that Democratic policy-makers can still be pretty racist mo-fos in terms of policy application, especially at the local level. It's not like the Chicago police force or transportation policy was assembled by Republicans.

[Parihaka]

it’s not just white people: Democrats are losing normal voters of all races

democrats fear they are losing white swing voters over racial politics. Three studies suggest that the party’s elite culture may be the real problem.


ryan grim
november 16 2021, 8:01 a.m.

last monday, a democratic firm hosted focus groups with women in virginia who voted in 2017 for democratic gov. Ralph northam, in 2020 for democratic president joe biden, and then this month for republican gov.-elect glenn youngkin. It was centered on suburban women: A group that pivoted significantly to the right in the governor’s election.

Consultant danny barefoot said that anvil strategies called roughly 30,000 people in virginia. Most didn’t answer, but several hundred of them fit the criteria he was looking for: People who voted democrat, democrat, republican in the last three elections. Those people were called back and offered a $100 gift card if they’d do a lunch-hour zoom and talk about why they voted the way they did. Ninety-six women, a fifth of whom were not white, were broken into three different sessions. Barefoot sat in on one of them and got permission from the funders to share quotes and results.


Focus groups are put together differently than surveys, which weigh the responses to reflect the population at large. While 96 respondents isn’t enough for a robust polling sample, it’s a chance to dig deeper into the views of a slice of the electorate. Virginia is about two-thirds white, and this sample was 79 percent white — so slightly whiter than the state at large but not by a ton. Eleven percent of them were black women, 6 percent latina, and 4 percent asian american. They came from around the state. Barefoot said he didn’t ask about college education, because what he was interested in was people who lived in the suburbs regardless of race or educational background.

What barefoot found is that while the women agreed with democrats on policy, they just didn’t connect with them. When asked which party had better policy proposals, the group members overwhelmingly said democrats. But when asked which party had cultural values closer to theirs, they cited republicans.

The biggest disconnect came on education. Barefoot found that school closures were likely a big part of their votes for youngkin and that frustration at school leadership over those closures bled into the controversy, pushed by republicans, around the injection of “critical race theory” into the public school setting, along with the question of what say parents should have in schools. One latina woman talked about how remote school foisted so much work on parents, yet later terry mcauliffe, the democratic nominee and former governor, would insist that parents should have no input in their children’s education. (that’s not exactly what he said, but that’s how it played.) as she put it: “they asked us to do all this work for months and then he says it’s none of our business now.”

when asked which party had better policy proposals, the group members overwhelmingly said democrats. When asked which party had cultural values closer to theirs, they cited republicans.

the anger they felt at democrats for the commonwealth’s covid-19 school closure policy became further evidence of a cultural gap between these working people and democratic elites, who broadly supported prolonged school closures while enjoying the opportunity to work remotely. Those with means decamped: Enrollment in fairfax county schools dropped 5 percent, and fell by 3.9 percent and 3.4 percent in arlington and loudoun counties, respectively. Those who were left behind organized parent groups to pressure the schools to reopen. Though the groups tended to be nonpartisan or bipartisan at the start, republican donors and conservative groups poured money and manpower into them, converting them into potent political weapons that blended anger at the closures with complaints about democratic board members prioritizing trendy social justice issues — all of it aimed at the november elections.

“they keep saying ‘a strong return to school,’ but there’s no details,” said saundra davis on fox news over the summer, co-founder of one large group, called the open fairfax public schools coalition. “their attention is on other things, like their pet projects and social justice issues, and the kids have been left to flounder and there’s still no plan for fall.”

“you’ll be surprised to know i’m a democrat,” she said. “i’ve tried to warn them that there’s a bipartisan tidal wave coming their way. They don’t look us in the eye, they don’t write us back. If we can’t recall them one by one, there’s an election in november.” that fall, davis cut an ad for youngkin, citing his commitment to keep schools open as decisive.

And while the group made a democrat angry at democrats the face of its opposition, behind her was a coterie of republican operatives. The bulk of the group’s financing came from n2 america, a conservative nonprofit, and republican gubernatorial candidate pete snyder. Its co-founder was a republican who lost a 2019 race for school board, and the rest of its officers were republican operatives too. A slick nonprofit named parents defending education was launched in 2020 to help guide the local groups. Little effort was made to conceal who was behind it: A longtime koch network operative, nicole neily, was placed at the helm of the “grassroots” organization. Aside from davis, nearly every mom and dad brought onto fox news to complain about critical race theory held a day job as a senior republican operative.

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it was the purest expression of the way republicans have driven the fight over schools and then capitalized on it. The fear of public schools indoctrinating our children has been a gop theme for its base voters for decades, but in the wake of trump’s rise, the party watched in horror as suburban voters recoiled from republicans into the arms of democrats. Casting about for an issue that could win some of them back — recall that this is a game of margins, not absolutes — the party landed on schools. Around the country, the conservative media apparatus, unrivaled by democrats, gave air cover to the schooling issue — handing local activists language to use, a story to tell, and the resources and platform to tell it.

The tactic was even more potent in northern virginia, where many professional republican operatives and lobbyists live. In loudoun county this november, mcauliffe outpaced youngkin 55 percent to 44. But biden had beaten trump there by 62 percent to 37. Youngkin’s showing was only 11,000 votes fewer than trump won a year earlier, while mcauliffe notched 50,000 fewer votes than biden had. While biden carried fairfax by 42 points, mcauliffe only took it by 31.

That the gop didn’t make even bigger inroads, given their heavy investment in the issue, may be the one silver lining for democrats — who, witnessing a dishonest astroturf campaign take shape and get twisted beyond all recognition on fox news, decided, perhaps understandably but to their later regret, to ignore the question. After mcauliffe’s debate gaffe, in which he delivered up the perfect sound bite to youngkin — “i don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach” — he took weeks to respond, initially not recognizing the danger. “everybody clapped when i said it,” mcauliffe insisted later.

Even where republicans spent heavily against outmatched democrats, they made only marginal gains in school board races. But if the issue continues to go uncontested, their luck may run out. National democrats have no coordinated response yet, leaving school board members — unstaffed, underfunded, borderline volunteers — hung out to dry, with nothing to rely on but mainstream media assertions that there’s actually nothing to see here.


a voter walks past election signs as she walks to the fairfax county government center polling location on election day in fairfax, va., on nov. 2, 2021.



Photo: Andrew caballero-reynolds/afp via getty images

in the virginia election, two arguments that have been running parallel in democratic circles for the past several years finally collided. One is the question of how democrats should position themselves in the ongoing culture war, with jockeying over fraught and contested concepts like wokeness and cancel culture. Critical race theory is one example of this; democrats can’t seem to agree on whether it’s a good thing that should be taught and defended or a republican fabrication that’s not being taught in elementary schools at all. The other is the round-and-round debate over race and class: Are voters who flee democrats motivated more by economic anxiety or by racial resentment and eroding white privilege?

While these debates have unfolded, democrats have seen a steady erosion in support among working-class voters of all races, while gaining support among the most highly educated voters. That movement would point toward class divisions driving voter behavior, but the rearing up of critical race theory as a central plank of the republican party appeared to throw the question open again. Maybe it’s racism, after all?

Properly understanding how different voting blocs understand the terms of the debate, however, unlocks the contradiction: The culture war is not a proxy for race, it’s a proxy for class. The democratic problem with working-class voters goes far beyond white people.

Now, for the portion of the republican base heavily predisposed to racial prejudice, the culture war and issues like critical race theory easily work as dog whistles calling them to the polls. But for many voters, and not just white ones, critical race theory is in a basket with other cultural microaggressions directed at working people by the elites they see as running the democratic party. Take, for instance, one of the women in barefoot’s focus groups. When asked if democrats share their cultural values, she said, “they fight for the right things and i usually vote for them but they believe some crazy things. Sometimes i feel like if i don’t know the right words for things they think i am a bigot.”

for many voters, and not just white ones, critical race theory is in a basket with other cultural microaggressions directed at working people by the elites they see as running the democratic party.

barefoot’s results rhymed with the conclusions of a memo put out by strategist andrew levison, who has long made the argument that democratic efforts at connecting with working-class voters are fundamentally flawed. The memo, published after the virginia election but not directly responding to it, looks at how democrats can win support among a growing number of anti-trump republicans. Rather than convince the entire white working class — which is typically approximated in polls by looking for white voters without a college degree — levison argues that democrats should “identify a distinct, persuadable sector of the white working class” and then figure out how to get members of that specific group to vote democratic.

Levison, citing data from multiple election cycles, notes that democrats roughly win about a third of white working-class votes. The party loses about a third right out of the gate: Hardcore right-wing people who would never consider voting for democrats and think even a democrat like senate majority leader chuck schumer — known for much of his career as “wall street chuck” — is a flaming socialist and a traitor. Levison calls that third “extremists,” and argues they are not gettable under any circumstances; he distinguishes them from the final third, which is made up of what he calls “cultural traditionalists.”


strategist andrew levison’s characterizations of “extremist” and “cultural traditionalist” voters.



Screenshot: The intercept

his category of cultural traditionalists, he acknowledges, is not meant to capture every voter who is gettable by democrats; likewise, many cultural traditionalists have competing and conflicting views on various issues. But just as corporations work to create consumer profiles before going to market with an ad campaign, democrats need to define who that persuadable person among the white working class is. To do so, levison relies on years of survey data, much of it collected by working america, a community affiliate of the afl-cio, that does tens of thousands of in-person interviews with working-class people around the country each year looking to identify those who are persuadable.

As levison defines them, cultural traditionalists are people who don’t follow the news closely but have an easy-going personality and an open mind — contrasted with cranky, short-tempered people who are more likely to fall into the “extremist” category. They believe in patriotism and the “american way of life” but also believe that diversity, pluralism, and tolerance are essential characteristics of that american way of life. When it comes to race, these traditionalists have something of a michael scott view, rooted in the cliche that they “don’t see race” or “don’t see color.” they also have religious and moral values they’d happily describe as “old fashioned” but say they have no problem with people who have different views. When these voters shifted their views on marriage equality, accepting it as something that ought to be legal even if they were skeptical of it, the dam had broken.
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cultural traditionalists, according to levison, also think of government as often wasteful and inefficient and of politicians as corrupt and bought off — but they don’t think government is inherently evil and can be convinced that it can do good things. Meanwhile, they think democrats are a party that “primarily represents social groups like educated liberals and racial or ethnic minorities while having little interest, understanding, or concern for ordinary white working people like themselves.”

levison’s distinction between these cultural traditionalists and what he calls the extremists, except for that last part, can plausibly apply to many, many black and latino working-class people as well. And even that last part — that democrats don’t have much interest or concern for ordinary white working people, specifically — is not really a value judgment, it’s a widespread interpretation of democratic messaging that is not uniquely held by white voters.

They’re the sort of voter that would be gettable for democrats without compromising on a racial justice agenda if it is sold as the united states continuously striving to close the gap between reality and its values. But, levison adds, there are a number of cultural issues on which cultural traditionalists and extremists align, and republicans have become adept at exploiting them. He defines them as: Pride in their culture, background, and community; respect for tradition; love of freedom; belief in personal responsibility, character, and hard work; and respect for law, strict law enforcement, and the right of individual self-defense.

there are a number of cultural issues on which cultural traditionalists and extremists align, and republicans have become adept at exploiting them.

in other words, they express the same sensibility as the women in barefoot’s group who wanted to teach their children a positive history of the united states. One suburban black woman in his group put it this way: “our kids should be taught about slavery and all of that awfulness but america is also a good country and that’s what i want my kids to learn.”

few people read the full 1619 project put out by the new york times in 2019, which is a rich tapestry of thoughtful essays and reporting about the role of slavery in the development of the united states. Instead, to the extent it has seeped into the public consciousness, it has done so around the notion of rejecting 1776 as the date of our birth and supplanting it with 1619 as our “true founding,” in a phrase that became so controversial it was deleted.

Times editor jake silverstein wrote in the introductory essay:

1619. It is not a year that most americans know as a notable date in our country’s history. Those who do are at most a tiny fraction of those who can tell you that 1776 is the year of our nation’s birth. What if, however, we were to tell you that this fact, which is taught in our schools and unanimously celebrated every fourth of july, is wrong, and that the country’s true birth date, the moment that its defining contradictions first came into the world, was in late august of 1619?

that section too has since been edited, blunting some of its edge, and creating another situation where supporters of the project at once say that there was nothing off-base about it, while changing it in response to the criticism. As schools around the country began teaching the project, republicans made a national issue out of it, one that can’t be disentangled from the fight over critical race theory.

Liberals often suggest that parents who are skeptical of the new york times’s 1619 project reject the idea of teaching the truth about american history. More often, as with the woman in the focus group, it’s a question of framing rather than truth. Believing or conceding that we as a people are defined by the worst of the past might actually be true, but the concession is seen as cutting off any hope of a better future. As an adult, if that’s the view you’ve come to — and i flirt with it often myself — it’s a more than understandable conclusion. But we want our children to remain hopeful about the possibility of a better world, since it’s the world they’ll inherit and build after we’re all gone. The argument that slavery was essential to the development of capitalism in the united states is well-established scholarship by this point. But absent a call to overthrow capitalism, that notion, particularly when compressed into something an elementary school student could absorb, loses any meaning beyond nihilism. And so of course parents of all races reject the framing and look askance at a party of elites who seem to be blithely suggesting — though not really meaning it — the overthrow of a capitalist system that benefits them before all others. And if they’re not suggesting that, then what?

Levison, meanwhile, argues that democrats need to lean into the kind of patriotic rhetoric that makes many progressives recoil. Democrats have the potential to split “extremists” off from “traditionalists” by couching democratic values as truly american, and extremists as “un-american.” as an example of such possible rhetoric, he offers, is, “i love the american flag as much as any american but i would never use a flagpole flying our flag as a club to assault other americans that i call my ‘enemies.’ that is not the american way.” or: “the values i grew up with are good values and i want them to endure. But the values of the people who want to turn americans against each other and divide our country are not my values.”


an attendee signs the campaign bus of glenn youngkin, republican gubernatorial candidate for virginia, during a campaign stop at the alexandria farmers market in alexandria, va., on oct. 30, 2021.



Photo: Eric lee/bloomberg via getty images

at the end of barefoot’s focus group, the women were asked if they’d have considered changing their vote if democrats had passed the bipartisan infrastructure bill. The bill, which was passed by the house the following week, is something that virginia sen. Mark warner, a democrat, has claimed would have helped win the election for mcauliffe.

Ninety-one percent of the suburban women said no, 9 percent said yes, and one woman laughed and said, “what does that have to do with anything?”

she’s right to laugh. But that 9 percent actually points to something hopeful. In a close race, a 9-point swing like that can matter. If democrats had passed the reconciliation bill as well and could talk about universal pre-k, the child tax credit, clean energy investments, and subsidies for child care, they might have won even more back. And if democrats were out of touch culturally, though, that swing could be even higher

a major new survey from jacobin, yougov, and the center for working-class politics points to another way that cultural chasm can be bridged: With candidates who focus on these economic issues but don’t talk like juniors at oberlin.

The survey design was unusual: Instead of asking about issue preferences or messaging alone, it concocted prototypes of candidates and asked which of them was more appealing. When it came to a candidate’s background, the survey found — somewhat awkwardly for a socialist magazine — that voters of all races and classes had the most positive reaction to small-business owners. The most disliked candidates were ceos of fortune 500 companies. Working-class candidates — teachers, construction workers, and veterans — also fared well, though not as well as mom and pop.

Broadly, jacobin did not find evidence to support the great left hope that if the masses would turn out in full at the ballot box, they’d eagerly support democratic socialists candidates and policies. “many working-class voters in advanced economies have actually moved to the left on questions of economic policy (favoring more redistribution, more government spending on public goods, and more taxation of the very wealthy), while remaining culturally or socially moderate,” they write. They contrast this from where mainstream democrats have gone: Left on culture while “tempering their economic progressivism.”

but the survey also pointed to how they could be won over, and the results mapped with levison’s and barefoot’s findings. Language jacobin described as “woke” created a cultural barrier between voters and candidates that diminished support for both “woke progressive” and “woke moderate” candidates, while universal, populist language did best for democrats. Notably, “woke messaging decreased the appeal of other candidate characteristics,” they write. “for example, candidates employing woke messaging who championed either centrist or progressive economic, health care, or civil rights policy priorities were viewed less favorably than their counterparts who championed the same priorities but opted for universalist messaging.” startlingly, the survey found a 30-plus point gap between support for a teacher running on a populist, universalist message versus a ceo running with a moderate economic platform, couched in woke rhetoric reminiscent of hillary clinton’s 2016 campaign.


a south carolina national guardsman meets a school bus as it arrives with black students at the lamar school on march 23, 1970, in lamar, s.c.



Photo: Bettmann archive/getty images

in today’s debate over critical race theory, it’s impossible not to hear echoes of the busing wars in the 1970s and ’80s. Like with busing, democratic elites are creating conflict within the working class while protecting their own class and cultural interests. By the early 1970s, white school districts had spent nearly two decades resisting brown v. Board of education, which outlawed segregation in schools, and national attention had turned to redlining and the dug-in segregation of housing.

The 1968 housing and urban development act had banned residential discrimination and empowered the federal government to forcibly integrate neighborhoods. In 1973, donald trump and his father were sued by the department of justice for racial segregation in their housing and settled two years later. That same year, a gallup survey asked black residents to choose from a list of preferred solutions to school desegregation, and the top choice was the most intuitive: Neighborhood integration and an end to redlining. Only 9 percent of black residents named busing as their preferred approach to school desegregation which, again, is intuitive: Attending the neighborhood school is always preferable, all things being equal, than being bused somewhere else. The same was true for white voters: Just 4 percent supported busing.

But neighborhood integration would require white residents to give something up. Even today, according to law professor dorothy brown, the author of “the whiteness of wealth: How the tax system impoverishes black americans — and how we can fix it,” when neighborhoods integrate, with the black population reaching at least 10 percent, property values either decline or grow more slowly. Facing that systematic decline in wealth, many white residents fought neighborhood housing integration. Busing, meanwhile, could be avoided by the well-off by sending their kids to private school. And so democrats went with busing over housing. Republicans began to use busing in campaigns as a dog whistle to bigoted parents resistant to desegregating education, banking on the fact that there was additional political gain to be had among a majority of voters who opposed it for a variety of reasons. In 1981, gallup found 60 percent of black voters supported busing as a means to integration, though opposition was strong as well.

“‘antibusing’” is a code word for racism and rejection,” wrote jesse jackson in 1982. “true, some blacks oppose busing, but not for racial reasons. Blacks sometimes are against busing because all decisions about desegregation are being made for them, not with and by them.”

battles over language are by definition divorced from the material reality that structures inequality.

white parents who couldn’t afford private school fled to the suburbs, creating new school districts along racial lines; since busing only happened within a school district, that meant it was largely going on inside big cities, with the suburbs immune. White working-class voters who remained in the cities noted rightly that the professional class in the suburbs, which proudly supported busing in the city, was merely signaling its own virtue, while engaging in the same bigoted resistance to — or avoidance of — integration.

Today’s white democratic elites are also confronted with school systems that have substantially resegregated, persistent racial income and wealth gaps, and test scores that reflect those patent inequalities. Their answer has been to thoughtfully interrogate the concepts of white privilege and systemic racism by examining interpersonal relationships and developing a new vocabulary that gives its speaker license to feel as righteous about things today as white folks did in the boston suburbs in 1975. But, as jamelle bouie writes, battles over language are by definition divorced from the material reality that structures inequality.

we must remember that the problem of racism — of the denial of personhood and of the differential exposure to exploitation and death — will not be resolved by saying the right words or thinking the right thoughts.

That’s because racism does not survive, in the main, because of personal belief and prejudice. It survives because it is inscribed and reinscribed by the relationships and dynamics that structure our society, from segregation and exclusion to inequality and the degradation of labor.

bouie answers with martin luther king jr.’s admonition to “look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth.”

telling the truth about king and his politics has always been too much for american liberals. The vulgar version of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” initiatives popular in boardrooms and school workshops is meant to fill the void created by a refusal to assault the roots of racism; they provide a way to talk about racism that strips it of its material reality and slots it instead into the world of individual self-improvement. Without the systemic context, it merely trains people in how to enact roles, identify people failing to play their proper role, and properly “call them out.”

one woman in the focus group, asked how she understood critical race theory, said, “it teaches our kids america is defined by the worst parts of its past.” instead of hiring corporate consultants to pretend to tear down white supremacy in the classroom, democrats could dedicate themselves to the pursuit of living up to the values on which the nation claims it was founded. Frederick douglass’s famous speech delivered in 1852 — “what, to the american slave, is your fourth of july?” — pounds at the conscience of the nation by describing the gap between its founding principles and its everyday reality.

“i have said that the declaration of independence is the ring-bolt to the chain of your nation’s destiny; so, indeed, i regard it. The principles contained in that instrument are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost,” douglass said.

Teaching the truth about american history, including all of its awfulness, doesn’t require teaching kids that they or their country are defined by the worst of its past. Quite the opposite: America’s greatest heroes have always defined their project within the outlines of the promise and spirit of the nation’s founding, daring and challenging it to live up to its promises.

“notwithstanding the dark picture i have this day presented of the state of the nation, i do not despair of this country,” douglass concluded on that fourth of july. “there are forces in operation, which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery. ‘the arm of the lord is not shortened,’ and the doom of slavery is certain. I, therefore, leave off where i began, with hope — while drawing encouragement from the declaration of independence, the great principles it contains, and the genius of american institutions.”

that’s something “cultural traditionalists” can all get behind. It would still, of course, trigger the far right. But the resulting fight would isolate the extremists, exposing their hostility to douglass’s message as the raw racism it is. Democrats win the argument when it’s about charlottesville, but lose if it’s loudoun county. But loudoun county isn’t charlottesville, just as glenn youngkin isn’t donald trump. Let the right lose its mind attacking frederick douglass. Make him and his allies like robert smalls — those who fought oppression against the worst odds — the true heroes of american history. And not one more word, for the love of god, from robin diangelo.