4378

Since I have not stated a goal, you have no idea what it is and certainly not whether I am achieving it.

Ronald Reagan is and has always been a racist. He was viewed as a racist, called a racist, and rejected as a racist long before some people suddenly discovered this fact in 2019. And if his worshipers still can’t add that to the list of his faults, that’s not his shortcoming.

4379

Is your goal not stopping Trump from destroying your country?

Because if it’s not, you’re an idiot.

4380

Fuck you Timex.

I called that man a racist before the tapes, and it wasn’t because I was wrong or that i was the idiot. The people in denial are the reason we have that asshole in the White House to begin with, and you’re an idiot if you can’t see the GOP cleared this path for him decades ago.

4382

Pointless.

4383

Just own it. It’s not I like didn’t see.

But please do keep telling me everyone didn’t know, you know, except the people that man actually used as target practice.

4384

People knew and said he was a racist at the time. Google ‘strapping young bucks Reagan’, or ‘Reagan Philadelphia Mississippi’.

4385

Can you even explain what this means? How does saying Reagan was racist equate him with Trump? How does it harm anyone’s goals?

4386

The entire GOP ever since the Civil Rights realignment has been and remains racist as fuck. Why bother arguing about who is Grand Wizard and who is merely a Shitty Dragon?

4387

Because it is important, hugely important, to know and recognize where we are today did not start with Trump. It didn’t start with his campaign, or his birther attacks, or his command of Twitter. This is a culmination and a purposeful tactic that started decades ago as an easy means to take and maintain power from a complicit group under the guise of claims of economic superiority and freedom.

One of the most prominent things Trump is doing differently is voicing publicly, out there for the world to see, what has been talked about for years… except it was never really a secret. It was just easier to excuse, gloss over or deny the existence of what was obviously there when coded words and private conversations were used instead of public declarations followed by weak ass denials.

4388

Pete went on Fox and told it how it is.

4389

I’ve got so much love for that dude. Gonna break my heart when he has to make way for Poppy Joe.

4390

The reason for the change isn’t because the Republican politicians changed their views. It’s that they need to go this low to whip up their base into enough of a frenzy to win.

They’ve always been this bad. They’re just being more blatant now because their base has radicalized enough that they can get away with it, and they’ve disgusted everyone else.

They do throw the occasional sop to moderation, but it’s more to convince their more squeamish followers that they aren’t rabid racists than it is to convert the minorities they despise (they are ok with the minorities that they can get away with giving honorary white status to)

4391

Yes, Buttigieg said it exactly correctly.

4392

That’s my point. I am sick of hearing excuses and trying to make Trump seem like some unforeseen aberration when he is the culmination of the Republican party, racism and all. It’s willful ignorance or just lack of caring that would lead anyone to believe that Reagan wasn’t racist until suddenly one sentence came out, on record. At no point did I call Reagan and Trump exactly the same though.

4393

It’s also pretty tone deaf for any white man to tell a woman of color that her thoughts about reagan being racist are wrong and that she ‘needs to have some sense of tactics here’

No she doesn’t. She gets to have her thoughts and even say them, whether some libertarian white guy likes it or not.

4394

There’s little point to trying to explain it further. The posts are there, for folks who actually want to read them. If that’s actually what you think they say, well, not much i can do.

4395
4396

Ugh, the dude is too damn old

4397

This is bullshit. There’s certainly latent racism in all of white America, but overt racism? No. My parents never uttered a racist statement during their whole lives. No one I was raised around did. I was shocked the first time I heard a racist joke… in high school. For my whole life, the norm in American life has been structural racism: racism without racists. Or racism that’s more subtle and even subconscious.

You understand that Nixon won 520 electoral votes in 1972. Should we avoid comparing Trump to Nixon if/when he gets impeached? Does winning a landslide make someone a good president? I don’t even understand what you’re saying here. Ever since the realignment during the Civil Rights movement, the GOP has been the party of white people, and has campaigned accordingly. Trump’s a buffoon, but he’s just saying overtly what Reagan did with dog whistles.

4398

Indeed, the hell we are experiencing now is what happens when we stop shaming overt racism. That’s the difference with Trump; not that he’s racist when his Republican ‘conservative’ predecessors were not, but that he is willing to be openly racist and encourage open racism and thereby encourage the open hatred and violence that always results.