Nesrie
1864
Trump is racist.
But as for some of the GOP riding the racist wave to get what they want…
The inheritance tax. Corporate Taxes. Taxes at the top, changes to the the backbone of our government and the ability to control a news network and still call it news… these are decades of purposeful targets. The things the way they are today are not an accident, it’s a feature.
Kids in cages, Fox News, the way campaign contributions work and the tax rates, they’re connected.
The other hidden “Income Tax” which always gets missed here are Payroll taxes, which are progressive to a point, and AFAIK the only time they’ve gone down in my lifetime is when Obama did a Payroll Tax Holiday as part of the stimulus. Of course, that kind of tax cut is never, ever considered by the GOP.
RichVR
1866
So then… the tax discussion here goes on?
I think Yglesias is spot on. Early on, Micheal Lewis in The 5th Risk, documented the damage the administration has done in place like the Dept. of Energy, the Dept of Agriculture in keeping our nuclear weapons safe, and their waste, or food safety were scary enough, but that was written early in the administration. I’m not sure if they were deliberately making our weapons and food less safe, I suppose Perdue Farms could benefit, but ignoring controls on nuclear weapons, I don’t think anyone benefits. Are just too stupid to understand why it matters or just didn’t give a shit. (Likely all of the above).
The reason doesn’t really matter why, throughout the government, career official are retiring, resigning in disgust, or being demoted/transferred in massive numbers, and as result, important government functions aren’t getting done. While we are distracted watching the Trump tweet train-wreck, find new a and creative ways of being even more horrifying each day…
rowe33
1868
No discussion of Iger is complete without mentioning all the layoffs we had at Disney throughout my time there. Job creator? Meh. I mean they’ve been talking about more layoffs lately with the Fox deal.
Has this been brought up yet?
Hey, at least the guy isn’t trying to hide it!
Nesrie
1872
Yep, honesty at last. A member of the GOP telling everyone what they really mean when they say Make America Great Again.
Timex
1873
That dude was apparently an independent candidate in 2016 when this was made. His restaurant has since closed.
This will be his 3rd run at the seat as an (I).
Nesrie
1875
Ugh! Then the tweet is a total lie. It has nothing to do with 2020.
rowe33
1876
His wiki entry sure tells it like it is:
Nesrie
1877
Freedom Party is a hate group… oh. Well, props for the GOP I guess since even they won’t run him.
rowe33
1878
If it happened to be a safe Blue district and they thought Tyler could win it for them then no doubt the GOP would be running him. As it is, seems like they’re already set with the incumbent.
To anyone who wants something else to keep them up at night…
One of the conference organizers, the Israeli think tanker Yarom Hazony, has written an entire book (“The Virtue of Nationalism”) to rehabilitate a doctrine that has been in bad odor since the 1940s. Like a Marxist true believer claiming that the Soviet Union did not represent “true” communism, Hazony writes that the Nazis weren’t actually nationalists but, rather, “imperialists.” This merely makes his book silly. What makes it sinister is that he embraces tribalism (“By a nation, I mean a number of tribes with a shared heritage”), disdains minority rights (he advocates “the overwhelming dominance of a single, cohesive nationality … whose cultural dominance is plain and unquestioned”) and rejects the “individual freedom” that lies at the heart of the American project. Trump accuses his political foes of being “anti-American”; the appellation more nearly fits his more fervent followers.
Another right-wing writer who explicitly rejects our founding ideals is Sohrab Ahmari of the New York Post. In May, he launched a nasty attack on David French, a social conservative who is critical of Trump. Ahmari, a zealous Catholic convert, rejects “autonomy-maximizing liberalism,” and even “civility and decency.” He advocates fighting “the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good.” I’m not sure exactly what that means, but it sounds an awful lot like Spain in the days when Francisco Franco blended fascism and Catholicism to justify his dictatorship.
It’s not just a few Trumpian intellectuals who are eager to embrace theocracy. So are some Trumpian politicians. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) doesn’t just reject abortion rights; he rejects the entire conception of individual liberty that underlies the Supreme Court’s abortion decisions. In May, he gave a commencement address in which he mocked the notion that individuals should have “the right to choose your own meaning, define your own values, emancipate yourself from God by creating your own self.” The well-educated evangelical Christian (Stanford University, Yale Law) condemned this as the “Pelagian heresy” (after a fifth-century Christian who taught that people could attain goodness through individual effort). It is more accurately described as the founders’ vision for a country where all are free to pursue happiness in their own way. At the Ritz-Carlton, Hawley employed a term that has often been used as a euphemism for “Jews” by excoriating “the cosmopolitan elite” that he claims secretly controls America.
But the real star of the “national conservatism” conference, reports Jacob Heilbrunn in the New York Review of Books, was Fox host Tucker Carlson. An isolationist and nativist, he has called Iraqis “semiliterate primitive monkeys” and said immigrants make “our own country poor and dirtier and more divided.” At the Ritz-Carlton, which is a subsidiary of the largest hotel company in the world, Carlson’s theme was, “Big Business Hates Your Family.” (Maybe not Carlson’s family: His stepmother is an heir to the Swanson frozen-food fortune.)
There has already been talk of Carlson running for president, and, Heilbrunn wrote, “Carlson’s own coy disavowal on the podium was hardly a denial.” Tucker in ’24? Don’t laugh. Weep. The Fox host is more intelligent and disciplined than Trump. He could well be the new leader of authoritarianism in America. If that were to happen, we may look back nostalgically on our present craziness as the calm before the storm.
He’s the clear choice for Proud Boys and Richard Spencer who think DJT’s white supremacy has been disappointing overall.
RichVR
1881
When a shitgibbon isn’t shitty enough.
ShivaX
1882
Just more proof that the party is the disease and Trump just a symptom.
Enidigm
1883
My drive-by take is that as incredibly frustrating and annoying as this stuff is, we actually do need to either do the heavy lifting or renovating, depending on your point of view, of what it actually means to have a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural society, and how such a society can actually function. I suspect this means devolving to states along with increasing state-to-state border controls in practice.
But the nation-state in the 20th Century was explicitly founded on the idea of ethnicity, and Nationalism and Ethnicity are intimately bound together. Look at Turkish expulsion of the Greeks in the 50s and 60s - from 200,000 to about 2,000 more or less. Look at the treatment of Uyghurs in Han China, the treatment of the Rohingya, the panic of Brexit, the race riots in France in 2005, the mocking and wanton cruelty at America’s border on asylum seekers. That the US avoided this problem until recently is because many Americans no longer see the “American Project” as being about individual freedom and liberty, or take freedom and liberty to mean something selfish and asocial / anti-social, which started after the 1990s removed the last real ideological threat and opponent. Now that we don’t care about Freedom and Liberty, conformity and tribal identity are coming to the fore, like everywhere else.
America today is increasing two groups of people that increasingly don’t want to live together but are forced to, not by choice but by compulsion, whose values are at odds with one another. It’s obvious that common ground exists - the question is whether the kinds of media which could unify a country in the early 20th C is now so diverse it will drive a country apart in the 21st.
