The NYT couldn’t have written a better exemplar of the liberal so-half-true-that-it’s-dangerously-false account of how conservative American politics became a xenophobic hellscape. It’s remarkable they missed so much history in such a lengthy account. 1/7 nytimes.com/2018/06/23/opi…
As I wrote at @jacobinmag: establishment “predecessors alongside nativist right and their mouthpieces on Fox News and talk radio helped move conservative Overton Window on immigration so far to the right that by 2016 it perfectly framed Trump.” 2/7 jacobinmag.com/2018/06/trump-…
What about Obama’s mass deportations in backfiring effort to placate the nativists, hundreds of miles of border wall signed into law by Bush, and Bill Clinton’s assertion that undocumented immigrants are “people whose first act is to break the law as they enter our country”? 3/7
NYT editorial ignores or was written by people ignorant of deep structural roots of Trump’s nativist appeal—wrt both rhetoric and policy. Theirs is a fairy tale of noble moderates struggling to do good, repeatedly thwarted by right-wing rubes with bad ideas in their heads. 4/7
This account doesn’t match actual history. And while I don’t like being mean on the internet (mostly because I’m not very good at it), this editorial is disgraceful. 5/7
It ignores the very story that we must correctly understand in order to stop not only Trump but also the massive and not-at-all-new machinery of migrant detention, deportation, vilification and brutalization that he now so dangerously commands from the White House. 6/7
And thus the NYT editorial board, like the liberal establishment as a whole, is utterly and unforgivably complicit in the very horrors they purport to be so nobly resisting. We must demand much better than this. 7/7
