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Seth Cotlar @SethCotlar
, 5 tweets, 2 min read Read on Twitter
Orange County was the birthplace of the modern conservative movement. It was instrumental in the rise of Goldwater and Reagan. Its house delegation is now entirely blue.
The GOP losing Orange County is like the Democrats losing Berkeley. Imagine a political future in which a Republican wins in Berkeley. That’s how mind-blowing this Orange County shift would have seemed 10 years ago.
Historical OC results can be found here, in case you’re curious. ocvote.com/data/election-…
These are just two of the many historical works that have traced the rise of conservatism in suburban Southern California.
Ok, I should have said that the GOP losing the OC is more symbolic than “mind blowing.” The political winds have been shifting there for a while (McCain only won OC 51/47 in 2008), but those GOP House seats were very safe for decades. At least for now, they’ve all gone blue.
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Question for the news editors at the major networks. If you knew then what we know now about the Gulf of Tonkin incident, would you have broadcast this speech live? I think the answer is probably, "no way." Just keep that in mind tomorrow.
For those unfamiliar with this incident, it was the "attack" that LBJ used to justify ramping up US involvement in Vietnam. Later it became clear that LBJ's account of the attack was greatly distorted with the intent to deceive the American people. usni.org/magazines/nava…
Trump is slow walking the nation into Gulf of Tonkin redux to justify taking on unconstitutional, emergency powers...the media's job is to report the truth, not amplify lies. #BoycottTrumpsAddress #BoycottTrumpSpeech
Read 5 tweets
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1. The movement of people across borders is a constant in world history (though the rate and direction of movement has ebbed and flowed over time). This tweet, however, helped me see the urgent contemporary connection between current/future immigration policies & climate change.
2. Put most simply, the world can either strengthen & militarize borders to deal with coming climate migration (build walls), or they can engage in a collaborative process of rethinking how they want those borders to work, how porous they should be. The latter is very hard work.
3. The nation-state as an institution has in many ways been weakened recently, largely by the mechanisms of global capitalism, but I don't see many signs that nations will be disappearing any time soon. Thus, nations (possessing geographical borders) will continue to exist.
Read 9 tweets
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This is a really important point. As we glory in dunking on dumb old Grover, we must remember that he was probably *the most important and influential Republican operative* of the 1990s. He was a key agenda setter and "idea guy" for the GOP in the ages of Gingrich and W.
Grover's "billionaires are the new slaves" schtick is of course absurd...and it was also pretty much GOP dogma for much of my adult life. Grover is not speaking for some bizarro fringe element within the GOP, he basically ran the GOP in DC from behind the scenes for decades.
A thread from yesterday with more "fun facts" about Grover Norquist.
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Ok let's do a quick dive into the origins of the modern GOP. Everything I am about to post is very easily found by doing simple google searches, with search words like John Birch Society origins/founders, dixiecrats, and paleoconservatism. you can verify what i am posting there.
Let's start with the origins of the modern day GOP. In 1948 civil rights issues revealed philosophical differences between northern & southern democrats, like never before. This is when the move of southern states moved from solid dem to solid republican. Dixiecrats & the
southern strategy was born. At the 1948 DNC convention a group of northern dems led by Hubert Humphrey proposed some controversial civil rights planks of racial integration & reversal of Jim Crow laws. Southern dems were dismayed to say the least.
Read 29 tweets
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re: that last RT...

winding back the clock a bit: race has always been central to how movement conservatism and its institutional organs have been organized.
People point to the SCOTUS decision in Roe v. Wade as the catalyzing event of the modern evangelical movement, but as the historian Randall Balmer writes, its genesis is actually two decades earlier, in the white backlash to Brown v. Board.

politi.co/2PjHjWu
The modern Religious Right sprouted directly from the political organizing around whites-only Christian academies that popped up in the South as a way to resist court-ordered desegregation.
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1) Yesterday I ended discussion with an interlocutor who became abusive (life is too short to converse with shitheads) after I told him that, in my view, libertarians often are some of the worst authoritarians. So let me explain. Long thread follows.
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3) Perhaps the single greatest indicator of this is the way libertarians have lined up in support of Donald Trump, who is the most authoritarian personality in the history of the American presidency, resembling nothing so much as a Banana Republic dictator in his ruling style.
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@NewsHour @TwitterMoments I spent the summers of '62 and '63 in Guatemala, aged 15 and 16. I met the Ugly Americans there--the ambassador who couldn't speak a word of Spanish, the United Fruit Americans who were CIA (even at 15 I knew the compound in Tiquisate wasn't about fruit). I went to school with
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