fun to look back a decade or so and see the exact same voter fraud accusations from "respectable" republican politicians huffpost.com/entry/mccain-c…
or here's McCain during the Oct. 15th debate
hOw DId wE gET HeRE?!?
i mean the Bush White House crackdown on voter fraud began in *2001*
anyway, to steal a line from a column i'm writing:
"There is no way to understand the Capitol mob & its drive to forcibly impose Trump’s will on the country without first situating that mob within a mainstream GOP discourse of 'voter fraud' & so-called election integrity."
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Yes. Think of it this way: How many people voted for Donald Trump the Republican politician, and how many voted for Donald Trump, star of The Apprentice, who plays the most successful businessman in America?
One reason I am a little skeptical that anyone currently within the GOP can rebuild the Trump coalition is that no one else has a lifelong celebrity brand that valorizes entrepreneurship and business success.
Yes! I was just about to make a similar point, which is if you break down the constituent parts of Trump's pre-political celebrity, it's not just "successful businessman" but "charming rogue" and "affable vulgarian."
my favorite part of this is how shapiro speaks as if this is simply something happening in the air and not a sense of siege that he’s dedicated his life to stoking and cultivating
ben shapiro is DIRECTLY RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS and he’s using politico to launder his reputation as if he isn’t one of the most toxic figures in the conservative media landscape
can’t totally disenfranchise black voters so the next best thing is to nullify their influence by gerrymandering them into a few districts and then distributing electoral votes on the basis of that gerrymander
the obvious complaint isn’t that candidates aren’t campaigning throughout the state, it’s that this guy doesn’t think his vote should count the same as a black person in a city he hates. it’s just outright opposition to political equality.
Have been thinking about the reasons *why* right-wing protesters get so much leeway from law enforcement and other authorities and came back to this piece I wrote last January, about the big gun rights demonstration in Richmond. nytimes.com/2020/01/22/opi…
the crucial insight of “some of those who work forces are the same who burn crosses” is that “working forces” and “burning crosses” are understood by “some” as existing on the same continuum of action.
This is so smart. Our political leaders are absolutely terrified by the prospect of backlash — the chance that someone, somewhere, will get mad about the "undeserving" — and reverse-engineer everything they do to avoid it. newrepublic.com/article/160810…
The result, of course, are byzantine, incomprehensible rules and policies that fail and an angry public that then, yes, doesn't trust that the government can do anything.
and at the end of the day, everyone is undeserving to someone, and a government that is preoccupied with rooting out aid to the undeserving eventually becomes a government that abandons aid altogether, and only has the capacity to deal out death and exposure to death