Thread by @adamjohnsonNYC

From the astute school of political analysis that brought you “poll taxes are just about govt revenue”, “the southern strategy is really about states rights”, and “the Tea Party was just worried about high taxes” comes “CRT is just about being aspirational and postracial”

https://twitter.com/nate_cohn/status/1456047454781063185

Man, that semester of journalism school where they teach reporters to have the most generous, literal-minded and ahistoric reading of obviously bullshit right wing dog whistles needs to be abolished & replaced w/ literally anything else, 12 hrs a week of staring at an empty wall

I often wonder, when people like Nate go over to their friend’s house and they open their fridge & their friend says “have whatever you like” if they grab the ice cube trays & walk out because they are apparently pathologically incapable of grasping that words have social context

sure CRT can simply mean "teach history where America isn't fundamentally the Baddies" and even if we accept this is normie, modest and a-ok (because Obama did it?) this is absolutely not how **most Republican voters are interrupting it** even if some soccer moms say otherwise.

indeed, this is why CRT was selected as the next moral panic after Trump's loss. It is popular exactly because it's generic and allows for racist pandering while maintaining deniability to the WSJ crowd. This isn't evidence of moderation, it's evidence of a successful dog whistle

We've done this faux "we promise it's not racist" GOP rebranding before. And last time, the paper Nate works for opened up their pockets to the wallet inspector. Here's now the NYT covered the Tea Party in 2010. Literally none of this ended up being true. It was all bullshit.

Literally the first 2 things the "economic focused" Tea Party candidates did when they swept into office on a state and federal level in Nov 2010 is

1) pass anti abortion laws
2) pass voter ID laws/gerrymandering

Everything else was rebranding bullshit for dopey centrist media

every 5-10yrs Republicans come up with a new way of rebranding the same Heritage/Koch/Scaife/Bradley racist pandering and every 5-10 yrs some "movement" emerges to find a new target audience and every time our media treats it as good faith, organic and on its own literal terms