Saying "Federal overreach" was how conservatives did racism while pretending to be decent people.
"Family values" was how conservatives did homophobia while pretending to be decent people.
"Let's go Brandon" is how conservatives do dickishness while pretending to be decent people
The crazy-making part for me is that so many Americans who do not identify as "conservative" have been willing to buy into the terms of this BS semantic game and still regard their fellow citizens as "decent people."
I mean, if you're on the side of the racist, homophobic, dicks...then I'd say just own it and don't dress it up in cutesy little "Let's Go Brandon" code words. Just own it. Say "Fuck the President of the United States." Just say it, dear "patriots."
You can dress yourself and your kid up in your American flag T-shirts, sing "God Bless the USA," look in the camera, and say "Let's Go Brandon" and pretend like you didn't just give your kid permission to say "Fuck the President."
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Thought experiment. When the Oregon Brandon dad was a cop, imagine he helped a black couple with young children change a tire on I-5. As he's leaving a parent turns to the kids and says "do you smell bacon kids? I sure smell bacon." Does Brandon dad hear that as "a joke?"
My point here is that Brandon dad is emblematic of an authoritarian political culture that expects that "people like us" can do and say whatever we want because of who we are, while others "who are not like us" must be quiet, respectful, and obedient.
Biden handled the situation perfectly by just passing over it and letting the guy embarrass himself. Saying snarky or disrespectful things to authority figures is not a crime.
Tell me you’re a politician who doesn’t understand how political culture works without telling me you’re a politician who doesn’t understand how political culture works.
These are people who will cheer elected officials who overturn election results they don’t like on the basis of obvious falsehoods like bamboo threads in ballots.
The whole point of what that guy did was to be shockingly transgressive…to say “Fuck the President” TO THE PRESIDENT’S FACE, on Christmas, when his kid was listening. What else might such a person be capable of?
At the American Legion's July 4 celebration in Salem, OR in 1934, General U.G. McAlexander gave a speech that lamented that the nation was on the verge of a union-led "social revolution" for which "the Jews and the Irish" were largely responsible.
A few days later Earl Sharp, who lived at the address (and likely in this same house) pictured here, wrote in to the newspaper to inform the General that this sort of racist rhetoric was not welcome in Salem. Salem Statesman Journal, 8 July 1934.
I can't resist highlighting this particular detail. I mean the words "all men are created equal" are literally right there in the text.
In 1936 William Lemke, a pro-New Deal Republican from ND ran for POTUS as a 3rd Party populist, allied with antisemite Father Coughlin. Richard Neuberger, a young Oregonian, went to hear Lemke talk and noted the gap between Lemke's "glistening generalities" & the crowd response.
Neuberger noted how prominent Republicans, in their efforts to defeat FDR, played plausibly deniable footsie with those on the far right who sought to marshal the "basest emotions" of "fear and prejudice" for political gain, thinking they could control those emotions.
Neuberger, a progressive Democrat, would eventually win election to the US Senate from Oregon in 1954. Sadly, he died at the age of 47 in 1960. google.com/books/edition/…
Palin: "There are more of us [who don't want to get vaccinated] than there are of them [who do]." As of today, 85% of voting age Americans have gotten at least one shot.
The fact that right wing populists have such a delusional understanding of how representative they are doesn't make them less dangerous.
It actually makes them more dangerous because it makes anti-democratic violence (a la January 6, for example) seem like the only viable option for implementing what they see as "the will of the people" that's been unfairly thwarted by "evil forces" in politics and the media.