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Sep 14 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Am I misreading or is @Timodc on pp. 11-12 of "Why We Did It" slyly insinuating that Mike Pence is a closet case?
"...the brainteasers I was playing with closeted myself parallel what I saw in my future corner GOP friends during the Trump Era. I would see relief on the faces of people who left his orbit and come clean, just as clearly as the pain on the faces of peoplelike Mike Pence who..."
"wouldn't admit to themselves what is obvious to themselves." Kind of a double valence there, amiright?
@billyeichner!
This guy's a serious writer, by the way. Preliniarily: I may finally have found a #nevertrump'er I can take to my bosom.

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More from @rickperlstein

Rick Perlstein Profile picture
Sep 15
As I've noted, the tactic of our more fascist state governors' petty little ethnic-cleansing exercise resembles nothing so much as... npr.org/2022/09/15/112…
...the 1961 racist trolling project known as the "Reverse Freedom Rides." npr.org/sections/codes…
"The White Citizens’ Council...announced that, since northern liberals were 'sending down busloads of people here with the express purpose of violating our laws, fomenting confusion, trying to destroy..." nymag.com/intelligencer/…
Read 6 tweets
Rick Perlstein Profile picture
Aug 9
Reminds me of what happened when news leaked that the wartime Office of Strategic Services was becoming permanent as the CIA. One GOP rep: "This is another indication that the New Deal will not halt in its quest for power. Like Simon Legree it wants to own us body and soul.” 1/x
Another called it “another New Deal move right along the Hitler line." The reactionary Chicago Tribune editorialized that it would be a U.S. "gestapo."
Of course, people like this were fans of the actual American Gestapo in their midst, J. Edgar Hoover's FBI--who was the guy who leaked it to the Trib in the first place.
Read 4 tweets
Rick Perlstein Profile picture
Jun 14
I found this article thoughtful, fair- minded, and productive. theintercept.com/2022/06/13/pro…
The smartest part of the article is the point that trashing culture is destroying the strength of activist organizations at just the moment many ARE being led by women and POC, with see-no-evil critics of the phenomenon thus abetting their disempowerment: tbe Glass Cliff.
(What he calls the "hollow prize" thesis.)
Read 7 tweets
Rick Perlstein Profile picture
Jun 13
In Oakland in the 60s, it was common practice for cops to in Black neighborhoods to apprehend people on Friday evenings outside the bars that served as banks where factory workers could cash their checks, to shake them down for cash--straight up.
Mike Davis and Jon Wiener's A People's History of Los Angeles present excellent documentary evidence that a major function of the police was preventing Black peoples from being in "white" areas outside of certain hours, in just the way South Africa's passbook system functioned.
There is tons of outstanding work in recent years on how the police force in Ferguson, Missouri, function in much the same way--as in: now.
Read 5 tweets
Rick Perlstein Profile picture
May 31
So fascinating how cunningly Reagan's economic ideology encodes in aristocracy in the guises of liberty. "U.S. tax policy... is restraining business growth because it attempts to redistribute earnings from the most productive to the least” means the rich are rich ONLY...
...by dint of their superiority, the poor are poor ONLY by dint of their inferiority. And if we try to tinker with that natural order, we'll ALL be poor, by dint of restrained growth. (Fascinating source, account of a 2/79 speech in an alt-monthly covering Montana.) Image
As is often the case, the alternative media can more accurately depict reality because they're allowed utter unflattering facts things that don't get uttered in the mainstream because "bias." In this case, that Reagan's "rancher" was actually a tax dodge. rollingstone.com/politics/polit…
Read 5 tweets
Rick Perlstein Profile picture
May 21
A "savvy" acquaintance of mine notes this news, describing it as an "own goal" by the Church. My response is the opposite... theguardian.com/us-news/2022/m…
This is how an institution behaves when it's serious about power and changing the world: the way, on certain core principles, the Democrats SHOULD behave. The Church has been working this strategy...
..loudly denying pro-choice public officials Community, for 35 years, since the Hyde Amendment; and now, on abortion, they've won--and so are pushing their public agenda even more aggressively, and likely soon even further, to seek to outlaw contraception...
Read 11 tweets

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