dagblog - Comments for "Russian social media operation targeted at Afro-Americans, using African intermediaries"

The NYT reviews an upcoming

rmrd0000 — Wed, 18 Mar 2020 15:01:57 +0000

The NYT reviews an upcoming book, "It Was All A Lie", written by a Republican who managed multiple campaigns. The book details the racism at the core of the GOP since the Goldwater days. The Republican Party has adopted racist themes. There voters may not be racists, but they are very willing to vote for and support racist politicians and racist policies.

Is the modern Republican Party built on race prejudice, otherwise known as racism?

Has it become, as Stuart Stevens — a media consultant with an exceptionally high win-loss record who was a lead strategist for George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004 — puts it, the “white grievance party”?

Stevens has impeccable Republican credentials. In addition to Bush, his clients have included Mitt Romney and other current and former senators — Roger Wicker, Roy Blunt, Chuck Grassley, Rob Portman, Thad Cochran, Dick Lugar, Jon Kyl, Mel Martinez and Dan Coats — and current and former governors: Larry Hogan, Haley Barbour, Bill Weld, Tom Ridge and Bob Riley.

Nonetheless, Stevens’s forthcoming book, “It Was All A Lie,” makes the case that President Trump is the natural outcome of a long chain of events going back to the 1964 election when Barry Goldwater ran for president as an opponent of the Civil Right Act passed earlier that year.

“As much as I’d love to go to bed at night reassuring myself that Donald Trump was some freak product of the system — a ‘black swan,’” Stevens writes, “I can’t do it”:

I can’t keep lying to myself to ward off the depressing reality that I had been lying to myself for decades. There is nothing strange or unexpected about Donald Trump. He is the logical conclusion of what the Republican Party became over the last fifty or so years, a natural product of the seeds of race, self-deception, and anger that became the essence of the Republican Party. Trump isn’t an aberration of the Republican Party; he is the Republican Party in a purified form.

“I have no one to blame but myself,” he declares on the first page. “What I missed was one simple reality: it was all a lie.”

The article documents the racism that drives the Republican Party.

It is important to remember this fact. It is just as important to remember Republicans are more likely to believe that the Coronavirus pandemic is being overblown. Congressional Republicans gutted the portion of the House bill geared towards aiding regular citizens. One Republican was bold enough to say that helping by giving financial aide would make citizens lazy. Biden will have little luck reaching out to the Republican cult.

I'm reminded that E.J. Dionne

rmrd0000 — Wed, 18 Mar 2020 02:59:53 +0000

In reply to To AA from above

I'm reminded that E.J. Dionne feels that the outreach has to between Democratic moderates and Democratic Progressives. In his new book, "Code Red", Dionne writes off the Republicans.

E. J. Dionne Jr. has spent a career searching for common ground among opposing groups, in the hope that it can become the foundation of a politics of consensus. In books like “Why Americans Hate Politics” (1991) and “Our Divided Political Heart”(2012), he tried to chart a course between left and right, suggesting that if we peer across the political divide with clearer eyes and more open minds, we can begin to build a postpolarization politics.

As part of this endeavor, he has often chided the right for its mounting extremism, but he never wrote it off. Which is why Dionne’s latest book should send our alarm bells shrieking. Though written in the same patient, even soothing, voice as his earlier works, the narrowed scope of “Code Red: How Progressives and Moderates Can Unite to Save Our Country” shows how much his view of politics has changed. The right barely factors into this new bridge-building project. Conservatives are, for all intents and purposes, a lost cause.

This means “Code Red” is not yet another call for bipartisanship (thank goodness). Nor is it a plea for centrism, which in an earlier era had been a defining feature of Dionne’s work. Here he has abandoned the idea of a center poised between left and right. “The political center cannot be defined as a halfway point between Democrats and a Republican Party that has veered far to the right,” Dionne writes. Instead it is something to be negotiated within the Democratic Party.

As a result, Dionne pleads with moderates and progressives to see one another as allies who have far more in common than they might think. And while his past calls for political unity seem to have failed, there’s reason to hope this one might succeed. The rise of Donald Trump and the radicalization of the right have been unifying forces for moderates and progressives. While the two factions disagree sharply on proposals like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, they share a distress and disgust with the Trump presidency and the growing right-wing extremism that preceded it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/06/books/review/code-red-e-j-dionne-jr.html

Biden will reach out to Republicans, but he will be rejected

To AA from above

rmrd0000 — Wed, 18 Mar 2020 02:29:55 +0000

In reply to Russian social media operation targeted at Afro-Americans, using African intermediaries

To AA from above

Biden is being conciliatory as he should as the Democratic candidate.

Republicans will throw the kitchen sink at him

If Biden chooses a black woman as his Vice President, the racists will come out in full force.

The NYT has an excellent story of an Evangelical church in the heart of Trump company that came to reconciliation by directly confronting race rather than running away from the issue. These Evangelicals wound up supporting a ballot measure that effected mostly black children. The direct discussions lead to the church to form a group that supported the measure.

The back story of the ballot measure is as surprising as the margin of victory. In 2015, the national policing controversy arrived in Cincinnati when a police officer killed an unarmed black man. Mr. Mingo, who is black, felt called to be a voice for racial reconciliation. With the approval of the head pastor of Crossroads, who is white, a six-week program on racial reconciliation called Undivided was born. Participants were placed in small, multiracial groups where they held meaningful conversations and connect to fundamental truths about being Christians.

One of the first participants in the 1,200-person cohort was Carolyn Heck, a white evangelical. In 2015, she felt paralyzed by the racial divisions she saw in her city. She did not know how to connect her faith to her feelings of complicity with racism and was not active in politics.

“The first session was really emotional — I felt a weight confronting my own implicit subconscious biases about black and brown people,” Ms. Heck said in an email. She was surprised that she became uncomfortable and unsettled right away. “I quickly realized that much of what I had taken for granted was not the norm for black people in my own church. I had privilege stacked upon privilege.”

Cameron Smedley, a black Christian, was skeptical at first. “I was used to being shut down, discredited or having whites change the subject when things got real around race,” he said in an email. But he wanted to finally bring his full self to church. “I not only heard from black leaders, but heard white leaders telling the truth about racial history and the transformative power of empathy,” he wrote.

And so it went over six weeks together, as groups shared personal stories, wrestled with the racial wealth gap and housing discrimination and grounded themselves in the practices of empathy, listening, love and grace. During the last session, when everyone shared a meal in a home, Ms. Heck broke down in tears. “I felt ill-equipped to lead or contribute to address racism. My group listened and encouraged me,” she said, and “called out the ways I had grown during the program. These relationships continue to this day.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/opinion/ohio-megachurch-crossroads-race.html

Your approach is to run from race. You dismiss black concerns.

You are the most tribal person I know. When I talk about whites who voted for Trump you argue in their favor. You argue as if I am talking about all whites. Your core is tribal.

Fortunately people are talking about, not dismissing, issues of race. Your goal is for blacks to become white, whites don't have to change. Blacks have to change.

Edit to add:

Obama reached out

Republicans tried to make him a one term President

Republicans wanted to bankrupt the auto industry and crash the economy

Republicans blocked judicial nominees.

You best starting thinking

artappraiser — Wed, 18 Mar 2020 01:39:03 +0000

In reply to AOC went on Fox in an attempt

You best starting thinking about it now: when he becomes president, he will attempt to be the president of all the people, including Trump voters.

See below

rmrd0000 — Wed, 18 Mar 2020 01:37:50 +0000

In reply to News: Your preferred

See below

News: Your preferred

artappraiser — Wed, 18 Mar 2020 01:36:20 +0000

In reply to AOC went on Fox in an attempt

News: Your preferred candidate, Biden, just did a short live acceptance speech, anti-identity politics, pro-common good. E pluribus unum, that coronavirus doesn't care if you're Dem. or Repub. nor what color nor zip code...

I don't believe I've ever

artappraiser — Wed, 18 Mar 2020 01:30:02 +0000

In reply to AOC went on Fox in an attempt

I don't believe I've ever seen anyone on this website say to appease Trump, not even Peter Unverified. Your old timey radical rhetoric just so blatantly sucks. Huge turn off. Worse than the Russian trolls.

AOC went on Fox in an attempt

rmrd0000 — Tue, 17 Mar 2020 21:28:34 +0000

In reply to I think you'll see her going

AOC went on Fox in an attempt to warn Fox viewers about the dangers of COVID-19. The Fox audience is in the prime target age group for complications.

Omar is thankful that Trump is finally suggesting useful information

Neither is appeasing Trump.

So?

PeraclesPlease — Tue, 17 Mar 2020 19:46:47 +0000

In reply to MLK got concessions from LBJ.

So?

It's 2020.

I hear he's dead.

If not shld get tested.

MLK got concessions from LBJ.

rmrd0000 — Tue, 17 Mar 2020 18:55:51 +0000

In reply to MLK used Bull for a photo-op

MLK got concessions from LBJ. He didn't meekly do outreach.