If you’re like me you have been gobsmacked by the fact that anybody can perceive Donald Trump as the friend of the working man. You have probably been further bewildered by the fact that the GOP in general is considered a working class party, when it is anything but that. Listen to this six-minute video and the scales will drop from your eyes. You will understand all. It starts out with an historical perspective on the post-Nixon era, which is when the GOP was at its lowest point in modern history — until now.
It describes Lee Atwater recruiting racist whites. Well do I remember that era. LBJ famously said, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best black man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” That set the stage for Trump. Trump is the fruition of not only Nixon’s corruption but all the backpedaling and finagling which followed it, as the GOP desperately strove to save itself. How will it save itself after this?
[NOTE: The account that this must-see video was on has been disabled. I have DM’d Bad Brad and I will post a YouTube version or some other Twitter version, when I am able to. Please do check back to see this video because it is stellar.]
I lived in quarters in Germany for 2 years with those McNamara moron 50K. It's true what this guy says. It was bad.
— Tes (@BrounsTes) March 15, 2024
That 50K figure is actually 100K. Wow. You heard the point being made that the MAGAs “know Trump isn’t any brighter than them but he’s a big shot.” That, right there, is the crux of this matter. Jennifer Crumbley, the mother of school shooter Ethan Crumbley, who was recently sentenced to 15 years in prison for involuntary manslaughter, said that when she first heard Trump, “he wasn’t a good speaker,” i.e., even she realized he was dumb, and “that’s when I knew he was real.” Oh, he’s real alright. A real moron. But as Bad Brad points out, that’s what they love about him. He’s a dummy like they are, with a dummy’s concept of how government works and this is the first time in their lives that they’ve ever been able to relate to or identify with a politician.
This is the source of Mike Lindell’s insane monomania. Lindell never voted before 2016. He’s one of the ones who heard the siren call of Trump’s pied piper and he’s only too happy to join his fellow lemmings and go over the cliff. You cannot reason with these people, they are beyond reason. Trump is as unique in their experience as he is in ours, the difference being that while we see the havoc he wreaks, they’re thrilled to hear his warped explanation of what is taking place with respect to any given issue, because he tells them what they want to hear. That’s the source of their fanatical devotion. He is “their” leader, the only one they’ve ever been able to understand, the only one they want. They are happy, delighted in fact, to destroy democracy so that they can have Trump lead until he dies. That is their desire and their plan, make no mistake.
And before Lee Atwater, we had the Powell Memo: pic.twitter.com/eefyMI68db
— DJ FM® (@djfm_dot_com) March 13, 2024
And so it came to pass 96 years later, in the fall of 2016. H.L. Mencken was the Jimmy Breslin of his day, from what I can discern, i.e., a journalist who was not only on top of all the stories of the day and how they interrelated, but also a keen observer of human nature, with a mordant wit. He certainly called this shot.
So where do we go from here? As Bad Brad pointed out, it’s the people in the middle, the ones who don’t get involved with politics, who have to be reached. Because if they go for the bread and circus and do a “what the hell” vote for Trump, just to see what happens (and there was a lot of that in 2016) then our way of life is doomed.
Voter outreach has never been more crucial, but we’ve got a mainstream media that is defaulted to frame this election like all the others, in demented both-sider, horserace terms. That is the first place to start, to make sure that voters understand it is not a choice of two candidates on the ballot, or two parties. Rather, it’s a choice between preserving our way of life or handing the country over to a man who has openly proclaimed his intention to be a dictator.
Good article, Ursula.
Thank you. I’m glad I discovered Bad Brad. I expect to post a lost of his work in the future.
Great article, Ursula. No idea who Bad Brad is, but if he6 on this site I can’t stay to read him. My smart phone screen was packed with competing pop-ups jumping out from top and bottom, left and right, static and scrolling along with me. The experience of anarchy from ads served in my direction certainly matched those pushes into anarchy by some who you write about, who want to tear democracy down, but that’s not what I want, so I won’t be back to this site -just too annoying, no matter whom I’m reading. Good luck.
Is it seriously that bad? I’ll adjust what needs to be adjusted, if you’ll tell me specifically what happens. I don’t see what you’re seeing on my phone. Maybe it’s because I have a terrific phone, an Ultra S23. What kind of phone do you have?
Ads are a drag, I agree, but we have no other way to make a living. And we don’t make a great living even with the ads (not that I’m complaining, just saying this is a tough business.)
Oh how things have changed. I’m a product of small town Midwest America. I was also a huge fan of Bobby Kennedy and am still haunted by my mother’s face when she woke me up before dawn to tell me he’d been shot and that it didn’t look like he’d live. RFK was like his brother JFK highly educated and not afraid to show it. Lacking the oratorical gifts of his brother RFK didn’t try to “dumb down” his language. Even poor people who couldn’t quite understand all he was saying understood enough. Even the poorest of people in godforsaken swatch of this country were captivated by him. Remember those pictures of him in Appalachia? Illiterate and barely literate people who lived in shacks coming “down from the hollers” just to see him in person when he came to their town/village!
We are of a time when middle, working class and poor parents from cities to small towns like mine saw leaders (both political and business) who’d been to the best universities and who pushed kids to work their butts off in school to get the best grades they could so they could get into the best schools. They’d bitch about bond issues to pay for small town schools but voted for them. And they backed up teachers too. I come from a lower middle class family, what I’ve sometimes called on the “right side of the tracks” but just next to them. Harvard? My dad shot that down in a heartbeat. Same with a toney private school up in Galesburg (IL) that wanted me to play basketball for a pretty good small college program but they didn’t offer athletic scholarships. Even with the financial aid package they did create for me it still would have cost my dad many times more than me to attend a nearby public university so that was that.
Still, had I chosen to attend the University of Chicago dad would have made it happen. That was THE best university in the country in his mind, better than any of the Ivy’s. He’d have borrowed against his state pension and life insurance and/or sold the house to make it happen but I simply wasn’t interested in that school. Yes, I knew how great it was (and is) but to his disappointment didn’t even apply. The point is that THAT is how parents, even in podunk small town/rural areas thought at one time. A time when those of us who are senior citizens can remember.
People with great educations and pedigrees were admired. Examples of the kind of people we might one day ourselves become if we had enough ability and worked hard enough. It didn’t matter if you started out in a place like where I grew up. And once upon a time adults believed that part of the American dream. But then, people with those Ivy League (or equivalent) educations and family connections pretended to the masses such things didn’t matter. And in fact were worse than useless. “Elites” became not a goal to be attained but a dirty moniker for people who were all this is wrong in this country.
But the shit worked for ELITE conservatives. I do hope we see/hear more from this guy in the months ahead. This ole jarhead would have a fine time discussing the state of the country and how it’s changed in our lifetimes and why even if he was Navy.
There’s two easy sayings that I always held in high regard:
One is: ignorance is bliss and the second one is:
Money talks bullshit walks.