Tag Donald Trump

We all saw it; we know what happened

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

“[Today marks] three years since thousands of Americans, lied to by the president of the United States and their elected representatives, perpetrated an assault on the building that has come to symbolize democracy across the globe, and the men and women who work on its grounds.  That’s not an opinion. It’s not an interpretation. It’s not one side of a debate. It is an unequivocal, demonstrable fact.”

Phil Mattingly of CNN stated it plainly, not to be misconstrued.  We all saw it for ourselves, plain as day on our TV screens: there was no doubt that armed protesters were attacking the Capitol.  That’s even what we heard from many members of Congress who were in the building at the time and experienced it first hand.

https://twitter.com/CNNThisMorning/status/1743274757796040901

I’m old enough to remember when it would have been stunning – unthinkable – to see some of those who lived through the attack on the Capitol from the inside completely change their story, now unashamedly insisting that we are being fooled by the evidence provided by our own eyes and ears.  Today, it’s another sad shoulder shrug as we witness a continuing assault on truth.  The Washington Post lays out the numbers from a recent national poll in which “a majority of Americans believe the events of Jan. 6 were an attack on democracy and should never be forgotten,” and yet…

…on the third anniversary of the nation’s first interruption to the peaceful transfer of power since the Civil War era, Republicans’ attitudes about Jan. 6 are increasingly unmoored from other Americans, and Trump holds a commanding lead in the race for the party’s 2024 presidential nomination.

The share of Republicans who said the Jan. 6 protesters who entered the Capitol were “mostly violent” dipped to 18 percent from 26 percent in December 2021, according to a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll. More than half of independents and about three-quarters of Democrats, on the other hand, believe the protesters were “mostly violent,” numbers that have remained largely unchanged over time, the poll found.

That’s good, but even that means almost half of people who consider themselves independents and about one-quarter of self-identified Democrats do not believe the protesters were “mostly violent.”  Why not?  Have they never watched the video?!?  OK, here’s some for you:

I call your attention in particular to the 11:48 mark where we hear the president’s voice describing what he had been watching on television for more than three hours without ever sending help for law enforcement; he says “They were peaceful people, these were great people.  The crowd was unbelievable.  And I mentioned the word ‘love.’  The love, the love in the air, I’ve never seen anything like it.”  There is no better example to prove that just because the president says something doesn’t make it true, and in the case of this president the fact that he said it makes it far more likely that it is not true.

I guess…I guess that the people who can watch that video and not see an assault on the American government are some of the same kinds of people who could have been persuaded that it was their “patriotic duty” to participate in that attack in the first place.  For the rest of us, this fight isn’t over yet.

Editorial: Three years later, beware dangerous revisionism of Jan. 6

A little something for the holidays

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

Let’s play a holiday game: I’ll describe someone we all know without using their name, and you see if you can guess who I’m talking about.

Crybaby.  Coward.  Liar.  Loser.  Cheater.

YES!  You got it…who else do we all know who can be recognized by all of those descriptive nouns?  I found a fun story about the first of them in today’s Chicago Sun-Times where columnist Gene Lyons cites the former guy’s “holiday message,” hoping that several adversaries would “rot in hell,” as another indication that he is “the world’s biggest crybaby.”

Donald Trump’s MAGA movement is fundamentalist at its core — with fundamentalism being understood as a psychological rather than a religious concept.

Pretty much every large-scale public movement, secular or sacred, has its share of extremists, and as the religious columnist Paul Prather has argued: “Remove the labels, close your eyes and quickly the fundamentalists in one group start sounding uncannily like the fundamentalists in all other groups, as if they were reading from the same script.”

It’s another word for fanatic.

Most Trumpists call themselves “conservative,” which used to signify a belief in limited government, low taxes, free trade and freedom of conscience but which under Trump signals tribal loyalty and revenge.

This explains what some see as the central paradox of the MAGA movement: that a congenital braggart who embodies what Christianity has traditionally called the seven deadly sins — greed, lust, envy, sloth, gluttony, pride and wrath — has come to seem the totem of faith for millions of Republican evangelicals.

(snip)

Prather credits David French with defining fundamentalism’s essential nature. French argues that whether religious or political, all fundamentalist cultures exhibit “three key traits: certainty, ferocity and solidarity.” He says certainty is the key to the other two traits.

“The fundamentalist mind isn’t clouded by doubt,” French has written. “In fact, when people are fully captured by the fundamentalist mind-set, they often can’t even conceive of good-faith disagreement. To fundamentalists, their opponents aren’t just wrong but evil. Critics are derided as weak or cowards or grifters. Only a grave moral defect can explain the failure to agree.”

To add to the many examples (very many) of the former guy’s cowardice, add this one: the recent cancellation of his planned campaign appearance by an Iowa college – an Iowa Christian college, mind you – was because he refused to take questions directly from the students:

[Dordt University] opted to cancel the event after the Trump campaign disagreed about what the format for the event should be, according to a statement released Thursday.

The university opens events up to all presidential candidates, regardless of their political affiliation, to allow students to engage in a questions-and-answer style forum with candidates during the primaries. However, the Trump campaign desired a format similar to a traditional presidential rally, according to the statement released by the university.

“These events are intended to be educational in nature, including questions directly from Dordt students to the candidates. The Trump campaign started the process of lining up a campaign stop but desired a rally format,” the statement reads.

It’s not hard to find long lists of words used to describe you-know-who, but I was happily surprised to discover this list from Rupert Taylor on Soapboxie in which he reminds us of that famous, insightful visionary presidential musing: “I know words.  I have the best words.”

As a professional writer for more than 50 years, I also know words and have written several articles here about words for each letter of the alphabet. Those previous offerings have featured random words; this time out they are themed around TFP and they are not intended to praise him.

A is for … agnotology. TFP would frequently refer to everybody not him as that body part hidden between the butt cheeks, but we can do better than that. Abrasive, absurd, and abysmal come to mind. But here comes “agnotology,” for which TFP would be a prime exhibit under the microscope. Agnotology is the study of ignorance about provable things for which doubt has been spread by misinformation.

B is for … bankruptcy. Our subject has developed an extraordinary skill at taking $413 million from his father, according to the New York Times, and turning it into six bankruptcies.

(snip)

D is for … dog-whistle politics. TFP is skilled at sending disguised messages to white supremacists that he is on their side.

E is for … epizeuxis. The forceful repetition of a word or phrase is a favourite of TFP’s rally pronouncements. “The election was stolen.” No it wasn’t.

F is for … falsiloquence. We will set aside TFP’s favourite off-camera F-word when dealing with his staff and go for something more eloquent. Falsiloquence is the use of deceitful and lying speech. “I won the 2020 election in a landslide.” “We had the biggest audience in the history of inaugural speeches.” “I am a very stable genius.” Plus 30,570 other falsehoods during a four-year presidency.

The list goes on; do yourself a solid and have a look.  And in the meantime, here are a few nuggets I’d like to share.  Happy holidays!

https://twitter.com/AnnieForTruth/status/1740370002094821884

https://twitter.com/kangaroos991/status/1732868491504734318

https://twitter.com/jilevin/status/1732476044643364910

https://twitter.com/AnnieForTruth/status/1732403223519260843

https://twitter.com/kangaroos991/status/1739075321918628305

Tick tick tick

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

Most of the people I know are tired of talking about you know who, the former president who does dare to speak his name.  I know I am, despite the evidence that indicates I am lying to myself and to you when I say that.  But I keep doing it because it does not seem to me that enough people are sufficiently aroused to the danger he still poses…that we are acting, as Pamela Paul writes in the New York Times, as if we are unaware that there is a bomb under the tale at which we sit.

Alfred Hitchcock explained the nature of cinematic terror with a story about the bomb under the table. People are sitting around a table having a mundane conversation about baseball when — boom! — a bomb goes off, instantly killing everyone. You’ve momentarily surprised the audience.

But what if, Hitchcock asked, we are shown beforehand that the bomb is there?

“In these conditions this same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the secret,” Hitchcock explained to his fellow director François Truffaut. While everyone is just sitting around chatting, the viewer wants to shout: “Don’t sit there talking about baseball! There’s a bomb!”

“The conclusion,” Hitchcock said, “is that whenever possible the public must be informed.”

I bring this up because we know there’s a bomb under the table — the threat of a second Donald Trump presidency. And we have a fairly good idea of the crippling destruction that will ensue. Yet here we are, still talking about baseball.

We’re less than a year from the next presidential election – just months from the party primaries and caucuses that will do most of the choosing of the candidates who will run in that election.  We’re running out of time to make choices that could protect our future from a second term of office for TFG.  And protection is what we all need.  In today’s Washington Post, Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institution does a thorough job of laying out the dangers on a “path to dictatorship.”  It’s worth your time to read it all, but here are some of the bullet points.

The magical-thinking phase is ending. Barring some miracle, Trump will soon be the presumptive Republican nominee for president. When that happens, there will be a swift and dramatic shift in the political power dynamic, in his favor. Until now, Republicans and conservatives have enjoyed relative freedom to express anti-Trump sentiments, to speak openly and positively about alternative candidates, to vent criticisms of Trump’s behavior past and present. Donors who find Trump distasteful have been free to spread their money around to help his competitors. Establishment Republicans have made no secret of their hope that Trump will be convicted and thus removed from the equation without their having to take a stand against him.

All this will end once Trump wins Super Tuesday. Votes are the currency of power in our system, and money follows, and by those measures, Trump is about to become far more powerful than he already is. The hour of casting about for alternatives is closing. The next phase is about people falling into line.

(snip)

No doubt Trump would have preferred to run for office without spending most of his time fending off efforts to throw him in jail. Yet it is in the courtroom over the coming months that Trump is going to display his unusual power within the American political system.

It is hard to fault those who have taken Trump to court. He certainly committed at least one of the crimes he is charged with; we don’t need a trial to tell us he tried to overturn the 2020 election. Nor can you blame those who have hoped thereby to obstruct his path back to the Oval Office. When a marauder is crashing through your house, you throw everything you can at him — pots, pans, candlesticks — in the hope of slowing him down and tripping him up. But that doesn’t mean it works.

Trump will not be contained by the courts or the rule of law. On the contrary, he is going to use the trials to display his power. That’s why he wants them televised. Trump’s power comes from his following, not from the institutions of American government, and his devoted voters love him precisely because he crosses lines and ignores the old boundaries.

(snip)

The likeliest outcome of the trials will be to demonstrate our judicial system’s inability to contain someone like Trump and, incidentally, to reveal its impotence as a check should he become president. Indicting Trump for trying to overthrow the government will prove akin to indicting Caesar for crossing the Rubicon, and just as effective. Like Caesar, Trump wields a clout that transcends the laws and institutions of government, based on the unswerving personal loyalty of his army of followers.

(snip)

If Trump does win the election, he will immediately become the most powerful person ever to hold that office. Not only will he wield the awesome powers of the American executive — powers that, as conservatives used to complain, have grown over the decades — but he will do so with the fewest constraints of any president, fewer even than in his own first term.

What limits those powers? The most obvious answer is the institutions of justice — all of which Trump, by his very election, will have defied and revealed as impotent. A court system that could not control Trump as a private individual is not going to control him better when he is president of the United States and appointing his own attorney general and all the other top officials at the Justice Department. Think of the power of a man who gets himself elected president despite indictments, courtroom appearances and perhaps even conviction? Would he even obey a directive of the Supreme Court? Or would he instead ask how many armored divisions the chief justice has?

Will a future Congress stop him? Presidents can accomplish a lot these days without congressional approval, as even Barack Obama showed. The one check Congress has on a rogue president, namely, impeachment and conviction, has already proved all but impossible — even when Trump was out of office and wielded modest institutional power over his party.

(snip)

Trump’s ambitions, though he speaks of making America great again, clearly begin and end with himself. As for his followers, he doesn’t have to achieve anything to retain their support — his failure to build the wall in his first term in no way damaged his standing with millions of his loyalists. They have never asked anything of him other than that he triumph over the forces they hate in American society. And that, we can be sure, will be Trump’s primary mission as president.

Having answered the question of whether Trump can win, we can now turn to the most urgent question: Will his presidency turn into a dictatorship? The odds are, again, pretty good.

It is worth getting inside Trump’s head a bit and imagining his mood following an election victory. He will have spent the previous year, and more, fighting to stay out of jail, plagued by myriad persecutors and helpless to do what he likes to do best: exact revenge.

(snip)

What will that look like? Trump has already named some of those he intends to go after once he is elected: senior officials from his first term such as retired Gen. John F. Kelly, Gen. Mark A. Milley, former attorney general William P. Barr and others who spoke against him after the 2020 election; officials in the FBI and the CIA who investigated him in the Russia probe; Justice Department officials who refused his demands to overturn the 2020 election; members of the Jan. 6 committee; Democratic opponents including Rep. Adam B. Schiff (Calif.); and Republicans who voted for or publicly supported his impeachment and conviction.

But that’s just the start. After all, Trump will not be the only person seeking revenge. His administration will be filled with people with enemies’ lists of their own, a determined cadre of “vetted” officials who will see it as their sole, presidentially authorized mission to “root out” those in the government who cannot be trusted. Many will simply be fired, but others will be subject to career-destroying investigations.

(snip)

And who will stop the improper investigations and prosecutions of Trump’s many enemies? Will Congress? A Republican Congress will be busy conducting its own inquiries, using its powers to subpoena people, accusing them of all kinds of crimes, just as it does now. Will it matter if the charges are groundless? And of course in some cases they will be true, which will lend even greater validity to a wider probe of political enemies.

Will Fox News defend them, or will it instead just amplify the accusations? The American press corps will remain divided as it is today, between those organizations catering to Trump and his audience and those that do not. But in a regime where the ruler has declared the news media to be “enemies of the state,” the press will find itself under significant and constant pressure. Media owners will discover that a hostile and unbridled president can make their lives unpleasant in all sorts of ways.

Indeed, who will stand up for anyone accused in the public arena, besides their lawyers? In a Trump presidency, the courage it will take to stand up for them will be no less than the courage it will take to stand up to Trump himself. How many will risk their own careers to defend others?

I wanted to embed a Tweet here which contains a great video abnout TFG…but X refuses to connect for a video it has labelled as “sensitive content.” OK, try looking at it directly.

Same song, next verse

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

When I was a college student in the capital city of Texas, the mayor once held his regular weekly news conference and was asked to comment on the fact that the state legislature was about to begin another biennial session under the big pink dome.  His immediate reaction was to say “Lock up the kids and dogs.”

America, your legislature is back in business: the House of Representatives has selected Mike Johnson of Louisiana as its new speaker.  Who is that, you ask, and what does he believe in?  Among other things, he

So, we got that going for us…which is not nice.  Ruth Marcus writes in the Washington Post that any sense of relief you might be feeling that a well-known extremist like Jim Jordan was not elected by Republicans in Congress is misplaced.

For Jordan’s shirt sleeves demeanor and wrestler’s pugnacity, substitute a bespectacled, low-key presentation, a law degree and an unswerving commitment to conservative dogma and former president Donald Trump.

This is not an upgrade. It is Jordan in a more palatable package — evidently smoother, seemingly smarter and, therefore, potentially more effective.

Johnson, now serving his fourth term in Congress, was the moving force behind aSpeaker Johnson Supreme Court brief that helped lay the shoddy intellectual groundwork for Jan. 6, 2021. In December 2020, he rallied fellow Republican lawmakers to support Texas’s brazen bid to overturn the election results. In a lawsuit that fizzled almost as soon as it was filed, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sought to have the Supreme Court intervene in the election by blocking the certification of electoral college votes in four swing states — Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin — where voting rules had been changed in the course of the election and voters, not coincidentally, had favored Joe Biden. The justices swiftly rejected the case, tartly noting that, “Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections.”

(snip)

The Johnson brief was a full-throated endorsement of the “independent state legislature” theory, ultimately rejected by the Supreme Court in 2023’s Moore v. Harper. The brief asserted that under the terms of the Constitution, only state legislatures — without any review by state courts or involvement of other state parties — have power to set rules for choosing presidential electors. “The clear authority of those state legislatures to determine the rules for appointing electors was usurped at various times by governors, secretaries of state, election officials, state courts, federal courts, and private parties,” the brief argued.

(snip)

The Texas episode was of a piece with Johnson’s conservative worldview. Before being elected to Congress, he was a senior lawyer and national spokesman for the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative group that opposes abortion, same-sex marriage and LGBTQ+ rights.

Running for Congress in 2016, he described himself as “a Christian, a husband, a father, a lifelong conservative, constitutional law attorney and a small business owner in that order, and I think that order is important.” Johnson said he had been “called to legal ministry and I’ve been out on the front lines of the ‘culture war’ defending religious freedom, the sanctity of human life, and biblical values, including the defense of traditional marriage, and other ideals like these when they’ve been under assault.”

We shall see how well Johnson does in leading the House, or at least its too-small-for-comfort Republican majority, in handling upcoming issues like a possible government shutdown in three weeks, or requests for more aid to Israel and Ukraine, or any of the other normal kinds of business which members of Congress are supposed to take care of on our behalf.  But given his still-declared support of Trump, it’s unlikely Johnson will be much of a leader when it comes to the reality of the need to work with Democrats to get things done: as David Frum wrote in The Atlantic earlier this month, “The rules of contemporary Republican politics make it had to accept reality.  Reality is just too awkward.”

In reality, Trump has been a big vote loser for Republicans. He fluked into the presidency with a Dukakis-like share of the vote in 2016, then lost his party its majority in the House in 2018. Trump got decisively booted from the presidency in 2020; rampaged illegally on January 6, 2021; and then cost his party its Senate majority in the January 2021 runoff elections. His election-denier message damaged his party further in the elections of 2022. His demand for a Biden investigation and impeachment in 2023 is producing an embarrassing fiasco. But no Republican leader dares say these things out loud.

Most taboo of all is working with Democrats, on any terms other than total, one-sided domination: We win, you lose. So [then-Speaker Kevin] McCarthy just had to press ahead, acting as if he commanded a majority when he did not; insulting and demeaning the minority, even though he had to know that he might need their help at any minute.

That minute came. McCarthy sought Democratic votes to save him from his own refractory members, and in return he offered nothing. Not even politeness.

That proposition did not produce the desired results, and so here we are.

Where we are is a country with a solid anti-Trump majority confronting a pro-Trump minority that believes it has a right to rule without concession or compromise.

The only way to produce a stable majority in the House is for the next Republican leader to reach a working agreement with the Democrats to bypass the nihilists in the GOP caucus. But that agreement will have to be unspoken and even denied—because making agreements that show any respect for the other side will be seen by Republican partisans as betrayal. The price of GOP leadership is delivering delusions and fantasies: the delusion and fantasy that Trump won in 2020, the delusion and fantasy that the Republicans did not lose in 2022.

“Delusion and fantasy” might well stand as a new motto for the remnants of a once proud GOP: in the Public Religion Research Institute’s annual American Values Survey, one-third of Republicans believe that “because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country,” almost half think we need a strong leader who is willing to break some rules to get things done, and 29% are strong believers in the QAnon conspiracy movement. In the Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin writes:

Most frightening is how many Republicans buy into white Christian nationalism, a racist ideology that rejects the basic premise of our democracy: “All men are created equal.” One-third of Americans but 52 percent of Republicans agree that “God intended America to be a new promised land where European Christians could create a society that could be an example to the rest of the world.” The number is even higher among White evangelical Protestants (54 percent). Americans who subscribe to white Christian nationalism are more than twice as likely as other Americans to say true patriots might have to resort to violence to save the country.

In a related question, 75 percent of Republicans think the Founders wanted America to be a Christian nation with Western European values.

Rubin also identifies a “positive sign of public sanity” across the ideological spectrum.

Overwhelming majorities of Americans today support teaching the good and the bad of American history, trust public school teachers to select appropriate curriculum, and strongly oppose the banning of books that discuss slavery or the banning of Advanced Placement (AP) African American History.” Moreover, “A solid majority of Americans also oppose banning social and emotional learning programs in public schools.” Though some Republicans have made “anti-wokeism” a key requirement of their political identity, their message is deeply unpopular. “Fewer than one in ten Americans favor the banning of books that include depictions of slavery from being taught in public schools (7%), compared with 88% who oppose such bans.”

Sixty percent say abortion should be legal in most or all cases, compared with 37 percent who say it should be illegal in most or all cases. In a political reversal, “Democrats are now significantly more likely than Republicans to say their support for a candidate hinges on the candidate’s position on abortion,” 50 percent vs. 38 percent.

(snip)

Taking a step back, the overall picture here is a country that is inclusive, respectful of religious differences, pro-democracy and supportive of women’s rights — except when it comes to the largely Republican, mostly White evangelical Christians who reject these fundamental ideas.

When a sizable portion of one of the major political parties, aided by a right-wing propaganda machine and infused with religious fervor, rejects the basis for multiracial, multicultural democracy, we face a severe crisis. Even if Trump does not return to the White House, this radicalized segment will not disappear. How we reintegrate millions of Americans into reality-based, pro-democracy politics in a diverse country remains the great challenge of our time.

“What happened happened”

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

Permit me to ignore my own advice just this once and call attention to current and dangerous behavior by some candidates for the Republican nomination to be president of the United States: their efforts to rewrite history.  Not to alter the timeline by winning the election and creating a future that would be recounted by historians as-yet unborn, but to reach a hand into the past and “revise” the record of what actually happened.  Like the un-impeachment of Donald Trump.  Both of them.

In a recent Salon article Austin Sarat and Dennis Aftergut ridicule the current fever dream among House Republicans to impeach President Biden, and remind us that these same geniuses want the House to change its mind on the historic impeachments of the former guy.

…many of these same MAGA acolytes want to rewrite history by taking the unprecedented and fanciful step of expunging the record of Trump’s two impeachments. Last month, Speaker Kevin McCarthy, desperate to hold onto his slender majority, gave in to those demands when he announced his support for that effort.

That calls to mind a Russian saying from Stalinist times, when rewriting history to suit and flatter a totalitarian leader was de rigueur: “Russia is a country with a certain future; it is only the past that is unpredictable.”

Constitutional experts say there is no mechanism to undo an impeachment; intelligent observers see the effort as a transparent attempt to (choose your own turn of phrase here; I’ll go with) “curry favor” with the former president and MAGA nation.  It’s an effort totally consistent with their modus operandi of ignoring verifiable truth and saying whatever they need to be true in the moment.

Consider the effort in Florida to sanitize the school curriculum on Black history – the whole “slaves learned skills they could benefit from later in life” eyewash.  Florida isn’t alone in this effort to fight attempts to teach a more complete view of the history of Black people in America, but Eugene Robinson says it has the spotlight now because its governor is trying to become president.

It was Gov. Ron DeSantis, running for the GOP presidential nomination as an “anti-wokeness” Savonarola, who inspired this latest effort to both-sides slavery. (Months ago, the state rejected an Advanced Placement course on African American studies, saying it “significantly lacks educational value.”) On Friday, DeSantis blamed the state Department of Education — “I wasn’t involved,” he claimed — but also defended the abomination: “They’re probably going to show that some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life.”

Where to begin? I’ll start with my own family history. One of my great-great-grandfathers, enslaved in Charleston, S.C., was indeed compelled to learn to be a blacksmith. But he had no ability to “parlay” anything, because his time and labor were not his own. They belonged to his enslaver. He belonged to his enslaver.

To pretend my ancestor was done some sort of favor by being taught a trade ignores the reality of race-based, chattel slavery as practiced in the United States. He was sold like a piece of livestock at least twice that I know of. To say he “developed skills,” as if he had signed up for some sort of apprenticeship program, is appallingly ahistorical. As was true for the millions of other enslaved African Americans, anything he achieved was in spite of his bondage.

(snip)

The problem with all of this is that it seeks to contextualize American slavery as something other than what it was: a unique historical crime, perpetuated over 2½ centuries. Slavery was practiced here on an industrial scale, based on race and the belief in white supremacy, with not just individuals but also their descendants consigned to lifelong servitude.

The Florida curriculum does a similar trick in interpreting the Jim Crow period. It calls for studying “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans” — blaming both sides — but then mentions the “1906 Atlanta Race Riot, 1919 Washington, D.C. Race Riot, 1920 Ocoee Massacre, 1921 Tulsa Massacre and the 1923 Rosewood Massacre.” All of those atrocities, and many more, were White riots against innocent Black victims.

What happened happened. We will not move forward until we truthfully acknowledge where we’ve been.

That acknowledgement is apparently a high hill to climb (a tough pill to swallow?) for many Americans. Some say those people are just racists and that’s why they won’t admit that the demonstrable facts of history are true; Paul Waldman has an alternative explanation:

When you see some of the positions taken by the Republicans running for president on issues that touch upon race, it can be hard to ascribe to them anything but the ugliest motives.

Why, for instance, would Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former vice president Mike Pence each announce their intention to change the name of an Army post to honor a Confederate general? Why would DeSantis advocate for new school standards in his state that appear to present slavery as a brief and salutary job training program?

Some will simply answer, “Racism.” But there’s a more complicated answer that better explains what’s happening on the right. The true commitment of today’s Republican Party is not to racism (though there are plenty of genuine racists who thrill to what the GOP offers, and especially to former president Donald Trump). It is to what is best described as anti-antiracism.

In a sense, anti-antiracism is its own ideology. It holds that racism directed at minorities is largely a thing of the past; that whatever racism does exist is a product only of individual hearts and not of institutions and systems; that efforts to ameliorate racism and promote diversity are both counterproductive and morally abhorrent; and, most critically, that those efforts must not only be stopped but also rolled back.

Listen to conservative rhetoric on book banning, affirmative action, teaching history or any of the ways race touches their war on “wokeness,” and you hear this theme repeated: We must stop talking and thinking about racism, and most of all we must stop trying to do anything about racism.

(snip)

Adherence to these kind of anti-antiracist ideas has become “a matter of partisan identity,” going to the core of “what it means to be a Republican,” [political scientist Rachel] Wetts told me. “More than 80 percent of White Republicans endorse these views at very high levels.” In fact, in Wetts and [Robb] Willer’s analysis, the only variable that predicted support for Trump more strongly than anti-antiracism was whether you identified as a Republican.

That helps explain why Republican candidates are so determined to call attention to their efforts to dictate what can be said about race in classrooms, to punish companies for promoting diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), or even to undo attempts to stop honoring the Confederacy.

(snip)

For some people, “opposition to antiracism is a way of expressing racial animus without explicitly endorsing it,” Wetts said. For others it’s about “distaste, anger and frustration with antiracists themselves,” an expression of revulsion against liberals and everything they want to do. Anti-antiracism is one more way to own the libs.

Feelings have become central to the way conservatives think about race; it’s no accident that many of the laws regarding critical race theory passed in conservative states explicitly outlaw discussions in schools that could make students feel “guilt” or “discomfort.” Anti-antiracism is fueled by White people’s unease with the growing diversity of American society, the knowledge that they’ve lost their dominant position — and to boot, liberals keep trying to make them feel bad.

(snip)

It is easy to see why Republican politicians think anti-antiracism is so potent. It allows people to claim a commitment to equality while opposing policies meant to achieve actual equality. It enables them to proclaim their own victimhood, which has become absolutely central to the conservative worldview.

The lies about history, the Big Lie about the 2020 election: they all fit right in with the the endless stream of lies that have been such an effective campaign message wooing MAGA nation.  And maybe, like most advertising, connecting with the audience at a subliminal level.

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