Last week, a local Indiana chapter of Moms for Liberty attracted attention for quoting Adolf Hitler in its newsletter. After the local paper reported the story, the group added additional “context” but kept the quote. Eventually, after it faced even more scrutiny, the organization removed the quote and apologized in a statement posted to its Facebook group.
That, however, was a big mistake, according to advice at the Moms for Liberty national conference’s media training session Friday.
“Never apologize. Ever,” said Christian Ziegler, the chairman of the Florida Republican Party. “This is my view. Other people have different views on this. I think apologizing makes you weak.”
He advised the attendees to instead make it clear that the Hitler comment was “vile” but to immediately pivot to make the point that Hitler indoctrinated children in schools and that that’s what Moms for Liberty was fighting against. Ziegler warned that any apology would become the headline, so that should be avoided.
Time for this dipshit to put his extensive media training experience to the test!
GOP: why would we give broadband assistance to people who already have broadband
Also GOP: let’s give vouchers so that people who already send their kids to private school can have school choice
There is a little nuance here (although I agree that it is bad policy for the public sector to offer exhorbitantly high pensions subject to all kinds of abuses). But FlyWF was aware of some patterns that do in fact matter. Here are my observations as both a pension actuary and a SOCIALIST.
Conservatives on the whole despise DB pensions (except for the generous ones they personally recieve, naturally). But on the whole, a stark anti-DB pension thread rules through conservative narratives. DB pensions, if designed properly, provide massive value to people by pooling their interests effectively. This runs against emotional conservative narratives that insist that everyone is better off on their own and that if you are forced to pool your interests with someone else then that means someone else is ripping you off. Any discussion of pensions with a conservative inevitably results in them declaring all pension plans to be ponzi schemes.
Conservatives lie about the sustainability of pension plans and social security systems because they don’t want them to exist. The best lies are the ones with an element of truth, so it is conservatives themselves that often amplify stories about big public sector pensions because they benefit from getting us outraged about cops with $200,000. They will use your outrage about $200,000 cop pensions to kill $20,000 teacher pensions. FlyWF saw through this dynamic and reached the wrong conclusion ($200,000 cop pensions are Actually Good) instead of reaching the (IMO) correct conclusion which is that abusive pensions should be reformed to save good pensions.
The disconnect of right wing cops taking their super-liberal-state inflated pensions to a conservative state and bad mouthing the pension giving state is pretty funny, in a not funny way.
I’d probably back some state legislation that cuts a percentage off your pension if you don’t reside in the state giving you the pension. Pretty bullshitty to collect a $130,000 state pension of which the state giving it has no chance of collecting any of that economic activity.
Isn’t the conservative position that they personally would prefer to be left alone? I don’t think they gaf about “everyone” in anything except enforcing religious norms.
I think for anyone who thinks they’re smarter or more hardworking or whatever than the median American this isn’t exactly an “emotional” argument. Particularly if they actually are: like your typical 140 IQ actuary.
