Reagan understood that America is full of paranoid idiots who worship the shit they see on TV. It’s all there, the “gov’t is always the enemy,” the idea that a clowny celebrity that you see on TV is therefore the best person to lead America, the flat-out lies, the blatantly racist dogwhistles about “young bucks” spending food stamps to get free steaks. It’s a direct throughline from Reagan to W Bush to Trump: profoundly stupid, unqualified people who know how to market themselves to morons watching TV.
The big innovation in the Trump era is the recognition that Fox News has been churning up the racism to such a level that their base isn’t satisfied with veiled racism and semi-qualified leadership. Paul Ryan’s 2012 bit about how we should take away school lunches to teach families responsibility would have worked in the Reagan years, but it’s not explicitly racist enough in our era.
Moving forward, I don’t think a Republican candidate will have a shot at the nomination if he isn’t a reality TV figure or a Fox News host. I don’t see how anyone in the GOP leadership can stop Tucker Carlson or Don Jr. if they throw their hats in the ring.
There was a tweet after saying he’s deleting the above, can’t find it right now and then he made the below tweet after getting ratio’d on the initial deleting tweet
Nah, this is pure media cliquery, of the type that made Bari Weiss a thing in the first place.
Anyway, just to sum up the last month or so for the NYT editorial page, Brett Stephens penned a dangerously terrible hot take about how Real America shouldn’t lock down like New York did and he hasn’t been heard from since. Then they let Tom Cotton publish a full-on Nazi editorial calling for the military to come in and rough up BLM protestors. Their chief editor had to admit that he didn’t even fucking read the Tom Cotton editorial he published and got fired. And now his understudy Bari Weiss is quitting, realizing that there’s no one around to provide cover for her utter incompetence.
What a fucking clownshow, just fire everyone and start over.
I think the problem with the Republican Party started with the Clinton New Democrats. These guys stole their constituency! They enthusiastically agreed with them on their core beliefs, serving capital and corporate power. Didn’t even pretend otherwise. Fuck off labor unions, NAFTA/TPP/Whatever the hell other trade deal, we’re in. So how the hell can they differentiate themselves from that? Go even harder for corporate interests and then bullshit social issues.
Incredibly, incredibly dumb for Bari to quit. She was doomed, but MAKE THEM FIRE YOU! Relish in the hate of your coworkers. You’re making hundreds of thousands of dollars to write two dumb columns a week that I swear I could crank out in about three hours and uphold the apparent writing standards that the Times held Bari to. Just skip into work, basking in the fact that your very presence makes your colleagues feel UNSAFE or whatever, crank out your column, and then walk around looking to see if there’s any free sandwiches or donuts lying around. Then when they inevitably fire you you can cry EVEN HARDER and then go get paid even more money to be a Fox News Contributor and write for Aggrieved Neoconservative Monthly or wherever.
