Onyx Lynx

4. Speaking of, at this point, someone could discover Donald Trump's secret strangled hooker burial ground and his followers wouldn't give a flying fuck. He could be caught in bed with a dead boy, a live girl, and half a sheep, and he'd still get at least 35% of primary voters. If you ever thought that Trump would go away quickly, you were an idiot. If you still think that Trump will burn out at some point, you're an even bigger fucking idiot. Trump has already taken out the seaside villages, and he's on his way to Tokyo. Your puny conventional weapons will have no effect.

The full political might of Florida's IOUs was on display in December, when a deceptive campaign, funded by the state's electric utilities, crushed a citizen-led effort to open Florida to solar competition through the 2016 ballot. "When your opponents have no ethical foundation, have unlimited resources and are willing to say and do anything to defeat you," says Stephen Smith, director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, which led the pro-solar effort, "it's a tough hurdle to overcome."

• "The Enduring Solidarity of Whiteness"

  There is not a single word in this response relating to race and racism in Western Europe or anything remotely closely to it. Instead, Johnson proposes to bait with race, and then switch to class. He swaps “labor conditions and daily lives of working people” in for “victims of white supremacy” and prays that the reader does not notice. Indeed, one might just as easily note that the advance of indoor plumbing, germ theory, and electricity have improved “the labor conditions and daily lives of working people,” and this would be no closer to actual engagement.
  
  This pattern—strident rhetoric divorced from knowable fact—marks Johnson’s argument. Reparations, he tells us, do not emerge from the “felt needs of the majority of blacks,” a claim that is hard to square with the fact that a majority of blacks support reparations. Instead, he argues, the claim for reparations emerges from a cabal of “anti-racist liberals” and “black elites” seeking to make a “territorial-identitarian claim for power.” In fact, the reparations movement runs the gamut from the victims of Jon Burge, to those targeted by North Carolina’s eugenics campaign, to those targeted by the same campaign in Virginia, to those targeted by “Massive Resistance” in the same state, to the descendants of those devastated by the Tulsa pogrom. Are the black people of Tulsa who suffered aerial bombing at the hands of their own government“black elites” in pursuit of “territorial-identitarian claim?” Or are they something far simpler—people who were robbed and believe they deserve to be compensated?

• "The Case for Considering Reparations"

  With that said, I concluded that the next-best step was to back John Conyers’s H.R. 40 bill, which proposed to study slavery and its legacy, and to determine whether reparations were feasible. This seemed intelligent, given that is the exact same path taken by one of the more successful reparations efforts—those awarded to Japanese Americans interned during World War II. It was also actionable—a bill in Congress that could serve as a rallying point—as opposed to merely rhetorical. Finally, although studies certainly end up in the dust-bin of history all the time, without some sort of official document tallying up the specific costs of some three centuries of injury, it seems relatively useless to argue for a plan for payment.

• "Against Endorsements"

  The point is to get people to question, not to recruit them into a religion. Citizens are not sheep. They do not need shepherds, and even if they did I would be poorly qualified. I have thought quite deeply about the problem of racism in American society. I have thought somewhat deeply about inequality and the social safety net. I have though only modestly about foreign policy and the environment. And I haven’t thought much at all about net neutrality. I voted for the first time in 2008, following years of skepticism about electoral politics. Whatever. The point is that this is not the record of someone who should be telling other citizens how to vote.

But the foundation for his claim upon the White House was that he knew how to get good things done because he was experienced and prepared.

But many Republicans and not a few Democrats these days not only don’t seem to think a would-be president needs to have experience or to have prepared for the office, they see experience and signs of thoughtful preparation as disqualifications.

Preparing? That’s for losers.

Experience? Just another way of saying you’ve been compromised and corrupted by Wall Street, the Washington establishment, and your husband.

Let’s remember that “ranchers” are being used as a proxy for every person or company that wants to get its hands on free government land. Despite being relatively big deals at the local level, there really isn’t enough money in ranching to get the kind of legislative support they receive. That money comes from extraction industries like mining and oil drillers and fracking companies, that stand to make billions if they can get the feds to give up its ownership of millions of acres of western land. It would not surprise me if some people hang on to unprofitable ranches solely for the value of the minerals and water beneath the ground in anticipation of the day when a republican administration lets them buy the land for pennies on the dollar. The ranchers are only the most photogenic of the groups that want to hoover up federal land, mining and other extraction industries don’t get the same kind of nostalgic preferential treatment from the public.

Does a nation that stands in line for a new smartphone when it comes out sound like a country that is aching for a revolution? When you walk down the street, for every person who’s handing out fliers calling for people to rise up against injustice, there are 100 who don’t see them because they’re staring at their smartphone and listening to Justin Bieber on their way home to turn on the TV to find out what happened to the Kardashians today.

Bernie people, especially the PUBs and pro lefties, who dream of “revolution” because they’ve talked themselves into being pissed off about things they don’t even understand, are doing far more to hold back the progressive movement than to move it forward. If you want things to change, wishing for it will never work. It never has worked and it can’t work. Moving this country to the left is amazingly easy, but you’re doing it wrong. Giving people hope and asking them to vote is how you move a society and a nation forward, not by trying to piss people off and hoping that more people will react. It’s been more than 40 years; how much longer will you continue to do this type of thing before you figure out that change doesn’t happen that way?

Create a political will and we can have anything we want.

We are seriously entering territory here where we should not go. When a leading candidate for his party's nomination starts calling for the crowd to "knock the crap" out of someone, well, I think you get the idea.

Many conservative pundits and politicians are acting as though they are not complicit in Trump's rise. But the party has been playing with fire for years. Look at the last two presidential election cycles. The jovial ignorance of Herman Cain. The routinized lying of Michele Bachmann. The cultural resentment and white identity politics of Sarah Palin. All of these unqualified figures were beloved by evangelicals in their moment, and tolerated by party elites. Trump launches a campaign of their greatest hits, and now the party suddenly realizes the downside?

[...]

I believe Trump's demagoguery will pass and there will be a better and more responsible conservatism in the nation's future. But that might not begin until we face the fact that Trump is not a weed in the garden of contemporary conservatism. He is its fruit.

My point being, it was all there from the very beginning. The eliminationist rhetoric and loathing of uppity women (and minorities.) The unswerving certainty that nearly-omnipotent Damn Dirty Hippie Commies were tirelessly plotting to enslave and destroy us all. Faith in a potato bug named Frank Luntz. Eternal hostility to the idea of moderation and compromise. Unshakable, dogmatic belief in an Imaginary Librul Media Conspiracy. Absolute conviction that every word they heard vomiting out of Hate Radio was the unvarnished truth.