This explains a lot. Board right wingers parrot this stuff here daily so it's interesting to see who has programmed the sheep.
Inside the GOP's 60-year authoritarian plot
These five movements all hitting America at the same time got the attention of conservatives and Republicans who had previously ignored or even ridiculed Kirk back in the 1950s. Suddenly, America’s richest conservative commentators (like William F. Buckley Jr.) were telling Republicans that Russell Kirk was, indeed, a prophet.
They’d finally found a politically acceptable “hook” to destroy the wealth of working-class people and transfer trillions into their own money bins: fear of communism and social decay caused by an activist middle class.
The Republican/Conservative “solution” to the “crisis” these five movements represented was put into place in 1981 when Ronald Reagan was sworn into office: the explicit goal of the morbidly rich white men funding the so-called Reagan Revolution was to take the middle class down a peg to end the protests and restore “social stability” — and increase corporate profitability.
Their plan was to declare war on labor unions so wages could slide back down again, end free college across the nation so students would live in fear rather than be willing to protest, and increase the penalties Nixon had already put on drugs so they could use those laws against their scapegoats: hippy antiwar protesters and Black people.
Thus, Reagan massively cut taxes on rich people, and raised taxes on working-class people 11 times. For example, he put a tax on Social Security income and unemployment income, and put in a mechanism to track and tax tips income, all of which had previously been tax-free but were exclusively needed and used by middle-class people.
It had been a pretty good scam for the billionaires who owned the GOP and wanted, back in the 1950s, to stop the union movement that was forcing them to share their profits with their workers.
First, they terrified Americans about communism and socialism, then convinced about half of us that those things came straight out of “liberal” social and economic movements.
Unions, feminism, acceptance of the queer community, civil rights, minimum wage increases, and even regulation of corporate behavior would, they told us, all lead to a Soviet-style tyranny.
So, to save America from herself, Reagan gutted the American middle class, transferring over $50 trillion in wealth from working class people into the money bins of the morbidly rich.
Into this maelstrom walked Donald Trump, proclaiming himself the savior of the country. In the GOP primary he pointed out how corrupt his opponents were, particularly Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, and destroyed them, one after the other.
For the general election in 2016, he changed his tune and ran as a Democrat, saying he was going to bring jobs home, end so-called “free trade” policies, raise taxes on the rich so much that “my friends won’t talk to me anymore,” and make sure every American had free or low-cost healthcare and access to an affordable college education.
They were all lies — something Trump had become adept at during his business career — but they worked and sucked in disaffected workers who knew they’d been screwed but weren’t sure who did it to them or why.
We have an open fascist and agent of authoritarian Russia running for the GOP nomination for president at the same time he’s facing 91 felony charges in our court system, having already been convicted in our courts of rape and fraud.
He’s promised to turn America into an authoritarian nation like Russia or Hungary, and wants to re-align the United States away from NATO and the EU and toward Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea.
We are literally facing the authoritarian future that John Stormer was warning us against back in 1964. Only instead of “communists” in the State Department, it’s a billionaire coming into the presidency with the avowed goal of ending union rights and locking up or using the Army with live ammunition against those who protest his policies.
And it all tracks back to wealthy conservatives funding a project in the 1960s to scare Americans about socialism and communism so they could stop the union-fueled growth of wages that were cutting into their profits.
Inside the GOP's 60-year authoritarian plot
These five movements all hitting America at the same time got the attention of conservatives and Republicans who had previously ignored or even ridiculed Kirk back in the 1950s. Suddenly, America’s richest conservative commentators (like William F. Buckley Jr.) were telling Republicans that Russell Kirk was, indeed, a prophet.
They’d finally found a politically acceptable “hook” to destroy the wealth of working-class people and transfer trillions into their own money bins: fear of communism and social decay caused by an activist middle class.
The Republican/Conservative “solution” to the “crisis” these five movements represented was put into place in 1981 when Ronald Reagan was sworn into office: the explicit goal of the morbidly rich white men funding the so-called Reagan Revolution was to take the middle class down a peg to end the protests and restore “social stability” — and increase corporate profitability.
Their plan was to declare war on labor unions so wages could slide back down again, end free college across the nation so students would live in fear rather than be willing to protest, and increase the penalties Nixon had already put on drugs so they could use those laws against their scapegoats: hippy antiwar protesters and Black people.
Thus, Reagan massively cut taxes on rich people, and raised taxes on working-class people 11 times. For example, he put a tax on Social Security income and unemployment income, and put in a mechanism to track and tax tips income, all of which had previously been tax-free but were exclusively needed and used by middle-class people.
It had been a pretty good scam for the billionaires who owned the GOP and wanted, back in the 1950s, to stop the union movement that was forcing them to share their profits with their workers.
First, they terrified Americans about communism and socialism, then convinced about half of us that those things came straight out of “liberal” social and economic movements.
Unions, feminism, acceptance of the queer community, civil rights, minimum wage increases, and even regulation of corporate behavior would, they told us, all lead to a Soviet-style tyranny.
So, to save America from herself, Reagan gutted the American middle class, transferring over $50 trillion in wealth from working class people into the money bins of the morbidly rich.
Into this maelstrom walked Donald Trump, proclaiming himself the savior of the country. In the GOP primary he pointed out how corrupt his opponents were, particularly Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, and destroyed them, one after the other.
For the general election in 2016, he changed his tune and ran as a Democrat, saying he was going to bring jobs home, end so-called “free trade” policies, raise taxes on the rich so much that “my friends won’t talk to me anymore,” and make sure every American had free or low-cost healthcare and access to an affordable college education.
They were all lies — something Trump had become adept at during his business career — but they worked and sucked in disaffected workers who knew they’d been screwed but weren’t sure who did it to them or why.
We have an open fascist and agent of authoritarian Russia running for the GOP nomination for president at the same time he’s facing 91 felony charges in our court system, having already been convicted in our courts of rape and fraud.
He’s promised to turn America into an authoritarian nation like Russia or Hungary, and wants to re-align the United States away from NATO and the EU and toward Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea.
We are literally facing the authoritarian future that John Stormer was warning us against back in 1964. Only instead of “communists” in the State Department, it’s a billionaire coming into the presidency with the avowed goal of ending union rights and locking up or using the Army with live ammunition against those who protest his policies.
And it all tracks back to wealthy conservatives funding a project in the 1960s to scare Americans about socialism and communism so they could stop the union-fueled growth of wages that were cutting into their profits.
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