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Theres no one moment that gave us Donald Trump, because his rise was the sum of many afflictions: a susceptibility to fraudsters, a broken media ecosystem, a failing ruling class, white grievance politics, the arbitrariness of state boundaries in the Midwest. The man himself may be extraordinarily shallow, but the forces that brought him to power are historically complex. Still, theres one incident I always circle back to when I think about not just the last few years of American politics, but the last two decadesthe 2010 fight over the construction of an Islamic center in lower Manhattan.

First things first: The Cordoba House, as the project was initially called (it later took on the more innocuous name of Park51), was never just a mosque, and it was never actually being built at Ground Zero. When Sharif El-Gamal, a New York City real-estate developer, went scouting for space in Lower Manhattan, he settled on a spot two long blocks away, in an old Burlington Coat Factory on Park Place. El-Gamal, the son of a Catholic mother and Muslim father, envisioned a community spacewith a mosque, sure, but also a fitness center, a food court, a day care, and an auditorium, spread out over more than a dozen floors. It would even include a memorial to 9/11.

But in August 2010, the details of the project werent the point. As the white rage of the tea party boiled over that summer, conservative activists and politicians simply saw an opportunity. And so the Ground Zero Mosque was born. Glenn Beck connected it to the specter of Shariah law. Other opponents, after perhaps a cursory amount of Googling, concluded that naming the project the Cordoba House was an homage to the Muslim conquest of Spain more than a millenium earlierin other words, this that was a way of declaring 9/11 a great Islamic victory. (The organization El-Gamal was working with on the center, the Cordoba Initiative, considers the name an homage to the history of religious intermingling in that city.)

The usual suspects fanned the flames. Fox News host Greg Gutfeld said he was going to open a gay bar next door to the site to troll the Muslims who would come to worship. The New York Post, which covered the whole saga with glee, allowed at one point that it was possiblemaybe even likely that the project was entirely peaceful.

Possiblemaybe even likely! And some of them, Im sure, are good people.

A reporter for Foxs New York affiliate chased El-Gamal through the street, asking, Sharif El-Gamal, why wont you talk to us, sir, why are you running? Local outlets reported on El-Gamals previous arrests and delinquent property taxesdelinquent property taxes suddenly becoming a subject of national political importance.

But with Congress in recess and the ascendant tea party in the news, other mainstream outlets piled on, too, allowingnot for the first or last timethe anger of conservative activists to serve as a sort of assignment editor. For a time that August, in the heat of the congressional Midterms, the Cordoba House was the biggest story in America. Republicans used it as a bludgeon against everyone else. And plenty of Democrats found it easier to fall in line than to fight back. Harry Reid came out against the project. So did Howard Dean. So did Joe Lieberman. Several New York Democratic congressmen opposed it.

Polls showed a majority of Manhattanites supported the project, but nationally, it faced overwhelming bipartisan opposition. Then, as ever, people in other parts of the country were eager to use New York as a prop for their political agendas but cared little for the people who actually lived there. Sarah Palin, at the time the most prominent Republican politician in America, tweeted out her own call to action: Peaceful Muslims, pls refudiate.

Pls refudiate was an easy term to mock, but Palins message was potent. In North Carolina, a tea party nurse named Renee Ellmers accused her opponent, seven-term Democratic incumbent Bob Etheridge, of refusing to take a stand against the victory mosque. After footage of Cordoba (the Spanish one) flashed across the screen, she addressed the camera: We should tell them in plain English: No, there will never be a mosque at Ground Zero. Ellmers would go on to win in November, as Republicans across the country channeled the tea partys rage (against this, against President Barack Obama, against everything) into a landslide the nation is still digging itself out from.

By the middle of August, the project had become an issue of national importance so profound that Obama himself felt compelled to weigh in. Speaking at the White Houses Ramadan dinner, he defended the project. It was a simple matter of freedom of worship, he explained. And that was really the issue here. Because the Park51 controversy was not just the story of one development in Manhattan. Park51 got the biggest headlines, but there were efforts to block the opening of mosques and Islamic centers in Tennessee, in California, in Kentucky, in Wisconsin, and elsewhere. There were incidents of vandalism and arson. In cities and towns across the country, the freedom of Muslims to worship was treated not as something enshrined in the Constitution, but as a matter of legitimate political debatethe kind of thing citizens could simply decide to stop, if they were loud enough. And they were really fucking loud.

You shouldnt be surprised to learn that Trump managed to fit himself into the story that summer, leaking to the press a letter hed written offering to buy the Park51 property from El-Gamal.

I am making this offer as a resident of New York and citizen of the United States, not because I think the location is a spectacular one (because it is not), but because it will end a very serious, inflammatory, and highly divisive situation that is destined, in my opinion, to only get worse, he wrote.

The kind of hostility to religious liberty on display during the Park51 controversy was considered simply ordinary in Republican politics. Antagonism toward a major religion, or at least this major religion, wouldnt stop you from getting feted in the national press or booked on Sunday shows, and it certainly wouldnt cost you many votes in a primary. Trump, who in 2015 would propose blocking Muslims from entering the United States entirely, understood that the professions of support for people of faith that undergirded his party did not apply to everyone. Quite the oppositethe opposition to specific groups was a powerful unifying force.

The Ground Zero Mosque was the story we really didnt need in 2010, but a decade later, it provides essential context for where we are today, not just for what it said about where the Right was headed, but for what it said about other people and institutions, too. The development continued, but the Islamic center hasnt materializedits mostly just condos now. On Sunday, Jonathan Greenblatt, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, formally apologized for his groups prior position that the proposed development should be relocated somewhere else.

As the leading anti-hate organization in the US, with experts tracking extremism of all sorts, ADL is committed to help our Muslim allies counter Islamophobia, Greenblatt wrote on CNNs website. But as a dear Muslim friend told me recently, ADLs stance on the Cordoba House project was a punch in the gut to the Muslim community. I hope that by righting this wrong, we can be better allies in the fight against the rise in anti-Muslim hate that is comingand it is coming.

It was a notable statement, freely offered. But I couldnt help but notice the forum it was published in. CNN, after all, was also a driver of the controversy. Heres a CNN segment in which reporter Deborah Feyerick interviewed El-Gamal:

FEYERICK: Plans include a performing arts center, swimming pool, child care facilities, and, yes, a Muslim prayer space two blocks from the worst terror attack in U.S. history. Why not have a prayer space for Buddhists or Jews or Christians or why must it be Muslim? It cant be just a business decision.

EL-GAMAL: There are Jewish community centers all over the country.

FEYERICK: But the Jews didnt take down two towers.

EL-GAMAL: There are YMCAs all over the country.

FEYERICK: But the Christians didnt take down the towers.

EL-GAMAL: And this is a need that exists.

FEYERICK: For those still sensitive and so raw to this, their questiontheir overriding question is, why here? Why so close? Its two blocks but it was close enough that landing gear ended up on the roof. Why?

This was emblematic of the way this real estate project played out in so many news segments. Feyerick was just asking the question, you knowfor those still sensitive and so raw to this.

In an in-studio appearance on Joy Behars HLN show, Pamela Geller, an anti-Islam activist, proposed turning the site instead into a center dedicated to the victims of hundreds of millions of years of Jihadi wars. Behar pushed back, but these were the kinds of voices mainstream outlets elevated.

There was some real trauma there in some of the reactions from victims families, but that didnt explain the totality of what was happening, and why it ballooned like it did. The national debate was an assertion of who counted and who didnt, a show of strength and power, wrapped up not just in the physical opposition to one groups religious liberty, but in the actions of the people and institutions who, when asked to pick a side, joined in the mob. Ill always think of the summer of 2010, and the weaponization of a construction project in Manhattan, as a flickering glimpse of things to comenot just the political potency of foaming prejudice against Muslims, but also the readiness with which those pushing the story were accommodated.

There really was a victory symbol in all of thisthere were proponents of a political ideology using a construction project to demonstrate their power. It just wasnt the people Fox News warned you about.

See the original post here:
The fight over the "Ground Zero Mosque" was a grim preview of the Trump era - Mother Jones

Id worked late finishing an investigation into a cabal of developers who were effectively dictating a local governments land-use decisions. As I groggily pulled into my newspapers parking lot that morning, only a few phone calls stood between me and one of the biggest scoops of my nascent career. Another reporter met me at the front door.

Did you see the news? he asked.

I hadnt.

Someone blew up the World Trade Center!

My story hit the streets of Orlando on Sept. 12, 2001. I doubt anyone read it.

Everyone old enough to have experienced 9/11 has their own version of a 9/11 story.

I remember trying to beat back anxiety while polishing copy that no longer seemed relevant and making last-minute phone calls that would never be returned.

I remember refreshing slow-loading news sites searching for updates How many were dead? How many more attacks were coming? and taking long smoke breaks on the second-story fire escape, staring at what passed for Orlandos skyline and imagining what it would look like if a 747 slammed into the 416-foot-tall county courthouse, then the tallest building downtown.

I remember thinking that the U.S. would soon bomb someone back to the Stone Age and I was mostly OK with that, which unnerved me.

I knew in my bones that this was an epochal moment, no less than the collapse of the Berlin Wall, JFKs assassination, or Pearl Harbor. But I was too young to fully appreciate what that meant and too naive to consider its context or implications for the future.

Hunter F. Thompson got it right away: The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country, he wrote on Sept. 12 for ESPN. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now with somebody and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives.

To his point, several soldiers who died during the last throes of that war, as the United States abandoned Afghanistan to the same totalitarian regime it had dislodged two decades earlier, were in diapers when the towers fell.

Its hard to describe the collective mood that followed 9/11; it was like watching 300 million people join a cult. We were told that to fight the war on terror like you can fight a tactic the nation must stand united. In reality, the unity that commentators recall with rose-colored glasses meant performative patriotism, obsequious media and suppressed dissent.

Flags were ubiquitous. Jack Bauer tortured people on television. Toby Keith sang about putting a boot in your ass because its the American way. Rudy Giuliani became a national hero.

More importantly, George W. Bush, who owed his presidency to hanging chads, claimed a 90% approval rating, which meant that Congress approved the Patriot Act without a second glance. And when the Bush administration beat the Iraq war drums, the media cheered. Those who questioned the neocons were condemned as unpatriotic. When France refused to aid Bushs invasion, House cafeterias began serving freedom fries.

It all proved disastrous. The Bush administrations excesses and failures were laid bare in his second term: the lies about Iraqs WMD, Hurricane Katrina, Abu Ghraib, the economic collapse. He slunk out of office less popular than bad sushi.

The mysterious Enemy remained, though its become abstruse, encompassing crises throughout the Middle East. You can never defeat terrorism. The threat will always linger. There will never be Peace in Our Time.

We soon found another Enemy to fight, too: ourselves. Over the last two decades, our forced unity has fractured into deeply (though asymmetrically) polarized factions, one of which is actively undermining our democracy. I dont know whether 9/11 served as a catalyst for this state of affairs or whether it was inevitable.

The country was already diversifying by 9/11, and the Republican Party had begun marching to the far-right years earlier, during Newt Gingrichs tenure as House Speaker. And theres no doubt that the financial collapse, the election of a Black president, and the rise of social media played a considerable role in the radicalization of the GOP.

But the with-us-or-against-us post-9/11 atavism played well on talk radio and Fox News which, after Bushs crash-and-burn, concluded that he wasnt conservative enough. Chief among his sins was trying to broker an immigration deal with Democrats.

After the election of Barack Obama unlikely without the Iraq War the Tea Party delivered to Republicans the House in 2010, the Senate in 2014, and became Donald Trumps core of support two years after that. Its libertarian rhetoric thinly masked the racial resentment at the heart of its appeal; its adherents saw the conflict as existential.

Their way of life was threatened. Nothing was off-limits. They refused to compromise. They shattered democratic norms. And they embraced Trumps demagogic populism. He embraced them back. Trumps remade GOP scorned the Bush version. His was working-class, resentful of elites and prone to conspiracies that flourished on social media: birtherism, QAnon, COVID vaccines and especially election fraud.

Nine months after a mob stormed the Capitol and more than half of congressional Republicans voted to overturn an election, three in five Republicans say supporting Trumps lies is central to being a Republican.

The party has become something very unlike what it was before the towers fell, as its former leader noted during Saturdays commemorations. Bush likened right-wing extremists to the militants hed sent Americans to fight in Afghanistan: They are children of the same foul spirit, and it is our continuing duty to confront them. So much of our politics has become a naked appeal to anger, fear and resentment.

As tempting as it is to applaud Bush for calling out his own party or a faction within his party I cant help but wonder whether hes trying to put out his own fire.

Get more Informed Dissent at billman.substack.com.

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Former President Bush calls right-wing extremists 'children of the same foul spirit' as Afghan militants. But he built the party where it flourishes -...

A decade before United Nations climate scientists issued a code red for humanity, the 20-year-old college junior Evan Weber joined several thousand protesters descending on Wall Street to declare a code red for democracy. At the height of the Great Recession, Weber and his generation saw the climate crisis staring them in the face, along with exploding wealth and income inequality, student debt, and housing and health-care costs. On September 17, 2011, they rebelled. Pointing a finger at banks, corporations, and the wealthiest 1 percent, whom they blamed for corrupting our democracy by buying elections to control the legislative process, the protesters camping in Zuccotti Park issued a clarion call for justice: We are the 99 percent. That fall, hundreds of thousands of people joined Occupy Wall Street and its partner occupations in more than 600 U.S. towns and cities. Overnight, the movement created a new narrative around economic inequalityand seized the publics attention. Polls showed that a wide majority of Americans supported Occupy.

Then, almost as quickly as it had arrived, the movement appeared to vanish, leaving behind little except for the language of the 99 and the 1 percent. In the decade since, the wealth gap has only widened. The rules havent changed; our system remains rigged to benefit those at the top. And yet, on the tenth anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, its clear that the movement has had lasting, visible impacts on our political and cultural landscapeigniting an era of resistance that has redefined economic rights, progressive politics, and activism for a generation.

At its core, Occupy made protesting cool againit brought the action back into activismas it emboldened a generation to take to the streets and demand systemic reforms: racial justice, womens equality, gun safety, the defense of democracy. As the Occupy veteran Nicole Carty told me, We cant unlearn the 99 percent. Now what you have is a whole generation that is growing up in movement times, which explains all the escalation youre seeing and the work thats happening among very young people who were still kids during Occupy.

Rewriting the protest playbook, Occupy introduced a decentralized form of movement organizing that enabled hundreds of city chapters to reinforce and strengthen one another yet remain independenta sharp break from the traditional, hierarchical structure of protest movements of the past. Pioneering the use of live-stream technology while employing powerful social-media messaging and meme tactics to grow participation both on- and offline, Occupy showed a new generation how to turn social movements into a viral spectacle that seizes control of the public narrative.

Read: The triumph of Occupy Wall Street

More deeply, the movement on Wall Street injected activists with a new sense of courage: Confronting power and issuing demands through civil disobedience is now an ingrained part of our political culture. In the years since, a cascade of social movements influenced by Occupy have altered the national conversation, including Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, the Womens March, Indivisible, and March for Our Lives. On a fundamental level, we changed the way that people hear and see and understand and process a narrative of resistance, the former Occupy activist Dana Balicki said.

And in a sense, the protesters have never gone home. Harry Waisbren, who helped lead the movements online efforts at Zuccotti Park, told me, The individuals and the networks would go on and start new projects, and youd keep seeing them over and over at the cutting edge: The same people who were in Occupy Wall Street were in Black Lives Matter, the Peoples Climate March, the Sunrise Movement. Some of the top activists of this generation got their start at Occupy.

The Sunrise Movement, the youth-led climate organization that Weber co-founded in 2017, is today among the loudest voicesin the streets and at the ballot boxdemanding transformative, Green New Dealstyle policies in Congresss $3.5 trillion budget bill. The impassioned Gen Z climate generation didnt come out of nowhere. It emerged as a direct successor to Occupy, whose activists helped redirect the fight against inequality into a focused, strategic movement to save the planet.

The six-year battle that defeated the Keystone XL pipeline and the 10-month defense of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe in its challenge against the now-illegal Dakota Access Pipeline are two other examples of Occupy galvanizing the U.S. environmental movement as activists recommitted themselves to halting oil, gas, and coal infrastructure projects nationwide. From the fossil-fuel-divestment campaign to the 2014 Peoples Climate March, which preceded the Paris Accord, and from Extinction Rebellions militant direct actions to the global climate strikes that brought millions of young people into the streets in 2019, Occupys groundbreaking message and tactics set the modern climate movement on its course.

Some of the most skilled Zuccotti Park organizers also later founded the organization Momentum to train activists such as Weber to develop tangible policy goals and create a road map for enacting long-term, structural change. As a result, Sunrise helped marshal the youth vote in the 2018 midterms to elect a slate of House progressives including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who would elevate the groups climate-jobs planwhich came to be known as the Green New Dealto the top of the Democratic Party platform.

In dollars-and-cents terms, Occupy changed the way Americans understood their role in the economy, inaugurating a decade of labor unrest as employees became activists and workers rediscovered their power. In the fall of 2012, a year after protesters were evicted from Zuccotti Park, Occupy organizers working in coalition with unions and nonprofits took the message of economic justice to those most ready to hear it: low-wage earners seeking a $15 minimum wage. When the first several hundred fast-food workers in New York City walked off their jobs demanding higher pay, better working conditions, and the right to form a union, that marked a breakthrough for organized labor, opening a new workers front known as the Fight for $15.

Annie Lowrey: The counterintuitive workings of the minimum wage

In response, voters and legislators raised the base pay in more than half of U.S. states; dozens of cities, including Seattle, Los Angeles, New York, and Washington, D.C., established a $15 minimum. Democrats nearly managed to include a $15 federal minimum wage in the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, which President Joe Biden signed into law in March, revealing how much the economic demands spurred by Occupy have reshaped the national discussion.

The fight against income inequality transformed the labor movement in other ways, as Occupy activists in 2012 began helping organize nationwide Black Friday strikes at Walmart, which eventually led to higher pay for half a million employees at the worlds largest retailer. The uprising spread across the low-wage sectorencompassing striking janitors, airport staff, nurses, domestic workers, hotel workers, hospital employees, construction workers, supermarket clerks, and othersshifting the balance of power between employers and employees. The decade-long wave of worker protests achieved its greatest visibility and impact in 2018, when public-school teachers launched strikes to demand raiseswhich they wonacross a dozen states, including West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Arizona, and the Carolinas, in what became known as the Red State Revolt.

The steady uptick in labor activism seems to be moving the needle. In March, the House passed the most pro-union bill in decadesthe Protecting the Right to Organize Actto strengthen labor protections, expand collective-bargaining rights, penalize employers who violate labor laws, and weaken right-to-work laws. Forty years after Ronald Reagan crushed the air-traffic controllers strike, dealing a generational blow to Americas unions, the nation appears to be entering a new, more robust era of worker demandsaccelerated by conditions in the coronavirus economy, and again, reflecting the distance the country has traveled since Occupy issued its seminal wake-up call to the 99 percent.

But perhaps Occupy Wall Streets most seismic and discernible impact has been on politics itselfshifting the window of what is deemed politically acceptable discourse and pulling the nation to the left. Prior to Occupy, no mainstream legislator in Washington dared to criticize capitalisms thorough corruption of our politics: the obscene wealth gap, the laws designed by corporations, the billionaires evading taxes, and the revolving door that keeps the 1 percent in charge. That all changed with Occupy, which declared that economic injustice and inequality were deliberate outcomes of policies shaped by Wall Streets greed. By framing the populist economic message that thrust anti-corporate lawmakers such as Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Ocasio-Cortez into the electoral spotlight, Occupy Wall Street arguably did more in six months to move American politics to the left than the Democratic Party was able to do in six decades. Which raises the question: Could Sanders and his political revolution have been possible before Occupy shattered decades of silence about income inequality? Not likely.

As Representative Ro Khanna from Californias Seventeenth District, which includes Silicon Valley, told me, Sanderss and Warrens lifes work was happening well before the Occupy movement, but Im not sure the country would have been ready to listen to their voicesand I dont think they would have emerged as national figuresif it werent for Occupy putting the issues of wealth and income inequality front and center. Some imagined that the movement would transform into a political force: a Tea Party of the left. Although the transition never happened, Occupy achieved something perhaps even greater. According to Khanna, it created the conditions for the emergence of a progressive wing of the Democratic Party, and in the long run, the progressive wing is ascendant and is likely to succeed.

The movement was particularly instrumental in the rise of Sanders, whom many would later call the Occupy candidate. When Sanders first got on the national map in 2015s primary season, it was thanks in large part to a group of Occupy activists who had repurposed their digital-organizing and social-media talents into a viral movement called People for Bernie. Operating independently of the Sanders campaign, the group created a horizontal model for voter engagement by inviting volunteers across all regions and demographics to help the Sanders phenomenon spread in the distributed, decentralized format of a social movement.

We understood how to mobilize the internet, Charles Lenchner, a co-founder of People for Bernie, said. We trusted the people and told them to do what they thought was right. We gave away the keys. The tactic drew millions of supporters as it empowered people to become stakeholders propelling the movement. The group fueled Sanderss meteoric ascent, particularly among Millennials, as the campaign introduced small-dollar fundraising as a winning strategy and activated a new generations engagement in the democratic process.

By reinventing digital electoral politics, Occupy veterans helped put a once-fringe Democratic socialist into the leadership of the Democratic Party, where he was able to move progressive prioritiesMedicare for All, the Green New Deal, debt-free college, a $15 wage, higher taxes on the wealthyfrom the periphery into the mainstream. Sanders would provide the springboard for Ocasio-Cortez and a generation of anti-corporate lawmakers to begin to remake one of Americas two major parties, as social movements shaped electoral outcomes. In the words of Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the Working Families Party, Occupy shifted the political culture of the U.S., birthing an era in which liberals have been radicalized, and radicals have been electoralized.

Photos: Occupy Wall Street spreads worldwide

When I interviewed Evan Weber for my book about Occupy and its legacy, he agreed that the movement played an essential role in igniting a new progressive eraone that might finally be on the verge of achieving transformational social, economic, and electoral reforms. AOC wouldnt have run if Bernies campaign wasnt as successful as it was, and Bernies campaign wouldnt have resonated and been successful if not for Occupy, he said. Occupy helped create a mood and understanding in the country of the populist moment that were in, where so few have so much at the expense of the rest of us.

Occupy was like a great wave hitting shoreand a warning of even bigger waves to come. Among the slogans and chants that resonated at Zuccotti Park, one in particular has echoed through the decade: This is what democracy looks like. For a generation whose time to solve the climate crisis is running out, government must now deliver. The alternative, Weber warned, may drive an army of young people to begin flexing its muscles on a scale not seen since the 1930s, through disruptive resistance featuring mass sustained shutdowns, occupations, and general strikes. As the turbulence of the past decade has shown, systemic crises must be confronted. Occupy provided a blueprint for how popular dissent and demands can change America. Now a new 99 percent must write the next chapter.

This article was adapted from Michael Levitins book Generation Occupy: Reawakening American Democracy.

See the article here:
Occupy Wall Street Did More Than You Think - The Atlantic

They say they'll quit en masse. They won't. They say they won't do what they're told. They will. They will do what they're told, then lie about it.

The day after the president issued a vaccine mandate last week that affects about 100 million workers, CNBC released a poll showing that of a minority of Americans still holding us back from reaching herd immunity, 83 percent said nothing would change their minds. A few days prior to that, the Post released a poll showing 72 percent would quit their jobs if mandates did not provide a "religious" exemption. This morning, a local TV station reported that Republican Governor Ron DeSantis would lead an anti-vaccine rally in rural Florida. All of this has the press corps wondering what Joe Biden is going to do.

Before they ask that question, however, they should be asking themselves another: Why believe anything these people say? They have decided what they will do and what they won't do, and they have rationalized their way toward that already determined conclusion using a grotesque process of intellectual dishonesty that's aided and abetted by grifters and corrupt political leaders. And then there's the anti-vaxxers who have decided against taking a free, safe and effective vaccine in favor of spending their hard-earned money on ivermectin, which might be safe and might be effective, but almost certainly is not, as Lindsay Beyerstein has said. Why are we trusting people who lie to themselves? Why are we trusting people who inject sheep drench?

Remember the difference between belief and conviction. Beliefs are cheap and easy. Convictions are hard and expensive. If people who eat horse paste genuinely believed eating horse paste would save them from "tyranny," then the president might really have a problem on his hands, one of his own making. But then again, these people are willingly and freely eating horse paste! It's not out of some sense of conviction, but because someone lied to them, and it felt super-duper good to believe that lie. And since "everyone" is doing it, why not do it, too? Convictions are built on rock. Beliefs are built on sand. By ordering a vaccine mandate, the president is calling their bluff.

It is a bluff, make no mistake. Here's how you'll know for sure. We are going to see two things that should not co-exist, but totally co-exist, because honesty plays a minimal role in these people's lives. Those two things are 1) polls showing resistance to vaccine mandates and 2) corporate reports showing compliance with vaccine mandates -- at the same time. The polls will be of workers. The reports will come from their employers. One of these should cancel the other, but won't.

Remember some of these people are injecting sheep drench. It should not be difficult to imagine an anti-vaccine employee of Disney, say, getting the shot in the morning, because his boss said so, then attend an anti-vaccine rally led by the Republican governor that evening. You might be thinking: You can't do both! You would be absolutely correct -- if we were talking about honest people. But we are already seeing this pattern play out. They say they'll quit en masse. They won't. They say they won't do what they're told. They will. They will do what they're told, then lie about having done what they're told. Cheap and easy!

It should be clear to the respectable white people who will determine the results of the coming midterms that they can't trust people who will do what they're told and then lie about it. What they can trust is a president laying down the law. (More on that in a minute.) Grifters, strategists and the most corrupt Republicans are making resistance to vaccine mandates seem noble. They are trying to cast themselves as freedom fighters! They are trying, in other words, to revive the old tea party. While the methods are the same -- billionaires funneling cash to astro-turf operatives -- the spirit is different. The tea party had credibility among respectable white people. Anti-vaxxers do not.

What isn't clear to respectable white people is that there is an honest minority inside the dishonest minority. Both are holding us back from reaching herd immunity, but only one threatens violence. This minority of the minority? True Believers who will quit their jobs in the belief that comrades will be by their sides. These are the people who will feel betrayed on discovering their comrades not only didn't quit but act like they didn't do what they're told. While their comrades are fine with getting the vaccine in the morning before attending an anti-vaccine rally in the evening, this honest minority can't tolerate so much bullshit. They will come to see the bullshit as something that prevents "a hero" from doing what "no one has the guts to do."

If and when the violence comes, it will be tempting to blame Joe Biden. But mandates are no more of a source of violence than regular law and order is. The president is laying down the law for a sizable minority that is fundamentally lawless. (For instance, DeSantis warned Florida businesses this morning that his administration will fine them $5,000 per instance if they comply with federal law.) More importantly, the president is laying down the law to instill public trust. It's for the benefit of law-abiding Americans who have honored their obligations. I hope respectable white people remember two Novembers from now.

Continued here:
Why should we trust GOP leaders and voters who reliably demonstrate their lawlessness? - Raw Story

By Mike McGann, Editor, The Times @mikemcgannpa

If they held a local competition for off the rails in politics, Chester County Republican Chair Gordon Eck would win by a landslide.

His I wont dignify it by calling it an Op/Ed recently published screed attacking a fellow Republican and local Board of Education president over the fake issue of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in our countys schools was factually challenged (okay, it was completely bogus), violated Ronald Reagans 11th Commandment Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican and frankly was just looney tunes.

Chris McCune is the president of the West Chester Area Board of Education and he has become the target of Ecks false claims about CRT in the school district. He is a Republican and has served two terms on the board and is seeking a third in November. Eck is calling for a write in campaign against the official GOP nominee which seems unlikely to do much beyond making it easier for a Democrat to win the seat.

I was able to speak with McCune this week and he came across as a shockingly normal, moderate person not unlike dozens of other board of education members Ive known over the last couple of decades in Chester County. The kids, their families, the staff and the schools are the top priority for people like McCune, while trying to keep budgets in check to respect local property owners. Its likely there are issues we disagree on, but at least you can have a conversation with the guy hes willing to listen and engage.

That last part describes almost every school board member I know in either party, by the way. For these folks today with the challenges in education, it is often about making the least bad choice when presented with no good ones. They get no pay, it is an amazing time commitment (dont forget about committee meetings, in addition to the two or more regular meetings held monthly). And in the best of times, they get a lot of grief.

It is not the best of times.

Right now? While McCune is in the spotlight, the same kind of crap is going on all over Chester County with a bunch of brainwashed lunatics screaming over something that just doesnt exist. For reference, these are some of the same people who claim COVID doesnt exist and masks dont work.

No school in Chester County is teaching CRT. None.

Are there schools working on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion efforts to better serve a growingly diverse community? Yes. Are those notoriously left-leaning Fortune 500 companies doing the same thing for their work forces? Yes.

McCune said he has tried to explain this to Eck and some of the others on the committee that the DEI efforts are not just about race, but about better inclusion for special needs students and those of varying social-economic groups, but that the message just doesnt get through.

In a county where only a few years back, entitled white students at one high school started chanting mow my lawn to the students of a school with a higher latino population during a football game, Im pretty DEI isnt just a nice idea, it is kind of warranted.

But, you know, those are just pesky facts.

Lets be honest, truth and reality have been slipping away from Chester County Republicans for more than a decade, since the Tea Party started taking over county committee slots, running out the old moderates.

According to McCune and others Ive spoken with of late, there are four unbreakable truths one must agree to if you wish to run for office as Republican in Chester County:

This is entirely out of step with the people of Chester County, of course, and leading a once dominant party into becoming a very small minority party of screaming extremists. It also keeps a lot of good people who might do well in the public arena, but consider themselves too conservative to be Democrats, from running for office.

Ive taken much heat in the last three years for suggesting that you cannot vote for any Republican as unfair as it is to folks like McCune and others who are part of sane minority in the party.

It was my thought that without utter and total repudiation and one would think that losing every row office and control of the County Commissioners, not to mention the countys Congressional seat might have been a wake up call the Republican Party would not reset, reassess and return to its old center-right conservative roots.

But thanks to a never-ending media machine driving these lies, Im not sure there is any hope for this party to be reformed.

In the long run, it might be best for the GOP to be retired and replaced with a less crazed center right party that can start from scratch. Like it or not, we need two parties dedicated to democracy so we dont find ourselves running to extremes. The Republican Party no longer embraces anything beyond a naked grab for power and autocracy.

Its a tragic truth and maybe one you do not want to hear: Gordon Eck is todays GOP, not Dick Thornburgh or Tom Ridge.

And we are all the poorer for it.

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Rabid GOP now feeding on their own | chescotimes.com - The Times of Chester County