Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Sunday, August 18, 2024

Trump Blows The Foghorn

 The concept of racial "dog whistles" goes back to Lee Atwater's famous formulation of how once you could throw the N-word around, but now you have to talk about crime and busing and things like that. Ronald Reagan was a practitioner of these dark arts, as when he spoke of Welfare Queens in Cadillacs and launched his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi talking about states' rights. 

The corrosive effect of Trumpism is that what had been reduced to subtly coded appeals to racism have become blaring foghorns. Now we have a perfect example: Trump is going to have a rally about crime in Howell, Michigan

Howell was a center of the KKK for a long time and just last month there was a march where they chanted "We love Hitler; we love Trump." 

I mean...c'mon.

Josh Marshall and others have pointed out the very obvious racism of this moment, but - once again - I am left to wonder how capable today's "journalists" are at reporting the bald truth staring them in the face. This should be all over the news until it either leaves a mark or he cancels the event that was no doubt planned by the many Nazis and Nazi-adjacent people he has working for him.

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