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Why the Republicans Will Only Talk About “Big Lies” & Culture Wars
More & more Americans are figuring out their feigned-outrage 4o-year scam
Now that “conservative ideas” have been so badly discredited, Republicans are resorting back to Big Lie and faux outrage techniques to try to hold their base together.
Back in 1981, when Republican strategist Lee Atwater was advising Reagan, he pointed out that using the N-word post-1965 was counterproductive.
But, he told a group of GOP activists, “Now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, Blacks get hurt worse than whites… ‘We want to cut this’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing and a hell of a lot more abstract than” the N-word.
At least, in their shout-outs to their white racist base, the Republican Party pretended to be advancing ideas that they said would help America.
They solemnly swore to us that cutting social safety net programs would “encourage” otherwise “lazy” (their favorite word for Black) people to find a good job and go to work every day.
They insisted that cutting taxes on rich people would raise the income of ordinary working people and cause those “job creators” to use their saved tax money to build new factories and open new stores.
It was all lies, of course, but at least they pretended to have ideas for the better part of three decades.
The façade slipped slightly when Atwater played a role in helping George HW Bush put together his infamous Willie Horton ads.
But soon Bush Sr., and later Bush Jr., would return to the GOP lie that keeping healthcare, food and decent housing away from people would “incentivize” them to work, but, paradoxically, that reducing the wealth of very rich people through raising top-bracket taxes would “de-incentivize” them from maintaining their businesses and thus cause a massive loss of jobs.
As we saw from the Republican response to the American Rescue Act, President Biden’s $1.9 trillion program to help out unemployed people and small businesses all across America, Republicans no longer even bother…
