Middle Class Con

The old, tried and tested way for Republicans to gain support has been the same for as long as I can remember. The first American president I can remember from my own experience is Jimmy Carter; that makes Ronald Reagan the first Republican president from my own personal memory.

What is that Republican strategy? It's to get (religious) middle class white people a target to kick down on. This has never changed during my lifetime and the earliest target in my memory are the "welfare queens" that were popularized by Ronald Reagan in his 1976 presidential campaign. As I got older and more interested in politics, I discovered that this strategy has served Republicans before and since Reagan as well, as it does to this day. Two things have changed though: 1) polarization between the Red and Blue camps has intensified severely, partly due to 2) the rise of identity politics and the culture war.

The Republican campaigns throughout my history of more than a half century have been characterized by their spreading of moral panics targeted at the minorities that are served up to the white middle class to make them feel better about themselves, or to give an explanation for their cultural, financial and political woes. From the welfare queen to the Satanic panic, from the full-fledged moral panic around critical race theory to the LGBT grooming conspiracy theory and QAnon related nonsense about child-murdering-satanists among Democrats, they're all based on nonsensical claims, designed purely for their emotional response in the religious white middle class base.

I'm not going to debunk all these propagandistic disinformation campaigns here; I've done so repeatedly already, and I'm not feeling so well today, so this will be a short post. Instead I invite you to watch the short video linked below which does an excellent job at debunking the claim that crime is increasing in so called "Blue cities", and that African Americans are predominantly to blame for this increase. It's nonsense. Don't buy in to it. Don't be conned.

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