-------------------
This is the first of a two-part series on the GOP and racism. It's an excerpt from his latest book Why the GOP Became a White Supremacist Party (Middle Passage Press)
One month after former President Donald Trump announced that he was a candidate for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination in July 2016, he boasted in a campaign speech that he was the "law and order candidate." At the time, Trump was locked in a dual with Democratic presidential foe Hillary Clinton for the handful of swing states that would decide the White House.
Trump wrapped himself in the law-and-order mantle as a blatant, naked, and cynical ploy to appeal to his base of less educated, lower-income white rural, and blue-collar workers. (Bare assertion. And Mr. Hutchinson cannot know Trump's motivations.
One can be sure that if a leftist is going to explain something, it will not be accurate, it will not clarify, and it will not be intended to impart information.
That's because leftists like Mr. Hutchinson are only interested in The Narrative, that is, the daily talking points and bumper sticker slogans promulgated by Central Command. The Narrative is circulated throughout the media landscape every day, and writers, commentators, and news operations dutifully regurgitate it.
So Mr. Hutchinson pretends to be a truth teller, but he's simply doing his duty to repeat The Narrative, spouting agitprop in service to The Agenda. The Agenda is the dismantling of the system. The system, being racist, unfair, and hurtful to the worker and minorities, must be replaced.
But in actual fact, none of these issues are actually important to the Left. They are simply excuses for advancing the leftist dream. So, nothing you will read below will be true, accurate, logical, or helpful.
This article is The Narrative, which facilitates The Agenda. The reader should keep this in mind at all times.
-------------------------This is the first of a two-part series on the GOP and racism. It's an excerpt from his latest book Why the GOP Became a White Supremacist Party (Middle Passage Press)
One month after former President Donald Trump announced that he was a candidate for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination in July 2016, he boasted in a campaign speech that he was the "law and order candidate." At the time, Trump was locked in a dual with Democratic presidential foe Hillary Clinton for the handful of swing states that would decide the White House.
Trump wrapped himself in the law-and-order mantle as a blatant, naked, and cynical ploy to appeal to his base of less educated, lower-income white rural, and blue-collar workers. (Bare assertion. And Mr. Hutchinson cannot know Trump's motivations.
First notice the use of language. "Blatant," "naked," "cynical," "ploy." That is, Trump was obviously appealing to certain voters in a racist manner. But Mr. Hutchinson will never quote Trump to show us this racism. If it is truly blatant there ought to be dozens of examples.
Second, the voters. They are hicks, slack jawed yokels, the smelly, gapped toothed country folk who cannot think or reason. They're so easy to fool by a slick talker like Trump.)
"Trump's single-handed effort to revive the slogan 'law and order' is the key to creating the perception of a new crisis of crime and violence;" observed NPR writer Geoff Nunberg, "it weaves together assaults by those he calls radical Islamic terrorists, inner-city thugs, and illegals. The racial overtones of the phrase are even harder to deny now than they were in the Nixon years when white radicals and students were part of the mix." (Mr. Hutchinson finds another Leftist to state an opinion that he agrees with.
Mr. Hutchinson will tangent to Nixon for the next four paragraph without reason except to try to tie Trump to this half-remembered history regarding Nixon.)
It worked for him as it worked for Nixon in the presidential election a half-century earlier. Nixon made the slogan "law and order" and "crime in the streets" his signature themes. He was brutal and direct in one speech when he flatly said that the "solution to the crime problem is not the quadrupling of funds for any governmental war on poverty but more convictions."
It was cold, calculating, and cynical. But it resuscitated the career of the man many viewed as a hopelessly failed, flawed, has-been politician. It turned him into the front-runner for the White House in 1968. Nixon played hard on the urban riots, antiwar mass marches and riots, and campus takeovers that tore the country in the late 1960s to paint a horrific picture of an America in anarchy.
He ridiculed the thought that poverty, racial discrimination, and social inequities were the root causes of crime, violence, and ghetto unrest. His answer was a get tough and crack down on crime.
The crime, of course, that he meant was Black crime, and that meant more police, prisons, tougher and longer sentences, and a full-scale militarization of police departments. Nixon doubled down on this with a thinly disguised Southern Strategy in which he did a hard court of fearful blue-collar whites and, unreconstructed racists in the South. He piled on a healthy dose of racially loaded code words such as "out of control big government," "welfare cheats," and "permissiveness." This pitch gave Nixon a comfortable lead in the polls over his Democratic rival Hubert Humphrey for much of the campaign.
Trump knew that history in 2016 when he first snatched the page from Nixon's playbook. (He did? How can Mr. Hutchinson possibly know what Trump thought?)
It worked for him as it worked for Nixon in the presidential election a half-century earlier. Nixon made the slogan "law and order" and "crime in the streets" his signature themes. He was brutal and direct in one speech when he flatly said that the "solution to the crime problem is not the quadrupling of funds for any governmental war on poverty but more convictions."
It was cold, calculating, and cynical. But it resuscitated the career of the man many viewed as a hopelessly failed, flawed, has-been politician. It turned him into the front-runner for the White House in 1968. Nixon played hard on the urban riots, antiwar mass marches and riots, and campus takeovers that tore the country in the late 1960s to paint a horrific picture of an America in anarchy.
He ridiculed the thought that poverty, racial discrimination, and social inequities were the root causes of crime, violence, and ghetto unrest. His answer was a get tough and crack down on crime.
The crime, of course, that he meant was Black crime, and that meant more police, prisons, tougher and longer sentences, and a full-scale militarization of police departments. Nixon doubled down on this with a thinly disguised Southern Strategy in which he did a hard court of fearful blue-collar whites and, unreconstructed racists in the South. He piled on a healthy dose of racially loaded code words such as "out of control big government," "welfare cheats," and "permissiveness." This pitch gave Nixon a comfortable lead in the polls over his Democratic rival Hubert Humphrey for much of the campaign.
Trump knew that history in 2016 when he first snatched the page from Nixon's playbook. (He did? How can Mr. Hutchinson possibly know what Trump thought?)
He knew it. He employed the tactic again during his 2020 presidential re-election bid. The second time around with the law and order pitch the issue he latched onto was the destruction of buildings in several cities and the seeming inability of local police to stop the destruction. (Hmmm. If there was any doubt the author is a Leftist, that is now dispelled. He is referring to the 2020 riots, where businesses were burned, government buildings were attacked, and entire city blocks were invaded and simply taken over. Hundreds were injured and dozens died. Rapes, arson, looting, assault. But to Mr. Hutchinson it was simply some destroyed buildings.
Yet he finds fault with Trump wanting to address the crime and violence. Mr. Hutchinson thinks this is the cynical, blatant ploy of a racist. That is, it is racist to want to stop crime. Which of course presumes that the ones who are committing crime are people of color.
It is Mr. Hutchinson who is racist.)
The subtle ingredients of racial hysteria were there again to try and make the pitch stick. There were enraged masses of demonstrators. There were repeatedly TV-looped scenes of buildings and even a police station being torched. There was the demand to defund and, even more terrifying to some, abolish the police. (Um, yeah. Who made these demands to defund the police? Rich white liberals, particularly in Congress.)
To top it off, there was the same convenient whipping boy movement, Black Lives Matter, (BLM was always a scam funded by rich white liberals used to foment racial resentment.)
that conjured up for many a nihilistic, anti-white, anti-police, lawless group. (All those descriptors are accurate. Notice Mr. Hutchinson does not make an attempt to refute them.)
In 2016, Trump aimed to make his law and order sell to nervous, fearful white voters in the swing states, and right-leaning independents. ("Nervous" and "fearful." Here we are again. Leftist frequently use negative descriptors like this in order to paint their detractors as lower life forms who do not think or reason.)
They were the ones Trump banked on to tip the scales in the crucial swing states in his direction.
He also got another foil as Nixon tried to make out of his Democratic presidential rival Hubert Humphrey in 1968. That was to tar the Democrats, and Biden, as a candidate and party that tilted, and pandered shamelessly to minorities, particularly Blacks, by allegedly stoking anti-police sentiment, with its kid-glove approach to Black Lives Matter. (Again Mr. Hutchinson does not attempt to refute these assertions.)
He also played hard on the theme that Democrats relentlessly pushed for more spending on job, health, and education programs. (Let's correct Mr. Hutchinson's sentence: "He also played hard on the theme that Democrats relentlessly pushed for more spending." Trump never made any statement about being against jobs, health, or education. Mr. Hutchinson added his editorial comment regarding what the spending was ostensibly for.
He also got another foil as Nixon tried to make out of his Democratic presidential rival Hubert Humphrey in 1968. That was to tar the Democrats, and Biden, as a candidate and party that tilted, and pandered shamelessly to minorities, particularly Blacks, by allegedly stoking anti-police sentiment, with its kid-glove approach to Black Lives Matter. (Again Mr. Hutchinson does not attempt to refute these assertions.)
He also played hard on the theme that Democrats relentlessly pushed for more spending on job, health, and education programs. (Let's correct Mr. Hutchinson's sentence: "He also played hard on the theme that Democrats relentlessly pushed for more spending." Trump never made any statement about being against jobs, health, or education. Mr. Hutchinson added his editorial comment regarding what the spending was ostensibly for.
It's this loose rhetoric that leftist often use to color people's perceptions [agitprop] and paint their enemies as evil, hateful, homophobic, or greedy.)
The not-so-subtle hint was that this was done at the expense of hard-working, law-abiding, white middle-class and blue-collar workers. (Again Mr. Hutchinson does not attempt to refute these assertions.)
It was true that 2020 was not 1968 America with gun-toting Black Panthers and white student radicals tearing up American campuses and streets. (??? The parallels are actually profound. The same ideology that tore America apart in 1968 is the same as the 2020 riots. Only now there's a new crop of far-left radicals, while the 60's generation are now in positions of power, egging on these thugs from their comfortable offices.)
That was the stuff that gave Nixon his fodder. It was also true polls showed that most Americans backed peaceful protests against police abuse (Notice the less-than-clever phrasing. Americans have always tended to back "peaceful" protests, but neither the late 1960s nor the summer of 2020 were peaceful protests. Mr. Hutchinson is doing his level best to obscure and recharacterize historical events.)
and thought the police were heavier handed with Blacks than whites.
However, property destruction and attacks on police were a far different matter. (Mr. Hutchinson seems to disapprove of the 2020 riots, yet he want to conflate Trump with Nixon, speculating on the motives of both. But if the 60s were peaceful and 2020 was destructive, as he seems to think, then how is there any parallel at all? And if there's no parallel, then Trump was not using the Nixon strategy in a racist manner.)
That was especially true for voters in the Heartland states and Florida that Trump needed to win again. The polls that showed Biden beating Trump handily at various points during that year's campaign could have easily changed if Trump had succeeded in pounding a message that touched the fear and rage of his supporters in those states. (Fear and rage. Mr. Hutchinson does it again. Once you notice the technique you will also notice how frequently the Left uses it.)
The recycling of Nixon's law and order ploy (Which Mr. Hutchinson himself has just refuted. And notice the use of the word "ploy," as opposed to "strategy," "principle," or "technique.")
was another stark reminder that presidential history often repeated itself. When Trump bellowed his law-and-order shout, he was just stealing the script from Nixon that sadly did much to land him in the White House.
Trump gambled in 2020 that it would put him back in the Oval Office again. This time it didn't quite work. But it certainly wasn't for lack of trying by Trump and the GOP to play hard on the race. (Mr. Hutchinson presumes his premise but does not demonstrate it beyond a faulty attempt to link Nixon and Trump while simultaneously misrepresenting the actions of both.
So this is part one, and Mr. Hutchinson has yet to mention the thing he wants to prove: White supremacy. We hope he improves in part two.)
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His latest book is Why the GOP Became a White Supremacist Party (Middle Passage Press). He is the host of the weekly Hutchinson Report on KPFK 90.7 FM Los Angeles and the Pacifica Network. He is the publisher of thehutchinsonreport.net
Visit Hutchinsonlegacybooks.com
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His latest book is Why the GOP Became a White Supremacist Party (Middle Passage Press). He is the host of the weekly Hutchinson Report on KPFK 90.7 FM Los Angeles and the Pacifica Network. He is the publisher of thehutchinsonreport.net
Visit Hutchinsonlegacybooks.com
No comments:
Post a Comment