I don't see on the left anything even close to what is taking place on the right with the Republican party. I will fully admit there can be people on the left that are an annoyance but this is not the same as the Republicans literally working hard toward the complete destruction of democracy in our country.
The left does make a lot of appeals to voters of color and has plenty of outreach to them, this is not the same, not in any way, as the torch the right has taken up to appeal to white supremacists in our nation nor does the left appealing to voters of color act as a call to violence as the Republican appeal to white supremacists does.
I mean, we've got to face facts here. White supremacists are a violent lot that pretty much drove the insurrection at the capitol. The right is instigating this violence, elected politicians are instigating this call for violence, Trump specifically asked his followers to go nuts if he is charged with anything.
We don't have any kind of equivalent of this on the left. We don't have a left wing QAnon group or a left wing Alex Jones. We don't have left wing militias and we don't have Democrat voters calling in death threats to their politicians because they have gone against Obama or heard something on CNN or MSNBC, or because a former president, like Obama, is stirring hate and insanity and holding rallies telling the people there incredibly stupid lies to incite them to violence.
We don't have Democrats saying that the terrorist attack on our capitol was "legitimate political discourse" and that the people trying to investigate it are going after "innocent people."
We don't have Democrats nor Democrat voters saying that the people attempting to protect our country should be the ones investigated and jailed. I'm sorry but there is no equivalent.
CRT is not being taught in our schools, nor are parts of it. My wife is what is referred to as a Master teacher and as such she has consulted on the curriculum for schools in different parts of the country...no aspect of CRT has ever been part of any curriculum she has ever been involved with. She has taught in deep blue Massachusetts for 24 years and you would think if CRT was being taught, this would be the place. She has taught at the elementary, High School. and college level, she is a brilliant and accomplished woman that knows her stuff. CRT is not taught, I am not sure what you are saying has been documented but if a history class teaches about MLK or the civil rights movement this is not CRT. I don't know who is claiming there is documentation of CRT or aspects of it have been taught in public schools but whomever that may be I would say there is a near 100% chance they are completely full of crap.
I see that people like Bernie Sanders or AOC have frightened some weird corners of our society and they definitely pissed off Democrats. However, I don't see any of that as "radical" nor do I see that attempting to tug our politics a bit back over toward the left is some dangerous nor horrible thing. What was the center in the 1970s or even 1980s was shifted way, way over to the right.
When Noam Chomsky talked about this I did not grasp it at first because I was looking at this at a societal level, that people in this country had been growing more tolerant and accepting of a more left leaning social environment. We were, I thought, heading in that direction.
Well, perhaps people were but our politicians were not. Basically, my feeling is Bill Clinton was the apex center right politician and he was successful doing things that once were the supposed goals of mainstream Republicans. His wife leaned even more right than him. Hence, the absolute hate from the right for the Clintons. They were stealing the Republican thunder, deregulating, appealing to the wealthiest Americans, balancing budgets, lowering deficits...basically Bill Clinton was what every single Republican aspired to be...except he called himself a Democrat. Hell, he was even from Arkansas.
So, along the way here Republicans gave up on policy, gave up on doing things for the republic, gave up on trying to have conversations with anybody. Instead, they became the party of tax breaks for the wealthy and telling their voters about all the grievances they should have.
Here's a sick thought, by today's Republican party standard, Ronald Reagan would be a Democrat. It is true and it is simple to point out why.
Reagan openly announced he wanted to put a woman on the Supreme Court. Said, that was it, he was putting a woman on, it was time it happened. Back then, not a single Republican raised a complaint. Now Biden (who in reality is just a vanilla right of center politician) says it is time to put a black woman on the Supreme Court...same thing Reagan did, same announcement, and Republicans go insane. They stoke the racist fires, work up their white supremacist base, and say a whole ton of racist shit.
Why? All Biden is doing is the same thing Reagan did. Both he and Reagan were selecting from qualified candidates, from a list of women, and they both said the reason they wanted to do it was to make the court a more diverse group of people.
So, why the freakout from Republicans...simple...the Republicans want the white supremacist vote, it belongs to them so they want to appeal to those voters. Not all Republicans are white supremacists but basically all white supremacists vote Republican. When you have a shrinking base, you appeal to what you have.
Trump did drop his promotion of vaccines in his latest rallies. Why? Because the lunatics that attend those rallies are anti science and anti vax.
This is where we are, Ross. I don't think every Republican is a racist and a loon but those are the people that are now steering every single decision and item the party promotes. This is a massive problem and we have no equivalent on the left.
Pat Brown is vaccinated. Pat said he is rooting for Biden. He does not seem to be part of the Republican lunacy. Pat came here and said Biden won the election. I assume Pat probably thinks the people that attacked the capitol were terrorists and criminals. They did beat and kill cops and destroy the place and actually smear their own feces on things. Great, Pat is living in reality.
However, the RNC, the Republican party, just put out a statement that what happened at our capitol, killing and beating cops, attacking and beating media people, rioting, breaking windows, smashing down doors, yelling they wanted to hang the vice president and kill Nancy Pelosi, breaking into offices, going through people's desks, smearing their own shit on things, erecting a gallows in front of the building, leaving bombs outside buildings, all of this was "legitimate political discourse."
I'm not talking about QAnon, or the Oath Keepers, or the Proud Boys, or even a group of Republican voters saying this...the Republican Party put this statement out.
It is the goddamn official line of the Republican Party, while Trump, a former president, floats pardons for these criminals if he is reelected.
Honestly, Ross, there is no equivalent here. Plus you have Tucker Carlson going on TV and literally saying we should hand Ukraine over to Putin and spewing all his talking points and Republican voters are calling their politicians and telling them we should do what Tucker says...which comes direct from the Kremlin.
There is no equivalent to this stuff on the left. The left is not winning the battle. Climate change is having a drastic impact on things and the evidence is right in front of our eyes. Maine has been known for lobsters for as long as I have been alive. It is quite likely, in my lifetime it will no longer be. Canadian lobsters will be the thing.
Only one party has tried to make people ignore climate change and small hint, it has not been the Democrats.
All the Republican party seems to have up their sleeve now is they want to piss off white people and consolidate wealth with the wealthiest people. It is no wonder they want to put an end to elections because they are wholesale betraying this country and everybody that is not rich.
When you say the talk of the voter suppression legislation that is being rammed through in red states is overblown, you are looking at things like they want to eliminate all drop boxes for voting or reduce them to a single box in large city areas where a lot of people vote democrat and reduce polling stations so people voting in blue areas have to wait in long lines, while keeping larger numbers of drop boxes and polling stations in red areas...I mean it is an old trick but they are all over it. Add this on top of their wacko gerrymandering and this is the typical Republican theory of when fewer people vote they have a better chance to win, when more people vote they are more likely to lose.
They are attempting to get this legislation through with not a shred of evidence presented that there has been ANY significant voter fraud and when they have found fraud it has been perpetrated by Republicans. So, far pretty much every "dead person" that voted was a vote for Trump cast by a Republican voter attempting to commit voter fraud in the last election...and there were not a lot of them. They don't even reach double digits.
In the country where Trump and his minions claimed like 5000 dead people voted in Georgia...turned out to be 4 dead people, all votes cast for Trump by Republican voters.
The "stolen election" and "voter fraud" stuff is not a reality, it is a strategy of the Republican party. It is another lie to go with all their other lies. Sad part is they are now going to do this in every election. That's the real fraud.
Basically, there was major fraud in the last election but the Republicans, led by Trump, urged by Trump, pushed by Trump perpetrated the fraud. We need to address this. States and elected politicians attempting to create fake paperwork and fake slates of electors to send in place of the real electors was not only fraud it was insane. Trump calling the guy in charge of elections in Georgia and telling him to find him almost 12,000 votes is insane and a full on attempt to defraud the American people.
There is no equivalent to this on the left, it has never been done. This was the election fraud. Not dead people voting, not people voting more than once, not mail-in voting, not drop box voting...nope, we had a president calling states personally with a team of absolutely joke lawyers trying to con state politicians into rigging the election in his favor.
No president has ever done that before so there is no equivalent.
Trump had his people draft plans to push the Attorney General and DOJ, Homeland Security, and the military to seize voting machines and ballots in the swing states and declare him the winner. NOBODY has done this before in the United States. There is no equivalent. Republican politicians lined up to go along with this scheme.
There is no equivalent.
They prepared a plan and tried to con the vice president into going along. Trump pointed his crazed followers at the vice president as a threat if he did not go along. His followers wanted to hang the vice president.
There is no equivalent.
Republican senators like Hawley, Cruz, Johnson and a bunch of other nutters all went along and attempted the coup.
We don't have anything to compare that insanity with, there is no equivalent.
I can separate out voters who have been fed lies and utter garbage and even the ones that are insisting the Republicans tell them more and bigger lies. These people have been conned. Some are self delusional and won't change.
I can't forgive though and can't see a reason not to prosecute the elected Republicans that attempted this lunacy and destruction of our country KNOWINGLY. They knew what they were doing was wrong. They knew they were lying and committing fraud. They were going all out to con their supporters, shamelessly, and with the intent to end democracy in the United States.
That's not an overstatement, it is what they did. It is why Bill Barr suddenly resigned because he wanted no part in that crime. Just think about that, the Attorney General of the United States resigned because the president was screaming at him to invent fraud and seize voting machines.
Where is the equivalent?
