Remember how you felt in 2008, after 8 years of 'Dubya' malfeasance, realizing this guy has what it takes to get us out of the mess we were in at the time? Now, consider where America was taken when Republicans began to cheat with REDMAP and, five years later, to have the Freedom Caucus endorse and enable his replacement...
Yesterday, as reported by many media outlets, the current sitting president of the United States, at the end of a 2hr meeting of his cabinet, said ranted the following, about Somali-Americans and any other Muslim-Americans generally, to gathered reporters:
"We're going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country. Ilhan Omar is garbage. She's garbage. Her friends are garbage. These aren't people that work. These aren't people that say, 'Let's go, come on, let's make this place great.' These are people that do nothing but complain. I don't want them in our country. Their country is no good for a reason. Their country stinks, and we don't want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from and fix it."
Ostensibly referring to both the unfolding indictments in the state of Minnesota, led by Governor and former Dem VP candidate in Election 2024, Tim Walz, of Somali social groups in that state that apparently were fraudulently applying for COVID pandemic payments; as well as conflating the separate — but still ‘Muslim-inspired’, according to DJT and MAGA — attacks on National Guardspersons last weekend by an Afghan refugee that had been brought to the US in 2022 as a member of intelligence units that helped American forces in Afghanistan, resulting in 1 death, and a severely injured survivor.
DJT wasn’t finished. With no sense of irony, he continued:
“These are people who do nothing but complain.”
“They contribute nothing. I don’t want them in our country — I’ll be honest with you.”
“Their country is no good for a reason. Their country stinks — and we don’t want them in our country.”
Nearly as shocking, at the end of this rant, DJT’s cabinet pounded the table and clapped in agreement. Secretary of State (and National Security advisor), Marco Rubio, can clearly be heard whooping “That’s right, Mr. President!”
This is psychological derangement. For someone occupying an office that exists to protect the rights of Americans, and anyone living within our borders, from unnecessary harm and lawless behavior, these statements constitute a contempt that makes obvious how unfit this individual is to be occupying the office, leading the American military, and using that authority to target entire groups of innocent people who happen not to be White and Christian, for the actions of a few that are still — legally-speaking — “innocent until proven guilty”. This prejudiced outburst, by the nation’s ostensible “chief law enforcement officer” — and not for the first time! — is effectively saying, “The law is useless. And if you agree with that, go ahead and do what you need to do. If you get picked up for it, I’ve got pardon power and I’ve used it before, for people who want to take the law into their own hands.”
Anyone who defends this administration and what they’ve done to American excellence in Government, and policymaking in the national interest, is complicit to what will follow, when the full impact of DJT’s pathologies are felt in the economy, and our global relationships, ‘from supply chains to spy planes’.
The only way to mitigate the long-term damage, is to prove to the world that we understand the causes for this political catastrophe.
The proximate cause, is the strategic apportionment abuse begun in 2010, called REDMAP, in response to the overwhelming-for-its-time Obama coalition, that gave Barack Obama the presidency during the 2008 financial crisis.
The larger cause, is the overall privatization and ‘theatricalization’ of the American electoral system. We turned it into a ‘product’, like a traveling roadshow but, like, for serious stuff, right? For ‘politics’. Then we allowed it the economies of scale that come with making the spectacle 365/24/7, and handed it to the private sector to finance. What did we think was going to happen?
With the help of a SCOTUS torching what was left of campaign finance reform, causing the political parties as we’ve known them — the Republicans and Democrats — to be neutered of their last bit of leverage over members and their fidelity to notional doctrines and policies, grounded in shared values, history, and convictions that are the normal province of a Government with responsibilities around the globe. To be able to, as we say, ‘leave the world a better place than we found it’, by fostering expertise and engaging with the world as it is.
Or at least make an honest attempt to do so.
But privatizing the electoral system changed the incentive structure society expected — citizen public servants capable of professional relationships, and a desire to serve the community — and replaced it with one that the private sector demanded, from the public servants it was now tasked with financing, on behalf of an American public that was sold on a false choice of financing elections. As being one of either public taxation — and who could trust politicians to finance their own elections? — or letting the titans of ‘successful capitalism’ conveniently take on the chore. Why should money make a difference to whom I vote for, as long as I don’t have to pay taxes for it, amirite?
Wrong.
That pie-eyed optimism sold to the public as a convenient solution in the 1980’s, evolved into what good businesses excel at, optimization of ‘product’, or production, to facilitate an investment strategy. Who’s strategy? Why, the mega-donors financing the system in the first decade of the 21st century, through a network of sanctioned tax vehicles, like Form 501(c)(3 and 4’s), providing any ‘investors’ with the veneer of ‘accountability’ that would appear to make up for the obvious window being opened to the possibility of corruption. For the Republicans that pushed REDMAP after the Obama ‘sweep’, it was people like:
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Bob J. Perry (Perry Homes / Perry family giving) — major Texas home-builder and one of the largest individual funders of Republican 527s and party efforts in the 2000s (notably heavy support in 2003–2004). Center for Public Integrity+1
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The Koch network / Koch family (Koch Industries & affiliated foundations/vehicles) — long-standing, substantial funders of conservative policy groups and Republican infrastructure in the 2000s; their network of donations and outside spending grew throughout the decade. OpenSecrets+1
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The DeVos family (Richard “Dick” DeVos / DeVos family foundations & PACs) — large, sustained contributions to Republican party committees and allied conservative organizations across the 2000s. OpenSecrets+1
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The Coors family / Coors foundations (Adolph Coors family philanthropic/donor network) — an influential conservative donor family whose foundations and giving have funded dozens of right-leaning organizations and Republican causes through the 2000s. ia904501.us.archive.org+1
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Richard Mellon Scaife / Scaife family foundations — a major conservative philanthropist whose foundations and grants supported Republican causes, conservative think tanks and media that aided GOP efforts during and before the 2000s.
They were the ones that, collectively, wanted to ‘strangle Big Government, and drown it in a bathtub’, as that perennial activist gadfly, Grover Norquist, became infamous for saying. After being ‘shellacked’ in Election 2008 and taking the heat for nearly tanking the global economy, while fully expecting a progressive backlash in response, the wealthy did what the wealthy do: they cheated.
This time, they did it by blatantly engaging in partisan gerrymandering (masquerading as an ‘election strategy’ called REDMAP), which was legally distinct from the racial gerrymandering addressed by election law in the VRA (Voting Rights Act).
What did that do?
It allowed, on a scale never seen within a single election cycle, the 2010-elected Republicans, to redistrict their states enough to platform what used to be considered ‘fringe’ and ‘extremist’ political opinion with their own, ‘specially-manufactured’, or astroturfed, districts. The kind that mainstream post-war Republicans, like Eisenhower, Rockefeller, and even Nixon, tried to keep on the ‘outside’ once the Civil Rights movement began to take shape in the 1950’s.
In effect, REDMAP seeded American politics with a cancer of political extremism that threatened the violence of Jim Crow, without having to put people in the streets to actually burn down whole neighborhoods, like the Tulsa Massacre of 1921, or hang victims from trees, as was endemic in the Jim Crow South. Because, for now, they had a ‘home’ to call their own in a sea of ‘soft’ Americans used to consensus politics in districts that had made such extremism socially-unacceptable. All they needed to do was degrade Government, and wait for average Americans to become fed up enough to commit the administrative violence necessary for the extremists to completely remake the American Experiment.
And so, we observe that unhinged rant, by the sitting President of the United States, barely ten years after America’s first Black president completed his two (consecutive) terms in office. When we wonder, “how did this come to pass?” I want everyone to think about the power of strategic apportionment abuse (REDMAP) in the Age of Cheap Computers, paid for by the wealthiest of Americans, which our SCOTUS has been captured by, and the ability to profoundly misrepresent the American electorate to destroy the hard-fought consensus that is normally the hallmark of a civilized, democratic, society.
