Conservatives crying ‘Orwell’ are downright Orwellian - "Such appropriation of the language of condemnation is an old trick. But the violent assault on Congress has fired the furnace of conservative rhetoric to record temperatures. After months of openly poisoning the body politic with lies that sent a mob crashing into the Capitol, right-wing politicians are deeply alarmed about . . . their ability to continue openly poisoning the body politic with lies.
"Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) recently tweeted, 'Big Tech’s PURGE, censorship & abuse of power is absurd & profoundly dangerous. If you agree w/ Tech’s current biases (Iran, good; Trump, bad), ask yourself, what happens when you disagree? Why should a handful of Silicon Valley billionaires have a monopoly on political speech?'
"There is nothing 'profoundly dangerous' about limiting the ability of co-conspirators to plot attacks against government ceremonies, officials and buildings. Cruz, who pretends to be an expert on constitutional law, knows that private companies making editorial judgments and enforcing their terms of service are not practicing 'censorship.' And he neatly elides the inconvenient fact that no one in this country enjoys 'a monopoly on political speech.' Indeed, a U.K.-based billionaire controls Fox News, America’s most successful cable news network and a gushing fount of incendiary disinformation."
‘War for the soul’: Capitol riot elevates GOP power struggle between pro-Trump conspiracy theorists and party establishment
No. 3 House Republican Liz Cheney to Vote to Impeach Trump
The Nationalist’s Delusion: Trump’s supporters backed a time-honored American political tradition, disavowing racism while promising to enact a broad agenda of discrimination. - "During the final few weeks of the campaign, I asked dozens of Trump supporters about their candidate’s remarks regarding Muslims and people of color. I wanted to understand how these average Republicans—those who would never read the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer or go to a Klan rally at a Confederate statue—had nevertheless embraced someone who demonized religious and ethnic minorities. What I found was that Trump embodied his supporters’ most profound beliefs—combining an insistence that discriminatory policies were necessary with vehement denials that his policies would discriminate and absolute outrage that the question would even be asked.
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"The frequent postelection media expeditions to Trump country to see whether the fever has broken, or whether Trump’s most ardent supporters have changed their minds, are a direct outgrowth of this mistake. These supporters will not change their minds, because this is what they always wanted: a president who embodies the rage they feel toward those they hate and fear, while reassuring them that that rage is nothing to be ashamed of.
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"For centuries, capital’s most potent wedge against labor in America has been the belief that it is better to be poor than to be equal to niggers.
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"Overall, poor and working-class Americans did not support Trump; it was white Americans on all levels of the income spectrum who secured his victory. Clinton was only competitive with Trump among white people making more than $100,000, but the fact that their shares of the vote was nearly identical drives the point home: Economic suffering alone does not explain the rise of Trump. Nor does the Calamity Thesis explain why comparably situated black Americans, who are considerably more vulnerable than their white counterparts, remained so immune to Trump’s appeal. The answer cannot be that black Americans were suffering less than the white working class or the poor, but that Trump’s solutions did not appeal to people of color because they were premised on a national vision that excluded them as full citizens.
"When you look at Trump’s strength among white Americans of all income categories, but his weakness among Americans struggling with poverty, the story of Trump looks less like a story of working-class revolt than a story of white backlash. And the stories of struggling white Trump supporters look less like the whole truth than a convenient narrative—one that obscures the racist nature of that backlash, instead casting it as a rebellion against an unfeeling establishment that somehow includes working-class and poor people who happen not to be white.
"The nature of racism in America means that when the rich exploit everyone else, there is always an easier and more vulnerable target to punish. The Irish immigrants who in 1863 ignited a pogrom against black Americans in New York City to protest the draft resented a policy that offered the rich the chance to buy their way out; their response was nevertheless to purge black people from the city for a generation.
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"Even before trump, the Republican Party was moving toward an exclusivist nationalism that defined American identity in racial and religious terms, despite some efforts from its leadership to steer it in another direction. George W. Bush signed the 2006 reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act, attempted to bring Latino voters into the party, and spoke in defense of American Muslims’ place in the national fabric. These efforts led to caustic backlashes from the Republican rank and file, who defeated his 2006 immigration-reform legislation, which might have shifted the demographics of the Republican Party for a generation or more. In the aftermath of their 2012 loss, Republican leaders tried again, only to meet with the same anti-immigrant backlash—one that would find an avatar in the person of the next Republican president."
Republicans begin to join impeachment push
Backlash to riot at Capitol hobbles Trump’s business as banks, partners flee the brand
