Ways to quash liberal thinking

A beautiful day today with a high above 70F. The newspaper forecast for the week says the highs for much of the week will be about 50F and below. So today was a good day for playing in the mud in the garage because much of the week will be too cold for it.



If someone were to write a book on how we as a country got to where we are now – with one major party interested only in power and never governing and a president doing all he can to kill us off as he tries to be a dictator – with what pivotal moment should the book begin?

That moment was long before the nasty guy took the oath of office – Merritt Garland (remember him?) is not on the Supreme Court. I was writing about the current trajectory way back in 2009 when the Tea Party was in full swing. I wrote a post titled Who needs democracy? I worded it that way because our first black president had been installed in office a bit more than six months before.

Was that pivotal event the election of the black president?

When the Supreme Court installed Bush II in the White House?

When Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the House in 1994 with his Contract with America that was more about purging the GOP of moderates than about governing?

When, during the GOP convention of 1992, one of the speakers said something nasty about LGBT people? Even though I wasn’t out yet my sister heard that and commented, “Well, they just lost my vote.” Mine too.

Was it when Ronald Reagan, early in his first term as president, fired all the air traffic controllers? I’m sure there are several other events in his occupation of the White House in the 1980s that could be considered that pivotal moment.

Was it the Powell Memorandum? This was written by Lewis Powell Jr. in 1971. Shortly after he wrote it Richard Nixon appointed Powell to the Supreme Court. This memo became a blueprint for conservative interests in America.

I’ve seen the short version of the documentary The Heist that talked about the major points of the memo. That was back in 2012 when the Occupy Wall Street movement was active and I attended a training session in the Detroit area about getting involved. The movie said there were three main components to the memo: Attack unions and workers, attack democracy (in all the ways we see the GOP operating today), and divide and conquer by convincing workers that immigrants are taking their jobs. We’ve been seeing the GOP follow this playbook since it was written.

Was the Powell Memo actually in response to some other pivotal moment? The Voting Rights Act? The Civil Rights Act? The New Deal?

Was it the Southern Strategy employed during the Nixon campaigns in 1968 and 1972? This was a racist appeal to white voters. It worked.

Sarah Kendzior has written a book, titled Hiding in Plain Sight. It came out about a month ago and is on best seller lists. However, this is more about the history of the nasty guy, than the GOP – though the GOP and its takeover by the Russian Mafia are certainly part of the story. I haven’t bought it (yet) because I’ve already been following Kendzior for a while and have heard some of what’s in the book through her Twitter feed and Gaslit Nation podcasts. Though I haven’t read it I am recommending it.

The best choice of where to begin such a book (one that I’m very interested in reading) I’ll leave to the person writing it and to historians in general.

Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer offers a candidate for that pivotal moment – the Kent State shooting in 1970, the 50th anniversary of which is tomorrow.

There had been Vietnam protests for a couple years by that point. Nixon had vaguely promised to get out, then a few days before the shooting announced he was expanding the war into Cambodia. There were protests at Ivy League schools, where the rich kids went. But Kent State was a school for working class kids. It was to this school the national guard was sent. The students protested, though there were a lot of students just observing. The national guard tried to disperse them with tear gas, then with bullets. Four dead, nine wounded. Millions of students, full of rage, went on strikes.

Bunch wrote:

But in many ways, the gunshots still echo in 2020. It’s no accident that in the months immediately after Kent State, business leaders and other conservatives began looking for ways to quash liberal thinking on campus and counteract it with the conservative web of noise that became talk radio and Fox News. Right-wing pols cut funding for public universities like Kent State, helping to send tuition skyrocketing and making college more about careerism and less about such dangerous ideas. And a dog-eat-dog economy forced young America to comply with that.

But the greatest impact was largely psychic — the shock and cynicism that the government was capable of gunning down its own youth. And that no one — not the Guardsman or their higher-ups — would ever be held to account for the massacre.

This is what prompted the Powell Memo. And all the rest.

Why don’t we see much campus protest these days (before the coronavirus)? Because students, when they aren’t studying, are too busy working to pay tuition – which this shooting prompted the GOP to raise out of the reach of poor students.