Well this has all taken an interesting turn....
Not entirely willing to call half the citizenry “moral failures”; as pointed out earlier, they have been aggressively brainwashed at work and at church for decades...and while racism and bigotry are key to what’s been happening, it’s all in service to the wealthy racists and bigots who decided in the 1950s that *they* were not going to integrate the schools, *they* were not going to let their taxes be used to integrate their schools, *they* were not going to let their children attend integrated schools. They were the ones who gave birth to the notion that “taxation is theft”, and they gave financial and political support to an economic school that is frankly covert and Leninist in its actions and its policies. That economic school has remained hidden by design, but it the the school that has been behind the transformation of the GOP from ‘actual’ conservatives to a racist, elitist, and intentionally gaslighting political machine, whose roots, founders, and actors have only recently come to light and are still pretty unknown.
The researcher who uncovered this rolling coup is Nancy McLean, and her book is “Democracy in Chains”. In it, she documents the formation, development, and ‘progress’ of this “rich man’s secret revolution”, naming names, providing the cast of characters and establishing the timeline for its activities...all based on reams of original documentation. I strongly recommend that EVERYONE who cares about “what happens next” and “how we got here” read her book - it is indispensable, illuminating, and, frankly, shocking...but I can tell you that it has filled in many gaps that I have uncovered in my half-century of research and investigation, and contradicts *nothing* that my research has revealed.
Here is a video presentation providing an overview by the author, and a link to the book itself:
Winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist for the National Book Award The Nation's "Most Valuable Book" “[A] vibrant intellectual history of the...
www.penguinrandomhouse.com
The problem of how we bring ourselves back from our current situation is urgent: it deserves all our attention, and every bit of understanding we can muster. It’s hard, for example, to imagine how we recover a full third of our population from the most comprehensive brainwashing effort since the Catholic Church controlled and miseducated all of Europe along with the native populations of the ‘new world’, but it must be done if we’re to avoid a blood bath that makes the pogroms of history seem like garden parties.
