Buzzfeed’s McKay Coppins wrote about the conservative obsession with incidents of black on white violence and their efforts to paint the narrative of a race war being propagated by black people on white people. Conservative talkers such as Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh along with conservative media outlets like The Drudge Report, The Daily Caller, and others have been looking for any incidents of violence perpetrated by black people upon white people and amplifying them during the Barack Obama presidency with the implication that the election of President Obama has served as some signal to Black America that now is the time for some sort of crude revenge. Coppins goes into detail even getting a sort of admission from Tucker Carlson of The Daily Caller who delights in his attempts to leverage fear to get back at “liberals” who are concerned about racism. None of this is new however. In the 90’s Rep. Ron Paul ran a newsletter preying upon the fears of roving bands of black youth attacking white people even going so far to teach readers how to buy and dispose of a gun in case they have to kill a black youth. This fear that the advancement of rights and achievement of Black Americans will directly imperil white lives and purity is evident as far back as D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation”. While Griffith makes his point nakedly how different is Limbaugh’s declaration “In Obama’s America, the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering”
Recently Paul Ryan (WI-R) released a budget that purports to solve our long-term deficit issue. The plan while quite ambitious is extremely flawed. Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias have been bulldogs on the subject and has given Representative Ryan no quarter. The main thrust of the criticism has been that Rep. Ryan targets the poor to shoulder most of the burden of solving the debt crisis with no tax increases and literally two-thirds of his cuts coming from programs designed to help the most vulnerable among us.
Many people have asked me why I’ve decided to form an exploratory committee for the Republican Presidential Nomination even though I’m a 23-year-old liberal with no money, no political connections, and no chance of winning. Well America it is because I have a big heart. At this time I think the Republicans could use a serious candidate in their race.
Ah, but no editor wants columns that make obvious points! This is the paradox of the opinion industry: If it sounds stupid, it leads. If it’s counterintuitive, it’s surely because the columnist has found a fresh angle on a mundane problem, and this angle will produce insights. Data is unexciting, especially if it’s the same data everyone else has. Discussions of fantasy scenarios that could prove your theories right? Exciting! – David Weigel
David Weigel gives the perfect diagnoses of our National Discourse at the moment that also sheds light to a development to our American character that aided by our new Twitter culture. With so much information and new ideas literally at our fingertips we are losing our ability to distinguish quality for novelty. This is how you end up in a world in which a serious presidential contender and her daughter are on reality t.v. shows. I’m not saying the new rules aptly described by David Weigel will doom our nation but there needs to be a conscious and collective effort to bring substance back to the forefront in America, at least in the matters that govern us otherwise we may very well be tweeting our way to a worse for wear world.
