Trump is spouting racist rhetoric popular a century ago, like "racehorse theory" — see Trump Praises Good Genes for Haaretz's comparisons to the Nazi era. Four years along, Trump is trolling progressives into fights with Middle America, still successfully. He is playing a game upon the left and we keep playing his game by his rules.
It's time we learn the rules and counter in a way that wins elections.
Trump trolls progressive upset, and leverages it to separate progressives from voters who don't really care about racism one way or the other.
Quite a lot of the people who are likely to vote for Trump both don't want to be racist and have no idea what "racehorse theory" is. If you haven't studied the early 20th century: how are we going from horses to Nazis? Why are progressives jumping from horses to Nazis? And now progressives say they are racist again.
That's *why* Trump's rhetoric works. It's a mirror image of the old dog whistles: Trump says things progressives will hear as racist and the middle will not, and weaponizes our anger to separate us from the middle. Voters who will be watching relatives dying from COVID as the election approaches, while liberals turn our attention to something angry about racehorses.
George Floyd's murder nearly broke the compact that the Birther-in-Chief in had built: the murder (the video) went too far, the video was more than a dog whistle, and he was losing the votes of lazy lazy lazy "I'm not a racist" people who. But Trump has pulled us off that video, and now we're upset at "racehorse theory" — applause in the video was very scattered when he mentioned it, and Andrew Jackson was a US president on a twenty, right?
The actual racists are long past needing to hear dog whistles, that's not the point, they are not the target — the target is us. Getting back to George Floyd, back to the visceral reality of racism, progressives will find many more allies for a more decent America. We need to find the stories of racism that people can see despite privilege and laziness, stay on those stories, make them the country's focus, and do it fast, the election is weeks away. Don't go where Trump leads.
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Using progressive outrage to convince lazy centrists to circle their wagons around Trump