The Koch sons would later revive the spirit of the John Birch society under a new more respectable name: the “Tea Party.”
Given that the Tea Party-dominated Republican Party became the party of the “You Lie!” Obama-obstruction era, the Koch brothers had succeeded in reintroducing the very note of hysterical paranoid racism into American politics. This was what Bill did had worked so hard to repudiate.
Bill would have never said Obama wasn’t a real American, let alone have gone along with the “birther” or “he’s a Muslim” nonsense.
.. Donald Trump did not come out of nowhere. He is the creation of the Birch/Koch brothers designs on our democracy. Now the Koch brothers and the Republican establishment are affraid of what they made.
.. First, Neil Postman’s prophetic book Amusing Ourselves to Death has been vindicated. It’s not coincidental that Donald Trump is a reality TV star. He is the face of an illiterate America that gets its “facts” from TV news and talk radio hosts. He is the result of a celebrity “culture” gone wild.
.. Second, Donald Trump is the creation of white angry lower and middle-class Americans who have come through our educational system that failed to educate them.
.. These are fact-free functional illiterates, creatures of TV news and celebrity culture, Postman’s walking dead. The are not moved by facts but their energy is fueled by overt racism, hate, xenophobia, isolationism and ignorance.
.. It turns out that what Bill Buckley misunderstood about America was the actual character of white America. Bill thought he could civilize conservatism. But the American right has never dealt honestly with the issue of race.
The Dilemma of Conservatives Who Say They’ll Never Vote for Donald Trump
Some conservatives who care about foreign policy above all other issues view Trump himself as a national-security threat. Bryan McGrath, a conservative blogger and former Navy officer, recently posted the text of the oath he took when he was sworn into the Navy, in which he swore to “defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” and wrote, “Because I view Donald Trump as domestic threat to the internal stability and external security of the United States, I cannot be faithful to this oath and vote for him.”
.. Peter Wehner, a top adviser to George W. Bush, wrote, “Mr. Trump is precisely the kind of man our system of government was designed to avoid, the type of leader our founders feared — a demagogic figure who does not view himself as part of our constitutional system but rather as an alternative to it…. For this lifelong Republican, at least, he is beyond the pale. Party loyalty has limits.” (Wehner was careful to add that he would not support Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders.)
.. It’s like Wolfgang Pauli’s famous crack, “That is not only not right, it is not even wrong.” He doesn’t even have a bad character. People with bad characters can have strengths. As far as I can tell he has no character. He’s a bully with subordinates. He does business in ways that good businesspeople despise—and he’s not even very good at that. He says things about people, especially his wives, that are so obnoxious that calling them obnoxious doesn’t come close to how awful they are. He constantly lies about things that can be checked. He brags incessantly—really unattractive in itself—but he doesn’t even brag about things that he could appropriately be proud of. The guy is pathetic.
The oddest thing about his popularity with white middle-class and working-class males is that if he lived next door to them, they would despise him.
.. Not backing Trump is one thing, but many anti-Trump Republicans may soon have to grapple with the question of whether they may actually need to support Clinton, assuming she’s the Democratic nominee. For ideological conservatives the question may come down to which candidate would be worse for their movement.
.. They may soon have to choose: Would they rather have as President an enemy they can oppose, or one for whom they are—in more ways than one—responsible?
How Trump Is Romancing the Christian Right
Evangelical leaders have lost control of their flocks.
Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, suggested Evangelicals who are drawn to Trump have been seduced by “the other side of the culture war, that image and celebrity and money and power and social Darwinist ‘winning’ trump the conservation of moral principles and a just society.”
.. Historically, “[Evangelicals] have been told by their leadership that the problem is liberals,” Bean said, “their culturally liberal ways, their cultural Marxism, whatever you want to call it.
.. Trump is more than willing to point out how business leaders are manipulating politicians and selling out average Americans
.. “They didn’t really ever do a good job in insisting on any distinctive Christian character in their leaders. They were usually determined to be good partners in the Republican coalition, which meant they would endorse anyone who was a strong Republican, and they would play along. It started with Reagan: Reagan is a Godly man over Jimmy Carter. But I don’t know of any way Reagan out-Christianed Jimmy Carter.
.. With that nerve severed, Evangelical voters are free to gravitate to whichever candidate is providing the most cogent reflection of their anxieties, and Trump, with his vivid account of the fall of the white American middle class, appears to be that candidate.
Rubio: Republicans can’t win without expanding beyound white base
The argument that there are simply not enough Republican voters today to elect a Republican president is one that is not usually uttered in public by Republican candidates. And it is essentially the opposite of the theory being put forward by Mr. Cruz, who says he can win by expanding the white vote.
.. “If an extra 10 million evangelical Christians show up on Election Day, we will not be up at 2 or 3 in the morning wondering what happened in Ohio or Florida; they’ll call the election at 8:37 p.m.,” Mr. Cruz told Glenn Beck in an interview last year.