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msternberg · 1 year

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Someone wrote this as a factual historically backed response to the claim that somehow Democrats and Republicans changed sides.

June 17, 1854

The Republican Party is officially founded as an abolitionist party to slavery in the United States.

October 13, 1858

During the Lincoln-Douglas debates, U.S. Senator Stephen Douglas (D-IL) said, “If you desire negro citizenship, if you desire to allow them to come into the State and settle with the white man, if you desire them to vote on an equality with yourselves, and to make them eligible to office, to serve on juries, and to adjudge your rights, then support Mr. Lincoln and the Black Republican party, who are in favor of the citizenship of the negro. For one, I am opposed to negro citizenship in any and every form. I believe this Government was made on the white basis. I believe it was made by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity for ever, and I am in favor of confining citizenship to white men, men of European birth and descent, instead of conferring it upon negroes, Indians, and other inferior races.”. Douglas became the Democrat Party’s 1860 presidential nominee.

April 16, 1862

President Lincoln signed the bill abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia. In Congress, almost every Republican voted for yes and most Democrats voted no.

July 17, 1862

Over unanimous Democrat opposition, the Republican Congress passed The Confiscation Act stating that slaves of the Confederacy “shall be forever free”.

April 8, 1864

The 13th Amendment banning slavery passed the U.S. Senate with 100% Republican support, 63% Democrat opposition.

January 31, 1865

The 13th Amendment banning slavery passed the U.S. House with unanimous Republican support and intense Democrat opposition.November 22, 1865

Republicans denounced the Democrat legislature of Mississippi for enacting the “black codes” which institutionalized racial discrimination.

February 5, 1866

U.S. Rep. Thaddeus Stevens (R-PA) introduced legislation (successfully opposed by Democrat President Andrew Johnson) to implement “40 acres and a mule” relief by distributing land to former slaves.

March 27, 1866

Democrat President Andrew Johnson vetoes of law granting voting rights to blacks.

May 10, 1866

The U.S. House passed the Republicans’ 14th Amendment guaranteeing due process and equal protection of the laws to all citizens. 100% of Democrats vote no.

June 8, 1866

The U.S. Senate passed the Republicans’ 14th Amendment guaranteeing due process and equal protection of the law to all citizens. 94% of Republicans vote yes and 100% of Democrats vote no.

March 27, 1866

Democrat President Andrew Johnson vetoes of law granting voting rights to blacks in the District of Columbia.

July 16, 1866

The Republican Congress overrode Democrat President Andrew Johnson’s veto of legislation protecting the voting rights of blacks.

March 30, 1868

Republicans begin the impeachment trial of Democrat President Andrew Johnson who declared, “This is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government of white men.”September 12, 1868

Civil rights activist Tunis Campbell and 24 other blacks in the Georgia Senate (all Republicans) were expelled by the Democrat majority and would later be reinstated by the Republican Congress.

October 7, 1868

Republicans denounced Democrat Party’s national campaign theme: “This is a white man’s country: Let white men rule.”

October 22, 1868

While campaigning for re-election, Republican U.S. Rep. James Hinds (R-AR) was assassinated by Democrat terrorists who organized as the Ku Klux Klan. Hinds was the first sitting congressman to be murdered while in office.

December 10, 1869

Republican Gov. John Campbell of the Wyoming Territory signed the FIRST-in-nation law granting women the right to vote and hold public office.

February 3, 1870

After passing the House with 98% Republican support and 97% Democrat opposition, Republicans’ 15th Amendment was ratified, granting the vote to ALL Americans regardless of race.

February 25, 1870

Hiram Rhodes Revels (R-MS) becomes the first black to be seated in the United States Senate.

May 31, 1870

President U.S. Grant signed the Republicans’ Enforcement Act providing stiff penalties for depriving any American’s civil rights.

June 22, 1870

Ohio Rep. Williams Lawrence created the U.S. Department of Justice to safeguard the civil rights of blacks against Democrats in the South.

September 6, 1870

Women voted in Wyoming in first election after women’s suffrage signed into law by Republican Gov. John Campbell.

February 1, 1871

Rep. Jefferson Franklin Long (R-GA) became the first black to speak on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives.

February 28, 1871

The Republican Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1871 providing federal protection for black voters.

April 20, 1871

The Republican Congress enacted the Ku Klux Klan Act, outlawing Democrat Party-affiliated terrorist groups which oppressed blacks and all those who supported them.

October 10, 1871

Following warnings by Philadelphia Democrats against black voting, Republican civil rights activist Octavius Catto was murdered by a Democrat Party operative. His military funeral was attended by thousands.

October 18, 1871

After violence against Republicans in South Carolina, President Ulysses Grant deployed U.S. troops to combat Democrat Ku Klux Klan terrorists.

November 18, 1872

Susan B. Anthony was arrested for voting after boasting to Elizabeth Cady Stanton that she voted for “Well, I have gone and done it — positively voted the straight Republican ticket.”January 17, 1874

Armed Democrats seized the Texas state government, ending Republican efforts to racially integrate.

September 14, 1874

Democrat white supremacists seized the Louisiana statehouse in attempt to overthrow the racially-integrated administration of Republican Governor William Kellogg. Twenty-seven were killed.

March 1, 1875

The Civil Rights Act of 1875, guaranteeing access to public accommodations without regard to race, was signed by Republican President U.S. Grant and passed with 92% Republican support over 100% Democrat opposition.

January 10, 1878

U.S. Senator Aaron Sargent (R-CA) introduced the Susan B. Anthony amendment for women’s suffrage. The Democrat-controlled Senate defeated it four times before the election of a Republican House and Senate that guaranteed its approval in 1919.

February 8, 1894

The Democrat Congress and Democrat President Grover Cleveland joined to repeal the Republicans’ Enforcement Act which had enabled blacks to vote.

January 15, 1901

Republican Booker T. Washington protested the Alabama Democrat Party’s refusal to permit voting by blacks.

May 29, 1902

Virginia Democrats implemented a new state constitution condemned by Republicans as illegal, reducing black voter registration by almost 90%.

February 12, 1909

On the 100th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, black Republicans and women’s suffragists Ida Wells and Mary Terrell co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

May 21, 1919

The Republican House passed a constitutional amendment granting women the vote with 85% of Republicans and only 54% of Democrats in favor. In the Senate 80% of Republicans voted yes and almost half of Democrats voted no.

August 18, 1920

The Republican-authored 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote became part of the Constitution. Twenty-six of the 36 states needed to ratify had Republican-controlled legislatures.

January 26, 1922

The House passed a bill authored by U.S. Rep. Leonidas Dyer (R-MO) making lynching a federal crime. Senate Democrats blocked it by filibuster.

June 2, 1924

Republican President Calvin Coolidge signed a bill passed by the Republican Congress granting U.S. citizenship to all Native Americans.

October 3, 1924

Republicans denounced three-time Democrat presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan for defending the Ku Klux Klan at the 1924 Democratic National Convention.

June 12, 1929

First Lady Lou Hoover invited the wife of black Rep. Oscar De Priest (R-IL) to tea at the White House, sparking protests by Democrats across the country.

August 17, 1937

Republicans organized opposition to former Ku Klux Klansman and Democrat U.S. Senator Hugo Black who was later appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court by FDR. Black’s Klan background was hidden until after confirmation.

June 24, 1940

The Republican Party platform called for the integration of the Armed Forces. For the balance of his terms in office, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (D) refused to order it.

August 8, 1945

Republicans condemned Harry Truman’s surprise use of the atomic bomb in Japan. It began two days after the Hiroshima bombing when former Republican President Herbert Hoover wrote that “The use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul.”

May 17, 1954

Earl Warren, California’s three-term Republican Governor and 1948 Republican vice presidential nominee, was nominated to be Chief Justice delivered the landmark decision “Brown v. Board of Education”.

November 25, 1955

Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s administration banned racial segregation of interstate bus travel.

March 12, 1956

Ninety-seven Democrats in Congress condemned the Supreme Court’s “Brown v. Board of Education” decision and pledged (Southern Manifesto) to continue segregation.

June 5, 1956

Republican federal judge Frank Johnson ruled in favor of the Rosa Parks decision striking down the “blacks in the back of the bus” law.

November 6, 1956

African-American civil rights leaders Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy voted for Republican Dwight Eisenhower for President.

September 9, 1957

President Eisenhower signed the Republican Party’s 1957 Civil Rights Act.

September 24, 1957

Sparking criticism from Democrats such as Senators John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, President Eisenhower deployed the 82nd Airborne Division to Little Rock, AR to force Democrat Governor Orval Faubus to integrate their public schools.

May 6, 1960

President Eisenhower signed the Republicans’ Civil Rights Act of 1960, overcoming a 125-hour, ’round-the-clock filibuster by 18 Senate Democrats.

May 2, 1963

Republicans condemned Bull Connor, the Democrat “Commissioner of Public Safety” in Birmingham, AL for arresting over 2,000 black schoolchildren marching for their civil rights.

September 29, 1963

Gov. George Wallace (D-AL) defied an order by U.S. District Judge Frank Johnson (appointed by President Dwight Eisenhower) to integrate Tuskegee High School.

June 9, 1964

Republicans condemned the 14-hour filibuster against the 1964 Civil Rights Act by U.S. Senator and former Ku Klux Klansman Robert Byrd (D-WV), who served in the Senate until his death in 2010.

June 10, 1964

Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen (R-IL) criticized the Democrat filibuster against 1964 Civil Rights Act and called on Democrats to stop opposing racial equality. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was introduced and approved by a majority of Republicans in the Senate. The Act was opposed by most southern Democrat senators, several of whom were proud segregationists — one of them being Al Gore Sr. (D). President Lyndon B. Johnson relied on Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen, the Republican leader from Illinois, to get the Act passed.

August 4, 1965

Senate Leader Everett Dirksen (R-IL) overcame Democrat attempts to block 1965 Voting Rights Act. Ninety-four percent of Republicans voted for the landmark civil rights legislation while 27% of Democrats opposed. The Voting Rights Act of 1965, abolishing literacy tests and other measures devised by Democrats to prevent blacks from voting, was signed into law. A higher percentage of Republicans voted in favor.

February 19, 1976

President Gerald Ford formally rescinded President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s notorious Executive Order 9066 authorizing the internment of over 120,000 Japanese-Americans during WWII.

September 15, 1981

President Ronald Reagan established the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities to increase black participation in federal education programs.

June 29, 1982

President Ronald Reagan signed a 25-year extension of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

August 10, 1988

President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, compensating Japanese-Americans for the deprivation of their civil rights and property during the World War II internment ordered by FDR.

November 21, 1991

President George H. W. Bush signed the Civil Rights Act of 1991 to strengthen federal civil rights legislation.

August 20, 1996

A bill authored by U.S. Rep. Susan Molinari (R-NY) to prohibit racial discrimination in adoptions, part of Republicans’ “Contract With America”, became law.

July 2, 2010

Clinton says Byrd joined KKK to help him get elected

Just a “fleeting association”. Nothing to see here.

Only a willing fool (and there quite a lot out there) would accept and recite the nonsensical that one bright, sunny day Democrats and Republicans just up and decided to “switch” political positions and cite the “Southern Strategy” as the uniform knee-jerk retort. Even today, it never takes long for a Democrat to play the race card purely for political advantage.Thanks to the Democrat Party, blacks have the distinction of being the only group in the United States whose history is a work-in-progress.

The idea that “the Dixiecrats joined the Republicans” is not quite true, as you note. But because of Strom Thurmond it is accepted as a fact. What happened is that the **next** generation (post 1965) of white southern politicians — Newt, Trent Lott, Ashcroft, Cochran, Alexander, etc — joined the GOP.So it was really a passing of the torch as the old segregationists retired and were replaced by new young GOP guys. One particularly galling aspect to generalizations about “segregationists became GOP” is that the new GOP South was INTEGRATED for crying out loud, they accepted the Civil Rights revolution. Meanwhile, Jimmy Carter led a group of what would become “New” Democrats like Clinton and Al Gore.

There weren’t many Republicans in the South prior to 1964, but that doesn’t mean the birth of the southern GOP was tied to “white racism.” That said, I am sure there were and are white racist southern GOP. No one would deny that. But it was the southern Democrats who were the party of slavery and, later, segregation. It was George Wallace, not John Tower, who stood in the southern schoolhouse door to block desegregation! The vast majority of Congressional GOP voted FOR the Civil Rights of 1964-65. The vast majority of those opposed to those acts were southern Democrats. Southern Democrats led to infamous filibuster of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.The confusion arises from GOP Barry Goldwater’s vote against the ’64 act. He had voted in favor or all earlier bills and had led the integration of the Arizona Air National Guard, but he didn’t like the “private property” aspects of the ’64 law. In other words, Goldwater believed people’s private businesses and private clubs were subject only to market forces, not government mandates (“We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.”) His vote against the Civil Rights Act was because of that one provision was, to my mind, a principled mistake.This stance is what won Goldwater the South in 1964, and no doubt many racists voted for Goldwater in the mistaken belief that he opposed Negro Civil Rights. But Goldwater was not a racist; he was a libertarian who favored both civil rights and property rights.Switch to 1968.Richard Nixon was also a proponent of Civil Rights; it was a CA colleague who urged Ike to appoint Warren to the Supreme Court; he was a supporter of Brown v. Board, and favored sending troops to integrate Little Rock High). Nixon saw he could develop a “Southern strategy” based on Goldwater’s inroads. He did, but Independent Democrat George Wallace carried most of the deep south in 68. By 1972, however, Wallace was shot and paralyzed, and Nixon began to tilt the south to the GOP. The old guard Democrats began to fade away while a new generation of Southern politicians became Republicans. True, Strom Thurmond switched to GOP, but most of the old timers (Fulbright, Gore, Wallace, Byrd etc etc) retired as Dems.Why did a new generation white Southerners join the GOP? Not because they thought Republicans were racists who would return the South to segregation, but because the GOP was a “local government, small government” party in the old Jeffersonian tradition. Southerners wanted less government and the GOP was their natural home.Jimmy Carter, a Civil Rights Democrat, briefly returned some states to the Democrat fold, but in 1980, Goldwater’s heir, Ronald Reagan, sealed this deal for the GOP. The new “Solid South” was solid GOP.BUT, and we must stress this: the new southern Republicans were *integrationist* Republicans who accepted the Civil Rights revolution and full integration while retaining their love of Jeffersonian limited government principles.

Oh wait, princess, I am not done yet.

Where Teddy Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to dinner, Woodrow Wilson re-segregated the U.S. government and had the pro-Klan film “Birth of a Nation” screened in his White House.

Wilson and FDR carried all 11 states of the Old Confederacy all six times they ran, when Southern blacks had no vote. Disfranchised black folks did not seem to bother these greatest of liberal icons.

As vice president, FDR chose “Cactus Jack” Garner of Texas who played a major role in imposing a poll tax to keep blacks from voting.

Among FDR’s Supreme Court appointments was Hugo Black, a Klansman who claimed FDR knew this when he named him in 1937 and that FDR told him that “some of his best friends” in Georgia were Klansmen.

Black’s great achievement as a lawyer was in winning acquittal of a man who shot to death the Catholic priest who had presided over his daughter’s marriage to a Puerto Rican.

In 1941, FDR named South Carolina Sen. “Jimmy” Byrnes to the Supreme Court. Byrnes had led filibusters in 1935 and 1938 that killed anti-lynching bills, arguing that lynching was necessary “to hold in check the Negro in the South.”

FDR refused to back the 1938 anti-lynching law.

“This is a white man’s country and will always remain a white man’s country,” said Jimmy. Harry Truman, who paid $10 to join the Klan, then quit, named Byrnes Secretary of State, putting him first in line of succession to the presidency, as Harry then had no V.P.

During the civil rights struggles of the ‘50s and ‘60s, Gov. Orval Faubus used the National Guard to keep black students out of Little Rock High. Gov. Ross Barnett refused to let James Meredith into Ole Miss. Gov. George Wallace stood in the door at the University of Alabama, to block two black students from entering.

All three governors were Democrats. All acted in accord with the “Dixie Manifesto” of 1956, which was signed by 19 senators, all Democrats, and 80 Democratic congressmen.

Among the signers of the manifesto, which called for massive resistance to the Brown decision desegregating public schools, was the vice presidential nominee on Adlai’s Stevenson’s ticket in 1952, Sen. John Sparkman of Alabama.

Though crushed by Eisenhower, Adlai swept the Deep South, winning both Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas.

Do you suppose those Southerners thought Adlai would be tougher than Ike on Stalin? Or did they think Adlai would maintain the unholy alliance of Southern segregationists and Northern liberals that enabled Democrats to rule from 1932 to 1952?

The Democratic Party was the party of slavery, secession and segregation, of “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman and the KKK. “Bull” Connor, who turned the dogs loose on black demonstrators in Birmingham, was the Democratic National Committeeman from Alabama.

And Nixon?

In 1956, as vice president, Nixon went to Harlem to declare, “America can’t afford the cost of segregation.” The following year, Nixon got a personal letter from Dr. King thanking him for helping to persuade the Senate to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1957.

Nixon supported the civil rights acts of 1964, 1965 and 1968.

In the 1966 campaign, as related in my new book “The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose From Defeat to Create the New Majority,” out July 8, Nixon blasted Dixiecrats “seeking to squeeze the last ounces of political juice out of the rotting fruit of racial injustice.”

Nixon called out segregationist candidates in ‘66 and called on LBJ, Hubert Humphrey and Bobby Kennedy to join him in repudiating them. None did. Hubert, an arm around Lester Maddox, called him a “good Democrat.” And so were they all – good Democrats.

While Adlai chose Sparkman, Nixon chose Spiro Agnew, the first governor south of the Mason Dixon Line to enact an open-housing law.

In Nixon’s presidency, the civil rights enforcement budget rose 800 percent. Record numbers of blacks were appointed to federal office. An Office of Minority Business Enterprise was created. SBA loans to minorities soared 1,000 percent. Aid to black colleges doubled.

Nixon won the South not because he agreed with them on civil rights – he never did – but because he shared the patriotic values of the South and its antipathy to liberal hypocrisy.

When Johnson left office, 10 percent of Southern schools were desegregated.

When Nixon left, the figure was 70 percent. Richard Nixon desegregated the Southern schools, something you won’t learn in today’s public schools.

Not done there yet, snowflake.

1964:George Romney, Republican civil rights activist. That Republicans have let Democrats get away with this mountebankery is a symptom of their political fecklessness, and in letting them get away with it the GOP has allowed itself to be cut off rhetorically from a pantheon of Republican political heroes, from Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass to Susan B. Anthony, who represent an expression of conservative ideals as true and relevant today as it was in the 19th century.

Perhaps even worse, the Democrats have been allowed to rhetorically bury their Bull Connors, their longstanding affiliation with the Ku Klux Klan, and their pitiless opposition to practically every major piece of civil-rights legislation for a century.

Republicans may not be able to make significant inroads among black voters in the coming elections, but they would do well to demolish this myth nonetheless.

Even if the Republicans’ rise in the South had happened suddenly in the 1960s (it didn’t) and even if there were no competing explanation (there is), racism — or, more precisely, white southern resentment over the political successes of the civil-rights movement — would be an implausible explanation for the dissolution of the Democratic bloc in the old Confederacy and the emergence of a Republican stronghold there.

That is because those southerners who defected from the Democratic Party in the 1960s and thereafter did so to join a Republican Party that was far more enlightened on racial issues than were the Democrats of the era, and had been for a century.

There is no radical break in the Republicans’ civil-rights history: From abolition to Reconstruction to the anti-lynching laws, from the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Civil Rights Act of 1875 to the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, and 1964, there exists a line that is by no means perfectly straight or unwavering but that nonetheless connects the politics of Lincoln with those of Dwight D. Eisenhower.

And from slavery and secession to remorseless opposition to everything from Reconstruction to the anti-lynching laws, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the Civil Rights Act of 1875, and the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960, there exists a similarly identifiable line connecting John Calhoun and Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Supporting civil-rights reform was not a radical turnaround for congressional Republicans in 1964, but it was a radical turnaround for Johnson and the Democrats.

The depth of Johnson’s prior opposition to civil-rights reform must be digested in some detail to be properly appreciated.

In the House, he did not represent a particularly segregationist constituency (it “made up for being less intensely segregationist than the rest of the South by being more intensely anti-Communist,” as the New York Times put it), but Johnson was practically antebellum in his views.

Never mind civil rights or voting rights: In Congress, Johnson had consistently and repeatedly voted against legislation to protect black Americans from lynching.

As a leader in the Senate, Johnson did his best to cripple the Civil Rights Act of 1957; not having votes sufficient to stop it, he managed to reduce it to an act of mere symbolism by excising the enforcement provisions before sending it to the desk of President Eisenhower.

Johnson’s Democratic colleague Strom Thurmond nonetheless went to the trouble of staging the longest filibuster in history up to that point, speaking for 24 hours in a futile attempt to block the bill.

The reformers came back in 1960 with an act to remedy the deficiencies of the 1957 act, and Johnson’s Senate Democrats again staged a record-setting filibuster.

In both cases, the “master of the Senate” petitioned the northeastern Kennedy liberals to credit him for having seen to the law’s passage while at the same time boasting to southern Democrats that he had taken the teeth out of the legislation.

Johnson would later explain his thinking thus: “These Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days, and that’s a problem for us, since they’ve got something now they never had before: the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we’ve got to do something about this — we’ve got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference.”

Johnson did not spring up from the Democratic soil ex nihilo.

Not one Democrat in Congress voted for the Fourteenth Amendment.

Not one Democrat in Congress voted for the Fifteenth Amendment.

Not one voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1875.

Dwight Eisenhower as a general began the process of desegregating the military, and Truman as president formalized it, but the main reason either had to act was that President Woodrow Wilson, the personification of Democratic progressivism, had resegregated previously integrated federal facilities. (“If the colored people made a mistake in voting for me, they ought to correct it,” he declared.)

Klansmen from Senator Robert Byrd to Justice Hugo Black held prominent positions in the Democratic Party — and President Wilson chose the Klan epic Birth of a Nation to be the first film ever shown at the White House.

Johnson himself denounced an earlier attempt at civil-rights reform as the “nigger bill.” So what happened in 1964 to change Democrats’ minds? In fact, nothing.

President Johnson was nothing if not shrewd, and he knew something that very few popular political commentators appreciate today: The Democrats began losing the “solid South” in the late 1930s — at the same time as they were picking up votes from northern blacks.

The Civil War and the sting of Reconstruction had indeed produced a political monopoly for southern Democrats that lasted for decades, but the New Deal had been polarizing. It was very popular in much of the country, including much of the South — Johnson owed his election to the House to his New Deal platform and Roosevelt connections — but there was a conservative backlash against it, and that backlash eventually drove New Deal critics to the Republican Party.

Likewise, adherents of the isolationist tendency in American politics, which is never very far from the surface, looked askance at what Bob Dole would later famously call “Democrat wars” (a factor that would become especially relevant when the Democrats under Kennedy and Johnson committed the United States to a very divisive war in Vietnam).

The tiniest cracks in the Democrats’ southern bloc began to appear with the backlash to FDR’s court-packing scheme and the recession of 1937.

Republicans would pick up 81 House seats in the 1938 election, with West Virginia’s all-Democrat delegation ceasing to be so with the acquisition of its first Republican.

Kentucky elected a Republican House member in 1934, as did Missouri, while Tennessee’s first Republican House member, elected in 1918, was joined by another in 1932.

Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the Republican Party, though marginal, began to take hold in the South — but not very quickly: Dixie would not send its first Republican to the Senate until 1961, with Texas’s election of John Tower.

At the same time, Republicans went through a long dry spell on civil-rights progress.

Many of them believed, wrongly, that the issue had been more or less resolved by the constitutional amendments that had been enacted to ensure the full citizenship of black Americans after the Civil War, and that the enduring marginalization of black citizens, particularly in the Democratic states, was a problem that would be healed by time, economic development, and organic social change rather than through a second political confrontation between North and South.

As late as 1964, the Republican platform argued that “the elimination of any such discrimination is a matter of heart, conscience, and education, as well as of equal rights under law.”

The conventional Republican wisdom of the day held that the South was backward because it was poor rather than poor because it was backward.

And their strongest piece of evidence for that belief was that Republican support in the South was not among poor whites or the old elites — the two groups that tended to hold the most retrograde beliefs on race.

Instead, it was among the emerging southern middle class.

This fact was recently documented by professors Byron Shafer and Richard Johnston in The End of Southern Exceptionalism: Class, Race, and Partisan Change in the Postwar South (Harvard University Press, 2006).

Which is to say: The Republican rise in the South was contemporaneous with the decline of race as the most important political question and tracked the rise of middle-class voters moved mainly by economic considerations and anti-Communism.

The South had been in effect a Third World country within the United States, and that changed with the post-war economic boom.

As Clay Risen put it in the New York Times: “The South transformed itself from a backward region to an engine of the national economy, giving rise to a sizable new wealthy suburban class.

This class, not surprisingly, began to vote for the party that best represented its economic interests: the GOP. Working-class whites, however — and here’s the surprise — even those in areas with large black populations, stayed loyal to the Democrats.

This was true until the 90s, when the nation as a whole turned rightward in Congressional voting.” The mythmakers would have you believe that it was the opposite: that your white-hooded hillbilly trailer-dwelling tornado-bait voters jumped ship because LBJ signed a civil-rights bill (passed on the strength of disproportionately Republican support in Congress). The facts suggest otherwise. There is no question that Republicans in the 1960s and thereafter hoped to pick up the angry populists who had delivered several states to Wallace.

That was Patrick J. Buchanan’s portfolio in the Nixon campaign.

But in the main they did not do so by appeal to racial resentment, direct or indirect.

The conservative ascendency of 1964 saw the nomination of Barry Goldwater, a western libertarian who had never been strongly identified with racial issues one way or the other, but who was a principled critic of the 1964 act and its extension of federal power.

Goldwater had supported the 1957 and 1960 acts but believed that Title II and Title VII of the 1964 bill were unconstitutional, based in part on a 75-page brief from Robert Bork.

But far from extending a welcoming hand to southern segregationists, he named as his running mate a New York representative, William E. Miller, who had been the co-author of Republican civil-rights legislation in the 1950s.

The Republican platform in 1964 was hardly catnip for Klansmen: It spoke of the Johnson administration’s failure to help further the “just aspirations of the minority groups” and blasted the president for his refusal “to apply Republican-initiated retraining programs where most needed, particularly where they could afford new economic opportunities to Negro citizens.”

Other planks in the platform included: “improvements of civil rights statutes adequate to changing needs of our times; such additional administrative or legislative actions as may be required to end the denial, for whatever unlawful reason, of the right to vote; continued opposition to discrimination based on race, creed, national origin or sex.”

And Goldwater’s fellow Republicans ran on a 1964 platform demanding “full implementation and faithful execution of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and all other civil rights statutes, to assure equal rights and opportunities guaranteed by the Constitution to every citizen.” Some dog whistle.

Of course there were racists in the Republican Party. There were racists in the Democratic Party. The case of Johnson is well documented, while Nixon had his fantastical panoply of racial obsessions, touching blacks, Jews, Italians (“Don’t have their heads screwed on”), Irish (“They get mean when they drink”), and the Ivy League WASPs he hated so passionately (“Did one of those dirty bastards ever invite me to his f***ing men’s club or goddamn country club? Not once”).

But the legislative record, the evolution of the electorate, the party platforms, the keynote speeches — none of them suggests a party-wide Republican about-face on civil rights.

Neither does the history of the black vote.

While Republican affiliation was beginning to grow in the South in the late 1930s, the GOP also lost its lock on black voters in the North, among whom the New Deal was extraordinarily popular.

By 1940, Democrats for the first time won a majority of black votes in the North. This development was not lost on Lyndon Johnson, who crafted his Great Society with the goal of exploiting widespread dependency for the benefit of the Democratic Party.

Unlike the New Deal, a flawed program that at least had the excuse of relying upon ideas that were at the time largely untested and enacted in the face of a worldwide economic emergency, Johnson’s Great Society was pure politics.

Johnson’s War on Poverty was declared at a time when poverty had been declining for decades, and the first Job Corps office opened when the unemployment rate was less than 5 percent.

Congressional Republicans had long supported a program to assist the indigent elderly, but the Democrats insisted that the program cover all of the elderly — even though they were, then as now, the most affluent demographic, with 85 percent of them in households of above-average wealth.

Democrats such as Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Anthony J. Celebrezze argued that the Great Society would end “dependency” among the elderly and the poor, but the programs were transparently designed merely to transfer dependency from private and local sources of support to federal agencies created and overseen by Johnson and his political heirs.

In the context of the rest of his program, Johnson’s unexpected civil-rights conversion looks less like an attempt to empower blacks and more like an attempt to make clients of them.

If the parties had in some meaningful way flipped on civil rights, one would expect that to show up in the electoral results in the years following the Democrats’ 1964 about-face on the issue.

Nothing of the sort happened: Of the 21 Democratic senators who opposed the 1964 act, only one would ever change parties.

Nor did the segregationist constituencies that elected these Democrats throw them out in favor of Republicans: The remaining 20 continued to be elected as Democrats or were replaced by Democrats.

It was, on average, nearly a quarter of a century before those seats went Republican. If southern rednecks ditched the Democrats because of a civil-rights law passed in 1964, it is strange that they waited until the late 1980s and early 1990s to do so. They say things move slower in the South — but not that slow.

Republicans did begin to win some southern House seats, and in many cases segregationist Democrats were thrown out by southern voters in favor of civil-rights Republicans.

One of the loudest Democratic segregationists in the House was Texas’s John Dowdy.

Dowdy was a bitter and buffoonish opponent of the 1964 reforms.

He declared the reforms “would set up a despot in the attorney general’s office with a large corps of enforcers under him; and his will and his oppressive action would be brought to bear upon citizens, just as Hitler’s minions coerced and subjugated the German people.

Dowdy went on: “I would say this — I believe this would be agreed to by most people: that, if we had a Hitler in the United States, the first thing he would want would be a bill of this nature.” (Who says political rhetoric has been debased in the past 40 years?)

Dowdy was thrown out in 1966 in favor of a Republican with a very respectable record on civil rights, a little-known figure by the name of George H. W. Bush.

It was in fact not until 1995 that Republicans represented a majority of the southern congressional delegation — and they had hardly spent the Reagan years campaigning on the resurrection of Jim Crow.

It was not the Civil War but the Cold War that shaped midcentury partisan politics.

Eisenhower warned the country against the “military-industrial complex,” but in truth Ike’s ascent had represented the decisive victory of the interventionist, hawkish wing of the Republican Party over what remained of the America First/Charles Lindbergh/Robert Taft tendency.

The Republican Party had long been staunchly anti-Communist, but the post-war era saw that anti-Communism energized and looking for monsters to slay, both abroad — in the form of the Soviet Union and its satellites — and at home, in the form of the growing welfare state, the “creeping socialism” conservatives dreaded.

By the middle 1960s, the semi-revolutionary Left was the liveliest current in U.S. politics, and Republicans’ unapologetic anti-Communism — especially conservatives’ rhetoric connecting international socialism abroad with the welfare state at home — left the Left with nowhere to go but the Democratic Party. Vietnam was Johnson’s war, but by 1968 the Democratic Party was not his alone.

The schizophrenic presidential election of that year set the stage for the subsequent transformation of southern politics: Segregationist Democrat George Wallace, running as an independent, made a last stand in the old Confederacy but carried only five states.

Republican Richard Nixon, who had helped shepherd the 1957 Civil Rights Act through Congress, counted a number of Confederate states (North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, and Tennessee) among the 32 he carried.

Democrat Hubert Humphrey was reduced to a northern fringe plus Texas.

Mindful of the long-term realignment already under way in the South, Johnson informed Democrats worried about losing it after the 1964 act that “those states may be lost anyway.”

Subsequent presidential elections bore him out: Nixon won a 49-state sweep in 1972, and, with the exception of the post-Watergate election of 1976, Republicans in the following presidential elections would more or less occupy the South like Sherman.

Bill Clinton would pick up a handful of southern states in his two contests, and Barack Obama had some success in the post-southern South, notably Virginia and Florida.

The Republican ascendancy in Dixie is associated with several factors: The rise of the southern middle class, The increasingly trenchant conservative critique of Communism and the welfare state, The Vietnam controversy, The rise of the counterculture, law-and-order concerns rooted in the urban chaos that ran rampant from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, and The incorporation of the radical Left into the Democratic party.

Individual events, especially the freak show that was the 1968 Democratic convention, helped solidify conservatives’ affiliation with the Republican Party. Democrats might argue that some of these concerns — especially welfare and crime — are “dog whistles” or “code” for race and racism. However, this criticism is shallow in light of the evidence and the real saliency of those issues among U.S. voters of all backgrounds and both parties for decades. Indeed, Democrats who argue that the best policies for black Americans are those that are soft on crime and generous with welfare are engaged in much the same sort of cynical racial calculation President Johnson was practicing. Johnson informed skeptical southern governors that his plan for the Great Society was “to have them niggers voting Democratic for the next two hundred years.” Johnson’s crude racism is, happily, largely a relic of the past, but his strategy endures.

4 notes · View notes

conniejoworld · 1 year

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This is the full list of all Republican House representatives who voted against the sick leave measure:

Robert Aderholt, Alabama 4th district

Rick Allen, Georgia 12th district

Mark Amodei, Nevada 2nd district

Kelly Armstrong, North Dakota

Jodey Arrington, Texas 19th district

Brian Babin, Texas 36th district

Jim Baird, Indiana 4th district

Troy Balderson, Ohio 12th district

Jim Banks, Indiana 3rd district

Andy Barr, Kentucky 6th district

Cliff Bentz, Oregon 2nd district

Jack Bergman, Michigan 1st district

Stephanie Bice (OK), Oklahoma 5th district

Andy Biggs, Arizona 5th district

Gus Bilirakis, Florida 12th district

Dan Bishop, North Carolina 9th district

Mike Bost, Illinois 12th district

Kevin Brady, Texas 8th district

Mo Brooks, Alabama 5th district

Vern Buchanan, Florida 16th district

Ken Buck, Colorado 4th district

Larry Bucshon, Indiana 8th district

Ted Budd, North Carolina 13th district

Tim Burchett, Tennessee 2nd district

Michael Burgess, Texas 26th district

Ken Calvert, California 42nd district

Kat Cammack, Florida 3rd district

Mike Carey, Ohio 15th district

Jerry Carl, Alabama 1st district

John Carter, Texas 31st district

Buddy Carter, Georgia 1st district

Madison Cawthorn, North Carolina 11th district

Steve Chabot, Ohio 1st district

Liz Cheney, Wyoming

Ben Cline, Virginia 6th district

Michael Cloud, Texas 27th district

Andrew Clyde, Georgia 9th district

Tom Cole, Oklahoma 4th district

James Comer, Kentucky 1st district

Connie Conway, California 22nd district

Rick Crawford, Arkansas 1st district

Dan Crenshaw, Texas 2nd district

John Curtis, Utah 3rd district

Warren Davidson, Ohio 8th district

Rodney Davis, Illinois 13th district

Scott DesJarlais, Tennessee 4th district

Mario Diaz-Balart, Florida 25th district

Byron Donalds, Florida 19th district

Jeff Duncan, South Carolina 3rd district

Neal Dunn, Florida 2nd district

Jake Ellzey, Texas 6th district

Tom Emmer, Minnesota 6th district

Ron Estes, Kansas 4th district

Pat Fallon, Texas 4th district

Randy Feenstra, Iowa 4th district

Drew Ferguson, Georgia 3rd district

Brad Finstad, Minnesota 1st district

Michelle Fischbach, Minnesota 7th district

Scott Fitzgerald, Wisconsin 5th district

Chuck Fleischmann, Tennessee 3rd district

Mike Flood, Nebraska 1st district

Mayra Flores, Texas 34th district

Virginia Foxx, North Carolina 5th district

Scott Franklin, Florida 15th district

Russ Fulcher, Idaho 1st district

Matt Gaetz, Florida 1st district

Mike Gallagher, Wisconsin 8th district

Andrew Garbarino, New York 2nd district

Mike Garcia, California 25th district

Bob Gibbs, Ohio 7th district

Carlos Gimenez, Florida 26th district

Louie Gohmert, Texas 1st district

Tony Gonzales, Texas 23rd district

Anthony Gonzalez, Ohio 16th district

Bob Good, Virginia 5th district

Lance Gooden, Texas 5th district

Paul Gosar, Arizona 4th district

Kay Granger, Texas 12th district

Garret Graves, Louisiana 6th district

Sam Graves, Missouri 6th district

Mark Green, Tennessee 7th district

Marjorie Taylor Greene, Georgia 14th district

Morgan Griffith, Virginia 9th district

Glenn Grothman, Wisconsin 6th district

Michael Guest, Mississippi 3rd district

Brett Guthrie, Kentucky 2nd district

Andy Harris, Maryland 1st district

Diana Harshbarger, Tennessee 1st district

Vicky Hartzler, Missouri 4th district

Kevin Hern, Oklahoma 1st district

Yvette Herrell, New Mexico 2nd district

Jaime Herrera Beutler, Washington 3rd district

Jody Hice, Georgia 10th district

Clay Higgins, Louisiana 3rd district

French Hill, Arkansas 2nd district

Ashley Hinson, Iowa 1st district

Trey Hollingsworth, Indiana 9th district

Richard Hudson, North Carolina 8th district

Bill Huizenga, Michigan 2nd district

Darrell Issa, California 50th district

Ronny Jackson, Texas 13th district

Chris Jacobs, New York 27th district

Mike Johnson, Louisiana 4th district

Bill Johnson, Ohio 6th district

Dusty Johnson, South Dakota

Jim Jordan, Ohio 4th district

David Joyce, Ohio 14th district

John Joyce, Pennsylvania 13th district

Fred Keller, Pennsylvania 12th district

Trent Kelly, Mississippi 1st district

Mike Kelly, Pennsylvania 16th district

Young Kim, California 39th district

David Kustoff, Tennessee 8th district

Darin LaHood, Illinois 18th district

Doug LaMalfa, California 1st district

Doug Lamborn, Colorado 5th district

Bob Latta, Ohio 5th district

Jake LaTurner, Kansas 2nd district

Debbie Lesko, Arizona 8th district

Julia Letlow, Louisiana 5th district

Billy Long, Missouri 7th district

Barry Loudermilk, Georgia 11th district

Frank Lucas, Oklahoma 3rd district

Blaine Luetkemeyer, Missouri 3rd district

Nancy Mace, South Carolina 1st district

Nicole Malliotakis, New York 11th district

Tracey Mann, Kansas 1st district

Thomas Massie, Kentucky 4th district

Brian Mast, Florida 18th district

Kevin McCarthy, California 23rd district

Michael McCaul, Texas 10th district

Lisa McClain, Michigan 10th district

Tom McClintock, California 4th district

Patrick McHenry, North Carolina 10th district

Peter Meijer, Michigan 3rd district

Dan Meuser, Pennsylvania 9th district

Mary Miller, Illinois 15th district

Carol Miller, West Virginia 3rd district

Mariannette Miller-Meeks, Iowa 2nd district

John Moolenaar, Michigan 4th district

Alex Mooney, West Virginia 2nd district

Barry Moore, Alabama 2nd district

Blake Moore, Utah 1st district

Markwayne Mullin, Oklahoma 2nd district

Greg Murphy, North Carolina 3rd district

Troy Nehls, Texas 22nd district

Dan Newhouse, Washington 4th district

Ralph Norman, South Carolina 5th district

Jay Obernolte, California 8th district

Burgess Owens, Utah 4th district

Steven Palazzo, Mississippi 4th district

Gary Palmer, Alabama 6th district

Greg Pence, Indiana 6th district

Scott Perry, Pennsylvania 10th district

August Pfluger, Texas 11th district

Bill Posey, Florida 8th district

Guy Reschenthaler, Pennsylvania 14th district

Tom Rice, South Carolina 7th district

Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Washington 5th district

Mike Rogers, Alabama 3rd district

Hal Rogers, Kentucky 5th district

John Rose, Tennessee 6th district

Matt Rosendale, Montana

David Rouzer, North Carolina 7th district

Chip Roy, Texas 21st district

John Rutherford, Florida 4th district

Maria Elvira Salazar, Florida 27th district

Steve Scalise, Louisiana 1st district

David Schweikert, Arizona 6th district

Austin Scott, Georgia 8th district

Joe Sempolinski, New York 23rd district

9 notes · View notes

cokeraita · 1 year

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Marjorie Taylor Greene on Ukraine, Speakership Fallout, Big Tech, CIA/FBI and More Video Transcript: System Update #33

Marjorie Taylor Greene on Ukraine, Speakership Fallout, Big Tech, CIA/FBI and More Video Transcript: System Update #33 Glenn Greenwald@ggreenwald February 02, 2023 post photo preview Note From Glenn Greenwald: The following is the full show transcript, for subscribers only, of a recent episode of our System Update program, broadcast live on Rumble on Wednesday, February 1, 2023. Going forward, every new transcript will be sent out by email and posted to our Locals page, where you'll find the transcripts for previous shows. Watch System Update Episode #33 Here on Rumble. Virtually everything that can be said about our guest tonight, Marjorie Taylor Greene, has been said, often without the slightest regard for whether or not it is true. But whatever one's views of her may be, there is no denying that in a very short period of time – she is just now entering her second term in Congress – she has become one of the most prominent, influential and popular politicians in America. As The New York Times recounted in an article on her complex history with current House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, when Democrats were plotting to strip her of all of her Committee assignments due to controversial comments she made on the Internet before she was even elected to Congress, she “stormed into Mr. McCarthy's office in the Capitol late one night, in February 2021, and handed him a letter signed by local Republican leaders in her district, urging him to keep her on committees. They had received “countless messages”, they said, from their voters who were intent on supporting her.” Many things interest me about the Republican Congresswoman representing Georgia’s 14th Congressional District – her strident opposition to bipartisan foreign policy orthodoxy in Washington, the still escalating U.S. role in the war in Ukraine, her opposition to the evils of the U.S. Security State and Big Tech: all of which we'll talk about – but one often overlooked aspect of her quick rise to prominence is the Founders’ aspiration to have a country free of a professionalized political class, but instead one that would be governed by “citizen-legislators” – people who have other jobs and professions beyond “politician” and who go to Washington for a few years after a lot of experience elsewhere to serve in the model of public service and then go back to their regular lives. Anyone who was able to construct a prominent political profile without decades of striving for political power, without drearily climbing the career ladder from low-level political office and trying to take a step up every few years, without the benefit of a famous political parent or a famous family name – in other words, a self-made person in Washington – is automatically someone who will be of greater interest to me than people who seemingly popped out of the womb dreaming of one day being in the U.S. Senate. Whatever else one might think of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for example, that's true of her, and it's at least equally true of Congresswoman Greene. Look at the two most senior politicians who lead their respective parties in the Senate. Republican leader Mitch McConnell has been a senator since 1985 – for almost 40 years. Other than a few years in the early 1970s when he worked as a lawyer, McConnell has never had any job outside of being a politician. The Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, was elected to the New York State Assembly at the age of 24. He was elected to the U.S. Congress in 1980 at the age of 30, and then to the U.S. Senate in 1999. He's been in Congress for 43 years. It's impossible to find people more insular and insulated and aberrational than they – their lives bear not even the slightest resemblance to those whom they pretend to represent. When AOC first ran for Congress, in 2018, almost nobody paid attention to her primary race, in large part because nobody had even heard of her opponent, Joe Crowley. That was the case, even though Crowley was one of the most powerful members of Congress: entrenched in House Democratic leadership and touted as the likely successor to Nancy Pelosi. But almost nobody in his district even knew who he was. He barely visited Queens, the district he nominally represented. There was no such thing as a “Joe Crowley supporter”. His extremely significant power had nothing to do with any popular support – he had none – and it has everything to do with his ability to navigate the backrooms of Congress, where a lobbyist for Google and Raytheon lurk, telling party leadership, both parties, what they want, as they hand over massive checks to build their war chests. That's the reality of how Washington works and has worked for decades in both parties. Marjorie Taylor Greene's power comes exclusively from popular support. Her relevance depends only upon one thing: the fact that, whether you like it or not, millions of Americans trust her, support her and will stand behind her. And that's what should matter. Regardless of what you think about her causes and her ideology – and she is, needless to say, a deeply polarizing figure, as is almost everyone who holds genuinely passionate convictions as a matter of principle – I think one could say without much controversy that she's the most organic and authentic representation in Congress of the MAGA movement that attracted the support of tens of millions of Americans from every walk of life, from every racial and ethnic group and from every part of the country. And that just has to matter in politics. The fact that someone actually has large amounts of popular support. In Washington, for those who know how to wield it – and she has learned a lot about how to do so in the past two years – that's real power. There was a reason that “citizen-legislators”, rather than a professionalized political class, was what the Founders envisioned. By definition, people have lived most of their lives without political power and political office has far more in common with those they are supposed to represent. They tend to be far more willing to learn, to grow, to evolve – not as the result of calculating careerist decisions, but simply because people who arrive in Washington afresh are not yet dependent upon it. They typically end up seeing things and learning things about how the country really works, and that, in turn, makes them less captive to party and dogma and more open to growth and change. Congresswoman Greene is no ordinary member of Congress, and she's no ordinary Republican either. Many of her most passionately held views are ones that were utterly anathema to the Republican Party until Donald Trump came along in 2016 and became the Republican nominee for president not by affirming and validating long standing Republican orthodoxies – voters already had Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio if they wanted that – but instead, by denouncing and vowing to uproot his own party's establishment orthodoxies. For that reason, Greene often inspires more anger and contempt in establishment Republican circles than she does among American liberals. Many of her views, her worldview, and her approach to politics, are a threat to subvert the GOP establishment and they know that. And that's why many of them despise her. But conservative voters also know that she's a threat to subvert the GOP establishment and that's why so many of them trust and support her. There are a lot more views I have to share about Congresswoman Greene but rather than take more time for me to express those, I'd rather spend our time letting her speak for herself. I'm thrilled that she's here tonight to do just that. G. Greenwald: Congresswoman, good evening. It's great to see you. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us. Rep. Greene: Hi, Glenn. I'm thrilled to be here. Thank you for having me. G. Greenwald: Absolutely. So, I was just talking about one of the things that I find interesting about your rise to prominence in such a short period of time, which is the pre-political trajectory you had, you didn't spend a lot of time plotting how to get elected to politics. You never ran for office. Previously, you had what I would describe as a life that has a lot in common with ordinary Americans. Talk about just in general, what your life was before you became Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, and how that shapes the work you do in Washington. Rep. Greene: Well, I am just a regular American. I've never been in politics before, never held political office. I never even went to a meeting. As a matter of fact, I'm a business owner. Very proud mom, that's the best part of my life. And I just became angry over time with the failures that I saw in Washington, D.C., that regular Americans were able to get done every single day in our and our normal lives. Being a business owner and growing up in a family business, serving our customers was the most important thing we could do. I was raised with the belief that the customer is king, and I see the American taxpayer as the customer of the federal government. But I see complete failure from our federal government. We're basically on the brink of falling apart. So, I decided that instead of complaining on Facebook or social media or to my friends, I thought, okay, I'll step up to the plate and take a swing at this and see if I can do a better job. G. Greenwald: So, speaking of Facebook and social media and the like and your use of it before you got to Congress, it's part of what makes you polarizing in certain circles that you said and published things on those platforms that you ultimately came to disregard and repudiate. It's an experience I know I had, too, when I was a lawyer, and I then first became a journalist and was able to kind of delve into, in a full-time way, political realities. I realized that a lot of things that I had been led to believe previously when I was just kind of able to only pay partial attention turned out to be untrue. I think it's true for everybody. What's rare is to actually acknowledge and admit that as you've done. Talk a little about that process, what it was like to navigate through things you believe, and come to reaffirm some of them, reject others. What has that process been like for you? Rep. Greene: Well, it's been, honestly, a really easy one, Glenn, and I'll tell you why. You see, it's not just people on the right, it's people on the left that are victims of conspiracy theories all over the Internet and social media. You know, so I did go through a process where I had to say, look, I'm sorry, I said a few things on social media. But to be honest with you, as a regular American, when you look at Washington, D.C., it doesn't make sense why we're in such pitiful debt that we're in. When as an American at home I could pay my bills every day and be able to save money and I wasn't in debt. And I'm not in debt now. And then looking also at our government failures, it's like, why doesn't our government care about our southern border or our border period? But yet we're obsessed with every other country's border across the world. And there were just so many injustices. It's easy to believe things that you read on the Internet. You know, there are a lot of people that believe insane lies about me, that they read on social media, on the Internet. And then we have major media companies, large corporations that have told lies every single day, 24 x7 on cable news, not only to Americans but all over the world. And so, see, I think everyone is a little bit of a victim of so-called misinformation, but I don't think that's anything to be totally ashamed of. But it's really easy to say you're sorry and move forward. You know who I am as a person. I've never broken a law. I've always paid my taxes. I've done everything right in my life, you know, And I'm pretty successful and I'm proud of that. If I believe something wrong and had to say I'm sorry for it. Well, you know what? Everyone makes mistakes. G. Greenwald: You know, it was very soon when I when we announced that I was going to be speaking to you tonight, there was a wide range of reactions, including rage, as you might imagine, the idea that a journalist will actually interview a member of Congress apparently has become something that is now regarded as immoral or a cause of anger. But one of the things that also I found very bizarre about the reaction saying, oh, why would you talk to her if she spread conspiracy theories, if you want to talk about strange conspiracy theories, you know, what prompted me to get into politics and journalism was the fact that I watched every major American institution endorse what turned out to be an outright falsehood, namely that Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons or biological and chemical weapons programs that led to a war that killed in excess of a million people, depending on how you count. All of those people who did that are now in all of the respectable precincts and welcomed on every show. We had a 2008 financial crisis that wiped out generational wealth for millions of Americans. And then we spent the last four years hearing the most prominent members of society, the most prestigious media outlets, claiming that the Kremlin had taken over the United States, and had seized control of the levers of power. Do you think that one of the reasons why Americans fall victim to conspiracy theories that aren't true, as you've acknowledged was true of you, is because there has been such a breakdown of trust in institutional authority and the legitimacy of institutions? And on some level, people don't know what to believe any longer. Rep. Greene: Yeah, I think that's so true and so well said. I really appreciate the way you put that, and I share a lot of what you said. I mean, here, our country, after 9/11, went straight into war looking for so-called weapons of mass destruction. And we didn't find any, but we lost thousands of lives, of American military lives, and we saw our brothers and friends and cousins and uncles and fathers come back home, maimed and disfigured and suffering from PTSD and committing suicide. There are so many things that we have been told are true by our trusted leaders but then we watch things unfold and, you know, it ends up being where things don't add up and people don't know what to believe anymore. I mean, we can talk about… here's things that have been said about me that are absolutely shocking to me every single day. If I look in my comments, someone will accuse me of being the pipe bomber on January 5th, and that's absurd. But there's a whole bunch of people that believe it, a bunch of Hollywood celebrities and so-called smart people. You know, probably some of the people that were outraged that you would dare interview me on your show. Every single day, there are people that think that I said a phrase called “Jewish space lasers,” a phrase that I never said. As a matter of fact, it was created and invented in a story that a bunch of people read in the news, and they believe that about me. But in fact, that's something I never said. And I don't hold any type of beliefs like that at all. But now we look at our leaders in Washington and we should be able to trust our leaders in Washington. We should be able to trust all of our leaders and believe what they tell us and trust them that they're going to do a good job. But they haven't done it for so long now that they have failed us. And people are grasping, no matter where they are in the political spectrum, they're grasping and trying to figure out, well, what do we believe and who do we believe? And I believe it's causing a very dangerous situation in a certain percentage of our population where they're becoming so fed up and so angry that they don't believe anyone and they can't be satisfied no matter what solution you present, no matter what you tell them, even if you're telling them the straight facts, they still don't believe you. And so, I think we're going down a very dangerous road. But this is what happens when governments fail their people so severely. We're over $34 trillion in debt, Glenn, and we're looking at having to raise our debt ceiling again so that we don't default. And that's extremely important. But at the same time, we're having to fight our president, President Biden, over reducing spending, which is hard to fathom because just as you listed, this man has spent decades in Washington and he can't connect with regular Americans like I can. And he can't even figure out why people think this overspending is a problem. He's more interested in what's happening over in Ukraine and figuring out how to get Crimea. And he's willing to go as far as possible, mean maybe even nuclear, in order to do that. But yet he's disconnected from what's happening at the southern border. He doesn't care that people are dying of fentanyl every single day. He doesn't hear that over 5 million people are flooding into our country. And he doesn't understand why the youth, the young people, young adults in this nation aren't pursuing jobs and careers. So, I think there is such a disconnect between our so-called leaders, who people should trust and what they believe on the Internet to the point where –think about this, Glenn, people will believe a perfect stranger that they have never met in their life that may have some kind of interesting name that they call themselves. And because they have a podcast, not only will they believe them, but they'll donate money to them. And I think that's a very dangerous place for us to be. G. Greenwald: Yeah. I mean, if you look at, I think, history and see a societal breakdown and genuine civil strife, it's almost always because there becomes this breach, this enormous gap between how elites are living, you know, kind of the classic wall behind the Versailles, of France, and the entire rest of the population. So let me ask you, though, because there is this kind of unavoidable irony in a sense, which is you start off as an outsider, you're angry about what's going on in Washington, but now you're in Washington, you're inside the kind of halls of power you have all the passes that let you in. In 2010, I read a book by the host on MSNBC, Chris Hayes. It was quite a good book. It was called “Twilight of the Elites”. And one of the arguments Chris made in this book was that elite institutions are extremely adept from decades of practice in taking anybody who enters their institutions, and no matter how well-intentioned they may be, no matter how smart they might be, how genuine they might be about trying to kind of subvert the institutions from within, and, over time, they can kind of co-opt you. They can say, here's a little benefit that we're willing to give you if you play ball a little bit with us here. And his argument was, no matter how well-intentioned, and determined you are to avoid that, it's basically inevitable that you'll be cognitively captured. And I remember asking Chris, “well, you just got a primetime show on MSNBC. What are you doing to protect yourself and shield yourself from that?” And he said, ‘Well, you know, actually, I haven't really thought about it.’ Watching him over the years turned into a Democratic Party mouthpiece and little else, I wish that he had thought about it. But let me ask you that. What are you kind of aware of those temptations, of those machinations, of the ability of D.C. institutions to take someone like yourself who arrives ready to battle, ready to fight, and kind of co-opt you? And do you feel like you have a plan to insulate yourself from that? Rep. Greene: Yeah. And this is such a big subject. There are multiple layers to this. So, I think one place to start is something that people might find interesting is political donations. Now, I'm very lucky and I'm very blessed to be supported by so many regular Americans. I received small-dollar donations. So, for me, that is not a problem. And I'm so grateful for that. But there's a lot of members of Congress that come here and a lot of senators as well, that just don't rise in popularity, may not have a good fundraising operation put together, and it comes time for reelection and they really need help. And in their primary, they may be facing a challenger or multiple challengers and they need help getting reelected. And so that's where the lobbyists come in. That's where Big Techs come in, and that's where people can maybe fall in line and not stay the true fighters that they were when they came to Washington. It's more where they fall in line and listen to a lobbyist that literally will say this – because I've heard it before – they just say that, you know, listen, Congressman, if you will just vote with us about 60% of the time, that's all we ask, 60% of the time, we're going to need you on some key bills like appropriations, the NDAA and some other things. And then the other 40% of the time, you know, you can take your issues, you can fight whether you're far-right, moderate, wherever you are, and you can fight on those issues. But we're going to need you right here about 60% of the time. And that's what creates what I call, Glenn, the Uniparty – that creates the Uniparty. And so, where you have – and that doesn't mean lobbyists are bad people – they're salespeople. That's what people need to understand. These are salespeople and their customers, the clients that they're selling for are large corporations. They're industries that need their needs met, too. And so, they hire lobbyists, send them in to talk to people like me, so that they can get what they need, put in bills to help their industry, protect their business, so they can keep going, so they can keep receiving funding or whatever it may be. But the problem is, Glenn, there's not a lot of lobbyists here for regular Mr. and Mrs. American, you know, like mom and pop shops, the single mom trying to make it, that the guy, the average white male trying to climb the corporate ladder when his problem is being a white male. So, there's that people in here fighting for regular Americans, you just have lobbyists fighting for big corporations and industries. And so that's one layer of the problem. The other layer of the problem is the nature of this job. It keeps members of Congress and senators in Washington so much of the time, too much of the time, to be honest with you, that we don't get to go home and spend more time with our families, our friends, you know, all in our district, or maybe just be “regular” people because this job is so demanding and it's turned into practically year around. And for those of us in the House of Representatives, we have to run for Congress every two years. So, you're practically campaigning nearly the entire time that you're here serving as a representative. So that's just a couple of examples that I can give you that I believe is a recipe for disaster. And that's how people just fall into this social club. I would call it a social club here in Washington, D.C. Now, for me, I have no interest in that. I really don't. And I'll tell you why. Becoming a member of Congress has made my life miserable. I made a lot more money before I got here. I've lost money since I've gotten here. I have people come up to me and say crazy things to me out of the blue, in public places, that they believe because they read it on the Internet or saw it on some news show about me. So, it's not a life that I think is like something that I enjoy because I don't enjoy it. But I'm committed to this job because I believe in it. I sincerely believe that the federal government is failing the American people so badly, like so badly that it disgusts me every single day. And I like to solve problems. That's who I am. I like to fix it. And I honestly hate the two-party system. I really do. People don't understand that about me. But I really hate the two-party system because it creates a divide in Congress and it takes away from the fact that we should just be working for all Americans. And that may surprise people to hear me say that. But I do believe that we should be working for all Americans because – guess what? – this is all of our country. And so, I'm not interested in being co-opted or changing the way I do things. As a matter of fact, that would upset me because I wouldn't sleep well at night. And I really do enjoy getting good sleep at night. G. Greenwald: Yeah. You know, I've told this story before, but I remember when I was working with Edward Snowden in Hong Kong, an incredibly stressful moment, we had no idea whether at any moment Chinese authorities or Hong Kong authorities or the CIA were going to bust down the door and none of us could sleep – the journalists working with him. But every night at 10 p.m. he said, “Hey, guys, I'm going to hit the hay.” He went to bed and slept like a baby. And at one point I finally asked him, you know, how are you able to do this when all of us can barely get an hour of sleep, even with sleeping aids? And he said because there's nothing like having a clean conscience that lets you sleep at night. And even though he's an exile, I always say he's probably the most internally peaceful and fulfilled person I know, despite these material deprivations. I don't want to spend a lot of time on the whole what ended up, I think, being more of a drama over the House speakership fight but I do want to ask you a couple of questions about it while I have you. To begin with, I did start noticing even before the Republicans gained control of Congress, that Kevin McCarthy was saying things about you along the lines of, “look, you may not like it, you may like it, the reality is Marjorie Taylor Greene speaks for millions of people within our party and deserves the platform that goes along with that.” He obviously was opposed to stripping you of committees, at least while he was saying those sorts of things. The people who are kind of the holdouts to Kevin McCarthy were people who are typically aligned with you, or that's the perception at least, and some people were surprised that you weren't one of them. They ended up getting some concessions in exchange for ultimately allowing Kevin McCarthy to become the Speaker. I'm just wondering either informally or formally, was your willingness to support Kevin McCarthy as speaker based on your perception that he would allow you to do the things that you felt you wanted to do or at least give you the space and the power in order to do them? Rep. Greene: Well, I think what people can take away from it is the fact that I supported Kevin McCarthy going into that Speaker's vote is that I will make decisions independently, that I'm not going to make decisions because my group of friends or the Freedom Caucus or the people I normally vote with are planning to do something. I will take and weigh all the information that I have, and I'll make that decision on my own. And I'm willing to do that at all times. It doesn't matter what the issue is, what the votes are going to be, what the bill is, I will continue to do that and I'll do what I believe is the right thing. And so, I had a different path than the 20 that opposed Kevin McCarthy going into January 3rd. My path was this: I had gotten kicked off a committee. One of the things I had been told by a lot of people is that it was Kevin McCarthy that kicked me off. But I found out – and it was well over a year after I had been here – from Devin Nunes, one night we were at a party and I found out from him that, in fact, that was not true because he was in the room when it happened and Kevin McCarthy was very angry and was screaming at Steny Hoyer over the fact that they were going to kick me off of committees and told them there's going to be paybacks and we won't forget this once you start this process, he said, we will continue it. And sure enough, everybody saw what happened. He removed Adam Schiff, and Eric Swalwell from the Intel committees. And we are getting ready to remove Ilhan Omar from Foreign Affairs for anti-Semitic comments and stances and views towards Israel. And so Kevin McCarthy held true to his word. But another thing that I did that was different from not having committees is I spent a lot of time on the House floor. And I really feel like I learned how Congress works. And I watch committees and I was able to observe and learn probably more than any member of Congress has ever been able to do. But I also went and talked to Kevin McCarthy, which was something different that none of them ever did. They more assumed his opinion, assumed his stances, and grew in their belief that he would be a bad Speaker and wouldn't be conservative, wouldn't put America First and they chose to oppose him, where I spent months and months going to meet with him and talk to him because I truly felt like, okay, I need to be talking to leadership and I need to tell leadership exactly how regular Americans think and feel and tell them, here's what's important. This is what we believe. This is what we want. And so, I had developed a relationship with Kevin McCarthy by going to him and sometimes fighting with him, sometimes arguing with him, but really earning his ear and his trust and explaining to him, here's what America First looks like. This is what MAGA Republicans feel like. This is what small business owners think and feel. This is what's important to my district. This is what's important for traditional values and conservatives. And then I would say, here's what I think we need to do. I give my opinion on a lot of things. But I also got to hear back from him, Glenn, and that's how you make a decision on whether you're going to support someone: you watch their actions, you listen to their words, you develop a relationship, and then you make your decision. But there's something also very important that most people don't realize. I also knew there was nothing to gain by opposing Kevin McCarthy. As a matter of fact, I knew there was a lot at risk. We could risk losing the gavel to the Democrats or to more of a Uniparty group from Democrats and Republicans, that could pull together and get 218 members on their own and elect someone for Speaker that none of us really want except that big moderate group. And to me, that was reckless and dangerous because we worked very hard to earn the majority and after two years without committees, you know what? I wanted the gavel and I wanted the gavel to belong to someone that I could support and someone that would help me and listen to me achieve the things over the next two years that I believe will help us win the White House and help us get control of the Senate so that we can truly make real changes to get things done. And so that's how my decision process worked. And so, once I get into something, I'm going to fight like hell for it. And I fought to support Kevin McCarthy, and it seemed like an unpopular thing to do. But I think people are realizing that I made the right choice and they're finding out that Kevin McCarthy is not Mitch McConnell and he's going to do a good job for us. G. Greenwald: So you mentioned the Ilhan Omar thing, and I want to actually ask you about that in just a second but before I get to that, just to kind of sum this all up, I realize you made a different choice than the 20 holdouts. I've heard you before, and again, you explained your reasoning. I think it's very clear, regardless of whether people agree with it or not. But what I do want to ask is that there were some concessions that were ultimately extracted in exchange for letting him ascend to the House speakership – but this was five days that didn't go on for weeks. It was just a few days that were designed to decentralize the decision-making process. And this kind of grip, the stranglehold that party leadership has had on Congress going back to the days of Paul Ryan and then John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi, all of whom basically stripped individual members of any kind of real power, at least some of these procedural changes and concessions restored to individual members, some power. Do you acknowledge or agree with the view that some of those concessions that they extracted did end up having real value? Rep. Greene: Well, actually, let me give a little information on that. All the agreements that came together on our rules package happened all before January 3. So, I supported our Freedom Caucus rules package and we worked with leadership and we worked in our conference. And all of those meetings and votes happened before the very first Speaker vote on January 3. As a matter of fact, the rules package was printed on January 1, ok?, and then the final printed version of the rules package on January 6, when we took our bill, I guess it was early hours, January 7, our 15th round where we finally voted and established Kevin McCarthy speakership. The only change in the rules package from January 1, all the way to January 6, during that big week fight from January 3 to January 7, early a.m. was one thing. One thing I'm not kidding you. It's like 55 pages both times. But the only change was it took the motion to vacate from 5 members to 1 member. That was it. So, people don't understand that. All of that, the debate and coming to this where we were returning power to members of the House and taking it away from leadership and taking the appropriation bills to 12 separate bills and all these wonderful things that happened, that all of that was done before January 3. The only thing that happened that week was a change in motion to vacate from five members to one. But there were a lot of meetings behind closed doors, and there were things requested that I didn't agree with. Those are the backroom deal-type things that I never was a part of. And, you know, they might have gotten some of them, but none of that is public. G. Greenwald: All right. So, let's talk about the question of whether Ilhan Omar should be taken off the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Kevin McCarthy promised that he would remove Adam Schiff, for example, as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee or ranking member, because he clearly lied to the public repeatedly and abused his position by doing so, vesting a lot of lies and conspiracy theories with the kind of aura of credibility that comes from that position. He constantly leaked classified information from political reasons to CNN and a bunch of other outlets. So, there's a clear reason why you would remove Adam Schiff from this committee. When it comes to Ilhan Omar, it seems as if the argument for removing her from the House Foreign Affairs Committee is similar to the argument that was made by Democrats for why you should be stripped from your committee positions, namely not that she abused her power or engaged in ethical violations – but instead that she expressed views that a lot of people dislike. And I want to just show you – you probably already saw it but for our audience – what Matt Gaetz said, a few days ago, in an interview about why he's at least not yet willing to support the campaign to remove Ilhan Omar from this committee. And I want to hear your reaction to it. (Video 42:16) Rep. Matt Gaetz on Newsmax: So, let's go ahead and show that Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell are dangerous to our country. They lied about intelligence. They created a structure of leaks and then embroidered those leaks on to other lies. You just saw Adam Schiff lying about his contact with whistleblowers. Even CNN had to recognize that point. But I have to tell you, Jen, I view the Schiff and Swalwell matter somewhat differently than I view the Ilhan Omar matter. Ilhan Omar didn't lie about our intelligence agencies. She didn't say that Trump was a Russian agent based on information from a particular committee that was just totally bogus. The reason I think a lot of Republicans want to kick Ilhan Omar off of the Foreign Affairs Committee is that they don't like what she has to say. And like I was just saying. Newsmax: She should have remained on. Rep. Matt Gaetz on Newsmax: That, well, I'm undecided on that question because the Democrats moved the Overton window. And I do believe Speaker McCarthy deserves deference. And so I want to hear him out. But I am undecided as of tonight as to whether or not I would vote to remove Ilhan Omar from the Foreign Affairs Committee, because it's one thing to do dangerous things to the country with intelligence, it's quite another to say, I don't like your viewpoint and thus I want to remove you. I don't support that with Direct TV and Newsmax, I didn't support it when it was directed at my friend and colleague Marjorie Taylor Greene, and it makes me uncomfortable that the case against Ilhan Omar, you know, isn't being subjected to any due process. G. Greenwald: Do you see any validity to that argument? M. Greene: No, I don't. And I'll tell you why. There's a major difference. Number one, I was removed from all committees, not allowed to serve on any committee in the House of Representatives for so-called comments and things on Facebook or social media before I ever became a candidate for Congress. But Omar is quite a different case. All of her statements and views have been made as a sitting member of Congress, and that's where it poses a problem. And her stances and views towards Israel are dangerous, very dangerous for the Foreign Affairs Committee because that committee does deal with Israel. And her support for Hamas, her support for terrorist organizations against Israel is not the type of viewpoint. And that's not what we should see out of members of Congress for the United States sitting on the Foreign Affairs Committee. And then the other differences. Guess what? Democrats can assign her to any other committee in the House of Representatives, just not the Foreign Affairs Committee. So, it's a night and day difference between how they treated me and what we are doing with Ilhan Omar and my friend Matt Gaetz, who I really like and admire, he's just wrong. But I will tell you, I'm pretty sure Matt Gaetz is going to be voting to remove Omar when we take that to the floor. G. Greenwald: That could definitely be the case. Let me just probe a little bit more on that, because you did mention Ilhan Omar, and his views with respect to Israel. Regardless of one's views on Israel, Israel is a foreign country. It's not part of the United States. It's actually a foreign country. A lot of Israelis have a better quality of life than a lot of our fellow citizens of the United States. Israel is a major recipient of enormous amounts of U.S. aid in the billions and billions and billions of dollars range that Obama signed with Prime Minister Netanyahu. Even if you support U.S. aid to Israel and can reconcile that with an America First ideology – which I want to talk about in a second, what that means – surely it has to be the prerogative of a member of Congress to be able to question whether that policy is the right one or even to oppose it without being punished. Isn't that something that we want to foster in Congress and our country generally, which is the ability to express views that others disagree with without being punished for them? Rep. Greene: Yeah, absolutely. But I don't think it should be views expressed through hatred or any type of negative feeling towards a country based on their identity. And that's the problem with Omar. You know, it's one thing for her to say we shouldn't be sending foreign aid or something like that. But that's not her view. Her views are negative. Her views are more anti-Israel because it's Israel, because of Palestine and that situation that lies there. But it's not one of more freedom of speech with policy. So that's a clear difference. Ilhan Omar is also someone that supported bailing out criminal rioters, Antifa, BLM rioters that were burning down American cities during the summer of 2020 and her daughter was involved with those riots on the ground. So, I mean, we can go further. We can talk about the fact that she married her brother, and broke immigration laws, and that's something I think we should look into. So. So, in my opinion, Glenn, there's a lot more we should be doing with Ilhan Omar than just removing her from foreign affairs. But that's the offer that's on the table. So that's the only one that I can talk about at this time. G. Greenwald: Yes. There's something we're going to have to leave to the side with a lot of disagreement, I think. I think we could at least agree that before someone can be treated as guilty of a crime or punished as a crime, they need due process. They need to be charged with that crime, given a trial. None of this has happened in her case with respect to things like immigration. So let me ask you the broader question, though, which relates to the question that I raised about Israel, but just in a much broader way, leaving Israel to the side In 2016, people forget that one of the things that Donald Trump actually did that got him not just elected president, but first, the nomination of his own party, was he ran against the establishment ideology of not just the Democratic Party, but also the Republican Party. And he did so in almost every sector – economic policy, trade policy, but particularly foreign policy, arguing that we should stop going around the world in changing other people's governments to try and make them better. But rather than have me describe what you regard as America First ideology when it comes to foreign policy, what do you understand that to be? And which parts of his critiques of Republican orthodoxy did you agree with on foreign policy? Rep. Greene: Well, I have America First views because of my life, because of my life experience. And that's why I supported President Trump because what I've lived and what I see, where I'm from in Georgia, and also all over America is that it's very sad. So, let's talk about that for a few minutes. You know, decades ago, the leaders in Washington joined together with big corporations and started to make trade deals. And this is what led to many of our manufacturing jobs, blue-collar jobs being sent overseas to foreign countries where they started manufacturing goods. And guess what? Manufacturing plants, steel plants, and many types of great American jobs disappeared and those manufacturing plants shut down. And so that affected every rural part of America. And small-town America today is suffering from that. And that's where America lost policies. So where big corporations made big profits on slave labor and cheap labor overseas, Americans here at home lost their jobs. And here's the result of that, Glenn. That meant that the breadwinner of the family, the father of the family, lost his job, came back home to his family and had a very difficult time replacing that salary and replacing that job because there weren't jobs that really exist anywhere in small town USA. And so, there's devastating things that happen from that. I mean, we're talking about divorce, alcoholism, depression. People just didn't recover over the past decades. And then you combine that and, Glenn, this is where we probably agree, the never-ending foreign wars added to that. And this is where our sons, brothers, cousins, fathers, uncles, all friends were shipped overseas, fought in these foreign wars, and then came back home, damaged goods and addicted to opioids and then drug use and suicide. And that also affected small-town America, because not only did you have families that got broken through a divorce or just never recovered from losing these jobs, their sons were addicted to drugs; kids just got confused. And small-town America basically rots away. And so if you drive through my district or you drive through rural America, you drive through any small town in the United States and you're going to see Main Street USA with a lot of empty storefronts, a lot of very sad people, very, very poor people, and a lot of people that don't have hope anymore. And when President Trump ran for president in 2016, that was something that he understood and talked about. And that's why average Americans, people like me, and people all over America supported his America First message. That's what I believe in. I believe we have to fight for the regular American. We have to fight to revitalize small-town America. We have to fight to bring hope back. We have to fight to bring jobs back. We have to actually care about our country and our people. And you can't put a political party on that and you can't put an identity on that or an ideology. It's very simple. It's just loving your country, loving your neighbor, loving one another, and wanting all of us to succeed. And the way to make that happen is to put our country first. It's very simple. America First. That's what Make America Great Again really means. And it's not something to be afraid of or hated. It's actually something that all of us should embrace. And it is certainly something that I believe in. G. Greenwald: So, let's talk about a couple of specific examples of where that ideology, as you described it, manifests. You have been certainly one of the most vocal opponents of the Biden White House's war policy in Ukraine, namely sending tens of billions of dollars with seemingly no end in sight, increasingly sophisticated weaponry, almost no safeguards, which isn't really even the Biden White House policy. It's the policy of both parties. And even Joe Biden himself says that the world is closer to nuclear annihilation right now as a result of the U.S. role in that war and the possibility of direct military confrontation with Russia than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis, where the two countries really came close to blowing up the entire planet. For years. Obama even was saying, ‘Why would we go to war with Russia or risk conflict with Russia over Ukraine? It has nothing in it that is of any interest to the American people’, even those horrible Middle East wars, at least there was oil there. There was like a rational reason why the U.S. would be interested there. How do you explain the fact that 100%, the Democratic Party, and 80% of your party is willing to pour gigantic sums of money into this war to risk all kinds of very dangerous implications, given all the suffering you just described in our country over Ukraine. Being in the middle of it, what do you think explains that? Rep. Greene: Well, again, there's a lot of layers to that. And I'll tell you one thing is war is big business. That's what it's always about. And it usually involves energy. The Middle Eastern wars were all about oil, but guess what? In Ukraine, they possess a lot of rare earth minerals, and those are very valuable now, especially with the climate agenda that we're seeing all over the world, especially out of the Democrat Party. Another thing is the military-industrial complex. Guess what? When we have a war going on, we get to manufacture weapons. We get to manufacture military equipment, and we keep that industry warmed up and cooking and they make a lot of money. We also sharpen up our military and they get to try out different exercises and war plans. And so, you see there's many things that happen across the board when there's a war going on and they get to practice it in another country that's not here at home. And you see, I think this is something that's a major problem. I do believe in having a very strong military. As a matter of fact, I want America's military to be the strongest in the world because I'm concerned about China. But I think what we're doing is reckless. It's endangering lives all over the world with this war in Ukraine. I think it's wrong. I think Ukraine is one of the most corrupt countries in the world. And I think Zelensky is not the person we should be supporting. Ukraine is not the 51st state of America. Ukraine is a foreign country and it's very far away from home. There's other things that I believe in. I believe we are going down a path that I'm not sure we're going to turn around from. There's a lot of egos that are posturing in this. And they've gotten themselves pretty far out there. And here we are. We just sent tanks over to Ukraine and now they want F-16 fighter jets. And what are they going to want next and where will it stop? And there's a bunch of them saying that they'll stop at nothing. And that is like blind fools driving our ship and guaranteeing and controlling our future. The other reason why I was against the war in Ukraine is because I knew it was going to drive inflation and I knew it was going to hurt poor people all over the world. And we've seen that happen. Inflation has gone up, energy costs have gone up, the price of food has gone up. And that hurts everyone. It doesn't help anyone. It hurts everyone. But Russia has proven something that I also warned everyone about. Russia has proven that they don't need the United States to make trades. They don't need the United States to sell their oil and natural gas. And that is another dangerous thing that Russia proved to the world that's going to hurt the United States of America because the dollar has been the world currency but Russia has shown in its trade with China and other countries that they're willing to sell oil and natural gas and they won't have to use the dollar. They can pick and choose which currency they want to use. So, I think the leaders here in Washington and the neocons and everyone involved and war games and Russia are endangering not only our lives, but they're endangering our economy and they're endangering the entire world while China is rising, Glenn. China has the fastest growing military in world history, and China is serious about what they're doing and they don't have to get it done tomorrow or next week. They're willing to wait years to get it done, and they are not deterred one single bit, while we're over here in the United States with our political pendulum, if you will, swinging back and forth between right and left. So, I think the United States needs to get a serious grip on reality. We need to get Russia and Ukraine to the negotiating table for peace. We need to end it. And we need to turn our focus on the Mexican cartels who are murdering Americans every single day. G. Greenwald: Right. So let me see. You mentioned China several times on that question, and I'm glad you did, because whenever I point out that the energy behind opposing American interventionism, American wars, is actually much more on the populist right than on the populous left, the argument I'll hear is, no, that is a fraudulent agenda they're selling. They're not actually opposed to going to war with other countries. They're just angry that we're at war with the wrong country. They want to stop the war in Russia. So, they can actually go have a war with China. And they say they're opposed to preventing Russia from taking over Crimea, that that shouldn't be our business. And yet they're willing to go to war with China in order to protect Taiwan, which is also a foreign country, not the 51st state on the other side of the world. Is there any circumstance in which you would defend – other than, of course, a direct attack by the Chinese government on America or its people around the world – is there any circumstance in which you would actually support a direct hot war between the United States and China, including China's potential invasion of Taiwan? Rep. Greene: I hope we never see anything like that ever happen. I think that we're looking at World War III, if that were to happen and the problem that we have is what I started with – when I said - decades ago they sent our jobs overseas so we wouldn't have to be concerned about defending Taiwan if we had our manufacturing if we had our critical supplies and if we had many of the things that we depend on, like microchips made right here in the United States, we wouldn't have to worry about any of this and we wouldn't worry about China either. And that's what I think that America needs to do. We need to turn inward and we need to look at ourselves when it does. We need to make things here in the United States so that we don't have to look at China and worry about what they're doing. So, we don't have to watch Taiwan, we don't have to worry about Ukraine. Of course, we don't want to see wars erupting all over the world. And we hate seeing innocent lives being murdered. But we have serious problems right here that we should be focusing all of our energy on, so that we don't have to be so concerned about what's happening and in the political and military landscape of other countries. No, I don't want to support a war with China because I don't want to see one ever erupt because we are a nuclear power and so is China. And that's bad for every single person all over the world, just like it is with Russia and the United States. But we have to be realistic about what China says. You see, we should listen to our enemies and believe them when they say it. China says that they want to be the number one world superpower, both economically and militarily, and they really mean that. So, we have to take them seriously and we have to be prepared if something terrible were to happen. And I hope it really never does. But again, Glenn, I'll go back to – I'm more concerned about three people down in Walker County, in Georgia, in my district from fentanyl poisonings this week, then than I am concerned about what's happening in Ukraine or possibly, God forbid, China ever, ever, you know, doing anything to provoke the United States. I seriously think and I warn everyone here in Washington, we need to turn inward here in America and start solving our own problems and putting our country first. Because when we do that – then guess what? – we're independent and we're more powerful than ever before. G. Greenwald: Yeah, if we were independent in terms of microchips and the like, Taiwan would be a lot less important to the United States strategically. We just have a few minutes left, there are a couple of topics, though, that I have to ask you about in these few minutes. So let me do that. I want to be very respectful of your time. First of all, when it comes to the abuse of Big Tech, I think it's very interesting that in Washington – I think on a bipartisan basis – people are finally coming to the realization that these companies are way too powerful to be reconcilable with a healthy democracy. Obviously, there are different concerns that people have, conservatives there tend to be more concerned about their power to censor, whereas Democrats are concerned about the economic power and this monopolistic ability. So, I just want to ask you a couple of specific questions about what you support in terms of reining them in. Just this week, the Biden administration sued Google, asking that their advertising business be broken off from Google, a similar lawsuit to the one that the Trump DOJ brought in 2020 about Google search engines. There's also legislation pending in both the House and the Senate with bipartisan support to rein in their monopolistic powers to break them up. Obviously, in Republican politics, it used to be almost gospel that the government should just let big corporations do whatever they want. The government has no role in interfering in big business. What is your view in terms of what are acceptable means to start trying to control and constrain this seemingly endless expansion of Big Tech power? Rep. Greene: Well, I'll start from a big picture. Big picture point of view of mine is we need to get the politics out of big corporations. That's a major problem. There's too much political alignment with our government and many big corporations, not just Big Tech. We're talking about many corporations where we see political policy forced on employees and customers when really these big corporations should just worry about doing a good job for their customer and leaving their political beliefs to the side and their political donations in their own wallets, not involving their companies. That's the big-picture view. But as far as Big Tech is concerned, we need to see the government and Big Tech break up, and the intelligence community and Big Tech break up. I have a bill that I introduced last Congress that Senator Hagerty introduced in the Senate. And what our bill does and it's really good because of their companion bills. If we got one in the House and one in the Senate that is the same and they're going to do a good job, then we can get it passed and hopefully have a president that will sign it into law. But what it can do, what we want to do is we want to get rid of section 230, number one. The second thing I want to see happen is I want to see Big Tech treated like a common carrier. Common carriers are like cell phone companies, telephone companies. FedEx is a common carrier. And what common carriers do is they treat every single customer the same. And it would stop censorship. And we need to end political censorship on these platforms where people's First Amendment is protected and their freedom of speech is protected as well. At the same time, we need to make sure there aren't things on there like child porn and dangerous criminals and terrorists, and so forth. I think that's important to watch out for those bad actors and immoral filth as well. But this bill would do a lot and it would go a long ways. And I think the biggest thing, again, is to break up the government and Big Tech and make sure that those two stay away from each other. G. Greenwald: So last question, which is, you know, it's been a focus of mine pretty much from the moment I began writing about politics and doing journalism, which was the abuses of the U.S. security state, the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, all of those agencies with this incredible power they have to operate in the dark to interfere in our domestic politics, to really operate without any constraints of any kind. Obviously, in 2005, when I began writing, it was at the height of the War on Terror, the idea was just to give them all the power they want. I feel like I'm living in this bizarre, surreal, twisted dream where it used to be a staple of liberal politics to oppose these institutions. And throughout the Cold War, they were more or less revered by the American right. And everything is now shifted where the only kind of skepticism and opposition and concern about these agencies comes from your sector of the Republican Party. Just talk a little bit about whether the skepticism was always something that you had toward these agencies or if there are things recently that have caused it. And what do you hope to see with things like this new Church Committee and other ways to finally rein in the power of these agencies that have plagued us since the end of World War II? Rep. Greene: Well, Glenn, I really feel like our intelligence agencies and our Department of Justice and FBI, certain parts of them, have become weaponized against the American people, and they're extremely dangerous. I also think there's parts of our intelligence community more interested in globalization and global politics than they ever cared about politics for the United States. And they've forgotten who pays their paychecks and funds or agencies, and that's the American taxpayer. And I think that's extremely dangerous. It’s hard for me to understand how we're living in a time where Congress – we can't rein them in and we can't really control them. And they're continuing down the path that they're going down, regardless of who tells them to stop, especially the American people who they should be serving. So, I think this is a dangerous time in our country. And I agree with you. These agencies have grown so big and powerful that they're more of a government of their own. And when that gets to be the case, we're all in trouble. And I don't think any agency that operates through our government or from our government should ever have a budget that nobody can see. I think that's another big, big problem. And I don't like that very much at all…. G. Greenwald: It's a parallel…. Rep. Greene: Well I would also say we do need intelligence agencies? There is a role that they play, of course. And it would be naive to ignore that. And we do need a Justice Department and we need an FBI that goes after the bad guys. So, there's that fine line, right? But what we've seen is a major shift where the average agent is the ones out in the field. You know, there are still some good guys left, but guess what? They're either at retirement age or a few years past it. And the new generation that's come in is very woke. And they don't believe like most Americans believe. As a matter of fact, they're buying into the things that are being taught to them and trained into them – that is the very problem. G. Greenwald: Yeah, this is just the real last question, which is a major reason we know about these agencies in the last decade or so is because of whistleblowers who have been willing to sacrifice their own personal freedom to tell Americans what they've been doing to in particular Julian Assange, who's rotting away in a prison and Edward Snowden, who is exiled in Russia, are two people whom you have spoken out in support of, have asked for or urged a pardon of. What is it that led you to do that? Why do you think that what they did was more of a public service than something that deserves punishment? Rep. Greene: Well, I believe that any time you see someone risking their life to tell the truth about an issue, being a real whistleblower, that's a person that is using an extreme amount of courage. But when you see the government come down on them trying to silence them – like you mentioned Julian Assange rotting away in prison – they're basically slowly murdering him. But that's when we see real danger there, when a government is trying to stop the truth from being told to its people, that's something to pay attention to. And I think we need to protect our whistleblowers. We need to protect the media who are willing to publish those stories that need to be told to the people. Because, after all, that's what freedom of the press is all about. And I truly support it. And I know that sounds kind of funny, Glenn, because I've been persecuted by the press. I've been demonized by the press, but I'm probably one of the few members of Congress that would fight harder than anyone to protect the freedom that the press has here in the United States because I believe in it. And I think we have to do everything we can to protect those whistleblowers who are risking their lives to tell the truth. G. Greenwald: So, I really want to thank you. I think these kinds of conversations where you can take the time to delve into things deeply are way more illuminating than little 3-minute-heads or having people hear about you from organizations paid to distort what you're saying. There was a lot we didn't get to and II would love to have you back. We're going to be hectoring you and pursuing you to have you come back on the show. But I really enjoyed the discussion. Thanks so much for taking the time. M. Greene: Thank you, Glenn. I appreciate it. G. Greenwald: Have a great evening. Bye. M. Greene: You, too. So that concludes our show for tonight. We are thrilled to have been able to spend an hour talking to the congresswoman about some incredibly important issues. The idea of the show is to avoid the constraints of cable news that require everything to be said in 30 seconds or 60 seconds or at most, 90 seconds, and to take the time to delve in. I wish we had had more time, actually, because there were a lot of things I would have liked to have pressed further on and raised with her. But we will definitely be asking the congresswoman back on, as well as a lot of other people in her position as well. Thank all of you for continuing to watch. The success of the show is enabling us to get more gas and to continue doing the kind of journalism we want to do. We really appreciate your tuning in and hope you will come back tomorrow night and every night at 7:00 pm EST, exclusively on Rumble. Have a great evening.

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tomorrowusa · 2 years

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It would be cool if a few signs like this showed up in Georgia’s 14th Congressional District.

Speaking of traitors, the hunt for January 6th insurrectionists continues throughout the US. Another MAGA loser just got nabbed – this time in Wisconsin.

Plover man charged in Jan. 6 attack on US Capitol

Lock ‘em up!

#marjorie taylor greene #marjorie traitor greene #georgia #ga-14 #racists #election 2022 #assault on the us capitol by pro-trump terrorists #maga zombies #clay bennett

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memesnotwelcome · 2 years

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---When a group of students sought to protest the ability of their classmates to wear the Confederate flag on campus, the principal threatened student Deserae Turner that she could be jailed for “instigating a riot,” the lawsuit says. The principal also announced over the intercom that any student protesting or even possessing a flyer announcing the protest would be disciplined.

The lawsuit alleges that four Black plaintiffs who organized the protest were suspended for five days, while nonblack student organizers were not disciplined. Lawyers also allege the preemptive shutdown of the protest and demands that students not post on social media violated students’ First Amendment rights. A fifth student who was not suspended has also sued.

The suit says dress code rules allowing Confederate flag apparel but not Black Lives Matter apparel are illegal viewpoint discrimination by a government agency, which also violates the First Amendment. It says the district also has violated the students’ and parents’ right to equal protection under the 14th Amendment, as well as the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

According to the school handbook, you have to have instigated a riot killing 620,000 Americans before your symbolic apparel can be comfortably celebrated on campus.

#blm #black lives matter #racism #georgia #college

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sataniccapitalist · 2 months

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youtube

Liberals Feckless, Conservatives Reckless: Elie Mystal on SCOTUS Trump Ballot Ban Case

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The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a historic case Thursday to determine if Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump is eligible to remain on the ballot for the 2024 election. The justices are reviewing a decision by Colorado's high court that found Section 3 of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution makes Trump ineligible to run for office because he engaged in an insurrection on January 6, 2021. _The Nation_'s justice correspondent Elie Mystal responds to the first day of proceedings, saying he was disappointed to hear both liberal and conservative justices casting doubt on the Constitution's application in this case to avoid the political ramifications of keeping Trump from office. "They decided to lock hands and ignore that because it would be too messy for the country to apply the law to Donald Trump," says Mystal, who also explains Trump's far-fetched plan to claim immunity from prosecution until after the presidential election, the scandal surrounding Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis during Trump's prosecution in Georgia, and writer E. Jean Carroll's successful defamation suit against the former president.

#Youtube

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