This is what Orwellian DoubleThink Looks like

Today, we're going to look at a meme that crossed my path, courtesy of the Regressives.

On its face, this looks nice and reasonable.  And, to anybody NOT paying attention to everything MAGA Republicans have stood for, promoted, and done since before their inception as the Tea Party, these might be ideas we all could rally around.

The problem is that we have 20 years of actions, rhetoric, and context to examine these talking points by.  Let’s take them one by one.

LOWER TAXES 

(citation source:  Investopedia https://www.investopedia.com/taxes/trumps-tax-reform-plan-explained/; CBS News https://www.cbsnews.com/news/student-loan-relief-triggers-state-taxes-mississippi/; PolitiFact https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/aug/30/instagram-posts/businesses-associated-these-gop-politicians-had-pa/)   

MAGA Republicans had an absolute grip on the levers of power over taxes for 4 years.  Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act did indeed cut the corporate tax rate, but that mostly only benefited shareholder, who tend to be higher earners. It only cut individuals' taxes for a limited period of time.  It scaled back the alternative minimum tax and estate tax, as well as reduced the taxes levied on pass-through income (70% of which goes to the highest-earning 1%).  The cuts were not distributed evenly or progressively. The analysis revealed that the tax break would hit 93.7% of taxpayers in the highest-earning quintile, and only 53.9% of those in the lowest quintile.  It increased real burdens on the majority of Americans, benefitting Trump’s personal circle of rich cronies more than anybody else on the ground.

So, this statement only holds true if you count the investor and CEO class as the only class of Americans.

Speaking of taxes, by the way, it’s interesting how 13 Republican MAGA states are now preparing to institute new taxes on any student who participates in the Federal loan forgiveness program.  Funny how that happens, when they certainly didn’t do the same for any of Trump’s cronies who had their own loans forgiven.

FEWER REGULATIONS 

(citation source:  Brookings Institute https://www.brookings.edu/policy2020/votervital/what-is-the-trump-administrations-track-record-on-the-environment/)

The vast majority of regulations cut were environmental ones, which subjected whole swaths of the population to dirtier air, poisoned water and more toxic living conditions in the name of corporate profit. 

So, we can conclude that this talking point means that MAGA Republicans want the American population to be poisoned, making them sicker and less able to work productively, thus increasing overall social and financial costs to consumers.

ENERGY INDEPENDENCE 

(citation sources:  CNN https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/15/politics/energy-independence-fact-check/index.html, InvestigateWest https://www.invw.org/2020/10/26/trump-administration-buries-dozens-of-clean-energy-studies/)

From the beginning of Trump’s term to the end, the US very much relied on oil and gas from abroad.

In 2020, Trump’s last full year in office, the US imported about 7.9 million barrels per day of crude oil and petroleum products. That was down from prior years – the US imported more than 10 million barrels per day in 2016.  While a 21% decrease in imports is a good thing, it is not an accurate term, especially when factoring in Trump’s deliberate stifling of Green Energy projects that would have allowed America to generate its own energy without poisoning the environment.

SMALL NON-INTRUSIVE GOVERNMENT 

(citation sources:  Wisconsin Examiner https://wisconsinexaminer.com/2022/07/05/criminalized-abortion-will-lead-to-cops-investigating-miscarriages-advocates-say/, Business Insider https://www.businessinsider.com/iowa-bill-cameras-classrooms-gop-teachers-2022-2, ACLU https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/homeland-security-violates-civil-rights-muslim-american-citizens, Brennan Center https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/department-homeland-security-must-stop-targeting-communities-color, Salon https://www.salon.com/2020/07/17/theyre-kidnapping-people-trumps-secret-police-snatch-portland-protesters-into-unmarked-vans/, NPR https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/04/04/472964974/it-was-torture-an-abu-ghraib-interrogator-acknowledges-horrible-mistakes, Electronic Frontier Foundation https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying/how-it-works)    

This from the party that wants the government to determine what medical procedures a woman may have, spy on teachers in classrooms, target American citizens for their ethnicity or religion, and cheered for the government literally black-bagging American citizens for exercising their First Amendment rights.  This, from the party that cheered for the USA violating the Geneva Conventions at Abu Ghraib and other black sites.  This, from the party who wire-tapped the entire American population after 9/11, turning the entire USA into a massive surveillance state.

How, exactly, are those the actions of a small, non-intrusive government?

 TEACHERS TEACHING, NOT INDOCTRINATING 

(citation sources:  The Hill https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/588983-indiana-republican-backtracks-after-saying-teachers-should-be-impartial/, USA Today https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/books/2022/06/29/banned-books-explained/7772046001/)

Again, it’s hard to believe that MAGA Republicans are for education when they’re banning thousands of books and demanding that Nazis be taught as if they were “the good guys” of history.  Coupled with the call for keeping cameras monitoring teacher behavior in classrooms and the demand that all teachers be armed, according to the NRA’s ludicrous reimagining of the 2^nd Amendment, this is a perfect example of the Orwellian tactic of subverting the direct meaning of a term to mean its exact opposite.

So we can discount this as yet another lie from that side.

LEGAL IMMIGRATION 

(citation source:  Cato Institute https://www.cato.org/blog/president-trump-reduced-legal-immigration-he-did-not-reduce-illegal-immigration)

By November 2020, the Trump administration reduced the number of green cards issued to people abroad by at least 418,453.  Trump succeeded in cutting legal immigration more than he initially planned, he oversaw the collapse of interior immigration enforcement. In 2020, the removal of illegal immigrants from the interior of the United States was the lowest as an absolute number and as a share of the illegal immigration population since ICE was created in 2003. Trump failed to increase removals because local jurisdictions refused to cooperate with his administration, instead relying on xenophobic comments about “shithole countries” to rile up his white supremacist base.

BRINGING MANUFACTURING BACK 

(citation sources:  Economic Policy Institute https://www.epi.org/press/trumps-trade-policies-have-cost-thousands-of-u-s-manufacturing-jobs-action-is-urgently-needed-to-rebuild-the-manufacturing-sector-after-the-coronavirus-pandemic/; Yahoo Finance https://www.yahoo.com/now/trumps-spotty-record-on-manufacturing-jobs-163449515.html; Brookings Institute https://www.brookings.edu/research/ten-facts-about-covid-19-and-the-u-s-economy/)  

As analysis has shown, Trump’s trade policies not only failed to curb offshoring, but also never addressed the root causes of America’s growing trade deficits and the decline of American manufacturing.

In addition to the Trump administration’s overall weak trade agenda, COVID-19—and the administration’s mismanagement of the crisis—has wiped out much of the last decade’s job gains in U.S. manufacturing.  Nearly 1,800 US factories disappeared under Trump between 2016 and 2018.  Additionally, the U.S. trade deficit in manufactured goods rose significantly between 2016 and 2019. In fact, the real U.S. trade deficit has increased in every year since 2016, reducing GDP growth by roughly 0.25% annually

Trump’s trade wars were probably the more likely cause of the 2019 slowdown. Trump began imposing tariffs on many Chinese imports, along with steel and aluminum from other countries, in 2018, and most of these nations imposed their own retaliatory measures on U.S. exports. By 2019, the trade war some analysts expected to peter out was escalating, instead. Trump ultimately slapped tariffs on about $361 billion worth of imported goods, imposing a cost of about $57 billion on the U.S. economy, according to the American Action Forum think tank.

Coupled with his public mismanagement of the public health crisis, which created a demand shock, a supply shock, and a financial shock all at once, those actions precipitated a severe economic downturn.

So, MAGA Republicans, in cheering for their beloved Fuhrer, once again push for the exact opposite of what their talking points claim.

FAMILY VALUES 

(citation sources: The Hill https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/392802-poll-majority-of-republicans-back-family-separation-policy/; The Desert Sun https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/392802-poll-majority-of-republicans-back-family-separation-policy/ ; Texas Tribune https://www.texastribune.org/2022/07/19/congress-same-sex-marriage-texas/; Political Wire https://politicalwire.com/2022/06/25/gop-senator-said-13-year-old-could-consent-to-sex/; Chicago Tribune https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2006-03-08-0603080162-story.html; NPR https://www.npr.org/2022/06/02/1102621352/how-the-southern-baptist-convention-covered-up-its-widespread-sexual-abuse-scand)  

 

Uh-huh.  The party that made policies of forcibly separating non-white families, relying on discrimination to prevent loving couples from adopting abandoned children, preventing loving couples from marrying at all and starting families, and openly endorsing the concept of child rape, even going so far as to force a 10-year-old rape victim to carry her rapist’s baby to term and openly stating that they believe 13 should be the age of consent, is now pretending to care about families.

Given the party’s open embrace of Christian Theocracy and Dominionist Nationalism, and the MAGA love of a thrice-divorced man who, on-camera, openly expressed his desire to copulate with his own daughter, I can only imagine how much their favored Southern Baptist church’s near-Catholic levels of child sexual abuse reinforces the “Father Knows Best” fantasy that this buzzword phrase has represented since its inception!

 

EQUAL OPPORTUNITY FOR ALL 

(cited sources:  AZ Mirror https://www.azmirror.com/2022/02/26/wendy-rogers-racist-white-nationalists-patriots-and-called-for-hanging-political-enemies/; Getty Images https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/ku-klux-klan-stages-an-america-first-parade-in-binghamton-news-photo/514702614; Yahoo News https://www.yahoo.com/video/tucker-carlson-endorses-racist-great-042659751.html; Haaretz https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/2021-02-04/ty-article/a-look-at-marjorie-taylor-greenes-antisemitic-anti-muslim-conspiracy-theories/0000017f-db0d-d856-a37f-ffcda2410000;

 This one is truly twisted.  Nobody believes the party that has openly embraced White Nationalism, down to the KKK slogan “America First,” and the racially inflammatory “Great Replacement” theory in its justification of using government troops to round up legal immigrants from “shithole countries”, after revoking the right of women to make their own medical decisions cares about anybody other than rich white Christian men.  They certainly don’t care about American Muslims, or non-whites, or Jews, or LGBT, or women, or people from other political parties, and have made a point of expressing that as often as possible for the past 20 years.

Only brainwashed MAGA extremists, who now make up the core base of the Republican Party, could possibly embrace the Orwellian DoubleThink of loving America while hating the vast majority of the people in it.

 ***

So, here we have MAGA Republicans, claiming to now love the very values that they’ve openly spent 20 years tearing apart, obstructing and condemning.  The same values they took up arms against the government itself to install an authoritarian regime to ensure were never embraced.

Sounds to me like the only statement they’re making that holds up to scrutiny is that MAGA Republicans, themselves, are the problem in America.