That trending National Review piece highlights a major problem for the GOP: old school white Republicans spent 50 years courting the "Cletus" vote, welcoming them to the GOP fold with a handshake over shared white supremacist goals, while sneering at them behind their backs.

Just look at how Williamson talks about the folks who comprise the base of the GOP: "Cletus", "studio audience from Hee-Haw", "midnight drunks karaoke-warbling that old Chumbawumba song", "stupid".

The contempt is palpable, and it always has been.
And while a lot of the old school GOP folks thought Cletus was not smart enough to understand the contempt the party leadership held for them, they really AREN'T that stupid.

Enter Trump, wearing a trucker hat and eager to pander to the Cletus vote.
Instead of cloaking the white supremacy which holds the GOP's base together like paperclips and chewing gum in dog whistles and euphemisms with plausible deniability, Trump said what Cletus has been saying to his friends over beers for years.
If the Republican elite come out swinging for the Cletus vote, as Williamson does here, it might feel good to aptly label their party's problem--and this violent, militantly ignorant faction that comprises the GOP's current base IS a problem--it's going to reduce their votership.
The Southern strategy was always making a deal with the devil. It bet the party's long-term survival on a coalition centered around keeping the disenfranchised disenfranchised and building a media ecosphere whose sole purpose was to be the brainwashing arm of the GOP.
Who is surprised that a 50-year project to build a hateful base who exist entirely in a manipulated, party-controlled alternate reality was eventually taken over by a malignant narcissist who directed that hate and indoctrinated rage to ensure permanent power for himself?
While Williamson sneers at Cletus for being stupid and dragging the GOP into the mud, it was elites like Williamson who started the GOP on this path. They chose to make a monster, and now instead of taking responsibility, they ridicule the monster and pretend it was never theirs.
The way out for the Republican party is to abandon the Southern Strategy, white supremacy, brainwashing media, and to attempt to move forward with the rest of us.

Instead, they're hoping they can use the same tactics to create a new monster that will hopefully benefit them more.
I don't know that it will work. Like I said, the Cletuses actually aren't stupid, and will be perfectly cognizant of the contempt of those like Williamson. What's more, the Williamsons of the GOP aren't in control any more. Cletus commands the monster.
And Cletus isn't going to respond well to these old school elites' contempt.

I wish I could muster sympathy for any of them, but I cannot. I can only hope they destroy each other without taking all the rest of us down with them.

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I want to break down Lindsey's letter, because it is breathtakingly hypocritical and stoking division with every sentence, despite claiming to be concerned with healing.


1) "But now, in your first act as Majority Leader, rather than begin the national healing that the country so desperately yearns for, you seek vengeance and political retaliation instead."

Trump incited an attack on the Capitol, on Congress, and on a free & fair election.

Trump has yet to concede, to apologize, or to admit he was lying about the outcome of the election. He has done nothing that demonstrates he does not continue to present a danger to our nation.

Trump's supporters continue to conspire to overthrow the government--with Trump's implicit, and quite possibly explicit--support. At this very moment, over 20,000 troops are stationed in our nation's capital to ensure the inauguration of President-Elect Biden can be completed.

It is not "vengeance" or "political retaliation" to insist a man that has fomented and continues to inspire a violent insurrection against the government is unfit ever to hold office again.

This is, in fact, a bare minimum protection for our country against future harm by Trump.

More from For later read

Nice to discover Judea Pearl ask a fundamental question. What's an 'inductive bias'?


I crucial step on the road towards AGI is a richer vocabulary for reasoning about inductive biases.

explores the apparent impedance mismatch between inductive biases and causal reasoning. But isn't the logical thinking required for good causal reasoning also not an inductive bias?

An inductive bias is what C.S. Peirce would call a habit. It is a habit of reasoning. Logical thinking is like a Platonic solid of the many kinds of heuristics that are discovered.

The kind of black and white logic that is found in digital computers is critical to the emergence of today's information economy. This of course is not the same logic that drives the general intelligence that lives in the same economy.
I should mention, this is why I keep talking about this. Because I know so many people who legally CAN'T.

How do I know they have NDAs, if they can't talk legally about them? Because they trusted me with their secrets... after I said something. That's how they knew I was safe.


Some of the people who have reached out to me privately have been sitting with the pain of what happened to them and the regret that they signed for YEARS. But at the time, it didn't seem like they had any other option BUT to sign.

I do not blame *anyone* for signing an NDA, especially when it's attached to a financial lifeline. When you feel like your family's wellbeing is at stake, you'll do anything -- even sign away your own voice -- to provide for them. That's not a "choice"; that's survival.

And yes, many of the people whose stories I now know were pressured into signing an NDA by my husband's ex-employer. Some of whom I *never* would have guessed. People I thought "left well." Turns out, they've just been *very* good at abiding by the terms of their NDA.

(And others who have reached out had similar experiences with other Christian orgs. Turns out abuse, and the use of NDAs to cover up that abuse, is rampant in a LOT of places.)

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