Ronald Reagan

The Sins of the Media Are To Be Laid On the Masses

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I believe in the Fourth Estate. I’m passionate about that belief, and I’m passionate about the role the Press is intended to play in a Free Society. Journalists have to hold those in power accountable and provide for an informed electorate. My colleagues have heard my rant often enough that they probably want to slap me whenever they know it’s coming. I occasionally find myself struggling to remind the people I work with that our responsibility is to elevate the level of discourse. It doesn’t matter whether we’re reporting on Congressional Legislation, new medical procedures, or anything else. Our role isn’t dissimilar from that of educators. We have to inform the people who rely on us, whether they like or agree with the information we provide.

Somewhere along the line, we’ve forgotten how important we are in keeping corruption, abuse of power, and malfeasance at bay. Some of us have become puppets of the very figures we’re meant to guard against, some have grown complacent, and still others have pivoted from providing information to providing entertainment. I’m not saying that education can’t be entertaining, because I’m a fan of John Oliver, John Stewart, Samantha Bee, Michelle Wolf, Cody Johnston, and others like them. But it’s a fine line to walk, and few do it well.

I won’t place the blame squarely on the Journalists who have lost their way. It’s the audience that craves drama, conflict, turmoil, and childish or boorish behavior. It’s the audience that drives engagement. It’s the audience that ultimately determines where advertising dollars are spent.

But we do bear some of the blame.

I first started working in Broadcast Television (and specifically News) back in mid-2000, when I was 21 years old. I began with the basics of operating studio cameras, controlling the teleprompter, floor directing, designing/assembling graphics, and so on. I left the industry in 2010, not entirely of my own volition. Eleven years later, in 2021, I was back again, and here I am today. I’ve spent approximately one-third of my 46 years working in that industry, and roughly half of my adult life. I’ve witnessed several changes over the last 25 years, and not all of them have been positive. I’ve seen faith in the News Media eroded, sometimes with good cause and other times because the average person doesn’t understand what goes on behind the scenes and beneath the surface.

When I left the industry in 2010, it was close on the heels of the Station Manager passing along a mandate from himself and the ownership of the station (several wealthy and influential families in the region) that, if a story had a political angle to it, we were to lean right in our reporting. I wasn’t part of the Newsroom at that station, but I didn’t think that was at all acceptable. I admit my morale and overall attitude toward station operations deteriorated after that. Unfortunately, that trend of rightward deviation has only persisted. But if you ask people on the street, a substantial number of them will claim that the News Media are biased and promoting a Leftist Agenda.

Perhaps it’s the fault of American audiences that they’re unable to recognize that there’s no such thing as left-leaning Media in the United States unless we’re looking at publications like Mother Jones and The Nation. Since most people don’t know that those outlets even exist, it’s a fair bet that most Americans have no idea what they’re talking about when they insist on a Leftist Bias in the Media. At best, what they’re referring to is a Liberal Bias from Media Organizations like MSNBC or CNN. Of course, those same people are likely to refer to the Associated Press, Reuters, NPR, and other politically unbiased Media Organizations as being left-leaning. Ultimately, it comes down to either accepting Propaganda over Reality or having a deep misunderstanding of Political Theory.

At best, it can be argued that there are Democratic (Liberal) and Republican (Conservative) Media Outlets. But even the Liberal ones tend to dismiss and disparage any Leftist or Progressive policies proposed by Democratic Party members. They do as much harm to actual Progressive Ideals as the Conservative Media does. The Liberals and Conservatives have far more in common than they don’t, in that they’re both invested in maintaining the Status Quo and shutting down any attempts to question it. The problem is that the Politicians and the Media are controlled by the same interests, because they control the money.

Of course, money has always been the worst influence on the Media. The earliest Newspaper in America had an advertisement in the first issue. And Advertisements have followed News from periodicals to radio, and from radio to television. And now, advertisements have jumped from television to social media platforms and websites.

The first advertisement on TV was way back in 1941, and they’ve become increasingly prevalent since then. The growth of television as an industry, and Television News as a result, led to the Federal Communications Commission enforcing the Fairness Doctrine, starting in 1949. It was intended to keep the burgeoning Media Outlets from misusing their power and promoting biased agendas. The Fairness Doctrine required that Media Outlets examine controversial public issues and provide airtime to opposing viewpoints.

As with several major errors made in the United States, it was brought to an end with a poor decision made under President Ronald Reagan (and his FCC Chairman), who dissolved the Fairness Doctrine in 1987. Of course, the Fairness Doctrine wasn’t perfect, and it wasn’t perfectly implemented. But there’s no denying that the purpose was noble and good, to hold off the prevalence of echo chambers and purely partisan News coverage. Abolishing the Fairness Doctrine is seen by many experts as the biggest contributor to the fractured, partisan environment we have today.

Naturally, one of the other major contributors to the decline in quality of News coverage was the advent of the 24-Hour News Cycle, after Ted Turner founded CNN in 1980. Much like the Internet today, it fed a desire for immediate updates and instant gratification. People didn’t want to wait until scheduled times to learn what was happening, especially when major events were transpiring. This need to cater to an audience’s obsession with instant gratification promotes mistakes, the sharing of bad information, and a lack of proper vetting. The need to be “first on the scene” because the audience will tune in elsewhere has done so much harm.

We in the Media are at fault for much of the misunderstanding and misapprehension we witness in the world around us right now. As an industry, we need to both acknowledge that reality and actively work to compensate for the damage we’ve caused. Now, I’m not talking about the explicit Partisan Propaganda of organizations like Fox News and Newsmax or Huffpost and MSNBC, but the otherwise unbiased news sources that do their best to provide balanced coverage. It’s not entirely on our shoulders, but we do bear a substantial portion of the blame, if only because we’ve been too uncritical for altogether too long, and that willingness to avoid being openly critical of various subjects and stances has allowed us to be backed into a corner that we seem to be ill-equipped to escape.

Of course, the lion’s share of the blame falls on the increasing tendency of politicians to turn every social, medical, and cultural issue into a political one. The people who watch it happening, without questioning how or why these things are suddenly “political” topics when they never had been before, are also at fault. It has left even the most legitimate media outlets with no simple way to address any of these topics. Instead, we dance around the issues, struggling to find opposing sides and lending them credence by providing them with a platform that they don’t merit. We hold off on sharing critical information because we haven’t been able to obtain a statement from someone with a viewpoint opposing whatever it is we’re trying to share. If we neglect to do so, we get called out for being biased.

We risk losing advertisers.

We risk litigation.

But in failing to inform, we risk losing the credibility we have left.

Fringe perspectives should NOT be provided the same degree of coverage. That’s the simple truth of it. But when a topic becomes heavily politicized, it becomes more challenging to navigate what should otherwise be a straightforward assessment of data, statistics, and known facts. When people refuse to accept that what they already believe to be true is not, we have no easy way to address that flaw. The political figures who insist on turning everything into a political battlefield know precisely what they’re doing, and we know WHY they’re doing it.

They force a dialogue that shouldn’t be a dialogue at all.

We saw it repeatedly during the COVID-19 Pandemic. It wasn’t exclusively the News Media at fault, because Social Media was a major source of much of the misinformation that was spread, and attempts to provide Fact Checks were perceived to be biased.

There are still people today who believe that the medical field was pretty evenly split on the topics of Vaccine Safety and Vaccine Effectiveness. Globally, based on a study of more than 40,000 nurses across 36 nations, fewer than 21% of nurses rejected the COVID-19 Vaccine. The most pronounced interval was between March and December of 2020, when Pharmaceutical Companies were initially testing the vaccines.
As early as June of 2021, according to the American Medical Association, 96% of practicing physicians were fully vaccinated against COVID-19, and an additional 1.8% of them were actively planning to receive vaccinations.

Unfortunately, the way the media reported on the topic gave people the sense that a large number of Medical Professionals were speaking out in opposition to the vaccine. This is a negative side-effect of the overcompensation involved in attempting to provide multiple sides of an argument with equal coverage. If we intended to provide balanced coverage, we should have given the anti-vaccine proponents roughly 5% of the coverage, compared to 95% of the coverage focusing on the medical consensus.

This is something we need to address.

It’s something we need to atone for.

What would previously have been simply a matter of focusing on medical consensus became a partisan issue, requiring more even-handed coverage of opposing sides when there are not equivalent claims made by both sides.

This is, of course, not isolated to the COVID-19 Vaccine. We’ve seen this happen with topics from Abortion to Gender Identity, none of which are inherently political topics. And they should not be.

These are subjects best left in the hands of the relevant professionals and experts, not politicians.

Abortion didn’t become a political issue until the 1970s, and Gender Identity started down that path in the UK in the 1970s as well. But didn’t become a major political issue in America until roughly a decade ago. Vaccination (as a whole) was a largely apolitical topic until more than 15 years ago. But, as these topics went from being personal and medical decisions to political ones, the News Media was forced to adjust how it covered them. The number of lies, discredited studies, and hate-based propaganda talking points we allowed to slip through has been disorientingly massive. We were supposed to be maintaining the public trust.

I’m sorry to say that we failed.

But we don’t have to continue failing.

How Income Taxes Work…and Why The Big Beautiful Bill Isn’t So Beautiful

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It stands to reason that I’m no fan of the Congressional Budget Bill that was recently signed into law. There’s a lot to hate about the contents of that legislation, and I’ve touched on some of those things previously. But it’s worth taking a moment to look at the “good” portions of what we’ve all heard referred to as the “Big Beautiful Bill” as well. This is, after all, the bill that everyone is so proud of and so certain you should be proud of too.

Before I get to all of that, unfortunately, I’m going to have to spend some time on a bit of a tangent. This will be long, tedious, and number-heavy, but I will do my best to make it at least marginally interesting too. It could be beneficial for everyone to read it. It seems like many people don’t understand the basics of how taxes work, so I also want to take some time to delve into that, while discussing how we are shortchanging Social Security and our Federal Revenue by catering to the wealthiest people in America. To do that, a discussion of how Taxes work is sort of imperative.

The 2017 Tax Cuts were set to expire this year, but are now permanent. However, I’m not sure how many people actually comprehend how tax rates are applied or how the brackets work, so it might be worthwhile to dedicate some time to explaining that.

For an individual (I’m not doing this for all statuses, you can do that shit yourself):

We’re going to make this simple; we’re going to pretend you earn $1 Million a year. Yes, I understand that less than 0.5% of Households fall into that category. In America, fewer than one million Households earn at least $1 Million in annual income. Congratulations on becoming part of the Top 1%, you magnificent bastard.

For the first $11,600 you earn, you owe 10% of that in Federal Taxes, which is $1,160. The math on that little bit is simple, just remove a 0 from the end.

For every dollar you earn between that amount and $47,150, you owe 12% in Federal Taxes. This comes out to $4,266. So, if your income were exactly $47,150 per year, you would only owe $5,426 in total. But that’s not you. You’re earning a whole hell of a lot more than that now.

For every dollar between $47,150 and $100,525, you are paying 22% in Federal Taxes, which translates into an additional $11,742.50.

The next bracket takes you all the way up to an income of $191,950. At that point, you are paying 24%, or another $21,942. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll see that our current Tax Burden is sitting at $39,110.50.

From $191,950 to $243,725, we are looking at a rate of 32% paid out to the Federal Government. That adds another $16,568 to your tax bill.

The next bracket is in effect up to $609,350, at a rate of 35%. That tacks on an additional $127,968.75. Your total Tax Burden is now sitting at $183,647.25. I know, that seems like an awful lot. But, come on, you’d be earning more than $600,000, giving up less than a third of that doesn’t seem so bad. Don’t be so greedy.

For every dollar above that, regardless of how much more you earn, we’re looking at a static rate of 37%. So, for the rest of your $1 Million income, it’s only another $144,540.50. See, that really isn’t so bad.

So, on your brand new $1 Million salary, you’d owe the IRS a grand total of $328,187.75 for the year, leaving you with $671,812.25 of your income.

Of course, there’s also Social Security Tax, which is currently 6.2% on everything up to $176,100. If that seems unreasonably low to you, next year the cap will be higher, because it adjusts annually according to the average wage index.

We’re going to stop here for a moment. Consider it the equivalent of a Scenic Overlook on a road trip. Much like a Scenic Overlook, you can take this as an opportunity to relieve your bladder. If you’d like to know one major reason Social Security is going to be depleted by 2032, we just skirted past it. One primary cause is that you (with your $1 Million annual salary) are not paying into Social Security on $823.900 of your earnings. That would have been $51,081.80 that could be contributed in addition to the $10,918.20 you’re paying in. The math on that one is easy, too, because it’s another example of simply removing a 0 or two. Instead of paying $62,000 into the Social Security fund, you only paid $10,918.20. If your salary were $5 Million, you avoided paying $299,081.80. That hardly seems reasonable, does it?

As we discussed (you lucky bastard), fewer than 0.5% of American households had an annual income of more than $1 Million in 2022, according to the World Economic Forum. Somewhere in the vicinity of 400,000 to 500,000 people earn $1 Million or more a year. Assuming they were all capped at exactly $1 Million, and there were 400,000 of them, that would be $20.4 Billion not being collected for Social Security every year because of that cutoff at $176,100. This has been a problem since the 1980s, because earnings for upper-income levels have risen substantially faster than those of the rest of the population.

Despite President Trump’s assurances that the Congressional Budget Bill would remove taxes on Social Security, that is not what happened. Instead, what we received was a temporary Deduction that applies to all income for people 65 and over, though it does include Social Security income.

The final version passed by the Senate makes this a $6,000 Deduction for individuals with adjusted gross income of up to $75,000 annually, or $150,000 for couples filing together.

The deduction will expire after four years and does not apply to all recipients, including those who claim Social Security benefits before they turn 65. So, unless you’re over the age of 61, you won’t be benefiting from this temporary deduction.

This is where we locate yet another major driver behind the failure of our Social Security program. Some estimates suggest this will accelerate the depletion of Social Security by two years, pushing the date up to 2032. All while increasing the federal debt by 7% over the next 30 years. So, suppose you’re under 58 years old as you’re reading this. In that case, you can dispel any assumption that you’ll be able to benefit from the tax-free Social Security (or Social Security at all) when you do turn 65, because the Social Security Trust will more than likely be empty, no matter how much you personally paid into it throughout your employment history. I’ll come back to the depletion of Social Security after I finish going over how your taxes work and take some time to touch on the other “good” things found in the Congressional Budget Bill.

Moving on, there’s the Medicare Tax of 1.45% up to $200,000, and 2.35% on every dollar beyond that, so you’re paying $21,700 into Medicare for the year.

Deductions then factor in, and the odds are that your effective tax burden will be substantially decreased.

First, there are Above-The-Line deductions. These are subtracted from that $1 Million you earned for the year before anything else factors in, decreasing your Tax Burden by formulating your Adjusted Gross Income.

If you paid toward Student Loans, used a Health Savings Account, contributed to a traditional IRA, or any of several other things that contribute to your overall deductions, that’s something you can figure out on your own. Those things are deducted before the Standard Deduction.

The Senate version of the Congressional Budget Bill allows people to deduct income paid as tips (in careers where tips are customary). This amount is capped at a maximum of $25,000. I’m not sure how common it is for someone to earn more than $25,000 in tips over a year, but since most tipped workers are at or below the Federal Poverty Level, it seems unlikely that there are many. This is only in effect through 2028.

The Senate proposal limits that deduction on Overtime Pay to $12,500 per individual. This is also temporary, expiring after 2028.

So, those are some of the “positive” things we can look forward to.

The Standard Deduction was previously $15,000 for an individual or $30,000 for a married couple filing jointly. Once the changes took effect, the Standard Deduction increased to $15,750 and $31,500, respectively.

The new Standard Deduction of $15,750 is a given, but anything else beyond that is specific to the individual. Assuming none of the Above-The-Line deductions apply to you, what that means is that you will only be taxed as if you earned $984,250 instead of $1 Million, which would knock $5,817.50 off of your tax bill. That doesn’t seem like much, but it’s not nothing. Of course, if you have to itemize your deductions, the change in the Standard Deduction is irrelevant.

Non-itemizing filers can now claim $1,000 in charitable giving per year, and couples can claim $2,000 for deductions.

The Senate’s version of the Child Tax Credit, while slightly lower, is permanent. So, instead of a deduction of $2,500 per child, it’s $2,200, but at least it doesn’t expire in 2028 as some of the Above-The-Line deductions will.

The State and Local Tax Deduction will increase from $10,000 to $40,000, and increase by an additional 1% every year until 2030, when it will revert to $10,000. I don’t know if you live in a state where you pay State Income Tax, but chances are good that you do. That percentage is extremely variable, depending on where you live (which you know if you read what I wrote regarding Single-Payer Healthcare), so I won’t bother calculating it. I live in a state without it, but work in a state where there is State Income Tax, so this is beneficial to me.

The changes to the Estate and Gift Tax will benefit almost no one.

It increases from an exemption of $13.99 Million to $15 Million for individuals and $27.98 Million to $30 Million for couples who file jointly. I say this will benefit almost no one because the minimum net worth to be part of the wealthiest 1% is $13.7 Million as of this January, according to Investopedia. So, less than 1% of the population has the potential to leave an Estate or Gift of $15 Million.

Now, the trouble is that the people who could benefit from that increased exemption are the ones who really don’t fucking need it.

Individuals like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, and other multi-billionaires avoid paying Income Taxes in several ways. Elon Musk receives no salary from Tesla, but was approved for a ten-year pay plan from the company last year that had a value of $44.9 Billion. The trick is that it was all in stocks, which means he won’t be paying any Federal Income Tax on that, while he can still use the stock value as collateral for loans, credit, and the like.

Mark Zuckerberg received an annual income of $1 last year, but received compensation amounting to $27.2 Million, which included $14 Million to cover his security and an estimated $1 Million in private jet travel. The rest, as you would imagine, came in the form of stocks.

Peter Thiel’s income is not publicly available. That’s something you might find amusing, considering what Palantir is capable of. Despite not knowing his annual income, we do know he has invested more than $5 Billion in Roth IRAs, which cannot be taxed, assuming he waits until retirement to liquidate them.

Jeff Bezos typically received a salary of $81,840, with total compensation that added up to $1.68 Million in 2022. Because of how he earns most of his money, via stock options, it was estimated he earned $8 Million every hour of the year between 2023 and 2024. And yet, there are several years in which he paid no Federal Income Tax, and has maintained an effective Tax Rate of 0.98% compared to his accumulation of wealth.

If you’re noticing a trend, you’re at least moderately observant. These people at the top of the American financial ladder are not even coming close to contributing their fair share in taxes. In part, because we don’t tax Unrealized Gains, which means all the stock options contribute to their Net Wealth and allow these people to live as they do, but are never taxed until they sell shares, and then Capital Gains Tax comes into play.

If something doesn’t seem wrong about that, you’re not paying attention.

There are years when the wealthiest people in the world are literally paying less in taxes than the people below the poverty level, and not just by percentage, but by dollar value.

Putting an end to that should be a priority. All it would take is implementing an Unrealized Gains Tax above a certain dollar value, maybe a 50% Tax on anything above $15 Million (just like the Estate and Gift Tax). Hell, Kamala Harris was far more generous, proposing a 25% tax on Unrealized Gains for anything over $100 Million. People freaked out over that because they had no idea what they were talking about, and because they were fed misinformation and fear-mongering that led them to believe their home’s increasing sales value would further increase their taxes. In reality, her proposal would have impacted fewer than 11,000 people nationally, and if you’re reading this, you’re probably not one of them. You probably don’t even know any of them, at least personally. That’s the kind of Tax Reform we need from something that anyone would consider worthy of calling a Big Beautiful Bill.

Now, I promised I’d get back to this, and I like to keep my promises. There’s one more massive driver behind the imminent failure of our Social Security program. It’s time to finish the discussion of why Social Security is likely to be bankrupt in only seven short years. We can thank Ronald Reagan and his Social Security Amendments of 1983 for that lovely little “fuck you,” with powerful assists from Alan Greenspan and a complicit and lazy 98th U.S. Congress.

Unfortunately, Trickle-Down (Supply Side) Economics was working out precisely as anyone but a moron would expect it to, and the decreased tax rates (for the highest income earners) were generating far less revenue than was promised. Our economy was in pretty big fucking trouble, because nothing but the delusional fantasies of our President happened to be trickling down. Reagan convinced a large number of people that Social Security was on the verge of bankruptcy, even though it wasn’t. But he had a solution. It was a two-pronged approach that would save everyone.

Surplus Social Security revenue generated by a Payroll Tax Hike implemented under Reagan, to the tune of roughly $2.7 Trillion, was meant to be invested in U.S. Treasury Bonds and held in trust until approximately 2010. That was it. That was his brilliant solution. It might have actually paid off, but Ronald Reagan was (predictably) Ronald Reagan.

Of course, Reagan, being the piece of shit he was, the surplus revenue raised by the payroll tax hike went into the General Fund instead of U.S. Treasury Bonds. Reagan then proceeded to spend every dime of that surplus that appeared during his remaining time in the White House. George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush followed suit and treated it like a fucking slush fund as well. Instead of putting $2.7 Trillion into trust, the money was spent on wars, covering the deficit from additional tax cuts for the wealthy, and shoring up other areas of the government.

Maybe this would have worked out if Social Security hadn’t stopped generating surplus revenue back in 2009, but it did. In 2010, it ran at a loss for the first time since 1983, by more than $40 Billion. This was money we borrowed from China. And we’ve had to borrow money from somewhere every year since then.

Well, we all sort of see where it goes from there. What’s worth noting is that, assuming we’d just kept the $2.7 Trillion where it belonged, and our Social Security shortage was by roughly $50 Billion every year, it could still be solvent through 2064, or 32 additional years from what is now projected.

How the American Political Parties Shifted Platforms

/ MeltdownMessiah / 1 Comment

It amazes me that so many people still love to trot out the old–and I believed, sufficiently dismantled–argument that Democrats started the KKK, so they are truly the party of Racists and Segregationists…while Republicans are the party of Lincoln, and therefore must be the good guys who believe in Equality and Liberty.

I never can tell whether these people are making intentionally bad faith arguments based on disingenuous, and manipulative cherry-picked snapshots of party standards from a century and a half earlier…or if they’re sincerely so historically illiterate that they just accept this argument at face value from other people who presented the bad faith argument for them. It’s sad either way, because they either aren’t capable of thinking for themselves or they aren’t capable of intellectual honesty…and neither of those traits should be praised or rewarded.

I want to get one big fucking fact out of the way before I address the falsehood there. This one is going to be hard for some people to hear, especially some of us White People…but it’s something that needs to be dealt with before I even begin digging into the process by which the Democratic and Republican Platforms became what they are today.

First of all, America as a nation is absolutely built on a foundation of White Supremacy, and that corrupt substrate still exists at the core of our society (regardless of party affiliation). It’s like a poison in the bedrock that finds its way into our spiritual and cultural soil and groundwater, tainting everything we do…and until we actively work together to leech that shit out of there, we’ll never be clean of it. The fact of the matter is that neither major party (nor the vast majority of smaller political parties) has been particularly interested in putting in that work, because the bulk of American politicians still benefit too much from their (conscious or unconscious) privileged status. That is a truth we need to remain aware of and vigilant to acknowledge and address whenever and wherever we see it manifesting.

Now, onto the claims made by people who insist on tossing 19th-Century Party Affiliations around as if they’re relevant to the platforms we see today. Those people are fixating on the titles while intentionally ignoring the most salient detail, which is to address which group was “Liberal” and which was “Conservative” at the time of Lincoln.

Just answering that single question turns the argument on its head. But I don’t mind going further into how the party demographics transitioned from what they were in the mid-to-late 19th Century to what they have been during my whole lifetime, and I’m currently 46 years old.

It started to take hold way back in the 1890s, in large part thanks to a Nebraska politician, William Jennings Bryan, who became the Democratic National Committee’s nominee for President, in response to backlash against President Grover Cleveland and the Conservative Democrats that dominated the party at the time. Unfortunately for Bryan, he lost to McKinley…twice.

After taking a brief hiatus from Presidential Campaigns, Bryan lost the Presidential Election for a third time, this time to Taft. But his influence didn’t fade, and he became Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson (until he ultimately resigned from the position).

During his life, Bryan made huge tectonic shifts in the Democratic Party. He drew in people from the political left (progressives) while fighting against American Imperialism, the influence of men like J. P. Morgan and other members of the privileged class who sought to manipulate American Politics for their gain through Crony Capitalism, and many traditionally Conservative ideals. All of this, while also supporting Women’s Suffrage and the League of Nations, and being the first Presidential Candidate to receive endorsement of the American Federation of Labor for his unflinching support of Labor Unions.

He did oppose American involvement in WWI, supported Prohibition, and actively fought against the teaching of Evolution and Darwinism in the Scopes Trial. So, on several matters, he and I would not have been in agreement. He also refused to attack the KKK directly, though not because he supported it, but because he expected it to fall apart on its own. He had more faith in the spirit of the American People than he perhaps should have, in that regard…but that was who he was to the core. He was a man of faith, which largely influenced his decision to take on the role he played in the Scopes Trial.

He was far from perfect, but he was emblematic of what the Democratic Party was gradually becoming.

William Jennings Bryan was arguably the figure one can most easily point to as the origin of the shift in party alignments. But he was only the first set of symbolic supports in creating the bridge that spanned that gulf.

While the transition may have started a few decades earlier, it wasn’t until FDR and the “New Deal” era that we started to really see Liberals as the Democrats we see today and Conservatives as the Republicans we recognize. FDR was, in many ways, the apex of that shift in party dynamics and platform. I would love to see a single Republican today adopt a platform as progressive as FDR’s. Unlike William Jennings Bryan, we all know at least a little bit about FDR and the “New Deal.”

It started as mostly a series of Economic Reforms: offering relief for the poor and unemployed, reforming the financial systems to avoid future economic collapse, and building the economy back up from the dismal lows following the crash of 1929. Major changes to the Federal Reserve, combined with the establishment of the FDIC and the Securities Exchange Commission, along with other Financial Regulatory Bodies, were engineered under FDR’s guidance to restore consumer confidence and bring the U.S. back from the brink of full financial failure. And it worked.

Though ostensibly a response to the Great Depression, there was much of FDR’s “New Deal” that cemented the new bedrock for the Democratic Party, outside of the purely economic considerations.

While modern Libertarians like to pretend that Corporations should be free to act outside of Regulatory Space and that the Free Market will force them to behave ethically, there is no historical precedent for that being the case. It was, in fact, Federal Regulations (and the emergence of Regulatory Agencies) under FDR that brought an end to some of the most egregious examples of Corporate predation. The National Labor Relations, Social Security, and Fair Labor Standards Acts protected workers, ensured protection for the elderly, disabled, and unemployed, fought against Child Labor, supported the development of Labor Unions, provided the 40-Hour Work Week, established a Federal Minimum Wage, and otherwise made it safer and less oppressive to be a worker in the U.S.

It was Conservative control of Congress (including the presence of many Conservative Democrats) that kept FDR from going even further with his “New Deal” Policies. But, during that era, the Democratic Party was reshaped further into being the Party of workers, racial and ethnic minorities, intellectuals, and others who had previously been traditionally aligned with the Republican Party.

Then we come to the Civil Rights Era, where the party transition reaches the Third Act, and the Southern Strategy (that only those invested in a fictional version of history will claim is a lie).

While men like Bryan and FDR reshaped much of the Democratic Party, there was, unfortunately, still a great deal of the previous century’s delineation present in the American South. The Civil Rights Era brought this to a head, as was always going to happen. The Democratic Party and, to a lesser extent, the Republican Party suffered from a sort of Identity Crisis, wherein members of the respective parties were closer in alignment with their opposition depending on where they happened to be located geographically.

Unlike the previous two Acts of the Three-Act transition of party platforms and demographics, the Southern Strategy was the work of Republicans. It was their effort to obtain support from White Southerners who were still Democrats (though they had little in common with Democrats outside of the dozen or so states involved).

There’s a strange symmetry involved in seeing this from a remove, decades afterward. Where Bryan started the process of pushing the Democratic Party to the Left, it was the Southern Strategy implemented by Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater that shifted the Republican Party to the Right.

One could argue (and I think, accurately so) that this started with the Republican Party taking on the banner of “States’ Rights,” which was previously a Democratic stance dating back to the time before the Civil War. This was in direct opposition to the platform of Abraham Lincoln, whom Republicans still want to claim, while defying virtually every aspect of Lincoln’s stated beliefs. This was part of Barry Goldwater’s “Southern Strategy” which focused on courting Southern Whites and dismissing further efforts to appeal to Black Voters, which included open opposition to the Civil Rights Movement as well as to Kennedy’s platform promoting expanded Unemployment Benefits, increased Social Security and Minimum Wage, sending aid to Economically Distressed regions of the country (including cities with larger minority populations), increasing Housing Availability, and so on. But it was the opposition to Kennedy’s Civil Rights policies that was most important here.

Kennedy fought for Voter Education and the removal of the Poll Tax (in addition to further increasing access to Voting Rights for Blacks). He used Executive Orders to promote Equal Opportunity and Anti-Discrimination for Employment, Housing, and Federal Contracts…becoming a champion of Affirmative Action within the Federal Workforce and beyond. Kennedy also struck a massive blow against Jim Crow by making it illegal, as it concerned Interstate Commerce.

These were all policies that Barry Goldwater and Conservative Republicans opposed. One need look no further than the conflict between Republican Governor Nelson Rockefeller and Barry Goldwater leading up to the 1964 Presidential Election to see the massive fissure growing in the Republican Party under Goldwater’s influence.

It’s no wonder he lost to Lyndon B. Johnson, with his Regressive, Pro-Segregationist, and Anti-Civil Rights stances even revolting significant portions of the Republican Party at the time (the remaining Liberal and Progressive elements at least).

It was around that time when Strom Thurmond left the Democratic Party and joined the GOP, where he helped to manage Nixon’s campaign in the South. He was far from the last to do so, followed by notable figures like Jesse Helms and countless numbers of formerly Democratic voters. Many Republicans remained with their Party, believing they could rehabilitate it or that this shift toward Racist and Conservative Values would be temporary…but it was no longer recognizable as the Party of Lincoln by that point.

I’d like to make note of one funny aside. As counterintuitive as it may seem, George Wallace famously refused to leave the Democratic Party like many of his like-minded peers (despite repeatedly being repudiated at the national level by the majority). He did gradually soften his perspectives regarding Segregation and White Supremacy. Whether that was sincere or a performative shift to better continue surviving as he had up to that point is anyone’s guess.

Richard Nixon took Goldwater’s playbook and ran with it far more successfully, and I don’t mean that solely in that he actually won a Presidential Election. He focused his platform on the Coded Language of “States’ Rights” and “Law and Order,” which might sound familiar to voters who have been paying attention since 2015 or so.

The Third Act really doesn’t conclude until Reagan’s campaign in 1980 (and the subsequent eight years he led the Nation down the toilet), where Lee Atwater’s assistance helped to shift the overt Racism to more Dogwhistle-Coded language, focused on Economic Policies that would transparently benefit Whites more than any other group.

And it’s not difficult to discern how I feel about Ronald Reagan and the absolute disaster he was for America and the U.S. Economy, creating devastation from which we’re still picking through the rubble today.

So yes, the Southern Strategy is a real thing, and one that was discussed openly by the Candidates and Political Advisers involved in both its development and implementation. It’s on record, and trying to pretend it’s some Conspiracy Theory is ludicrous, at best, and entirely reliant on people never fact-checking what they want to believe is true. This isn’t like PizzaGate or any of the subsequent QAnon nonsense paraded around by the least credible people on the Political Right in America. There’s actually clear, concise data and historical records that don’t need to be twisted and distorted into the most bizarre shapes, explaining the Southern Strategy and how it was done.

Finally, to the people who want to make these bad faith arguments, all I can say is that you should read a book or two, and take some time to learn about American History…because even our High School Textbooks would have provided sufficient evidence to counter most of these ignorant claims. It leads me to believe that you didn’t retain much during your education, and that’s all the proof we need that the Department of Education should be more involved (rather than less) in establishing nationwide standards that aren’t associated with Standardized Tests, but on different methods of teaching and diverse styles of learning, to ensure that our Natural Born Citizens know at least as much as Naturalized Citizens have to.

I know I could pass a Citizenship Exam, do you? When taking that test, there is no Participation Trophy (and no points awarded) for waving a flag and displaying performative (though ultimately false) patriotism based on revisionist understandings that you didn’t even come up with for yourself.