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Fear & Loathing in the 21st Century

Barry Dredze
4 min readMay 3, 2022

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Stormtrumpers at the Capitol, Jan. 6, 2021. (Photo by Probal Rashid/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Republicans hate America so much they gotta wave American flags with some Reality TV asshole’s face all over them.

Seriously, no joke, this is some sick shit.

“The Republican Party today is basically a coalition of grievances united by one thing: hatred,” wrote Reagan-Bush era policy wonk Bruce Bartlett. “Hatred of immigrants, hatred of minorities, hatred of intellectuals, hatred of gays, feminists and many other groups too numerous to mention. What binds them together is hatred of Democrats because they are welcoming to every group that Republicans reject.”

And the old Reaganite wrote that stuff way back in 2016, but long after he helped draft the Kemp-Roth tax bill that enshrined supply-side Reaganomics in Republican orthodoxy. Much of the damage has been done. And while they have since blown off the formality of a party platform in 2020, the hatred motivating Republican policy priorities (such as they are) is measurable enough to chart it.

Can we really be all that surprised by Justice Alito’s draft majority opinion overturning Roe v Wade, and recently leaked to Politico? It is very much as if the North had won the Civil War, but the South wins the peace. They cheer for states’ rights as their Supreme Court majority strips away women’s rights to control their own bodies and makes it harder for their…

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Barry Dredze
Barry Dredze

Written by Barry Dredze

Just another mortal, tweaking my cognitive map on the fly.

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