November 27, 2017

GOP hijacking of Trump agenda nearly complete

The first warning sign that the GOP Congress would not be yielding to the overall themes or specific items of the Trump agenda, as developed during the primary and general campaigns, was the near unanimous re-election of Paul Ryan as Speaker of the House just a few weeks before the inauguration of his nemesis in the party, Donald Trump.

The two are completely opposed on major policies, and they have a poor working relationship owing to the campaign-season feuding over which direction the party would be taking. But Ryan did not single-handedly re-elect himself as Speaker -- the entire GOP caucus in the House, minus Thomas Massie, did that.

That was a loud-and-clear signal that they would not be working with the Trump movement, on neither a policy nor a personal level. The GOP Congress would continue pursuing the same ol' BS, and Trump could either join their stampede over the cliff, or remain on solid ground yet politically isolated and publicly marginalized.

Trump decided to give the crooked Congress the benefit of the doubt, even after they preemptively stabbed him in the back with the re-election of Ryan as Speaker. The result was to make himself the standard-bearer of a legislative agenda that began with trying to ramp up corporate rape in the healthcare sector, when he has argued for years in favor of universal healthcare ("single-payer," "socialized medicine").

Despite that failure, the agenda is moving on to tax cuts for the rich, when the elites ought to be soaked for having destroyed the nation's economy, government, population, and culture -- you broke it, you bought it. When Trump was considering a third-party campaign in 2000, he proposed soaking the rich with a wealth tax in order to pay off the national debt.

And during the 2016 campaign, he regularly mocked the idea that all we need to do is give more tax incentives to corporations for them to return production to this country -- they just take the money and run. We need those big fat 35% tariffs, but those are nowhere to be seen in the GOP tax reform bill.

Whether or not that effort succeeds, the next big item will not be infrastructure -- supposedly the third major focus from earlier in the year. Back then, people debated whether the GOP Congress and Trump should have led with that, and score an easy bipartisan victory that would boost his popularity among all citizens, and begin building his pile of political capital with Congress critters on both sides of the aisle.

The GOP-ers said, We'll get to that after the really important stuff -- like corporate rape in healthcare and tax cuts for the rich -- which, by the way, will be difficult wins if they are won at all because the partisan approach leaves no margin for error, which will destroy his popularity among all but hardcore GOP voters, and which will probably not build his political capital since he will not have been part of a team that delivered the goods.

Now it looks even worse -- not just that Trump has wasted so much time, effort, goodwill, and political capital on the usual Republican crap, before getting to the good stuff, but that the GOP Congress will not be putting together a big infrastructure bill at all.

He got suckered by the worthless Republican politicians in Congress, and he should immediately cut off his cooperation with them. Politically isolated or not, at least he would not throw himself over the cliff for no reason like the rest of those retards.

For the time being, though, he appears to still be going along with their agenda. Instead of infrastructure to "rebuild America instead of Afghanistan," what are we moving onto after tax cuts for the rich? Why, gutting what's left of welfare!

Swamp-supporting defense contractors and Wall Street bankers will continue getting richer than God from make-work government contracts and bailouts, but if you're a poor white family that voted for or at least supported Trump, your reward is going to be having the rug pulled out from under you.

And so much for the "What the hell do you have to lose" angle for urban black voters. Plenty to lose, as it turns out. Not that blacks were a key element of the Trump coalition -- not at all -- but it will still be part of the larger hijacking of Trump's campaign themes by the typical Republican bullshit.

To the extent that Trump did touch on welfare during the campaign, it was to point out what a damning symptom it was of a great big festering underlying disease -- the eradication of good-paying jobs in this country. Trump is not an "ideas, values, and culture" airhead -- he is a pragmatic materialist, and said that poor people have turned to welfare because the economy offers them nothing dignified and prosperous to do. He did not insult them as having moocher values or a culture of slacking off.

He posed the emptying of the welfare rolls as a reaction to the flood of high-paying jobs back into this country, motivating them to go looking for work again. He did not get the cause-and-effect arrow backwards like the conservative movement, which believes that high-paying jobs will result from emptying the welfare rolls first.

On the contrary, without larger structural changes -- such as the re-introduction of manufacturing plant jobs for the material sectors, and trustbusting in the informational sectors to create more workplaces and more jobs -- kicking people off welfare will only have them taking the low-paying, benefit-lacking, no-security-having jobs that are already on offer from the latter-day slave-drivers who hire and fire today's workers.

Welfare is not only a way of cushioning the blow from random bad luck. It is a way to let workers go on strike until employers agree to higher wages or better conditions. Unlike union membership, it is not a collective form of bargaining and therefore packs far less of a punch. But it is a government policy that gives the worker a little extra bargaining power against the employers who only want to pay $5 an hour. It is pushing employers to make their workplace more appealing than collecting a pittance on welfare.

The only welfare reform that Trump ought to be pursuing is cutting off all immigrants, whether legal or illegal. We need to "take care of our people," not try the impossible task of making 10 billion foreigners enjoy middle-class lifestyles. Then declare an immigration moratorium, since they are far more likely to use welfare services than Americans are -- keep the system from getting burdened even further.

But the main focus should be: You crooked Republicans will get your welfare reform when you impose 35% tariffs on off-shored manufacturing, and when those jobs come flooding back into this country to give people good enough jobs that they won't need welfare.

That will paint the GOP into the rhetorical corner of arguing for welfare elimination not as part of an effort to give low-income Americans good decent jobs, but solely to squeeze more cheap labor out of the American population. If they won't work for $5 an hour, they won't have the welfare payments to fall back on -- so $5 an hour it is, and the cheap labor lobby wins again.

The GOP is not too far from using the police, intel agencies, and the military itself to force poor Americans into literal labor camps. If you're able-bodied, we need you to go to work -- for $5 an hour, or else.

Fiscally, welfare accounts for none of the budget or the national debt. It is of marginal priority for getting the nation's finances in order, which are thrown outta-whack instead by the government inflating bubbles for Wall Street and the Pentagon.

At this point, it is probably better that the Democrats take control of Congress. Then Trump won't have to decide whether to pursue suicidal policies or remain isolated. True, he'd have to get on board with some of the awful Democrat agenda items -- but at least we'd get some good things from them, too. The moribund Republican party is intent on just riding out their last years without having their bedridden rest disturbed by any drastic changes coming from within the household.

As for the medium term, the Trump supporters ought to build a new second party to replace the Republicans. Re-alignment of an existing major party was the ideal solution, but the GOP refuses to yield and re-align. They will go down with their sinking ship that we have torpedoed, rather than allow us to board it and make it sea-ready again, for a new crew steering it in a new direction.

A new second party arose from the first Civil War, and another will arise from the second.

16 comments:

  1. It sucks to feel completely powerless. On Mike Duncan's Revolutions podcast (Duncan's a pretty liberal anti-Trump guy but thankfully never shoves his politics down the listener's throats on his podcasts) he's been covering 1848 and one of the things that consistently amazes me is how much a mob could get done. Not disorganized band of rioters like we saw in Baltimore but a very large group of people marching into public squares, to palaces and such and demanding to be heard. You march, things get tense as the military/national guard comes in and the government eventually blinks. Maybe at some point some street fighting breaks out between the mob and the military/guard and you get a few dead martyrs and then that's when the state was really in trouble.

    People got pissed and within days the July Monarchy fell, Meternich was run out of Vienna or Frederick William IV promised to pursue German unification.

    Can you imagine people doing that today? Marching on DC, holding their ground, being willing to die (and pass around the bodies of the dead) to show the state that their demands are serious and they aren't afraid to escalate things and die for their cause. It makes me wonder if stuff like that would truly have the same effect it would have a century and a half ago. Maybe not topple governments but make those running the show really take notice that hey, the people are pissed and they're not playing around anymore; they're willing to die en masse for this. Or would the end result just being some tanks rolling in, people scattering and the idiots double down on their "screw the people" shtick?

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  2. "Welfare is not only a way of cushioning the blow from random bad luck. It is a way to let workers go on strike until employers agree to higher wages or better conditions. Unlike union membership, it is not a collective form of bargaining and therefore packs far less of a punch. But it is a government policy that gives the worker a little extra bargaining power..."

    I thought a lot about the minimum wage and welfare during my summer picking peas at age 14/15. The fields were only about 80 acres total and were picked by 1 poor white family (friends), myself, and some elderly black folks. Only $3 a bushel. They all talked about how welfare kept the young blacks away and that the older ones must be doing it out of some kind of habit.
    I thought about those fields again when Ron's piece advocating for minimum wage made a splash...

    You know, Ag, I think you may be onto something. I paid close attention to who was paying attention to the Ron Unz minimum wage campaign, and for the TrueCon and ordinary Republicans, and later, even #MAGA, Ron's arguments for it are nonexistent. The Libertarians (Caplan- hahahahahahahahahahaha!!!), ordinary liberals, they were aware, but the others? They still to this day spastically point out lost jobs over a raised wage *and the idea that this is a feature, not a bug, because of whom they're mostly going to: a taxpayer-subsidized alien force* has never been introduced to them. The minimum wage may still be a bad idea, but the debate has moved beyond them.
    But Ron wrote his piece for liberals and conservatives, but in reality, only one group got the message.

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  3. Mobs marching against the govt will be restricted in the US to urban areas that are less diverse -- Portland, Milwaukee, Boston.

    Collective action benefits from population density, which is why the power factions prefer congregating in a single area -- Silicon Valley, Pentagon, Wall Street, etc. The only group of citizens similar to that is those living in major metro areas, though not necessarily just the jam-packed downtown parts.

    But ethnic diversity destroys social trust, and prevents collective action (Putnam). So, no way will there be organic marches on Washington, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, or Houston from the people living in the area.

    At best, you'd see the Mexicans marching on the town hall in a Mexican-dominated town, Vietnamese marching on Little Vietnam, Somalis blowing up New Mogadishu, blacks burning down Baltimore, etc. But nothing large-scale or society-altering.

    That still leaves hope for the Pacific Northwest, the Great Lakes, and New England. It'd be part of a long tradition of class-based activism there, due to low diversity -- the blacks being in the Deep South, and the Hispanics being in the Southwest.

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  4. Marches and protests against the government haven't worked well in decades, basically since the cyber era

    They work against corporations sometimes because they fear loss of business do to the mob and know the state can't make them whole fast enough

    They are vulnerable to social signaling in ways government is not

    An example, back in 2003 they put up to 11 million people on the streets against the gulf war to no effect. It was a peaceful, peace loving protest that changed nothing

    However actual violence does work as has been seen in many nations. I'm not advocating for it and its not time anyway but its the only thing that does work with high levels of corruption and collusion

    As far as President Trump goes, it never wash is job to fix anything and one man can't drain the Swamp when so many people's livelihoods depend on it.

    His job is to buy time so a counter ideology can form, resources can be gathered and change can be made after the systems own weakness does it in, probably the 1030's,

    Maybe if we are lucky we can do it with elections.

    if we are very lucky, with President Trump we get a wall and some deportations and slowed immigration. It won't get fixed though

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  5. It's not a violent vs. non-violent thing. It's whether the collective action raises the costs to the target. Maybe violence does, maybe it doesn't -- depends on the case. Maybe non-violence does, maybe it doesn't -- depends on the case.

    The non-violent marches etc. against the Iraq War did not stop the war because they didn't escalate into actions that raised the costs to the elites. Again, not necessarily that they failed to reach violence. Just that they didn't lead to a broader and longer-lasting resistance to the elites.

    During Vietnam, it wasn't just marches now and then -- it was a whole feeling that the next generation was going to reject the received wisdom, challenge the system, and withdraw their consent at a fundamental level. Social chaos seemed to be growing, and the elites didn't want that fraying of the fabric to continue.

    If ending the war in Vietnam was what it took to quiet down the "question everything" phenomenon, then OK, get the hell out of Vietnam, and veto Johnson from running for re-election.

    Now, that doesn't mean today's elites will respond to the same pressures. Maybe the elites during the Vietnam War were still fairly concerned about societal cohesion -- Great Compression, not intense in-fighting among elites in the neo-Gilded Age.

    And maybe today's elites wouldn't even care if large swaths of the population were challenging the system ideologically and behaviorally at a fundamental level, more or less constantly. They seem to be in more of a "fiddle while Rome burns" mindset, and may require a different pressure to make them feel uncomfortable than what the anti-war protesters did back then.

    If today's elites are not concerned about societal cohesion, at least they care about their own skin. I'm afraid they're only going to start taking things seriously when they fear a mob is going to march them up to the guillotines.

    Doesn't mean it has to reach that level of violence -- just imagine how scared they'd be if the 2020 campaign season features crowds of tens of thousands angrily chanting, not "Lock her up" or "Drain the swamp" -- but OFF WITH THEIR HEADS! OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!

    Are they being literal or figurative? I don't think the elites would want to keep pushing and find out for sure. Actually the suicidal Republicans might, but the Democrats are going to go into save-your-own-ass mode so fast it'll make ya head spin.

    No way fake tears Chuck Schumer is going to let himself wind up in a guillotine. That's only something that a "principled" retard like Paul Ryan or John Kasich would allow to escalate. From "losing with dignity" to "decapitated with dignity".

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  6. "That still leaves hope for the Pacific Northwest, the Great Lakes, and New England. It'd be part of a long tradition of class-based activism there, due to low diversity -- the blacks being in the Deep South, and the Hispanics being in the Southwest."

    Well, I think we can understand why the bringers of diversity have at times openly admitted that they target formerly homogenous areas; the "joy" of diversity is that it creates such tension within the masses that they can no longer effectively unite in opposition to a common foe. The clock is ticking; New Jersey, WA state, and Rhode Island have all lost more than 15% of their white population (as a % of the state's population) since 1990. Minnesota was for all intents and purposes an all-white state in the 1970's, then tons of blacks moved up from Chicago and had tons of kids, causing the state's white population to fall by 5-10% in the 80's. In the 90's and 2000's, cheap Mexican labor, boat people, and refugees began arriving. Minnesota's white population now hovers around 80%, and it doubtless will continue to fall. Coastal gentrification, high living costs, difficulty of development, need for cheap labor, and conspiring NGOs will continue to push more and more non-whites into the heartland.

    Until the Western ruling class accepts what Russia, Hungary, Poland, Japan etc. have accepted (an aging of the nation's legacy ethnic group, low birth rates among this group, telling the muh GDP crowd to fuck off), virtually every Western country is set to become dramatically less white over the next several generations, and it's going to eventually affect virtually every part of these countries. My formerly virtually all-white block (back in the earlier 2000's) now has a one-time (or maybe current) rental that hosted at least 3 different ethnic groups none of whom were white beginning around 5 years ago. A couple houses down, a north Asian (with an American accent, granted) family moved in and they had Illinois plates. They're polite, keep their yard tidy, they recently trick or treated after just moving in, and so forth. But they still aren't white, let alone Teutonic as nearly everyone in this state was back in the 70's (with of course some Brits and some Slavs mixed in). Diversity is coming to a neighborhood near you, thanks to the corporate whore elites, it may not have happened yet but it soon will, esp. with white post-Boomers not having many kids.

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  7. Feryl, lack of reproduction has nothing to do with the diversity problem.

    Its driven by greed by the corporate elite, Leftist virtue signaling and by the Democrats hunger for power.

    There is absolutely no reason that a modest decline in fertility in a crowded nation like we had , 1.8 being perfectly fine for an urban society requires any immigration and anyone who claims we can't afford Social Security is full of bunk

    We could easily afford infrastructure, basic welfare, nation defense and a pension system when we didn't have wage arbitrage (wages as percentage GDP down by half) and with some effort after the wage crunch

    This would make a lot of elite less wealthy relative to each other which they won't tolerate a tax system that is populist at its core and a defensive military

    That won't be allowed to happen and that means either the US falls into separate nations, becomes Brazil or there is mass genocidal slaughter

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  8. Agnostic, the French Elite could not understand why they were executed even when it was explained to them in detail and the blade was coming down

    Once a holiness spiral sets in, those type of people can no more be reasoned with than an ISIS suicide bomber

    The question in my mind is how much is opportunism and how much is virtue signaling . If its mostly the former, elections can matter a great deal.

    Also the level of division makes old school collective action like you are thinking of less than useful. People who barely speak the same language and have and want nothing in common aren't going to rebel that way

    It will be a a lot nastier. We've seen inklings of this with the two attacks on member of Congress and with the very personal action, not illegal against the FCC directors Net Neutrality decision

    This has come from the Left as are far better at collective action than the Right is but its subject to change in time

    I don't expect to see much for a few years though, the implosion of nearly every institution of our society is ongoing and ironically this reduces some of the tensions

    heck we might get very lucky and get off without violence which is what I'm hoping for. I'm getting to old for that sort of thing

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  9. "Feryl, lack of reproduction has nothing to do with the diversity problem. "

    Huh? If every white American had 4-5 kids, it would stave off demographic change. The overall population would end up being huge, of course, in the absence of an immigration moratorium. But whites would still be the vast majority of the population. What I've noticed over the last 5 or so years is that with the echo-Boom having ended in the 2010's (due to the economy and Boomers aging/not needing anymore kids), demographic changes have become much more noticeable. When white Boomers and late 60's born X-ers (a gigantic cohort) were having 2-4 kids in the 80's, 90's, and early 2000's, many parts of America still seemed, well, American. Whites born in the 70's-1987 (a pretty small cohort to begin with) are hardly having any kids. So we're talking about the generation born in the 2000's and 2010's being substantially less white, with the many many non-white post-1986 immigrants bringing their kids with them or having kids on American soil.

    Given the extremely high immigration rates of the late 80's and beyond, the demographic crisis should've been evident from the get-go. But it was concealed by the massive white Boomer cohort having lots of kids in the late 80's-early 2000's. Now though, the reckoning is apparent. There simply aren't that many white people who were born in the 70's and early 80's, and moreover they aren't having many kids.

    BTW, I myself don't buy the economic excuses for immigration, which I thought I already said. Having a stable or declining population simply means less consumption, with fewer people in or near their prime spending years (e.g. young adulthood and middle age) and fewer younger people around who are eager to get hitched, buy a house in a nice area, and raise a family, all of which facilitates greater consumption and thus greater corporate profits. As does high immigration levels.

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  10. Cultural continuity is more important than GROWTH. If we don't have high native birth rates, than we've got to accept reduced spending and corporate profits. Not fall for BS about immigrants and high birth rates being needed to ward off some kind of calamity, or, sheesh, take care of an aging and dying native population (an absurd lie which Japan has been disproving for 40 years; Japan can take care of itself, no matter what the West has been blathering about).

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  11. Feryl, there is nothing wrong with reducing spending and profits. Its the money and work obsessed psychopaths that can't.

    In any case its not about a breeding war, its about deliberate sabotage of our borders and the inability of Whites to get their stuff together enough to do anything about it

    White Americans are the best armed population on the planet but they have no will to fight and more importantly are so self centered they cannot think beyond the nuclear family at most.

    This is a product of cultural changes, less unions, less grange halls, the Internet of course but until those social changes are fixed the birth rate can't go up

    Even if they are there is no certitude that the population will grow . Its an urban culture now with many distractions and the ability for people even married couples to control fertility

    even if you fix marriage, again no solution. You have to do away with an economy that makes people rootless vagabonds chasing "the job"

    Fail to do that and you have a recipe for disaster

    In general White Americans 9and allied too) are a sentimental people who love and want a couple maybe three kids, after all despite every bad thing, living in crappy boring Dystopia they still reach near replacement fertility.


    You want a higher rate?

    Expel every Leftist and Globalist and most of the non Whites than fix the social and economic problems and make sure enough boots are on enough necks for around three generations till all the errant social junk all washes out

    This won't happen with the "Liberty Minded" Constitutionalists , the Libertarians the Deus Volt crowd or most anyone on the Right because they are eother stuck on stupid or too terrified to rule and want nothing more than to flee home

    No, the winner will be the first guy who has a real plan and is able to tell people "You know those Hallmark Christmas movies you love? If you follow me I can give you a real society kinda like that"

    People will follow that guy into hell because its worth fighting for and if he wins and holds power and it will be a he in a few decades society will reboot

    Its probably going to take a lot of fairly horrible things to happen first but the wages of sin are typically death.

    Right now though society is in the phase while its institutions implode and people come up with new ideas. Peaceful for the most part , patience and prep required

    This situation leaves us a huge vacuum to fill later and opening for a new ideology


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  12. Nice MPC thread on "Is Trumpism devolving into GOP-ism?" (gets started at 3rd post):

    https://mpcdot.com/forums/topic/10084-looks-like-the-demoncrats-are-going-after-the-little-guy-again-banking-jews/

    More and more hardcore Trump supporters are seeing how much the GOP has hijacked the populist-nationalist movement for its own tired, losing, and hated agenda of elitism + globalism.

    If that's the thanks we get for participating in the GOP primary, and voting GOP in the general, next time we're going to shift our massive weight over to the Democrat primary and tip the scales for the populist and hopefully globo-neutral candidate.

    Especially if it's a certain surfer girl with the most soothing voice in the world. That would go a long ways toward undoing the Democrats' brand as the party of ugly snappy wet blanket crones.

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  13. "Especially if it's a certain surfer girl with the most soothing voice in the world."

    I have a hard time understanding why she's still so unpopular. I get it on an intellectual level, mostly, but she'd be such a shoo-in, probably the most popular candidate to ever run in U.S. history. But they are still so bitter about Bernie, for some reason, so for Tulsi...

    God, Ag, they really are the party of "ugly snappy wet blanket crones", aren't they?

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  14. ""You know those Hallmark Christmas movies you love? If you follow me I can give you a real society kinda like that"

    That's a really good point, the rise of brands like Hallmark and Yankee Candle hearken back to a period of equality, when public space were more beautiful, and it was easier to make happy experiences. The beautiful scenes they portray, like "Picnic Day" or "Day at the Beach" or "Summer Wish", is something the younger generations are unacquainted with.

    If you want to see more scenes of a beautiful egalitarian society, check out the paintings of Robert Finale(just one example I can think of).

    www.robertfinalepaintings.com/




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  15. Now the Deep State is very nakedly telling everyone who runs the show by booting Tillerson (a "soft" Deep State guy) and putting Pompeo into the role of Secretary of State. Tillerson sucked but I can't imagine this being any better.

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  16. If the Salem Witch Trials and "To Kill a Mockingbird" had a baby, the Persecution of Roy Moore would be it.
    So few are brave enough to put their neck out there to speak out against this mob, not even when it's their own heroes *who can't offer them anything* like an entertainer, writer, or journalist. You can just see the wheels spinning in their heads ruminating calculations about the politicians, though: will it be good for my team overall if x politician resigns?
    Thank God for Breitbart. They could have easily abandoned Moore, but they did not. Instead, they chose to seek out the truth amidst a howling mob. History will look kindly on them for that.

    "Faye Gary, a former police officer with the Gadsden Police Department in Alabama, has been featured in the news in recent days making the unsubstantiated claim that she was told to protect young cheerleaders from Roy Moore at local ballgames.
    Speaking in a Breitbart News interview on Wednesday, Gary falsely claimed that Moore “wanted to keep segregation here in the south.”

    She then claimed that Moore “hates Jews. He hates blacks. He hates Muslims. He hates gays.”

    When challenged for specifics, Gary conceded that “I don’t know exactly what he said about Jews, but he doesn’t like Muslims. I know he doesn’t like Muslims. It is my personal feeling that he doesn’t like blacks.”

    When further petitioned to support her charges, especially her claim that Moore “hates blacks” and supports segregation, Gary further admitted, “I am not sure. That is my feeling.”

    The news media in recent days uncritically featured Gary making the undocumented claim on MSNBC that as a police officer “we were also told to watch him at the ball games to make sure that he didn’t hang around the cheerleaders.”

    The news media seemingly failed to vet Gary, with numerous articles and the MSNBC interview not mentioning that Moore was the prosecutor in an 1982 high profile case that sent her brother, Jimmy Wright, to prison"

    http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/11/30/cop-accuser-breitbart-interview-unsupported-claims-moore/

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