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Notes -
"Iraq has weapons of mass destruction."
"We are building a democratic society in Afghanistan."
"Our test grades are low because we don't spend enough on education."
"Race-based caps on school discipline will lead to better outcomes."
"COVID was not a lab leak."
"Police routinely kill unarmed, compliant black people."
"Joe Biden is mentally competent."
"The laptop is Russian disinformation."
"Insurrectionists murdered a police officer on Jan 6th."
"Rittenhouse is a white supremacist murderer."
"The BLM protests are mostly peaceful."
"Antifa is just an idea."
"Brett Kavanaugh is a rapist."
...Off the top of my head. There are plenty more where those came from.
Could you elaborate on what you mean by "shaping of the truth"?
Iraq was a failure of the establishment and also a failure of the anti-establishment. It was supported by a large majority of rural, working-class, no college degree, salt of the Earth white people. The modern Right is incapable of telling those people they are wrong on any issue, so we know what they'd do if the war happened today.
I must begrudgingly second FC here, your assessment does not square with how I remember the political climate of the 2000's, unless you really want to lump Michael Moore and Adbusters in with MAGA.
(Admittedly, Moore himself did make comments around 2016 to the effect of "Trump and MAGA is what the neoliberal establishment deserves.")
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...I don't know if you're old enough to remember the events of the 2000s first-hand, but in that era, rural, working-class, no college degree, salt of the earth white people believed that they had their own elites. George W Bush was president, and was at least attempting to implement policy at the federal level in direct service to Red Tribe and its values. The anti-establishment of the time would be the grass-roots antiwar types.
Then why are Liz Cheney and John Bolton urging people to vote Democrat?
You may be reluctant to recognize it, but the last ten years has been one long campaign within Red Tribe to purge the neocons. That effort has been wildly successful, to the point that the neocons attempted to defect to the Democratic party, and now with the defeat of Harris appear to have collapsed as a coherent faction. It is true that Red Tribers are not giving speeches about how the 2000s hippies and Noam Chomsky were totally correct, but what they have actually done is change their policies and their coalition on a fundamental level.
Blue Tribe, by contrast, absolutely smothered its peace movement the moment Obama was inaugurated and is now the party of imperial wars and armament corporations. The fact that you have not received emotional gratification from the Red Tribe public should not outweigh the concrete changes that have in fact happened. The most significant break from this pattern, Biden apparently forcing through an Afghanistan withdrawal, also appears to be an example of the deep state resisting the lawful authority of the President.
It's been one long campaign to purge anyone who doesn't support Trump. Neocons are fine as long as they support Trump.
And since Trump has pretty thoroughly rejected the Neocon agenda, most (all?) of the prominent Neocons have found themselves unwilling or unable to support Trump. They instead support the Democrats, who have largely signaled willingness to adopt their policies. I remember people claiming that John Bolton's involvement in the first Trump administration was proof that nothing had changed. And yet, Bolton got no policy wins that I'm aware of, and now he has written a tell-all about how Trump is a monster and everyone should vote Democrat. There is a proverb about judging someone by the quality of their enemies; this seems to be an example of that.
If you disapprove of the neocon agenda, then the fact that the Democrats are inviting the Neocons in should worry you. If you support the Neocon agenda, then by all means say so. Claiming that Red Tribe is still aligned with the neocon agenda, though, is simply not factual. Again, you may not like how that turn happened, and you may even think it was dishonest to change policy without explicitly admitting error, and it is at least arguable that you would be correct. None of that changes the fact that Trump is by far the least warmongering president we've had since at least Clinton, and likely much earlier, and that this lack of warmongering is in fact one of the things his base explicitly endorses.
Trump increased military spending in his first term.
Yet he did not start any new wars, and actively worked to withdraw from existing ones, with the deep state likely violating black-letter law to successfully resist those efforts.
Increased military spending is almost certainly necessary, because it is increasingly evident that our military is clapped out and obsolete. Our navy in particular appears to be in a particularly dire state.
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