What The Hell America!

“In today’s world, everything is online, and yet folks in rural areas, low-income households, and racial and ethnic minorities all suffer from the same challenge—barriers that keep people offline,” Amy Huffman, policy director at the National Digital Inclusion Alliance, told me. “It’s absurd to say this is reverse racism.”

For decades, Republicans have demagogued about Big Government giving handouts to racial minorities, in order to justify slashing government programs in myriad ways that hurt their own voters. This has often been communicated in couched language: For Ronald Reagan it was “welfare queens.” For Mitt Romney, it was the “47 percent” who were “dependent on the government.” For Paul Ryan, it was the “hammock that lulls able-bodied citizens to lives of dependency.”

We constantly hear that Trumpism is supposed to represent a break with that old form of Reaganesque, drown-government-in-the-bathtub, plutocratic GOP ideology, as part of its supposed project to remake the GOP as “working class.” But the reality is that MAGA often takes that old race-baiting trick and, if anything, supercharges its racist overtones. This latest move is a case in point: Once again, here we see Trump carrying out precisely that same old swindle. And once again, GOP voters may very well get screwed by it.