My Facebook account is restricted again*. I've discovered a new thing you can't talk about. As I've scanned the net lately, there has been a burst of actual disinformation. Even Wikipedia has been hit with efforts to show that Republicans and Democrats "switched" policies, especially on the subject of race. The discredited Big Switch Theory which posits that the entire Democrat Party suddenly saw the light in the 60s and rejected their racist past and Republicans suddenly embraced it, has risen from the almost dead and is bleeding into the history books and encyclopedias.
The trouble with this narrative is that Republicans have continued until the present day to promote racial equality. They were solidly in favor of the Civil Rights Bill. Democrats had to be bullied into it by LBJ who told them that if they did, that then the n!@#$% (his word) would vote for the Democrat Party for the next 200 years. Democrats at the time referred to it as the "Nigger Bill" among themselves. I used the word deliberately for its shock value so as not to gloss over the cold-bloodedness of the Democrats of the time. They appear hardly on the verge of a sudden conversion to racial holiness.
Of 60 openly racist Dixiecrats in the House and Senate, 59 of them remained in office for 10 to 30 more years. The only one that went Republican did so after it was revealed that he had a black girlfriend and a daughter by her. So he had already decided black people, at least black women, weren't so subhuman.
The alterations to Wikipedia entries, blogs, articles and historical websites have tended to push the narrative of so-called Republican racism back to the 1920s, adding all sorts of sinister behavior to "facts" about Republicans and to minimize Democrat support for racism in the 20th century. The strategy seems to be to recast Democrats as actually heroes, standing against racism in the early Progressive era. There's little historical evidence for that. The one major Democrat figure who began eliminating racial segregation after WWII was Harry Truman. Eisenhower continued to press against the racist policies of the day. Kennedy pushed for Civil Rights. Both Truman and Kennedy wouldn't last 10 minutes in today's Democrat Party which has doubled down on racial paternalism in a thinly veiled pseudo-egalitarianism that still maintains it's old white superiority over minorities who they firmly believe need the protection and guidance of the white plantation owner class of Democrat.
Noam Chomsky explains above how that tactic works. A big part of the tactic is to limit what you can talk about. At this point Facebook is limiting any talk of mid 20th century Democrat racism or the racist history of the Democrat Party. Part of this complex power grab is a strategy to hide Democrat racism and to find anything they can dig up to paint Republicans as the new racists and thus insure for themselves the power to effectively protect their own wealth and power.
© 2022 by Tom King
* I've been released from one of 5 types of restriction. The other 4 appear to be designed to prevent my infecting others with my disinformation (which although true makes Democrats look bad). I'm spending more time on other social media and I don't care what Facebook is doing toward cracking down on conservative thought. Like the Democrat party, I think the technocracy is over-playing its hand. It's a rerun of 1860 except this time the South has developed a little sense. 2024 will be an interesting year.
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