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Tay Zonday
@tayzonday
SOME things, like neoliberalism, you can blame on BOTH American political parties. But the “War On Drugs” is a Republican child. Richard Nixon’s domestic policy advisor confessed in 1994 that it targeted rights-seeking blacks and anti-war hippies, their political enemies: https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/ Should Jimmy Carter have done more with his supermajority to end the drug war? Sure. Carter’s key legacy is actually neoliberal deregulation. Reagan caught the drug culture-war pass from Nixon and the neoliberal pass from Carter like a champion wide receiver. I grew up in the 1980s. Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign was ubiquitous. Drug abuse has *never* varied with race or income-level. Reagan’s super-severe crack VS powder cocaine punishment caused decades of black family separation and federal handouts to corporate prisons. Marijuana prosecution also depopulated disproportionately black areas. This is partly why today’s black family wealth 1/8 that of whites.
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Stuart
@olystuart
Perhaps it was their child but fully adopted by the Dems afterwards. The Crime Bill, increases to police and mass incarceration funding, all the continued corruption and meddling in foreign countries. Why not blame that on both parties?
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Tay Zonday
@tayzonday
Bill Clinton had to live in a world controlled by Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan’s narratives. That’s how history usually works. It’s written by the victors. New leaders must acquire power appealing to victor narratives. That’s why Obama didn’t win in 2008 promoting a “1619 Project” American history. Now, there’s a long list of valid Bill Clinton grievances. His Secretary-of-state said point-blank that 500,000 Iraqi children dying of diarrhea was “worth it”—because America used the Defense Intelligence Agency under the guise of “No Fly Zones” to bomb Iraqi water purification infrastructure that could theoretically make chemical weapons, while also denying them chlorine under UN sanctions. But Clinton validating Nixon’s drug war in order to accomplish anything when he had six years of Republican congresses? After George H.W. Bush beat Dukakis using black crime hysteria? That’s not anywhere close to equal Democrat guilt. https://youtu.be/FbIX1CP9qr4?si=WUNZjyiK8p6bBxrY
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Stuart
@olystuart
A convenient excuse the Dems would be happy to use I'm sure, to paper over their decades of authoritarianism and continuation of conservative policy.
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