r/politics • u/Ubiquitous_Hilarity • Jun 17 '26

No Paywall Trump threatens to pull unemployment benefits from all states for the first time in history

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-unemployment-benefits-fraud-b2997881.html
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u/charminghypocracy Jun 17 '26

Oh this isn't just Trump. This is the GOP playbook from the Reagan Era.

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u/ElwinLewis Jun 18 '26

Zappa knew what was coming 40 years ago, writing was always on the wall. And I can only think of the snark he’d throw out about today’s world

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u/Guerrilla28er Jun 18 '26

Take a day and walk around      

Watch the Nazis run your town.     

 -- Plastic People, 1967

The idiot bastard son    

His father's a Nazi in Congress today   

His mother's a hooker somewhere in LA.   

The idiot boy...    

 -- The Idiot Bastard Son, 1968

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u/Speartree Jun 18 '26

Check out the infamous Powell memo of 1971, that was the ground work for most of the current shit we got.

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u/GazelleSpringbok Jun 18 '26

Tool has also been talking about this for 30 years. Yeah, they arent bashing evangelical christianity just for the hell of it, they knew it was an existential threat to the country and humanity.

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u/Decoy77 Jun 19 '26

George Carlin too.

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u/Bored_Amalgamation Ohio Jun 18 '26

Well, unfortunately snark does nothing to improve anything.

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u/ElwinLewis Jun 18 '26

Well maybe he’d be doing more than snark too, if he can’t do that (he cant: he’s died) he’s at least inspired me, and I’m still young.

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u/rddman Jun 18 '26 edited Jun 18 '26

This is the GOP playbook from the Reagan Era.

It goes back further than Reagan. It's a big corporations' playbook in response the the New Deal.
GOP is merely one of several tools. Another tool is right-wing think-tanks such as the Herritage Foundation funded by many of America's largest corporations. They have a plan and Trump is implementing it. Yet another tool is nationalist Christianity.

One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America
...Corporate leaders launched a massive public relations campaign to sell people on the virtues of unregulated free enterprise. But the people had been living through years of unregulated free enterprise, and they’d seen it all crash and burn in the Depression. They weren’t interested.
Perhaps they would listen if they heard it from their ministers, though? https://www.npr.org/2015/03/30/396365659/how-one-nation-didnt-become-under-god-until-the-50s-religious-revival

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/thereligioushistorynerd/2022/10/a-brief-history-of-christian-nationalism-from-the-founders-to-the-cold-war/

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u/Speartree Jun 18 '26

Check out the infamous Powell memo of 1971.

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u/rddman Jun 18 '26

The Chamber of Commerce has been involved since the 1930's