Why right-wingers are having some success with voters of color

I don't agree with everything in this interview. But a lot of it does seem to me to be valid, though it does reflect an unfortunate, unpleasant reality that I certainly wish wasn't happening.

We’re witnessing the cumulative impact of much deeper developments that have been underway for longer than a decade. The deep ambivalence with institutional politics and institutions themselves, across the political spectrum, is at the heart of this. I’ve recently been doing interviews with conservatives of color, and there’s little sense right now of buyers’ remorse. Instead, the alienation and sheer disgust with what they perceive as the stasis of contemporary politics is so sharp that they’re alongside much of the hardcore MAGA base in being quite willing to watch things get dismantled and attacked.

In the conference we recently organized on the multiracial Right, we tracked the many inroads this is happening through — religion, gender, militarism, immigration enforcement, appeals to entrepreneurship and frustrations over public institutions. There’s not one story that accounts for the turn of many people of color toward the Right. - In These Times

Republicans are pro-child labor

The crazed stupidity does not end. I get that the right wing is scared and flailing, but that doesn't justify anything.

The New York Times’s recent exposé on child labor in the United States wasn’t about what might be called “child labor lite”: examples, say, of kids working in candy stores, logging long hours as babysitters, or getting up early to do paper-delivery rounds. Instead, it was about truly Dickensian conditions: children, many of whom were unaccompanied migrants, getting mangled while working overnight shifts in meat-packing plants; children working long hours on construction sites; children working into the wee hours in food-processing facilities; children getting chemically burned after working overnight shifts as janitors. These kids were, plain and simple, being labor-trafficked...

I was right that politicians would indeed be goaded into action; I was wrong, however, as to what action they would take. Far from shoring up protections against the exploitation of children by multinational corporations, by temporary employment agencies and by the “guardians” who, like Dickensian villains of yesteryear, send their wards out to work, GOP politicians took it as an opportunity to weaken child labor laws. - Truthout

Republicans, including Minnesota's, offer nothing

In fact, for most people in this country what they've "delivered" when in power is worse than nothing. Recessions, wars, assaults on rights, mega-corruption...

But on the very rare occasions when Republican candidates for office are required to articulate exactly what their policies would be if elected, that dominant, exclusive goal of tax cuts for corporations and the nation’s uber-wealthy is oddly never mentioned. Instead, we are treated to a seemingly never-ending litany of imagined Democratic evils and appeals to voters’ base fears and grievances (which, for the most part, boil down to racism and xenophobia).

When a Republican candidate loudly declares we must “Close the borders,” for example, he’s not talking about denying Texas businesses the 1.1 million undocumented workers those same businesses eagerly hire to reduce their operating costs and obligations to pay a living wage to their employees. Because that would swiftly wipe out Texas’s service, agricultural, and construction economy which, along with the economies of most Southwestern states, relies on exploiting those undocumented workers so its businesses can stay afloat. In this way, “immigration” simply serves as a shiny object for their voters to angrily focus on while Republicans drain the nation’s treasury for the benefit of their corporate donor base.

Beyond the “close the border” tripe (and fear-mongering about guns and abortion, hot-button topics trotted out in service of the same end goal of gutting corporate taxes) what exactly do Republicans have to offer Americans that will actually, tangibly make their lives better? The answer is: literally nothing. - Daily Kos

About that "crime surge"

This article is from a California-based blog. I'm passing it along because it also very much applies in Minnesota. Especially the parts about corporate "news" media and Party of Trump politicians.

Unfortunately, the reporting about crime is generally distorted, too. The FBI's published crime stats do not include “white collar” crime like wage theft and violations of the Clean Water Act. Despite recent protests from the Chamber of Commerce about pursuit of corporate criminals, "white-collar crime likely costs the American economy between $300 and $800 billion per year, while street crimes like burglary and theft cost around $16 billion."

...How bad is U.S. incarceration? With five percent of the world's population, the U.S. is the world’s "champion" incarcerator, jailing 25% of the world's inmates--more in absolute or per-capita numbers than any other nation. The demographically-identical Canadians cage one-seventh as many people, per capita.

So is Canadian crime greater than in the U.S.? No, it's about the same. - It's Simpler Than It Looks

Tell your Republican friends to watch out for the "pre-checked box."

I remember back when online petitions were a bigger deal. I saw where Republicans started demanding a phone number, so they could later hassle you for money, before they’d include your “signature.” I indulged righteous indignation, until Democrats soon started doing that as well. Hopefully that won’t be the case with this.

Concerns around Trump's donation scheme first emerged in April, when a Times investigation found that the former president's campaign operation had routinely been signing up contributors for monthly — or even weekly — recurring contributions, through deliberately bewildering online forms and pre-checked authorizations. In the weeks before Election Day last fall, the Trump campaign rolled out an increasingly opaque array of these boxes, which featured huge blocks of boldface or all-caps text, full of aggressive phrasing, evidently intended to distract donors from the opt-out language in smaller, fainter type below.

This tactic, the Times reported, "ensnared scores of unsuspecting Trump loyalists — retirees, military veterans, nurses and even experienced political operatives. Soon, banks and credit card companies were inundated with fraud complaints from the president's own supporters about donations they had not intended to make, sometimes for thousands of dollars."

Trump's campaign was forced to refund $122.7 million as a result of 200,000 disputed transactions in 2020. Refunds to donors who exceed legal limits are not infrequent in political campaigns, but that was a vastly higher sum than the amount refunded by Joe Biden's campaign. This captured the attention of the Federal Election Commission (FEC), which in May sent a formal recommendation to Congress, asking for an outright ban on pre-checked recurring donation boxes.

That doesn't appear to have had made any meaningful impact on Trump's fundraising effort. In fact, Salon's reporting reveals that dozens of other Republican candidates and organizations now rely on pre-checked boxes to keep the money flowing, so much so that it can essentially be regarded as standard operating procedure on conservative fundrasing. - Salon