Getting to The Heartland of the Matter

 

Today in "What are our Never Trump allies lying about now?" news we ask how exactly it is that you believe that Charlie Sykes is your good-good friend?  

Well that's easy, isn't it?  He says all these pretty that you want to hear.  

For example, last week Mr. Sykes was strongly warning his listeners that you just know those Republicans over there are planning to memory hole the entire Trump administration.  Just pretend the past never happened!  They're all gonna become deficit hawks overnight and swear that Joe Biden is responsible for COVID because lying about the past to evade responsibility is just something those Trumpy assholes do.

Then Mr. Sykes was on to a'stomping and a'faunching about The Heartland Institute, about which Mr. Sykes says he barely knows, except that he gets their "weirdo newsletter" hahaha!

Brief Driftglass Aside/

You might have heard of The Heartland Institute on this very blog, as it is headquartered in Chicago and is the fetid Libertarian shithole that was once funded by Big Tobacco dollars (Because Cigarettes are Freedumb!) and then, when that wingut welfare trough dried up, quickly pivoted to Big Climate Change Denialism money (Because Coal is Freedumb!)  It was also the whelping box for Young Ben Domenech who went from there to the very edge of professional oblivion we his plagiarism came to light.   

Young Ben's career was salvaged in no small part because his good friends Ezra Klein and Chris Hayes helped resurrect it by inviting him to bro it up with them on MSNBC.  Then, having been officially absolved of his past misdeeds via Liberal media baptism, Young Ben went on to be a regular guest on CBS, took the odious Megan McCain to wife, and founded The Federalist, where he and his staff now write Trump porn for incels.

It's a funny old world.

End Brief Aside/

Anyway, although Mr. Sykes barely know them, he has some very strong opinions about The Heartland Institute.  From the transcript:

Charlie Sykes: You know the Heartland Institute from...based in Chicago?  Okay so education-style well they're... they're... they, uh. are sort of libertarian. Very obsessed with opposition to doing anything about climate change. I think they used to be more mainstream but they've gone the way a lot of other conservative organizations.  I got their their their quarterly performance report, you know, in the mail because I'm still on the mailing list...I'm still on some really weird-ass mailing lists so I'll tell you that you can never get off those weirdos.

Amanda Carpenter:  Yeah.

Sykes: I will be on these mailing lists forever.  But I really I love this one um they... they... the...cover of this is, you know, them standing there, The Heartland Institute taking the fight to the Socialists and the Climate Left it's got a picture of them looking like Superman and then you have this this shadowy figure of this robot which would of course be the Climate Left with a hammer and sickle on it because of course they're all Communist!  But let me just read you the first paragraph which I think is fantastic...a fantastic I mean in an awful way...

Sykes goes on to gleefully describe the hysterical kookery of the Heartland goofs insistence that asking people to wear a bit of cloth over their mouths was the most unprecedented violation of human freedom in history.  Basically the apocalypse.

Who in their right mind would want to hang with that bunch of batshit freaks, right?

But see, here's one of the tricksy things about the internet.  It's just full of the records of things that happened before today.

For example, here is a video of the very same Charlie Sykes back just a few years ago when he was known as the Rush Limbaugh of Wisconsin.  Back during the reign of the Kenyan Usurper when slagging Liberals was where the money was and in aid of helping Mr. Sykes promote his book, "A Nation of Moochers", Mr. Sykes' friend Joe Bast threw him a fete at which Mr. Sykes was the guest speaker.

And who exactly is Joe Bast?

Well according to the blurb on their website, Mr. Bast is a Senior Fellow at The Heartland Institute. In fact he cofounded Heartland in 1984, and served as its executive director then as president & CEO until January 2018.

So here, if you're interested, is Charlie Sykes speaking at that "weirdo" Heartland Institute about which he is barely familiar...at the 2012 book party they threw in his honor (it's all appalling but if you want a sampler, jump ahead to around the 34:30 mark where you'll hear about Barack Obama's sinister plan to destroy the coal industry by regulating carbon emissions.)

And since this is a full-service blog, I feel it is my duty to share with you one more Never Trump fairy tale that you may have noticed coming down the pike here and there.  The alibi.  The Republican voter alibi.

You see, it's not that the reprogrammable meatbags who voted for Donald Trump twice are bad people.  Not at all!  They're not stupid and they're not racists.  Instead, according to Mr. Sykes, they all good people.  The best people.  Who have been driven to their condition of dog loyalty to Donald Trump out of resentment at being unfairly called racists by us Libtards.

Sykes:  ...now the flip side of the message and this is something that I think that ... that ... that the Left has not really grasped because there is a lot of, y'know, yes you you people are racist!  This is a white supremacist country!  Um we need to ... all of that stuff is read as an indictment that you think that I am a bad person.  You people are terrible people!  And amazingly that does not win hearts and minds.

This right here is why is it imperative for grifters like Sykes to throw a Temporal Barrier across 2016 and pretend all that came before is unknown and irrelevant.  Because it is absolutely impossible to reconcile the actual history of the Republican Party as it was built racist brick by racist brick by men like Charlie Sykes from the party of Nixon's Southern Strategy to the Party of Birtherism and Trump with the claptrap Sykes is peddling.  

There are no hearts to win, Charlie, and no minds left at all.  Just reprogrammable meatbags who will go right on doing exactly what they've been doing for decades -- taking direction from the likes of Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson until they keel over dead.

Mr. Sykes continues

Sykes: When I think the more powerful message is you are a good person and you are better than this. A good person does not look the other way when there are racist policies!  No you're not that person who wants to listen to those uh those those dog whistles.  And that's the difference of saying look I know this stuff is complicated and I'm going to appeal to the better angels of your nature and ratify that that when we you know we talk about who Americans are yeah we have some problems we have some issues nobody's perfect but you don't want to be that person.  That's a very different message than saying, y'know, America is so deeply corrupt and so deeply racist and white supremacists and... and... you people need to apologize and even when you apologize we're not going to accept that because ... uh .. we don't want redemption we want reparations.  I mean seriously years and years and years of taken a huge toll.

And thus we leave Mr. Charlies Sykes attempting to executing the wingnut equivalent of the Triple Lindy.

Clutching his pearls, swooning and falling ten stories onto two different and diametrically opposed Bulwark fainting couches at  the same time!

One couch for those overcome with over the awful awfulness of those damn Trump voters who think they can get away with just lying about the past to evade responsibility.  

And the other couch reserved for those who have grown faint with fury over us Libtards forcing tens of millions of otherwise good, God-fearin' Republicans to stop up their ears with Fox News and Hate Radio, and lash themselves body and soul to the most catastrophically failed racist madman to ever occupy the Oval Office.  

Update 1:  Tom Nichols is also very big on everyone shutting the fuck up about anything that happened prior to 2016 because events prior to 2016 make him look like a lying fraud:

It's too early for all the "Republicans were always like that" tweets, so I'll just empirically note that GOP voters once tended to be higher info, high participation voters, by any metric. Trump turning them into paranoid and dumb villagers is a remarkable - and rapid - change.

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) November 16, 2020

Update 2:  Project Lincoln co-founder Mike Madrid is also very anxious for you to believe that his GOP was just fine until 2016 when it went suddenly and inexplicably insane.

This is a very good take on what the GOP has become. Op-Ed: What broke the Republican Party? https://t.co/cISrWECDWo

— Mike Madrid (@madrid_mike) November 16, 2020

No Half Measures