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marmar

(76,985 posts)
Tue Feb 15, 2022, 10:23 AM Feb 2022

Joe Walsh on what lies ahead: Trump is "sowing a race war" -- and his followers love it


Joe Walsh on what lies ahead: Trump is "sowing a race war" — and his followers love it
He helped elect a "bigoted, authoritarian traitor," Walsh says. Now he works to save "members of the Trump cult"

By CHAUNCEY DEVEGA
PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 15, 2022 6:30AM


(Salon) Joe Walsh was elected to Congress as a Republican in the "Tea Party wave" of 2010 and served one term in the House, where he was a vocal and harsh critic of Barack Obama. After losing his re-election campaign in a redrawn district in 2012 (to future U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth), Walsh became a nationally syndicated right-wing radio host and, a few years later, a leading supporter of Donald Trump.

When Trump was elected president in 2016, Walsh already had doubts: He didn't love Trump and didn't hate him, as Walsh told me in the first part of our recent interview. But he was rewarded for his loyalty with access to the highest levels of power in the Trump White House and the MAGAverse, before ultimately deciding that Donald Trump represented an existential threat to American democracy and the future of the country. At significant personal and professional risk, Walsh turned against Trump and his movement, even running against Trump (albeit very briefly) as a 2020 Republican presidential candidate.

In the first part of his conversation with Salon, Walsh warned that Donald Trump and his followers would "happily burn this country down to get the country they want. They would happily do it. And they tell me that. I don't think the folks who watch CNN and MSNBC every night really understand that fact." I may not agree with Walsh on many political or ideological issues, but he's correct about that. Democratic leaders, and too many liberals and progressives at large, remain in denial about the level of threat despite years of evidence and a mountain of proof that speaks to the true intentions of Trump's neofascist movement.

....(snip)....

You have said that the Republican base needs an intervention so they can be brought back to reality and out of the delusions of TrumpWorld. What would that look like?

Here's how you teach them: This country that you love, my friends, is never going to be 80% or 90% white again. America is never going to make 90% of the automobiles in the world again. It's a big, competitive world and America's going to get browner by the year. There's nothing wrong with that, and here's why. But instead of having those conversations, the [Republican] establishment just turned the other way and the base grew angrier and angrier.

What do you do about those Republicans and members of that cult movement who would rather destroy America, through violence if need be, than share power with Black and brown Americans?

I think at this point, it's too late. I think at this point, all we can do is outvote them. I remember being in Congress eight years ago. Then I said that America was more divided than we'd been at any time since right before the Civil War. That was five or six years before Trump. I think it's too late. That is a hard thing for me to say, because I spent a lot of my time trying to save people from the cult. The situation is not hopeless. Every day and every week, I save a few of them but the vast majority are lost. .................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2022/02/15/joe-walsh-on-what-lies-ahead-is-sowing-a-race-war--and-his-followers-love-it/






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Joe Walsh on what lies ahead: Trump is "sowing a race war" -- and his followers love it (Original Post) marmar Feb 2022 OP
I wonder how Sen. Tim Scott and Justice Clarence Thomas feel about that? ProudMNDemocrat Feb 2022 #1
They used to be Joe Walsh's followers. He's changed a lot. mucifer Feb 2022 #2
Oligarch infighting... TheRealNorth Feb 2022 #3

ProudMNDemocrat

(16,485 posts)
1. I wonder how Sen. Tim Scott and Justice Clarence Thomas feel about that?
Tue Feb 15, 2022, 10:28 AM
Feb 2022

Being that they are the 2 most prominent Republicans who happen to be African-Americans. Could they back a man who is sowing seeds of racial hatred within the Republican Party?

I mean we already know Thomas is against Voting Rights for African-Americans.

TheRealNorth

(9,435 posts)
3. Oligarch infighting...
Tue Feb 15, 2022, 12:34 PM
Feb 2022

There was always going to be competition over the rights to pick the carcass (America) clean once Trump ended Democracy. Same thing happened in Nazi Germany.

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