Bush hasn't always been the cheery moderate that he's presented as today. In fact, during his first campaign for governor of Florida in 1994, he was quite conservative.

In order to win the Republican nomination in that race, Bush ran as a hard-liner, staking out positions to the right of his GOP primary opponents on issues such as education, taxes, welfare and criminal justice. He eventually prevailed over the five other Republicans in the primary, though he lost the general election.

"A lot of Bush's ideas during his first run for governor in 1994 were really cutting-edge for the GOP," said Dr. David Colburn, director of the Askew Institute on Politics and Society at the University of Florida. "Bush was the fellow who was out in front and leading the charge with radical reforms."

The cornerstone of Bush's campaign was a sweeping set of conservative proposals that, if enacted, would have made Florida a virtual laboratory for far-right policy.

"I would abolish the Department of Education as it now exists, reducing the 2,000 person bureaucracy to about 50 to administer federal education funding and maintain minimum academic standards in Florida's schools," Bush told the Orlando Sentinel in a November 1994 interview.

Bush also laid out a plan to require that any proposed new taxes be approved directly by Florida voters, a strategy that would have made it nearly impossible to pass them. What state revenue there was, Bush said, should be used whenever possible to hire private corporations to replace state employees.

"We must push privatization [of government] in every area where privatization is possible," Bush told the Sentinel.

Jeb Bush has a reputation as one of the most moderate GOP presidential candidates. But while governor of Florida from 1999 to 2007, he actually racked up an extremely conservative record.

This disparity between his language and his policies isn't an accident. While he's long held strongly conservative views, Bush concluded two decades ago that the best way for a Republican to get elected is to use very compassionate and appealing rhetoric — and he's used that strategy ever since.

This approach was inspired by failure. During Bush's first campaign for governor of Florida, he called himself a "head-banging conservative," talked about "blowing up" state agencies, and said he wanted to "club this government into submission." He didn't carefully watch his words, and ended up causing controversy when, asked what his administration would do for the African-American community, he responded, "Probably nothing." (He intended to make a point about not governing based on race.)

Despite a nationwide landslide for Republicans that year, Bush lost. The lesson he took, as he told the Weekly Standard's Andrew Ferguson this year, was that "the thing I didn't do was show my heart." He thought he turned off voters by hard-line rhetoric and failed to show he cared about them.

So over the ensuing four years, Bush gave himself a political makeover. He embraced education reform as a major issue where he could combine conservative principles with a positive message, he launched high-profile efforts at outreach to the African-American community, and he focused his message on opportunity and compassion. But, Bush told Ferguson, "The ideology that I believe, the belief in limited government — that didn't change."

And once Bush won the 1998 election and took office, he proved that, pushing through a variety of very conservative measures in what had been one of the most progressive states in the South.

As governor he slashed taxes, rolled back regulations, vetoed $2 billion in legislative spending requests, and privatized a wide variety of government functions. He overhauled the state's public school system, trying to apply market forces like choice and accountability to it. He lifted restrictions on guns (including passing the nation's first Stand Your Ground law), passed pro-life bills, and fought to prevent Terri Schiavo's husband from having her feeding tube removed.

What is interesting about all this caterwauling from the right about Jeb Bush is that on most issues, he is as conservative as it gets. "He was really reactionary on education, criminal justice, taxes, and privatization, but he is regarded as a moderate because he speaks Spanish and has a Mexican wife, and supports more effective immigration laws," Susan Greenbaum, Professor Emerita of Anthropology, University of South Florida and the author of the forthcoming book Blaming the Poor: The Long Shadow of the Moynihan Report on Cruel Images about Poverty, told me in an email exchange. In reality, says Greenbaum, "he is clearly no moderate."

Situationally, conservatism is defined as the ideology arising out of a distinct but recurring type of historical situation in which a fundamental challenge is directed at established institutions and in which the supporters of those institutions employ the conservative ideology in their defense.

Thus, conservatism is that system of ideas employed to justify any established social order, no matter where or when it exists, against any fundamental challenge to its nature or being, no matter from what quarter. Conservatism in this sense is possible in the United States today only if there is a basic challenge to existing American institutions which impels their defenders to articulate conservative values.

The Civil Rights movement was a direct challenge to the existing institutions of the time, and conservatism as an ideology is thus a reaction to a system under challenge, a defense of the status – quo in a period of intense ideological and social conflict. The very notion of a race of people that was; at our beginnings as a country, only considered to be 3/ 5’ s of a human being, now having equal footing with those that actually believed in this idea, is a direct challenge to a long held social concept . It denied the idea of white supremacy as legitimate. It’s surprising how many people still cling to this idea, and will go to extreme lengths to perpetuate it. The idea that a person that could have been your slave at one time, could today be your boss, or even President of the United States, is more than some people can deal with on an emotional level. White supremacy as an institution is renounced, discredited, and dismantled, and that is a major blow to an existing order, and conservatism is always a reaction to a challenge to an existing order. These are people that desperately need somebody to look down to in order to validate their own self-worth. “Sure, life is tough. But at least I’m White.” They can no longer rely on a policy that used to be institutionally enforceable. When that is removed by law, hostility is the result; hostility for those that have been emancipated by law and elevated to equal status, and hostility for the law itself including those that proposed it and passed it.

Thus hatred for African-Americans and for the Liberal’s and liberal policies that endorse their equal status is fully embraced by the conservative. Letting go of the past is difficult to do. An entire race of people becomes an easy scapegoat for one’s own failures. Hate is passed on from one generation to the next. Parents teach their children to hate. The cure for hate is education, so every attempt to keep schools segregated was an important factor. Every attempt to desegregate schools was blocked.

The Conservatives entire set of values is wrapped in a theory of rationality that was handed to him by somebody else with a nice big bow. His way of life is now threatened by a truth that contradicts his beliefs. To admit that it was flawed and without any basis, is to admit that, foundationally, everything he believed in is flawed and that means that he could be wrong about something. And that also means that there is no justification for the pain and suffering that his ideology has inflicted on others. An entire war was fought and over 600,000 lives were lost in order to continue a way of life that was baseless. Rather than admit that his beliefs were in error, he clings to the ideology of hate and directs that hate toward the object that is the very cause of the hate: The Black Man. The Black Man is a constant reminder that his ideology is flawed, a reminder that his hatred is baseless. Holding on to an ideology with no basis is irrational. Rather than dump this irrational way of thinking, he embraces irrationality as a way of life. He becomes a justificationist, and looks for anything that will justify his flawed ideology. He looks for passages in the Bible as a justification for slavery and therefore a justification for his beliefs. He finds a refuge in the Bible and religion, (conservatives a very religious bunch) and this becomes the foundation that he “feels” he can stand on. But he fails to recognize that the Bible cannot be its own basis. That’s circular reasoning. A Criteria cannot be its own criteria. If we claim a basis gives us truth, we then are making the implicit claim that truth requires bases. But then it is plainly obvious our own basis lacks a basis, as it cannot be its own basis. The Bible might justify slavery, but what justifies the Bible? Well… it’s the inspired word of God. According to whom? According to the Bible. That’s circular reasoning. That’s a logical fallacy.

According to Smith; “The South is and always has been the most conservative part of America, conservative in an almost militant promotion of Lockean principles and institutions, and the only part of the country that claimed some kind of Burkean aristocratic conservatism. The South has also always been the most racist part of the country. This is probably the most direct connection between racism and conservatism in America; despite all the denials of southern intellectuals and politicians, past and present, the South’s militant conservatism was rooted fundamentally in its hyper-racism”.“ The schizophrenia that is part of “southern thought”, is that while it embraced John Locke for whites, it denied Locke to blacks. But at the same time, many of the South’s leading thinkers rejected Locke because slavery could not be squared with his idea of inalienable natural rights. It was one thing to deny Africans civil rights as northern whites did, but to deny them liberty and their property in their labor was more difficult, leading to a full-bore embrace of a bastardized Burkean Aristocracy”. “Southern conservatism is an integral part of American conservatism. And if one looks at it, you’ll find racism at its core. Its militant laissez-faire capitalism, it’s emphasis on the soil, limited government, states’ rights, concurrent majorities, tradition, and all the rest are little more than reactions to modernity and to anti-racist movements.”

Welfare chauvinism is a scientific term used for the political notion that welfare benefits should be restricted to certain groups, particularly to the natives of a country as opposed to immigrants. It is used as a populist argumentation strategy ,mainly by radical right-wing populist parties, which describes a rhetorical connection between the problems of the welfare state and, in essence, immigration but also other social groups such as welfare recipients and the unemployed. The focus is placed on categorizing state residents in two extremes: the "nourishing" and "debilitating" and the contradiction between them in the competition for the society's scarce resources.[1][2][3]

...gender segregation in one of San Francisco’s fastest-growing and most lucrative industries may have helped fuel a growing pay gap in the city. Since the end of the recession, the pay disparity between fully employed men and women, those with advanced degrees and even those holding tech jobs, has grown wider, according to census data.

“Not seeing many people that look like you, having that added element of discomfort, makes it difficult to enter the industry,” Vogt said. “I’m sure the impostor syndrome has a lot to do with it,” she added, “the feeling that everyone else knows so much more than I do, which isn’t necessarily true.”

A handful of programs and nonprofits are trying to diversify tech — and in turn possibly shrink the pay gap — but the lack of women in the industry has complex roots. Factors include a shortage of female engineers, a higher-than-average exit rate for women within the sector, possible bias that impacts hiring and promotions, a lack of female executives and board members, and uncomfortable work environments for women at some companies.

DONALD TRUMP: We went after Iraq, they did not knock down the World Trade Center. It wasn’t the Iraqis that knocked down the World Trade Center, we went after Iraq, we decimated the country, Iran’s taking over, okay.

But it wasn’t the Iraqis, you will find out who really knocked down the World Trade Center. Because they have papers in there that are very secret, you may find it’s the Saudis, okay? But you will find out.

Despite the various commissions that concluded that Iraq was not providing support to Al Qaeda and did not have a WMD program, a “large and undiminishing minority of Americans continues to believe these were both the case.” Among those surveyed:

– 38% believe that the US has found clear evidence in Iraq that Saddam Hussein was working closely with Al Qaeda.
– 31% believe that Iraq gave substantial support to Al Qaeda but was not involved with the September attacks while an additional 15% believe that Iraq was directly involved in carrying out the September 11 attacks.
– 26% believe that Iraq had WMDs just before the Iraq War.
– 16% believe that WMDs were found in Iraq.

Additionally, among those polled, the beliefs that Iraq was connected with the 9/11 attack and that Iraq had WMDs immediately prior to the Iraq War were highly correlated with support for the Iraq War.

Despite the various commissions that concluded that Iraq was not providing support to Al Qaeda and did not have a WMD program, a “large and undiminishing minority of Americans continues to believe these were both the case.” Among those surveyed:

– 38% believe that the US has found clear evidence in Iraq that Saddam Hussein was working closely with Al Qaeda.
– 31% believe that Iraq gave substantial support to Al Qaeda but was not involved with the September attacks while an additional 15% believe that Iraq was directly involved in carrying out the September 11 attacks.
– 26% believe that Iraq had WMDs just before the Iraq War.
– 16% believe that WMDs were found in Iraq.

Additionally, among those polled, the beliefs that Iraq was connected with the 9/11 attack and that Iraq had WMDs immediately prior to the Iraq War were highly correlated with support for the Iraq War.