Monday, February 25, 2019

Mask on – Mask off


Krishang Nadgauda
Feb. 25th, 2019.

I’m not well acquainted with America’s political history and therefore, I do not know whether Nixon was a democrat or a republican. Not that it’s tough to decipher.

His ’68 rhetoric seems to mirror the political discourse in 2019. Politics is cyclical, of course. After a couple of unfortunate and not so unfortunate troughs and peaks, rhetoric has returned from Nixon to Trump. But can you blame a republican for governing like a republican? Do you?

The contents of Nixon’s RNC address of 1968 is what you’ll hear right wing pundits like Ben Shapiro preach on their podcasts, today. Who’s to grade them on the scale of good and evil, though? Rhetoric works much like a spring, in that the more you compress it, towards whichever side, the greater the resistance you will experience.

And I won’t be shocked if some Mitchell Jackson-like professor plays one of Trump’s speeches in class, a couple of decades down the line. Even then, black lives will continue to matter, not all white people will be prejudiced; hate will remain intangible and impossible to address.



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