Since so many people are acting like they don't understand the importance of messaging and insist that they don't understand what we mean when we say stop using the WORDING "defund the police", let's look at some GOP messaging. A master of this was Lee Atwater. He said: 1/?

Atwater referred to this as "coded language". It's the dog whistle politics. Language so coded that only the target understands it. Scandal explained this quite well. But we refuse to learn this. 2/?

When the GOP wanted to take control of women's uteruses because they need to stop the rate of abortion to slow the blackening and browning of the country, they didn't say we need stop white women from having abortions. Nooooo. They called it "pro-life". 3/?

When Trump wanted to support WHITE nationalism, he didn't call it WHITE nationalism, he called it "nationalism". 4/?

When the GOP realized that unions played a role in racist whites still voting Democratic because it affected their money, they knew they needed to bust up the unions. But they didn't call it union busting. They called it "right to work". 5/?

When Reagan wanted too get rid of welfare b/c it was helping too many crawl into the middle class, more white folks actually, he counted on the tried & true, racism. He spoke of the "Welfare Queen". He never called her the "Black Welfare Queen", but people knew what he meant. 6/?

I'm old enough to remember one of the origins of the phrase "family values". It was when the uprising happened as a result of the Rodney King verdict. VP Dan Quayle pulled a twofer here. Sexism & Racism. 7/?

Back then, conservatives hated the freedom that women, especially white women, were getting from being more educated and getting jobs. It meant that they didn't have to stay with their abusive husbands. 8/?

That same year, the show "Murphy Brown" had a the namesake character have a baby on her own and out of wedlock. This upset conservatives. 9/?

So Dan Quayle said, that the reason people were uprising after the Rodney King verdict b/c of portrayals of women like Murphy Brown having children out of wedlock and a breakdown in "family values" 10/?

Quayle did not outright say that women are becoming too independent and Black people are not staying in their place, but it was a coded language that spoke to white men and offended women and Black people 11/?

Then after that conservatives started reminiscing about a "simpler" time with better social mores. The time of Ossie and Harriet, where women were property and Black people "knew their place". 12/?

And for the last 6 decades the GOP has modified this message into several iterations. They call control of women's uteruses "pro-life". 13/?

And because of the fact that they are better masters of messaging than the left is, they are winning. Roe v. Wade, affirmative action are likely to be overturned. The Voting Rights Act is gutted, they have conservative judges. 14/?

But the left? Well we just stuck on stupid. We just outright tell our enemy what we want to do even though we know it helps our enemy. Letting the righteousness become the enemy of the good. 15/?

Though I have criticized Bernie Sanders, I have liked him since he was a Congressman. We need people like him to be a beacon of what should be. That said, we also need people who can get shit done. Bernie is not that person as evidenced by his record 16/?

I have watched you so-called "progressives" seem disappointed Biden won b/c you wanted to be able to say: "Bernie would have won". NO! HE WOULDN'T HAVE. If Trump was able to get some voters to believe Biden was a "socialist" what do you think he could have done with Bernie? 17/?

What the GOP is good at doing is getting their hardliners to sit back in the cut while the seemingly less right folks get elected. They get the numbers in the chambers of the House & Senate, then they enact hardline policies 18/?

It has worked for them for 60 years. And we have been doing the same damn thing for 60 years and have been losing miserably. The right thinks about the courts, we don't. 19/?

The so-called "woke" crowd is putting the everybody to sleep. And by that I mean the approach is leading to us all possibly having a permanent dirt nap. I have seen more regression in the last 10 years than progress. But you refuse to change strategy. 20/20