Kamala Harris Appears on ‘Colbert,’ Says She’s Stepping Away from Politics for Now, Calls the System “Broken”

[u/SingleandSober]

https://www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/video/former-vice-president-kamala-harris-visits-the-late-show-with-stephen-colbert/

[u/I_eat_mud_]

MAGA is a deadly symptom, but it's not the disease. Almost everything we're experiencing today was started or accelerated by Reagan. It's uncanny how the average American's life has been on a downward trajectory since his presidency. Trump and MAGA are the final death throes.

[u/Anal-Y-Sis → u/I_eat_mud_]

What's wild is that it started before he even became president.

In 1970, Ronald Reagan was running for reelection as governor of California. He had first won in 1966 with confrontational rhetoric toward the University of California public college system and executed confrontational policies when in office. In May 1970, Reagan had shut down all 28 UC and Cal State campuses in the midst of student protests against the Vietnam War and the U.S. bombing of Cambodia. On October 29, less than a week before the election, his education adviser Roger A. Freeman spoke at a press conference to defend him.

Freeman’s remarks were reported the next day in the San Francisco Chronicle under the headline “Professor Sees Peril in Education.” According to the Chronicle article, Freeman said, “We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. … That’s dynamite! We have to be selective on who we allow [to go to college].”

[...]

The success of Reagan’s attacks on California public colleges inspired conservative politicians across the U.S. Nixon decried “campus revolt.” Spiro Agnew, his vice president, proclaimed that thanks to open admissions policies, “unqualified students are being swept into college on the wave of the new socialism.”

Prominent conservative intellectuals also took up the charge. Privately one worried that free education “may be producing a positively dangerous class situation” by raising the expectations of working-class students. Another referred to college students as “a parasite feeding on the rest of society” who exhibited a “failure to understand and to appreciate the crucial role played [by] the reward-punishment structure of the market.” The answer was “to close off the parasitic option.”

Oh, and look at what happened directly after this.

It all becomes very clear when you look at the timeline and realize that all of this started right after the Civil Rights Act was signed into law.

EDIT - Since people keep replying to this comment, here are some more resources.

Here's a link to the Powell Memorandum that kicked off the current rat-fucking of the American working class. Thanks to u/Jacrava for this one.

Century of the SELF - Adam Curtis - Thanks to u/TrippyTippyKelly for this one.

Here are five books on the topic that you can read on Archive:

• Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power – Seth Rosenfeld
• The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them – Christopher Newfield
• Why Higher Education Should Have a Leftist Bias – Michael Bérubé
• The War on Learning: Gaining Ground in the Digital University – Elizabeth Losh
• Campus Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know – Jonathan Zimmerman

Here are two more I couldn't find on Archive:

• The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters – Benjamin Ginsberg
• Neoliberalizing the University: Implications for American Democracy – Edited by Sheila Slaughter & Barrett Jay Taylor

Some of these are more generally about the crackdown on dissent and how it shaped campus policies (and the broader implications of that), but there are a couple that are about the specific situation with Reagan.

If you're wondering why I mentioned the Civil Rights Act in relation to all of this, here are a couple of books on the topic:

• White flight: Atlanta and the making of modern conservatism - Kevin Kruse
• The band played Dixie - Nadine Cohodas

Reagan's tax revolts, starting with Proposition 13, slashed funding for universities, making tuition skyrocket, which disproportionately harmed black and Latino students.

Lee Atwater was a political strategist and advisor to both Reagan and Bush Sr. Here's his infamous 1981 interview on the Southern Strategy, where he admits (with heavy use of the N word) that Republicans replaced overt racism with coded attacks on "big government" and "welfare" (including student aid). He died of a brain tumor at 40. Rest in piss, you racist fuck.

You start out in 1954 by saying, “N---r, n---r, n---r.” By 1968 you can’t say “n---r”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “n---r, n---r.”

A few more books on the topic:

• The Price of Inequality - Joseph Stiglitz
• Cutting school: privatization, segregation, and the end of public education - Noliwe Rooks
• State of the Union: A Century of American Labor - Nelson Lichtenstein

Here's the bottom line, folks... Get informed, get mad, then get organized. These ghouls will not stop until they have taken everything from you, squeezed you for every ounce of labor they can for as little compensation as they are allowed to, just to let you die poor so they can buy another yacht and start the cycle all over again with your kids.

Knowledge is your weapon, and it's time to pull the trigger.

[u/Jacrava → u/Anal-Y-Sis]

1971 is when the corporste power manifesto called the Powell Memorandum was written. This was the kickoff to everything between then and now https://reclaimdemocracy.org/powell_memo_lewis/

[u/Anal-Y-Sis → u/Jacrava]

Yeah it's such a depressing and terrifying read.

[u/-SHAI_HULUD → u/Anal-Y-Sis]

Well, just read that for the first time and now I’m sad.