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Who called Romney a fascist? The only example I can find is a comment made around the time of the Democratic convention by a delegate from Kansas, but I'd bet you couldn't name him without looking. Maybe you can find something I can't, but I've done a bit of looking and I can't find any contemporaneous sources describing him as such. The "binders full of women" comment is a different kettle of fish entirely, largely because he embellished the story. He didn't go out and look for female appointees and compile a binder; it was handed to him by MassGAP, a bipartisan advocacy group. The further criticism was that he spent 25 years in business and evidently didn't know any qualified women.
As for the rest of your comment, the glib thing to say would be that Democrats are indifferent to white men while Republicans are indifferent to everyone else, but that would be overly reductive. In another post I made today about jury instructions I say that:
The rest of the post gives some additional context, but the upshot is that lawyers need to put themselves in the shoes of the people who will actually be acting on the jury instructions rather than automatically assume that since they make sense to them they'll make sense to anyone. And this is true for most of the legal system; if you have a system created and run by lawyers and judges you have a system that works great for lawyers and judges, even though when the system fails it ultimately isn't lawyers and judges who have to deal with the consequences. Any number of legal reforms over the years were met with stiff resistance from within the legal community along the lines of "that won't work because this is the way we've always done it and it simply can't be done any other way. This is true even for things that seem blindingly obvious in retrospect. In 1843 there was a murder at Yale University. A young man was charged with the crime, posted bond, then returned home to Pennsylvania, at which point the Connecticut prosecutors closed the case. In the view of the lawyers involved in the case, this was an appropriate resolution. That’s the way things were done. A bond is posted to ensure that the defendant appears at trial. If the defendant doesn’t appear for trial, he forfeits the bond, and the books are closed. It has to be done that way, the lawyers argued. Otherwise, what is the point of posting bond? The press had a different take. As the press saw it, the failure to prosecute the murderer because the murderer was wealthy enough to forfeit the bond was an outrage. The lawyers thought that the reaction of the press was ignorant. These people just didn’t understand the process. The press brought to it a different perspective—and the press was right, and the press won. The practice of abandoning warrants when a defendant posted bond and fled the jurisdiction was gradually curtailed.
What we've had in America, historically, is a system that works well for white men and varying degrees of less well for everyone else. And while it hasn't worked well for all white men, as a group white men have been in the best position. You can mock the Green New Deal statement, and I'm generally not a fan of this kind of posturing but it at least makes sense. It doesn't name white men, but every group named has a counterpart, and alleging indifference to the counterparts ranges from cringe-inducing to ridiculous:
The whole point is that some people in the US are in a worse position than the should be as a result of policies that were designed with indifference to them but which worked well for certain majorities, and that it is more just to change those policies so that we have a system that works equally well for everybody. One of the more recent frontiers in legal reform is getting rid of the plea bargain system. There are arguments to be made on both sides, and I'm not necessarily in favor of the idea, but one of the worst arguments against it is that it isn't feasible because there's no way we could have that many trials. Complaining about alleged Democratic indifference to white men is like arguing that the plea bargaining system is necessary because it's easier for the lawyers and judges.
No, and no one could name Myron Gaines without looking either.
Alas, I am not a randomly-assigned member of the group! Identitarianism is a corrosive poison that is utterly destructive to having a functional, pluralistic, multicultural society.
Anyways, my point is trying to provide an alternative to the perception that Democrats (writ broadly) hate white men. It isn't quite true, but that perception stems from this.
If you don't care about that perception and the effect it's having on politics... good luck.
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Hasn't the world itself been broadly a project that's been good to white men and middling towards other groups?
For fairly large stretches of American history I'd also imagine the gap between the average African American and African African was far more pronounced and positive in terms of lifespan and affluence than between the average US white male and the global average white male. Couldn't you thus argue that the American project has done more to uplift Africans than anything else?
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Are you pretending to not know what sort of channels in the Democratic coalition would, or are you pretending that the Democratic party and their allies have not been leveraging fascist / nazi themes into political attacks on Republicans for over half a century?
A two-word search of 'Romney fascist' can find this NPR story from the 2011 election cycle whose opening paragraph is-
Is this a direct accusation of fascist? No. However, a deflection to that would be willfully ignoring that raising the subject of the fascist preacher in this format is a indirect accusation via presenting the association in the first place, with the purpose of the insinuation being to encourage the perception and linkage of Romney and fascism. In a public media format where irrelevant information is excluded for reasons of space format, the fascism is a critically relevant
That Romeny was also running at the time in part on the merit of his religious morals, and the fascist raised by the NPR article is identified as preacher when [fascist] would have worked just as well as the noun as opposed to the adjective, is an additional form of the accusation-by-insinuation. The not-subtle subtext- but not direct accusation- to the audience is that the preacher's religious nature is relevant and provides another parallel to Romney, i.e. like to like that, which serves to reinforces the fascist linkage.
This and the Maher article were not the only format in which Nazi themes was raised against the Romney campaign, as media covered at the time. 'I didn't directly call them Nazis, I just referenced Nazis while condemning them, and I'm sorry if they take offense to that' is, again, a form of calling someone a Nazi. So is the earlier accusation-by-analogizing of Romeny aides or supporters- 'I wasn't accusing Romney of being a Nazi, I was just comparing the people Romney chooses to surround himself with the fascists who were Nazis.'
What a presenter choose to raise in the context of a denunciation is the context of the denunciation. Democratic politicians, partisans, and partners in the media were calling Romney a fascist, even if they were doing it indirectly and passive-aggressively. An indirect accusation is still an accusation.
You're missing my point. With the frequency I hear people complaining about Romney having been called a fascist, I'd expect there to be innumerable examples out there, as if it was something that was unavoidable at the time of the election. Instead, all you can come up with is an NPR article that doesn't directly call him a fascist, comments from three people you couldn't pick out of a police lineup (one of whom apologized), and comments made after the election about not Mitt Romney by a comedian who is known for making edgy remarks. What's even more curious is that you seem invested in defending this point, but you're almost certainly relying on the internet for your examples; I doubt you came to the conclusion that Romney was called a fascist because you read that NPR article upon publication or were paying attention to what Dick Harpootlian was saying in 2012.
More importantly, though, I don't know what the importance of pointing this out is. So five people called Romney a fascist in 2012, so what? What relevance does it have on contemporary politics. It's nowhere near the number of Republicans who were calling Obama a socialist or Marxist at the time, so it's not like one side has a monopoly on political hyperbole. The most common response I get is that people can't trust the Democrats when they call Trump a fascist because they said the same thing about Romney. Okay, and if these five examples didn't exist you would trust the Democrats and would have voted for Clinton, Biden, and Harris solely to prevent the rise of fascism in America? Come on, give me a break.
I assume that he came to that conclusion because there were a lot of things said like that, rather than because he saw those specific examples.
Obviously it would make no sense to track down the exact examples that he had actually seen.
Particularly if observations were not in an internet-capturable format... and if the ease of finding internet-captured variations by Democratic party officials, media allies, and high-visibility commentators stands alone as a point of 'yeah, this was a thing that did happen.'
The attempt to frame trivial-to-find examples as if they were the limit of instances is itself an example of the deny / downplay / dismiss technique which has long been used to complimentary effect of the false accusation strategies. Who accused Romney of being fascist, only five people accused Romney of being a fascist, the five examples are irrelevant because you wouldn't trust the Democrat accusations if they hadn't made them...
Well, yes, for the same reason that you would otherwise trust a robber if they didn't have a history of robbery.
If the Democratic party was the sort of party whose party members did not falsely accuse Romneyy of being a fascist, and also were not the sort of party members to later deny / downplay / dismiss that they falsely accused Romney, I might indeed put more weight in their warnings of fascism. But this would be because they would, by their nature, also be the sort of party that did not falsely accuse generations of opponents, and the deny / downplay / dismiss that they had falsely accused generations of opponents, and wouldn't be in thhe position as a party to now be falsely accusing people of fascism.
It's not the single instance, or even five instances, that make a pattern that ruins credibility. But the subset of examples only exist because the pattern of behavior exists. If the removal of the examples is the result of the removal of the pattern of activity, there would be no reason to hold the non-existent pattern of activity against the people who, in the imaginary hypothetical, didn't do it.
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