The Massachusetts Democrat said Saturday that "a line was crossed" by the GOP presidential contender.
GOP presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy did not back down Sunday when questioned about comments he made during a campaign stop in Iowa Friday, calling Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) part of the “modern KKK.”
“I stand by what I said to provoke an open and honest discussion in this country,” Ramaswamy said during an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
For one simple and depressing reason - people click on it. That’s the dopamine button for modern media outlets online; those clicks are the cash register ringing.
If you want to figure out a way to elevate the discourse you have to disrupt the payment model - at the end of the day people do what gets them paid. Doubly so when the harm it causes is anonymized by operating in corporate aggregates.
I think you answered your own question. He’s playing the Trump bit. Saying extreme things to get news headlines and people talking about him. And it’s working to some extent.
Oh they learned alright. They do this not because they didn’t learn their lesson but because they did. Actual journalism and reporting is ALWAYS second to shit articles that are wrong in order to be the first one out the door, click bait the article title, showcase the fascists for the rage bait, etc.
They exist to make money and so the lessons learned revolve solely around finance. Whey would they learn anything else? This shit is working for them
During his Friday appearance in Iowa, Ramaswamy accused Pressley, the first Black woman elected to represent Massachusetts in Congress, of racism and compared her to “modern grand wizards” of the Ku Klux Klan for comments she made in 2019, saying: “We don’t need any more Black faces that don’t want to be a Black voice.” Pressley clarified her remarks at the time, noting on social media that she “speaking to the collective impact of lifting up one’s lived experience, whatever that is.”
Pressley, a progressive elected to the House in 2018, shot back on Saturday, calling the comments “harmful.”
“We typically don’t engage in these bad-faith attacks but yesterday a line was crossed. A GOP candidate referred to Ayanna as ‘a modern grand wizard of the KKK’ because she speaks out against racial injustice,” Pressley’s team said in a fundraising pitch. “This is backwards and harmful, but that is the point.”
You conveniently left out what immediately followed that quote in the article:
But on Sunday, Ramaswamy did not back down when he was repeatedly questioned about the comparison by Bash.
“I think it is the same spirit to say that I can look at you and based on just your skin color, that I know something about the content of your character, that I know something about the content of the viewpoints you’re allowed to express,” Ramaswamy said, calling the rhetoric “divisive.”
It is so weird watching national politics being conducted in terms more fitting to a playground argument. And not just in the US, we're getting a lot of it in the UK too. And I'm assuming it is similar everywhere the fash and their fellow travellers have gained some kind of platform in national politics.
There were never "grown ups" in charge. But I miss them at least pretending to be serious. Or maybe it's better that they're so laughably bad, instead of cloaking equally dire arguments in more convincing rhetoric?