The GOP's Big Lie is tearing America apart, as Trump expanded it to assault American democracy.A 40-year Republican Big Lie brought us to this crisis point in America.
When Ronald Reagan was running for president in 1980, one of his biggest boosters was the political heavy hitter Paul Weyrich, who was also a cofounder of the Heritage Foundation and multiple other rightwing think tanks and operations.
Weyrich told a group of political activist in a church basement in Dallas that the GOP was changing their strategy to win elections.
No longer would the Republican Party try to win elections through high-minded policy goals or wonky speeches about the importance of fiscal austerity, like Barry Goldwater had tried to do in 1964.
No more would the GOP embrace the goal that as many people vote as possible, and the GOP would no longer support widespread voter registration like Nixon had done in 1968 and 1972, cooperating with the League of Women Voters.
"I don't want everybody to vote," Weyrich bluntly told the assembled Republican operatives. "Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populous goes down."
The job going forward for the Republican Party would be to make it harder for people to vote rather than easier, particularly people who typically vote Democratic. In order to justify that, they had to create the Big Lie of the fraudulent voter.
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-Thom
