Tag: Max Boot

‘Lazy, stupid and dangerous’: This ex-Republican admits he enabled right-wing ‘populism’ — and it went completely off the the rails

Sometimes, it’s only when you’re on the outside looking in that you can perceive the real truth of a situation.

This appears to be the case for Max Boot, a conservative pundit who has become disillusioned with the right wing and the Republican Party since the rise of President Donald Trump. Boot has already publicly announced that he was wrong for supporting the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and he left the GOP in disgust at its current state. And in a new column for the Washington Post this week, he expressed more regret about his past in the conservative movement — in particular, his engagement in the anti-intellectual rhetoric common on the right.

“I used to think right-wing anti-elitism against the intellectuals — in contrast to the left-wing anti-elitism against the rich — was innocuous and even well-warranted,” he wrote. “While warning of the dangers of populism, I sometimes indulged in this kind of posturing myself. Like a lot of conservative eggheads, I imagined that, even though I lived among the coastal elite, I was expressing the wisdom of the heartland.”

View the complete June 12 article by Cody Fenwick on the AlterNet website here.

Ex-Republican reveals how the conservative movement is a total scam — and GOP voters are ‘Trump’s willing marks’

Max Boot has left the Republican Party, and he has some harsh words for the conservative movement he left behind.

The whole ideology has become a “racket,” he argues in a new op-ed for the Washington Post, a development he dates to 1996 when Fox News was launched. The latest revelations about the NRA, from the vice president Wayne LaPierre’s profligate spending to the various self-dealing projects spearheaded by the organization’s top executives, only hammer the point home.

Of course, the most obvious sign of the hollowness of conservatism is its figurehead, President Donald Trump. His supposed business success has been exposed as a sham, a sham on which he built a presidential campaign that had no other justification. His supposed religiosity is an obvious hoax. And his policies, supposedly designed to help the “forgotten man,” have only helped the rich get richer. He has no problem letting countless supporters “fall victim to his trade wars,” as Boot puts it, for the sake of nationalist crusade.

View the complete May 13 article by Cody Fenwick on the AlterNet website here.