Family Planning Doublethink

I'm still amazed at how often the sort of meme above still appears now that the "conservative" movement has gone full racist in their breathless approval of Donald Trump. We will dispense with providing examples of racism from Trump and his supporters, i.e. the Republican base, and move on to concept of holding two contradictory ideas in your head at once and accepting both as true. I found this one at the bottom of a reply thread posted by an epic troll calling himself "Dindu Nuffins". Sanger never said this, Snopes dot com debunked an even more spurious claim that she included Latins, Slavs, and Hebrew immigrants. I have been writing about Eugenics for three years now (example here), Margaret Sanger and the family planning movement in America has not been the focus of my research but it takes a few clicks to find that this is a fabrication, misattribution, or a lie; take your pick. The doublethink on the part of Trumpeters is holding the idea that black people are bad and that somehow a progressive movement headed by Sanger sought to exterminate black people which was also bad. That Planned Parenthood clinics are somewhat more common in poor neighborhoods that serve minority populations also means the existence of a systematic campaign to control or eliminate reproduction by those minorities through voluntary contraception and abortion services. Even that is not true, and the fact that 'winger's heads don't explode when they suppress the thought of "wait a minute, I'd actually really like it if welfare queens couldn't have kids" demonstrates a mastery of holding two contradictory ideas at once and using one's true desire to smear your opponent.

Just as a refresher I found this concise definition of doublethink as introduced in George Orwell's 1984.

In 1984, the Party used doublethink as part of its large-scale campaign of propaganda and psychological manipulation of its leadership and the public. Doublethink is the ability to hold two completely contradictory beliefs at the same time and to believe they are both true. Early in the book, doublethink refers to the ability to control your memories, to choose to forget something, as well as to forget about the forgetting process. Later on in the novel, as the Party implements its mind-control techniques, people ultimately lose the ability to form independent thoughts. Eventually, it becomes possible for the Party to convince the public of anything, even if it's the exact opposite of what the public already knows to be true.

Orwell defines doublethink as, ''To know and to not know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy is impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy. To forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself.''

Is it just conscious trolling to have right wingers say that all African-Americans are criminal, lazy, awful parents in one breath and then clutch their pearls over the insidious plot by liberals and Planned Parenthood to wipe African-Americans out? Or can they really put everything they said about "thugs" and "paid protesters" away, forgetting that they forgot? Robert Altemeyer described the ability of right wing authoritarian followers to compartmentalize their thoughts so that no matter how contradictory the ideas were they will never touch and spark cognitive dissonance in the individual. Or is it actually simpler than that? Is it just that when 'wingers are presented with an opportunity to "get" liberals or Democrats, they take it and don't really care what the contradiction is? In an online discussion with liberals, trolls put aside their racism to take a swing with something as absurd as the meme above just because they hate liberals more. It would be nice if they were honest with their bigotry, but this is where we are.

If you have the guts, I suggest checking out one of the new white supremacist sites to see the dichotomy. Those guys are for real, they really hate minorities and mean it. Most trolls I have encountered seem to see racism as a hobby, pointing out bad behavior by African-Americans or other minorities is just another tool to attack Democrats and liberals such as the oft-repeated line about Democrats being in charge of big cities where riots occur and crime is rampant. Yeah, that Rahm Emanuel is such a Progressive. Or when they whip out the "straying off the plantation" line. But that one is usually followed up by an exhortation to get off welfare, get a job, marry your baby momma, etc. So the partisan Republican racism is usually just way to get under the skin of liberals no matter what color it is.

Maybe it is a bizarre form of outreach to African-American Democrats by Republicans. After all, the two main sources of the myth of genocidal Margaret Sanger has come from Black Republicans. Ben Carson and Herman Cain tried using the fantasy of Planned Parenthood being out to get them in their respective presidential runs. I think the line got more rebuttals than support though; Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post, Bob Cesca on the Daily Banter, and Martha Raddatz of ABC all debunked the tenuous grasp of reality that Messrs Cain and Carson had on what Planned Parenthood does or even what Eugenics is. I wrote about it at the time of Carson's mumblings too. But why would 'winger trolls care about facts, empirical history, or even logic? Basically what 'winger trolls who paint Sanger and Planned Parenthood as evil and by extension any Democrat who supports PP are saying is "come over to our side black brothers and sisters, we only want to put you back in your proper place in society, the Democrats secretly want to exterminate you." The conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones may buy every rumor about evil Progressives and their social engineering and secret breeding programs, but it appears that African-American voters are not as gullible.

It is a strange though epic projection for 'wingers to claim that their liberal enemies are the ones who want to exterminate African-Americans. And it seems to be only the desire to not sink to that level that liberals defending PP and birth control don't point that out. Whether it is true doublethink, mere compartmentalization, or the fact that these are sociopathic liars who just don't give a damn that what they spew makes no sense makes very little difference. The past is still with us, it isn't even past. As Hillary Clinton slowly and inexorably moves toward the White House, this kind of woman-hating and racist bullshit is going to get worse and worse.