[nickpp]

> When did we forgo

>> Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness

Right about the time we started screaming for government regulation every single instace we saw something we didn’t like/agree with in the world around us.

"It’s for your own good" and "Think of the children" were such convenient excuses to shift our responsibility from us to an ever growing government more than happy to protect us from ourselves.

[zasz]

That's ahistorical and just wrong. The government saw an opportunity to selectively target its most dissident elements during the 60s and it went for it: https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-rich...

"You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities," Ehrlichman said. "We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

[njarboe]

It's too bad this quote was published by Dan Baum in Harper's 22 years after Ehrlichman might have said it and after Ehrlichman was not alive to confirm. I would say the quotes around the text are not really appropriate for this most important of historical memories. It is not like something recorded on the Nixon tapes.

From the same CNN article we have the Ehrlichman children saying: "The 1994 alleged 'quote' we saw repeated in social media for the first time today does not square with what we know of our father. And collectively, that spans over 185 years of time with him," the Ehrlichman family wrote. "We do not subscribe to the alleged racist point of view that this writer now implies 22 years following the so-called interview of John and 16 years following our father's death, when dad can no longer respond. None of us have raised our kids that way, and that's because we were not raised that way."

[rosser]

One can not be the kind of racist that raises their children to hate, while still being the kind that leverages the racism in the broader culture against social and political movements that run counter to your own.

I'm not sure which is worse: one directly teaches hatred; the other takes advantage of that taught hatred to pursue its own ends, at the cost of fomenting and entrenching it.

[kirsebaer]

The Ehrlichman quote was first published by Dan Baum in his 1997 book, Smoke and Mirrors. This book came out before Ehrlichman died, and it included other interviews with Nixon staffers that supported the Ehrlichman quote. The book was reviewed by the New York Times.

[uxp100]

I believe that this quote was not published in that book, and instead he "remembered" the quote years after the book was published to put in a Harper's article. He chose not to publish it in the book because he was focused on first hand accounts of the time period, not people's statements in retrospect.

Do you know the page number this quote appears on?

[fwip]

"Our dad couldn't have implemented racist policies because we're not racist."