This is scary but not surprising:
Rachel Maddow uncovers the people behind Arizona’s new immigration law: neo-Nazis, white supremacists, nativists, and eugenicists. Lovely.
The main guy taking credit for the new law is Kris Kobach — a Birther who’s running for Kansas secretary of state. But his Birtherism is the least offensive thing about Kobach.
His campaign Website brags, “Kobach wins one in Arizona.” He’s also an attorney for the Immigration Reform Law Institute, the legal arm of an immigration group called FAIR, the Federation for American Immigration Reform.
[….]For nine of the first years of FAIR’s existence, the group reportedly received more than $1 million in funding from something called the Pioneer Fund. The Pioneer Fund describes itself as based “in the Darwinian-Galtonian evolutionary tradition and eugenics movement.” For the last 70 years, the Pioneer Fund has funded controversial research about race and intelligence, essentially aimed at proving the racial superiority of white people. The group’s original mandate was to promote the genes of those “deemed to be descended predominantly from white persons who settled in the original 13 states prior to the adoption of the Constitution.
Crazy eugenics type stuff is surprisingly mainstream. Bobo has quoted Steve Sailer on occasion and William Saletan of Slate based a series of articles on some white supremacist propaganda that he mistook for science.
I suspect that as we near a future where white, non-Latino Americans no longer are a majority, we will see more and more of this. The idea of racial superiority is seductive — it’s hard for me to see so-called conservative intellectuals resisting it, especially when demographics start to hinder conservative political aims.
Zifnab
In before “We’re not racist!”
Rommie
The Sheriff is nearer..
MikeJ
Don’t forget Sully and The Bell Curve.
Kiril
Actually, I bet in the future, anyone who basically looks whitish and acts a certain way will be considered white, no matter their heritage. Zack from Saved By the Bell, for instance, is half-Indonesian, so he’s mixed race, but as far as anyone is concerned (except maybe him and his family) he’s white.
licensed to kill time
Mirror mirror on the wall
Who’s the FAIRest of them all?
Snow White People, that’s who!
beltane
Jeb Bush has come out against this law. How long until the teabaggers turn on him?
Mark S.
Don’t leave out the Derb!
Zifnab
Racial superiority is only seductive to the ignorant and alone. Anyone that’s taken a college course with 40 or more people, anyone that’s worked in a moderately large office, anyone that’s got a social life, knows how ridiculous the idea is.
You have to be truly cloistered – both geographically and intellectually – to assume there is any significant intellectual difference between two different people based solely on who has the deeper tan. And as for physical superiority – turn on a god damn football game. Preconceptions – destroyed.
It’s a medieval concept for medieval people.
Mike
Here is Katie Halper on how to make the Arizona law more effective:
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/04/27/arizona_immigration_law_is_great_lets_make_it_even/
Arizona Immigration Law is Great! Let’s Make it Even Greater!
By Katie Halper – April 27, 2010, 4:39PM
“Friday, Governor Jan Brewer (R-AZ) signed an immigration bill which requires law enforcement to demand immigration papers from anyone who they have a “reasonable suspicion” is in the country illegally. Asking someone to carry around papers is cruel and unusual. How are people expected to not forget or misplace them? A much more humane and efficient policy would be requiring people to wear arm bands stating their immigration status. There could be different symbols for different statuses. For example, a star could symbolize U.S. born, a triangle could symbolize naturalized citizen. Of course this is no guarantee either, as arm labels can fall off or get lost too. So if need be, we can consider some kind of permanent branding. Perhaps a numbers system that indicates a person’s origins and allows us to keep track of them? “
Midnight Marauder
Birthers. Is there no end to the crazy shit these people can come up with?
Gregory
“Galtonian”?!
AxelFoley
@Rommie:
Obama: “Excuse me while I whip this out.”
Jay Arcey
But didn’t Jonah Goldberg prove eugenics was a Progressive concept? I’m confused . . .
handy
@Mark S.:
He said that? (No, really…he actually said that stuff?) Words fail.
Mike
Greg Palast has a slightly different take:
http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/heather/greg-palast-arizona-immigration-issue-rea-0
“….What moved GOP Governor Jan Brewer to sign the Soviet-style show-me-your-papers law is the exploding number of legal Hispanics, US citizens all, who are daring to vote — and daring to vote Democratic by more than two-to-one. Unless this demographic locomotive is halted, Arizona Republicans know their party will soon be electoral toast. Or, if you like, tortillas….”
Worth a read
jeffreyw
Damned half breeds.
meh
There is also a long and winding money trail between the Eugenics right/Neo Nazis/et al and the Evangelical right. The Evangelicals, specifically guys out of New Mexico, Detroit, and Colorado Springs have been funneling money into institutes like FAIR for years looking for them to produce “scientific evidence” (see, also – sentences with big words that makes whites look betterz) of genetic superiority. This is racial separatist stuff, plain and simple. SPLC, through Hatewatch has been tagging these dicks for a while now.
Bud
As I white guy myself, I love the way some other white people strut around acting superior because of western history and culture. While I revere that history and would not want to live under any other system, I’m smart enough to realize that the ability to push buttons on a remote does not make me superior. It’s not as if any of these yahoos could actually invent and build a remote, or a longbow for that matter. The fact that a member of their race did does not make them superior (and in the case of the remote, it was probably an asian who invented it, but I’m not certain – not that it matters anyway.)
The beautiful irony is that white supremecists are probably the worst examples of the white race imaginable.
Calouste
Kris Kobach from Kansas. You can’t make this up, can you?
Bill Section 147
Race and God are such broad terms. We all think what we think when we say either one but while everyone else hears something different they usually assume we mean the same thing that they hear.
The guy pounding his fist and shouting about “them” doesn’t register as “me” for a lot of people.
I know I am not descended from Real America before the abomination known as the Constitution. I bet the Majority of “white” Arizonans are not the “us” that the Pioneer Fund is calling “us” either.
Makes me proud to be “them.”
Quicksand
Who is
JohnFrancis Galton?twiffer
racism is typically based on skin color. skin color pretty much only determines how long it takes you to get a sunburn (some other stuff too, but we’ll gloss over it for now).
bitterness at having to use SPF 30+ sunscreen is no basis for any sort of claims of superiority; certainly not a basis for legislature.
i will never understand these people.
El Cid
By the way, the anti-immigration racist group FAIR is not the same as the liberal media watchdog group FAIR linked to in this comment as a reference.
Calouste
@beltane:
Well, Jeb’s kids are going to be pulled over under this law. Rubio has come out against it as well, not unsuprisingly, although that is going to out some emphasis on the fact that he is not as white as the teabagger wave he is riding to the GOP nomination would like.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
They could barely put up with white Clinton, and now Obama has done drove them round the bend. Conservative political aims have always been nothing much more than attaining and keeping power and control, once you peel away the talking points. That goes to the personal level all the way up to governing this nation and is also tied directly to accumulating monetary wealth to keep the wheels to power greased, in service of gaining (and stealing) more personal and tribal wealth. A Krebs cycle for producing Oligarchs. IYW.
The details of those aims take second seat and losing that power and control, or the prospect of not getting it at least some of the time will make them crazier by the day, and somebody, or something, will feel the brunt of the rage from their disempowerment. And none so easy as the obvious, or skin color, with a degree of cultural “different”.
JGabriel
DougJ:
B-b-but, Jonah Goldberg told me only liberals are into eugenics. He wrote a book about it and everything!
.
Crashman
@Gregory: I expect we’ll be hearing this term a lot more often in the future. It’s got a certain ring to it.
Jay C
@Gregory:
“Galtonian” from this guy: Sir Francis Galton – Victorian polymath/genius and coiner of the term “eugenics”.
meh
@JGabriel:
http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-files/profiles/john-tanton
—
As a side note, I’ve worked with a group that does informal research on these guys (and I am using a broad brush to describe the militia/eugenics/white power/american taliban/etc) and you would be fucking shocked to see how many times these guys intersect with “mainstream” conservative politicians.
gbear
…where all the children are above average.
JGabriel
@beltane:
The teabaggers have already turned on the Bushes:
Remember, George is a liberal who crashed the economy and bailed out the bankers. And Jeb married one of those people – you know, one of those brown Catholic latinas who think they’re wise.
So Jeb only came out against the bill because he’s a brown-lady lover.
(/teabagger “logic”)
.
Cat Lady
I hate this law and everything it engenders, but am loving that the ignorant sumbitches feel compelled to drop the masks and put their cards white face up on the table. Sunlight, disinfectant, and all that. In the meantime my fear is that like in all situations where there are unintended consequences, someone who never asked for it will end up paying for the sins of the fucktards.
ciotog
Wow, that’s pretty strict. That would exclude most German-Americans and Scandinavian-Americans. When you’re more willing to parse the Northern Europeans than Hitler was, that’s saying something.
Brachiator
Wouldn’t this exclude Swedes, Irish, Italians, and Poles, among many others?
This is some deeply drug addled goofy BS.
And “descended predominately….” Wow. Just wow. A whitey “one drop” rule. Consider the people who might not be up to snuff, racially: Keanu Reeves ( Reeves’s mother is English, and his father is an American of Hawaiian, Chinese, Portuguese and English descent); Dean Cain (Cain is of mainly Scottish descent, with a quarter Breton, French Canadian, Irish and Japanese); or Steve Jobs (Jobs’ biological parents [were] Joanne Simpson and Abdulfattah Jandali—a Syrian Muslim).
Cat Lady
@ciotog:
It would also exclude Tom Tancredo. Irony. It’s what’s for dinner.
Joe Lisboa
As someone with childhood roots in Petoskey, Michigan can I be the first to call this Tanton guy the douchebag he is? Okay, if not the first then I’ll gladly wait in line to do so.
Gregory
@Jay C:
Ah, I thought it was some kind of weird Ayn Rand reference. When in fact it’s even weirder.
Allan
@meh: You mean like this?
h/t to Tim Wise via Facebook
The Main Gauche of Mild Reason
Arizona SB 1070: the GOP killing act of 2010. Seriously, did they not learn the lesson from Pete Wilson’s anti-immigrant crap of the 90s? They managed to turn CA from a swing state to a solid Democratic state based on just that one issue.
JGabriel
Greg Palast via Mike:
So Brewer signs a bill guaranteed to piss off the Hispanic population and push the vast majority into the Democratic column?
It’s almost enough to make me say, “Thanks, Jan!”
If it weren’t for all the xenophobia, harassment, and violence it’s sure to engender, that is.
.
Cerberus
Know what this shit just reminded me of? Reading up on the history of South Africa and the bat-shit crazy stuff the white supremacists did there both when the Brits tried to put the halt on the worst excesses and again near the end when outside pressure was getting unsustainable. Well, that and Jim Crow South.
Basically, white people have the worst history in the world dealing with situations where they were top-dawg and now political trends and demographics start looking bad for them. Whenever it looks like the political system is opening up and the “darkies” may have a little too much political power, the white power movements start ramping up terrorism campaigns like this or the Night Riders to try and scare away the inevitable future and try and force a nice system where they might lack the numbers and power they used to enjoy, but can still dominate.
For the white supremacists, the writing has been on the wall for awhile on the changing demographics in America and the election of Obama was like a bar yelling “Last Call”. They feel they might not have many more election cycles as the big cheez, so they’re trying to burn as much shit down as they can on the way out and are seeing what sneaky shit and terrorism campaigns they can whip up to prevent the inevitable for a little longer.
Power never gives without a fight, sadly.
I hate that I arbitrarily share a skin color with these fuckers.
Bill Section 147
@Mike: When you are at war you fight to the death. A long time ago the inner circle of Republican thinking outlined groups that support Democrats.
That is the hit list decision tree. Support Democratic Party? If Yes, then death.
The war on public education is really the war against the Democratic Party supporting Teachers Union. It has never been about anything else. Sure they play along to get broader support on other side issues like prayer in school. But it is at its heart an attack on Democratic Party supporting institutions.
Christianity. Abortion. Women’s Rights. Gay Rights. Equal Rights. None of those things matter philosophically to the current Republican Party. They have weaponized everything.
For that group it is about winning. It isn’t racism (though they count many racists among them). It isn’t about ideas or truth. It is all, “Go Team!”
gbear
@Brachiator:
Some of the Scandinavians in northern MN would put up one hell of a fight over that. The 13 colonies were late-arrivers as far as they’re concerned.
meh
@Allan:
winner winner chicken dinner – let’s show him what he’s won…
Jason “J.T.” Ready, 34
Mesa, Ariz.
A member of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps as well as the founder of the prominent, Arizona-based nativist extremist organization Americans First, Jason “J.T.” Ready advocates deadly force to stop Mexicans from crossing the U.S. border illegally. “I firmly believe in having a minefield across the border,” he says in a widely distributed video. “This is 100% effective.”
The past president of the Mesa Community College Republican Club and current Maricopa County Republican precinct committeeman, Ready is deeply involved in mainstream conservative politics. He’s also an outright neo-Nazi. Ready spoke at a rally put on by the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement in Omaha, Neb., last September (where he was billed as an “Arizona Republican activist”) and appeared at the neo-Nazi National Vanguard’s “Winterfest” gathering in Phoenix last December. He regularly posts to white nationalist online forums, including NewSaxon, where last December he offered this charming observation on the root causes of illegal immigration: “The truth is that negroids screw monkeys and rape babies in afreaka [sic]. Then stupid white man who licks kosher jew rear lets negroids in. … Stop Negroid immigration and integration now!!! Nature will take care of the rest.” – Jason “J.T.” Ready
In 2006, Ready ran for Mesa City Council. He made headlines that March when he fired a pistol at a Latino man armed with a BB gun. Later, his campaign derailed when, shortly after Ready volunteered to act as master of ceremonies at the Mesa Veteran’s Day parade, it came to light that Ready had been court-martialed and drummed out of the Marines.
glynor
Interestingly, that “white supremacist propaganda” that William Saletan of Slate mistook for science? It was written by J. Philippe Rushton. Who is J. Philippe Rushton? Well, since 2002 he has been the head of the Pioneer Fund.
In 2000, the Pioneer Fund actually awarded fully 73% of its grants to the Charles Darwin Research Institute which is run by whom? J. Philippe Rushton, of course.
The Fund gave the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) a total of $1.3 million between 1985 and 1994, and only stopped due to negative publicity linking the Pioneer Fund money to ads purchased by FAIR as part of the California Prop 187 campaign.
JGabriel
@The Main Gauche of Mild Reason:
Which part of “Know-Nothing” are you failing to get?
.
Jay C
@Bud:
Actually, the remote control was invented by a couple of white guys: Eugene Polley and Robert Adler; working for Zenith in the mid-’50s. Adler was Jewish, though (and Austrian-born refugee from the Nazis), so maybe semi-qualifies as “sort-of-white”.
freelancer
via Wonkette:
Iowa Congressional Candidate, Pat Bertroche:
Why not just make all Hispanics sew little yellow sombreros on their clothes?
But healthcare is a slippery slope to fascism.
[headdesk]
slag
@JGabriel:
Not according to this dude:
John Cole is correct. The teabaggers are Republicans. Crazy right wing Republicans. But that’s what makes them Real Americans, so it’s ok. Just like it is for Bobo, Steve Sailer, et al. They’re just representing all those common folk who hang out at the Applebee’s salad bar.
Alex
Can I just make a plea, that it’s kind of off-putting to hear people say “White people” this and “white people” that, especially after trashing Derb and Murray for doing the same thing with other races. White or black or brown, it’s all just pigmentation. There’s no inherent social or psychological meaning to it beyond what people invent, and sometimes it seems like people here don’t realize that.
Elie
@General Egali Tarian Stuck:
“That goes to the personal level all the way up to governing this nation and is also tied directly to accumulating monetary wealth to keep the wheels to power greased, in service of gaining (and stealing) more personal and tribal wealth. A Krebs cycle for producing Oligarchs”
Now that is a truth penetrating all the way to one’s mitochondria, lol!
Warren Terra
How is it possible that the racist anti-immigrant Federation for American Immigration Reform and the solidly left-wing Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting share an acronym? You’d think trademark law would have fixed this long ago, much as happened for the WWF.
In any case, keep in mind that fair.org is the latter, the lefties. I don’t agree with them about everything (they like Alexander Cockburn, for heaven’s sake), but their basic media criticism is great and whatever their sins they’re neither anti-immigrant nor racists.
JGabriel
@Cerberus:
Honestly, we’re not alone. Historically, Japanese and Hindu nationalists – and, to be fair, some Islamic fundamentalists, like the Taliban – pretty much play that particular game at our level too.
.
thomas Levenson
Slightly OT, but the link to FAIR given in the post led to this gem of malicious understatement:
Indeed he is, and that’s the nicest way anyone has said it in my hearing.
Heh.
Cat Lady
@gbear:
The Pilgrims are the johnny-come-latelies to the Spanish, too.
Mart
I am a Son of the American Revolution (I got documents) and I will sell my pure white seed to the Pioneer Fund for breeding purposes. The fee is $25,000/load. (I would charge more but I am pretty old and the quality may be suspect.)
Allan
@Alex: A great place to begin your journey is with Tim Wise’s White Like Me, available through Amazon and wherever better books are sold.
Midnight Marauder
@Alex:
Really, this plea seems better suited to the large scores of white people who are actually pushing through such legislation. Unless I am mistaken, of course, and this is all really just a plot by the Caesar Chavez Freedom Brigade for reasons that escape me. But I think most people here understand that not all white people are ignorant, reactionary bigots.
Just this group of charming lads and lasses.
Bud
@ Jay C
JGabriel
@Slag, quoting Tom Schaller:
Sure, as long as you’re talking about global warming or war. But as soon as you point out that Bush instituted the bailout, they suddenly say, “Oh, well, he’s really a liberal on that issue.”
Conservatism can never fail, it can only be failed.
.
Cerberus
@JGabriel:
I guess that just goes back then to the “power doesn’t let go without a fight” bit then.
It just seems sometimes like White people manage to get that extra little shiv in long after the numbers look bad for them. The germans parading an ideal that the vast majority of the country didn’t fit, the Boers in South Africa holding total control despite being vastly outnumbered, and Southeastern USA managing to use anything and everything to suppress black votes from the minute blacks were “technically” allowed to vote.
But yeah, hardly a crime contained by one racial makeup and oppressive minorities have certainly oppressed racial minority majorities in other countries where there were no “white” people.
So yeah, “power doesn’t let go without a fight”.
Bud
@ Jay C
Thanks for the information. Hearing that a Jewish guy helped invent the remote control should send a few of these jerk-offs over the edge!
SGEW
I can’t believe that B.O.B. hasn’t shown up on this thread. Was he banned again or something and I missed it?
Mark S.
Are the morons at Reason figuring out that the teabaggers aren’t a bunch of libertarians?
Their stupidity is really breathtaking.
via
Albatrossity
You might be interested in this website, which documents the zany antics of Kris Kobach. He’s a wingnut’s wingnut, irritating even Kansas Republicans with his insistence on a “loyalty oath” while he was the state party chairman.
The Moar You Know
@Cerberus: It ain’t just white people that have that problem. It’s any alpha group that’s getting forcibly demoted from the top spot. Read up on the history of Haiti as a classic, horrifying example. Or Algeria. Or Rwanda. Or modern Ireland. Or….well, I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this.
We all like being in the driver’s seat. We all hate getting pushed out of it. Proof that there really aren’t that many differences between the races after all, amirite?
licensed to kill time
@SGEW:
Yes, he was. BOB showed up on one of the Confederate History Month threads with his variation of arbeit macht frei and got banished. I don’t know if it is permanent or not, but it’s been a while now.
Dee Loralei
@JGabriel: If it’s about legal immigrants being able to vote, doyou think that citizens having the right/obligation to force police to check papers please will be wild at the polls on election day? Will it intimidate Hispanics from going to the polls, or will it make them go to the polls with all their papers in order and for none of them to miss the vote?
I’m not saying that well. I know Rachel made a good point that the publics part of the law was so the right-winger law firms can make steady income off suing municipalities. But is Pallast also right that it is about Nov?
Alex
@Mark S.:
A feather. You can knock me over with one.
And was there ever an “original tea party”? Similar to turtles, I can only ever remember it being racist cranks all the way down.
Third Eye Open
Angry Canadians, who knew?: “what exactly are the great historical accomplishments of “your” race that make you proud to be white? Capitalism? Slavery? Genocide? Sitcoms? Guns? War? Pollution? Addiction? NAFTA? Thigh-Master? This is your fucking white-history, my “friend”. So why don’t we start making a history worth being proud of and start fighting the real fucking enemy”
JGabriel
@Cerberus: Don’t get me wrong. There are definitely embarrassing, evil, things that only white people would do: like go to the moon, and, once we got there, play golf.*
But, yeah, the “not letting go of power” trick is pretty widespread among cultures.
(*h/t Lester Bangs)
.
bemused
@freelancer:
Sheesh, it gets confusing. All types of wingnuts have been freaking out thinking the gov’t is going to microchip them & now this nutjob wants to microchip people. Of course, he doesn’t mean white people but still, how are the microchipphobes going to process this? I suppose it would make perfect sense to them as long as they weren’t the ones who got the microchips.
JGabriel
@Dee Loralei:
I wouldn’t think so. The people who can vote are all citizens. They may (and, until this law is overturned, probably should) bring birth certificates, passports, extra ID, to the polls with them, just in case.
But they’re citizens. If I were citizen of Hispanic heritage in AZ, this law wouldn’t intimidate me into not voting; it would goad me.
.
JGabriel
Iowa Congressional Candidate, Pat Bertrochevia via freelancer:
Canadians beware!
.
Da Bomb
Steve Sailer is filled with the stinkest of crap. I had no idea who that idiot was until I stumbled upon his site and he was going off about how White men don’t find black women attractive. Then he went on to talk about how black women look like men and are subhuman.
Somebody jumped on the site and made an ass out of Sailer. But that doesn’t stop his hate speak.
He is a first class asshole and there is a special place in hell for him.
WereBear
I believe what I learned from Guns, Germs, and Steel: European domination is a function of their comparatively advanced technology, which was the fruits of their geographic location, not any particular “attribute” of their genetic heritage.
Pale people are pale because they need to make vitamin D at northern latitudes. Maybe a short growing season, sailing abilities to get fish (vitamin D again!) and the large body to hold in the heat in the snow all combined to create some kind of rowdy raiding mentality, but once again, it was created by environmental pressures, not the other way around.
Implying that the melanin-challenged have some sort of corner on rapacious behavior is, itself, a racist statement.
Randy P
Wait… they weren’t states prior to ratifying the Constitution, were they? So does anyone qualify as a “white person who settled in the original 13 states prior to the adoption of the Constitution?”
slag
@JGabriel: This is true.
I just wish they would get called on their bullshit more often when they spout off about pretending to care about the deficit and government spending and yet still, by and large, love the guy who took us from a surplus to a deficit in under 8 years. It’s the single issue they consistently claim to coalesce around, and yet their supposed concern appears to be mostly fabrication. In every respect.
It’s also just a coincidence that an above average percentage of teabaggers believe that Obama wasn’t born in America. It pisses me off that such a large and vocal portion of this country is composed of deranged, paranoid people, and yet, I’m supposed to care about what they have to say. Whatever they’re saying is demonstrably not what they’re meaning. So, frankly, I can’t bring myself to care about what they’re saying. These people need a new therapist, not a new president.
Omnes Omnibus
@Randy P: People who lived in the the States during the Articles of Confederation?
LuciaMia
I just don’t get this. The same idiots who are screaming about ‘Freedom!!’ will then turn around and demand some kind of ‘oath’ that’s the norm in a totalitarian state.
Guess they have their own individual, creative definition of ‘freedom.’
And I guarantee, it doesn’t include you.
Jay
@LuciaMia:
Yes, and it all depends on who the “individual” is….
Kryptik
@Mark S.:
Holy sweet christ, the gall.
Though I’m iffy…did he actually say that in front of the student association, or just…mailed it to them? Because I’m not sure the kind of gall it would take to actually stand up to a group of students like that and flat out tell them ‘You’re biologically inferior because of your race, and that makes you inherently dumber than us, that’s why there’s disparity’.
Brachiator
@gbear:
Ah, but Minnesota wasn’t one of the original states (well, maybe if you count that special episode of A Prairie Home Companion), but I take your point.
Good catch. These goobers mix up “colonies” and “states.” Either way they seem to be in step with those tea baggers who want to re-invent an America which corrects the errors of the Founders in even potentially allowing for “undesirables.”
Just pathetic.
The Grand Panjandrum
I blame this all on Obama for not authorizing the release of his long form birth certificate. If he had just done it January 2009 none of this would have happened. We would have single payer health care, the economy would be booming, the wingers and Teabaggers would have been satisfied, the bankster would all be in the Federal pen, and the entire world would now be at peace. Damn! See how easy all this shit really is, man.
burnspbesq
@beltane:
What time is it? 6:20 Eastern? Give it until 7:00.
Mark S.
@Kryptik:
This is what he claims to have said at the symposium or whatever the hell it was.
That’s not how I understand the science of it.
JGabriel
@gbear:
Some of the Hispanic population in AZ could no doubt say much the same thing. There has been a Hispanic population in AZ since before the US formed. Wikipedia:
.
liberty60(Veteran, Great War of Yankee Aggression)
@The Moar You Know:
Which is why I am cool to the use of the word racist; not that it is technically innacurate, its just that the word has, in American usage, a very narrow, very specific meaning.
Specifically, a Southern, usually potbellied man who could be played by Strother Martin.
Which is why so many people get huffy and indignant when you use the term racist- why, I’m no Klansman they’ll exclaim.
But racism is tribalism, and whether it is practiced by the Boers/Afrikkaners, or the Serbs/ Croats, or the Hutus/ Tutsis, or the Indonesians and Chinese, or the Han and the Mandarin, it all comes down to the same equation- “You can’t trust those folks! They’re gonna take our jobs and steal our wimmin!”
Citizen_X
@LuciaMia: The same idiots who are screaming about ‘Freedom!!’
Or the same idiots who are screaming about ‘police states’…
Or the same idiots who are screaming about ‘government-implanted microchips’…
Be sure of it: whenever a wingnut spouts one of his paranoid fantasies, you are seeing a demonstration of p-r-o-j-e-c-t-i-o-n.
MoeLarryAndJesus
Bobo’s not the only NYT columnist with his nose up Steve Sailer’s ass. Douthat had Sailer on his blogroll for most of his tenure with the Atlantic. For some reason Sailer’s listing disappeared without explanation not long before Douthat got his NYT gig. Imagine that.
Of course Ross has had his racist moments, too – like when he referred to a black woman in post-Katrina New Orleans as a “welfare duchess” because she lived in subsidized housing but had a TV Ross thought was too large. He’s a white supremacist prick just like the rest.
gbear
The invention of PopTarts.
Midnight Marauder
@The Grand Panjandrum:
You are kidding, of course. But as I posted in another thread today, the Arizona Hispanic Republicans actually made that claim in their response to the passage of Arizona SB 1070:
All italics mine.
And hilarious.
JK
Doug,
“O Pioneers” might make for a catchy title of a blog posting, but I’ve never read anything suggesting that Willa Cather was a racist.
Bobby Thomson
@Albatrossity: Oooh, good stuff.
Kobach is a dick, but he’s an opportunistic dick. I seriously question how much of that crap he actually believes. As for the question as to what motivates him? Narcissism.
Omnes Omnibus
@gbear: Mmmmm… raspberry poptarts…..
JK
@The Grand Panjandrum:
I blame this on Obama because he chose Janet Napolitano to be Homeland Security Secretary. Jan “Shit for Brains” Brewer became governor of Arizona as part of the line of succession as determined by the Arizona constitution, replacing Napolitano.
Dennis G.
Not surprisingly they are listed by the SPLC as a hate group:
WereBear
Once again, we see the Wingnut answer to everything is to make it illegal.
In this case, they decided something already illegal wasn’t illegal enough.
kommrade reproductive vigor
OK, the number of reasons for anyone who isn’t str8, white and male to vote Republican is dropping so far into the negatives Hawking is going to have to invent a new form of math to express it.
Well they put some thought into it which shows they’re at least aware that with slightly less specific wording they’d have to support my mongrelized genes over those of my Aryan-type SO’s.
Not that I’d want those people putting their grubby hands on my genes…
Fxd.
Brachiator
@Mark S.:
This is a great example of the use and abuse of science, conservative style. Two of the biggest pieces of BS are when this asshat says,
and
There was always a lot of back and forth mixing going on, and humans have never been isolated long enough to diverge into separate species.
Hell, lions and tigers are separate species, but their behavior is still very similar. On the other hand, despite all the variations in the physical appearance and demeanor of dogs, they are still the same species and easily inter-breed.
It really amazes me how these morans can’t get evolution, or even basic elementary school level science right, and yet insist on bloviating on the significance of human differences.
kommrade reproductive vigor
@Midnight Marauder: Yep. And when the GOP votes a resounding NO on gay rights legislation it’s the Democrats’ fault. Really. The Log Cabin Republicans say so and it’s not like they’re insane or terminally confused or … Wait a minute.
Never mind.
Brachiator
@JK:
Isn’t DougJ doing a riff on the Pioneer Fund?
It’s a pun worthy of Rocky and Bullwinkle.
Elie
I agree with many of the commenters addressing the loss of power by some white people but I also believe that this will never go back to their world as they knew it.
They are feeling under enormous pressure because of the missmatch between the reality of a diverse nation and their view of themselves as “in charge”. They are being smoked out and will be under increasing scrutiny. No more gentle euphemisms disguising their bigotry. They are out and having put it all out there, you sense the lack of other alternatives for them. They are weak rather than strong — cowards needing to frisk strangers and threaten the sense of decent rights of citizens. While they cannot be ignored, the train has passed their station already, moving faster and faster. All they can do is scream and throw rocks as it retreats…Though its Arizona, every American should feel embarrassed. Like having your brother arrested for burning down someone’s house — yeah, you didnt do it, but its a stain on the family anyway.
My guess is that this will be walked back some kind of way, pretty quickly.
Cacti
I’m not making this up:
Kris Kobach is a special legal advisor to the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office (Joe Arpaio) for Constitutional Issues.
So, if you’re a resident of Maricopa County, your taxes go to pay this fucker’s $300/hr fee.
Brachiator
@Elie:
To the contrary, these boneheads are going to take it to the limit.
At every point where the GOP could have said enough, they deny where the worst of the tea baggers and wingnuts are going, and fan the flames even higher.
Hell, I don’t think the GOP even knows how to stop it, even if they wanted to.
Linda Featheringill
So if some of my ancestors were in the Jamestown group [1608 or so], what exactly is Mr. Kobach offering to do for me?
Linda Featheringill
@Mike: The arm band.
How about tattooing an identification number on their arm?
El Cid
@Linda Featheringill: If some of the starving first English colonists who had to dig up and eat corpses to survive had children, does this make them super-ultra pure descendants by the principle of digestive inheritance?
Linda Featheringill
That means she said “No.”
Elie
@Brachiator:
Not “walked back” by the Republicans or people responsible for its passage, but pushed back (better term) by the surrounding community of this country and its people and institutions..
Who knows, you may be right and nothing will happen. I am believing differently though. We will see
WereBear
Ooooooh, just what I wanted!
A nation designed by whiny Puritans!
…wait a minute.
(Actually, I can’t think of Puritans without thinking of this Blackadder episode. My favorite? Ah, they all are.)
Larv
@Brachiator:
Yeah, the fact that the Derb feels free to opine on a topic like that, to an audience like that, despite having an understanding of the subject essentially that of a stoned sophomore who just took his first anthro class, is just mind-boggling. For one thing, he doesn’t seem to get that evolution is generally in response to selective pressures. So we’d only expect human populations to differ markedly in intelligence if there were significant differences in the selective pressures favoring intelligence in their respective environments. Is intelligence really more adaptive for a proto-European than an African? Maybe, but I’d like to see his work.
And this is if we grant his dubious claim that early human populations were essentially genetically isolated. At the geographical extremes, maybe. But I’m pretty sure the core regions of the human range (and that includes most of Europe) have had significant gene flow throughout human history.
Elie
@Larv:
This is buttressed by the fact that many people and populations who have lived along the old “silk road” in the middle and near east through central Europe and Northern Africa have a hell of a time getting matches for transplants as their “tissue types” are extremely complex and difficult to match due to their “mixing’ with the riff raff over the years. Hell, from way back when I was involved with clinical research, 30% of so called black HlA antigens are “white”…
We are so oversimplifying the human experience when we speak of “race” and ethnicity (whatever THAT means biologically and genetically).
Elie
@Elie:
HLA Antibodies – not antigens.. My edit time had elapsed
DougJ
@Brachiator:
Yes, it’s a play on Pioneers Fund.
Brachiator
@Larv:
But we don’t have to grant his claim at all. The plain fact is that human populations have never been genetically isolated long enough in any locale for the isolation to make any significant difference.
I also like to point out that in many cultures, the most intellectually or artistically gifted individual has been a person with some degree of African ancestry. In France, for example, we have Alexander Dumas. In Russia, we have Alexander Pushkin, who pretty much created native Russian literature. In Brazil, there is Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis:
And in America, there is Prince (I joke a bit here because of Prince’s resemblance to some portraits of Pushkin).
By the way, you can do this same trick of “who’s great” with other ethnic combinations. But the essetial point is that there is really no such thing as ethnic purity, nor does ethnic purity get you any guarantee of whatever it is that racist clowns think that they are looking for.
Methinks Sailer doth protest too much.
Remember November
@Bud:
exactly, and they don’t realize that ehy are walking ads for white stupidity.
No Guy in the Sky
@licensed to kill time:
Very clever. :)