I am an Indian American who was born here and it's crystal clear that the Democratic Party sees me as American and a large part of the base of the Republican Party does not. I hope Indian Americans remember this moment at the next election. They don't see you as one of them. And never will.
— Neera Tanden (@neeratanden.bsky.social) December 27, 2024 at 9:08 AM
Possibly because two & a half of my four grandparents were immigrants (my maternal grandmother was reportedly conceived in Ireland, but born in New York), I was raised to believe that immigration was not only Good, but a key factor in America’s glorious transglobal success. (The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N was one of the first ‘grown-up’ books I read, and unlike Mr. Roberts, or Against the Fall of Night, or Teahouse of the August Moon, I didn’t have to illicitly borrow my dad’s paperbacks to do so.)
Of course, because I was a native New Yorker, I was also raised to believe that nativists were ignorant rubes who had nothing to be proud of beyond multiple generations of squatting on the same patch of stolen-from-the-natives soil, so it’s not as if chauvinism was an unknown factor in my education, either.
For the past 10 years, Russians have been fantasizing about bringing Europe to its knees by turning off Russian gas in the middle of winter and making the spoiled, effete "Gayropeans" freeze.
And when they've finally done it, who is freezing? Russia's own insurgent allies. ?? https://t.co/QlBu4O1RWZ— Slava Malamud ???????? (@SlavaMalamud) January 2, 2025
Transnistria, the middle of nowhere I was born in, is the latest case study in what Russia does to anyone stupid enough to trust it.
Here is my latest.https://t.co/L4Y9akgZbz pic.twitter.com/Hj42wuM3dL— Slava Malamud ???????? (@SlavaMalamud) January 4, 2025
If nothing else, this whole saga might make you feel slightly better about American idiots…
I remember how it all started in Transnistria, the thin sliver of land on the eastern edge of Moldova, where I was born, raised and lived the first 17 years of my life. An eternal borderland, forever stuck between Slavs, Romanians and Turks, it had been a part of Ukraine, Russia, the Ottoman Empire and Romania. Always in turmoil, never truly settled in as a part of any nation, constantly populated by fighters, adventurers and crooks, but whose most prominent citizens always turned out to be Jews of extremely peaceful vocations, my home town of Bender was built by Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, once housed the Swedish king Charles XII, and loved erecting monuments to Glorious Russian Military Past, even though nobody in Russia proper ever knew it existed.
When Stalin annexed Moldova in 1940, he, as was his custom, redrew the borders, taking the eastern bank of the Dniester river from Ukraine and giving it to the new “Moldavian SSR”, in exchange for Moldova’s southern area of Bugeac (pronounced “Boo Jack”, but don’t bother remembering). The region has remained about two thirds ethnically Slavic (most of the Jews, like myself, had the good sense to blow the joint when the going was good) and almost universally Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking since. And, of course, as was the case of most such areas of the USSR, subject to colonization by Russian settlers and complete erasure of most traits of Romanian national identity.
So it came to pass that in 1990, as I was fruitlessly trying to convince a female classmate in a tiny provincial high school that my height and erudition trumped the terminal handicaps of my Jewishness and fashion sense, Moldova had the bad taste to declare independence, and all hell broke loose. It all began the same way it would in eastern Ukraine in 2014: with the defense of Ze Greyt Rashen Kalchur. With fears that Moldova’s Romanian speakers would exact their revenge upon Russian colonists. With proclamation about the sanctity of Russian monuments, of the Russian language, of returning to the Russian history of the region, of the utter unacceptability of ever letting this piece of The Great Motherland to become a part of the collective, hated West. Bender, incidentally, is on the west bank of the Dniester and thus couldn’t even claim to be a part of historical Russia torn away by “Stalin’s mistake”, but since most of its population spoke Russian, the colonists claimed it anyway.
Spurred by KGB agents hastily sent from the metropolis, the locals organized against the despised “Romanian nationalists” and proclaimed their own quasi-state, catchily named “Pridnestroviye”, which Romanian speakers referred to as Transnistria (literally “land beyond the Dniester”). As the USSR got busy dying, this thin strip of land was resolved to carry on the Soviet legacy. The flag of “Transnistrian Republic” and its coat of arms carried the hammer and sickle, its national languages were Russian, Ukrainian and “Moldavian” (a Soviet invention, which constituted nothing more than the Romanian language transcribed in the Cyrillic alphabet)…
Thus started the Transnistrian War, a short conflict in which Russia, the biggest nation in the world, fought Moldova, one of the smallest and poorest countries in Europe. Not that Russia ever declared war, of course. It merely sent in its troops, disguised as Cossacks, insurgents and volunteers, and then swooped in as “a peacekeeper”, effectively occupying the region. But not before several hundred of the locals, clad in their faux leather jackets and their knockoff “abibas” track suits and carrying Kalashnikovs handed out by covert Russian agents, perished in their assigned roles as front-line cannon fodder. All of this in the name of Ze Greyt Rashen Kalchur and “fighting Romanian Nazis”, mind you. If it’s hard not to see this piece of bloody bullshit as a dress rehearsal for Ukraine, it’s only because this is exactly what it was…
For more than three decades, the citizens of “Transnistria” lived in an unrecognized pseudo-state, without internationally convertible currency, valid passports or human rights, feeding on the delirium of being the last outpost of the Soviet empire and waiting for the glorious day when Mother Russia would take them back into her bosom. The Lenin monuments stood proudly erect in city squares, the children grew up being taught the Soviet version of history and, of the three official languages, only Russian was spoken or tolerated…
For those who don’t follow the news coming out of Eastern Europe, here is what happened. Russia, in its valiant efforts to fix any foreign election it possibly could in order to install Moscow-friendly crooks, kooks and dictators worldwide, has been trying to do just that in Moldova. And, unlike in America, Russia failed! Moldovans managed to elect a pro-Western president and are now gearing up for a parliamentary election. In an effort to sway Moldovans to vote for a pro-Russian party, Putin has stopped transferring Russian gas to Europe through Moldova, hoping to freeze the recalcitrant former colony in the middle of winter. Moldova, though, is at least being helped by Romania, so it’s not doing too bad. But guess who IS freezing as a result of Russia’s actions! That’s right, its loyal colonial vassals in Transnistria!…
This is a good time to quote Arkady Babchenko, a former Russian journalist, now in exile, who once, by way of debunking the myth of Russia’s glory and benevolence, famously said: “Motherland will always betray you, son!”
The most powerful thing about Russia is not its military and certainly not Ze Greyt Kalchur. It’s the awesome strength of its delusions, which it harbors within itself and infects its loyalists with. Transnistria only exists so that Russia can have troops on Moldovan soil and intimidate its former colony into obedience. But Transnistrians have spent more than three decades fantasizing about a benevolent Motherland that will save them, take them back into the imperial embrace and help them lord over the rustic Romanian speakers again. The poor idiots truly thought that Russia loves and protects them. One can only hope that hypothermia can cure delirium…
“A vampire has more heart than Ted Cruz,” & McConnell is Voldemort.
MS TANDEN YOU CANT BE HEAD OF OMB YOU’RE TOO MEAN!
“Take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face” you stupid base voters of my party.
HAVE A GOOD EVENING PRESIDENT MUSK!
— Dana Houle (@danahoule.bsky.social) December 28, 2024 at 1:33 AM
I was a kid when we moved here in the 90s. I went to school, learned English, studied American history and government, and loved it so much I studied history in college. I was an American. And I never once felt like I didn’t belong.
Until Trump was elected. https://t.co/mOZ9BuHCPV
— LadyGrey 🇦🇲🇺🇦🇺🇸 (@TWLadyGrey) January 4, 2025
Refresher on the actual program(s) in question:
An erupting civil war in MAGA world over foreign workers has shone a fresh spotlight on a visa scheme that has become the backbone of the country's highly-skilled tech industry.
Here's what to know about the H-1B visa program fueling the divide in MAGA world.— Axios (@axios.com) December 27, 2024 at 1:26 PM
NotMax
FYI.
USPS issuing a stamp honoring Betty White later this year.
Baud
More than Indian Americans need to hear that message.
Baud
IIRC, it was Bernie Sanders who tanked her nomination.
WereBear
@NotMax: That makes me so happy!
satby
@Baud: so much to hold against that dick.
satby
Morning Krugman: I’ve tried to maintain a light tone in this newsletter, with plenty of snark. But sometimes I do get angry. Apologies.
Bothsidesing, With a Republican Slant: Here We Go Again
Election results don’t change the facts
Suzanne
@Baud:
Agreed.
What makes me sad — well, there are many, many things about this whole state of affairs we find ourselves within that make me sad. But the specific thing that makes me sad here is that a small-yet-statistically-significant percentage of them were on board for GOP racism, as long as they weren’t the target.
That dynamic exists in every group in humanity, and it’s just depressing as fuck.
Suzanne
@satby: Just wanted to thank you for sharing that story from ProPublica yesterday. Incredible stuff.
Baud
@Suzanne:
Many humans will compromise a lot of their dignity for the promise of being able to punch down.
Ohio Mom
Oh yes, that NYC chauvinism, I know it well. I’ve lived elsewhere nearly half a century yet it still beats within.
satby
@Suzanne: I’m glad you found it interesting, thanks for letting me know!
Krugman does a musical coda at the end of every post. Today’s is a 55 year old video of a very young Joni Mitchell singing (of course) Both Sides Now. Contrasting that with the memory of her singing it last October, as an 80-something: awe-inspiring.
lowtechcyclist
@Ohio Mom:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View_of_the_World_from_9th_Avenue
eclare
Interesting about Transnistria. I like geography news, and I had never heard of it. Thank you for this and everything, Anne Laurie!
eclare
@Baud:
Wasn’t there a (fuck LBJ) LBJ quote about that very thing?
lowtechcyclist
@satby:
I’m all too aware that, with respect to stuff like economics, most Americans don’t know or give a damn what’s happening in the rest of the world.
But if any daily newspaper in the U.S. should be letting its readers in on whether what’s happening in America is strictly a U.S. phenomenon, or whether it’s part of some larger global phenomenon, the New York Times is that newspaper. And if they don’t bother to do that, then what’s their excuse for pretending they’re the newspaper everyone else should look up to?
Yeah, I know, we jackals have seen through them for some time now. But the chattering classes in general still subscribe to the notion of the FTFNYT’s superiority.
satby
@lowtechcyclist: Presumably, that’s one of the reasons Krugman left. After attempting to counter the NYT narrative for years. The unchained Krugman is much better to read, IMO.
delphinium
@Baud: So very true. And that still won’t earn them the respect they think they’re entitled to.
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone 😊 😊 😊
BellyCat
Ditto. (And to Jeffro). Remarkable tale of resolve. I’m not sure why Kay doubts the authenticity?
Suzanne
@lowtechcyclist:
I’m increasingly convinced that the chattering classes are chattering only to one another. Which makes this an even more difficult problem to untangle, IMO. A decentralized media environment presents just as many challenges.
It’s 14 degrees outside. Got some snow in the last couple of days, but the big storm is supposed to hit later today or early tomorrow. The doggo wants walks, but the sidewalk salt bothers her paws, and she won’t tolerate the booties. Sigh.
gene108
I do not know where Lady Grey immigrated from, but as an immigrant from India, I’ve known since high school there are parts of this country I’m not going to be welcomed.
I didn’t grow up in those places. I didn’t have any noticeable in my face racism to deal with growing up or as an adult.
One observation I’ve noticed is most white people are not used to being the only white person in a group. Some look at it like a learning experience, while others are uncomfortable being an “outsider” in the group. I think this is a big driver in white conservatives resentment. They see themselves as becoming the “out group” in their community or country, because they hear foreign languages at the grocery store, they see non-whites in more prominent roles in entertainment and politics (President Obama’s existence broke something inside many of them), and the culture rejecting their views on what’s acceptable. They are not surrounded by like minded people and some go from uncomfortable to angry about a changing society.
rikyrah
@Suzanne:
Because they thought they were special.
They were chasing that White Adjacency 😒😒
Betty Cracker
I lived in Boston for a few years after college. (Was supposed to get more schooling there, but I was sick of school so just worked for a few years until the cold drove me back home.)
Anyhoo, the most surprising thing to me, apart from the nasty weather, was the ethnic rivalry among white folks.
That wasn’t really a thing in Florida. When I was growing up, I noticed class and religious divides among white people, but no one made a big deal about being of Irish or Italian, German, etc., descent.
It was a very big deal in Boston. I have a recognizably Irish surname and was pigeonholed on that basis, to my surprise. It was weird.
BellyCat
@Betty Cracker: When the police are all Irish, EVERYONE cares about ethnicity! (/s?)
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
Suzanne
@Betty Cracker:
Oh yes. And class-based prejudice.
I have written here about being raised by my grandfather on my mother’s side, who was of German Jewish and English descent. He loathed Italians. Convenient, because I’m of Italian descent on my father’s side. He absolutely harbored racist attitudes about others, but none so potent as that.
eclare
@Betty Cracker:
I have lived mainly in East Tennessee (Knoxville), Atlanta, and Memphis. There was no ethnic rivalry among white people in any of those areas.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
Betty O’Cracker. 🤣
Suzanne
@rikyrah: Every culture has their version of sparrows and curtain rods.
Baud
@gene108:
Agree.
Baud
@Suzanne:
Very true.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
It is weird. Tribal.
delphinium
@gene108:
The first time I really experienced this was watching The Original Kings of Comedy in the movie theater. Went with my Hispanic friend from work and was one of the few white people in the theater. Of course I was too busy laughing to be uncomfortable but it was a learning experience (even noticing how different the upcoming movie previews were from what was usually shown). Back when I worked in an office, would often take a bus to work which was always of mix of people so that was always an occasion to learn as well.
Gin & Tonic
@Betty Cracker: The most racist city in the US.
Suzanne
@eclare: I think the ethnic rivalries were really more of a thing in the older cities, probably moreso in the Northeast, that got multiple waves of European immigration. Boston, New York, Philly, etc. Pittsburgh still very much has ethnic neighborhoods.
The cities of the Sun Belt weren’t really settled that way, and there, white people are probably mostly Euro-mutts.
eclare
@Suzanne:
Every society has its pecking order.
Kay
The wingers on TikTok think the Right wing suicide bomber terrorist who worships Trump/Musk was issuing a warning to Trump supporters to protect Trump from Democrats who will try to stop Trump from taking office.
Like wildfire. Millions of views.
BellyCat
@Kay: Glad to catch you. Was wondering if you might elaborate on why you had doubts about the ProPublica militia infiltration story?
tobie
I remember fearing that Ukraine was going to be attacked by insurgents in eastern Ukraine and in the rogue “republic” of Transnistria to its west. I haven’t been following what’s going on around the Dniester river, so thank you, AL, for posting a chunk of Malamud’s essay. I enjoyed it.
Josh Marshall has a good post up about the cybertruck suicide perp. I mention it because Livelsberger was apparently a full fledged member of the cult of masculinity and against foreign wars that make America look weak but in love with domestic wars that make Republicans seem strong. When does the strongman get exposed as a weak man? I guess that’s what the Putin-friendly govt in Transnistria is finding out.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: Doxxed myself! ;-)
@eclare: Maybe it’s a Southern thing, the lack of ethnic sorting, and if probably flows from the South’s overtly racist laws and customs. I don’t know.
Kay
They have a You Tube host who had a guest who claims to be in the CIA who developed this theory. It’s tied into the drones in NJ, which are Chinese weapons, also directed at Trump.
The craziness just keeps accelerating. It’s worse than 2020, when they lost.
BellyCat
Read that as “Euro-nuts” at first. Makes similar if not more sense. LOL
eclare
@delphinium:
Steep and I went to see that in the theater as well, had a blast, and yes, we were some of the few white people there.
When my mom and I saw Malcolm X in the theater as some of the few white people, def got a different feeling. But we were both glad that we went.
eclare
@Suzanne:
My dad referred to us as Heinz 57.
UncleEbeneezer
@Baud: Yup. Latino/as and Asian-Americans would do well to understand this truth as well.
Suzanne
@Betty Cracker: It has more to do with settlement patterns. The U.S. is still fairly ethnically sorted. The regions where immigrant groups originally landed — like Irish in Boston, Italians in NYC, Scandinavians in upper Midwest, etc — that’s all still there. But the faster-growing places in the South and West, the white people who are there mostly didn’t come there straight from Europe. Their ancestors came to this country and then a couple generations later, their descendants moved to Orlando or Houston or Phoenix or wherever. And then they didn’t really form ethnic enclaves, because by then, they were just generic white people.
BellyCat
Not sure who “they” refers to. ProPublica or ?
Kay
@BellyCat:
I just don’t find him credible. He sounds like an inmate bullshitting to other inmates. Why did he legally change his name to his alter ego name? Why does he have like 25 years of adulthood unaccounted for?
I could absolutely be wrong – I love Propublica and have donated from the start. They’ve been churning out deeply reported stuff at breakneck speed and they’re not the NYTimes and WaPo – they operate on a shoestring. It made me nervous. I hope I’m wrong.
Princess
Democrats will always understand immigrants from all nations as Americans but won’t offer them white adjacency in exchange for their loyalty, which it turns out is what a lot of them wants, not a majority but enough to turn an election, so we discovered. Whatever “white adjacency” means in the minds of those who seek it.
Baud
@Kay:
Always a risk. I think ProPublica got suckered into a lab leak story last year.
Kay
@BellyCat:
Sorry. That wasn’t a response to your question. It’s a different topic.
TBone
@NotMax: wake me up when they issue one honoring Stephanie Clifford. (I love Betty tho).
satby
@Betty Cracker: In the older cities like Boston, Chicago, NYC it was as much an attempt to keep the first gen born in America kids in the community rather than fully assimulating. First generation immigrants always face it, now it’s the first generations born to Muslims, Asian, and other ethnic groups. The South’s whites didn’t need that as much, they had slaves so ethnic identity wasn’t important, being white was.
We forget immigration not only came in waves, but new immigrants tended to move to settle near where previous countrymen had. Again, if a preponderance of the people around you are the same group as you, it becomes an unremarkable norm. In cities, no one immigrant group outnumbered another, so the identity, rivalry, and competition for dominance became generational.
What Suzanne says too, a bit better.
Jeffg166
As a kid in grade school in the 50s the melting pot idea of American society was stressed repeatedly. That was to get the public to accept Southern & Eastern Europeans. Now many of those groups are firmly in the anti immigration movement.
Baud
@Princess:
Just means status. Clarence Thomas doesn’t make it onto the Supreme Court as a Democrat. Being a Republican worked out for him. Other people make the same calculation.
TBone
@tobie: Donold only attacks our allies, because attacking a real threat would expose his weakness.
p.a.
@lowtechcyclist: Travel back in time to 2008 & the right’s: “the economy is crashing because of a fair housing law from the 1970s!” and *crickets* from the usual MSM “leaders” instead of: “it’s a worldwide recession, how can a US rule do this!? And why would it take decades?”
(h/t Barry Ritholtz)
The “horserace” & “who scored rhetorical points today?” b.s. is, maybeeeee understandable when so many Murcans look so effing ignorant (willfully or not) about basic economics, taxes, and where they sit on the wealth spectrum. Puts our talks here on better messaging in perspective. Can the Demoncrat Party “learn up” the population? Is that its job? Can they do it without coming off as hectoring know-it-alls? The 45% are beyond the pale for this, so the target is the people we look at as, basically, unaffiliated boobs who vote according to their most recent visit to the market or gas station, like plants turning towards a light source. Yeek!
Princess
@Kay: They need a Reichstag to burn. I wonder if they’re going to announce that some dastardly Dem plot was foiled when Trump is peacefully inaugurated.
i also wonder what Musk’s game is with all this anti/China stuff and the tariffs. China is his biggest car market.
BellyCat
@Kay: Gotcha. My sense was that due to the extended timeframe for research and reporting, the reporter was exceptionally careful and rigorous about confirmation. Hoping this is the case.
People drop out of society for a variety of reasons. Doing so after five years of jail time is not surprising to me. (Hell… Steve Jobs disappeared for a spell, too!).
Changing legal names easily could have been part of the guy’s cover. But if he hasn’t changed his name (yet) again now, and his story is true, hard to see how this guy is not a dead man walking.
Suzanne
@Jeffg166: It makes me crazy when I meet other Marinara-Americans and then I find out they’re anti-immigration. Like, do you not have any cultural memory?! Up until 20 minutes ago, you were the ones everyone hated!
Ladder-puller-uppers. SPIT.
Kay
@BellyCat:
The part where the reporter says the informant has 3 criminal charges in his past – I feel like the convention with that is to say where that information came from – “Mr. Blah said X and indeed there are 3 charges in such and such county”.
Is his past just all self reported by him? I can’t tell.
schrodingers_cat
I don’t need Neera Tanden to tell me that the Republican party does not see me as one of them. I realized that when I first got here. But the Trump era showed me that many who vote D don’t see me as one of them either.
Princess
@delphinium: I saw Southside with You (about the Obama’s first date) in Hyde Park as the only white people in the audience. It was great, people calling out and cheering. Felt like I was in a fun church.
artem1s
this Vo thing is partially an attack on Chutkan’s sentencing of the J6 rioters and the DC juries. Vo’s getting a lot of attention and is likely to be used as an example so TCF can pardon the poor dears.
fox59.com/news/indycrime/bloomington-man-to-serve-9-months-in-prison-after-participating-in-jan-6-ri…
According to court documents, 31-year-old Antony Vo was found guilty by a jury in September 2023 of participating in the U.S. Capitol Riot. Vo was convicted of:
Entering and remaining in a restricted building
Disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building
Violent entry and disorderly conduct in a capitol building
Parading, demonstrating or picketing in a capitol building.
Vo was sentenced to nine months in prison, followed by 12 months of supervised release, according to court documents. Vo will also be required to pay a $1,000 fine.
apnews.com/article/judge-tanya-chutkan-trump-capitol-riot-93b33b1f1774e4e5c430f1598c7115a3
In his bio for a social media account, Vo has called himself a “J6 wrongful convict.” In a post after his trial, he wrote that “there was zero jury of peers and 100% a kangaroo court.”
She and DC residents don’t meet his idea of ‘peers’. I wonder why.
Vo is seeking asylum because he violated his terms of release while waiting for his appeal. The articles don’t specify the what ‘violent entry’ meant for Vo. The picture obviously doesn’t show it. I don’t know about anyone else but when someone ahead of me in line for a protest starts talking about beating people and pepper spraying, I’m heading in the opposite direction. No way I’d stick around if was planning on a quiet day of tourism.
Another Scott
@eclare: When I was growing up in the Atlanta suburbs, one of my friends liked to tell Pol**k jokes. There was a non-Black ranking as well, it seemed.
And Chicago is well known for being a “City of Neighborhoods” which is a polite way of saying that it’s massively segregated.
Progress is slow, but we need to keep trying to make it happen.
Best wishes,
Scott.
tobie
@TBone: Yeah. Disparaging EU- or NATO-member states won’t lead to an armed conflict.
I guess what struck me most about Livelsberger’s posts is that he, like Trump, Gabbard, Kennedy, MTG et al claim to be anti-war but that’s not ture. They’re fine with the idea of domestic war & terror so long as it targets the people they hate: Democrats, BLM protestors, trans activists etc. That’s why MTG wants to make Jan 6 a federal holiday. Celebrate the insurrectionists as heroes. MAGA loves war…against fellow Americans.
Professor Bigfoot
@Baud: A message Black folks have understood quite well ever since 1877.
satby
@Suzanne: It was a big deal in my family (supposedly) that my father’s oldest brother married an Italian* girl. My Irish* grandmother consoled herself with “at least she was Catholic”. * denotes everyone actually American by birth.
His son married a Jewish girl, and we all know my aunt secretly baptised the babies in the kitchen sink the first time she babysat each of them. They were raised Jewish, and my aunt was fine with that as long as she knew she had saved them from limbo 😄
Baud
@Professor Bigfoot:
Based on voting percentages, just about every non-white group has heard the message, although not as well as as black folks. There are still stragglers who don’t, however.
TBone
@tobie: yep, I said to my brother right before the 2020 election “I told you he’d start a war, but I didn’t think it would be against 65% of Americans!”
BellyCat
@Kay: Seems the dang reporter, not an attorney, foolishly went with the Civil standard rather than the Criminal standard for evidence in the court of public opinion? 😂
TBone
@Professor Bigfoot: an old classic I’ve had in my stash for years.
bsky.app/profile/fancysplace.bsky.social/post/3lexzlzi3cs2r
Jeffg166
@satby:
Intermarriage in the 50s and 60s was a Northern European marrying someone Southern or Eastern Europe.
Professor Bigfoot
@Suzanne: I just wish I could believe it is “small.”
Life has convinced me that it’s not small at all.
Gvg
@Betty Cracker: I was told by a black military vet that the worst racism he encountered in America was in Boston. However, he listened to Rush Limbaugh so his judgment was suspect to me. Nice guy though, helped me fix my car a few times. I still found the Limbaugh thing inexplicable.
Others have reported that about the Boston are though.
cmorenc
My paternal grandmother literally came to the US on an indentured servant contract at age 13 from a poor family in Passau, Germany, accompanied only by her 16 yo sister – neither speaking a word of English at her arrival, both entering the US at Ellis Island. When I visited Ellis Island in 2000, it was a very emotional moment standing on the balcony overlooking the intake area where she had passed through immigration processing 90ish years prior. I was able to find her under the registry under her maiden name Pauline Krauss. She married another German immigrant and they had 3 sons who each went on to prosperous success in the US, including my father, an Army Air Corps pilot in WW2 who went on to become a medical doctor. In short, the paternal side of my family are the paradigm of the huge value-added success immigrants have contributed to thUS.
schrodingers_cat
@Professor Bigfoot: Most Indian Americans get it as well. They vote D upwards of 70%. I have posted on BJ since 2009 but the H1B threads showed me how many BJers see me as not one of them.
Elizabelle
@Jeffg166: Or a Lutheran marrying a Catholic. Quite the scandal in my mother’s family. Oy vey.
Professor Bigfoot
@eclare: Fuck LBJ for Vietnam; but thank God for LBJ for CRA64 and VRA65.
Kay
@BellyCat:
Maybe it’s just written in a narrative fashion as a “hook” – like, here’s the story in Episode I, stay tuned for details/verification. It reads like a podcast. I wish reporters would resist the urge to jazz things up. We’ve all been burned so many times. We need clarity so we can weigh credibility.
Suzanne
@satby: So anti-semitism was not a thing transmitted to me by family or neighbors at all. I legit never heard any of the conspiracy-theory stuff ever, until I was an adult. We had Jewish friends and neighbors and we shared holiday meals and stuff like that. But, like, the anti-Catholic bigotry was real and frequently expressed, and Italians most of all.
satby
@Jeffg166: they got married in the ’40s, just before he was deployed to Europe for WWII. They wouldn’t see each other again for 4 years. Quite a love story, actually.
Jeffg166
@Elizabelle:
My father’s family had been protestants for 450 years until my Irish Catholic mother showed up. We were all raised Catholic much to the dismay of his parents.
TBone
Choose your fighters! I want this guy (video at link):
McGovern: Where Is The Mandate? Is It In The Room With Us?
Professor Bigfoot
@Suzanne: I’m not sure that’s true.
Sub-Saharan Africa is awash in “ubuntu,” which is a concept that seems utterly missing from whiteness.
There is no “we” in whiteness if you’re not white.
different-church-lady
@Betty Cracker: In the south you don’t have to hate each other because you can hate the entire north.
Suzanne
@cmorenc: I recently learned that one of my great-grandmothers boarded a boat in Naples, Italy, at the age of 16, by herself, with only $10 in her pocket. Came through Ellis Island before WWI. Unbelievable to think of a girl, just a little bit older than one of my Spawns….. crossing an ocean and making her way in the world.
MomSense
@Kay:
And now the fogvid! They are losing their shit about fog.
UncleEbeneezer
@Betty Cracker: I think animosity between different white ethnicities in every day attitude, talk etc. is common in places like Boston, Philly, Pittsburgh, NY (to pick the cities I have some experience with) etc. But at the end of the day they will happily unite and put aside their differences to bash Black and other not-white groups, who they hate even more. For all the inter-ethnic conflict/animosity between white people in Boston I can’t think of anything that was bigger and more hateful than their response to bussing.
tobie
Both my parents came to the US as Holocaust refugees. My mother made it out in the nick of time in 1938. My father wasn’t able to get a visa until 1948 when the US opened its doors to child survivors. Every member of my family has always been a fierce advocate for immigration. No one believes in the American dream more than immigrants. I really do not understand how Latino voters ended up being opposed to immigration this past election. I mean WTF…don’t you think you’ve been a boost this country?
Kay
We had an ordinance in this town where a Catholic priest couldn’t spend the night in town. My husband does a presentation on the Constitution for Constitution Day at the high school and he totally derailed his own presentation by mentioning this – its all the kids wanted to talk about.
different-church-lady
@schrodingers_cat: To me you look like the same typeface as everyone else here.
Professor Bigfoot
@schrodingers_cat: The through-line of whiteness remains, doesn’t it?
”There is no horseshoe. There is only white people who are at best uncomfortable with any power being held in Black hands. Those white people are at all points of the ‘left-right’ spectrum.”
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
satby
@Suzanne: she was actually ok with the kids being raised Jewish, as all Catholics are taught, correctly, that Christ was an observant Jew. But she really was concerned about limbo, which I don’t think is even a doctrine any more. She was probably 70 when her last grandchild was born. We used to tease her about it, but she never admitted she did it.
schrodingers_cat
@Professor Bigfoot: Truth!
Baud
@satby:
The Holy Kohler.
eclare
@MomSense:
I just googled that, wow. Although, if some people believe that bad weather is making them sick, and they’d rather stay at home, I’m ok with that. There are definitely worse conspiracy theories that they can believe.
I will bravely run errands…
UncleEbeneezer
@Gvg: I’ve heard many Black People (who aren’t Republicans, don’t listen to Rush) say the same about Boston. There’s a documentary series about the Charles Stewart crime case from the 1980’s streaming now. It’s not great but they do a good segment on Boston’s horrific response to bussing and more generally to the history of anti-Black racism that makes the city so infamous.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
Settlement patterns can be sliced and diced depending on time frame, which group(s) happened to be “coming over” at the time and to a degree when certain segments of already-Americans (think the Scots-Irish) decided it was too crowded where they were and moved. Much of what I’ve looked at is 19th Century; 20th Century is a whole different ball game.
A fair number of towns across the Midwest (basically think north of the Ozarks, aka southern fringes of Missouri) were settled not by people who were 2nd or 3rd generation whatever but newly arriving. Many of these places had French populations dating back to the Louisiana Purchase and amazingly, people coming over from France from the 1820s-early 1850s, knew about these places, booked passage to ports like NYC or NOLA, and made a beeline to these settlements.
Germans on the ground in a similar manner actually made promotional pitches back to “Germany”. People overlook the fact that the biggest mass migration into the US in the 19th Century were ethnic Germans. They didn’t wait to “go west”, they landed and hightailed it out of where they landed.
In the midst of this you had the Scots-Irish always on the move west, they were most of the early Oregon Trail settlers. And when OR got “too populated” and that pesky ocean prevented them going any further, they back-migrated to the Ozarks.
Post-Civil War and all that “free” land for settlement really opened things up and that’s where you see more European ethnic groups come here, take a train to some godforsaken place on the Plains and homestead.
Suzanne
@Professor Bigfoot: “Whiteness” is a category has shifted over time, and continues to do so. But hatred or at least fear of the other seems to exist everywhere.
When I went to middle and high school in Arizona, at the time, there were no secondary schools on the nearby reservation. So the Native kids were bused to schools in the western part of Mesa, because the rich white Republicans in Scottsdale didn’t want them to mix with their kids. That part of Mesa was almost evenly racially mixed at the time, with Latino (mostly Mexican) Catholics and white people, mostly Mormon. I was surprised to learn how much hostility still existed between members of the various tribes. Fistfights in school over it.
Kay
@MomSense:
The FOG! Its too much to keep up with, but its scary. They’re absolutely getting crazier. We are watching about a quarter of the country going mad. I tried to watch the You Tube video about the Chinese attack drones/Democrats attacking Trump but conspiracy theories are always so boring. Just ON and ON, disorganized, “I’ll circle back to …”. No! No circling! Focus! Make yourself some bullet points, no one has time for this.
Professor Bigfoot
@Baud: True enough. It’s why, when I hear people complaining about the failure of “Democratic messaging,” I always want to ask— what exactly is there about Democratic messaging that Black folks and Latino folks and Asian folks and Jewish folks seem to hear JUST FINE, but white people cannot?
schrodingers_cat
@tobie: A majority of Latino voters voted D. But T did increase his vote share among Latino men.
There is racism and misogyny yes, but a lot of what the DSA left does hurts Ds among immigrant communities.
Chief Oshkosh
@Kay: Clearly the Democrats’ HQ for all the planning is the basement of a DC pizza parlor.
Goddamn but these people are fucking idiots.
eclare
@satby:
TV, I know, but there was an episode on SATC where a grandma was worried about her grandson not being baptized because of ending up in limbo. This was early 2000’s.
Like you, I thought that concept died years ago. But I’m not Catholic.
frosty
@Suzanne: My M-I-L, who’s family was from Western PA, was prejudiced against Italians and Catholics. The first time I noticed it my (silent) reaction was “That’s kind of an obsolete prejudice, isn’t it?”
TBone
I got the ‘Surely You’re Joking’ book as a child, mom always gave me books above my pay grade as something to reach for. A little Sunday morning consolation read by Tom Sullivan:
digbysblog.net/2025/01/05/on-real-genius/
Betsy
What’s wrong with Russia? Why are they always like that? It’s like a person with a malignant psychological disorder.
eclare
@different-church-lady:
I would laugh, but it’s true.
different-church-lady
@Kay:
“KILL YOUR
TELEVISIONYOUTUBE”satby
@Professor Bigfoot: I usually agree with most of what you say, but humans will be human and there wasn’t a lot of ubuntu happening in Rwanda between the Hutu and Tutsi, nor in the DRC between pretty much everybody. Colonialism certainly greatly exacerbated ethnic rivalries, but that’s not the sole cause. We can find ways to hate each other when we all look alike too.
Chief Oshkosh
@Baud: You shall be punished.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@UncleEbeneezer:
This can’t be highlighted enough as follow-on generations were either never exposed to bussing, only grew up in a white-flight burb where that stuff was never discussed, or have been part of the “make cities white again” gentrifying efforts of the last 15 years and ignore what their actions mean to people who felt the effects of this first-hand.
A great read on Boston in particular:
harvardpolitics.com/why-is-boston-racist/
The effects and reaction of bussing were obviously very acute in high population, Northeastern cities but you see it anywhere it was implemented. Hell, two Denver burbs were created out of nothing specifically in response to busing. And school districts here are still gerrymandered to essentially gheto-ize black and brown students, well, the ones whose families haven’t been displaced…yet.
p.a.
@frosty: It’s not obsolete in the eyes of conservative Catholics. They’re poutrage leaders! All these liberal attacks over a little pedophilia, it’s anti-Catholicism! I’ve heard it😂 and pointed out that apparently 99.4% Catholic Irish Republic is a den of anti-Catholicism🙄
Suzanne
@satby: So much of the ethnic hatred among white people is class-based, IMO. Catholics were seen as low-class, and I remember hearing a fair amount of gossip about some families “having more kids than they can handle”, especially if any of the kids made any trouble. Which, of course, is a way of implying that poor people are badly behaved.
different-church-lady
@Professor Bigfoot: It’s not what they can’t hear. It’s what they do hear, which is “We care about non-whites too.” That just won’t do, because care is a zero-sum resource in their minds.
tobie
@schrodingers_cat: The whole thing is crazy to me. I gather that the big shift was among Latino men. I’m sure racism and misogyny were huge factors in their vote. I’ve often wondered, though, if Latino tradesmen have not picked up the same prejudices & resentments as white tradesmen. There’s a reason John McCain gave shout-outs to “Joe, the Plumber” and “Tito, the Builder.” The small business folks in the home trades that I know all complain about the same thing: taxes, red tape, overregulation, etc. Maybe they identify with Trump as a construction guy (though I doubt he has a clue how to use a table saw or nail gun)???
Kay
@different-church-lady:
One of my younger sisters was radicalized watching You Tube. She was always eccentric but now she’s a flaming Right winger. She’s a landlord, she owns several rental properties and she always been cheap – doesn’t want to pay taxes and upkeep. I feel like her new ideology is just a political home for the fact that she’s a miser.
Professor Bigfoot
@UncleEbeneezer: I’ll get hammered for saying this, and frankly I hate saying it myself, but— it begins to seem like *conflict* is a core of “white culture.”
Like they GOTTA be hatin’ on SOMEBODY.
Which necessarily brings Pastor Niemöller’s dictum to mind.
Sooner or later they’ll get around to YOU.
Suzanne
@satby:
This is true, but I will also note that, for the white people who held/continue to hold these ethnic bigotries…. they do not think all white people look alike.
I have typically Italian brown curly hair, and my grandfather absolutely did not think I looked like “Anglo-Saxons”.
satby
@different-church-lady: agree with this.
tobie
@Chief Oshkosh: Gene Wilder and Cleavon Little would agree. This scene from Blazing Saddles (1974) remains the most brilliant commentary on American political life. “Morons.”
frosty
I’m curious. I understand not being seen as one of “them” ethnically. Do you get the impression that D voters don’t see you as an American, either? Because as a naturalized citizen, that’s absolutely wrong.
KSinMA
@TBone: That’s my Congressman! Yay McGovern!
TBone
@TBone: the video vignette where he talks about surface tension, the joy on his face just talking about it! LOVE
Also, this explains incels.
Gvg
@schrodingers_cat: I am sorry you see it that way. I think you are misunderstanding what some of us think. First, to me you are an American.
I understand that your personal experience with the H1B1 visa was not exploitive and therefore you think the program is not, and you are upset that we don’t accept your word and life experience for it. However, multiple other people have known multiple other situations in multiple fields and had personal friends who have had those same Visa’s who had different experiences. Both the visa holders and the American. I have been reading and hearing about this for years. There have been studies and published reports. The people who most loudly proclaim they need the program are employers that are known as not credible IMO because they are bad at paying employees and have records of outsourcing later and going back on agreements. People like Musk, but he isn’t the only one, just the latest.
Your one story cannot overcome the weight of what we already have heard and seen. It does influence me to watch more carefully, and think about proposals to fix a “problem”. I personally don’t think any proposed fix of cutting off all immigration of any category will do anything but make things worse, such as prohibition did. I favor increasing legal immigration overall by quite a bit. The general voting public does not seem to agree now and that is going to bite us.
I don’t think straight messages will help. We need emotions and culture and romance. I’d like to secretly arrange to influence what older movies and shows get played on all channels I can, to get more of the ones I remember about immigrants being a good thing and prejudice being stupid and self defeating. About how America got wealthier than other countries by accepting immigrants that other countries didn’t want. There are lots of shows that made a big romantic deal about that. Make sure they get played more, and not crap like red dawn. Over and over for years, annually. Quietly, so resistance doesn’t happen till it’s too late.
Music play lists also can help. Lots of songs already exist. Get them back into play.
I feel like the emotional side is how conservatives screwed peoples logic up, it’s how we need to fight back. Which does not mean we don’t also need to do the immediate political party stuff too.
p.a.
@tobie: W did well in Texas’ Rio Grande counties, but after that they were firmly D until 2024, when there was, maybe actually a seismic shift to tRump. I’ve heard of Fox-like Spanish radio and internet outreach.
ETA: Since: Texas, it wouldn’t matter in national (Electoral College) elections, but I wonder about downslate.
Also too: was this mirroring or causing the more minor national shift?
eclare
@tobie:
A good friend of mine who watches a lot of soccer in the Spanish language broadcasts was not surprised by the love for TCFG by Latino men. He said the broadcasts are misogynistic and show lots of beautiful buxom women.
And then there is Colbert with one of my favorite characters, Esteban Colberto
dailymotion.com/video/x2nbetm
The greatest jokes have a basis in truth.
New Deal democrat
@tobie:
As I wrote after this statistic first came out, it is confounded by age demographics. Hispanics make up a much larger share of the younger population, and Whites of the older population.
Thus any blanket statistic about the Hispanic vote is also going to look like the young vote. And we know that the young vote, especially that of young men, swung significantly to the GOP.
So is the problem Hispanic men, or young men? We don’t know yet, but I suspect it is more the latter than the former, and had a lot to do with the skyrocketing price of moving out into your own house or apartment.
Nukular Biskits
Good mornin’, y’all!
Professor Bigfoot
@UncleEbeneezer: The thing that hurt the most about Charles Stuart and that woman who drowned her kids (cannot think of her name!) is how EASILY and COMPLETELY they were BELIEVED— and how white people were QUICK to start punishing random Black people for “fitting the description.”
That someone in trouble with the law might lie, that’s just human. That when that lie puts blame on a Black person, *white people will join right in.*
It’s this tendency that led to Tulsa 1921.
Suzanne
@frosty:
I have that thought, too. Like, “My brother in Christ, is it 1954? Did you just come back from the sock hop?”
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@satby:
I’m reminded of this quote:
Shouty McWaggyfinger’s leadership style involves shitting where he eats and then expecting his fellow diners to bask in the aroma.
In the Scold’s (nominal) defense, he wasn’t alone in opposing her nomination, he had plenty of help from good ole Joe Mansion. They all found tweets she’d made and you’d swear reading them, they came from BJ:
They’re all still dicks. But I guess if one of us is ever nominated to head OMB, we’ll hafta scrub a lot of our online commentary. :)
Nukular Biskits
@Baud:
Sanders is a mystery to me. He proposes some of the most sweeping legislation and supports liberal causes … but he allows his contrarian dickishness to blow up a lot of deals that would benefit this country.
Scout211
A bit off topic, but really?! I read a Fox News headline this morning that Amazon is partnering to release a new Melania documentary in theaters. I was thinking that Melania was purchasing a fluff piece for her image. But then I read a Semafor piece that suggests something more than just a Melania-fluffing “documentary.” Big tech is going all in on Trump 2.0. That’s no surprise to jackals but this blatant seems over the top. (A phrase that is becoming obsolete these days).
. . .
Chief Oshkosh
@tobie:
The vast majority of which are outcomes of state and local, not federal, regulations.
Professor Bigfoot
@New Deal democrat: I want to ask folks: are Rafael Cruz and Marco Rubio “white” or “Hispanic?”
Or could they simply be bog-standard conservative white men with Hispanic names?
Does that “Hispanic” category actually *mean* anything?
[ed to clarify just what category I’m talking about]
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Kay:
Marx got that one right.
marxistsociology.org/2019/12/whats-wrong-with-rent-and-the-rentier/
I wrote a diary about becoming a landlord a dozen years ago:
dailykos.com/stories/2013/12/19/1263674/-On-Being-a-Landlord
MomSense
@Kay:
The gubmint is using chemtrails to make Republicans sick!!! It’s not really fog! And did you know that if you fly your drone above the fog you can see the sun!! And also too proof that the earth is flat.
It’s all coming together now! The great convergence of all the bizarre conspiracies. Pretty sure they can be cured by some combination of Jesus, elderberries and raw milk.
Nukular Biskits
@Ohio Mom:
Is that anything like TX chauvinism? I have yet to meet anyone from that state who doesn’t declare it’s the best state since the invention of sliced bread.
eclare
@Nukular Biskits:
Mornin’!
H.E.Wolf
From 1949: “The Merry Minuet”, music adapted from Mozart, with lyrics by Sheldon Harnick.
ETA: link failed.
satby
@Suzanne: oh, no doubt. The old Know Nothings, as typified by the cartoonist Thomas Nast, were anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, and anti-Irish (who were always depicted as ape-like). There’s always physical characteristics that are ways to determine who’s in and who’s not in any group.
TBone
@Scout211: it’s fascism, the race to marry corporate and state power.
schrodingers_cat
@Gvg: I have many problems with the H1B visa, which I stated in those threads. I tried to bring nuance and argued for the humanity of visa holders themselves. But I was treated as if I was Vivek or Elon in those threads.
Baud
@Nukular Biskits:
I don’t know what deals he’s blown up. Since the election, he’s returned to his old standbys of blaming Dems for the white working class vote and dumping on immigration.
H.E.Wolf
@H.E.Wolf:
Trying again with the link.
musicandmore.info/music/_All%20Songs/_Additions/Merry%20Minuet%20(Full%20Original%20Lyrics)%20(C%20G…
TBone
@H.E.Wolf: link not working for me
It’s a .pdf now
Kay
@Scout211:
We are going to be subjected to unlimited propaganda. Musk announced yesterday that its time for happy news and he’ll be promoting that. Its already happening. I have not heard a word about the moms struggling to buy eggs or the crime wave since election day.
Get ready for Morning in America, except with Right wing suicide bombers and repression of any dissenting political speech. Its going to be all we can do to cling to what is real.
Baud
@Professor Bigfoot:
Most firms I’ve seen separate Hispanic status from race.
tobie
@New Deal democrat: I’m willing to bet that the rise in rent had a huge impact on younger voters. Female voters responded differently to this increase, so I don’t think it was the decisive factor for the rightward shift among men was. The emergence of a cult of masculinity was fueled by resentment at women, the nanny state, the desire to say fuck-it-all and I’m-the-boss which Trump and Musk incarnate for them. As I’ve been saying, these voters are not antiwar. But they perceived America as weak under Democrats because of the sheer number of global fires, some set deliberately by Russia, China and Iran to weaken a Dem President and install a Republican they can buy.
Gvg
@frosty: I though anti semitism was obsolete until Trump when it all came back out in the open. I mean seriously I never heard it in my life growing up until my slipping into dementia grandfather said something just before he died (an old joke I didn’t get). Then Trump, with a Jewish son in law but somehow he approves and gives cover and they all crawl out were us innocent non racist code readers can see them. OMG.
schrodingers_cat
@frosty: Check out the post Biden debate threads or the latest H1B threads and you will see what I mean.
Nukular Biskits
@Suzanne:
That’s an interesting phrase. I had to look it up.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Yep. And many Latinos identify as white.
TBone
I don’t know why this song keeps poking at me today. Over and over, Elvis Costello is telling it
m.youtube.com/watch?v=snPDoXl9ZPs
It goes with the Melanoma.
Baud
@Kay:
In all my years following politics, the only thing I can count on being real is that practically all the forces in the world I consider malignant oppose Dems having control over government.
It’s the number one reason why all the imperfections and flaws don’t affect how I vote.
Suzanne
@Gvg:
I agree with this 100%. Conservative messaging very much appeals to emotion, and mostly to base emotions. They reinforce a narrative, what Arlie Russell Hothschild called a “deep story”, of immigrants and women and minorities and eggheads “cutting in line”, and “taking their country from them”. (Book recommendation: Hothschild’s Strangers in their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right.)
And they reinforce this message for years if not decades, and it becomes impossible to counteract it with facts and statistics and political campaigns.
Richard Rorty wrote about the Left needing for foster their own version of American national pride. I think he was correct in this. Feelings are incredibly powerful.
tobie
@Chief Oshkosh: To some extent, true. But I think every small business person is outraged that they have to pay income tax at all. For professionals, tax is deducted automatically so we don’t think about it as much. You have every incentive to cheat on taxes if you are in the home trades and our tax code is written in such a way that people in the home trades can write off tons of what they’ve earned. If we taxed the rich and small business–social security, Medicare and Medicaid would be secured to two hundred years. Amtrak would be fully funded too.
TBone
@KSinMA: yay!!! Mockery is a superpower we need to use until outright resistance becomes necessary.
schrodingers_cat
Biden delivered on many initiatives that the DSA left said was important to them
Getting out of Afghanistan
Canceling student debt
Bringing back American manufacturing
Being pro labor
Bringing back Keynsian economic policy.
And so on. Not only did he not get any credit for it from the horseshoe left, he got called Genocide Joe for his troubles. He also lost a lot of the squishy independents because of these initiatives. Next D president is not going to be as left Joe Biden has been.
ETA: Many immigrant voters belong to that squishy independent group.
Baud
@Gvg:
During the 90s, the religious right had a big propaganda push to emphasize America’s “Judeo Christian heritage.”
Just one in a number of attempts to woo Jewish voters into the party of hate.
satby
@Professor Bigfoot: Well, there’s a lot of internal racism between people of Hispanic descent who are mestizo or more directly descended from European origin, depending on which country the person is from. In Mexico, the official belief is that all citizens are mestizo, not sure about Cuba.
Kay
@MomSense:
I loathe the crunchy MAHAs more than the MAGAs. They’re morons who are also insufferable scolds. RFK Jr’s entire entourage are making bank on woo woo remedies. The physician he promotes has made billions on supplements. That they have the nerve to lecture us about Big Pharma when every single one of them is selling something in the huge, corporate “wellness” industry enrages me.
My kids like Curb Your Enthusiasm and put it on over Christmas. I could not watch because RFKs grifter wife repulses me. He’s not even confirmed yet and they’re making bank off the job. Gross people.
Baud
@Suzanne:
Agree. I think too many on the left like the right wing because right wing America lines up more closely with what the left sees America to be. It’s not an aspirational viewpoint and it’s going to push more people away than it attracts.
TBone
@Kay: BOHICA
UncleEbeneezer
@Professor Bigfoot: A valid question and one I’ve never heard a good answer to. Also, the very notion that voters/non-voters are particularly responsive to messaging, evidence, facts etc., is one that consistently gets debunked by election results and polls of the voters themselves.
Amanda Marcotte just wrote on B-sky about how Non-voters didn’t believe Trump’s criminality (despite all the indictments, a criminal conviction and multiple civil rulings, the Jan 6 Report and all his public actions/statements etc.) but see those Non-voters who shrugged all of that off totally would have done an about face ad voted for Harris if DOJ had only arrested/tried him faster.
Girl…if you really are that naive, I have some NFTs you should invest in, lol
Nukular Biskits
@Professor Bigfoot:
I think during the election, we were witness to numerous examples of members of each of those groups expressing support for Donald Trump.
So … I don’t think it’s a universal truth that all “Black folks and Latino folks and Asian folks and Jewish folks” were listening to Democratic messaging.
You can argue that those identifying as white were less likely to listen than those other groups and you’d have a damned good point. But it’s a fallacy to present those groups as being monolithic.
ETA: What @satby said.
TBone
Fascism needs to change the American culture to succeed here. It’s why we need to support all of our artists (musical, artistry of paint & drawing, writing, photography, craft, science, culinary, this list is very long).
Suzanne
@Baud: Honestly, I think this was an aspect of Barack Obama’s political brilliance. He made it clear that wanting to make the country a better, fairer place was the deepest form of loving it. It was a fresh perspective of genuine patriotism.
I know some people dismiss that stuff as “speechifying”, but I think it was the foundation of his political capital.
Trivia Man
@Nukular Biskits: A family from texas was on a road trip. At a rest stop in Ohio the 5 year old started talking to another family with kids. “Are y’all from texas?”
His dad immediately shushed him and hustled him off.
“Son, its not polite to ask someone if they’re from texas. If they aren’t, you will make them feel bad. And if they are, why they will tell you soon enough.”
tobie
@Baud: When Jane Sanders served as President of Burlington College and managed to run the institution into the ground, woodworking became a major via a pretty corrupt arrangement.
schrodingers_cat
Trump increased his vote share in NYC and New England. According to Dana Houle, most of the Republican legislative gains (state level) came from the northeast. The horseshoe left’s policies are not electoral winners
The next nominee will have to stand up to the horseshoe left because Biden’s attempts to win them over have been largely unsuccessful, and counterproductive.
Kay
@Baud:
You know I don’t go with that. Its fine and its true as far as it goes but “better than these scumbags” cannot be our benchmark. I feel like that leads inexorably to low standards. Trump lowers standards. He has already done so to a frightening degree. Sanders and Fetterman have now lowered THEIR standards to match his. Democrats cannot do that, and if they do the D base has to hold up standards FOR them. They’re not the last guardrail – we are.
Trivia Man
@satby: Growing up in California, i was shocked to learn the KKK hated all minorities- “including catholics”. About 90% of everyone i knew was catholic. To think of them as a “minority“ made me rethink my world view.
Baud
@Kay:
I know, we have different approaches. I think most people follow yours.
UncleEbeneezer
@Gvg: As much as we (people of privilege) struggle to see/identify/understand any Ism/Phobia that effects groups we aren’t a part of, I think antisemitism is the one that we are most blind to. A lot of it comes in subtle forms that are much less obvious than the egregious examples.
schrodingers_cat
@Nukular Biskits: Prof Bigfoot is citing data which you are countering with anecdata.
More than 50% of non white groups vote D even if the asshole contigent within those groups vote R.
But close to 60% white people vote R and have done so since the passage of Civil Rights Legislation.
TBone
Please aim your guns to the right.
Geminid
@p.a.: I think the shift to Republicans in the Rio Grande Valley predates the last election. At least, I remember was commented upon after the 2020 election.
I think Democrats still hold three of four RGV seats. They would be Vicente Gonzalez, Henry Cuellar and Veronica Escobar.* Republican Anthoney Golzalez holds the fourth.
Henry Cuellar is under indictment for taking money from Azerbaijan. If he takes a plea deal or is convicted at trial, the special election for his successor will get a lot of attention.
* Veronica Escobar succeeded Beto O’Rourke when he ran for Senate in 2018. The two were political allies.
Escobar’s Wikipedia biography is worth reading. It gives an account of how in 2009(?), after El Paso’s entrenched Democratic machine defeated the reformist mayor Escobar worked for, she and O’Rourke and two other party activists planned and executed a successful campaign to wrest control of El Paso politics from the old guard. The four were known locally as “the Progressives.”
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@UncleEbeneezer:
And yet, that notion remains widely accepted and pushed by a lot of people here and nationally–I’ve fallen into that mindset at least in terms of the amorphous “messaging” portion of the post-election, hot-take curriculum discussion. This gives me something to mull over the next time somebody here starts down that path.
Marcotte has only been worth reading on one topic, abortion rights (and the broader implications surrounding it) all these years (I go back to her Pandagon days). Insufferable Music Snob with insufferably obscure (and poor) taste in music. I digress.
tobie
@TBone: This is important. Artists may be the only folks speaking out. I’m assuming everyone here has heard the story of the editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes who resigned after the paper refused to publish her cartoon, which was critical of the obsequiousness of media owners vis a vis Trump.
zhena gogolia
@Baud: Hence, President Trump.
satby
@Baud: proud to be on team Baud.
TBone
@tobie: 🎯
Ohio Mom
@lowtechcyclist: I know that New Yorker cover, I have lived it.
During my first decade of living in the Buckeye state, my family back home often asked me how life was in Columbus or Cleveland, and less frequently, Cincinnati. They knew I live in one of those cities starting with “C.” I guess I ought to be thankful they didn’t ask about how things were going in Chattanooga.
Kay
@Baud:
The successful resistance to Trump in Round One was not led by Democratic electeds. It was led by the base. I reckon we’ll have to do it again. It’ll look different, but it will originate bottom up. It always does in this Party.
Baud
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
IMHO people focus on “Democratic messaging” because it’s emotionally easier than admitting “My views are in the minority and I have no idea how to persuade more people to agree with me.”
Nukular Biskits
@Professor Bigfoot:
I’m probably late to the pile on (Pacific time, business travel) but, yes, I take issue with this.
To the naked eye, I’m what you’d call “white”. On various forms asking how I self-identify, I’m “white”. On my birth certificate, I was identified as a “Caucasian male”. So … I’m white, I guess.
But I don’t identify with anything in your statement; i.e., “Like they GOTTA be hatin’ on SOMEBODY.”
Now, you could have been making the point about “white culture” (WTF that is … I’ve been white here in the South (the first 20 or so, rural and small town South MS) lily-white and, believe me, there aren’t any deep cultural roots, experiences, shared experiences that I can identify that I’d call part of “white culture”, much less core to it.
Again, while I could never walk in the shoes of someone who is NOT white, I understand where you’re coming from. The very last thing I want to do here is whitesplain but I ask that you just trust me on this. And, again, I ask that you not paint with such a broad brush.
Trivia Man
@schrodingers_cat: Idealism is a real danger. “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good enough.” IOW a purity pony will always be disappointed. We didn’t get here overnight, progress comes in first and starts.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@schrodingers_cat:
Neither are the “new liberals“.
TBone
Mood
bsky.app/profile/seeshell.bsky.social/post/3levoyw2drk2x
Baud
@Kay:
Yes the Dems are a bottom up party. Which is why I never expect to the led from the top down and I’m not frustrated when that doesn’t happen.
Mai Naem mobile ¹
@Baud: i did not know that. You would think somebody who was head of CAP would be an automatic ally of Sanders. I’ve always assumed it was Manchin. I know Manchin tanked something she was nominated for.
UncleEbeneezer
@Nukular Biskits: PB never says “all” or treats groups like a monolith. He takes pretty good care to make that clear, all the time. But if you look at groups that vote 70-90% for Dems (Black, Jewish) and compare to groups that vote 60-80% for GOP (White, Latino) clearly there’s a major difference in how Dem messaging goes over with those groups. Black People (not all) vote for Dems. White People (not all) vote Republican. Those statements are emphatically true and important, given the role that race plays in American politics.
eclare
@Suzanne:
Agree. Obama was perfection with “hope and change” and “yes we can.” No policy can compete with that. Voters will always be swayed by stories and emotions. We need to find our own.
Baud
@Mai Naem mobile ¹:
Sanders and Manchin were on the same committee and both opposed her. Bernie was the chair of the committee however.
Denali5
@eclare: I was born and raised in Knoxville, and the very small minority who were Catholic were definitely view as “other” and not marriage material. The even smaller Jewish population were not even present in east Knoxville where I lived. One reason I wanted to move away was I wanted to experience a more diverse set of friends. I was raised Presbyterian, and I was tired of the attitude that change was always sometime in the future. Living my life away from my home town meant it was harder to maintain relationships with my friends from high school, and harder to accept the culture that has not changed.
TBone
Jon Cooper
bsky.app/profile/joncooper-us.bsky.social/post/3leyssgrr722h
Baud
@UncleEbeneezer:
We still won the Latino vote nationwide, even though we lost ground.
UncleEbeneezer
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Oh really? Which Denver burbs? Doesn’t surprise me at all (I just came back from visiting Denver), just curious.
Nukular Biskits
@Baud:
I was never a Bernie-bro but generally supported him.
But I think it’s time for him to step aside.
Baud
@TBone:
Does that mean we’ve arrived?
Baud
@Nukular Biskits:
Heh. He just won another 6 years and Vermont’s governor is a Republican.
Professor Bigfoot
@Baud: But what value does the “Hispanic” label bring?
I get Latino, “coming from Latin America,” but like I said— Ted Cruz is “Hispanic,” so making “Hispanics” into a cohesive community is a non-starter.
It’s worse IMO than the amalgamation of Asian folk— ignoring that China, Japan, and the Korea are VERY different countries with very different cultures!
Sometimes I think a binary solution set would be illuminating:
“White”
”Not white”
It would be very interesting to see who chose what, eh wot?
Denali5
@Suzanne: There is a sizable population in Texas and New Mexico who descended from the Spanish who were living there when the West became part of the United States.
TBone
@TBone: betcha no one heard this, hope I’m wrong
blueamerica.crooksandliars.com/2024/12/04/bernie-weve-got-to-find-grassroots-leaders-at-the-local-st…
Nukular Biskits
@Baud:
My short reply can’t do the topic justice, but there have been lotsa reporting/analysis on one of the primary reasons WHY: It’s tied to support of Israel and the bringing about of the Second Coming.
Professor Bigfoot
@Baud: I know most will consider it coincidental; but this hatred of Dems seems to have started in the late 1960s into the ‘70s— just as the effects of CRA64 and especially VRA65 began to manifest… leading to the election of Reagan and his “states rights” rhetoric.
Suzanne
@eclare:
I know that this is ultimately just vibes. But most people make really important decisions based on vibes, not data. I can wish that this was not true, all day long, but it is what it is.
And it has always been true. The Founders were afraid of demagoguery, which is stirred up and perpetuated by vibes.
Nukular Biskits
@Trivia Man:
LOL! How true!
Ohio Mom
@Suzanne: In addition, I suppose that if being Italian-American or Irish-American or whatever is an important part of someone’s identity, they will stay where there are expressions of that identity — lots of Italian restaurants and markets, churches full of your people, some place with a big St. Patrick’s Day parade, etc.— and not move to the Sunbelt where such things do not exist.
Now if that part of your heritage isn’t important to you, yeah, move to where you like the weather better.
Professor Bigfoot
White people are seldom cognizant of the role of race and of whiteness in their daily lives.
That’s not meant as a slam— just a statement of fact, like how a fish cannot understand the concept of “wetness.”
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@UncleEbeneezer:
And you didn’t make the meet up on Friday, tsk, tsk. :P
Specifically, Lakewood and Wheat Ridge. Each remain around 90% white.
Whites who flocked here over the last 10-12 years for their Urban-Living Theme Park Experience, when little Liam or Emma hit school age and they can’t “choice” them into a “better” school, try to move into another school district like Central Park (formerly Stapleton) or Lowry. If they can’t swing that, we often see them go back to their burb of origin because the schools are “better” plus they typically have parents nearby to then help. If they can’t do that, it’s amazing how many move to Lakewood or Wheat Ridge because as we see constantly, Gentrification Stops At The School House Door.
Kay
I wish we’d get away from national statistics. No one in real world campaigns uses them. What Latinos? Where? Which white women? College educated NE or southern rural? Which Black women? Southern rural or Los Angeles? In order to reach people you have to know WHO they are and WHERE they are. This whole thread is about regional and class and educational differences yet we return again and again to national numbers. It doesn’t hang together.
Baud
@Professor Bigfoot:
Some of them did leave the water for land. Jury still out on whether that was a good thing.
UncleEbeneezer
@Professor Bigfoot: I think there is definitely some truth to this. “Male” culture too. I think it’s pretty standard for people at the top of every Oppressor/Oppressed equation to be indoctrinated with the notion that they have to be forever on guard and ready to fight to keep their status. Polls to tease out the amount of racial resentment show White People with significantly higher numbers than Black People. Which makes no sense since BP are the actual victims. Likewise, it’s Men who are most resentful on gender, than the Women who actually pay the price of Patriarchy.
Nukular Biskits
@satby:
which reminds me of that classic Groucho Marx quote:
TBone
Freight Train A’Comin
bsky.app/profile/sheilakathleen.bsky.social/post/3leyvyv4mq22y
Artists
Professor Bigfoot
@Nukular Biskits: So explain why Trump only wins *white people.
eclare
@Denali5:
Yeah, out of my graduating class of around 400 from Knoxville Central (Bobcats represent!), there was one Catholic family. That was it for religious diversity. I never heard anything racist against them, and their son was one of my friends, but obviously I did not hear every conversation.
I think there may have been twenty to thirty Black people in my class?
So that was my experience with diversity until I got to Emory University. Wow
ETA> I do not maintain any high school friendships. No point. I recently found out my sweet college BF is now full MAGA. Again, no point.
Nukular Biskits
@Baud:
Yeah, I know. So … that ain’t happenin’ anytime soon.
zhena gogolia
@UncleEbeneezer: I don’t know why this is so hard for people to grasp.
Meanwhile I’m discovering the abolitionist and Union Army history of my mother’s side of the family and loving it.
Baud
@zhena gogolia:
You have good genes!
frosty
@Nukular Biskits: I agree; I thought the same thing when I read that comment. You answered it well.
I don’t hate on anyone and neither did my parents or grandparents. I don’t have a NEED to hate on anyone. It’s quite possibly that you and I are immersed in white privilege and we’re whitesplaining something we’ll never understand. Nevertheless, that’s my experience.
UncleEbeneezer
@Professor Bigfoot: No need to apologize. Believe me, I’m well aware of how completely unaware most white people are on how race effects them and the world in general. It drives me nuts, regularly. It’s the main issue I have with my own family members.
Barbara
@Betty Cracker: I just read Brooklyn by Colm Toibin and interethnic tension is definitely a theme. However, I think you would find that it’s no longer really noticeable and diminished greatly once people decamped to the suburbs.
zhena gogolia
@Baud: At least on my mother’s mother’s side. My mother’s father’s side, I’m not so sure. My father was a Slovak peasant, so that’s okay.
Glory b
@Nukular Biskits: That was the media narrative (that they reinforced with their “focus groups”) though.
Now that more deep-dive numbers have come out, it seems that the only minority group making a significant turn to Republicans was Hispanic males, the others voted Democratic close to their usual percentages.
UncleEbeneezer
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: I flew back to LA on 12/30. Otherwise I woulda tried to join. I was hoping you’d say “Highlands Ranch” or “Castle Pines”, the two incredibly-white suburbs where my Sister has lived for decades, lol.
Baud
@Glory b:
Two things people always do.
Suzanne
@Ohio Mom:
I mean, white people of various flavors have mostly been here long enough to intermarry, and so some of the traditions get lost. And that leads to the kids not speaking the language, falling away from religion, moving around the country to chase economic opportunities, etc.
This is kind of one reason I think that white-people-who-finish-college are evolving into kind of a different group from white-people-who-don’t-go-to-college. We’ve done more geographic mixing and intermarrying, but now we’re spatially and culturally separating along educational lines, because white people have gone to college in significant number for long enough now.
Interesting fact: here in the Pittsburgh area, the bougie suburbs of Mt. Lebanon and Upper St. Clair shifted more Democratic. Those are pretty wealthy, exceedingly white, very college-educated places. The towns of Clairton, West Mifflin, and others in the Mon Valley (the dead center of steel country) are also very largely white, but far more working-class….. and they shifted more Republican. Clairton is where “The Deer Hunter” is set, for reference. Up until just a couple of elections ago, Mt. Lebanon was pretty close to 50/50 D/R, and Upper St. Clair was pretty much the Platonic ideal of “country club Republicans”.
Professor Bigfoot
@UncleEbeneezer: It is entirely too easy for masculinity to go over the cliff into toxicity, that’s a fact.
Of the Black folk who voted for Trump, the vast majority were men.
Likewise the male Latino vote went up for him.
Misogyny seems to have a tremendous appeal.
Geminid
@Denali5: Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes’ family settled in what is now southern Srizona during the 1740s. On the other hand, Senator Ruben Gallego’s mother moved from Mexico to Chicago not long before he was born.
One similarity: both Fontes and Gallego are Marine Corps veterans.
Baud
@Professor Bigfoot:
100%
tobie
I have a co-worker, a veritable prima donna, who serially breaks long-standing work arrangements and, when called on it, says the rules (or norms) were never written down or made clear to her, so if we want them, we can agree to them as binding in the future but not for her right now. She get aways with murder because of this. Bernie Sanders reminds me of her. No one stood up to him in 2016. He should have been knee-capped then for refusing to exit the primary after he lost. He acts the way he does because undermining Democrats has worked out well for him personally.
dr. luba
Back in the mid-2000s (before the war) we held our UCARE summer camp in Zakarpattia/Transcarpathia. The head of our sister organization in Ukraine had gotten a large donation from a company in Odesa, and invited the businessmen running it to come visit us.
For some reason not clear to anyone, they decided to take a shortcut through Moldova. Which meant driving through Transdnistria. Per the map, this was a much shorter route; traveling through Ukraine they would have to make a wide swing around the Carpathian mountains.
When they arrived, they were quite shaken. Border crossings with crazy men with machine guns. Bribes. Threats. Having to spend the night in Transdnistria, hearing gunfire through the night.
They drove back home the long way.
Miss Bianca
@Professor Bigfoot: Your definition is about as succinct a summary of the American White Wing as I’ve seen.
oldgold
@Glory b: It is like what Miles Davis said about Jazz, “It’s not the notes you play, what’s important is the notes you don’t play.”
We left millions of notes unplayed.
Nukular Biskits
@Professor Bigfoot:
I’m not sure I understand your question here.
I’m pretty confident that you’re not asserting Trump won the votes only those who identify as white, and all other voters supported Harris (or third-party).
If you’re question is why did Trump overwhelmingly win the majority of (primarily) white male votes, my answer is what you’ll probably consider a trite one: Fucking ignorance.
Ignorance is the parent of all prejudices and biases, IMHO. For example, people didn’t vote for Harris because she’s a woman (misogyny) or they supported Trump because of his publicly-stated enmity towards immigrants (xenophobia, racism and bigotry). The list goes on and on.
But to ascribe all of this to something called “white culture” which, to my knowledge, isn’t a thing that has been defined, and is a bit of a bridge to far.
Now, if what you’re posting is working towards defining the phrase “white culture”, I’m interested in hearing, debating and discussing it. But I ask that you apply the same template as you would when referencing “black culture”, etc. I think you’re going to have a long row to hoe in coming up with a similar definition (as I don’t think there is such a thing, no matter what white Christian nationalists, for example, might say) so we can have a common platform for all culture-related discussions.
Suzanne
@Geminid: Gallego’s mom is Colombian and his father is Mexican.
Harrison Wesley
@Trivia Man: Largest mass lynching in US was of Italians.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@UncleEbeneezer:
Oh, now I remember that.
Those came into existence long (relatively speaking) afterwards and yes, they are simply a continuation of white flight, in those cases people in a burb beginning to see POC move in, thus, time to get the hell outta dodge, hence, burbs like those two.
They are notorious in the metro area for their whiteness and political rightness.
Nukular Biskits
@Glory b:
Good to know!
TBone
@TBone: holy shit, Tulsi is so much worse than I knew!
digbysblog.net/2025/01/04/tulsi-and-her-guru/
moonbat
@gene108: I count it as one of the most positive formative experiences of my growing up that my family moved from a (very white) north suburb of Kansas City, MO to the Mississippi delta when I was in middle school. I went from a school with one (count him- one) black guy named B.G. to a school that was 80 percent black and 20 percent white. Most of the white families of means in that community put their kids in private schools.
Culture shock doesn’t even begin to describe it. I left school that first day crying because I was certain I was going to fail everything (really struggled with the southern accents of my teachers at first) and because I felt so alienated and alone. Then I thought about that one black kid in N.KC in a sea of white and shook my head when my dad asked me if I wanted to go to private school. Being in the minority is a great teacher. I’m glad I learned that lesson fairly early.
Baud
@TBone:
Probably a sentiment that can be applied to every Republican.
Kay
Here’s my take on why Democrats are losing Latinos. This is based solely on our clients and the Latino school parents I knew over 30 years of having kids in public schools. The Latino group here are Mexican and they are 2nd or 3rd generation, so that’s the subset. They are patriotic and aspirational. They aspire to own their own businesses. That’s real success in that community. They plan to hand the business down. They don’t want to change “the status quo” they want to BE PART of the status quo. Just treat them like Americans. That’s what they want. We actively sought them as clients, we got many of them, and that’s how we did it.
Professor Bigfoot
@Nukular Biskits: Let me be clear— oNLY WHITE PEOPLE gave Trump over 50% of their votes.
Now explain this, please.
Miss Bianca
@different-church-lady: I don’t get it about YouTube. I mean, I use it all the time, for music and yoga videos. And some car “how-to” stuff, sometimes. I’m sure if I scrolled down the “suggested for you” on the side I’d find some crazy woo-woo or religious shit, but…*I don’t go looking for it*. I guess what I’m wondering is: Why are people even *looking* for this crap?
Nukular Biskits
@moonbat:
Segregation academies were (and still are) a big thing in MS.
And that’s one of the reasons Gov. Tate Reeves continues to push for “school choice” to direct public education funding to those private schools.
Professor Bigfoot
I am once again reminded that “in this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.”
They want to be treated like they’re WHITE.
That is “white adjacency.”
Baud
@Kay:
That makes sense to me. Our story has become predominantly about fixing what’s wrong, which isn’t aspirational. It’s drudgery.
Baud
@Professor Bigfoot:
Not so. It’s only white adjacency if they want to punch down. In the liberal ideal, everyone is treated as “white” in the sense that they are all treated with equal dignity.
Denali5
@oldgold: I love that! So true!
eclare
Oh….photo by OzarkHillbilly today. Beautiful.
Nukular Biskits
@Professor Bigfoot:
I believe I did: Fucking ignorance.
Now how this represents “white culture”, I’m at a loss to understand.
Once again, you and I are not on opposing sides of this issue so don’t take it that way. Time and space here (for me, at least: About to get a shower and run down to the lobby for breakfast) probably doesn’t allow for making it clearer on my part but, if you’re arguing the overwhelming majority of those who identify as “white” who voted for Donald Trump did so exclusively because they acting on their less-than-noble biases, you won’t get much pushback from me.
But lumping all them (And me????? And all other “whites” who didn’t vote for Trump and his cronies?????) into something called “white culture” is something I simply can’t wrap my head around.
Baud
@eclare:
Thanks for pointing that out.
TBone
@Baud: it’s not MAGA, this cult is its own thing.
Our incoming Director of National Intelligence literally had her start under a fucking overpass in a quonset hut.
wonkette.com/p/was-tulsi-gabbard-in-a-cult-that
Geminid
@Kay: During Trump’s first term, the Democratic “resistance’s” most important accomplishment was in the 2018 midterms, when Democrats flipped 40 red districts. It was a nationwide phenomenon.
I figure that had to be a grass roots effort. If national leadership was responsible, how come they couldn’t do it before or after?
WaterGirl
@schrodingers_cat: You frequently talk about the horseshoe left, and I am never exactly certain of who you are referring to. I have questions, and I’m hoping you can answer them.
Do you mean extremists on the left, who are just as damaging as extremists on the right?
Can you share what kinds of people you are referring to when you use that phrase? Do you think that’s a very large group?
If you think that’s more than a tiny percentage of people on the left, are there familiar names that you consider to be part of the horseshoe left?
Wondering if you can share names so who you are referring to so it’s more clear?
Do you think Balloon Juice peeps are part of the horseshoe left?
Kay
@Professor Bigfoot:
Do you want to get them as voters or do you want to tell them what they think? Is this a seminar or an election? Choose. We wanted them as clients. We were supposed to say “well, clearly your aspiration to buy a carwash and for your son to be the quarterback on the HS team means you’re white adjacent”
bluefoot
@Betty Cracker: I’ve lived in Boston for quite a few years now and some of that ethnic identity is less, but there’s still a lot of judgement and assumptions based on your background and in what town or neighborhood you live in. It’s a LOT stronger in the native Boston area people.
The other thing that continues to strike me about Boston is how closed the communities are. It’s almost impossible to be accepted if you’re a newcomer, particularly if you’re at all outside the “norm” for any one group.
Denali5
I still think it should be referred to as majority white Republicans – maybe Independents – voted for. TCF.
UncleEbeneezer
@frosty: I think what you are both doing is assuming that your personal experience is somehow representative of the larger phenomenon, when it might not be. It’s possible that the more you learn about how racism works (especially the nuances and subtleties that can be hard to see) you may look back and see much more of it than you were initially aware of. That’s what happened for me. Twenty years ago I would have told you I hadn’t really seen much racism at all aside from the really egregious examples. And that was very much at odds with what Black People would tell you about how damn prevalent it is. I was skeptical because it didn’t match my own experience. But the more I’ve listened to Black voices, watched films and read books about racism etc., now I see a shitload of often-subtle ways that it played out among friends, family, myself. So you could be where I was at and as you learn more you will see/understand more. Occam’s razor is that that is probably the case. And there’s no shame in that, it’s what makes privilege such a hell of a drug. I think we all start out clueless and fairly blind to the subtleties of Isms/Phobias and we all have a journey/progression to get better at seeing and understanding them. Additionally, you might have just had experiences that were uncommonly free of this shit. Which is great, but it’s not representative of the greater/general truth.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: As a wise man on BJ stated in this very thread.
Bernie Sanders has trafficked in white grievance politics since he was elected to Congress in the early 90s. His politics just wears economic justice clothes.
TBone
@Baud: astute
WaterGirl
@schrodingers_cat: So we’re contrasting “more than 50% of non-white” people who vote Republican with “close to 60% of white people who vote Republican.
For the sake of argument, let’s say that “more than 50% of non-white people” = about 52 or 53%.
And let’s say that “close to 60% of white people” = about 57 – 58%.
At worst, that’s a difference of 6%. At best, it’s a difference of 4%.
That seems like a fairly small gap to close.
Kay
@Professor Bigfoot:
Maybe they are white adjacent. I have no earthly idea but Ill spot you that. Here we are. Do you want to reach them as voters or not?
bluefoot
@schrodingers_cat: Yep. The mask really came off in 2020 during BLM and once it became clear that PoC were disproportionately affected by the pandemic. Many PoC I know (incl myself) were surprised to realize how fragile allyship and even friendships were. We had thought people had learned better since then, but the election has put paid to that.
tobie
@Kay: Harris made supporting and promoting small business a big part of her campaign. There was no equivalent on the Republican side. Evidently it made no difference to Latino voters but this was not for lack of tryng.
(I say this as someone who is not enamored of small business at all, so the pitch always stands out to me.)
moonbat
@Nukular Biskits: All I knew at the time (I have always been an academic nerd) was that I could take Latin as a class in the public school and they never heard the like in the private schools in that town. I had some of the best learning experiences of my life in Mississippi public schools. But this was JUST before the not so subtle attempts to re-segregate the public schools began to pick up steam. Now of course they are not even trying to pretend they want to do anything but bring back segregation with private school grift for added flavor.
Grrrrrr
zhena gogolia
@dr. luba: Yeah, it’s a sad place by all accounts.
zhena gogolia
@moonbat: I was a minority in my high school as well. It’s a good experience (for a white person).
Baud
@tobie:
It’s pretty clear that specific campaign promises don’t seem to mean a whole lot anymore.
Suzanne
@Baud:
Yes. It doesn’t have that deep emotional appeal.
It’s also really hard to get people credibility excited about governmental institutions being agents of positive change in an age of lack of trust in those institutions. The GOP has driven institutions into the ground for so long that it’s hard to remember them working.
zhena gogolia
@Nukular Biskits: Maybe this will help.
One candidate was a highly qualified, longtime public servant with a stellar record and not a hint of scandal in her career.
The other candidate led a violent insurrection that attacked the U.S. Capitol, is an adjudicated rapist, and was convicted of 34 felony counts of fraud. (I could go on.)
The second candidate won, with the majority of white people voting for him. How do YOU explain that?
ETA: To annotate: Candidate 1 is a person of color. Candidate 2 is a “blond” white man.
bluefoot
@frosty: I am native born American of an American, but not white (not Black either), and I am DEFINITELY not considered American by many white people I encounter. Especially here in Boston. I could tell you stories…
kindness
I never heard of Transnistria before. Moldovia, sure. But Transnistria? Nope. I linked over to the article and you know what Putin’s scrum of lackeys in Transnistria remind me of? MAGA folk. Morons knowingly lying to service their cult and their leader, in spite of the fact that their cult keeps them poor and ignorant.
That kind of shit is hard to fight against. Particularly when our MSM has gone Pravda on us.
Baud
@Suzanne:
Yes, it’s also clear to me that people don’t even want to hear evidence of government working. Can’t make the horse drink the water.
Kay
@tobie:
Make the pitch aspirational and patriotic. The policy details don’t matter that much. I think Harris did a good job reclaiming patriotism – that came thru loud and clear – but I don’t think we do enough optimistic aspiration. Obama understood it really well. He talked about “strivers”, people who overcome, that’s how they see themselves. I actually love those people so I was like ” lets get them!”
schrodingers_cat
As for messaging. For me it is enough to know that the Democrats who seek my vote don’t want to kill me. The other side does. So the choice couldn’t be more clear.
dnfree
@gene108: I went to college in the 1960s (non-prestigious state university). I’m a white female, and one summer a white friend and I wound up living in off-campus housing where everyone else was black, from Chicago, and members of Alpha Kappa Alpha. (One of them was a friend of my white friend, and had rescued us from a bad housing situation). That was a tremendous learning experience, and one I treasure. After a few weeks, I started looking at my own skin as being disgustingly pasty and pale and not “the norm”. Being in the minority teaches you something.
Edited to clarify that it wasn’t my black housemates making me feel inadequate; they were unfailingly friendly and accepting. It was my own perception of myself that changed subliminally.
tobie
@Kay: I don’t think Obama would have won in this climate. Seriously. The country has changed so much with Trump’s entrance on the political stage. Grievance, resentment, and the promise of revenge have beat out hope and change.
Harris, the joyful warrior, did pitch small business as the backbone of America. I heard this and accepted she had to do it, though the idea bothers me. My grandmother worked in a sweatshop and then started her own small biz for custom curtains. The last thing in the world she wanted was for me to inherit her business. Study hard was all I ever heard.
lowtechcyclist
@Another Scott:
Remember Jimmy Carter in the 1976 primaries, talking about preserving ‘ethnically pure’ neighborhoods?
BellyCat
@different-church-lady: UPVOTED
Professor Bigfoot
@Baud: Fair point… would that more white people felt that way.
Suzanne
@Kay:
That’s what made him a generational political talent. He envisioned and communicated and embodied a whole new positive vision of the American future in that era. He read the vibes and built the vibes. Then, he turned that into legislative success. But the vibes were the foundation.
Professor Bigfoot
@Nukular Biskits: EVERYBODY KNOWS IT’S NOT ALL. OF YOU, goddammit.
But IT’S SO GODDAMN MANY OF YOU that we’re only RATIONAL to assume it of any one of you we run across.
And HIT DOGS HOLLER.
Baud
@tobie:
Obama might not have won in 2008 if it weren’t for all of Bush’s problems and especially the economy.
cain
@Kay:
They got their talking points now. It will be spread and will be the common wisdom.
UncleEbeneezer
The problem is the Progressive faction of our coalition hates the very concept of American national pride. Any attempt to garner good/positive feelings about America will always be met with a lecture about how America is a Racist, Imperialist, Colonialist, Genocidal project of Oligarchy etc. And this sentiment is very popular with activists and academics who dominate a lot of our social media spaces. People like Biden, Kamala, Obama and even Hillary, imo, have presented great frameworks for good feelings about America that the Left can embrace, but too many people in our coalition will always fight that effort tooth-and-nail. This is yet another problem Republicans don’t have to worry about that we do.
MomSense
@Kay:
Yup. You can tell which jackals actually campaign by interacting with voters and which ones don’t.
Nukular Biskits
@moonbat:
(Back from grabbing b’fast. Yum. Not.).
Yeah, we’re seeing the same thing here in MS being pushed by “conservatives” (meaning, in this case, predominately white Republican evangelicals): “School choice”.
By now, everyone and his brother knows what that phrase means. Some of use, however, are willing to point out exactly what it means: Resegregating public education and directing public funding to schools where the population will be primarily white.
So-called “conservatives” will claim that, nosirree, segregation isn’t the goal here and how dare you even mention that, that the “vouchers” (or tax credits or whatever other scheme they come up with) will be open to all. They’re lying, both by omission and misdirection, though as they full well know that those vouchers will not cover the full cost of educating kids and that most white families in the state have the resources to cover the gap, whereas most black families do not.
I oppose the use of public funds for ANY private education.
Nukular Biskits
@zhena gogolia:
Again, I submit that I did: Fucking ignorance.
Nukular Biskits
@tobie:
I’m sad to say that I must agree with this.
Baud
@Nukular Biskits:
Ok, so why are white voters disproportionately more ignorant than non-white voters, if, as you posit, there’s no white culture driving it?
MomSense
@TBone:
My boys played that song last week after the train went by the house. I think she was 12 when she wrote it.
My grandma used to play it on the piano and I learned to sing it when I was a little girl.
cain
@Suzanne: makes sense about the low class. The Catholics were the Irish, Italians, and the Spanish.
zhena gogolia
@Nukular Biskits: I don’t think ignorance explains it.
zhena gogolia
@Baud: Exactly.
Miss Bianca
@UncleEbeneezer: Yeah, sadly. I got into a thread on FB which I shouldn’t have, pushing back against some knucklehead on the subject of Ukraine, who was all, “I’m no Putin apologist BUT yadda yadda yadda American desire to expand NATO” basically was the only reason anyone would oppose Russian expansionism. I guess. It was hard to tell what his point was, except that “America is bad and oh by the way we are the only country in the world that has agency so we must be driving Sweden and Finland into the arms of NATO.” Uh-huh.
It’s like, America is somehow *uniquely bad* in these peoples’ eyes. I guess it’s a knee-jerk response to American exceptionalism, but it kind of reinforces it in a negative way: “America is EXCEPTIONALLY bad! Only American imperialism exists!”
I sort of get it. They sound like me when I was in my teens and early 20s. But then…I grew up. And all of that “American badness is the ONLY badness” BS started to sound like…BS, to me.
Suzanne
@UncleEbeneezer:
Agree. I think this attitude is deeply unstrategic. Rorty would agree (he’s dead now). The whole essay is in Achieving Our Country, which is fantastic reading.
Again, that’s why I think Obama played this so well. He managed to thread that needle almost perfectly. The message was that all of that terrible history was true, and that those who wanted to make the country more fair were doing the best work of citizenship.
Professor Bigfoot
@Kay: Whiteness is predicated on anti-Blackness. It exists as “not Black.”
Funny how the immigrants want to be American but none of them want to be Black.
MagdaInBlack
@Baud: Complacency.
Nukular Biskits
@Baud:
My problem here is I have yet to see a definition of “white culture”. What is it? Ignorant (as defined by folks like you and me, which, of course, would be entirely subjective) white people? White Trump voters? White male Trump voters who identify as Christians?
Who belongs to this “white culture”? What are the beliefs of the members of this group?
But, then again, the use of “culture” to apply to any group of people is probably fraught with things that’ll trip you up. For example, what is “_______ culture” <fill in the blank with any demographic>.
Stream of consciousness here, but I wonder if things like “culture” are like pornography:
Kay
@tobie:
Its brave of you to say you don’t like small business in this country so kudos. Seriously. Its good to hear the other side. Bold! Its like saying you hate apple pie :)
IMO, Mexican Americans in my county revere small business because they are discriminated against and if they own it they control it.
dnfree
@Professor Bigfoot: Our grandchildren go to a very diverse northwest suburban Chicago high school. Their sports teams have adopted Ubuntu as a slogan and aspiration. It’s on their uniforms.
Professor Bigfoot
@Kay: At the expense of the rights and political power of Black people?
No.
TBone
@MomSense: 💜
moonbat
@Nukular Biskits: Stating the obvious here, but the academic nerd in me is incensed that this ALL about race politics and not about education. Back then it was clear that the private schools in that town were considered superior only because they were all white. Yet we public school kids routinely kicked their asses in academic bowls, which REALLY pissed them off. It shattered that de facto sense of superiority they got from being White and private.
It’s all about denying education to black folks NOT about making their lily white schools better learning institutions.
Full circle. Its where a lot of white resentment comes from in my experience. In a real meritocracy they have to admit the possibility they might fail. They’d rather it be assumed that they are better than actually have to prove it. We’re entering (SO slowly, dragging our feet) a nation where enough minorities and women are out there proving that in a meritocracy they are better than your average to below average white male. And a big chunk of average to below average white males who have til now benefited from that assumption just CANNOT handle that.
Sorry about breakfast…
Nukular Biskits
@zhena gogolia:
Okay. Then it was “economic anxiety”. J/K.
Seriously, I disagree. If you want to argue those voters supported Trump because of racism, racism is nothing more than a virulent form of ignorance.
If you want to claim it was misogyny (or toxic maleness, which I think is the same thing), ditto.
My point here is not to claim everyone who voted for Trump was stupid (although I do think that personally). And, for the record, I do think that ignorance (manifested in its various forms) definitely is what won Trump the election.
My problem is with the use of the phrase “white culture”. What does it mean? Who are its members? What are their beliefs? Beyond outright racists blathering shit about “white culture”, I’m unaware of anyone claiming white people have a culture unto their own.
See also my response to Baud.
Suzanne
@Kay: Small business is deeply masculine-coded. Not having a boss. Employing your children. This is an aspiration for a lot of men. It’s a status signifier.
I didn’t really notice in 2016, but it stood out to me later…. Trump has the aesthetic of the family businessman. He wasn’t telling anyone to go to college, which is really the opposite…..most college grads go to work for someone else.
Nukular Biskits
@moonbat:
Agreed 1000%
schrodingers_cat
@WaterGirl: In this entire thread you have singled me out to explain and justify my comments. To what do I owe this honor?
Professor Bigfoot
@Nukular Biskits: I sincerely believe it really began in 2008.
UncleEbeneezer
@Miss Bianca: Yeah, being honest/critical about America’s sins is really important. But some people then get addicted to it and end up with overly simplistic outlooks that center the US and overlook the sins of every other country.
Miss Bianca
@moonbat: I emphatically oppose public funds being spent on private education.
That said, I ended up being glad (can’t believe I’m saying this, but hey, it is 50 years later) that my parents decided to enroll me in private school starting in 7th grade. Not for the reasons they were glad for, although the education I got, by American standards anyway, *was* top-notch, but I would have gotten a good education in the public school system in Grosse Pointe as well, because it was supremely well-funded.
No, the reason I have ended up being so glad I went to private school in that community was that I ended up going to school with so.much.more racially and ethnically diverse a student body than I would have in public school. And I quickly learned that it wasn’t going to be the Black or Asian or Hispanic or Jewish or Arabic students who were going to be making my life a misery…nope, it was usually always my fellow WASPs.
That taught me some lessons. Lessons it may have taken most of a lifetime for me to absorb, but that’s on me.
Nukular Biskits
@Professor Bigfoot:
I don’t recall anything of import happening that year, other than two failed wars of choice, an economic meltdown and the election of a presidential candidate who was “other”, which broke the fucking minds of millions of Americans, apparently.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@UncleEbeneezer:
Bingo. I was part of the first 2-years of court-ordered busing in Norfolk VA in the early 70s. Our neighborhood (then) would be considered blue collar white. They shipped 5th and 6th graders downtown on the city buses to Monroe Elementary.
It wasn’t until I was an adult, and then only over time, did I learn about and then realize all the things I saw being bussed. When I tell people it turned out to be probably the best thing that happened to me as a kid, they look at me like I’m nuts…and those reactions are from white people who grew up in a white burb. They still don’t get it and the flood of them who move into city cores to displace those same people I went to elementary school with bring that racial tonedeafness with them.
Chris T.
@Betty Cracker:
You’re an O’Bama?
Shakti
@gene108:
Oh yes. My college boyfriend couldn’t deal with being the only white person at one meeting of an ISO. My reaction was “Welcome to my world” because I was one or a handful of non-white people at PWIs my entire life.
@schrodingers_cat:
In general-
Some of the H1-B discourse makes me twitchy and often veers into nativism. Plus I notice a lot of people just ignore what H1-Bs or former ones or those adjacent actually say about the system as they experience it.
As you know and I have to keep reminding myself:
Most people are not going to be familiar with how any immigration works if they don’t have a personal stake in it because depending on what sub-group you get slotted into the rules are different and arcane and complex. And a lot of immigrants will only be familiar with how people who are as apples to apples to them as possible experience the system.
I don’t blame them, because most people will not have the bandwidth in their brain to know more than that.
However, I find it incredibly dishonest that nobody in public life seems to acknowledge that in any way.
And it just seems very telling people argue about whether or not they need to brain drain the most educated people from other countries and stopping there without redirecting to actually funding and protecting education here or equalizing what labor protections to the higher standard.
Kay
So I represent A lot of Toledo area union members. Partly its my charm and grace (duh) but partly its because I met labor people in Democratic politics over 30 years. So I have a lot of carpenters union people. In Toledo, that union is Latino. Now, carpenters in commercial construction (not residential) have a problem because modern building has less and less use for carpenters. They’re used as laborers a lot and why not just hire a laborer? So what they are doing is sort of cannabilizing work from other trades – they’re trying to get solar and wind turbine from electricians, duct work from HVAC etc. This is turning into a war – the other trades are pissed and some of that ire is attributed to Latinos not being good union members. So this is the kind of granular stuff Democratic pols encounter. All politics is local :)
Professor Bigfoot
@Nukular Biskits:
bsky.app/profile/professorbigfoot.bsky.social/post/3leyrhzi4ak2k
moonbat
@Miss Bianca: I think the contrast seems clearer to me because in that part of the country the race lines are very sharply drawn and you are either on one side or the other.
As Betty mentioned above, in northern parts of the country there is more sorting/divides among white ethnicities and folks, in general, like to think of themselves as being less racist or not racist at all because they are not living in former slave states.
But I take your point.
schrodingers_cat
@Shakti: There is another factor ignored in the discourse here. Indian citizens, especially the ones who are Modi and BJP supporters have been pushing a pro Republican and pro Trump narrative on social media. They frequently get mistaken for Indian Americans.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Baud:
Yup and that’s not just on the right. Our resident Libertarian in a Trench Coat’s cognitive dissonance on this is pronounced and they’re not alone in that outlook as it’s part of the entire left/right political spectrum. It’s sometimes easier to deal with someone on the right because they, like white supremacists, are at least honest about their hatred and stances whereas on the left, it’s disguised language and misdirection about actual policy outcomes.
There are shitloads of examples of government working, both at the local and national level that achieve positive change, we pointed out numerous examples at the “Biden Level” yesterday. And yet, as you say, we still have people coming in pounding the same, tired talking points to the contrary.
Nukular Biskits
@moonbat @Miss Bianca:
I think in the interest of full disclosure, we pulled our sons out of the local public school system and home-schooled. The primary reason was because the county school board was driven by a clique of well-to-do busybodies who pushed the entire county school system to implementing a mandatory uniform policy, something I vehemently opposed.
Secondary reasons included the oldest one was bored and the youngest one was having problems with math (he was a kid who couldn’t grasp 1+1=2, finally understanding it, then when confronted with 1+2=3, had never seen anything like that before).
Don’t get me wrong: The public school they were attending was diverse, and highly-rated. But the uniform policy was the final straw for us.
It worked out well, since both boys went to college and got their master’s but that’s only because my salary allowed their mom to stay at home and plan lessons, field trips, etc. And it didn’t hurt both were voracious readers.
Having said that, I’m still an advocate of public education.
WaterGirl
@Baud:
White voters can afford to be ignorant. Those who are “othered” can not.
@zhena gogolia:
I think ignorance can explain part of it – once you assume that it’s mostly white people who can afford to be ignorant.
tobie
@Kay: I like apple pie. I’m not always contrary!
WaterGirl
@schrodingers_cat: As I said, you use that term frequently and I decided that it was time for me to try to understand what you’re saying instead of skipping over it.
bluefoot
@UncleEbeneezer:
OMG, this. And I don’t understand why some fight/reject those frameworks. The best parts of the American ideal have always been aspirational. And the vision doesn’t have to be perfect, not its implementation – we can (as they say in business-speak) work on continuous improvement.
I went to an exhibit of photographs of women in the Black Panther movement in 1960s Oakland, and the thing that really struck me was the joy in the struggle. Recognition that the fight was hard, with a lot of opposition, and dangerous, but it was f*cking righteous. It IS righteous. Maybe that conviction is lacking now for some reason? I don’t know.
UncleEbeneezer
@Nukular Biskits: Asking “what is white culture?” is a pretty good example of white culture. It’s a question you will never see come from a black person. There’s no real precise/fool-proof definition of “white culture”, it’s more a you know it when you see it (if you can see it) kind of thing. But if you spend time in majority-black spaces you will hear all types of examples.
Nukular Biskits
@Professor Bigfoot:
Hope you don’t mind, I did a “follow”.
I am a witness to that “mind-breaking”. You’d have to understand my family history, which would take too much time to put here, but after Obama was elected, my brother asked me, “What do you think about our ________ president?”
What followed was a very heated argument after which I never again heard the N-word from him. In fact, IIRC, it was several months before we talked again.
Examples like this are why I get so pointed with you. Some of your posts are a bit too generalized, IMHO, and some hit a little too close to home.
bluefoot
@schrodingers_cat:
I see this a lot amongst my various social and professional circles. Indian Americans are clearly pro-Dem, and are constantly conflated with the pro-Modi/BJP Indians. A good (white) friend of mine does this, and it’s been coloring how he talks with/about our Indian-American friends. Then he wonders why they have been socializing with him less.
Nukular Biskits
@WaterGirl:
I’m glad you provided a “Toggle”. I finally resorted to putting someone on the pie list but I panicked when I saw you waxing poetic about pies and thought I had done something wrong.
Miss Bianca
@moonbat: the other thing that I absorbed from my private school years was the experience of competing against a racially and ethnically diverse student body in terms of *achievement* in so many arenas – academic, athletic, artistic. It was just a given that all these kids were equally, and so often, *more*, talented than I was. That I would have to work *hard* to stand out against so many talented people who just happened to look different than I did and had had such different experiences of life. It prepared me for college in so many ways, not least of which was acceptance of a student body who didn’t look just like me!
That’s something I honestly wish every kid in America could look back on, having taken it for granted.
Ruckus
@gene108:
My deep knowledge of family history goes only so deep, both parents were born in the US to immigrant parents. One set from Sicily and the other from I believe England, and to Los Angeles via Kansas by horse drawn wagon. One born in Los Angeles and the other in Kansas City. So siblings and I and cousins are second generation American. Mother’s side had 5 siblings with her as one and Dad’s had the one. I’m now the oldest in the extended family, my two siblings are also gone, last one early last year. I’ve traveled for work to 49 of the states and have to say, there is at least some difference in areas of this country. I’ve lived in 3 states, one on each coast and one in the middle, and all quite different. My point is that immigrants from most any place were looked upon with at least a bit of distain. For what reason I have no clue, because most of us have immigrants in our family history.
Nukular Biskits
@UncleEbeneezer:
[Wherein I tread carefully …]
Wouldn’t that be indicative, in some cases, of racial stereotyping?
And, at the risk of sounding like a broken record (and with reference to that Justice Potter Stewart quote), it doesn’t really answer my question.
schrodingers_cat
@bluefoot: Yes, I have also observed this dynamic on social media and IRL. Never have I felt so lonely, politically speaking.
Another Scott
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
You’ve used this construction before. Who do you mean?
(In general, I’m personally a fan of making examples explicit when possible.)
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
moonbat
@bluefoot: I’m taking my cues from Kamala Harris. There was a bittersweet video making the rounds on bluesky this week of her comforting the son of one of the newly elected representatives she was swearing in. He told her he was sorry she didn’t win the election — on the point of tears. She told him with a smile not to be sad because the fight is not over.
Miss Bianca
@Nukular Biskits: See, I went to school *with* uniforms and I was glad of it, first because it made dressing so much easier in the morning, and second because it was harder for the better-off or more sophisticated students to make fun of your clothes and fashion sense when we all looked like little nerdlets in our plaid skirts and jackets with ties.
YMMV, of course, as well as your children’s.
moonbat
@Miss Bianca: Agreed.
schrodingers_cat
@Miss Bianca: Heh, you and me both! The dress code included hair as well. If it was not short it had to be tied up in two braids or two pony tails with a ribbon. Black with the regular uniform and white with the gym uniform.
UncleEbeneezer
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: One Summer my parents decided to hire a neighborhood child to mow a particularly difficult section of our lawn (a steep hill with the grass mostly in clumps, so a real pain in the ass for a push-mower). I was really too small to do it at the time so they hired this boy named Erasmus who was from Ghana, iirc. While mowing the lawn he got stung by a bee and the sting got swollen really bad. My Mom was skeptical at first and seemed to think he was somehow trying to get out of having to finish the job. Eat the time I thought nothing of it, but looking back I shudder with the realization that my Mom was being RACIST AF in that moment gaslighting a suffering child simply because he was black. But it wasn’t until 30-40 years later that I even understood that. That’s how long this shit can hide from our view/understanding. And even then, if it wasn’t for Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, BLM leading me to start listening and paying more attention it could’ve taken me even longer. That’s how sneaky and internalized all this shit is. That’s why it’s so hard to unlearn individually and address collectively. And most people will never even bother to try, and will get extremely defensive at even the suggestion that they should.
Note: I could just as easily use examples of misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, antisemitism etc.
Trivia Man
@Ruckus: every time you mention 49 states i am curious. It’s alaska, isn’t it? I am at 45 but hope to bag OK and WV soon.
bluefoot
@schrodingers_cat:
Yeah, I hear you. It’s My Indian-American father fought for civil rights and social justice here in the US since the 1950s until his death a few years ago. He was part of the march to Selma, was almost strung up (literally) by some white supremacists in MO, constantly worked on outreach, interfaith initiatives, providing education and legal help to people of disadvantaged SES, etc etc. My siblings and I all try to continue and expand the legacy he started. But somehow I am not “really American” etc. It makes me lonely, and feel isolated.
Re my friend I referenced: he knows about my family history and what I do for social justice. And yet he has, for instance, decided that “Indian people are way more racist than white people” on the basis of his interactions with several of his pro-Modi coworkers in tech.
Nukular Biskits
@Miss Bianca:
My problem was making uniforms a mandatory condition of attending a public school, no exceptions, period.
During the “policy” discussions leading up to the Board of Ed decision, I can’t tell you how many times pro-uniform parents would claim uniforms were cheaper (not) and someone somehow would set up a fund to help out disadvantaged students (they never did).
The other major problem I had (and I have this with most all gov’t policies and legislation) is that it wasn’t based on any actual publicly-verifiable evidence of need. Those pushing this could offer absolutely no studies, etc, which showed benefits. The school board also refused to lay out a plan by which they could determine if such a policy was successful … or not … and then reevaluate it.
But, in the end, our decision worked out for us … but we were fortunate enough to have the resources. Not everyone else could do that.
Matt McIrvin
@UncleEbeneezer: The funny thing is, people on the right will selectively embrace the same ideas as an excuse for atrocities, when it’s convenient. Trump does this. People complain about Putin killing Ukrainians and he’s all, “oh, are we so clean?” Or the neocons who were big on American exceptionalism in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars until someone accused the US of war crimes, and then it’s “well, war is hell, that’s what everyone does”.
UncleEbeneezer
@Nukular Biskits: Not really. Of course some black voices will take things too far, but most don’t. And frankly, the ones that do get mocked by the rest. If you look up one of the old In Living Colour skits with Damon Wayans playing the incarcerated Black Muslim who uses a bunch of impressive-sounding words and blames everything on The Man or the White Devil etc., that’s a good example. The Boondocks also has great examples. The black community is well aware of the fact that some of its’ most Liberation-minded members end up in cartoonish territory and they don’t hesitate to clown the hell out of them for it.
Shakti
@schrodingers_cat:
There’s that too. I try to avoid the Whatsapp discourse.
A lot of these online Modi-BJP-stans are actively hostile towards Indian -Americans.
I do think it’s very convenient for a lot of people to confuse/ conflate Indian Americans with those Modi-BJPstans/Indian citizens. Even people who should know better and should distinguish between the two. Especially since India doesn’t allow dual citizenship.
The chaprasis like Ramaswamy & Haley are more famous political figures/talking heads and that also contributes to this perception because “highly compensated yapping minority tool” gets conflated as being representative.
[Sorry. It’s funny as fuck to me that these highly status and caste-ist people suck up to Republicans who think the dumbest fucking white person is better than them. It’s not even plausibly deniable. Like, you do realize the status you do enjoy is the result of the Civil Rights Act and you’d wilt if they brought back Jim Crow or something like South African apartheid?]
Matt McIrvin
@Geminid: Because before and after, Trump was on the ballot, but in 2018 he wasn’t. The Trump phenomenon is to a large degree an individual personality cult.
Professor Bigfoot
@Nukular Biskits:
When women talk about what absolute awful shits men are, I don’t jump in with “not all men” because I know damned well they’re not talking about ME.
And in the same breath I can recognize that they are accurately talking about the vast majority of men.
Hit dogs holler, even if they’re not aware that they’re hit dogs.
jowriter
@Baud: They don’t affect how I vote, either. In the end, I have to go with the crew that leans somewhat near my beliefs, even if they screw up some. Nuance doesn’t work at election time. Any politician who lines up perfectly with my own beliefs will never be elected in this society at this time. Purists get trampled to death. If wishes were horses, as they say, beggars would ride. And now I see I’m at the end of a very long thread. Ah, so be it.
moonbat
@UncleEbeneezer:
One thing I try to instill in my anthro students is the acknowledgement that we all, all of us, have bias. We might have absorbed it from our family, our schools, our neighborhoods as we were growing or an experience that marked us. It could be against a minority or a majority, an orientation or a sect or a skin tone or a religion. As you said, it may be years later before we recognize just how ugly it is/was in those around us and in ourselves. There is no magic wand of understanding you can wave to clear yourself of bias.
The trick is to identify your biases and correct for them. Check yourself. Practice putting yourself in the other person’s position. It might get easier, more of a reflex, over time, but it’s never-ending work. That’s why a lot of folks don’t do it.
Nukular Biskits
@Professor Bigfoot:
Obviously, you’ve never been around women. I’m here to tell you that, yes, they are talking about ALL men, including you and me! ;>)
Miss Bianca
@Nukular Biskits: Understand that I’m not advocating for uniforms in pubic school – there are all kinds of reasons to question/oppose that particular ukase. I’m simply relating what my personal experience was – I thought I would hate it, and it ended up being far more freeing and less annoying an experience than “dress codes”, for example, which constantly change and are generally a PITA both to enforce and comply with.
Geminid
@Suzanne: I checked out Ruben Gallego’s social media efforts for a few weeks last summer and was impressed. Mark Hamill hot involved some, both replying to Gallego and on his own Twitter account.
I’m looking forward to Gallego’s first year in the Senate. He’s quite knowledgeable on border issues and tbe politics of them.
Secretary of State Adrian Fontes is another one to watch. I think Fontes willl be Governor before too long.
Suzanne
@Geminid: Adrian Fontes is an absolute mensch. I’ve met him in person a few times at Party events. He personally helped me with an issue with SuzMom’s voter registration back when he was County Recorder. I hope he climbs as high on the career ladder as he dreams.
WaterGirl
@Nukular Biskits: Yeah, replies to people you have pied also show up as desserts.
Citizen Alan
@Another Scott: heck, i grew up hearing Polish jokes growing up in rural Mississippi. There was, to my recollection, no significantly ethnic Polish population within 500 miles of my hometown, at least. It was just a class of people for whom it was socially acceptable to mock for their perceived lack of intelligence. They might as well have been mythical creatures. Like we were telling jokes about how dumb centaurs are.
Citizen Alan
@Nukular Biskits: i hate bernie sanders more than any non republican in america. Because everything he piously claims to want for this country has been put out of reach for generations because at crunch time he was unable or unwilling to persuade his own most devoted followers to vote for a woman who merely agreed with him on seventy five percent of the issues.
prostratedragon
@Another Scott: Emphatically, on Chicago. For the historical/academic view see Dominic Pacyga. Sara Paretsky makes that landscape part of her V.I. Warshawski stories.
Denali5
@WaterGirl: I recall my government teacher in high school talked about the idea that the extremists on both the right and the left are very similar in their views- reactionary calls for violence or other simplistic answers to complicated situation, for example. While I don’t agree that politicans on the left such as Bernie Sanders and AOC advocate violence, sometimes their positions seem to line up with those on the right. Bernie Sanders has come out in support of RFK, for example, for some of his less extremist views.
Glory b
@Citizen Alan: Exactly.
And we are criticized about our difficulty/inability to promote our accomplishments without recognizing that our biggest obstacles is Bernie & his assorted lefties constantly undermining them.
We need to recognize that we have a 2 battleground war, Republicans on the right, cosplay socialists on the left.
And why can’t we see the “Uncommitted” group’s finances?
Nukular Biskits
@Miss Bianca:
Oh, I didn’t take it as an overall endorsement from you.
This thread is probably dead so I’m not sure you’ll see this but you bring up a very important point: Arbitrary definitions and enforcement.
This is particularly the case with “dress codes”, but even with uniforms, definitions of what is acceptable are often vague and compliance can be in the eye of the beholder.
And that reminded me: The weasels on our school board voted to call it a “mandatory dress code policy” and not a “mandatory uniform policy” on the advice of the board attorney. So … they could claim that no one had to wear actual uniforms and the dress code allowed a lot of variance for individual expression and situations.
Asshats.
Kathleen
@moonbat: I resonate with everything you said. I spent a semester in New Orleans attending an HBCU it it changed my life because I discovered my own prejudices. I’m still learning and I appreciate Black Twitter for opening my eyes.
Captain C
@Professor Bigfoot: “Not all white people” may be technically true, but it’s functionally irrelevant, given that the problem is “enough white people do such that it’s a huge problem, especially for their targets.”
(ed. for spelling)
Captain C
@Professor Bigfoot: I read something recently, I think on BlueSky but possibly here, which pointed out that “white” as a category was specifically designed to be exclusionary.
Kathleen
@Denali5: Some Bernie’s followers have advocated violence. Bernie supporter threatened Nevada Dem Chairperson and her grandson in 2016 after the caucus didn’t go their way.
theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/17/nevada-democrats-bernie-sanders-violence
Citizen Alan
@tobie: i have said for years now that obama would not have won either time, if mccain or romney had embraced outright racism and fed into the insinuations that he was a kenyan muslim usurper. As awful as both those men were, they had just enough decency to not go four bore in that direction, and so they lost narrowly.
Citizen Alan
@Nukular Biskits: here’s an example of what I consider to be white culture. When I was a kid growing up in mississippi, my late father considered pizza hut to be ethnic food. Pizza Hut! And at the time, the pizza hut in our town (which opened in the early 1980s) was the only pizza hut within a forty mile radius. In the 1970s, it was considered fancy when you drove to Tupelo to eat at a Pizza Hut. And I had never eaten at any other “Italian” restaurant until I got to college. Now, of course, white people are perfectly happy to eat pizza, while Italian americans who take pride in their heritage turn up their nose at chain pizza restaurants.
White culture is literally anything and everything in america that is not expressly coded as [anything not white] culture, right up until the moment that a critical mass of whites adopt that thing and water it down so that members of the original culture no longer recognize it as being part of their heritage. At which point that thing becomes part of white culture too. Whites in this country are like the fucking Borg.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Citizen Alan:
Nominated!
schrodingers_cat
@Citizen Alan: I toast your comment with a Chai Latte with turmeric
brantl
@different-church-lady: Touche’
sab
@Suzanne: Yes. Yikes and wow, and I do believe it.
Thanks especially to satby for the link ( early yesterday morning thread.) Apparently luddites can’t link between threads or I would have.
Old police I know (70ish) are pretty horrified by a lot of of the younger ones, especially the Gulf War and Afghanistan vets. Some (not all) clearly see themselves as an occupying force, not members of the same polity.
Denali5
Fucking Borg? – I am old.
JMG
@Scout211: The Melania movie is gonna lose Bezos a lot of money, not that he cares.
Eduardo
@tobie: tradesmen and small business always complain about taxes and overregulation and tend to vote with right of center parties anywhere I have ever look at. I think it actually makes sense and it is fine.
it is not fine that our right of center party has been taken over by a fascist faction but that’s another story.