That puts it in better context if you’ve rejected a lot of flags. So my apologies, I was wrong.
I may be too late to this party, but I’ll add my tidbit to the soup anyhow.
I saw this thread before the one it’s about. So I read this thread to this point, then the other thread to its current end, skipping over the mod-hidden posts. Then went back to unhide the mod-hidden posts to see what the kerfuffle was about.
My take was @Wesley_Clark flunked writing, not thinking.
Each of those paragraphs are plausible things I suspect many people think but don’t say for fear of public censure. But the way the ideas were presented was as a personal venting of the things Wesley thinks but doesn’t say, and would dearly love to say out loud. So took this opportunity to do so.
Then misunderestandings ensued.
FWIW, @Wesley_Clark, I read your post as a list specifically answering the question posed in the thread title.
mmm
Speaking of flunking writing…
Should be “each of those paragraphs IS…”
I find your construction … awkward.
“Those paragraphs are each plausible things …” would have been better than what I wrote, or your suggestion. IMO, YMMV, not a professional. 
No, Barney Fife’s girlfriend is correct. 
“Each of those paragraphs is a plausible thing …” is the correct and perfectly sensible construction. The word “each” in this case functions as a singular pronoun and is the subject of the verb. “Of those paragraphs” is just an adjectival phrase that applies to the singular pronoun “each”.
I agree it’s correct. Technically. Which is often the worst kind. The immediate juxtaposition of the plural word “paragraphs” and the singular verb form “is” is awkward. Not wrong; awkward.
Better to restructure the sentence so there’s both singular / plural agreement and no awkward misleading juxtapositions. Hence my second attempt.
Speaking as a poster, who read this thread before the thread that spawned it:
@Wesley_Clark 's post had 5 paragraphs. None were structured as “some people believe, but won’t say”, they were inconsistent, though.
The first was structured as “i think this is true” and was a rant about white Christians that sparked a hijack
The second was a political claim, also structured as “i think this is true”, that i think fit the op, except for the structure.
The third actually starts with “here are some people who believe…” but kinda turns into a rant against those people. So i think that one wasn’t a perspective Wesley_Clark would like to say.
The fourth was like the second, a political claim he probably believes, without mentioning who would say it.
The fifth is roughly “I’ve heard Black people say an embarrassing thing about the Black community, but here’s why that’s true”
None of these exactly fits the OP. But it’s the first one that probably got you moderated. As it didn’t come close to fitting the OP, was offensive, and sparked a significant hijack. I kinda agree with @LSLGuy , that you could have posted the other four without running into problems if you’d presented them clearly as “things this group believes but doesn’t want to say due to social consequences”. The first… I think it would have taken more work to get to anything thread-appropriate.
Given the wording of the OP, I figured the first one could be — and was, therefore, meant to be — read as a fit-the-OP claim: that the majority of them have beliefs that are proto-fascist and white supremacist, and that the majority of them don’t admit it because of the social consequences.
Well, he could had posted, “i think a lot of white Christians believe x, y, and z, but don’t say so out loud because they know it’s not socially acceptable”. But that’s really not what he posted.
He didn’t spell that out, but I honestly thought he didn’t need to: given the OP, I figured that posting those remarks in that thread would mean that such comments would have — and would have to have — that implied context.
Yes, that’s how I received it.
OP asks a question. @Wesley_Clark gives examples of five answers to the question.
Do we really need to say “The answer to the question is…”
mmm
As an example, one point I made was
Donald Trump is severely mentally ill and physically ill.
I think many people know this, but we don’t talk about it due to the consequences. Admitting that all the guardrails failed in our democracy and the voters didn’t do their due diligence would cause an existential crisis. So we all collectively pretend Trump isn’t severely mentally ill.
Another issue is that Donald Trump suffers from a form of narcissistic personality disorder called malignant narcissism, and also has frontotemporal dementia (dementia that affects the parts of the brain that control language, impulse control, empathy, judgment, etc). Both of those illnesses have an inability to accept the fact that you are sick as a symptom. Frontotemporal dementia affects the parts of the brain that control things like self awareness, and people with NPD are incapable of admitting they have weaknesses or vulnerabilities due to how fragile their egos are and how painful it is for them to admit to vulnerability.
So Donald Trump is never going to admit he has serious mental illnesses, his mental illnesses make him incapable of comprehending this fact. But I think many people including many of his supporters, understand there is something deeply wrong with him mentally but we’ve all collectively chosen not to talk about it since admitting that all the guardrails of society failed is too emotionally overwhelming to face.
I agree completely w your characterization of trump himself.
One hell of a lot of us have been talking about it. But …
Due to his proven capacity for revenge, something that’s unprecedented in the USA, lots of organizations are afraid to speak up clearly. Not out of fear of social consequences, but out of fear of government reprisals. E.g. CBS.
Yes, I suspect many MAGATs are staying quiet so their fellow MAGATs don’t disown them.
A MAGAT in total denial about trump’s defective and failing mind, who also consumes mostly trumpist hagiographic media, isn’t staying quiet out of fear of social consequences. They’re staying quiet because they sincerely, if incorrectly, don’t believe there’s a problem.
There’s also the fact that people in general are very, very reluctant to admit to themselves, much less anyone else, that they’ve been bamboozled. So lots of them are hiding behind their own cognitive dissonance to prevent themselves from admitting to themselves that they’ve been bamboozled. Only after they can look in the mirror and say “I’ve been bamboozled”, can they begin to think about speaking up to others.
So there’s sort of a three step process to get a MAGAT to speak up.
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They need media exposure to the real facts, not the hagiography / propaganda. And enough repeated exposure that they begin to believe the real facts over the fake anti-facts.
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They need to overcome their own aversion to admitting their bamboozlement. They need to get to saying to themselves: “I was wrong”.
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Then they need to work up the courage to say to their family & social circle: “I was wrong and you are too.”
My goal with writing that was to make this argument.
There are lots of marginalized groups in the US, but marginalization against black people was intentionally constructed and as a result is more ingrained. It was constructed after Bacon’s rebellion to prevent any kind of white-black alliance against the aristocrats. The black codes of 1705 were intentionally designed to dehumanize black people so that white people would identity with their skin color, and not their economic class. They wanted white people disgusted by the idea of allying with black people against the aristocrats.
The laws were devised to establish a greater level of control over the rising African slave population of Virginia. It also socially segregated white colonists from black enslaved persons, making them disparate groups and hindering their ability to unite. Unity of the commoners was a perceived fear of the Virginia aristocracy, who wished to prevent repeated events such as Bacon’s Rebellion, which occurred 29 years prior.[3]
My understanding is that prejudice against black people based on skin color wasn’t as common before all this. Then you have slavery, where people felt the need to dehumanize slaves to justify why they were mistreating them.
Then you have the fact that the ownership class have known that all you have to do is divide white and black people, and as a result there will never be any unity against the ownership class. This is also why Saudi Arabia pushes such strong tribal philosophies that are anti-Israel and anti-Shia, so the people of Saudi Arabia never unite and rise against the monarchy who have stolen over a trillion dollars.
Other groups get mistreated in America, but black people have been intentionally dehumanized for centuries. Black people are taught to hate themselves and each other, and white society is taught to hate them too. Because of that, building a sense of black community is more difficult than it is among other groups like immigrants or latinos, since they haven’t faced centuries of orchestrated dehumanization and divide and conquer tactics.
There are concepts in sociology called proximity to whiteness and white adjacency. It basically states that as a POC group integrates into society, one of the signs that they’ve been accepted as part of the in-group by the white christian majority is they start to share in the hostility towards black people shown by the white majority.
Its too late to edit my post, but An example would be Sean Hannity, who liked to make points about the prejudice his irish catholic ancestors faced. His ancestors were Irish catholic and faced a lot of prejudice a century ago.
But as irish catholics got more integrated into the anglo-saxon protestant majority, they started to share the anti-black hostility shared by the dominant group. Its a sign you’ve ‘made it’ in America when you can start mistreating black people. In 20 years there will be trans groups and latino immigrants who unconsciously express the fact that they’ve been accepted by the white majority by punching down on black people.
Thank you, I appreciate it. The fact that what I wrote got so many people upset verifies that there are social consequences for admitting these religious and political things. But I appreciate you understanding.
I clicked on this thread out of curiosity, and I’ll say upfront that I think the accusation in the thread title doesn’t seem to be supported by the evidence.
BUT if anyone’s tallying votes on the modnote, I think it’s excessive. I read Wesley_Clark’s post as did mmm et al. I’ll add to that that Velocity’s OP is basically soliciting strawman arguments, or, perhaps less generously, baseless conjecture about what “others” really think. Which isn’t against the board rules or anything, but doesn’t seem like a great way to start a thread. And to his credit, Wesley_Clark at least owned his opinions, and didn’t hide behind “here’s what I tell myself other people believe deep down.”
Actually, @ParallelLines only issued a Modnote and not a warning.
Go figure?
Fair enough. Post edited.