Which side of that fight do you perceive Huey Freeman to be on?
Rather than play “Let’s you and him fight”, how do you perceive the problem?
I think anyone who says “whiteness itself has become an existential threat to the country” is making a race-based stereotyping argument that doesn’t stand up well to thought or reason. Now your turn?
Not sure if this was already posted…
Steve Schmidt, Republican strategist, also recommending voting “D” all down the ballot in November…
In tweets that went viral on Wednesday, Schmidt criticized the Trump Administration’s policy of separating parents and children caught crossing the border as “evil” and “immoral” and argued that Republican lawmakers who failed to repudiate the president were “feckless cowards who disgrace and dishonor the legacies of the party’s greatest leaders.”
I think the brush strokes are rather broad…but looking at our history, I can see his viewpoint is not ridiculous or very extreme. 7,000 times bitten, twice shy.
Curious if he’s been saying that all along, or if separating parents and children pushed him over the line. I mean, it’s not like this is the first policy of this administration you could call “evil” and “immoral.”
I agree. But the way I would word it is that protofascist whites have become an exsistential threat to this country.
Really, the issue is authoritarians. They are the threat. They’ve undergone a political realignment and mostly moved to the GOP. Authoritarians tend to be tribal and bigoted, so they unite around white skin. They make up 1/4 of the public, but now that they are almost all republicans they are half the GOP. Half the GOP are a lost cause of deplorables.
The white skin isn’t the issue. If that wasn’t there, they’d just unite around some other in-group trait. The authoritarianism is the issue. But it is only authoritarians who also are part of the in group (aka whites) who are the real risk. Basically you need to be both white and high on authoritarianism to be an existential threat to modern democracy.
I’ve remarked before that there aren’t two sides to the abortion debate, but at least six (plus gradations between those six). There’s the pro-life side, the anti-life side, the pro-choice side, the anti-choice side, the pro-abortion side, and the anti-abortion side. Some people genuinely are pro-life, but some are also on the anti-abortion or anti-choice side, and right now, in this country, they mostly falsely claim to be on the pro-life side. But this alliance is not set in stone nor inevitable: For instance, the procedure called for in Numbers 5:11-41 is both anti-choice and pro-abortion.
My impression is more the argument that white people who are defending the tribalism and privilege of being white to the degree that they will abandon morals, ethics and western values are an existential threat.
And they are. Whites who fit that bill do not respect democracy. They hate the free press, they hate the independent judiciary, they hate honest law enforcement, they hate honest intelligence agencies, they would postpone (or cancel) elections. They support human rights abuses. They support voter suppression. They believe irrational lies and conspiracies.
They are an existential threat to western values.
More than that, they are useful idiots. They are puppets of the billionaire class and of Russian political strategists playing on their tribalism and gullibility to further their own agenda.
Sigh. Against my better judgment, I’ll respond.
Three things. Forgive the list, I don’t have much time:
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You have to understand that you are a double minority among white folks.
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You have to also understand that white folks do not respect white liberals. Elizabeth Warren, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Nancy Pelosi, etc are proverbial court jesters to most white folk. Think this is an over-exaggeration? Name one white liberal that white folks respect? You can’t. White folks have dehumanized white liberals to the point they openly call Warren racial slurs and trade in conspiratorial gossip about Clinton involved in pedophilia at a pizza shop.
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White liberals are too nice. I like you. But you’re too nice for your own good. White liberals forgave white folks for openly declaring war on the first black President. That’s strike one. White liberals let white folks steal a Supreme Court seat then broke ranks to vote for the illegitimate replacement. That’s strike two. White liberals haven’t stood for DACA recipients and declined to shut down the government. White liberals will stand by Hispanics for their votes but not for their interest. That’s strike three. And, I guarantee you, in September, Democrats will vote to keep government open despite the administration who engaged in separating families. No spine White liberals are blinded by the bias of white folks because they, too, are white.
Nah, bro. The fight against racism is over. It is what it is. Keep in mind, this isn’t the first time. In the 1850’s, the white folks formed the Know-Nothing Party which was a modern tea party hate group focused on Catholic and European immigrants. The Know-Nothing party engaged in all sorts of hateful shit. Then you had the 1960’s where young baby boomers decided to be brown shirts for the Wallace campaign and a burgeoning conservative movement. In these two cases, white folks pushed back and rejected hate. In 2016, white folks decided not to reject hate but overwhelmingly voted to vote for it. White folk deliberately voted for a guy who affirmed his daughter was a “piece of ass”. Why did white folks reject hate in the 1850’s, reject it again in the 1960’s, but decide to overwhelmingly support it in 2016? You know why, I know why, and they know why. We just pretend not to know.
(emphasis mine)
Exactly.
::upvote::
You can’t frame anything as white liberals vs. white folks, because white liberals are white folks.
Gotta tell ya, I’m still not seeing anything wrong with what Huey is posting. Rather obvious, actually. Shit, just look at this debate whether it’s “counterproductive” to publicly confront Trumpers: a complete bullshit position, “It’s not nice and you’ll get Trump in 2020, just you watch”, is being promulgated as how we should properly respond. :rolleyes:
We’re too polite… at least, y’all are, I’m kinda an asshole who has no problem voicing anti-Trump sentiments in public*… and it’s going to lead to a point where there will be no recourse but to physically fight, if we don’t want to submit.
*At the bank today:
Teller: What are you going to do for the 4th?
Me: Trying to find a rally or a protest against the Trump Administrations war on children, including watching them get shot in school and placing them in concentration camps. I can find nothing more noble than fighting for the rights of all people on the Fourth. You?
Daughter (as we are leaving): I don’t know why you always have to do that*.
Me: Sophia, this society is designed so that white guys like me have an outsized voice. If I do not use that voice, daily, openly and publicly, to fight against this evil who will?
Talking to everyone here on the SDMB is nice and fun, and y’all give me great lines and ideas which I throw into my mix, but it is not, and never will be, “activism”. And not until we can all openly condemn fascists without worrying whether they’ll like/pay/be convinced by/be upset by/whatever us, we will not get through this with American Democracy intact, even if Trump has a fatal heart attack tomorrow.
*Sophia is 16, so is very attuned to being embarrassed by her parents. She’s very progressive and outspoken herself, but still… she’s 16.
Absolutely. For example, the people who kick women out of restaurants just because they work for someone they don’t like. Or the people who ‘no platform’ people they don’t like by shouting them down, blocking public access, or hitting people on the head with bike locks.
Then there’s those authoritarians who don’t want people to own guns, or drive cars, or smoke (unless it’s pot), or use energy other than the one preferred by the authoritarians, or peacefully assemble in groups they don’t like.
Then there are the authoritarians who don’t want merchants and customers to negotiate their own prices, or allow merchants to operate at all without meeting a host of demands and controls. There are the authoritarians in Washington who set up special bureaucracies designed to control people’s financial lives without any congressional oversight - including launching financial pograms against gun stores after they found out the constitution wouldn’t let them just take away people’s guns.
How about those authoritarians who want to forcibly take the property away from some people and give it to others? Just the worst. Then there are those who want to prevent you from using plastic straws or buying soda.
Another type of authoritarian you must hate are the ones who threaten and fire autistic engineers for daring to publish a memo that simply explained scientific findings that don’t fit the authoritarian’s political beliefs. Or who injure liberal female professors for having the audacity to bring a 75 year old social scientist to a university for a talk. Can’t have that.
In my country, the authoritarians create special ‘tribunals’ to punish people who say the wrong kinds of things. And we have authoritarian politicians pushing bill that make it an offence to use a gender pronoun someone doesn’t like, or to utter ‘hate speech’.
You’re right. Authoritarians are the worst. I remember someone once said, “Government is just the name for the things we do together.” That should be changed to, “Government is just the name for the things we are forced to do together at gunpoint when some of us don’t like what others do and have the political power to stop them - or else.”
I’ll say. Have you SEEN what they do to press spokewomen they don’t like? Or to a professor with opinions they don’t like? Or one that refuses to get off campus for a day because he’s white? Or GOP congressmen who play baseball? I’ve even heard some of them claim that whiteness is a ‘disease’, or that white people are a threat to the nation. Crazy tribal racists.
I’m sure glad there’s no tribalism and racism anywhere else. Like here, for example.
Just out of curiousity, when was the last time a left-wing intellectual needed massive security to protect him or her from mobs of the authoritarian right?
If you are going to lead with absolute crap, the rest of your message is likely to get ignored.
SHS was asked to leave because of what she does and what she says in public.
“To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”
― Theodore Roosevelt
… Or that there should be no criticism to people that do lie for a living to the American people.
All this effort, in defense of an ideology and persons who place children in concentration camps.
BRAVO!
Really? You’re going to fight for plastic straws? That’s not even political. That is just such an easy substitution that will cost you nothing. Animal Kingdom in Disney World has been using paper straws without issue for a decade or more.
Jeesus Sam, I can’t take your long winded post seriously after seeing that one. Sea birds are in a political party, give then a friggin break.
To Huey’s point, I bring unto you, this:
A Virginia Baker Is in the Spotlight at a Ryan Rally
Everyone arguing “civility” - you people get played. Every goddamned time. This entire brouhaha is, again, the American Left being played by the Right.