To be fair, I posted that article since there was a conversation about immigrants eating cats in the parent thread.
“Your day” must not have been the 70s, because back then, it was the Chinese food restaurants that were catching the cats for food.
The only thing new in racism is which group the racists tell their lies about.
And in the 80s, it was ALF.
Actually, I was thinking of this quote from ol’ Bill Buckley.
With an especial blindness that something is “broken” only if it’s broken for them personally, not for other people.
Plus of course the idea that something merely adequate could and therefore should be made better is anathema to them. Which is how “change in the measured service of improvement” gets conjugated by them into “change for change’s sake; IOW busywork for government busybodies.”
Once the conservative movement redefines all the words in seemingly innocuous sentences, suddenly they’re not innocuous in meaning at all.
A while back, when Vietnamese food was still a novelty in the Midwest, a local Vietnamese restaurant was located right next to a pets’ spay and neuter clinic. I can’t imagine that helped their business.
Yeah, I still remember getting into a minor argument with somebody in High School over that. Instead of just another teen making a tasteless joke (which, whatever) they were seriously complaining about a Chinese restaurant serving cat meat to him. Based on nothing but his not being able to identify chunks of pork because he was a dumb shit. Rumors like this are pernicious when some of your audience don’t have half a brain to think things out.
Or Taco Bell (or McDonalds or whoever) serving horse meat instead of beef. People want to believe stupid shit, so they do. Easier than actually giving anything a moment of thought.
Ehh, that sort of thing actually has happened. However, the restaurants weren’t intentionally doing it, they were fooled by the supplier.
Just highlighting this. This is a well-known and widely studied urban legend. It is absolutely anti-immigrant, and in the 70s was weaponized against the wave of Vietnamese immigrants, as it had been used against the Chinese before that.
What people are actually eating or not eating is immaterial. People are saying, “well, we don’t actually know,” but yes, we do: this is not factual, and even if not believed, the narratives feed anti-immigrant sentiment.
“Stories of Vietnamese eating pets supported the belief that the refugees were using up residents’ share of good depriving them of what was rightfully theirs—whether pets, jobs, or sanitary food supplies. Simultaneously, tales of degrading acts marked the immigrants as socially inferior, requiring segregation from the rest of society.”
Michael Owen Jones, “What’s Disgusting, Why, and What Does It Matter?,” Journal of Folklore Research 37:1 (Jan.–Apr., 2000), pp. 53-71, What's Disgusting, Why, and What Does It Matter? on JSTOR, quote from p. 65.
I remember when Wendy’s served worms as burgers.
Well it’s come full circle. A Vietnamese-American coworker, an actual very proud boat person, was enraged that we were joking about this.
I guess that’s assimilation that she idealizes. To join the in-group she turning literally the same calumny on the next group of desperate immigrants.
This is the same person who insisted that someone chasing her and screaming “Go back to China” was not racial abuse, but a legitimate political gripe about the Chinese government’s actions in re COVID.
Hatemongering is what today’s far right does. It’s their thing. They hire people who make their livings spreading hate in all its forms to dredge up scandalous lies about anybody they see as vulnerable. Trump’s campaign team has at least three very well-known people who profit from this filth online and who will end up on his White House staff if he’s elected.
Trump’s future in politics may be over, but as a songwriter, he’s got potential! 
Sometimes I think that what people are actually remembering when they fantasize about, say, the 1950s, has more to do with the idyllic sitcoms of the era than with actual life back them. Father Knows Best literally had most of those good things you list, including the white picket fence.
What’s interesting is that even though the show portrays a highly idealized picture-perfect life, today we’d perceive a lot of negative factors even in that completely whitewashed supposed Utopia. For example, misogyny was rampant, disguised as a well-meaning doctrine that a woman’s place was in the kitchen. Minorities were scarcer than hens’ teeth, and where they existed (e.g.- the Andersons’ Mexican gardener Frank) they zealously abandoned their heritage in their quest to become “real Americans” (i.e. white). Blacks were nowhere to be found at all.
There’s also a great film called Far From Heaven (2002) that deals with some of these issues. Set in the 1950s, it’s beautifully filmed in vibrant colours to underscore the supposed idyllic nostalgia. The couple is seemingly perfect, the husband with an executive job, the wife a happy homemaker with an active social life. It soon falls apart when the husband turns out to be a closet homosexual who can no longer repress his true feelings, and the despondent wife befriends a Black man with the consequences you’d expect in the 1950s.
All of that said, some things were indeed better or at least simpler back then. But for the most part the bad significantly outweighed the good.
is going to?
Remember, if you push back too hard on this “news” you’ll trigger fragile white people to have to vote for Trump.
Let’s meet “halfway” and admit the fears are well founded and that immigrants should do a better job of convincing white people that they won’t eat their pets.
The real problem is, there are real problems in Springfield, because you get those sorts of problems any time an existing community sees a sudden influx of new people, no matter who those new people are. You could have 20,000 white rural Republicans move there over the course of 4 or 5 years, and housing costs would still climb, school attendance would still increase, and city and state services would still lag trying to keep up with these changes.
But the racists don’t want to address those real problems, because they would require real solutions. Better to just rant about a bunch of cat-eating immigrants.
As someone who grew up in the '50s, in an upper-middle-class, Leave it to Beaver bubble (my father, on whom be peace, was a doctor), I can attest to both of the above. It wasn’t until I was in (a Jesuit) high school that I began to see the underside of the society I lived in — the bubble was that pervasive.
While I won’t (and can’t) apologize for the caste I was born into, I’ve spent most of my adult life at least trying to help those who weren’t so fortunate get a rung or two up the ladder.
It’s hard not to repeat myself (ourselves) when Trump has only the single page in his playbook:
“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
–Lyndon B. Johnson
“Hold my beer (Diet Coke).”
–Donald J. Trump
And it doesn’t have to be a ‘colored’ man. Just anybody that’s either traditionally a minority, a member of a vulnerable population, or ‘the other.’
“We have serious problems to solve, and we need serious people to solve them. And whatever your particular problem is, I promise you: [Donald Trump] is not the least bit interested in solving it. He is interested in two things, and two things only: making you afraid of it, and telling you who’s to blame for it. That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you win elections. You gather a group of middle age, middle class, middle income voters who remember with longing an easier time, and you talk to them about family, and American values and character, …”
– “The American President”
Trump and the other RW surrogate ‘opinion leaders’ are horrid disgusting people, but the notion that there is substantial demand for this rankest form of demagoguery is profoundly disheartening.