Excellent piece today...superb. The only disagreement is in the "I can't believe" part.
I totally believe because my foundational understanding of Democrats in general and the far Left in particular is they don't know how to do a fucking thing. They don't understand housing, so they develop and promote idiotic policies to overcome the problems their earlier policies caused in the first place. They don't understand human societies or interaction, enacted policies in direct opposition to long understood human interactional dynamics, and then yell at anyone pointing out their stupidity. They don't understand energy policy and enact impossibly stupid regulations that satisfy people able to afford EV's and net zero building codes but that hit working class and poor people dead center in the pocketbook.
Even now, the top folks in the DNC are still insisting the problem was not the message, but in how the message was presented. It's like they've never heard how one doesn't solve problems by using the same thinking that created them.
I hear what you're saying; there's a reason that when The Simpsons depicted a Democratic gathering in 1994, the banners hanging in the rafters said "We can't govern!" and "We hate life and ourselves!" Though I would say that SOME Democrats don't get it and don't know how to do anything and some do. There's a factional fight occurring on the left right now.
Every twenty years or so Democrats decide that racial gaps in "metric XYZ" are a BIG PROBLEM that HAS TO BE FIXED (and The Bell Curve explanation for why is like LITERALLY HITLER).
They then go a do a bunch of the same dumb shit they did twenty years ago (school busing in the 70s was pretty fucking retarded for instance, Kamala even brought it up in 2019).
Then after 5-10 years of this shit being a train wreck they back off and memory hole the entire thing but don't really admit any of the fundamental problems with their view. They just adopt whatever the polling says will sell and have enough memory of putting their hand on the stove and it being HOT that they do "triangulation" for a generation.
Then a new generation of leftists that didn't get their hand burned on the stove come up and we get another 5-10 years of searing flesh again.
"Some" isn't a big enough number. I'd allow "a couple", maybe "a dozen" (being facetious). I also hear what you're saying, but the momentum toward incompetence is strong. I'm not convinced there's a plurality that knows anything useful.
Elsewhere in this column, I gave my opinion on Trump and the GOP, which is they are scum. That's why I'm super dismissive of the Dems. They had the golden opportunity to bury the assholes, and they frittered it away on dipshit paeans to "feel the joy", DEI asshattery, gender stupidities, and every other thing that all polling indicated Americans don't give a shit about or actively dislike.
I think that's an excellent observation, and a major component of their failure. I run into those "email job people" all the time. Never built anything, but are cocksure they know how to build.
The party of the PMC. Bill Deresiewicz has done some good writing on this. Anyone in these admin heavy roles is likely to be extremely cautious, neurotic, and conformist. That’s bc these jobs (and the institutions that admit, train, and funnel ppl into them) select for the ability to keep things going on their current course without deviation and without question.
Bill Deresiewicz has amazing insight on this stuff! So do Wesley Yang and Musa al-Gharbi, and the books The WEIRDest People in the world and The New Class War.
But more than anything, Deresiewicz's speech 'On Leadership' really helped me understand the same 'cautious, neurotic, conformist' people in my life. Hope you read it if you get a chance!
I think I found it, or at least, an article about it. The chart in the article says that doctors overall, as well as some specialties like Internal Medicine and Oncology, skew Democrat.
> “In surgery, anesthesiology and urology, for example, around two-thirds of doctors who have registered a political affiliation are Republicans. In infectious disease medicine, psychiatry and pediatrics, more than two-thirds are Democrats.”
> “There is no way to know exactly why certain medical specialties attract Democrats or Republicans. But researchers who have studied the politics of physicians offered a few theories.”
> “One explanation could be money. Doctors tend to earn very high salaries compared with average Americans, but the highest-paid doctors earn many times as much as those in the lower-paying specialties. The fields with higher average salaries tended to contain more doctors who were Republican, while the comparatively lower-paying fields were more popular among Democrats. That matches with national data, which show that, for people with a given level of education, richer ones are more likely to lean Republican (possibly because of a concern over the liberal policy goal of taxing the wealthiest at a higher rate).”
> “The sorting may also reflect the changing demographics of medicine. As more women have become doctors in recent years, they have tended to cluster in certain specialties more than others. The data showed that female physicians were more likely to be Democrats than their male peers, mirroring another trend in the larger American population. So as women enter fields like pediatrics, obstetrics/gynecology and psychiatry, they may be making those fields more liberal.”
> “Over all, the partisanship of doctors looks very different from a generation ago, when most physicians identified as Republicans. The influx of women may help explain that change, too. The researchers Adam Bonica, Howard Rosenthal and David Rothman compared political donations by doctors in 1991 with those in 2011 and 2012. The study found that doctors had become substantially more likely to give to Democrats.”
MAGA is totally nihilistic, and it’s the Republican Party now. Idk if that’s evil, but these ppl have no principles or goals beyond enriching themselves and taking power at any cost, whether that’s undermining social and institutional trust or antagonizing our geopolitical allies or allowing a Chinese spying app to run unabated.
My point was to ask you to challenge the tribalistic talking points.
Evil is a strong claim, and if an entire party is evil we should be able to point to things they were accountable for that brought evil to the world. I don’t know why your post triggered me to do so —- probably just a mood when I was tired of all the left vs. right generalization’s.
We have to stop fighting each other and refocus on these entrenched politicians who don’t represent the actual people.
I think we should attack them on all the boneheaded shit they are doing, have done, and want to do, and I won’t take any of that back. We should call the Trump admin out on corruption, grift, errors, etc. that make us poorer and less safe…but yes I take your point that the average democratic voter, to say nothing of leftists and progressives online, is unbearable to listen to in how they go about doing this.
Like you did the Biden administration? So now you have the courage to identify and reject corruption and self dealing? After being struck down on the road to Damascus I suppose. Where is your outrage at the influence peddling and self enrichment of the Biden family, necessitating preemptive pardons for the lot. This is the typical liberal/progressive nonsense that somehow or another all the good liberals were unwittingly co-opted into reluctant agreement for fear of being seen as uncivil. Weak sauce, cry me a river. Grow up and get a real life.
This article is literally talking about their principles and goals, lamenting that these principles were once espoused by the left. So you clearly can't say they have none. As for enrichment, the Democrats have regularly raised far more money from rich donors than the right for years.
Not convinced, Trump seems like a pretty unprincipled guy. Look at the enrichment in the form of the $50b slush fund he just created out of a memecoin. It's also pretty weak commitment to free speech to threaten deportation of Palestine protestors.
And I'm not on the left, I'm just a normie liberal. I've held pretty firmly to the principles in the article my whole life and think wokeness is mostly dumb.
That's the spirit of the anti corruption vote that happened in 2024.
That's ANTI nihilism.
The DNC, in the meantime, preaches that you can't do anything without their velvet gloved iron hand controlling everything so they can give you a pittance of government "assistance"... if you vote for them and eternally support them.
Well, first of all that was meant more as a joke or quip than as a policy discussion.
So you want to first tie my hands behind my back before I can answer? Madam, we can’t, at this point, AVOID personality based comments given the personalities that the Republican Party continues to elect. The party must own those personalities and all of their flaws.
But I’ll take a shot at an answer anyway just for grins with my hands tied behind my back as you ask.
Most of the good things that people actually LIKE about the Federal government come from the New Deal (hmmm… I can’t remember who the party in power was during the New Deal - maybe you can help?). And it was also the New Deal which ballooned the Federal Government and spending at that level.
As a quick aside I will note that pre-great depression (you know, around the time of the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act) the Fed was MUCH smaller. It’s THAT version of the Federal government that Trump thinks can be supported solely with tariffs. But that would require getting rid of most of the programs people actually LIKE in the Federal Government. But I digress.
Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Farm bills which help feed the poor, minimum wage, agencies which make sure that we aren’t poisoned by corporations - those all ultimately stem from the New Deal or post New Deal thinking.
And it’s all those things that Republicans were trying to kill even BEFORE the Trump era. They’ve ALWAYS had an agenda of unwinding those policies.
Now I ask you with a straight face: if Jesus Christ Himself came down to earth tomorrow and found that one party was (and had been for decades) trying to take away medicine for the sick, food for the poor, and housing for the elderly what would he name those actions?
Horrifically false question at the end. Complete the picture.
If Jesus saw people taking peoples’ money they earned with guns (yes taxes are enforced with guns and jail time) taking a cut and then very inefficiently doling out the spoils in the ostensible effort to do good, what would he say?
Furthermore, this system also relies on deficit spending which is actually borrowing on a credit card for all those alive and not yet born to fund pet program. This to me is one of the most immoral things going in our current society. If you want to fund studies about cocaine induced mating habit of the yellow bellied warbler, have the honesty to pay more taxes and fund it with your own money not the unborn.
By the way, which party affiliated people give more to charity? Leftists believe govt is in charge of charity and donate less per capita than conservatives who believe it is their own responsibility and donate their own after tax monies of their own free will.
Gee I wonder if Jesus cares if we do things of our own free will versus being forced to do it?
None of the new deal programs you claim are so popular are authorized by the constitution. Have the honesty to propose amendments for these things. Surely they will pass since they are so popular.
The federal government as it exists now is so far beyond the constitutional intent for the government and it's so corrupt that arresting the majority of DC (75 to 99.999999%) might not catch anyone that's innocent.
Many of those programs can be done better by people using money that's NOT taken by the government and laundered through government pandering corruption.
The New Deal is actually an albatross around the country's neck, slowing the economy and choking of of prosperity with bureaucracy and government control.
And that's one of the biggest lies of history, that FDR "saved us" from the great depression. He made a recession that was ENDING into the great depression by cancering the government into the economy, and we haven't recovered since.
Jesus would tell us all we're sinners and have failed in the eyes of God, and that all of us should repent of our sins and pray for salvation.
The leadership of the RNC was corrupt (and still is corrupt, see people like Mitch the Snitch McConnell), but the rank and file are working for reform.
And the federal government itself is corrupt.
That's why Trump got hate from all sides.
Because an outsider reformer is the last thing the unreformed want.
Well, first of all that was meant more as a joke or quip than as a policy discussion.
So you want to first tie my hands behind my back before I can answer? Madam, we can’t, at this point, AVOID personality based comments given the personalities that the Republican Party continues to elect. The party must own those personalities and all of their flaws.
But I’ll take a shot at an answer anyway just for grins with my hands tied behind my back as you ask.
Most of the good things that people actually LIKE about the Federal government come from the New Deal (hmmm… I can’t remember who the party in power was during the New Deal - maybe you can help?). And it was also the New Deal which ballooned the Federal Government and spending to levels FAR higher than it had ever been previously.
As a quick aside I will note that pre-great depression (you know, around the time of the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act) the Fed was MUCH smaller. It’s THAT version of the Federal government that Trump thinks can be supported solely with tariffs. But that would require getting rid of most of the programs people actually LIKE in the Federal Government. But I digress.
Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Farm bills which help feed the poor, minimum wage, agencies which make sure that we aren’t poisoned by corporations - those all ultimately stem from the New Deal or post New Deal thinking.
And it’s all those things that Republicans were trying to kill even BEFORE the Trump era. They’ve ALWAYS had an agenda of unwinding those policies.
Now I ask you with a straight face: if Jesus Christ Himself came down to earth tomorrow and found that one party was (and had been for decades) trying to take away medicine for the sick, food for the poor, and housing for the elderly what would he name those actions?
We could have an interesting policy discussion if not constrained by the limitations of an internet comments section...mainly being I don't have the time nor inclination to pen a lengthy dissertation addressing your points.
You are talking almost 100 years ago, an entirely different world order. All those things people like...a couple folks smarter than me had relevant observations...
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else."― Frederic Bastiat
And...
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship."---Alexander Fraser Tytler.
When phrased in terms of what Jesus would demand....ok, you win...except this dismisses the idea that humans can act compassionately amongst themselves without reference to a 3rd party intermediary. I find it remarkable that folks require a 3rd party intermediary to have a moral ethical relationship with their fellow brethren.
"Taking away (all those things)"...is not the single defined end result of wanting intelligent stewardship of "those things". The continued expansion and utterly corrupt application of "those things" is now the pawn in power plays benefiting a very few entrenched power brokers, and will remain that way until dismantled.
There are already male prison guards. Male guards are constantly assaulting prisoners .The problem is the assaults, not the trans women. (And FWIW, I think sex offenders should be housed in separate prisons entirely. They can’t be trusted no matter what gender they use.)
This is the kind of out-of-touch mental gyration that drove average voters away from the left.
You’re excusing putting male sex offenders, nearly all of whom conveniently discovered that they were “trans” once arrested for their crimes, into prisons by saying that “well, women are already being assaulted by prison guards, so… in essence we haven’t made the problem any worse.”
There are news reports of female inmates being raped and impregnated by “trans” inmates. I think these individual women might beg to differ with your point of view.
In particular: "MOJ stats show 76 of the 129 male-born prisoners identifying as transgender (not counting any with GRCs) have at least 1 conviction of sexual offence. This includes 36 convictions for rape and 10 for attempted rape" (p3)
"Crimes are already being committed against women, so why not do away with their remaining protections?" is really the argument you're going with.
Really truly.
Folks, if any of you weren't already familiar with how virulently hateful and misogynist trans activists and their enablers are, here's some more evidence for you.
I think that is about the 20th time I’ve seen that one. Same ole same ole frI’m the trans & allies. “The guards rape them anyway.” Then they can understand why women don’t like them, why fathers and husbands don’t like them. They scream about how mean and how people lack empathy towards them while simultaneously having no empathy for women. How does one became that simple? I feel like you have to be dim witted to not comprehend how terrible an argument that is. Well, ya know, the prisons guards rape the female prisoners so it doesn’t matter if we let in men who are lying about being trans women. It doesn’t matter that they just decided yesterday and that they are a convicted rapist. That woman that got locked up with him, well, it doesn’t matter because a guard will rape. Who cares if the guard raped her at 3 pm and the lying male sex offender rapes her at 3 pm. She was raped meat anyway. No good to anyone, just throw body out back when you are done. We can’t have a maybe, possibly trans woman get raped. That would be a shame!!
Transwomen are men. Just like any men they're bigger than women, stronger than women, and mostly like sex with women. Half the ones in prison are there for a sex offence.
Replacing male prison guards with female ones would be a great idea. But guess what! We could do that AND take the men who are convicted felons out of the female prison population and put them back with the other men.
What’s a little more rape? Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. They guards rape them anyway. I know! I so totally agree. I too think that trans women are more important than women that get raped by guards. They don’t have any value after the guards rape them. Nothing wrong with taking a gamble when locking a woman in over night with a male. That isn’t cruel, because, just a woman. Not a real woman like a trans woman. Trans women are women!
So, if you find yourself wondering why people are turning on trans women, you reread your comment. They rape them anyway. That’s only the 20+ time I’ve seen that awesome gem from the trans & allies.
It is trans vs women. That has been made abundantly clear.
Trans think they are the civil rights movement of this time. They are wrong. Women’s rights are civil rights movement of this time.
Nothing is more important than trans people. Gotcha. Heard that one loud and clear repeatedly. How about you watch for it, maybe you will start to understand why the LGB are abandoning trans at an increasing rate. No, not all and not all will. But it is the sand slowly disappearing underfoot. Unstable and tottering and unwilling to change. Unwilling to even think about what the cost has been to women and children.
And no, the Rs aren’t coming for me and no I’m not scared for marriage and no I’m not going to a camp. I do t care if they take my marriage away if it keeps women from being locked in cells with rapists lying about being trans because “no gatekeeping”! Which really means their life isn’t worth inconveniencing a trans woman. If my marriage were a card and women being locked in cells with male sexual offenders were a different card, I would slap my marriage card onto the table and yank the prison rape card off the table in a blur. Because I give a fuck about women, unlike trans people, including the women.
By the way, I bet there a whole lot of trans people out that agree with me. That see this farce for what it is. That would slap one or more of their rights on the table to keep those women from what would be considered a violation of the Genova Conventions. But since they are Americans in an American prison it doesn’t fall under those.
But remember ladies, everything is fine…because they guard will be raping you too. What’s one more rape after all?
Not that it matters to you and your desire to rant, but my point is that banning transwomen doesn’t do anything to make anyone safer but does reinforce the idea that men are always and in every circumstance superior to women, which is the REAL conservative and TERF point. If those people really wanted to make women safer, they would ban male guards. I was also noting that there are NO spaces where women can go without men; men will always be coaches, trainers, guards, priests, bosses, or whatever position of authority is denied to women. Focusing on a small number of transgender people distracts from the way conservatives always put men in charge.
Within living memory male guards were banned from women's prisons, at least in the US. But that seemingly rational precaution was found to be discriminatory. So now male guards must be hired for women's prisons, despite the substantial incidence of sexual abuse that results. And women have to hired to guard men's prisons, where they are often sexually harassed or assaulted, and on occasion "fall in love" with some charming sociopath, which creates obvious security problems.
Much less than leftist compassion run amok leading to rent control / insurance caps which then lead to the destruction of rental stock / affordable housing, and insurance companies exiting the California insurance market leaving homeowners without fire insurance.
Coming to w va from Cali, I can attest to how much better life is here. And Mississippi is a gorgeous state.
Cali has a legion of problems. West Virginia has problems, but minor compared to Cali. Chiefest among w va problems is probably a lack of retention of young people, despite having free college
Last time I checked, the conversation was about political partie's talking points, and iirc the Dems lost all the talking points to the Pubs. All of them. I also seem to recall the Dems losing the election to a convicted felon, and the large migration of all previous Dem constituencies to the lying felon, apparently due to having lost control of the relevant talking points.
If we're talking State fiscal responsibility and responsible city management, they're all fucked with the possible exception of Texas and Florida...which iirc are Red. Having no credible personal experience with either of those states, I'll leave it up to you to decide.
If sharp criticism disappears completely, mild criticism will become harsh. If mild criticism is not allowed, silence will be considered ill-intended. If silence is no longer allowed, not praising hard enough is a crime. If only one voice is allowed to exist, then the only voice that exists is a lie.
I managed to find this....I was in Wuhan when Covid broke out, the quote was widely distributed and censored and redistributed....
"Annie Lab found that the passage was likely to be taken from a 2015 essay by Zhang Xuezhong, an outspoken Chinese legal scholar who has criticized the political oppression and lack of rule of law in mainland China. Zhang’s essay was influential and cited by many others at the time."
Its provenance is not tightly known. I’ve read variations in different languages and cultures. This one has circulated at various times in China. If you can find out who wrote it, you’ll be the first.
Thanks for that reply! Perhaps safer for its author to remain anonymous? Could last part of "If sharp criticism disappears completely, mild criticism will become harsh." perhaps be better translated as " ... mild criticism will be perceived as/take to be harsh".?
Translating Chinese to English is tricky. Direct translations can sound blunt. It could be rewritten in English to have better poetic effect. If you want to rewrite it that way, fine with me. It's a great observation of human communication.
Well said! While I absolutely abhor Trump and everything he stands for and while the right is absolutely worse, the far left is authoritarian in a way that I hate too and they are my team. And we MUST take a stand when our own team is doing stupid things. Thank you for this.
No apology necessary. I suspect about 60% of the country is a little grumpy this morning but there’s a large portion of them who have no right to complain now because they should have known to do something about it. Besides, whether it was a criticism or not I still agreed with it. I thank people for correcting me usually. It lets me be correct the next time.
It's important not to absolve the Democratic leadership. "Social justice" politics wasn't forced on them by the far left; they willingly embraced it as a club to wield against populist liberals who were more interested in "class justice.
The problem wasn't cowardice, it was that their first priority was the intraparty fight against economic populism.
I don't want to totally absolve them, but I do think they get too much blame on this stuff. The Dem leadership absolutely embraced the social justice movement and the far Left, particularly in the first days of Trump.
But as they saw little electoral returns for the move, the Democrats and particularly their leadership pivoted away from it. Biden didn't govern as some crazy Leftist and he seemed to endorse the post-racial vision of America. But, here's the thing, they kept getting tagged for the most inane things the Left said, even if there's no real significant Leftist anywhere near the leadership of the Democratic Party. The whole Latinx thing is a perfect example. Yes, its dumb, but the Democrats weren't doing it... they were getting harmed by the blowback against the Left, who incidentally, opposed the Dems on other grounds.
That's because Biden was largely quite good at governance. What he sucked at was politics and messaging. Which, you know, is bad for a politician (but probably good for a president).
Some of the comments about racial equity above miss the mark on one point addressed in the post: are you actually speaking for the people you purport to speak for? I think it's been proven that the answer is no.
Poll after poll has shown that the majority of all races and ethnicities favour a post-racial world. This makes sense; when you have people who have historically been judged by their immutable characteristics, you can see how they'd be loath to return to those days, even if it is purportedly for their benefit. At its worst, this ideology infantilizes people, treating them like they lack agency and need the help of the Educated Whites to save them from oppression.
The fact is that most of these equity ideals stem from post-secondary education, which is overwhelmingly richer and whiter than the general population. The discourse over privilege is privileged (mostly) white people yapping to each other at the exclusion of those without privilege.
I think these people are well-intentioned at heart, but ironically, their privilege blinds them to a degree. In a lot of cases, the only people of colour they have interacted with are people just like them: educated, upwardly mobile, and with an activist streak. IMO, this skews their views of what these groups actually believe in and what they actually want.
Virtually every demographic- save for educated white people- broke for Trump in higher numbers than 2016 and 2020. When you make your entire ideology about identity and the groups you purport to speak for reject you, that's a sure enough sign that you aren't really speaking for those you think you're protecting.
As a college-educated white person who knows a number of non-college-educated black people, I basically agree with you. Any reparations need to focus on economic inequality, a good portion of which is related to racial oppression. That said, I doubt there are many black people who would say their life has not been more difficult due to their race, and I think programs and organizations that support them on that basis are worthy ones.
Can we also give an honourable mention to always attacking/blaming capitalism as a stupid thing on the left along with all the woke stuff? This kind of goes with your ‘blocking things’ post…but the dominant economic system in the world which creates abundance and ensures better growth, innovation, productivity, property rights, the creation of generational wealth, class mobility, and reduction of poverty is probably worth defending. I don’t love big business or monopolies or anything like that, but there’s a lot of brain-dead, pseudo-intellectual online ‘socialism’ out there that needs to get shut down. Free market with redistribution and common-sense regulation is a good liberal principle, and we should own it…without rebranding it as socialism for no reason.
I for one am sick of the term "late-stage capitalism" which always seems to imply that the glorious revolution is coming Really Soon Now. It also seems to imply that socialism is in the flower of its youth and not a fossilized dinosaur.
Agree this is so important! I was vaguely "anti capitalist" in college until friends started starting their own businesses and crowdfunding cool projects and I realized ohh, markets help make cool things happen.
Not a fan of Trump’s personality but his executive orders on our open borders, the insanity of gender identity which deny the reality of human sexuality, and the craziness of DEI which discriminates against whites, Asians and men in attempting to cure past discrimination against others are absolutely the correct approach to those festering problems.
I'm looking for a sober review of all the day one executive orders that Trump did, and how many are normal things you expect when control changes, and how many are insane.
Ending birthright citizenship via executive order, I think, goes in the "insane" bucket.
Brilliant piece which I’ll attempt to share with my far-left friends and family and to look forward to it not making a difference because they’re so dedicated to the cause. Van Jones had a similar view on Maher back in October - “if progressives have a politics that says, all white people are racist, all men are toxic, and all billionaires are evil, it’s kind of hard to keep them on your side. And so, we might want to think about, if you’re chasing people out of the party, you can’t be mad when they leave.”
Read Mark Andreesen's interview with Ross Douthat in the NYT. It walks you through exactly what happened in Corporate America with young leftist activists and then talks about what senior Biden staffers were telling tech companies.
They honestly believe that the government permitting social media was a catastrophic mistake politically.
They also intend for AI to be 100% controlled by the government via a couple of private entities.
Their bottom line is that Big Tech went for Trump mainly because he didn't want to kill them.
Andreesen’s interview was illuminating, but I found it telling that during the discussion about AI regulations, Andreesen didn’t bring up safety or job concerns as a source of backlash at all. He argued that it was just about woke stuff, despite that AI skepticism is fairly high among all Americans (https://news.gallup.com/poll/648953/americans-express-real-concerns-artificial-intelligence.aspx). It took Douthat questioning Andreesen’s characterization for those other issues to come up.
At times, I think criticism of progressives along “woke vs antiwoke” lines is allowed to overtake any acknowledgement of what progressives say about other issues.
That’s a valid position, but it doesn’t justify Andreesen leaving out that large swathes of the non-elite-woke -Democrat-bogeyman public doesn’t trust big corporations and billionaires’ intentions on AI. Andreesen selectively acknowledges opposition that’s easily dismissed by the antiwoke zeitgeist. It’s the same tactic that much of big tech used to try to appeal to woke liberals, only in reverse. Andreesen might be doing this sincerely and subsconsciously though.
Maybe this is overly personal as a response to what you said, but I’m a non-elite, non-woke Democrat and I don’t feel much affinity at all with elite woke Democrats—hell, my own congresswoman (AOC, lol) is probably an example of the latter (though she’s not as “elite” as, say, a lot of senators and older Dems with more money than she has, tbf; she just has a big megaphone), and I don’t feel particularly well-represented by her at all.
I mean, I think she’s a nice person who means well, but she has no business being in that position, IMO. But for some reason this district votes super-lefty in a way that I find baffling; whoever these people are, they must live in a different area than I do or something. (Or it’s probably just that out conspicuously pathetic turnout here in New York leads to very unrepresentative results.)
The reason y’all lost is Kamala was an untalented, spineless corporate fake politician tied to an administration that was deeply unpopular and who she refused to distance herself from. The reason y’all lost is she ran a shitty neoliberal campaign at a time of populist rage and resentment. It appealed to people making $200,000 a year and no one else. The reason y’all lost is that the Democratic Party stands for nothing and has abandoned the working class and everyone knows it. The reason y’all lost is that the Democrats suck at politics. I’m as critical of the liberal professional-managerial class “left” as anyone, but watching liberals blame them when Kamala Harris did avoided the culture war issues described in this essay is maddening. She ran the platonic ideal of a campaign attempting to ignore and transcend the woke shit. But she lost bc her message on the economy wasn’t strong enough, she very clearly wanted to appeal to corporate America, and when asked if she would do anything different than Biden on The View, she said no.
It's hard to imagine a less able politician in this particular election than Harris. The "Democrats" did the most undemocratic thing imaginable and pushed her in our face and demanded fealty. Fuck that. The Dems blew this. Blew it bad in every possible way, and to point it out is to receive their same lame abuse for not getting in line with them.
I agree the left is overly censorious, but Donald Trump is much more so. It's good to learn from one's mistakes but it's not good to commit the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.
He’s worse because we’ve never talked about it. Every time we tried something came up. “Oh. You can’t talk about it cus #metoo, you can’t talk about it cus #blm, you can’t talk about it cus Trump got elected (the first time), we can’t talk about it because the pandemic…. There was always an excuse to not talk about it. It’s like an abusive relationship where your concerns just keep getting ignored because one side is always “busy” until one day you’ve had enough and you say “no. We are talking about this now. I don’t care if it’s your dad’s funeral. Right now. You keep putting it off!”
Of course Donald is worse. He's somewhere deep beneath the lowest sump of disgusting.
I'm usually up on my fallacy recognition, but I had to look that one up. I think it's a wrong application. The sooner I realize I'm screwing up, the sooner I can make a course correction.
There's no crying allowed in baseball, nor feeling sorry for one's self in politics. It's not like this needs some deep contemplation of where the Dems went wrong. If someone can't figure this one out very quickly, there's even deeper problems to overcome.
How was Trump more censorious? Did he try and create a Ministry of Truth like the left did? Did he use NGO governmental cut-outs to force social media companies to bury stories?
He's literally suing people for saying things that he didn't like. He's literally threatened to prosecute people for saying things he doesn't like. He literally wanted to remove media outlets that he didn't like from press conferences.
You're right, which is why I'd like liberals to stand up for liberal ideals once again. Because if we do so, it'll be far more genuine than Trump pretending to care about those things when he clearly doesn't.
Excellent. If you're a typical example of lefties, that's a great sign that the Dems will continue to stew in denial rather than change course away from their most wildly unpopular positions, like men in women's sports, "hate speech", medical mutilation of kids, pretending that "the economy" matters more to voters than inflation, and pretending that illegals aren't illegal and openly wishing to grant them full citizenship.
You're guaranteeing GOP dominance for the foreseeable future 👍🏼
Given that we in part have them to thank for Trump even being inaugurated yesterday in the first place, I'd say it's a fine day to point out their shortcomings that led us to this point.
This post is EXACTLY right. As a (former) D voter myself - I stand aghast at their reintroduction of segregation. Of racial essentialism. Of insane gender theories that defy the bullshit sniff test. Of the D driven managerial class of business, media, entertainment, academic, and urban political leaders cowering in the fetal position as their blue-haired nose pierced activist wing threatened them with the “R” scarlet letter that would automatically disqualify them from their CEO, VP, Chancellor, Dean, and Mayor jobs with all the pay and perks of a lifetime of struggle to reach. I don’t blame them. Protecting your hard won zebra from the hyenas who would steal it from you to pick the bones clean is a natural reaction. I really can’t blame normie Dems for this reaction.
BUT LETS BE HONEST AND CLEAR: By abdicating their responsibility to keep the racist and sexist stench of DEI, CRT, BLM, and MeToo (all imports from their activists) out of their institutions / normie Dems allowed the national socialist sewers to back up on their watch. They could have, and should have, defended free speech and color blindness and merit while they held the high ground. But normie Dems failed us all. They deserve this.
And they shouldn’t be shocked that hardened Conservatives in hazmat suits show up to flush our national backed up sewers of this social filth.
That’s how you sugar coat segregation? Affinity? Freedom of association?
Team Progressive turned race and gender into essentialism. Driving all of this into structures and institutions. Spreading the lie and outright fabrication of systemic racism and sexism. All to elevate their preferred groups to higher power based on nothing more than their skin color and gender. That is racism. That is sexism. A violation of non discrimination laws. And that will be legally challenged and rolled back in the coming months.
Segregation doesn't need to be sugar-coated because it is neither an inherently bad or good thing; it simply means 'separation." Whether it is ultimately a net positive or negative in society depends on the bases, assumptions, and motives upon which it is built.
American de jure segregation was bad because it was imposed by the state, not because the races didn't "mix.' And it's easy to condemn segregation wholesale when the costs of doing so didn't fall so disproportionately upon your own community. It's so ironic that desegregation came with a huge unforeseen penalty for Black Americans that either broke even with or outweighed the expected benefits. The parents who were plaintiffs in Brown v Board could have cared less whether their children sat besides White kids or not in school. They simply believed it was unfair for the children of tax-paying citizens to be prohibited from attending a public school because of the state's racist practices. If we're all equal, what's wrong with all/predominantly Black neighborhoods or White ones or Hispanic ones? I thought it was racist to think that Black people needed to be in close proximity to White people to succeed or thrive.
Good point. Nothing wrong, at all, with separation. I get that. Sometimes, you want to hang out with people who “get you”. Food, lingo, culture. I don’t see that as a goal for what’s been happening these post George Floyd years. It’s been done under guise of safety. Harm reduction. As if our decades of social mingling and color blindness were somehow wrong and harmful. It has had the effect of raising racial consciousness and distinctness. That’s not good. We ignore universal character traits in favor of immutable group traits. That is the complete opposite of MLK speech and everything Obama ever said. How is it that Progressives find that a good idea?
It’s not. It’s a terrible idea. It sets us up in zero sum conflict based on traits we have no control over and cannot change. It leads one favored group toward social entitlement and the disfavored group toward resentment and aggression. This is not complicated to understand and is quite intuitive an outcome. How is it that our best and brightest Progressive thinkers continue to pursue it when this is clearly what’s happening?!
You make a fundamental mistake by heaping all the blame on progressives when conservatives do the exact same thing in their own preferred contexts. Whenever we're talking about something like crime or unmarried mothers or education, conservatives have no qualms at all with trafficking in race consciousness or even promoting their version of the narrative that America has made no progress on racial matters over the years. We're constantly told that the Democratic Party is the party of slavery, the KKK, and Jim Crow to this very day, LBJ was a raging racist that implemented the Great Society to devastate Black communities, Sen. Robert Bird was an unrepentant KKK member whom Biden spoke fondly of (while omitting that Obama did as well), etc. When we speak of crime or births out of wedlock, everything is Black this and Black that, never American this and American that. And more recently, you have "DEI" being used as a slur by conservatives. "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing" is sung at the Super Bowl as part of pre-game activities (and was announced by its actual name) and not immediately before the national anthem and you have the Fox & Friends crew getting White folks whipped into a frenzy by reporting that the Black national anthem (which is not what the announcers called it, but rather by its actual name "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing") was competing with the national anthem during the Super Bowl, which then triggered uninformed and borderline racist statements about Black Americans and the song itself (which is over a century old and nicknamed the Black [Negro at the time] national anthem before the U.S. had a designated national anthem), etc. I can go on and on and on. It was rather funny seeing these same folks go full-on racist towards Vivek in response to his statement about mediocre American culture and its failure to produce top talent that we now have to import in large numbers when that's the same thing they say to Black folks in an economic context.
From where I sit, what the Right does in this regard is absolutely worse than the Left without question. If someone feels that a Black graduation ceremony or college residential hall with a Black-oriented theme is so egregiously harmful but they completely and totally ignore how complicit they are in the "othering" of Black Americans on a constant basis, then that says a lot about their actual priorities. Honestly I get tired of the insistence on the right that Black Americans are not part of the body politic, that we shouldn't "depend on the government" or Whites and do things "for ourselves" as though we aren't taxpaying law-abiding citizens whose "issues" are very common to all Americans.
This is well done. The canceling and shaming worked well on everyone, not just your fellow liberals. It's a lesson we all should take to heart. Come to someone's defense if they speak up against clearly stupid ideas. And do so no matter what side of the aisle they are on. Thank you for writing this. Given the exit poll data on who voted for Big Orange, perhaps we can also stop naming and shaming. Oh, and no one is the gatekeeper of someone else's opinion.
Truth. And Oooooooo the lefties are gonna be so mad at yoooooooooooouu 😂
But there's a simple explanation: the Democratic party is run pretty much exclusively by wealthy-family graduates of expensive colleges with Humanities degrees now. They're radicalized, by the increasingly-radical Academy. All their beliefs are luxury beliefs. They are clueless about the working class, and that includes most disadvantaged minorities.
Recently discovered your Substack. I’m an American First supporter, however in addition to your terrific writing and fabulously sharp humor - I appreciate the common sense & honesty you bring to the conversation.
I’ve shaken my head at the Dems too often in the past 8 years, last year especially. I keep saying “what happened to the Dem party?” Or, “they can’t all think like this”. But the silence has been deafening. It’s going to take Dems like you to give other Dems permission to stop self-censoring and stop the cycles of insanity.
The left is NOT attacking free speech!!! This statement is offensive and I’m reporting you to Substack!!!!!
I think (and hope) this is a joke.
One can never be sure on the Internet. But yes, it’s a joke.
Excellent piece today...superb. The only disagreement is in the "I can't believe" part.
I totally believe because my foundational understanding of Democrats in general and the far Left in particular is they don't know how to do a fucking thing. They don't understand housing, so they develop and promote idiotic policies to overcome the problems their earlier policies caused in the first place. They don't understand human societies or interaction, enacted policies in direct opposition to long understood human interactional dynamics, and then yell at anyone pointing out their stupidity. They don't understand energy policy and enact impossibly stupid regulations that satisfy people able to afford EV's and net zero building codes but that hit working class and poor people dead center in the pocketbook.
Even now, the top folks in the DNC are still insisting the problem was not the message, but in how the message was presented. It's like they've never heard how one doesn't solve problems by using the same thinking that created them.
So, no surprise. I totally believe it.
I hear what you're saying; there's a reason that when The Simpsons depicted a Democratic gathering in 1994, the banners hanging in the rafters said "We can't govern!" and "We hate life and ourselves!" Though I would say that SOME Democrats don't get it and don't know how to do anything and some do. There's a factional fight occurring on the left right now.
Every twenty years or so Democrats decide that racial gaps in "metric XYZ" are a BIG PROBLEM that HAS TO BE FIXED (and The Bell Curve explanation for why is like LITERALLY HITLER).
They then go a do a bunch of the same dumb shit they did twenty years ago (school busing in the 70s was pretty fucking retarded for instance, Kamala even brought it up in 2019).
Then after 5-10 years of this shit being a train wreck they back off and memory hole the entire thing but don't really admit any of the fundamental problems with their view. They just adopt whatever the polling says will sell and have enough memory of putting their hand on the stove and it being HOT that they do "triangulation" for a generation.
Then a new generation of leftists that didn't get their hand burned on the stove come up and we get another 5-10 years of searing flesh again.
"Some" isn't a big enough number. I'd allow "a couple", maybe "a dozen" (being facetious). I also hear what you're saying, but the momentum toward incompetence is strong. I'm not convinced there's a plurality that knows anything useful.
OK but please let's dispense that Trump's GOP is full of "can do" SMEs and not a party of grifters, scam artists, and petty criminals.
Elsewhere in this column, I gave my opinion on Trump and the GOP, which is they are scum. That's why I'm super dismissive of the Dems. They had the golden opportunity to bury the assholes, and they frittered it away on dipshit paeans to "feel the joy", DEI asshattery, gender stupidities, and every other thing that all polling indicated Americans don't give a shit about or actively dislike.
I think that's an excellent observation, and a major component of their failure. I run into those "email job people" all the time. Never built anything, but are cocksure they know how to build.
The party of the PMC. Bill Deresiewicz has done some good writing on this. Anyone in these admin heavy roles is likely to be extremely cautious, neurotic, and conformist. That’s bc these jobs (and the institutions that admit, train, and funnel ppl into them) select for the ability to keep things going on their current course without deviation and without question.
What an insight. Extremely cautious, neurotic, and conformist is exactly how I would describe my PMC friends in admin heavy roles.
Bill Deresiewicz has amazing insight on this stuff! So do Wesley Yang and Musa al-Gharbi, and the books The WEIRDest People in the world and The New Class War.
But more than anything, Deresiewicz's speech 'On Leadership' really helped me understand the same 'cautious, neurotic, conformist' people in my life. Hope you read it if you get a chance!
https://fs.blog/great-talks/solitude-and-leadership/
What is the evidence that engineers and doctors are distinctly not joining the Dems?
I think I found it, or at least, an article about it. The chart in the article says that doctors overall, as well as some specialties like Internal Medicine and Oncology, skew Democrat.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/07/upshot/your-surgeon-is-probably-a-republican-your-psychiatrist-probably-a-democrat.html
> “In surgery, anesthesiology and urology, for example, around two-thirds of doctors who have registered a political affiliation are Republicans. In infectious disease medicine, psychiatry and pediatrics, more than two-thirds are Democrats.”
> “There is no way to know exactly why certain medical specialties attract Democrats or Republicans. But researchers who have studied the politics of physicians offered a few theories.”
> “One explanation could be money. Doctors tend to earn very high salaries compared with average Americans, but the highest-paid doctors earn many times as much as those in the lower-paying specialties. The fields with higher average salaries tended to contain more doctors who were Republican, while the comparatively lower-paying fields were more popular among Democrats. That matches with national data, which show that, for people with a given level of education, richer ones are more likely to lean Republican (possibly because of a concern over the liberal policy goal of taxing the wealthiest at a higher rate).”
> “The sorting may also reflect the changing demographics of medicine. As more women have become doctors in recent years, they have tended to cluster in certain specialties more than others. The data showed that female physicians were more likely to be Democrats than their male peers, mirroring another trend in the larger American population. So as women enter fields like pediatrics, obstetrics/gynecology and psychiatry, they may be making those fields more liberal.”
> “Over all, the partisanship of doctors looks very different from a generation ago, when most physicians identified as Republicans. The influx of women may help explain that change, too. The researchers Adam Bonica, Howard Rosenthal and David Rothman compared political donations by doctors in 1991 with those in 2011 and 2012. The study found that doctors had become substantially more likely to give to Democrats.”
I'd guess that most of the Dem-leaning specialities are more people-oriented while surgeons and anesthesiologists are less so.
Remember (and I say this as a lifelong Democrat) that you only have two choices: incompetence or downright evil. It’s a shitty choice.
How is the Republican Party ‘evil’? Please no personality based comments - but instead the conservative agenda outcomes.
MAGA is totally nihilistic, and it’s the Republican Party now. Idk if that’s evil, but these ppl have no principles or goals beyond enriching themselves and taking power at any cost, whether that’s undermining social and institutional trust or antagonizing our geopolitical allies or allowing a Chinese spying app to run unabated.
My point was to ask you to challenge the tribalistic talking points.
Evil is a strong claim, and if an entire party is evil we should be able to point to things they were accountable for that brought evil to the world. I don’t know why your post triggered me to do so —- probably just a mood when I was tired of all the left vs. right generalization’s.
We have to stop fighting each other and refocus on these entrenched politicians who don’t represent the actual people.
I think we should attack them on all the boneheaded shit they are doing, have done, and want to do, and I won’t take any of that back. We should call the Trump admin out on corruption, grift, errors, etc. that make us poorer and less safe…but yes I take your point that the average democratic voter, to say nothing of leftists and progressives online, is unbearable to listen to in how they go about doing this.
Like you did the Biden administration? So now you have the courage to identify and reject corruption and self dealing? After being struck down on the road to Damascus I suppose. Where is your outrage at the influence peddling and self enrichment of the Biden family, necessitating preemptive pardons for the lot. This is the typical liberal/progressive nonsense that somehow or another all the good liberals were unwittingly co-opted into reluctant agreement for fear of being seen as uncivil. Weak sauce, cry me a river. Grow up and get a real life.
This article is literally talking about their principles and goals, lamenting that these principles were once espoused by the left. So you clearly can't say they have none. As for enrichment, the Democrats have regularly raised far more money from rich donors than the right for years.
Not convinced, Trump seems like a pretty unprincipled guy. Look at the enrichment in the form of the $50b slush fund he just created out of a memecoin. It's also pretty weak commitment to free speech to threaten deportation of Palestine protestors.
And I'm not on the left, I'm just a normie liberal. I've held pretty firmly to the principles in the article my whole life and think wokeness is mostly dumb.
Less government.
More freedom.
American can be great again.
We can do it.
That's the spirit of the anti corruption vote that happened in 2024.
That's ANTI nihilism.
The DNC, in the meantime, preaches that you can't do anything without their velvet gloved iron hand controlling everything so they can give you a pittance of government "assistance"... if you vote for them and eternally support them.
Well, first of all that was meant more as a joke or quip than as a policy discussion.
So you want to first tie my hands behind my back before I can answer? Madam, we can’t, at this point, AVOID personality based comments given the personalities that the Republican Party continues to elect. The party must own those personalities and all of their flaws.
But I’ll take a shot at an answer anyway just for grins with my hands tied behind my back as you ask.
Most of the good things that people actually LIKE about the Federal government come from the New Deal (hmmm… I can’t remember who the party in power was during the New Deal - maybe you can help?). And it was also the New Deal which ballooned the Federal Government and spending at that level.
As a quick aside I will note that pre-great depression (you know, around the time of the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act) the Fed was MUCH smaller. It’s THAT version of the Federal government that Trump thinks can be supported solely with tariffs. But that would require getting rid of most of the programs people actually LIKE in the Federal Government. But I digress.
Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Farm bills which help feed the poor, minimum wage, agencies which make sure that we aren’t poisoned by corporations - those all ultimately stem from the New Deal or post New Deal thinking.
And it’s all those things that Republicans were trying to kill even BEFORE the Trump era. They’ve ALWAYS had an agenda of unwinding those policies.
Now I ask you with a straight face: if Jesus Christ Himself came down to earth tomorrow and found that one party was (and had been for decades) trying to take away medicine for the sick, food for the poor, and housing for the elderly what would he name those actions?
Horrifically false question at the end. Complete the picture.
If Jesus saw people taking peoples’ money they earned with guns (yes taxes are enforced with guns and jail time) taking a cut and then very inefficiently doling out the spoils in the ostensible effort to do good, what would he say?
Furthermore, this system also relies on deficit spending which is actually borrowing on a credit card for all those alive and not yet born to fund pet program. This to me is one of the most immoral things going in our current society. If you want to fund studies about cocaine induced mating habit of the yellow bellied warbler, have the honesty to pay more taxes and fund it with your own money not the unborn.
By the way, which party affiliated people give more to charity? Leftists believe govt is in charge of charity and donate less per capita than conservatives who believe it is their own responsibility and donate their own after tax monies of their own free will.
Gee I wonder if Jesus cares if we do things of our own free will versus being forced to do it?
None of the new deal programs you claim are so popular are authorized by the constitution. Have the honesty to propose amendments for these things. Surely they will pass since they are so popular.
The federal government as it exists now is so far beyond the constitutional intent for the government and it's so corrupt that arresting the majority of DC (75 to 99.999999%) might not catch anyone that's innocent.
Many of those programs can be done better by people using money that's NOT taken by the government and laundered through government pandering corruption.
The New Deal is actually an albatross around the country's neck, slowing the economy and choking of of prosperity with bureaucracy and government control.
And that's one of the biggest lies of history, that FDR "saved us" from the great depression. He made a recession that was ENDING into the great depression by cancering the government into the economy, and we haven't recovered since.
Jesus would tell us all we're sinners and have failed in the eyes of God, and that all of us should repent of our sins and pray for salvation.
Well I’m telling you I have absolutely no interest in engaging with your horse shit so I’m blocking you.
False choice fallacy.
The DNC is corrupt.
The leadership of the RNC was corrupt (and still is corrupt, see people like Mitch the Snitch McConnell), but the rank and file are working for reform.
And the federal government itself is corrupt.
That's why Trump got hate from all sides.
Because an outsider reformer is the last thing the unreformed want.
Go fuck yourself.
I'm a proud member of the party of stupid.
Which one? 😂
Well, first of all that was meant more as a joke or quip than as a policy discussion.
So you want to first tie my hands behind my back before I can answer? Madam, we can’t, at this point, AVOID personality based comments given the personalities that the Republican Party continues to elect. The party must own those personalities and all of their flaws.
But I’ll take a shot at an answer anyway just for grins with my hands tied behind my back as you ask.
Most of the good things that people actually LIKE about the Federal government come from the New Deal (hmmm… I can’t remember who the party in power was during the New Deal - maybe you can help?). And it was also the New Deal which ballooned the Federal Government and spending to levels FAR higher than it had ever been previously.
As a quick aside I will note that pre-great depression (you know, around the time of the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act) the Fed was MUCH smaller. It’s THAT version of the Federal government that Trump thinks can be supported solely with tariffs. But that would require getting rid of most of the programs people actually LIKE in the Federal Government. But I digress.
Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Farm bills which help feed the poor, minimum wage, agencies which make sure that we aren’t poisoned by corporations - those all ultimately stem from the New Deal or post New Deal thinking.
And it’s all those things that Republicans were trying to kill even BEFORE the Trump era. They’ve ALWAYS had an agenda of unwinding those policies.
Now I ask you with a straight face: if Jesus Christ Himself came down to earth tomorrow and found that one party was (and had been for decades) trying to take away medicine for the sick, food for the poor, and housing for the elderly what would he name those actions?
We could have an interesting policy discussion if not constrained by the limitations of an internet comments section...mainly being I don't have the time nor inclination to pen a lengthy dissertation addressing your points.
You are talking almost 100 years ago, an entirely different world order. All those things people like...a couple folks smarter than me had relevant observations...
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else."― Frederic Bastiat
And...
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship."---Alexander Fraser Tytler.
When phrased in terms of what Jesus would demand....ok, you win...except this dismisses the idea that humans can act compassionately amongst themselves without reference to a 3rd party intermediary. I find it remarkable that folks require a 3rd party intermediary to have a moral ethical relationship with their fellow brethren.
"Taking away (all those things)"...is not the single defined end result of wanting intelligent stewardship of "those things". The continued expansion and utterly corrupt application of "those things" is now the pawn in power plays benefiting a very few entrenched power brokers, and will remain that way until dismantled.
Jesus could not be reached for comment....
Do you really support Social Security? It is, both in theory and practice, a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.
So, what policies are ‘ direct opposition to long understood human interactional dynamics?’ Please provide a specific example?
How about putting male sex offenders into women’s prisons?
Ya can’t wake those, who pretend to be asleep.
There are already male prison guards. Male guards are constantly assaulting prisoners .The problem is the assaults, not the trans women. (And FWIW, I think sex offenders should be housed in separate prisons entirely. They can’t be trusted no matter what gender they use.)
This is the kind of out-of-touch mental gyration that drove average voters away from the left.
You’re excusing putting male sex offenders, nearly all of whom conveniently discovered that they were “trans” once arrested for their crimes, into prisons by saying that “well, women are already being assaulted by prison guards, so… in essence we haven’t made the problem any worse.”
There are news reports of female inmates being raped and impregnated by “trans” inmates. I think these individual women might beg to differ with your point of view.
I want to stop assaults and I don’t see any evidence that trans women are responsible for those attacks
So much for #BelieveWomen
Men who call themselves "transwomen" do the same amount or more sex offending than other sorts of men.
Cite: https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/18973/pdf/
In particular: "MOJ stats show 76 of the 129 male-born prisoners identifying as transgender (not counting any with GRCs) have at least 1 conviction of sexual offence. This includes 36 convictions for rape and 10 for attempted rape" (p3)
You don’t WANT to see the evidence
https://news.wttw.com/2020/02/19/lawsuit-female-prisoner-says-she-was-raped-transgender-inmate
https://womensliberationfront.org/chandler-v-cdcr
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/oct/11/transgender-prisoner-who-sexually-assaulted-inmates-jailed-for-life
https://www.nbcnewyork.com/investigations/man-posing-as-transgender-woman-raped-female-prisoner-at-rikers-lawsuit-says/5067904/?amp=1
"Crimes are already being committed against women, so why not do away with their remaining protections?" is really the argument you're going with.
Really truly.
Folks, if any of you weren't already familiar with how virulently hateful and misogynist trans activists and their enablers are, here's some more evidence for you.
I think that is about the 20th time I’ve seen that one. Same ole same ole frI’m the trans & allies. “The guards rape them anyway.” Then they can understand why women don’t like them, why fathers and husbands don’t like them. They scream about how mean and how people lack empathy towards them while simultaneously having no empathy for women. How does one became that simple? I feel like you have to be dim witted to not comprehend how terrible an argument that is. Well, ya know, the prisons guards rape the female prisoners so it doesn’t matter if we let in men who are lying about being trans women. It doesn’t matter that they just decided yesterday and that they are a convicted rapist. That woman that got locked up with him, well, it doesn’t matter because a guard will rape. Who cares if the guard raped her at 3 pm and the lying male sex offender rapes her at 3 pm. She was raped meat anyway. No good to anyone, just throw body out back when you are done. We can’t have a maybe, possibly trans woman get raped. That would be a shame!!
Transwomen are men. Just like any men they're bigger than women, stronger than women, and mostly like sex with women. Half the ones in prison are there for a sex offence.
Replacing male prison guards with female ones would be a great idea. But guess what! We could do that AND take the men who are convicted felons out of the female prison population and put them back with the other men.
So, since they’re already being assaulted, what’s a few more assaults?
What’s a little more rape? Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. They guards rape them anyway. I know! I so totally agree. I too think that trans women are more important than women that get raped by guards. They don’t have any value after the guards rape them. Nothing wrong with taking a gamble when locking a woman in over night with a male. That isn’t cruel, because, just a woman. Not a real woman like a trans woman. Trans women are women!
So, if you find yourself wondering why people are turning on trans women, you reread your comment. They rape them anyway. That’s only the 20+ time I’ve seen that awesome gem from the trans & allies.
It is trans vs women. That has been made abundantly clear.
Trans think they are the civil rights movement of this time. They are wrong. Women’s rights are civil rights movement of this time.
Nothing is more important than trans people. Gotcha. Heard that one loud and clear repeatedly. How about you watch for it, maybe you will start to understand why the LGB are abandoning trans at an increasing rate. No, not all and not all will. But it is the sand slowly disappearing underfoot. Unstable and tottering and unwilling to change. Unwilling to even think about what the cost has been to women and children.
And no, the Rs aren’t coming for me and no I’m not scared for marriage and no I’m not going to a camp. I do t care if they take my marriage away if it keeps women from being locked in cells with rapists lying about being trans because “no gatekeeping”! Which really means their life isn’t worth inconveniencing a trans woman. If my marriage were a card and women being locked in cells with male sexual offenders were a different card, I would slap my marriage card onto the table and yank the prison rape card off the table in a blur. Because I give a fuck about women, unlike trans people, including the women.
By the way, I bet there a whole lot of trans people out that agree with me. That see this farce for what it is. That would slap one or more of their rights on the table to keep those women from what would be considered a violation of the Genova Conventions. But since they are Americans in an American prison it doesn’t fall under those.
But remember ladies, everything is fine…because they guard will be raping you too. What’s one more rape after all?
Not that it matters to you and your desire to rant, but my point is that banning transwomen doesn’t do anything to make anyone safer but does reinforce the idea that men are always and in every circumstance superior to women, which is the REAL conservative and TERF point. If those people really wanted to make women safer, they would ban male guards. I was also noting that there are NO spaces where women can go without men; men will always be coaches, trainers, guards, priests, bosses, or whatever position of authority is denied to women. Focusing on a small number of transgender people distracts from the way conservatives always put men in charge.
Within living memory male guards were banned from women's prisons, at least in the US. But that seemingly rational precaution was found to be discriminatory. So now male guards must be hired for women's prisons, despite the substantial incidence of sexual abuse that results. And women have to hired to guard men's prisons, where they are often sexually harassed or assaulted, and on occasion "fall in love" with some charming sociopath, which creates obvious security problems.
Please think it through and you'll figure it out.
The Civil Rights Act.
Bipartisan, and 61 years ago. Try something from this century. You're being intentionally obtuse.
Think harder.
I’m just following your wording. You didn’t specify a time. Do you support Civil Rights? Those laws certainly changed local practices and society.
No. I believe all DNC supporters should be rusticated to learn from the peasants.
All of it Karen, ALL of it.
Pricing in free markets, to name a big one.
How much does Trump’s required bribe increase those prices?
Much less than leftist compassion run amok leading to rent control / insurance caps which then lead to the destruction of rental stock / affordable housing, and insurance companies exiting the California insurance market leaving homeowners without fire insurance.
Yeah, the deep red states are really showing us all how to do it. Like Alabama, W Virginia, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Mississippi, etc.
Coming to w va from Cali, I can attest to how much better life is here. And Mississippi is a gorgeous state.
Cali has a legion of problems. West Virginia has problems, but minor compared to Cali. Chiefest among w va problems is probably a lack of retention of young people, despite having free college
Last time I checked, the conversation was about political partie's talking points, and iirc the Dems lost all the talking points to the Pubs. All of them. I also seem to recall the Dems losing the election to a convicted felon, and the large migration of all previous Dem constituencies to the lying felon, apparently due to having lost control of the relevant talking points.
If we're talking State fiscal responsibility and responsible city management, they're all fucked with the possible exception of Texas and Florida...which iirc are Red. Having no credible personal experience with either of those states, I'll leave it up to you to decide.
If sharp criticism disappears completely, mild criticism will become harsh. If mild criticism is not allowed, silence will be considered ill-intended. If silence is no longer allowed, not praising hard enough is a crime. If only one voice is allowed to exist, then the only voice that exists is a lie.
如果尖銳的批評完全消失，溫和的批評將會變得刺耳。 如果溫和的批評也不被允許，沉默將被認為居心叵測。 如果沉默也不再允許，讚揚不夠賣力將是一種罪行。 如果只允許一種聲音存在，那麼，唯一存在的那個聲音就是謊言
Great quote? Whose words?
I managed to find this....I was in Wuhan when Covid broke out, the quote was widely distributed and censored and redistributed....
"Annie Lab found that the passage was likely to be taken from a 2015 essay by Zhang Xuezhong, an outspoken Chinese legal scholar who has criticized the political oppression and lack of rule of law in mainland China. Zhang’s essay was influential and cited by many others at the time."
Its provenance is not tightly known. I’ve read variations in different languages and cultures. This one has circulated at various times in China. If you can find out who wrote it, you’ll be the first.
Thanks for that reply! Perhaps safer for its author to remain anonymous? Could last part of "If sharp criticism disappears completely, mild criticism will become harsh." perhaps be better translated as " ... mild criticism will be perceived as/take to be harsh".?
Translating Chinese to English is tricky. Direct translations can sound blunt. It could be rewritten in English to have better poetic effect. If you want to rewrite it that way, fine with me. It's a great observation of human communication.
Well said! While I absolutely abhor Trump and everything he stands for and while the right is absolutely worse, the far left is authoritarian in a way that I hate too and they are my team. And we MUST take a stand when our own team is doing stupid things. Thank you for this.
Honestly when your best argument is “the other team is worse,” you’ve lost my support.
I honestly can’t tell if this is a criticism of what I said or agreement. I keep going back and forth. But I think I agree regardless so…. 🤷♂️
Ha sorry this was absolutely not directed at you! Forgive me for being a little grumpy this morning.
No apology necessary. I suspect about 60% of the country is a little grumpy this morning but there’s a large portion of them who have no right to complain now because they should have known to do something about it. Besides, whether it was a criticism or not I still agreed with it. I thank people for correcting me usually. It lets me be correct the next time.
Damn right.
It's important not to absolve the Democratic leadership. "Social justice" politics wasn't forced on them by the far left; they willingly embraced it as a club to wield against populist liberals who were more interested in "class justice.
The problem wasn't cowardice, it was that their first priority was the intraparty fight against economic populism.
I don't want to totally absolve them, but I do think they get too much blame on this stuff. The Dem leadership absolutely embraced the social justice movement and the far Left, particularly in the first days of Trump.
But as they saw little electoral returns for the move, the Democrats and particularly their leadership pivoted away from it. Biden didn't govern as some crazy Leftist and he seemed to endorse the post-racial vision of America. But, here's the thing, they kept getting tagged for the most inane things the Left said, even if there's no real significant Leftist anywhere near the leadership of the Democratic Party. The whole Latinx thing is a perfect example. Yes, its dumb, but the Democrats weren't doing it... they were getting harmed by the blowback against the Left, who incidentally, opposed the Dems on other grounds.
That's because Biden was largely quite good at governance. What he sucked at was politics and messaging. Which, you know, is bad for a politician (but probably good for a president).
Some of the comments about racial equity above miss the mark on one point addressed in the post: are you actually speaking for the people you purport to speak for? I think it's been proven that the answer is no.
Poll after poll has shown that the majority of all races and ethnicities favour a post-racial world. This makes sense; when you have people who have historically been judged by their immutable characteristics, you can see how they'd be loath to return to those days, even if it is purportedly for their benefit. At its worst, this ideology infantilizes people, treating them like they lack agency and need the help of the Educated Whites to save them from oppression.
The fact is that most of these equity ideals stem from post-secondary education, which is overwhelmingly richer and whiter than the general population. The discourse over privilege is privileged (mostly) white people yapping to each other at the exclusion of those without privilege.
I think these people are well-intentioned at heart, but ironically, their privilege blinds them to a degree. In a lot of cases, the only people of colour they have interacted with are people just like them: educated, upwardly mobile, and with an activist streak. IMO, this skews their views of what these groups actually believe in and what they actually want.
Virtually every demographic- save for educated white people- broke for Trump in higher numbers than 2016 and 2020. When you make your entire ideology about identity and the groups you purport to speak for reject you, that's a sure enough sign that you aren't really speaking for those you think you're protecting.
As a college-educated white person who knows a number of non-college-educated black people, I basically agree with you. Any reparations need to focus on economic inequality, a good portion of which is related to racial oppression. That said, I doubt there are many black people who would say their life has not been more difficult due to their race, and I think programs and organizations that support them on that basis are worthy ones.
Can we also give an honourable mention to always attacking/blaming capitalism as a stupid thing on the left along with all the woke stuff? This kind of goes with your ‘blocking things’ post…but the dominant economic system in the world which creates abundance and ensures better growth, innovation, productivity, property rights, the creation of generational wealth, class mobility, and reduction of poverty is probably worth defending. I don’t love big business or monopolies or anything like that, but there’s a lot of brain-dead, pseudo-intellectual online ‘socialism’ out there that needs to get shut down. Free market with redistribution and common-sense regulation is a good liberal principle, and we should own it…without rebranding it as socialism for no reason.
I for one am sick of the term "late-stage capitalism" which always seems to imply that the glorious revolution is coming Really Soon Now. It also seems to imply that socialism is in the flower of its youth and not a fossilized dinosaur.
Agree this is so important! I was vaguely "anti capitalist" in college until friends started starting their own businesses and crowdfunding cool projects and I realized ohh, markets help make cool things happen.
Jeremiah Johnson of Infinite Scroll already touched on that with this article: https://www.infinitescroll.us/p/ugh-capitalism
That was brilliant! Thank you for the recommendation!
Not a fan of Trump’s personality but his executive orders on our open borders, the insanity of gender identity which deny the reality of human sexuality, and the craziness of DEI which discriminates against whites, Asians and men in attempting to cure past discrimination against others are absolutely the correct approach to those festering problems.
I'm looking for a sober review of all the day one executive orders that Trump did, and how many are normal things you expect when control changes, and how many are insane.
Ending birthright citizenship via executive order, I think, goes in the "insane" bucket.
Hanania posted such an article at https://www.richardhanania.com/p/the-ultimate-guide-to-trumps-day ; I don't have the expertise to say how "sober" it is.
I'd like to ask, why are the open/closed borders important to you?
Also, "insanity of gender identity which deny the reality" - Are you referring to folk who are transgender, or something more specific than that?
Brilliant piece which I’ll attempt to share with my far-left friends and family and to look forward to it not making a difference because they’re so dedicated to the cause. Van Jones had a similar view on Maher back in October - “if progressives have a politics that says, all white people are racist, all men are toxic, and all billionaires are evil, it’s kind of hard to keep them on your side. And so, we might want to think about, if you’re chasing people out of the party, you can’t be mad when they leave.”
Yeah, it's too bad about abandoning Meritocracy as a key value. It sure would come in handy as an argument against cronyism and nepotism.
Read Mark Andreesen's interview with Ross Douthat in the NYT. It walks you through exactly what happened in Corporate America with young leftist activists and then talks about what senior Biden staffers were telling tech companies.
They honestly believe that the government permitting social media was a catastrophic mistake politically.
They also intend for AI to be 100% controlled by the government via a couple of private entities.
Their bottom line is that Big Tech went for Trump mainly because he didn't want to kill them.
Andreesen’s interview was illuminating, but I found it telling that during the discussion about AI regulations, Andreesen didn’t bring up safety or job concerns as a source of backlash at all. He argued that it was just about woke stuff, despite that AI skepticism is fairly high among all Americans (https://news.gallup.com/poll/648953/americans-express-real-concerns-artificial-intelligence.aspx). It took Douthat questioning Andreesen’s characterization for those other issues to come up.
At times, I think criticism of progressives along “woke vs antiwoke” lines is allowed to overtake any acknowledgement of what progressives say about other issues.
If we had a non-politicized administrative state it would one thing. But we don't.
I don't like the idea of Ingsoc owning AI.
That’s a valid position, but it doesn’t justify Andreesen leaving out that large swathes of the non-elite-woke -Democrat-bogeyman public doesn’t trust big corporations and billionaires’ intentions on AI. Andreesen selectively acknowledges opposition that’s easily dismissed by the antiwoke zeitgeist. It’s the same tactic that much of big tech used to try to appeal to woke liberals, only in reverse. Andreesen might be doing this sincerely and subsconsciously though.
I think non-elite non-woke Democrats and elite woke Democrats is a distinction without a difference.
It is all part of the Borg, which is in charge of things and shouldn't be allowed to control AI
Maybe this is overly personal as a response to what you said, but I’m a non-elite, non-woke Democrat and I don’t feel much affinity at all with elite woke Democrats—hell, my own congresswoman (AOC, lol) is probably an example of the latter (though she’s not as “elite” as, say, a lot of senators and older Dems with more money than she has, tbf; she just has a big megaphone), and I don’t feel particularly well-represented by her at all.
I mean, I think she’s a nice person who means well, but she has no business being in that position, IMO. But for some reason this district votes super-lefty in a way that I find baffling; whoever these people are, they must live in a different area than I do or something. (Or it’s probably just that out conspicuously pathetic turnout here in New York leads to very unrepresentative results.)
What is a “borg”?
It's a star trek reference.
That was a good article - I read it too. It was quite enlightening.
Today is maybe not the day to bitch about the left.
Today is exactly the day to bitch about the left for exactly this reason.
Exactly, word for word, what I was about to reply. Two great minds and all.
What reason is that?
The reason why we lost. The sooner one accepts one's mistakes and changes course, the sooner things improve.
The reason y’all lost is Kamala was an untalented, spineless corporate fake politician tied to an administration that was deeply unpopular and who she refused to distance herself from. The reason y’all lost is she ran a shitty neoliberal campaign at a time of populist rage and resentment. It appealed to people making $200,000 a year and no one else. The reason y’all lost is that the Democratic Party stands for nothing and has abandoned the working class and everyone knows it. The reason y’all lost is that the Democrats suck at politics. I’m as critical of the liberal professional-managerial class “left” as anyone, but watching liberals blame them when Kamala Harris did avoided the culture war issues described in this essay is maddening. She ran the platonic ideal of a campaign attempting to ignore and transcend the woke shit. But she lost bc her message on the economy wasn’t strong enough, she very clearly wanted to appeal to corporate America, and when asked if she would do anything different than Biden on The View, she said no.
It's hard to imagine a less able politician in this particular election than Harris. The "Democrats" did the most undemocratic thing imaginable and pushed her in our face and demanded fealty. Fuck that. The Dems blew this. Blew it bad in every possible way, and to point it out is to receive their same lame abuse for not getting in line with them.
I agree the left is overly censorious, but Donald Trump is much more so. It's good to learn from one's mistakes but it's not good to commit the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.
He’s worse because we’ve never talked about it. Every time we tried something came up. “Oh. You can’t talk about it cus #metoo, you can’t talk about it cus #blm, you can’t talk about it cus Trump got elected (the first time), we can’t talk about it because the pandemic…. There was always an excuse to not talk about it. It’s like an abusive relationship where your concerns just keep getting ignored because one side is always “busy” until one day you’ve had enough and you say “no. We are talking about this now. I don’t care if it’s your dad’s funeral. Right now. You keep putting it off!”
Of course Donald is worse. He's somewhere deep beneath the lowest sump of disgusting.
I'm usually up on my fallacy recognition, but I had to look that one up. I think it's a wrong application. The sooner I realize I'm screwing up, the sooner I can make a course correction.
There's no crying allowed in baseball, nor feeling sorry for one's self in politics. It's not like this needs some deep contemplation of where the Dems went wrong. If someone can't figure this one out very quickly, there's even deeper problems to overcome.
How was Trump more censorious? Did he try and create a Ministry of Truth like the left did? Did he use NGO governmental cut-outs to force social media companies to bury stories?
He's literally suing people for saying things that he didn't like. He's literally threatened to prosecute people for saying things he doesn't like. He literally wanted to remove media outlets that he didn't like from press conferences.
You're right, which is why I'd like liberals to stand up for liberal ideals once again. Because if we do so, it'll be far more genuine than Trump pretending to care about those things when he clearly doesn't.
Excellent. If you're a typical example of lefties, that's a great sign that the Dems will continue to stew in denial rather than change course away from their most wildly unpopular positions, like men in women's sports, "hate speech", medical mutilation of kids, pretending that "the economy" matters more to voters than inflation, and pretending that illegals aren't illegal and openly wishing to grant them full citizenship.
You're guaranteeing GOP dominance for the foreseeable future 👍🏼
Except Dems aren't in power. The guaranteed excesses of the GOP is what precludes GOP dominance for the foreseeable future.
Why am i reading this?
DURING PRIDE?
Given that we in part have them to thank for Trump even being inaugurated yesterday in the first place, I'd say it's a fine day to point out their shortcomings that led us to this point.
I understand the sentiment, but it's never too early to recognize one's self is utterly wrong.
This post is EXACTLY right. As a (former) D voter myself - I stand aghast at their reintroduction of segregation. Of racial essentialism. Of insane gender theories that defy the bullshit sniff test. Of the D driven managerial class of business, media, entertainment, academic, and urban political leaders cowering in the fetal position as their blue-haired nose pierced activist wing threatened them with the “R” scarlet letter that would automatically disqualify them from their CEO, VP, Chancellor, Dean, and Mayor jobs with all the pay and perks of a lifetime of struggle to reach. I don’t blame them. Protecting your hard won zebra from the hyenas who would steal it from you to pick the bones clean is a natural reaction. I really can’t blame normie Dems for this reaction.
BUT LETS BE HONEST AND CLEAR: By abdicating their responsibility to keep the racist and sexist stench of DEI, CRT, BLM, and MeToo (all imports from their activists) out of their institutions / normie Dems allowed the national socialist sewers to back up on their watch. They could have, and should have, defended free speech and color blindness and merit while they held the high ground. But normie Dems failed us all. They deserve this.
And they shouldn’t be shocked that hardened Conservatives in hazmat suits show up to flush our national backed up sewers of this social filth.
"This post is EXACTLY right. As a (former) D voter myself - I stand aghast at their reintroduction of segregation."
Democrats are not reintroducing de jure segregation and de facto segregation simply reflects freedom of association.
That’s how you sugar coat segregation? Affinity? Freedom of association?
Team Progressive turned race and gender into essentialism. Driving all of this into structures and institutions. Spreading the lie and outright fabrication of systemic racism and sexism. All to elevate their preferred groups to higher power based on nothing more than their skin color and gender. That is racism. That is sexism. A violation of non discrimination laws. And that will be legally challenged and rolled back in the coming months.
Good. End Progressive racism. And sexism. Now.
Segregation doesn't need to be sugar-coated because it is neither an inherently bad or good thing; it simply means 'separation." Whether it is ultimately a net positive or negative in society depends on the bases, assumptions, and motives upon which it is built.
American de jure segregation was bad because it was imposed by the state, not because the races didn't "mix.' And it's easy to condemn segregation wholesale when the costs of doing so didn't fall so disproportionately upon your own community. It's so ironic that desegregation came with a huge unforeseen penalty for Black Americans that either broke even with or outweighed the expected benefits. The parents who were plaintiffs in Brown v Board could have cared less whether their children sat besides White kids or not in school. They simply believed it was unfair for the children of tax-paying citizens to be prohibited from attending a public school because of the state's racist practices. If we're all equal, what's wrong with all/predominantly Black neighborhoods or White ones or Hispanic ones? I thought it was racist to think that Black people needed to be in close proximity to White people to succeed or thrive.
Good point. Nothing wrong, at all, with separation. I get that. Sometimes, you want to hang out with people who “get you”. Food, lingo, culture. I don’t see that as a goal for what’s been happening these post George Floyd years. It’s been done under guise of safety. Harm reduction. As if our decades of social mingling and color blindness were somehow wrong and harmful. It has had the effect of raising racial consciousness and distinctness. That’s not good. We ignore universal character traits in favor of immutable group traits. That is the complete opposite of MLK speech and everything Obama ever said. How is it that Progressives find that a good idea?
It’s not. It’s a terrible idea. It sets us up in zero sum conflict based on traits we have no control over and cannot change. It leads one favored group toward social entitlement and the disfavored group toward resentment and aggression. This is not complicated to understand and is quite intuitive an outcome. How is it that our best and brightest Progressive thinkers continue to pursue it when this is clearly what’s happening?!
You make a fundamental mistake by heaping all the blame on progressives when conservatives do the exact same thing in their own preferred contexts. Whenever we're talking about something like crime or unmarried mothers or education, conservatives have no qualms at all with trafficking in race consciousness or even promoting their version of the narrative that America has made no progress on racial matters over the years. We're constantly told that the Democratic Party is the party of slavery, the KKK, and Jim Crow to this very day, LBJ was a raging racist that implemented the Great Society to devastate Black communities, Sen. Robert Bird was an unrepentant KKK member whom Biden spoke fondly of (while omitting that Obama did as well), etc. When we speak of crime or births out of wedlock, everything is Black this and Black that, never American this and American that. And more recently, you have "DEI" being used as a slur by conservatives. "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing" is sung at the Super Bowl as part of pre-game activities (and was announced by its actual name) and not immediately before the national anthem and you have the Fox & Friends crew getting White folks whipped into a frenzy by reporting that the Black national anthem (which is not what the announcers called it, but rather by its actual name "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing") was competing with the national anthem during the Super Bowl, which then triggered uninformed and borderline racist statements about Black Americans and the song itself (which is over a century old and nicknamed the Black [Negro at the time] national anthem before the U.S. had a designated national anthem), etc. I can go on and on and on. It was rather funny seeing these same folks go full-on racist towards Vivek in response to his statement about mediocre American culture and its failure to produce top talent that we now have to import in large numbers when that's the same thing they say to Black folks in an economic context.
From where I sit, what the Right does in this regard is absolutely worse than the Left without question. If someone feels that a Black graduation ceremony or college residential hall with a Black-oriented theme is so egregiously harmful but they completely and totally ignore how complicit they are in the "othering" of Black Americans on a constant basis, then that says a lot about their actual priorities. Honestly I get tired of the insistence on the right that Black Americans are not part of the body politic, that we shouldn't "depend on the government" or Whites and do things "for ourselves" as though we aren't taxpaying law-abiding citizens whose "issues" are very common to all Americans.
This is well done. The canceling and shaming worked well on everyone, not just your fellow liberals. It's a lesson we all should take to heart. Come to someone's defense if they speak up against clearly stupid ideas. And do so no matter what side of the aisle they are on. Thank you for writing this. Given the exit poll data on who voted for Big Orange, perhaps we can also stop naming and shaming. Oh, and no one is the gatekeeper of someone else's opinion.
Truth. And Oooooooo the lefties are gonna be so mad at yoooooooooooouu 😂
But there's a simple explanation: the Democratic party is run pretty much exclusively by wealthy-family graduates of expensive colleges with Humanities degrees now. They're radicalized, by the increasingly-radical Academy. All their beliefs are luxury beliefs. They are clueless about the working class, and that includes most disadvantaged minorities.
Recently discovered your Substack. I’m an American First supporter, however in addition to your terrific writing and fabulously sharp humor - I appreciate the common sense & honesty you bring to the conversation.
I’ve shaken my head at the Dems too often in the past 8 years, last year especially. I keep saying “what happened to the Dem party?” Or, “they can’t all think like this”. But the silence has been deafening. It’s going to take Dems like you to give other Dems permission to stop self-censoring and stop the cycles of insanity.