The white power folks have Trump calling the Koch brothers "globalist"

If there is any doubt that this is a fascist backed agenda, you are a Trump cultist, you probably are not even aligning with the Koch brothers libertarian views. It is all about race, religion, and ethnicity........and that hate is now hurting our economy. The globalist is dixiecrat dog whistle for Jew. He must have chit with his daughter's choice.

Of those who did turn out, Trump actually won a lower share of the white vote than Mitt Romney. He was able to win because [b ]he won a larger share of Hispanics and Asians than his predecessor, along with the largest share of the black vote of any Republican since 2004.[/b]

President Trump always said during the campaign he would get a lot of Hispanic and Black votes. And he did. They were a big factor in his winning the election.

That little FACT must drive liberals crazy because it goes against all the propaganda and dogma they have cemented into their confused liberal brains.

Heterodox Academy.

It was founded to counter progressive ideas on College campuses. It was founded in 2015. No empirical evidence of racism........now that is hysterical. If you are going to try to prove something, try thinking, and using actual academic sources who actually do real research.......the funny thing is that you members of the cult lack the education to discern the propaganda you are being spoon fed. Trump won the Republican nomination by complete and utter support by the old confederacy and dixiecrats, who have fought voting rights, affirmative action, and people of color.........I guess you think that brown people crossing the border are the real threat in immigration violations, but people over staying their visas which are not necessarily brown flood the country and nada....nothing. No, I can say this with great confidence........if a dixiecrat is voting for someone, they want a return to the good old days.....Jim Crow.

2seaoat wrote:Heterodox Academy.

It  was founded to counter progressive ideas on College campuses.  It was founded in 2015.  No empirical evidence of racism........now that is hysterical.  If you are going to try to prove something, try thinking, and using actual academic sources who actually do real research.......

What are your credentialsl?




COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK
Department of Sociology

Musa Al-Gharbi
Bio
Musa has M.A. degrees in Sociology and Philosophy, and B.A. degrees in Near Eastern Studies and Philosophy. Prior to joining Columbia, he served as an instructor in Government & Public Service at the University of Arizona and managed an academic consortium that studied conflcit in the Middle East.

This eclectic background is reflected in his objects of study: while all Musa's work relates to questions about knowledge, cognition and communication, his research contexts range from terrorism, extremism and war to race, inequality and social movements--and more recently, U.S. political elections.

Musa is also a core member of Heterodox Academy, which aims to enhance the quality and impact of social research by promoting viewpoint diversity, civil disagreement and constructive engagement within institutions of higher learning.

Publications
Musa's work has been published and cited in academic journals and textbooks across a range of disciplines. His research is also regularly cited in policy journals and dossiers--to include publications by the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Army War College, the Combatting Terrorism Center at West Point (CTC), the Brookings Institute and the RAND Coroporation. Musa's essays have also been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Atlantic Magazine, Foreign Affairs, Voice of America, Al-Jazeera and many other popular outlets.

2seaoat wrote:.....I guess you think that brown people crossing the border are the real threat in immigration violations, but people over staying their visas which are not necessarily brown flood the country and nada.

How could you possibly know what I think on that particular topic as I don't recall having ever commented upon it on this forum?   Or what my skin tone or ancestry might be?

As I said before, perhaps you need to check your biases?

What a stupid conversation. I am talking to somebody who thinks a MA in sociology is special.......geez.......this place is becoming a crucible for the uneducated. My credentials.......well my education did not stop at a masters, and I sure as hell did not get involved with Heterodox Academy as my education is more than this idiot who attempts to fool stupid people. The Russians duped Americans with false stories and made up chit for propaganda which would have made the Nazis proud. If you cannot even accept the fact that a MA in sociology is NOT an advanced degree, and that you never cite a scholarly source because you are unable to recognize the same. Go back to school and learn something....maybe you can get your MA in sociology from West Florida and can post with authority....now being a scholar.......bizarre is an understatement.

Or what my skin tone or ancestry might be?


Now you are just being a comedian.

2seaoat wrote:What a stupid conversation.  I am talking to somebody who thinks a MA in sociology is special.......geez.......this place is becoming a crucible for the uneducated.  My credentials.......well my education did not stop at a masters, and I sure as hell did not get involved with Heterodox Academy as my education is more than this idiot who attempts to fool stupid people.  The Russians duped Americans with false stories and made up chit for propaganda which would have made the Nazis proud.  If you cannot even accept the fact that a MA in sociology is NOT an advanced degree, and that you never cite a scholarly source because you are unable to recognize the same.  Go back to school and learn something....maybe you can get your MA in sociology from West Florida and can post with authority....now being a scholar.......bizarre is an understatement.

Disregard the message and attack the messenger? How typical of a liberal.

Argumentum ad hominem, much? Pardon me if I question your academic credentials. Or perhaps you know exactly what what you are doing by failing to address the facts presented by the author of the article? It's either one or the other in my opinion, because you are obviously fairly literate. You tell us which?

ConservaLady wrote:

2seaoat wrote:What a stupid conversation.  I am talking to somebody who thinks a MA in sociology is special.......geez.......this place is becoming a crucible for the uneducated.  My credentials.......well my education did not stop at a masters, and I sure as hell did not get involved with Heterodox Academy as my education is more than this idiot who attempts to fool stupid people.  The Russians duped Americans with false stories and made up chit for propaganda which would have made the Nazis proud.  If you cannot even accept the fact that a MA in sociology is NOT an advanced degree, and that you never cite a scholarly source because you are unable to recognize the same.  Go back to school and learn something....maybe you can get your MA in sociology from West Florida and can post with authority....now being a scholar.......bizarre is an understatement.

Disregard the message and attack the messenger?  How typical of a liberal.  

Argumentum ad hominem, much?   Pardon me if I question your academic credentials.  Or perhaps you know exactly what what you are doing by failing to address the facts presented by the author of the article?   It's either one or the other in my opinion, because you are obviously fairly literate.  You tell us which?

YOU.ARE.STUPID. There's your ad hominem. AND PROVIDE A LINK TO YOUR SOURCES.

Argumentum ad hominem, much

Posting a source from folks whose only purpose is to create propaganda to counter what is being done on college campuses, and that person only has a MA in sociology and is not a tenured professor with a major Academic University.....and I point out that somebody has to be pretty stupid to post the same......yep......my conclusion remains the same, stupid people eat up propaganda as if it is the truth. I can see my neighbor submitting an article from his high school days saying that the tariffs are working.......same dialogue but just a different page of stupid.

Aw.  You gonna whine because nobody's addressing your article.  You run like hell from me now when I answer you (I don't blame you, really, since whenever I do I fit your ass with a chinstrap and hand it back to you) but... I'll be your huckleberry.  

Now let's just take you apart, again.

ConservaLady wrote:Perhaps you and some others on here should check your own biases Mr Seaoats.

Face it.  The real reason Trump won the election is not because he is racist or because he was elected by racist whites.

I know, it's annoying when people base their ideas of things on overwhelming data rather than just... faith.

We were misled into thinking Trump supporters were bigots because all the signs pointed to the idea that they were.  And most of the hard data backs that idea up.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/04/17/racism-motivated-trump-voters-more-than-authoritarianism-or-income-inequality/?utm_term=.822e9cc21d07


https://psmag.com/social-justice/more-evidence-that-racism-and-sexism-were-key-to-trump-victory

https://www.thenation.com/article/economic-anxiety-didnt-make-people-vote-trump-racism-did/

But, as any scientist will tell you, looking at facts and data is no way to arrive at an hypothesis!  Right?  The best way is to either find some quote in Ephesians, or to figure out what Sean Hannity said about it.  That's the scientific method.

The real reason is because corrupt Hillary was a terrible candidate with terrible ideas for America and Americans.

Yeah, like "build bridges instead of walls," and not banning all Muslims from the country... terrible ideas like that.  

Really depends on who you consider "Americans" when you talk about the people who the ideas were terrible for, doesn't it?



If these are your Americans, then Hillary's ideas were terrible for them.  They love 'em some Trump, though.



 

And because Trump is a strong leader

 Sorry, I just keep remembering how Trump rubbed his face on Putin's shoes in front of the world.  Only somebody who worships the ultimate victim would consider that "strength."

with great ideas for putting America First and people were and are ready for that.

Especially those people in that picture above.  They love that ill-defined shit.


 

It's not the wealthy or business that are the enemy of the middle class, it's the pointy-headed political and academic elitists - who are mostly Democrats.

Yeah, damn smart people, they always get in the way with their fancy book-larnin' 'n' education 'n' what-not, ammirite?

Social Science Fails to Prove Racists Elected Trump
But you'd be hard-pressed to find one of these 'studies' that actually says so.

By MUSA AL-GHARBI • May 7, 2018

The field of “Trump studies” is vast—but disappointingly homogenous.

One way to understand its paradoxical scope and uniformity is through co-occurrence searches on Google Scholar. A query for “Donald Trump” and “racism,” for instance, would net you more than 8,000 articles published since 2016 in journals or textbooks or cited in academic research. “Donald Trump” and “white supremacy” brings in about 1,800 results. “Donald Trump” and “xenophobia” exceeds 2,400 hits. You get the idea.

Do you know why those words bring you so many hits?   It's due to the same reasons searching for "Hitler" gets you a lot of results about bigotry.  It's weird, but bigots get articles about bigots.

I know, it's fun to pretend that people only think those things because "the media is biased" and there's this huuuuuuge o'erreaching conspiracy ag'in' ya, but sometimes it's just Occam's Razor and Trump is associated with racism because... he's a fucking racist.  He's been racist for years.

He put out an ad against the Central Park Five and, even after DNA cleared them, he still wanted them executed.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/feb/17/central-park-five-donald-trump-jogger-rape-case-new-york

He tried to keep blacks out of his apartment buildings.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/28/us/politics/donald-trump-housing-race.html

And his rallies:

https://www.inquisitr.com/2842580/donald-trump-black-students-reportedly-banned-from-trump-rally-in-valdosta-video/

He started out his campaign calling Mexicans criminals and rapists.  He called for a ban on Muslims.  He said a judge wasn't fit because he was Mexican.  He tries to pretend that black athletes who take a knee during the plege are doing it because they aren't patriotic;  he ignores that the reason they're doing it is because blacks are killed disproportionately by cops.  He's happy to stoke up white anger against 'em.   He mocks Elizabeth Warren's claim that she's part Native American by calling her "Pocahontas."  He belittled a Latina Miss Universe contestant by calling her "Miss Housekeeping."  He said Jews make good bookkeepers and blacks don't because "they're lazy."   He makes fun of Asian accents.  It goes on, and on, and on, and on.

Really, the main thing Trump did that the other Republican candidates in the primary didn't do was play -- hard -- to the white supremacists.

And that's why you guys climbed over a thick field of other, less laughable possibilities to choose Trump.   Let's face it -- conservatives, in general, like racism.  Not all of 'em, by any means, but it is one of the big draws to your party.  And, remember, I live in Mississippi, I've been around you guys all my life, I live and work with you, I know conservatives, and so I'm not about to buy the "conservatives aren't really racist" bullshit.  Oh hell yes a whole freakin' lot of 'em are.   Not all, no, but most, yeah.   And Trump appealed to that.   And most of the Republicans that racism doesn't appeal to are not supporting this fuck.  He embarrasses 'em.


And for good reason.  He's done a lot of racist stuff, all his life.

http://fortune.com/2016/06/07/donald-trump-racism-quotes/


And a hell of a lot of his followers are racist as hell.  Such as these guys who he called "very fine people."



If Trump isn't sparking racism, how do you explain racists flocking to him so hard?  Something is definitely appealing to 'em.

These are astonishing numbers considering the slow turnaround time for publication of journal articles, the lag time before an article appears on Google Scholar, the restrictiveness of the search criteria, etc. While there’s certainly some overlap, it is clear that a massive body of literature has rapidly developed around Trump, his supporters, and their alleged racism (one can also find a parallel corpus about Trump and sexism, misogyny, and toxic masculinity).

And the reason you can find that parallel corpus is because his sexism and misogyny are also pretty much unavoidable conclusions, based on all data.

Survey the titles and abstracts of these works, page after page, and you’ll be hard-pressed to find a single article that challenges the prevailing narrative that Trump voters were driven largely, or even primarily, by anti-minority or white-supremacist sentiments.

Oh, horseshit.  There have been people desperately trying to claim Trump isn't racist all the way back to the "economic anxiety" argument.   Which is silly on its face, considering the economy wasn't a lot different then than it is now.  A lot of trends have, in fact, slowed down.  Republicans are just willing to acknowledge the strength of the economy now because they feel like they can give Trump credit for it.  When Obama was getting the credit, they plugged their ears and shut their eyes every time a jobs report came in.

Given all the ink spilled on this topic by highly educated scholars across a range of disciplines using diverse methodologies and theoretical frameworks, it seems reasonable to assume that the case is airtight: Donald Trump is a racist and so are those who voted for him.  

And the article would have been a lot more truthful if it just ended there.

There’s just one problem: the actual voting data.

The most decisive votes for Trump in 2016 came from districts that went for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. It is unclear why these voters, if horrified at the prospect of a black president, would have voted Obama into office to begin with—let alone given him another four years to advance his agenda when he stood for reelection should they have developed buyers’ remorse.

This pretends it's the same people voting, though.   Did Obama voters vote for Trump?  Really not fucking likely.   What's more likely is, due to all the reports that Hillary already had the thing won, Obama voters didn't bother to show up at the polls, or wrote in Jill Stein because, yeah, Hillary was not as popular with them.   Republican voters, who'd been unhinged by eight years of a highly-successful black president and terrified at the humiliating idea of a woman and a Clinton were driven to get out and vote against her.

The election did not constitute a rejection of Barack Obama: Obama’s popularity remained high throughout the 2016 cycle. In fact, his popularity rose over the course of the campaign, even as the ratings for Trump and Clinton plummeted. More than a year into Trump’s presidency, Obama remains highly popular.

Trump did not spearhead a white uprising: participation rates among whites were roughly equivalent to those in 2012 and lower than those in 2008. In fact, whites made up a smaller share of the electorate than they had in previous cycles, while Hispanics and Asians were better represented.

Of those who did turn out, Trump actually won a lower share of the white vote than Mitt Romney. He was able to win because he won a larger share of Hispanics and Asians than his predecessor, along with the largest share of the black vote of any Republican since 2004.

And yet Trump won with the lowest minority vote in decades:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-polarization-analysis/trump-won-with-lowest-minority-vote-in-decades-fueling-divisions-idUSKBN13I10B

You're dickin' around with data there, trying to create a false narrative.  Truth is, there was a lower minority vote turnout overall... not Trump getting more of them.  Trump performed badly with people of color.  It's just that they didn't show up to vote for Hillary, either.  

When confronted with these inconvenient facts, the most common retort is something along the lines of “Trump shouldn’t have been a viable candidate to begin with. The fact that he was elected despite his racist, sexist (fill in the blanks) language—that this rhetoric was not disqualifying—suggests that his xenophobia, misogyny, etc. resonate strongly among his supporters.”

But does it really suggest this?

Yeah, it actually does.

A “turnabout test” can be illuminating on this point. Here’s how it works.

Take your interpretation of a given social phenomenon and change the agent or subject, ideally switching actors you are negatively predisposed towards for ones you are positively inclined towards, or vice-versa. If your judgments about the appropriateness of the analysis shift in a substantial way depending on its referent, chances are you are biased and need to rethink things a bit.

For instance:

Hillary Clinton has a long record of hawkishness, surpassing even most of the Republican candidates in the 2016 cycle. The only other candidate in either party with such an extensive and unqualified record of support for war—any and all—might have been “issue” candidate Lindsay Graham (his issue? Be hawkish!).

Indeed, during the primaries, Clinton actually relied on the same foreign policy consulting firm that advised hawks Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. Her general election national security advisor team was populated with many of the same people who oversaw the worst excesses of the Bush II administration.

Clinton was prominently endorsed or praised (and Trump denounced) by almost every major neoconservative “thought leader” on the block. Some endorsed her early on as the best candidate in either party to realize their agenda. Clinton bragged repeatedly on the campaign trail about her close relationship with Henry Kissinger, whom many on the left view as a war criminal.

Given this clear and unwavering record of hawkishness, from her days as first lady supporting the bombing of Yugoslavia, to her senatorial support for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, to her incessant Obama-era drives for regime change in Libya and Syria, to her campaign trail calls for increased U.S. involvement in Ukraine and doubling down on unqualified support for Israel—should we assert that because her supporters did not find this disqualifying, they must themselves be hawks?

Or to be less charitable: did people vote for Hillary primarily because they support the killing, traumatization and immiseration of others abroad—typically people of color, often of relatively low socio-economic status, often Muslims, etc., in the name of ill-defined “U.S. values and interests”?

No. Many who voted for Clinton condemned her foreign policy at length (or otherwise distanced themselves from it), just as many Republicans denounced Trump’s often irresponsible and racial rhetoric. For most Clinton voters, her hawkishness was an aspect of her record and platform that they found troubling, even abhorrent, but not disqualifying. Maybe there were other issues they cared about more than who would suffer and die in Clinton’s inevitable wars. Maybe they just thought the alternative would be the same, or even worse, in these respects. In any case, it is inappropriate to conflate (often begrudging) tolerance for a key component of a candidate’s record or campaign rhetoric with an endorsement thereof.

This guy's assuming that one is of equal importance to drive voters as the other.  I know of a lot of people who didn't vote for Hillary because of her hawkishness (and that Kissinger thing was a definite buzzkill).  These people either sat it out and didn't vote at all, or they wrote in Bernie or voted Jill Stein, because they felt safe that she was going to win, anyway, and prized their "purity" more than keeping Trump out.  If they had it to do over again, they'd likely do differently.

It's easier to assume that racism did account for a lot of Trump's vote, though, because, as I said before, what main feature did Trump have that others in the Republican primary did not?   Racism.   Think about who was in that primary.   Jeb, while not exciting, was infiinitely more qualified.  Rubio's a peezle but his resume for the job dwarfed Trump's.  I despise Cruz because he's a booger-eatin' theocrat, but c'mon, now, he was a more reasonable choice than Trump.  And Kascich (who most of the decent Republicans I know voted for in the primary) was sane.  Romney was back in the race for about five minutes before your folks let him know they prefered Trump.  Even Fiorina was less repugnant than Trump.

Fact is, Republican voters wanted  repugnant.  They didn't understand policy, anyway, they just wanted somebody who'd "piss off the loonie libtards" so they picked the biggest tormenting object.  And the one who hated blacks 'n' Mexicans 'n' Muslims 'n' furriners-in-general the most.  Build a wall and keep all the dusky-hued folks out, and shut those BLM people up and give cops a hunting license to shoot 'em, and soon ya'll get the "white ethnostate" David Duke and Richard Spencer have been longing for.

But while social researchers appear to take into account these mitigating factors when analyzing Clinton votes, they hardly afford the same to Trump’s. Rather, within many academic and otherwise progressive circles, Trump’s election is held up as an indictment of America’s fundamental racism.

But is it really?

Yeah, it really is.

Looking at the lackluster white turnout in 2016 relative to previous cycles, and Trump’s lower vote share among whites as compared to his predecessor, it could be (it is consistent with the data to argue) that Trump’s rhetoric was a drag on his candidacy among white voters rather than being the key to his electoral success. Indeed, one could plausibly argue that the overwhelming majority of whites did seem to find his rhetoric disqualifying.

Congratulations, you've figured out that most white people don't like racism.  And nobody's claimed otherwise.  A lot of Republicans can't stand Trump, and didn't vote for him.   But that doesn't mean that the people who did aren't often racist as fuck, and were motivated by that.  It's not the only reason people voted for Trump -- some just really hated Hillary -- but it is one of the driving forces behind his campaign, and it's still overwhelmingly the driving force behind his continued support.

Trump only won 37 percent of eligible non-Hispanic whites—meaning the overwhelming majority, 63 percent, did not vote for him. Nearly as many whites, 36 percent, abstained from voting as those who voted for Trump, and an additional 27 percent outright supported other candidates (Clinton, Johnson, Stein, McMullin).



Therefore, even if we assume that 100 percent of those who voted for Trump were motivated primarily by anti-minority or white supremacist sentiments (an assertion that has no empirical basis, to be clear, and that would include millions of minorities as well), we still would not be able to make sweeping claims about whites overall on the basis of such a dubious representative sample. Another turnabout test can help drive this point home.

According to Bureau of Justice statistics, about a third of African-American men can expect to be incarcerated at some point in their lives. On a pie chart, the wedge for “black men expected to do time in the penal system” would look roughly equivalent to the red wedge above.

Would it therefore be appropriate for someone who came across a black guy (like me) to assume criminality on the basis of skin color? Of course not.

And yet we see plenty of people who do exactly that, which is why black people can't even have a barbeque without somebody calling the cops on 'em.  What's "appropriate" doesn't always come into play.

Yet researchers feel disturbingly confident declaring an epidemic of racism among whites because 37 percent of eligible non-Hispanic white voters cast their ballots for the Republican candidate.

These are just a couple quick examples. I did a deeper dive into how negative priors about Trump and his supporters systematically distort research in the forthcoming volume of The American Sociologist.

Was race a factor in the 2016 election? Of course it was. Race has been a factor in virtually every electoral cycle in U.S. history, including the 2008 and 2012 races that led to the election and reelection of Barack Obama. The specific ways that race influences electoral politics are complex, often subtle and unpredictable. Social researchers generally do understand this—yet they pretty consistently fail to apply that knowledge to the case of Donald Trump and his supporters.

Musa al-Gharbi is a Paul F. Lazarsfeld Fellow in Sociology at Columbia University and a research associate with Heterodox Academy.

This guy's screwing around with data, parsing it so he can try to cram it into his chosen narrative, but, objectively, he's full of daisyfuel.   It'll satisfy those who want to believe his chosen outcome, but anybody looking at his real parameters are going to see some flawed logic there.  But, when you're dealing with a conservative audience, you feel safe using flawed logic, because they don't understand anything, anyway.   Why make the effort, when they'll believe Bible quotes?

Seaoat's right about the guy's credentials, too - they're laughable -  but you wanna throw a tizzy about that.   Go ahead.  We all know you're going to think what you want to think, rather than what makes sense.  You made up your mind for your desired outcome long before you started looking at any actual data.  Which is why the South continues to elect people who do 'em no good.

Now, I gave your little article far more attention than it was ever worth, just because you whined and I had a few minutes to spare doing something silly.

Have a nice day, chew-toy.  

see my signature line .....

There is objective truth and there are lies. President Trump cannot handle the truth, so in his cowardly way, he tries to bully the lie into truth.....the problem is America still has a press, and some pretty smart folks.

2seaoat wrote:There is objective truth and there are lies.  ...

A subjective statement of opinion if I ever heard one

look at the sign in the story about Till, and I can tell you racism is alive and well predominately in the south where there is a lock step rejection of all things federal, not because of states rights, but because the vast majority of citizens in the old south feel we have gone to far with civil rights......oh in proper company they say the right thing, but the votes from these states, and this sign tell another story. Huckabee was right guns, grits, get back in your place boy......as Sarah the evil spawn of a huckster now lies regularly that Donald Trump is not a racist.....he is. Heck, maybe junior was in MS shooting signs.....I would rather see that than shooting big game in Africa.....

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/the-spot-where-emmett-till%e2%80%99s-body-was-found-is-marked-by-this-sign-people-keep-shooting-it-up/ar-BBLxhma?li=BBnb7Kz

Speaking of white power, now the truth is coming out about the Trump -- or should I say Miller? -- immigration policy. Ain't pretty none.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/now-trump-administration-wants-limit-citizenship-legal-immigrants-n897931

I'm always getting in arguments with right-wingers who swear that they aren't bigots, and they welcome legal immigrants, it's just the illegal ones they want to shoot on sight/separate from their children/put in camps, etc. If you go through proper channels, they say, they're glad to have 'em.

I've never believed them, because I've been raised around conservatives, and my dad was an immigrant. He was a legal immigrant, and I still saw the kind of treatment a lot of conservatives gave him, and me for being his son and having a "foreign" name. Even if you weren't having to get in fights with some flat-out bigot, you had to put up with a lot of "good-natured" bullshit about "Lemme see your green card, just kidding, haw haw!" constant-reminder crap. And we're white... it's even worse if you don't look like them -- I saw a lot of that going on. It's not just illegal immigrants they hate, it's anybody. They don't want to be made uncomfortable at having to deal with any other cultures, they don't want to hear languages they don't want to understand, they don't want to see anything but white Christians, and, deep down at the core of it, they don't want anyone else to be happy.

Now I'm waiting to see if they defend this, and what their excuse will be, now that it's not just illegal immigration that's got a target on it. I can't wait to see how they're going to try to make "I'm not a bigot, I just don't want anyone from other countries coming here" work. Because I know none of 'em will have the guts to buck Trump on anything. They're too deep in now. If Trump starts rounding up people and putting them in camps, conservatives will go right along with it. They might feel a little sheepish, but they're cowards -- they'll good-German their asses off to support Trump, just to "piss off the libs" if nothing else.

Every day the Trump administration gives America a new atrocity to accept or reject, and every day a big chunk of our population fails the test. They've gone this far, might as well not stop now. There's no last straw with these fucks.

zsomething wrote:

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/now-trump-administration-wants-limit-citizenship-legal-immigrants-n897931

.

From the linked article: "The Trump administration is expected to issue a proposal in coming weeks that would make it harder for legal immigrants to become citizens or get green cards if they have ever used a range of popular public welfare programs, in"

I don't have much of a problem with that.

EmeraldGhost wrote:

zsomething wrote:

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/now-trump-administration-wants-limit-citizenship-legal-immigrants-n897931

.

I don't have much of a problem with that.  

Then fuck ya.

zsomething wrote:

Then fuck ya.

Ah, gee .. thanks for the offer 'Z' ... but I'm a happily & faithfully married heterosexual man. You'll just have to look elsewhere. Try 'Deucie' maybe? 

2seaoat wrote:If there is any doubt that this is a fascist backed agenda, you are a Trump cultist, you probably are not even aligning with the Koch brothers libertarian views.   It is all about race, religion, and ethnicity........and that hate is now hurting our economy.   The globalist is dixiecrat dog whistle for Jew.  He must have chit with his daughter's choice.

OPINION

The End of Identity Liberalism

By Mark Lilla
Nov. 18, 2016

It is a truism that America has become a more diverse country. It is also a beautiful thing to watch. Visitors from other countries, particularly those having trouble incorporating different ethnic groups and faiths, are amazed that we manage to pull it off. Not perfectly, of course, but certainly better than any European or Asian nation today. It’s an extraordinary success story.

But how should this diversity shape our politics? The standard liberal answer for nearly a generation now has been that we should become aware of and “celebrate” our differences. Which is a splendid principle of moral pedagogy — but disastrous as a foundation for democratic politics in our ideological age. In recent years American liberalism has slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing.

One of the many lessons of the recent presidential election campaign and its repugnant outcome is that the age of identity liberalism must be brought to an end. Hillary Clinton was at her best and most uplifting when she spoke about American interests in world affairs and how they relate to our understanding of democracy. But when it came to life at home, she tended on the campaign trail to lose that large vision and slip into the rhetoric of diversity, calling out explicitly to African-American, Latino, L.G.B.T. and women voters at every stop. This was a strategic mistake. If you are going to mention groups in America, you had better mention all of them. If you don’t, those left out will notice and feel excluded. Which, as the data show, was exactly what happened with the white working class and those with strong religious convictions. Fully two-thirds of white voters without college degrees voted for Donald Trump, as did over 80 percent of white evangelicals.

The moral energy surrounding identity has, of course, had many good effects. Affirmative action has reshaped and improved corporate life. Black Lives Matter has delivered a wake-up call to every American with a conscience. Hollywood’s efforts to normalize homosexuality in our popular culture helped to normalize it in American families and public life.

But the fixation on diversity in our schools and in the press has produced a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups, and indifferent to the task of reaching out to Americans in every walk of life. At a very young age our children are being encouraged to talk about their individual identities, even before they have them. By the time they reach college many assume that diversity discourse exhausts political discourse, and have shockingly little to say about such perennial questions as class, war, the economy and the common good. In large part this is because of high school history curriculums, which anachronistically project the identity politics of today back onto the past, creating a distorted picture of the major forces and individuals that shaped our country. (The achievements of women’s rights movements, for instance, were real and important, but you cannot understand them if you do not first understand the founding fathers’ achievement in establishing a system of government based on the guarantee of rights.)

When young people arrive at college they are encouraged to keep this focus on themselves by student groups, faculty members and also administrators whose full-time job is to deal with — and heighten the significance of — “diversity issues.” Fox News and other conservative media outlets make great sport of mocking the “campus craziness” that surrounds such issues, and more often than not they are right to. Which only plays into the hands of populist demagogues who want to delegitimize learning in the eyes of those who have never set foot on a campus. How to explain to the average voter the supposed moral urgency of giving college students the right to choose the designated gender pronouns to be used when addressing them? How not to laugh along with those voters at the story of a University of Michigan prankster who wrote in “His Majesty”?

This campus-diversity consciousness has over the years filtered into the liberal media, and not subtly. Affirmative action for women and minorities at America’s newspapers and broadcasters has been an extraordinary social achievement — and has even changed, quite literally, the face of right-wing media, as journalists like Megyn Kelly and Laura Ingraham have gained prominence. But it also appears to have encouraged the assumption, especially among younger journalists and editors, that simply by focusing on identity they have done their jobs.

Recently I performed a little experiment during a sabbatical in France: For a full year I read only European publications, not American ones. My thought was to try seeing the world as European readers did. But it was far more instructive to return home and realize how the lens of identity has transformed American reporting in recent years. How often, for example, the laziest story in American journalism — about the “first X to do Y” — is told and retold. Fascination with the identity drama has even affected foreign reporting, which is in distressingly short supply. However interesting it may be to read, say, about the fate of transgender people in Egypt, it contributes nothing to educating Americans about the powerful political and religious currents that will determine Egypt’s future, and indirectly, our own. No major news outlet in Europe would think of adopting such a focus.

But it is at the level of electoral politics that identity liberalism has failed most spectacularly, as we have just seen. National politics in healthy periods is not about “difference,” it is about commonality. And it will be dominated by whoever best captures Americans’ imaginations about our shared destiny. Ronald Reagan did that very skillfully, whatever one may think of his vision. So did Bill Clinton, who took a page from Reagan’s playbook. He seized the Democratic Party away from its identity-conscious wing, concentrated his energies on domestic programs that would benefit everyone (like national health insurance) and defined America’s role in the post-1989 world. By remaining in office for two terms, he was then able to accomplish much for different groups in the Democratic coalition. Identity politics, by contrast, is largely expressive, not persuasive. Which is why it never wins elections — but can lose them.

The media’s newfound, almost anthropological, interest in the angry white male reveals as much about the state of our liberalism as it does about this much maligned, and previously ignored, figure. A convenient liberal interpretation of the recent presidential election would have it that Mr. Trump won in large part because he managed to transform economic disadvantage into racial rage — the “whitelash” thesis. This is convenient because it sanctions a conviction of moral superiority and allows liberals to ignore what those voters said were their overriding concerns. It also encourages the fantasy that the Republican right is doomed to demographic extinction in the long run — which means liberals have only to wait for the country to fall into their laps. The surprisingly high percentage of the Latino vote that went to Mr. Trump should remind us that the longer ethnic groups are here in this country, the more politically diverse they become.

Finally, the whitelash thesis is convenient because it absolves liberals of not recognizing how their own obsession with diversity has encouraged white, rural, religious Americans to think of themselves as a disadvantaged group whose identity is being threatened or ignored. Such people are not actually reacting against the reality of our diverse America (they tend, after all, to live in homogeneous areas of the country). But they are reacting against the omnipresent rhetoric of identity, which is what they mean by “political correctness.” Liberals should bear in mind that the first identity movement in American politics was the Ku Klux Klan, which still exists. Those who play the identity game should be prepared to lose it.

We need a post-identity liberalism, and it should draw from the past successes of pre-identity liberalism. Such a liberalism would concentrate on widening its base by appealing to Americans as Americans and emphasizing the issues that affect a vast majority of them. It would speak to the nation as a nation of citizens who are in this together and must help one another. As for narrower issues that are highly charged symbolically and can drive potential allies away, especially those touching on sexuality and religion, such a liberalism would work quietly, sensitively and with a proper sense of scale. (To paraphrase Bernie Sanders, America is sick and tired of hearing about liberals’ damn bathrooms.)

Teachers committed to such a liberalism would refocus attention on their main political responsibility in a democracy: to form committed citizens aware of their system of government and the major forces and events in our history. A post-identity liberalism would also emphasize that democracy is not only about rights; it also confers duties on its citizens, such as the duties to keep informed and vote. A post-identity liberal press would begin educating itself about parts of the country that have been ignored, and about what matters there, especially religion. And it would take seriously its responsibility to educate Americans about the major forces shaping world politics, especially their historical dimension.

Some years ago I was invited to a union convention in Florida to speak on a panel about Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous Four Freedoms speech of 1941. The hall was full of representatives from local chapters — men, women, blacks, whites, Latinos. We began by singing the national anthem, and then sat down to listen to a recording of Roosevelt’s speech. As I looked out into the crowd, and saw the array of different faces, I was struck by how focused they were on what they shared. And listening to Roosevelt’s stirring voice as he invoked the freedom of speech, the freedom of worship, the freedom from want and the freedom from fear — freedoms that Roosevelt demanded for “everyone in the world” — I was reminded of what the real foundations of modern American liberalism are.

Mark Lilla, a professor of the humanities at Columbia and a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation, is the author, most recently, of “The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/sunday/the-end-of-identity-liberalism.html

That's very good. Thank you. Hillary's "deplorables" label certainly hurt her campaign.

Whenever a politician tries to make efforts on the behalf of any minority, the right-wing likes to claim they're trying to play "identity politics," and thus try to paint it as a bad thing.

This leaves their opponent either to (A) just stop trying to look out for the rights or advancement of minorities, to avoid that label, or (B) to get accused of trying to "manipulate" people by using race, gender, sexual orientation, whatever.

It's part of an old right-winger trick to turn anything good into something bad, which they think excuses them from ever having to do anything for minorities, and paints anyone who does as "divisive" or whatever. They bring out the ol' "you're the REAL racists by pandering to races" or whatever. It's all bullshit. If you really want to see which party does more for minorities, check into which party elects the most minorities to positions of power. Spoiler alert: it ain't even close, and it ain't the Republicans.

Truth is, Republicans are some of the biggest players of "identity politics" you're gonna find anywhere. It's just the only "identity" group they bother playing to are right-wing Christians. And they play to them so much that they're really the life-support system of their party. And they play them HARD. You can hardly run for office anymore without sounding like a televangelist. They'll fault you for "pandering" to LGBT, people of color, women, etc., and they'll fault you twice as hard if you point out that they're doing even more of that to evangelicals.

Right-wingers, by and large, are selfish fucks who don't give a good goddamn about anybody but themselves and their own group, and they're so hard-wired into that that they figure anybody who does care about the rights of other groups is just running a scam. If you stand up for somebody else, they'll accuse you of "virtue signalling," because there's no way you could be sincere about it, right? They don't give a shit, so you couldn't either, it's all just "manipulation," or "white guilt," or whatever other sinister motives they try to attribute to ya to turn your virtues into vices, and to excuse their lack of 'em.

Pretty easy to see through it, but a lot of people get so defensive at being accused that they don't take the time.

Good... keep going left. Bill Clinton couldn't get elected by dems anymore... much less JFK.

Eventually the leftists will take over as they condition through education... but that isn't today.

Comment seen on the net:

Leftists like Elizabeth Warren must wonder if anyone will notice that while tarring the our local police as racists ala Bull Connor, they are simultaneously demanding that Trump supporters show more respect for the FBI, the DOJ and the heroes of our honorable law enforcement institutions in Washington.

Why the difference? Maybe lowly street cops don't send their kids to the same private Washington DC schools as FBI directors and DOJ attorneys - where their kids mix with the children and grandchildren of our government and media elites.

Robert Mueller has a pricey DC golf club membership. You local county sheriff owns a fishing boat. Guess which one our "lady of the working people," Elizabeth Warren, calls racist?

Show respect for Mueller and Comey, they demand. But the cop who's married to the teacher who lives down the street? Well, he's practically KKK.

And the democrats can't figure out why or how they've lost touch with middle America? They can't understand why Clinton was rejected

EmeraldGhost wrote:From the linked article:  "The Trump administration is expected to issue a proposal in coming weeks that would make it harder for legal immigrants to become citizens or get green cards if they have ever used a range of popular public welfare programs, in"

I don't have much of a problem with that.

You would deny a Green Card holder citizenship for taking advantage of the Earned Income Tax Credit or Medicare?

What a hateful position. Why?