One of the commenters on this blog, Liz, posted a link (here) to this post, GEORGIA H WALKS AWAY (powerlineblog.com). That post is about this video.
Too long? Nope. The content makes it worth your time.
Do I know anything about that young woman? No. Conceivably the video was suppose to be a ruse. However, if that is so it backfired because it exposes the truth. Why is that a problem for Liberal Democrats? We are suppose to judge the ideas a person presents, what they show us about the content of their character. We don’t judge persons for we are all sinners. If not for God’s mercy and grace we would all be damned.
Citizen Tom 
Tom this is a great video as to gets to the heart of how much Leftism has taken over the Democratic Party. I know a lot of who I would call sane Democrats who have no idea how far left their party has veered.
I read some comments from her responding to all the attention the video has gotten and just loved this particular remark:
“i am very certain that nowhere in the video did i say “racism doesnt exist,” but if that was your impression i will clarify. racism exists, it’s an endemic human evil, and we ought to do our best to fight it any place we see it. my intention in this video was to shine light on an overlooked element of racism that is running rampant under the guise of “morality”. i think the stealthy way this type of racism works is particularly dangerous and insidious. I believe telling a child they are hated by their society and doomed to fail is the most oppressive form of all. anyone who hates racism should be up in arms about this with me. we ought to fight it as ferociously as we fight other forms of racism.”
@Tricia
Excellent!
Reblogged this on Boudica BPI Weblog and commented:
Video
Thanks again!
Here’s an anecdote since such emotivism, rather than data or science, is all that seems to count here:
Right now on the Mississippi Gulf Coast we are having our annual weeklong Cruising the Coast event. This event essentially involves mostly vintage cars that have either been beautifully renovated to the original standards or fixed up as classic hot rods. Along with several coordinated events up and down the coast, people set up viewing areas in rented vacant lots along the beach to watch the cars drive up and down Beach Blvd and to show off their own lovingly are created jalopies.
The other day my wife and I were walking our puppy along the beach as we do most days and we walked past a private event tent of such Cruisers that had numerous Trump signs purporting to make America great. My wife, an intelligent and formidable woman who never had many filters to begin with and has even less these days, quietly remarked to the man standing there that America has always been great. At first the guy just started stammering something about Democrats, but we just kept walking. By the time we turned the corner at the other end of the block, the poor Trumper was literally continuously howling unintelligible expletives punctuated by actual hoots and jeers. I didn’t know whether to feel sorry for the fool or just laugh at him (my wife just laughed).
The next day on my morning run down the beach, I noticed that my wife must have lit a fire under the guy because now Trump paraphernalia was plastered everywhere on his little rented vacant lot, complete with American flags desecrated with Trump’s orange face sewn to them and a life size Trump cutout.
As I ran along I noticed more and more Trump campaign flags and posters on cars and next to the other visitors attending the Cruising festival here, often interspersed with American flags, Confederate flags and the now repealed Mississippi flags with the Confederate emblem.
Let me tell you that this does not reflect the politics of the Mississippi Gulf Coast where you are slightly more likely these days to see Biden/Harris as Trump/Pence signs in people’s yards (except that with the Trump/Pence fans one sign never seems to be enough to reflect their worship of their heroic leader – often there must be dozens in the yard and even more bigger ones taped to the house).
As I ran along I began to wonder why the vintage car and hot rod demographic were such adamant Trump fans? And then it hit me. Our Cruising the Coast cars enthusiasts are almost exclusively white, mostly older and predominantly male. But I realized that wasn’t the most important characteristic of these good folks that made them particularly susceptible to Trump’s brand of Nationalist Populism.
These cars are absolutely beautiful and lovingly preserved and renovated by guys who grew up learning how to work on cars, fix their own plumbing and build their own houses, fences and sheds. I know because I’m one of them. The first cars that I owned were two 1956 Chevys that I bought for 50 dollars and 75 dollars. With the help of my friends who I worked with at the lumberyard, I took the engine out of one car, rebuilt it and put it in the other. It drove like a tank and needed continuous repair, but I loved that old car until I sold it a year later for ten times more than I paid for it. Every time I have seen a 55 or 56 Chevy roar by at the Cruising (and there are lots of them) it fills me with a strong and wonderful sense of being 16 years old, of Friday nights, of having a weeks pay in my pocket and going to pick up a date to go to a drive-in movie with and hopefully make out with on the back seat.
That’s the key I think for this crowd. It’s not Trump’s policies – these are wonderful, salt of the Earth folks, but they know way more about the starting line up at Auburn, LSU or Alabama this Fall than they know about macro or micro economics, or about the intricacies of the healthcare debate. The appeal to Trump is pure emotion and that emotion is pure nostalgia.
It’s nostalgia for a time when working with your hands meant lifetime employment at the paternal manufacturing company with good pay and benefits for skilled and even low skill production line workers. It was a time when being male automatically meant being the bread winner and making way more than a female even though the man had a lower skilled job requiring less education and training. And yes, in the South, whether one considered himself a racist or not, in those days it meant that the lion’s share of the best paying jobs went to whites, and blacks were mostly relegated to menial labor.
I can very well understand that kind of nostalgia, if for no other reason than the flood of memories that come from the nostalgia of being young with every dream in front of me and no disadvantage like being black or gay or female limiting my possibilities. I get the emotion that brings on that kind of nostalgia for an era before all our unskilled and much of our skilled jobs were outsourced or turned over to robotics, a time before when it took either a college degree or advanced technical training to even have a chance at making a decent living, and even then only if one is willing to leave home and family to move to the other side of the country pursuing the ever changing job market at companies that no longer offer any of the security of lifetime employment.
That’s Trumps big con to so many of his most adamant followers: nostalgia for a time that never really was for so many Americans, that has been lost because of the inexorable march of progress that is Globalization, that we can’t really go back to even if we tried and that so many of us would not actually like if we did, but especially conservatives, because it would require a return to strong unionization with much fairer reformed collective bargaining laws, legislation of more workers rights protections, less free trade and a return to corporate governance laws that criminalized the fraud, waste and abuse that is the rape of companies through exorbitant executive compensation packages. It would require increases in the minimum wage and greater social safety nets for healthcare, retirement, training and unemployment. In short, it would require tons more government in the form of the kind of partnerships between labor, industry and government that is already successfully taking place in devolved countries around the world.
But Trump is not really selling any plans for that. Trump is selling the typical Nationalist snake oil that is just a dream. He is selling nostalgia.
@tsalmon
It is all you can do. You cannot defend — you can’t even explain — what YOU BELIEVE. All you can do is attack what others believe.
Look at the theme of the post. You are just proving its truth.
When you are in a hole, stop digging.
I just presented a true personal anecdote, Tom. You may want to ask yourself why you feel so threatened by it.
Who says it’s my job to “defend” anything? I don’t to work for anyone but God these days, and God doesn’t need me to defend Him.
My comment is quite obviously what I “believe”. I believe that the strongest core of Trump’s average supporters are not any more deplorable than I or you are, but they are also quite obviously driven by passionate emotions around grievance and loss, and in particular, the emotion of nostalgia. Do you think these folks honestly are experts with strong opinions on economic policy or geopolitics? Why should you care what some obscure young woman thinks about the Democratic Party unless it’s to prop up your emotional need for tribal affirmation and support? Because she’s a world renowned expert on politics or policy? That’s kind of of laughable isn’t it?
Perhaps this is why you see what I wrote as an “attack” rather than just my observation of what is actually happening in my life and in my neighborhood as it relates to the country right now. Isn’t that what your young lady in this video from the AstroTurf #walkaway meme purports to be doing? Isn’t my emoting on this just as valid as hers, and just as worthless as hers, and just as worthless as yours? 😜
Your “hole digging” metaphor is just your usual way of deflecting what you either don’t understand or don’t want to. Otherwise you’d have an actual counter argument now wouldn’t you? 😌
@tsalmon
It is not about who. It is about logic. The young lady provided rational reasons for switching parties, not a psychological analysis. Her point, to the extent she mentioned “brainwashing”, is that it is difficult to change the beliefs that were instilled in us when we grew up.
Interesting anecdote (kind of funny about the doubling-down on Trump products).
I agree about the appeal to nostalgia. I do not agree that “Trump’s policies” are not what interest his voting base. I do not agree that “salt of the earth folks” wouldn’t support his policies, as you seem to suggest. But then I guess I must not be not a salt of the earth type person.
In the appeal to nostalgia, I can think of about a hundred things off the top of my mind that have nothing to do with white supremacy or sexism. That suggestion alone makes the point. I yearn for a time when people weren’t using sexism or racism as a way to silence people, label them, take away their livelihoods (examples available upon request) without due process. I have nostalgia for a time when masses of rioters weren’t bludgeoning our cities demanding loyalty oaths with the raised fists (that used to be a tell). I yearn for when the US was making its own products and not reliant on enemy countries for essential items that can just be shut off.
I yearn for a lot of things and none of them are racist (except to race baiting dog whistle obsessive compulsives).
“I yearn for a time when people weren’t using sexism or racism as a way to silence people, label them, take away their livelihoods (examples available upon request) without due process.”
Liz,
MLK yearned for a day when folks would be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. It’s funny how we, mostly privileged white folks, have twisted that dream. Remember that, especially toward the end of his life, MLK had determined that he was not just fighting racial prejudice, but that instead the a stratified caste system that underpinned racism in America and that was being used to keep all poor people, of all races and sexes, in their place.
Here is an excerpt from an article in The Guardian by Isabel Wilkerson:
“In the winter of 1959, after leading the Montgomery bus boycott that arose from the arrest of Rosa Parks and before the trials and triumphs to come, Martin Luther King Jr and his wife, Coretta, landed in India, at Palam Airport in New Delhi, to visit the land of Mohandas K Gandhi, the father of nonviolent protest. They were covered in garlands upon arrival, and King told reporters: ‘To other countries, I may go as a tourist, but to India I come as a pilgrim.’
“He had long dreamed of going to India, and they stayed an entire month. King wanted to see for himself the place whose fight for freedom from British rule had inspired his fight for justice in America. He wanted to see the so-called “untouchables”, the lowest caste in the ancient Indian caste system, whom he had read about and had sympathy for, but who had still been left behind after Indiagained its independence the decade before.
“He discovered that people in India had been following the trials of his own oppressed people in the US, and knew of the bus boycott he had led. Wherever he went, the people on the streets of Bombay and Delhi crowded around him for an autograph. At one point in their trip, King and his wife journeyed to the southern tip of the country, to the city of Trivandrum in the state of Kerala, and visited with high-school students whose families had been untouchables. The principal made the introduction.
“‘Young people,’he said, ‘I would like to present to you a fellow untouchable from the United States of America.’ King was floored. He had not expected that term to be applied to him. He was, in fact, put off by it at first. He had flown in from another continent, and had dined with the prime minister. He did not see the connection, did not see what the Indian caste system had to do directly with him, did not immediately see why the lowest-caste people in India would view him, an American Negro and a distinguished visitor, as low-caste like themselves, see him as one of them. ‘For a moment,’ he later recalled, ‘Iwas a bit shocked and peeved that I would be referred to as an untouchable.’
“Then he began to think about the reality of the lives of the people he was fighting for – 20 million people, consigned to the lowest rank in the US for centuries, ‘still smothering in an airtight cage of poverty,’ quarantined in isolated ghettoes, exiled in their own country.
“And he said to himself: ‘Yes, I am an untouchable, and every negro in the United States of America is an untouchable’. In that moment, he realised that the land of the free had imposed a caste system not unlike the caste system of India, and that he had lived under that system all of his life. It was what lay beneath the forces he was fighting in the US.“
The full article is here:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/28/untouchables-caste-system-us-race-martin-luther-king-india
I also recommend Wilkerson’s book “Caste”.
Let me ask you a basic question Liz. What do you think “character” as MLK used it actually means, and how do we judge it’s content, and raise people up who tower over the rest of us in that content?
TSalmon, I do not know a lot about the 1619 project, but much of what she wrote sounds very 1619 projecty.
A NYT writer, Bret Stephens, wrote a column titled The 1619 Chronicles. It may be his last. Since I can only provide two links or my post will get knocked into a black hole, I will just quote portions.
The 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.
In a lengthier dissection, published in January in The Atlantic, the Princeton historian Sean Wilentz accused Hannah-Jones of making arguments “built on partial truths and misstatements of the facts.” The goal of educating Americans on slavery and its consequences, he added, was so important that it “cannot be forwarded through falsehoods, distortions and significant omissions.”
Wilentz’s catalog of the project’s mistakes is extensive. Hannah-Jones’s essay claimed that by 1776 Britain was “deeply conflicted” over its role in slavery. But despite the landmark Somerset v. Stewart court ruling in 1772, which held that slavery was not supported by English common law, it remained deeply embedded in the practices of the British Empire. The essay claimed that, among Londoners, “there were growing calls to abolish the slave trade” by 1776. But the movement to abolish the British slave trade only began about a decade later — inspired, in part, Wilentz notes, by American antislavery agitation that had started in the 1760s and 1770s. The list goes on.
The article is worth reading. But again, we’re living in times where simply speaking your mind can instigate a rampage to destroy your life. So I’m not sure how long the NYT will allow this dissension in its ranks. It is worth mentioning too that there are far more “caste-like” systems in the world than the three “standout” examples she mentioned. The first that comes to mind is the middle east. Also much of Africa. Also just about all of Asia. If we’re going to use our nation as a “stand out example” I think that’s extremely inaccurate as well as unfair.
As a side note: I’m having some health issues right now (not covid, I was tested twice!) and have been for a couple of weeks. I think this is a good time to mention it.
Not in much the mood to debate race. I think we both agree systemic poverty is a huge problem. FWIW, extreme poverty is on the rise (worldwide) for the first time since 1998.
I am in favor of effective measures to combat systemic poverty.
It should be results-based, and need based. Not race based.
And race cannot be a crutch for poor performance because that itself is racist…and worse (I am not of the opinion that racism is by default the worst affliction on the planet. There are other things, like actual crime. If one wants to see a lot of racism one must travel outside the US) the results are extremely poor.
We need more David Goggins (who will be the first to tell you racism exists) and less Maxine Waters.
More this guy:
The groups with the highest household incomes in the US are:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_United_States_by_household_income
(1) Indians (from India), (2) Taiwanese, (3) Australians, (4) South African (5) Filipinos
(6) Austrians (7) Chinese (8) Japanese (9) Singaporeans
Do we have systemic problems with Indian privilege, Taiwanese privilege or Pinoy privilege? The “people of (historic) white privilege” start out around number 10 (norwegians). I suppose we could blame the Aussies for all our problems but that doesn’t really support the 1619 project. Is the West evil? The West is flawed because it is composed of human beings. Some societies may be our equals, but none are or were superior; most are inferior in terms of the opportunities they offer their citizens. Which is why so many people from around the world have chosen to migrate to the West.
Just to add, I’ve heard of a psychological study done way back when.
Students were told they were gifted, and had scored extremely high in testing.
But they had just scored normally. When they were later tested again, they scored a lot higher. Once they were treated like gifted kids, and felt like gifted children, they started acting accordingly.
The opposite must also be true. I’d say any testing to prove it would be too harmful to administer as an experiment. Yet we’re doing this to kids en masse right now.
…and I don’t think labeling children as untouchable members of a “stand out caste system” is a terribly helpful way for them to view themselves.
I don’t doubt the intention (of the very lovely author, that’s what pushing sixty looks like? Daymn) is good.
Liz,
It may have gotten lost in the blitz but I can’t see where you answered my question about “character”.
I hope you feel better.
Heh, sorry…
I read the article last night but responded this morning so I forgot about the question.
What do you think “character” as MLK used it actually means, and how do we judge it’s content, and raise people up who tower over the rest of us in that content?
I think character as MLK used it means a person’s values, judgement, intentions.
There is only one way to measure (judge) that: By what people actually do.
I don’t understand the “raise people up who tower over the rest of us” bit.
Liz,
The last had to do with MLK’s use of the term “measure”. One assumes that if we are to measure people by the “content of their character”, then that would mean that we would raise those people up in some way, such as preferring them as our leaders or rewarding such character in terms of esteem, rank and/or in pecuniary earnings.
I basically agree with your definition, but I would take it a bit further and say that I think the content of a person’s character is the extent to which that person practices certain virtues especially in the unselfish service to others. An example might be a service member who shows courage In service of her unit and her country as a whole. Contrast that with a person who does very well for himself because he is smart, talented, attractive or lucky, either through fortunes of birth or personal fortune.
What would a society look like that valued content of character over these other measures of merit?
@tsalmon
You are voting for people who practice identity politics. You are voting for people who assume the police are guilty from the getgo. You are voting for people whose campaign strategy is to demonize their opponents. You are voting for people who lie continually. Yet you are trying to guilt us into not supporting Donald Trump? What is wrong with you?
“You are voting for people who practice identity politics.”
No, I’m not.
“You are voting for people who assume the police are guilty from the getgo.”
No, again.
“You are voting for people whose campaign strategy is to demonize their opponents.”
I don’t think so.
“You are voting for people who lie continually.”
That’s a laugh.
“ Yet you are trying to guilt us into not supporting Donald Trump?”
You’re responsible for your own guilt.
“What is wrong with you?“
Lots. But none of that has anything to do with my question.
@tsalmon
Great! So, you are not voting for Harris/Biden.
One other thing Liz,
“I do not agree that ‘salt of the earth folks’ wouldn’t support his policies, as you seem to suggest. But then I guess I must not be not a salt of the earth type person.“
You seem to have misread what I wrote. I said that these Trump fans ARE the salt of the Earth, I and I meant it. These are basically decent, hard working people, the kind of people that I grew up with and who are still my best friends.I think you easily fit that category too in my mind.
Being the “salt of the Earth” so to speak, does not make them less susceptible to Trump’s nostalgic con – I think it tends to make them more so. There is a reason why predators prey on the innocent. Other predators are much harder to fool.
Love that line she says, “always be a cheerleader, always be a cheerleader.” She mentioned her instinct, intuition, wanting to do what’s right for her students. That’s been my issue too when it comes to helping people, serving their needs. Lot’s of cheerleaders in the family, and when the team is down 70 points and hasn’t won a game all season, you cheer them on, you rally the crowd, and you keep going. The last thing you do is teach them the odds are against them, the deck is stacked, their efforts are futile, and they are powerless victims within a system that is out to get them. That is so unhealthy and disempowering and that is exactly what Dem policies and attitudes have delivered to the little people on the ground for decades now.