Reasons for optimism

Personally I am of the opinion the feature [thumb up or thumb down] should be taken out.

[M]embers of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. …

One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past 40 years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. … All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.

Eric Kaufmann, a professor of politics at Birkbeck University in London, has spent years studying the ways that ethnicity intersects with politics. While most researchers in that field focus on ethnic minorities, Professor Kaufmann does the opposite: He studies the behavior of ethnic majorities, particularly whites in the United States and Britain.

White nationalism, he said, is the belief that national identity should be built around white ethnicity, and that white people should therefore maintain both a demographic majority and dominance of the nation’s culture and public life.

So, like white supremacy, white nationalism places the interests of white people over those of other racial groups. White supremacists and white nationalists both believe that racial discrimination should be incorporated into law and policy.

Some will see the distinction between white nationalism and white supremacy as a semantic sleight of hand. But although many white supremacists are also white nationalists, and vice versa, Professor Kaufmann says the terms are not synonyms: White supremacy is based on a racist belief that white people are innately superior to people of other races; white nationalism is about maintaining political and economic dominance, not just a numerical majority or cultural hegemony.

For a long time, he said, white nationalism was less an ideology than the default presumption of American life. Until quite recently, white Americans could easily see the nation as essentially an extension of their own ethnic group.

But the country’s changing demographics, the civil rights movement and a push for multiculturalism in many quarters mean that white Americans are now confronting the prospect of a nation that is no longer built solely around their own identity.

For many white people, of course, the growing diversity is something to celebrate. But for others it is a source of stress. The white nationalist movement has drawn support from that latter group. Its supporters argue that the United States should protect its white majority by sharply limiting immigration, and perhaps even by compelling nonwhite citizens to leave.

It was exactly one year ago that Donald Trump said he would “absolutely” implement forced registration for all Muslims living in the United States. Sunday morning, his chief of staff confirmed that the President-elect still isn’t ruling it out.

On Meet The Press, host Chuck Todd asked Reince Priebus whether he could equivocally rule out a registry for Muslims. He responded, “Look, I’m not going to rule out anything.”

From there, the former RNC chairman made a series of conflicting statements, often times trying to correct himself mid-sentence. He said, “We’re not going to have a registry based on a religion,” but he also said that Trump supports banning entry of people from any country that “harbors or trains terrorists.”

Todd pressed Priebus on the issue, citing a tweet from Trump’s National Security Adviser Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn that said that “fear of Muslims is rational.” Priebus seemed to indicate that Trump disagrees, because “he believes that no faith in and of itself should be judged as a whole,” but he still believes certain countries should be banned from allowing people to enter the United States.

In a separate interview Sunday morning on ABC’s This Week, Priebus similarly said of Islam, “Clearly there are some aspects of that faith that are problematic. And we know them. We’ve seen it. But it certainly isn’t a blanket for all people of that faith.”

The Trump transition team has sent many mixed messages in the past week about the President-elect’s stance on Muslim registration and immigration. On Tuesday night, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who has advised Trump, again recommended a national database for Muslim immigrants. Trump surrogate Carl Higbie agreed Wednesday that it would be legal, citing Japanese internment camps set up during World War II.

Jason Miller, a spokesperson for the transition team, then claimed that Trump had “never advocated for any registry or system that tracks individuals based on their religion.” Miller’s statement is contradicted by a video of Trump blatantly endorsing such a registry.

The 2016 election spurred a record-high rate of hateful attacks on American Muslims. Those attacks spiked in the days following Trump’s election.

White Nationalism,’ Explained

Despite that, I found Blatham's & Revelette's complaints about the thumbing down 0f posts here quite touching. The poor dears deserve more consideration

The following was written 18 years ago.

Quote:

....... One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past 40 years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. … All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.

http://nyti.ms/2eY7c02

As he stands in his gold-plated apartment in Trump Tower gazing out over Manhattan, Donald Trump has no doubt marveled at how in becoming president he has finally achieved the power and influence he so richly deserves. He always knew he was smarter than everyone else and more of a winner than all those nobodies who would carp and criticize, when they don't even have their own planes or are so weak they're still married to their first wives. He showed them all.

And now, it's time to really cash in. He's got the greatest business opportunity he's ever had, and he's not going to let it pass him by.

Surely you weren't naïve enough to believe him when Trump said his network of businesses and partnerships didn't pose any conflict-of-interest problems, because his grown children will run the business while he's president and he'll be completely focused on making America great. That was just something to tell the rubes, no more true than the promises a Trump University instructor would make to a mark as he browbeat them into maxing out their credit cards to move up to the Gold Elite seminar where the real investment secrets would be revealed.

After explaining how he used "the same techniques" outlined in the Diabetes Solution Kit, Huckabee asks viewers to "sit tight, because in a moment a free presentation is coming up that’ll show you everything you need to know about the Diabetes Solution Kit so you can discover all the natural secrets that are backed by real science that really work."

That free presentation lasts more than 30 minutes, kicking off with a spokesman named Lon showing a picture of cinnamon rolls that "contain a real ingredient that reverses diabetes" and going on to berate insulin, diabetes pills and other injectables as treatments. (We sat through it so you don’t have to.)

The kit turns out to be booklets offering tips for eating, exercise, and yes, formulating dietary supplements — for the low, low price of $19.97.

The odd part is that any thinking person thought of it as informative or illuminating. That it wasn't instantly seen as a piece of self congratulating nonsense is a good deal more interesting than the specious content - typical stuff from the NYT.

That it wasn't instantly seen as a piece of self congratulating nonsense is a good deal more interesting than the specious content - typical stuff from the NYT.

Most politicians in democratic systems appeal to voters much the way marketers do, tailoring a consistent message in different ways to reach different groups of people who have different value systems. Democrats, for instance, don’t talk about the need to combat climate change the same way to college students as they do to factory workers. Authoritarians like Trump, Stanley explained, operate much differently. They uncork rhetorical fantasies—inner city war zones, rigged electoral systems, hordes of terrorists and job thieves streaming across the southern border—that entice people to justify an agenda many of them wouldn’t normally support. “Donald Trump is trying to define a simple reality as a means to express his power,” Stanley wrote.

“The goal,” he added, “is to define a reality that justifies his value system, thereby changing the value systems of his audience.”

Letting Trump’s vile comments speak for themselves, in other words, isn’t bound to erode his support. It has the potential to enhance it.