We are witnessing the rise of a new Republican ‘Southern Strategy’
The Republicans have been poaching white votes in the South since the time of Goldwater and Nixon. What matters now is whether they can hang on to Male Hispanics and make greater inroads amongst women.
How to make sense of the Trump administration’s attacks on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
Surely Vivek Ramaswamy deserves some credit? His book claimed that DEI was damaging the competitiveness of American industry. China didn't bother with 'Woke' virtue-signalling. America needed to refocus on STEM subjects or risk Chinese dominance in crucial new knowledge industries.
On his first day in office, President Trump signed an Executive Order targeting “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” programs in the federal government. A day later, the President signed an executive order entitled “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit Based Opportunity.” Together, these executive orders have been used to justify an across the board targeting of all federal programs, grants, and contracts, essentially a targeting of the entire federal bureaucracy. For example, very quickly, thousands of federal web pages have been taken down, with vast amounts of data from Alzheimer’s research to clinical trials being removed.
No doubt, some babies were thrown out with the bathwater. However, tech companies seem to have been backing away from DEI because it caused a nuisance and lowered productivity.
The Trump administration has taken as its chief target DEI - Diversity Equity and Inclusion. The Executive Orders Trump signed on his first two days in office have been used to justify targeting federal agencies and other institutions, and to threaten the jobs of those suspected to be less than completely loyal to the new regime, on the grounds that they embody the ideology of DEI.
One may equally say that DEI was a stick to beat those considered to be politically incorrect in their views. What is sauce for the goose &c.
In the vocabulary of America’s new regime, meritocracy is meant to replace diversity in hiring.
Hire the guy with better grades even if he is white and heterosexual.
But what the administration means by “meritocracy” is distant from its original meaning.
No. That was the original meaning.
The original meaning of “meritocracy” is a system based on competence and excellence.
On merit. The clue is in the word.
Based on its actions, we can see that the sole metric of this regime’s judgements of merit is loyalty to the regime.
Jason can also see that everybody he doesn't like is actually Adolf Hitler.
The attack on DEI is thus Orwellian double-speak.
Orwell was guilty of double-speak. So is Jason. Their own ideology is some sort of crazy leftist shite and they say everybody who disagrees with them is Adolf fucking Hitler.
But, if anything, the true danger of the attack on DEI has been overlooked and underestimated.
There is no 'true danger'. DEI was a way of wasting money. America is waking up to the fact that, if it falls behind China, it won't have any fucking money to waste.
In the Republican “Southern Strategy”, enacted most clearly and powerfully under
Goldwater and Nixon.
Reagan,
who did use the term 'state's rights' but who then pivoted to talk of God. This 'God Strategy' worked. But what worked even better was 'oppo research'- Lee Atwater's trademark. Al Gore had mentioned Dukakis's giving convicts weekend passes. Atwater investigated this and found Willie Horton who robbed and raped wile on such a pass. That enabled Bush Snr. to win. I don't suppose Horton's being black was wholly irrelevant.
federal programs that wealthy individuals supported eliminating in order to make way for tax cuts were described as “welfare.”
They were described as 'social welfare' by the people who created those schemes. Reagan's genius was to bring up 'Welfare Queens'.
By describing such programs as “welfare”,
because that is what they were called
Republicans intended to communicate that these programs were there to take money away from “hard working” white Americans and directed to benefit Black Americans,
it is true that African Americans were twice as likely to be on Welfare
who, according to longstanding US anti-Black racist ideology, were associating with criminality,
in which case they were incarcerated. I suppose their families may have got welfare.
laziness, and corruption (there are of course far more white Americans on programs aimed to help the poor
not relative to the size of their population
than there are Black Americans on such programs).
Actually, African-American intellectuals- like the writer who coined the term 'woke'- saw with their own eyes that 'Welfare' was destroying African-American families. Thomas Sowell and Clarence Thomas are the foremost exponents of this view. Clinton got the message and thus came up with 'work-fare'.
Scientists have repeatedly found, at least as recently as 2018, that this strategy was successful. Research has shown that almost half of white Americans regard Black Americans as lazier than whites, and almost as large a percentage regard Black Americans as less intelligent.
because us darkies have ginormous dongs.
By describing certain government programs as “welfare”, politicians can easily decrease their popularity among this group of Americans.
Why not decrease the popularity of masturbation by describing it as 'welfare'? Did you know that if everybody stopped jerking off, productivity and hence Corporate profits would rise by 2.3 percent?
The original version of the Republican Southern Strategy was necessarily limited –
it was about getting White votes in the South. It worked well enough once Carter was out of the picture.
it was, after all, hard to describe all federal grant-making as welfare, or all federal bureaucracy as welfare.
So, the stuck to calling stuff which was already called 'welfare', welfare. How very devious! This shows Republicans are all 'boys from Brazil'- i.e. clones of Hitler.
We are now witnessing a radical broadening of the Republican Southern Strategy, drawing on the same underlying racist attitudes towards Black Americans.
No. We are witnessing crazy shit. Hopefully, Trump will do a U turn before he tanks the market completely. As things are, he expects a recession by the end of the year.
The idea behind the mechanism of extending the Republican Southern Strategy to all public institutions was due to Christopher Rufo, who realized that, in the expression “Critical Race Theory”, lay a potent weapon:“Strung together, the phrase ‘critical race theory’ connotes hostile, academic, divisive, race-obsessed, poisonous, elitist, anti-American.” Most perfect of all, Rufo continued, critical race theory is not “an externally applied pejorative.” Instead, “it’s the label the critical race theorists chose themselves.”
In other words, if darkies get to weaponize race, whites can do the same thing. There's no need for 'doublespeak'. What's important is to get the Hispanic vote. Just redefine them as White already. Same with East Asians. As for African-Americans, they are smart and keep their eye on the prize. What's so wrong with letting them rise in productivity and wealth? Anyway, the second half of this century is going to be all about Africa's economic rise. Surely, African-Americans can play a great role in this?
By connecting all of federal bureaucracy to “Critical Race Theory”, Rufo could create negative attitudes towards the entire federal system.
Which is why Left-Liberals should have kept their distance from it. It's one thing for me to bang on about how us Darkies invented everything. I am clearly stupid and ignorant and have a chip on my shoulder. If a well educated white person does it, we know they are lying. There's probably tax dollars that Whitey wants to get her greedy little mitts on.
There is, however, an obvious problem with radically extending the Southern Strategy by replacing “welfare” with “Critical Race Theory.”
This is the obvious problem with Jason's article. The 'Southern Strategy' is irrelevant. It was obvious that if the Dems backed Civil Rights, they would lose white votes in the South. CRT was a poison which parents wanted kept out of schools. That's it. That's the whole story. There is no secret program to take an axe to the Federal Government in the belief that this hurts African Americans. There is an open program to cut Federal spending so as to lower taxes and keep the Government's nose out of our business.
The argument that the ideology of the federal government was Critical Race Theory was impossible to make.
Like Jason's argument that those who oppose it are rich bastards who want the poor to starve.
Critical Race Theory is a small academic subdiscipline,
it is nonsense.
and the expression “Critical Race Theory” occurs almost nowhere in federal documents. To argue that Critical Race Theory was somehow guiding the funding of (for example) Alzheimer’s research at Harvard and Yale would always sound like a conspiracy theory on the level of QAnon.
Rufo's tweet on the subject reads ' Columbia professor Jennifer Manly, who participated in the pro-Hamas demonstrations, has received $100 million in public funds for her "research" arguing that Alzheimer's is caused by "racism," not genetics or "lifestyle choices." He links to a video of her saying this. Incidentally, she is African American.
Still, the fact is Black people think Alzheimer is something which can be cured by Scientists working in laboratories. At the very least, the guys researching this should be Medical Doctors. A psychologist focusing on 'mechanisms of inequalities in cognitive aging and Alzheimer’s Disease' can't add much value even if her research team has partnered with the Black and Latinx communities in New York City to design and carry out investigations of structural and social forces across the lifecourse, such as educational opportunities, discrimination, and socioeconomic inequality, and how these factors relate to cognition and brain health later in life.' We get that poor people of colour have horrible lives. Maybe they also suffer disproportionately from all sorts of cruel diseases. But the solution is better medicine not saying 'it sucks to be a darkie.' Even if this lady is black, there is no point spending money on her research.
Even when Rufo argued that Critical Race Theory was guiding public schools, for example, his opponents could simply challenge him by asking for evidence that this academic theory had so much power.
He did produce such evidence. It is a different matter that kids don't give a shit about anything taught in public schools. They are too busy knifing each other or selling drugs to teechur.
And it was evidence that, even in the much narrower range of education, was difficult to provide.
Jason never provides any evidence for his claims. The fact is CRT or some such shite motivated Manly's research which most of us darkies think was a complete waste of time. We know granny had a hard life. The question is whether Doctor Manly could cure her so she becomes well enough to cook our dinner. Sadly, Manly wasn't a Medical Doctor. She was a psychologist- i.e. useless.
In short, “Critical Race Theory” could be deployed as an effective political weapon, for the reasons Rufo so clearly explains. But it was impossible to argue with any force that it was an ideology that governed the entire federal government.
People think the government spends a lot of money for political or cosmetic reasons. The funding for Dr. Manly is a case in point. You don't increase 'diversity' by hiring useless people. You merely waste public money.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs are there to
piss money against a wall
help ensure that workplaces are free from discrimination,
they become free of workers if the enterprise goes bankrupt. Still, we can always buy stuff cheaper from China- right?
and accessible (for example to the disabled).
What about the dead? It is unfair to stop paying a dude just because he is pushing up daisies. Have you never heard of 'work from home'? The grave is the home of the dead person. Many dead people continue to be highly productive while working from their coffins.
These programs are ubiquitous across federal agencies. Unlike Critical Race Theory, then, it is trivial to show that DEI is present across all federal agencies as well as institutions that the Trump administration deems hostile, such as universities.
So what? If CRT is part of the ideology of DEI then it shares the blame for the money being wasted in this way.
The term “Welfare” was such a potent political weapon in the Republican Southern Strategy,
'Welfare Queen' was a weapon. Anyway, Clinton came up with 'work-fare' thirty years ago. It was popular with African Americans.
as it was a useful shorthand for the deeply embedded racist attitude that Black Americans were lazier and less competent than whites. Rufo and others quickly realized that “DEI” could also be used to evoke the same racist attitudes, that Black Americans needed special help to compete with white Americans, positions that they could only obtain through cheating because of their supposed lesser competence and intelligence.
Did you know Vivek Ramaswamy is secretly white? That's how come he is so smart.
We know that calling programs “welfare” made many Americans think less of them.
We know that working people didn't want their taxes to go to lazy drug-addicts.
The anti-DEI campaign is the Republican Southern Strategy on steroids, as “DEI” marshals racist attitudes as effectively as “welfare”, but against a vastly broader target.
No. DOGE is about increasing efficiency by making a bonfire of regulations of various kinds. It is also about cutting government spending so more resources are available for household consumption and investment.
The Republican Southern Strategy was a devastatingly effective weapon against America’s social safety net.
No. What was effective was running out of money. It turned out printing the stuff caused 'stagflation'. Who knew?
By arguing that social programs were “welfare”, and benefitted supposedly undeserving Black Americans,
Black American tax payers were not keen on subsidizing 'Welfare Queens'.
Republican politicians could argue that funding to these programs should be slashed, and the savings handed over to the wealthy in new tax cuts. The new version of the Southern Strategy is directed not just against the social safety net,
I suppose the retirement age will have to go up. This has nothing to do with any political strategy. It's just Accountancy is all.
but against the entire federal government, and all the programs it supports, from health research to foreign aid to basic science.
If there are genuinely worthwhile scientific programs which have been axed, mention them by all means. Dr. Manly, sadly, does not qualify.
Right now, America’s legacy of racism is being now directed as a weapon against America itself.
Jason is a weapon directed against the subject he teaches. The problem with telling stupid lies is that people think you are a stupid liar.
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