More examples of how flyover suburbia, long excoriated by Democratic culturati, trended toward Kamala, while Trump increasingly dominated the forgotten fringes of America, such as the Lumbees.
Kerouac I believe went to Mass every day with his mother.
Steve you should do something about the Melungeons, another tri-racial isolate, though Appalachian not tidal lowland, which may have some Jewish or Arab admixture. Phenotypically they ring a lot of bells.
Melungeons used to pretend that they had Portuguese blood in them so they could attend the white schools of Virginia in the segregation days. There seems to have been more black/white race mixing in 17th Century Virginia when it was a frontier.
1. My Persian wife informs me that one of the top 5 Iranian comedians is getting ratioed on Instagram for claiming that Elon Musk actually made a Nazi salute, with many commenters telling him that "we've moved on from Democrats".
2. Walking to the Trump rally in DC on Sunday, I ducked into a very nice hotel to use their bathroom; a Black guy who worked there was also in the men's room and volunteered that he'd voted for Trump "this time".
In the summer of 2016, the first live person I heard announce for Trump was an older black guy driving a parking shuttle--in deep blue Chapel Hill, where he probably couldn't afford to live.
A friend told me his theory is that Musk bet some other Billionaire he could do a Nazi salute at the inauguration. I think it's more likely the other way around, that Bezos or whoever bet Musk he wouldn't have the balls to do a Nazi salute and then Musk did it three times to remove any ambiguity. They'll share a laugh next time they go to the island where they hunt their fellow man for sport I say.
I'm no expert but it sure looked like one. What's the distinction, that he shot it straight from his heart rather than raise it from level after it was straight?
Around 2000 there was a woman from Johnson County, a recent Yale grad, working as a paralegal in a San Francisco law firm. Pretty good looking. Didn't know her politics. Interestingly, to me at least, is that she married a Pendergast. Jackson County Missouri, home of the famous boss Pendergast, is only 20 miles from Johnson County Kansas. The couple lives in Sacramento, which physically resembles the midwest. By the way, has it ever been resolved whether William Shatner "got" Heather Locklear?
Thanks, but I live in Kansas City MO, and I can authoritatively write here that Jackson County, MO is adjacent to Johnson County, KS. The border between them is a street called State Line. :)
There’s a case to be made that the archetypal American is still the blue collar, beer-drinking, church at Christmas white guy. Trump likely got >95% of that vote.
The other fact usually associated with DEI hires is that they are extremely BORING people, as they’ve usually moved up by mastering corporate politics rather than living an interesting life. Obama and Kamala are both good examples - did they ever have some great adventure or unique passion? Nope, just law school and then politics. Yawn. Credit to America that we still want some colorful characters to represent us.
Would you believe I never saw Karen Bass speak on video even until after she had gone to Ghana instead of staying home and pretending she was on top of the wildfire situation? What a rookie mistake! And BTW, I mean I never saw her when she was running. I was served a gazillion Rick Caruso ads and assumed he was going to win but then she did. What was her background? I have no idea. Seems it was just time for a black lady to get to be mayor of LA for a while. You are probably right that her main feature was her ability to make white people feel comfy. And a city pretty much runs itself as far as I know.
I haven't looked up the LA city government, but where I live (Kansas City MO), we have a city manager form of government. The mayor appoints people to committees but has little power, and the executive branch writes ordinances that the city council rubber stamps.
My grandmother told me a saying in central NC from over a century ago: your town isn't considered prosperous until it gets its first Jew, which I guess is a backhanded compliment. I doubt Robeson Co. attracted many Jews.
Lynch's Blue Velvet was set in Lumberton, Robeson's seat and major town.
More like one hour west. I guess Jordan could have been coming back from Pinehurst. Until I was 16, we vacationed most years at White Lake in the adjacent county (Bladen), but I didn't realize until today that Lumberton was so close, as we never went there.
He lived in Wilmington, North Carolina, and the official story is he was driving back from a golf outing and pulled over in the parking lot of a Quality Inn to rest (some say the car was moved there from the side of the road) and was shot while he slept. His car, a red Lexus, a recent gift from Michael, was stolen. The Robeson County sheriff was sentenced to 6 years prison for lying to a grand jury investigating corruption in his office.
Early in the movie the radio is playing and the announcer goes something like "it's 90 degrees here in Lumberton where at the sound of a falling tree...it's 9 o'clock"
One of my favorite moments from 'The Big Bang Theory' is when Penny's slutty friend from back home sleeps with Howard and upon learning his last name says something like "That's so cool, my first Jew!" The actress nailed it.
There's a book out there to be written by a twenty-five year old Michael Barone type. Voting trends in America have changed a lot since 1980 when I first began to study the county votes for president. Issues have changed over the last forty-four years. The USSR died. Reagan died. Christianity has receded. The culture has become more vulgar. The Internet was born and became widespread in a majority of American lives. The Democrats gave up on FDR/LBJ/Hubert Humphrey tax and spend. The Republicans gave up on budget cutting and small government. Woke was born. And woke leftists inspired a culturally conservative counterattack. Witness the decline of Bud Light.
America is dividing into rural conservatives and urban leftists. Suburbs close to big cities have moved left since the rise of Bill Clinton. The old ethnics that ran cities like Chicago, Baltimore, Buffalo and Cleveland have run off to the outer suburbs and rural areas and surrendered cities to blacks and white leftists. Trendy woke whites have moved into the cities to experience diversity and ethnic restaurants. Rural areas that once voted Democrat like the coal mining counties of southern West Virginia, eastern Kentucky and southwestern Virginia have moved right. So has middle Tennessee and, to an extent, the iron range of Minnesota.
A big determination of a county's voting is how they regard gun rights. Another is the acceptance of homosexuality. Another is the acceptance of strident feminism.
Republicans are now open to all kinds of economic policies that would have been anathema in the 1980s, basically a feeling that more regulation to reign in the greed of corporations is ok...except (for the moment) in health care, which is arguably the industry in which it would make the most sense.
I’m pleased to see that Cornell is producing a student who can think.
Here’s an interesting fact: the Cornell University Chapel where Father Berrigan rallied us against the war in Vietnam is now officially called “The Department of Spirituality and Meaning-Making”.
The establishment is now firmly associated with the Democratic party, and groups that derive benefits or status by association with it voted for Harris. Obviously that includes blacks and the Alphabet People, but also upper middle class whites who are culturally distant from middle and working class whites and derive more status from their association/promotion of various minority interests than their less economically successful co-ethnics. On the flipside, the GOP and Trump are insurgents that were able to highlight how the establishment ignores huge but disparate parts of America and that appealed to some unusual constituencies.
The NYT had an interesting periodic interview series with focus groups of voters in various locations in the runup to the election. Now obviously however you select these groups will influence the responses you get, but what stood out to me repeatedly was that a lot of people that would have been considered overwhelmingly likely to vote Democratic were just not that attached to what was on offer. Some indicated that they would do so but without any real enthusiasm, others were not exactly Trump fans but felt like his election wouldn't make things worse for them. There was also a small but regular cohort of younger or minority voters who basically said although they had voted for Biden in 2020, they felt like all the rhetoric about Trump's evils turned out to be BS and frankly felt their lives were better in his first term. The only people who ever had swung from Trump to anti-Trump were whites offended by J6.
When you lose the weird you lose the creative. The biggest change I have seen over the past four years is creative people turning on the democrats. Some of the most enthusiastic converts are people who just got sick of the restrictions on their ability to create art, comedy, furniture, whatever, without fearing running afoul of some left wing project.
Middle class and higher people are often driven by fashion and are impacted by media propaganda. I remember when the NY Times dropped the Russian Collusion Hoax after the Mueller report blew it up and replaced it with promoting racism against white people. Six months later I was visiting a friend (who had been the best man at my wedding) and his super liberal wife. She started grousing about how evil white supremacy is. Not having read the Times for a while, I had no idea what she was talking about. When I said that was ridiculous we got into an argument and I haven't talked to him since then which is sad.
People in Palisades could have voted for Rick Caruso who's competence would probably have saved or at least lessened the losses. Instead they voted for the incompetent Karen Bass because she has "Black Girl Magic" and so lost their homes.
I am wondering if this will cause the more intelligent normies to wake up out of their stupor.
Yes, they're very attuned to signals and incentives, which is why they are middle class. Nothing particularly wrong with that, but the feminine element seems to have the upper hand in the middle class now due to higher levels of education among women and that has pushed it to extremes of groupthink.
As for the racism against whites, my attitude is that no matter how long we may have known each other, if you honestly favor racial discrimination against me and my kids, you're not being much of a friend.
I'm sure plenty of Jews faced a dilemma in the 1930s in Germany as "friends" joined the NSDAP. It's not good to lose a friend, but when people support your political disenfranchisement and racial vilification it's pretty personal.
You know the parable of the Good Samaritan is often invoked to urge us to be kind and compassionate toward others, but the other side of the story is rarely if ever brought up. Jesus was responding to the question "who is my neighbor?" He gave two examples: the compassionate Samaritan and the callous Pharisee. In the end, the Samaritan is your neighbor; the Pharisee is not.
In a modern retelling, we could compare a working-class Hispanic who opposes racial discrimination to a white leftist who supports it. The former is my neighbor; the latter is not.
So the commandment to "love your neighbor as you love yourself" does not apply to the cruel Pharisee or the anti-white racist. Instead, the lesser "love your enemy" (but not as yourself) is the proper approach in that case.
Democrats have become the party for people with institutional capital, and that includes a lot - perhaps a majority - of very responsible, toe the line, maintain a proper CV white people.
This is a catastrophic trend for Democrats, because the policies that appeal to their goodwhite supporters are going to drive away most of their remaining working class support, and then what are they left with?
Kerouac would've loved Trump
Kerouac I believe went to Mass every day with his mother.
Steve you should do something about the Melungeons, another tri-racial isolate, though Appalachian not tidal lowland, which may have some Jewish or Arab admixture. Phenotypically they ring a lot of bells.
Melungeons used to pretend that they had Portuguese blood in them so they could attend the white schools of Virginia in the segregation days. There seems to have been more black/white race mixing in 17th Century Virginia when it was a frontier.
So is the takeaway that people in nicer areas voted Democrat since they don't relate to the anti establishment MAGA populism?
Couple of anecdotes to share:
1. My Persian wife informs me that one of the top 5 Iranian comedians is getting ratioed on Instagram for claiming that Elon Musk actually made a Nazi salute, with many commenters telling him that "we've moved on from Democrats".
2. Walking to the Trump rally in DC on Sunday, I ducked into a very nice hotel to use their bathroom; a Black guy who worked there was also in the men's room and volunteered that he'd voted for Trump "this time".
In the summer of 2016, the first live person I heard announce for Trump was an older black guy driving a parking shuttle--in deep blue Chapel Hill, where he probably couldn't afford to live.
He probably lives in Carrboro.
A friend told me his theory is that Musk bet some other Billionaire he could do a Nazi salute at the inauguration. I think it's more likely the other way around, that Bezos or whoever bet Musk he wouldn't have the balls to do a Nazi salute and then Musk did it three times to remove any ambiguity. They'll share a laugh next time they go to the island where they hunt their fellow man for sport I say.
I don’t think it was a Nazi salute.
I'm no expert but it sure looked like one. What's the distinction, that he shot it straight from his heart rather than raise it from level after it was straight?
In the movies, the Roman salute was to thump the heart with the fist first. Musk used an open hand.
The Democrats need to get a different hoax to try.
To be pedantic, it isn't a hoax. You may not agree that this is what he was doing but he clearly made the gesture
Around 2000 there was a woman from Johnson County, a recent Yale grad, working as a paralegal in a San Francisco law firm. Pretty good looking. Didn't know her politics. Interestingly, to me at least, is that she married a Pendergast. Jackson County Missouri, home of the famous boss Pendergast, is only 20 miles from Johnson County Kansas. The couple lives in Sacramento, which physically resembles the midwest. By the way, has it ever been resolved whether William Shatner "got" Heather Locklear?
Thanks, but I live in Kansas City MO, and I can authoritatively write here that Jackson County, MO is adjacent to Johnson County, KS. The border between them is a street called State Line. :)
There’s a case to be made that the archetypal American is still the blue collar, beer-drinking, church at Christmas white guy. Trump likely got >95% of that vote.
The other fact usually associated with DEI hires is that they are extremely BORING people, as they’ve usually moved up by mastering corporate politics rather than living an interesting life. Obama and Kamala are both good examples - did they ever have some great adventure or unique passion? Nope, just law school and then politics. Yawn. Credit to America that we still want some colorful characters to represent us.
Agreed. The Gulf of America thing is hilarious.
Would you believe I never saw Karen Bass speak on video even until after she had gone to Ghana instead of staying home and pretending she was on top of the wildfire situation? What a rookie mistake! And BTW, I mean I never saw her when she was running. I was served a gazillion Rick Caruso ads and assumed he was going to win but then she did. What was her background? I have no idea. Seems it was just time for a black lady to get to be mayor of LA for a while. You are probably right that her main feature was her ability to make white people feel comfy. And a city pretty much runs itself as far as I know.
I haven't looked up the LA city government, but where I live (Kansas City MO), we have a city manager form of government. The mayor appoints people to committees but has little power, and the executive branch writes ordinances that the city council rubber stamps.
Not a bad system
My grandmother told me a saying in central NC from over a century ago: your town isn't considered prosperous until it gets its first Jew, which I guess is a backhanded compliment. I doubt Robeson Co. attracted many Jews.
Lynch's Blue Velvet was set in Lumberton, Robeson's seat and major town.
Michael Jordan's father was killed in Robeson County by a black and a Lumbee Indian. Just a little tidbit.
why was he there?
Mr. Jordan was sleeping in his car traveling through Robeson County. Robeson is about three hours west of Wilmington NC where the Jordans are from.
That is some horrible bad luck
More like one hour west. I guess Jordan could have been coming back from Pinehurst. Until I was 16, we vacationed most years at White Lake in the adjacent county (Bladen), but I didn't realize until today that Lumberton was so close, as we never went there.
He lived in Wilmington, North Carolina, and the official story is he was driving back from a golf outing and pulled over in the parking lot of a Quality Inn to rest (some say the car was moved there from the side of the road) and was shot while he slept. His car, a red Lexus, a recent gift from Michael, was stolen. The Robeson County sheriff was sentenced to 6 years prison for lying to a grand jury investigating corruption in his office.
Early in the movie the radio is playing and the announcer goes something like "it's 90 degrees here in Lumberton where at the sound of a falling tree...it's 9 o'clock"
One of my favorite moments from 'The Big Bang Theory' is when Penny's slutty friend from back home sleeps with Howard and upon learning his last name says something like "That's so cool, my first Jew!" The actress nailed it.
I remember telling my friends in high school the same thing many years ago. Of course, the sexes were reversed.
There's a book out there to be written by a twenty-five year old Michael Barone type. Voting trends in America have changed a lot since 1980 when I first began to study the county votes for president. Issues have changed over the last forty-four years. The USSR died. Reagan died. Christianity has receded. The culture has become more vulgar. The Internet was born and became widespread in a majority of American lives. The Democrats gave up on FDR/LBJ/Hubert Humphrey tax and spend. The Republicans gave up on budget cutting and small government. Woke was born. And woke leftists inspired a culturally conservative counterattack. Witness the decline of Bud Light.
America is dividing into rural conservatives and urban leftists. Suburbs close to big cities have moved left since the rise of Bill Clinton. The old ethnics that ran cities like Chicago, Baltimore, Buffalo and Cleveland have run off to the outer suburbs and rural areas and surrendered cities to blacks and white leftists. Trendy woke whites have moved into the cities to experience diversity and ethnic restaurants. Rural areas that once voted Democrat like the coal mining counties of southern West Virginia, eastern Kentucky and southwestern Virginia have moved right. So has middle Tennessee and, to an extent, the iron range of Minnesota.
A big determination of a county's voting is how they regard gun rights. Another is the acceptance of homosexuality. Another is the acceptance of strident feminism.
Republicans are now open to all kinds of economic policies that would have been anathema in the 1980s, basically a feeling that more regulation to reign in the greed of corporations is ok...except (for the moment) in health care, which is arguably the industry in which it would make the most sense.
I’m pleased to see that Cornell is producing a student who can think.
Here’s an interesting fact: the Cornell University Chapel where Father Berrigan rallied us against the war in Vietnam is now officially called “The Department of Spirituality and Meaning-Making”.
Kelvin Sampson, U of Houson's basketball coach, is Lumbee.
The establishment is now firmly associated with the Democratic party, and groups that derive benefits or status by association with it voted for Harris. Obviously that includes blacks and the Alphabet People, but also upper middle class whites who are culturally distant from middle and working class whites and derive more status from their association/promotion of various minority interests than their less economically successful co-ethnics. On the flipside, the GOP and Trump are insurgents that were able to highlight how the establishment ignores huge but disparate parts of America and that appealed to some unusual constituencies.
The NYT had an interesting periodic interview series with focus groups of voters in various locations in the runup to the election. Now obviously however you select these groups will influence the responses you get, but what stood out to me repeatedly was that a lot of people that would have been considered overwhelmingly likely to vote Democratic were just not that attached to what was on offer. Some indicated that they would do so but without any real enthusiasm, others were not exactly Trump fans but felt like his election wouldn't make things worse for them. There was also a small but regular cohort of younger or minority voters who basically said although they had voted for Biden in 2020, they felt like all the rhetoric about Trump's evils turned out to be BS and frankly felt their lives were better in his first term. The only people who ever had swung from Trump to anti-Trump were whites offended by J6.
When you lose the weird you lose the creative. The biggest change I have seen over the past four years is creative people turning on the democrats. Some of the most enthusiastic converts are people who just got sick of the restrictions on their ability to create art, comedy, furniture, whatever, without fearing running afoul of some left wing project.
I found an article on Fox News today, claiming that far-out trans politics is driving people out of the Democratic Party, which they feel unable to influence. https://www.foxnews.com/sports/democrat-voters-abandon-party-after-aoc-jeffries-say-anti-trans-athlete-bill-empowers-child-sexual-predators?dicbo=v2-FOs7fJ0
Middle class and higher people are often driven by fashion and are impacted by media propaganda. I remember when the NY Times dropped the Russian Collusion Hoax after the Mueller report blew it up and replaced it with promoting racism against white people. Six months later I was visiting a friend (who had been the best man at my wedding) and his super liberal wife. She started grousing about how evil white supremacy is. Not having read the Times for a while, I had no idea what she was talking about. When I said that was ridiculous we got into an argument and I haven't talked to him since then which is sad.
People in Palisades could have voted for Rick Caruso who's competence would probably have saved or at least lessened the losses. Instead they voted for the incompetent Karen Bass because she has "Black Girl Magic" and so lost their homes.
I am wondering if this will cause the more intelligent normies to wake up out of their stupor.
Yes, they're very attuned to signals and incentives, which is why they are middle class. Nothing particularly wrong with that, but the feminine element seems to have the upper hand in the middle class now due to higher levels of education among women and that has pushed it to extremes of groupthink.
As for the racism against whites, my attitude is that no matter how long we may have known each other, if you honestly favor racial discrimination against me and my kids, you're not being much of a friend.
I'm sure plenty of Jews faced a dilemma in the 1930s in Germany as "friends" joined the NSDAP. It's not good to lose a friend, but when people support your political disenfranchisement and racial vilification it's pretty personal.
You know the parable of the Good Samaritan is often invoked to urge us to be kind and compassionate toward others, but the other side of the story is rarely if ever brought up. Jesus was responding to the question "who is my neighbor?" He gave two examples: the compassionate Samaritan and the callous Pharisee. In the end, the Samaritan is your neighbor; the Pharisee is not.
In a modern retelling, we could compare a working-class Hispanic who opposes racial discrimination to a white leftist who supports it. The former is my neighbor; the latter is not.
So the commandment to "love your neighbor as you love yourself" does not apply to the cruel Pharisee or the anti-white racist. Instead, the lesser "love your enemy" (but not as yourself) is the proper approach in that case.
Democrats have become the party for people with institutional capital, and that includes a lot - perhaps a majority - of very responsible, toe the line, maintain a proper CV white people.
This is a catastrophic trend for Democrats, because the policies that appeal to their goodwhite supporters are going to drive away most of their remaining working class support, and then what are they left with?