I worked a project in Lima, OH, for a few months (made the effort to tour the Neil Armstrong Museum in Wapakoneta while I was there).
I remember its being a primarily two lane blacktop road from there to Columbus OH and also remember along the way a waterfront community that was nothing but shacks and trailers and really rundown messy.
It wouldn’t surprise me if a Klan existed there and this was 17 years ago.
I worked downtown St. Louis and inner city schools, including Normandie HS, where Michael Brown was a student. All the white folks with money are in St. Charles Co., and all the poor whites went into the country.
Gave up all those brick buildings downtown for cookie cutter McMansions. What dopes. Time will tell. Mostly that black folk get robbed on what nobody wanted just like on anything else.
Ohio is full of hollowed out shells of towns, to which it’d never even occur to a citizen to consider moving. Residents of such towns should be thanking immigrants for coming in, putting glass back in the windows and trying to get something going again, because nobody else is going to!
Strange that two academic “scholars of extremism” have not bothered to describe how they operationalize “extremism”. This article applies the label to ideologies as well as rhetorical styles and violent tactics. That seems misguided, and indicative of unclear reasoning.
Moreover, one of their examples is a self-described “incel”. What is his connection to anger over “changing demographics” in Ohio?
In general these ProPublica reprints are of lower quality than Talking’s regular reporting.
Asian and Hispanic immigrants renewed blocks and blocks of abandoned buildings in Brooklyn NY and in NJ.
The strongest statistical trend among the Jan, 6 treason rioters wasn’t race, or gender, or finances. It was living in a county that was losing its white population.
That would have been March of '66. UCLA won in '64 and '65.
The starters were all black. There were at least a couple of white dudes on the roster. ISTR that one had started some games that season, but coach Haskins made the conscious choice to start five black players in the tournament. It was a big deal, especially against the legendary coach Adolph Rupp’s highly touted Kentucky team, which added its first black player some three years later.
Was that the waterfront of Indian Lake? If so, Russells Point was the small town. There was / is a McDonald’s there, just off the main route but visible from it.
My partner was a manager there in high school, kid you not. His hometown is now represented by Jim Jordan. My old hometown representative is Matt Gaetz. So I guess you could say we have a common background. Both of us left soon as we could. What worries us now is in the intervening decades the electorate has descended to those so-called “values” rather than progressed beyond them.
My partner often notes that the wacky conspiracies rattled off now by Dump, MTG and a majority of Republicans sound just like the bull he used to hear as a little boy from farmers (all being paid government subsidies, some years for not planting) hanging at the feed store.
In the first round of feminism there was a slogan: The personal is political.
It had dawned on the women that no amount of individual self-improvement was going to improve the lot of women if they were only allowed to compete for a small proportion of the available seats at the table.
Studying hard to attain one of the, say, 5% of the seats in a graduate program still left a world in which women had only 5 % of those seats.
He doesn’t have a guaranteed well-paying union factory job straight out of high school the likes of which used to enable his father to keep his mother in a small pumpkin shell. Nor can he fall back on a job in the family farm as small farms have largely been run out of business.
These folks have not made the cultural switch to the idea that intellectual effort in school is now required if you wish to get ahead.
Not clear why these folks failed to compete against the Haitians who are switching cultures wholesale.
One of the factory owners did speak up in praise of the Haitian workers, and how they benefit the community. He subsequently received so many threats that now he has to keep his place shuttered during working hours for fear someone will take a shot at his business.
ETA: after I posted, I saw that JanL had already pointed this out.
People like these, who feel the need to conceal their identities with masks, cannot be taken as proponents of serious political ideas. Their masks serve one purpose, and one purpose only, and that is to prevent their identification as perpetrators of crimes. They are terrorists or terrorists in waiting.
I’ve noticed that none of these guys work. They probably haven’t had a girl friend, ever. So yeah, they are pissed off because they all have character flaws that make them losers. The immigrants and people of color know how to work and want to work. These sorry fucks couldn’t do a day’s work if there lives depended on it. Just another gang that could’t survive without their mommies.
Thank you for the clarifications.
After he retired from the Air Force (having been enlisted since 1943) my Dad moved our family east to the vicinity of Wright-Patterson AFB; in other words, close to Springfield. He wanted to be able to take advantage of the commissary, BX, hospital, and other amenities.
I knew Springfield as a mid-sized town, struggling with the decline of manufacturing, but not so different from many other Ohio towns. I took my driving test to get my first license in Springfield on Bechtle Avenue. I would hang out at Upper Valley Mall to alleviate the boredom of my teenage life. But I headed west as soon as I could to attend graduate school.
I would return to Ohio off and on to visit my parents, before they died, and always was struck by the culture of the area. It was backward, hyper-patriotic, but always in a way that seemed to be covering up or compensating for something. Honestly, it made me uneasy. Though as American as anyone, and having grown up as a younger person on military bases before my Dad retired from the Air Force, visiting that part of Ohio as an adult always made me uneasy.
After we had children, my Dad’s health went downhill and I accepted a transfer from the west coast to my employer’s office in the Dayton area, a short drive from Springfield. I wanted our sons to know their grandfather before he died.
I’m glad I did, but it didn’t take long – a few months – for my wife and I to conclude we couldn’t live there. Too much racism. Too much hate. We didn’t want our kids growing up in that environment.
My Dad’s health improved, and we made the decision that we couldn’t continue living in Ohio. I pressured my employer for a transfer back west, and thankfully I was valued enough to get an offer to return. My career suffered somewhat from our sojourn in Ohio, but overall it probably was a good move, for my parents’ mental health at least.
But I couldn’t live there. I’ve been back to visit my parents’ graves and to visit my sister and brother-in-law, who still live in the area. But it’s alien territory to me. Backward. Negative. It’s hard to describe, but it’s simply not a positive place to be.
That said, Trump’s lies about the place sicken me. The people living there are victims. They’ve put up with so much negative stuff. And for him to pile on with lies that draw the dregs of American culture like the KKK and Proud Boys and other brownshirt wannabes just adds to the misery. And he does it not because he cares one whit about the residents of Springfield or the surrounding area, but because he thinks it will help him win reelection. He’s a shitty person with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.
In other words…a Trump rally
Yeah. So these very same people support the rightwing/ evangelical / Roman Catholic ban on abortion. Which will result in the birth of more black and brown babies to mostly poor women who cannot flee to a state where abortion rights have not yet been destroyed by the fanatical right.
Logic is just not in their DNA.
In 2020, for example, the population of Springfield was about 60,000. But over the past three years, city officials estimate that the population has grown by about 25%, partly fueled by the arrival of as many as 15,000 Haitian immigrants during that time.
Seems like important context for this is that in 1970, the population was 82,000.
Changing demographics: Translation: Black people moving into white neighborhoods.
This has been one driver of US politics at least as far back as the early 50s.
why do they cover their faces…what are they afraid of…the townspeople already know who they are.