Short version: When your church tells you that you’re righteous, and God rewards the righteous with money, then when you’re broke there must be someone to blame. People that you think are smarter than you, for example. Like, I dunno, The Jews.
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I am hardly “swarthy” being a straw blond but now grey due to age. But my genetic background is Celtic. Origin in Brittany then generations in Ireland and finally Ohio… 200 years ago. The family has “assimilated”. Ol’ Ben can go jump.inna lake somewhere should he reincarnate.
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OT, but I figure that this comment might best go with this article.
TPM’s Weekender arrived in my inbox this morning, and Josh Kovensky added some commentary to his excellent article on SACR (The Society for American Civic Renewal), a Christian Nationalist group of elite men, presumably most or all of them White. I don’t recall that his article included anything like the words from his commentary in the Weekender that I have put in bold typeface:
"But there’s a deeper, unresolved issue here which goes more towards what they say Christian nationalism is: the idea that a very narrow, specific view of Christianity should define our country, and should play a supreme role in grounding national policy. If that’s really the case, then should it matter who is in charge? After all (and as we regularly see), a public servant of any race or creed could implement the policies that they likely prefer. Anyone can play politics, anyone can appeal to the subset of voters who wants this.
"My guess is that would only whet their appetite. What they want, and as SACR said, is for their group to be in control: the wealthy Christian men of yore. It’s not standing athwart history and yelling stop; it’s an attempt to drag the country back towards a past that’s long gone [emphasis mine].
I’d like to register some disagreement with Josh: that past never existed in post-colonial America. To be sure, the very early Puritans of MA, who did not permit even Anglican worship, punished and/or expelled people like Roger Williams (who described himself as a “seeker,” though he did receive a Baptist baptism) and Anne Hutchinson, along with many others. While the founders – and the men who voted to ratify the Constitution – certainly envisioned a society where prosperous (though not necessarily rich) White men would lead society in many arenas, and while most of them probably assumed that these men would be Christians (at least nominally, and in most places Protestant), they adamantly opposed the notion of a “Christian nation.” See Article 6 Section 3 and the First Amendment. Their opposition to established religion and religious tests (leaving aside the Deists among them) grew out of several factors not in play today – the basis of my disagreement with Josh. Two of them:
– Passionately felt disagreements between and among numerous Christian denominations and sects – different stripes of Protestant as well as Protestant v. RC. Disagreements exist today, of course, but seldom animate American Christians the way they once did. Today, socially and politically conservative Christians of all stripes, as well as conservative Jews and even some Muslims and Hindus, operate in a loose coalition, notably around “cultural issues” like abortion, women’s rights, and LGBQT+ rights – a coalition that, curiously, SACR’s requirements for membership threaten to disrupt.
– Religious wars in Europe between and among Christians were fresh in the founders’ minds. Except for the long past Crusades, in 1789 and even in the late 19th century, these religious wars were prominent among the wars school children and adults read about in their Euro- and Anglocentric textbooks, journalistic essays, and novels. In the second half of the 19th century, the waves of immigrants sharpened awareness of religious differences and reanimated Protestants’ prejudice against Catholics and Jews. But since the PLO highjackings that started in the late '60’s and especially since 9/11, conservative Christians and Jews alike (and probably Hindus) have focused their suspicions and prejudices on Muslims. SACR’s exclusion of Jews and Hindus, as well as non-Trinitarian Christians (do they so designate Mormons?), threatens to upset a shared focus on Muslims as “other” from which SACR types have benefited.
The SACR guys remind me of the “tolerant” and polite elites of Southern towns who secretly gave active support to the KKK. They can be much more effective when their secret remains a secret, even an open secret.
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I doubt they would recognize the irony.
Go figure.
I don’t think the pasts reactionaries want to take us back to ever actually existed.
At the very least, they are sanitized and idealized so that they may be exalted to mobilize partisans.
Just as an example, company stores, housing and 12 hr. days in a six day work week don’t exist in the free enterprise utopia libertarians like to bandy about.
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At least for the moment, the ‘me’ in “…me or your lying eyes?,” seems to be winning.
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I agree that these reactionaries are deluded about history, and in ways much more odious and dangerous than the delusion I call out here. It’s important, I believe, to call them out on all their deluded accounts of the past, from the erasure of most Native American, Black, and other non-northern-European-American inflected history to Alito’s twisted reading of the history of abortion in England and America.
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The lapses from mainstream media are too deliberate to imagine there is such a thing. Any tidbit is from the GOP is immediately whipped round, and even the production quality is different.
Every GOP on the TV has a rictus smile and a warm background, and every Dem seems to be scowling, with a cold background.
Trump has survived the Press, and more likely been abetted wholeheartedly by the people that own those companies and plan on a bigger boat next year.
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Bruce Pearl, a Jew, is coaching a all black basketball team at Auburn and playing a all black team from Mississippi State.
Is the South fucked up or what?
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Brittany still hasn’t given up the Gaelic. God love them.
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The Real Replacement
Iran is teasing that it’ll send missiles to Russia to help with the war.
The Republican Party is rooting them on.
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I think dangerous is a better descriptor of white fragility. Just because white nationalists metaphorically slither like snakes on their bellies is no reason to think they are pathetic. That just cedes them power they do not deserve.
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What you are objecting to is not socialism (i.e. government owing means of production), but a perversion peddled by the GOP.
“ Greetings from the Truman Library,
Thank you for your question regarding the quote about Truman and socialism. In President Harry’s Truman’s remarks in Syracuse, New York on October 10, 1952, he said this:
Socialism is a scare word they have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years.
Socialism is what they called public power. Socialism is what they called social security.
Socialism is what they called farm price supports.
Socialism is what they called bank deposit insurance.
Socialism is what they called the growth of free and independent labor organizations.
Socialism is their name for almost anything that helps all the people.
When the Republican candidate inscribes the slogan “Down With Socialism” on the banner of his “great crusade,” that is really not what he means at all.
What he really means is “Down with Progress–down with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal,” and “down with Harry Truman’s fair Deal.” That’s all he means.
You can listen to President Truman deliver this speech (and download it, if you want) on the Truman Library’s website here: https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/soundrecording-records/sr59-160-president-truman-rear-platform-remarks-syracuse-new-york. The portion you’re looking for is about 6:45 into the speech.”
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Speaking of nazis, and their perennial target the Jews, Politico has a truly fascinating interview with Chuck Schumer’s Rabbi.
From her lips to Chuck’s ears: Schumer’s rabbi weighs in on his Israel speech
Choice quotes:
In the Jewish community, it is often the case that the far left and the far right are by far the loudest voices.
(Not just in the Jewish community, Rabbi, certainly not just there.)
We definitely have a generational divide happening in the Jewish world where younger Jews who’ve only grown up knowing an Israel that is an occupier and that has been occupying the West Bank and blockading Gaza for decades.
“Yom Kippur War? What’s that?”
And her conclusion:
I think that most Americans are going to see that [Schumer] was advocating a path that would make us safer, both American Jews and Israelis.
From your lips to the Lord’s ears, Rabbi. 
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And just a bit of historical context - the word “power” had a rather literal resonance at the time. Before FDR, and things like the TVA and the Rural Electrification Project, unregulated for-profit electrical companies in this country generally considered that it wasn’t worth their while to run service to rural areas. Farmers didn’t use, and wouldn’t pay for, electricity.
Fly over most of the United States now at dusk, and what do you see? Lights winking on at farms from horizon to horizon. Farm families could use electricity to save labor, work better, allow the women some respite from the grind of washing and cleaning and grinding things by hand. Not worth the while of the complacent fat cats in the big electrical monopolies until they were forced to do it – and then, surprise, it turned out to be a sustainable, even lucrative, market.
Yeah, remind me again why FDR was “anti-business”?
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Trump doing his best to do his xenophobic bit.
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I remember a picture of two of those “animals” - a father and his young daughter who drowned in the Rio Grande. It’s seared into my brain, as are the details of that awful tragedy. Father, mother, and little girl, trying to make the crossing to the hope of a better life. Like a nightmare version of the old puzzle with the farmer, goat, wolf, and cabbage, they first decided that the two adults would swim across the dangerous current together, and then the father would return to bring his daughter across.
But of course the little girl, left alone on the southern shore, wanted to get to her parents, and so she plunged into the water by herself. And the father desperately dove back into the water - oh Jesus I can hardly finish typing this, my eyes are brimming - and they both died there.
Those are your animals, you sick fuck. Biden had you absolutely nailed.
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The dehumanizing precedes and justifies in the Trump mob’s collective consciousness, the atrocities that will be committed…
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Maybe “WASP” vanished from the discourse because it was only invented in 1964, always had an edge to it, and came to be felt by many to be downright derogatory. At least, so according to a 1996 WaPo article (though I feel like I was aware of the term before I was 14 years old), from which I quote:
"Without the work of E. Digby Baltzell, we might not know what to call George Bush, except Poppy.
"Baltzell invented the term “WASP.” Before the acronym first appeared in his 1964 book, ‘The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America,’ one had to spell out White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Although, having done so, you would have barely begun to communicate all that WASP had come to connote by the time of Baltzell’s death on Saturday, at age 80.
"‘The term took off,’ said Frank Furstenberg, a fellow sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, where Baltzell carved an impressive career from studying the nation’s elite when colleagues were more likely to lavish attention on the downtrodden.
“‘He happened to capture a portrait of a social class and a social time and a social place, when the power of the upper class was giving way and was being shared with a larger and more diverse group of individuals,’ Furstenberg said. ‘And Digby very much believed in that ideal.’”
"An ebullient, well-born Episcopalian, Baltzell spent his career warning the nation’s traditional elites to bring down their barriers against minorities or face the obsolescence that, in many ways, has come to pass. If he hastened the process by naming the group for an insect, Baltzell always claimed it was accidental. His book included tables that did not leave enough room in the headings for those four words.
"‘It was easier to just fit WASP in there,’ he once explained.
“In the literal sense, the term was more than a little redundant. Anglo-Saxons are pretty much always white, and quite often Protestant. But this acronym was always less about the words than about their sound. Saying ‘White Anglo-Saxon Protestant’ is like reading a checklist; it implies pedigree, hierarchy. It implied order, one that ‘people like us’ saw as their role to maintain, from the top of the heap.”
Despite its apparent specificity, the “Anglo-Saxon” part (which became popular in the late 19th c.) would exclude virtually every person in America – or in Great Britain, for that matter – with predominately English ancestry, since the Angles and Saxons, if they ever had a genetic make-up very different from other groups in their vicinity, had already, for centuries before (say) 1619, been mixing it up with various Celtic and Nordic peoples – not to mention Huguenots (mostly from Normandy and southern France) who found their way to England and the tradesmen like glaziers, some of them recently Jewish and all of them more Protestant than was usually welcomed in England, whom Elizabeth I encouraged to immigrate from what we think of as southern Germany. Also, like the Pilgrims, many Huguenots had spent enough time in the Lowlands to marry people from what we call Holland and Belgium before they ventured to England and/or America. Even the Angles and Saxons – Germanic peoples – intermarried with Celts, Picts, and descendants of whomever the Roman empire had brought to Britannia.
“Anglo-Saxon” is a term of no value of any kind.