Roy Rodgers said something like: 'Some men learn by reading and some men learn by being taught... and then there are the guys who have to pee on the electric fence...
Many people don’t think about politics nearly as much as others. I think Prof. Krugman is right when he says that some voters allowed themselves to be wooed that Trump could magically turn back the clock to the conditions before the pandemic — despite him having botched the handling of the pandemic.
However, when Trump first started saying that “immigrants are poisoning the blood of our country” in 2023, you knew things were going to be different. Throughout his campaign, Trump promised the "single largest Mass Deportation Program in History" and a "blitz" of enforcement, which would bring the mass detention of millions of immigrants. Much of this was documented in Project 2025.
Finally, when Trump filled Madison Square Garden with a fascist rally of anger, vitriol and racist threats last October, it was game over. No one with brown skin or a foreign name would be safe.
We downsized last year. The Latino men we interviewed to get our old house ready for market and to make repairs to our new house were confident the negative economic impact would limit deportations. They assumed Trump and his advisers would act rationally when money was involved. Also, the younger Latinos seemed caught up in the manosphere idea of “putting women in their place”.
In the past the Republican politicians were often play-acting their hate and either didn't believe it themselves or didn't think it was worth acting on when elected. So voters could find out the hateful party and grab onto the parts they liked. This time around the Republicans meant what they said and those careless voters brought ruin on us all.
This is so true. My grandmother was a Republican precinct worker in Orange County, California in the 1960s and 1970s. She told me in 1980 she supported Reagan although she was strongly pro-choice because he and other Republicans were just paying lip service to the anti-abortion rights movement. She said he and other Republicans would never follow through on their promises. She didn’t realize Republican leadership was setting itself up to eventually lose control of its base. Playing with matches rarely ends well.
This time around the extraterrestrial MAGA species on Earth believes there might never be a better time to mug the humans and take the planet for themselves. Toward that end, they seek control of the United States, then the rest of the western hemisphere, then the other continents.
NYT did a good job of interviewing Hispanics and those things were brought up. One Puerto Rican Trump supporter tied himself in knots parsing Trumps words like Puerto Rico is a garbage dump. (Trump was talking about the problem PR has in garbage collection.) to deny the real meaning behind Trump and MAGA.
The Hispanics who voted for Trump most likely were FOX viewers. Right wing media is totally different. So what we see, and what they saw was most likely different.
Many Hispanics are social conservatives, want limited immigration and are skeptical of too strong a safety net.
If they are sceptical, it is because they themselves can't afford the tax shift burden with has occurred under Trickle Down Economics. The only thing that has trickled down has been the tax burden to support government functions. Notice the hystaria among the rich for Mamdani asking for just 2% of their wealth! Nauseating!!
unfortunately we live in a world where it might even be by design that people dont have the luxury of time to think about anything beyond survival
no one can track everything happening...
i suggest looking at this vid (not mine) about the problem of time scarcity that leads to intelectual shortcuts of "following the masses" ...ie death of critical thinking
Wage Slaves, now being replaced by even ever growing AI just as offshore manufacturing first displaced labor unions and American workers and also robotics manufacturing replacing numbers of workers. Now the job of the Democratic Party is find a way that all that progress is Shared fairly amongst all of us American.Anybody taking a birds eye view of the distribution of wealth even way before the pandemic could see the working class prosperity shrinking and the Middle Class containing fewer and fewer people. Meanwhile Capitalism concentrated in fewer and fewer individuals hands. By the time that mutual funds, IRAs and 401Ks were developed the workers in our society had no ability to invest with no matter what vehicle was invented on Wall Street. They had already been reduced to hand of mouth and working two jobs to put a roof over their head and food on the table. Just look at the numbers of Americans legitimately on SNAP. 42 million!!! And Wall Street calling Mamdani A Communist because he is planning to redistribute only 2% of their wealth on a basis of everyone including the Billionaires eligible for the benefit including themselves, even if they don't need free bus rides or free early childhood care. They can still use it if they want. The amount is less than the interest alone on their obscene wealth, even if they just squat on it! They and their descendents can't possibly find a use for that money, hense the arise of A Jeffrey Epstein who offered even more heinous use of money because there was nothing else to buy for their amusement! Well back to the Democratic Party. Using Government to redistribute wealth should be its primary purpose and not in grudging bare survival amounts. Not in narrowly defined eligible groupings because this we know both stigmatizes recipients and causes jealousy The beauty of Social Security was everyone's eligibility. The Campaign by the wealthy to retain and grow all their wealth think To Much but Never Enough is the thinking here, was the effort starting with the Reagan Administration to destroy Government by propaganda on Fox, by Murdock richly rewarded with citizenship and Reagan with his ranch. They recognized that government was the only thing powerful enough to reign in their ambition and greed. We must as a society and using the Democratic Party, which is the least corrupted of the two, thanks to Bernie Sanders idea of funding the party with small donations, rebuild the power of government, starting with rebuilding the reputation with the half of society that Government has let get left behind. Nobody should be taught or allowed to think that only their contribution to society should be rewarded and someone else's isn't worth starvation wages. Essential workers anyone, didn't we learn that lesson in the pandemic. Labor discarded, didn't we learn anything from the fentinol crisis. Drug war in the 1980sand 90s ,didn't we learn that removing government support to a bonifid minority group through Welfare Reform led to an alternate means of support called drug trafficking? Please think about all this as we all weigh in on what we want our Country to be.
I know a Spanish speaking immigrant (not Mexican) who clearly thought that Trump would bring down grocery prices. She constantly complains about high prices and tells us about the stuff she buys. I don't think she sees a connection between tariffs and prices. She also may not realize she should probably not speak Spanish when she is out in public.
An acquaintance of mine that I bump into every few years is fond of pronouncing my first name in the Spanish fashion. That's not going to be funny any more.
The same can be said for poor white people in the South.Many with no critical thinking skills because of poor schools for generations and religion that just says obey with blind faith that you believe enough in what you can't see or t
I don't like to say this, but both racism and misogyny played a role in the most recent election. Hispanic men did go from 59% for Biden to 44% for Harris, but Hispanic women went from 72% to 61%. Poor whites in the South aren't the only victims of their own prejudice.
The Cities: In looking at the states, I noticed that the big urban counties constantly showed a shortfall. So I pulled out the biggest 30 cities and broke NYC into 4 boroughs. Harris lost 2.5 million votes from Biden in these cities; the loss accounted for 82% of the swing in the cities. Had she just held the Biden big city vote, she would have only been 200K behind in the popular vote. Had she kept the 9.9 million Biden margin in big cities, she would have won the popular vote. Harris underperformed Biden in every big city. The biggest dropoffs were Los Angeles (612K), Chicago (278K), Miami-Dade (138K), Queens (132K), San Diego (123K), Houston (109K), San José (107K), and Brooklyn (102K). By percentage, the biggest falls in overall turnout occurred in The Bronx (15%), LA (13.6%), and San José (13.3%). Convicted Felon Guy (CFG) gained votes in 24 of the 30 cities. The biggest swings by percentage are 22.5% in El Paso and a whopping 34.5% in The Bronx.
I believe this has a lot to do with the Hispanic vote. While I find no direct correlation between turnout and the percentage of Hispanic residents, there is a +.46 correlation (on a scale between -1 and +1) between Hispanic residency in a big city and the swing toward CFG. In turn there is a -.69 correlation between turnout and swing. I suggest that many Hispanics stayed home in anger over the Obama/Biden/Harris tough immigration policies and Harris’ promise to become even more punitive (the Lankford Bill). A few may have even voted for CFG in the belief that he would continue the largely performative policies of 2017-2020.
Continued, touch, you will get your rewards in an afterlife. They have had little hope in this life and when Trump said Trust Me I am the only one who can fix your problems, they have been preprogrammed for this for generations. Many poor Southerners moved North generations ago to work in Northern factories and brought their bigotry and religion with them as a legacy. I am a native Michigander Senior and come from a long line of native Michiganders. My Parents were from Ann Arbor and the Upper Peninsula. They used to tell me that in their youth people in Ann Arbor used to refer to Ypsilanti next door with its Ford Factory as Ypsitucky. Anyway I have noticed that the people in my apartment building that supported Trump this time around all have roots in the South. We are all moderate to low income Seniors and have all had major setbacks in life, but those who families started in Michigan voted for Harris this time around. Those whose families came North for the Industrial Revolution or later voted for Trump. Maybe a political scientist could unpack this differently or better than I, but this is the best I can do.
No. The problem with that paraphrasing is that it is insulting. Besides being needlessly degrading, insulting people works against building alliances. Many people have been wooed by Donald Trump, yet we should be glad that the Hispanic community has rejoined the coalition against him. Having one's community disappeared off the streets by masked thugs wearing skeleton-print gloves is a tragic way to learn one's lesson, so the learning should be respected.
fair enough... im not a politician and dont need to take extra care with my words to make it politically correct
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on the other hand if someone doesnt point out the problem of blindly following the masses without critical consideration... some people will repeat the same mistake in another context...
sometimes getting emotionally burned by a jibe from a stranger will lead to people not being burned by something actually harmful later? Alternative is to pretend their actions were right, protect their feelings... and let some of them experience worse pain later as they didnt get the lesson?
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as i said and strongly believe.... all people can learn and it is good that we are not all the same and uniform. So instead of being a "helicopter neighbor" why not use the situation as a harmless learning opportunity to prevent worse harm down the road
just a thing to consider
Re "needlessly degrading"..... so you think that the current outcome of ICE having such power is needless of scorn for those that enabled it?
what would it be required for someone to be allowed to call out people bringing tyrants on the throne? Concentration camps?.... oh right...
My pandemic mask had "Ignorance Kills" written in felt marker on it.
When harm to others results from willful ignorance, it should be addressed directly and bluntly. Truth and facts are not negotiable. Ignorance is curable only if the ignorant are willing to learn. Bias is harder; implicit bias is harder yet to change.
The problem with that is people who only watch right wing media think they are informed, but are intentionally misinformed. Right wing media keeps them from finding out by telling them all the other national news outlets are the ones lying to them.
The $787,500,000 settlement for Fox "news" intentionally lying to them for a year about the 2020 election being stolen isn't even a blip on their radar.
The problem with that is people who only watch right wing media think they are informed, but are intentionally misinformed. Right wing media keeps them from finding out by telling them all the other national news outlets are the ones lying to them.
The $787,500,000 settlement for Fox "news" intentionally lying to them for a year about the 2020 election being stolen isn't even a blip on their radar.
The problem with that is people who only watch right wing media think they are informed, but are intentionally misinformed. Right wing media keeps them from finding out by telling them all the other national news outlets are the ones lying to them.
The $787,500,000 settlement for Fox "news" intentionally lying to them for a year about the 2020 election being stolen isn't even a blip on their radar.
That Hispanics somehow fell for Trump in large numbers is a tragedy, because to so many of us, the outcome of their own votes hurting them was predictable. The notion of "needlessly degrading" applied not to masked ICE thugs (who have earned our scorn), but to applying a hierarchical judgement on Hispanics, suggesting that they were too stupid to learn what was obvious to others. Yes; their own votes hurt them, but it is in terrible taste to present them as being too low on the mental hierarchy to have seen in advance that their communities would be devastated by ICE thugs with at least the temporary approval of the Supreme Court. (Kavanaugh wrote that their detentions were okay because they were immediately released if ICE realized they had detained a legal person, even while ICE was not releasing those they knew, or should have known, were legal.) Beyond being in bad taste, there is nothing constructive about describing Hispanics as fools while they are reverting to their prior, wiser politics. It is not possible to build coalitions and create us-vs.-them hierarchies simultaneously. It's just good manners and good strategy to be respectful of those being harmed, even if they were inadvertent agents in their own harm.
Trump fooled many in the Hispanic community. Shame on Trump! But, glad to see them returning to their prior politics.
I am really bad about being judgmental....living beneath one's supposed social or socio-economic status can give one a perception of people others don't see. Kind of like the janitor being considered invisible and behaving in a way that one wouldn't in higher status company.
this is a common problem unfortunately... the divestment of those making the rules from the reality of those affected by the rules.
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personally, i would limit the income and benefits of the "ruling class" to the median of the country. So they experience for themselves what specific changes will mean.
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As long as they get to have paid vacation for not working and full healthcare... its easy for them to make rules increasing the costs of the same for the rest of the country
Its easy for them to underfund education while they know full well their kids will not be going to those schools... etc...
have i ever said hispanics as a whole are stupid? or you put that in my "mouth"?
the point stands that people are diverse. And that different people (IN EACH SUBGROUP - if you really need me to spell it out) learn differently.
As far as i know there are still white women, and white men and other subgroups that still vote for racism and bigotry when possible.
Neither of last weeks elections was 100% blue... thus MANY people still need to get burned personally to change their ways... as they seem to be resistant to learning from past mistakes of others...
what the rest of us need to do is make the learning process successful (even if it means point out mistakes that hurt their ego) if it means less mistakes that really hurt are made later
also take a look at the vid (not mine) that relatively quickly explains that people voting for charlatans are not necessarily stupid, just out of time to fully think things out.
People feel they can get away with intellectual shortcuts as the decisions are harmless... but hopefully, when more people get to understand that such decisions are not really harmless (ie by experiencing negatives themselves) they will be more cautious next time and somehow find enough time and will to invest time in rational or at least informed voting preference
and finally, its great to be respectful, just dont be too coddling. people do need to know that cause and effect are related. If you let anyone retreat to a world of fantasy where their decisions are not connected to the outcomes (everything is the fault of others, poor luck ...divine will) you remove their sense of agency, and why would they bother thinking about it next time either.
build coalitions on painful truth and facts .. vs comforting lies and fantasy of what you think others would wish to hear. in the end it will be stronger and more honest. And of course, if the problem is actually systemic, try offering systemic solutions
Yes. You said that Hispanics were stupid when you created a hierarchy in which the superior people learned through abstract reasoning, but the fools had to get hurt before they could understand.
I will add, denial kills. It is a different sort of ignorance. I think many who voted for trump were and still are in denial. They are not ignorant. Waking up from denial usually requires a jolt of some sort. The election suggests many have been jolted and are not in denial anymore. Fingers crossed more and more wake up out of the fog. Likely won’t happen until they or their neighbor or children are personally affected. The falling approval rating is more evidence people are waking up.
As Foo Fighters shouted out "It's times like these you learn to live again It's times like these you give and give again". This is the way forward! Communities fighting back, by voting, are part of this nation that embraces change. What we have been taught and learned. Change is why people want to come here. The need to scrape this administration off the bottom of our shoe becomes more and more apparent daily. This last administration choice likens to grabbing a knife by the blade and attempting to carve a place in history with the hilt. Does it not seem like the Mikey's Shutdown is the Coup?
Conservative Hispanics Latinos Asians hate LGBTQ PEOPLE. I'm not sure that the GOP MAGA has lost them in greater numbers as we think. Pick me Latinos and Hispanics are perfectly fine with throwing their brothers and sisters less fortunate from them into a wood chipper.
When I was younger and learning about things like the Holocaust, I used to comfort myself by remembering that the old Nazis and other bigots eventually died off, and we got a new fresh crop of babies with blank slates that don't have those conditioned hatreds.
Later I realized that the "blank slate" condition works both ways: Babies are raised into their parents' tribal beliefs and religions, so the cycle continues.
The cycle also continues because the lessons of history are easily forgotten once no one with first hand knowledge is around.
By the 2016 there were very few people born in 1930 or earlier around. By 2024 even fewer. It doesn’t surprise me that’s when fascism rose from the grave.
FWIW, I see the *narrative* as being more important than the memory. The anniversaries that have these very old Nazi camp survivors reciting their "experience" (which is really a heavily re-crafted and edited story they have honed over the years) are just rituals using human totems, rather than a report of what actually happened.
The only "first hand knowledge" that has any plausible value is something recorded soon after the event, because human "memory" about important things can evolve a lot over time.
I was handing out flyers for no kings 1 and got into a conversation with an Hispanic man in the DC mall. I thought by then he'd know exactly what Krugman is saying... But he let me know that he was a citizen and had done it "right" and supported Trump. I answered "before the year is out you or someone you love will be impacted by ICE, remember this conversation then". We went back and forth repeating ourselves, and parted. I hope he gets it now and that he and those he loves are safe.
I was speaking with a nurse from Peru who was caring for my husband. She was educated as an engineer, but once in the U.S., she found nursing to be a more lucrative career. She was mostly still OK with Trump's ICE men. She eventually admitted that their tactics are a bit brutal, but she was convinced they were only rounding up criminals, rapists, drug-added people who came here illegally (thus becoming law breakers), who deserved what they got. It will take a while.
Let me guess: she thinks she's pale enough to be safe. Colorism is why Latinos don't feel solidarity with each other.
Show her the videos of the American citizens and daycare workers being hauled away. Show her that Yes, Even Light-Skinned Latinos Are Being Disappeared.
Which is why I won’t bother to try. People just dig in and shut down. But that doesn’t mean they can’t change their own minds. Some do figure out the mistake for themselves, and that is the best you can hope for. They need to be enveloped in an accurate information rich environment that they can absorb.
Quite a lot of American voters believed that although they belonged to the group Trump was promising to persecute, THEY would be exempt from Trump and Heritage Society/Proj 2025's malice... because he was only going after "the worst illegal criminals". They thought THEIR faces wouldn't be eaten. Not just Hispanic-Americans, but a lot of poor white people (SNAP, Medicaid, etc) believed the absolute garbage talking point that Trump was only going after genuine, proven in court, criminals. And now his mask wearing, no ID, goon squad ICE is "disappearing" people
“For good” is not forever, but probably at least a generation. The Black vote was the Democrats’ to lose after 1965, just as it was the Republicans’ after 1865.
A very important point made in Ian Haney-Lopez's book published in 2015 and titled "Dog Whistle Politics, How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class" himself a "WHITE HISPANIC", predicted that demographic changes would not save us from racial appeals because most Hispanics think of themselves as White because they are White and therefore are as suspectable as all White Americans are to racism.
This is also my own experience with Hispanics who I know both professionally and personally. They are White and like most White women who do not like overt racist appeals are otherwise at best ambivalent to racism.
That is Hispanics understood that Trump was the candidate of White Christian nationalism and as White Christians themselves to the extent Trump and Republican racism mattered it was not necessarily a negative.
To be sure, this is not new or news. Republicans voters believe in two sets of morals and standards, one for themselves and another for everyone else. That is most Republican voters are Republican voters because they believe the favored set of standards, the ones that allow a convicted felon to be president but takes a teacher who has complied with all legal requirements to be arrested while teaching children and throws her out of the country.
That is what Hispanic voters are finding out is that they are not in the White privileged group and are bound but not protected by the law.
Will it, as it was in the case of Jews, a lesson that will take or will the lesson pass in a few years cannot be predicted at this time. That is from time to time the White working class also learns this lesson but forgets it in a few years.
As Professor Krugman points out, Jews tend to be better educated and as a result are more economically affluent than most in the White working class. So again, I think how Hispanics vote in future election is a much less settled than does Professor Krugman.
Quickly, for evidence of this I point to the Catholic and especially the Irish Catholic experience the Haney-Lopez bases his conclusions that Hispanics will not save us from Republican appeals to racism. More than Jews, Moslems, Hindus or any other religious group, Catholics were the most discriminated religious minority in America for over 150 years.
Prohibition for example was seen by its supporters as above all else an anti-Catholic and especially and anti-Irish Catholic law. The state of Maine, which at the time did not have enough Black people for a good basketball team or Jews for banking system but had a very high percentage of Catholics also had as large a per-capita membership in the KKK as any state in the union. For those who wonder about this there are 3 groups the KKK is against, Blacks, Jews and Catholics.
Noting again that most Hispanics are Catholics and that most non-Hispanic White Catholics today vote mostly for Republicans and support of Donald Trump, I still agree more with Haney-Lopez than I do Paul Krugman on this topic.
Funny. I just saw this exact message on the bumper of a car at the gas station today. The guy driving must’ve been about 20 years of age. Brings to mind The Darwin Awards.
Meanwhile, FBI Association issues an unprecedented statement that Trump's FBI Director Patel has "disregarded the law & launched a campaign of erratic & arbitrary retribution" against agents & others for doing their jobs. "When leadership abandons due process it doesn't just erode trust--it makes Americans less safe". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAHdU-NtVZM
When you appoint a guy FBI director who has proclaimed his hatred of the FBI, a. health science denier head of your Health Dept, an alcoholic buffoon to instill "warrior spirit" in the Defense Dept...
When you put together the rust injected at every level and in every institution you start to remember what Benedict Arnold was up to before he was discovered.
Or when you appoint an unqualified media hack to be transportation secretary and he makes a difficult situation with air traffic control worse by continuing to parrot the GOP gaslighting and blame Democrats while slashing the number of domestic flights coming into the holidays...
They have been purging the right people, in FBI, Armed Forces, etc. Right now this is only an observation. After a while, it will be irreversible without worse pain (edited in response to a fair comment received by chris lemon).
And now, even though I’m angry at those who refused to see the truth before them, I’m really just sad. We are months from being able to reverse this catastrophe. It’s so awful.
Oh for Pete's sake. Voters knew EXACTLY what Trump was going to do, because HE TOLD US. They chose to listen only to Fox and think "it won't happen to me". How any Hispanic or Black or woman could vote for Trump and Rs is beyond me.
Right. When Trump ran in 2016, he told us he was going to “build the wall.” He didn’t. (Don’t believe claims that Congress or the “deep state” stopped him.) So complaining that voters didn’t believe Trump’s campaign promises in 2024 is complaining that voters are not sufficiently gullible. Project 2025 was a better guide to what a second Trump Administration might look like, but reading it wouldn’t allow you to predict the extremes to which ICE is going under Trump.
I’m not defending Trump voters; I’m rejecting the claim that Trump is predictable. I prefer to vote for candidates who are sufficiently predictable that I can confidently predict that they won’t cause major harm to the United States.
As an aside, I wish economist Paul Krugman would address the reasons for low prices and mortgage rates in the late 2010s. The data at the StLouis Fred site seems to show them declining during the 2008 financial crisis and remaining ahistorically low for the next decade, which is similar to the post-1929 deflationary period. So reducing prices and mortgage rates would mean generating another financial crisis and increase in unemployment.
Yes. And if over 30% still favor Trump (as per The Economist) then I reckon in a couple of election cycles a large chunk of the rest could easily go back to supporting the GOP.
It’s not like the media does a good job of reminding them. Journalists and pundits are too busy playing gotcha and looking for candidates who are exciting and “more fun to have a beer with”. The uber serious “Dean of Washington Journalists” David Broder openly complained that Al Gore had talked so much about what he would do if elected Broder almost fell asleep. This criticism was about Gore’s acceptance speech for the nomination! I watched that speech and the crowd loved it. I still wonder what the heck Broder thought Gore should have talked about. What type of beer he likes to drink?
This is as true as the sun will rise tomorrow morning! What is tragic- saddening- terrible-- find the most negative adjective- still will not express the tragic destruction of a country ! Let me first set aside the relevance of the saying " man does not live by bread alone"... EVERYBODY is claiming food prices killed it.
REALLY, not eating 6 eggs at higher prices made Hispanics mad?
So mad that they gave up blindness for getting cheaper burritos?
It is not the only community- A LOT OF US here followed that trap. And caused blindly to lose a nation's " inner strength”.
Here are the tragic losses the bread lovers will never recover from
- world class Universities
-World-class unrivaled Research Capabilities in many Institutions in Science and Medicine
All this downward decent for expectations of more gas and a few pennies lower prices of bread!!!!
Know that Kazhakastan has broadcast to the world the Gov will entice 150,000 international students in its brand new Universities - teaching every kind of subject that one can imagine.
Yeah, 30%+ of Americans have something seriously wrong with them. Stupidity? Gullibility? Rage? Herd mentality I think is a major component. Fortunately that herd could stampede the other direction.
Our national security team was aware that there had been previous terrorist plots to hijack planes and fly them into buildings. I think that was somewhere in Europe. The Bush administration had tons of advanced warnings that something big was likely going to happen and plane hijackings had been a common terrorist tactic yet Bush did not put our airports on high alert.
Bush brushed off the guy who brought him the report about buildings potentially being hit - I forget the exact quote but it was something along the lines of, "Fine, you've done your job..." Completely dismissive.
I read that too. Anything Clinton did had to be wrong. The one thing that I have read several times is also they were convinced that only a state actor could attack us on a big scale which is why they wouldn’t drop the idea that Saddam was behind the attack. Of course it also fit their other objective of getting control of his oil fields.
That was nothing but a CYA excuse. Passenger jets had been hijacked for decades, buildings had been bombed (including the WTC) for ages. It didn't take a genius or great insight to combine the two, and the only surprise is that it didn't happen sooner.
Hollywood has also imagined giant ants infesting the storm drains of Los Angeles. And rains of pelagic sharks. And using the Antikythera mechanism to go back in time. The screen writers don't have crystal balls.
Agreed. He basically laid out what he'd do during his next term as soon as he got booted out of office in 2021. So anyone who's surprised by what Trump's doing was either not paying attention or didn't care.
Of course the vast majority of Black women and the majority of Hispanic women were astute enough to vote for Harris. On the other hand, white women who have expressed surprise at the rollback of their rights and job opportunities really do deserve to be challenged.
Truth sneaks in slowly. It was clear that the invasion of Iraq was based on lies but look how many people fell for it. It took years for the truth to sift into consciousness. Now magas hate the Republican elites who lied to them.
That's an interesting question. It's one thing for former conservatives to either 1) second-guess their intellectual premises or 2) steer away from the awful place where the GOP has drifted now, or 3) both. But that describes people who once held "responsible views" that they must now re-evaluate as well-intentioned but perhaps wrong-headed. It's way more difficult to credit anyone who has actually embraced MAGA as having enough idealism or self-respect and/or intelligence to re-evaluate anything. There is no well-intentioned good faith there; no reserve from which to draw on for re-evaluation.
I can imagine people who barely pay attention pinging from MAGA to its alternative. And that could include a lot of voters. But for anyone who has ever truly bought in on MAGA, it's difficult for me to imagine how they can recover (their soul). I do not personally know any who seem to be knocking on that door.
At one point my work required me to research “Life Skills” classes offered to women on welfare after the Welfare Reform Act of 1996. I sat in on a class of young white isolated rural mothers who were considered unemployable because they lacked even the most basic skills of bathing regularly and awakening at specific times in the morning. As I listened it seemed their community elders had purposely kept them as ignorant and unemployable as possible, which fit with the religious idea of women as simply reproductive vessels. So in some cases it really isn’t the fault of ignorant person.
Nailed it! Remember George Carlin's line about half of the population being dumber than average? Officials in Kentucky had to field numerous complaints that Kentucky polling places were closed on Tuesday. Those voters had to be advised that Kentucky wasn't having elections this year and they couldn't vote for NYC mayor, NJ and VA governors, or Prop 50 in California. 🙄
In my SC county, which includes a lot of rural areas and unincorporated "towns," the local Democratic Party office fielded dozens of calls asking where people who live in those areas should go to vote. They seemed to have a difficult time understanding that the fact that their mailing address was a town, they did not actually live in the town. But we have one of the fastest growing areas in the country, so perhaps they were new here. I've seen it many times in conversation too, a person telling me they live in such-and-such town, when they live miles outside the city limits.
If we write off the gullible, Trump voters, his electoral coalition remains in place, and we will forever have to deal with Trumpist fascism. Please be strategic and ask yourself which is worse: living in a Trumpist state or having to educate stupid voters. Let’s not confuse personal worth with building electoral coalitions. On a one-to-one level, of course you will always remember that the Trump voter who changes his or her tune now was a stupid person who you cannot trust in the future. For example, you’ll never name that person as a successor trustee for your family trust. However, that shouldn’t mean you will not vote in coalition with them and against Trump.
The context here though is first-time Trump voters in 2024. I agree that people who have been with him since before covid are like a brick wall. Apparently a good chunk of his 2024 voters are more flexible.
“Winning them over” won’t help anything unless they learn some important lessons. Voting for Trump was an irresponsible decision, and it was always going to lead to misery.
The thing that’s needed in the long run is a cultural change that expects adult-aged people to behave like responsible adults. This is partly about taking their votes seriously, but it’s mostly about taking an interest in the interests of their fellow citizens generally.
We are always next in line. How true. I have never understood other Jews who are anti-immigrant.-Oh yeah, there is the creepy Mr. Miller in the White House, he is one of those guys. What is so hard to understand here.. you lift up those who need it the most and you lift up everyone.
in my town of Dover NJ, we are also a very heavily Hispanic town and my neighbprs are definitely pissed at how people like them are targeted. One citizen (naturalized) keeps copies of her documents with her at all times. This is madness and hardly represents the open and friendly America that we once were.
OMG, I do so love Paul's musical tastes! One of my all time favorites -- "The Way It Is" -- I was around when it came out. The bottom line to all this is in Verse 3:
Well, they passed a law in '64
To give those who ain't got a little more
But it only goes so far
'Cause the law don't change another's mind
When all it sees at the hiring time
Is the line on the color bar
I remember '64...not much has changed -- in people's minds.
Yes. As a relatively coherent group despite its many cultural and even religious differences, the Jews have a long memory, and that memory has made them wary of autocrats. And, I suspect, the unifying and sublime uber-commandment of Tikkun Olan--Leave this world a better place than you found it--has had a role to play also. The intentions we hold most dear has a lot to do with who we are and what we will do, and not do.
The Republicans have spent decades trying to make (((us))) single issue voters for Israel and it’s been a complete failure. Even though most American Jews are sympathetic to Israel to one degree or another. They just don’t understand that other issues motivate us too. Most critically right now, we know that authoritarian environments will eventually turn their sights on us too.
The weird thing is that right wing evangelical “Christians” are people who always vote in favor of an extreme form of Zionism. They believe Jesus will only return to earth and rapture them all up to heaven (as if they qualify as true Christians!) when all of the historical Biblical lands that had been controlled by Jews is retaken by them. That is a far more extensive area and includes parts of neighboring countries. They believe that after that happens Jews will be sent to hell along with all the rest of us evil sinners. So they are in fact antisemitic Zionists. Sadly I know a few and they are serious about this — dead serious.
I really don’t care if people want to believe in God or not. I don’t but there are a lot of people I respect who do — but not in a “magical man in the sky” kind of way. In fact it would be great if all those people who claim to be Christian really followed the teachings and example of Jesus.Take care of those in need, love/respect everyone, turn the other cheek, don’t be driven by greed or feel superior to others, etc. Jesus is what inspired my hero Martin Luther King Jr.
"Oh the Protestants hate the Catholics, And the Catholics hate the Protestants, And the Hindus hate the Muslims, And everybody hates the Jews." - Tom Lehrer.
That was not what things were like when I was growing in the 50s and 60s up as a Catholic in Appalachia — although we Catholics were viewed with some suspicion by the older fundamentalists. We had a few Jewish families and even one Muslim family from Egypt and we had a lot of low poverty white kids. But we all went to the same school which goes a long way to undoing old prejudices. My senior class president was a black. He won handily even though the school was 90% white and he ran against just one other person who was also a good candidate. No one even remarked on his race. It was perfectly normal and he gave the better speech.
My parents talked about how it was like that when they were growing up in NYC in the 20s and 30s and people were immigrants or their parents were. Even the Catholics discriminated against each other. Irish Catholics looked down on the Italians and they both looked down on the Polish and Hispanic Catholics. They all lived in their own neighborhoods and attended their own Catholic schools so they never got to know each other. It freaks me out that so many are trying to return to that kind of world with vouchers. The good news is most of my southern city’s schools are well integrated by both income and racial and ethnic groups. My grandkids are all getting a great education in those public schools and the mixed demographics groups seem perfectly normal to them as they did to me and my friends.
I grew up in East Tennessee. During the early '60s, the black kids were all bussed to Austin High on the east side of town. The Catholic kids went to Catholic High on the north side of the old city. The Jewish kids were mixed in with the rest of us, but there was no orthodox community there. In about '65, they integrated the school system and we got some local black kids in my school. The Catholic kids stayed at their high school, which may have been run by the church.
My mother remained there and fed us all the gossip until she died. According to her, several private schools were established to allow people to re-segregate the school system. White kids with well-to-do parents didn't have to mix with "their inferiors." Some of these schools kept Jewish kids out, in addition to black kids.
That is why I am so thankful that my parents moved us from Queens (not far from where the Donald was growing up —ugh) to a small town. There was no way to have separate schools in such a small community so I went to school from k -12 with the same mixed groups of kids with few changes. There is such an advantage to really know so many kids and their parents who are from such different groups. I am thrilled my grandkids are getting the same kind of experience but in my city there are even more groups. We had no Indian, Hispanic or Chinese families when I was growing up.
I know plenty of true Christians who are nothing like you describe. They really work hard to live up to their beliefs by doing things like Meals on Wheels, visiting nursing homes, working at food banks, going with doctors groups to third world countries. I even have one friend who visits prisoners. And they accept me even though I don’t believe in God.
I hope more people buy John Fugelsang’s book “Separation of Church and Hate” which is a guide to pushing back against those faux Christians using their own supposed beliefs. If becomes a huge seller the mainstream “liberal” media that has normalized these dangerous extremists as representative of Christians might have to address this issue.
I am still furious that Tim Russert regularly had the odious Jerry Falwell on to represent the Christian point of view. Russert kept having him on as an honored guest even after Falwell had hawked the crackpot, wildly slanderous “Clinton Chronicles” on his Old Time Gospel Hour show. That video accused Clinton of running a drug smuggling operation and having had scores of people killed. Falwell’s excuse was he didn’t know if any of it was true, he was just asking the questions — and making a lot of money in the process.
I hope Paul is right, but I suspect that something else is happening. We have a two party system. The argument that "if you don't vote for a Democrat or a Republican you have wasted your vote" is mostly true. We live in times of significant hardship to a large percentage of the population. In each election, people vote for the "other guy" because the guy in office "is not getting it done". The "other guy" gets into office and also does not make any meaningful progress in making people's lives better. Yeah, I know that Biden did a lot of things, but if you didn't buy a house 20 years ago you will probably never buy a house. Rent costs an increasing percentage of your income. If you get sick, you go broke. Education is supposed to provide for a better life but it doesn't and you are still left with a lifetime of debt paying for the education.
It's great that MAGA/GOP/Trump had a thumb put in their collective eye on Tuesday, but if we want to defeat right-wing populism we need to fix the problems.
I agree with your assessment but remember where both parties derive their power-wall street, corporate and the wealthy's money that buy influence to rig tax laws in their favor, continue to socialize their losses even when committing fraud continue wage theft for working families and prevent union organizing (Obama promised card check but renegged). Until the money is taken out, changes will be incremental for most Americans.
I’m not sure if it will ever be possible to take money out of politics, although I wholeheartedly agree with you that nothing will change unless it is. I’ve often thought I’d make a great politician who works hard for ALL of my constituents, regardless of whether or not they voted for me, but I don’t have the money necessary to run a successful campaign. Unfortunately, winning takes more than time (of the candidate and volunteers) and always has. It takes money, and the people with money to spare always want something in return for parting with it. I couldn’t live with being beholden to anyone like that, hence why I’ve never even considered running for any position at any level of government. And I have a feeling I’m not alone in that. My dream is rather than taking money out of politics, anyone who wants to contribute financially must do so through a centralized fund, and all candidates for that particular position receive an equal amount to spend on their campaign. Or something along those lines…some way to level the playing field so good people aren’t deterred from running for financial reasons.
Unfortunately, IMO, the First Past the Post system we use locks in a two-party system. Has been since parties started in the late 1790's. we need to think about other election systems: Ranked Choice voting, multi-member districts (so instead of voting for 1 person, you have 2-3 Representatives in each district, which gives a shot to others to get elected).
I also think we also need to expand the House. For over 100 years, until 1920, after every census, the size of the House was increased. Then in 1920, they couldn't agree on a new size and locked us into 435 Representatives (https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-the-house-got-stuck-at-435-seats/). At at a time when the US population was 106 million, while the 2020 census is 331 million (https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/dec/popchange-data-text.html) That means there was 1 Rep for every ~243,000 people then, it's now 1 for every ~760,000 - over three times as many. I recommend we return to increasing the House size, using the Cube-Root metric that seems to work (not too big, not too small - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cube_root_law) - which would give us 692 reps, or 1 for every ~478,000 individuals. Although I would require the number of members to be odd (round up), to reduce the chance of a tie vote, which would make it 693, for 1 for every ~477,000 people.
All of the above don't require a change to the Constitution, just passing laws. In some cases (like Ranked Choice) at the state level.
And if we increased the number of Representatives, that would make the House too small to seat everyone. We would have to have a seating system like the English Parliament.
Are we really going to say 'We can't have a more representative legislature because the building is too small?' We can build arches and ballrooms but not a larger chamber? I bet we can fix that.
I keep hearing about a new 90,000-square foot building planned for downtown Washington, DC. Maybe that could be the new House chamber?
Seriously, I did the arithmetic a while back, about what the number would be if we applied the "Wyoming Rule" to the House, making Congressional districts all with the same population as the least-populated state. More than 600 seats. Long overdue.
The problem with the "Wyoming Rule" is it also means that the number of members of the House can drastically change with each new census. For example, in the 1900s, the Wyoming Rule would have had the House varying in size from 480 to 1,833 (https://thirty-thousand.org/blog/the-wyoming-rule/ - check out the chart). Even worse, it ends up requiring CUTS to the number of Representatives, even with an increasing population, as can be seen by the chart. All based on changes in the population of the smallest state.
Better (IMO) a rule that provides a gradual, predictable chance in the size of the House, based on the total population of the USA.
I didn't offer it as a rigid formula, but as a step away from the undemocratic imbalance inherent in the Senate and Electoral College. We'll never have perfect balance down to the individual level, but state delegations already change with the decennial census, so an orderly reappointment every ten years could still achieve the goal of one person-one vote.
The current mid-decade gerrymandering going on now is a completely different situation that spotlights the need for a federal umbrella of basic election-fairness rules. Congress has express constitutional authority to occupy any parts of the default state regulation of elections, unlike Trump's ideas about imposing rules by executive order. The Executive branch simply doesn't have the authority.
I don't see a deal-breaker in some variability of the final number of representatives taking place every ten years. Something similar already happens by shifting seats from shrinking states to growing states after the census. It's an orderly process. The problem is that Wyoming voters have more per capita political clout than, for example, Californians. Increasing the number of districts to equalize that imbalance could help break the current sclerosis in Congress. With red Texas and Florida being among the most populous states, it wouldn't necessarily unduly empower the big blue states.
You say that like it's a bad thing. After WWII, when they rebuilt the UK Parliament, Winston Churchill deliberately kept the size small - because the real work doesn't happen in the chambers, but in the various committee rooms. "he insisted the Chamber should not be big enough to seat all its Members at once and that no Member should have a seat reserved because it was a privilege to be there at all. " (https://www.restorationandrenewal.uk/palace/extraordinary-history/churchill-and-palace)
Watch C-SPAN - except for the State of the Union address, you almost never see the room even close to filled.
The bigger impact will be finding office spaces for them - but it can be done because it's been done in the past. Be a lot better if we'd been increasing the size of the House for the last 100 years.
You misunderstand me. I don't regard it as a bad thing. It would eliminate the aisle that Representatives are afraid to cross. I think it would also result in a few broohahas as people try to find seats. It might produce good results if people from different parties were forced to sit next to each other.
It will be interesting to watch the 2026 election results in Texas. The gerrymandering is partially based on an underlying assumption that the Hispanic voters who switched to voting Republican would stay with Republicans in 2026. If there is a massive shift back Republicans could actually lose House seats in Texas.
Professor Krugman: you wrote: “So Tuesday showed that the Hispanic vote has re-realigned. And my prediction is that this won’t be a pendulum. Republicans had their chance to win over a new bloc of voters; but by indulging Trump’s violent racism and nativism, they have lost them and will probably never get them back.”
gawds, i certainly hope that the hispanic vote has fled the GOP forever. FAFO, plain and simple.
Immigration isn’t always a major motivator for Latino voters, but the Republicans threw away growing support for them twenty years ago too. Dubya was popular among Latino voters, they liked him as Texas governor and he got something like 40% of their vote in 2004.
And then immigration became a hot issue again, 2006 I believe. Dubya was willing to work with the Democrats on immigration to get something else passed, and the rest of the party revolted.
The problem is that they now know that ICE will sweep up anyone who looks Hispanic and will detain them, sometimes when they are American citizens. I have a neighbor who is a citizen but always carries her passport and has her teenage son do the same but she knows even that isn’t a guarantee against being swept up in a Kavanaugh stop. She is beyond horrified.
I read about one businessman who carries his "Real Id" and passport all the time, but has been repeatedly hauled in and detained for a day or more. My guess is that the local ICE 'tards are trying to put him out of business.
Could this also be an indication that something might be awfully wrong with our educational system? Why would voters, knowing Mr. Trump's history, think he would be a solution to their economic problems?
You’re not exactly wrong, but politics has always been very emotional. Trump makes some low-propensity voters feel a certain way, as long as he’s on the ballot and as long as he’s just talking. They’ll hear what they want to hear in his chaotic contradictory statements.
I believe the right wing has been working hard for decades to dumb down the electorate to the point where they are easily led and manipulated. "God" being injected into our public schools just leads to relying on "belief" rather than "fact" when it comes to making important decisions and we see this a lot nowadays with the mindless parroting of Fox talking points.
I think most of them don't know DonnyJon's history. They believe that he's a successful businessman (he never was that good). They also believe that a successful businessman is the best person to run the country. They don't know about his bankruptcies and the way he cheated employees and contractors (or they regard that as "smart business"). His flouting of laws is regarded as "witch hunts" on the part of his enemies. Many of the men wish that they too could treat women the way Trump did, and many of the women think that DonnyJon's victims probably did something to deserve it.
So true. Some immigrants feel safe, as they believe they live in a law abiding country, with law abiding governments, and they think, as long as they are legal and follow the laws of the land they are living in, nothing can happen to them. And they can look down on the new arrivals, if they are not quite to their "model citizens " level as yet. But they forget that racism and bigotry is alive and well, and when espoused as a policy by a Government, who doesn't abide by the law of the land, they are no longer safe. They forgot (and not just them, many in the USA and the UK) this poem from the German pastor Martin Niemöller. "First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a Communist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me," . The poem is attributed to Martin Niemöller, who was a prominent Protestant pastor in Germany and initially supported Nazism before becoming an opponent and was imprisoned for his anti-Nazi views. Take note people.
And they chose a country where they would feel safer and become more prosperous than they could be “at home”. Having lost the comforts of home, it is hard to believe that this was somehow a scam. Must be just the current guy not making our lives better even after we worked so hard to become citizens and voters here. The feeling of having become an American (or more likely, the parents having come and sacrificed to help them be Americans and have their lives be better) leaves a lot of room for disappointment.
Remember Hispanic voters ARE citizens, have invested their hopes and dreams in this country no less than the Irish or Italians or Poles. 80% of them think of themselves as white. The shock of discovering that they are not seen as “white enough” to be given full citizenship without question has been hard on many.
The analogy with Jews is accurate. In Germany assimilated Jews like my ancestors really hated the “Ostjuden” who came from Poland, Russia, Ukraine etc. and who were socially more conservative thus discrediting their “culturally advanced“ co-ethnics. The US „culture war” has enlisted conservative Hispanics in fighting their battles.
The term Hispanic is an American creation. Latin America has different peoples, even different language. A big part of the population is European in origin. I am entirely European, born in Europe from same ancestry and in US I am Hispanic. How odd.
Regarding the reaction to inflation and wages, in 2025 I asked a small group of people I interact with online (but have never met) how they were doing financially compared to 2019 all but one person was doing better (often *much* better) in 2024 than in 2019.
One other guy would not admit he was doing better at first and just ranted about inflation. But finally she said
"Yes, I am making 37% more than I was in 2019. But that is because I have good negotiating skills. But inflation is Biden's fault"
Actually that guy shares a lot of Fox News videos, too. I think it was right wing media who persuaded him that he's miserable.
Also interesting is how macho Latino culture is or isn’t. Not voting for a female president? Evidence of sexism. But they just voted decisively for a female governor. There are different ethnicities, nationalities, and generations in the Latino world, and the story will evolve.
I would agree with you, Mr. Krugman. But doesn't this inevitably happen when a political party begins to regard a voting bloc as a cohesive mass rather than a discrete collection of individuals? When anyone begins to use the phrase, "oh, you know... Jews (or Hispanics or LGBTQ folk or Catholics, or South Asians or whomever) always vote for _____________ you may be pretty sure that individual is indulging in sweeping statements that surely will -- at some point in the future -- be proven incorrect. Republicans in recent years have become too comfortable in listening to their own voices telling one another that the Hispanic vote was theirs.
I am sure there is some validity to the economic perspective, but I think the reality of Trump's anti-immigrant policies are also playing a significant role. It's one thing to talk about getting rid of criminal and gang elements prior to an election and another to realize that not only are your friends and neighbors in the crosshairs, but the racist Supreme Court has now said it is OK for ICE to stop you in the street and maybe arrest and deport you because you "look" you might be one of "them."
Sometimes you have to touch the stove and get burnt to understand the assignment
you should have paraphrased it to ...
Some people need to touch the stove and get burnt to learn.
Some people need to only hear of others making the mistake to not fall for it themselves.
Some people can extrapolate from current knowledge and know a hot stove is not to be touched in advance of making the mistake.
All get to learn eventually .....so there is the light at the end of a dim tunnel.
Roy Rodgers said something like: 'Some men learn by reading and some men learn by being taught... and then there are the guys who have to pee on the electric fence...
Will Rogers said it.
I have always suspected that, but ol'Roy used it as well.
Thank you! Didn’t know! So appropriate for Paul’s post!
I collect great quotes. They give me a lot of pleasure in my dotage.
John Lyly, in his Elizabethan era prose work. Euphues, also made this point.
i know i read the same somewhere...sometime... but i cant recall where/when/who wrote it at that time...
still the image stuck with me so im sharing it back to the interwebs ...
Many people don’t think about politics nearly as much as others. I think Prof. Krugman is right when he says that some voters allowed themselves to be wooed that Trump could magically turn back the clock to the conditions before the pandemic — despite him having botched the handling of the pandemic.
However, when Trump first started saying that “immigrants are poisoning the blood of our country” in 2023, you knew things were going to be different. Throughout his campaign, Trump promised the "single largest Mass Deportation Program in History" and a "blitz" of enforcement, which would bring the mass detention of millions of immigrants. Much of this was documented in Project 2025.
Finally, when Trump filled Madison Square Garden with a fascist rally of anger, vitriol and racist threats last October, it was game over. No one with brown skin or a foreign name would be safe.
IKR? Hundreds (thousands?) of people waving signs that said, "Mass Deportations Now" - what did people think was gonna happen?
We downsized last year. The Latino men we interviewed to get our old house ready for market and to make repairs to our new house were confident the negative economic impact would limit deportations. They assumed Trump and his advisers would act rationally when money was involved. Also, the younger Latinos seemed caught up in the manosphere idea of “putting women in their place”.
In the past the Republican politicians were often play-acting their hate and either didn't believe it themselves or didn't think it was worth acting on when elected. So voters could find out the hateful party and grab onto the parts they liked. This time around the Republicans meant what they said and those careless voters brought ruin on us all.
This is so true. My grandmother was a Republican precinct worker in Orange County, California in the 1960s and 1970s. She told me in 1980 she supported Reagan although she was strongly pro-choice because he and other Republicans were just paying lip service to the anti-abortion rights movement. She said he and other Republicans would never follow through on their promises. She didn’t realize Republican leadership was setting itself up to eventually lose control of its base. Playing with matches rarely ends well.
This time around the extraterrestrial MAGA species on Earth believes there might never be a better time to mug the humans and take the planet for themselves. Toward that end, they seek control of the United States, then the rest of the western hemisphere, then the other continents.
NYT did a good job of interviewing Hispanics and those things were brought up. One Puerto Rican Trump supporter tied himself in knots parsing Trumps words like Puerto Rico is a garbage dump. (Trump was talking about the problem PR has in garbage collection.) to deny the real meaning behind Trump and MAGA.
The Hispanics who voted for Trump most likely were FOX viewers. Right wing media is totally different. So what we see, and what they saw was most likely different.
Many Hispanics are social conservatives, want limited immigration and are skeptical of too strong a safety net.
If they are sceptical, it is because they themselves can't afford the tax shift burden with has occurred under Trickle Down Economics. The only thing that has trickled down has been the tax burden to support government functions. Notice the hystaria among the rich for Mamdani asking for just 2% of their wealth! Nauseating!!
unfortunately we live in a world where it might even be by design that people dont have the luxury of time to think about anything beyond survival
no one can track everything happening...
i suggest looking at this vid (not mine) about the problem of time scarcity that leads to intelectual shortcuts of "following the masses" ...ie death of critical thinking
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sfekgjfh1Rk
dont be put off by the title...its just to elicit response
It's definitely by design.
Wage Slaves, now being replaced by even ever growing AI just as offshore manufacturing first displaced labor unions and American workers and also robotics manufacturing replacing numbers of workers. Now the job of the Democratic Party is find a way that all that progress is Shared fairly amongst all of us American.Anybody taking a birds eye view of the distribution of wealth even way before the pandemic could see the working class prosperity shrinking and the Middle Class containing fewer and fewer people. Meanwhile Capitalism concentrated in fewer and fewer individuals hands. By the time that mutual funds, IRAs and 401Ks were developed the workers in our society had no ability to invest with no matter what vehicle was invented on Wall Street. They had already been reduced to hand of mouth and working two jobs to put a roof over their head and food on the table. Just look at the numbers of Americans legitimately on SNAP. 42 million!!! And Wall Street calling Mamdani A Communist because he is planning to redistribute only 2% of their wealth on a basis of everyone including the Billionaires eligible for the benefit including themselves, even if they don't need free bus rides or free early childhood care. They can still use it if they want. The amount is less than the interest alone on their obscene wealth, even if they just squat on it! They and their descendents can't possibly find a use for that money, hense the arise of A Jeffrey Epstein who offered even more heinous use of money because there was nothing else to buy for their amusement! Well back to the Democratic Party. Using Government to redistribute wealth should be its primary purpose and not in grudging bare survival amounts. Not in narrowly defined eligible groupings because this we know both stigmatizes recipients and causes jealousy The beauty of Social Security was everyone's eligibility. The Campaign by the wealthy to retain and grow all their wealth think To Much but Never Enough is the thinking here, was the effort starting with the Reagan Administration to destroy Government by propaganda on Fox, by Murdock richly rewarded with citizenship and Reagan with his ranch. They recognized that government was the only thing powerful enough to reign in their ambition and greed. We must as a society and using the Democratic Party, which is the least corrupted of the two, thanks to Bernie Sanders idea of funding the party with small donations, rebuild the power of government, starting with rebuilding the reputation with the half of society that Government has let get left behind. Nobody should be taught or allowed to think that only their contribution to society should be rewarded and someone else's isn't worth starvation wages. Essential workers anyone, didn't we learn that lesson in the pandemic. Labor discarded, didn't we learn anything from the fentinol crisis. Drug war in the 1980sand 90s ,didn't we learn that removing government support to a bonifid minority group through Welfare Reform led to an alternate means of support called drug trafficking? Please think about all this as we all weigh in on what we want our Country to be.
I know a Spanish speaking immigrant (not Mexican) who clearly thought that Trump would bring down grocery prices. She constantly complains about high prices and tells us about the stuff she buys. I don't think she sees a connection between tariffs and prices. She also may not realize she should probably not speak Spanish when she is out in public.
Acela, you are absolutely correct.
And I think they were warned and should have seen it coming. Trump repudiates them, the poor, and the working class.
An acquaintance of mine that I bump into every few years is fond of pronouncing my first name in the Spanish fashion. That's not going to be funny any more.
Acquaintance: "Jorge Paterna, how ya been ol' bud?"
ICE officer standing near: "Señor Paterna, I'd like you to come with us..."
I had students who would write Jorge Washington - and read it as George. It's a Spanglish speaking community.
The same can be said for poor white people in the South.Many with no critical thinking skills because of poor schools for generations and religion that just says obey with blind faith that you believe enough in what you can't see or t
I don't like to say this, but both racism and misogyny played a role in the most recent election. Hispanic men did go from 59% for Biden to 44% for Harris, but Hispanic women went from 72% to 61%. Poor whites in the South aren't the only victims of their own prejudice.
The Cities: In looking at the states, I noticed that the big urban counties constantly showed a shortfall. So I pulled out the biggest 30 cities and broke NYC into 4 boroughs. Harris lost 2.5 million votes from Biden in these cities; the loss accounted for 82% of the swing in the cities. Had she just held the Biden big city vote, she would have only been 200K behind in the popular vote. Had she kept the 9.9 million Biden margin in big cities, she would have won the popular vote. Harris underperformed Biden in every big city. The biggest dropoffs were Los Angeles (612K), Chicago (278K), Miami-Dade (138K), Queens (132K), San Diego (123K), Houston (109K), San José (107K), and Brooklyn (102K). By percentage, the biggest falls in overall turnout occurred in The Bronx (15%), LA (13.6%), and San José (13.3%). Convicted Felon Guy (CFG) gained votes in 24 of the 30 cities. The biggest swings by percentage are 22.5% in El Paso and a whopping 34.5% in The Bronx.
I believe this has a lot to do with the Hispanic vote. While I find no direct correlation between turnout and the percentage of Hispanic residents, there is a +.46 correlation (on a scale between -1 and +1) between Hispanic residency in a big city and the swing toward CFG. In turn there is a -.69 correlation between turnout and swing. I suggest that many Hispanics stayed home in anger over the Obama/Biden/Harris tough immigration policies and Harris’ promise to become even more punitive (the Lankford Bill). A few may have even voted for CFG in the belief that he would continue the largely performative policies of 2017-2020.
Continued, touch, you will get your rewards in an afterlife. They have had little hope in this life and when Trump said Trust Me I am the only one who can fix your problems, they have been preprogrammed for this for generations. Many poor Southerners moved North generations ago to work in Northern factories and brought their bigotry and religion with them as a legacy. I am a native Michigander Senior and come from a long line of native Michiganders. My Parents were from Ann Arbor and the Upper Peninsula. They used to tell me that in their youth people in Ann Arbor used to refer to Ypsilanti next door with its Ford Factory as Ypsitucky. Anyway I have noticed that the people in my apartment building that supported Trump this time around all have roots in the South. We are all moderate to low income Seniors and have all had major setbacks in life, but those who families started in Michigan voted for Harris this time around. Those whose families came North for the Industrial Revolution or later voted for Trump. Maybe a political scientist could unpack this differently or better than I, but this is the best I can do.
As a footnote. We are all white and are located in the rural area left in exurbia Ann Arbor!
"But by day I make the cars and by night I make the bars. I wanna go home." Bobby Bare.
Pee on the electric fence, twice, for the really dim ones.
As someone who's been bitten by electric fences on numerous occasions, totally by accident, I love it. Not the electric fence jolt. The analogy.
Well now, there's a picturesque metaphor.
Who are you going to believe, me or you’re lying eyes! Message from Republicans
Which Roy Rogers, the singing cowboy or the blues guitarist?
The singing cowboy. Honestly, I didn’t know about the other one.
No. The problem with that paraphrasing is that it is insulting. Besides being needlessly degrading, insulting people works against building alliances. Many people have been wooed by Donald Trump, yet we should be glad that the Hispanic community has rejoined the coalition against him. Having one's community disappeared off the streets by masked thugs wearing skeleton-print gloves is a tragic way to learn one's lesson, so the learning should be respected.
fair enough... im not a politician and dont need to take extra care with my words to make it politically correct
.
on the other hand if someone doesnt point out the problem of blindly following the masses without critical consideration... some people will repeat the same mistake in another context...
sometimes getting emotionally burned by a jibe from a stranger will lead to people not being burned by something actually harmful later? Alternative is to pretend their actions were right, protect their feelings... and let some of them experience worse pain later as they didnt get the lesson?
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as i said and strongly believe.... all people can learn and it is good that we are not all the same and uniform. So instead of being a "helicopter neighbor" why not use the situation as a harmless learning opportunity to prevent worse harm down the road
just a thing to consider
Re "needlessly degrading"..... so you think that the current outcome of ICE having such power is needless of scorn for those that enabled it?
what would it be required for someone to be allowed to call out people bringing tyrants on the throne? Concentration camps?.... oh right...
My pandemic mask had "Ignorance Kills" written in felt marker on it.
When harm to others results from willful ignorance, it should be addressed directly and bluntly. Truth and facts are not negotiable. Ignorance is curable only if the ignorant are willing to learn. Bias is harder; implicit bias is harder yet to change.
The license plate holder on my wife's car reads "Vote Informed." I need to get me a couple of those.
The problem with that is people who only watch right wing media think they are informed, but are intentionally misinformed. Right wing media keeps them from finding out by telling them all the other national news outlets are the ones lying to them.
The $787,500,000 settlement for Fox "news" intentionally lying to them for a year about the 2020 election being stolen isn't even a blip on their radar.
The problem with that is people who only watch right wing media think they are informed, but are intentionally misinformed. Right wing media keeps them from finding out by telling them all the other national news outlets are the ones lying to them.
The $787,500,000 settlement for Fox "news" intentionally lying to them for a year about the 2020 election being stolen isn't even a blip on their radar.
The problem with that is people who only watch right wing media think they are informed, but are intentionally misinformed. Right wing media keeps them from finding out by telling them all the other national news outlets are the ones lying to them.
The $787,500,000 settlement for Fox "news" intentionally lying to them for a year about the 2020 election being stolen isn't even a blip on their radar.
That Hispanics somehow fell for Trump in large numbers is a tragedy, because to so many of us, the outcome of their own votes hurting them was predictable. The notion of "needlessly degrading" applied not to masked ICE thugs (who have earned our scorn), but to applying a hierarchical judgement on Hispanics, suggesting that they were too stupid to learn what was obvious to others. Yes; their own votes hurt them, but it is in terrible taste to present them as being too low on the mental hierarchy to have seen in advance that their communities would be devastated by ICE thugs with at least the temporary approval of the Supreme Court. (Kavanaugh wrote that their detentions were okay because they were immediately released if ICE realized they had detained a legal person, even while ICE was not releasing those they knew, or should have known, were legal.) Beyond being in bad taste, there is nothing constructive about describing Hispanics as fools while they are reverting to their prior, wiser politics. It is not possible to build coalitions and create us-vs.-them hierarchies simultaneously. It's just good manners and good strategy to be respectful of those being harmed, even if they were inadvertent agents in their own harm.
Trump fooled many in the Hispanic community. Shame on Trump! But, glad to see them returning to their prior politics.
I am really bad about being judgmental....living beneath one's supposed social or socio-economic status can give one a perception of people others don't see. Kind of like the janitor being considered invisible and behaving in a way that one wouldn't in higher status company.
this is a common problem unfortunately... the divestment of those making the rules from the reality of those affected by the rules.
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personally, i would limit the income and benefits of the "ruling class" to the median of the country. So they experience for themselves what specific changes will mean.
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As long as they get to have paid vacation for not working and full healthcare... its easy for them to make rules increasing the costs of the same for the rest of the country
Its easy for them to underfund education while they know full well their kids will not be going to those schools... etc...
but is only wishful thinking.....
have i ever said hispanics as a whole are stupid? or you put that in my "mouth"?
the point stands that people are diverse. And that different people (IN EACH SUBGROUP - if you really need me to spell it out) learn differently.
As far as i know there are still white women, and white men and other subgroups that still vote for racism and bigotry when possible.
Neither of last weeks elections was 100% blue... thus MANY people still need to get burned personally to change their ways... as they seem to be resistant to learning from past mistakes of others...
what the rest of us need to do is make the learning process successful (even if it means point out mistakes that hurt their ego) if it means less mistakes that really hurt are made later
also take a look at the vid (not mine) that relatively quickly explains that people voting for charlatans are not necessarily stupid, just out of time to fully think things out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sfekgjfh1Rk
People feel they can get away with intellectual shortcuts as the decisions are harmless... but hopefully, when more people get to understand that such decisions are not really harmless (ie by experiencing negatives themselves) they will be more cautious next time and somehow find enough time and will to invest time in rational or at least informed voting preference
and finally, its great to be respectful, just dont be too coddling. people do need to know that cause and effect are related. If you let anyone retreat to a world of fantasy where their decisions are not connected to the outcomes (everything is the fault of others, poor luck ...divine will) you remove their sense of agency, and why would they bother thinking about it next time either.
build coalitions on painful truth and facts .. vs comforting lies and fantasy of what you think others would wish to hear. in the end it will be stronger and more honest. And of course, if the problem is actually systemic, try offering systemic solutions
Yes. You said that Hispanics were stupid when you created a hierarchy in which the superior people learned through abstract reasoning, but the fools had to get hurt before they could understand.
I will add, denial kills. It is a different sort of ignorance. I think many who voted for trump were and still are in denial. They are not ignorant. Waking up from denial usually requires a jolt of some sort. The election suggests many have been jolted and are not in denial anymore. Fingers crossed more and more wake up out of the fog. Likely won’t happen until they or their neighbor or children are personally affected. The falling approval rating is more evidence people are waking up.
As Foo Fighters shouted out "It's times like these you learn to live again It's times like these you give and give again". This is the way forward! Communities fighting back, by voting, are part of this nation that embraces change. What we have been taught and learned. Change is why people want to come here. The need to scrape this administration off the bottom of our shoe becomes more and more apparent daily. This last administration choice likens to grabbing a knife by the blade and attempting to carve a place in history with the hilt. Does it not seem like the Mikey's Shutdown is the Coup?
Conservative Hispanics Latinos Asians hate LGBTQ PEOPLE. I'm not sure that the GOP MAGA has lost them in greater numbers as we think. Pick me Latinos and Hispanics are perfectly fine with throwing their brothers and sisters less fortunate from them into a wood chipper.
When I was younger and learning about things like the Holocaust, I used to comfort myself by remembering that the old Nazis and other bigots eventually died off, and we got a new fresh crop of babies with blank slates that don't have those conditioned hatreds.
Later I realized that the "blank slate" condition works both ways: Babies are raised into their parents' tribal beliefs and religions, so the cycle continues.
The cycle also continues because the lessons of history are easily forgotten once no one with first hand knowledge is around.
By the 2016 there were very few people born in 1930 or earlier around. By 2024 even fewer. It doesn’t surprise me that’s when fascism rose from the grave.
FWIW, I see the *narrative* as being more important than the memory. The anniversaries that have these very old Nazi camp survivors reciting their "experience" (which is really a heavily re-crafted and edited story they have honed over the years) are just rituals using human totems, rather than a report of what actually happened.
The only "first hand knowledge" that has any plausible value is something recorded soon after the event, because human "memory" about important things can evolve a lot over time.
I was handing out flyers for no kings 1 and got into a conversation with an Hispanic man in the DC mall. I thought by then he'd know exactly what Krugman is saying... But he let me know that he was a citizen and had done it "right" and supported Trump. I answered "before the year is out you or someone you love will be impacted by ICE, remember this conversation then". We went back and forth repeating ourselves, and parted. I hope he gets it now and that he and those he loves are safe.
I was speaking with a nurse from Peru who was caring for my husband. She was educated as an engineer, but once in the U.S., she found nursing to be a more lucrative career. She was mostly still OK with Trump's ICE men. She eventually admitted that their tactics are a bit brutal, but she was convinced they were only rounding up criminals, rapists, drug-added people who came here illegally (thus becoming law breakers), who deserved what they got. It will take a while.
Let me guess: she thinks she's pale enough to be safe. Colorism is why Latinos don't feel solidarity with each other.
Show her the videos of the American citizens and daycare workers being hauled away. Show her that Yes, Even Light-Skinned Latinos Are Being Disappeared.
Is she drinking Cool Aid?
She's probably a light-skinned Latino who thinks her paleness will protect her.
Yeap Nanci, until ICE handcuffs and kidnaps her… I wonder what she’ll say then…
It's hard to convince people they've made a mistake.
Even harder for people to admit they made a mistake.
Or to admit it even when they have been convinced.
Which is why I won’t bother to try. People just dig in and shut down. But that doesn’t mean they can’t change their own minds. Some do figure out the mistake for themselves, and that is the best you can hope for. They need to be enveloped in an accurate information rich environment that they can absorb.
“It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.”
― Mark Twain
Quite a lot of American voters believed that although they belonged to the group Trump was promising to persecute, THEY would be exempt from Trump and Heritage Society/Proj 2025's malice... because he was only going after "the worst illegal criminals". They thought THEIR faces wouldn't be eaten. Not just Hispanic-Americans, but a lot of poor white people (SNAP, Medicaid, etc) believed the absolute garbage talking point that Trump was only going after genuine, proven in court, criminals. And now his mask wearing, no ID, goon squad ICE is "disappearing" people
You hit the nail on the head Paul
"As I see it, the G.O.P. didn’t just lose the Hispanic vote for one election. It has lost that vote for good."
Maybe not "for good." Apparently the Hispanics forgot the lessons of "Operation Wetback."
“For good” is not forever, but probably at least a generation. The Black vote was the Democrats’ to lose after 1965, just as it was the Republicans’ after 1865.
Only Americans are stupid enough to touch the stove a second time after it tried to coup the kitchen though.
You are correct. Even if people are insulted by the tone. It’s factually true. I don’t think you meant it as an insult anyway.
A very important point made in Ian Haney-Lopez's book published in 2015 and titled "Dog Whistle Politics, How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class" himself a "WHITE HISPANIC", predicted that demographic changes would not save us from racial appeals because most Hispanics think of themselves as White because they are White and therefore are as suspectable as all White Americans are to racism.
This is also my own experience with Hispanics who I know both professionally and personally. They are White and like most White women who do not like overt racist appeals are otherwise at best ambivalent to racism.
That is Hispanics understood that Trump was the candidate of White Christian nationalism and as White Christians themselves to the extent Trump and Republican racism mattered it was not necessarily a negative.
To be sure, this is not new or news. Republicans voters believe in two sets of morals and standards, one for themselves and another for everyone else. That is most Republican voters are Republican voters because they believe the favored set of standards, the ones that allow a convicted felon to be president but takes a teacher who has complied with all legal requirements to be arrested while teaching children and throws her out of the country.
That is what Hispanic voters are finding out is that they are not in the White privileged group and are bound but not protected by the law.
Will it, as it was in the case of Jews, a lesson that will take or will the lesson pass in a few years cannot be predicted at this time. That is from time to time the White working class also learns this lesson but forgets it in a few years.
As Professor Krugman points out, Jews tend to be better educated and as a result are more economically affluent than most in the White working class. So again, I think how Hispanics vote in future election is a much less settled than does Professor Krugman.
Quickly, for evidence of this I point to the Catholic and especially the Irish Catholic experience the Haney-Lopez bases his conclusions that Hispanics will not save us from Republican appeals to racism. More than Jews, Moslems, Hindus or any other religious group, Catholics were the most discriminated religious minority in America for over 150 years.
Prohibition for example was seen by its supporters as above all else an anti-Catholic and especially and anti-Irish Catholic law. The state of Maine, which at the time did not have enough Black people for a good basketball team or Jews for banking system but had a very high percentage of Catholics also had as large a per-capita membership in the KKK as any state in the union. For those who wonder about this there are 3 groups the KKK is against, Blacks, Jews and Catholics.
Noting again that most Hispanics are Catholics and that most non-Hispanic White Catholics today vote mostly for Republicans and support of Donald Trump, I still agree more with Haney-Lopez than I do Paul Krugman on this topic.
Bought the book on Kindle. Thx for the tip.
So is that why the Federalist Society put so many Catholics out for referral to SCOTUS and onto Project 2025?
Nenapoma,
…Or we could tell those GOP
voters —Be careful what you wish for
I wish they wasnt hard headed
Do you reqlly think that imbecile will ever understand?
Which imbecile?
And many people need to get burnt over and over even if in between they come to their senses. They are called swing voters.
Re: rapists, look at the pot call the kettle black!
And: "Stupid should hurt"
Trump's "stupid" definitely hurts...
Just not him.
Funny. I just saw this exact message on the bumper of a car at the gas station today. The guy driving must’ve been about 20 years of age. Brings to mind The Darwin Awards.
Meanwhile, FBI Association issues an unprecedented statement that Trump's FBI Director Patel has "disregarded the law & launched a campaign of erratic & arbitrary retribution" against agents & others for doing their jobs. "When leadership abandons due process it doesn't just erode trust--it makes Americans less safe". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAHdU-NtVZM
When you appoint a guy FBI director who has proclaimed his hatred of the FBI, a. health science denier head of your Health Dept, an alcoholic buffoon to instill "warrior spirit" in the Defense Dept...
When you put together the rust injected at every level and in every institution you start to remember what Benedict Arnold was up to before he was discovered.
Or when you appoint an unqualified media hack to be transportation secretary and he makes a difficult situation with air traffic control worse by continuing to parrot the GOP gaslighting and blame Democrats while slashing the number of domestic flights coming into the holidays...
They have been purging the right people, in FBI, Armed Forces, etc. Right now this is only an observation. After a while, it will be irreversible without worse pain (edited in response to a fair comment received by chris lemon).
It won't be irreversible, Germany was de-Nazi-fied. But this isn't exactly a reassuring thought.
Er, no, not reassuring—de-nazification could only happen after total war, countless deaths, smashed cities.
And the US instituted "debaathification" in Iraq. That did not work out well *at all*
Spain sort of de-franco-ed ?
Yeah, but again it probably required that his fascist allies had been destroyed (and I believe it required decades to get there even then)
And now, even though I’m angry at those who refused to see the truth before them, I’m really just sad. We are months from being able to reverse this catastrophe. It’s so awful.
...and fearing it won't be reversible...🥺
Yikes!!!
😬
I think that was true in 2016 - FBI has long been very Republican. But I’m not so sure that was true in 2024, or even in 2020.
Oh for Pete's sake. Voters knew EXACTLY what Trump was going to do, because HE TOLD US. They chose to listen only to Fox and think "it won't happen to me". How any Hispanic or Black or woman could vote for Trump and Rs is beyond me.
He also said he'd bring down prices
and end wars. Turns out those were just lies. And now he's lying about having done it.
The issue with Trump is the lying, not any supposed honesty.
"First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.”
— German pastor Martin Niemöller
Right. When Trump ran in 2016, he told us he was going to “build the wall.” He didn’t. (Don’t believe claims that Congress or the “deep state” stopped him.) So complaining that voters didn’t believe Trump’s campaign promises in 2024 is complaining that voters are not sufficiently gullible. Project 2025 was a better guide to what a second Trump Administration might look like, but reading it wouldn’t allow you to predict the extremes to which ICE is going under Trump.
I’m not defending Trump voters; I’m rejecting the claim that Trump is predictable. I prefer to vote for candidates who are sufficiently predictable that I can confidently predict that they won’t cause major harm to the United States.
“He also said he'd bring down prices”
As an aside, I wish economist Paul Krugman would address the reasons for low prices and mortgage rates in the late 2010s. The data at the StLouis Fred site seems to show them declining during the 2008 financial crisis and remaining ahistorically low for the next decade, which is similar to the post-1929 deflationary period. So reducing prices and mortgage rates would mean generating another financial crisis and increase in unemployment.
Correct.
Yes. And if over 30% still favor Trump (as per The Economist) then I reckon in a couple of election cycles a large chunk of the rest could easily go back to supporting the GOP.
True, Americans have extremely short memories, They couldn't even remember 4 years prior, when trump started an insurrection to stay in office.
It’s not like the media does a good job of reminding them. Journalists and pundits are too busy playing gotcha and looking for candidates who are exciting and “more fun to have a beer with”. The uber serious “Dean of Washington Journalists” David Broder openly complained that Al Gore had talked so much about what he would do if elected Broder almost fell asleep. This criticism was about Gore’s acceptance speech for the nomination! I watched that speech and the crowd loved it. I still wonder what the heck Broder thought Gore should have talked about. What type of beer he likes to drink?
Probably Kool-Aid.
This is as true as the sun will rise tomorrow morning! What is tragic- saddening- terrible-- find the most negative adjective- still will not express the tragic destruction of a country ! Let me first set aside the relevance of the saying " man does not live by bread alone"... EVERYBODY is claiming food prices killed it.
REALLY, not eating 6 eggs at higher prices made Hispanics mad?
So mad that they gave up blindness for getting cheaper burritos?
It is not the only community- A LOT OF US here followed that trap. And caused blindly to lose a nation's " inner strength”.
Here are the tragic losses the bread lovers will never recover from
- world class Universities
-World-class unrivaled Research Capabilities in many Institutions in Science and Medicine
- Cultural centers of great value
- Museums containing universally acclaimed artifacts
- Sources of great literature
- Greatly developed ingrained desire to excel in disseminating how societies evolve through Journalism.
- Institutions that keep alive dozens of Constitution mandated Balance of power, to limit abuse, obstruction and authoritarianism
- The USG as it evolved over decades
-Set in random illegal behaviour of elected officials with lies unbounded
- Set in a whole political party unable forever to distinguish falsehood from truth
- Dismantled Climate mitigation science and technology.
- Instilled fear, racism, xenophobia, cruelty, violence.
- Revived violent groups roaming the cities
All this downward decent for expectations of more gas and a few pennies lower prices of bread!!!!
Know that Kazhakastan has broadcast to the world the Gov will entice 150,000 international students in its brand new Universities - teaching every kind of subject that one can imagine.
Too aligned with Russia for a westerner....Russia would like to have it back.
Yeah, 30%+ of Americans have something seriously wrong with them. Stupidity? Gullibility? Rage? Herd mentality I think is a major component. Fortunately that herd could stampede the other direction.
its like 911 no one could have imagined how it would be done
Our national security team was aware that there had been previous terrorist plots to hijack planes and fly them into buildings. I think that was somewhere in Europe. The Bush administration had tons of advanced warnings that something big was likely going to happen and plane hijackings had been a common terrorist tactic yet Bush did not put our airports on high alert.
W was given the August 6th PDB indicating 'Bin Ladin Determined To Strike'
W preferred to cut brush on his fake Texas "ranch."
A month later 9/11 happened. W continued to read The Pet Goat.
Secretary of State C. Rice rejected the intelligence of chatter about flying airplanes into buildings. Yeesh
My sympathies…
And from that era I recall George Stephanopoulos catching her in a lie on Sunday morning show….
Bush brushed off the guy who brought him the report about buildings potentially being hit - I forget the exact quote but it was something along the lines of, "Fine, you've done your job..." Completely dismissive.
W also specifically referred to those warnings as mere CYA on the part of the experts conveying the warnings.
I read that too. Anything Clinton did had to be wrong. The one thing that I have read several times is also they were convinced that only a state actor could attack us on a big scale which is why they wouldn’t drop the idea that Saddam was behind the attack. Of course it also fit their other objective of getting control of his oil fields.
That was nothing but a CYA excuse. Passenger jets had been hijacked for decades, buildings had been bombed (including the WTC) for ages. It didn't take a genius or great insight to combine the two, and the only surprise is that it didn't happen sooner.
You mean besides Hollywood (Escape from New York, 1981)?
Hollywood has also imagined giant ants infesting the storm drains of Los Angeles. And rains of pelagic sharks. And using the Antikythera mechanism to go back in time. The screen writers don't have crystal balls.
But it was never going to be them, only the “others”.
Agreed. He basically laid out what he'd do during his next term as soon as he got booted out of office in 2021. So anyone who's surprised by what Trump's doing was either not paying attention or didn't care.
Of course the vast majority of Black women and the majority of Hispanic women were astute enough to vote for Harris. On the other hand, white women who have expressed surprise at the rollback of their rights and job opportunities really do deserve to be challenged.
I worked for all women regardless. Don’t generalize.sometimes white women are invisible too.
Nope. No slack. The time for tolerance of other people’s intolerance has passed. With you on the rest.
I can think of no concrete evidence that any of the MAGA can be deprogrammed.
Truth sneaks in slowly. It was clear that the invasion of Iraq was based on lies but look how many people fell for it. It took years for the truth to sift into consciousness. Now magas hate the Republican elites who lied to them.
That's an interesting question. It's one thing for former conservatives to either 1) second-guess their intellectual premises or 2) steer away from the awful place where the GOP has drifted now, or 3) both. But that describes people who once held "responsible views" that they must now re-evaluate as well-intentioned but perhaps wrong-headed. It's way more difficult to credit anyone who has actually embraced MAGA as having enough idealism or self-respect and/or intelligence to re-evaluate anything. There is no well-intentioned good faith there; no reserve from which to draw on for re-evaluation.
I can imagine people who barely pay attention pinging from MAGA to its alternative. And that could include a lot of voters. But for anyone who has ever truly bought in on MAGA, it's difficult for me to imagine how they can recover (their soul). I do not personally know any who seem to be knocking on that door.
And the people who voted R two days ago? Do they also deserve slack?
Lol thank goodness because I hadn’t planned to give them any. I’m over being the bigger person! It’s exhausting.
"You liberal Democrat." - St. Ronnie Reagan
At one point my work required me to research “Life Skills” classes offered to women on welfare after the Welfare Reform Act of 1996. I sat in on a class of young white isolated rural mothers who were considered unemployable because they lacked even the most basic skills of bathing regularly and awakening at specific times in the morning. As I listened it seemed their community elders had purposely kept them as ignorant and unemployable as possible, which fit with the religious idea of women as simply reproductive vessels. So in some cases it really isn’t the fault of ignorant person.
Nailed it! Remember George Carlin's line about half of the population being dumber than average? Officials in Kentucky had to field numerous complaints that Kentucky polling places were closed on Tuesday. Those voters had to be advised that Kentucky wasn't having elections this year and they couldn't vote for NYC mayor, NJ and VA governors, or Prop 50 in California. 🙄
In my SC county, which includes a lot of rural areas and unincorporated "towns," the local Democratic Party office fielded dozens of calls asking where people who live in those areas should go to vote. They seemed to have a difficult time understanding that the fact that their mailing address was a town, they did not actually live in the town. But we have one of the fastest growing areas in the country, so perhaps they were new here. I've seen it many times in conversation too, a person telling me they live in such-and-such town, when they live miles outside the city limits.
If we write off the gullible, Trump voters, his electoral coalition remains in place, and we will forever have to deal with Trumpist fascism. Please be strategic and ask yourself which is worse: living in a Trumpist state or having to educate stupid voters. Let’s not confuse personal worth with building electoral coalitions. On a one-to-one level, of course you will always remember that the Trump voter who changes his or her tune now was a stupid person who you cannot trust in the future. For example, you’ll never name that person as a successor trustee for your family trust. However, that shouldn’t mean you will not vote in coalition with them and against Trump.
The context here though is first-time Trump voters in 2024. I agree that people who have been with him since before covid are like a brick wall. Apparently a good chunk of his 2024 voters are more flexible.
There's more of them bricks than us slabs of marble. About a third more. So, we'd better work with them or be annihilated by MAGA.
“Winning them over” won’t help anything unless they learn some important lessons. Voting for Trump was an irresponsible decision, and it was always going to lead to misery.
The thing that’s needed in the long run is a cultural change that expects adult-aged people to behave like responsible adults. This is partly about taking their votes seriously, but it’s mostly about taking an interest in the interests of their fellow citizens generally.
We are always next in line. How true. I have never understood other Jews who are anti-immigrant.-Oh yeah, there is the creepy Mr. Miller in the White House, he is one of those guys. What is so hard to understand here.. you lift up those who need it the most and you lift up everyone.
in my town of Dover NJ, we are also a very heavily Hispanic town and my neighbprs are definitely pissed at how people like them are targeted. One citizen (naturalized) keeps copies of her documents with her at all times. This is madness and hardly represents the open and friendly America that we once were.
OMG, I do so love Paul's musical tastes! One of my all time favorites -- "The Way It Is" -- I was around when it came out. The bottom line to all this is in Verse 3:
Well, they passed a law in '64
To give those who ain't got a little more
But it only goes so far
'Cause the law don't change another's mind
When all it sees at the hiring time
Is the line on the color bar
I remember '64...not much has changed -- in people's minds.
I came here to say that too....Paul is so cool.
All he needs now are a pair of Ray-Bans !!
Love his song Long Valley Road and many others. He’s a native Virginian who lives in his hometown of Williamsburg.
Yes. As a relatively coherent group despite its many cultural and even religious differences, the Jews have a long memory, and that memory has made them wary of autocrats. And, I suspect, the unifying and sublime uber-commandment of Tikkun Olan--Leave this world a better place than you found it--has had a role to play also. The intentions we hold most dear has a lot to do with who we are and what we will do, and not do.
The Republicans have spent decades trying to make (((us))) single issue voters for Israel and it’s been a complete failure. Even though most American Jews are sympathetic to Israel to one degree or another. They just don’t understand that other issues motivate us too. Most critically right now, we know that authoritarian environments will eventually turn their sights on us too.
The weird thing is that right wing evangelical “Christians” are people who always vote in favor of an extreme form of Zionism. They believe Jesus will only return to earth and rapture them all up to heaven (as if they qualify as true Christians!) when all of the historical Biblical lands that had been controlled by Jews is retaken by them. That is a far more extensive area and includes parts of neighboring countries. They believe that after that happens Jews will be sent to hell along with all the rest of us evil sinners. So they are in fact antisemitic Zionists. Sadly I know a few and they are serious about this — dead serious.
If they weren't so dangerous to themselves and others, people suffering from mass hysteria and delusions would be more obviously objects of pity.
Religion! If only people would realize that there IS no man in the sky that knows your every thought…
I really don’t care if people want to believe in God or not. I don’t but there are a lot of people I respect who do — but not in a “magical man in the sky” kind of way. In fact it would be great if all those people who claim to be Christian really followed the teachings and example of Jesus.Take care of those in need, love/respect everyone, turn the other cheek, don’t be driven by greed or feel superior to others, etc. Jesus is what inspired my hero Martin Luther King Jr.
"Oh the Protestants hate the Catholics, And the Catholics hate the Protestants, And the Hindus hate the Muslims, And everybody hates the Jews." - Tom Lehrer.
That was not what things were like when I was growing in the 50s and 60s up as a Catholic in Appalachia — although we Catholics were viewed with some suspicion by the older fundamentalists. We had a few Jewish families and even one Muslim family from Egypt and we had a lot of low poverty white kids. But we all went to the same school which goes a long way to undoing old prejudices. My senior class president was a black. He won handily even though the school was 90% white and he ran against just one other person who was also a good candidate. No one even remarked on his race. It was perfectly normal and he gave the better speech.
My parents talked about how it was like that when they were growing up in NYC in the 20s and 30s and people were immigrants or their parents were. Even the Catholics discriminated against each other. Irish Catholics looked down on the Italians and they both looked down on the Polish and Hispanic Catholics. They all lived in their own neighborhoods and attended their own Catholic schools so they never got to know each other. It freaks me out that so many are trying to return to that kind of world with vouchers. The good news is most of my southern city’s schools are well integrated by both income and racial and ethnic groups. My grandkids are all getting a great education in those public schools and the mixed demographics groups seem perfectly normal to them as they did to me and my friends.
I grew up in East Tennessee. During the early '60s, the black kids were all bussed to Austin High on the east side of town. The Catholic kids went to Catholic High on the north side of the old city. The Jewish kids were mixed in with the rest of us, but there was no orthodox community there. In about '65, they integrated the school system and we got some local black kids in my school. The Catholic kids stayed at their high school, which may have been run by the church.
My mother remained there and fed us all the gossip until she died. According to her, several private schools were established to allow people to re-segregate the school system. White kids with well-to-do parents didn't have to mix with "their inferiors." Some of these schools kept Jewish kids out, in addition to black kids.
That is why I am so thankful that my parents moved us from Queens (not far from where the Donald was growing up —ugh) to a small town. There was no way to have separate schools in such a small community so I went to school from k -12 with the same mixed groups of kids with few changes. There is such an advantage to really know so many kids and their parents who are from such different groups. I am thrilled my grandkids are getting the same kind of experience but in my city there are even more groups. We had no Indian, Hispanic or Chinese families when I was growing up.
And the Kingston Trio's Merry Minuet:
"The whole world is festering with unhappy souls
The French hate the Germans
The Germans hate the Poles
Italians hate Yugoslavs
South Africans hate the Dutch
And I don't like anybody very much!"
I know plenty of true Christians who are nothing like you describe. They really work hard to live up to their beliefs by doing things like Meals on Wheels, visiting nursing homes, working at food banks, going with doctors groups to third world countries. I even have one friend who visits prisoners. And they accept me even though I don’t believe in God.
I hope more people buy John Fugelsang’s book “Separation of Church and Hate” which is a guide to pushing back against those faux Christians using their own supposed beliefs. If becomes a huge seller the mainstream “liberal” media that has normalized these dangerous extremists as representative of Christians might have to address this issue.
I am still furious that Tim Russert regularly had the odious Jerry Falwell on to represent the Christian point of view. Russert kept having him on as an honored guest even after Falwell had hawked the crackpot, wildly slanderous “Clinton Chronicles” on his Old Time Gospel Hour show. That video accused Clinton of running a drug smuggling operation and having had scores of people killed. Falwell’s excuse was he didn’t know if any of it was true, he was just asking the questions — and making a lot of money in the process.
I hope Paul is right, but I suspect that something else is happening. We have a two party system. The argument that "if you don't vote for a Democrat or a Republican you have wasted your vote" is mostly true. We live in times of significant hardship to a large percentage of the population. In each election, people vote for the "other guy" because the guy in office "is not getting it done". The "other guy" gets into office and also does not make any meaningful progress in making people's lives better. Yeah, I know that Biden did a lot of things, but if you didn't buy a house 20 years ago you will probably never buy a house. Rent costs an increasing percentage of your income. If you get sick, you go broke. Education is supposed to provide for a better life but it doesn't and you are still left with a lifetime of debt paying for the education.
It's great that MAGA/GOP/Trump had a thumb put in their collective eye on Tuesday, but if we want to defeat right-wing populism we need to fix the problems.
I agree with your assessment but remember where both parties derive their power-wall street, corporate and the wealthy's money that buy influence to rig tax laws in their favor, continue to socialize their losses even when committing fraud continue wage theft for working families and prevent union organizing (Obama promised card check but renegged). Until the money is taken out, changes will be incremental for most Americans.
And that is thanks to the GW Bush appointment to the court John Roberts. Dems can’t unilaterally disarm.
I’m not sure if it will ever be possible to take money out of politics, although I wholeheartedly agree with you that nothing will change unless it is. I’ve often thought I’d make a great politician who works hard for ALL of my constituents, regardless of whether or not they voted for me, but I don’t have the money necessary to run a successful campaign. Unfortunately, winning takes more than time (of the candidate and volunteers) and always has. It takes money, and the people with money to spare always want something in return for parting with it. I couldn’t live with being beholden to anyone like that, hence why I’ve never even considered running for any position at any level of government. And I have a feeling I’m not alone in that. My dream is rather than taking money out of politics, anyone who wants to contribute financially must do so through a centralized fund, and all candidates for that particular position receive an equal amount to spend on their campaign. Or something along those lines…some way to level the playing field so good people aren’t deterred from running for financial reasons.
Unfortunately, IMO, the First Past the Post system we use locks in a two-party system. Has been since parties started in the late 1790's. we need to think about other election systems: Ranked Choice voting, multi-member districts (so instead of voting for 1 person, you have 2-3 Representatives in each district, which gives a shot to others to get elected).
I also think we also need to expand the House. For over 100 years, until 1920, after every census, the size of the House was increased. Then in 1920, they couldn't agree on a new size and locked us into 435 Representatives (https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-the-house-got-stuck-at-435-seats/). At at a time when the US population was 106 million, while the 2020 census is 331 million (https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/dec/popchange-data-text.html) That means there was 1 Rep for every ~243,000 people then, it's now 1 for every ~760,000 - over three times as many. I recommend we return to increasing the House size, using the Cube-Root metric that seems to work (not too big, not too small - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cube_root_law) - which would give us 692 reps, or 1 for every ~478,000 individuals. Although I would require the number of members to be odd (round up), to reduce the chance of a tie vote, which would make it 693, for 1 for every ~477,000 people.
All of the above don't require a change to the Constitution, just passing laws. In some cases (like Ranked Choice) at the state level.
And if we increased the number of Representatives, that would make the House too small to seat everyone. We would have to have a seating system like the English Parliament.
Are we really going to say 'We can't have a more representative legislature because the building is too small?' We can build arches and ballrooms but not a larger chamber? I bet we can fix that.
Congress can just meet in the new ballroom./s
I keep hearing about a new 90,000-square foot building planned for downtown Washington, DC. Maybe that could be the new House chamber?
Seriously, I did the arithmetic a while back, about what the number would be if we applied the "Wyoming Rule" to the House, making Congressional districts all with the same population as the least-populated state. More than 600 seats. Long overdue.
The problem with the "Wyoming Rule" is it also means that the number of members of the House can drastically change with each new census. For example, in the 1900s, the Wyoming Rule would have had the House varying in size from 480 to 1,833 (https://thirty-thousand.org/blog/the-wyoming-rule/ - check out the chart). Even worse, it ends up requiring CUTS to the number of Representatives, even with an increasing population, as can be seen by the chart. All based on changes in the population of the smallest state.
Better (IMO) a rule that provides a gradual, predictable chance in the size of the House, based on the total population of the USA.
I didn't offer it as a rigid formula, but as a step away from the undemocratic imbalance inherent in the Senate and Electoral College. We'll never have perfect balance down to the individual level, but state delegations already change with the decennial census, so an orderly reappointment every ten years could still achieve the goal of one person-one vote.
The current mid-decade gerrymandering going on now is a completely different situation that spotlights the need for a federal umbrella of basic election-fairness rules. Congress has express constitutional authority to occupy any parts of the default state regulation of elections, unlike Trump's ideas about imposing rules by executive order. The Executive branch simply doesn't have the authority.
I don't see a deal-breaker in some variability of the final number of representatives taking place every ten years. Something similar already happens by shifting seats from shrinking states to growing states after the census. It's an orderly process. The problem is that Wyoming voters have more per capita political clout than, for example, Californians. Increasing the number of districts to equalize that imbalance could help break the current sclerosis in Congress. With red Texas and Florida being among the most populous states, it wouldn't necessarily unduly empower the big blue states.
You say that like it's a bad thing. After WWII, when they rebuilt the UK Parliament, Winston Churchill deliberately kept the size small - because the real work doesn't happen in the chambers, but in the various committee rooms. "he insisted the Chamber should not be big enough to seat all its Members at once and that no Member should have a seat reserved because it was a privilege to be there at all. " (https://www.restorationandrenewal.uk/palace/extraordinary-history/churchill-and-palace)
Watch C-SPAN - except for the State of the Union address, you almost never see the room even close to filled.
The bigger impact will be finding office spaces for them - but it can be done because it's been done in the past. Be a lot better if we'd been increasing the size of the House for the last 100 years.
You misunderstand me. I don't regard it as a bad thing. It would eliminate the aisle that Representatives are afraid to cross. I think it would also result in a few broohahas as people try to find seats. It might produce good results if people from different parties were forced to sit next to each other.
Sorry for the misunderstanding - looks like we're on the same page.
Harris had an affordable housing plan. Trump had no plan. Go figure.
100%
It will be interesting to watch the 2026 election results in Texas. The gerrymandering is partially based on an underlying assumption that the Hispanic voters who switched to voting Republican would stay with Republicans in 2026. If there is a massive shift back Republicans could actually lose House seats in Texas.
It would serve them right.
Professor Krugman: you wrote: “So Tuesday showed that the Hispanic vote has re-realigned. And my prediction is that this won’t be a pendulum. Republicans had their chance to win over a new bloc of voters; but by indulging Trump’s violent racism and nativism, they have lost them and will probably never get them back.”
gawds, i certainly hope that the hispanic vote has fled the GOP forever. FAFO, plain and simple.
Immigration isn’t always a major motivator for Latino voters, but the Republicans threw away growing support for them twenty years ago too. Dubya was popular among Latino voters, they liked him as Texas governor and he got something like 40% of their vote in 2004.
And then immigration became a hot issue again, 2006 I believe. Dubya was willing to work with the Democrats on immigration to get something else passed, and the rest of the party revolted.
The problem is that they now know that ICE will sweep up anyone who looks Hispanic and will detain them, sometimes when they are American citizens. I have a neighbor who is a citizen but always carries her passport and has her teenage son do the same but she knows even that isn’t a guarantee against being swept up in a Kavanaugh stop. She is beyond horrified.
I read about one businessman who carries his "Real Id" and passport all the time, but has been repeatedly hauled in and detained for a day or more. My guess is that the local ICE 'tards are trying to put him out of business.
Could this also be an indication that something might be awfully wrong with our educational system? Why would voters, knowing Mr. Trump's history, think he would be a solution to their economic problems?
You’re not exactly wrong, but politics has always been very emotional. Trump makes some low-propensity voters feel a certain way, as long as he’s on the ballot and as long as he’s just talking. They’ll hear what they want to hear in his chaotic contradictory statements.
...makes some low-propensity voters feel a certain way...
He speaks the hate they all feel. I cannot fathom why they support oligarchs but begrudge their neighbors.
I believe the right wing has been working hard for decades to dumb down the electorate to the point where they are easily led and manipulated. "God" being injected into our public schools just leads to relying on "belief" rather than "fact" when it comes to making important decisions and we see this a lot nowadays with the mindless parroting of Fox talking points.
I think most of them don't know DonnyJon's history. They believe that he's a successful businessman (he never was that good). They also believe that a successful businessman is the best person to run the country. They don't know about his bankruptcies and the way he cheated employees and contractors (or they regard that as "smart business"). His flouting of laws is regarded as "witch hunts" on the part of his enemies. Many of the men wish that they too could treat women the way Trump did, and many of the women think that DonnyJon's victims probably did something to deserve it.
So true. Some immigrants feel safe, as they believe they live in a law abiding country, with law abiding governments, and they think, as long as they are legal and follow the laws of the land they are living in, nothing can happen to them. And they can look down on the new arrivals, if they are not quite to their "model citizens " level as yet. But they forget that racism and bigotry is alive and well, and when espoused as a policy by a Government, who doesn't abide by the law of the land, they are no longer safe. They forgot (and not just them, many in the USA and the UK) this poem from the German pastor Martin Niemöller. "First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a Communist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me," . The poem is attributed to Martin Niemöller, who was a prominent Protestant pastor in Germany and initially supported Nazism before becoming an opponent and was imprisoned for his anti-Nazi views. Take note people.
And they chose a country where they would feel safer and become more prosperous than they could be “at home”. Having lost the comforts of home, it is hard to believe that this was somehow a scam. Must be just the current guy not making our lives better even after we worked so hard to become citizens and voters here. The feeling of having become an American (or more likely, the parents having come and sacrificed to help them be Americans and have their lives be better) leaves a lot of room for disappointment.
Remember Hispanic voters ARE citizens, have invested their hopes and dreams in this country no less than the Irish or Italians or Poles. 80% of them think of themselves as white. The shock of discovering that they are not seen as “white enough” to be given full citizenship without question has been hard on many.
The analogy with Jews is accurate. In Germany assimilated Jews like my ancestors really hated the “Ostjuden” who came from Poland, Russia, Ukraine etc. and who were socially more conservative thus discrediting their “culturally advanced“ co-ethnics. The US „culture war” has enlisted conservative Hispanics in fighting their battles.
The term Hispanic is an American creation. Latin America has different peoples, even different language. A big part of the population is European in origin. I am entirely European, born in Europe from same ancestry and in US I am Hispanic. How odd.
Remember, there were Hispanics in what is now the USA before the English arrived, never mind the creation of the 13 Colonies, never mind the founding of the USA. The oldest city in the US is St Augustine, FL - and it was founded by the Spanish in 1565 (https://www.citystaug.com/693/Our-History) Roanoke Colony VA (which disappeared) was founded in 1585, evacuated in 1586, refounded in 1587, and disappeared (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roanoke_Colony). The first English permanent colony was Jamestown, VA in 1606 (https://www.nps.gov/jame/learn/historyculture/a-short-history-of-jamestown.htm).
Regarding the reaction to inflation and wages, in 2025 I asked a small group of people I interact with online (but have never met) how they were doing financially compared to 2019 all but one person was doing better (often *much* better) in 2024 than in 2019.
One other guy would not admit he was doing better at first and just ranted about inflation. But finally she said
"Yes, I am making 37% more than I was in 2019. But that is because I have good negotiating skills. But inflation is Biden's fault"
Actually that guy shares a lot of Fox News videos, too. I think it was right wing media who persuaded him that he's miserable.
Also interesting is how macho Latino culture is or isn’t. Not voting for a female president? Evidence of sexism. But they just voted decisively for a female governor. There are different ethnicities, nationalities, and generations in the Latino world, and the story will evolve.
Blocs are an invention of statisticians.
Also quite a few top (Presidents and so) politicians in Central and South America..
Mexico has a female President.
I would agree with you, Mr. Krugman. But doesn't this inevitably happen when a political party begins to regard a voting bloc as a cohesive mass rather than a discrete collection of individuals? When anyone begins to use the phrase, "oh, you know... Jews (or Hispanics or LGBTQ folk or Catholics, or South Asians or whomever) always vote for _____________ you may be pretty sure that individual is indulging in sweeping statements that surely will -- at some point in the future -- be proven incorrect. Republicans in recent years have become too comfortable in listening to their own voices telling one another that the Hispanic vote was theirs.
I am sure there is some validity to the economic perspective, but I think the reality of Trump's anti-immigrant policies are also playing a significant role. It's one thing to talk about getting rid of criminal and gang elements prior to an election and another to realize that not only are your friends and neighbors in the crosshairs, but the racist Supreme Court has now said it is OK for ICE to stop you in the street and maybe arrest and deport you because you "look" you might be one of "them."