Crips and Bloods, maybe even a little MS-13ish.
When you think about it, contemporary politics is little different from a national gang war, complete with initiation rituals, colors, gang signs, criminal activities, and no-go zones.
It’s hard not to recognize the initiation rituals. They involve saying absurd things, cancelling people on social media, threatening them online, committing looting, arson, and mayhem, defunding the police, claiming to be transexual, supporting enemies of the US and its allies, supporting open borders, denying God and denouncing religion, hating the U.S. Constitution, gluing your hands to the pavement, blocking traffic, attacking priceless art with ball peen hammers, paint or soup – generally doing what Democrats do.
You know the colors: blue, the colors in the LGBTQ2IA+++++++++ flag, the color of the Palestinian flag and kufiyah, the red of China, the black of BLM and ANTIFA, Pussyhat pink – all signaling membership or affiliation.
There are signs – displaying the flag of the month on your Facebook profile, saying or putting “Black Lives Matter” in your social media profile (especially if you are not black). Saying “From the river to the sea…”, infinite forms of virtue signaling to let others see the affiliation.
Criminal activities? Well, right off the top of my head, I can think of the Clinton, Obama and Biden crime families, Gold Bar Menendez, pay for play, insider trading, getting rich off the taxpayer’s back, extortion, taking bribes and protection money from Ukraine, Russia and China. Yeah, there’s criminal activity.
No-go areas – US Capitol complex, college campuses, newsrooms, upper class leftist enclaves around large metropolitan areas.
It’s all there.
Gangs of D.C.
Maybe even the gang tats, but if Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Jerry Nadler or Bernie Sanders has a tramp stamp, I don’t want to know.
But America is not a naturally a hateful nation; we never have been. We are just not built that way.
Sure, we went through periods when hate was promoted, but we outgrew them the way a child overcomes irrational behaviors - but then we were taken back to those turf wars by people who knew hate would tear us apart.
You probably wouldn’t know it now but a decade ago, America was ranked as one of the most tolerant nations in the world. Back in 2013 (before intellect was replaced with wokeism), the Washington Post (yes, it was safe to report factual data helpful to the Obama administration) published the results of something called the World Values Survey. A significant part of it was a global survey designed by two Swedish economists to determine tolerance of nations. The Swedish researchers settled on a question, one they deduced could be a strong indicator of tolerance for other races.
The survey asked respondents in more than 80 different countries to identify kinds of people they would not want as neighbors.
Seems a logical and revealing question. Without admitting prejudice or bigotry, simply indicating such a preference is a good way to get at the heart of likes and dislikes at in a non-threatening way.
When asked to pick from groups they would not want as neighbors, Americans who picked “people of another race” fell in the 0 – 4.9% category, the lowest bracket in the study.
That survey found Anglo and Latin countries were, by far, the most tolerant. People in the survey were most likely to embrace a racially diverse neighbor in the United Kingdom and its Anglo former colonies (the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) and in Latin America. The Post noted the only real exceptions were oil-rich Venezuela, where income inequality sometimes breaks along racial lines, and the Dominican Republic, perhaps because of its adjacency to troubled Haiti. Scandinavian countries also scored high.
So essentially, the modern iteration of Western, Christian civilization was the most tolerant.
Some surveys still put America in the top twenty of the most tolerant/least racist categories, but several now rank us much lower. Did America become less tolerant and more racist over the past 10 years? Not likely. What is more likely is that ideological bias during the Trump years caused variations in the surveys.
It is interesting that Western nations, or at least those still following the Western model of cultures and economies, still rank at the top, especially since those nations are the most likely to be under attack by Woke Marxists for being the most racially oppressive nations in the world.
One might deduce those attacks are about something else entirely, and if one does, one would not be far wrong.
Wherever you are, look around you. Look in your neighborhood, your wider community, your church, your kid’s schools, your city or town. Look at where you work. Do you see any racists or white supremacists?
You will be hard pressed to find any.
Have you devolved into a bigot or racist in the past five or ten years?
If you are like me, probably not.
You probably still oppose the same programs you opposed when whites were in certain offices. I still oppose the leftist programs of the Clinton administration (who is white but according to novelist Tony Morrison was white but America’s FBP – first black president) as well as the same leftist ideology championed by Barack Obama (who was multiracial but “identified” as black) and Joe Biden (who is so pasty white it hurts).
You might be irritated about being called a racist when you are not - and find it difficult to suffer morons lightly, disdaining jerks, a-holes and perpetually aggrieved malcontents as a matter of principle, but that’s not being bigoted or racist.
The fact is that over the past five years or so, the American left changed the definition of racism to “things and people we don’t like”. There is literally nothing people like those on AOC’s Squad and the Ivy faculty lounges won’t classify as racism and intolerance if they need a defense of their squirrel brained ideas.
The only people I can see who exhibit the characteristics of bigoted racists include the usual suspects, the 60’s era communist revolutionaries who want to use race as a new wedge between racial classes – but the majority are white, college educated people (and a large percentage of them are female) and the black nationalists in the BLM movement (I’m not including ANTIFA because they are just criminals disguised as a social movement). As a matter of racial demographics, studies of the 2020 BLM/ANTIFA “protests” (based on video censuses of the events) found that the majority of marchers in those events were white.
These are people who see the conservatives as racists (they aren’t) but cannot accept that the radical black members of BLM (and Congress) are.
When we take an honest look out across our national landscape, the most striking thing I see is the near total absence of tribal hatred. Even in today’s corrosive and toxic public discourse and as political factions try to separate America into tribes, that’s not our nature.
For all the ranting about diversity, inclusion and equity, America has always been a nation of diversity, inclusion and equality.
The hate we see these days is manufactured for ideological and political purposes, it is not naturally occurring, nor is it inevitable.
It’s just pure gang war.
"When asked to pick from groups they would not want as neighbors, Americans who picked “people of another race” fell in the 0 – 4.9% category, the lowest bracket in the study."
Isn't this called the "Bradley effect," wherein people responding to pollsters are afraid to do so honestly, lest they incur the judgement of the pollster or lest the results be doxxed. I would suspect that number was at its lowest in 2006 and has risen dramatically since, especially since 2020.
"Have you devolved into a bigot or racist in the past five or ten years? If you are like me, probably not."
Well no, but I am, and officially have been, All Blacked Out™. I never would have supported His Royal Blackness but I would have been supportive of the likes of Dr Carson. Now, however, we've seen comprehensively and with almost zero exceptions that rule by aggrieved minority -- be that racial minority, women, or those of eclectic sexualities -- has been such a ridiculous and avoidable disaster that none of them are ever likely to get my support again.
I was likewise sympathetic to the problems of poverty in America, but between the Trayvon, handsupdontshoot™, St. George of Fentanyl, jogger incidents, numerous others, and the floods of aliens -- legal and otherwise -- into this country, my well of sympathy has run competely dry. I don't have any left to give.
The woke left hates America and therefore they hate Americans.