Happy Friday! 🥳 And a special hello to my new subscribers. I send out 2 newsletters a week: a short one on Friday — usually a news round-up — and a longer essay on Monday or Tuesday.
For this week’s news roundup I’d like to share with you two videos which rendered me almost speechless. They really do a paint a stark picture of the huge class divide which is currently — in my opinion — on the brink of breaking America apart.
These two women live in the same state, but they have radically different perceptions about their country. One is a mixed race journalist at the most famous newspaper in the world, the other is a mom (whose ethnicity isn’t immediately obvious), who is the daughter of a cop, and who is married to a Muslim immigrant.
Never let anyone tell you the great American divide is about race. It’s about class.
First up, the journalist: yet another human manifestation of my favourite topic, the utter debasement of the American mainstream journalistic elite.
Many of you may have seen a story this week about Mara Gay, “member of The New York Times editorial board” and talking head for MSNBC. When not pontificating on cable television, Mara is at pains to point out, she’s just one of the people. A regular Joe, who is just like us. She lives in “a fifth floor walk-up”! She “rides the subway”! And she swims with the proles on Rockaway Beach! I mean, she’s basically the fifth member of The Ramones, guys.
Her salt-of-the-earth tendencies have their limits, of course. These limits she revealed on TV this week, when she spoke of a recent trip to Long Island — that New York suburb well-known as a hotbed of white supremacists, like its denizens Jerry Seinfeld, Billy Joel and Chuck D. While visiting a friend there, Ms Gay recounted being disturbed by seeing “dozens” of American flags and pick-up trucks (note also this was around Memorial Day.)
Why was this disturbing? Because, Ms. Gay claimed “they [pick-up truck drivers] see Americanness as one with whiteness.”
Did she interview each pick-up driver she saw to confirm their views of their whiteness? Because, I mean, she is a journalist, right?
As the kids say, I just can’t with this. I cannot.
The stereotyping, the overgeneralising, the profound lack of curiosity and empathy in her fellow man, the bone ignorance and intellectual deficiency at play here — this interview just left me stunned.
It really does feel like the entire American upper class — the managers, the intellectuals, the educators and the policy makers — have wholly absorbed a childish, cartoonish version of their own countrymen. In this version, people who display the stars and stripes are all tobacco-chewing, yee-hawing, shotgun-toting rednecks constantly on the hunt for black people to lynch. It’s like they watched one after-school TV special back in the nineties about a racist sheriff with a pick-up truck, and their intellectual development just stopped right there.
The class hatred and fear is palpable.
Next up, in the opposing corner, with a very different viewpoint, is one Ms Tatiana Ibrahim, a mother in Carmel, New York — a town which is home to a lot of cops and firemen. Eight men (all but two firefighters or cops) from Carmel were killed at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.
Ms Ibrahim also went viral this week, after giving her local school board the verbal beat-down of the century over the critical race theory teachings being foisted upon Carmel’s children. She told the local school board they were “thieves and liars” and commanded them:
“Stop indoctrinating our children.”
Her daughter’s teacher, it seems, told her daughter she was “pasty white.” In a district with a lot of children of cops, Ms. Ibrahim said teachers push the “All Cops Are Bastards” slogan onto the children, recruit them to attend protests against police, and attack as racists and bigots kids who push back.
She went on to remind the board: “You work for me. I don’t work for you.” Which, in my humble opinion, is something we should be telling all government employees on a daily basis.
“You’re emotionally abusing our children and mentally abusing them. You’re demoralising them by teaching them communist values.”
In Ms Gay’s America, people like Ms Ibrahim and her neighbours are actively, every day, trying to disenfranchise people of colour. And that includes people of colour like Ms Gay who, despite having a powerful job at one of America’s most powerful institutions, is struck with fear at the sight of the American flag.
In Ms. Ibrahim’s America, little kids of different races “get along because they don’t look at colour.”
My sympathies are clearly with Ms. Ibrahim — aside from her being correct and sassy (my favourite qualities in a woman), she also invited all of Twitter to meet up for drinks at her local bar on Friday. Cheers!
If my tone is slightly flippant, it’s a just a coping mechanism. Because I genuinely don’t see how these two camps can come back together. They are looking at the same thing, but seeing totally different things. Can these two world views be reconciled?
Mrs. Ibrahim is my hero. I don't have kids, but if I did I would like to have the kind of courage she has to stand up to those school board crooks and imbeciles. There must be millions of parents across the country who are sick of their kids being brainwashed. If only they could organize and fight back.
I don’t see the divide narrowing to be honest. My best guess is you will see liberals shift toward more conservative as the hypocrisy gets worse and worse and more apparent. It’s difficult to discuss online, however if you look into it the entire divide is heavily engineered.... you enter “conspiracy” land which often just turns out to be true. It’s probably going to get crazier before things calm down, people need to focus on growing gardens and reconnecting with Nature.
I live in Northern Virginia, and our public schools are going mad with this strange racial derangement we're all undergoing. But a lot of parents are really aggressively fighting back, which is heartening. The tiger moms will be the saviors of us all.
Mrs. Ibrahim is my hero. I don't have kids, but if I did I would like to have the kind of courage she has to stand up to those school board crooks and imbeciles. There must be millions of parents across the country who are sick of their kids being brainwashed. If only they could organize and fight back.
I don’t see the divide narrowing to be honest. My best guess is you will see liberals shift toward more conservative as the hypocrisy gets worse and worse and more apparent. It’s difficult to discuss online, however if you look into it the entire divide is heavily engineered.... you enter “conspiracy” land which often just turns out to be true. It’s probably going to get crazier before things calm down, people need to focus on growing gardens and reconnecting with Nature.
I live in Northern Virginia, and our public schools are going mad with this strange racial derangement we're all undergoing. But a lot of parents are really aggressively fighting back, which is heartening. The tiger moms will be the saviors of us all.