The media reflex here is to abstract the problem into process, tone, or polarization and not motive, so that racism can remain ambient and unnamed while still doing explanatory work.

This isn’t novel; it’s a familiar defensive maneuver. Acknowledging that racism exists in the abstract is relatively inexpensive. Acknowledging that one has materially benefited from it is costlier, because it destabilizes the self-concept of being uncomplicatedly virtuous.

There’s a smaller irony here. You’re diagnosing the pundit class’s risk aversion while using analysis as a way to say what you admit is obvious. The elaborate framing does the same protective work nuance once did: it earns permission to state the banal truth without quite owning its banality.

Are rural Iowan’s good people though? Seems like maybe they’re not.

In a few years the audience for AI (read: people who can’t distinguish between what’s real and what’s not, and therefore have no interest in making such distinctions) will be THE target audience (read: the only audience that matters).

Reminds me of the classic children’s book, “If You Give a Nazi a Concentration Camp.”

This is revisionist. The reason it happened is the vast majority of us were down with bringing democracy to the ME. The main takeaway was Republicans are amoral and incompetent.

Your view is hopelessly skewed by your own decency. Love this for you.

Later that day:

Hyndman, Pennsylvania has been a Republican stronghold for at least the past two decades. It is a lie to suggest that Democrats have failed them. They’ve failed themselves.

Or, more fundamentally, it’s the thing that persuades innocent people to comply. You would think blue lives would understand that, but I suspect they’re of a mind that liberals are pussies. Good luck.

I think it’s imperative that we adopt a framing that, once and for all, assigns responsibility for what’s happening — not to Trump, not to a slogan, but to Republicans. It’s Republicans who are responsible. Republican President. Republican Tariffs. Republican Leap Back. Republican Executive Orders.