These new people are, like us, a modern invention. But unlike us, their new name has no real meaning divorced from the machinery of criminal power. The new people were something else before they were white—Catholic, Corsican, Welsh,
“On November 28, 2000, while the Bush and Gore campaigns were still arguing over hanging chads in Florida, Sailer wrote a blog post. Citing exit-poll data, he demonstrated that if Bush had increased his share of the white vote by just 3 percent—if 57 percent of white Americans had voted for him, rather than 54 percent—he would have won in a landslide. Sailer then expanded his hypothetical: what if, in order to win those additional white votes, Bush had embraced a platform so caustic, so openly hostile to racial minorities, that he lost every nonwhite vote? “Incredibly,” Sailer found, “he still would have won.”
― Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation
― Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation
“Lee Atwater, a Republican consultant and the Paganini of the modern political dog whistle, once explained the Southern Strategy, a ploy by which his party used coded racism to appeal to white voters. “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger,’” Atwater said. “By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you, it backfires—so you say stuff like ‘forced busing,’ ‘states’ rights,’ and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract.”
― Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation
― Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation
“Samuel Morse, the man for whom the Morse Code was named, was convinced immigrants were destroying America. “A conspiracy exists … its plans are already in operation,” he wrote. “The serpent has already commenced his coil about our limbs, and the lethargy of his poison is creeping over us … We must awake, or we are lost.”
― Outrageous: A History of Showbiz and the Culture Wars
― Outrageous: A History of Showbiz and the Culture Wars
“To put it another way, war in our time is always a war against children. And if the children of other countries are to be granted an equal right to life with our own children, then we must use our extraordinary human ingenuity to find nonmilitary solutions for world problems.”
― A People's History of the United States
― A People's History of the United States
“Some on the left still found it comforting to assume that every Trump supporter was a shiftless rube under a demagogue’s spell. The reality I’d seen so far was more unnerving in its complexity. The leaders of the Deplorable movement were deeply wrong on many fundamental questions, both empirical and ethical, but they weren’t guileless or stupid. They were deft propagandists who, having recognized that social media was creating an unprecedented power vacuum, had set out to exploit it.”
― Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation
― Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation
James’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at James’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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