i genuinely think one of the things that contributed to the rise of anti-intellectualism is when leftists started conflating characters in a book being sexist, racist etc. with the book itself, or the author, being sexist or racist or possessing any other type of prejudice that they wrote into the book. and then one step further, accusing anyone who reads such a book of having those opinions as well lol. toddler-level media criticism
In any sort of war and conflict, there’s always people pointing at parts of the population and being like, “Look at this! Look at how evil and cruel and bigoted these people! Don’t you think they deserve the war? Don’t you think they deserve to die? Isn’t it a good thing that they will cease to exist when their country loses?” And to be quite blunt, I think that’s an extremely dangerous stance to hold in any country that is also filled with bigots.
Which is to say all of them, because humans are kinda assholes who are very good at finding things to hate for no real reason. But people find it much easier to point at that bigotry in other countries and say that it means collective punishment is deserve than to actually face the bigotry in their own homes and try to fix it.
Congressional Republicans can end this at any time, you know. They can just do that. Stopping the tariffs wouldn’t even take that many of them, not even 10 total.
People keep saying, “How can one man have the power to do all this?????” One man doesn’t. One man is being supported in this by an entire political party, and that political party was elected to the majority in both of our houses of Congress. This isn’t one man.
“Less than three months into his presidency, Trump’s approach to policy-making had already begun to reveal its erratic nature. His decision to impose tariffs, a move that put the global economy on the brink, did not stem from a robust economic discussion or expert consultation. Instead, as Maddow explains, the genesis of this policy was farcically superficial. Trump, lacking formal economic advisors, tasked his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, with finding an economic expert. Kushner’s method? Browsing Amazon for books, where he was struck by a title, “Death by China,” leading him to contact its author, Peter Navarro. Navarro, a proponent of aggressive tariff policies, appeared to have the intellectual backing for his views. However, it was later revealed that the economic expert he repeatedly cited, Ron Vera—an anagram of Navarro’s own name—was entirely fictitious. This shocking discovery implies that significant policy decisions, capable of wiping trillions of dollars off the global market and pushing the world towards a recession, were based on citations from a non-existent person. This revelation not only casts a shadow over the credibility of Navaro’s advocacy for tariffs but also raises profound concerns about the validation process of policy proposals within the administration.”
amhrancas 