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I highly doubt this. Given the fervent hatred of conservatives I see espoused by educators, and to a lesser degree bureaucrats, even in deep red counties, it is beyond any doubt in my mind they will target the children of conservatives. If not exclusively, then disproportionately. Anything to hurt the enemy, and snuff out their line forever more. The rhetoric coming out of even mainstream Democrats is increasingly that The Republican Party is "the party of treason", and conservative voters are not a legitimate constituency. The raucous celebration by the left when the last census showed white people/conservatives are becoming a demographic minority much faster than anticipated, and specifically celebrating the death of older white people hastening this transformation told me everything I need to know.
They hate me, they want my children sterilized, and they want me dead. They say so, openly, repeatedly. I don't know why I wouldn't expect them to act on these openly expressed beliefs.
The trans children seem to be mostly teenaged girls of wealthy democrats and blue tribe conservatives married to them, and anecdata seems to indicate that the rest of them are the sons of single moms by choice. This is an inter-blue tribe squabble and by the actual numbers there simply aren't enough red tribe families with a trans kid for them to be targeted disproportionately over the issue.
There are things that democrats can do to weaponize CPS against red tribe groups- for example, mandating child protective oversight over homeschooling families(which I believe already exists in parts of Europe). Democrats are by and large not doing those things. This is a bad law for all sorts of reasons and indicates why it's frustrating sharing a country with the blue tribe in a democracy. "They're trying to genocide the red tribe" is not one of them.
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No, they don’t.
I don’t know that I can say anything that will convince you I’m not out to piss on your values.
Maybe if there were some members of Blue Tribe calling out Blue Tribers who openly piss on Red Tribe's values - then pointing out to those examples would be useful to convince Red Tribers that at least some Blue Tribers aren't out to piss on their values. Right now the situation looks more like some Blue Tribers are openly pissing on Red Tribe's values and gleefully proclaiming "look at us, how we're pissing on Red Tribe's values, and we're going to do it more and more, and you can do nothing to stop us!", other Blue Tribers loudly cheering them, and yet other Blue Tribers telling Red Tribers "you know, we're not out to piss on your values, but we have no idea how to convince you in that!" I don't think it can work this way.
It's worse than that.
Because ostensibly there are a few Blue Tribers calling out their tribe. They get swiftly unpersoned. Next thing they know their names are spoken in the same hushed tones as Alex Jones, and all their friends and colleagues will no longer return their calls.
I'm waiting to see what happens to Bill Maher. By and large he's a good little DNC footsoldier. He has his eye on the prize during election season, and his criticisms of the DNC are fairly mainstream when it's not. He also benefits from being "grandfathered in" when it comes to whether he gets punished for going off script. But lately he's been going a little too hard at trans issues, a little too close to election day. I'm curious if he'll still be on television in 2024.
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Don't overgeneralize "they". I do see a democrat coalition with their eyes on the prize to force their opponents into a checkmate in terms of sociopolitical influence. Reforms like adding DC and Puerto Rico as states; or defining republican value advocacy as hate speech; or gatekeeping all respectable institutions with tests of 'modern' values; or simply letting urbanization and demographic changes proceed as normal, are all achievable goals that will lock the current republican coalition into a "no-win" scenario. At that point, the republican party will reorganize around a different coalition, institutions will stop nodding to the old values, and the current republican coalition will go the way of the olde Tidewater coalition that is now Gone With The Wind™.
I think the average blue triber is fine if you're just powerless and the memes in your head go extinct as your children adopt their values.
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I invite my fellow academics to backyard barbecues with my (self-proclaimed) gun nut Red Tribe neighbours regularly. They don't hate each other and neither side wants the other dead. If you think the majority of normal Blue Tribe Americans want you (as a stand in for the Red Tribe) dead, I think you are entirely incorrect. I am a part time academic who works in a very Blue city and lives in a very Red rural town.
If they did they wouldn't turn up at bbqs and make polite small talk while passing the potato salad with each other. Do not confuse signals boosted by the Toxoplasma of Rage for the views of the majority of ordinary Americans.
If they hated you, if they wanted you dead, then they would be taking direct actual concrete steps towards doing so. Small Red towns like my own would have a rash of car bombings and the like. It's not as if it is difficult to find Red Tribers. Trans issues overwhelmingly affect Blue tribe kids not Red Tribe ones for instance.
Humans can be ugly and people often indulge in schadenfreude when people they disagree with suffer yes. But that isn't the same thing as actively wanting them dead. People often say things they do not mean and do not act on. That's why the saying is "actions speak louder than words". If Arugula eating Prius driving death squads start rolling out into my town then your rhetoric may match reality. But you're not even at Troubles level hate let alone that.
Maybe it's an American thing. You have been the greatest at almost everything for so long that you think you are at hating your own countrymen. When to an outsider you're barely at lukewarm dislike at a population level. You're not even kneecapping people who marry across tribes let alone killing them! You're not even in the hatred game, let alone pros.
If this is what you think of as hate, then you are very lucky. You're pretty much just LARPing as far as I can tell. Performative hate is not real hate. It's what you do when you don't actually have someone to hate properly. You're the greatest most powerful nation on earth. No-one can challenge you. No-one is a real threat. You can neuter one of your biggest historical enemies by throwing a few dollars at a proxy and watch as they learn all over again that you can buy their humiliation with your pocket change, like Yeltsin in an American supermarket.
Like supporters of a football club whose deadly rivals are now three divisions below you, you have to turn that emotion somewhere. But it isn't real. It's a mirage. You're fighting over whether you would win the league by more points if you bought a new goalkeeper or subbed on that teen prodigy for more of the game. Blowing up tiny irrelevancies into fights so you can at least get a scrap in after the match. Your culture war is entertainment. You can root for your side against the other, wear the flag and the shirt and the hat. You yell and scream and jeer like Eagles fans at the Cowboys. Yet you're not even pelting Santa Claus with bottles!
You're not Eagles fans or Millwall fans, you're the country equivalent of Manchester United in the Ferguson era. The only enemy strong enough to be a challenge are yourselves. Fighting over whether you eat prawn sandwiches or a pie. The question is whether Man City or Liverpool will rebound enough for you to have to turn your gaze outward again.
Your internal hatred is but a pale shadow of what it used to be. Barely even worth the name in my opinion. If this is your nations hatred, then everything is going to be just fine. You're just not good at it. You're far too hopeful as a nation. It's one of your most endearing qualities as a foreigner. I've seen real population level hate. I've seen it in Northern Ireland and I've seen it in the Balkans and I've seen it in Rwanda. But not here. And hopefully I never will.
What about flooding them with opiates? Car bombings are a dumb way to kill. Expensive, high-risk and don't scale. Opiates are profitable, legally low-risk and easy to distribute.
https://www.herald-dispatch.com/news/pillbillies-oxycotinville-emails-from-drug-exec-reveal-mockery-of-appalachians/article_03619647-b096-5b49-b675-6f8be7613fec.html
Or what about destroying their jobs by exporting them overseas? A certain kind of contempt bleeds through.
https://twitter.com/matthewstoller/status/1578130142655905816
Stupid, poor people kill with knives, guns and bombs. If you're smart, rich and powerful, you kill with laws and regulations. The pen is mightier than the sword, Mao killed more than even the worst serial killers/warriors with words alone. You can make it look legitimate by some meme you invented like 'manufacturing and energy production is ugly, polluting, needs to be heavily regulated' and 'let's have trade liberalization with foreigners who don't care for regulations' plus 'let's intensively market these non-addictive painkillers in these communities'.
That has been one of the decisions that has gutted the areas like the one I live in yes. But that happened in the UK and other developed nations too. That is was targeted rather than simply being financially expedient does not seem to fit the evidence.
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Gotta give credit where it’s due, the fentanyl epidemic is to the credit of forward-thinking cartels, not Purdue pharma et al. Fentanyl is complicated to manufacture compared to heroin but far easier to smuggle, and should be understood primarily as an innovation in the illicit drug market. It’s still contentious how big an impact easy access pharmacy opioids had compared to the counterfactual standard progression of heroin use incidence, but ultimately we’re 10 years past peak Oxy abuse. Gotta blame the markets, my guy.
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Would the Tutsi have fared better if they had had as many guns and preppers as Red Tribe?
Consider that one (1) single teenager of the Red Tribe can pacify a whole city of rioting Blue Tribe.
There has been a low-intensity civil war going on for a while, after all despite only making up 13% of the population, the major Blue Tribe voting block committed in 2021 60% of the violent crime.
Red Tribe just hasn't been fighting back, because they are systematically targeted by law enforcement organizations, censorship in the media, exclusion from economic opportunities (just ask Kanye West).
Perhaps one of the biggest factors is that a large share of the Red Tribe believes in turning the other cheek.
Crime (even violent crime) is not the same as a civil war. And most of the victims of that crime are not actually Red Tribe due to demographic separation. So even if it were a civil war it would be an internal Blue Tribe coalition one.
Kanye isn't Red Tribe just to be clear (neither are urban black communities Blue Tribe in fact). His position is mostly in common with Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam and so on.
Not sure what you mean by Red/Blue tribe. Urban black communities overwhelmingly vote for Democrats in the US.
Kanye is definitely '
our guyunless by Red Tribe you mean the pro-Israel National Review cucks and other establishment shills voting for welfare for Ukraine.Nick Fuentes is a fan of Kanye. Link is great, Nick has 2-3 African-Americans agree that imported Africans didn't have much chance at success in America/Europe what with coming from a civilization that had not had written language before colonial contacts.
Andrew Anglin and others are praising Kanye
Does not prevent him from speaking truth.
Most of his statements are pretty trivial for entertainment insiders or noticing enjoyers (1) (2)
Red and Blue Tribe are terms coined by Scott Alexander, this sub is a spin off of a spin off of his site. Blue Tribe is basically urban educated professionals (eat arugula, drive hybrids etc.) Red Tribe are rural working class (watch NASCAR, drive trucks etc.) they correlate some what with Democrat and Republican in that each tribe has a preferred party. However most Republicans here are Blue Tribe dissidents (or gray tribe which is a sub division of Blue, if you think that distinction is meaningful.).
Notably Urban black populations while they do indeed align with Democrats politically are not Blue Tribe.
Link is here to the original post on the blog: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/
Worth knowing the distinction because you will see those terms used here repeatedly. Though unfortunately with some definitional drift and used as a simple stand in for Democrat/Republican, which renders the usage of a different term somewhat needless.
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I've been in the room with professors after they were forced to interact with filthy hick townies, and heard what they're comfortable saying about them to students. You seem to be under this weird impression everyone is just imagining this stuff.
And my experience is different.
I am not saying your experiences do not exist. I am saying that at a population level they are not representative of most Blue Tribe Americans. We can tell this because if there was the virulent hatred then they would not be tweaking laws on trans issues and so on. You wouldn't be in a culture war, you would be in a civil war.
I am saying these things you mistake for hatred are pale imitations compared to actual population level hatred. It is by and large performative.
Tweaking laws on trans issues is one of the intermediate steps to a civil war. Civil war arrives when the intermediate steps are exhausted. Attempting to weaponize CPS is not one of the earlier steps. By the time the level of evidence you're demanding arrives, it will be too late for everyone involved.
Weaponizing CPS on this specific issue would overwhelmingly affect blue tribers. Red tribe kids very rarely try to become trans and when red triber adjacents are under spurious CPS investigations they just take their kids and go to a different state.
The entire point of my original post is that the individual laws don't matter. What actually matters is the extent to which policy is driven by tribal animosity, and at this point, the extent is "greatly" for both tribes. The outcome of any given policy doesn't matter, compared to the long-term aims and goals of the tribes. If the goal is to harm the other tribe, and this policy fails to achieve that goal, then they'll simply try something else, and keep trying until their goal is achieved.
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I entirely disagree. otherwise you have been on a route to a new civil war since the last one. If Northern Ireland can step back from the Troubles the US at a much much lower stage can and probably will. What it means to be Democrat and Republican has changed, and indeed almost entirely flipped previously. Switches to political coalitions are easy compared to religious division. White rural working class used to be a Democratic demographic, now that has changed. Coalitions rise and fall and the parties will change with them.
If I'm understanding you correctly, you think the culture war will resolve itself as people organically change their opinions and values?
Well people (in general) do change their values under social pressure, that is one of our most stable social technologies. But I am more talking about representation, consider the Conservatives in the UK. They won a bunch of non traditional seats in Labour strongholds due to Brexit. The influx of MPs representing those people (very similar to the working class inversion in the US) means that there is now a faction of MPs who don't want to lose their seats representing them. That faction is part of the reasons for the Conservatives budget climbdown recently. Voters in Stoke may have voted Conservative but that doesn't mean they suddenly became fiscal conservatives.
The Democrats have to change what they can accomplish based on what they can persuade Joe Manchin to vote for. The Republicans similarly for Sinema. And that is because of the people they represent.
When the UK government backtracked on its initial fairly lukewarm response to Covid to introduce lockdowns it was because MPs were under pressure from constituents to Do Something. The people in my experience are much more the drivers for "elite" decisions than I think even they realize.
Wokeness started as a backlash against cultural hegemony that had a number of groups considered as outcasts. When those groups got large and numerous enough they were able to form a coalition. The opposite will happen when people consider wokeness to be too oppressive. It's a see-saw that never stops moving. I think we can see some early signs of that. There will be a lag as things coalesce and as groups on the "outside" have to find and develop new alliances and get large enough to tip the scales once more. When that happens politicians will go with the current.
Which is not to say each tip doesn't leave some lasting changes. It usually does. Nothing can ever go back to the exact way it was before.
Edit: To clarify a bit, we will never be free of the culture war itself I don't think. It's an intrinsic part of human desire to form groups and then impose our values on those groups. But which side is winning, or what side represents what, is malleable and will change over time. It is an infinite war that cannot be won, but luckily it isn't an actual war.
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It's a big country, running over a teenager with a truck or hospitalizing a political canvasser are just things that happen. And according to the police in both those incidents there was no political motivation, so everything is fine.
Sure, that's why I am talking at a population level. If it were really widespread virulent hatred as claimed, you would not be in a culture war but a civil war.
I would note that with the exception of one year in particular, Bleeding Kansas was also not all that bloody either. The various terror campaigns of the late 1960s, early 1970s were bloodier still with less political fallout though those were less inter-tribal so much as far groups against the general center.
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