❝ In Queenstown, New Zealand, the stakes have been raised in the adrenaline experience market. There’s now a “catapult” that launches participants almost 500 feet into the air at a speed of up to 60 miles per hour.
❝ It’s not for the faint of heart, or those with a fear of heights, necessarily.
RTFA. How did this come about?
❝ A new University of Virginia study found that white nationalists are likely to be low-income, divorced, uneducated and unemployed.
❝ One year after the Unite the Right marches in Charlottesville, Virginia that led to the death of 32-year-old Heather Heyer and dozens of serious injuries, scholars at the nearby university analyzed the demographics of potential alt-right members in hopes of discovering what makes certain Americans susceptible to joining white nationalist movements.
❝ Researchers at UVA’s Institute for Family Studies studied responses to 2016 American National Election Survey, and singled out respondents who had a strong sense of white identity, a belief in the importance of white solidarity and a sense of white victimization. The group found that unemployed white Americans without a college degree and with an annual income between $0 and $29,000 were more likely to agree with the principles of the white nationalist movement. These respondents were also much more likely to be divorced than married or never married.
Anyplace I ever worked – where I was just looking for a short-term, less skilled [or no skilled] job, a quick buck for mediocre pay – a significant minority of my fellow-workers fit this description. Not that they migrated towards each other like untrained rodents. These were the leftover jobs after occupations requiring education and somewhat demanding skill-sets were already taken.
I’m not certain of the cause-and-effect relationships; but, I have to wonder if better education was required and available could better pay have been justified? Might their understanding of a better life for all of us have been possible?
Wee, sleekit, cow’rin’, tim’rous beastie, O what a panic’s in thy breastie!
❝ It wasn’t so much a dog whistle as it was an airhorn. Or perhaps a primal scream. But whatever it was, Laura Ingraham’s forceful denunciation of “massive demographic changes” served as another raw example of a Fox News host echoing white nationalist language.
Perhaps it was a glimpse into President Donald Trump’s well of support, too.
❝ The Fox News audience is almost 100% white, according to Nielsen. And on the channel’s highest-rated shows, the politics of white anxiety play out practically every day, as hosts and guests warn about the impacts of immigration and minimize or mock the perspectives of people of color…
“The America we know and love doesn’t exist anymore,” Ingraham said Wednesday night. “Massive demographic changes have been foisted on the American people, and they are changes that none of us ever voted for, and most of us don’t like.”
Ingraham said “this is related to both illegal and legal immigration.”
Nixon’s Southern Strategy has come home. Another president who – no doubt – also deserves to be impeached has taken up the racist cudgel. The Fake President marches on in his campaign to squash democratic opportunity. His Republican allies in Congress, whether through cowardice or shared racist conviction, march proudly at his side.
Folks ignorant enough to believe “It can’t happen here” had better get off their rusty-dusties – because once the Klan-types are through with reinstalling racist officialdom they’ll be coming for anyone who isn’t wholly subservient to their version of law.
