I very much appreciate your efforts at compiling a vast array of different viewpoints and sources on this topic for someone as lazy as I to pour over. The history of strife between different groups in America continues to fascinate me. Ethnic politics is a relatively novel concept over here in Sweden. The Nordic countries have traditionally been relatively homogenous, but recent decades have seen an influx of immigrants - from the Balkans in the 90's to the 2015 refugee crisis. To be clear, I do not oppose this. Many of my closest friends are first-or second generation immigrants from the areas mentioned above, all of whom are extremely well adjusted. However, we are also dealing with integration problems reminiscent of those America has faced pertaining to urban decay and increasing segregation of society. The language barrier in particular is a difficult obstacle to overcome, as community leaders in these areas have been revealed to say one thing to the Swedish government and an entirely different thing to the newly arrived. This is, of course, a topic that has very easily utilized as a political battering ram by the more... dubious parts of the political right, even in America. My country is however no hellscape, and I am not worried about a growing minority of muslim immigrants subverting our government and establishing a Scandinavian caliphate or something. My concern is rather that this problem becomes a fixture in Swedish society, much like it has become in America. I understand that your focus is on American politics (as has been made abundantly clear by your coverage of the Russo-Ukrainian war), but what do you think small European countries should do to avoid the pitfalls that the US has struggled with in regards to, as Dr. King would have put it; "making the crooked places straight"?
On a completely unrelated note: when tf you getting back to the Aztecs? I've been waiting an E T E R N I T Y .
What books are you working from about upper class wasps using blacks as a battering ram to break up neighborhoods. Very curious about this due to family connections in places like Detroit and Philadelphia
I'm not sure what DC used ,sorry Mr Cooper, (was just listening to you and your mate on the unraveling) Maybe this was already mentioned but Mau Mauing the Flak Catchers was an interesting read. It is chronicle like it in that it was written in 1969 by Tom Wolfe. It features Leonard Bernstein. I will have to go back and read it again now after the 'Blacks and Jews' series applying that filter
I am old enough (barely) to remember how terrible the late 70’s were for the larger cities in the US. Darryl mentions (in God’s Socialist) how the commentators of the 1977 World Series openly comment on the fact that the Bronx is on fire again. I actually have a memory of that since my father and I were watching the game (I was 7). Therefore, I also remember the violence of the 80’s as a teenager. Luckily for me, I grew up in rural SC and watched from afar as cities destroyed themselves. And, being a teenager, had no idea what underpinned all this violence and degradation. All this context leads me to ask DC this question(s): what books have you read that try to explain the link between the collapse of the civil rights movements of the late 60’s into chaos and the ensuing violence and institutional collapse (at least in the cities) of the 1970’s? Second, you mention the Third Worldism ideology and the effect it had on the relationship between Blacks and Jews. Do you consider Third Worldism to be connected to or the same as the exporting of Marxism from Western intellectuals to the former European colonies so that the oppressed peoples of the world could throw off the colonial masters? Professor Bruce Gilley was on the Uncancelled History podcast and he referred to this exporting of Western Marxism as the true imperialism. What role does the Third Worldism outlook play in many people, particularly Blacks, in viewing the Jews as nothing more than the new imperialists (whether in the Middle East or the management of so many global businesses)? Maybe I am drawing too many connections here but there seems to be something there. Anyway, thank you for a great series! I needed a bit of a break after reading Stalin’s War and currently reading my 6th book on the Rwandan genocide.
Curtis Yarvin talks about a divide between German and Yiddish speaking Jews in NYC. Did you notice this dynamic come into play when you were researching school integration there?
Can you point me to a post or something where Yarvin talks about German/Yiddish speaking Jews so I can take a look?
From my own experience and knowledge I can confirm that immigration of Jews from Germany to the US began earlier and that German Jews were far wealthier and cosmopolitan than the vast majority of other European Jews who lived in the Pale of Settement. However, most German Jews still probably spoke Yiddish, which is an amalgam made up mostly of German words written in Hebrew characters that is easy for most German speakers to pick up even today.
The divide between German and Eastern Jews (ostjuden) was more cultural and class-based than linguistic, as even the Jews of Poland and Lithuania routinely also spoke German, Russian, and Polish along with Yiddish.
The divide was still sharp however - the Eastern Jews were poor, lacked anything resembling a Western education, and lacked even the first notion of fancy society’s social graces. The German Jewish emigres who were trying to work their way into American upper crust society (with varying degrees of success) were worried that the new lower class Jewish immigrants would reflect poorly on all of them and so set up a system of “intake” centers designed to help acclimate new immigrant Jeas to American society and get them set up to participate in a new economy. That seems altruistic - and it was to some degree - but it came with no small amount of contempt.
As a personal anecdote, my mother’s family are Jews from Germany who moved to the US in 1910s. My father’s family are Jews mostly from what is now Belarus. My mother’s objected to the wedding and almost refused to attend because they thought my mother was marrying beneather herself. This was in the 1970s!
I don't remember exactly how I heard it. I think it was when he was on the Good Ol Boys podcast. He said similar things to your comment, while adding that the German Jews in the US weren't exactly worked up about the Holocaust while it was going on.
The last bit seems unlikely, although they didn’t know much about what was really going on in Europe after the war started. Before the war, as Germany was ramping up persecution of Jews internal to Germany, the German expatriate Jews in the US were a bit divided over the right approach but they were all pretty freaked out. Some thought that Hitler couldn’t be as bad as he seemed and just needed to be reasoned with, others - particularly those with friends and family still in Germany - were panicking and begging the White House to act.
Yeah I may have been misremembering. Wish I could remember which specific podcast appearance this was. Anyways I'm not Jewish but it is fascinating to learn about internal divides in the Jewish diaspora.
More specifically, with respect to politics. My understanding is that most American Jews are liberal. What divides a Norman Podhoretz or a Ben Shapiro from the rest of American Jews?
Yeah that's not correct. Most German Jews were freaked out about Hitler and what he'd do to European Jewry, German and Eastern. That said some didn't take him seriously, or it was happening to people far away on a continent they'd left behind.
For many who cared, there was a great deal of concern of seeming too parochial, both how it might affect them status wise--either that they weren't assimilated enough, or if they were leftist or liberal that they weren't being universalist enough--but also that it might backfire in terms of galvanizing support to confront Germany. Many thought, and were probably right, that emphasizing Hitler's threat to Europe and through some intellectual gymnastics the US, would galvanize the US to join the war against Hitler better than emphasizing the specific plight of the Jews.
I feel like DC gets a little bit too charitable in these articles about the violence and depravity that was unleashed on the white working class by abolishing de facto urban segregation in the North. This was a deliberate policy inflicted on people without any regard for the fallout it caused. The government-enforced integration of cities from the 50s-70s caused incalculable harm- physically, as in the many victims of the now-unleashed criminal black youth element- see Left Behind in Rosedale if you have a strong stomach. But the financial damage, from loss in property value (most Americans' largest asset), police budgets, building new suburbs, costs to jail criminals, the lost time to commutes and car buying, the gutting of city tax revenues, urban decay, etc may never fully be calculated. Look at Detroit today versus Hiroshima today. The ruling class since 1945 has been absolutely arrogant and cruel, and they don't give a damn about who suffers for their utopian projects.
This series absolutely clinches your status as my very favourite podcaster.
My question is:
How is it that you are drawn to the most controversial topics that exist?
(I wonder if you are a Type 9 on the Enneagram... that's not part of the question, feel free to ignore)
This is a heavy burden you have taken on.
My second question:
Are you feeling the weight of these issues and the controversial opinions that they stir up in others or do you thrive on this kind of work? Peterson has spoken about the burden these sorts of controversies have had in his psyche.
I was in 9th grade when JFK was assassinated (1963) so my high school and college years coincided with the events described in this series. As I read I visualized and recalled so much about where I was and what I was doing when these events took place. Its created a unique opportunity to relive the 60's -70's and remember people, music and events from the times. It was glorious. Thank you.
I am a 60 year old Jew, from New York and then New Jersey. I grew up around very few Protestants. Most of the Christians in my school and neighborhood were Roman Catholic or Greek Orthodox. I’ve lived in Florida, California and Massachusetts over the past 25 years, where I’ve met many more Protestants than from New Jersey. I found there was a fair amount of Anti-semitism growing up. Nothing really problematic, more annoying than anything. I have been fascinated, however, as I’ve grown older, and been around more Protestants, that the attitude toward Jews and Israel, in particular, is far more accepting. My question is, has there been a change with more evangelical influence, or is it just my environments have changed?
In one of the earlier essays you mentioned the blacks being offended that the Jews would challenge them for status for most prolific victim. It seems that in the 50 years since then, that feeling has only increased, from all sides, to the point where one’s elevated status in the modern world is contingent on the depth of one’s victimhood. From your perspective as the researcher, what has to happen or change, both in individual cultures and society as a whole, for this morality of victimhood to be changed or done away with?
One of the threads I detected throughout the story had to do with “whiteness” in America, what it means, and who gets to decide who is white and who isn’t. After the first rounds of immigration to NY that you described, it seemed like the existing white majority got to decide who was white - not the Irish, not the Italians, not the Jews. Gradually these groups were incorporated into “whiteness,” or at least the Irish and the Italians were.
For Jews there was more ambivalence. But that eventually ended only when *the Blacks* decided that Jews were white. I was particularly struck by how this played out in your description of the early Civil Rights movement - the Jews were participating in it *as Jews*, until Blacks began to view and resent them as *whites* and kicked them out.
None of which turns at all on how *Jews* think of themselves - it is all just imposed on Jews from the outside by larger groups of people who exercise coercive power over them. In this case, the power is exercised to define Jews in ways that suit the definers, instead of according to how Jews choose to define themselves.
All of which gets really interesting when translated over to the Crown Heights pogrom, which pitted Blacks against the chassidim. A mainstream, assimilated, mostly secular Jewish person in the US may be “white,” as far as it goes. It seems a real strain to try to cram people like the chassidim into the frame of American “whiteness.” These are people who don’t speak English, only immigrated to America in the ‘30s and ‘40s, follow a basically incomprehensible religion, dress and behave in alien ways, and have less than zero cultural, financial, or political clout outside of their tiny enclaves in Brooklyn.
And yet, the Blacks of Crown Heights vented their anger at all white people generally, and against Jews specifically, on the chassidim, and the mainstream narrative seems to accept that the Crown Heights pogrom was “anti-White” more than “anti-Jewish.”
There’s a question in here.
If even the chassidim, of all people, are “white people,” regardless of how they view themselves, what does that term even mean anymore? Who falls within its limits and who gets to decide?
Thanks for the series Darryl, great stuff as always!
Do you think the positions / roles that Jewish people tend to gravitate towards within any society (landlord, merchant, banker, etc) lead to the resentment from other cultural subgroups? It seems that the Jewish people tend to end up in the scapegoat position regardless of which society there in.
Yes, Sowell and Daryl both hit this theme in their works.
My mother emphasized that with me when I was young: "Value what you learn! Jews have been kicked out again and again, and you can't carry the stuff with you when you run. But if it's in your head, you can never lose it."
That's the mindset. You can't bring a farm with you, or a workshop (unless you're lucky) so the trades that just need your brain look attractive.
Historically, I believe it was a tactic -- the kind Machiavelli would approve of. Give an unpopular outgroup the unpopular job. (Money lending, tax collection). Then the people get angry at the outgroup, rather than the prince giving him orders.
This is precisely what the British (and to a leaser extent the US in the Middle East) did with their colonies. They would find a minority group and put them in charge. This group was then beholden to the British for their wealth, power, and safety. And if the majority population got out of hand, the British could blame everything on the minority government they had installed. This is a huge part of Iraq’s history for example.
What do you make of the Kyrie Irving situation back when you started this thing? Used to watch NBA intensely before pandemic/radicalization in 2020 and cut entirely. But I did notice a lot of white liberals calling for the players to denounce him, but it feels like that never happened at all... LeBron - their God - said he wanted him on his own team, basically, a far cry from any condemnation. What does that tell you?
If we’re recycling all the the dumb, rich-kid-radical ideas of the 60s now, but with millennials and zoomers, are we going to repeat the whole 60s-70s-80s cycle again, though faster and with fewer resources?
In other words, if the new 60s started with Obama/Trump, and now we’re into the urban decay/energy crisis/silent majority 70s, can we expect some sort of “the pride is back” 80s vibe to roll in around 2030?
Maybe it will even be led by a conservative governor from a sunny state named “Ron”? (mostly kidding on that one...mostly)
I’ll add that I’m assuming that any such cycle would not represent a real resurgence of US prosperity but rather another step downward in our stop-and-go decline, underway since about 1970.
Hello, Mr. Cooper.
I very much appreciate your efforts at compiling a vast array of different viewpoints and sources on this topic for someone as lazy as I to pour over. The history of strife between different groups in America continues to fascinate me. Ethnic politics is a relatively novel concept over here in Sweden. The Nordic countries have traditionally been relatively homogenous, but recent decades have seen an influx of immigrants - from the Balkans in the 90's to the 2015 refugee crisis. To be clear, I do not oppose this. Many of my closest friends are first-or second generation immigrants from the areas mentioned above, all of whom are extremely well adjusted. However, we are also dealing with integration problems reminiscent of those America has faced pertaining to urban decay and increasing segregation of society. The language barrier in particular is a difficult obstacle to overcome, as community leaders in these areas have been revealed to say one thing to the Swedish government and an entirely different thing to the newly arrived. This is, of course, a topic that has very easily utilized as a political battering ram by the more... dubious parts of the political right, even in America. My country is however no hellscape, and I am not worried about a growing minority of muslim immigrants subverting our government and establishing a Scandinavian caliphate or something. My concern is rather that this problem becomes a fixture in Swedish society, much like it has become in America. I understand that your focus is on American politics (as has been made abundantly clear by your coverage of the Russo-Ukrainian war), but what do you think small European countries should do to avoid the pitfalls that the US has struggled with in regards to, as Dr. King would have put it; "making the crooked places straight"?
On a completely unrelated note: when tf you getting back to the Aztecs? I've been waiting an E T E R N I T Y .
What books are you working from about upper class wasps using blacks as a battering ram to break up neighborhoods. Very curious about this due to family connections in places like Detroit and Philadelphia
I'm writing up an essay about this. I'll list all the books and other sources I use.
How reliable do you find E Michael Jones's Barren Metal on this topic?
I'm not sure what DC used ,sorry Mr Cooper, (was just listening to you and your mate on the unraveling) Maybe this was already mentioned but Mau Mauing the Flak Catchers was an interesting read. It is chronicle like it in that it was written in 1969 by Tom Wolfe. It features Leonard Bernstein. I will have to go back and read it again now after the 'Blacks and Jews' series applying that filter
I like Darryl’s audio.
I am old enough (barely) to remember how terrible the late 70’s were for the larger cities in the US. Darryl mentions (in God’s Socialist) how the commentators of the 1977 World Series openly comment on the fact that the Bronx is on fire again. I actually have a memory of that since my father and I were watching the game (I was 7). Therefore, I also remember the violence of the 80’s as a teenager. Luckily for me, I grew up in rural SC and watched from afar as cities destroyed themselves. And, being a teenager, had no idea what underpinned all this violence and degradation. All this context leads me to ask DC this question(s): what books have you read that try to explain the link between the collapse of the civil rights movements of the late 60’s into chaos and the ensuing violence and institutional collapse (at least in the cities) of the 1970’s? Second, you mention the Third Worldism ideology and the effect it had on the relationship between Blacks and Jews. Do you consider Third Worldism to be connected to or the same as the exporting of Marxism from Western intellectuals to the former European colonies so that the oppressed peoples of the world could throw off the colonial masters? Professor Bruce Gilley was on the Uncancelled History podcast and he referred to this exporting of Western Marxism as the true imperialism. What role does the Third Worldism outlook play in many people, particularly Blacks, in viewing the Jews as nothing more than the new imperialists (whether in the Middle East or the management of so many global businesses)? Maybe I am drawing too many connections here but there seems to be something there. Anyway, thank you for a great series! I needed a bit of a break after reading Stalin’s War and currently reading my 6th book on the Rwandan genocide.
+1 to this comment generally, and specifically I could use an explainer or “third worldism.” Until this podcast I’d never even heard it before.
Curtis Yarvin talks about a divide between German and Yiddish speaking Jews in NYC. Did you notice this dynamic come into play when you were researching school integration there?
Can you point me to a post or something where Yarvin talks about German/Yiddish speaking Jews so I can take a look?
From my own experience and knowledge I can confirm that immigration of Jews from Germany to the US began earlier and that German Jews were far wealthier and cosmopolitan than the vast majority of other European Jews who lived in the Pale of Settement. However, most German Jews still probably spoke Yiddish, which is an amalgam made up mostly of German words written in Hebrew characters that is easy for most German speakers to pick up even today.
The divide between German and Eastern Jews (ostjuden) was more cultural and class-based than linguistic, as even the Jews of Poland and Lithuania routinely also spoke German, Russian, and Polish along with Yiddish.
The divide was still sharp however - the Eastern Jews were poor, lacked anything resembling a Western education, and lacked even the first notion of fancy society’s social graces. The German Jewish emigres who were trying to work their way into American upper crust society (with varying degrees of success) were worried that the new lower class Jewish immigrants would reflect poorly on all of them and so set up a system of “intake” centers designed to help acclimate new immigrant Jeas to American society and get them set up to participate in a new economy. That seems altruistic - and it was to some degree - but it came with no small amount of contempt.
As a personal anecdote, my mother’s family are Jews from Germany who moved to the US in 1910s. My father’s family are Jews mostly from what is now Belarus. My mother’s objected to the wedding and almost refused to attend because they thought my mother was marrying beneather herself. This was in the 1970s!
I don't remember exactly how I heard it. I think it was when he was on the Good Ol Boys podcast. He said similar things to your comment, while adding that the German Jews in the US weren't exactly worked up about the Holocaust while it was going on.
The last bit seems unlikely, although they didn’t know much about what was really going on in Europe after the war started. Before the war, as Germany was ramping up persecution of Jews internal to Germany, the German expatriate Jews in the US were a bit divided over the right approach but they were all pretty freaked out. Some thought that Hitler couldn’t be as bad as he seemed and just needed to be reasoned with, others - particularly those with friends and family still in Germany - were panicking and begging the White House to act.
Yeah I may have been misremembering. Wish I could remember which specific podcast appearance this was. Anyways I'm not Jewish but it is fascinating to learn about internal divides in the Jewish diaspora.
Gosh there are so many to choose from, internal divides are kind of our thing.
More specifically, with respect to politics. My understanding is that most American Jews are liberal. What divides a Norman Podhoretz or a Ben Shapiro from the rest of American Jews?
Yeah that's not correct. Most German Jews were freaked out about Hitler and what he'd do to European Jewry, German and Eastern. That said some didn't take him seriously, or it was happening to people far away on a continent they'd left behind.
For many who cared, there was a great deal of concern of seeming too parochial, both how it might affect them status wise--either that they weren't assimilated enough, or if they were leftist or liberal that they weren't being universalist enough--but also that it might backfire in terms of galvanizing support to confront Germany. Many thought, and were probably right, that emphasizing Hitler's threat to Europe and through some intellectual gymnastics the US, would galvanize the US to join the war against Hitler better than emphasizing the specific plight of the Jews.
Any backlash, yet?
Nah, everybody loves me.
But of course! [In the Grey Poupon voice]
I feel like DC gets a little bit too charitable in these articles about the violence and depravity that was unleashed on the white working class by abolishing de facto urban segregation in the North. This was a deliberate policy inflicted on people without any regard for the fallout it caused. The government-enforced integration of cities from the 50s-70s caused incalculable harm- physically, as in the many victims of the now-unleashed criminal black youth element- see Left Behind in Rosedale if you have a strong stomach. But the financial damage, from loss in property value (most Americans' largest asset), police budgets, building new suburbs, costs to jail criminals, the lost time to commutes and car buying, the gutting of city tax revenues, urban decay, etc may never fully be calculated. Look at Detroit today versus Hiroshima today. The ruling class since 1945 has been absolutely arrogant and cruel, and they don't give a damn about who suffers for their utopian projects.
Hi Darryl,
This series absolutely clinches your status as my very favourite podcaster.
My question is:
How is it that you are drawn to the most controversial topics that exist?
(I wonder if you are a Type 9 on the Enneagram... that's not part of the question, feel free to ignore)
This is a heavy burden you have taken on.
My second question:
Are you feeling the weight of these issues and the controversial opinions that they stir up in others or do you thrive on this kind of work? Peterson has spoken about the burden these sorts of controversies have had in his psyche.
I much appreciate your work, my friend
Stay well!
I was in 9th grade when JFK was assassinated (1963) so my high school and college years coincided with the events described in this series. As I read I visualized and recalled so much about where I was and what I was doing when these events took place. Its created a unique opportunity to relive the 60's -70's and remember people, music and events from the times. It was glorious. Thank you.
I am a 60 year old Jew, from New York and then New Jersey. I grew up around very few Protestants. Most of the Christians in my school and neighborhood were Roman Catholic or Greek Orthodox. I’ve lived in Florida, California and Massachusetts over the past 25 years, where I’ve met many more Protestants than from New Jersey. I found there was a fair amount of Anti-semitism growing up. Nothing really problematic, more annoying than anything. I have been fascinated, however, as I’ve grown older, and been around more Protestants, that the attitude toward Jews and Israel, in particular, is far more accepting. My question is, has there been a change with more evangelical influence, or is it just my environments have changed?
In one of the earlier essays you mentioned the blacks being offended that the Jews would challenge them for status for most prolific victim. It seems that in the 50 years since then, that feeling has only increased, from all sides, to the point where one’s elevated status in the modern world is contingent on the depth of one’s victimhood. From your perspective as the researcher, what has to happen or change, both in individual cultures and society as a whole, for this morality of victimhood to be changed or done away with?
Darryl, what are you personal take aways from studying for this series? How, if any, has your worldview changed?
One of the threads I detected throughout the story had to do with “whiteness” in America, what it means, and who gets to decide who is white and who isn’t. After the first rounds of immigration to NY that you described, it seemed like the existing white majority got to decide who was white - not the Irish, not the Italians, not the Jews. Gradually these groups were incorporated into “whiteness,” or at least the Irish and the Italians were.
For Jews there was more ambivalence. But that eventually ended only when *the Blacks* decided that Jews were white. I was particularly struck by how this played out in your description of the early Civil Rights movement - the Jews were participating in it *as Jews*, until Blacks began to view and resent them as *whites* and kicked them out.
None of which turns at all on how *Jews* think of themselves - it is all just imposed on Jews from the outside by larger groups of people who exercise coercive power over them. In this case, the power is exercised to define Jews in ways that suit the definers, instead of according to how Jews choose to define themselves.
All of which gets really interesting when translated over to the Crown Heights pogrom, which pitted Blacks against the chassidim. A mainstream, assimilated, mostly secular Jewish person in the US may be “white,” as far as it goes. It seems a real strain to try to cram people like the chassidim into the frame of American “whiteness.” These are people who don’t speak English, only immigrated to America in the ‘30s and ‘40s, follow a basically incomprehensible religion, dress and behave in alien ways, and have less than zero cultural, financial, or political clout outside of their tiny enclaves in Brooklyn.
And yet, the Blacks of Crown Heights vented their anger at all white people generally, and against Jews specifically, on the chassidim, and the mainstream narrative seems to accept that the Crown Heights pogrom was “anti-White” more than “anti-Jewish.”
There’s a question in here.
If even the chassidim, of all people, are “white people,” regardless of how they view themselves, what does that term even mean anymore? Who falls within its limits and who gets to decide?
Thanks for the series Darryl, great stuff as always!
Do you think the positions / roles that Jewish people tend to gravitate towards within any society (landlord, merchant, banker, etc) lead to the resentment from other cultural subgroups? It seems that the Jewish people tend to end up in the scapegoat position regardless of which society there in.
I’m sure Darryl will have good insights to share on this, but I particularly like Thomas Sowell’s
explanation in “Middleman Minorities,” definitely worth a read. This article also tallies up some of the other explanations along with Sowell’s: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/antisemitism-meme-eugene-bardach
Yes, Sowell and Daryl both hit this theme in their works.
My mother emphasized that with me when I was young: "Value what you learn! Jews have been kicked out again and again, and you can't carry the stuff with you when you run. But if it's in your head, you can never lose it."
That's the mindset. You can't bring a farm with you, or a workshop (unless you're lucky) so the trades that just need your brain look attractive.
Historically, I believe it was a tactic -- the kind Machiavelli would approve of. Give an unpopular outgroup the unpopular job. (Money lending, tax collection). Then the people get angry at the outgroup, rather than the prince giving him orders.
This is precisely what the British (and to a leaser extent the US in the Middle East) did with their colonies. They would find a minority group and put them in charge. This group was then beholden to the British for their wealth, power, and safety. And if the majority population got out of hand, the British could blame everything on the minority government they had installed. This is a huge part of Iraq’s history for example.
I think Daryl mentioned this tactic as well. He said the British were the masters of it.
What do you make of the Kyrie Irving situation back when you started this thing? Used to watch NBA intensely before pandemic/radicalization in 2020 and cut entirely. But I did notice a lot of white liberals calling for the players to denounce him, but it feels like that never happened at all... LeBron - their God - said he wanted him on his own team, basically, a far cry from any condemnation. What does that tell you?
If we’re recycling all the the dumb, rich-kid-radical ideas of the 60s now, but with millennials and zoomers, are we going to repeat the whole 60s-70s-80s cycle again, though faster and with fewer resources?
In other words, if the new 60s started with Obama/Trump, and now we’re into the urban decay/energy crisis/silent majority 70s, can we expect some sort of “the pride is back” 80s vibe to roll in around 2030?
Maybe it will even be led by a conservative governor from a sunny state named “Ron”? (mostly kidding on that one...mostly)
I’ll add that I’m assuming that any such cycle would not represent a real resurgence of US prosperity but rather another step downward in our stop-and-go decline, underway since about 1970.