Noah Smith & Matt Yglesias: We’re Losing the Tech War to China (And Nobody Cares)

We are all minorities now. Americans need to recognize that we are all minorities and focus on being Americans and making life better for everyone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cc61eF3TPQo

DC Shooting Kills 2, House Passes ‘Beautiful’ Bill, Trump Falsehoods on South Africa | The Headlines

Pro-Palestinian terrorism in the U.S..

Trump spreads misinformation about South Africa live in front of the South African leader.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtrhOdAPqCs

No More Refugees, Trump Said. Except White South Africans.

Trump is dismissive of refugees, but then actively supports these South African refugees. Why? One obvious difference is that these refugees are white. Or maybe this is just Musk’s influence who has a personal interest in South Africans because he is from there? Maybe it’s because of the relative wealth and/or skills of these refugees? Is it about ease of assimilation? Does focusing on South Africa stoke fears about potentially anti-white policies in the U.S., increasing fervor and support for Trump and those like him?

The South African government is not taking land from white farmers. They have an offer to buy their land for redistributive purposes, but there is no forced land takings by the government. There is a law that could be read as allowing the government to take land from whites, but it has not been used like this so far, and it could just be similar to eminent domain laws in the United States.

There have been robberies and murders of white land owners, but there is a lot of crime in South Africa, and this is a small minority of it. It’s not clear that there is a focused crime attack on white farmers. What is clear, is that South Africa has a lot of crime in general.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6ETTPv6TMQ

Trump’s South Africa ‘Genocide’ Spin

“There is a real issue with South African farmers being killed or violently attacked, experts told us. But most of the violent acts are committed during robberies in a country where most of the wealth and land post-apartheid is still owned by a relatively small white minority.

“Yes, white farmers are being killed in South Africa,” political scientist Jean-Yves Camus, co-director of the Observatory of Political Radicalism at the Jean Jaurès Foundation in Paris, told us via email. “However, there is nothing like a ‘white genocide.’ And the issue needs to be seen in the broader context of a country plagued by crime and gang activity.”

Although police statistics are imprecise on the issue, there have been about 50 farm murders per year over the last several years. That’s less than 1% of all murders in the country.

“Murder victimization is far more correlated to class, gender and location than race,” Lizette Lancaster of the Institute for Security Studies in South Africa, told us via email.

“Farm attacks, including murders, do occur in South Africa, and many are undeniably brutal,” Anthony Kaziboni, a political and critical sociologist at the University of Johannesburg’s Centre for Social Development in Africa, told us via email. “However, South Africa must be understood in its broader socio-economic and historical context.” South Africa has “extreme inequality, with approximately 10% of the population (largely white) owning over 80% of the wealth. It also has a deeply violent past, and the country’s structural violence persists today alongside physical violence, economic violence, and many other forms of violence.”

“Violent crime affects all sectors of society, not just farmers,” Kaziboni said.”

https://www.factcheck.org/2025/05/trumps-south-africa-genocide-spin/

The Republican Party is less white than ever. Thank Donald Trump.

“1) Trump has successfully associated himself with a message of economic nostalgia, heightening nonwhite Americans’ memories of the pre-Covid economy in contrast to the period of inflation we’re now exiting.
2) Trump and his campaign have also zeroed in specifically on outreach and messaging to nonwhite men as part of their larger focus on appealing to male voters.

3) Trump and his party have taken advantage of a confluence of social factors, including messaging on immigration and cultural issues, to shore up support from conservative voters of color who have traditionally voted for Democrats or not voted at all.”

“These three theories try to describe how Trump specifically has been able to improve his and the GOP’s standing among a growing segment of the American electorate. They place Trump as the central cause for the majority of this racial political shift. But would these dynamics still be happening if he weren’t involved?

There are signs that some of this shift may be happening independently of Trump. It could be a product of the growing diversification of America, upward mobility and changing understandings of class, and growing educational divides.

For example, as rates of immigration change and the share of US-born Latino and Asian Americans grows, their partisan loyalties may continue to change. Those born closer to the immigrant experience may have had more of a willingness to back the party seen as more welcoming of immigrants, but as generations get further away from that experience, racial and ethnic identity may become less of a factor in the development of political thinking.

Concepts of racial identity and memory are also changing — younger Black Americans, for example, have less of a tie to the Civil Rights era — potentially contributing to less strong political polarization among Black and Latino people in the US independently of any given candidate — and creating more persuadable voters in future elections.

At the same time, younger generations are increasingly identifying as independents or outside of the two-party paradigm — a change in loyalty that stands to hurt Democrats first, since Democrats tend to do better with younger voters.

Regardless of whether Trump just happens to be the right kind of populist at the right time of racial and ethnic change in America or if he’s a unique accelerator and contributor to the changes America is experiencing, November may offer more evidence that something has fundamentally changed in US politics. As America diversifies, it makes sense for its political parties to diversify too — and that poses a reckoning for Democrats in elections to come.”

https://www.vox.com/2024-elections/373535/3-theories-gop-donald-trump-nonwhite-voters-hispanic-black-latino-asian

Don’t sneer at white rural voters — or delude yourself about their politics

“Trump is the fundamental threat to American democracy today. All political violence is lamentable, but individual militants cannot undermine the independence of federal law enforcement, the integrity of the electoral process, or the peaceful transfer of power; an insurrectionary president plausibly can.
And there is no question that white voters from low-density areas support Trump by much larger margins than their counterparts in high-density places.

In the 2020 election, rural white voters backed Trump over Biden by 42 points, while suburban white voters favored him by just 7, according to the Democratic data firm Catalist. Urban white voters, meanwhile, supported Biden over Trump by a 32-point margin.

If rural white Americans voted the same way that suburban white Americans do, then Trump would never have been elected president and his brand of authoritarianism would not be competitive in national elections. If all white Americans voted like those who live in cities, meanwhile, then Trump’s party would have negligible influence over the federal government.

What’s more, Harper acknowledges that rural white Americans are “overrepresented” among those who support restoring Trump to power by force.

Given these facts, it’s silly to argue that urban and suburban white people are doing more to imperil American democracy than their rural counterparts. Harper’s only real counter is that more supporters of January 6 live in cities than in rural areas. But this is a trivial point: Roughly 80 percent of Americans live in non-rural areas. Name any ideological group under the sun and you’re almost certain to find that a majority of that group lives in high-population municipalities, rather than in places that, by definition, have few people.”

“All this said, rural white voters are not a monolith. In fact, such voters were an indispensable part of Biden’s 2020 coalition.

Yes, the president won only 28 percent of that voting bloc, but that adds up to more than 9 million votes. In 2020, Biden won nationally by roughly 7 million ballots and took many swing states by tiny margins. Subtract all rural white Democrats from Biden’s column and Trump almost certainly would have won reelection.”

https://www.vox.com/politics/24128478/white-rural-voters-politics-trump-biden-2024-election-polling

America’s white majority is aging out

“Generation Z will be the last generation of Americans with a white majority, according to census data. The nation’s so-called majority minority arrived with Generation Alpha, those born since about 2010.
Barely two decades from now, around 2045, non-Hispanic white people will fall below half as a share of the overall U.S. population.

Those conclusions, and the numbers behind them, seem simple enough. Yet, some scholars contend that the numbers are wrong, or at least misleading, and that the looming ascent of a majority-minority America is a myth.”

“: By 2045, more than 18 million people will claim two or more races. Subtract them from the total, and the population of non-Hispanic white people leaps from 49 percent to 52 percent of the remaining population, their majority status restored.

“Whites are going to be the largest group in this country for a long time,” said Richard Alba, distinguished professor emeritus in sociology at the City University of New York.

“In a sense, we’re forming a new kind of mainstream society here, which is going to be very diverse. But whites are going to be a big part of that. It’s not like they’re going to disappear and be supplanted.”

Alba argues that the census itself is “locked into a way of thinking that dates to the 20th century, and that’s the idea that people are only one thing when it comes to ethnicity and race.”

It makes sense: Back in 1980, non-Hispanic white people made up about 80 percent of the American population. Black and Hispanic people, Asian Americans and others split the remaining 20 percent. They were the statistical minority, and demographers used that term to describe them.

Today, multiracial Americans are the fastest-growing racial category in the census, a group projected to double in size between 2020 and 2050.

Alba and others said they believe even that number is a dramatic undercount.

People of mixed race “have relatively fluid identities,” Alba said. “They can think of themselves as white, they can think of themselves as minority, or they can think of themselves as mixed.”

Consider an American with three grandparents who are non-Hispanic white people, and one who is Black, Hispanic or Asian. Simple math suggests labeling that person as white. But long-standing American tradition might favor a “minority” identity.

The practice of labeling mixed-race Americans as minorities dates to the 1600s and the racist “one-drop” rule, which held that a person with any Black ancestry should be counted as Black.

The nation engaged in racial reductivism as recently as 2008, scholars say, when America unblinkingly identified its new mixed-race president as Black.”

Why Tucker Carlson’s text message about “white men” matters

“In the text, Carlson describes watching a video of several Trump supporters beating up an (alleged) antifa member on the streets of Washington, DC. His reaction is nuanced: He confesses to feeling a certain vicious bloodlust while watching the video — “I really wanted them to hurt the kid” — but realizes that this is a horrific impulse that ought to concern him. “I should remember that somewhere somebody probably loves this kid, and would be crushed if he was killed,” Carlson writes.

But the most important line is one where he describes the attack in racial terms: “Jumping a guy like that is dishonorable obviously. It’s not how white men fight.”

His obvious implication is that nonwhite men gang up on defenseless opponents all the time, whereas whites only commit violence honorably.”

“is it any worse than mainstreaming the “great replacement” conspiracy theory developed by white supremacists? Is it more offensive than saying immigrants make America “poorer, and dirtier, and more divided”? Is it more racist than downplaying the killings of unarmed Black men by the police, or accusing Tennessee state Rep. Justin Pearson (who is Black) of putting on a fake “sharecropper” accent?

Tucker has done all of these things on the air”

“A core part of Tucker Carlson’s message is that he, and his viewers, are colorblind: that they are standing up for the ideals of Martin Luther King Jr. against liberals who want to polarize America along racial lines for their own nefarious purposes. “You can’t attack people, whole groups of people on the basis of their race and ethnicity. Not in the media, especially,” he said in a representative February broadcast.”

“Seeing whites as at once the master race and victims is common in racist thought. Nazi propaganda described Jews as both inferior to Aryans and their conspiratorial oppressors; modern-day white supremacists routinely warn about the prospect of “white genocide,” a specter that Carlson also invoked on his show.
But Carlson’s maneuver was to sever the theory of white victimhood from its explicit white supremacist roots. Fox viewers should stand up for white interests not because whites are the superior race, in this narrative, but because they’re being victimized by the dastardly Democrats and race-mongers who are standing in the way of racial harmony.”