Im-Politic: Parents Should Ignore this Over-the-Top Woke Guide to Pop Culture

Tags

Al Qaeda, children, families, Im-Politic, movies, parenting, parents, Phillipines, political correctness, popular culture, racism, The Washington Post, white supremacy, wokeness

Even though the Washington Post has turned into a daily display of guilt-drenched, virtue-signaling wokeness and political correctness, I was still gobsmacked to read the following in yesterday’s edition of its weekly feature “Common Sense Media.”

These reports’ raison d’etre is helping “families make smart media choices” for their kids when it comes to “movies, games, apps, TV shows, websites and books,” and its latest group of reviews included this warning about a new action flick called Plane:

“[T]here are troubling aspects to how the film’s non-White characters are represented. Darker-skinned, Southeast Asian-presenting actors are cast as criminals, while lighter, more East Asian-presenting actors are cast as “good guys.” And Black characters are coded as heroic but violent.”

Now I actually consider “Common Sense Media” to be a great idea in principle. Who can doubt that popular culture offerings today are saturated with material that’s disgusting, perverse, and wildly inappropriate and even dangerous for the intellectual, social, and ethical development of kids of various ages? (The impact on grown-ups surely isn’t very beneficial, either.) So everyone should be all for alerting parents to this garbage.

But common sense – not to mention minimal logic and coherence – really is imperative, and if you think about it for more than passing moment, that’s exactly what this comment is missing.

After all, what’s the message that this review is trying to send? That Plane is a film created by folks with some major racial and ethnic prejudices. But they’re obviously bizarre kind of racists and bigots at best.

They don’t like “darker skinned Southeast Asians.” But they do like “lighter…East Asians.” And they seem to like “Black characters” yet more – even though people of subsaharan African descent are almost always darker skinned than Southeast Asians.

There’s no law requiring prejudice to be logical, but the assumptions evidently underlying this passage surely deserved at least some scrutiny. Like maybe by editors?

Nor do the review’s shortcomings stop there. For example, in real life, how much skin color difference is there between many East and Southeast Asians, especially since the population of the latter region contains large numbers of individuals of Chinese ancestry?

Maybe the writer is referring to the “dangerous separatists in the Phillipines” who are the movie’s villains? Well, according to this academic article, the archipelago is quite the demographic melange, having been peopled by at least five major migrations from all over Australasia, Southeast Asia – and Taiwan (which is located between East Asia and Southeast Asia). So exactly which of these numerous groups is allegedly being slimed?

Moreover, “dangerous separatists in the Phillipines” aren’t figments of some white supremacist screenwriter’s imagination. As explained here by the Congressional Research Service, separatism has been a long-standing problem in that country, especially in the southern-most islands. And these movements have included an organization with impressive-looking ties to Al Qaeda. Since that’s the group that planned and carried out the September 11 attacks, it sounds pretty dangerous.

In principle, one could ask why the film-makers decided to zero in on this country and this group. But the obvious, common sense answer is “Why not?” Should Filipino separatists – or any non-white groups – be exempted from the list of villains permissable in America? If so, why?

Or is the reviewer implying that American popular culture doesn’t regularly, and never has regularly, produced works featuring white villains? Just posing the question should reveal its absurdity.

In this vein, I also found myself wondering about the need to mention that “Black characters” are “coded as …violent”? Were Plane‘s white characters not violent, too? If so, that would be weird for a movie that “Common Sense Media” tells us from the get-go is “an action film” with lots of “violence.” Do such movies typically include characters seeking to resolve their differences through dialogue or role-playing or compulsory arbitration?

That this material made it into a leading American newspaper without a single editor apparently batting an eye –and does so again and again – makes you wonder what new lows in progressive pearl-clutching and sanctimony are just around the corner. But “Common Sense Media” also offers one reason for modest optimism: It includes no bylines, indicating that its contributors feel some sense of shame – even if unwitting -about purveying such divisive drivel.

Advertisement

Im-Politic: Has Everyone Gotten “The Great Replacement Theory” Wrong (Except Me)?

Tags

Buffalo shooting, Center for American Progress, conservatives, Democrats, Great Replacement Theory, Hispanics, Im-Politic, Immigration, Latinos, Payton Gendron, racism, Republicans, Steve Phillips, white supremacy

The question in today’s title has been nagging me for some time, and since the appalling Buffalo, New York massacre has brought the “Great Replacement Theory” (GRT) back into the headlines, it seems like an especially good time to explain why.

It’s not that the GRT doesn’t exist, or that it hasn’t played a part in motivating white racist violence in America. The idea that elites have sought to reduce the political influence of native-born white Americans through means ranging from promoting racial integration to supporting mass immigration not only unmistakably exists; it’s got a pretty lengthy history. And it’s been explicitly cited in recent years to justify killings of members of various minority groups (see, e.g., here and here), including (somewhat confusingly), Jews, who evidently are viewed by many adherents as non-white. (Or is their sin being non-Christian?)

Accused Buffalo shooter Payton Gendron was a GRT believer, too – at least if a lengthy statement posted on-line shortly before his assault began really was – as widely believed – written by him.

But the claim that Republicans and other conservatives are the only non-fringe U.S. political figures who have written about the immigration version of GRT is flat wrong. It’s been explicitly in the nation’s political air since the issue achieved hot-button status in the mid-2000s with the outbreak of mass demonstrations by illegal immigrants and amnesty supporters and the Congressional battle over a “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” bill. And the mentioners have prominently included Democrats and Mainstream Media journalists.

For example, as just reminded by (conservative) columnist Rich Lowry, in 2013, the Center for American Progress (CAP) – closely associated not with the Democratic party’s progressive faction but with its supposedly moderate “Clinton wing” – published a paper arguing that “Supporting real immigration reform that contains a pathway to citizenship for our nation’s 11 million undocumented immigrants is the only way to maintain electoral strength in the future.”

Nor was the 2013 report a one-off CAP product. CAP Fellow Steve Phillips’ 2016 book Brown is the New White argued, according to his publisher, that “hope for a more progressive political future lies not with increased advertising to middle-of-the-road white voters, but with cultivating America’s growing, diverse majority.”

And in 2013, journalist Emily Schultheis wrote in that unerring guide to Inside the Beltway political conventional wisdom, Politico, that

“The immigration proposal pending in Congress would transform the nation’s political landscape for a generation or more — pumping as many as 11 million new Hispanic voters into the electorate a decade from now in ways that, if current trends hold, would produce an electoral bonanza for Democrats and cripple Republican prospects in many states they now win easily.”

Moreover, the haste with which President Biden moved to overturn many of his predecessor Donald Trump’s restrictive immigration policies and Congressional Democrats determination to stuff lenient immigration positions into the Build Back Better stimulus bill and the so-called China competitiveness bill strongly suggest they firmly believe these claims.

So are Republicans and conservatives and whites and anyone else worried about GRT right to fear being replaced – that is, about mass immigration’s potential to change America into something they would find odious and indeed un-American? That seems anything but clear.

This post does a good job of presenting the reasons for and against such Republican concerns (though the author is emphatically pessimistic). But these days, it suffers a major flaw: It’s five years old. And since its publication, there’s been abundant evidence not only from polls but from actual voting behavior that Republicanism – including its Trump version, has significant and growing appeal to Hispanic voters. Or is it that this group is increasingly turned off by what it’s been seeing of the Democrats lately? Six of one, half a dozen of the other. Either way, that doesn’t sound very Great Replacement-y to me.

Certainly, this latter trend is too short-lived so far to warrant tossing GRT fears onto the ash heap of history. But at the least it argues for immigration restrictionists turning down the GRT volume some, and focusing on what I view as the strongest arguments against the Open Borders-friendly policies so long pushed by most on the political left, along with Big Business’ Cheap Labor Lobby, and globalist and libertarian ideologues (many of course lavishly funded by that Lobby).

These concern the wage-depressing effect of mass immigration throughout the economy, and the national security dangers created by indifference to the matter of who exactly is entering and residing in the country, And given the power and money still at the command of the opposition, they should be more than enough to keep the restrictionists’ plates full for the foreseeable future.

Im-Politic: A Colleyville Media Terrorism Cover Up

Tags

Aafia Siddiqui, ABC News, Biden, Colleyville, domestic terrorism, hostages, Im-Politic, Islam, jihadism, Kamala Harris, Mainstream Media, media bias, Muslims, terrorism, Texas, white supremacy

Here’s something I don’t often say – and may never have ever said: Congratulations to ABC News. As of this writing (just shy of 4:30 PM EST yesterday), they’re the only national news outlet I’ve looked at that’s mentioned  the distinct possibility (based on a claim from “a U.S. official briefed on the matter”) that the person who took hostages in a Dallas, Texas area synagogue was “claiming to be the brother of convicted terrorist Aafia Siddiqui” and was “demanding to have the sister freed.”

According to ABC, here’s who he wanted freed: Someone with “alleged ties to al-Qaida” who was “convicted of assault and attempted murder of a U.S. soldier in 2010 and sentenced to 86 years in prison.”

The ABC News report must have come out before 3:18 PM EST because it was referenced in a Fort Worth Star-Telegram posting at that time. (As of posting time – Sunday morning – this link and those appearing below have been superseded by updates, so it appears you’ll have to take my word for the following information having been accurate when I grabbed them yesterday at the URLs presented at which they were found then.)

But here’s where I haven’t yet read about the suspect’s possible identity (in the order in which I checked these news sites out):

CNN as of 4:32 PM EST.

The New York Times as of 4:36 PM EST.

The Washington Post as of 4:37 PM EST.

CBS News as of 4:45 PM.

NBC News as of 4:46 PM.

Even Fox News as of 4:44 PM.

The Associated Press as of 4:32 had mentioned a Fort Worth Star-Telegram report that “The man, who used profanities, repeatedly mentioned his sister, Islam and that he thought he was going to die….”

Reuters as of 4:47 PM mentioned the Siddiqui angle.

It’s still possible that the reported Siddiqui connection proves to be completely wrong, as it’s officially unconfirmed, or somehow tangential to the hostage-taker’s motives. But can anyone doubt that if any claims of a white supremacist angle or a Trump-supporter angle – as opposed to a Muslim or a jihadist angle – had surfaced that these descriptions would have been shouted from the rooftops, and immediately?

In fact, there can’t be much reasonable doubt that Mainstream Media articles also would have prominently reminded readers of the Biden adminstration’s recent decision to set up a new domestic terrorism unit in the Justice Department, in line with the President’s declaration that “domestic terrorism from white supremacists is the most lethal terrorist threat in the homeland.”

(It’s similarly revealing that a President and Vice President quick to jump to racially charged judgment regarding several recent violent incidents – see, e.g., here – were much more cautious this [Sunday] morning. The former simply stated that “There is more we will learn in the days ahead about the motivations of the hostage taker.” The latter echoed this reticence practically word-for-word.)  

Last Wednesday, Gallup published the results of a poll presenting American respondents’ views of 22 professions, ranking them from most honest and ethical to least. Newspaper and television reporters came in fifteenth and seventeenth, respectively. The early coverage of the Colleyville hostage situation adds to the abundant evidence why.