yeah, i'm sure conservatives will forget that you want to take all their guns after this. incredible political triangulation with this guy.
Dumber than a brick lmao.
And he is doing this in Texas, where they own more guns than most anywhere else in the US
Beto:
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Against guns in Texas
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For oil
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Against CRT
...what in the even is he trying to do?
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Claims to be against AR-15s
Continues to shoot his mouth off
Curious.
I can't help being reminded of the Washington Guntakers plot in Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. It involved finding a name more offensive and controversial than Washington removed.
Being against CRT as a Democrat will simultaneously drive away Dem voters and also not gain a single GOP vote
What do you mean? Talking conservative positions on social issues while wearing the D has been the playbook for decades now and has won elections zeroes of times!
a 50/50 political grind but you taco your arm on the dismount
Democrats don't actually like CRT when they actually know what it is. The only way to get libs to like CRT is to make them think its just teaching kids about racism. It makes sense. I've personally met Biden voters who have swung republican in the gov election over CRT.
beto chasing the anti-gun, pro-lgbtq, anti-CRT vote. HUGE demographic. HUUUGE.
this exactly is the kind of political saaviness ive come to expect from democrats
beto chasing the anti-gun, pro-lgbtq, anti-CRT vote.
He'll be carving letters off of LGBTQ as fast as his pollsters tell him to. Nevermind how he can't even win Texas Latinos, the real key swing vote in the state. Dude's going to be endorsing Donald Trump before he comes out in favor of sick leave or child care, in a state where ending poverty in The Valley was supposed to be what flipped the board.
The more you talk about non-issues like they're some big deal the more you convince people they're a big deal
First "Defund the police", then "Critical Race Theory", it's shocking how lazy the Republicans are with their propaganda yet how effective it is simply because the Democrats consistently walk into rakes as a deliberate strategy.
The Democrats consistently walk into rakes as a deliberate strategy.
57D chess?
Democrats years from now: "Childhood box-opening youtube star turned Congressman comes out against bans on death camps in home state."
The two runner ups in that election (both around 3%) were: Joy Diaz, a journalist no one has heard of and has never held a public office and Michael Cooper, an actual used car salesman who has never held an office either. Beto was the only name anyone recognized.
Fair enough, makes Texas Dem establishment look pathetic though for seemingly consolidating all their efforts around someone as unelectable as Beto. Especially considering the state could be very winnable with a decent candidate.
How big is Texas' legal sector? I feel like the answers to those two questions are correlated.
My problems with CRT are very different than the average voter's (I am not a fan of Critical Theory in general and think it's a bourgeois perversion of Marxism), but I think the reality is that CRT is very unpopular with most working people in the US. And I don't just mean white chuds who want to ban teaching kids about slavery.
I work in construction and talk to lots of Hispanic workers and tbh, they're not very fond of this kind of stuff, especially the Hispanic folks. Idk the numbers but it feels like there has been a big change in the Hispanic community in particular. Basically all the Hispanic folks I've worked with in the past couple years either liked Trump, Bernie or didn't care about politics (the majority). Before 2016, they were basically all default Democrats. After Bernie was dunked on by the Dem establishment, I basically hear zero positive comments about Dems. Most of the pro-trump Latinos I have encountered were mostly fond of him because of the massive construction boom he presided over (obviously skewed since they're all construction workers). But since Biden took power, I've heard nothing but complaints, sometimes about stuff like gas prices and inflation and often about....less than woke grievances about education policy. A lot of these people are basically "socially conservative but economically progressive". Since the Dems aren't offering them economic progressivism, they're going for the socially conservative party, because why not? You're not getting any healthcare from either party, so why not go with the one closer to you on the culture war sphere?
I am not a fan of Critical Theory in general and think it’s a bourgeois perversion of Marxism
please elaborate on this, because i have heard people say this about CRT, Feminism, Postcolonial studies only to end up spewing a bunch of reactionary garbage later, but I want to give you the benefit of the doubt.
My understanding is that critical race theory, rather than being a "bourgeois perversion" of marxism, is simply a cross-disciplinary intellectual and social movement of civil-rights scholars and activists who seek to examine the intersection of race and law in the United States and to challenge mainstream American liberal approaches to racial justice. This is neither a perversion of Marxism, nor is it mutually exclusive to Marxism.
Also just because you anecdotally know a bunch of socially conservative laborers who have swallowed propaganda doesn't mean people should abandon an entire field of academia, especially since reactionaries will call anything they don't like Marxism/CRT/Feminism anyway.
Critical Theory in general eschews the materialist basis of Marxism in favor of idealistic "oppressor" and "oppressed" dichotomies. Marxism is materialist, and the arrival at the conclusion that the capitalist class is an "oppressor" comes via the economic analysis that capitalists exploit workers for their surplus value, rather than the fact that capitalists vaguely have more power than workers do. Critical Theory strips the material basis from Marxism and repositions it's assertions as idealist ones. That is why I oppose it. Critical race theory is just another offshoot of the broader critical theory movement that emerged out of academia in the postwar US-hegemonic west. It's no coincidence that these academics were nobodies on the European left until the US dominated Western Europe and started the cold war. Look around the global south and try to find communists who take the Frankfurt School folks seriously. You won't. They're only taken seriously in the west, because their theories clashed with the ideological foundations of the USSR and the PRC, and were less antagonistic to those of the capitalist West.
I understand what you're talking about. There has been much scare mongering amongst the western far right about """cultural Marxists""". Like many conspiracy theories, they're partially right, but through the lack of sound analytical framework, they arrive at horribly wrong conclusions.
We have successfully frozen their brand—"critical race theory"—into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category. The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think "critical race theory." We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.
- Chistopher Rufo, the reporter who got the CRT debate going, and why CRT discussions are so chaotic (different definitions of CRT)
(Spoiler) Earlier comment of mine on the discursivity of identity if needed
Gender and race are discursive traits in the sense that they require the existence of an Other to have meaning. Just like it doesn’t make sense to talk about boneless pizza, it doesn’t make sense to talk about gender when you’re the only person in existence. This due to the definition “man” being useless without a contrastive “woman.”
But discursive identities are “performed” - at least if you follow Judith Butler’s school of thought, there’s no such thing as “a woman” so much as (and this is the phrasing she uses) her experience of “been being a woman.” That is to say the gender doesn’t exist in the person themselves, but rather in the communication between two people and the understanding springing therefrom (because we established earlier the need for an Other). So in critical race theory and queer theory and such, people are not “black” but rather “being black,” which allows for changes in what black means (and blackness can change because it’s a shared understanding and not an inherent trait).
Conversely to discursive, performed identity, class is a material relation to power. That is, in contrast to gender and race, it does make sense to talk about class when you're the only person in existence. You are either reaping the full benefit of your labor or you are not, sort of like being asleep or awake, which can happen in the absence of an Other.
Class reductionism holds that all oppression not along class lines falls away once class struggle is resolved. This is an ignorant position, and also is utilized by reactionaries to shut down any progress in those important arenas in favor of waiting on a revolution springing from the imperial core (won't happen) and therefore only functions as an impediment to real issues. However, this difference between the material and discursive is important in understanding how, for example, the conversation slips into Robin DiAngelo-esque co-opting of these issues into a massive corporate diversity industry, more aligned towards pacification than actual change, springing up from the need to avoid discrimination lawsuits, that doesn't even increase workplace diversity.
Quotes from Harvard Business Review link for the lazy
After Wall Street firms repeatedly had to shell out millions to settle discrimination lawsuits, businesses started to get serious about their efforts to increase diversity
It shouldn’t be surprising that most diversity programs aren’t increasing diversity. Despite a few new bells and whistles, courtesy of big data, companies are basically doubling down on the same approaches they’ve used since the 1960s—which often make things worse, not better.
This conversational slip occurs because, to utilize a common framing of racism, if we view such as "power + prejudice" the current focus is on eradicating the prejudice, leaving power unmolested. It should go without saying that prejudice has existed since time immemorial and will continue to exist for quite some time after this. People kill each other over football games, for chrissake. It also lends itself to an individual-level critique "you, Mr. Trump, are a racist" as opposed to system-level. Its fluidity (like annexation of Irish into whiteness) is not a proof of its soon to-be distruction: racism was propagated to serve the function of uniting the white West against all others, and now must be eradicated due to American multiculturality and reliance on, for example, PhDs from the third world. These particular expressions of a universal jingoism are abandoned once they are no longer useful (in the environment where their use has diminished).
Analogue from the Manifesto about sexism
The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labour, in other words, the more modern industry becomes developed, the more is the labour of men superseded by that of women. Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class. All are instruments of labour, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex
The current construction of power, on the other hand, does not suffer this issue. It is important to treat symptoms as well as disease, but don't mix the two up, and don't fall into the trap of either "symptoms all gone once disease gone" or "treating symptoms fixes disease." The former downplays women's, minorities', and the queer community's progress. The latter is reformism and merely shifts the burden (see "white feminism" et al).
I think it just forgets (in worse interpretations) that initial dynamic of oppressed is coming from worker/burger relationship. If you look at how america was racist through years, the pattern of being racist to “unskilled” labor is unmistakeable. Codifying this racism into law is further offshoot of this, as separating workers into unskilled/skilled in law is hard, while doing it by race is easy and sellable to populace
thanks for sharing your thoughts and giving feedback, I think I better understand where you're coming from, now
How does CRT “Strip Marxism of its material basis and repositions it’s assertions as idealist ones”?
Could you be more specific and give examples of this ideological striping
i don't really feel CRT runs counter to marxist ideology at all. critical race theory is basically an acknowledgement of systemic racism that is prevalent in the US, seeming to only have mutated rather than dissolved in the last 70.
crt has basis in fact, in the material conditions of people being oppressed, and therefore i don't really feel it's idealist. there are concrete, substantial, and documented statistics that show that people of color are treated on a different basis than white people in the US.
Look around the global south and try to find communists who take the Frankfurt School folks seriously. You won’t. They’re only taken seriously in the west, because their theories clashed with the ideological foundations of the USSR and the PRC, and were less antagonistic to those of the capitalist West.
perhaps they're taken more seriously here because we stripped africans of their culture and heritage in such a vast number, and CRT here is seen as a response to an extremely flawed, but evolving society, built on the backs of black people, slowly pulling itself away from years of racial oppression.
the two theories are not in opposition to each other. both are based in fact. workers of the world are being oppressed, as are people of color.
It's hard to even talk about CRT in this context because it really just literally means "not being racist" to these fucking people
Yeah I mean CRT is pretty poorly understood by the general population and what is being claimed as CRT varies widely. In some places, just teaching about American slavery is considered CRT. In others, they are teaching that white people as a whole are responsible for the suffering of black and indigenous people, and forcing white children to acknowledge their complicity in the white supremacist social structure. If they paired this kind of learning with an understanding of dialectical materialism, I'd be all for it, but they don't. In stead of creating young radicals ready to overthrow the current systems of oppression, it's going to create young reactionaries who feel they've been unfairly demonized and excluded from success based on their race.
not to say it hasn't happened before, but the tall tales about teachers singling out white kids in a classroom and telling them they're responsible for the current situation of racism and white supremacy in America just seems
overwhelmingly unlikely. If it has happened, I'm going to guess it's very isolated incidents with teachers who got immediate backlash
Now in college classrooms? Sure, professors get away with that kinda thing all the time
I really don’t understand why it’s so hard to teach kids that a specific group of white elites we’re the ones perpetuating this horrible racial hierarchy.
Who enforced that hierarchy and benefitted from it extensively?
If CRT meant "kids are reading Settlers", I'd say hell yeah. In practice, it means either conservative parents whining about their kids being taught that Indigenous People and slavery existed - which theynhave always complained about, even when today's parents were in school - or weird white liberal teachers taking shit too far and telling 10 year olds they were made by Yakub in the lab (save that for high school at least!). It's like the definition of made-up nonsense.
you say this as if “Critical Race Theory” is being taught in schools and is an actual point of debate on the table, and not just a reactionary culture war wedge being used to stop children from learning about any of the sins of their forefathers, because plenty of voters secretly think racism is either not a big deal or flat out positive but they can’t say that. the whole thing is in completely bad faith and there’s no point even entertaining the discussion.
yeah when conservatives talk about "schools teaching CRT," they mean like teaching that the south fought the civil war to maintain slavery.
This is so contrary to my experience that I have to ask what you do for a living. Either you don't know these people at all, you make racist assumptions of them, or you live in a place where the social conditions are drastically different from the norm.
I have a hispanic upbringing and I have literally worked in construction. You are making excuses for reactionary bullshit, sorry.
That's fine, I'm not asking you to dox yourself, just give an idea of your social relation to production. It's not like I asked where you worked. I'm pretty confident people won't find out who I am despite me telling everyone I'm a construction worker with family in Russia , in a state where a few local unions endorsed a moderate GOP governor
I dunno about the patronage bit, but I worked in construction and saw plenty of anti black racism from Hispanic guys.
The vast majority of western leftists are like this. They romanticize POC struggles but don't know any themselves.
talk to lots of Hispanic workers and tbh, they’re not very fond of this kind of stuff, especially the Hispanic folks.
Lol no shit? What, you think Hispanics are any less racist against black people?
I think we’re going to see a rightward shift in Hispanic voting patterns as they become assimilated. I would say many Hispanics are socially conservative already, but they lean Dem because the Dems association with labor.
But the Dems will continue to abandon working class voters in favor of their new favorite electorate, the college educated professional woke class. That will lead to Hispanics being split in their voting patterns.
That's why I will always LOL at any bluecheck that hates Bernie but dreams of a blue, gentrified Texas. Bernie was their best shot at that happening.
- He polled very well with Latinos.
- He raised interest in NON-VOTERS. We're not gonna win over hogs. We likely will win over a few, but non-voters are the better market here.
- Didn't start cheesily pandering to Latinos during election season by breaking out into Spanish.
I'm not saying to go stupidpol here. In fact, I think that prioritizing labor will lead to the de-hogging of many.
100% this. The emphasis on labor will have a huge impact on a lot of lives in the Latin communities because spoiler alert: They're the fucking labor.
Also like every Mexican or Mexican-descent individual I've ever worked with has told me they find it really pandering (not offensive, just total WTF kinda reaction) when white politicians bust out the Spanish for points. Older millenial 2nd Gen Mexicans grew up in houses where the parents didn't teach them Spanish because they wanted them to assimilate to English which compounds the awkward factor for them in particular.
When your platform is based on the first five bullet points that are randomly pulled out of a hat.
What is the "Dem association with labor"? Does anyone really think people believe the Dems are pro-union instead of corporate?
What is the “Dem association with labor”? Does anyone really think people believe the Dems are pro-union instead of corporate?
nobody here believes that, but the dems have been running on the legacy of the New Deal, and the Great Society even if they don't do anything like that anymore. Basically these moves were dem attempts to prevent communist revolution by offering a semblance of social democracy. Those semblances of social democracy have been chipped away by neoliberalism and decline.
The Republicans similarly run on the fact that they were the good guys during the civil war era. "Party of Lincoln" bullshit obviously doesn't apply to them anymore but it doesn't mean they're above using that idea for propaganda. Also, just like New Deal was to prevent communist revolution, Emancipation was to prevent secession. Both were quasi-progressive moves that were done cynically for reactionary reasons. Lincoln wasn't abolitionist, and even when he became in favor of emancipation, he wanted it to be limited only to states that had rebelled. That's why loyal slave states got to keep their slaves until after the 13th amendment.
Republicans are almost entirely openly hostile to Unions while Dems will proudly boast their endorsements with labor unions. A couple local unions in my area endorsed the "moderate" GOP governor in 2018 and nobody talked about it, including the candidate himself, but the Dem candidate made a point to call out the unions that supported him.
Honestly from what I understand is that unlike African Americans who were brought here as slaves and have had their ancestry basically stripped from them, Hispanics often view themselves as being more proud of their specific country of origin as Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Honduran, etc. and the problem with this is that apparently a lot of them are racist as fuck towards each other so the republican rhetoric towards the border appeals to them because they don't want Hispanics that arn't from their country of origin coming in to the US
Idk, I'm not Latino so I can't say for sure but I've only ever seen this type of shit as playful ribbing (ie: Mexicans are fat, Ecuadorians are short etc). What I've seen as serious issues among Latino immigrants is economic issues like how consistent work is and if wages are rising, and cultural issues where I find myself starkly diverging from my Latino coworkers.
A lot of Hispanics are slowly being subsumed into something like "whiteness" as time goes on an sucessive generations become more Americanized. You haven't lived until you see some Pablo looking ass motherfucker go into an impassioned borderline Adolf Hitler esque rant about how the people who were their parents one, two, three generations ago or EVEN right fucking now should be gassed for crossing illegally.
I've noticed if you're not too ethnic and Hispanic and espouse enough reactionary bullshit you can sort of ingratiate yourself within the whole of reactionary bullshit. Mexico and other Latin American countries have been multiracial far longer than the USA and they are still as racist and as fucked up and have also had many people who were historically oppressed by the racialized caste system become oppressors.
I think the cracka's are slowly starting to realize they don't have the numbers anymore and are going to need some honorary cracka's.
It makes no sense for the USA to not become the multiracial woke empire. I've noticed a trend among some younger people here in California where they are opposed to racism in a vague sense but despite being a minority they have a very strong, distinct American identity. If you are like me and are born to some poor "Aztec mud people" who can't even speak English, don't know shit, don't even know what the direction "left" is, who are you going to choose: your parents culture which is constantly denigrated, clowned on, shit on, brings you awesome hits like LiveLeak chainsaw beheadings,
the greatest food known to man, poverty, or the strong Chris Kyle 1488 culture with the bigass trucks were if you act as psychotic as the progenitors of that zeitgeist you can secure yourself a tenous position of security?
Do they edit him to appear more “ethnic”? Like, the guy is Irish to the bone, he does not look this dark.
I'm pretty sure that's the case
They desperately want you to think he's Mexican
Which is why I refuse to call him Beto
That and my shithead cousin was also a Beto
Tacking left and tacking right as I look at the audience as they boo me like I'm on the price is right
This idiot said he would take their guns. He will never win the conservative vote. Even the mythical, moderate, anti-trump conservative, could-flip-democrat vote.
Look up the Lilly white movement, it’s how the republicans lost blacks
When your platform is based on the first five bullet points that are randomly pulled out of a hat.
Video you can skip the first couple minutes. He basically just says CRT is not being taught in schools except for law schools, where it's appropriate, and that's how it should stay.
He basically just says
I'm sorry, I literally can't hear you over the thousand headlines saying "BETO BETRAYS THE LEFT"
Getting riled up over a Fox News headline; This is the fourteenth type of liberalism. Coincidentally, ceding to the right wing's framing of a political issue (i.e. CRT should stay out of non-higher education) is the thirteenth type of liberalism.
ceding to the right wing’s framing of a political issue
I mean, its not so much ceding to the headline as being eye-gouged by ten thousand social media accounts blasting the message across cyberspace.
Like, I'm not inventing this framing or endorsing it. I'm simply a guy at the terminus of a long line of media donuts, with a little device that pries my mouth open and shoves them in.
