Am I the only one who has a hard time getting his head around a sub-continental Indian supporting White Supremacy? Or is Patel just now realizing that he is, really, actually white and it is our eyes that see him differently? Although, according to his bio in Wiki, "Kash Patel was born in Garden City, New York to Indian Gujarati parents …
Am I the only one who has a hard time getting his head around a sub-continental Indian supporting White Supremacy? Or is Patel just now realizing that he is, really, actually white and it is our eyes that see him differently? Although, according to his bio in Wiki, "Kash Patel was born in Garden City, New York to Indian Gujarati parents who had immigrated to the United States through Canada from East Africa."
Well, according to progressives, especially the ones who love DEI, you have to keep Asians, including South Asians (from India) out of merit based programs and schools (which you do by eliminating the standardized tests that achieve merit based admissions) because they may not be white, but they are “white adjacent”. So it’s the progressive DEI advocates who have told Patel, Usha, Vivek, and all these Indian kids in the Ivy League schools and the honors magnet high schools that they’re white. And now you make fun of them for believing it? I’m shocked!
Well, although I never heard of a category on any government form seeking racial information, "White Adjacent", I am willing to wait for those three and their WA friends to begin attending "White Adjacent Supremacy" meetings and podcasts to prove their bona fides.
It's not on a government form. It's the argument progressives make when they lobby to get rid of standardized tests in both college admissions and public honors high schools like the ones in NYC and Virginia. The DEI activists go after these schools for not being diverse enough, which they interpret as not enough Blacks and Hispanics. Most of the schools that have been targeted are majority Asian (honors high schools), and when you point that out (it's not white kids) the activists say the Asian kids are white adjacent and they are taking up places that should go to Blacks and Hispanics.
Google the controversy over the NYC schools and Thomas Jefferson high school in Virginia. The DOE did the exact same thing in my school district in the 90's. The metric for measuring racial balance in our gifted programs was Black vs Non-Black. The Asian parents in our program were appalled to find out they were "white" and that there were too many of them in the gifted programs. This has been a thing for a long time in education. It's just that now it's called DEI and the term is "white adjacent".
It is a natural human tendency to look for and exaggerate differences in order to create distinction, especially WRT status hierarchies. These distinctions might be based in appearance (skin color or hair color), they might be cultural (religious beliefs/practices, diet), or language/education--basically ANYTHING that can be leveraged to create distinction.
The less actual variation, the less consequential the thing used to create distinction will be, but the distinction will often be seen or made as being even more substantive.
The purpose of the distinctions is to basically Other the people that you are making distinct, so that they do not have to be treated as fellow human beings--so that they can be denied rights or even, in extreme cases, life, without having done that to "actual human beings." It is the justification for preferential treatment/mistreatment.
This is a core mechanic of the whole Us/Them human dynamic.
Great explanation; thank you. I continue to struggle w/ it being a "natural human tendency." Why is that? And is it really? Why isn't it our tendency to want to cooperate vs. compete / "Other"?
The short answer is evolution. The full answer literally takes books to cover (but still basically breaks down to evolution, it just expalins the details better).
That was a really insightful book. Caste is a much more useful explanation for US racism than just race. Look at how Jamaican and African immigrants feel about native born US African Americans.
Indians and Persians are Aryans.. at least some Indians are. So some of these people are relying upon that perception to classify themselves as somehow belonging to a white supremacist movement.
I think they are kinda overlooking the white part... because most of the people that belong to these types of organizations care more about your look than your supposed racial geneology.
Because once they get rid of the first group of non-white people, pretty sure that people that look like Patel will be up on the list.
Color is a huge status thing in Indian culture. If you work in tech, it’s really obvious. The people in management tend to be Brahmins and are light skinned and Caucasian looking. The darker the complexion, the lower the status.
Kash is fairly dark skinned as high status Indians go and I wonder if being crapped on by Brahmins is another source of his resentment.
Yeah, ummm far from just Americans who use "color to color their worldview"(one word fyi) it's global bro, racism started before America even had Caucasians, and Native Americans also subjugated other tribes, also Africans, let alone basically THE ENTIRE WORLD! Come on.... you can do better....
i agree with this statement above of yours except one thing : caste knows no colour in India, there are black,brown and white brahmins and its not like black/brown brahmin is an exception or something. The color/status thing is a hangover from british times.... and its a huge problem even now with all "fair and lovely" face cream ads...
It was hilarious when geneticists established that the only racial group that was not part Neanderthal was sub-Saharan African. The white supremacists went crazy, and there was a push to rehabilitate Neanderthals, which continues to this day.
Talking about race WRT humans is kind of stupid, actually. It is an artificial distinction based largely on physical appearance and mythology of various stripes.
There are genetic subgroups of humans that evolved slightly different characteristics due to localized evolutionary adaptations, but there is only 1 race, the human race.
I recall reading somewhere that there is more genetic variation between individual humans than there is (as an aggregate) between "races."
Maybe we need the evil alien subjugators to show up to force people to recognize their shared humanity?
OK, but I doubt that Indians would have passed in 1933 for white and Aryan. After all, Jews, gays, communists, were all white but not "Aryan" enough. And your last paragraph says it all.
Agree. Hispanics have always included a white sub-category, mostly for those who claim Spanish (Spain) heritage. A lot of Cubans identify as white. But thats not Kash. And Kash is Hindu. How does that work?
As someone whose parents were original supporters of the Southern Poverty Law Center (founded in 1971), and having been involved with and supported it for decades, unless you look “white,” regardless of how much you aren’t going to be considered equal to “real” white folk to true believers in the white supremacist movement. And I am the definition of an “Aryan” to those folks.
White southerner here, and of course that's true. Skin color counts — it just doesn't necessarily exclude you from the category of whiteness. Just as being extremely light-skinned did not and still does not make you reliably "white" if you have any Black ancestry at all. There would be no concept of "passing" if it did. As Nell Irvin Painter points out in that article I shared, there have always been degrees or levels of whiteness. It's complicated, but the best way of understanding it is through a lens of history, ideology, and status, not biology.
Agreed—I was reading what is now considered books by critical race theory authors in the 80s. bell hooks is my favorite. But, we have our own version in the Northwest of bigots working to establish an aryan nation, and they may “adopt” folks into their cause, but not as true equals.
I love bell hooks, too! American racism is such a nasty, toxic stew, and there's no avoiding it, no matter where you are. American Renaissance has its national conference every year in a beautiful state park a couple of miles from my house. Nobody I know is happy about it, regardless of their politics, but there's no keeping them out of a public facility.
But Patel's mug shot is always right there staring you in the face. Or are you suggesting that his "mug" is a mask and underneath it he is lily white? No? Hmmm, I didn't think so.
Ali Alexander is another one. Given that he actually confessed to being behind 1/6 via Periscope (while safely removed from the action), it was disappointing that he was never charged by Jack Smith.
It sort of maps onto the demographic in the US that has gravitated to MAGA—locally high status people who run local businesses or are prosperous farmers, but are seen as bumpkins by the east coast elite. Small business owners, local officials, entrepreneurs…sounds like he’d be right at home in a boat parade.
It is fascinating to see how Trump’s backstory is exactly what attracts his followers. His family was certainly wealthy but was not high social status in New York—and he spent his adulthood trying to break into the “master of the universe” Manhattan rich guy crowd and didn’t achieve acceptance—he was seen as a boor and a social climber and that fueled his sense of resentment.
Old Money looks down on New Money, and New Money resents that it will never be seen as equal to Old Money. New Money has Musk, Richest Man In the World, as its champion, he gloms on to DJT, and together they say to Old Money, “Well, who needs you, anyway?!”. Doing well is the best revenge.
“Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds”. MAGA gives Elon a dispensation because he seems to be cheering on and FINANCING their venting of spleen.
Elon is still in his heart of hearts that smart obnoxious kid that nobody likes. You know—the one that went around asking people their SAT scores and then bragging about his.
He’s a brilliant guy, and I’m sure he’s perceptive—sometimes it takes somebody who is on the outside to see an opportunity clearly. He’s perceptive enough to understand that nobody likes him—the people around him are there because of his power and his money.
Yes—it’s a much better explanation of MAGA. I think JVL had a lot of material on this after J6–research done into the backgrounds of people who showed up at the ellipse and later the Capitol. The common thread seemed to be people who had enjoyed a certain amount of affluence and security and then had had some kind of setback that knocked them down financially or socially. It certainly explains the grievance and resentment that drives the movement.
Musk, for all of his wealth and fame, seems to be driven by grudges. Only his mommy loves him, but he’s estranged from his kids, he’s never had a successful marriage, and booty hooty hoo mean old President Biden didn’t invite him to the EV summit—never mind that the summit was about scaling up and transitioning from ICE cars to EV’s. If your business model is EVs to start with, you are not in that category. Musk is even more of a man-baby than Trump is.
Anne Applebaum talks about such bumpkins in her 2020 book, "Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure Of Authoritarianism". Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham all have such affluent backgrounds and they were not accepted by the elites. She calls them political entrepreneurs and they're leading "thought leaders" in the authoritarian movement.
Clarence and Ginni Thomas are both like that too. Ginny’s family was quite well off, even wealthy, by Nebraska standards. Clarence grew up poor in the south at the tail end of Jim Crow.
If you end up vaulting out of your band into a more elite band of the culture, I guess there are two ways to look at it. Some people will think “wow—I am so blessed in life to be here and have this great education and these opportunities.” Other people will look at the opportunities that are given to people they are newly rubbing elbows with and resent that they get better stuff than the arrivistes.
I grew up in a small town. My granddad was on the school board. I am a bumpkin at heart even if I got a graduate degree and moved to California to become a coastal elite.
I have 2 advanced degrees, but my great grandparents on both sides were farmers and, while I spent most of my life living in cities, I now live in what is considered as small town by many. It shares Tim Walz’s attitude, “mind your own damn business” when it comes to neighbors. So long as comment is made as a person who isn’t denigrating working folks, as a fellow costal elite myself, I can live with the term. Context makes all the difference.😉
Am I the only one who has a hard time getting his head around a sub-continental Indian supporting White Supremacy? Or is Patel just now realizing that he is, really, actually white and it is our eyes that see him differently? Although, according to his bio in Wiki, "Kash Patel was born in Garden City, New York to Indian Gujarati parents who had immigrated to the United States through Canada from East Africa."
Well, according to progressives, especially the ones who love DEI, you have to keep Asians, including South Asians (from India) out of merit based programs and schools (which you do by eliminating the standardized tests that achieve merit based admissions) because they may not be white, but they are “white adjacent”. So it’s the progressive DEI advocates who have told Patel, Usha, Vivek, and all these Indian kids in the Ivy League schools and the honors magnet high schools that they’re white. And now you make fun of them for believing it? I’m shocked!
Well, although I never heard of a category on any government form seeking racial information, "White Adjacent", I am willing to wait for those three and their WA friends to begin attending "White Adjacent Supremacy" meetings and podcasts to prove their bona fides.
It's not on a government form. It's the argument progressives make when they lobby to get rid of standardized tests in both college admissions and public honors high schools like the ones in NYC and Virginia. The DEI activists go after these schools for not being diverse enough, which they interpret as not enough Blacks and Hispanics. Most of the schools that have been targeted are majority Asian (honors high schools), and when you point that out (it's not white kids) the activists say the Asian kids are white adjacent and they are taking up places that should go to Blacks and Hispanics.
Google the controversy over the NYC schools and Thomas Jefferson high school in Virginia. The DOE did the exact same thing in my school district in the 90's. The metric for measuring racial balance in our gifted programs was Black vs Non-Black. The Asian parents in our program were appalled to find out they were "white" and that there were too many of them in the gifted programs. This has been a thing for a long time in education. It's just that now it's called DEI and the term is "white adjacent".
Allow me to introduce you to the Honorable Justice Clarence Thomas...perhaps he can explain it all to you.
Also, Patel is a useful idiot and an expendable one at that...
1) Will there ever be an end to the things coming out of MAGA world that sane people can't get our heads around?
2) In Isabel Wilkerson's book *Caste*, she discusses the whole idea of "race" extensively. It's fascinating.
It is a natural human tendency to look for and exaggerate differences in order to create distinction, especially WRT status hierarchies. These distinctions might be based in appearance (skin color or hair color), they might be cultural (religious beliefs/practices, diet), or language/education--basically ANYTHING that can be leveraged to create distinction.
The less actual variation, the less consequential the thing used to create distinction will be, but the distinction will often be seen or made as being even more substantive.
The purpose of the distinctions is to basically Other the people that you are making distinct, so that they do not have to be treated as fellow human beings--so that they can be denied rights or even, in extreme cases, life, without having done that to "actual human beings." It is the justification for preferential treatment/mistreatment.
This is a core mechanic of the whole Us/Them human dynamic.
Great explanation; thank you. I continue to struggle w/ it being a "natural human tendency." Why is that? And is it really? Why isn't it our tendency to want to cooperate vs. compete / "Other"?
The short answer is evolution. The full answer literally takes books to cover (but still basically breaks down to evolution, it just expalins the details better).
That was a really insightful book. Caste is a much more useful explanation for US racism than just race. Look at how Jamaican and African immigrants feel about native born US African Americans.
Indians and Persians are Aryans.. at least some Indians are. So some of these people are relying upon that perception to classify themselves as somehow belonging to a white supremacist movement.
I think they are kinda overlooking the white part... because most of the people that belong to these types of organizations care more about your look than your supposed racial geneology.
Because once they get rid of the first group of non-white people, pretty sure that people that look like Patel will be up on the list.
Color is a huge status thing in Indian culture. If you work in tech, it’s really obvious. The people in management tend to be Brahmins and are light skinned and Caucasian looking. The darker the complexion, the lower the status.
Kash is fairly dark skinned as high status Indians go and I wonder if being crapped on by Brahmins is another source of his resentment.
Lol, brahmins are" light skinned", Americans and their love to use color to color their world view , can't even explain how stupid this sounds ...
Yeah, ummm far from just Americans who use "color to color their worldview"(one word fyi) it's global bro, racism started before America even had Caucasians, and Native Americans also subjugated other tribes, also Africans, let alone basically THE ENTIRE WORLD! Come on.... you can do better....
i agree with this statement above of yours except one thing : caste knows no colour in India, there are black,brown and white brahmins and its not like black/brown brahmin is an exception or something. The color/status thing is a hangover from british times.... and its a huge problem even now with all "fair and lovely" face cream ads...
Patel looks much blacker than Obama, e.g.
I doubt the Nazis who used the word Aryan had any notion of who the real Aryans were and are.
Hitler sent Himmler and others all around the world, looking for the roots of the "aryan" race.
Indians to Germans: “we were Aryans while you all were living in caves picking lice off of each other.”
It was hilarious when geneticists established that the only racial group that was not part Neanderthal was sub-Saharan African. The white supremacists went crazy, and there was a push to rehabilitate Neanderthals, which continues to this day.
Talking about race WRT humans is kind of stupid, actually. It is an artificial distinction based largely on physical appearance and mythology of various stripes.
There are genetic subgroups of humans that evolved slightly different characteristics due to localized evolutionary adaptations, but there is only 1 race, the human race.
I recall reading somewhere that there is more genetic variation between individual humans than there is (as an aggregate) between "races."
Maybe we need the evil alien subjugators to show up to force people to recognize their shared humanity?
OK, but I doubt that Indians would have passed in 1933 for white and Aryan. After all, Jews, gays, communists, were all white but not "Aryan" enough. And your last paragraph says it all.
They did not pass for white in S Africa, ask Ghandi.
I've always wondered how Jews were grouped with non-whites by nazis. There are, Sephardic Jews, of course.
Apparently subservience can trump race. (Ahhhh...sorry)
Probably only up to a point though.
When they run out of enemies. Patel and Vivisection Ramaswampy will suddenly be on the new enemies list.
That I look forward too.
"White" has been a fluid category over its relatively brief history. There's no reason to assume it can't evolve to include people of Indian or Hispanic ethnicity. It's not fundamentally about skin color. It's about power and social hierarchies. https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/white-identity-america-ideology-not-biology-history-whiteness-proves-it-ncna1232200
Agree. Hispanics have always included a white sub-category, mostly for those who claim Spanish (Spain) heritage. A lot of Cubans identify as white. But thats not Kash. And Kash is Hindu. How does that work?
As someone whose parents were original supporters of the Southern Poverty Law Center (founded in 1971), and having been involved with and supported it for decades, unless you look “white,” regardless of how much you aren’t going to be considered equal to “real” white folk to true believers in the white supremacist movement. And I am the definition of an “Aryan” to those folks.
White southerner here, and of course that's true. Skin color counts — it just doesn't necessarily exclude you from the category of whiteness. Just as being extremely light-skinned did not and still does not make you reliably "white" if you have any Black ancestry at all. There would be no concept of "passing" if it did. As Nell Irvin Painter points out in that article I shared, there have always been degrees or levels of whiteness. It's complicated, but the best way of understanding it is through a lens of history, ideology, and status, not biology.
Agreed—I was reading what is now considered books by critical race theory authors in the 80s. bell hooks is my favorite. But, we have our own version in the Northwest of bigots working to establish an aryan nation, and they may “adopt” folks into their cause, but not as true equals.
I love bell hooks, too! American racism is such a nasty, toxic stew, and there's no avoiding it, no matter where you are. American Renaissance has its national conference every year in a beautiful state park a couple of miles from my house. Nobody I know is happy about it, regardless of their politics, but there's no keeping them out of a public facility.
It's like Dave Chappelle's bit, a blind black guy who gets to be Grand Dragon of the KKK thanks to the fact that they always wear hoods at meetings.
But Patel's mug shot is always right there staring you in the face. Or are you suggesting that his "mug" is a mask and underneath it he is lily white? No? Hmmm, I didn't think so.
Nope, but it is a great reminder of the scene with Cleavon Little in “Blazing Saddles.”
Go figure. Enrico Tarrio is Afro-Cuban snd runs a white nationalist organization.
'Uncle Tom' has gotten woke. He now comes in a variety of colors.
Ali Alexander is another one. Given that he actually confessed to being behind 1/6 via Periscope (while safely removed from the action), it was disappointing that he was never charged by Jack Smith.
In the end, even the charges that were actually made by Jack Smith were disappointing.
And I don’t think Nick Fuentes is exactly Aryan, either.
It reduces the idea of race to absurdity.
Clearly a major part of the race to the bottom.😫😏
He wishes he were white. Of course, it would be interesting to see what social caste in India his family came from.
I looked it up…you can get a lot of info using a surname. Wikepedia’s summary seems to check out with other explanations… https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patel#:~:text=4%20See%20also-,As%20a%20title,in%20the%20Politics%20of%20Gujarat.
It sort of maps onto the demographic in the US that has gravitated to MAGA—locally high status people who run local businesses or are prosperous farmers, but are seen as bumpkins by the east coast elite. Small business owners, local officials, entrepreneurs…sounds like he’d be right at home in a boat parade.
It is fascinating to see how Trump’s backstory is exactly what attracts his followers. His family was certainly wealthy but was not high social status in New York—and he spent his adulthood trying to break into the “master of the universe” Manhattan rich guy crowd and didn’t achieve acceptance—he was seen as a boor and a social climber and that fueled his sense of resentment.
Local elites are not necessarily downwardly mobile, but they are not keeping up with coastal economic gains. They feel downwardly mobile.
Bingo!
Old Money looks down on New Money, and New Money resents that it will never be seen as equal to Old Money. New Money has Musk, Richest Man In the World, as its champion, he gloms on to DJT, and together they say to Old Money, “Well, who needs you, anyway?!”. Doing well is the best revenge.
Somewhere there is a book that will educate me on this but how is Elon not considered an elitist that MAGA rails against?
Cause he's anti-government and on the right side of the culture war.
“Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds”. MAGA gives Elon a dispensation because he seems to be cheering on and FINANCING their venting of spleen.
Elon is still in his heart of hearts that smart obnoxious kid that nobody likes. You know—the one that went around asking people their SAT scores and then bragging about his.
He’s a brilliant guy, and I’m sure he’s perceptive—sometimes it takes somebody who is on the outside to see an opportunity clearly. He’s perceptive enough to understand that nobody likes him—the people around him are there because of his power and his money.
Ah, Andrew Gold’s 1977 “Oh What a Lonely Boy” comes to mind. Here’s the cut, for your musical pleasure: https://youtu.be/iq2TxnlWunw?si=6DzuLIzAW7afIgRM
So MAGA is the revenge of the bumpkins? That idea goes beyond the idea of racism as the motivator. Actually that explains a lot.
Yes—it’s a much better explanation of MAGA. I think JVL had a lot of material on this after J6–research done into the backgrounds of people who showed up at the ellipse and later the Capitol. The common thread seemed to be people who had enjoyed a certain amount of affluence and security and then had had some kind of setback that knocked them down financially or socially. It certainly explains the grievance and resentment that drives the movement.
Musk, for all of his wealth and fame, seems to be driven by grudges. Only his mommy loves him, but he’s estranged from his kids, he’s never had a successful marriage, and booty hooty hoo mean old President Biden didn’t invite him to the EV summit—never mind that the summit was about scaling up and transitioning from ICE cars to EV’s. If your business model is EVs to start with, you are not in that category. Musk is even more of a man-baby than Trump is.
Anne Applebaum talks about such bumpkins in her 2020 book, "Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure Of Authoritarianism". Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham all have such affluent backgrounds and they were not accepted by the elites. She calls them political entrepreneurs and they're leading "thought leaders" in the authoritarian movement.
Clarence and Ginni Thomas are both like that too. Ginny’s family was quite well off, even wealthy, by Nebraska standards. Clarence grew up poor in the south at the tail end of Jim Crow.
If you end up vaulting out of your band into a more elite band of the culture, I guess there are two ways to look at it. Some people will think “wow—I am so blessed in life to be here and have this great education and these opportunities.” Other people will look at the opportunities that are given to people they are newly rubbing elbows with and resent that they get better stuff than the arrivistes.
Bumpkins? how classist of you.
I grew up in a small town. My granddad was on the school board. I am a bumpkin at heart even if I got a graduate degree and moved to California to become a coastal elite.
I have 2 advanced degrees, but my great grandparents on both sides were farmers and, while I spent most of my life living in cities, I now live in what is considered as small town by many. It shares Tim Walz’s attitude, “mind your own damn business” when it comes to neighbors. So long as comment is made as a person who isn’t denigrating working folks, as a fellow costal elite myself, I can live with the term. Context makes all the difference.😉
“Bumpkin” sounds American, while calling then them the “local gentry” gives them an aura of class they don’t deserve.