So much of state politics is currently Republicans dog whistling made up issues to their base rather than any kind of evidence based policy.
> We began by asking eligible voters how “convincing” they found a dog-whistle message lifted from Republican talking points. Among other elements, the message condemned “illegal immigration from places overrun with drugs and criminal gangs” and called for “fully funding the police, so our communities are not threatened by people who refuse to follow our laws.”
> Almost three out of five white respondents judged the message convincing. More surprising, exactly the same percentage of African-Americans agreed, as did an even higher percentage of Latinos.
I guess it’s easy not to care about this stuff if you didn’t literally flee your homeland to get away from it.
You have a point with immigration! But you overplay your hand with the defund stuff. Democratic candidates who run on "defund" lose their primary elections everywhere except a tiny number of ultra-blue uncompetitive districts.
It’s not just the Twitter elite doing that—it’s a lot of folks who don’t necessarily want to defund the police, but just wanted an opportunity to call republicans racist. But the end result is that we went about a year invoking minorities to attack policies that the minorities themselves supported, which is gross. The underlying practice needs to stop.
That the primary system elevates fringe candidates is, yes, a problem. But those candidates lose.
Like I said, we have an exceptionally mobilized defund movement in Oak Park, with demonstrations, proposed ordinances, and candidate slates. They got slaughtered. We're a single-party municipality; being outed as in any way sympathetic to Republicans is fatal here. It came to nothing: liberals don't want to defund the police.
Faced with that, Democrats in 2020 did not treat the idea as "fringe." The put up the BLM signs on their yards and didn't say a word against the activists promoting defund. Aside from Joe Biden, prominent Democrats equivocated when confronted directly: Elizabeth Warren responded to a question about "defund" by saying "it's not the term I would use." That's not how you describe what you think is a "fringe" idea.
I’m not “trolling.” In the last few years folks have become too comfortable calling policies “racist” or “dog whistling” without being confident that minorities actually perceive them that way. I think this is itself racist and manipulative—a way of fluffing apparent support for progressive policies by vaguely invoking minorities—and needs to be called out as such.
Cross-border criminal activity is a real concern that affects real people. There’s a reason majority Hispanic communities along the border have flipped Republican in the last couple of years. Right now Abbott is leading Beto among Hispanics in reputable polls: https://www.dallasnews.com/news/politics/2022/01/29/abbott-r.... Waving your hands and calling these concerns racist “dog whistles” is not only lazy but disrespectful to a distinct community with its own interests and often nuanced positions.
Yes, you can get results from push-polling with heavily loaded wording and unsubstantiated, hyperbolic claims like "overrun with drugs and criminal gangs" and correlating police funding to public safety.
Yes, that's different from evidence-based policy.
Yes, the Texas state governement has enacted a program of disenfranchisement.
I care.
I think that's the part you need to expand on, because even if I knew 10 people who crossed the border for that stuff, I wouldn't really care that much.
So what makes you care so much, are there visible, arguably tractable second order effects resulting from this that I wouldn't be able to deny if I lived in Texas? And they're so bad to the Texan state that I'd too want this surveyed and enforced at all cost?
I’m personally impacted by the shipment delays. I currently await more than $250,000 worth of product ordered from Mexico, so questioning my motives with false equivalencies isn’t going to get anywhere.
To be honest, I probably need to be schooled on the whole thing. Generally, when there's issues at a local level, my gut reaction is I probably just don't understand the problem. But I'll also probably start by asking naive questions.
My first question is, it seems that yes there are lots of people trying to smuggle drugs or illegally enter the US for... Maybe working under the radar? Escaping Mexico?
And I can believe that it is a hard job to prevent this.
But it also seems to me like we made up the problem, why are we wanting to prevent the drugs and migrants in the first place?
For the drugs, seems we might as well manufacture them ourselves, make them in the US, label them properly, dispense correct dosers, list out side effects and risks, and tax their sales.
If people can get them through other channels, the demand for the Mexican one will reduce and that seems like it would naturally cause the smuggling to decrease. Or maybe, it wouldn't be smuggling anymore, just another import they self-declare and we tax, just like avocados.
For migrants, I'm curious what they're looking for. Are they running away from danger and trying to find safety? Are they looking for work? And why don't we want them? We're worried they resort to crime and theft? We don't have jobs for them? They bring anti-democratic values with them and promote things that we worry would eventually destroy our democracy and take away our freedom?
I think if any of those were true for migrants, I could see it being a harder problem. I'm not sure they are true though. But say they do lead to crime, violence, loss of democracy, loss of employment, and loss of freedom. If that's the case, it's definitely going to be challenging to stop so many people from entering such a big border. I get that. I guess I'm just missing that first link, do they cause all that trouble? Or are we just making up the problem?