The Republican Party has nothing to offer downwardly mobile voters with graduate degrees. Just completely (economically, culturally) out of touch with this demographic.
Neither party offers or even tries to offer such people anything to slow down, let alone reverse, their economic downslide. But Democrats compensate the economic despoliation to which they subject the most high-IQ people by offering them endless possibilities to feel morally superior. This way, the smart crowd can still feel upper-class. It finds the economic trappings of upper-class life increasingly out of reach but at least it can lay claim to the refined sensibilities of the well-heeled.
Republicans don’t make a play for this group at all.
I watched a fascinating interview today with the wife of Yigal Amir, the murderer of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Her name is Larissa Trimbobler, and when she met Amir she was married to another man with whom she had four children. Larissa and her husband met Yigal Amir when they visited him in jail where he was serving a life sentence for assassinating Rabin.
Larissa dropped her husband and the father of her children and embarked on a long saga of trying to marry the jailed assassin. Then, she tried to get pregnant by him, which involved Amir trying to smuggle ziplock bags of sperm out of the jail. She did get pregnant and gave birth to Amir’s child at the age of forty. And she’s been waiting for him to get released (which isn’t too likely) ever since then.
Isn’t it a crazy story? If it were a novel, people would dismiss it as being too over the top but it’s completely real.
Delayed homeownership means delayed childbirth. It means fewer or no children. This is a catastrophe for regular people. And prattling moronically how we are in the Golden Age of the US economy sounds like a cruel joke to pretty much everybody who is not wealthy. 82% of women under 30 and 68% of men in the same age group in NYC voted for Mamdani. And yes, he’s a nepo baby fraud. But he got these young people’s support by taking these very serious issues seriously. Because nobody else is doing it.
Trump announced the other day that “grocery prices are way down.” Why, in the name of everything normal, would they be down? This is delusional and is precisely the kind of stuff that loses elections, as it well should. We mocked Biden for exactly this kind of ridiculous lying.
Instead of exercising pressure on our elected leaders to abandon the la la land of this utter fantasy, the Right is mired in whiny complaints about microaggressions and inclusivity and who said what to whom that hurt their everloving fee-fees. Lonely Matt Walsh is begging people to get their heads out of their Israel-obsessed anal cavities and start paying attention to what is happening in our country.
This is very embarrassing and very self-defeating.
The President of Mexico Claudia Sheinbaum was groped in the street.
She is understandably upset and is filing charges.
Sheinbaum says that all Mexican women experience unwanted groping. She is right. Strangely, however, she seems not to understand why Americans are unwilling to undergo the same humiliation at the hands of the millions of Mexican men she is trying to push out of Mexico to enrich her wealthy cronies.
My friend, who is woke to the point it’s been hard to talk to him because he gets so red in the face I’m afraid he’ll suffer a stroke, was denied funding because he’s a white male who invited two other white males to speak at his event.
Should I tell him why he was denied? It’s supposed to be confidential but he is a friend. On the other hand, is the enjoyment I’ll feel when telling him a sign that I shouldn’t?
What I recommend is getting there not through the intellect but through practice. Go to church (synagogue, mosque, temple, etc) and simply do what everybody else does. Start showing up every week and following other people’s lead. It’s going to feel weird and awkward but stick with it. It’s all in the practice, ritual, and community. Religion is not about solitary striving. It allows you to be part of something that’s bigger than yourself. It gives you a respite from having to choose and decide everything for yourself. Many, many generations of people worked hard to give you the gift of a consolidated ritual where all you need to do is show up.
Religion doesn’t have a ticket to entry. You don’t need to have it all settled in your mind before starting the practice. Instead, you can simply fold yourself into the ritual that’s all there for you and enjoy the sheer restfulness of it.
As for reading, even the tiniest of parishes have a Bible study, a reading group, a prayer group. This is best done in the spirit of togetherness.
When I first started going to church, I was the mother of a small child and overwhelmed by responsibility at home and at work. I found Orthodox service to be extremely long and confusing. I knew nothing about the dogma. But the relief of being in a place where I didn’t need to decide anything because it had all been decided for me a thousand years ago was magnetic. It doesn’t matter why you go. It matters that you go.
I deeply despise Mamdani, the nepo dude, but I understand why people voted for him. Cuomo is a washed up Boomer with zero energy. He brought nothing to the race except for being a Democrat who is not Mamdani. Sliwa is old and weird.
No argument was advanced to discredit Mamdani. Republicans kept harping on him being a Muslim which is ludicrous. He’s a Muslim like I’m a ballerina. He conducted his campaign in gay clubs and promised huge sums to trans people. They also kept saying he’s a Communist which means nothing to anybody outside of the Boomer crowd.
“He quoted Marx (badly) in a joking exchange on Twitter five years ago!”
I quoted Marx (correctly) last week, so what?
Life is very expensive in NYC. For young people, it’s extremely harsh. Housing prices are ruinous. Mamdani offered a fantasy of affordability. And yes, it’s a fantasy. It’s dumb. But nobody else offered anything. Mamdani brought great energy, optimism, excitement, and fun. Energy always wins. I lose energy even just listening to Cuomo for 2 minutes.
There’s a lesson here that, I’m afraid, nobody is learning.
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