Comment by rayiner
4 years ago
I’ve spent quite a bit of time in South Georgia, as a visibly non-white guy with a Muslim surname. Folks were nicer to me there than in NYC or DC.
Majorie Taylor Greene was elected in 2021. She’s a reaction to national media efforts that started with the governor’s race in 2018 to paint half of Georgia as “deplorables.” People are tribal. When attacked from outside, they’ll close ranks.
As to Ahmed Aubury, it’s an unfortunate fact that police fuckups and cover ups happen. But the media chooses how it frames any given such event. Notice how the media isn’t portraying the Uvalde police department’s efforts to cover things up as an indictment of the whole community? Do you think it has nothing to do with the community being 80% Hispanic in addition to the police chief? If the community and shooter had been white, we would have been treated to story after story about how “mass shootings are a manifestation of white supremacy.”
> As to Ahmed Aubury, it’s an unfortunate fact that police fuckups and cover ups happen. But the media chooses how it frames any given such event. Notice how the media isn’t portraying the Uvalde police department’s efforts to cover things up as an indictment of the whole community?
The difference is that in Ahmed Aubury’s case, there was clear evidence of corruption along racial lines amongst local leaders, and which there is a long history of in the area Aubury was murdered in.
Obviously, this was not the case in Uvalde and so it would not be portrayed as such.
> Obviously, this was not the case in Uvalde and so it would not be portrayed as such.
Jeffrey Epstein was obviously killed. What’s obvious to one group of people is not obvious to others. There are a great many people to whom it is obvious that the median journalist is more like Taylor Lorenz than them and hates people like them and has no compunction about lying if it makes hurting them easier.
As someone with family from the Dalton area, I would warn against trivializing the difference between Greene's district (NW corner of the state) and places where sane people tend to congregate in larger numbers. People I love have lived there, but it's exactly the kind of place where three out of four people would think voting for Marjorie Taylor Greene is a good idea.
Marietta is a cultural Mecca, comparatively, not to mention Atlanta.
> Marietta is a cultural Mecca,
Whose culture?
For someone who claims to have lived in Atlanta, you should be able to answer this one.
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>She’s a reaction to national media efforts...
This comment goes a long way to rationalize your initial assertion that "it's the media's fault".
You're essentially saying that MTG's constituents voted for her out of their resentment over the media believing they were ignorant enough to vote for her.
Could it be that they actually voted for her because they like her? How are you so sure that's not the case?
>an indictment of the whole community
Again, I actually live in GA and there was largely no such indictment of the overall community. That indictment was overwhelmingly reserved for the police department and the perpetrators. And, yes, there was some discussion around systems and conditions that produce such perpetrators and coverups.
You seem to be picking up these threads that just don't exist here and forcing them into a frame of media blame. Of course, you must be getting these ideas from...the media.
In other words, you're railing on about false media narratives and the entire basis for your claims seems to rest on false media narratives.
>story after story about how “mass shootings are a manifestation of white supremacy"
The only instances of this I've seen were in the cases that involved actual manifestos or other evidence directly espousing white supremacist beliefs.
Do you have evidence to the contrary?
I believe your explanation is more unlikely because the animosity of their political opponents is very transparent and also media reinforcing narratives that either increase condemnation or defensiveness depending on political party. Mostly a business incentive for media instead of rigid believes perhaps but the results are measurable.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/media-great...
The developments are interesting especially for the different demographic of voters.
> Do you have evidence to the contrary?
The believe in white supremacy playing a significant role is dogmatism and religious. It is also disinformation spread by intelligence agencies for political purposes. If I would ask for evidence people fall back to systemic white supremacy and it further collapses from there. Because even that is based on very questionable metrics.
The article you linked is an odd mix of critiquing both opinions (e.g. editorials) and facts reported by certain media outlets. On the opinion side, it asks that we pretend there are no countervailing opinions from the other side with which they are contending.
Factually, it asks that we believe that everything reported is simply false; that, for instance, there is not such a construct as systemic racism nor a legacy of same with which to contend. To "support" this, it conflates improvement in some areas as absolute proof and commits to other such fallacious reasoning.
In short, it employs the recently favored right-wing redirection tactic of identifying or reporting racism as itself racist.
>I would ask for evidence people fall back to systemic white supremacy
No. I'm asking OP (and now you) for specific instances wherein "the media" blamed a mass shooting on white supremacy, absent a manifesto from the shooter, online habits, or other such evidence supporting it.
Because those are the only instances I've seen media report white supremacy to any significant degree. There have been enough shootings where you or OP should be able to point to copious evidence demonstrating conduct to the contrary by the media. We don't need to rely on your hypotheticals. Just point us to some of the many articles in mainstream media that falsely charged white supremacy for shootings, without evidence.
And, on the other side of that, are you actually claiming that there have not been a significant number of shooters who did evidence influence from white supremacist ideology?
> People are tribal. When attacked from outside, they’ll close ranks.
That is a piss-poor excuse for electing the worst representative instead of the best.
Folks are nicer to everyone anywhere than in NYC or DC. Your anecdote doesn’t tell us anything for or against South Georgia.
As for Uvalde, you’re straw-manning like mad. White communities have had school shootings and were not represented as w.s. stories.
Everyone who cast a vote for MTG should feel shame. Everyone who can vote for MTG should be getting involved in a way that results in a much more sane election result.
You're missing the whole picture. They banded together to elect the best representative in their eyes, not yours.
> I’ve spent quite a bit of time in South Georgia, as a visibly non-white guy with a Muslim surname. Folks were nicer to me there than in NYC or DC.
I won't dare to tell you your experience but I will say that the southerners I've known (about half of my extended family and their friends) are very friendly to your face while capable of hating your existence just under the surface. They say "Bless your heart" instead of the NYC or DC person simply saying "Fuck you!"
> When attacked from outside, they’ll close ranks.
"The Left got a little too PC so I changed all of my opinions about the economy, social issues, systemic racism, health care, and history."
If someone criticizing you for being racist makes you act out in a racist way, then you're not really proving to anyone how not racist you are.
You're instead proving that the criticisms were valid.
Replace racist with gun-obsessed, conspiracy-minded, uneducated, psychotic, or whatever other associations you want to build with "deplorable".
Also.
> Folks were nicer to me there than in NYC or DC.
Rural areas are more friendly and cordial than urban areas. They have more time to do so. This isn't news.
The real question is not whether they'll be nice to you at a checkout register, or let you borrow their car.
The real question is how would they feel if you were actually Muslim and started discussing your respective religions - or lack thereof if you were atheist.
Ask them how they would feel about you marrying their daughter, then tell me if they are still nice.
> She’s a reaction to national media efforts that started with the governor’s race in 2018 to paint half of Georgia as “deplorables.” People are tribal. When attacked from outside, they’ll close ranks.
Tribalism and reactions to attacks from outside might explain why she won the general election.
But before she got to the general election she had to win the primary. That was Republican only and there were 8 other candidates.
I haven't been able to find biographies on all of them, but the 7 I did find seemed to be normal Republicans, several of which had held state elected or appointed offices in the past, rather than promoters of QAnon and various antisemitic, white supremacist, and 9/11 (and many other) false conspiracy theories.
Getting to the runoff could be explained by all the reasonable candidates splitting the vote, but how to you explain her winning the runoff?
When a community is attacked from the outside, they will put aside their internal disagreements and coalesce around someone who promises to "fight," as opposed to reasonable folks who take a conciliatory approach.
But they picked someone to "fight" who doesn't fight to show that the outsiders were wrong about the community. They instead picked someone who illustrates the outsider's points.
It's like if the fraternities at a college are asked to send a representative to a committee that is addressing accusations that the frats are rife with excessive drinking and sexual harassment, and the frats pick someone from Animal House, or like if Clowns of America International needed a spokesman to fight the image many people have that clowns are creepy and scary and dangerous, and they picked John Wayne Gacy.
Maybe there is a Pied Piper strategy where influence is being used to promote the worst in ones enemies so they’re easy to beat later on. Sometimes it can backfire though.
This is the text version of this comic[1].
[1] https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/8/8/1786532/-Cartoon-Y...
> When you are recieving the pointy end of the stick, it doesn't matter to you whether the person on the other end believes in what they are doing or not.
Correct, but who is holding the pointy stick? Hint: it's not rural folks in Georgia. It's the folks that have Wall Street and Silicon Valley behind them.
Who the rural folks in Georgia keep voting for? In record numbers?
You're kind of making my point.
However, yes, these rural folks ARE the ones standing in front of abortion clinics and assaulting people and shooting doctors. They ARE the ones who drove up to Washinton, DC, to take part in an insurrection. etc. All at the behest of a really shitty conman from New York and his criminal cohort.
I can go on if you would like?
These rural people ARE shoving the pointy end of the stick into people. Directly and individually as well as with their votes.
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