Exactly. Mention “Trump” with a slight sneer and…everybody’s on board. No further discussion is needed.

This is my experience with Leftists, always has been.

Of course we didn’t say anything, much less yell and throw things at them (not being entitled leftist brats), but I marveled at them assuming that OF COURSE icky Republicans/conservatives would not appreciate their work and would NEVER be in their audiences.

I didn’t quit listening to his CDs or reading her books, but they kind of soured the experience for me.

Very true. It’s the dirty secret of the left. This really hit me some years ago, realizing that the people, some of whom are personal acquaintances, more or less screaming out their hatred of this or that person or movement opposing their doctrines and programs, were getting some kind of pleasure from it.

Obviously there’s plenty of hate on the right, too, but it’s more of a contradiction for leftists, as their whole self-conception rests on the belief that they are the Smart Good People, the kind and generous people, intrinsically the opposite of haters.

But the purpose is to demonize. It’s a semi-conscious culture, for at least many Dem thinkers, an actual strategy.
The Demicratic Demonization Strategy. Against Trump, as also Bush, but also Kavanaugh and Palin in 2008.
People like to hate. Hating is fun, sadly. It’s also a common bonding emotion, we can all easily agree on hating the bad.

DDS-the Dem Demonization Strategy. Now used by many Dems against any leading Rep, like Musk.

Scotland appears to be the most racially diverse place on earth on tv dramas despite being something like 90-95 white.

The “diversifying” of the past is a pretty transparent propaganda technique. It’s even done in what’s purported to be history, with credentialed historians (dishonestly) defending it:

Yet benign as its plot may seem, this little film — which, sadly is only available for British viewers — has stirred up a big fight on social media. And it all revolves around the color of the leading characters’ skin.

Paul Joseph Watson, editor at Alex Jones’ far-right Infowars website, fired the first volley late last month, casting the educational video as an anachronistic attempt “to re-write history to pretend Britain always had mass immigration.”…

The cartoon “is indeed pretty accurate,” Beard tweeted in response to Watson, “there’s plenty of firm evidence for ethnic diversity in Roman Britain.”

The argument, as Beard and several other historians laid it out, was that for an empire that extended from Britain to North Africa — and from Spain to Syria — it was “unsurprising” to see nonwhite faces so far north. Soldiers were drawn from around the empire, and the University of Reading’s Matthew Nicholls noted several instances of Africans serving on Hadrian’s Wall specifically.

The dishonesty here is twofold: first, pretending that “African” and “black” are synonymous–any visit to Libya, Egypt, Algeria, etc should quickly disprove that. Second, pointing to “several instances of Africans”–“several” meaning countable on one hand–in Roman Britain and from that justifying a portrayal of a black African Roman soldier as somehow representative.

If you read enough old primary sources, you will find isolated incidents of “diversity”. They are noted in these primary sources because they are rare and unusual, not because those societies were “diverse” as people use the word today.

In London Labor and the London Poor the author describes about half a dozen black street people. Everybody in Victorian London had heard of them and knew who they were, because there were only half a dozen of them, not because Victorian London was “diverse” in the modern sense.

Samuel Pepys’ famous diary describes black people he met in England. They were so rare he went home and wrote about it in his diary when he met one. (One of them, Mingo, lived with his boss’s family, and so it wasn’t a special occasion to meet him, but Pepys notes him three times in the diary.)

The famous Dr Samuel Johnson left his property in Lichfield (a cathedral town of at that time a few thousand people) to a black man, Francis Barber, who had been his servant. He moved to Lichfield, married a local girl, and their descendants continued to marry locally and are indeed still in Lichfield to this day, and I bet you everyone in the 18th and 19th centuries in Lichfield knew who they were because there was only the one family.

There is a vast gulf between “existed” and “common” or “typical”.

My wife listens to lots of them, usually of fairly recent vintage, and I overhear a lot. Gratuitous references to climate change affecting the local flora and fauna seem to be required. Nobody with even slightly conservative politics can be a neutral character, and flaming liberals are always the most sympathetic. She leans toward who-dun-its and covert action thrillers so every plot has to involve an obvious stand-in for Putin or Orban, usually supported by shadowy US politic operators obviously drawn to look like Steve Bannon with Musk clones come up fast.

Other things I’ve learned from British tv, especially but not only the crime dramas:

–The most serious socio-political problem in the UK is right-wingers who either engage in or want to engage in a great deal of violence. These are easily identified because they aren’t keen on mass immigration from Muslim and other non-European countries. Also they are ugly, especially the women. They do a lot of plotting but are usually thwarted.

–White working-class men are stupid, violent, and racist.

–“Eastern European” is a race. I just learned that one tonight: hostility to Poles or other EEs is racism.

–Roughly 25% of the population is gay and gaily married.

–Maybe 5-10% are transgender.

–The only problem associated with Pakistanis and other Asian-Muslims is the racism of the white working-class men.

The very pleasant light crime drama Grantchester set in the 1950s Cambridge had a new vicar this past season and of course he was black. The bishop the last few seasons has also been black and I saw somewhere there wasn’t a black bishop in the Church of England until 1983 or something.

Scotland appears to be the most racially diverse place on earth on tv dramas despite being something like 90-95 white.

I’ve noticed plenty of allusions to miners strikes and other comments about Britain in the 1980s that are pretty clear shots at Thatcher if you know a little about the times but they don’t usually say her name.