Zaid Jilani

Let's imagine an alternate universe where ISIS or white nationalists killed thousands of young poor kids across America last year. Then would we still be trying to minimize huge spikes in homicide in 2020, with some cities having their deadliest years in half a decade?https://twitter.com/abgelb/status/1356239721727406081 …

The COVID-19 bill would be more generous if there was more worker power in GOP. That would require participating in GOP primaries more aggressively and labor not being so segmented to one party. Might sound like a pipe dream but in WV teachers actually won some big GOP primaries.

If you were trying to help Democrats your money should go to competitive races in state legislatures and the House in 2022, the two pressure points. LP looks for what liberals are mad about on Twitter that day and then sells them on very bad ideas to take a cut....

The Lincoln Project is raising money to place useless billboards attacking incumbent GOP senators who aren't up for reelection until 2024 in TX and MO (fairly red states) because the Lincoln Project's chief objective is making money off extremely online liberals...https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1355555939475214338 …

So McWhorter has chosen not to be intimidated by this tactic, and that's important because Kendi is becoming an influential thinker, but he doesn't do very much thinking.

Kendi has created a binary: you're either racist or anti-racist. Conveniently he has declared his ideas anti-racist. Therefore, if you disagree with him, well. And especially white left-of-center people are terrified of being called racist. He's trying to eliminate conversation.

Now I don't really care if there are people with sort of looney tunes ideas out there. I'm not one of the pro-censorship utopians that wants the Internet to be scrubbed clean of wrongthink. But when Netflix gives looney tunes ideas 3 specials, it's worth interrogating those ideas

The Aliens theory and Amy Coney Barrett adopted Haitian children but she might still be just like a colonizer of African people theory are on the same level, intellectually.

The Aliens theory and the left-of-center-John McWhorter-is-actually-inciting-white-supremacist-violence-by-criticizing-a-private-school's-CRT theory are about the same level, intellectually.

This is not me exaggerating, that's literally what he writes in his book. Now, he explains that he grew out of the belief, but do you think that someone his epistemology evolved to a much more sophisticated place from the aliens are coming to get me phase? I don't see it.

If you do read Kendi's life story and his ideas rationally, you might come to the conclusion that he is approaching the world from a paranoid, sectarian worldview. He writes in his book that he once believed white people were aliens from outer space without a conscience.

If you simply read someone's ideas and nod along and don't think critically about them, I don't think you are taking them very seriously. It's like listening to someone in conversation, getting lost in thought, then saying, "Oh yeah, totally." It's not even respectful to Kendi.

I don't mean him any ill will nor do I mean the people who read him any ill will, but it's obvious the folks who are taking Kendi seriously are not giving him the dignity of actually...taking his ideas seriously and analyzing them logically or rationally.

Well it displaces one group of haters with another group. In Rwanda folks on radio broadcasts saw themselves as historical victims so anything they did including murder, was justified. I think the American civil rights approach is better https://twitter.com/GBaizuo/status/1356054993887850497 …

This was a thread that ran through life of civil rights movement: they didn't want to hate the people who hated them, because their opposition was to hatred itself. Andrew Young tells good stories about this when he talks.