'Tis the season for inflammatory rhetoric. Of late, I'm not sure when it isn't.
- Leaving aside for the moment that somewhere around 1.1% of the population has no self-reported immigrant ancestry (2020 Census), the deranged animus to immigrants serves only a nightmarish fantasy. Why is it nightmarish? Because it reifies that one's parents status at their birth is a rightful limitation on one's own ambitions… and even basic rights. On the other hand, I'd be happy to send some Africans (Afrikaans?) back where they came from because they don't meet my native-born vision of what's proper for the nation, and for immigrants to it — and that's rather the point, isn't it? <SARCASM> Perhaps the most-likely future amendment to the Constitution is one that removes the restriction on titles of nobility, because that appears to be what they want. </SARCASM>
But then, some US citizens (with US citizen children) worry about getting their own family members into the country because they were doing their jobs. The contrast with a purported "think tank" that doesn't even bother coding its racial/related preferences — except, perhaps, in its name and the appropriation of "heritage" — is all too enlightening. Oh, wait, that's a word that that institution wants to reject, too… especially when another form of that word modifies "self-interest."
- Then there's the underlying problem of what makes America great (let alone "again"). The current Administration's actions and rhetoric, ranging from Venezuala to Greenland, make it fairly clear that it means "any landmass with the word 'America' in its imposed-by-Europeans name," and any immediately-adjacent islands. Of course, after assimilation, those will no doubt remain insular territories, because we might have to acknowledge all the brown people there as new citizens, not mere "immigrants," unless… ok, that rhetoric would be too inflammatory even for me. But the Administration hasn't given enough, or indeed any, thought to how that would functionally replace some Real 'murikans.
- Things aren't much better in Blighty, if any. The UK also has a problem with accepting "replacement theory" as something real, ranging from university recruiting to general government policies strongly coded for race and national origin. And some of those "general government policies" are not so general after all; one wonders about how certain "former royals" would be treated if the policies were applied even-handedly.
- Meanwhile, publishing and entertainment institutions continue to implode, ranging from book distributors depended upon by libraries (sometimes by law!) to conceptual flaws in the Anthropic settlement driven by monopsonic publisher interests (those "half the proceeds of copyright suits belong to the publisher" clauses were achieved only by misuse of market power — and imply that half of the creativity was really the publisher's, which except in rare instances is utterly implausible). The less said about self-anointed merchant-princes imposing the New Mercantilism on H'wood, the better; and we shouldn't inquire into the past too closely, either.
This is one of the times that I'm glad so much will be wasted on legal fees, even though that won't benefit me — better BigLaw lawyers than the merchant princes!