Media, what have y'all?
Welcome to It already happened here, because this was the goal of this show, was to tell you that things was probably going to happen here, and then it did.
I am not one of the normal hosts, as you can tell.
I am your your friendly cousin that shows up every once in a while during the holidays. And if your cousins are anything like my cousins, which means we're immediately going to get in trouble because parents are gonna blame you since I'm the cousin, because it's not my fault because I'm the guest. Anyway, we want to talk about some stuff that, like in some senses, is a bit absurd to talk about, because like the American understanding of pan ethnic terms and demographics are just.
Oh god, sir, yes, right, it just don't make sense.
Like nobody in the group identifies as what the group is called, but that's still the group, right. I recommend a book called white Fish Don't Exist. It's a great book. I'm here with the brilliant, brilliant meta wong.
What's up, miya, It's it's all happening, It's it's all happening here. And it sucks, but at least I'm getting great interests, best what I've ever gotten best best interest.
That's what I come for, you know what I'm saying, Like I come for us to be able to have pancakes for breakfast, you know, because your cousin's here, you know what I'm saying, So you get to have like pancakes for breakfast and you know, stay in your pajamas longer, Like it's great when your cousins are here.
Yeah.
Yeah, anyway, so let's do this we want to talk about. Well, the thing is, like I don't know if y'all have admitted I admitted this on our show that like we kind of had to have all hands on deck discussion here as to like, okay, let's get organized, like let's figure out what we're gonna say as a network and kind of brainstorm things talk about because I'm pretty sure like a lot of us are still like wait, what
the fuck? I'm sorry what like, you know, and us holding down the DEI section of cool zode we are the diversity, equity and inclusion over here. Figured you know, there were some things that were super shocking around some of the data that was coming back from the exit polls as we thought about like, okay, so who actually voted for who and how much? And so we kind of wanted to talk about the asient vote, right yep, which is again from the intro it's an absurd category to.
Say that, yeah, totally, Yeah.
The Latino vote, which is also equally as absurd as a category.
And yeah, just.
Where some of the sort of marginalized groups, like some of the numbers that were in some way shocking. I will say, as far as holding down the black man, say, I am very proud of us for eventually coming back home, right and voting in the upper eighty percent for the black woman, you know, which was encouraging. Now granted our number of how many of us voted shrike.
Immensely, you know. But either way, we just wanted to talk about those things.
And I think one caveat for me, I would say, and then I'll turn it over. I think Mia, like, you know, you can take it on from there. Is I am, in fact a black man, So I think I can speak from a certain level of experience. Obviously not the experience of every human, right, but I can speak from a certain level of experience. Now, as we talk about the Latino vote. I am, in fact, news flash, not Latino. You know what I'm saying. My wife is
from East LA. But obviously proximity is not the same as being a member of So keep that in mind as we discuss these things. So turn it over to turn it over to me.
Yeah, and you know, this is one of these you're talking a bit about the sort of category and coherence here, right, And like one of the things about the way this is aggregated is that so Asian Americans as a whole went about five percent to the right in this election, but that doesn't capture what was going on, because every part of the demographics were just sort of flying in
every direction. Yeah, and unfortunately, most of the actual right wing pull was very specifically from my people, which is to say, Chinese Americans who went right in staggering numbers.
Yeah.
I don't know, I'm not really surprised by because this has just been the way that sort of specifically Chinese American communities have been shifting for the past I mean
really like eight ten years, but particularly intensifying since twenty twenty. Yeah, And so if you look at sort of where these things happened, the biggest ones were New York and LA, and you know, places like Seattle had some shifts, but I think New York in particular, your can La in particular are important for this because a huge part of the reason that this happened was the sort of crime
panic stuff. Yeah, and the crime paddic didn't one hundred percent start with Chinese Americans, but it's one of the earliest sort of incubators of this entire thing. So the sort of trajectory of this is that in twenty twenty, you have this sort of like whole stop Asian hate campaign, right, and you know, yeah, you have all this race like sort of like racist like excitement of violence. Yeah, and you get sort of two responses to it.
Right.
There's the kind of like liberal ish response, which is stop Asian hate, but it's kind of vacuous, it doesn't doesn't really have any political like content at all. It's kind of vaguely anti Trump, but like there's not much there. And then there's the right wing response. And the right ring response is just okay, like there, we're just gonna blame black people for this, yeah, and that's like fucking horseshit.
It's like, no, it was almost everyone which is getting killed by white people because that's almost all yeah, the way racial violence works in this country, right, yeah, yeah, But unfortunately, you know, this was an area where the left kind of just did nothing. And if you look at left response, you know, there's there's there's some people who did stuff, right there is you know, like some sex worker orgs like Red Canary Song did some great work.
But most of the rest of the American left saw this and was like, Okay, the thing that matters here and the actual problem with anti Asian violence is that people are criticizing the Chinese government too much and that's what's causing this, and so we need to defend the CCP. And this is just politically, this is fucking radioactive to like, yeah, eighty ninety percent of like fucking Asian Americans because like, yeah, there's a sort of sort of combinations of factors.
Right.
You have on the one hand, us sort of immigant communities where most of this shit doesn't work because you're dealing with people who were like, I don't know, we're fucking sterilized by the government because the CCP decided to like do Malfusian fucking population control.
Have no love for the CCP none whatsoever.
Yeah, yeah, right, and then this is all this is too reductive, even with Cubans. But it's like this is something where you could just sort of brush this away with like, oh, all of these people were like reactionaries from Taiwan or something like that. It's like no, like a lot of these people came here very recently, and there are you know, there are sort of Tibetan communities.
There's finishing gen here.
Yeah, and all of those people like all of the sort of pro CCP shit is radioactive, and that's what was coming out of the American left. And the same thing with like sort of with with the Hong Kong movement right where there was like you know, there was this really broad consensus amongst sort of American social democracy.
You know, you're sort of like people who were like.
Marginally she left of Bernie right, that that stuff was all CIA stuff and it was bad and that you should support the CCP.
You know.
I mean there are some Tenet organizers you do at work, We've had on the show, right, like, there there are there are people trying to organize the communities, but like the mainstream left was just like, fuck it, we don't care, we don't give a shit about you, Like the important thing about you being killed is that we can defend
this fucking state that we like. Yeah, And so what happened to the stop Asian hate thing is that it got folded into the crime panic because the product of this was both the sort of right wing we're going to give you anti black racism as you're like, this is this is going to be your solution quote unquote to this yeh, and the sort of stop Asian hate, like mainstream sort of liberal thing both just fed directly
into carcuralism. And you know, so you started like it turned into this rallying cry for like hate crime bills, and then like increasing police presences and you know, like the fucking cops were like all over the place of this shit was happening, and you know, didn't do anything because they're cops, right.
Like, all of this.
Fed into it went sort of seamlessly into the crime panic, where you could just feed all of these people the sort of the sort of memory of the fear and the anger over like Asian people getting killed, and you
could just lump that in with crime. And then these communities also and when I say these communities, it's it's kind of important here to do like class breakdowns here too, because the big part of what's happening here is an alignment that I think, like if the Republicans could be like fifteen percent less racist or figure out how to channel the racism against one target at a time, a lot of these people would have fucking fled right in the first place, because.
Yes, yes, so I was gonna say, yeah, yeah.
It's like rich people, professionals and like small business owners. It's like, well, yeah, of course those people are like unbelievably sort of turbo hardline reaction areas. It's like, yeah, those are the guys who are like shooting at people from the rooftops and fucking la and ID two. Yeah, like these same people in China, like in Taiwan, in Hong Kong, like these are people that if you were on the left, you would just be fighting every day.
But you know, they kind of had been lumped into the Democratic Party because of the just unbelievable racism from the Republicans. Now the sort of crime panic stuff has finally given them this thing where the Republican deal is basically like okay, if you're if you're okay with sort of being anti black with us, if you're okay with massive expansions of police presence, you're okay with us running
on that right and also on anti homeless politics. That's been a huge, extremely effective thing Chicili among yeah, business owners.
I remember, God, I think.
I've told the story on air, But back when I was in Chicago, there was this library in Chinatown that I used to like, you know, it was it was an extra a bunch of shops, and so you could sort of you could get bakery food, and you could go sit at these benches. And I came back to them in twenty twenty and the benches literally had had a thing drilled into the table threatening to arrest you if you sat at them for too long a right, and this is this is.
Like twenty twenty, twenty twenty one.
Yeah, so you know that the sort of anti homelessness stuff had started really really early there, and it's just hideous.
And you know, these places are swung to the right.
They're electing Republicans, and they're doing it because this kind of like Asian American petit bourgeois like small business class and some of the sort of richer tech people, et cetera, et cetera, are swinging really really hard to the right.
Yeah, man, that actually connected so many dots for me. Like first of all, like even to like the anti homeless thing, like you know, you start seeing that weird middle of.
The bench arm rail, yep.
You know, like, well it's like that's so you won't lay on it. You know, that's that's why you did this. But like, I hope what I'm about to say is not a trope, you know what I'm saying, It's just it's because of like the proximity that I've had with the Asian community in the sense that my stepmom's Filipino. You know, all the DJs I've all worked with, all these just hip hop. At some point in the nineties, the Filipinos took over. Yep, I'm saying so like that's
been a lot of ways our community. But I found that, you know, the like proper Asian in the jungle Asian thing where it's like pending on your relationship with the United States is almost even if you identify as Asian, because you sit down ten Filipinos, like half of them going to stay a Pacific islander. You know, the other have gonna say it Asian, the other Avic gonna say hey, Asian Pacific islander. And then and then my lord Cambodia right next to them, who are all in Long Beach
and their crips, you know what I'm saying. So like that sort of world like they were with us, you know, as far as like they were just a part of our community, whereas the sort of northern kind of proper Asian world, like its cities is like Alhambra, Monie Roy Park, this is very California stuff.
But they stuck to themselves, you know, and they they saw a lot of the.
American things like this is pragmatic, like we're here to win, like you know, Like so when you started having the Asian hate thing like it it's almost like now that you say it, it's like we just tied that community up into a bow and then handed them to the right. Because this all happened at the same time as like the the anti affirmative action yep, you know.
So I do want to say in the antiffirmative action stuff, because I think people mischaracterize what's going on with that Asian Americans as a whole and as subgroups support affirmative action, yes, very consistently. Every time they're polls, there's like sixty percent support for it, right, Yeah, but there's like forty percent of these fucking dipshits who are like, yes, I don't know, you know, I'm like my sort of like classic age response to this is like I fucking did it. I
was a terrible student. I fuck I got into the University of Chicago. Like you didn't take a fucking study harder, Like you're you're not the reason. The reason you're not getting into these universities isn't because like black people are being allowed in. It's because you suck, like fucking skill issue, what.
The fuck is wrong?
Really?
Yeah, but like like there's there was this like class.
Yeah, you know, the sort of class and I was gonna get to is this class distinction in the sense that from a black perspective, it was like, Yo, we rallied for y'all over the like stop Asian hate thing, you know what I mean. And then to come back around and see this again from a class perspective because kind of the same thing happened in a lot of ways in the black community. Because the reasoning as you say that. That's why I say it all makes sense.
The reasoning is the same, Like the system is not for me, so I'm just gonna get mine. Damn the community, you know what I'm saying, Like, I'm just gonna go get mine, you know. And so in the again, in the black community, for those that swung right, it was just like like in some senses, they're like.
Well, why no, y'all are fucking racists, like you know what I'm saying.
So I'd like as far as like the rights, like I know you are with the left, it was more like, you're just gaslighting me. So well, if you're just gonna gaslight me and I already know that you hate me, well fuck it, I'm just gonna get mine, you know.
And that becomes the thing.
But as a community, like you said, you know, in the same way, as far as like the beef between like the you know, the historical la riots like Chinese and Korean communities, while their parents were on this on the roofs of their of their shops shooting at us, they kids was breaking into the city.
They was with us like that, breaking into the same stories we was breaking into, you know.
So that that class distinction was something that made us kind of be like, bro, like, don't you understand you'll never be one of them, They'll never really love you, you know. And I feel like even that sort of like appeal would lurch this group even further to be like, don't tell me who you are, don't tell me where they're They're giving me what I need, you know. So yeah, like I never thought about tying all that together and being that it being like a specific a Chinese lurching.
Wow. I never thought of that.
Yeah, And okay, you know, you know what else sells products that are from China.
It's these products and services support the podcast.
We sell products from China.
And we're back.
So I think that there's one more thing I want to make sure I get to about the Chinese American
stuff before we move on. And that's one of the things you kind of brought up earlier, was the insolarity, because part of what's going on here too is that there's a lot of Chinese immigrants and people who, you know, you get communities there speaking like they're uspeaking like kenzaneseor Mandarin, and in a lot of cases it's like you'll get these very very small, tight knit communities with people who are speaking like the provincial dialect that's like semi incomprehensible
to other people, right, because it's like effectively its own language. And one of the problems here, and this is one of the places where the left shit the bed like wasn't doing a good organizing, right, And the consequence of this is that in these a lot of the things that we're getting put out in these spaces, the media is all.
Unbelievably right wing.
Yeah right, there's Miles Guah who whatever, God, like twelve years from now when I finished the lab leak episode, Wich is gonna be He's gonna be. A big part of this was he was this Chinese billionaire who defected to the US and came here and ran one trillion scams and is currently going to prison for Like, yeah, I'm pretty sure he was the guy whose boat Steve Bannon was on when Steve Bannon got arrested by the Post office cops.
So like this varsity level guy, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, Like he was here.
He was issuing passports from like a fake government in exile that he set up. He's running every scam in the entire world. But he's also you know, he's also one of the people who started the whole Lablique thing and he so he was flooding the like all all the sort of Chinese language media with this hardline right wing sort of pro Republican, hardline anti China stuff.
And then you have a very similar thing.
Coming from the Phone Gong, who are sking everywhere in any every China town, there's Fallen Gong guys everywhere.
They're posted.
There are people so there are cult they run shn Yu, they run a newspaper called The Epoch Times, which is just a pure fascist propaganda outlet, and those things kind of just like devoured the entire Chinese language media ecosystem. And it wasn't good before because like there were also
a bunch of other weird wing groups. Like part of the problem here too is it's possible for in sort of Asian American community for you to have two people who, in by American standards, have identical politics, right, they're identically right wing on things like racial politics, and they're like edi crime stuff, you know, who are incredibly sexist and like houblophobic, but they absolutely fucking hate each other because one of them is a pro CCP Chinese nationalist and
one of them is an anti CCP Chinese nationalists.
Wow yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.
But this this kind of like you know, what's been able to kind of weld that shit together is is this sort of like republican anti black, off on crime campaign combined with all of this sort of media sphere stuff.
Wow.
Yeah, you know, it's Shade's Rebellion all over again. Like just that at least you're not them, yeah, you know. And and yeah, like the simplicity of that right wing message of just like here's all your problems, all your problems are those fools, and I'll just get rid of them.
Yeah, and we can solve this with more cops and Donald Trump.
We just solve it war. Yeah yeah. Man.
So for my end, I looked at the black and Latino vote. I can run through the black one pretty quick because it wasn't as interesting of a story and also because you know, we did an episode with Garrison Hayes from Mother Jones on like black conservatives and Trump voters. And I think ultimately it comes down to the fact of like the Frans for anand thought of like, okay,
what is what is liberation? Like what is freedom And is it, you know, my ability to flourish without any hindrances or is it a collective ending of suffering?
You know what I'm saying.
So like, in other words, it's like this, this plantation would be better if I ran the big house rather than being like, burn the fucking big house down because there shouldn't be slavery, you know I'm saying, so like that sort of approach to again the reality of why know, the systems not for me in a lot of ways. That's what's interesting about the understanding of this. So when you would look at somebody like a black person, like
why would you vote for this racist man? And it's like, well, the same reason I will vote for every other racist man, you know what I'm saying, Like, which find me one that ain't you know, So like that attitude is already there, so you know, obviously all of us would push back and say that like, well, you choosing yourself is also a vote against yourself and is destroying your community. Clearly it's never worked at some point, you know, which I'm
sure y'all can relate to. It's like I feel two ways when I see like black people, specifically black men sit at this table because I'm like, I can imagine the first joke that you kind of let slide that was like, I was kind.
Of weird, but I don't know, it's no big deal. I'll get over it.
Maybe maybe they didn't mean it, you know. And then that joke gets more and more intense, and then all of a sudden, you sitting in a room and they cracking jokes about Haitians eating pets and that Puerto Rico's a track, you know what I'm saying. It's like it didn't start there. It started with you accepting and just being like all lightening up, and at some point somebody said something to you and you made a face and they went, dude, just it's a joke.
Man, it's a joke. Come on, bro, you know me.
You know me right, you've had that, you know I'm saying, and I know that happened a year ago, and now look at you. You know, so like eventually, the point I'm making is like, at some point you are going to have to lay down all of your identifying factors to be able to stay at this table. And I hope that I hope that thirty year fixed mortgage was
worth it, you know. So the black story is that it's like, what is going to get us the financial or get me specifically minds the financial freedom that the Democrats kept promising but never gave to us. But that's, like I said, that's a much less interesting story, in my opinion, than the Latino vote, which we could.
Talk about after it is break.
All right, so we're back now sixty four percent right
of air quotes, Latinos voted right wing this year. Now I feel like this, well, I don't feel like I know this needs a lot of unpacking, because first of all, what the hell is the Latino right is the first question that you have to ask, And essentially I find I figure, I think I've come to the fact that what America means by that is you were colonized by Spain, so in some way you kind of speak somewhat Spanish, unless it's Brazil, in which case you were colonized by
the Portuguese right. So it's like you don't even know what you mean, Like y'all don't even know what you mean.
It's sort of it's staggering that, like one of our primary demographic categories was invented by a coalition of like Maoists and like Vietnamese merchist Leninist that fell apart immediately the moment that trying to invade Vietnam. And that's only our second most incoherent democratic category.
It's completely incoherent.
Right, So you have exactly you have my wife, my life partner, who is born in La but she is a first gen She grew up in southern Mexico.
She is first gen Mexican.
But she's like, I identify as indigenous and it's and it's true. She is like, even when we did the DNA test, if you believe in that stuff, She's like, but you could just look at her and I'm like, you're incing, like you know what I'm saying, Just I'm just you're looking at.
Her, and she's like, yeah, you're right, Like we are.
Overwhelmingly vast majority of her DNA is indigenous. So for her, if you check a demographic box, it's like are you are you Hispanic? She's like, why would I identify with the colonizer? So no, I'm not Hispanic, Like they're the colonizer, right, Whereas you ask a Puerto Rican or a Cuban or Dominican they say Hispanic, but they just mean it differently. One because the island was called It's Fanola, I'm saying,
so like they just mean something totally different. And Dominicans as black as hell, yo said, And then what about a Cuban. The way that they relate to America is also incredibly different, especially because of like you know, I'm pretty sure y'all y'all room knows, is if you could touch dry ground, right, And that really just had to do with the fact that we just ain't fuck with Castro.
So the way that they relate to even immigration is completely different because if you could make it to the soy, if you go back to Florida, you're a citizen. So they just didn't go through the same things that people from Central and South America went through to be able to become a citizen. And on top of all that, California, Arizona and Texas is Mexico, so like so some of them ain't immigrants. They was here, like the border move
didn't the border to border across US. So you put all that together mixed with a group of people who might be nice generation Mexican that people that don't speak Spanish, they're no samples that you call it like, well't even speak Spanish, you know what I'm saying that, Like you love all these people who speak so many different languages and have so many different understandings of who they are, and you just call them Latino and then you get
this number. But if you're willing to accept the absurdity of it, then then we could talk about the actual, Like what actually happened here and what you find are two things that are seem so reductive. But as you look at the exit polls and even like interviews that I actual that I personally conducted. If you set aside the person that has been just cooked by just the right wing information, like set that person aside, that is
just you've just your brain's been cooked. Like you set that aside, and you look at this, there are two very reductive things that just continue to just be true. One is, Latin America is very religious. It's still Catholic, and machismo is a big part of their culture. And it just it seems so reductive, but it's but it's what happened. You know, this is still a very patriarchal culture. And you know, as anecdotal and as running joke as it is that like if you have a Latina daughter
and she's bringing because again they're very traditional. That's why I'm saying I'm using cisgender things. It's like you bring a boy over your grandma, all your theas are watching, you make him a plate. You have to go over there and make him a plate and sit it in front of him, or you going to be judged. This is just the culture, you know, so it's no surprise that that is not going to play into how you
vote right. And then secondly, the religious thing in the sense that like this actually like really blew my mind.
And a couple interviews I had I wanted to talk to specifically Latina women cause I was like, it just seemed as though there was just a triple layer of shit you'd have to swallow to be able to go this route right, And my main question was like what was the non negotiable and was there a line that Trump and by extension, the Republican Party could cross, Like where's the where's the line?
What is the too far line? Right?
And they landed on a few things. It was crazy, like after talking to three different women, they all kind of landed on the same things.
It was abortion, right.
They were like, at the end of the day, this is untenable, and to which I pushed back where I was like, well, Trump's not anti abortion, And what they all said was like, we could deal with the sixteen week like I could deal with the sixteen week thing, obviously, because again they are women and they're not completely pilled. They're like, we understand that there are situations that happened,
right that just are untenable. And then the next thing that they said was like, which was the part that like really just kept putting my brain in a pretzel, was we are really big on anti sex trafficking and the idea for us on this knowing that like, okay, so the right wing stole that, like they don't believe it.
They stole that concept and they wrapped everything around it. Right, But one of them mentioned how she couldn't vote for Hillary because she heard rumors about child stuff and she's I mean, she's referring to pizzagate, you.
Know, yeah, yeah, it's just cute shit.
Of which I was able to push back to be like, well that was you know, it was debunked, like and she was like, I just don't want to I just don't like.
I just don't like how they move.
I don't trust Bill and how he behaved in the Oval office.
And it's like you're looking around, like are.
You They weren't both on that played.
I'm like.
She even said, she was like, but the Epstein thing, and I'm like, well, they're all I don't.
I don't understand.
I don't understand how you don't see this connection, right, And to which they both said, oh, no, we see it. You're again. Find me someone that's not nasty, is their answer. Find me someone that's not corrupt, Find me someone that's not nasty. At least he's gonna save the babies, was the thing. And then the next question I had about them was the anti immigration thing, the borders, right, and we're talking to people who are one in two, some
of them three generations removed. And one of them gave me an example of a family members in law who got deported fifty years old, got deported from something they did when they were nineteen. He's like, it's tough, like this was a hard working man who's done his best, who you know, has has done everything they could and it's got it. So I asked her like, Yo, do you think that so, do you think that that's unfair? No, she was like, our family waited in line, Our family
did everything they needed to do. We fought. We came to this same thing. We came to this country because we believed in the dream and we fought for it, you know, and we and we did it right, you know. Obviously, like with the Mexican like sort of like work ethic of like no excuses, just work. We can't stand for no cheaters. We don't believe in stuff like that. You have to work for yours right, and we come here. There's no cuts in front of the lines, there's no shortcuts.
You do the work right and if you cheat, you go to the back of the line.
That's just what it is.
So she's like, he's talking about criminals. I'm not a criminal. He's talking about criminals. You know, that's not me. I'm I'm a hard working citizen, you know. So that sort of mindset, and then she said, at the end of the day.
We came for the dream. I'm here to work, you know.
And if I put in the work, if my family puts into work, we succeed. That's what this country's for. You're fucking it up for all of us. You cheating the system is fucking it up for all of us. And so that sort of like I can swallow the racist shit because I don't give a fuck about you anyway, because I already know you don't give a fuck about me. I'm just here to get mine. So for them, at least according to the way they're explaining it is like the prejudice line is not a line they worried about.
That's something I've already accepted, you know. But what is a line is oddly enough, treatment of women and the treatment of children and the ability to flourish. And then lastly for the men, it's what we know, like just the Mano sphears cooked our kids, just cook them, you know. And it dovetailed so well into the Latino machismo and even on the black shit. Like I knew we were in trouble when the hood niggas was talking, was running around here saying they was gonna vote for Trump because
it's because they understand it. It's like you either get on or get out. Like I'm here, I'm gonna get with my You either form me or against me.
This is what we're doing.
You know what I'm saying, right, I'm gonna let you be you know, as as derogatory as this is, like, I'm gonna let you be a man. You go fight what you gonna fight, and the Democrats are gonna turn your sons and the daughters. I don't rob like that's the that's the thought, you know what I'm saying. It's like, okay, well well fuck it, let's just get ours.
You know what I'm saying.
That simplicity of a message. It just resonated while you have which didn't bother me, but you have somebody like Obama coming in there like somebody's uncle.
Basically like you young.
Niggas need to turn, pull up your pants, stop acting like thugs, and get in line.
You know what I'm saying.
It's like, all right, okay, uh you know, to me, I don't bother me because I'm like, well, yeah, you're somebody's uncle, like you are that oh of course that's how you talk, you know. But the street dudes, it's like, look, man, I don't need this, like I don't need this Harvard grad like pretty ass like rich nigga to tell me what it's like. You was never out you weren't out here, you weren't in the trenches. You know what I'm saying,
Like you're a millionaire, I don't like you. You barely want to oh because you can hoop, Oh because you like basketball. You one of us, you know what I'm saying. So I just think that that like you've already got yours, so let me get mine. Is like, at the end of the day, was so appealing to this particular demographic and it just made sense.
So that's why they voted that way.
Yeah, And I think there's there's sort of like angles of this too that connect with what was going on with with Dasian Americans, so partially, also the religion angle is a thing that isn't talked about enough and also isn't talked about enough with Asian Americans, like particularly Chinese Americans.
There's a whole bunch of how do I explain this in a way that.
You know, the sort of like zeal of a convert shit, where like the first generation converts are the most nuts. Yeah, so that's like a huge portion of like Chinese Christians or these like first generation evangelical converts, and so you get these just like really terrifying, like ferociously right wing stuff that there's just kind of like just kind of
eats everything around it. And I think the second part is, I think it's an interesting distinction here too, because I think there's like a kind of differing parts of the storysness of the kind of like we came here to work thing, because that was the Asian American thing from maybe twenty years ago, and the last ten years and especially post twenty twenty has been people realizing that it's not real, yeah, and that you know, you work, you work, you work, you work, and this is this is actually
also funny enough, exact same thing happening in China, with sort of different political results because it's less it's you know, we're not dealing with ye, like the same kind of
sort of immigrant culture stuff. But the Chinese American version of this was like, Okay, we need to figure out who to blame for this, and they were like, well, yeah, okay, it's because of like all of this crime shit, because like people are going to prison for one million years, and like I see a black person and there's like a homeless person who I have to like walk past every day. This is the reason why like our fucking dream died and that was a really sort of appealing
message people. And it's the same kind of thing with the people who went for the affirmative action stuff, where it was like the people who you know are like in all seriousness, like we're running into kind of like oh no, there actually is a sort of wall that you hit, yeah, where it doesn't matter how hard you work, like there's only so many spots at the university. There's only so many totally, you know, there's only so much
so far you can go. And hitting that wall drove a bunch of people, right.
You make a good point, you know, And and I'm I imagine the same sort of reaction to that within the Chinese communit He's gonna be the same with ours, where it's like, okay, you gont learn that you are not welcome to that table. You know, they will always
choose themselves. And you know you could dress yourself up, you know, and just to the degree for which you can alter all identifying factors for us, it's like to the degree for which you can remove your blackness is to the degree for which you're welcomed in this table. But at some point you can't take it off, it all rub off, you know, dress your kids up. You know, that was like for us with respectability politics, like teach your kids just speak proper English and dress them up
and don't let them wear hoodies. Okay, good luck, you know, like Jay Z's seminal work. Look, OJ said, I'm not black, I'm OJ Okay, Like you know, it's just yeah, they will never accept you. The world you're trying to get into will never accept you. And this step towards trying to be accepted by this world is working against you and everyone else behind you.
You know. But this is America. You can vote whatever you want to vote well.
And I think twenty twenty, like for us, was that moment right where like, you know, everyone kind of got knocked out of the you know, whichever way you sort of fragmented politically, it is like that's when we got knocked out of the sort of obamam multiracial dream. Was when you realize that, like all of this fucking progress you made isn't going to stop people from killing you
in the street. Yes, And the reaction to that was like, and I saw this on the left where like a bunch of people basically splintered off and became like hardline Chinese nationalists because they were afraid and they were like, Okay, well, you know, here's this thing that we have, this like strong state that will protect us, and we just have to fight for it. Here it's like, well that didn't work, right,
you know. And then you have a lot of other people who started to recognize that this wasn't going to happen right, that like the thing that they had bought into was a lie. But the part of it that they believed, they were just like, well, okay, if we can just like fucking get the black people out of here and like we can get the cops in, yeah, you know, we can go back to living in our fucking fantasy world.
Yeah.
And that's been just the sort of dominant response to it. And I don't know, it's bleak, but it's it's not something that can't be overcome, but it's gonna require, like, it's going to require organizing, and it's going to require the left to not be about fucking making white people feel more anti imperialist, which has been what fucking politics ortation Americans has been. And until that shake at Sheddison's like you're gonna keep seeing this shit accelerate.
Yeah, man, has there been any if the right term is like vision casting among this community, because like I say that to say, albeit a very small, very small fraction of voices, but among some of the black thinkers, is like a serious consideration of pursuing like creating a third party of just like like but let's like take
it serious this time, like for real, for real. Yeah, you know, like there's you know, it's like I said, it's very small and like obviously, like my grandchildren will probably be the ones to see any sort of beginnings of that actually taking route. But it's still like, you know, people are some of the things that are being talked about right now, Like we just did like really like really consider it.
Is there anything like that going on?
No, like, and this is this Alcio.
Part of the problem is that like the Asian American intellectual class is like one of the most bankrupt classes in the entire country. There's nothing, it's a wasteland out there. Like it's oh my god, yeah, like it's it's so bad. It's it's like all of the art and the media, the culture and the sort of analysis is all I've talked about in this show a decent amount, but it's all wrapped up in this sort of like oh, you two can like integrate and become a small business owner.
And those people, you know, the people who believe that and people who did that don't actually have any interesting ideas.
Yeah they have.
They have the incredibly narrow ideas of their class and the incredible narrow idea, incredibly narrow ideas that their class are completely useless for the sort.
Of task we have ahead of us.
Yeah, and it's kind of working for them.
Yeah, I mean it's working for them. It's just said, it isn't working for anyone else exactly.
Yeah, And like god, like I don't know, like the people who are supposed to be like Wesley Yang, who was supposed to be like the great sort of like new Asian intellectual is now this just completely cooked, right, Winger Like some of some of the people have been like turning on some of the like the big podcasters have been like turning on trans people, and I'm just like, well, fuck all you guys eat shit basically, So yeah, it's
it's the situation's bad. It's also the fragmentation is so powerful because you're dealing with so many kinds of like linguistic lions and lines between people who've been here for ten generations and people who just like walk off the boat yesterday. There's you know, and so the fragmentation I think helps prevent a more coherent sphere.
But like it's it's bleak out there.
Yeah, yeah, you know, obviously, like the Black queer community is obviously incredibly vibrant and strong and organized, and you know, at least from the part of the intersection that I'm a part of, you know, the voice coming out of that that space of like a lot of times of like very much prophetic and like, you know, very much
like truth telling that you hear from. Again, like you know, black queer community is like from our perspective, they continue to be like five steps ahead of us, yeah, you know of like where we need to go as as a as a people.
Yeah, this was like the sex worker Orgs for us.
But then because this is another thing with Left just kind of hit the bed right, Like this is a thing with Bernie where Bernie voted for SIS to foster, right, and there's never been a reckoning about that at all. Yeah, And so you know, like the stuff that could have come out of that just kind of never did and we never got the kind of integration and the kind of politics that we could have had if people had been like five percent, well not five so they would would require.
Them to move their positions a bit.
But like people had actually cared about sex workers, we wouldn't be here right now.
But you told a different story. Yeah, yeah, well that was informative. This has been.
Uh, I don't know how do I how do we describe what this has been? Well?
Miya, you know I think I close to this right, Like this situation isn't hopeless. Yeah, right, there's there's been a lot of good, tenanted organizing going on, Like there's a lot of kinds of stuff that can and do work. It's knows to the grindstone time, right, it is time to lock in, time to organize, and these communities can be organized.
Yeah, we just haven't yet.
And you know, yeah, to your point, like for me, like all information is helpful, like like if somebody's lying to you, like it's it's good information to know that this person thinks that that's something worth lying about.
You know, like you just you.
Just told me something about yourself that the fact that you think that that's worth lying about. So I say all that to say this understanding a better understanding of like it's hard to reason reason with somebody when they're hungry, you know, so just a better understanding of what are these communities actually prioritize, what do they actually value? And obviously, like you know, the dims and unfortunately even the left was just like just swinging a miss. Guys, Like this
type of thing, like you said, is not hopeless. It's like, now there's an understanding of like, okay, so you value the hustle. All right, well let me tell you in the ways for which the choice you just made is working against your hustle, you know, like or now now here, here are ways for which you can like you said no to the grind and accomplish these goals in a way that's not so detrimental to the people around you.
Yeah, you know, I'm with it. Like I'm not hopeless either.
I think that we just need to think about the word, our word choice and what hills we willing to die on and be like this is what we met when we said this.
Yeah, it could happen.
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