Sunday, October 5, 2025
Saturday, October 4, 2025
"How the Irish Became White Again"
Trisha McOrmond: (Métis Sociologist. Policy Punk. Coach. Writer. Speaker. Committed to building a world prepared for the future)
I’ve been reading How the Irish Became White again and reflecting on what it means in this moment …
This line “… the assimilation of the Irish into the white race made it possible to maintain slavery.”
Super revealing.
He continues “The need to gain the loyalty of the Irish explains why the Democratic Party rejected nativism. It also explains why not merely slaverybut the colour line became so important to it.”
The psychological benefits of being white are a mechanism of control “sure my boss pays me nothing and leaves me to die on the street, but at least I’m not Black.”
These outweigh the physiological pain of hunger by creating a sense of belonging.
And creating a sense of belonging with the “in” group is a part of safety, “I’m with them”
But when you can’t belong, you learn to fit in. And by fitting in, we give up ourselves. Just like the Irish abandoned themselves when they stopped fighting for the equality they’d long stood for.
In this moment it means: Part of professionalism in our current economy is fitting in, pretending everything is fine while science and our eyes tell us something very different.
The illusion of fitting in by denying what we know to be true is more comfortable in the moment, absolutely.
In the long run though, speaking from personal experience, deciding to stop pretending is the best decision I’ve ever made.
Find groups who embrace all of you, not just the pretty parts, so we can all do work that matters for our selves and our communities.
Give up the goal of being popular, which is really all whiteness is to paraphrase Ignatiev - a popularity contest among mostly incompetent people who rule by fear and violence (and no one really likes anyway) and require you to lie to yourself about what is real.
3 Factions and 1 Factor of USA political power, right now. - Max Blumenthal Oct. 2. 2025
Nima R. Alkhorshid:
"Who's the main, the mastermind of the administration? Is there anybody there, to be called mastermind? Or it’s a huge, some sort of division, within the administration, two forces, three forces, factions that are fighting each other, within the administration?"
Max Blumenthal:
Bush/Kissinger/Trump/Rubio/Miller/Graham/Neocon Faction:
“Yeah, I would say there are various factions, but the factions that are winning represent the neoconservative faction, that started this conquest, post 9/11 conquest under George W. Bush. So, I keep saying that Trump's second term feels like the third coming of George W. Bush's first term. Lindsey Graham is the big winner on Ukraine after Alaska. Trump has completely turned around and agreed to new weapons deals, freezing negotiations and so is General Keith Kellogg.
Donald Trump on the Western Hemisphere has ceded his agenda to Marco Rubio who has quietly become the most important or influential figure within the national security bureaucracy, along with Steven Miller, the sort of nativist fanatic, who is backing up Rubio's plan, to start to wage a war inside Venezuela. Rubio controls actually more cabinet level national security positions than anyone in the United States since Henry Kissinger, but he's certainly not as savvy an operator as Henry Kissinger, but he's getting his way.”
Colby/Vance/Anti China/Imperialists Faction:
“And so these three or four factions all have different agendas. The one faction that I think is losing out right now is the faction of Elbridge Colby who is in Trump's cabinet of national security advisers, who is an anti-China fanatic, who sees the ultimate objective of US empire to be neutralising or weakening the Chinese threat, as China supersedes the US, as a global economic power using not military force but, trade and infrastructure and the belt and road initiative and the expansion of BRICS.
So Elbridge Colby, would be terrified by the prospect of another conflict over Iran because it would further deplete US THAAD missile stocks, which he would like and I would think JD Vance, who's a figure from the Colby faction, you could call it the Vance faction would like to give those THAAD missiles to Taiwan, or to Japan and the Philippines, which have just signed a defence pact, an anti-China defence pact. They want to militarise the Pacific Rim and contain China. And they're not able to do it because Israel, we keep wasting or “we” the United States, keeps wasting bad missiles on this crazy little apartheid colony that can't stop attacking Iran. And at the same time, Ukraine has had to redeploy Patriot batteries even to defend Israel.
The faction that wants to take on China, ultimately would want a deal in Ukraine and has pushed for a deal in Ukraine that freezes lines around Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. And the lines are not frozen anymore, Russia continues to advance, Ukraine does not have manpower, no matter how much technical wherewithal they have, to wage these sophisticated drone attacks, or to use more advanced US weapons, including Tomahawks, to attack inside Russian frontier regions. They just don't have the manpower, which means as long as those lines are not frozen, the US will keep pouring more and more weapons in, as Russia advances towards Odessa.
So, the real imperialist, the real long-term imperialist planners inside the Trump administration are losing long-term as the Trump administration positions itself for conflicts that appease the factions that have a much more myopic vision. And I mean, it's three visions, as I said before. one, Rubio catering to the gusano industrial complex in South Florida, which is a major key for Trump's electoral strategy, is to always win Florida, but also Rubio has this ideological fervour, that they share, to destroy Venezuela. Then they think once Venezuela is destroyed, they will be able to topple the Government in Cuba, which depends on Venezuelan exports and help. And then Nicaragua will be next, and then the region will be completely free for the US to exploit. And then you have the Zionist Neocon faction, Lindsey Graham, is sort of fronting for them. They want to destroy Iran, for ideological reasons.”
Military Industrial Complex Faction:
“And then you have this third faction, which is focused on, they're like the traditional military leadership. They're focused on the revolving door. They're making loads of money through the trillion dollar defence budget, which is mostly going to contractors. Only 6%, actually goes to maintaining US troops, in the field. And they're just focused on profits and continuous war.”
Military Purge factor:
“And then I should say there's a sort of a fourth factor. I don't know if it's a faction, but a fourth factor. If you paid attention to Donald Trump's speech (to a rare meeting of U.S military leaders) at Quantico, which is being minimised, even by the people who hate Donald Trump the most in Washington, the liberals and so on, they're like, "Oh, he mocked... .”
Basically, for those who don't know, Pete Hegseth, who is one of the least qualified defence secretaries, just because of his rank and lack of experience and is there basically because he's an effective communicator, who is a former Fox News host, he convened 200 US generals and high-ranking officers at Quantico. Many of them had to come across, some of them had to come across 10 time zones. And then he delivered this speech lacerating them for being fat and gay. I mean, that's basically what he said. He's like, "We're not going to have any more dudes in skirts and too many of you are too fat and that's not who we are." And that was sort of treated as a joke by the media and even by liberals. But it's actually setting the stage for a politicised purge of the military, in which Trump loyalists will be elevated to new positions. and those who are perceived as Democrats will be ousted.
Then Donald Trump comes on stage and he tries to get the military audience to laugh at his jokes. I thought some of some of them are like classic Trump humour like comedy like he's opening up at a New Jersey nightclub or something, he's talking about how Obama “bops down the stairs on Air Force One”, and he thought that if there's laughter, it will show some kind of support for himself, from the Generals, like an organic support. But nobody laughed. So, he sort of failed there.
But if you parsed what Trump was saying, including his support and endorsement for Rubio's agenda against Venezuela, he called for using US cities as training grounds for the US military. To essentially wage war on and pacify parts of the American public that he described as animals, essentially urban minorities and the poor. They're sending troops to Memphis this coming week, and there are plans to deploy in Chicago as well. But he talks about American cities as training grounds for foreign conflicts. We haven't heard this kind of language before.
And as Trump does that, this is something Steven Miller, his top adviser wants and a large part of his base wants, it diffuses the drive to actually send US troops into a conflict theater, in the Pacific Rim or in Iran. So, you have all of these competing agendas and factions, and the faction that will lose here are the long-term, I think ultimately more dangerous Imperial planners, and they're losing to the ideologues and the avaricious grifters in the military.”
- Max Blumenthal, Oct. 2, 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMZ202d8Auc
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