<
https://lithub.com/rebecca-solnit-jd-vance-is-just-another-know-nothing-nativist/>
"For a person who’s supposed to be smart, Republican vice-presidential
candidate JD Vance delivers a pretty high volume of stupid and unstrategic
remarks. It’s hard to tell if he is just used to operating within whatever
tech-oligarchy or MAGA insider circles where this stuff flies, whether he just
doesn’t have a clue, or if there isn’t really much difference between the two
conditions.
His latest misstep, surprisingly, doesn’t have to do with women and how they
should not have rights, but with poor recall of a movie he thought buttressed
his anti-immigration argument. Plot spoiler: it didn’t.
A few days ago, Vance was questioned about some remarks he’d made to a
far-right podcaster:
You had this massive wave of Italian, Irish, and German immigration right?
And that had its problems, its consequences. You had higher crime rates, you
had these ethnic enclaves, you had inter-ethnic conflict in the country
where you really hadn’t had that before.
Asked about this a few days ago, he skipped the chance to save his bacon and
doubled down (just like he did when it came to childless cat ladies) declaring:
“Has anyone ever seen the movie
Gangs of New York? That’s what I’m talking
about. You know, when you have these massive ethnic enclaves forming in the
country, it can sometimes lead to higher crime rates.”
Film criticism isn’t really a job requirement for a vice president, but basic
mastery of facts should be—or to lower the bar really far, not saying
super-stupid shit. Martin Scorsese’s 2002 film
Gangs of New York is about the
rivalry between the immigrant Irish Catholics in the slums of 1850s Manhattan
and their enemies, the Bowery Boys, who in some iterations were a gang tied to
the anti-immigration Know Nothing Party. The violence at the heart of the movie
is occasioned by an ethnic enclave of older white immigrants who are hostile to
newcomers, specifically to Irish Catholics. The villain of the movie is gang
leader Bill the Butcher, played with oily hair and campy menace by Daniel Day
Lewis. The Irish fight back, but their violence seems generated by this
malevolent hostility.
Gangs of New York is loosely drawn from Herbert Asbury’s lurid 1928 history
of the New York underworld before the Civil War. Scorsese’s Bill the Butcher is
based on the New Jersey-born butcher, gang leader, and brawler William Poole
(most of the other characters in the film are fictional). Here’s a bit of what
Poole was like, as reported in the
New York Daily Herald in 1846: “William
Poole and Smith Ackerman were amusing themselves by putting two dogs to fight
in Christopher Street, creating a most disgraceful riot.” When someone tried to
stop the fight, Ackerman “knocked him down and nearly gouged out his left eye,”
and he and Poole were arrested."
Via Kenny Chaffin.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
