Imagine being an informed, educated European having to listen to a lecture by Marco Rubio

[BeyondGeography]

The things our allies have to put up with.

Unsurprisingly, it didn’t resonate, judging from the take here from Lindsay Hilsum of Channel 4 News, who was in the room.

“MAGA Lite,” was one response.

“Basically he was saying it was a bad idea to give up the colonies,” Hilsum said.

There are a lot of such gems here:

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[yellow dahlia]

1. I saw clips. It was uninformed and replete with grievance politics.

So many instances of rewriting history!

Eg: Columbus showed up to the Americas and the (white) European settlers created something. Hey Marco - you know there were indigenous peoples here first, right?

And of course he had to insert "religious right" doctrine - talking about godless Communists.

It was not a sophisticated speech. Marco is not a sophisticated man.

[ChicagoTeamster]

2. It's all performative for MAGA and Trump back home. They're in Putin's pocket with no legit reasons for anything.

Nothing they say will ever be or sound reasonable. The grievance politics is Trump's continuous message for the MAGA masses watching back home that he will never do anything to help. As long as they think he's screwing over the people they don't like they will not notice what's actually being taken from them.

[yellow dahlia]

3. Indeed.

[gulliver]

4. The "I hear white" tinnitus is not good

Women's rights, for example, are Western. Every Democrat supports them. Calling them somehow cryptically "white" would be, in a word, wrong, both intellectually and morally.

The separation of church and state, also supported by basically every Democrat, is largely owed to a "white guy" (Locke). It obviously doesn't mean every drooling white antisemite or race-head is Locke. But it does mean that the adjective "white" is often a poor word choice, regrettably ignorant, or unjustly aggressive toward innocent individuals.

True liberalism is colorblind and should be colordeaf and color mute too, imo. This Hatfields and McCoys crap is going to start looking like luxury tantrums pretty soon, imo. The Tao Te Ching talks about emptying minds and stuffing bellies. That's what we should be doing.