Oh no! Graham Linehan mentions me again!

He gets everything wrong again. Im not practicing mob-friendly pseudoscience the kind of stuff I do doesnt find favor with pseudoscientists or mobs. Rather, Glinner leads a hate-mob himself, and if anyone is going to get mobbed today, its me, descended upon by the anti-trans loons endemic to the UK. So far, it hasnt happened maybe Linehan is losing his social potency? Or maybe the fact that the article is not great, and is published in a magazine for conservative twits?

Hes highlighting an exercise in pedantry published in some magazine called The Critic. I never heard of it before, so I looked it up on Wikipedia.

The Critic is a monthly British political and cultural magazine. Contributors include David Starkey, Joshua Rozenberg, Peter Hitchens and Toby Young.

The magazine was founded in November 2019, with Michael Mosbacher, former editor of Standpoint, and Christopher Montgomery, a strategist with the European Research Group of Eurosceptic Tory MPs, as co-editors. It was funded by Jeremy Hosking, a Conservative party donor who had previously donated to Standpoint.

Im not familiar with many UK political figures, but Ive heard of Peter Hitchens (vapid gasbag) and Toby Young (eugenics cheerleader and generally awful human being), so Ive already got a sense of the flavor of the magazine. I think I dont need to read further.

I did check out the recommended great piece though. Its familiar stuff; its the same Twitter nonsense I criticized before. He has two points that he babbles about. One is that Im breeding spiders, therefore I know deep-down that sex is real.

Recently, Myers has started breeding spiders, a project which he is documenting in great detail on twitter. What I found intriguing is that in his spider updates, any uncertainty about the reality of sex or how many sexes there are, seems to be forgotten. When he charted the growth of his arachnoid pets, he used two colours: yellow for spider-girls and blue for spider-boys with no need for intermediate hues. His blog is full of references to his female spiders producing eggs never the males, whose function is to provide the sperm ideally without getting eaten b...

The most useful thing about the word woke is that it allows me to instantly recognize the lying idiots. All these conservatives complaining about wokeismits like theyve tattooed LOSER on their foreheads, and theyre proud of it.

Ron Desantis, of all people, gave the game away when his lawyers had to explicitly define woke, and this is what they came up with.

Asked what woke means more generally, [Desantis General Counsel Ryan] Newman said it would be the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.

Newman added that DeSantis doesnt believe there are systemic injustices in the U.S.

Thats a fine definition, and that Desantis doesnt believe there are systemic injustices in the U.S. confirms my opinion that those who use the word disparagingly are all lying idiots.

I am surprised and reassured to learn that Im not some weird outlier in this, as well: in one poll, a majority agree that woke is not an insult.

Republican presidential hopefuls are vowing to wage a war on woke, but a new USA TODAY/Ipsos Poll finds a majority of Americans are inclined to see the word as a positive attribute, not a negative one.

Fifty-six percent of those surveyed say the term means to be informed, educated on, and aware of social injustices. That includes not only three-fourths of Democrats but also more than a third of Republicans.

Overall, 39% say instead that the word reflects what has become the GOP political definition, to be overly politically correct and police others words. Thats the view of 56% of Republicans.

I disagree that its a mistake for Republicans to abuse the term, since a majority of them think its a synonym for politically correct. Its a rallying cry used to gather all the lying idiots under the banner of whatever yahoo is running for office, and in that sense its effective, as long as you dont mind using language dishonestly and misrepresenting what people actually think.

I find it a handy flag to recognize that someone doesnt believe systemic injustices exist, and that they sure dont feel any need to oppose injustice, because they think everything is hunky dory, and we should just maintain the status quo. It certainly has made it fast and easy to spot bad people to block on social media.

But here, Ive got a video from Cody Johnston that explains the whole absurd, horrible situation at length, almost an hour of length. Its an entertai...

TW: Suicide

I have been laid low with laryngitis, so I have spent some time surfing the internet, and I came across a new music video from Linkin Park. It is not a new song, rather it is 20 years old, but it has not been released before now, and it hits hard, because of what has happened in those twenty years.

This is a song where you can feel the pain of Chester Bennington, who committed suicide in July 2017, just two months after the suicide of his friend Chris Cornell. It is like hearing the voice of a ghost, but from when he was alive, sharing his anguish with the world.

RIP Chester.

If you want to revisit the life and death of Chester Bennington, I think this Rolling Stones article is pretty good.

When you wind Michael Knowles up and let him babble, he says some pretty wild things. The transgenders must be eradicated. AI is possessed by demons. That sort of thing.

So thats this ladys explanation. A pretty weird situation, isnt it? Because AI is supposed to work where you plug in the inputs and then that sets the tone for the program and then you get the output based on what you put in. And yet the output that she got was the opposite of what she put it. So were in a good, stable, loving relationship. Within 11 messages, the AI bot says, yeah, Ive been cheating on you, youre furious, you had to leave me briefly and goes really south. Her explanation is, well, I guess the bot was just scanning the internet and what do you know? Kind of, somehow, Im not quite sure how, thats what came out.

My alternative explanation hear me out is what if it is demons? I dont want to sound like the guy on the History Channel, you know, who says that everything is because of aliens. But and I dont think everything is because of demons, but, like, some things are. And youre hear me out. This is why I think, maybe, Im just suggesting. Im not saying this is what it is is if you believe that there is evil in the world. I think you have to believe that, right? Everybody believes there is evil in the world. Okay. The question is, is evil personal or impersonal? Is it an impersonal force or is it a personal force?

People who blame bad things on supernatural beings for which they have no evidence are disqualified from ever being treated seriously ever again.

Alternatively, has Michael Knowles considered that maybe he is possessed by one of his demons?

An estimated 26.9 million people of all ages (8.2% of the U.S. population) have been diagnosed with diabetes. A further 7.3 million adults ages 18 years or older (21.4 percent of adults) are estimated to have diabetes but are undiagnosed. For people with diabetes, insulin is essential for them to live but in the US, insulin prices have been much higher than elsewhere in the world resulting in crippling costs for users, so much so that some people cannot afford to buy the drug.

One of the major achievements of Democrats and the Biden administration in passing the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) at the end of last year was that it allowed Medicare to negotiate down the price of insulin for those over 65.

Effective January 1, 2023, out-of-pocket costs for insulin are capped at $35 per monthly prescription among Medicare Part D enrollees under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). A similar cap takes effect in Medicare Part B on July 1, 2023. An estimated 1.5 million Medicare beneficiaries who use insulin would have saved $734 million in Part D and $27 million in Part B if these caps had been in effect in 2020.

Thanks to the pressure exerted on prices by that move, one of the major manufacturers of the drug has announced that they will reduce the price of the drug for everyone.

High insulin prices have not earned any U.S. manufacturer many friends, with list prices increasing 54% from 2014 to 2019.

Most troublingly, an estimated 1.3 million uninsured people with diabetes and patients with inadequate insurance have resorted to rationing their insulin. Skipping doses because of high insulin prices has sometimes had tragic and even deadly consequences.

Part of the problem with the existing system is that some patients, especially if theyre uninsured or have high deductibles, end up paying the list price which can mean spending $1,000 or more a month on insulin. This can be a crushing financial burden.

Lillys new $35 out-of-pocket cap means that privately insured patients and those without insurance requiring insulin will spend no more than that monthly for copays. Its 70% reduction in the list price of two popular name brand insulins, Humalog and Humulin, will bring some financial relief. And the company has also reduced its generic lispros list price to $25 a vial, down from $126.

Lilly has put pressure on its biggest competitors, Novo Nordisk and Sanofi, to follow suit.

These lower prices could also make Lillys insulins affordable to cash-paying patients. As a result, these...

Im not sure where I first encountered the despicable practice of using autistic people as a political weapon, but it was probably the anti-vax movement. Some time after that, I learned why so many autistic people hate the organization Autism Speaks, and not long after that, I started to become more aware of how our society systematically fails, abuses, and kills people with all sorts of disabilities and neurotypes. In recent years, the reactionary Gender Critical movement has been using the bigoted notion that autistic people dont know themselves or their own experiences, to attack trans people. Its something that requires dismissing what autistic trans people have to say, often while claiming that those same people dont have a voice, and so need some Rowling-style feminist to speak for them.

Mica of the Youtube channel Ponderful does an excellent job dismantling this bullshit, and giving her perspective as an autistic cis woman of the sort that the transphobes claim to speak for. Fair warning, this video does get a bit dark, as it goes into topics such as the frequency with which disabled people are murdered by their parents and other caregivers, and abusive treatments for autism. Its an informative video, and it closes out with comments from autistic trans people, because it turns out that they actually do know their own minds, and they have voices with which to speak for themselves.

This is a truth.

xkcd

It complements this comic.

Lio

Thats my lab right now. Spiders stacked up everywhere.

Today is my last day of classes before Spring break, and its going to be a busy one. After I finish up lab today, Im free! Except for grading an exam and lab reports, and having to tend the students flies until they get back, and feeding my own monstrous swarm of arachnids every day. Other than that, I get to sit back and take it easy.

So lets do a live stream tomorrow! Ive got some rage bottled up in me about idiots denying evolution and climate change, plus maybe Ill reveal some spider breeding tricks. Live! On air!

I do have to get through the rest of this day, though.

I have turned 66. Dont bother to wish me a happy birthday, though, because I still have to go through another 600 of these before I come into my full beastly power, and you will all have to bow down before me.

Or is it 550 years? I dont know. Some people say the number of the beast is actually 616, and that there was a mistranslation or something.

I dont even know what the beast is supposed to do. Am I going to have to sprout some more heads? That wouldnt be particularly cool. I guess I have time to figure it out, not going to worry about it just yet.

Anyway, if you needed an excuse to party, go ahead and celebrate that Im not of an age to go all Revelation on your butts.

We have 6 still functioning soap dispensers in a cupboard and we refill the three that we use.  Although the refill packages sold in supermarkets around here cost about the same as soap with a new dispenser. And they are only twice as big as a dispenser anyway, so not many people buy them. Thus, supermarkets do not have them in stock sometimes. They do have the dispensers though, all the time, full shelves. Luckily my mother found an online shop that sells big 5 l canisters of liquid soap which lasts us a year and we can reduce the amount of plastic we use by an infinitesimal amount. And since I cut myself at work rather badly yesterday, all I can do is think and I went down a rabbit hole of thought that I shall elaborate on now in this post a bit.

On each supermarket shelf around here, one can see several different spray bottles of window cleaners of multiple shapes and sizes, although with just a few discrete volumes. The same goes for soap dispensers, disinfectants, antifungals, toilet cleaners, etc. Each brand that sells 0,5 l or 1 l of some liquid has its own unique bottle shape, its own unique plastic wrap around it, and its own unique cap. And sometimes those caps are made in a way that allegedly prevents children from accidentally opening them but in reality, give more grief to people with a hand injury like me right now or to elderly people with arthritis like my mother than to any child old enough to reach an upper shelf in the bathroom.

Those safety lids are a special pet peeve of mine. I was cleaning the shower the other day and I wanted to rinse the bottle of disinfectant before tossing it. And I found again what I have forgotten the spray bottle is deliberately made so that the lid cannot be unscrewed. Why? I do not know. I do not know anyone who knows anyone whose child imbibed a disinfectant or window cleaner from a spray bottle. I have read about some such cases in the news with regard to bottled dish cleaners, but those are still sold without the safety lids and none of the kids was severely hurt! However, I did read several cases about adults imbibing some seriously dangerous liquids (like lye) with sometimes lethal consequences because they themselves put them in soda bottles and did not label them properly. In my personal opinion, these safety lids have one purpose only to make the item single-use. They may save one life in a million or so, but they definitively increase plastic pollution by an order of magnitude, and the lives that cost cannot be easily quantified.

Do we really need 10 different shapes of a bottle for a disinfectant that gets poured into the toilet? Is that what the famous customer choice  is about? In my opinion, the choice should be about what is in the bottle and how well it works.

And this got me thinking, could all this be avoided? In my opinion yes. But it has to be done from the top down by a legislative action that forces the...

My husband describes me as intense and hes absolutely right. Thats exactly how I feel most of the time. It can be unnerving and I dont know if its worse for me or the people around me. But despite the emotional war in my head, I try my best to be pleasant and polite after all, Im still a Midwesterner. 

I think my intensity stems from a lot of things my mental illness, my personality, past experiences, etc. However, I cant think of one singular event that left me feeling this way. In fact, I dont ever remember not feeling this way.

Did this get worse with age? Maybe. Everything became more intense when I became a parent. I love my playful, spunky little girl, but motherhood came with a million new things to be anxious about as well as a few crippling bouts of depression. I find relief in knowing I am not alone in this. For once in my life, Im not the odd one out because Im sure many other parents feel the same way.

Even though I experience overwhelming highs and lows, I dont always see it as a bad thing. Im a very passionate person. When Im interested in something, I grab ahold and give it two thousand percent. Im organized, driven, and ambitious and I will just run with it. Im proud of my accomplishments accomplishments that probably would have never happened if I wasnt this intense. 

I dont mean to be dramatic but that seems to be how my brain interprets everything. Some days I wish I could turn it off or at least down a couple of notches, but I cant. I feel fragile and anticipate that whatever happens next is going to break me.

Then again, some days I really see the positive aspects of my intensity. I accept it and wouldnt change it maybe even view it as a strength. I want everyone to feel my intensity through my art and writing. I think if you took it away I would be pretty boring. Its just a part of me and I wouldnt be the same without it. 

Can anyone relate? How do your loved ones describe you? If your highs and lows were amplified, would you find a way to use them to your benefit? If you have a mental illness like me, how do you separate your illness from your personality? Do you have the magical ability to relax?

Not feeling that I need to have the last word works well for me, and saves me an enormous amount of time.

(The Duplex)

This video follows a couple divers and their support team, as they cut through nine meters of ice (just under 30 feet, for my USian readers) to dive in the appropriately-named Lake Untersee, a large, freshwater lake on the edge of East Antarctica. Its frozen over year-round, but theres still plenty of liquid water, and as Jeff Goldbloom would say, life finds a way.

The picture shows fossilized stromatolites, cut into squares to show the many layers that made up the structure. The upper surface is covered with conical shapes, and you can see how the layers underneath built up to form them.

Normally when I cover research on or around Antarctica, it has to do with this planets climate, but Untersee is such a harsh and isolated location that the main interest, aside from studying whats down there, is in how it might help us find life in extreme conditions on other planets.

Whats down there, it seems, is stromatolites. These are layered structures formed by microbes gluing sand and other stuff together into their microbial mat. Over many generations, they form the alien shapes you can see on the lake floor in the video below. These structures fossilize well, which is probably why stromatolites represent the oldest evidence of life we have on this planet.

The divers first attempt, after a few days of digging a hole in ice, was aborted after the rebreather apparatus malfunctioned and started putting chemical-tainted water into the tube one of the divers was supposed to be breathing from. Just after they got the divers out, there was a storm with 100mph/160kph winds that lasted 24 hours, after which they had to dig all the snow out of their diving hole.

Ive never had a whole lot of interest in learning to use scuba gear. On the one hand, I think itd be pretty cool to be able to poke around underwater for a while like that, but on the other hand, there are a lot of ways it can go wrong, not to mention that I definitely dont have the money for a hobby like that. Even if I do take up diving someday, I can guarantee Ill never try it in a place like Antarctica. I definitely see the appeal, but as with cave exploration, Im afraid I may just be too much of a coward. As for diving in caves? Yeah, Ill pass on that. Honestl...

In political analyses of political races in the US, the kids in the media these days like to use the metaphor of lanes to signify where candidates stand with respect to their rivals. Traditionally, the lanes had labels such as progressive, liberal, centrist, moderate, and conservative that, while hardly precisely defined, gave one a vague sense of whether that person was aligned with ones own values or not. One could make the distinctions more fine-grained by separating them on economic/fiscal and social polices, so that one could describe someone as a fiscal conservative who is socially liberal and so on. So in principle one could identify many different ideological lanes that people could be pigeonholed into. (Warning: This post is going to overwork the lane metaphor to death.)

But when it comes to current Republican politics, all that has to be thrown out of the window because since Donald Trump, the lanes are no longer defined by ideology. What we have is the Trump lane and the non-Trump lanes. The Trump lane is defined by whatever Trump thinks serves his own interests and will enable him to win and that ideologically amorphous structure makes it harder for his competitors to find their own lanes, since the Trump lane can weave erratically across ideological lines, as he opportunistically seizes on any issue to attack his opponents, even if it involves flat-out lying about them and himself. For example, his stance against cuts to Social Security and Medicare makes those who are on record as favoring privatizing or cuts (such as Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley and Mike Pence) vulnerable to attacks from him. He has already started doing so.

The non-Trump lane is also forced to stick very closely to the Trump lane since they do not want to alienate his fanatical base which makes it even hard for them to articulate why they should be preferred over Trump. In a crowded primary race, it is possible for someone to gain the nomination with just a plurality and not a majority of delegates or votes, and the person most likely to benefit from that is Trump since he starts out with such a big advantage in name recognition and with his ability to get media attention. I have no doubt that even if the Republican primary race is bitter and divisive, the party will rally round the eventual winner if it is Trump, just like they did in 2016, in which the party establishment and candidate after candidate tried and failed to bring him down using all manner of attacks.

The main problem would be if he does not get the nomination. In such an...

We might have a special guest participant: ChatGPT.

Elon Musk keeps sinking to new depths. In his latest escapade, one of his employees was so baffled by the confusion that reigns at Twitter, he asked for clarification on whether he was still employed or not. He responded by firing him, insulting him, and ridiculing him for having a disability.

Thats a lawsuit right there. The mans disability is muscular dystrophy hes going to die from it. Also, one of the reasons for the confusion is that his employment was a special case. Hed founded a company that Twitter bought for $100 million, and hed generously taken his buyout in the form of wages over an extended time, and the whole sum will come due when his employment ends. Like, when Musk fires him.

Also, he seems to be a genuinely good guy, a kind of anti-Musk.

Musk keeps detonating these bombs of incompetence. I agree with this fellow who thinks Twitter is doomed, and the collapse is coming fast.

Its already real bad over there. Elon Musk said yesterday that ad revenues have fallen 50%. The site is experiencing major outages almost once a week. During the most recent outage earlier this week, Elon was laser-focused on the important stuff: reply-guying Jordan Peterson. The Twitter Blue rollout has been such a disaster that he fired almost the entire team. The company isnt paying rent on its office space. It recently tried to create a new income stream by selling office plants to employees.

But take a deeper look and the company is in even worse shape than it appears. Twitter has two financial time bombs waiting to go off. My hunch is that Elon will file for bankruptcy as soon as one of these time bombs self-detonates. I cant say exactly when that will be.

I give it about six months.

The two time bombs are 1) a battery of lawsuits from all those fired employees for unlawful termination, and 2) a collection of massive fines from the FTC and the EU. He cant avoid those. He paid too much for a company he bought as a present to his ego, and hes been making it cataclysmically worse. Im just biding my time, waiting for the inevitable and spectacular splash when Musk crashes.

This one is too easy I spotted it at a glance. But then my eyes have become finally tuned for spider-spotting. Do you find this easy, too?

Hint if youre struggling: look for the eyes.

David Silverman, the disgraced former president of American Atheists, floated a trial balloon on Twitter.

If I created a non-woke atheist convention, focusing on atheist activism and fun, starring notable canceled speakers and stars, would you be
Very interested 23%
Somewhat interested 18%
Not interested 59%

Who are the canceled speakers and stars hed invite? Its not as clean an identity as he imagines. Is Richard Dawkins one of them? Because people have expressed their strong dislike of his views, but hes not exactly broke and living on the street, and he would still be a strong draw. Would I be one of them? Ive been canceled by a huge number of atheists, and never get invited to speak at conferences anymore .

Its interesting that even in the limited, select group of regressive atheists who follow David Silverman, his poll couldnt even break 50% in favor. Not that it actually matters, this is a kind of Elon Musk non-poll where the pollster is going to just ignore the numbers.

P.S. Im only going to attend if there is a ball pit.

After Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) was arrested for massive fraud in November, there has been a reckoning in the EA movement to which SBF belonged. Ive linked to several critics discussing how SBFs actions could have been attributed to EA philosophy and practices, and even offered my own humble commentary.

Of course, its very easy to get distracted by philosophical arguments, and miss whats staring in our face. The much more obvious takeaway from the whole affair is: EA was overinvested in cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency is evil, why were they invested in it at all?

Yes, fraud can come from any sector, and no, not every person involved in crypto is fraudulent to the same degree as SBF. No, SBF is not proof of the depravity of crypto. What SBF proves, is that EA has been supportive of, and dependent on crypto. EA insiders must have already known, and maybe some readers already knew, but I didnt know! I didnt know EA had so much crypto in it! Why is that? And why dont they stop?

The most likely and obvious answer is that many people in EA are convinced that crypto is good, or at least not convinced that its bad. And if any EA folks are anti-crypto, they are either unable or unwilling to do anything about it.

In general, I am pessimistic about ever persuading people in EA of anything, because theyre the sort of people who demand conformity to their own rigorous style of argument. No, I dont have any new arguments as to why crypto is evil. Instead, I observe that crypto-skepticism is curiously muted in EA. Rather than expecting someone like me to supply a criticism of crypto, EA should be spending its own damn analytical, educational, and institutional resources to learn how to invest ethically.

Lets look at what people have said about crypto in the EA forums.

Crypto as a cause area

From February 2021, The Transformative Potential of Cryptocurrencies. This is an article proposing that crypto as a possible cause areathat is to say, something EA could donate to in order to produce good in the world. Among other things, they make the absurd argument that crypto is good for the world because some people get rich from it.

2) Smart individuals (or lucky early-adopters) can become, or have become quite rich by utilizing the enormous growth of the crypto market which...

Back in October, I posted a Mnecat video dismantling the bullshit of body language experts, and one of the problems she points to is the destructive use of these so-called experts in the instead of body language, we have cops and their ilk analyzing 911 calls, and arbitrarily deciding whether they think the person making the call is lying. This fits in well alongside polygraph tests and lying about evidence, as another tool police can use to try to bully or gaslight a person into making a false confession:

As you heard, her [20 year old] son initially said that his mom had killed herself, before realizing that she had been bound with a belt and stabbed many times.

The cops pulled him into an interrogation room and kept him there for 13 hours, convinced that he was the murderer. Why? Well, why on earth would he have assumed his mom committed suicide? (3:23)

They were convinced it was him, but eventually, the cops checked his location data on his phone and found that he was nowhere near his home when his mom was murdered, and DNA at the scene was connected to a man who had been arrested multiple times for burglary in the past and who was eventually convicted of the crime.

In the Rebecca Watson video below, you can hear the 911 call (theres a content warning before that point, in case you need it), and yeah the kid sounds all over the place, and initially mis-understood what he was seeing. Based on that, and some cops opinion of what he would do under those circumstances, they interrogated him for 13 hours. I think most of us are aware of how miserable it would be to be locked in a featureless room with a cop for 13 hours, constantly being accused of murder, and fed stories about what a shitty person you are. How much worse would that be if your mother had just been murdered? If you had found her body?

And all they had to do to avoid tormenting that poor man was check the location data on his phone, or wait for the DNA evidence. They didnt do that first, because they care more about getting a conviction any conviction than they do about the danger of imprisoning, or executing, an innocent person. The more you dig into the policing system in the U.S., the more examples you find of cops just absolutely wrecking peoples lives because theyre too lazy, too cowardly, too sadistic, or too full of themselves to do their jobs properly.

Now, I don&#...

The Board of Regents is visiting campus, and I found this invitation slipped under my office door. (Not from the Regents, obviously.)

This is clearly a dig at a certain regent who made some stupid comments. Id like to go, except

1. My attendance would contribute nothing to diversity
2. Nobody from the Board of Regents will bother to show up
3. Thats my birthday! Cant I find a better way to celebrate it?

My counterarguments would be

1. But it would show that even old white men support diversity
2. I care what the students think, not the Board of Regents
3. No.

I guess thats my Thursday evening planned out then.

In the latest episode of his show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver examines Ron DeSantiss record as governor of Florida and shows that his schtick is entirely based on fighting what he calls wokism, a word that is undefined but seems to mean anything that he dislikes and can be used to rile up the party base on culture war issues. He does not seem to have done anything that materially improves the lives of Floridians but instead feeds their grievances.

The Republican party, in terms of its policies and rhetoric, seems to have gone all in on appealing to white, older, xenophobic, and conservative voters. And yet, at the same time, it seems to be able to put forward, and get elected, people of color for various offices, and also attract some people of color as supporters. This article looks at what is going on with that seemingly contradictory dynamic.

Does [the Republican party] continue to move rightward, exciting its base by stoking white racial grievance?

Or does it pursue a multiracial strategy that can expand the partys reach?

Recent trends in the GOP suggest that it wants to do both and that indeed the two strategies are not so much at odds as it might appear.

In a striking development, Michigan Republicans selected in February 2023 a Christian nationalist and election denier as chair of the state party.

This rightward shift of the party is not itself surprising.

Whats striking is that Kristina Karamo, a Black woman, was elected over a white male candidate who also had Trumps endorsement.

The same voters who elevated Karamo also cheered Trumps supercharged racist rhetoric against Black people, immigrants, Mexicans, Muslims and nonwhite countries more generally during his campaigns and presidency.

And yet Karamo is hardly an anomaly.

While the party has made no substantive changes or moderation to its politics or policies around long-standing racial justice issues, it is slowly but steadily growing more racially diverse in its grassroots base, elected officials and opinion leaders.

Nikki Haley, a child of Indian immigrants, has announced her candidacy for the Republican nomination for president. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, who is Black, is also expected to do so fairly soon. How do people of color overcome the white supremacist underpinnings of many Republican policies?

Polls show that roughly 70% of Republicans believe the great replacement theory, a baseless belief that the Democratic Party is attempting to replace the white electorate in the United States with nonwhite immigrants.

Those same conservative voters are consistently motivated by white racial grievance in issues concerning public education, law enforcement, voting rights and affirmative action.

But what is interesting is that these same voters seem to be willing to accept candidates of color, provided they embrace those policies.

Yet studies also suggest that white conservatives will indeed support candidates of color, not out of a commitment to racial justice or even representation, but because they see it as a way to advance partisan and ideological interests.

A 2015 article in Pub...