Yeah, I am not at all defending Trump or his supporters. I just think it's important to distinguish taking issue with universities or employers having explicit racial preference in admissions or hiring (which many liberals take issue with) vs. opposing or hating immigration or non-whites. Trumpism is almost exclusively the latter two.

Andreessen wrote:

>"The combination of DEI and immigration is politically lethal. When these two forms of discrimination combine, as they have for the last 60 years and on hyperdrive for the last decade, they systematically cut most of the children of the Trump voter base out of any realistic prospect of access to higher education and corporate America."

I am not necessarily accepting the premise, but this statement doesn't seem racist in itself, to me.

I did this steelmanning for decades. Teased out the nuance. Assumed people were coming from the best intent, even if they expressed themselves ham-fistedly. Rolled my eyes at friends reflexively shoehorning everything into "racism". Hated the refrain of "dog whistle" rather than addressing the actual point. And so on.

At the point when we've got an overtly fascist administration that is ineffective at doing anything but making a show of putting some powerless brown people in concentration camps, yet is still being cheered by a large number of people? I'm coming around to the idea that the underlying hidden variable is really just racism. So I'm done engaging with the dog whistles as rational points, at least until the pendulum starts swinging back. I'm certainly not going to be a useful idiot enabling this shit.

(I'm even left wondering if the reactionaries' constant refrain of "California [delenda est]" isn't just a straight up invitation to enter the racism closet. I spent time in LA. The place is a nuthouse. But when I respond to the "California..." narrative with actual sympathetic criticism it's still just crickets like I'm not understanding something)