Another Heaping Bowl of Stupid

Anand Giridharadas

I ask, who are all these children, those of prized first generation immigrants who came here as professionals and have done well while adding much to the American experience?? Children raised with all the privilege and opportunity America has to offer, like the best schools and universities. And once on their own, see everything that was earned and given and laid at their feet, what made them who and what they are, now must be changed because of who created it all.

One such soft skull is Anand Giridharadas, son of East Indian heritage, former columnist for the NYT, schooled in privilege at Sidwell Friends School, University of Michigan & Harvard, who now (because he's more smarter and wrote a book) is one of the media's go-to oracles on what's wrong with America, Americans, and in-particular, people who don't look like him.

Giridharadas latest ignorant proclamation is he believes "freedom-obsessed Americans" are blinded to threats like virus or climate change. In his own words speaking on MSNBC's 'Morning's with Squinty' of the present Corona Virus outbreak:

“One of the fundamental questions to me is, what’s going to be our relationship to government, the idea of government after this?  There’s a primordial American tradition going back to the founders of being freedom-obsessed, even though we’re a country founded on slavery and genocide, being freedom-obsessed to the point that we’re always so afraid of the government coming for us that we’re blind to other types of threats, whether it’s a virus, whether it’s bank malfeasance, climate change, what have you. 

There’s also a more recent, kind of 40-year version of this, which is the Reagan war on government, government is the problem, right? That’s not just an idea on the right. There’s a hard version on the right, there’s a small-c ‘conservative’ kind of militant version of it, but it has also infected many people on the left in this passive sense, like ‘I believe in government,’ but ‘I would never go work there,’ or ‘I believe in government but, you know, I kind of like don’t like my taxes too high, or I use trusts in the Cayman Islands..." 

And then there is the more recent Trump-era twist in this which is the war on government becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, you undermine government, you undermine it, you undermine it, you put someone who can barely read a sentence in government, in the figure of Donald Trump, and it becomes true that government sucks because you made it suck by telling everybody it sucks. 

And I think the most important thing that could come out of this is realizing the government is not the biggest threat to our liberty. What government fundamentally does is protect us from a lot of those other oppressions that we in America are often quite blind to."

Giridharadas then was unceremoniously slammed to the pavement on the Tweeter machine for his take and “utter contempt” of Americans.  Here is but a sample:

OMG “obsession with freedoms”
When will he be moving to Cuba?

— VeronicaCorningstone (@andreaUSA7373) May 6, 2020

Obviously this guy loves the sound of his own voice and thinks whatever he has to say is brilliant. 🙄

— DeeRody (@Dee_Rody) May 6, 2020

Oh he does. He just has utter contempt for them akin to the contempt that Soviet apparatchiks has for us.

— Rafael G. Nendel-Flores (@rnendelflores) May 6, 2020

Joseph Stalin approves of this message....

— Rich Jones (@rjones138) May 6, 2020

With lock downs imposed across the country in recent weeks as governments attempted to control citizens to stem the spread of the virus, many would probably not be quick to agree that the frequent cases of overreach are just the government trying to “protect” people.

[BizPac]
[The Tweeter Machine]
[MSNBC]

~ Thank You WHATFINGER NEWS for the Linkage! ~