Hopefully this isn’t breaking any rules of this group, but this is disturbing and something we should definitely be talking to our kids about (if we haven’t already).
@doschicos These are scary times. I’m hoping to send my strong, smart, politically active daughter out into the world (college first!) to make it a better place.
Anyone else notice that random replies are appearing in comments to news articles and in FB feeds advising of numbers to call if you want to report illegal aliens? You are encouraged to gather addresses and their place of employment before calling.
Text of message is this:
For places of employment, do they mean politicians’ houses where housekeepers, nannies, and gardeners are hired?
Most of the time these types of flyers are fakes made by someone trying ‘to start a conversation’. The sycophant press picks it up and uses it to drive clicks. I just give these types of things the big yawn, just more noise to rile the easily offended.
As far as ICE trying to illegal aliens - who are by definition criminals, how is that different than the ’ Seen a crime? Call 1-800-crimebusters’ ads that have been around for the past 30 years. Some of them are really bad - like the MS13 hoodlums. No one is trying to deport legal aliens and especially those on student visas.
@ucbalumnus , SO True! Politicians are the biggest hypocrites of all.
“For places of employment, do they mean politicians’ houses where housekeepers, nannies, and gardeners are hired?”
Or certain people’s hotels?
What evidence do you have that most of those types of White supremacist recruiting flyers are “fakes”?
No, but I did see an amusing satire post on social media where a guy was reporting his mother in law, and fervently hoping she’d be deported.
Honestly, I don’t give much credence to the whole white supremacist recruiting thing-they don’t really flourish in places of intellectual rigor and open dialogue (aka college). The kid who was the son of the white supremacist springs to mind-the dad sent him to “convert” and instead the son left the white supremacist movement.
First, not all colleges are necessarily places of academic rigor. Second, some people who are academically successful can harbor racist thinking, and therefore, be susceptible to recruitment.
Some folks here are forgetting how racism and White supremacist groups aren’t solely the preserve of the un/undereducated.
Fact#1: The KKK was founded by several southern White men who were Confederate military officers and college graduates.
When the second iteration of the KKK was founded, they reached such a peak of popularity among the mainstream White population that it included many prominent and/or highly educated citizens and had a sheen of upper-middle class respectability before their membership rapidly plummeted due to the kidnapping, rape, and violent mutilation of Madge Oberholtzer by an Indiana KKK grand dragon D. C. Stephenson in 1925.
Fact#2: Physiognomy, the pseudoscience favored by proponents of scientific racism…including those in the highest halls of the academy in Europe and the US was widely accepted as legitimate science by many of the highly educated from the mid-late 19th century till sometime after WWII. Prof. George L. Mosse covers this in depth in his book “Towards the Final Solution”.
Fact#3: Several prominent Nazis had the benefit of elite university educations. Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels earned his PhD in German Lit from Heidelberg University. Martin Heidegger not only earned a PhD in Philosophy from University of Freiberg, but was also considered one of the most influential and noteworthy academic philosophers of his generation. And there’s more…though these two are two good prominent examples of highly educated Germans who were enthusiastic ideologically convinced Nazis.
And then there’s this breaking news about a hate crime suspect who is a CPA and a graduate degree in accounting.
http://chicago.suntimes.com/news/synagogue-hate-crime-suspect-was-educated-suburban-accountant/
The groups doing this type of recruiting most certainly are not fake. I don’t know how much traction they will get on college campuses, but they exist and are active.
I grew up in the vicinity of some of this stuff. I think people where I live now (east coast) are very naive by thinking it’s just a few bumpkins.
Darn I remember when life was simple and only had to worry about a kid leaving college and running off to join the Hare Krishna.
^^ Exactly. Colleges are and always have been recruiting grounds for groups such as the Moonies, Hare Krishna, Scientologists, Young Republicans, the Marines, religious groups. Students are naive, want to find their groups, can work long hours recruiting other naive college students and their money to join the cause.
^^Yes but I think there’s a huge difference between the Hare Krishnas and hate groups. Searching for where you belong and chasing a utopian ideal is one thing, and I can see teenagers finding that very attractive, but hate groups-I think that’s an entirely different mindset.
However, I don’t want to minimize the effect that the Nazis and other hate groups have had on society. However, the very horribleness of them would seem to limit the recruiting to people who are pretty darn damaged and marginalized to begin with.
College is in a lot of ways a time of extremes. Some kids are gonna radicalize, in a variety of different ways. It is not hard for me to believe that hate groups are recruiting on campuses. Certainly a specific kind of kid who sees a community that is far more progressive than he or she is, and feels their viewpoint is considered impermissible, can be susceptible to an approach from some of these loonies.
I agree, @Ohiodad51 , especially if he hears from a group that is telling him that he is indeed special and maybe even more deserving than everyone else.
My kids go to a liberal, mostly white, east coast private high school. They have found multiple swastikas on campus recently and hate speech has absolutely been on the rise. I don’t necessarily think these kids are “white supremacists” per se, but I do think that ideology is more alluring than most people imagine.
As a practical matter, most such tips are likely to be pointless, since the typical person on the street has no way of knowing who is or is not an illegal immigrant. Tips that may be more reliable would be if someone observed an employer failing to do proper I-9 checks or some such. In terms of those committing serious non-immigration-related crimes, better to report to the regular police.