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Kevan Hudson's avatar

Elon Musk, Zohran Mamdani and Yasha Levine: the New York Three (with more to be added).

Hopefully you beat the system like the Chicago 7.

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Bonnie Blodgett's avatar

Hi Yasha! Totally agree. But I wouldn't be too concerned if I were you. Being Jewish is (at least for now) a good thing. Hence the nonsense that Zohran, who is not Jewish and also not "white," MUST be an anti-Semite. His "communist tendencies" don't help either.

I subscribed to learn why you, a former Russian, think Putin's invasion of Ukraine was unprovoked. Is it because you think NATO expansion was not a threat to Russia? Or is it because of your memories of Russia during a horrible time there (that the West helped make worse)? Or Is it because there's a lot of anti-Semitism in Russia?

I think people "who were there" are sometimes too enmeshed to see the big picture, which (in my view) is that U.S. global corporations have enlisted the U.S. government to overturn governments whose resources and/or cheap labor those corporations seek to control. This is the story of America and since 9/11 it's gotten totally out of control. Or maybe it's just more obvious. At least to me.

But getting back to this insane deportation binge, those who SHOULD worry are those who are neither Jewish nor Anglo. Trump is going after people he and his white-supremacist advisor Stephen Miller deem inferior, black and brown people. The "other." Our local newspaper ran a story yesterday about how ICE is deporting Laotian (Hmong) men who were given asylum decades ago because they helped us in our efforts to "defeat Communism" in Southeast Asia, efforts (i.e. a bloody war) that failed, of course. Hence the asylum.

This particular group of deportees were children when they came to Minnesota and followed the Hmong custom of marrying at 14. This triggered arrests on charges of sexual predation. The men have long since "rehabilitated" themselves. They have "adapted" to Western culture and then some. Many support their families through vegetable farming. Many opened restaurants. They have become indispensable to our local food culture, not in the way undocumented immigrants are in places like Iowa and Kansas (and Minnesota) where they are "employed" (read enslaved) by meat packers like Cargill to do the dangerous and inhumane dirty work "no one else will do" for poverty-scale pay.

The Hmong are U.S. citizens, fully self-sufficient, and are educating Americans about how food should be grown and cooked. And this is what happens to them. They get thrown out of the country; their lives destroyed not once but twice by the ruthless corporate-sponsored warmongers who run our country and always have.

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