Thread by @SlavaMalamud

Towards the end of this interview, Biden talks about "amelioration of the immigration situation", which means "letting Soviet Jews go."
Many of them, who owe their current US citizenship to Biden, now curse him for a communist and a senile traitor.
Racism is a hell of a drug.

https://twitter.com/RyskeldiSatke/status/1326124271043833858

You can see him searching for the word before saying "amelioration." This is not the stutter. He knew that even uttering the word "Jews" to Soviet media and this implying the USSR's institutionalized anti-semitism would enrage Soviet officials.
But, in the end, diplomacy worked.

Soviet Jews, though, were always Soviet first and everything else last. Unaccustomed to nuanced political discourse, they came to America determined to support whichever party was furthest to the right, and farthest away from socialism. Everything else was Brezhnev, by definition

Also, after being subject to terrible discrimination, they yearned to be in the majority, to be accepted by the racial elites. And, coming from a deeply racist country, they were not adverse to racial stereotyping and white supremacy, as long as they were on the giving end...

And the GOP, which was undergoing its racist "southern strategy" rebrand right at the moment, fit them like a glove. Soviet emigres became the staunched and most radicalized supporters of the Republicans, only growing more vehement with time. Like Cubans with much worse cuisine.

Russian American diaspora is an extremely sad, utterly insane intellectual landscape.
It has also given us Boris Epshteyn and Lev Parnas. And birther queen Orly Taitz.
Speaking to most fellow Russian Americans is unbearably depressing. They are miles to the right of Alex Jones.

They will always say the same bullshit about having lived through socialism and not wanting to go back to it again. It's raving lunacy. The reasons they support the GOP now are lazy reductionist thinking, asshole selfishness and unvarnished racism.
The same as anyone, really.
/x