More on the long history of affirmative action/DEI in the US. These excerpts are from Chapter 5 of the 1992 book "Paved With Good Intentions," and cover affirmative action outside of education and employment. The 1978 Community Reinvestment Act forced banks into giving subsidized loans to nonwhites.
When broadcasting licenses change, citizens can challenge the racial bona fides of their hiring policy, allowing black activists to extort money and jobs through threat of lawsuit.
There are tax breaks for selling broadcasting stations to nonwhites, in the tens of millions of dollars.
Special economic zones with tax privileges and other benefits in black neighborhoods, plus affirmative action in the GOP (running nonwhites in safe seats).
Many public and some private pension funds preferentially invest in nonwhite-owned businesses, or require contractors to have racial preferences for their own contractors.
It is the law that real estate ads must show a certain number of black faces. Even newspapers for real estate ads placed by others not having enough blacks,
The Voting Rights Act requires special gerrymandered racial districts for minorities. New York has a local version of the same.
Employers have been sued for asking about employees credit ratings (disparate impact). Louisiana was forced to hire black judges. Michigan threatened to withhold funds in 1989 if the Detroit orchestra did not end blind auditions and hire more blacks.
A New Jersey town had a sensible enough law that only residents could be hired for public positions. Insanely, the NAACP successfully sued them to force them to hire according to the demographics of the surrounding counties because too few blacks lived in the town itself.
Education discourse: to close the gaps, teach blacks first and let the black students teach to everyone else. Surprised this wasn't resurrected for the Floyd era.
California Highway Patrol advertised job vacancies in Mexico to meet race quotas for Hispanics.
Racial shakedowns of moviemaking in NYC and tourism in Miami.
Blacks threatening bloodshed and terrorism if blacks are not hired as police chiefs or given $100M.
The saga of Kansas City, Missouri's magnet school, where a federal judge gave himself the right to impose massive taxes to make the magnet school so luxurious more whites would attend (for integration purposes). Supreme Court ruled judges could levy taxes for racial purposes.
In 2015, Twitter was "the free speech wing of the free speech party" according to CEO Jack Dorsey, even avoiding collaboration with the NSA (unlike Google, Facebook). By 2019 it was one of the most censored, monitored, and controlled social media networks in the world.
YouTube was the biggest and most monetizable platform, Reddit the most important discussion forum, Amazon needed for authors and websites, and Google Search the only way to surface niche info sources. Twitter mattered as the social network of the intelligentsia.
In 2015, Twitter under Twitter general counsel Vijaya Gadde began reinterpreting their existing rules much more broadly and banned hate speech, to "keep Twitter safe." Chuck Johnson was banned for tweeting that would "take out" (attack digitally, not murder) a BLM activist.
Alaric on 2010s feminism and sexual norms. He sees it as a concrete, sharp break in 2014 alien to anything that came before. which almost overnight made anti-male sentiment the most pervasive cultural force in the Western world.
2014 saw a huge top-down feminist media campaign both motivating and caused by government initiatives and international institutions. This was the true start of Woke as a feminist and internationalist movement, before it became more racialist and parochial.
2014 redefined consent and made rape and street harassment, low and falling for decades in the American mainstream, centerpieces of American social consciousness.
Another thread on the closure of the Internet. Amazon, like other major tech giants, had little content policy beyond "no illegal content, spam or scams/fraud" in 2015 and by 2020 had a well developed censorship infrastructure for both the web store and AWS.
Amazon is particularly important for two reasons: (1) AWS making it, like Google Search, a major Internet chokepoint and (2) 50% book and 80% e-book market share; Amazon banning a book is the closest a non-classified book can really come to being banned in the US.
The first cracks in Amazon's neutrality appeared in June 2015, when a media blitz and political pressure campaign (sparked by Dylan Roof) led to Amazon removing all Confederate flag (a completely normal American symbol) merchandise from the site.
WIRED: Silicon Valley gay networks are so influential because gays are "cross-generational" allowing settings where "established wealth meets emerging talent."
Gays run Silicon Valley, lesbians and fat people hardest hit.
There is a common Hollywood upwards mobility narrative for early 20th century European immigrants. It's not really true; for most origins earnings for both first and second generation were similar and were already above average in generation 1.
Relative rank order didn't change much either.
I know you might be wondering "why are Italians so high and Norwegians, Swedes, etc so low." Answer: farms.
More on the 2016-2019 closure of the Internet. In 2015, Reddit, like YouTube, had almost no content policy beyond banning illegal activity, doxxing, harassment, and involuntary or underage pornography. By 2020, Reddit had purged political dissent from the site.
Much of Reddit's shift was motivated by one thing: that r/The_Donald, the hub of internet Trump support, could consistently reach and dominate the front page. Reddit repeatedly changed their algorithm and policies specifically to suppress r/The_Donald before banning it.
The first major crack in Reddit's freedom of speech stance was in 2016, when the CEO of Reddit, Steve Huffman, was caught personally editing user's posts on r/The_Donald. He then changed Reddit's policy to exclude r/The_Donald from the r/popular Reddit homepage.