EFFORTPOST A step further than Ruy Teixheira: The Democratic party was doomed to become elitist long ago because of the Vietnam War (It's actually just me ranting about everything I have bottled about it but apparently you guys like that)

[Yet another time when I start replying to some comment and then I have to divulge everything I've thought of for many years. I thinks it's a medication thing but it's just the fricking bupropion. It does nothing until about 8 hours later and then suddenly you're really amped up and want to do something. Thanks, that's great, how do I schedule that? I wake up and take it and it starts helping right at the end of the working day? Anyway people I'm not trying to be presumptuous, I'm just testing how much people will actually read or like this type of type of bullshit.]

[Originally started out as a reply to this. Apparently given my numbers this is a genre people like. Me just dumping stuff that mattered a lot to me a long time ago but I couldn't dump on anyone at the time. Apparently that's acceptable behavior. ]

I think this is the original sin of the Democratic Party that's led to where we are today. During the Vietnam War while the normies were out there staring at the jungle bored out of their minds, the young guys getting into politics in the party were draft dodgers. This introduces all kinds of problems.

You had to have money or political connections and probably go to college to dodge the draft, so this is when the Democrats begin turning into the party of the East Coast elite. This wasn't apparent at the time. Their voters were still mostly normal working-middle class people without college degrees. But as the draft dodging generation grows older they end up taking over the party. This reaches its apex with Biden where Democrats are getting completely fricked in the butt by non-college voters who know how much the party despises them. Polling suggests that Trump is even going to get a substantial part of the latinx and black vote this time. Those people too might not be writing essays about it, but they understand that people like Robin DiAngelo who are really uncomfortable around them probably won't represent them well.

Second, the draft dodgers needed some kind of ideological reason why they did it. In that generation literally everyone's parents had been through WW2 where the entire country was completely mobilized and everyone was serving the war effort in some way even if indirectly. Even when I was growing up, the WW2 people were all over the place. When you said "the war" people still defaulted to thinking of WW2. For most people there was an intense sense of gratitude toward these people who'd been through real shit against Nazis and japs.

So the draft dodgers desperately need some kind of ideological reason for why this is different. Now don't get me wrong, I think (with the benefit of hindsight) we should never have tried to fight there. It was especially cynical and r-slurred to half-butt it the way Johnson did, pretending that we respected Laos' "neutrality" while covertly being involved in a massive war there. (Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying Nixon was good. I think the one thing about this war that really explains it the best is my dad is sitting there listening to Nixon on the radio saying we're not in Laos, and he looks up and sees planes in the sky going west which can only be to Laos.) Another thing he told me that really stuck was that you don't go to some country and give 18-year old kids guns and tell them they're fighting for democracy unless you're willing to go all the way for them. So a good True and Honest American had all kinds of reasons to oppose the war. Like look at a fricking map, you can't win in the really long skinny country while you let the enemy have impunity in all the countries bordering it. A fricking child could figure that out.

The draft dodgers though didn't have the military acumen that I expect from 10-year old boys though. They just didn't want to go because it was really dangerous and unpleasant and takes away 2 of the best years of your life. (Btw Redactor Sr. says The Best Years of Our Lives is a very accurate depiction of what coming home is like. I still haven't got around to it yet because I got too much depressing stuff going on already. (Also [Umbrellas of Cherbourg](

So anyway, the draft dodgers are too vapid to understand the obvious military reasons why this war (at least the way we're fighting it) is a bad thing because we will eventually lose and our troops and our allies will have been killed for nothing. Keep in mind these are effete middle-upper to upper class f-slurs who went to college to dodge the draft and studied some bullshit subject like poetry appreciation. So using the mental toolbox that they have, they approach this problem of justifying draft dodging. Mostly this is just extremely vague, like "it's immoral" and they think dropping a word on you is enough. (What was immoral was doing H&I fire on places you're not observing when there might be civilians around. But they never made this argument because it would mean thinking too hard.) And this vague idea that we should "end the war" (b-word what do you think we're trying to do?).

So what ends up happening? Lyndon Johnson finally admits that he's worse than worthless. Hippies riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. This is presented nowadays by shrieking leftoids as an unprovoked "police riot". But to the majority of the country back then they just saw mob violence and after a few years of race riots (imagine BLM but it was in the 20th century so everyone wasn't a total kitty), assassinations, and terrorist bombings people were ready for some law & order. (Obviously this wasn't the only issue in the campaign but you have to leave some things out to turn history into a narrative.) This is one of things that tipped this close election over to Nixon, who was running on a platform of "I'm gonna end the war magically but I can't tell you how". So there really wasn't even a pro-war side at all. (I'm not gonna talk about Nixon fricking everything because again, brevity.)

Eventually "the war ends" in 1973. We sell out the Vietnamese who we'd encouraged to fight for a decade and have hundreds of thousands of their people killed, but we're getting our own guys out so the war is over, right? No. The South Vietnamese keep fighting and they're not doing great but they're holding their own. This makes the leftoids in America go ballistic. They had been saying for all these years that the South Vietnamese all loved the Viet Cong except for mercenaries and gusanos who fought for the hated imperialists. Now it turns out there's actually hundreds of thousands of guys willing to fight against the commies. And the Viet Cong hadn't even existed since the Tet Offensive when the last of them were killed off. There's no pretense of a guerilla war, it's just North Vietnam attacking with a thousand tanks.

So what do the American leftoids do? They control congress so they cut off ammunition supplies to South Vietnam. The NVA blows the shit out of Quang Tri and they can't shoot back. (Basically what Republican f-slurs like JD Vance want to do to stab Ukraine in the back.) At this point the war is effectively over. People with artillery will beat people without artillery every time going back centuries. Saigon falls and the journos cover that a little bit because they've got really dramatic footage from it. But things don't go quite as planned. It turns out, this is gonna blow your mind, but the North Vietnamese rolling in on tanks were actually not there to allow democratic elections.

They start rounding up people and putting them in camps. I dunno exactly what the criteria is but in Hue in '68 they rounded up all the teachers and shot them because technically they work for the government. But is this as bad as they say? You should be skeptical. These things usually are exaggerated. But in this case, yeah, this is real. We know because of the boat people who would rather get in a little wooden boat and try to escape, knowing they're like 50/50 gonna die. You guys ever notice that there's lots of refugees from Vietnam, Cuba, East Germany, but nobody went the other way? Curious?

But the real big issue is Cambodia. Redditors will tell you "well ackshually the Americans gave some food to refugees in Thailand in the 1980s so they're responsible for everything." In 1975 large parts of Cambodia had been occupied by the North Vietnamese for a decade. The commie countries were running guns to them through there (omg this could be a whole post in itself). This was a whole thing as you kids say. The Khmer Rouge were the local puppet army for them. Reminder for kids what a Fifth Column is. When the NVA overran South Vietnam and the US cut off aid, there was no hope of resistance.

And when the Khmer Rouge take over... Zoomers probably haven't heard this: There's a huge insane genocide of like literally a million people. If you're counting scores of genocides I think it wins per capita. It's the level of genocide where you start comparing it to the Jews and Armenians and then you realize really quick that maybe you don't really care who gets the trophy, genocide is just bad in general. I've known two people I've had who absolutely will not talk to me about anything remotely political about their country, one from Iran and one from Cambodia. (Regular listeners will remember my story about the latter.)

And as redditors will always remind you, there very soon was a falling out between the Vietnamese commies who put them in power (bad) and the Khmer Rouge (absolutely batshit insane) so Vietnam invades and takes over the country. But guerilla warfare starts up right away. Guerilla warfare against my innocent peasants in rubber sandals, how does that even happen??? At least they, as victims of the most horrible atrocities in all of human history will just go to each village and have dialogue and maybe solve these these problems through restorative justice using their own local indigenous ways of knowing?

Nah, LOL, they just did the obvious thing that the Americans never did because we have souls. They cut off food to anywhere people opposed them. This lasted until about 1988. I'm not gonna bother looking up exact numbers but it's a lot.

So the draft dodgers have a problem. They've built up this whole idioligion (if I may steal a term from the Rimworld guy) by now about how this is totally different than WW2, really the Americans (and the majority of people in Vietnam) are the real bad guys. But then their side does that generation's version of the Holocaust. AWWWWWWKWARD!!!

Now they're in trouble. Noam Chomsky hasn't just whitewashed this, he blamed the victims saying that this was like the French killing collaborators in WW2. (!jidf It takes some whatever the goy equivalent of hutzpah to go from reality -> I'm just asking questions -> but how many? -> it didn't happen -> it happened and actually it was a good thing!) So they have to go completely full psycho in blaming everything in the world ever on America to explain why they didn't either serve or be a gigachad and go to prison over it.

So then all these boomer draft dodgers end up in jobs they have because they were in college to dodge the draft. What's an easy career? How about teaching. And that's why the millenials are so r-slurred. They're all being taught by people who have no interest in teaching, children, or helping society at all. This is how you end up with teachers where you keep pointing out "uhhh... not to be a peepee, but you might want to update your curriculum because we got access to the Soviet archives and literally everything you're teaching us is wrong." They were cheating. This is the worst thing a teacher can do, where the teacher isn't catching the kid cheating, the kid is catching the teacher cheating.

(Yes I am still butthurt that I could have run circles around that f-slur about every fricking paper I was assigned. The "original research" thing isn't a specifically wikipedia thing, it comes from that generation. Had a lot of conversations where it was like "yeah but obviously in the late 1940s there were American airbases in Morocco, this isn't controversial, this is common knowledge, I don't need to cite anything". "Yeah but when the Japanese in Manchuria were overrun, the Russians gave all their weapons to the Chinese. Nobody disputes that." These commies would actually order you to take one paragraph from a few books and one would be slobbering over Kennan's peepee, one would be The People's History of the United States", one was some extremely obscure source you know nothing about. And you're ordered to write about what was going on in this fantasy world dreamed up by this f-slur who never had it hard in his life while most of my family and friends are still trying to deal with real stuff then.)