Cruz's "New York Values" is code for Jewish

[JackRiddler]

40. Of course, and yet, it means so much more!

it's a code designed to speak to multiple prejudices, which is how it's supposed to work. These prejudices are all familiar in the RW thought-universe and individuals tend to hold more than one of them together.

Imagine he said this: Vote for me because you hate Jews, blacks, Puerto Ricans, Latinos, homer-seshuals, liberals, feminists, Yankees, egghead elitist know-it-alls who act superior to you, effete city-dwellers, the poor, readers of books other than the Bible, atheists and other anti-Christians, commie pinkos, the liberal media, hipster environmentalists who believe in global warming - oh and of course immigrants but especially Muslims, and foreigners generally (all images with which New York has always been, or is closely associated today), then THAT would be shocking. It would lose a lot of votes or get him net-zero returns, at best, and knock him out of "serious" media consideration. It's the rhetoric of the open fascist, right? It doesn't work for winning presidential elections.*

Instead he uses the code, and this allows the voter's choice to cover all of that - hell "New York" even covers the amorality of Hollywood and "sex and violence" on TV, given its frequent use in movies and series. But he can deny any of it and need get no one one specific angry enough to attack him, except the residents of a state and region he's totally written off anyway. Also, those who are members of the above groups but still RW may hear "New York values" to mean whatever they want it to mean.

This is classical culture-war politics, by the way.

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* (Well, except Trump as he claims could say all of that while shooting a guy on Fifth Avenue and his numbers would still go up, ha ha, which has truth insofar as Trump came into this from the Celebrity Universe and thus gets to operate on different standards as the TV will always love him whether cast as villain or total villain.)