The White House on Tuesday condemned “death to America” chants that surfaced online from a recent rally in Dearborn, Mich., protesting Israel’s war in Gaza.
Press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre replied, “yes” when asked if President Biden condemns the comments in the chants, which were captured on video by some attendees.
“Peaceful protests are something that the president has also been very clear that, its important to give folks space to peacefully protest. But any type of violent rhetoric, we are going to denounce,” she said.
Dearborn mayor Abdullah Hammoud (D) has also denounced the chants, sharing in a statement on X that “Dearborn is a city of proud Americans.”
Some basic questions to train your media literacy:
How many people, exactly, (or less ideally, roughly,) were doing this? (Article provides no answer.)
How often does this normally occur, esp. when it isn’t a trendy topic? (Article provides no answer.)
Any similar events to provide context, perhaps give us clues about what to expect? (Article provides no answer.)
Was this a critical mass, or majority, of those present? (Article provides no answer.)
If you ask basic, perfectly reasonable questions, and then read the article, and see that it answers nothing an interested individual is curious about, you get suspicious about what you’re reading. “Oh jeez, a thing happened, we have a thing, it involved people.” Very cool, very news.
Death to America.
While living in America.
No one’s keeping you here.
No one’s keeping you here.
It’s actually very difficult and expensive to leave your home country for 99% of the population.
Just in terms of cost you need a plane ticket (or other travel costs), money to navigate the country’s immigration programs and all the fees associated, you probably need to pay to learn a new language for a year or two before you’re fluent enough in that language (DuoLingo/self-learning has very mixed results), you need to pay for housing for when you arrive until you’re able to get a job. Realistically the ones fed up with our society are the ones living paycheck to paycheck, do you think they can shoulder those costs?
This is all assuming they even let you in, most developed countries won’t unless you have an in-demand skillset and/or a job already lined up in the country of question (i.e., the type of jobs that are doing well here already). And often times even if you have valid reasons and a job lined up they can still just tell you to go fuck yourself.
Add on top of that that if you somehow get that far, get past all of that, you’re giving away your right to vote in your new society for several years due to requirements to become a naturalized citizen.
Makes a lot more sense to try to improve your own country and local society when you consider all of those factors. “Don’t like America then leave” is something only the privileged that can hop on a jet to a new country at a moment’s notice think is a valid suggestion. At best it’s shit advice and at worst it’s a bad faith argument to push aside any and all criticism of the current system.
It’s quite affordable to emigrate as a natural citizen. Canada’s actual fees are about 200-800 USD for PR status, that may jump by about 600 extra if you want to come in on a working visa. There’s also.the relocation cost - I think moving any distance usually costs about two thousand dollars between gas, deposits and maybe a night in a hotel.
Let’s call it three thousand to move to Canada. That’s not nothing but it’s an amount of money most people can secure debt to cover.
Actually stopping being an American is even more expensive. It costs thousands of dollars to revoke your US citizenship, surprisingly enough. Only America demands everyone pay a fee to leave.
Putting aside that this is clearly pearl clutching [over a chant made by a handful of people] to distract from the fact that the US government fully supports genocide, let’s think about this for a minute. Would it be controversial to say “Death to Nazi Germany”? Surely such a horrendous institution should be killed off, right? The argument could be made that the US government, with all the horrible things it has done (slavery, wars, coups, the main driver of climate change, pollution, genocide, etc), does deserve death. That doesn’t mean death to the people of the US (or even the people in the US government), it means death to the institution known as America that is carrying out such horrendous things.
“Death to America” absolutely means killing US Citizens. This is the the chant at every anti-American rally in Iran, and something ISIS has been chanting for a very long time.
The US govt needs to get its shit together and deal with these major quality of life issues. The longer there is no response to massive protests the bigger, and likely, more violent these demonstrations will get. Who this violence will be caused by remains to be seen, but the larger the group of people gets, the easier it is to manipulate with panic/chaos.
“Death to America” is not a result of quality of life issues. It’s a phrase that is very specifically associated with Islamic terrorism.
I’m too lazy to go find my old comment but it was basically
Biden is just gonna go hide in the Ford plant when he comes for his Michigan rally otherwise Dearborn will eat him alive
