As goes Starr County, so goes the nation

A majority-Hispanic county in Texas goes from deep blue to deep red in just eight years.

They said the pogroms would start as soon as Trump was elected, and they were right:

Israeli soccer fans were beaten and injured in violent clashes in Amsterdam overnight, which Dutch authorities condemned Friday as antisemitic.

Dutch police said they had launched a major investigation into multiple incidents following the Europa League soccer game Thursday night between Israel’s Maccabi Tel Aviv and Dutch side Ajax.

Amsterdam Mayor Femke Halsema said criminals on scooters searched the city in search of Maccabi supporters in “hit-and-run” attacks. “This is a terrible moment for our city. … I am very ashamed of the behavior that was shown last night,” she said in a Friday news conference.

Amsterdam authorities said Friday morning that five injured Israeli soccer fans have since been released from the hospital, and 20 to 30 other people were lightly injured. In total, 63 individuals were arrested and 10 remain in custody, police said.

Tensions had been rising in the lead up to Thursday night’s match with multiple social media videos showing Maccabi fans chanting anti-Arab slurs, praising Israeli military attacks in Gaza and yelling “f**k the Arabs.” Other videos apparently filmed in Amsterdam show men ripping Palestinian flags off buildings. It is unclear when those videos were filmed.

Hundreds of Maccabi fans “were ambushed and attacked in Amsterdam,” the Israeli embassy to the United States said on social media platform X, sharing video of the violence.

One video shows a man being kicked while he lies on the ground, while another video shows a man being hit by a man yelling “free Palestine” and “for the children, motherf***er.” CNN has not yet been able to verify those videos.

Some Maccabi fans did behave abominably (soccer fans acting like racist assholes: dog bites man ) but I leave it to you to determine if taking to the streets to hunt down Jews is an acceptable response.

Or if that was a proximate cause, or merely a pretext.

Or what would happen had their roles been reversed, and Jews went out beating up Arabs because some Muslims chanted antisemitic slogans.

Or just how smug Europeans have any right to be about what happened when Americans went to the polls this past Tuesday.

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If you want to understand the magnitude of what happened on Election Day, check this out:

President-elect Donald Trump is poised to win a Texas county that former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton won by 60 points in 2016.

Starr County, which also favored President Joe Biden in 2020, is expected to go to Trump by about 16 percentage points in the 2024 presidential election.Rio Grande City is located in Starr County, which sits on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Well, that’s exactly what you’d expect from those white trash Texas rednecks, right? Yeah, about that…

The U.S. Census Bureau data shows 98% of the county's population is Hispanic or Latino. Starr County has not voted for a Republican president since the late 1800s.

[…]

NBC News exit polls found that 55% of Hispanic and Latino voters in Texas cast their ballots for Trump. Across the U.S., 45% of those voters picked the former president, according to polls by The Washington Post.

In 2020, Biden won 55% of the Hispanic vote, the Pew Research Center reported. Trump said during his Wednesday speech he has helped build the “broadest coalition.”

The shock of Trump’s victory still hasn’t completely worn off yet (maybe some more Ativan oughta do it) so it’s possible that people are reading too much into his surprisingly strong showing with minority voters. In 2024 the Hispanic vote was won by…Kamala Harris, by a margin of 55 to 42 percent, according to the Associated Press.

But the whole idea of a “Hispanic vote” might be out of date in any event. Instead, it might make more sense to speak of a “Mexican-American vote” and a “Cuban-American vote” and a “Puerto Rican (already American) vote,” and so on.

Which, ironically, is kind of the opposite of what happened with white people. Italians and Poles and Irish and WASPs are all lumped together now, but it certainly wasn’t the case a hundred or even fifty years ago.