First of all…Mike Lindell has a TV station? He’s got something called “Lindell-TV,” anyway, which seems to be nothing but a streaming channel on an off-brand service. The costs for a kook to get online and make noise just gets lower and lower.
Anyway, one of the babblers on that network wants Kamala Harris to take a DNA test.
A host on Mike Lindell’s television network called on Vice President Kamala Harris to take a DNA test to prove a demonic spirit wasn’t prompting her to say she was Black.
During his daily “Let’s Talk About It” program on Lindell TV, host Will Johnson defended former President Donald Trump’s claim that Harris had only recently “happened to turn Black.”
What does demon DNA look like? How would we tell?
But Johnson suggested Thursday that Harris was lying about her race and should take a DNA test.
“How about we get Kamala Harris to do a DNA test like him and like Elizabeth Warren?” Johnson said. “Then we’ll put it to rest. She comes back, and she’s a little bit more Black than Elizabeth Warren is Indian, then we’ll, OK, go, she can be Black half the time.”
“Why not do that?” he asked. “And then they say we are the weird ones — we’re the weird ones because we don’t want to go along with the insanity.”
Elizabeth Warren was negligibly Indian, and most importantly, did not have any cultural connection to any tribe. Harris has a father who is black, so she’s roughly half black genetically, but what matters more is that she grew up with black and Indian heritage. You don’t get to tell her what her background is. She’s black and Indian. That the Republicans are diving into this weird obsession with inventing criteria for people’s cultural and genetic heritage is creepy.
Mr Johnson is the insane weird guy who wants to quantify how “black” a person is allowed to be. It doesn’t make any sense — if 23andme comes back and says she is 43.5% black, how does one “be” black 43.5% of the time?
I’ve had 23andme analyze my DNA, and this is what it tells me.
I guess I’m 2/3 Scandinavian. What does that mean for my allowed behavior? So two of my 3 meals per day should be matpakke, herring, or kjøttkaker, and the other meal should be pasties, bangers and mash, or mushy peas? Since I’m an atheist, I’m probably fractionally demonic, so my snacks should probably be demonic.
This is what we mean by calling these bozos “weird” — they have this twisted idea that people must conform to the stereotypes rattling around in their heads.
Of course, that presumes that the way 23andme (and the other ‘regional/national/ethnic-origin’ databases gather their baseline data) depends upon purity in the respective baseline populations. Umm, generations of Cossacks and intermarriage sort of screwed that up on my mother’s side of the family… anyone whose family shows any “Askenazim” can just laugh at this. So do those from Northern Germany who have significant percentages of “Scottish” show up (seventeenth-century Scottish mercenaries vacationing in the First Thirty Years’ War weren’t all that careful).
And it also presumes that heritage is purely genetic. Which PZ clearly doesn’t…
So now they are against the one drop rule. /s
It’s kind of a thing I’ve noticed with a lot of these types:
Stereotypes and labels are more real than actual people.
The words we use to describe organisms with a lot in common (from species to “kind”) are more real than the organisms in question.
It’s probably why they get so upset when we “change the definition of words” instead of treating them as sacred and immutable.
Words are tools humans invented. They change as their utility and/or our understanding of reality changes.
I think you’ll find the English and Scots mostly eat curries, pizza and kebabs these days. We would immediately be suspicious of the ethnic credentials of any white British person who doesn’t. About a third of your fluid intake should be cups of tea though – that one is correct. I don’t drink tea myself, so I don’t really count as British. I think by law I’m classified as some kind of experimental robot.
Who living in the USA isn’t a mix of one sort of another?
Almost all of us are.
In the above example, PZ is a mix of several different European types.
Trump is half German and half Scottish.
His latest son is part German, Scottish, and Slovenian from his mother.
So, Kamala Harris is the norm, not the exception.
She is half Jamaican Black and half Indian.
This is not at all complicated.
I played with my 23andMe results and discovered the the ancestry provided is based on 50% probabilities. When I adjusted the probability to 90% my ancestry was only Northern European whereas before there were ~5 different ethnic – origins listed with various percentages. Did this couple years ago so could have changed but 50% probabilities don’t seem particularly meaningful.
If PZ is a real Scandinavian he should survive on a diet of 99% coffee (real coffe, not the substitute they drink Over There). His ancestors did not come from the “enjoys fermented herring” zone so he is excused from that.
Interestingly, we have embraced ketchup and New York pizza, we do not reject good ideas.
Even the likes of Ben Shapiro and Tomi Lahren have realized questioning Harris’s racial background is a losing strategy. Trump and his team are, thankfully, stubborn and stupid so I’m sure they keep at it.
It would be really cool if a candidate had 80% or more of Capoid DNA, it is a group distinct from all other groups. Apart from a handful of ex-hottentot people in SA they are represented by the !Kung hunter gatherers in Botswana. The dumb Afrikaaner immigrants assumed the skin color made them related to the ‘mainstream’ Black Africans.
About the demonic spirit thing. It would be nice to have a demon spirit working as temp while I sleep. I would get home from work fully rested.
And the people at Innsmouth had advantages from being related with the fish people. Maybe I should call Lindell and warn him of the ‘Deep Ones’ infiltrating us.
Generally people eat their mushy peas with their bangers and mash. Pasties are portable snacks, not so much the basis for a full meal. But both should be washed down with copious quantities of tea.
They want Harris to take a DNA test to ‘prove’ that she is Black? That her Dad is her father? It doesn’t even make sense. Have they looked at her?
Perhaps these two white supremacists should take an eye exam and an IQ test, as they are apparently blind and dumber than a box of rocks.
I’ve never had my DNA tested, but I know from records where my ancestors came from. I’m half German, one quarter Irish, and one quarter English.
So I should spend half my time being brutally efficient and organized, one quarter of my time working on my novel while drunk, and the other quarter taking walking tours of local tea shops.
The video at the link was an idpol rant. “Identifying as” is incomprehensible to him, so the fact that it’s mainstream must be the work of a demon compelling the public to accept ‘insanity’… for reasons. (Yep there’s a nod to transphobia, too.)
If Harris had no ancestry that satisfied his test and yet identified as Black, that’d be the demon making her lie. If some were detected, he’d allow it but made no mention of implications for the demon (presumably still lurking about, making her ‘lie’ about other things he doesn’t like).
There is a nastier reason underlying this insanity. It’s resurrecting the classification system of the slave trade where mixed race slaves were classified according to the amount of white ancestry they had.
This is the sort of abuse of science we saw with Cold Spring Harbour Lab in the early 20th century and it’s nastier spawn, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Nazi Germany.
Here is the summary of LindellTV from IMBD, which helpfully tags it as right wing propaganda.
It’s just bizarre to watch Will Johnson, who is black, claim that Kamala needs to prove that she is black by submitting a DNA test.
Yes Will, questioning other people’s bleedingly obvious ethnicity as if it is a problem proves you are definitely weirdo’s, even before the bit where you start babbling on about demon DNA.
Since Harris’s father is/was (I don’t know if he is still alive) a black Jamaican, he (and therefore she) almost certainly has some white European ancestry not very far back, since it was routine for the male enslavers to rape enslaved women. But of course the same is true of most African-Americans. Presumably Trump thinks he can peel off some of Harris’s African-American support with this nonsense, but I can’t see it working with any significant number – he may indeed lose more Black votes than he gains by it. Is it possible he has genuine difficulty understanding that people can have mixed, complex ethnic identities? But his own daughter converted to Judaism to marry a Jew, so his grandchildren are Jewish, while Vance’s wife is Indian-American and his children are thus “mixed race”…
It’s true: they are weird!
@13 Feralboy12
This brings to mind the European definitions of heaven and hell.
http://www.heidecker.eu/MultiKulti/E_MultiHimmelHoelle.htm
Someone should remind the ‘Biological Realists’ about ‘hybrid vigor’. Vice-President Harris is a mixing of two relatively distinct populations, Trump is a mix of nearly identical populations….thus VP Harris would presumably be ‘fitter’ than her slightly inbred competitor. High heterozygosity (‘hybrid vigor’) is just another form of diversity, and once again diversity is productive! It would be amusing to watch the mental gears of the racists grind as they try to rationalize their way out of the point.
“What does demon DNA look like?”
A Black person obvs /s
Speculating that her Jamaican father has white European ancestry because of slaver rapists is not helpful or accurate.
You only get 50% of your parents DNA, so if one parent has 30% Irish ancestry, their child could inherit any percentage of that from 30 to 0. It’s entirely possible for siblings to have completely different ethnicities based on DNA.
My niece is very disappointed to learn that she only inherited the German and Dutch ancestry of her parents, while her brother got a far more diverse genome.
It’s not speculation: it’s extremely unlikely Harris does not have some fairly recent European ancestry, but this does not affect her ethnicity. Ethnicity does not depend on what precise percentage of your genome comes from which of your ancestors – where the fuck did you get that idea?
Might I suggest these people first take a DNA test themselves to determine of there is any pigeon (insert dumb animal of choice…) DNA in them. I’m quite sure there is!
Robert79 @ 23
I was hit by lightning when there was a great white shark nearby, which I was trying to escape in my electric boat. Ever since then I have been growing gills.
Also, see
“Electrical Canoe”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=x_RjAdQpLMM
When I was in university years ago some of my classmates were from Trinidad and Tobago. They were each some mixture, I assume, of African and Indian. They would thus confuse the fuck out of the MAGAts. Indian presence was the reason curry was adopted amongst some Caribbean cuisine I assume.
I had wondered about the provenance of so called China boxes and thought they came from a Chinese part of Havana, but names can be misleading:
https://www.shoplatintouch.com/caja-china-history/
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/12/24/459976586/why-miami-cubans-roast-christmas-pigs-in-a-chinese-box
The other right wing Meme is Harris supposedly had a white slave-owning great grandfather so checkmate LIBS.
They don’t seem to want to comment on the status of her great grandmother on that side or how she got pregnant.
Oh and a black girlfriend from a while back was Antiguan and she thought she had some Indian (the subcontinent) heritage. Looking up the demographics though makes East Indians seem not so common there:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antigua_and_Barbuda
That’s okay. I think your Swedish meals also cover the necessary demonic food intake.
“What does demon DNA look like? How would we tell?”
Just ask Trump to take a DNA test.
If they did find some demon DNA, how would they know which demon they were dealing with? Since there isn’t any demon database, that I’ve heard about, how could they identify a demon? If they wanted to start a database, they should get some samples of Trumps DNA.
First off, I don’t care at all about the racial make-up of people. I DO care about the honesty and decency of their character.
The following is my recollection of info gathered from reputable sources over many years. Look it up using succinct search terms in duckduckgo yourself. No conspiracy theories here. And, don’t ask me to spend hours searching through our archives. Based on personal experience talking with some of the people working in them, these companies that test your DNA and tell you about your family tree are often distorting reality and more than a little insidious. Do you feel them putting the coverglass on you while you are lying on the microscope slide? Many of them are stockpiling personal and genetic info about millions of people. And, some of them have been caught using all that personal info rather unethically.
I think we can clearly deduce that Mike Lindell’s DNA would show that he is at least 50% imbecilic and at least 35% demonic, just like the rest of the MAGAT cult members. Their forebears seem to have not been able to pass any reasoning ability in their brains on to the present generation.
Over at X the MAGAts are back to throwing around the word “Communist!” rather a lot. Not that any of them really can define communist.
I have Swedish ancestry on mom’s side and dad was a mongrel (Scots-“Irish”orange jerks, Dutch?, maybe Brit). I love Swedish meatballs and Gevalia coffee. Not even going anywhere near Surströmming. Nope. Rotting baitfish.
I can surely appreciate the culinary delights of other ethnicities. Thai fish sauce seems far more tolerable than the Swedish way.
These uptalk accented guys represent part of my heritage making fun of the other part?:
Demon snacks are traditionally made from the blackened souls of sinners, with tears of the damned salt for seasoning.
Perhaps PZ can substitute lutefisk, and satisfy the Demon and Scandinavian DNA with one snack?
To be fair, Elizabeth Warren only mentioned having a bit of native-American DNA as a throwaway line at one of the debates. Trump made that a large part of his campaign speeches for whatever reason, and Warren only took the DNA test because Trump publicly stated that he’d give a million dollars to the charity of her choice if a DNA test proved it. Of course, it did, and he didn’t.
Larpar @2 has it right,
For a century the “One-Drop” rule applied. The racist fucks don’t get to back out on that now.
I reckon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nativism_in_United_States_politics
The history of Jamaica’s colonial era is long, and far more complex than the English plantation system that was one of the most brutal examples of chattel slavery.
It was a Spanish colony for over one hundred years before the English took it. Cromwell had Irish and Scots ‘undesirable’ people transported there despite it being a Spanish colony. There were also African slaves, but they weren’t a majority of the island population.
The Maroons are a mixed ethnic bunch that included the African people, who fled into the mountains to live free from the colonial oppression.
One leader was known as Queen Nanny, and she protected her people with great skill.
Before it became a British sugar plantation, it was a haven for Pirates, many of whom were also European men.
It seems really prurient to make claims about someone’s Jamaican ethnicity being the result of a slave owner Grandparent. The slave population far exceeded the British Plantation owners at the end of the slave trade.
Kamala Harris could just as likely have a GGG-Grandfather who was a Spanish Pirate, and a GGG-Grandmother who was a Maroon rebel freedom fighter.
@5 Raven
Trump may have some German or Scottish ancestry. But he’s 100% American.
Guess what? I’ve got a fever and the only prescription is more racism.
Of course she could – although I’m puzzled that statements about the likelihood of white European ancestry given the absolutely routine rape of enslaved women by their enslavers is “prurient” while mentioning the possibility of a Spanish pirate ancestor (who would himself likely be a white European) is not. And no-one has made “claims about someone’s Jamaican ethnicity being the result of a slave owner Grandparent” – that’s your own misreading. My point@17, which your weird ideas about ethnicity caused you to misunderstand, was that a DNA test, which would likely indicate that Harris has some white European ancestry, would not provide any information about her ethnicity. Ethnicity is a social classification based on beliefs and emotions relating to a person’s parentage and family history. Harris’s father is* a Black Jamaican, whatever the details of his ancestry.
*I’ve looked him up – he is alive, Donald J Harris, an economist who is Professor Emeritus at Stanford.
Really, this Repub kerfuffle about “Ethnicity” is just another classical manifestation of the authoritarian’s fixation on “purity”.
Being ignorant AF, they cannot realize that no one, ever, can be “pure” – the concept is meaningless. Dig deep enough in your ancestry, and you’ll see your genes come from every-which-a-where, inevitably.
In my case: being a native of the Emilia region in Italy, I expect to have some genes from what today is Hungary (local gaulish tribes came from there originally). Then, those gauls mixed with local Etruscans, who came from what today is Turkey, so that’s some genes from Asia Minor. Then, I got an Austrian ancestor somewhere, so that’s some Central European bits, but Austria has some significant Slavic components, so that’s some genes from that side too. And so on.
That’s why when our local racists go on about “racially pure Italians” I know they are full of shit to the brim.
And concerning our favorite Mango Baboon: I reside in Baden-Württemberg, South-West Germany, and Rheinland-Pfalz is just across the river. That’s where DT’s gramps (family name Drumpf) came from, and the fact is widely considered a vaguely humorous embarassment.
My DNA is 20% Numenoran, 25% Dark Numenoran 45% Easterling and 10% Orch. Because of the connection with Ar-Pharazon I should be qualified for high office- I have all character flaws of Trump, and some additional ones.
outis: it should be a point of pride that your neighbours were smart enough to boot Drumpf out.
Thinking about it, I find it weird that so many on the far right believe that genes are destiny, but also accuse us evilutionists of believing in genetic destiny. Of course, it does fit the pattern: Every accusation is a confession.
@44: if memory serves, Granpa got the hell out of dodge to avoid conscription in the imperial german army and that I can understand. Who wants to be sent to die for a “glorious fatherland”? Those like him were branded as deserters, Drückeberger, but they are all right in my book. Pity about his descendants tho…
@43: well, the orc part gives you form in waving blunt instruments around and going Aaaaarg, while the Dark Num side brings fluency in human sacrifice and similar. If that’s not a winning ticket I don’t know what is ;)
lasius@39 Trump’s mother was born on the Isle of Lewis in the village of Tong, so he’s half Scottish. The MacLeod family spoke Gaelic at home.
@ 47 timgueguen
So what?
No, your ethnicity has nothing to do with beliefs and emotions. That would be your culture. Your ethnicity is based on your genes.
The gene pool of Jamaica is about 80.3% Sub-Saharan African, 10% European, and 5.7% East Asian; according to a 2010 autosomal genealogical DNA testing.
Afro-Jamaican
Ethnic group
Afro-Jamaicans are Jamaicans of predominantly African descent. They represent the largest ethnic group in the country. The ethnogenesis of the Black Jamaican people stemmed from the Atlantic slave trade of the 16th century, when enslaved Africans were transported as slaves to Jamaica and other parts of the Americas.
It’s prurient to leap immediately into speculating that any white European ancestry comes from rape by slavers, rather than Pirate ancestors. You don’t know what her DNA contains, but it could have 0% European considering that children get a random 50% of the parents DNA and the average Jamaican only has 10% European in the first place.
As to the weirdos who think in terms of genetic ‘purity’, if your DNA profile comes back as 100% of anything, odds are good that you are inbred due to cousins marrying each other. It was considered completely normal until the mid 1800s, especially among Catholics and various European Royal houses.
<sarcasm> @43: One of the character flaws you appear to share with the Clown Prince of Orange is that you believe, or at least claim, you have things that others don’t. Money, all the best words, pure evil ancestry, good business judgment… </sarcasm>
Utter garbage.
An ethnicity or ethnic group is a group of people who identify with each other on the basis of perceived shared attributes that distinguish them from other groups. Those attributes can include a common nation of origin, or common sets of ancestry, traditions, language, history, society, religion, or social treatment.
See also “a large group of people with a shared culture, language, history, set of traditions, etc., or the fact of belonging to one of these groups”
And: Ethnicity definition: an ethnic group; a social group that shares a common and distinctive culture, religion, language, or the like.”
Tethys @49
No. Ethnicity and genes are distinct. They may track a bit but are not the same.
Latina/a/X identity is a case in point. US visual perception of Mexicans and groups in Central and parts of South America tends to overlap heavily with indigenous heritage. In the Caribbean there’s a black/native/white spectrum.
In Chile folks of German heritage can become enculturated over generations or instead stay in their towns.
Why is there an accordion in some Mexican music? Is that in their genes too? Confederates escaped to Brazil. The Cavalera brothers of heavy metal legend are Brazilian, speak Portuguese and have Italian heritage.
Because the Reconquest and escape of Jews to the New World there’s some Jewish heritage in parts of Latin America. There are Ethopians who identified as Jewish. There were other groups in Africa with apparent genetic markers.
The topic is in fact ethnicity as determined by a DNA test, which as noted, tells you nothing about behavior or preferences for accordions and Polkas.
Jewish is an ethnicity. German is an ethnicity.
Mexican is an ethnicity. Afro-Jamaican is an ethnicity.
A DNA test on any individual would give a result similar to PZ’s example, with varying percentages of different ethnicities.
Culturally, PZ, Kamala Harris, Mike Lindell, and I are all American, but our ethnicities are completely different.
In any case, my objection was to KG uncritically offering up a salacious rumour that he apparently pulled from his pasty white arse about Harris supposedly having a slave owning rapist G-Grandfather and thus being partly white. WTF? Does that make her less Jamaican? Does it make her less black? Is demon DNA the slaver rapist bit?
This nonsense about ethnicity is just deflection and goalpost moving.
cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essentially_contested_concept
@49 Tethys.
Just keep your racist notions to yourself Tethys. Ethnicity has never been determined by genetics. Ancestry may be a component, but culture, language or even religion have always played much bigger parts in ethnogenesis.
@54
Bingo! Ergo their ethnicities are mostly American.
A DNA test can’t tell you anything about your ethnicity, it merely shows your ancestry.
German is in fact an ethnicity, but DNA has absolutely nothing to do with it.
Or would you deny Keno Veidt his 100% German ethnicity?
@ John
I would tend to agree with that assessment, although the entire subject of blood quantum is a racist framing of ethnicity.
@lasius
La, those racist geneticists and their DNA based ethnographic studies!! The only people in the Americas whose ethnicity is American are Native Americans.
I’m sure that a DNA test for Keno would show multiple ethnicities that are not German, regardless of his German citizenship.
Ach, geh fott!
Tethys, you keep using that word. I don’t think you know what it means.
DNA tests cannot show ethnicity. They can show ancestry. You keep conflating those terms.
Here is the definition of ethnicity.
Err, no. Your ethnicity is American too. Native Americans may have one ore more of the many Native American ethnicities, such as Sioux, Dakota or Cherokee. But since you yourself grew up in American culture, you are of a US-American ethnicity. Because ethnicity is primarily shaped by culture and language.
Once again, DNA tests cannot show ethnicity. Keno is of German ethnicity, or more particularly of the local East Frisian ethnicity. But while his mother came from Cameroon, he himself grew up with his grandparents in Germany and never learned any Cameroonian language or culture, so he’s 100% German.
Tethys@54
Which, of course, it cannot do – my point @17, which you failed to understand because of your ignorance, which you now try to cover with bluster, insults, and lies.
I did not offer up a “salacious rumour” and of course did not mention any specific ancestor of Harris. I noted that she (because of the horrific nature of Caribbean slavery about which you are apparently in denial) almost certainly has some white European ancestry, which a DNA test would likely reveal. And I said explicitly @41 that:
I didn’t make this point explicitly @17 because I didn’t expect to be dealing with anyone as ignorant and dishonest as you, and therefore expected my point to be understood. Neither you nor anyone else has cited any reputable source (or even any disreputable source apart from your own arse) for the claim that ethnicity is defined in terms of genes. That’s because it isn’t. If it was, it would mean that the vast majority of the world’s population don’t know their own ethnicity – and indeed, up until a few decades ago, absolutely no-one did. Incidentally, even for those who have sent their DNA to one of the companies offering to reveal where your ancestors came from, the results are far less conclusive than they claim – because the vast majority of the human genome does not vary in the all-or-none way they like to imply, but only in the percentages of particular genetic variants in different populations.
Heh.
Doesn’t matter one whit, does it?
Kamala ain’t white.
No Irish, either. As if.
Nah.
Isn’t that why the ‘person of colour’ (sorry, USAnian is ‘color’) is all about?
Who cares if Black or Red or Yellow or Swarthy or whatever?
Non-white.
—
Surely I’m not the only one seeing how ‘Black’ is privileged by this sort of thing, rather than ‘non-white’.
First, these weirdos who want Kamala Harris to take a DNA test to prove that she is only half Black (she is) and want her to be only a part-time Black person are craven bigots. How much of the time did they allow half-Black, American born Barack Obama be half White? The answer is zero minutes. These people are White Supremacists and should be called that. They are bad for our country.
I have zero interest in getting into an argument about my supposed racism in using the term ethnicity to refer to ethnic heritage. Nationality can change, but you can’t change your genes. It does not require a DNA test to determine that Keno is a black man, and Kamala is a black woman.
It’s stupid that I’ve got two (presumably) white, European males who feel the need to bully me because they lost the last argument they picked with me. (Sparrows)
In America, Blood Quantum is a real thing. It’s not determined by DNA, though it’s definitely racist.
Speculating about an obviously black woman’s percentage of white ancestry is in fact racist as shit, and that’s without the slaver/ rapist origin. A simple analysis of the population of slave owners vs slaves would show that there were far more white people in Jamaica that were originally indentured servants and pirates than plantation owners, but the vast majority of the population was enslaved African people. Average lifespan of African slaves in Jamaica under British Rule was 7 years.
Own your shit KG. I am not require to give you a history lesson, you are perfectly capable of researching the subject yourself.
Further reading on Jamaican History:
https://www.embassyofjamaica.org/about_jamaica/history.htm
And slavery in Jamaica, though the first few paragraphs are rather badly worded, and a trigger warning for horrific brutality.
Plantation Slavery in the British Caribbean
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-13260-5_22
Lol, you’re one dishonest pathetic know-nothing.
What a lovely ad hominem from a sore loser!
Geh weg!