Until about an hour ago, I had never heard of Ekaterina Jung, now calling herself Cathy Young, a writer for something called Newsday and the website, The Federalist. This link was in my twitter feed along with a bunch of snarky comments. The article is another tantrum about the growing army of people who have had enough of so-called conservatism and went elsewhere for their arguments.
The phrase “alt-right” has become an abracadabra phrase for the commercial Right, in the same way that “extreme right-wing” is a magic phrase for the loonies of the Left. The theory is that if the good-thinker says the phrase three times, their tired old excuses and arguments are declared the winner and they can dismiss their critics. The hacks of Conservative Inc now call everyone to their right, “alt-right” so they can avoid debating them.
The Cathy Young tantrum is fairly typical. She spent an hour breezing through some sites like VDare and Unz looking for “evidence” she could use to pad out her claim that the bad-thinkers are all racist Hitlers and stuff. I’m old enough to remember when Lefty used to write these sorts of columns about Buckley Conservatives, using National Review as the source material. That’s how far the Overton Window has moved left.
Anyway, two things are interesting to me. One is the bio of the writer. According to Wiki:
Born in Moscow, the capital of what was then the Soviet Union, Ekaterina Jung was 17 when her family emigrated to the United States in 1980. She became a naturalized citizen in 1987 as Catherine Alicia Young, and graduated from Rutgers University in 1988.[1] At Rutgers, she wrote a column for the student newspaper The Daily Targum and worked as a student writer for The Detroit News. She also completed her autobiography, Growing Up in Moscow: Memories of a Soviet Girlhood, published in 1989.
Continuing her association with The Detroit News, Young was a regular columnist for the newspaper from 1993 to 2000 and worked as a freelance journalist for a variety of publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Newsday, The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, National Review, Salon.com, The Weekly Standard, and Reason.
From 2000 to 2007, Young wrote a weekly op-ed column for The Boston Globe. In 2008, she began to write a regular column for RealClearPolitics.com. In 2012, she became a weekly columnist for Newsday. Over the years, Young has had a close association with Reason, where she is a contributing editor and was a monthly columnist from 2001 to 2007. Since 2014, she has regularly contributed to Time.[2]
Young is a research associate at the Washington, D.C.-based libertarian think tank Cato Institute, for which she co-authored a 1996 policy analysis paper, “Feminist Jurisprudence: Equal Rights or Neo-Paternalism?”. Her writing covers a variety of topics in politics and culture, with particular focus on gender issues and feminism, reflecting an individualist feminist perspective (c.f. Wendy McElroy), frequently agreeing with men’s rights activists, while criticizing them for emulating the identity politics associated with some forms of feminism. In addition to appearing on a number of radio and television shows, she has spoken on college campuses and, during 2001 and 2002, taught a 3-week gender issues course at Colorado College.
Young supports legally recognizing same-sex marriages.[3]
Young is basically a liberal woman who likes money so she defends the people who give her money. Today, that happens to be the Koch Brothers so she is a libertarian. You don’t write for those hyper-progressive publications without having been cleared by the Cult of Modern Liberalism. Throw in the middle-aged woman’s obsession with her vagina and you have a Cato endorsed social justice warrior.
That’s the thing with libertarians. They agree with the Left on all the important stuff. Their quibble is mostly over who gets sent off to the camps and by what means. Liberals want the state running the camps while libertarians think Elon Musk should get the contract. Over 50 years ago, Whittaker Chambers pegged these people and nothing much has changed, other than the fact the Buckley Conservatives surrendered to them.
The other interesting bit is this at the end of the Young’s tantrum:
Today, the excesses of the “social justice” movement have brought us to a point where reasonable conservatives, libertarians, and liberals are ready to join forces against quasi-totalitarian identity politics. We need to start reclaiming the principles of common humanity, freedom, and universal values, not put a positive spin on a different brand of divisive identitarianism.
Progressivism is based on the claim that all humans are the same. Egalitarianism is the foundation stone of the Left. Their coat of arms is decorated with the phrases “common humanity” and “universal values.” These are not conservative expressions or sentiments. They are antithetical to traditionalism, conservatism and biological reality. What Cathy Young finishes with is a call for total surrender.
That’s why the Buckley Right is collapsing. Decades of surrender and excuse making have sapped them of their legitimacy. What’s the point of following these guys if all they do is lose and blame you for it? You may as well throw in with these new guys, who may be nuts, but they are spoiling for a fight. If your culture and people are going to be erased from the book of life, you can at least put up a fight on the way out.
Why now? Because Obama is re-introducing well-nourished, healthy, formerly endangered terrorist species back into the wild where they may procreate like a Zika virus. It wouldn’t do to point out the moral outrage inconsistency between Bush’s duplicity and Obama’s, citizen. Run along. This is a redirect operation.
“Cathy Young” is a another opiniated Russian jewess, these types dominate the NY based press.
I have read many articles like Young’s that you quote above. She, like so many other reporters seems to be signalling to some in the Alt-Right while maintaining a position of faux astonishment at the rise of the Alt-Right. She will one day be looking for work at a news outlet that people read and believe, and it won’t be any she’s been affiliated with to date.
Oh, and Trump is Hank Rearden.
I find this “he’s so vulgar” stuff amusing. Sounds like it’s coming from NPR subscribers. Do we not live in a vulgar society? Television certainly seems to depict that. And why isn’t Obama considered vulgar? He doesn’t read, as far as I can tell, and wants to hang out with rappers and basketball players. He can’t bother to attend state funerals and delivered that brief statement about the San Bernadino shootings looking like he just came off the golf course.
Every President in recent times cussed although usually in private. I am very sure that Trump can hold a state dinner and behave in a Presidential manner. You are not going to be noticed in a big field of candidates if you are the nice guy.
“Cathy Young, a writer for something called Newsday”
Newsday is a local New York City & Long Island paper…
In the 1960’s -70’s it was known as The Long Island Press; their offices (and I believe their printing plant too) were located in easten Queens (part of NYC) near Archer Avenue and Sutphin Blvd. At the time, its Editor was Martin Asimov, brother of Sir Isaac Asimov, the Sci-Fi writer. As an aside, his children, Eric and Nan, write for the NY Times and San Francisco Chronicle, respectively.
Her pointing out that identity politics is destructive and totalitarian is quite important actually and is at the core of mass muslim immigration. It’s identity-politics which stops us from looking at people and societies and figuring them out and instead instructs us to like them because their skin is a little darker and/or they’re Muslim.
There is of course a risk in turning ‘common humanity’ into a new slogan to blind the West to anti-Westernism in most Muslim societies: “we can’t admit they kill and rape us or else we risk forgetting our common humanity”, but her condemnation of identity politics suggests she wouldn’t do that.
All politics are “identity politics.” That’s just an abracadabra phrase to dismiss objections. Without an identity, you have politics.
“identity politics” means judging a person’s actions or logic by his skin color or religion. At least that’s what it’s come to mean today. “Affirmative action” is identity politics at its best. Raising the bar for caucasians and chinese/japanese is nothing but racism and is as awful as the reverse (which would be to demand that blacks can only get into university if their grades or IQ is much higher than white people). So I don’t see all politics as “identity politics”.
You are so naïve! Identity politics means “group vs. group”. How you define “groups” is up to the participants; it can be race, ethnicity, sex, sexual preference, IQ level, you name it!
The fact is that identity politics are what’s behind ‘affirmative action’ and mass muslim immigration.
Let’s say Islam was a Dutch phenomena and it was Dutch men exploding in airports worldwide. Would we import Dutch society? No, because identity politics wouldn’t play a role. American politics shouldn’t promote one group of Americans over others (affirmative action, “a woman is always a victim”, etc). Identity politics is at the root of promoting Islam and insisting Muslims are victims. It is anti-rational and goes against the ‘justice is blind’ principle.
Looking after a country’s interests or protecting its cultural ways isn’t identity politics except in the most abstract sense.
“reasonable conservatives, libertarians, and liberals”. First, there are no reasonable liberals. If they were reasonable they would not be liberals. Second, the American founding was not designed to be reasonable, to the contrary, it was designed with the strictest rules ever devised for a democratic republic, before or since, to avoid even discussion itself on a host of political issues. The Constitution is an anti-trust document for government. Was.
“With respect to the words general welfare, I have always regarded them as qualified by the details of powers enumerated in the Constitution connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character in which there is a host of proofs which was not contemplated by its creators.”–Madison. He ought to know, he wrote it.
One of my dad’s favorite shows was Columbo. For a cop, he was just so dumb. He looked and acted like a simpleton, he just has one little question… next thing you know, the super-intelligent criminal mastermind, with his impeccable plan, is in handcuffs! That dumb cop with his one stupid question has outsmarted him.
Amazing how much satisfaction there is in watching the rich and powerful crooks get their comeuppance!
I see Trump doing much the same thing. He’s laid out his plan, it’s right there in his book, “The Art of the Deal.” He’s following that plan, there’s no secret about it, and it’s working a treat! And as others have pointed out, he’s having a wonderful time pointing his finger at the MSM and calling them on their BS. Finally someone who will point out the obvious!
If nothing else, Trump deserves great credit for unmasking all the phonies, frauds and sycophants that have been masquerading as conservatives (and it’s sure lightened my reading list.) He gives me hope that perhaps our country can yet be saved!
What is the difference between the psychopath in a pants suit, the chocolate emperor or Ekaterina Jung?
I think what these human extinction movement actors and psychopaths fear most is actually The Traditional Right. In fact they should be if they are good little red diaper baby cultural marxists. The dirt people of the traditional right are their existential enemies. The dirt people who created and waged the human races’s first successful insurgency of freedom, aka the revolutionary war, leading up to the creation of liberty and America as founded.
I think that guerrilla war has never ended, it has ebbed and flowed, and the traditional right has been subjected to a myriad of cunning and deliberately undermining of permutations, from usurpations of various components of the rule of law, specious impositions of administrative tyranny in the form of federal power, to the war of northern aggression in 1865, (which yankeedom aka cultural marxism has really never finished waging).
Cultural marxism is just another in a long line of species of the human extinction movement brought to us by the Jacobin’s and Fabians, SJW’s and the such today. The greatest current threat is through the creation of proxies the purpose of which is to destroy the dirt peoples culture via immigration. In all war the human terrain is above all else, and culture is upstream of politics. It is why the rise of the dirt people and Trump is on the ascendent and on the threshold of being unstoppable, why the cracks in the facade of “legitimacy” of the state, and especially its actors and their criminality and corruption is coming apart at the seems. It is the Mouse That Roared, the Dirt People, The Traditional Right, The Great Fuck You, it has a cultural/political energy unlike anything on Earth.
But through it all, it is clear the dirt people of the traditional right are totally despised, loathed and feared, by the cult of cultural marxism. It’s the rise of the traditional right, all signs of it, just it’s mere existence, sends these psychopaths into genocidal rage. They will do anything and everything to liquidate the dirt people. It is why they are totally bugfuck insane over the rise of Trump and the great fuck you party he symbolizes.
How can the regimes of the human extinction movement and their sycophants in the media, along with their legions of useful free shit army dupes marginalize and disenfranchise the traditional right and its dirt people, stop this grass roots insurgency when they have become a plurality? I think they can’t, but what is germane also is after such a culture war having been waged over the last 150 plus years and in particular its relentless war waged over the last 5 decades, up springs the very thing the bastards sought to eradicate, self determination, sense of individual sovereign identity, of legitimacy of the rights of men.
The whole cultural marxist movement in America has devoted billions, invested incalculable influence and political capitol, its red diaper baby generation was bred for a single purpose, it inherited a legacy of wealth and political power, to liquidate in entirety the traditional right and its dirt people.
Me. I’m saying the sonofabitches are terrified of the rise of the dirt people, if “permitted” to evolve into a plurality with an understanding it is a plurality, is a nightmare, a nightmare in the form of a movement which crosses the threshold of provincial awareness it is a force which can not be denied, awareness of its grass roots cultural people power really, motive power of legitimacy, which it is and possesses, political consciousness it is rightful, well your talking culture and the primal first principles it is born with upstream of everything.
The dirt people are who have ever been the ones to change things for good reasons.
The South was in the unfortunate position of being chained to slavery. Hardly a good advertisement for Liberty.
And the Former Soviet Union has the misfortune of being chained to Communism. They can never amount to anything. Ever again. It’s all pre-determined. The South is only chained to slavery because the people who scapegoat the South work like hell to keep those chains forged and strong. Don’t be one of them.
At least you can put up a fight . . . “Arm yourselves, and be ye men of valour, and be in readiness for the conflict; for it is better for us to perish in battle than to look upon the outrage of our nation and our altars.”
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“You may as well throw in with these new guys.” That’s my entire rationale for supporting Trump. In a Hillary / GOPe election, you’d have a choice between a technocratic statist who talks about Jesus occasionally and is probably a criminal, vs. a technocratic statist who occasionally uses a fake cornpone accent as is definitely a criminal (which one is which is an exercise I leave to the reader). A vote for Trump is an acknowledgment that we’re past the “crisis of legitimacy;” the whole system is broke beyond repair. The fact that he’s a clown who has never bothered to learn his own “positions” is a feature, not a bug – time to pull the curtain back on the whole sordid mess.
Severian please may I borrow your quote? I like it very much
Of course.
Not a clown, a showman. He is not a politician. And if you read early stuff about him or watch some early video on You Tube, he’s been consistent on trade and development. People don’t pay any attention to policy papers or party platforms. This is the last chance to push the cultural pendulum in the other direction. It may already be too late.
Good point. But if he’s too coarse in his statements to be elected then it would have been better to have Cruz.
Ah. Yes. Cruz. A totally owned and operated GOP subsidiary.
Having been up close to more than a few politicians, I can report that few have learned their own positions. They read from notes written for them. They memorize their lines like actors, because they are, for the most part, actors. Many are remarkably stupid. John Kerry is a good example. He’s great at bagging rich widows. He is good at playing his part, but is otherwise as dumb as a goldfish.
The media makes a fetish over policy wonkery because they pose at one another over who has memorized the most policy wonkery. Therefore, they judge the candidates on those terms. It’s what makes them nuts with Trump. He dismisses all of that, which is taken as a personal affront by bitchy bimbos like Megyn Kelly.
The thing with Trump is I wonder if his “confusion” is not deliberate. People who have done business with him report he does not miss a trick. He is a master of detail. I suspect he wants to project the image of a guy who is hiring the best people and letting them do their work. Reagan did this and I suspect Trump is trying to emulate that vibe. Reagan was a master of it, having been governor for eight years.
You have hit on something. Master negotiators do not advertise their strength. They don’t walk into the room proclaiming themselves and acting as though they are the smartest person in the room. Thus their adversaries are off guard, immediately understimating them and overestimating their own ability to prevail. My favorite example, a close friend, was an attorney/labor negotiator for a major automaker. Very low key. Pleasantly businesslike, but did not advertise his smarts. He was an excellent listener. Mind like a steel trap. Donald Trump has exhibited the same characteristic. And yes, Ronald Reagan did the same thing.
“The thing with Trump is I wonder if his “confusion” is not deliberate. People who have done business with him report he does not miss a trick.”
ZMan, you might be giving Trump a little too much credit here, and not giving enough credit to the mainstream mass media. When you consider that, since day 1, the agenda of EVERY mainstream media outlet (including the ones nominally on the “right”) has been to frame Trump up to look like a buffoon, you have to allow that these consummate professional propagandists are going to have some success. Trump of course understands all this and has very successfully employed a few different strategies to fight it, but when an army of people are throwing shit at you every day, they are going to score some hits no matter how good you are.
Especially when you consider that the anti-Trump crowd has spent in excess of $200 million to aid in throwing that shit!
Funny enough they gave Trump $2 billion in free help to counter that. So far.
Will offer one vignette on Trump and draw your own conclusions. One of my old firm’s board members was the senior “work out” guy at Citi in the 80s. At a dinner a few years ago was seared next to him and Trump came up. He hated the bastard. Turns out their commercial lending guys got into Trump for a huge amount that went south. So it got dumped in his lap. Turns out the loans, priced at senior secured rates had most of the control covenants eviscerated by Trump and his lawyers. Ran circles around the bankers. So in a situation where the senior lender should have had control of,the property and recoveries, had instead to sit back at take what Trump would give them. Trump,is not dumb.
Running circles around bankers is not difficult, even when they employ highly over-paid NYC legal counsel. Remember, their training mainly consists of finding creative ways of saying “No’ to rubes.
Still, I agree Trump is smart and learned all he needed to know about politics from his first NYC real estate project. Nothing is more vicious than the politics of real estate development in any large city, but NYC especially so.
So true, Zman, so true! Once upon a time, I was hired to write up a series of position papers for a gubernatorial candidate and she was thrilled with what I wrote, but fretted over the short period of time she had in which to familiarize herself with these positions ( many of which are echoed here). Aside from what I wrote, she was pretty much clueless. Oh, and stop insulting goldfish!!!
Agreed. Politicians and actors have similar middling intelligence but high sociability and charisma. Cruz is an exception. He is off the charts intelligent and has decided to use it to conquer the political world. To what end is the question? Is Cruz a white knight or a black lord? Trump is no slouch. Becoming part of the top 0.1% in wealth (through the dint of one’s work) is truly exceptional. On the other hand, Obama is a slug but with the cunning of a mega psychopath (like Hitler or Stalin). O has used his cunning and the accident of his birth to propel his career: the master con artist in a nation of charlatans. No wonder he rose to the top in record time. With this kind of embarrassing record, It’s time to start over America.
“The fact that he’s a clown who has never bothered to learn his own “positions” is a feature, not a bug…”
You might want to re-examine this assumption. The mainstream media loves to play “gotcha games” in order to make a candidate look confused, especially with respect to controversial, confusing, and divisive issues like abortion. It’s no accident that Chris Matthews picked that issue, and framed his question to Trump as precisely as he did. I find it more instructive to look at the questions the media DOESN’T ask. For example, Trump has a very straightforward and efficacious policy for health care reform; it is easy to explain, and can be put into motion by the Executive Branch immediately on assuming office, simply by enforcing commerce and anti-trust laws already on the books. But of course, pursuing this line of inquiry would only make Trump look smart, not to mention threatening a trillion dollars or so worth of special interests.
Abortion is murder. If it is murder it is Murder One – Premeditated. There is no statute of limitations on murder. Government’s can’t make murder legal. Nuremberg. That means we have 10 to 50 million women who need killing.
Got a plan?
Unless the people who say “abortion is murder” don’t really mean it. Hypocrites.
The idea that we need laws to solve every social problem is socialist.
Nah, it’s a bug. His being vulgar is sometimes amusing but it’s a bug too.
I’d much rather have Mark Steyn as a viable candidate. He’d be a much bigger threat to the system and they wouldn’t be able to complain that he’s vulgar (except for his occasional criticism of ‘pansies’). He’s firmly pro-Western without beating his chest like an ape. He’s principled, instead of hitting principled positions only occasionally. He’s consistent. He’s deep. He’s more aware of the left-wing cultural battle (which everyone is only dimly aware of).
He’s said things against Islam that I can’t even begin to imagine Trump saying.
Of course he too would be branded a racist and a ‘hater’ and a right-wing extremist.
If a Conservative candidate would say: “I’m not against every Muslim coming to America, I’m only in favor of having excellent methods to filter out Jihadist sympathisers”, who could possibly argue against him? Would Hillary say “on the contrary, let’s bring in thousands of Jihadist sympathizers a year”?
I loved hearing Trump say there’s plenty of room in Saudi Arabia for the Syrian ‘refugees’ (pity he forgot Qatar) and in a saner universe both left and right would be united in noting that Saudi Arabia has room.
Sometimes you must go with what you have, rather than pine for what you wish you had.
Sure but I won’t argue his bugs are a feature 🙂 It’s still too early to know if his going too far sometimes (and not nearly far enough other times) are a good or a bad thing. On the whole, one would rather have articulate, principled, sane and bold representatives. Trump is certainly bold. He’s got some problems on the other three categories. What if he’d said the money for the wall would come out of the money America gives Mexico? Wouldn’t that be far better and be harder to argue against?
He gains a lot of valuable publicity from being outrageous but if his more silly pronouncements make him too unpopular to win against Clinton or Sanders, then it’s our loss.
Problem with Steyn is, deep down , he’s nice and decent person. Trump is an a**hole and that’s what the times call for. Just ask Sam Adams about that. Between 1769 and 1776, Sam Adams played the part of hapless malt merchant , while in fact he was an a**hole agent provocateur greatly responsible for the New England portion of the Revolution against the Crown! His family burned most of his papers to protect his reputation as a mere “innocent” meddler in affairs of the time. I firmly believe Adams sent Paul Revere back to Lexington Green to fire the first shot at the British, provoking the furious Redcoat response. Both Adams and Revere were rather vague about Revere’s alleged mission to “recover papers” left with Hancock’s daughter in Lexington and many early recountings of events that day, tell of a shot fired from off to the side of the Green, away from the positions of either the Lexington Militia or the drawn-up Regulars, as the triggering event.
People want to get away from Obama’s cultural legacy. But they do appreciate that he sounds balanced and is polite, rather than vulgar. Trump might open the door both to sane people like Steyn in politics but also to people crazier than Trump. Trump begins to remind me of Erdogan and that’s not a good thing.
Trump and Erdogan are both carbon based bipeds. So yeah, they are exactly the same.
I like sailor talk. I had the good fortune to be a sailor in a former life.