Steve Sailer likes to talk about how the liberal media picks very bad mascots to champion their latest causes. Michael Brown was a good example of it. A violent street thug killed attacking a cop is never going to elicit much sympathy from the public. The fact that smart people in the liberal press keep falling into this “trap” suggests something other than collective stupidity.

The thing that Steve misses is that burning Ferguson to the ground was a warning. Acts of senseless brutality are a type of display item intended to communicate a message to potential foes. The Mayans built increasing complex public structures using slave labor to show their wealth and power to rivals. ISIS beheads Christians on the Internet to show the rest of the Muslim world that they are the strongest horse in the barn. Obama burned Ferguson to warn flyover country that resistance is futile.

You can see that in the case of the cop who appears to have shot  a suspect in the back. It was caught on video and is certainly looks like a senseless killing. Whether or not it is murder, under the laws of the state of South Carolina is unknown. North Charleston, S.C is not taking any chances. They saw what happened to Ferguson. So, they have fired the cop and charged him with murder.

Since there is a possibility he could get off or there may be exculpatory evidence out there, they have released his entire personnel file to the public. What’s happening here is the city is washing its hands of the matter and turning it over to the mob. You can be sure the cop’s lawyers will ask for a change of venue and the City will not fight it. They want this case as far from them as possible.

You can be  sure that no one from the Social Justice League will be protesting this violation of the man’s rights or his privacy. While releasing video of Michael Brown beating a store clerk on his rampage was universally condemned, releasing this white guy’s file is celebrated. Everyone knows he is guilty so why get hung up on technicalities?

I’m fond of saying that you blancos better polish up on your Spanish. In all seriousness, you better study the history of Rhodesia. That’s what’s coming to America in the mid-21st century.

Red State has a great article up on Sabrina Rubin Erdely, the fabulist who made up the rape hoax story for Rolling Stone. I phrase it that way as the only other option is that Erdely and her coevals at Rolling Stone had some sort of collective psychotic episode. There’s simply no way people in possession of their faculties did not know it was a fake story.

It turns out, Erdely may have been guilty of the same journalistic errors she committed in reporting the UVA rape story on at least one other rape story that garnered national attention at the time. The story in question was published in 2013 and was titled “The Rape of Petty Officer Blumer.”

Erdely’s reporting of the Blumer story is eerily similar to her reporting of the UVA story. In each case, Erdely uses a central figure who has a similar tale to tell: she was a victim of a horrific rape, she reported the rape to authorities, and her concerns were ignored and/or used against her. The narrative in each case is used to advance the theory that the institution in question (college administrators in the UVA case, military command in the Blumer case) is indifferent to the problem of systemic sexual assault occurring right under their noses. In both cases, the stories read suspiciously as though Ms. Erdely arrived at her conclusion before writing her story, and simply set out to find the first person who would constitute a credible vehicle for the narrative she wanted to create, without regard to the factual accuracy of her story. Recall that during the initial investigation of the UVA story it was uncovered that Erdely had sent emails indicating that she was looking for a story that fit a particular fact pattern – it would be no surprise to discover that similar emails existed in this case.

RedState has now spoken with multiple members of Navy command who were either personally involved in the investigation of Ms. Blumer’s allegations or who had firsthand knowledge of the facts of this case. For obvious reasons, their names have been withheld to protect their identities. However, it seems clear that, if Ms. Erdely’s story concerning Petty Officer Blumer were subjected to the same scrutiny as the UVA story, it might well come unraveled just as quickly.

The key fact from these conversations is this: Everyone I spoke to in connection with this investigation was crystal clear that at no point did Sabrina Erdely or Rolling Stone ever contact them whatsoever, even to ask for background information. This is exactly the same lapse in journalistic standards that doomed the UVA story and ultimately led to its retraction. The fact that it occurred in this story is indication of a systemic problem with Rolling Stone and Sabrina Erdely’s reporting, not of a single lapse in judgment.

Frankly, the writer at Red State is being far too kind. There’s a pattern with these people that is well established. They steal a little here and a little there as a short cut. They eventually figure out that the editors are not checking their work that closely. That means they start doing fake reporting and fake research rather than the real thing as it is easier and tends to make for better copy.

The other thing we always see is it happens where the publication is uniformly progressive. The faker starts writing tales they wish were true, getting pats on the head from their coreligionists in management, because they want to believe these stories too. The reason no one upstream from Erdely questioned her work is the fake stories confirmed what they were inclined to believe.

That’s the piece not getting enough discussion. Erdely and her enablers either think this stuff is true, or they hate you so much they are wiling to accuse you of horrific crimes. It is not hard to understand why decent Germans volunteered to shove Jews into ovens. People like Erdely are far willing to declare others as outside the human family. That inevitably leads to monstrous acts.

Read the whole Red State piece. It is top notch stuff.

One of my hobbies is studying human belief. People, singularly and in groups, especially groups, will come to believe something to be true, no matter the facts. Their belief reaches a point where all dis-confirmation triggers a redoubling of their dedication to the cause. So much so it begins to look like madness.

So it is with the people running the Republican Party and their belief in winning the Hispanic vote. The math has been worked out for a long time now, but they persist in the belief that the party of gringos will be the party of the mestizos. It’s not just the party leaders, many of the rank and file buy it too. It’s what’s driving the Marco Rubio campaign.

Anyway, here’s a good example of it from Fox News Latino!

Congressman Mike Coffman has been studying Spanish for less than two years, but he launches into it with the seeming comfort and ability of a veteran speaker.

The Colorado Republican, who won re-election in 2014 in what was considered the most competitive House race in the country, drew some skepticism when he began taking Spanish and going to Latino neighborhoods and adopting a more moderate view of issues such as comprehensive immigration reform.

You see? He followed the Jeb Bush model and turned himself into El Jefe!

His district’s boundaries were redrawn in 2011, after the Census came out a year earlier, and suddenly the predominantly white, Republican area was ethnically diverse – including 20 percent Latino – and was winnable by a Democrat.

That made last year’s mid-term election, as Politico put it, “a proxy war for the national Democratic and Republican parties” in the battle for the growing Latino electorate.

Coffman, 60, does not deny that the need to reach out to Latinos, a community he concedes that he knew very little about, was non-negotiable if he was to remain in Congress.

But what began as a survival tactic, Coffman said, developed into a genuine interest and respect for Latinos and the Spanish language.

Just like Jeb Bush! What a coincidence!

I wrote about this last year. The facts tell a vastly different story. Sure, learning Spanish and soliciting votes from Latinos helped. The fact is he won because his opponent turned out to be a nut, the Latino and black votes were much lower than in previous elections and he did better amongst white voters. The telling fact is no one ever mentions his share of the Latino vote. The reason is he did no better than Republicans ever do with Hispanics.

To quote myself, the RINO fantasy is a world where pasty-faced blancos rule over a land of socially conservative brown people who enjoy authoritarian rule. The fact that California turned into la dictadura perfecta, to borrow Mario Vargas Llosa‘ description of the Mexican ruling party, never comes up. Maybe in addition to learning Spanish, the Jeb Bush GOP has some other transformation in mind.

I did not follow Ellen Pao’s attempt to shake down the Silicon Valley VC firm closely. I read the news reports toward the end summarizing the case and I concluded, like everyone else, that she was just shaking down her former employer. The employer decided not to blink, thus the court drama. The very average people in the jury apparently thought the same thing and ruled against her on all counts.

If you look at her bio, it is not hard to figure out what’s going on here. She is not very good at doing real work so she has focused on gaming the system. That seems to be the only thing she is good at doing. Her work history suggests she checks the right boxes and pushes the right buttons. When it comes time to do real work, she starts screaming about discrimination. It just goes to show that a high IQ does not trump a lack of scruples.

The news brings word that she is now installed as the interim CEO of Reddit. How or why she landed in this job is unknown to me, but I’m familiar with failing up, having spent enough time in the Imperial Capital. From what I gather, Reddit is just a group-sourcing site with a small staff. They claim 68 employees so you would assume even Ellen Pao is not going to screw that up. But, you would be wrong.

Ellen Pao is swiftly emerging as the new face of feminism in the U.S., despite losing a closely watched gender discrimination lawsuit against one of Silicon Valley’s biggest venture capital firms last month. Pao, who has been interim CEO of Reddit since November, is now speaking out about how her experience has changed the way she manages her own employees.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal published Monday, Pao says she decided to rewrite the rules of hiring at Reddit. In addition to hiring workplace diversity consultant Freada Kapor Klein, the company no longer allows new hires to negotiate their salaries. Pao defended her move based on studies that have shown that when women negotiate, they don’t fare as well as their male counterparts.

“We’ve got a lot of diversity on our team,” she told Yahoo’s Katie Couric in a separate interview. “We could use more, but we’re very excited to make sure we have different perspectives that represent the people we have using the site.” 

If I’m the owner of Reddit, I fire this stupid twat tomorrow. Her job is to run a profitable firm, not engage in social science experiments. But, Reddit is not a real company so the owners can afford to have her engage in the nonsense of the day. Reddit is a rich man’s hobby.

Although Pao doesn’t name specific research, there have been plenty of studies to back up her claims. One 2006 study led by Carnegie Mellon University professor Linda Babcock revealed that when women negotiate, both men and women are less likely to want to work with them. Men, on the other hand, are much more respected for their negotiation skills. For women, it’s generally a lose-lose situation. In another study published in 2014, researchers found that female negotiators are perceived as more easily misled than male negotiators and are more likely than men to be lied to in negotiations.

Sensible people would look at this data and conclude that men and women are different. Crazy people, like the social justice warriors now plaguing tech, think Harrison Bergeon is a true story.

Pao’s solution wouldn’t give hiring managers a chance to inadvertently discriminate against women who ask for more. “We come up with an offer that we think is fair,” Pao says. “If you want more equity, we’ll let you swap a little bit of your cash salary for equity, but we aren’t going to reward people who are better negotiators with more compensation.

We reached out to Reddit for comment but have not heard back yet.

This might sound like a good idea, in theory at least. It’s hard to argue with any move that might make the hiring process and salary decisions as democratic and equitable as possible.

Still, it’s hard to imagine a corporate world where salary offers are the final word. There are people whose entire careers are built upon the promise that they will help people (and women in particular) master the art of negotiating. In recent years, blockbuster books like “Lean In” and “Know Your Value,” penned by high-ranking women working in male-dominated industries, have focused on coaching women to negotiate in a gender-biased workplace.  And by removing the ability to negotiate, it’s possible some employees will feel disempowered knowing that they have no real control over their compensation.

It’s more likely that talented people will tell this goofy bitch to fuck off and take a different job. What they will end up with are the beta males and losers who worry about this nonsense. But, Reddit is a hobby and having a trophy like Ellen Pao burnishes the liberal credentials of Condé Nast.

Ellen Pao has figured out how take Reveren Al’s game into tech and give it an Asian flair.

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The last Great Progressive Awakening started in the 1950’s as American Progressives began looking for an alternative to Communism as their organizing religion. The Soviet Union, despite the attempts by major newspapers like the New York Times to normalize political murder, was an embarrassment to the American Left. If you read the accounts of David Horowitz, his generation of radicals were ashamed of the old CP-USA types, like his parents.

Radicals latched onto the Civil Rights Movement. What better way to freak out the squares, like their parents, than to invite the blacks in for dinner? So the New Left jumped into the cause, not to help blacks, but to harass white people like their parents. At the heart of radicalism is a tantrum against biological reality. Eventually, we all become our parents and radicals rail against that by indulging in juvenile and dangerous political causes well into adulthood.

This round of radical lunacy started in the 1990’s with the disappointment that was Bill Clinton. The Progressives really thought he was going to be JFK 2.0 and when he was basically JFK 2.0, rather than the imaginary version of JFK, Progressives began to radicalize again. The result has been a war against normal Americans for the last two decades.

Unlike the last wave, this one has been a bit more diverse. Blacks have proven to be unreliable victims. Like the Soviet Union, it is hard to ignore the bodies stacking up. The near total absence of demonstrable discrimination was also a problem. Whites have been reordering their lives to accommodate the sensibilities of black people for a long time now. A new civil right movement was just not practical.

Instead, they went for homosexuals, sexual deviants, immigrants and single white women. Blacks, as a voting block, have been taken for granted by Progressives for a long time now so there’s no reason to cater to them, other than when they can be used as a cudgel. Blacks have become just another bit of furniture in the Progressive fun house, so the Cult could go after Hispanics and gays without fear of alienating blacks.

When building a coalition of bitter weirdos, the bitterest will always rise to the top. In the 60’s, the pasty-faced white kids in the student movements gave way to the bitter (and violent) weirdos of the black power movement. In the 90’s, the most bitter and deranged weirdos turned out to be the homosexuals. As a result, the Great Fag Wars have raged for close to two decades now.

Take a look at some recent skirmishes. Razib Khan gets hired and fired in one day by the NYTimes, allegedly for hanging out with people that say bad things about immigrants. The head of that lynch mob was a deranged homosexual working at the homosexualist site called Gawker. If McInnes is accurate, the Gawker guy just wanted to be an asshole.

Of course, the recent turmoil in Indiana, where very modest protections against predacious homosexuals were put in place, has been led by homosexual fanatics like Tim Cook, the fascist ruler of the MacCult. Homosexuals from around the country have been taking to the Internet, threatening anyone and everyone who supports protecting Christians from these rampaging mobs. ISIS has to be wondering why we care what they do to their Christians.

Even the rape hoax stuff on college campuses is being championed by homosexual activists. Rolling Stone is run by the flamboyant homosexual Jann Wenner. The homosexualist site Gawker got in on the act, defending what was clearly a fabricated story. The New Republic, run by the billionaire homosexual fascist Chris Hughes, was also on the case, trumpeting the veracity of the story, despite their history with the fabulist that wrote it.

Blacks, in the long run, turned out to be poor mascots for the Cult of Modern Liberalism. Government discrimination against blacks, however, was a real problem and overturning it was a good thing. Denying people full citizenship based solely on their ethnicity is no way to run a republic. The train load of other stuff that came along with overturning those laws may have been a disaster for the country, but it was right to overturn those laws.

No such dynamic exists here. This is a war on Christianity and a war on traditional Americans. There’s nothing that can be plucked from the tidal wave of sewage coming from the Cult that one can hold up as a benefit. It’s all filth and the people riding the wave are the worst elements of society, the deviants.

I have no predictions as to how this ends. The last Great Progressive Wave collapsed in an orgy of drug abuse and violence. This wave will end similarly. The last time, however, American society had huge storehouses of surplus. Today, we are showing the signs of exhaustion, with limited reserves to blunt the denouement of this wave. My sense is the great homo wars will not end well.

Back when “social media” was getting going, I was invited to Facebook by just about everyone I knew. I was familiar with the platform, but it is did not interest me. I’m just not that interesting nor am I all that interested in sharing my life with the world. But, I kept getting pestered so I relented and setup my page. I used fake information, of course, and set about friending all my friends, family and acquaintances. They, in turn, friended me and before long my “timeline” was full of the comings and goings of many people I know.

It did not take long to confirm my suspicions. Not only am I not very interesting, but my coevals are not that interesting either. Posts about gratifying bowel movements, pics of vacation trips, and updates on kids I did not know or care about got boring quickly. For fun I would find a moonbat page and harass the moonbats therein – until I was blocked, which happened quickly. A few years ago I shuttered my account and that was the end of it. A few friends asked why and I lied, saying I was spending too much time on it.

With the blog doing well, I signed up for twitter, thinking that a) I could get ideas and b) I could promote the blog. Plus, I thought I should take a closer examination of twitter. On the first point, I do get some post ideas on occasion. Of course, that means following people and things that I may not like. The NYTimes or TED Talks are two obvious examples. The second point has not produced much. I get some traffic from twitter, but not a whole lot. At least not a lot from my very modest efforts.

The thing about twitter, is it appears to be suffering from a tragedy of the commons. Because it is free to be on twitter, you have loads of people on twitter. They are there for content, presumably created by other users. Writers, bloggers, news sites, celebrities, weirdos, etc. post their stuff on twitter and you pick through it, like a hobo picking through the dumpsters. The standard model for the theory is that the number of takers will exceed the number of contributors. A cascading effect ensues where the takers increase geometrically and contributors abandon the project.

That’s not what’s happening with twitter. Instead, you have far too many contributors. Every nitwit with something on his mind is littering every post worth reading. One nugget of interest is therefore wrapped in a thick coating of stupid. To break through the noise, bloggers and news sites rat-a-tat-tat their twitter posts, usually promoting their site. Kathy Shaidle is some sort of twitter bot, sending dozens at one clip promoting her work. Multiply this over thousands and thousands of people and even a small twitter account like mine is a tidal wave of useless redundant data.

The worst offenders are the major news sites. I’m assuming they hire interns to feed a twitter bot of some sort. Maybe they have automated it from the content management systems. The redundancy suggest it is humans or really bad coding. I’ll get the same story from the NYTimes fifty times in a day. A site called TechCrunch was so bad I stopped following it, even though some of their stuff was of interest. This strikes me as a problem that can only get worse.

Initially, twitter was probably a great promotional vehicle. As more people piled on, however, the people using is had to invest more in promoting themselves through twitter. That just increases the noise leading to more and more people doing the same. Users will then be incentivized to follow far fewer people in order to minimize the traffic. I dropped quite a few sites for this reason.

The other thing I noticed that I think is worth mentioning is that some people seem to get hooked on twitter like people get hooked on exotic porn. Their posting gets increasingly manic and strange, like they are chasing some sort of unattainable high. They have these deranged 140 character interactions with other twitter-tweakers that are loaded with abbreviations and references to previous tweets. Some of it is alcohol fueled. Greg Gutfeld gets drunk and hits twitter, but there definitely seems to be some twitter induced psychosis that I’m not getting. I guess it is like gambling. Either you get the high from the spinning wheels or you don’t.

I don’t think I get it. There’s pretty much nothing I need to say that is under 140 characters. Those things can be handled with a nod or a grunt when someone asks me if I need more beer or pizza. Everything else exceeds those limits and I’m not interested in learning the weird pidgin language of twitter.

The hand-wringing and high-fiving over the Iran deal has me a bit puzzled. No one really knows what’s in the deal. Even the parties to the deal are at odds over what is in the deal. They only agree that the deal is an agreement to strike a deal at some point in the future. The Americans take this to mean “soon,” while the Iranians have no understanding of the concept. Persia, in one form or another, has been around for five thousand years. “Soon” is measured in decades.

That has not stopped the 24×7 clown show that is the American media from having a food fight over the deal to make a deal. The Progressives are hailing the deal as the greatest achievement of man since the wheel. Conservative Inc is condemning the deal and calling Obama Chamberlain. They have a Nazi fetish, comparing every Muslim with a bad attitude to Hitler. I watched a bit of Fox yesterday and it was clear that none of them knew more than my cat about this deal, but they were certain they were right.

That’s how things work in a democracy. The people running things employ persuasive morons to sell their position to the persuadable morons. Arguing through a megaphone leaves only one option. The side that is the loudest wins. It’s why Progressives will work free of charge for a turn at the megaphone. They get it. Own the megaphone and the people will obey you. It’s why Jeb Bush is the smart bet in 2016. Everyone in the press says he is the frontrunner.

Putting all that aside, I looked up the deal in the foreign press and the best I can tell it is an agreement that slows down Iran’s quest for a nuclear weapon and lifts the sanctions on them. The fact that every energy firm on earth is lining up to make a deal with the mullahs says the sanctions are sure to be lifted, no matter what Iran does or does not do. Western governments are the tools of their rich people and their business interests. Western business loves groveling to despots. It is their natural state.

From the point of view of Iran, negotiating with the great Satan is an easy call. There is little downside. The hardliners in Iran have a lot of power, but they have no constituency outside the ruling elite. Iran’s rulers have to respect their sensibilities, but that still leaves plenty of room to deal. Since they have no intention of abandoning their nuclear program, they only stand to gain. In short, if the West is willing to accept Iran’s terms, why not make the deal?

The West has different motives. The Europeans want that natural gas pipeline from the gulf to get done. The preferred pipeline around Iran to the west or east is simply unrealistic. Afghanistan will never be pacified and the eastern route runs into the Israeli problem. The most practical route is through Iran. While the Europeans are not in love with the idea of giving the Russians more leverage over their gas supplies, they can use that as a carrot in trying to fend off Russian aggression in the Baltic states and Ukraine.

The Americans are the key and Obama really wants this deal. It is easy to forget that Obama and his cult see him as the anti-Reagan. They used to pitch him as the Progressive Reagan back in 2008. The narrative did not work out as they planned, it never does, but this deal gives them a shot to fulfill part of the fantasy. Having Obama give a speech in Tehran would be the rejection of the Reagan policy toward Iran. It would also finally heal the wound to the pride of Progressives over Carter’s handling of the hostage crisis. The subtext of the Left’s celebration right now is “Carter was right after all.”

There’s also another bit going on here. The American empire is exhausted and most in Washington know it. Trillions have been spent trying to conquer the Muslim lands and we have nothing to show for it. Conquest only works if the booty exceeds the expense. The early expansion of Rome during the Republic was financed by the booty of the conquered. Once the Romans ran out of rich people to conquer, expansion ended and decline immediately started as the economics of empire reached the point of diminishing returns.

America is a rich country with a huge reserve so the blunders into Iraq and Afghanistan may not be as costly, but they could be and the more savvy people in Washington know it. They have looked around at the Middle East and determined that the entity with the best prospects over the next several decades is Iran so they are making a deal with them. The US will back off and the Iranians will keep the oil and gas flowing. If the Iranians decide they need nukes to do it, that will be worked out when it happens.

In theory, it is not a terrible plan. America needs out of the Muslim world. Whether or not it is a good idea to turn things over to the Persians remains to be seen, but history is on their side. They have been the dominant people in the region for 5,000 years, give or take. How the rest of the region responds is an unknown, but you can be sure the Saudis are in Pakistan offering whatever it takes to get a nuke of their own. The rest of the GCC is there with them.

There are also the demographics to consider. The last three American presidents have so badly bungled things in MENA, Europe is now facing a great wave of barbarian invaders to her south. Europe is as weak today as she was prior to the Muslim conquests. Maybe even weaker. There are a billion poor people to her south ready to head north. Iranian help in rebuilding the buffer zone in the Maghreb would go a long way toward forestalling the collapse of Europe.

The war on Christian pizza makers has the professional Right sorely vexed. I think most of their outrage is legitimate. They truly are offended by this latest assault on normal Americans. The fund raising by the pizza joint in Indiana suggests normal Americans are growing weary of the lunatics and their causes. Still, I think a part of what vexes the professional Right is their fear of stating the obvious conclusion.

That conclusion is you cannot have freedom of any sort without freedom of association. If you must get permission from the state to associate or disassociate from others, you have no freedom. The state may allow you some options, but everything you do must come with a permission slip. Otherwise, putting two people who hate one another in the same room ends up with blood on the walls.

Here’s a recent screed from National Review struggling to avoid stating the obvious.

Policies come to us with principles attached to them, and when debating public policy we should consider the principles not only of legislation that has passed but also of legislation that has been rejected. No one to my knowledge is discussing where the principles implied in the Left’s rejection of the RFRA lead. Responsible statecraft entails an examination of a principle’s logical conclusion. In the case of liberalism, the conclusions to which its principles lead help us see just how deeply opposed those principles are to the constitutional order we’ve inherited.

When the Left rejects the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, it invites compelled speech. When photographers are forced under threat of fines to shoot weddings or religious services that they believe are immoral, the assumption is that we are sometimes legally bound to participate in certain kinds of speech, and the state becomes the arbiter of what that speech is in specific instances.

Well, no. Forcing someone to work for someone else is not forcing them speak. It is forcing them to participate. Put another way, it is compulsory association. The state is saying to the photographer, “We really don’t care about your opinions of these people. You must do what we say, act as we say or else.”

Of course, the reason Andrew Walker of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the guy who wrote the piece in question, must fetishize speech is he cannot mention association. To do so, to draw the obvious conclusion from the events in Indiana and elsewhere, would risk his job and career. Rand Paul almost saw his career come to end in 2012 because he dared utter this conclusion.

The reason, ostensibly, is that letting stores refuse service to homos would lead to stores not serving blacks. That has things exactly backwards. Separate public accommodations in the South were falling apart on their own. Basic economics makes such practices self-limiting and self-destructive. The reason Progressives pushed through laws against private discrimination was to eliminate private association.

It’s rather amazing how easily Americans were willing to surrender their liberty, but there it is. Now, there’s no reason to think things like Christianity, private clubs, fraternities, etc will hold up much longer. After all, if you cannot deny admissions based on your own peculiar criteria, why have an organization at all?

The thing I think is vexing to the professional Right is the mounting proof that they were wrong about the Left. They were convinced that the “other side” (as if there are only two sides) was acting in good faith, but just need convincing. Recent events show that to be nonsense, but Conservative Inc. can’t bring itself to admit it.

There’s no evidence from Progressives that they see any of this as a flaw or even unintentional. Yes, they fully expect to impose their morality – at gunpoint if necessary – on the rest of us. That’s how political cults operate. Hell, it’s how Christianity operated for over 1,000 years. But, admitting this is the case would point out that Conservative Inc has been wrong for thirty years now.

On occasion, I like to read old books about taboo subjects. I developed the habit as a student, when assigned the task of writing an essay on the 1948 presidential election. We were permitted to use one source and that was the NYTimes archive at our library. That meant staring through a device, resembling a peep show machine, at film on which the archives of the paper were stored.

What I found fascinating were the horribly taboo things written in the Old Gray Lady about blacks, Jews, Catholics, women, etc. The want ads were hilarious. “Two Irishman wanted for painting crew.” Or, “Negros wanted for ditch digging.” Newspapers used the language of the man on the street and reading those old papers gave me a sense of what it was like to live in that age.

The thing is, mass media must respect the sensibilities of the buying public, even if those sensibilities are insane. American newspapers in the 40’s, for example, could not criticize America’s conduct of the war, even in cases where it was warranted. The people simply would not tolerate it. A decade later when passions had cooled, papers could indulge in revisionist history.

Similarly, the mass media of every society must live within the constraints of the ruling classes. They must promote and support the legitimizing ideology of the day. A newspaper man in Nazi Germany could not celebrate diversity. A cable news talker today cannot question the joys of diversity. To do so puts your job and career in jeopardy.

Just as those public sensibilities can be insane, the legitimizing ideology can belch forth its own brand of crazy. Homosexual marriage, for example, is nonsense, but sacred nonsense. Go against it and you reap the whirlwind. Point out the suicidal nature of diversity and cultural Marxism and you will be condemned to a life of penury or worse. Unlike the public, the people in charge can throw you in gaol so you’re wise to tread lightly.

I was thinking about this the other day reading Steve Sailer’s latest Taki column. Sailer is a very smart and a very well trained person. There are maybe a handful of people who possess his social science skills. He also possess the sorts of credentials that lead to riches in modern America. An MBA from UCLA is no small thing.

Sailer also writes and says things that violate the taboos of the ruling class so he is unwelcome in the places run by those serving the ruling class. He maintains a blog and lives off donations. Maybe his wife has a job, I don’t know. Instead of selling books, getting paid by a think tank and doing TV, he begs for donations.

Sailer thinks he is right. So much so he has condemned himself to a life of penury, despite possessing the credentials and intellect to be highly successful. Presumably, he has chosen this path because he values being right over making money. Malcolm Gladwell is wrong about most everything and probably knows it, but he likes money so he has gotten rich uttering nonsense in public.

Sailer is certainly not a martyr or even unique. He made his choices for his own reasons and was surely aware of the consequences. The dissident right is littered with guys and some gals who write interesting things about interesting topics, but do so on the fringe, banned from the respectable salons that dominate public life.

It’s not a new phenomenon. Galileo got himself in trouble not because he challenged dogma, but he refused to play along with the rules and customs of the ruling classes. Copernicus first laid out the heliocentric view long before Galileo, but he played by the rules and avoided challenging the established order. You can say anything you want as long as you don’t threaten the established order.

That’s what you see with a guy like Kevin Williamson at National Review. He’s smart enough to know that Charles Murray is right, for example, but he knows it takes credentials and talent he lacks to walk up to that same line. Instead, he lets Robert Putnam draw the lines and is willing to live within them. Williams has a habit of describing cultural issues precisely, only to avoid drawing the only logical conclusion.

This column from a few months back is a great example. Without freedom of association, you cannot have any freedoms at all. Williams clearly gets that, but also knows that it is a lethal point to make if you earn your living from a legitimate publication. So, when faced with the reality of his observations, he springs for the safety of equivocation. It’s left to commenters to fill in the blanks.

Many on the fringe take comfort in the belief that reality does not go away when you stop believing in it. Eventually, the lunacies of our day will have to give way to math and science. That assumes there will be anyone left capable of sorting fact from fiction. It is axiomatic that you get less of what you punish. Another generation of punishing heretics and who will be left, capable of recognizing reality, much less articulating it?