Bloody Democracy

One of the more abused words in the English language is the word “democracy” which has come to mean just about anything. Our politicians love talking about the glories of democracy, especially after they have won an election. When they lose, as we are seeing with the Left these days, well, it is an assault on democracy! The word has become a Western version of Juche, the North Korean state ideology. It is not a form of government, but a mystical spirit that is the essence of the people’s goodness.

For Progressives, democracy is one the of the primary abracadabra words in their book of incantations. Whatever they want, it is almost always decorated with the word democracy or some reference to it. It’s not that they have any respect for the will of the people; it is that they truly believe their whims and causes are imbued with the magic they associate with the word democracy. Democracy is what they call that supernatural force that guides history and carries the righteous to the promised land.

This article from the Progressive site Jacobin is a good example. America, of course, is not a democracy. It is a representative republic. In fact, what we have come to know as liberal democracy in the West is explicitly not democracy. Instead, Western nations employ various forms of representative government. The reason for that is experiments with democracy have been disastrous. It turns out that mob rule is not a great way to run a country. The usual result is a blood bath followed by a tyrant.

Of course, the Left is not all that interested in democracy as a form of government. For them, it is trolley they ride from where they are now to the place they wish to be. That place is where they have an iron grip on society. Naturally, while they are waiting for that trolley to take them to the promised land, they sing the glories of the trolley system they call democracy. If things don’t work out as planned, well, the system is not democratic and the proof of that is they lost. After all, the spiritual goodness of the people is on their side.

The linked article is interesting and entertaining for a number of reasons beyond the less than credible claims about the glories of democracy. What’s fascinating about it is what it reveals about the Left. The author, after detailing what he sees as the facts of the undemocratic outcome, falls back on the example of revolutionary France. Appropriately enough, for a site called the Jacobin, the author wants some sort of National Constituent Assembly, where the people can fashion a new constitution.

The National Constituent Assembly lasted two years and can only be viewed as a failure, as it led to the radicalization of the Paris mob and eventually The Reign of Terror. Roughly 16,000 people were sent to the guillotine and another 25,000 were hung, shot or beaten to death by mobs. All of these murders were done in the name of the people. After all, what is more democratic than murdering people in the name of the people? Most of those killed were in no way opposed to the revolution. They either got in the way or failed to do what the radicals expected.

Nowhere in that long piece does the author mention Maximilien Robespierre, Les Enragés (“the enraged ones”) or Madame Guillotine. He later celebrates the Marxist revolts of the 19th century and then the glories of the Bolshevik Revolution in the 20th century. No mention in those cases of the bloody outcomes. That would require either a reconsideration of the glories of radical democracy or the celebration of senseless murder by angry mobs. It’s better to just skip past those problems.

That’s the revealing bit in the piece. The Left has learned nothing from the past, even their own past. The Right is often accused of being captive to a romanticized past, but it is the Left that is trapped in a permanent time warp. The first radicals of the Left followed the logic of Rousseau to its natural conclusion, murdered a bunch of people and then gave way to a tyrant. They keep repeating this pattern without ever having learned from past results. The Bolsheviks, for example, looked to the Jacobins as examples.

Part of this is explained by the radical fixation on the future. The Left has always been blind to the past as they put all of their energy into reaching the glorious future. The bigger issue is that radicalism is an intellectual dead end. When the only acceptable answer to the natural inequality of man is more democracy, you eventually end up with pure democracy, but the same natural inequality. That leaves enforced equality as the logical next step. With coercion naturally comes political violence and then terror.

Girrrrl Power!

One of my friends mentioned the other day that he had seen the movie Rogue One, the latest Star Wars offering. He said he liked it, which I thought surprising. From the commercials, I was under the impression that it was another Girrrrl Power! movie telling us that girls can do anything they set their pretty little heads to, even if the evil white men try to stop them. Put another way, it looks like another movie that has a tiny little female in a role that was traditionally played by a tough guy leading man.

He said it had a lot of that nonsense, but the shoot ’em up stuff and special effects were good enough to let you ignore the preachy garbage. My friend is a movie goer so he has developed the ability to filter out the proselytizing so he can enjoy the entertainment portion of films. Maybe that is a skill you acquire after sitting through a certain quantity of movies or maybe it is a natural personality trait. I know I lack it, which is why I don’t watch many movies. If it is going to be preachy, I’ll just skip it.

There’s also the Star Wars element. For good or ill, the franchise has a become Star Trek for the fake nerd movement. Women who “fucking love science” seem to be big into Star Wars. I liked the movies as a kid, but I was always a Star Trek guy. I also tended toward real science fiction, the stuff you had to read. Even as a kid, Star Wars struck me as a bad western with good special effects set in space. It’s why I only got around to watching the “prequels” earlier this year when they were on free cable.

Star Wars is a good reminder that pop culture is aimed mostly at women and kids, so it is no country for old men. Peddling movies to young people is made easier by the fact they don’t know a lot. They simply have not been alive long enough to notice that this year’s blockbuster is the blockbuster from five years ago, just with different actors and explosions. They don’t know that Big Bang Theory is just Friends, with nerds instead of hot looking Manhattanites. This stuff is all new to them so they eagerly buy it up.

Women are also easy targets for pop culture because women are hard wired to notice what other women are doing. It’s why the fashion industry exists. Most men wear the same styles their whole life. Women change every year. That’s because of biology. Hollywood has figured this out so they put out films with female leads in the newest styles and fashions. Since the New Religion says all girls are really kick-ass ninja warriors, we get lots of films where 90-pound pixie ninjas with adorable haircuts.

The odious John Podhoretz claims that Hollywood figured out that action films would always attract male viewers so they decided to cast females in the lead to bring in the females. Podhoretz is an example of reversion to the mean, his father being an exceptionally smart man, but he may be correct here. This sounds like the sort of thing a corporate studio would do, thinking it is brilliant. Whether it works or not will never be tested because the committee said it was brilliant and the matter is closed. It strikes me as plausible, at least.

No matter the reason, the thing about modern movies is the habit of putting females in roles that should be played by men. Unlike the habit of casting a black guy in the smart guy role, this feminizing of the male lead never works as intended. There are smart black guys in the real world. There are no 90-pound females beating up full sized bad guys using nothing but ninja moves. That’s never happened. It’s never going to happen either. No one comes away thinking it will ever happen, other than the crazies in the cult.

The other day, I watched a movie called Sicario, which is about Mexican drug dealers and the US efforts to catch them. The movie is well done and a good two hours of entertainment. The one problem is they put a tiny little nymph in the lead role. The viewer is supposed to accept that this tiny little girl is not just a member of a tactical team, but recruited to be part of what amounts to an off-the-books Seal Team. Most of her screen time is her brooding and crying over the fact the boys don’t play by the rules.

Of course, the writers, directors and producers of our entertainments have to work within the rules the censors give them. We’re supposed to believe the censors were all sent packing, but they never went away. It’s just that they were replaced with ideological enforcers from the Cult. Instead of a prim faced Christian lady editing the scripts, it is a vinegar drinking lesbian from the Womyn’s Studies Department. The people making a living in Hollywood like their jobs so they play along as that is the path of least resistance.

The result is a paucity of male leads in movies these days. This probably has something to do with the collapse of the male audience for movies. Guys are not all that interested in Girrrlll Power!. Young males are spending their leisure time blowing stuff up and killing people in video games. It’s why the lunatics have been making war on gaming. They will not sleep until the last pale penis person is hunted down and forced to submit to the New Religion. Given the results thus far, it does appear that the effort has failed.

Maybe that means the Girrrrl Power! era is coming to a close. Movie makers need to make money so they may be forced to bring back the normal male leads. Maybe the next big thing in movies will be men who are not sobbing pussies, but old fashioned tough guys doing the hard work of being men. I hope so as I’m getting old and it will not be long before I’m spending my days in the movie theater with the other geezers, before we head to Denny’s for a 4:00 PM dinner.

The Face of Modern Antisemitism

In a speech delivered Wednesday, that was supposed to be the pièce de résistance for one of the dumbest men to take up space in the political class, John Forbes Kerry declared himself an anti-Semite. He was not that polite about either. If he had simply said, “I hate Jews” that would be better than what he actually said. Specifically he said, “Israel can either be Jewish or democratic, but it cannot be both.” In other words, he hates the very concept of Judaism, not just a particular manifestation of it.

The implication, the only way to interpret it, is that he thinks Judaism is incompatible with liberal democracy. There’s never been a time when he has hinted at the same argument with regards to Islam. He has not even said this about Christianity. That would be laughably stupid, but Lurch is a laughably stupid man. No, he specifically singled out Judaism for this argument. Judaism is incompatible with democracy. Presumably, he would argue that Jews can either be Jewish or citizens of a democracy, but not both.

Sensible people have pointed out for years that Islam is incompatible with modern liberal democracy. The reason we say this is Muslims regularly say that Islam is incompatible with Western liberalism. Logically, Imams and Muslim scholars are good authorities on these issues so taking them at their word is a good idea. The fact that everywhere Muslims get to vote they go for theocracy confirms these claims. Muslims are not fond of democracy and they really hate modern liberal democracy.

Israel is a Jewish state and a liberal democracy. Christians and Muslims are free to do their thing, as long as they abide by the laws of Israel, which are written by the Israeli parliament. In theory, Israelis could vote to fling open their borders and let the Muslims pour into the country. They can vote for all sorts of things, because it is a democracy, but they choose to be a Jewish state that preserves itself as the homeland of world Jewry. As a sovereign people, that is their right and consistent with western liberal democracy.

John Kerry disagrees. He does not thinks Jews have a place in a liberal democracy, even one of their own. The modern Progressive sees national and ethnic identity as obstacles to the glorious future. It’s why they embrace open borders and multiculturalism. They truly believe that obliterating ethnic and national identity is the key to the lock. Jews are the most stubborn of ethnic groups because they combine race and religion into a single, immutable identity. That simply cannot work in the glorious future.

It was always just a matter of time before American progressives got around to Jew-hating. Once you go down the road of multiculturalism, you eventually end up trying to erase anything resembling cultural identity. Now that you-know-who is far enough in the past, no longer in the rear view mirror for most people, taking on the tree stump of ethnic identity was inevitable. For 2,000 years, Jews have kept their thing going in the West, despite every conceivable attempt to erase them. Now it is the Left’s shot at them.

The Fake News

There’s not much new under the sun. Governments have been putting out propaganda to fool the public since the first guy figured out he could order some other guys to stack one rock on another. The trick is for the people in charge to appear to believe their own bravo sierra, but not actually believe it. If a ruler begins to think he is actually a god, for example, he is going to start making terrible errors. He needs the people to think he is a god, but he has to know he is a man and vulnerable to all the same defects as any other man.

Put another way, rulers must never get high off their own supply. A good example of this is the agit-prop about the Russians hacking the election. Polling shows that close to 60% of the public thinks the “Russians hacked us” stories are ridiculous. About 20% seem to think it happened and matters. That 20% is most assuredly the back benchers from the Cult of Modern Liberalism. That would not be a big deal, except the news media and the White House, at least for a few more weeks, are run by these people.

The result is the Obama White House is getting pressure from their toadies in the press to do something about the Russian hacking that never actually happened.

Over the past four months, American intelligence agencies and aides to President Obama assembled a menu of options to respond to Russia’s hacking during the election, ranging from the obvious — exposing President Vladimir V. Putin’s financial ties to oligarchs — to the innovative, including manipulating the computer code that Russia uses in designing its cyberweapons.

But while Mr. Obama vowed on Friday to “send a clear message to Russia” as both a punishment and a deterrent, some of the options were rejected as ineffective, others as too risky. If the choices had been better, one of the aides involved in the debate noted recently, the president would have acted by now.

The options are risky because the White House knows the hacking story was made up to pacify the lunatics. They also know the Russians know it was made up. Creating a diplomatic crisis over something both sides know is a fiction – and a ridiculous one at that – is very dangerous. The Russians will assume there must be some other reason for the move. Once countries are left to guess about motives, things can spiral out of control quickly. Thus the White House has to just make a show of it, but not actually do anything.

The “Russians hacked us” stuff does show how the Left is expert at narrative management. They can easily retrofit the past, even the very recent past, into the official story line. If necessary, they will rewrite the narrative on the fly. You see that in this section of the linked story.

Mr. Obama is the president who, in his first year in office, reached for some of the most sophisticated cyberweapons on earth to blow up parts of Iran’s nuclear facilities. Now, at the end of his presidency, he has run headlong into a different challenge in the cyberwarfare arena.

The president has reached two conclusions, senior officials report: The only thing worse than not using a weapon is using it ineffectively. And if he does choose to retaliate, he has insisted on maintaining what is known as “escalation dominance,” the ability to ensure you can end a conflict on your terms.

Obama did nothing of the sort. It was the Israelis who sabotaged the Iranian reactors with malicious code. In fact, the US intelligence community was as baffled as everyone else about how the Israelis pulled off one of the great cyberwarfare capers of all time. But, that does not serve the narrative so the past will now be restated. The new past is Obama opened a desk drawer and pulled out a “cyber weapon” to deploy against the Iranians, like the Bond villain often does when he thinks he finally has Bond trapped.

Of course, the bigger problem here is that running endless fake news stories erodes public trust in the media and their government supervisors. Fifty years ago, people could suspect something was bullshit, but proving it was often impossible. Today, there is too much information and too many ways to disseminate it. This stuff is quickly exposed and the public becomes more skeptical, as well as better able to spot the lie. That’s why only nut jobs believe the Russian hacking stuff.

Russian hackers are real. So are Ukrainian hackers and Chinese hackers and Nigerian princess looking for your bank account number. The great threat to network security, however, is not a secret team of super villains writing malicious code. The broken window is the old guy, who is uncomfortable with technology, using “pass123” as his password. John Podesta was not hacked. He had a childishly simple password and he left it lying around for people to see.

According to research, 4% of people use “123456” as their password. Cracking that is not hacking. It is guessing. According to the revelations in WikiLeaks, the people working for Team Clinton at State shared passwords with one another. That means one person leaving the door open exposes everyone, which is what happened in every conceivable way. The reason all of this private information ended up in the public during the campaign is the people producing it are morons and should never be trusted to keep secrets.

That’s ultimately the real news behind the fake news. A skeptical public was presented evidence that confirmed their skepticism. The attempts to retroactively discredit these revelations is only reinforcing the general sense that the mainstream media cannot be trusted. Trust in major media is at all time lows and their audience is dissipating as people seek out alternatives. There’s nothing mysterious about it. As the gatekeepers lose control of the gates, the public learns the truth about what lies beyond the gates.

Playing With Fire

The great mistake over the last century, or more, is in thinking that the American Left is an intellectual movement that relies on facts and reason to formulate policy and strategy, with the goal of making the nation better. Conservatives have long been obsessed with talking about the Left as their colleagues, insisting they are simply mistaken, but otherwise well intentioned. The truth is, the Left in America is a cult, a suicide cult, that seeks to pull down the support beams of society so the roof collapses on all of us.

Here is a good example of it.

More Democratic electors are joining the call for an intelligence briefing on Russian interference in the presidential election before they cast their votes for president on Monday.

Twenty-nine electors now are pressuring Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to disclose more information about the CIA’s conclusion that Russian interference helped sway the election in President-elect Donald Trump’s favor.

On Monday, 10 electors — spearheaded by Christine Pelosi, the daughter of House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) — wrote an open letterto Clapper, demanding more information ahead of next week’s vote.

 

“The Electors require to know from the intelligence community whether there are ongoing investigations into ties between Donald Trump, his campaign or associates, and Russian government interference in the election, the scope of those investigations, how far those investigations may have reached, and who was involved in those investigations,” the letter reads. “We further require a briefing on all investigative findings, as these matters directly impact the core factors in our deliberations of whether Mr. Trump is fit to serve as President of the United States.”Twenty-eight Democrats and one Republican have now signed the letter.

On Monday, the Clinton campaign voiced support for the effort.

The absurdity of the Russian hacking claims should be enough to put this story to bed long ago, but the media is run by the Cult so they are pumping air into this story every day. The Washington Post ran a fake news story with claims that the CIA has proof the Russians forced John Podesta to write all of those embarrassing e-mails that got released by WikiLeaks. Put another way, the people running the Post are willing to destroy what is left of their reputation to promote something they know is nonsense.

It is one thing for a campaign to cook up fake news in order to divert attention. The Clinton people were desperate to get their scandals out of the news so they made up the Russian hacking stuff. Politicians of all stripes do this sort of thing. LBJ used to accuse his opponents of horrible things, just so they would have to deny it. What the Left is engaging in now is an attempt to undermine public support of the political system. It’s as if they figure that if they can’t win, then everyone must lose.

What makes it especially suicidal is the obvious consequences, if their efforts actually succeeded. Let’s assume they are able to crack the Electoral College and overthrow the election. The result would be a constitutional crises. As Steve Sailer pointed out the other day, the people pushing for that should think about who would probably step into the crisis to impose order. The military is full of PC ninnies, but there are plenty of people in uniform that would like a shot at changing it. It is a safe bet that they did not vote for Clinton.

Of course, none of this is going to happen. Still, the public does notice that the people in charge are unwilling to abide by their own rules. To some degree, that is why Trump won the election. Corruption is just lawlessness among the ruling class and Trump promised to clean it up. If the ruling class appears to be throwing the rules aside in order to stop Trump, the public is going to begin to wonder why they are supporting the political system at all. Millennials are already on the fence about democracy.

None of this is to say the nation is staggering toward revolution or civil war. That seems unlikely at the present date, but the lesson of history is that things can spiral out of control quickly. The number one duty of every ruling elite is to maintain public support of the system that props up the ruling elite. Progressive attempts to kick the legs out from under the system could eventually work. The fact that they will be the first ones sent to the gallows does not seem to bother them. In fact, they probably long for it.

The Party is Over

After an election, there are two things that almost always happen. One is the winning side draws the wrong lesson from their victory. The lesson they usually draw is that that they are on the right side of history or that the gods are on their side. Same idea, different magic. One of the anomalies of the recent US Presidential election is that Trump is not prone to magical thinking and his own party hates him, so he seems fairly level headed about his win. His party is acting like they lost so no gloating there.

The losing side, on the other hand, draws any number of wrong conclusions. Republicans generally assume they lost because they were too far to the Right, so they immediately start adopting the positions of the Left. The Democrats will often conjure up some sort of conspiracy theory, thus the ridiculous recount efforts now under way. The point is the losers never learn from their mistakes and therefore just rely on the other side burning itself out or screwing up so they can be the default option in the next election.

The way the Democrats lost and their wobbly condition, suggests they may be in for a much longer winter than typical. There is a British Labour Party vibe to them these days. You see that in this piece from Time Magazine on the state of the party.

The narrowness of Hillary Clinton’s stunning loss to Donald Trump — especially given the fact that she actually won the popular vote by 2.5 million and rising — has led many liberals to conclude that the Democratic Party only needs a slight adjustment to win future presidential elections. A better candidate, a more competent campaign, or a more credible message on economic issues — any one of them might have kept the presidency in Democratic hands.

On one level, this is true. A large football stadium’s worth of additional votes distributed correctly across three states, and Clinton would be president-elect today. But it also obscures the fact that the Democratic Party has basically collapsed at the state level.

There are many things the party must do to rebuild. Here’s one more to add to the growing list: The Democrats need a better breed of operative.

The article then goes onto to describe a few top operatives as soulless, corrupt incompetents. What’s interesting here is you very rarely see anyone on the Left question anything about the Cult, including its political arm. Self-awareness is not their thing. That and doubt on the Left is always assumed to be a gateway drug for apostasy, so it is fanatically discouraged. Losing and losing badly may be forcing some soul searching. The party is now a regional party, for all practical purposes.

What I think we may be seeing is the the end of the normal life cycle for an ideological party. The Democrats, like British Labour, were always a coalition party that adopted an ideology as a theme song, more than a political philosophy. Political parties are practical things. They organize to win elections so the party can us the power of the government to reward friends and punish enemies. In order to win they must make compromises and they often have to get ideological opposites to temporarily agree.

Ideological parties, on the other hand, are impractical, which is why they tend not to last long. They cannot compromise and instead go through purifying rituals in which the doubters and questioners are boiled off. Eventually they become so narrow they no longer have any practical benefit, if they were ever able to have any at all. The Libertarian Party is a good example. It is useless as a party because it spends all of its time wrangling over theory and doctrine. That and figuring out how to keep fat naked guys from showing up.

Like Labour, Democrats went through a period where they jettisoned many of the people who were willing to challenge the Cult over political strategy. In the 1990’s, moderate Democrats were voted out in favor of moderate Republicans. The elected officials that remained after the ’94 election were a bunch of pols from the New Left, who took up leadership positions. They went about turning the party into an ideological movement, that had some early success, but has been burning itself out over the last decade.

Take a look at the Democrat Party and it looks a lot like the CP-USA after World War II. The people in charge like being in charge and use ideology to maintain their grip. The foot soldiers with any talent are heading to other things, leaving an increasingly incompetent core. The Democrats have become the party of “Kill the Honky” because Progressives have become a suicide cult that thinks salvation can only come after the last white guy is hunted down. Outside of Zimbabwe, that is not a winning formula for electoral success.

The Democrats are not going away and Labour is not going away in the UK. Something will replace them. In the UK, it appears the new political alignment will be SNP versus the Tories, with the foreign traitors in London often siding with the Scots. In the US, we will probably see the neo-cons waddle back over to the Democrat side to form a more centrist coalition. There will be the identity political Left and the hyper violent, lose wars of choice, Right in one party. The Republicans will be the honkies from flyover country.

Regardless, progressivism cannot be the core of a majority coalition, at least not in anything resembling a liberal democracy. At best, it can be an influential part of a  coalition, but never the dominant part. In the fullness of time, it may be understood that the worst thing to happen to American Progressives was their final victory over one of the parties. They may have discredited themselves to the point where their thing is never the same again. Robespierre lost his head learning this lesson so Nancy Pelosi should count her blessings.

The Cult of Anti-Racism

The ridiculous lecturing of Mike Pence, from the cast of Hamilton the other day, is a good reminder that religions are highly adaptive. The Progressive nutters quickly went from smug triumphalism the day of the election to declaring themselves the new Freedom Riders, fighting the segregationists. Within hours of the result, race hustling grifters like Jamelle Bouie were spinning fantasies where he and his hotep brothers were spontaneously organizing a black underground resistance movement.

The musical Hamilton is flypaper for moonbats, because it titillates their fantasies about race. Progressive don’t actually like real flesh and blood black people very much, which is why they avoid them. Take a look at the liberal bastions of America and you always find urban reservations for the folks who likes to keep it realz. It’s why big cities are using housing gimmicks to ship their blacks to the suburbs. Gentrification is just Progressive ethnic cleansing.

No, Progressives prefer their black people to be like the ones in their fantasy version of America. These are blacks like Obama. Black but, you know, not really black. As Steve Sailer put it, Obama is the nation’s first black wigger. It is one of life’s great ironies that the ideal black man on the Left is an exotic mulatto, who acts and sounds like an Oreo. Most people would have preferred President Camacho, but in the Progressive paradise, everything is drained of color, even the black guys.

Half a century ago, Progressive radicals adopted anti-racism as a tactic. It let them lever themselves into positions of political authority by first establishing their moral authority. The old honkies on the Left, who wanted economic justice for all Americans, were pushed aside by the New Left, who promised racial justice. In the 60’s and 70’s, these new anti-racists took over the Left and when the Cold War ended, they came to dominate it.

The trouble with moral causes like anti-racism, is there is no limiting principle, so it quickly went from political expedient to religious tenet. You can’t really be anti-racist enough. How does one define the anti-racist paradise? It’s why they are always chanting about the “more work needs to be done.” It’s also why they have developed a fetish for miscegenation. The only way there can be no racism is if there are no races and the way to achieve that is inter-breeding.

It’s why the genetic test kit companies like doing ads where the customer discovers she is not what she was told. No one in these ads learns they are 100% pure honky. Instead, the person always learns they are a beef stew of different ethnic tribes. There’s even one with a middle-aged cat lady type learning that she has some American Indian in he blood. You can be sure she went right out and bought some dream catchers and started talking about her spirit guide.

The one exception is a white man delighted to learn he is not German. instead he is a mix of groups from the British Isles. He was, of course, thankful to learn he was not a Nazi. The message being sent in these ads is that even though race and ethnicity are biological reality, inter-breeding makes it unimportant. Most likely the people running these firms know better, but they also know they are on dangerous ground. They make these ads to keep the anti-racist wackos off their back.

Progressives may have built the still and cooked up the anti-racist moonshine, but the Official Right is just as drunk off the concoction as the Left. This post on the Federalist is a good example of how people, thinking they are conservatives, buy into all the anti-racism stuff. The author of that piece is sure that race relations were just fine until Trump and his voters broke some deal we are just learning about now. It’s as if the author is unaware of the last decade.

The other day, National Review editor Rich Lowry had a piece up begging the Left to not cast him and his fellows into the pit reserved for the racists. Despite the fact that Trump is the most diversity celebrating President in American history, the boys and girls of the Official Right™ accept the Left’s claims about his racism, simply because Trump does not attend the Church of Anti-Racism. It is how the hive mind works. You’re either inside the walls or outside the walls. There are no gray areas.

Steve Sailer is convinced this is just a conspiracy to reclaim the urban landscape. To some degree he is right, but that’s a downstream consequence. As anti-racism has become a defining feature of the Progressive sense of self, these schemes to hide away dis-confirmation have become a natural defense mechanism. Shipping the ghetto out to flyover country is just a way to hide the problem from the new modern hipsters in gentrified areas.

The Dissidents and the Media

Back in the 80’s, one of the more irritating things about following politics was watching stupid Republicans walk onto liberal news programs and get ambushed. It was if they were just made aware of the fact that the Left never plays fair. It was not just Republican politicians. Conservative chatters would also fall into these traps. It was very frustrating until I figured out that it was all a show. The “conservative” was hired to play a role in the drama. George Will, in private, thought you people were gross and disgusting.

This model persisted through the 90’s and it was only when Fox News came on-line did we see some fair treatment of people outside the Progressive orbit. Even there, the obsession with being fair often resulted in being stupid. Exactly no one gives a crap what Juan Williams has to say about anything. Yet, FNC felt they needed to decorate the set with him. Even so, it was just one outlet among many so the prevailing model was a Progressive gang-up on anyone not professing the One True Faith.

What made it most infuriating is that so-called conservatives would go on moonbat networks and do taped shows. The producers would then cut up the recording to make the conservative sound nutty or unresponsive. When confronted, the so-called conservative would admit to knowing it was a setup, but they would say they did it to try and change minds. In reality they were just taking the check. The boys and girls from Official Conservatism™ on the payroll of PBS and CNN were taking a dive on purpose so they could get paid.

It’s why the Tea Party was doomed from the start. When guys like Dick Army got involved, you knew it as a con. More important, the organizers were clawing each other’s eyes out trying to get on TV. These were not people motivated by a cause. They were motivated by the desire to be famous and hang around green rooms with the Lefties they saw on television. Those are people easy to corrupt so it was just a matter of when, not if, they sold out their people, which most promptly did for short money.

What has always been encouraging about Trump is he seems to get this. He has done almost no taped interviews and he avoided private interviews with news sites like the NYTimes and Washington Post. In the former case, he knew they would edit the hell out of his interview because he saw it first hand doing his TV shows. In the latter case, he knew these people were not honest. They lie on spec and giving them a private interview would only enable them make up fake news about Trump.

Trump’s live events were big enough to require coverage, but he put the media in pens so they could not pretend to be talking to Nazis and Klansmen in the crowd. The only thing they could do was show the video and moan about it. You also note that Trump uses lots of hand gestures when speaking. He never used to do this, but I suspect he started doing it because it makes editing impossible. As you can see in this Breitbart story, editing is now the main tool of the media.

National Public Radio ombudsman/public editor Elizabeth Jensen has recommended that the taxpayer-funded radio news service bar future live interviews of conservatives who may have controversial views, following an interview Nov. 16 with Breitbart News’ Joel B. Pollak.

Pollak, who serves as Breitbart’s Senior Editor-at-Large and In-house Counsel, defended its Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon from false and defamatory claims of antisemitism and “white nationalism.” He also turned the tables, pointing out that NPR has “racist programming,” including a story that called the 2016 election results “nostalgia for a whiter America.”

 

NPR listeners were apparently outraged that anyone from Breitbart News had been given an opportunity to defend the website and its chairman.

 

In her response, “Listeners: Two Recent Interviews Are ‘Normalizing Hate Speech’,” Jensen concluded that the live format had allowed Pollak to get the better of host Steve Inskeep.

 

She suggested that future interviews be taped: “In addition, in my opinion, these interviews should not be done live. Inskeep is an excellent live interviewer, but live interviews are difficult, especially when there is limited time. A little contextualizing never hurts.”

In other words, live interview make it hard to fake the interview. In the Reagan years, the press complained that Reagan sat for few taped interviews and he preferred giving speeches to be covered live. Trump seems to have learned this and taken it to another level with the use of social media. What he was able to do is keep the media on the wrong foot, always playing defense, even when they thought they had him, like with the fake bimbo stories. By being unpredictable, he was impossible to script.

It’s a good lesson for the Dissidents doing interviews on Lefty media. Avoid anything that is taped and only do live interviews. Supporting media that supports you has a corollary. Don’t support media that is at war with you. If you are at an event, just ignore the people with cameras and microphones. When you see people claiming to be prominent members of the alt-right, for example, begging to be on CNN or FNC, it is a safe bet that they are just in it for the money and you would be wise to tune them out and drop them from your rotation.

The New Model Rhodesia

I read a book years back titled Banana Sunday by a former Telegraph reporter named Chris Munnion. The book is a memoir about his career covering Africa for the British papers. Munnion was an old school reporter. By that I mean he did not subscribe to narrative journalism where the reporters collect up facts to fit the pre-written story. In his memoir he covers the rise of that form of journalism and why it was and is totally insane. That’s not the point of the book, but it is an interesting side bar. Otherwise, the book is about Africa.

The book is full of a great observations about the Dark Continent, but the part that stuck with me is on the fall of Rhodesia. There are two schools of thought on what happened in Rhodesia. One says it was inevitable, as Africans would eventually revolt against their white rulers just on racial grounds. We don’t hear this sort of argument much these days, as it is just politely assumed. The fact that what came next for what is now called Zimbabwe is not exactly the ringing endorsement for the claims of the multiculturalists.

The other school of thought says that Zimbabwe is the inevitable end of multiculturalism. The elevation of non-whites to preferred status is simply viewed as a surrender by whites to non-whites, who do what victors always do in ethnic conflict. They slaughter and subjugate the vanquished. In 1960 Rhodesia was 4% white, with the prosperous portion in the south being 7% white. The total population was 8 million. Today it is all black with a population of 15 million. It is also one of the poorest countries in the world.

The thing about these competing theories is they are not really in competition as they both accept the inevitable conclusion. In the West, the people in charge are possessed with a bizarre fatalism about migration out of the south into the north. Exactly no one makes the claim that importing millions of Muslims into Europe, for example, is good for Europeans. They simply claim that it is inevitable and since the mystery forces of history will it, it must be the morally correct thing to embrace. Right side of history and all that.

You see this in the increasingly bizarre acting out by America’s PC elites on the college campus. This story from Emory University is one that caught my attention, because it shows that we are a long way from the old Civil Rights days of equality and integration. There’s little doubt that the organizer spends his free time nursing anti-white revenge fantasies, where his tribe rises up and smashes the Pale Penis People. After all, if your organizing principle is hatred of the honkies, what else are you dreaming about?

If these sorts of things were organized by fringe minority nutters, it would be of no consequence. The truth is multiculturalism shrivels up in an instant without the support of white elites. They invented it and they sustain it. It is their religion. Non-whites are vastly more practical, but they play along as this is their ticket up the social ladder. Fifty years ago black elites named their kids after Founders and preached the Protestant work ethic to one another. Today, they give their kids nonsense names and preach hatred of whitey.

When you read about Rhodesia the thing that jumps out is that many of the whites in charge of the country were just as delusional as their superiors back home. Both assumed things about the black population that have proven to be completely false. The people on the ground, however, had enough of a survival instinct to work their way through reality to a solution. The European elites were simply too drunk on multiculturalism to see what was happening and anyway, they were isolated from it.

There’s a similar vibe going on in the West today. The overgrown boys and girls romping around the campus kindergartens of America are just high on the fumes of their own sanctimony. They can indulge all of their fantasies because they are inoculated from reality, at least for now. They can rail against white males and turn them into lepers on campus because there’s no risk. Even if public pressure thwarts these efforts, guys like DeLa Sweeney suffer no personal or professional consequences.

The big difference between what happened in post-colonial Africa and what is happening in the West now is there is no escape. Instead, the elites, based on and around the campus, both corporate and academic, imagine a world like New Haven. Yale is a safe, secure world where the modern Eloi can live self-actualizing lives. Occasionally one of them is eaten by the Morlocks living down the hill in the rough parts of New Haven, but otherwise they are immune to the reality of daily life. That’s the future our elites dream for themselves.

I’m sure it will work out just fine.

Pink State

Imagine the space-time continuum gets scrambled and you find yourself in a world where the coming election is between a crazy old cat lady, an old hippie, Hitler and Mussolini. Hitler is leading one major party and Mussolini is leading another major party. The hippie and the cat lady have no party and very little support. As a practical matter, your choice is between Hitler and Mussolini. More important, you know the ramifications of both choices. The former is murder and mayhem and the latter is authoritarianism and long speeches.

To anyone with a soul, the choice is clear. You vote for Mussolini. It’s a terrible option, but so is chemotherapy. No one enthusiastically opts for chemotherapy, but it beats dying from cancer. If you told your doctor that your morals prevented you from choosing chemo, so you were going to visit some guy with magic crystals, your doctor would try to have you committed. Similarly, no one would wants Mussolini as the ruler, but he is a vastly better option than Hitler. You do what you must, even when it is unpleasant, to stop Hitler.

To continue this a bit further, imagine if someone came up to you are said “I’m Susan Wright and my principles prevent me from voting Mussolini, even though I know Hitler will murder millions, so I’m voting for the goofy hippie guy.” You would have dark thoughts about that person. They are willing to stand aside and allow something truly horrible just so they can avoid doing something unpleasant. To make it worse, they demand that you pretend that their cowardice and treachery is high minded.

Further, you would look at those people investing all of their energy ridiculing Mussolini as pro-Hitler partisans. After all, the successful end of the efforts can only mean one thing –  Hitler wins. They could protest all they like that they hate both Hitler and Mussolini, but you would know them by their deeds. They are working to pave the way for Hitler, regardless of their reasoning. If successful, they would be, in part, responsible for what comes next. Blood would be on their hands and you would feel justified in holding them responsible.

Alternatively, if someone came up to you and made the case for Hitler, along with pointing out the faults of Mussolini, you would not feel the urge to punch them in the face. They may be horribly mistaken, but at least they are being honest. They are pro-Hitler and they take responsibility for it. They own it. Who knows, they could be right and Mussolini is worse in the long run. In theory, at least, you can debate this with the Hitler fans and maybe in the process sway some undecided voters to your side.

Obviously, you see what I’m doing here. Replace Hitler with Clinton and Mussolini with Trump and we have the debate between the Cult of Never Trump and the rest of us. No one thinks Trump is the ideal candidate. Many of us think he is a awful candidate, but he is orders of magnitude better than Clinton. Her election means the nation lurches into authoritarianism. What comes next will be unfathomably horrible. If you have a soul, you do what you must to prevent evil from triumphing. Susan Wright has no soul.

This twitter exchange I had with her is the genesis of this post:

Red State, of course, has gone full-on moonbat. Their only reason to exist these days is to bash Trump and Trump voters. A moral nullity like Susan Wright also takes time out to bash other Dirt People like Sarah Palin. Even loopy liberals have moved on from Palin-bashing, but as a dog returns to its vomit, the degenerate social justice warriors of the Never Trump Cult go back to Palin-bashing when they need material. Reading her posts, you could be forgiven for thinking she was a writer for Salon.

To return to my analogy, Susan Wright is the sort that would spend all her time harping about the defects of Mussolini, then claim she is standing on principle, as Hitler rounds up the Jews and packs them off to the gas chambers. She would rather something horrible happen, than get her hands dirty doing the hard work of opposing evil. Of course, that assumes she thinks Clinton is a bad choice. Again, reading her posts, it’s hard not to think she is related to the old bag, not just a supporter.

After the war, many Germans tried to say they did not know what was happening so they should not be held accountable for supporting the Nazis. The question in those cases was whether or not the person should have known or could have known. The Clinton Crime Family has been a known quantity for 25 years. Susan Wright and her ilk know exactly what comes from a Clinton victory. Blood will be on their hands. “I did not know” is not going to be an acceptable excuse when the time comes.