Category Archives: Progressives

Immigration & The Moonbats

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My office manager is a communist. She’s not a young nitwit with a head full of nonsense. She is an old women who grew up wishing her parents were communists. From what I can gather, she has signed up for every crackpot scheme to bubble forth from the Cult of Modern Liberalism since her glory days as a teenager.

Whenever we discuss politics, which is something I try to avoid, her preferred solution is for the men with guns to impose a uniform solution on all of us. The phrase “single payer” pops out of her mouth anytime health care is mentioned. She has Moonbat Tourette’s.

Today we were talking about current events and the subject of immigration came up, regarding the lower classes. We were having some moving done and the crew that showed up was mostly Hispanic, with a few blacks. The guy running the show was Eastern European. My guess is he hits one of the many open air labor markets for day labor. The moving business is a tough way to make a living so Sergei can’t worry about the niceties of the current labor laws. He needs cheap labor.

I fully admit to being a bit torn on the issue of immigration. My grandparents were immigrants. Even though I now “identify” as African American on government forms, my genome says my people come from Eurasia. They fled the Bolsheviks and set up shop in America.

I kind of dig the fact that my country welcomes those who can’t seem to get along with the folks back in the old country. I love thinking about what the rest of the world thinks when all those mutts wrapped in Old Glory march into the Olympic stadium. You just know a lot of them are thinking, “I wish that was me.”

In my mind, I see that as a big old middle finger to the rest of the world. I get that from my grandfather. He was never a rich man, but he loved the “fuck you” side of being an American. He came here, learned perfect English and made a life for himself as an American. As far as he was concerned, the folks back in the old country were losers.

That bit of sentimentality is not intended to get your patriotism up. I’m just stating my bias. I have an unreasonable bias toward immigrants, at least the ones trying to be Americans. But, that only works if citizenship has any value. If anyone can wander over the border and get all the same rights and privileges as me, the citizenship has no value. Further, my loyalty to my country evaporates.

Anyway, that’s where I come from on immigration issue. Talking with my commie office manager, I was surprised at how strongly she is opposed to immigration. Her reasoning is that it hurts blacks and poor whites. I get the sense she is new to the subject, at least this side of the topic. She’s up on all the latest Progressive trends so I doubt she has arrived at this position independently. She’s getting this from somewhere.

The other thing she said is that immigration is a tool for corporations to exploit the middle-class. She is a big Elizabeth Warren fans so I suspect all of these new opinions from my office manager are coming from the Fake Indian side of the fever swamp. Warren has voted in line with her party on immigration, but I don’t recall her saying much about it.

Warren’s faculty lounge populism mostly appeals to credentialed Progressives who resent not making more money. A rich white woman standing on the steps of her mansion, ranting about the rich strikes normal people are laughably absurd. I think Progressives understand that this brand of populism has a small audience so they are looking to expand into other areas.

The idiots in the GOP may be focused on winning Hispanic votes, but the Progressives know better. They need to get white people voting for them again and an easy way to do that is the immigration card. They can even pitch immigration restrictions as a way to help immigrants, thus avoiding the charge of xenophobia.

There’s always been a Star-Bellied Sneetch quality to American Progressives. By that I mean they get revved up on a fad and it eventually fades, to be replaced by a new fad that often contradicts the old fad. In that regard, liberals are like teenage girls. In order to distinguish themselves from the Old New New Left of the Obama years, the New New New Left is embracing immigration restriction.

The polling on the issue makes clear that a hawkish position on immigration is the safe one and that may be what’s happening here. As both parties gear up for 2016, they are figuring out that the mood of the public is running away from them so they need to catch up. Whether or not the people in charge will follow on is unknown, but we may be seeing a paradigm shift over the next 18 months on the issue of immigration.

Or, my office manager will be burned at the stake by her coven for the crime of apostasy.

 

Barak Milhous Nixon

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One of the striking things about the Left is just how much they model their tactics on those they swore Nixon used against them back in the last Great Liberal Awakening. Even forty years ago, when the Left was in a panic over Tricky Dick, their charges sounded more like a revenge fantasy than plausible reality. By that, I mean they were accusing Nixon of what they would do if only they were in his position.

A good recent example is Obama’s “Executive Amnesty” that was just blocked by the courts. This is reminiscent of Nixon’s use of impoundment, the power of the executive to not spend appropriated funds. In theory it gives the executive the opportunity to reign in nutty ideas funded by Congress. In practice, it was simply a way for a president to block spending on something he did not want.

The paranoia of the Left about Nixon, the imaginary one not the real one, led to the Impoundment Act of 1974. This stripped the power from the executive. Like most of what the Left claimed about Nixon, they imagined he was doing what they would do if they had the chance. In reality, Nixon’s use of impoundment was trivial.

The Left claimed Nixon was trying to be an emperor, which is always a concern in our form of government. There’s a balance between the executive, legislative and judicial. Giving the president too much power runs the risk of sublimating the other two branches to the whims of a temporary dictator. A degree of paranoia about what the executive is doing or planning is probably healthy.

Of course, no such paranoia exists now because Obama is the leader of the Cult of Modern Liberalism. The Führerprinzip has always been very strong with American Progressives. Just look at how they rallied to defend Bill Clinton, despite knowing he violated holy writ. With Obama, it is off the charts because they truly think he is Chocolate Jesus. There’s nothing the man could do to shake their faith in The One. Naturally, they are defending his lawless amnesty to the last man.

Yesterday I got home and flipped on the news. A Greg Gutfeld show was on and one of the people on the set with him was repeating the old line about Obama’s amnesty relying on the precedent of Reagan. It is nonsense and a lie, but the Cult believes it so they keep chanting it nonetheless. The striking thing about what the woman was saying is just how much it reminded me of the Nixon years. Nixon was no Boy Scout and he often justified his actions by comparing them to past liberal presidents. This tactic sent the Left into a frenzy. He was trolling them, in a way.

Here we are forty years later and the Cult is doing all the things Nixon did, plus the things they imagined Nixon wanted to do , but never got around to doing. The IRS scandal is a good example of how Obama is making Nixon look like a piker. Having the DOJ harass reporters as Obama has done would have led to massive protests in the 1970’s, championed by every news organization in the country. Today they defend it because it is their cult and that’s how cults work.

This amnesty stuff is more striking in that it gets to the heart of the liberal brief against Nixon. That is, an Imperial President inevitably leads to an Emperor. It was not what Nixon did that warranted removal; it was what he could do that warranted removal. The justification for pushing through The Impoundment Act was that Nixon, in the midst of Watergate, could not be trusted with that power.

Fast forward forty years and we have Obama claiming he can re-interpret laws in ways that clearly contradict the letter of the law. In this case, he says can direct federal agencies to not enforce certain criminal statutes and direct other agencies to ignore certain legal requirements. There’s no discussion of a limiting principle, which means there is no boundary to this authority. Logically, what they are claiming is the president could stop the FBI from arresting bank robbers and order prosecutors to drop all their criminal cases. In short, he can re-write the laws as he sees fit.

Interestingly, someone in the administration sees the problem and the risk of such an approach. If you read the judges ruling, it appears Obama never actually signed an executive order, which is a legally recognized document. Instead, he ordered DHS to issue a memorandum. The judge wrote that “both sides agree that the president in his official capacity has not directly instituted any program at issue in this case.”

Later he writes, “Regardless of the fact that the Executive Branch has made public statements to the contrary, there are no executive orders or other presidential proclamations or communiqué that exist regarding DAPA. The DAPA memorandum issued by Secretary Johnson is the focus in this suit.”

This is something even Nixon, the imaginary one concocted by the Left, was never able to conjure. Here we have the president saying he has issued an order, when in fact he did not. Of course, the reason for lying to the public is to deceive, something Tricky Dick was accused of in the Articles of Impeachment drawn up by Congress. Not actually issuing the executive order is an obvious attempt to shield the president from legal jeopardy. Again, that’s a degree of slipperiness Nixon could not imagine.

Liberal FieldTurf

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Nancy Pelosi famously called the Tea Party “AstroTurf” alleging it was a synthetic grass roots movement just as AstroTurf is synthetic grass. It was a clever line and whoever wrote it for her deserves credit. Pelosi then went on to repeat a million time like some sort of malfunctioning robot. The rest of her cult followed suit, like chanting monks in a monastery. Within a week it was self-parody.

The person who came up with the line is also a member of the cult and as such assumes the world beyond the walls works just like the world within the wall. Inside the walls, everything is carefully choreographed. Nothing is spontaneous. Unity and conformity are essential to the functioning of a hive so the adherent naturally assume their enemies operate the same way.

Reality, as we often see with the Cult of Modern Liberalism, is 180 degrees out of phase with their perceptions. It is primarily their group that is responsible for synthetic protests and marches. It turns out that the attempts to angry up blacks in Ferguson was a George Soros operation.

There’s a solitary man at the financial center of the Ferguson protest movement. No, it’s not victim Michael Brown or Officer Darren Wilson. It’s not even the Rev. Al Sharpton, despite his ubiquitous campaign on TV and the streets.

Rather, it’s liberal billionaire George Soros, who has built a business empire that dominates across the ocean in Europe while forging a political machine powered by nonprofit foundations that impacts American politics and policy, not unlike what he did with MoveOn.org.

Mr. Soros spurred the Ferguson protest movement through years of funding and mobilizing groups across the U.S., according to interviews with key players and financial records reviewed by The Washington Times.

In all, Mr. Soros gave at least $33 million in one year to support already-established groups that emboldened the grass-roots, on-the-ground activists in Ferguson, according to the most recent tax filings of his nonprofit Open Society Foundations.

The financial tether from Mr. Soros to the activist groups gave rise to a combustible protest movement that transformed a one-day criminal event in Missouri into a 24-hour-a-day national cause celebre.

The proof that the opposition to the Cult is non-existent is right here. Soros should have died of lead poisoning long ago. If the opposition had any strength at all, someone would have made the call. Instead, Soros operates with impunity in the US.

“Our DNA includes a belief that having people participate in government is indispensable to living in a more just, inclusive, democratic society,” said Kenneth Zimmerman, director of Mr. Soros‘ Open Society Foundations’ U.S. programs, in an interview with The Washington Times. “Helping groups combine policy, research [and] data collection with community organizing feels very much the way our society becomes more accountable.”

I’m working on a longer post that goes into the consequences of letting the Cult control the language. Mr. Soros is a fascist and pours tens of millions into stifling dissent. Everything about his operation is intended to stifle debate and silence dissent. Yet, he calls his operation the Open Society Foundation. By open, he means closed. It’s the Opposite Rule of Liberalism.
The other proof that the opposition is non-existent is this story took months to get out into the public domain. Surely the GOP operatives knew what was happening. Team Obama was trying to whip up black anger in order to get their base out on election day. That meant the money men were there paying for the riots. Waving the Soros connection around would have been good business for the GOP, but they couldn’t muster the resources to get the story out.

So?

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The late great Andrew Breitbart used to have a great way to befuddle moralizing liberals in TV. The liberal would go on a rant about something, which meant repeating the liberal pieties about the subject, then sitting back, full of righteous indignation expecting Andrew to cower. Instead, he would respond with “So?” and a rye smile. He had the perfect look to pull it off and the confidence to deliver it on target. The liberal would be poleaxed, unsure why they did not get the expected reaction.

I thought of then when looking at this:

THE brutal murder of 12 people at the offices of a satirical magazine in Paris today appears to have been carried out by militant Islamists. If so, many will again question the compatability of Islam with secular-minded, liberal European values. Mistrust of religion is not confined to Islam, but Europeans regard it as more threatening to their national cultures than other faiths (or indeed atheism), according to a 2013 poll by the Bertelsmann Foundation, a non-profit organisation in Germany. The threat of Islamic terrorism is rising, to judge not just by today’s slaughter but also by other attacks and a recent upward trend in arrests for religiously-inspired terrorism reported by Europol, the European Union’s law-enforcement arm. Perceptions can easily run ahead of reality, however. There were still more arrests for other types of terrorism (motivated by separatism, for example) in Europe in 2013, the last year for which pan-European data are available. And European publics wildly overestimate the proportion of their populations that is Muslim: an Ipsos-Mori poll in 2014 found that on average French respondents thought 31% of their compatriots were Muslim, against an actual figure closer to 8%.

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So what? People are notoriously poor at this sort of thing. They simply pick a number that feels big or small or about right, depending upon the subject. Americans wildly overestimate the number of queers in the population. The reason is we are bombarded with the subject by the Cult of Modern Liberalism. It feels like there are many more than there are, which is what should be the point. Europeans are suffering from a similar phenomenon. Culturally, Islam is punching way above its weight in Europe so it feels like Muslims are swarming in big numbers.

This sort of passive-aggressive tactic is popular with the CML. Instead of making an argument and supplying facts to support it, they put things “out there” to shift the focus. You can be sure that the chattering skulls in Europe will prefer focusing on this rather than the lunacy of importing millions of Muslims. That’s what made Brietbart’s retort so much fun. It turned the focus back on the other guy, forcing him to explain himself.

Never Cross The Left

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I’m fond of comparing the Left with Islam, as I think there are a lot of points of comparison between the two. That and it drives Progressives bonkers, but both religions do have a lot in common. One good example of a commonality is the willingness and ability to hold grudges. Once either religion puts you on the list, they never forget about you. The Friday news dump brings word that the Feds plan to charge General Petraeus will be indicted for pillow talk.

The F.B.I. and Justice Department prosecutors have recommended bringing felony charges against retired Gen. David H. Petraeus for providing classified information to his former mistress while he was director of the C.I.A., officials said, leaving Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to decide whether to seek an indictment that could send the pre-eminent military officer of his generation to prison.

The Justice Department investigation stems from an affair Mr. Petraeus had with Paula Broadwell, an Army Reserve officer who was writing his biography, and focuses on whether he gave her access to his C.I.A. email account and other highly classified information. F.B.I. agents discovered classified documents on her computer after Mr. Petraeus resigned from the C.I.A. in 2012 when the affair became public.

Petraeus was put on the proscribed list back in the Bush years when he managed to change the course of the Iraq mess, thus stealing a victory from the other fundamentalists going crazy at the time, the Democratic Party. The fanatic website MoveOn.org ran full page ads in the New Cult Times issuing a fatwa denouncing Patraeus as a heretic traitor. The Islamists Democrats continued to call him General BetrayUs through the remainder of the Bush years.

The Left never forgets about these things. They finally got their man when he foolishly decided to accept the CIA post from the Obama administration. That was probably a setup. In order to get the job he had to submit to a full FBI background check. You would think this happens with generals while they serve, but that’s not the case. The FBI is supposed to do regular background checks on people holding security clearances, but they don’t. Nominating Patraeus to the CIA post was like the mob boss setting up a meet with his arch enemy in order to whack him.

As Steve Sailer pointed out at the time, the affair that got Patreaus jammed up was surely turned up long before it was revealed. It is one of those useful things in the sort of war-band politics played in DC these days. Whether or not they dropped the dime on him to cover up their shenanigans in Libya is debatable, but they put the screws to him for a reason.

The decision to send the guy to prison leads me to believe it is revenge, not some Libya conspiracy. The press did all the hard work covering up the gun running the administration was doing in the Maghreb. There was no need to blackmail Patraeus. I could be wrong, but that’s my sense. The White House put the hit on the general to pay a debt to the fanatics. This is just the finishing blow.

It is yet another example of how the the normals simply don’t get what they are dealing with in regards to American liberalism. They keep thinking these people can be reasoned with like normal people. Instead, what we call the Left is more like the Scientology. Their primary motivation is defense of the cause. That trumps everything. All enemies within striking distance must be struck, no matter the cost.

 

True Believers at War

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Razib Khan has a post up responding to something Ezra Klein posted regarding the Paris incident. First here’s the Ezra Klein piece. This is the bit that got Razib exorcised:

These murders can’t be explained by a close read of an editorial product, and they needn’t be condemned on free speech grounds. They can only be explained by the madness of the perpetrators, who did something horrible and evil that almost no human beings anywhere ever do, and the condemnation doesn’t need to be any more complex than saying unprovoked mass slaughter is wrong.

This is a tragedy. It is a crime. It is not a statement, or a controversy.

Razib first wonders if Klein had some sort of aneurism while writing that bit. Maybe he is unfamiliar with Klein’s work, but that piece was probably one of the better ones from the Vox project. I have no idea what sort of traffic the site gets, but no one ever mentions it, unless it is to mock Ezra Klein. Even the mockery has faded, for the most part. Anyway, Razib goes on to make an excellent point:

This co-mingling of religious and communal identity is not an aberration, but the human norm over most of history. In much of the world it still is the norm. Dishonoring the gods of barbarians and unbelievers has long been a matter of course. Churches were built over temples and mosques over churches for a reason. To show the power of one communal identity and the eclipse of another. Gods and people were interchangeable in the psyche. When the Assyrians sacked Babylon they dragged away the statue of the god Marduk in chains. But individuals dishonoring the gods of their own people was always a matter of serious concern, violating public order, and potentially undermining social harmony (often, innovation in religious practice prefigured rebellion). It doesn’t take much to imagine that there might be functional reason for societies to establish taboos of what is inviolate and sacred, and sanction those who trespass.

It is incorrectly assumed that religions must have an invisible man in the sky component. Dividing theology from ideology by the presence or absence of the super natural is convenient, but leads to the false assumption that ideologies are devoid of magical thinking. That’s not the case.

The most obvious example is PETA, the cult that claims to be the guardians of non-human mammal rights. The adherents of that cult imagine all sorts of things about animals that are laughably untrue. They also proselytize about the killing of animals, while running abattoirs all over the country.

Ezra Klein is a conventional liberal and of middling intelligence. He is not a blockhead, but he has a narrow mindedness that suggests a lack of curiosity about the world. He’s also overstocked with religiosity. It’s why his posts often sound like the journal entries of a rabbinical student or the private musings of a novice monk. He is forever wrestling with his faith.

Luckily for him, the prevailing religion of modern America is cultural Marxism so he has found a comfortable place to cast himself as a post-modern Tertullian. He has organized his life around proselytizing over the Internet. As a novice he worked his way up to a major media organ, but that was not enough. He went off to build his own Mosque called Vox where he can pray and train others to believe like him. It’s not a coincidence that cultural Marxism has many of the same structures as Islam.

Of course, Ezra really does not believe the things he preaches in the sense that he knows them to be true. I know two plus two is four for all known values of two. There’s no need for me to argue it or prove it. The reason for proselytizing is to convince yourself by convincing others. Misery loves company and so do the believers. Vox in explanatory journalism in the same sense that Shia is explanatory Islam.

One fascinating thing about the Paris attack is watching how the Left reacts to it. At some level, it seems they get that they are at war with a complimentary religion. As Razib points out, every religion has its taboos. Much of what modern liberalism preaches is taboo in Islam. What is sacred in Islam is considered barbaric by liberals.

The trouble is the Left can’t bring itself to condemn Islam. That’s simply against the core of their faith. Islam does not suffer from such a defect. They get that they are a religion at war with another religion. Hilariously, even when Islam makes that point, liberals are forced to call them liars and inauthentic Muslims.

Added to the crazy stew is the fact that western liberals have a technological edge and are killing Muslims wholesale. Muslims have to settle for retail killing, like the Paris attack. The simple solution is to expel all Muslims for Western lands, but again, they bump into their own dogma prohibiting such things. The result is a surge in Muslim immigrants, hell bent on killing the decadent West.

This will not end well.

Sincerity Versus Piety

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A fact of the human condition that baffles most people is that humans are believing machines. Belief is a vital part of human existence. In fact, you can’t have human society without the human trait of belief. It allows for the building of cultural institutions, which are the storehouse of human knowledge.

The natural tendency of humans to accept, on faith, what is told to them by their parents, other adults and even their peers is what allows us to advance in a material and evolve in a cultural sense. If everything your parents told you, for example, had to be proved to you before you would accept it, humans would not have got past hunter gatherer stage. We would never have climbed down from the trees.

Norse mythology developed over a long period of time, probably a 1000 years before the runic alphabet. Throughout human settlement, there is a similarity of belief. You have a pantheon of gods, creation myths, codes, explanations of the natural world and so on. It’s easy to see why these people believed in this stuff, but it is hard to figure why they settled on this specific stuff. Yet, they did and did so just about everywhere.

In modern times, belief is most on display when it comes to politics and culture. For example, Liberals believe the Red Team is evil. So much so, they oppose everything the Red Team supports. Liberals believe Christians and Southerners are evil too. That’s why they refuse to go to Chick-fil-A and WalMart. Lefty women were visibly spooked by images of Sarah Palin.

You see some of this on the Right, but it is less clear. Lots of non-Liberals watch ESPN and 60 minutes, despite the fact these outfits are run by lunatics. Still, you have a lot of non-Liberals convinced the GOP is the only answer, despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary. Americans outside the liberal hive tend to be into conventional religions so maybe that’s why their political intensity is much lower.

Anyway, this was posted on MR  the other day. This bit from Thomas Sowell is is the inspiration for this post.

Sincerity is so central to the unconstrained vision that it is not readily conceded to adversaries, who are often depicted as apologists, if not venal. It is not uncommon in this tradition to find references to their adversaries’ “real” reasons, which must be “unmasked.” Even where sincerity is conceded to adversaries, it is often accompanied by references to those adversaries’ “blindness,” “prejudice,” or narrow inability to transcend the status quo. Within the unconstrained vision, sincerity is a great concession to make, while those with the constrained vision can more readily make that concession, since it means so much less to them. Nor need adversaries be depicted as stupid by those with the constrained vision, for they conceive of the social process as so complex that it is easy, even for wise and moral individuals, to be mistaken — and dangerously so. They ‘may do the worst of things without being the worst of man,’ according to Burke. (pg 59-60)

This is why it is best to look at our political tribes in terms of religion, rather than conscious philosophical outlook. What Sowell sees as a ranking of character traits, is best viewed as in-group/out-group signaling. The hive minded always assign the worst imaginable traits to those outside the hive or anyone they see as a threat. Paul Krugman’s hive puts purity of faith above all us, therefore those outside the hive lack faith or sincerity.

It’s why the concept of indifference is alien to the Left. Everyone is either inside or outside the walls. Everyone has had that weird conversation with a lefty about something like homosexual marriage. Shrugging your shoulders and saying you don’t care is not enough. You have to be either for or against. In the old days abortion was this subject. You could easily have lost friends over it.

For the hive minded, people are not just wrong; they are a mortal threat because they oppose that which gives the adherent a reason to exist. Early Greek generals started to figure this out while observing how their men fought differently on their home turf than on the road. Additionally, Greeks fighting other Greeks could feel empathy for their enemies when they saw how they defended their lands and families.

The remedy to this was to find ways to convince the fighters that the enemy was evil in some way that made them undeserving of sympathy. Plunder was simply not enough to motivate men to kill their neighbors. The solution developed over time was small unit training to build loyalty within the ranks. When the men saw one another as blood brothers, those opposed were blood enemies. It is why trench socialism is still a part of Progressive proselytizing, despite their own social chauvinism.

What is passed off as sincerity, is actually an obsession with piety. Inside the hive, public displays of piety are critical to reinforcing one’s place in the hive. Those who fail in their devotions are, in effect, personally rejecting the group. Pretending to be pious, but secretly rejecting the group is crime because it undermines the very foundation of the group. Therefore, assigning this quality to the enemies of the group is not a lot different than ancient soldiers hurling curses at their enemy before battle. It reinforces reasons for the group and motivates the adherents to make war on their enemies.

 

 

Visiting the Hive

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Here we go again. The last time they got caught coordinating their “news reporting” it was very entertaining. Tucker Carlson really enjoyed tormenting them with their own e-mails. While there’s nothing wrong with members of the same club buzzing together on-line, these are the folks constantly tisk-tisking about ethics in journalism and all that nonsense. It looks like some of them did not learn their lesson.

A prominent CNN commentator, the top two political reporters for The Huffington Post, a Reuters reporter, the editor of The Nation magazine, a producer for Al Jazeera America television, a U.S. News & World Report columnist, and approximately two dozen Huffington Post contributors are among the more than 1,000 members of Gamechanger Salon.

Founded by leftwing activist Billy Wimsatt, the group is a secretive digital gathering of writers, opinion leaders, activists and political hands who share information, ideas and strategy via a closed Google group.

The group’s existence was discovered by Media Trackers through an open records request filed with a University of Wisconsin professor who happened to be a member of the network.

There’s something deeply weird about people in a competitive racket like the media going in for something like this. The reason these liberal personalities blend together on the screen is all of them say the same things. Talk radio guys love doing montages of them using the exact same phrasing. It’s good radio. If your career depends on being a draw on TV or on-line, blending in with the blob seems odd.

But, I’m not a member of a cult.

Related is a very weird post on Wonkette.

Pity the poor wingnuts. They worked so hard to bust ACORN into a million pieces and salt the earth so no part of it would ever grow back. Little did they know that the Progressive Menace was just using ACORN as a distraction while it rebuilt the most fearsome of all anti-American organizations dedicated to spreading leftist propaganda like the Ebola virus: JournoList, which has been reconstituted as a closed Google Group called Gamechanger Salon. And the conservative website Mediatrackers.org is ON IT.

First, a disclaimer: Despite our impeccable leftist credentials, yr Wonkette is not now, nor has it ever been, a member of the Communist Party secretive anti-American group Gamechanger Salon. Nor would we join a group with such a stupid name. Seriously, you guys couldn’t come up with something better? The wingnuts are going to find it scary no matter what, so go all out. Call it Mao’s House of Propaganda or All Hail Pol Pot or HITLER! (The all caps with exclamation point is so they know you’re serious.)

Another coo-coo for cocoa-puffs site I used to like trolling was FireDongLake. All of these lefty sites popped up in the middle of the Bush years and most were founded by women or homosexuals. In other words, people with hormonal imbalances seem to be drawn to this form paranoid stuff.

The Poor Door

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Maybe landlords will label the doors “Gamma”, “Delta” or “Epsilon” and give the tenants different keys based on their social standing. Perhaps they will just make them scale a fence or navigate through obstacles to get into the building. This story is not all that clear on the details, but the “poor door” is coming to a reservation near you.

New York City has approved a developer’s Dickensian plan to include a “poor door” in a luxury apartment complex in the Upper West Side.

The prospect of a separate entrance for lower-income residents has been circulating for some time, but as the New York Postreported today, plans by company Extell Development to put a separate entrance for affordable housing tenants, who make 60 percent or less of median income, in the 33-story condo have been given the green light. The property will have 219 units, including 55 affordable units overlooking the street. Those renting and buying the apartments at the market-rate will have waterfront views.

The entrance is part of the Inclusionary Housing Program application, under which developers can build larger projects if they also provide low-income housing, either on- or off-site.

The mock outrage by the snooty writer is tiresome. Liberals have been self-segregating for years. They have driven most of the NAM population out of San Francisco. They are doing the same in DC, where blacks are no longer a majority. Similarly, gentrification in NYC is intended to drive away the NAM population so young professionals like Lucy Westcott can live in trendy urban neighborhoods.

Beyond that, it is just the natural evolution of the servant’s entrance. Before we got all of these egalitarian ideas in our heads, it was simply understood that the rich did not want to mix it up with the poor. Big houses had a separate entrance for the cooks, nannies, gardeners and other staff. For live-in staff, there were quarters on the edge of the property or maybe above the carriage house or garage. No one thought it strange or mean, especially not the servants. The poor have always known their place.

The approval of the entrance at 40 Riverside has prompted outrage, with many on social media calling it nothing more than an updated version of segregation. ThinkProgress’ report notes that issues affecting low-income tenants in luxury buildings — which include not being allowed to use perks like the gym or pools — usually fall on people of color.

Brooklyn Magazine points out that it’s “not an unusual scheme” to include affordable housing units in fancy buildings that will remain, for most people, mere real estate fantasies. But New York Magazine reminds us that the entrance will serve the purpose of  “[sparing] all the residents from the terrible awkwardness of regularly encountering people whose lifestyles differ from theirs, or something.”

The only people outraged are the credentialed urban lefties who think it is grossly unfair that they don’t get to live like the over-class. That’s the dirty little secret of the meritocracy. The truly poor now live on welfare. The dwindling working class is supplemented by indirect welfare payments like public schools, free health insurance and so forth. The urban middle lass is now the servant class to the rich. Young Lucy Westcott, is merely a servant for the rich people signing her paychecks.

That’s why the people most outraged by inequality are the urban credentialed lefties of the managerial class. They were told all along they were special little snowflakes and destined to rule the world. Now they find out that the rich are nothing like them and they will never be in that class. Instead, they will be the modern equivalent of footmen, chauffeurs and coat holders to the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world. They don’t like it one bit, so we get these tantrums.

The Religious Divide

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Way back in the olden thymes, “spiritual” people eschewed traditional religion, in favor of pseudo-paganism and Eastern mysticism. Along with it came sub-cults like saving the whales or saving the environment. Concern for people and things over the horizon is the hallmark of new age religion. Most of these people were miserable to their families and friends, but they had nothing but love for mother earth, nature and oppressed people living far away.

All of that nonsense from the 60’s and 70’s was just religion for people who liked the benefits of public piety, but were not into any of the sacrifices. They had special outfits to wear in public, signaling their goodness. They ate strange foods and got into meditation and yoga. Bumper stickers were a big thing. it was a way for them to impose their values on you without taking an risk. That’s the thing with the self-righteous and publicly pious. It grace without sacrifice for them.

Still, they were a minor nuisance, for the most part. Cleaning up rivers and protecting wildlife is the sort of stuff rich societies can do without causing too much trouble. It is what economist call public goods. Despite the fact the people behind these efforts were mostly monomaniacal weirdos, like Ralph Nader, the goals appealed to people’s Christian sense of duty.  It’s the same way the social-welfare laws tag along on the people’s sense of Christian charity.

This arrangement started to change in the 1990’s. Bill Clinton felt it necessary to be open about his Christian faith. It was, in part, to make inroads into the South, but also appealed to northern Catholics. By 2000 Al Gore was dismissive of religion entirely while Bush was the Evangelical. That’s the source of the great divide that has roiled the nation ever since. People who worship the old gods versus those who worship the new gods and have zero tolerance for the old gods.

Obama comes along in 2008 and is clearly non-Christian. Maybe he is a Muslim or maybe he is simply not religious. His membership in the crazy black church hardly qualifies as religious. The clear message was that unlike the people who put Bush in office, Obama was not a Christian. The last election featured a man who never attends services and a man who belongs to a weird cult that is alien to the Judeo-Christian traditions of America.

The point of all of this is to underscore just how far Christianity has fallen in public estimation. In 1980, Reagan seeded his talks with references to the Bible, on the assumption everyone would know what he meant. His opponent was a deeply religious man who felt comfortable discussing his relationship to God on television. Today, it would seem strange to see a presidential candidate discussing his relationship with God or his duties to his church as a Christian man.

One thing you learn when reading about population genetics is religion is near universal. We have evidence of religious practice going back as far as we have evidence of modern human activity. Science thinks religion evolved as one of the first human traits. If you take a step back and look at religion as a subgroup of mass movements, then it is even more obvious that faith and belief are necessary human traits that are integral to our understanding of the world.

Religion was most likely the first solution to the free rider problem. Not only does guilt and moral suasion push the free loader to pull his weight, it justifies taking harsh action against those who take more than they give. Belief in the common gods and common morality would have obvious reproductive advantages. A natural bias toward religiosity would, over many generations, bake belief into the human animal. Like all traits, it would manifest itself more prominently in some and less so in others.

That brings me back to the collapse of Christianity in America. Take a look at church attendance by state. Where are you more likely to find, for example, global warming fanatics? Vermont or Mississippi? If you look at the bottom ten states, there you find the most deeply committed liberals and the most deeply committed warmists. Gaia worship, manifested as climate concern, is the religion filling the void left my Christianity for the people least connected to Christian faith and heritage.

Whether you want to call AGW the master cult, encompassing the lesser cults of environmentalism, or you lump all of it into the same bucket with the other progressive fads, there’s no escaping the religious overtones to all of it. Here’s an interesting bit from a hard core believer site called Think Progress. These are the sort of folks who invest a lot of time counting heretics. Their map is revealing. It is not just party preference dividing the nation. It is religion.

The question is whether it was the vacuum left by the collapse of Christianity in these areas that allowed this pagan faith to spread or do the causal arrows point in the other direction? The American Left has been hostile to Christianity since the end of World War II, mostly in order to include Jews in their cause. Perhaps as the people of these areas became more liberal, church attendance dropped and these weird fads spread or maybe as Christianity died, the people went crazier.