Some people are reportedly upset that actor Bradley Cooper is with Her. Given the age in which we live, the smart bet is that no one cares enough about Bradley Cooper to have noticed so his PR team authored the story and sent it out to the media. That is often how celebrity news gets created. The PR team sends e-mails to the media telling them their client will be doing something and included in it will be suggested story lines. A big chunk of sports “news” is cooked up by player agents.

Cooper’s people want the big shots in Hollywood to know that he, despite being a Pale Penis Person, is still firmly on the reservation. Another one of the strange parts of our current age is that those who make movies popular with the normies immediately fall under suspicion. American Sniper was a big hit with normal whites so the lunatics naturally suspect that Cooper may be some sort of spy for the enemy or even a heretic. Dressing him up and sending him to the old witch’s speech sends the right signal.

Now, actors are often quite stupid so their handlers do not want them performing off-script. Even the smart ones, Cooper went to Georgetown, often have psychological problems that can lead them to say and do strange things when not on their leash. Cooper has suffered from mental illness and addiction. Putting him in a box so the cameras can see him and then planting the phony victim story gets the coverage they want without risking an embarrassing off-the-cuff comment from the celebrity.

Logic says entertainers should avoid politics. There is no upside. On any given issue, close to half the public is on one side and the rest are on the other side. On the other hand, people do not really care what these people think so maybe there is no downside either. People make sport of the Hollywood moonbats because it is easy, but it does not seem to alter anyone’s viewing habits. Susan Sarandon is nutty as an outhouse rat, but in her prime she was easy on the eyes and a popular actress.

Politics in America is entertainment, at least that is how it is sold to us, so it makes sense for entertainers to be drawn to it. The people in charge assume we prefer things sold to us the same way Hollywood sells actors and they are probably right. Barack Obama won in 2008, despite being a foreign weirdo with a funny name. He is a good actor and he reads his lines flawlessly. For all anyone knows he was hired out of a community theater somewhere as he never had a job prior to politics.

Up until last week, none of this would have mattered. For the bulk of human history carny-folks were at the bottom of the social ladder. Perverts, deviants and troublemakers ended up in the entertainment business. That is true today, except we used to have the good sense to keep the carnies out on the fringe. They would come in, do their shows and then be told to move along. Decent people understood that you did not want these dirt bags hanging around too long. Now, the carnies are in charge.

Most actors are crazy liberal. They stake out positions that suggests they are divorced from reality. The rich, famous ones embrace third-world authoritarian politics, which if implemented, would land them in a work camp. The minor actors embrace the latest Progressive fads, usually in the most degrading fashion. People like Lena Dunham seem to invest most of her time finding new ways to humiliate herself on behalf of a cause. It turns out that stupid, crazy and liberal is not much of a handicap in Hollywood.

My guess is that there is a lot of overlap in cognitive qualities required to be an actor and be a loony-tune liberal. They say there is no dignity in television, because you will inevitably be required to degrade yourself on camera. To do that means you cannot have a high opinion of yourself. A healthy self-loathing and a desire to obliterate one’s own is going to be a necessary skill for an actor. Similarly, joining a mass movement like a political cause is best done by those seeking to exchange their identity with that of the group.

People in show business are always on the prowl for affirmation. They go on stage because they want the applause. What makes American Progressivism enduring is it imbues the adherent with the sense of intellectual and moral superiority. To be a liberal is to be super-smart so if you are a super-smart good person, you are a liberal. That is the belief. It is why dimwits like Janeane Garofalo and Sarah Silverman kit themselves out as bohemian intellectuals. They just assume that their ability to remember the lines from the liberal catechism makes them intellectuals.

The wisdom of putting carny folk at the top of the social ladder is open to debate. My sense is the only people who think these people are at the top of the status structure are the actors and people who want to be actors. Everyone else gets that actors are low-lifes and fairly stupid. While there are exceptions, the public is conditioned to assume their favorite actor is nutty as a fruitcake in real life. Then again, the people running for office are often worse than the carny folk so maybe it is a good idea to put the carnies in charge.

I finally finished watching the series Justified. Binge watching is my preferred method of watching these things nowadays, but it still took me two months to watch the whole series. I guess I am a slow watcher. Admittedly my taste in TV shows is pedestrian. I just do not expect TV shows or movies to be art or anything close to art. They are intended to entertain the average person. Against that standard, I would rank the series highly. It was not quite as good as Breaking Bad, but it was better than Sons of Anarchy, which went on too long and ended ridiculously.

I somewhat expected the same result as I entered the final season of Justified, despite the particularly good writing of the first five seasons. These long form dramas seem to lose their footing at the end for some reason. My hunch is the creators produce a great idea that works over a single season. They get picked up and put together a few more seasons and then run out of ideas or they cannot figure out how to bring it to a close. That was not the case here as the writers wrapped it up in a sensible way that worked with the rest of the series.

I do not want to give anything away, in case I am not the last person on earth to have watched the series, but what struck me about it was how the main character was a man from start to finish. By that I mean he was what we used to expect from leading men on TV and in movies. He was not racked with guilt or morally compromised. There were plenty of forks in the road where the main character had to figure out the right course, but there was none of the brooding and self-doubt we see in the modern leading man.

That is not typical today. In fact, it is rare. I mentioned Sons of Anarchy and that is a good example of the modern leading man. The hero of that series is always racked with guilt, doubt and Lord knows what else. The rebooted Batman, the one I watched anyway, is mostly about the hero’s battle with mental illness, instead of his fight with the threats to society. That is the model for the modern leading male. They are emotional cripples struggling to keep from leaping off a roof. Even James Bond has been turned into a head case. The last one I saw had him dealing with mommy issues.

Of course, male leads today almost always look like a pillow-biter’s wet dream. Steve Sailer has pointed out that most casting directors in Hollywood are effeminate gay men. The others are middle-aged women so the casting of male leads tends toward the fantasy male that appeals to old maids and queens. The result is steroidal freaks, who look like they spend all their time at the YMCA working out, among other things. That is something else that is changed. It used to be that a male lead lacked the sort of vanity that leads someone to steroid up and use “product.”

Tastes change and styles come and go so it may be nothing more than that, but I was struck by how out of place Justified seemed compared to modern dramas. The main character is a normal looking man, middle-aged with some gray around the temples. He is not a cartoonish looking brute or a mentally unstable pretty boy. His physical confrontations happen within the laws of physiology, as well as the laws of physics. The striking thing is that he is a genuine tough guy in the old time sense. When it comes time to face off with the bad guy, he faces off with the bad guy.

The classic western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, addresses the issue of traditional male in the modern world. John Wayne is the classic tough guy who operates on the edge of society, protecting society, but never quite part of it. Jimmy Stewart is what passed for the beta male hipster back in the day. Wayne settles things the old fashioned way. Stewart settles things in court arguing the law and morality. The movie never resolves the tension between the two male roles in society, suggesting there is no resolution, just a balance and a tension.

The near total lack of traditional male leads today probably reflects the fact post-scarcity America has lost the will or ability to do the hard work of civilization. Maybe it is simply no longer necessary. The people making TV and movies seem to think that is the case. Hollywood is, after all, the agit-prop of the ruling class. The people in charge want docile males, who are willing to be bossed around by women in Lycra jumpsuits. For the same reason the schools dope up the boys, Hollywood promotes the ideal male as being the Stepin Fetchit for the womyn’s studies department.

In Saudi Arabia, getting caught with alcohol can get you the lash. Maybe. It sort of depends upon where you are in the social order and who is determining your guilt. In Iran, listening to western music can get you sent to prison or perhaps cost you a job in the government. Again, it all depends upon who you are and who is judging your violation. It can also depend upon who is accusing you too. This was true in colonial New England where accusations of witchcraft were arbitrary and the trials mostly based on things other than religious doctrine.

We have the image of theocracies as places with long lists of precise rules governing morality, public conduct, social relations and so forth, but the reality is always the opposite. Written rules can be debated by anyone with the ability to read. There is not much fun in being a priest if anyone can read the rules and render a judgement. In a theocracy, the religious order educates the public, handles the violations of morality and makes sure the laws comply with the official religion. The result is a high degree of arbitrariness for those who live in the theocracy.

Going back to Saudi Arabia, members of the royal family regularly head off to Dubai to drink, do drugs, fornicate with women, fornicate with men and otherwise live like rock stars. Everyone in the Wahhabis world knows about this, but they like living more than they like Allah so they say nothing. On the other hand, if you are a foreigner, who can be a bargaining chip for the royal family, then you can get jammed up for some pruno. Anyone that is a nuisance to the government can expect to have the religious police snooping around in their life, looking for a reason to send them to jail.

Theocracy is arbitrary. It is this arbitrariness that encourages neighbors to spy on neighbors, associates to rat on each other and even children to report their parents to the morality police. Being a rat brings grace. You see that in this story about the George Washington men’s basketball coach.

In early April, shortly after his team celebrated a postseason championship, a George Washington men’s basketball player visited a campus Title IX coordinator to log complaints about Coach Mike Lonergan. Lonergan, the player believed, had created an offensive, intolerable environment, evidenced in his mind — and in the minds of many of his teammates — by the spate of transfers during the coach’s five-year tenure.

The first thing to notice is the code words for morality. Title IX has become holy writ in the Progressive faith. Like the Bible, it is a mysterious source of authority to the adherents. Most Christians never bother to open their Bible and few Progressives can tell you anything about Title IX. They just know it is the highest of law on the holiest of sites, the college campus. To be the Title IX coordinator is no different from being the Mutaween in Saudi Arabia. This person is the supreme moral authority on campus.

Then we have the complaints lodged against the coach. Notice the vagueness here. On the college campus, “offensive” is the same as blasphemous. Any word or deed can be called offensive if it is deemed to have violated some tenet of the faith. Since these tenets are arbitrary, just about anything can be offensive, as long as someone in good standing with the religious authorities is willing to say they were offended. Again, you will notice that it matters who is accusing and to whom the accusation is being leveled.

Read the whole 2400 word article and you struggle to figure out what exactly the coach had done to warrant being thrown off the roof by the PC enforcers. That is probably why the writer resorts to quoting various shaman in the Title IX sect.

“They have an obligation to make sure the school is operating an environment where there is no sexual harassment,” lawyer Nancy Hogshead-Makar, a Title IX expert and a former Olympic gold medal swimmer, said when apprised of the players’ complaints. “He is sexually harassing both the athletic director and the athletes.”

Notice the language again. They never say who is obliging us in this quest. The God of Puritanism is now just a mysterious blank space, a void that can never be mentioned, but must always be acknowledged. In other words, if you know you are obligated to enforce the one true faith, you are an elect. Of course, the quest to which we are supposedly obligated is equally mysterious. What does “an environment where there is no sexual harassment” look like? How do we know we are in one? The answer is one of the priestesses of the faith will tell us.

“Priestess” is the right word. In the America theocracy, women run the cult. Take a look at the bio of Nancy Two Names in the Post story. The hyphen is the first clue. She is or was married to a cuck. People assume that hyphen indicates feminist, but it is a gang symbol within feminism to indicate the adherent has bagged and tamed a male. Second, her bio tells us she went from college into the order and has spent her life as a professional nuisance. Hassling men is her all consuming passion. It is what defines her life.

As with Iran or Saudi Arabia, the accused in the America theocracy often make the mistake of thinking they can beat the charges. After all, if they have done nothing wrong, what do they have to fear? In a theocracy, however, the unwillingness to submit and confess is proof of guilt. Coach Lonergan is a dead man; he just does not know it. He will play by the rules, or at least the rules written down, but the Inquisitor is not bound by rules so the coach will be broken on the wheel and cast out of the campus.

That is life in a theocracy.

Churchill supposedly said, “a fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.” I think of that almost every time I visit National Review Online these days. As I’m writing this, the featured article is by the unhinged lunatic David French. He is the kook who thought about running for president on Bill Kristol’s Trotskyite party ticket. There is another article by French on the sidebar, which is a rant about Trump. Above that is a tantrum about Trump by Jonah Goldberg.

If you were new to the scene, you could be forgiven for thinking that National Review is some sort of leftist site that was created for the sole purpose of howling about Trump. I have not counted, but others tell me that more than half the posted articles over the last year have been about the terribleness of Trump and Trump voters. Someone told me they went back a few months counting posts on their blog and the anti-Trump posts outnumber the anti-Clinton posts five to one. I am not going to test the assertion as it seems in-line with what I have observed.

National Review is the flagship operation of Buckley Conservatism and it has given itself over almost entirely to anti-Trump lunacy. For over a year now they have been pumping out anti-Trump content to the point where there is no point in reading any of it. The striking thing is not the volume so much as the total lack of content. Their rants fall into one of two categories. There are the base personal attacks, calling Trump a big meanie that makes them cry. Then there are the rants claiming Trump is not a “movement conservative” as if that has any meaning.

That is really the issue at the heart of what is happening. I have often argued that Buckley Conservatism was just anti-communism with things like small government and social conservatism as decorations. Buckley-ites were fine trading authority for those decorative items over to the Left so they could have the whip hand on foreign policy. Once the Cold War ended and intellectual communism fell out of fashion, the Buckley-ites were left without a purpose. They were a mass movement without an enemy. To quote Hoffer, “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.”

Thinking back, the fall of the Berlin Wall was in ’89 and then Clinton won in ’92. All the smart people at the time were wondering what would come of conservatism, but then the Republicans won the House in ’94 for the first time in fifty years. Republicans were able to impose spending limits on Clinton and for the first in generations and it appeared that the ratchet was going to click the other way. The smart people suddenly shifted gears and started wondering what would become of liberalism. Even Clinton thought the era of big government was over.

Rolling back the welfare state was going to be dirty work and there is not a lot of fun in it. The Buckley Conservatives had been bred for generations to trade away authority over domestic policy so there were few with a real desire to get into the trench warfare that would be required to claw back the concessions of the previous generations. The ugly fight over welfare reform “taught” the Buckley-ites that there were no parades for the party that cut spending and shrunk government. Fighting wars was much more fun and less risky, to them at least.

I used to say that the worst thing to happen to Buckley Conservatism was the Bush family, but the death blow was actually 9/11. The Buckley-ites went all in on the Bushism because they were sure they had found the successor to the Evil Empire. It was like old times. They eagerly gave the Left whatever they wanted on spending and government, just as long as they could wage the great crusade against the Muslims. It was rank boosterism, devoid of anything resembling principle, but the movement had finally found a new devil and that is what really mattered.

Now that making war on the Muslims is out of the question, the Buckley-ites are once again in search of a devil around which they can base their movement. Anti-Trumpism for fanatics like David French is not going to be a fulfilling cause in the long run. Trotskyites like Bill Kristol and the other neo-coms can probably busy themselves with it for a while, but even they will tire of it eventually. Maybe they go back to being Progressives or maybe they just go away. Pat Buchanan thinks (hopes?) they will just go away, having been rejected by the public.

That is not the way to bet. Fanatics will always be with us. The lesson of the Clinton years was that the ideologues would eventually adapt to the post-Cold War world. The Progressives dived headfirst into the cesspool of identity politics while the Buckley-ites launched a crusade to pacify the Muslims. Now that the Coalition of Weirdos is blowing apart and the Buckley-ites are reeling, we may enter a period of cultural sobriety, but it is hard to know. Perhaps neo-nationalism will the next big thing to sweep the West. Maybe it will be something else, but the fanatics will eventually find their causes.