Monthly Archives: April 2018

In Defense Of Kevin Williamson

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I’ve made no bones about the fact I don’t like Kevin Williamson. I’ve called him “Sloppy Williamson” and a “gold-plated phony” for years. I think his quill pen act is just that, an act intended to make his otherwise mediocre views appear sophisticated. I know that is probably unfair of me, but some people just bug the crap out of me and Williamson is one of them. I fully accept that I could be wrong in my opinion.

The point is, I take a back seat to no man in my disdain for Williamson and all of the Buckleyite-Conservatarian-Libertarian cabal. To borrow a Derb phrase, I’m a low number hater on this score. That said, what the Atlantic Magazine has done to Kevin Williamson is despicable. In fact, it looks like they plotted it, hiring the guy knowing they would soon fire him, because the lunatics would start howling. Even if the execrable Jeffrey Goldberg simply folded to pressure, firing Williamson is immoral.

Kevin Williamson is a guy with bills and responsibilities. He needs an income like most everyone else in this world. Firing someone is never something to be taken lightly, because it is a life altering experience. To hire a guy away from one company, only to fire him a week later, is to recklessly cause harm to another, for no other reasons than a failure to do your job. If Jeffrey Goldberg was really upset by his hiring of Williamson, he should have quit as editor-in-chief, but that would require personal integrity.

There’s a larger point here. The Atlantic is basically succumbing to the mob, one that is most likely entirely artificial. It is the ultimate heckler’s veto. A relatively tiny cabal of lunatics get to determine who is and who is not allowed on the public stage. It’s exactly what can never be allowed to happen if you want a civil society. The reason is, torch wielding mobs encourage the formation of counter mobs, who see that their only rational option is to meet force with force.

Just as important, from our perspective, is what our Progressive oppressors are trying to establish with this move. All of a sudden, a guy who is slightly to the right of center – maybe – is now beyond the pale. Williamson’s views on social issues like abortion and gender delusions are held by the majority of Americans. What this is about is a new push by our oppressors to make any criticism of their increasingly deranged opinions a disqualifying act. If Williamson can’t get work, imagine what happens to us.

One of the great mistakes of the Buckleyites has been to think they can cut a deal with the Left, by purging people to their right. The various groups in polite conservative circles have been silent as people on our side have been systematically attacked by the orthodoxy and shut out of public debate. Now they find themselves facing the same challenge. Kevin Williamson has just learned that no matter how much he disavowed our side, Progressives would never accept him.

Welcome to the party pal.

Edit: I dashed this off in five minutes, so I was not clear on a couple of things. One is the dumb cuck had it coming. If you get in bed with Lefty, expect to wake up with a lot of problems. The other thing is these guys give legitimacy to Progressive media by going on their platforms, so I have no sympathy for them when they get thrown off of them. I just wanted to make the point that we either have a public square or we have mob rule. I’m good with either, but I don’t think the people in charge want the latter.

A Million Petty Tyrants

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When news broke that someone was shooting up YouTube, the usual suspects geared up to profit from it. You can be sure that the ridiculous little twerp David Hogg was looking for cheap airfare to California, so he could mug for the cameras. Then it turned out to be a Persian woman, who was pissed about being censured. She was a nut, but what sent her over the edge was the way she was treated by the petty tyrants of YouTube. She was the multicultural version of Falling Down.

The funny thing is, none of the respectable people have bothered to notice what has been happening with social media until now. This story on PJ Media takes the girl angle and this post on National Review takes the CivNat approach. If the shooter had been Baked Alaska or Sam Hyde, they would be saying the usual things about extreme right wing extremist hate speakers. Instead it was a neurotic foreign vegan, tormented into a homicidal rage by the semi-official thought police now running the public square.

Of course, when bullets start flying, people tend to get serious. Up until now, the people running the social media companies have paid no price for their behavior. In fact, they have been publicly praised by the left side of the ruling class, and quietly praised by the right side. All of a sudden, the folks in charge have to consider the possibility of a lunatic with a gun showing up in their offices, when one of their moderators willy-nilly decides to nuke a user account. That changes the math of being the morality police.

Even through this has been ignored by the media, there are now two types of meetings going on in companies like YouTube. The people in charge are huddling in their executive suites, talking about security and how best to make sure the next lunatic does not get beyond the first floor. The soulless shrew running YouTube will no doubt make sure security around her is beefed up in response to this incident. She will probably issue a memo demanding greater vigilance by the YouTube morality police.

There is a second form of meeting going on today. That’s the one in the lunchrooms and chat rooms for employees of these social media companies. These are the people who take the bullet when the next pistol packing Persian shows up with a beef about the arbitrarily enforced terms of service. At least for a little while, some of them will think twice before pushing the button to delete a video or take down an account. After all, that vegan yoga instructor with quirky politics, could be a really good marksman.

A smart man once said that the post-modern age is a period where the best people painfully relearn all the things everyone used to know. For example, the whole point of liberal democracy was not to give the people a say in how things are run, but to give them a non-violent veto. Instead of the angry rabble stringing up their local rulers and burning down their mansion, the angry rabble gets to vote out some candidates or perhaps pass a referendum that will be ignored. Political liberty is the pressure release.

The guy on street corner, waving around a manifesto, proselytizing to his fellow citizens, is only a threat to the public order, if the people in charge don’t have better answers or a way to steal his ideas. Otherwise, he is just a crank who can be ignored. Today, the street corner is a user account on social media and the manifesto is a series of videos detailing some political or social cause. All of which is entirely harmless, just as long as the people in charge have better answers. Within this lifetime, people used to know this.

Something else people used to know is that the guy with a tiny bit of power, is often the most dictatorial. Meter maids, building inspectors, zoning office clerks, these are people with very narrow authority, but hey wield it with the zeal of a bloodthirsty tyrant. That is because the sort of people attracted to the work, are the sort of people looking for any chance to have authority over another person. The way American cities solved their sadist problem is they installed parking meters and made the sadists into meter maids.

Today, it is the social media companies hiring the petty tyrants, sadists and mentally disturbed spinsters, giving them a job of reading your tweets. These are the people who scan the internet, looking for “hate speech” they can put on a list, so that other petty tyrants can use it to torment the hate speaker or anyone interested in him. These are people who relish the task, because it is the only time anyone notices them. Our public space is turning into a daycare center run by sadistic schoolmarms.

The people in charge of social media firms spend so much time smelling their own farts, they truly think they can regulate what the world has to say about things. Again, people used to know better. Reality is that thing that does not go away when you stop believing in it and reality is, there is no controlling public opinion. There is no way to stifle dissent. The only thing that comes from efforts to do so is a violent response. But, the petty tyrants will only learn that lesson when the next Persian vegan shows up at their door.

Prince Rupert’s Revenge

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There was a time when it was possible to have cordial and even friendly relations with people on the Left. I spent many hours debating my lefty friends over drinks, about the defects of various central planning schemes. Anyone my age or older remembers the way these debates would go. One side talked about economic justice for the working class, while the other side talked about the glory of free markets. Usually, the “right-winger” would bring up the Soviets.

Often, one side or the other would get mad, but it was rarely personal. People get hot in political debates, mostly because we are social animals. Conflict with people inside our group vexes us. It makes us uncomfortable. That was the thing. Liberals and non-liberals could operate in the same peer group. The reason is the Left and Right back then, agreed on the goals. Both sides wanted prosperity. The Left believed socialism produced plenty, while the Right believed a rising tide lifted all boats.

Thinking back, a strange thing happened in the 1990’s, with regards to my own debates with lefty friends and acquaintances. The debates in the 90’s were almost all about the peculiar personal lives of Bill and Hillary Clinton. The Right was always scandal mongering and the Left was conjuring novel defenses for the degeneracy of Bill Clinton and the personal corruption of Hillary. These revolved around Red Team/Blue Team scat fights, that had little to do with policy or ideology. It was just ritualized tribal warfare.

That changed instantly with the 2000 election. All of my lefty friends and acquaintances went insane overnight.  They hated Bush with the intensity of a fanatic. The wars made it impossible to have a discussion with the Left. Granted, many of us were naïve about the lunacy of the neocons, but the Left’s opposition was never more than shrieking madness. How does one debate someone who thinks Halliburton controls the weather and attacked New Orleans?

I remember thinking my lefty friends would return to sanity after Bush left office, but that never happened. A few stopped foaming at the mouth, but for the most part, they crossed into a realm from which there is no return. In the Obama years, they went from one peculiar fad to the next. One week it was homosexual marriage, while the next week it was claims about sex being a social construct. There’s simply no discussion, much less debating, these issues with them.

Looking back, it’s useful to think about the fight between the Left and the Right as a set-piece battle on an agreed upon battlefield. At the center of both sides was economics. The Right had religious archers and the constitutional conservatives on the flanks, but the center of the army was formed around economic issues. Similarly, the Left had race hustlers, second and third wave feminists on the flanks, but their main line troops, the center of the line, were economic Utopians.

The collapse of the Soviet Union had an enormous impact on the ruling classes of the West. In America, it meant the center of the Progressive army broke and fled in all directions. The flanks, however, the racial justice warriors, the gender dragoons and exotic identity battalions rushed into the center, forming a new main line of the Left. The Right, despite carrying the day, was too busy setting up battlefield trophies to notice that the Left had reformed around sexual and racial fanatics, so they promptly surrendered.

A curious thing is happening to this new center of the Progressive battle line. Their moral certainty about the innate equality of man and his infinite malleability, is crumbling in the face of scientific reality. The release of David Reich’s book is the latest direct hit on Boasian anthropology. The response from the soft sciences, which has been a key intellectual authority for the blank slate Progressives, looks like a panicked flight from the battle field. They simply have no answer to science.

The tent pole holding up modern Progressivism is the assertion that all humans are essentially the same and that the observable differences are trivial. All of the Left’s arguments spring from that belief. It’s why they insist the magic of white privilege is the reason black crime is so high or rape culture is why girls don’t go into STEM fields at the same rate as boys. In other words, magic is a plausible answer, as long as reality is ruled out as an option. Biological realism explodes the center of Progressive theology.

That’s what we see happening all over the human sciences. Twenty years ago, some guy in a cardigan could claim that racism was learned behavior and their was no biological basis for race. He could be held up as an intellectual authority and therefore, a moral authority. Genetics is undermining the intellectual authority of those preaching cultural anthropology, multiculturalism and the blank slate. The main line of the Progressive army is suddenly looking like a bunch of primitives chanting oogily-boogily.

It’s tempting to say I’m getting ahead of myself, but we have millions of people relying on DNA services to map their ancestry. Genetics is promising new cures for disease and soon, people will be able to get their intellectual destiny for $50. It will not be long before some clever fertility lab begins offering bespoke artificial insemination, using donors with desirable traits, based on their genetics. People are becoming habituated to the idea that humans are different, because of biology, not culture.

The question, of course, is where does the Left go now. In the late 19th and early 20th century, what we call Progressivism was mostly a Protestant crusade. In the 20th century, they shifted to embracing  the economic utopianism of socialism, with racial and sexual politics as side acts. For the last three decades, the dream of sexual and racial utopias has been the dominant theme of the Left. Once the blank slate is broken on the wheel of biological reality, what comes next?

The answer could be nothing. There are many currents to American history, but the dominant one is what John Derbyshire calls the Cold Civil War. It is our inheritance from the mother country. The story of America has been the good whites and bad whites, the Roundheads and Cavaliers, fighting for control of the country. It’s also a conflict of visions, where the Roundheads always embraced extreme egalitarianism, while the Right has embraced the natural hierarchy of man.

November Rain

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The conventional wisdom says the Republicans are headed for a bloodbath in the November midterm elections. Sadly, it will not be a literal bloodbath, but it could be a big swing in the House. The Senate is a different issue, as most of the seats up this time are currently held by Democrats. Many of them are in states that tilt Republican and many are held by blockheads like Debbie Stabenow of Michigan. The House is where the Democrats have a chance to claw back larger capitol offices.

Now, there are some things to keep in mind when thinking about this stuff. One is the mass media is just the propaganda wing of the Democrat party, so they will be endlessly gas lighting us from now until November. Then there is the fact that the gerrymandering of House districts has made most of them bulletproof. About 15% of seats are truly competitive now. There’s also the fact that the Democrat freak show tends not to show up in midterms. T

To get some sense of what could happen this November, I took a look at the district by district results in presidential races over the last three cycles. If a Republican held a seat during the Obama years, it is a safe bet that the seat is solid GOP. If a Democrat held the seat, despite blowouts in 2010 and 2014, the safe bet is the seat is solid Democrat. The result is 183 seats that the GOP will always win and 194 that Democrat will always win.

That means there are 58 house seats that are in play this election. Redistricting and local issues will always play some role. Then there is the fact that solid districts can swing to the other party because the default candidate is weird or corrupt. Still, the fact that incumbents win 85% of the time and we have 13% of the seats in the contested column, means the real election will be over roughly sixty seats this fall. The “Great Shellacking” in 2010 resulted in 63 seats swinging to the GOP.

Another aspect to this midterm is the fact that Hillary Clinton did not win any of the solid GOP districts and she only won in eight weak Republican districts. Even more interesting, she won in just five toss-up districts. The Democrats perform like a regional party, with a small number of high intensity zones. This has been true since 2006, when the Democrats last had a good midterm. In order to win a toss-up district, they have to put up a candidate that does not remind the voters of his party’s leadership.

There’s also the local flavor. A district like Arizona’s 2nd is a good example. The district went Clinton in 2016, but had been solid GOP for the previous four presidential elections. In 2012, the Democrats won the seat, but lost it in 2014. The Republican incumbent then trounced the Democrat in the 2016 election, despite the district tipping to Clinton. Voters don’t always punish their representative, just because his or her party is run by idiots. The idiot you know is better than the idiot you don’t know.

The challenge for the Democrats is to find 26 seats held by Republicans that they can flip this November. Assuming the solid districts on both sides, there are 58 “in play” districts this election, give or take. Of those, 33 have been pretty reliable for the GOP. That’s defined as going Republican in presidential elections, even when the Democrats won the White House. That leaves 25 truly vulnerable Republicans in the November midterm, plus or minus the results of redistricting, bad candidates and so forth.

Now, the party holding the White House often does poorly in the midterm elections, as the loyalists of the party out of power are full of anger. They’re still mad about losing the last time. Here’s the breakdown of midterms going back to Reagan.

Year President Approval House Senate
1982 Reagan 42 -26 +1
1986 Reagan 64 -5 -8
1990 Bush I 57 -8 -1
1994 Clinton 48 -52 -8
1998 Clinton 65 +5 0
2002 Bush II 67 +8 +2
2006 Bush II 37 -30 -6
2010 Obama 45 -63 -6
2014 Obama 41 -13 -9

Democrats do vastly worse in midterms than Republicans when they hold the White House. This is a familiarity breeds contempt issue. The average net loss for the Republicans is about 12 seats, with a high side of 30 under Bush in 2006. That 2006 election is probably the absolute bottom for the GOP. The Democrats rely on outlandish lies to get their way into majorities, so they suffer greatly in midterms. Their average loss is 31, which reflects a swing back to normal after a presidential election.

The GOP can look at history and figure they probably hold the House just on inertia. Even when the voters are really mad at them, like 2006, the losses are not catastrophic, despite the claims by the media. After the 2008 election, the media was carrying on about the dawn of the Progressive utopia. In reality, the country remained mostly Republican in inclination and that was proven out in the following midterm. The fact is, the GOP is the majority party in America, because it is the party of the white middle-class.

Now, the one sure way to keep the House in the hands of the GOP is to make sure the Republican president in popular. Reagan was suffering in the polls and his party suffered as a result. Bush was popular in 2002 and his party did well. Clinton was very popular in his second midterm and his party did well in that election. If the GOP wants to avoid a disaster this November, they would be wise to help Trump get over 50% in the polls. The obvious way to do that is help deliver on his campaign promises.