Learning From Present Reality

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A regular topic of debate on the Dissident Right is whether or not conservatives know they are just props for the Left. Some argue that they know and have always known, but they like the lifestyle that comes with it. There’s no getting around the fact that guys like Jonah Goldberg live fabulous lives while being nothing more than stooges. The sheer volume of losing by gentry conservatives should be enough to wake up even the dumbest and most naïve.

Others are more generous, arguing that conservatives are simply naïve or mistaken about the nature of the Left. They come out of orderly upper middle-class suburbs where the rules makes sense and everyone abides by those rules as a matter of courtesy. That makes gentry conservatism and Reason magazine libertarianism attractive to them. After all, their Progressive friends are great people, the best people, so they can surely be persuaded. It just takes the right argument.

Reading Kevin Williamson’s latest retelling of his firing from the Atlantic, those arguing in favor of gross stupidity get a boost. At the start of his piece, he claims to have predicted what would happen to him if he took the Atlantic job.

In early March, I met up with Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of the Atlantic, at an event sponsored by the magazine at the South by Southwest conference in Austin. He had just hired me away from National Review, the venerable conservative magazine where I’d been a writer and editor for 10 years.

“You know, the campaign to have me fired will begin 11 seconds after you announce that you’ve hired me,” I told him. He scoffed. “It won’t be that bad,” he said. “The Atlantic isn’t the New York Times. It isn’t high church for liberals.”

My first piece appeared in the Atlantic on April 2. I was fired on April 5.

Assuming this is true, he took the job knowing it would result in a mob of angry liberals calling for his death. His decision to go through with it could be seen as just part of the Progressive passion play, with Williamson gladly playing his part. The trouble is he rather clearly thought the very liberal Jeffrey Goldberg was some sort of honorable guy, rather than a typical fanatic. More important, he thought Goldberg would stand up to his coreligionists when they came to haul away the heretic. That’s remarkably stupid.

Of course, for gentry conservatives, being remarkably stupid about the nature of motivations of the Left has been a badge of honor for as long as anyone reading this has been alive. The hallmark of gentry conservatism for generations has been the insistence on playing by a set of rules the other side refuses to respect, a set of rules that guarantees failure by the so-called Right. Even the allegedly hard-boiled realists of Buckley Conservatism, like Williamson, can’t seem to grasp this obvious bit of reality.

Then there is this tidbit later in the column. Williamson writes “If you want to know who actually has the power in our society and who is actually marginalized, ask which ideas get you sponsorships from Google and Pepsi and which get you fired.”  No doubt he was thinking of the internet meme, probably thinking the quote is from Voltaire. The line is actually from an old white nationalist named Kevin Alfred Strom. Dumb people tend to believe what they see on the internet, without making sure of the source and accuracy.

At the end of his column, Williamson writes this.

Where my writing appears is not a very important or interesting question. What matters more is the issue of how the rage-fueled tribalism of social media, especially Twitter, has infected the op-ed pages and, to some extent, the rest of journalism. Twitter is about offering markers of affiliation or markers of disaffiliation. The Left shouts RACIST!, and the Right shouts FAKE NEWS! There isn’t much that can be done about this other than treating social media with the low regard it deserves.

But when it comes to what appears in our newspapers and magazines, some of the old rules should still apply. By all means, let’s have advocacy journalism, but let’s make sure about the journalism part of it: Do the work, ask the questions, give readers a reason to assume that what’s published adheres to some basic standards of intellectual honesty. To do otherwise is to empower those who dismiss the media as a tangle of hopeless partisan opportunism.

Without credible journalism, all we have is the Twitter mob, which is a jealous god. Jealous and kind of stupid.

Conservatism, at its root, is the acceptance of reality. The man of the Right accepts the world as it is and acts accordingly. Williamson looks out at a world overrun by Progressive mobs, egged on by our Progressive rulers, and concludes that the only proper response is to pretend it is otherwise. He’s nobly walking in front of the speeding train, because trains should not speed. That’s not principled conservatism. That’s suicidal stupidity. Williamson is the example for the side arguing that these guys are morons.

In the end, it probably matters little if gentry conservatism is dying from subversion or stupidity, other than as a cautionary tale. The lesson that Williamson is unable to learn is not lost on the others hoping to get on the big Progressive stage. They will be sure to scrub their time lines and avoid saying or writing anything that could offend their Progressive paymasters. The golden rule is immutable. The man with the gold makes the rules, which is why the Dissident Right needs to build its own institutions.

73 thoughts on “Learning From Present Reality”

  1. By and large, Mr. Goldberg et al are merely continuing the long tradition of giving people a reason to hate Jews. Just as Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Biden and Mr. Kerry and Bergoglio give people a reason to hate Catholics.

  2. “Conservatism, at its root, is the acceptance of reality. The man of the Right accepts the world as it is and acts accordingly. Williamson (cuckservatives generally) looks out at a world overrun by Progressive mobs, egged on by our Progressive rulers, and concludes that the only proper response is to pretend it is otherwise. He’s nobly walking in front of the speeding train, because trains should not speed.”

    This is among your very best passages at explaining the current predicament.

    Bravo.

  3. Zman: “No doubt he was thinking of the internet meme, probably thinking the quote is from Voltaire. The line is actually from an old white nationalist named Kevin Alfred Strom. Dumb people tend to believe what they see on the internet, without making sure of the source and accuracy.”

    It’s really kinda bogus of you to assume what a guy thought, then call him dumb for supposedly thinking it. The way Williamson used the popular formulation was pretty creative and effective.

    –I thought Williamson would have the balls to own his “hang the women” opinion on abortion. Since he’s supposedly Mr. Ballsy. But he totally copped out, with about 4 paragraphs of him basically saying it was in jest and he was just trolling the opposing argument. He wants to play badass. But when he was called out on it he totally pussied out. The fact is that he was very serious about hanging women. Listen to his demeanor on the original podcast. His whole tone and language was saying “no, I’m serious, I really am this gonzo”.

  4. You write that “The sheer volume of losing by gentry conservatives should be enough to wake even the dumbest and most naive.”
    With all due respect, you give far too much credence and intellect heft to the gentry conservative. They are, apparently, willfully blind to the fact that the socialists amongst us are not playing by our rules. True Fascism, evidenced by the shout-downs of conservatives and the instant full-throated attacks upon anyone in Twittery or Fakebook for even the slightest deviation from their fanatical goal, make it apparent and obvious that we are in a war.

  5. Sloppy deluded himself because deep down he’s an arriviste hick who just wanted to prove what a good poodle boy for the left he could be – he really, really wanted to be the next Ross Doucehat because all the right people are always praising Douchey for being such a bold, principled sellout – and Sloppy wanted in on that action in the worst way. But poor Sloppy went and crapped on the carpet as soon as he was brought inside, and never had a chance to show what a good housebroken pet he could be.

    Fuck that guy with a sideways screwdriver.

    • You obviously don’t like KW; nor do I. But don’t get carried away.

      If KW deserves a ‘sideways screwdriver fuck’, then what does somebody you really hate deserve?

      I hope I never get on your ‘bad people’ list, Mr Johns.

  6. I don’t think he’s stupid per se; he is just — like all members of the Uniparty — a virtue-signaler uber alles. For guys like him, self-identification as a “conservative” is *almost* as important as “writes [however briefly] for a respectable middlebrow publication.” Given this, I’d bet good money that getting fired was actually the whole point of the exercise. He’s good enough to write for them, damn it!, but they just can’t handle his Real Conservativeness. (Andrew Sullivan used to play this game well, back when people cared who he was (is he still alive?). For whatever reason, “being Catholic” was almost as central to his identity as being gay, so he had to nail himself up on the cross as the One True Catholic in this vale of tears…. instead of doing what anyone who cared about the tenets of Christianity would do, and simply switch to one of the seventeen thousand other varieties of the Faith. Hell, the Episcopalians probably would’ve made him a bishop on the spot, but no dice).

    • The “troubled Catholic” is a personality type nowadays, and they crack me up. Not so long ago, a “troubled Catholic” was like the Prodigal Son, so ashamed of his lifestyle and conduct that he avoided the Church out of shame. Graham Greene illuminates such people in ‘The Power and the Glory’.

      But now, the ‘troubled Catholic’ is one who, like Sullivan, sees the Church itself as the ‘prodigal son.’ He “loves” the Church, despite its erring ways. If only his beloved Church could stop in its errors and follies, and come back to him!

  7. The hallmark of gentry conservatism for generations has been the insistence on playing by a set of rules the other side refuses to respect, a set of rules that guarantees failure by the so-called Right.

    They want it to be one way… but, it’s the other way.

    https://youtu.be/PwuckTkE7T4

  8. I only wish that they were morons. Unfortunately, many of them are clever and articulate. They can weave some wonderful visions of how the world might be if only they were in charge of things. Those visions have the power to deflect the attention of many well-intentioned people from the fact that we are engaged in a take-no-prisoners war for the soul of the Republic.

  9. HW Bush thoroughly disabused me of the idea that the Gentry conservatives were just honest and dumb. Bush was a Trojan Horse who supervised an adversarial transition in ’89. He and his country-club cronies purposely set about undoing everything Reagan accomplished. He had absolutely no intention of keeping his “read my lips” promise and was talking to Ed Rollins months into the administration about raising taxes. Rollins was stunned at the casual betrayal.

    The know exactly what they are doing and don’t care one bit if it angers “the base” or costs them elections.

    https://spectator.org/65551_why-bush-dynasty-fell/

  10. The single most damaging thing for small-c conservatism is supposed capital-C conservatives who think that tut-tutting and shaming a Progressive will make him admit his shenanigans and concede that he was wrong. Progressive play to win, they play to win for keeps, and they play dirty. Conservatives who insist that they would never dream of violating Marquis of Queensbury rules are our generation’s “useful idiots”.

  11. Z Man;

    Another factor: The ‘lure of significance’ (aka Pride) plus money (aka Avarice) accounts for a lot of anybody’s behavior. Cuck’s are no exception.

    As an extreme parallel example, consider the history of Stalin’s NKVD big shots. They were smart guys so they all knew that Communism was gilded b*llsh*t, that it was a false religion + terror that held the USSR together. They’d all *personally* shot ‘wreckers & saboteurs’ in the back of the head at the edge of some pit in Siberia or in some basement cell in some city or other. They all knew that some of those that they and their lackeys had put down were their predecessors, maybe even ‘unfriends’. They all knew that the guy above them had been denounced and disappeared.

    But they took the promotions anyway, even though, like Williamson, they knew what might happen to them. “Better to keep on your toes and hope for the best.”, they told themselves. Beyond Pride and Avarice, unlike Williamson, they had nearly unlimited satanic arbitrary power within their own smaller spheres.

    Stalin went through a whole lot of NKVD generals that way over the 32 + years he lasted. Finally Beria was smart enough to see what was coming, steel himself to save his own life (temporarily), and actually form a plot that put Stalin down in 1953 after the old dog’s nose wasn’t so keen anymore.

    Unlike them, Williamson was not betting his own life, at least for right now.

  12. The class differential is everything here. Gentry conservatives desperately want to be gentry and though they may be suicidal idiots, they do instinctively respect hierarchy and authority. This may be what is short circuiting the naturally right-inclined in most of the population. When vested power becomes uniformly left wing, the orderly con simply chocks that up to the new order of things and modifies his views to get on.

    As I’ve noted before, I can think of no historical reform or revolution that didn’t have any upper class components. Until one emerges, cons will have to be stupid or silent.

  13. Williamson has always been a token hire his entire career.

    the sooner he realizes that truth, the better he will be.

    • Yes, it’s really remarkable how far downhill NR has slid in the last thirty years. I mean, I know all the things that can be said about Buckley Conservatism, and most of them are true, but NR did start out as a serious journal run by serious men. Buckley may have been a horse’s ass, but he was erudite and well-read and genuinely loved America, at least in the beginning. James Burnham and Ernst Van Den Haag were deeply thoughtful men who verged on being actual philosophers, and Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn was an actual monarchist reactionary straight out of a Curtis Yarvin wet dream. As opposed to Goldberg, who got his position due to his mother’s murky connections to Monica Lewinski (no, really!). National Review in many ways resembles America itself; it started as a somewhat flawed but noble project of serious men who wanted to do something good for their fellow man; it’s ending as a ludicrous parody of itself run by clowns and buffoons. As Trump would say “Sad!”

  14. I know it is a small point of pride but I have never read anything written by Williamson. Come to think of it, .01% of anything from NR.

    There is not much to be positive about being on the Right as far as our views becoming dominant where it counts, but I do enjoy seeing our Quislings being fed to the lions, even if they still come out ahead financially.

  15. We can also apply the same logic to our progressive “friends” by asking whether they are evil or gullible. Increasingly, I’m beginning to hold that they are evil…and treasonous.

  16. “To do otherwise is to empower those who dismiss the media as a tangle of hopeless partisan opportunism.”

    Which it is. Too bad that’s how you earn your money, Sloppy.

    “Without credible journalism, all we have is the Twitter mob”

    Only if you pay attention to Twitter, which is completely up to you. Same with Facebook and the rest of social media.

  17. Speaking of firings, what happened to Sailer over at Takis?
    Two weeks in a row and no column.

  18. Beyond politics, this is a case study in “be careful what you wish for.” The need to walk into the ring of fire and sacrifice yourself to the wackadoodle bunch in charge of the virtue culture these days isn’t going to make the scales drop from anybody’s eyes at this point. The culture crossed that Rubicon about thirty years ago. This was just stupid.

    • At some point, it is very important to step aside and let the culture warriors have at it amongst themselves. Pay close attention to what Remus constantly reminds his Woodpile Report readers—stay away from crowds. Is one more or less person—you—thrown into the ring going to make a difference? We all know the SJWs and their fellow travelers will turn on their own, they always do. Just be sure you are around to salt the graves and give it a good start on beginning anew in the right way. It is the most important thing we can do. In the meantime, rubberneck all you want at the societal accident scene, but don’t fall for the temptation to wade into the mire.

      • Best comment.

        Smile and say nothing about anything in the papers, pursue interests, behave like a well-meaning gentleman of education and sensitivity. And guard the remnant – by being part of the remnant.

        If an SJW yells at you, you smile and say, gently, “Right you are!” and then go about enjoying life.

        Nothing annoys and confuses the SJW more than someone enjoying life.

        So you make chairs, watch birds, learn French, play the bass, study astronomy, or just drink beer, while they carry placards and shout slogans in the streets. In the end they’ll come to you, to your feet, asking how to be alive, to be human.

  19. Hemlock conservatives indeed, via kakistocracy:

    “The point is that America’s future won’t be forged by process, but results. The Court’s left-wing understands this as clearly as men like Gorsuch do not. His four confederates in this case did not vote to overturn the law because it was vague or unconstitutional, but because it did not advance their primary agenda of white disembowelment. The rational counter is not panting Gorsuchian pining for blind lady justice, but rather ruthless prejudice in favor of your own results.”

    • Kakistocracy is a good blog, like Zman, worth going to and spending some time reading

  20. You have to understand who guys like Sloppy and Goldberg are: They aren’t conservatives; they’re classical old world liberals. As the left became progressively more insane, they all got run out of their troop on a rail. They are now desperately searching for a new tribe, because even the cucks now are losing their minds – or being red pilled. Sloppy saw a chance at reconciliation and redemption and jumped at it.
    That is ultimately the difference between us and guys like Sloppy, Goldberg and the other turds at the NRO – being minority dissidents scares the hell out of them while guys like us accept it and deal with it.

    One thing you have wrong about the mass media, Z, is that it is now largely irrelevant. It’s so bad, and so biased that even Lefty can’t stand it. In 20 years they’ll be gone. They have the ratings and diving subscriptions to prove it. We have any number of ‘institutions’. Your blog is one of them, and more are on your blog roll. Countless others can be linked to through them. I see many of your commenters on those other sites to.

    My point is that the whole internet is our institution. Zuckerface and Oytube are threatening censorship and most of us no longer care. They’ll turn into leftist idiot chambers and anyone with a triple digit IQ will walk away, conservatives AND liberals. We may not all be on one convenient site, but we are certainly around, easily found, we can move as a group if we are so inclined. The last election proved that.

    The thing to keep foremost in our minds is that Lefty WILL destroy himself. The trick for us is to keeping clear so he doesn’t take us with him when he goes.

    • I sometimes wonder about the large media institutions going bankrupt. I just assume some future president or congress will declare the NYT and CNN to be too vital to the nation’s well-being and just outright subsidize them with taxpayer money, either quietly or overtly. Roll it all under NPR and PBS and declare anyone who doesn’t like it a Nazi.

      • Oh – guaranteed! In Canada, the CBC has ratings that are literally in the single digits – and that’s AFTER excluding the American programming. Their budget literally still runs in the billions every year and they are basically the propaganda arm of the liberal party and sometimes the further-left NDP. Without massive gov’t funding, it would be done next week.

        But even with all that gov’t pork – nobody is watching. Increasingly furious Canadians, from the right and the left, are demanding that it be shut down.

        The Canadian version of the NYT is The Globe And Mail. They are trying to sell on-line subscriptions for 99 cents now. Maybe the elderly chitlib cat ladies are buying them but even so – how much revenue can that create…?

        The institutions don’t matter – it’s the gate keepers. Now that the walls have fallen, they are still guarding their gates while free speech and public opinion goes on without them.

        Lefty is in deep trouble and he knows it. That’s why the deep state is going after Trump’s associates, that’s why they’re trying to censor the internet, that’s why they want your guns, that’s why they are trying to isolate and marginalize Whitey. I expect a major provocation out of them soon – which will be grounds for a shooting war, possibly a full blown civil war.

        Z sees a ‘peaceful seperation’ but don’t. Without Whitey, the black man goes back to the jungle. Without white males, white females are at the mercy of their own bad choices and stupidity.

        Also, contrary to Z, I think this ultimately WILL end well – after Darwin, Murphy and God have finished correcting the appropriate individuals with attittude and cognitive problems. Once the smoke clears, and the rubble is cleaned up – we can start again.

        • My biggest concern is the DNA. Gizmos can be reinvented but when we wipe out the best genes it could take thousands upon thousands of years to “reinvent” those.

          • The best genes are the ones that aid survival and procreation – that’s ‘biological realism’. There are no “best genes” except measured against this fact.

            Or am I missing something?

            The giant sloth was a weird and impressive animal, but it lacked ‘robustness’ in changing times. Well, what about us? Are we robust? Or are we like the giant sloths, too finely-tuned to a specific ecosystem to weather a crisis?

            It won’t take another glacial irruption to answer this question. It will take another 20-40 years.

            Ortega y Gasset: Man doesn’t have a “nature”, he has a “history”.

          • It is a issue. England and Germany both lost the creme of the crop in terms of manhood in two senseless wars.

            They never recovered. What little exists of their martial traditions is found in the lower classes.

            A nasty civil war could do a lot of damage. Sadly the Left is doing tremendous damage already by poisoning the mind of our your in college kids. White girls get f**ked mentally and become undatable or worse pursue the “meaningful career” only to find it’s really meaningless and end up living alone with a cat. We’re basically taking our most brightest females out of the genepool by sending them to college.

            My view, it’s better to get CW 2.0 on now than in 20 years. And given how insane the Left has become they’ll force our hand. quite soon.

    • My presumption is that some of them will survive as they are useful tools for folks like Bezos and Carlos Slim, regardless of whether they are profitable.

  22. The statement “But when it comes to what appears in our newspapers and magazines, some of the old rules should still apply” indicates pretty clearly he’s operating as a stupid person and not as a collaborator with the Progs – a collaborator wouldn’t even acknowledge this.

    The challenge the Dissident Right will face is that as success comes to the movement, and I believe it will come, it will attract both idiots like Sloppy Williamson as well as grifters looking for a payoff. How the movement handles these people (include them as half-witted children or drive off like rage zombies) will be the question we’ll have to tackle.

  23. Speaking of the foolishness of conservatives and their inability to learn from reality, I have tried to subdue my irritation and contempt for all these conservatives who are ecstatic that Kayne West and a few other rappers have made some MAGA noises.

    This twitter feed is one example: https://twitter.com/lyndseyfifield/status/989269146201358336
    “They’re setting fire to the plantation.”
    “I truly never thought I would see this day. The Culture War has truly begun.”
    “Maybe Black America will finally realize the Democrats are still the same ol slave drivers”

    I will bet my retirement that whoever the GOP nominee in 2020 is, he will win no more than 2% more of the black vote than Trump did in 2016.

    I remind myself that I had to get excited by blacks making conservative noises and then observing that nothing changed many times before I realized the parasitic and tribal nature of blacks. But it is tiresome to watch this foolishness over and over.

    • It is simpler than that…no different than the Goldberg “conservatives”, they will stick around for a few crumbs on the table until the Left has fully replaced them with Hispanic immigrants. All the while convincing themselves they are “winning”.

  24. The Spartans selected their leaders based upon tangible merits like physical strength, courage demonstrated in battle, and an indomitable spirit expressed under existential threat. Those were the days. The top of the pyramid in our current society is inhabited by pussies and poseurs.

      • Plutarch openly states that when Spartan boys reached puberty, they became available to older male lovers (Life of Lykourgos 17.1). There are several examples of famous historical characters who were once either lover or beloved in pederastic relationships (such as the fourth century BC king Agesilaos). Modern scholars do not doubt that man-boy love was very common in Classical Sparta. It has even been suggested that the only way to become a member of one of Sparta’s tent groups upon reaching adulthood was to be the beloved of one of that tent group’s existing members, making pederasty a fundamental element of Spartan social organisation. See S. Hodkinson’s ‘The Development of Spartan Society and Institutions in the Archaic Period’, in Mitchell and Rhodes’ The Development of the Polis in Archaic Greece (1997).

  25. Just a few things.

    –Clarity of writing is honesty. Zman has it in spades. Williamson is always overwriting and overthinking. Like Zman used to call it, “golden tongued bullshit”. Or something like that. What a fake. They’re not naive. They truly get off on the charade. Weird fuckers.

    –And as for you guys here who gleefully predicted that Williamson wouldn’t get another job after The Atlantic…”NO ONE WANTS HIM NOW!” That was always just stupid wishful thinking. There’s about five major Neocon magazines that would gladly take him. And so, he’s at the WSJ, or Commentary now. Or both. Guess you were wrong.

  26. “The Atlantic” took its precipitous plunge after Michael Kelly got killed in Iraq. Jeffrey Goldberg (the guy currently running it) was in the Israeli Army (like the son of David Brooks over at “The New York Times”) and even worse, he was a prison guard. Moral pedigree-wise, he’s somewhere down there well below used car salesman and crack dealer. Like almost everyone else, I was trained to regard things like racism and antisemitism as déclassé, but what should ultimately matter is not whether something is tasteless or bad form to say, but whether or not it’s true. David Frum (cousin of the NYT’s Paul Krugman) is still writing for the Atlantic, despite being the brain-trust for the most disastrous Republican president in a long time, and the biggest foreign policy shitstorm of the 21st century. The bipartisan fusion party and their media organs will tolerate some values voting sops from ancient Semites (i.e. Norman Podhoretz can say nice things about Christianity or pro-Lifers) but Williamson was on dangerous ground talking about anything besides lowering taxes and turning everything from Kabul to the Kremlin to rubble, even at National Review. Going to “The Atlantic” was about as smart as performing Johnny Rebel songs in a Klan outfit on Showtime at the Apollo in Harlem. What the hell did he think would happen?

    • “What the hell did he think would happen?”

      I’ll tell you what he thought. He thought what might happen, actually did happen, and at no loss to himself. He gets fired from the Left. It creates a big story. He’s sort of a novelty hit. So he gets re-hired by the NeoCons. All you have to be is a pretend-good writer. Just don’t talk shit about the Jews and you’re gold.

      • Frip;

        Re “…what happened is what he thought might happen..”

        If we’re looking for evidence on the ‘cynical vs. stupid’ controversy a check of Williamson’s employment contract, hiring letter, etc (if available). would be instructive.

        – Employee at will = Stupid

        – Play or pay, minimum guaranteed payment, severance beyond state law minimums; etc. = Cynical if large, Prudent if small. If prudent sized, jury’s still out but leaning towards cynical.

      • The strange thing is that in the Wall Street Journal article Z-Man links, Williamson comes very close to saying the reason he got axed was that he was from Texas and not New York. He even mentions Goldberg saying he couldn’t get away with it because he wasn’t “part of the club.” WSJ gave Kevin MacDonald right-of-reply in some recent exchange, and Williamson is basically saying (for anyone who is not incredibly dense) that he would have survived this if he was Jewish. Interesting times.

  27. Guys like Williamson are lower than Judas. Not only have they sold us out for their 10 pieces of cotton candy but they continue a charade of noble angst and supposed great courage while they do so. When the revolution comes he’ll find himself up against the wall with his masters. The humorous thing is that he’ll be genuinely surprised; he’ll have thought that he would have been king of the pile due to his previous ‘credentials’.

  28. It’s a pretty short walk from “you can’t work here because some people don’t agree with you” to the Chinese Government’s policy of social-credits and “you can’t buy that house because your views do not reflect offically State policy”. A VERY short walk.

    Pretty much ANYBODY who is not a Progressive will require a separate set of institutions and platforms in the next few years. A lot of Conservatives get by on the old, “Well, they’re not doing anything to me. I’m just going to go about my business.” They (we?) don’t always understand that we are going to be hunted down and driven from the public square.

    I see it a lot on Social Media where my conservative friends will maintain some of the most bizarre wackos as “friends” or “followers”…but the Progressives will just cut you loose and/or block you. They are utterly incapable of maintaining thoughts in opposition to their world view. When ignoring Conservatives no longer works (we’ll find other ways), they’ll move on to destroying lives.

    It’ll be subtle, like banks checking your credit scores, and then they ask Google or Facebook for your “social media profile” to see if you are a member of anything unsavory. Unsavory, of course, being anything not Progressive.

    We are tipping very close to China’s “social credits”. Except it won’t be the Feds enforcing it. It will be corporations doing it for them.

    • Funny, your statement about social media. My spouse just had that experience with a supposedly old and good friend who is also a whack job Progressive. She told my wife she was blocking her on Facebook because when you “disagree with me it upsets my friends and I constantly get DMs complaining about why you are on my “friend” list”. Mind you, my wife’s “disagreements” have been of the mildest sorts. But that is the mentality. It can’t be reasoned with. It can’t be satisfied with anything but utter compliance the Hive.

        • Disagree. She is afraid, and she explained herself. It’s terrifying and disheartening, but you can see the difficulty. Being “hurled into the void” is truly terrifying to the smartphone generation. It can last forever.

          • And a simple thing to do electronically. Used to be you considered whether or not you really wanted to pursue a beef with another person since that required getting up in their grill and presenting your case

        • Have known this person for twenty years. What’s fascinating is watching how fanaticism has gradually taken over every fiber of her being (and that of a substantial number of others in the same demographic) Increasingly this is all they live for and there is no separation between personal and political. The latest jihad these folks have is a “comprehensive” set of “common sense” local gun control laws. Completely untethered in reality, but it is clear the thought that someone, somewhere, might actually enjoy a day on the range, own more than one firearm and a half dozen cartridges is utterly terrifying to them.

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