The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Auto-Marginalization: @BrooksBayne Decides to Jew-Bait (!) Aaron Walker

Posted on | November 30, 2012 | 39 Comments

Did I ever mention that I was friends with the late Sam Francis? That I have shaken hands with Pat Buchanan and once interviewed the late Joe Sobran? I’m bringing this up — doing “guilt-by-association” against myself, as it were – to make the point that I’ve hung out with Thought Criminals of the Dreadnaught class, the kind of right-wing extremists your nice Republican mother warned you about.

Having been smeared as a “hater” myself and having seen good people suffer from intra-conservative factional infighting, I am loath to support purges of people on the basis of cheap attacks from the Left or flimsy accusations of ideological impurity.

Ask Pamela Geller who stood up for her when Charles Johnson accused her of abetting “Euro-fascism.”

So now we confront the problem of Brooks Bayne.

Exactly who he is, or thinks he is, or has convinced other people that he is, Brooks Bayne has recently decided to auto-marginalize himself. It’s a hell of thing to say about somebody that I’d rather link a Firedoglake article about them than to link anything they ever wrote.

The Entire Internet Hates Brooks Bayne’s Guts

That was in March, when Bayne decided to go off on a weird tangent about Sandra Fluke’s boyfriend being Jewish and the scion of a family who subscribed to “the typical Jewish variant of socialism.” Marc Tracy offers an examination of Bayne’s rant at Tablet Magazine.

Just to demonstrate that one can speak of “the typical Jewish variant of socialism” without being a Jew-hater, I would direct you to David Horowitz’s memoir Radical Son, in which he ponders how and why his Jewish parents became members of the Communist Party U.S.A., and thus idolators in the totalitarian personality cult of a mass murderer named Josef Stalin. Horowitz recognized the cultural roots of this and discussed it in the context of tikkun olam. As I wrote in February 2011:

Tikkun olam is a rabbinical concept that might properly be translated as “for the public good,” but which in the modern era has been politicized by many on the Left, so that it is indistinguishable in their interpretation from “social justice.” Most famously, Michael Lerner — a 1960s anti-war radical who once led an SDS splinter group called the Seattle Liberation Front — named his magazine Tikkun.

“Social justice” is, as Hayek said, a mirage. Whatever you call it, and whatever compels you to pursue it, chasing the mirage of social justice will eventually bring about disillusionment, if you are intelligent and honest with yourself. It would be good if more Jewish conservatives spoke bluntly about this, just as it would be good if more Catholic conservatives spoke bluntly about how various ”social justice” teachings of their church empower Welfare State liberalism that is ultimately hostile to faith and morality. For that matter, most Protestant churches could use a stern lecture or two about this perverse and nonsensical misinterpretation of Christian teaching.

As Ludwig von Mises observed nearly a century ago, “Christian Socialism is nonetheless socialism.” But I digress . . .

Brooks Bayne rather reminds me of another enthusiastic political parvenu, Glenn Beck, in that during his famed chalkboard lectures, Beck was often teaching his viewers facts that he himself had just learned. Not that there was anything wrong with that — Beck’s genuine excitment as he traced the historical background of current politics was quite infectious — but there is always a danger that such student-teachers will let themselves be sidetracked into well-known dead-ends that more experienced teachers might have warned them about.

The origins of the Federal Reserve system are indeed a frightful mess, but if you start ranting too excitedly about Jekyll Island and “international bankers,” you’ll sound like a kook — and might actually become one. More than a few well-meaning folks have started down that path and ended up on the paranoid fringe, barking madly about the Bildebergers, the Bavarian Illuminati and the New World Order.

It is in such light that we must evaluate Brooks Bayne and the suspicious whiff of anti-Semitism that surrounds him. I don’t want to be hasty. It takes more than a few sharp jabs at “neocons” to arouse my suspicion in this regard; many of my good friends are paleoconservatives, traditionalists or libertarians who have their own legitimate complaints against neconservatives. Such an éminence gris as Russell Kirk once infamously quipped that it seemed some neocons “mistook Tel Aviv for the capital of the United States.” Unless we’re willing to airbrush Kirk from the conservative pantheon, then, we can’t be haphazardly purging people on the basis of random remarks.

Nevertheless, Brooks Bayne keeps tallying up marks against himself, and has managed to alienate so many conservatives that it’s difficult to find anyone willing to defend him anymore. And this brings me to the incident that inspired this long rumination: After a U.S. District Court judge dismissed Aaron Walker’s federal lawsuit against Brett Kimberlin — I blogged about that decision, and the PDF of the judge’s ruling is here – Brooks Bayne made a comment at his own blog mocking the plaintiff as “Walkerwitz.”

WALKERWITZ?

What the hell is this? Never mind why Bayne, who endlessly celebrates himself as a True Conservative, would take sides with Brett Kimberlin. Why would Bayne make this bizarre anti-Semitic jest about Walker, a conservative Presbyterian from Texas? Maybe because Brooks got this idea (as he has seems to have gotten so many other falsehoods) from the pro-Kimberlin “Breitbart Unmasked” site.

More than two months ago, Aaron Walker explained how “Breitbart Unmasked” began harassing him in March on Twitter with claims that records at Yale Law School showed Walker as being Jewish.

This was preposterous. And where did “Breitbart Unmasked” get that silly idea? From an anti-Semitic site whose idiot author evidently decided anyone with the first name “Aaron” must be Jewish.

So, a falsehood makes its way from a Jew-hating site to a pro-Kimberlin Twitter account and now, it seems, to Brooks Bayne, “True Conservative.”

Anyone care to defend Bayne in this? Anyone? Bueller?

UPDATE: Phillip McGuire on Twitter informs me that Bayne has been throwing this “Walkerwitz” idiocy at Aaron Walker for weeks now, and Google confirms this as true, raising the question: Why were none of Bayne’s fanboys troubled by this? And why do mainstream conservatives think they can safely ignore people like Brooks Bayne?

On the one hand, he may be an irrelevant distraction. On the other hand, he seems to have made himself the center of gravity of a minor galaxy of “True Conservative” posturing, so that when he starts Jew-baiting a Presbyterian, maybe we ought to take time to warn people about this dangerous fool.

UPDATE II: Back in September, Ladd Ehlinger Jr. subjected Bayne to a memorable satirical beatdown.

 


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Category: Aaron Worthing, The Kimberlin Files

Comments

  • Finrod Felagund

    The Bavarian Illuminati are always a threat, but the Gnomes of Zurich can take them straight on most times, the Society of Assassins can put the hurt on them, and even the Bermuda Triangle stands a pretty good chance against them.

    What, we’re not talking about the Steve Jackson boardgame Illuminati? :-)

  • MrPaulRevere

    Freud famously said “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”. And sometimes a shallow buffoon is just a shallow buffoon.

  • http://boogieforward.us/ K-Bob

    I can see getting a little hammered and telling obnoxious jokes starting with “A rabbi, a priest, and a chicken walk into a bar,” or maybe even getting Mel Drunksoned and laughing about “it all being the fault of the jooooos.” I mean, sometimes people do really stupid things when they are as high as Lindsay Lohan behind the wheel.

    But once you decide to be a “pundit,” you pretty much forfeit the right to Drunk-Mel-Gibson-style slips of the tongue. You are expected to have just enough self-control that you don’t sound like a guy with tourettes shouting the n-word every time they see a person of color.

    So basically, screw “hasty.” Auto-marginalization is instantaneous for someone that glaringly stupid.

    Oh yeah:

    Only Democrats care about skin color.

  • robertstacymccain

    As I tried to indicate at the outset, I’m not the Nervous Nelly type that rushes out to be the first to denounce any Republican who is accused of “extremism.” But when somebody starts doing what Brooks Bayne has been doing and, when embarrassed like he was in March, reacts by doubling-down on stupid — well, you ignore someone like that at your own peril. The fact that Bayne is now cheerleading for Brett Kimberlin ought to wake people up to the fact that Bayne isn’t just an irresponsible joker, but a deranged personality who is actively collaborating with the Left for destructive purposes, and deceiving people into thinking that his selfish ego-trip is a “True Conservative” cause.

  • slp

    Stacy —

    You need to an editor to proof your posts.

    You wrote:

    “After a U.S. Circuit Court judge in dismissed Aaron Walker’s federal lawsuit against Brett Kimberlin”

    All you have to do is read the PDF post of the order to see that the judge is a U.S District Court judge.

    10 lashes with a wet noodle for you.

  • robertstacymccain

    Thanks for the proofreading. Fixed it.

  • http://boogieforward.us/ K-Bob

    Good point. I guess I’m not so much denouncing him as placing him on my “do not listen to this man without being aware of his glaring flaws” list.

    Huckabee’s on that list, too, so it’s not just for guys who “goe there” on jew-baiting.

  • Pingback: All Hail Brooks Bayne « The Crying Wolfe

  • PGlenn

    Brilliant analysis, RSM. You’re among the best reporters/analysts on the right. Unfortunately, it’s a small group that’s mostly ignored.

    Here’s my take home point, which is probably different than yours: Bayne might have gone off the deep end, anyway (it happens to people every day). Inasmuch as we might associate his recent trajectory with “dead end” ideological influences, however, we – of the non-kooky right fringe – don’t usually appreciate that some of our own assumptions feed into those dead ends.

    For example, we fail to adequately recognize the extent to which “progressive” ideas can be intuitively very persuasive. That’s how they’ve attracted generations of very smart, well-intended scholars, activists, etc. as well as been embraced by theological movements (in Catholicism, in Judaism, etc.). Unfortunately, reality intervenes: counter-intuitively as it might seem to them, progressive ideas rarely work in the real world. Yet the modern world is so hyper-complicated, and mixed-market “capitalist” economies have been so relatively successful (compared to even more socialistic models) in paying for the “progressive” freight, that it becomes that much more difficult for “progressives” and everyone else to see the failures of their ideas.

    Progressivism is not a nefarious series of hidden agendas that aim to control everything and steal the resources. Some individual progressives are control freaks and/or thieves, but progressive ideas are rooted in the 150+ year old desire to solve the “Social Problem.” In that vein, “social justice” is just a catch-all phrase that progressives use to encapsulate their loosely conceived notions of what socioeconomic progress might represent.

    When we ascribe evil motives to the “progressive” project more generally, it sends us down dead ends and diminishes our fleeting opportunities to reverse the “progressive” scourge. Unless we find more effective ways of counter-intuitively illustrating why progressivism fails and why Hayekian liberalism is more conducive to general happiness, etc., especially for non-elites, progressivism will continue to seduce.

  • http://thecampofthesaints.org Bob Belvedere

    Apparently, you can’t see the fnords or you’d have known.

    Kick Out The JAMS!

  • http://twitter.com/dereliquemybalz BradandSarah

    I tried to give Brooks the benefit of the doubt after reading his piece on Fluke’s boyfriend and the family, thinking he’s just caught up in Fluke hatred or something. But then it didn’t stop, he just kept writing just stupid, lazy things, as though being or seeming to be an anti-semite is avant garde or something. Then he really lost it and started going after all the Breitbarts and anyone else who dared criticize his very lazy and simple conspiracy theorist garbage. So, on to the dustbins of fruticake land with ya. I swear he thinks it’s all a joke and just craves the attention.

  • http://twitter.com/wjjhoge WJJ Hoge

    I wonder how Jeffrey Cohen, the “Executive Director” of the Kimberlin “charities,” Justice Through Music Project and Velvet Revolution US, feels about Team Kimberlin’s anti-semitism?

  • Pingback: Team Kimberlin and Anti-Semitism | hogewash

  • http://wizbangblog.com/ Adjoran

    When I first joined Twitter, or first started actually signing into it, in the spring, AG Conservative was in a bit of a twit-war with Bayne and his supporters over Baynes’ alleged antisemitism. I took no position at that time, Brooks was among my first follows, and I had seen no signs other than the examples AG-C was claiming (which I hadn’t seen firsthand).

    But as time went on, there were ever more occurrences. Finally I just unfollowed him, but it wasn’t ONLY because of the Joo stuff, it was also the actions of some of his followers. Their behavior reminded me very much of the CJ slitherlings. It was beginning to resemble a true internet cult.

  • http://wizbangblog.com/ Adjoran

    Yes, that’s a lot of it – the conspiracy nut stuff seems to just lead to the antisemitic stuff, like it’s just uphill from it on a muddy California slope.

  • http://twitter.com/wjjhoge WJJ Hoge

    If all it takes to be Jewish is the right kind of first name, then did we elected our first Jewish president in 1860?

  • http://twitter.com/wjjhoge WJJ Hoge

    Miss Mao for Rule 5?

  • http://twitter.com/DaTechGuyblog Peter Ingemi

    On the plus side Mr. Bayne has you linking to Ladd Ehlinger.

  • robertstacymccain

    The enemy of Kimberlin’s enemy is Kimberlin’s friend. Do the math.

  • http://twitter.com/richard_mcenroe richard mcenroe

    The way things are going, I’m planning on capping my list somewhere around 329,999,900 people or so.

  • http://twitter.com/richard_mcenroe richard mcenroe

    “Social Problem”= ‘”Human Condition”. Ain’t been fixed in the last 5,000 years and we ain’t gonna fix it any time soon.

  • Pingback: Weird Fact Challenged Antisemitism Of @BrooksBayne & @Beccas43

  • http://boogieforward.us/ K-Bob

    Can we begin the denunciations when we reach that number (or are we already there)?

  • http://twitter.com/richard_mcenroe richard mcenroe

    I say give it one more election after Boehner and Cornyn sign on with the Dem/GOP merger.

  • http://twitter.com/richard_mcenroe richard mcenroe

    When you’re in love, the whole world is Jewish… http://youtu.be/jKG6UWtrPD4

  • http://boogieforward.us/ K-Bob

    Hey Bob (and anyone else who might be interested), I just had an O/T idea over at Scoop’s. Be interested in what you think.

  • Pingback: Weird Fact Challenged Antisemitism Of @BrooksBayne & @Beccas43 « Stranahan In Exile

  • http://twitter.com/TheBluto Darth Bluto

    I took the “Walkerwitz” comments as mocking Walker’s “generalship” of the legal battle with Kimberlin, i.e., a reference to Carl Von Clausewitz.

  • Bob Agard
  • http://thecampofthesaints.org Bob Belvedere

    As long as she keeps her arms by her side.

  • http://thecampofthesaints.org Bob Belvedere

    Oh, and by the way, please remember: Never Whistle While You’re Pissing – thank you, The Mgt.

  • http://thecampofthesaints.org Bob Belvedere

    ‘Self-Hating Jew’, perhaps???

  • http://thecampofthesaints.org Bob Belvedere

    Pretty much the same here.

  • http://thecampofthesaints.org Bob Belvedere

    What’s your Twitter name?

  • http://thecampofthesaints.org Bob Belvedere

    Interesting idea, indeed.
    I’ll need to think about it [I have saved the link].

  • http://boogieforward.us/ K-Bob

    It occurs to me that my idea over at Scoop’s might be apropos here.

  • dad29

    “Social justice” is a contradiction in terms.

    Justice, properly defined/understood, is rendered ONLY to individuals; it cannot be rendered to a “class”.

    The Catholic Church does not teach that ‘social justice’ should be employed, although some Popes used the term sloppily. The only infallible teaching that encompassed the topic was the Beatitudes–which were, as you recall, uttered by Christ.

    However, the Catholic Church DOES encourage that ‘poor in spirit’ which was also endorsed by Christ when He told the young man to ‘sell all your stuff, give the money to the poor, and follow Me.’

    That was a rather broad hint which Americans (Christian or otherwise) do NOT take seriously. As Burke foretold, materialism–the spawn of the Benthamites–is a serious, debilitating disease which WILL lead to tyranny.

    Gee. Is it just a co-incidence that…….?

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