Category: New York Times

For Crying Out Loud! ‘The Paramilitary Wing of the American Right,’ Ma’am?

Posted on

Michelle Goldberg lives in Brooklyn and writes for the New York Times, and I doubt she has ever actually spoken to any member of “The American Right.” In a column that endeavors to connect the Uvalde massacre to the 2021 Capitol riot, she seems utterly unhinged:

It will be impossible to do anything about guns in this country, at least at a national level, as long as Democrats depend on the cooperation of a party that holds in reserve the possibility of insurrection. The slaughter of children in Texas has done little to alter this dynamic.
Republicans have no intention of letting Democrats pass even modest measures like strengthened background checks . . . Victims of our increasingly frequent mass shootings are collateral damage in a cold civil war, though some Democrats refuse to acknowledge it, let alone fight it. . . .

Permit me to interrupt this to point out that (a) Democrats certainly will not be satisfied with “modest measures,” (b) it has been demonstrated that “strengthened background checks” would not have stopped the Uvalde shooter, and (c) “mass shootings” are not “increasingly frequent.” Such incidents continue to be rare, but we have had two this month — in Buffalo and Uvalde — to which the national media have devoted saturation coverage, while habitually ignoring the daily death toll from the wave of violent crime in major cities. Goldberg continues:

Throughout the country, reported The New York Times, “right-wing Republicans are talking more openly and frequently about the use of force as justifiable in opposition to those who dislodged him” — meaning Trump — “from power.” Expecting those same Republicans to collaborate with Democrats on public safety is madness.
The horrifying irony, the hideous ratchet, is that the more America is besieged by senseless violence, the more the paramilitary wing of the American right is strengthened.

You can read the rest of that, but you see how the lazy demonization of gun owners and Republicans (whom Goldberg seems to assume are one and the same) gives way to this paranoia about the threat of the “paramilitary wing of the American right.” When Republicans are in power, Democrats proclaim themselves the “resistance” fighting against the allegedly “authoritarian” GOP. Oh, but when Democrats have power, they immediately start hatching plans to criminalize dissent and speak of opposition as if everyone who voted Republican is a neo-Nazi menace who needs to be arrested. Remember how, when Bush was president, Democrats insisted that “dissent is the highest form of patriotism,” but once Obama got elected and the Tea Party movement started, we were told that dissent is RAAAAACISM! Liberals like Michelle Goldberg don’t even notice, much less admit, the hypocrisy of their attitude on this subject. In their minds, because Republicans are evil, anything that hurts Republicans is good, and their habitual slanders must always be flexible, adaptable to whatever the circumstance may be.

Isolated from the rest of America, hunkered down in her bunker in Brooklyn — in a neighborhood that boasts “one of the city’s finest collections of nineteenth-century houses,” including the home in which Winston Churchill’s mother was born — it may be easy for Michelle Goldberg to imagine that everything south of the Hudson River has been taken over by “paramilitary” Republicans. After all, didn’t her own newspaper report that “right-wing Republicans are talking more openly and frequently about the use of force as justifiable”? That was last November, and their evidence for this assertion included, for example, Republican candidate Josh Mandel, the grandson of Holocaust survivors, declaring in a video, “When the Gestapo show up at your front door, you know what to do.” This was apparently a reference to Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate, and if Mandel was engaged in hyperbole, well, it was a fiercely contested primary where rhetorical stakes resembled the aggressive line-setting of high-stakes sports betting just to secure a polling advantage. But having recently been to Ohio, where my wife’s family lives, I could assure Michelle Goldberg or any other fretful Brooklyn liberals that right-wing paramilitaries are not — repeat, not — running rampant in the Buckeye State, no matter what any Republican candidate in the Senate primary might have implied or suggested.

Residents of the Cobble Hill neighborhood in Brooklyn, forced to rely on the New York Times to tell them what’s happening out in the provinces, can be forgiven for thinking latter-day Sturmabteilung have taken over vast swaths of America. After all, didn’t that dangerous extremist Glenn Youngkin get elected governor of Virginia last November? Here’s how the NYT article about the Republican “menace” concludes:

But even at right-wing gatherings of the like-minded, there is a shared assumption that political confrontation could escalate into violence.
At a Virginia rally last month for conservative supporters of Glenn Youngkin, the Republican candidate for governor, the urgency of a call to arms was conveyed right from the opening prayer. The speaker warned of the looming threat of “communist atheists.”
“Heavenly Father, we come before you tonight,” said Joshua Pratt, a conservative activist. “Your children are in a battle, and we need your help.”

Has Terry McAuliffe ever denied being a “communist atheist”? Did these enterprising journalists from the New York Times ask him that question on the campaign trail? But never mind that. The martial reference to the Lord’s children “in a battle” and in need of help from their Heavenly Father is not alarming to anyone with access to a hymnal:

Stand up, stand up for Jesus,
Ye soldiers of the cross;
Lift high his royal banner,
It must not suffer loss.
From victory unto victory
His army shall he lead,
Till every foe is vanquished,
And Christ is Lord indeed.

This “paramilitary” anthem (which I recall being the tune played when our children marched into the sanctuary during Vacation Bible School) was composed in 1858 by the Rev. George Duffield Jr., who “was known as a zealous advocate of abolition and Union causes during the U.S. Civil War.” Given its author’s sentiments, and its origins in those days of “Bleeding Kansas” and other provocations that subsequently led to the Civil War, I suppose Duffield’s hymn could be considered “extremist,” but most listeners understand these verses as a poetic metaphor. Surely no one could be hired as a reporter for the New York Times who doesn’t know what a metaphor is, but we are expected to believe — and apparently, Michelle Goldberg does believe — that Joshua Pratt’s prayer was some kind of coded message, a threat of armed violence.

How is the opening prayer at a Glenn Youngkin rally, or the “Gestapo” reference in a Josh Mandel campaign video, related to the Uvalde shooting? This is unclear to me, but Michelle Goldberg is certain that these things are related, perhaps by a syllogism as simple as this:

A. Guns are bad
and
B. Republicans are evil,
therefore
C. Vote Democrat!

Strip away the finely crafted verbiage and this is the core of her “argument,” although I doubt any student of rhetoric would dignify Michelle Goldberg’s column by that name. It’s really just an 876-word insult, but what else do we expect from “communist atheists”?

Well, she hasn’t denied it, has she?

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!




What Counts as ‘Russian Disinformation’?

Posted on

Everybody’s having a laugh at the New York Times which, attempting to smear conservatives as purveyors of “Russian disinformation,” prompted Candace Owens to point to how often the Times (and other liberal outlets) have reported on the same facts that are now called “disinformation.” (Hat-tip: Instapundit.) Just the other day, for example, I noticed that it is now considered “Russian disinformation” to mention that Ukraine has a neo-Nazi problem.

Neo-Nazis and the Far Right
Are On the March in Ukraine
— The Nation, Feb. 22, 2019

The author of that article, Lev Golinkin, is a Ukranian-born Jew, and The Nation is a left-wing journal that is certainly not pro-Putin, so why are we now required to ignore this information?

[In 2012] Ukraine’s Maidan uprising ousted President Viktor Yanukovych, to the cheers and support of the West. Politicians and analysts in the United States and Europe not only celebrated the uprising as a triumph of democracy, but denied reports of Maidan’s ultranationalism, smearing those who warned about the dark side of the uprising as Moscow puppets and useful idiots. Freedom was on the march in Ukraine. . . .
Post-Maidan Ukraine is the world’s only nation to have a neo-Nazi formation in its armed forces. The Azov Battalion was initially formed out of the neo-Nazi gang Patriot of Ukraine. Andriy Biletsky, the gang’s leader who became Azov’s commander, once wrote that Ukraine’s mission is to “lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade…against the Semite-led Untermenschen.” Biletsky is now a deputy in Ukraine’s parliament.
In the fall of 2014, Azov—which is accused of human-rights abuses, including torture, by Human Rights Watch and the United Nations — was incorporated into Ukraine’s National Guard.
While the group officially denies any neo-Nazi connections, Azov’s nature has been confirmed by multiple Western outlets: The New York Times called the battalion “openly neo-Nazi,” while USA Today, The Daily Beast, The Telegraph, and Haaretz documented group members’ proclivity for swastikas, salutes, and other Nazi symbols, and individual fighters have also acknowledged being neo-Nazis.

Far be it from me to draw conclusions about political events on the other side of the world on the basis of stuff I read on the Internet. Maybe this “ultranationalism” in Ukraine is misunderstood, and maybe negative reports about the Azov Battalion and other alleged neo-Nazis in Ukraine really are “Russian disinformation.” The point is, we don’t know, and maybe it doesn’t matter — like, if you’re fighting off a foreign invasion, do we need to impose a litmus test on who’s doing the fighting?

Is Ukraine corrupt? According to the New York Times‘ own reporting from 2018, the answer is, “yes.” Is Ukraine more corrupt than Russia? Probably not, and I don’t think Ukraine is more “ultranationalist” than Russia, either. So why is the New York Times now attacking Candace Owens and others for talking smack about Ukraine? In a word, politics.

Democrats seem to have the idea that smearing Republicans as Putin stooges — traitors! enemy agents! — is the way they’re going to avert a bloodbath in the midterm elections. And the New York Times is doing what it always does, producing Democratic Party propaganda.




 

‘The Negro Problem,’ Then and Now

Posted on

For about four decades, Nathaniel Southgate Shaler (1841-1906) was among the leading professors of science at Harvard University. In 1884, Professor Shaler published in The Atlantic Monthly a lengthy article entitled “The Negro Problem,” which begins with this paragraph:

When the civil war determined by its result the political position of the black people in the Southern States, there was a general belief among their friends that the race had thereby received a complete enfranchisement as American citizens; that they were made free to all our national inheritances; that all the problems of their future involved only questions of a detached nature — such slight matters as their rights in hotels and railways, in fields of labor, or at the polling booths. But those who by their eagerness to bid the negro welcome to his new place in the state did so much credit to the spirit of hope and friendship of our time could not see the gravity of this problem. Never before in the history of peoples had so grave an experiment been tried as was then set about with a joyous confidence of success. Only their great military triumph could have given to our hard-minded, practical people such rash confidence. Here, on the one hand, was a people, whose written history shows that the way to the self-government on which alone a state can be founded is through slowly and toilfully gained lessons, handed from father to son — lessons learned on hard tilled and often hard fought fields. The least knowledge of the way in which their own position in the world had been won would have made it clear that such a national character as theirs could be formed only by marvelous toil of generations after generations, and an almost equally marvelous good fortune that brought fruit to their labor. There, on the other hand, was a folk, bred first in a savagery that had never been broken by the least effort towards a higher state, and then in a slavery that tended almost as little to fit them for a place in the structure of a self-controlling society. Surely, the effort to blend these two peoples by a proclamation and a constitutional amendment will sound strangely in the time to come, when men see that they are what their fathers have made them, and that resolutions cannot help this rooted nature of man. . . .

You may read the rest, and I suppose both the current editors of The Atlantic and the current leadership of Harvard University would vehemently disavow the entirety of Professor Shaler’s arguments. Nevertheless it is always helpful, in studying the origins of social problems, to consult in the original text the opinions of our predecessors, rather than to rely on modern interlocutors to summarize or interpret those views. One of the problems with the teaching of history nowadays is that most students just absorb the Cliff Notes summary of the past — reading only whatever is assigned, as necessary to obtain the desired grade — and thus we have millions of “educated” Americans who are almost entirely ignorant of vast amounts of history, despite having gotten A’s in the subject, even at our most prestigious universities.

Professor Glenn Reynolds today calls attention to a dispute between Princeton Professor Sean Wilentz and Nikole Hannah-Jones of the infamous “1619 Project.” The latter’s authorial purpose was to impugn the United State, per se and in toto, as hopelessly stained by “white supremacy.” Wilentz’s criticism is that Hannah-Jones goes too far — indeed, she goes so far as to completely outrace the historical evidence, which does not support her outlandish claim that our War of Independence was waged to prevent a threat to slavery from the British homeland (a fictitious threat that Hannah-Jones manufactures from whole cloth, a threat which the Patriots in such places as Vermont and Massachusetts certainly never mentioned). Wilentz is correct in this. However, I would argue that the real issue is not that Hannah-Jones goes too far, but rather that she is going in the wrong direction.

Hannah-Jones’s argument is wrong because her intentions are wicked — motivated by a hatred of America which is, in turn, informed by a hatred of white people (never mind or, at least, leave to examination by psychoanalysts, the fact that her own mother is white). Hannah-Jones began her project with an anti-American (and anti-white) agenda, and having made hatred the premise of her argument, everything else followed logically. Wilentz speaks of Hannah-Jones’s argument as exhibiting such “perversity” that, if it were submitted as a high school history paper, would automatically receive an “F” grade.

It can be easily demonstrated that Hannah-Jones is factually wrong about America, but why and how did she get it so wrong? And the answer is that her hateful purpose led her into these errors. She is wrong because she wants to judge the America of 1619-1776 by a standard of radical egalitarianism by which our forefathers are condemned as racists, and never mind that the word “racist” did not even exist at the time.

Anyone familiar with the history of England would see, in the Patriot cause of 1776, a sentiment that can be traced back through the Whig cause in the Glorious Revolution — principles delineated by John Locke — and further to the Parliamentary cause as exemplified by the heroic figures of Algernon Sidney and John Hampden, among others.

What the Patriots believed was that the home government was denying to them the rights which their English ancestors had fought so hard to obtain. Even while proclaiming it to be a “self-evident” truth that “all men” were “endowed by their Creator” with these rights, the signers of the Declaration were aware that such rights were not recognized in most of Europe, to say nothing of the lack of recognition of these “self-evident” rights in more remote regions of the globe. But I digress . . .

What is important is that we try to see the past as it actually was, rather than trying to impose our moralistic views on the past, in order to congratulate ourselves on our superiority to dead men who are not here to defend themselves against our accusations of “racism,” etc.

Read the original texts, let dead men speak in their own voices, and you’ll learn a lot more than you can from any tendentious intellectual presuming to interpret (and usually, to condemn) the motives of historic figures. For example, Ibram X. Kendi, author of the popular BLM/CRT diatribe How to Be an Anti-Racist, previously published Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (2016). In the process of explaining how he got the title of his first book, Kendi linked an online text of The Congressional Record from April 1860. What he meant to call attention to was the “Racist Ideas” of one of the senators who was participating in that debate. There was a proposal to use federal funds for public schools in the District of Columbia, a measure that the Senator opposed. But someone (and I haven’t gone through the entire legislative history of that bill) then amended the legislation to specify that the proposed public schools would be for both white and black children.

Here is an excerpt from the Senator’s remarks:

“Mr. President, the propositions, both the main one contained in the bill and that contained in the amendment, I think, rest on two fundamental errors: in the first place, that our Government was instituted for eleemosynary purposes, and in the next place, that it was instituted for a mixed race. This Government was not founded by negroes nor for negroes, but by white men for white men. It was not founded for eleemosynary purposes, but as an agent of the States; and there is no right to take one dollar from the Treasury to appropriate it to public schools. . . .
“The errors are fundamental on which the bill rests; and these errors have been developed by the alliance which it has brought from the other side, developing, as a consequence of the very proposition, this controversy as to the rights of whites, and the equality of the negroes. I do not choose to argue with any one who thinks proper to assert the equality of the negro and the white man. The man who makes the assertion may prove to me his equality with the negro. He proves to me no more; and I accept his argument only for so much.” [Emphasis added.]
— Sen. Jefferson Davis, April 12, 1860

The highlighted sentence, you see, is offered by Davis as a statement of fact — the same fact that Chief Justice Roger Taney expressed in the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision. So far as I am aware, no one has ever provided evidence that Justice Taney and Senator Davis were wrong about this. Examine the writings of the Founding Fathers and see if you can find anything indicating that they desired or intended (or even imagined in their wildest dreams) a future in which the descendants of African slaves would obtain, en masse, full political equality with whites.

What has happened, you see, is that most Americans have been taught our own history in such a way that they don’t even recognize the importance of something that was apparent to Professor Shaler in 1884 when he spoke of the “experiment” that necessarily followed emancipation.

If we experience difficulties — political, social and economic — as a result of trying to integrate such diverse people into a single body politic, this should not cause surprise or dismay, simply because no one else anywhere has ever attempted anything remotely like it. Well, yes, you can speak of the Austro-Hungarian Empire as an experiment in “diversity,” but how did that work out? Our problem in America, I suggest, is that our expectations are too high, that we have been encouraged to think it should be easy to arrive at some utopian ideal of Equality (with a capital “E,” denoting its religious significance to liberals).

Utilized as a weapon by dishonest partisan agitators, “Equality” tends to make people unhappy, to cause resentment and suspicion — those evil rich people are exploiting us, we are told, as we sit in our air-conditioned homes with high-speed Internet connections and giant flat-screen TVs. It’s not just racial hatred that is incited by these “Equality” agitators, but every imaginable species of hatred, fear and envy.

We must live in reality, rather than in our political fantasies of an ideal condition of “Equality” that, so far as I know, has never existed anywhere at any time in all of human history. This utopian fantasy is harmful in that it breeds irrational discontentment, no matter how objectively splendid our actual circumstances may be. Some of the most bitter people in America are rich liberals whose affluent lifestyles would have been unimaginable to their grandparents or more remote ancestors. My own grandfather plowed the red clay hills of east Alabama behind a mule team. He had no indoor plumbing or electricity or central heat. Rather than make myself miserable by comparing my situation to that of Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates, I prefer to make myself happy by thinking how much easier my life is than that of my grandfather. Right now, I’m drinking a fruit smoothie and eating a meal I warmed up in the microwave, while preparing to hit the “publish” button and communicate with a readership of thousands. What have I got to complain about, if I pause to compare my situation to my grandfather’s life in rural Alabama?

Couldn’t the same be said for Nikole Hannah-Jones? She’s employed by the most influential newspaper in the world, yet it seems she’s made herself miserable by dwelling upon her alleged oppression.

“The errors are fundamental,” as Jefferson Davis said, and I don’t think Nikole Hannah-Jones is doing much to prove Davis wrong.

But “I do not choose to argue,” et cetera.




 

N.Y. Times Doxxes Scott Alexander Because They Hate Free Speech

Posted on

Once upon a time — young people may imagine that I’m speaking of an antique, mythical era — liberals believed in the First Amendment.

Or at least, that’s what liberals said at the time.

Liberals once insisted that the First Amendment protected everything from the right of Communists to teach in public schools to the right of pornographers to produce films of women getting gang-raped. If you wanted to burn the flag? Cool — the First Amendment protected that “free speech,” too, according to liberals.

Liberals are still in favor of Communism, flag-burning and pornography (some things never change), but the kind of First Amendment absolutism that once characterized liberalism (e.g., the ACLU insisting Nazis had a right to march through Jewish neighborhoods) is long gone.

Destroying anonymity on the Internet for bloggers who stray outside the prescribed lines of acceptable opinion was a project undertaken last year by Cade Metz of the New York Times when he decided to dox the proprietor of Slate Star Codex (SSC). When Metz contacted the (inarguably brilliant) blogger known as Scott Alexander, the SSC proprietor immediately shuttered the blog and put up a post explaining what the New York Times was doing, i.e., trying to destroy his private life in order to punish him for allowing free discussion on his site.

Why? Because Slate Star Codex had become influential among certain computer geeks and venture capitalists in Silicon Valley.

See, that’s the thing about Internet anonymity — you can create a blog or a Twitter account using a pseudonym to say whatever you want, and this probably won’t get you in trouble unless you are so good at it that you attract a following and having real influence on public opinion, in a way disapproved by the liberal Thought Police. People like Oliver Darcy of CNN work more or less full-time to dox conservatives, and this is to say nothing of the SPLC’s massive research staff, which specializes in what Laird Wilcox called the “links-and-ties” smear method.

After briefly summarizing some of the distortions in the New York Times attack on him, Scott Alexander says:

They further presented a more general case that I am six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon-style linked to right-wing / pro-Trump figures in Silicon Valley like Peter Thiel. This is true — I can think of a friend of mine who also knows Peter Thiel. In fact, I met Peter Thiel once, kind of unexpectedly, at a party, long before Trump was in the news, and exchanged about two sentences of conversation with him (I don’t think he had the slightest idea who I was, nor was there any reason he should have). I have never personally met the other right-wing figures named in the article. I wrote a 30,000 word condemnation of one of them on my blog a few years ago, and we have since had some email exchanges about to what degree this was unfair. I received a sympathetic email from another of them about the Times article. Others I have had literally no contact with. Again, it would not surprise me if I was a few degrees of social separation from some of these people. I don’t feel like this means I have done anything wrong, and I assume most people are a few degrees of social separation away from a Republican or Trump supporter. I myself am a Democrat, voted Warren (IIRC) in the primary, and Biden in the general.

This “six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon” game of trying to portray someone as connected to people with whom they have no actual connection is, really, the essence of what the Left calls “McCarthyism.” The thing is, Joe McCarthy was fundamentally correct about Communist infiltration of the U.S. government, as M. Stanton Evans demonstrated. So it has never been my habit to accuse liberals of “McCarthyism,” which would wrongly imply my disapproval of Senator McCarthy. But I digress . . .

What is so wrongheaded about the “links-and-ties” smear is the way it attempts to blame people for things they didn’t say or do, because of their “association” (however casual) with others. For example, I first met Kevin DeAnna back around 2007 when he was a Leadership Institute staffer, and often showed up at libertarian events in D.C. At the time, there was a general disgust among right-wingers with the failures of the Bush administration, failures that were blamed on “neoconservatives,” and the organizational focus for many of those activists was the GOP presidential campaign of Ron Paul. I knew Kevin and, because the Thought Police had identified me as a dangerous Wrongthinker, there was a certain natural friendship. We’d see each other at events and chat briefly, but I honestly had no idea what Kevin was up to behind the scenes.

Then a couple of years ago, Kevin’s ex-girlfriend, Katie McHugh (someone I met a few times at CPAC) decided she was a liberal and started dumping emails and everything else into the lap of the SPLC, and I was like, “Whoa!” Kevin had gone off into some really crazy neo-Odinist pagan thing called “Wolves of Vinland,” among much else. The point of this long digression is that if Kevin Deanna had sought my advice, certainly I would have counseled against what he did, and yet my “association” with him could be used by dishonest smear artists to imply that I was somehow complicit in all Kevin’s ill-advised adventures.

This is what the New York Times is doing to Scott Alexander. Slate Star Codex became a hub for the so-called “Rationalist” community, some members of which are skeptical about the mindless “diversity is our strength” nonsense spewed by Social Justice Warriors (SJWs). Despite the fact that Scott had specifically condemned the self-declared “reactionary” faction of Rationalist community (e.g., Mencius Moldbug and Michael Anissimov), the Times nonetheless tries to depict Scott as sympathetic to (or at least, tolerant of) reactionary Rationalism.

This is not merely false, but completely dishonest.

It’s even more dishonest than if the SPLC tried to claim I was down for Kevin DeAnna’s “Wolves of Vinland” agenda, because while at least DeAnna I are both generally right-wing, Scott Alexander is a liberal who voted for Elizabeth Warren in the 2020 primaries. The main difference between Scott Alexander and the New York Times is that Scott believes “Reactionary” ideas are best countered by free discussion, whereas the New York Times is pursuing a Stalinist agenda of silencing dissent.

Here’s the thing: If your political beliefs cannot withstand criticism — if open discussion is an existential threat to your ideology — you cannot solve this problem by attempting to silence your critics. You can send a Solzhenitsyn to the gulag, but truth always ultimately wins.

Liberals seem determined to learn this lesson the hard way. “Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other.”

More at Instapundit.

UPDATE: I’m waiting for Ed Driscoll to declare that WE’VE DESCENDED INTO SOME SORT OF BIZARRE HELL-WORLD IN WHICH MATTHEW YGLESIAS IS A VOICE OF SANITY, but in the meantime, I’ll quote Yglesias observing that the New York Times article “is structured as a kind of syllogism”:

  • Scott Alexander’s blog is popular with some influential Silicon Valley people.
  • Scott Alexander has done posts that espouse views on race or gender that progressives disapprove of.
  • THEREFORE, Silicon Valley is a hotbed of racism and sexism.

This is “specious,” as Yglesias says. What is really going on here? Perhaps it’s that Cade Metz, an old white guy who works for an organization where old white guys are now routinely getting purged by newsroom mobs of “woke” young staffers, feels that it is unfair for someone like Scott Alexander to be able to write without fear of SJW reprisal.

UPDATE II: Welcome, Instapundit readers!

In the comments over there, a troll is calling me — me! — a “cuckservative”! It’s not just the ignorance of this insult that disturbs me, but the ingratitude. There are people who actually know what harms I’ve suffered for daring to hold the right flank, as it were, for 20 years, and I would expect them to defend my honor, so that it would never be necessary for me to speak in my own defense. Who was it, after all, who finally flushed LGF’s Charles Johnson out into the open, huh? For that feat alone, you might suppose people would be eternally grateful to me, but I suppose one ought not expect gratitude in politics.




 

‘Something for Everyone to Hate’

Posted on Comments

It would be interesting to know how many high-school students in Loudon County, Virginia, would be able to identify Col. Edward D. Baker. If you are a student of the Civil War, you know that Baker’s death in the Battle of Ball’s Bluff was the chief inspiration for the creation of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, chaired by the radical abolitionist Sen. Ben Wade of Ohio. This tale is told artfully by Bruce Catton in a dozen pages (pp. 68-80) of Mr. Lincoln’s Army, a book I doubt any recent student at Heritage High School in Leesburg has actually bothered to read, despite the fact that the historic events related by Catton happened about five miles down the road from the high school.

Military history is almost completely absent from the 21st-century curriculum, which is big on “social justice” themes and short of any genuinely useful knowledge. What students are expected to learn in school now is not facts, but rather a politically-correct attitude. The way history is now taught, the chief goal of the curriculum is to inspire teenagers with the kind of fanatical passion for “progressive” values that one might find in an Antifa riot in Portland, Oregon — fire-bombing police cars as your senior project. But I digress . . .

Heritage High School was the scene of a teenage melodrama this summer, when a vindictive punk decided to make a big deal out of a Snapchat video, thus destroying the reputation of the captain of the school’s varsity cheerleading squad. “There’s something for everyone to hate in this story,” Ed Driscoll remarks, and indeed I found something:

How long must the South be chastised for its history? For the editors of the New York Times, apparently, the answer is, “Forever.” Nothing could be more obvious in its intended purpose than the non-accidental choice of Leesburg, Virginia, for the latest iteration of the tiresomely familiar “Legacy of Slavery” theme in the New York Times.
If you are not a Southerner, or if you pay no attention to the New York Times, you may be unfamiliar with that newspaper’s long tradition of invoking slavery, the Civil War, and Jim Crow as a means of insinuating the South’s permanent status of moral inferiority. . . .

Read the rest of my latest column at The American Spectator.




 

@RealDonaldTrump: Still #Winning

Posted on

 

When your enemies keep breaking the law to attack you, we can conclude that your enemies are bad people:

The New York Times published details Sunday of what it claimed were President Donald Trump’s tax returns to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), going back more than two decades, showing “chronic losses and years of tax avoidance,” it said. . . .
The Times story, if based on authentic documents, appears to debunk several conspiracy theories held by Democrats for years. The tax returns do not [show] “any previously unreported connections to Russia,” the Times reports. Moreover, the Times story appears to confirm Trump’s claim — long treated as an excuse by Democrats — that he is under audit by the IRS. And the Times could not find “any itemized payments to Mr. Cohen,” ostensibly the subject of the New York investigation. . . .
It is illegal for the IRS to leak the personal tax returns of any individual. The Times is guarding its sources closely.

Yesterday, Trump had a few comments:

It’s fake news. It’s totally fake news. Made up. Fake.

The New York Times has been so wrong for so long.




 

The New York Times Smears French Author Who Predicted Our Current Crisis

Posted on

Twenty-five years ago, when a friend sent me a copy of Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints, it was a book so taboo that you were considered racist merely for knowing of its existence. The 1973 novel, which imagines France invaded by a flotilla of refugees from the Indian subcontinent, pointed out how Western civilization had lost its will to survive, having become decadent, full of self-loathing and racial guilt.

Five years ago, however, when the Syrian civil war produced an influx of “refugees” into the European Union, suddenly Raspail’s novel was recognized as prophetic; even many liberals said the scenes in Europe were reminiscent of The Camp of the Saints. The election of Donald Trump and other politicial events indicative of a “nationalist” mood in the electorate seemed to validate much of Raspail’s critique.

Jean Raspail died at age 94 earlier this month, and his obituary in the New York Times was an act of deliberate character assassination.

Phyllis Chesler describes the crude smear:

A photo of Raspail’s book is accompanied by a caption: “Mr. Raspail dehumanized immigrants in his 1973 book.” The piece describes Raspail’s followers as “white supremacists, far-right political figures;” worse yet, as one “member of the Trump administration.” In addition, “many conservatives” attended his funeral; his readers were “far right,” his book spawned or influenced today’s “white supremacists” — and led to the shootings at two mosques, one in New Zealand, one in Texas. . . .
In case you still don’t know what Raspail represents, the obituary goes on to describe Raspail as one of the “last members of the old reactionary right” in France. One of President Trumps advisers had “written approvingly of the novel in an email (!) to an editor at the right wing website Breitbart.” Can’t be clearer than this.
But, in case you are still unsure of whose reputation must be shamed, cancelled, and toppled, his novel has been called a “racist novel.” Raspail insisted that he was not a “racist,” but he also said that he would not change a single line in The Camp of the Saints, and “described himself as ‘right wing, even right-right-wing.’” The Obituary continues along in this vein. The novel is a “racist diatribe.”

Never mind, of course, that Raspail’s novel accurately predicted the future in which we are now living. The fact that Raspail was correct in his assessment of the West’s cowardice doesn’t matter; what matters, to the New York Times, is that Raspail was against surrendering to foreign invasion. You’re not allowed to be against surrender. It’s “racist” to think French people have a right to defend France against foreigners.

You’d better buy the book now, before they ban it.




 

The Definition of ‘Execrable’

Posted on Comments

 

The word originally meant, deserving of curses:

Nikole Hannah-Jones, the lead writer for the New York Times’ “1619 Project,” caught backlash Sunday for telling people to “read” a conspiracy theory about the use of fireworks being an attack by the government “on Black and Brown communities.”
Hannah-Jones’ “1619 Project” suggests America’s “true founding” was when the first slaves arrived in 1619 and “aims to reframe the country’s history.” The NYT writer won a Pulitzer Prize in commentary for her work related to the “1619 Project,” despite numerous historians raising objections to some of its claims.
“Read this,” Hannah-Jones tweeted Sunday about a conspiracy theory suggesting the government was planning attacks on minority communities. The post suggested that the numerous fireworks going off in Brooklyn over the past two weeks is actually “part of a coordinated attack on Black and Brown communities by government forces.”
This alleged “attack” is intended “to disorient and destabilize the #BlackLivesMatter movement,” the claim, written by author Robert Jones Jr., reads. Hannah-Jones appeared to delete her tweet and deactivate her Twitter following backlash. She appeared to [reactivate] her account shortly after, according to reports.

She is certainly deserving of curses.

Of course, if fireworks are “part of a coordinated attack,” you’ll want to help support my family’s Fourth of July fireworks show. Because racism.