The Other McCain

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

In The Mailbox: 05.19.16

Posted on | May 19, 2016 | 3 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
Proof Positive: Newt Gingrich For VP?
Louder With Crowder: Debunking The Myth Of Karl Marx And Communism’s Great Successes
EBL: What Happened To EgyptAir MS804?
Da Tech Guy: The Little Sisters Stalemate
The Political Hat: American Bar Association Poised To Ban Expressions Of Thoughtcrime
Michelle Malkin: TSA’s Union Power Grab
Twitchy: Federal Judge Hammers Obama’s Deceptive, Ethically-Challenged DOJ Lawyers
Shark Tank: Rubio Wants To Hold Slumlords Responsible


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: Trump Blames Terrorism For Loss Of EgyptAir MS804, Gets Ripped By NYT, Then French & Egyptian Governments Warn of Terrorism As Likely Cause
American Thinker: What Does Fair Share (In Taxes) Mean?
Don Surber: Clinton Meltdown Is Two Months Early
Jammie Wearing Fools: New Poll Finds 90% Of Native Americans Not Offended By Redskins Name
Joe For America: Texas Tells Obama “You Can’t Blackmail Us With Your Thirty Pieces Of Silver”
JustOneMinute: Summer Of Love For Hillary
Pamela Geller: Devout ISIS Muslims Torturing Children To Death
Shot In The Dark: Creative Problem Solving
STUMP: Kentucky Update, And Trying Something New
The Jawa Report: Sandcrawler PSA – Don’t Be A Sucker For Communism
The Lonely Conservative: NY Health Insurers Request Huge Increases For 2017
The Quinton Report: Michael Graham Returns To DC
This Ain’t Hell: Christy Russell Sentenced For VA Fraud
Weasel Zippers: Google Doodle Honors Woman Who Praised Bin Laden As “One Of The People I Admire”
Megan McArdle: Why The TSA is So Terrible
Mark Steyn: The Chief Commissar Of Municipal Zoning


The Cult – Choice Of Weapon
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Category: Linkagery

Mommy Blogger @JosiDenise Tells the Truth: Nobody’s Reading Your Fake Crap

Posted on | May 19, 2016 | 49 Comments

 

Josi Denise is a mother of three who has spent the past three years “building her brand” online as a mommy blogger. Apparently, moms never read books or magazines anymore. Everything is Facebook and Instagram and Pinterest. This creates opportunities for clever women to cash in by promoting products (and promoting themselves) on the Internet. But then she got tired of the fakeness and wrote a brutally honest takedown of the entire phenomenon of mommy blogging:

YOUR MOMMY BLOG F–KING SUCKS.
NOBODY IS READING YOUR S–T
I mean no one. Even the people you think are reading your shit? They aren’t really reading it. The other mommy bloggers sure as hell aren’t reading it. They are scanning it for keywords that they can use in the comments. “So cute! Yum! I have to try this!” They’ve been told, like you, that in order to grow your brand, you must read and comment on other similar-sized and similar-themed blogs. The people clicking on it from Pinterest aren’t reading it. They are looking for your recipe, or helpful tip promised in the clickbait, or before and after photo, then they might re-pin the image, then they are done. The people sharing it on Facebook? They aren’t reading it either. They just want to say whatever it is your headline says, but can’t find the words themselves. Your family? Nope. They are checking to make sure they don’t have double chins in the photos you post of them, and zoning in on paragraphs where their names are mentioned.
Why? Because your shit is boring. Nobody cares about your shampoo you bought at Walmart and how you’re so thankful the company decided to work with you. Nobody cares about anything you are saying because you aren’t telling an engaging story. You are not giving your readers anything they haven’t already heard. You are not being helpful, and you are not being interesting. If you are constantly writing about your pregnancy, your baby’s milestones, your religious devotion, your marriage bliss, or your love of wine and coffee…. are you saying anything new? Anything at all? Tell me something I haven’t heard before, that someone hasn’t said before. From a different perspective, or making a new point at the end at least if I have to suffer through a cliche story about your faceless, nameless kid.
You’re writing in an inauthentic voice about an unoriginal subject, worse if sprinkled with horrible grammar and spelling, and you are contributing nothing to the world but static noise.

Read the whole thing. (Via Motto. Hat-tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

Ace of Spades has sometimes noted the “Internet Famous” syndrome, whereby people seek a simulacrum of actual fame by blogging, YouTube videos, etc. And while it is possible to exploit fame to get money, their motive is essentially narcissistic: “I want to be somebody!”

This is why every 19-year-old girl is posting selfies on her Tumblr. She is celebrating her own existence and seeking validation from online admirers, and this mentality seldom leads anywhere good. If she ends up working as a “camgirl” or being a “sugar baby” for old rich guys, at least there is the profit motive to explain that. What is more difficult to explain is why nobody warned her against seeking admiration this way.

Sometimes you need to step back from your life, examine what you’re doing and ask yourself why you’re doing it. “Money” is a good answer. There’s nothing wrong with writing for money. “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money,” Samuel Johnson famously said, but who would want to get paid to lie? Why be a professional liar?

Sure, Hillary Clinton has made a career of it, but . . .

Josi Denise found herself in an existential crisis because she realized that the work-to-reward incentive ratio in mommy blogging is insane, and that writing the truth is always better than “building your brand” by creating a phony public image as a marketing strategy. Then she published an angry rant about her ex-husband not paying child support, and when that went viral — because people actually want to read the truth — she realized how fake her online image was. Mommy blogging is a cult in much the same way modern feminism is a cult, and one of the emotional incentives a cult provides its members is the sense of belonging. The cult is Us, and the outside world is Them, and everything Eric Hoffer wrote about The True Believer applies to such a situation. Inside a cult, the only people who matter are Us, and your identity as one of Us requires you to buy into whatever ideology defines the cult. If you are not willing to constantly prove your loyalty to Us, you might be exiled and ostracized from the cult, becoming one of Them — and this, to the cult member, is a fate worse than death.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg chose the death penalty rather than to cooperate with the FBI and expose their Communist spy network. This is an extreme analogy, but the basic psychology is the same. Marxism is much worse than mommy blogging, but whenever we see people acting irrationally in order to demonstrate their loyalty to a cult and its ideology, we always find the psychology of The True Believer in operation.

Motherhood is a wonderful vocation, and if a mom can be home with her children, earning money by blogging, this is wonderful, too. Thank God for capitalism, which makes this possible through technological innovation. If companies are willing to pay mommy bloggers to promote their products, this is also wonderful, and as long as you’re honest about what your doing, why not? Nothing wrong with honest capitalism.

Better to be a mommy blogger than a Commie blogger.

Just tell the truth, and don’t buy into a cult mentality.





 


Category: Blogging

Guys: Leave @Jindi Alone

Posted on | May 18, 2016 | 37 Comments

 

Jindi Mehat (@jindi on Twitter) is a radical feminist and digital project manager for the Vancouver-based web services firm YellowPencil.com.

Ms. Mehat despises liberal feminists:

Liberal feminists stop debate by crying “choice” when radical feminists unpack the context and impacts of choices — especially choices that reinforce male supremacy. . . .
Unquestioningly celebrating “choice” helps women feel good about themselves while they avoid confronting the system of patriarchy and even, in some cases, uphold it. It allows them to earn the benefits society gives women who don’t challenge male supremacy while comforting themselves with the idea that their behavior — no matter how problematic — is feminist.
There are real and dangerous consequences when women do misogyny while thinking they’re doing feminism. Convinced they’re on the side of women without critically examining the behaviour they are supporting and beginning the real work of feminism, they lash out in anger at radical feminists who ask them to consider that they might actually not be on women’s side. . . . Instead of directing their anger at patriarchy and male entitlement, third wavers pile on radical feminists who dare ask the difficult questions that need to be answered if we are to bring about actual change.

Got that? Real feminism is inherently radical — it’s about “confronting the system of patriarchy,” to “challenge male supremacy,” directing “anger at patriarchy and male entitlement . . . to bring about actual change.”

On this, Ms. Mehat and I are in complete agreement. The difference is, Ms. Mehat thinks radical feminists, by virtue of being “on the side of women,” are going to bring about an egalitarian utopia, whereas I recognize radical feminism as a dangerous Death Cult Ideology.

Radical feminism is akin to the Symbionese Liberation Army, the Khmer Rouge, Jonestown, the Branch Davidians, Heaven’s Gate and every other doomstruck paranoid kook squad you’d care to name. The radical feminist worldview flourishes on university campuses, where tenured professors teach it to rich girls spending Daddy’s money to get their Women’s Studies degrees. Subsidized by taxpayers, the university campus is a bubble of make-believe where feminist gender theory — the social construction of the gender binary within the heterosexual matrix — is protected from criticism by speech codes, and where its practitioners can avoid contact with the facts of human life as it exists in the real world.

Everywhere she looks, the radical feminist perceives herself threatened by the sinister forces of patriarchy — misogyny, objectification, heteronormativity, male privilege, rape culture, etc. — and views men with paranoid suspicion. Her hostility toward “the system” feeds paranoid delusions of persecution. She lashes out at male scapegoats with constant accusations of “sexism,” convinced that she is always being unjustly victimized by oppression. The only way a man can avoid offending her is to avoid her altogether. Never talk to a feminist. Unfortunately, some guys think they can be exceptions to the rule and these “Male Feminists” are always causing trouble. Men know nothing, the feminist believes, and therefore he has nothing to say that she needs to hear.

Jindi Mehat hates “Good Guys”:

One of the most frustrating parts of talking with men about sexism is the amazing ability so many of them have to remain absolutely convinced that they are “Good Guys” while they behave in ways that reveal their sexist beliefs.
You know these guys. They are the ones who tell sexist jokes and then chastise you for objecting because “it’s just a joke.” They are the ones who constantly interrupt and dismiss women but definitely aren’t sexist because they “love women.” . . .
It’s like these men keep a list of the most abhorrent, misogynistic behaviour possible and, as long as they don’ t regularly do those things, believe they can confidently declare themselves Good Guys and wash their hands of this whole sexism business, while continuing to behave in ways that harm women. These self-identified Good Guys are convinced they needn’t bother with silly things like listening to what women say about the impacts their behaviour has on us, or working to challenge the messages they’ve absorbed that allow their problematic behaviour to continue.

Ms. Mehat offers a list of 25 questions for “Good Guys,” including:

1) Do you get annoyed when women aren’t as nice or quiet as you think we should be instead of recognizing how the expectation that women are nicer and quieter than men is harmful? . . .

4) Do you interrupt women when we’re speaking? . . .

11) Do you stare at women you find attractive, instead of considering how threatening this feels to most women? . . .

18) Do you think a woman you’re in a sexual relationship with should have sex with you even if she doesn’t want to?

19) Do you pout or try to convince her if she doesn’t? . . .

24) Do you think it’s women’s responsibility to make sure you understand sexism?

You can read the whole thing, but you get the idea here. What Ms. Mehat implies is that women should be rude to men and men should never notice their rudeness; that once a woman starts talking, a man’s job is to shut up until she’s finished lecturing him; that men should never so much as look at an attractive woman; that men should never have sex with women, nor even think about having sex with women, never mind trying to convince a woman to have sex with him; and that men should understand all these rules without women having to explain them.

In summarizing her argument, Ms. Mehat asserts that “the behaviours that define masculinity are inherently misogynistic ones” — i.e., to be masculine is to hate women. Quod erat demonstrandum.

Guys, do you see why I keep saying never talk to a feminist?

When a woman tells you, “I am a feminist,” what she is actually saying is:

  1. Shut up,
  2. Go away,
    and
  3. Leave me alone.

If a guy is in a room and Jindi Mehat walks in, this is his cue to walk out of the room — quietly, without making eye contact. If possible, men should never go anywhere near Vancouver, rather than risk the chance of an accidental encounter with Jindi Mehat. You have been warned.





 

Category: Sex Trouble

In The Mailbox: 05.18.16

Posted on | May 18, 2016 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 05.18.16

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
Proof Positive: A Game Of Crones
EBL: California Condors
Da Tech Guy: Are You Kidding Me? Donald Trump And The Willing Blindness of Michael Choen & The Boston Globe
The Political Hat: The Unlibertarian Libertarians
Michelle Malkin: My Memo To Elon Musk On B1 Cheap Labor Visa Racket
Twitchy: Priorities! Chicago “Is Broke And Crime Is Soaring” While Rahm Emanuel Focuses on THIS?
Shark Tank: Angry Alan Grayson Website Launches


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: The Sick Mind Of Noam Chomsky
American Thinker: Another Racial Attack Ruled A Hoax In College Town
Don Surber: The Electoral College Likely Won’t Matter
Jammie Wearing Fools: Man “Representing Himself As A Woman” Enters Womens’ Department Store Dressing Room
Joe For America: Obama’s National Security Adviser Who Manipulated Iran Deal Won’t Testify?
JustOneMinute: Knife Attack, Police Shooting In Manhattan
Pamela Geller: Texas Governor Refuses Obama’s Request To Lift State Sanctions On Iran
Protein Wisdom: Orange Is The New Black
Shot In The Dark: Philosophical Question
STUMP: Detroit Resurrected By Nathan Bomey – A Review
The Jawa Report: Primary Results – Oregon & Kentucky
The Lonely Conservative: The Venezuelan Health Care Crisis, Brought To You By Socialism
The Quinton Report: Rapper Involved In SC Waffle House Fight
This Ain’t Hell: Bergdahl’s Court-martial Postponed Until After Inauguration
Weasel Zippers: Drama Queen Barbara Boxer Says She “Feared For Her Safety” After Being Booed By Sandernistas
Megan McArdle: You’re Gonna Need A License For That
Mark Steyn: Priority Boarding On The Lolita Express



Category: Linkagery

‘Entangled in the Homosexual Web’

Posted on | May 18, 2016 | 52 Comments

“Homosexuality destroys a woman’s personal integrity. Little by little, she becomes more deeply entangled in the homosexual web. . . . She finds it easier to submit to homosexuality than to fight against it. . . .
“She slowly deteriorates in character, losing her power of will, and her integrity. Thus the deterioration and destruction of character and integrity are the end results of homosexuality.”
— U.S. Navy, “Indoctrination of WAVE Recruits on Subject of Homosexuality,” 1952, reprinted in The Lesbian Issue: Essays from Signs, edited by Estelle B. Freedman, et al. (1985)

Imagine yourself a young woman recruited into the Navy in 1952 — Harry Truman was president and American boys were fighting Communists in Korea — and finding that, as part of your basic training, you are lectured by two officers and a chaplain about the dangers of homosexuality.

“It is important that you understand the Navy’s policy toward homosexuality,” your unit officer explains:

“The policy of the Navy is quite positive in that all persons found guilty of so much as one single homosexual act while in the Naval service must be eliminated from the service. The ‘first timer’ or experimenter is just as liable to separation as the confirmed homosexual. . . . Under certain circumstances she will be given an undesirable discharge, commonly called a U.D. It means she has been discharged from the Navy as an undesirable, and her discharge papers will state that it is under conditions other than honorable and without satisfactory service. In certain circumstances she may face trial by General Court-Martial. . . .
“The families, parents, and friends of women who have been discharged from the Navy for homosexual acts, write tearful letters to the Navy Department in Washington, D.C., begging for relief from the type of discharge they have received. They claim the Navy has branded them as homosexuals, and because of this they find it difficult to earn a living, or find an acceptable young man for dating, companionship, or possible marriage. Actually, the Navy has not branded these women. They have branded and disgraced themselves, and no relief is possible. Women who engage in homosexual acts cannot and will not be tolerated by the United States Navy.”

This is part of a lengthy presentation, which is followed by a presentation by the medical officer, and then it’s the chaplain’s turn:

“Moral and ethical codes reaching far back into history are against any form of homosexuality. It is universally condemned by all religions. All nations who have given way to the practice of homosexuality have fallen and it is against the law of all civilized nations. The guilt associated with homosexuality is a barrier between the individual and God.
“The Creator has endowed the bodies of women with the noble mission of motherhood and bringing human life into the world. Any woman who violates this great trust by participating in homosexuality not only degrades herself socially but also destroys the purpose for which God created her.”

You can read the entirety of these presentations, which I have scanned in and uploaded to Scribd as a Word document:

Navy Lesbian Briefings 1952 by Robert Stacy McCain

These official presentations, which were part of every Navy woman’s training, were instituted in the wake of a scandal in Washington, historians Allan Berube and John D’Emilio explained in their article:

Early in 1950 a State Department official testified before the Senate that several dozen employees had been dismissed on charges of homosexuality. . . . A Senate investigation into the employment of “homosexuals and other sex perverts” painted a menacing picture of the infiltration of the federal government by “sexual deviants” whose presence threatened the moral welfare of the nation. The popular press kept the homosexual issue alive with reports of dismissals from government service and exposés of alleged homosexual “rings.” Scandal writers in stories with such titles as “Lesbians Prey on Weak Women” charged that there were cells of lesbians in the schools and in the military bent on seducing the innocent.
Rhetoric portraying sexual deviance as a threat to national security had its analogue in more repressive policies. . . . The military’s response to the “homosexual menace” was especially severe.

Far be it from me to say that the United States Senate was wrong about “sexual deviants” posing “a threat to national security.” How do you think America could have won the Cold War if something hadn’t been done to stop “homosexuals and other sex perverts” from infiltrating?

The 1952 training presentations to Navy women make for lively reading:

There are several techniques which may be used by the practicing homosexual to lure you into involvement in a homosexual act.
One of the most commonly used techniques is for the practicing homosexual to use friendship as a means to secure for herself a partner in her homosexual acts. . . . The practicing homosexual may begin her approach to you as a sympathetic, understanding and motherly person. At first she will present the same appearance as many of your friends. She will have many interests in common with you, but as time progresses you will be aware that she is developing this friendship as much as possible along romantic lines. . . . As time goes by, she may propose that you take a week-end trip with her to a near-by city, to sightsee or take in a show. This trip will involve sharing a hotel or motel room. When you are alone . . . she orders drinks . . . and more and more alcohol is consumed. Then follow the improper physical advances and a homosexual act is committed. . . .
If a homosexual makes an approach to you . . . stay away from her. If you have evidence of homosexual acts report them to the proper authorities.

Why were the top brass at Navy headquarters so familiar with these “techniques” of the “practicing homosexual”? Maybe it’s because of all those “tearful letters” they got after “undesirables” were discharged. If this sounds like the plot of an old pulp novel, hey, it was 1952, OK?

It was during the medical officer’s presentation that Navy recruits got the psychiatric community’s view of homosexuality:

Generally speaking, homosexual activity is the manifestation of failure on the part of the individual to grow up sexually, which leads to personality disorders in adult life. This is true whether the individual be exclusively homosexual or only a “dabbler.” . . .
Several common misconceptions exist about homosexuality and it is these misconceptions which lead people into trouble. One such misconception is that it is easy to identify a practicing female homosexual by her masculine mannerisms and characteristics. This is not true. Many practicing homosexuals are quite feminine in appearance and some are outstandingly so. . . .
Another misconception is that those who engage in homosexuality are safe from acquiring venereal disease. This is also not true . . .
A third misconception is that homosexuals are born and not made. This idea leads to the beliefs, first, that an individual who is not born a homosexuality can participate in homosexual acts without danger and, second, that nothing can be done medically for the confirmed homosexual. Neither of these beliefs is true. Treatment is available for even the confirmed homosexual but this is not an obligation of the Navy Medical Corps. As to the other belief, repeated dabbling in homosexuality in late adolescence as well as in adulthood can and frequently does constitute the making of a homosexual. Some who start as “dabblers” or “experimenters” progress steadily to become exclusively homosexual in their behavior. Experimentation, therefore, aside from being an infringement on social as well as Navy standards, is dangerous in its own right.

Got that, you “dabblers”? Cease your “dabbling” immediately! As an American, heterosexuality is your patriotic duty. You’d better “grow up sexually” and meet “Navy standards,” because if you continue your adolescent “dabbling,” you might become a “confirmed homosexual.”

Remember: “Lesbians Prey on Weak Women” — this was once reported as news, so therefore it must be true — and these Navy briefings for recruits represented the official policy of the United States government.

There was a scientific consensus about homosexuality in 1952.

Just like global warming nowadays, really.





 


Category: Gays, History, Military, Sex Trouble

Late Night With The FMJRA

Posted on | May 18, 2016 | Comments Off on Late Night With The FMJRA

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Rule 5 Sunday: May Flowers
The Pirate’s Cove
Political Clown Parade
90 Miles From Tyranny
A View from the Beach
Batshit Crazy News
Proof Positive

Australian Gay-Marriage Crusader Was Fugitive Wanted on Kiddie Porn Charge
The Political Hat
First Street Journal
The DaleyGator
Hot Gas
Living In Anglo-America
IOTW Report

The Myth of the Masculinity Crisis
The Razor
A Voice For Men
Batshit Crazy News

FMJRA 2.0: Seven Days To Reno
A View from the Beach
Batshit Crazy News

In The Mailbox: 05.09.16
Batshit Crazy News

In The Mailbox: 05.10.16
A View from the Beach
Batshit Crazy News
Proof Positive

In The Mailbox: 05.11.16
A View from the Beach
Proof Positive

‘Male Feminist’? Don’t Waste Your Time
Batshit Crazy News

‘A Collective Blind Spot’
The Political Hat
Batshit Crazy News

In The Mailbox: 05.12.16
A View from the Beach
Proof Positive

Feminists Against Heterosexuality (@CarolineHeldman Edition)
The Political Hat

Police: Lesbian Teacher Had Sex in Cemetery, Spent the Night With Teen Girl
The Political Hat
Living In Anglo-America

Prosecutors in Scotland Say Lesbian Couple Murdered Two-Year-Old Boy
The Political Hat

Top linkers this week:

  1.  Batshit Crazy News (7)
  2.  (tied) The Political Hat and A View from the Beach (5)

Thanks to everyone for their linkagery!

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Category: FMJRA Award

In The Mailbox, 05.17.16

Posted on | May 17, 2016 | 3 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
Proof Positive: “All Aboard!” or Not…
EBL: Hillary Clinton – I Will Survive
Da Tech Guy: Baldilocks – Explosion
The Political Hat: Brazilian Impeachment Shenanigans
Michelle Malkin: How Government Food Guidelines Are Making You Fat
Twitchy: What’s Wrong With The #FightFor15 Movement? Here It Is, In One Photo
Shark Tank: Clay County School Superintendent Opposes Obama’s Transgender Mandate


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: Some Democrats Starting To Get Queasy Over Hillary Clinton
American Thinker: What Lies Beneath?
BLACKFIVE: Book Review – Robert Parker’s Slow Burn and The Innocents by Ace Atkins
Don Surber: Muslims Had Inside Help In Bataclan Attack
Jammie Wearing Fools: Nevada Democrats Warn DNC Of Violence From Sandernistas
Joe For America: Ben Rhodes Spins Climate Change
JustOneMinute: Hold The Front Page, or, Thank Heaven For Our Free Press!
Pamela Geller: Danish Professor – Wrong To See Muslims As Victims, They Act According To Koran
Protein Wisdom: “If Meat Eaters Acted Like Vegans”
Shot In The Dark: Syttende Mai
The Jawa Report: Welcome To Beautiful Communist Venezuela!
The Lonely Conservative: The Dreaded GOPe Is All On Board The Trump Train
This Ain’t Hell: Pentagon’s Transgender Acceptance Plan Hits Snags
Weasel Zippers: Sandernistas Threaten To Kill NV Dem Chairwoman And Her Grandchild Over Delegate Dispute
Megan McArdle: Oops! Obamacare Runs Afoul Of The Constitution
Mark Steyn: The Criminalization of Dissent


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Category: Linkagery

On @DKThomp, Trumpism and the Misunderstood Crisis of White America

Posted on | May 17, 2016 | 35 Comments

 

Derek Thompson (@DKThomp on Twitter) is not a stupid knee-jerk liberal, despite “Donald Trump and the Twilight of White America,” an article at The Atlantic that at first glance might seem like yet another knee-jerk liberal smear of the presumptive Republican nominee.

“Gleeful-sounding headlines announcing the end of white America may play a role in Trump’s rise, too,” was Professor Reynolds’ reaction, which is almost certainly true. The headline on Thompson’s story, and his tendentious treatment of political history, may create the impression that Thompson is just another of those “Democrats with bylines” whose partisan contributions to increasing ignorance we have come to expect.

A quick scan through his past work reveals that Thompson has read Charles Murray’s Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, a 2012 book that is a sober, factual analysis of the social and economic forces that make it impossible to view “whiteness” as a monolith. Increasingly, over the past half-century, white Americans have been sorting themselves into two groups — a small, affluent, college-educated elite, and everybody else. To speak categorically of “white privilege,” as young progressives habitually do, conjures up an image of white people sitting around their mansions sipping chardonnay. Not only does this image of “privilege” fail to capture the reality of life for the majority of white Americans, who are just working people with bills to pay, but it also fails to reflect the reality of what life is like for affluent, college-educated elite.

Guess what? The elite work, too, and they’ve also got bills to pay.

Among the bills that the elite must pay is tuition for their ungrateful offspring, who think themselves entitled to have Daddy send them to expensive private schools like Hampshire College (annual tuition $48,065) where they can learn to whine about living in a “white supremacist cisheteropatriarchal society.”

When we behold idiots like Jennie Chenkin and her social-justice comrade Cora Segal (aka “TrigglyPuff”), what we are seeing is the decadence that besets the children of privilege who have not been taught to appreciate the hard work that produced the wealth they frivolously squander. Their exhibitions of infantile narcissism — protest tantrums and self-pitying postures of victimhood — reveal the defects of their personal character, the moral depravity of minds warped by a corrupt education system.

Modern Americans have an unfortunate tendency to consider “education” a virtue unto itself, and to accept as proof of this virtue the attainment of academic credentials, especially from prestigious “elite” schools. All that was necessary for progressives to control America, therefore, was to take over elite educational institutions and promote their own political opinions as truth, thereby convincing the college-educated segment of American society that progressivism is not only what all Smart People™ believe, but is also synonymous with moral virtue.

William F. Buckley Jr. spotted this problem long ago, and his 1951 classic God and Man at Yale remains highly relevant in the 21st century. Buckley saw that Yale, originally founded as a Christian school, had quietly abandoned Christianity and adopted a new religion, liberalism. The consequences of this were evident, as Buckley demonstrated at some length, in the way that Yale’s department of economics was dominated by Keynesians who were hostile to free-market enterprise and enthusiastically in favor of central planning and confiscatory taxation. The American intellectual elite, in turning against God, had opened the door to what Buckley’s colleague Eric Vogelin later diagnosed as a revival of gnosticism:

All gnostic movements are involved in the project of abolishing the constitution of being, with its origin in divine, transcendent being, and replacing it with a world-immanent order of being, the perfection of which lies in the realm of human action.

Pursuing a utopian heaven-on-earth fantasy of “social justice” invariably leads to catastrophe, and conservatives have been striving to stave off this disaster for so long that many have forgotten what the struggle is about.

‘The Fools That Bring Disaster’

If the people who lead a movement have forgotten their own principles, if they lack the courage to state their principles or are unwilling to do the work of helping others understand why these principles matter, then the movement is certain to fail. The sense of failure that has gripped the conservative movement as a result of Donald Trump’s success would be a teachable moment, if the leaders who have failed were willing to admit their own failure. From Karl Rove to Mitt Romney, from Rich Lowry to Jeb Bush, all across the vast spectrum of Republican politicians, consultants and pundits, what do we see? Evasions of personal responsibility, lashing out at Trump as a scapegoat for their own incompetence. When David Horowitz gave Bill Kristol a well-deserved spanking, the only thing the “Never Trump” crowd seemed to notice was the headline phrase “Renegade Jew,” and the merits of Horowitz’s argument were ignored by all the virtue-signalling spoilsports who lost the game but don’t want to admit they deserved to lose.

Careerism in the punditocracy means that political wizards like Karl Rove are more concerned with preserving their own prestigious reputations — their prestige being their stock in trade — than in telling the truth or winning elections. And too many conservative pundits who profess to loathe Karl Rove are nonetheless guilty of playing the same game. While consultants keep getting paid to provide bad advice, while the politicians continue listening to such advice, and while the pundits are all busy trying to get booked for their next cable TV appearance, the selfish concerns of such so-called “leaders” do nothing to strengthen the conservative movement. The soldiers of the army become demoralized when their generals repeatedly lead them to defeat. During the winter of 1862-63, when command of the Union’s Army of the Potomac had devolved onto the incompetent Gen. Ambrose Burnside, a soldier in the 79th New York Infantry wrote a letter home in which he complained: “Mother, do not wonder that my loyalty is growing weak. . . . I am sick and tired of the disaster and the fools that bring disaster upon us.”

For the past 25 years, going back to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the Republican Party has gone from one disaster to another, and the fools in charge of the GOP can’t seem to comprehend the fundamental nature of their problem. Talk of reviving “Reaganism” is common among pundits and politicians who seem willing to ignore the historic context from which the modern conservative movement emerged. Reagan biographer Craig Shirley has chronicled the history of the movement and its greatest leader, and yet we must wonder how many conservative pundits have read Shirley’s books, because they seem not to have learned any useful lessons from this history. In politics, it is important to have both the right message and the right messenger. Ronald Reagan’s personal experience, particularly in his fight against Community Party efforts to take over Hollywood in the 1940s, provided him with a profound insight into the nature of America’s enemy in the Cold War. By the time he gave his famous 1964 speech “A Time for Choosing,” Reagan had spent nearly 20 years studying the issues confronting America. He was familiar with the ideas of men like Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, he was well-informed about current events, and he was an experienced public speaker. Reagan had traveled the country as spokesman for General Electric, and in his travels had met and listened to the voices of many ordinary Americans, developing a strong sense of their problems and concerns. From the disaster of Goldwater’s defeat in 1964, it took another 16 years (and his near-miss attempt to get the 1976 nomination against Gerald Ford) for Reagan to be elected president. By that time, America had been through the ordeal of defeat in Vietnam and the economic stagnation of the 1970s, and was ready to listen to a common-sense message that had been rejected as dangerous “extremism” when Barry Goldwater had been the messenger.

Attempts by Republicans in the past 25 years to recapture the magic of Reaganism have failed in large part because Ronald Reagan possessed such a rare combination of personal qualities as to be nearly unique. Yet the Republican Party’s decline also reflects a failure of GOP leaders to understand the issues facing America in the post-Cold War era. Steve Sailer’s terse summary of Republican policy during the presidency of George W. Bush — “Invade the World. Invite the World. In Hock to the World.” — hits the nail directly on the head. By 2008, the GOP leadership was officially committed to a neo-Wilsonian crusade to impose “democracy” on Mesopotamia at the point of a bayonet, the pro-amnesty policy of “comprehensive immigration reform,” and a continued drift away from sound fiscal and monetary policy. If this is what the Republican Party stands for, certainly Republicans deserve to lose.

Trumpism is a repudiation of Bushism.

Whatever else you may say about Donald Trump, it seems unlikely he’ll be seeking advice from Karl Rove, Nicolle Wallace or Lindsey Graham.

And thank God for that.

The Problem With ‘Hate Whitey’ Politics

After eight years of Obamaism, threatened with a return to Clintonism, how many Americans might be willing to give Trumpism a try? Well, the number was large enough to destroy every rival who stood between Trump and the GOP nomination, and Democrats are afraid enough of Trumpism that they’re unloading their opposition-research dossiers in May. Sidney Blumenthal and the other Democrat strategists believe they can elect Hillary by demonizing her opponent, and perhaps Trump will be the perfect test for this strategy. Yet whoever the Republicans had nominated would have faced a similar attack and, as counter-intuitive as it may seem, Trump might prove to be the one guy on the planet against whom the Clinton slime machine doesn’t work. But I digress . . .

Derek Thompson’s article “Donald Trump and the Twilight of White America” is one of those demographics-of-decline pieces that assume, as the basis of analysis, that current trends may be extrapolated into the future, so that the continued rapid growth of the U.S. Hispanic population, for example, can be taken for granted. Yet just as the white population bifurcates into separate socio-economic groups (the elite vs. everybody else), so also do Hispanics. My daughter’s husband is Hispanic, but he is an ambitious young attorney in private practice, the scion of a very prosperous family, and it is a racist stereotype to imagine that “Hispanic” is a synonym for “poor” or “ignorant” or “Democrat.”

The hard-working taxpayer is always at least a potential Republican voter, no matter his or her ethnic background. While Democrats and their allies in the media have been successful in fomenting racial hatred for partisan purposes — “Hate Whitey! Vote Democrat!” — this political charade cannot succeed forever. The policies of the Democrat Party are ultimately bad for everybody, and if you want to see where these policies lead, take a look at the bankrupt catastrophe of Detroit. Or take a look at Chicago, where there have already been 234 homicides this year. Beyond this startling death toll, more than 1,100 people have been wounded by gunfire so far this year in Chicago, where about a dozen people get shot on an average day. Most of the victims (74%) are black, and another 22% are Hispanic, so that the politics of “Hate Whitey” correlates with very bad outcomes for the people who elect Democrats. Are there people in Chicago who hate whitey so much they don’t mind their kids getting gunned down by the Latin Kings or the Gangster Disciples?

“A lot of the gangs that you see . . . when you look at Baltimore, when you look at Chicago and Ferguson and a lot of areas, you know a lot of these gang members are illegal immigrants. They’re going to be gone.”
— Donald Trump, August 2015

Most white people probably don’t realize it, but many black communities are feeling squeezed by immigration, too. The gang warfare in the streets of Chicago is often between black gangs defending their “turf” against Latino gangs and, as Trump said, illegal immigration contributes to this problem. A lot of the dope being sold by these gangs is imported from Mexico, and you can’t address the problem of gang violence without addressing the drug problem and the immigration problem, too. Beyond that, there is the job shortage problem, the crappy school problem and also the problem of fatherless children, and the Democrat Party is certainly not going to do anything to fix any of these problems.

Put the dope dealers in prison, deport the criminal gangsters, get serious about enforcement of the existing immigration laws — these are not “extremist” ideas, they’re just common sense, and white people are not the only hard-working taxpayers who would support these policies.

Yet here we have Derek Thompson playing racial psychotherapist:

Trump’s core constituency is clear: Republican whites, particularly men, and especially those who didn’t go to college, who feel their American whiteness like a second skin. Many of these first beneficiaries of the franchise now feel disenfranchised. The original middle class feels cut out of the American Dream. The majority is collapsing in on itself. . . .
It is not enough to say that Trump is a purely racial phenomenon. Nor is it complete to argue that he is the perfectly predictable result of economic upheaval. Rather, in the last half-century, several events have pushed conservative white American middle-class men to conflate their majoritarian, economic, and cultural decline. Economic anxiety and racial resentment are not entirely separate things, but rather like buttresses in an arch, supporting each other in the creation of something larger — Donald Trump.

Never mind, for the moment, the idea that “racial resentment” explains Trump’s success. Instead ask, what does this have to do with policy?

Thompson takes for granted what liberals (and too many Republicans) expect everybody to take for granted, namely that a determination to enforce existing immigration law is racist, and therefore illegitimate. Yet the chief architect of our existing immigration system was Ted Kennedy. From the time of The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 until the day he died in 2009, no immigration bill could make it through the Senate without Kennedy’s approval. For most of the past half-century, in fact, Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, and even after the Republican takeover of 1994, which gave the GOP congressional control, the Democrats in the Senate could always use the filibuster to force Republicans to compromise. In 2006-2007, Republicans like John McCain twice failed in their attempts to pass a “comprehensive immigration reform” bill. When Barack Obama was elected in 2008, Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate, and what did they do about immigration? Nothing. Zero. Nada.

A profound dishonesty about immigration as policy has made immigration as politics impossible to discuss rationally. The liberal media’s “reporting” on immigration is simply partisan propaganda. The media depict Republicans as hateful bigots, so as to maximize Latino votes for Democrats, and this requires a narrative about immigration which ignores the differences between legal and illegal immigrants, portraying all immigrants as impoverished victims of white racism.

Donald Trump is a blunt instrument, a political sledgehammer with which angry voters seek to smash the Democrat-Media Complex that has tried to conceal the failures of the Bullshit Factory in Washington, D.C.

Derek Thompson is an alumnus of prestigious Northwestern University (annual tuition $49,047) and his sneering disdain for “conservative white American middle-class men” is an attitude widely shared by Democrats, who consider “white male” an acceptable synonym for evil. However evil they may be, however, it is a mistake for Derek Thompson to think he is a better judge of their political interests than they are. This is what elite education does to people. Every 22-year-old who graduates from a school like Northwestern thereby obtains, along with his diploma, an incurable certainty of his own moral and intellectual superiority.

The narcissistic arrogance of the elite makes it impossible for them to empathize with their inferiors (i.e., everybody whose Daddy couldn’t afford to pay $49,047 a year to send them to school), and it is this absence of empathy that makes the intellectual elite so dangerous. Even though Derek Thompson is not a stupid knee-jerk liberal, his analysis of the Trump phenomenon still manages to convey the idea that the opposite of “racist” is Democrat. Every consideration of policy evaporates into an invisible mist, because anyone who didn’t vote for Obama (and who won’t vote for Hillary) is presumed by Derek Thompson to be motivated by racial hatred. It would never occur to Derek Thompson to ask why black people in Detroit and Chicago keep voting for Democrats who are manifestly not solving the problems of the black community. The prejudices that inspire Democrat voters never arouse journalistic curiosity. So long as the politics of “Hate Whitey” elects Democrats, no mainstream journalist will ever question the rationality of such sentiments. And what this means in terms of policy, of course, is that whatever policies Democrats support are good, and all criticism of Democrat policies is wrong — racist, sexist, homophobic, etc.

Regardless of who wins in November, we will continue to be plagued by the decadence of the intellectual elite. It is a tremendous irony that the populist sledgehammer is a billionaire with an Ivy League education (Penn, ’68), but Trump is not an intellectual, and he seems to have more empathy for ordinary Americans that does Hillary Clinton. Can he win? I don’t know. I’m just a conservative white American middle-class man and, as such, I need Smart People™ to do my thinking for me.





 


Category: Donald Trump, Election, Intellectuals
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