The Other McCain

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

Real Life Is Not Twitter or a Video Game

Posted on | January 7, 2021 | 2 Comments

Practically everybody on Twitter today is sharing their opinion of what happened Wednesday in Washington, D.C. Not only are Democrats using the mob scene at the Capitol to smear all Republicans as traitors, etc., but a lot of “conservative” are making a point of how much they deplore the unruly rabble. See, it is not enough — from the moralistic standpoint of political Twitter — that we refrain from bad behavior, but we are expected to ostentatiously proclaim how much we despise those who do. To maintain one’s status as a pundit, you must “distance” yourself from Those Deplorables Over There, heaping up a pile of epithets and pejorative descriptors, to make clear In No Uncertain Terms that you’re a Serious Intellectual, rather than part of the lumpenproletariat.

Homey the Clown don’t play that game, see?

However much I might ever have aspired to be a Serious Intellectual, I am at heart a redneck populist, whose chief claim to be heard in our national conversation is that I speak in defense of the dignity, and on behalf of the interests, of the Ordinary American.

Ashli Babbitt was the prototypical Ordinary American, 35 years old, a small business owner who had spent 14 years in the Air Force. She was an enthusiastic Trump supporter who sincerely believed the election had been stolen. There were some 200,000 Trump supporters in D.C. on Wednesday, although the crowd that breached the barricades to storm the Capitol was much smaller, certainly less than 2,000. Considering that 74 million Americans voted to re-elect Trump, 200,000 protestors was merely the tip of a massive iceberg of political disappointment, and the ones who overran the Capitol were the angriest part of the crowd.

It has been asserted that some Antifa radicals apparently played the part of agents-provocateurs Wednesday, inciting the pro-Trump crowd to violence in order to discredit the pro-Trump cause. Without regard to this, however, most of those who stormed the Capitol were, like Ashli Babbitt, sincere Trump supporters — too sincere, perhaps.

Politics is a cynical business, and excessive sincerity can be dangerous. As a professional journalist, I have to struggle to maintain the appropriate level of cynicism, lest I destroy my credibility by morphing into a wild-eyed fanatical True Believer. There is never a shortage of fanatics in the vicinity of politics, just like there is always a ready supply of opportunists looking to cash in. My job is merely to chronicle the passing political parade, a task that will neither make me rich nor change the world.

My efforts to maintain an appropriately cynical attitude toward politics have never been entirely successful. I am prone to enthusiasm, to act the role of cheerleader for Our Team in their constant battle against Those Other Guys. For three or four years, I zipped around the country on the campaign trail, covering every fringe-kook Tea Party challenger who seemed to offer the slightest hope of stopping the Obama machine. I ended the 2010 campaign at the Boca Raton victory party for Allen West, and then immediately jumped aboard the Cain Train for the 2012 Republican presidential primary campaign. After the crushing disappointment of Obama’s 2012 re-election (“Doomed Beyond All Hope of Redemption”), I more or less abandoned politics, as such. It was better for me, from a standpoint of mental health, to devote myself to covering the cultural fringe, radical feminism and all that, than to let myself be dragged down into the depressing tedium of politics.

Meanwhile, however, Alex Jones had acquired a massive audience for his paranoia-inducing variety of populism, and Ashli Babbitt appears to have been part of the core InfoWars audience. She was all into QAnon and other conspiracy theories and you know what? That still doesn’t mean she deserved to get shot by a plainclothes Capitol Hill police officer.

Wednesday night, I watched this 44-minute video from an InfoWars cameraman who was part of the crowd that stormed the Capitol:

 

What is so sad about that video — besides, of course, Ashli Babbitt getting shot in the neck at the end — is that, having once breached the security perimeter and entered the Capitol, the protesters seemed to have no idea what they were there to accomplish. I saw a video of one woman claiming this was a “revolution,” but it was more like a bunch of unruly middle-schoolers on a field trip. The protesters wandered around, amazed at the glory of their sudden triumph, apparently with no clue what to do next. Almost accidentally, some of them ended up outside Speaker Pelosi’s office, which is where the armed officer decided that gunfire was necessary to prevent any further intrusion.

Real life is not a video game. You don’t get another life after you get shot dead. Real life is not cosplay. It’s not a Twitter argument.

This business of constantly escalating rhetoric, turning up the outrage meter to 11, and then declaring that anyone who isn’t 100% as angry as you is some kind of half-hearted sellout — well, there are consequences to this kind of attitude. Some of the people who stormed the Capitol on Wednesday will go to federal prison as a result of letting themselves be incited into this stupid and futile gesture. And no one will be able to speak out in their defense, because how can we be taken seriously when we condemn Antifa mobs if we defend mob behavior on “our side”?

So the people who go to prison for storming the Capitol will find themselves without defenders, simply because of the way the game is played. Those who insist on the Rule of Law — which is what conservatism means, if it means anything — are effectively powerless to help anyone on “our side” who decides breaking the law is OK. And certainly, we can do nothing to help you if you get shot dead amid the chaos. Nothing I write can bring Ashli Babbitt back from the grave.

People seldom ask for my advice — “Hey, Stacy, is it a smart idea to overrun a police barricade in D.C.?” — and when I volunteer my advice, people usually ignore me, so I’ve long since given up on the illusion that I can persuade people not to do stupid things. Republican primary voters made Mitt Romney the 2012 GOP presidential nominee despite me doing everything I could to stop them. The “Anybody But Mitt” (ABM) movement had my enthusiastic support, but when it failed, I made the best of a bad situation and tried everything I could to prevent Mitt from losing to Obama, but that effort was ultimately futile. We got here, at this dark abyss of desperate hopelessness, not because of anything I did, but despite everything I could do to avoid this situation.

Less than a month ago, I wrote “How to Maintain Your Sanity,” advising people not to let themselves be driven mad by all this political noise. How many people read that and took it to heart? Not enough, I guess.

No doubt many more people will go crazy and do violent things inspired by politically motivated rage and despair. There will be mass shooters and bombers and lots of “Lone Wolf” type terrorists. Nothing I write on my blog is apt to dissuade these kooks from their kookiness. All I can do is to try to keep the regular readership from flipping out, so that I never have to talk to an FBI agent after they discover that some crackpot bomber has cited me in the footnotes of his deranged “manifesto.”

Don’t go crazy, please? If I can maintain my grip on some semblance of sanity amid this whirling vortex of craziness, anybody can.

And if you’re ever in a crowd where somebody says, “Hey, let’s storm that police barricade,” maybe you should skip that opportunity.

Just a suggestion.




 

Category: Crime

In The Mailbox: 01.06.21

Posted on | January 7, 2021 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Silicon Valley delenda est.

Big mood.

OVER THE TRANSOM
Ninety Miles From Tyranny: The 90 Miles Mystery Box, Episode #1224
357 Magnum: I Thought Cooperation Was The Key To Safety
EBL: Mostly Peaceful Protests At The Capitol
Twitchy: Megyn Kelly Mixes It Up With Tom Nichols – “Your Sanctimony Is Repulsive”
Louder With Crowder: The Media Doesn’t Mind Electoral Objections When Democrats Are Doing It
Vox Popoli: You Won’t Vote Your Way Out, also, Pence Cucks And Runs
Stoic Observations: I Ching & The Jack In The Box Taco

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Conservative: The Republicans Blow It
American Greatness: Georgia Runoff Marred By Irregularities
American Power: Protesters Storm Capitol, Halting Electoral College Certification
American Thinker: Waving Goodbye To The America We All Knew & Loved
Animal Magnetism:  Animal’s Hump Day News
Babalu Blog: Cuba’s Slow Collapse – A Country Running Out Of Food
BattleSwarm: Too Much Stupid To Process
Cafe Hayek: “Protectionism Echoes Luddism”
CDR Salamander: On The Storming Of The Hill
Da Tech Guy: Shades Of Lunenberg At Pelosi’s House, also, Readin’, Writin’ & ‘Rithmetic
Don Surber: Condemn Protest? Naw, Dawg, I’m Good, also, Never Trumpers Got Their Wish
First Street Journal: Politically Correct Crime Reporting
The Geller Report: Photos & Reports Show It Was Antifa Infiltrators Who Stormed The Capitol, also, Unarmed 14-Year Air Force Vet Shot & Killed At Capitol Protest
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of The Day, also, In Re Yesterday & Today
Hollywood In Toto: Second Opinion – A Semi-Defense Of Wonder Woman 1984, also, The Timeless Virtue Of High Noon
The Lid: Electing Warnock Doesn’t Prove Georgia Turned Blue, It Proves They Turned Stupid
Legal Insurrection: Twitter Removes Tweets & Locks Trump’s Account While Facebook Removes Trump Post, also, Trump Tells Supporters He Won’t Concede, Wants To “Primary The Hell” Out Of Republicans Who Won’t Fight
Michelle Malkin: The Zuckerberg Heist
Nebraska Energy Observer: Stop The Steal
Power Line: The Left Claims Another Victim, also, After Last Night
Shark Tank: Rep. Greg Steube On 2020 Election – “Clear Violations Of The Constitution”
Shot In The Dark: Translation Services While You Wait
The Political Hat: Lizard Squad Drains The Swamp!
This Ain’t Hell: Watch Out, Hooters, There’s A New (Military-Themed) Breastaurant In Town, also, This Isn’t Good
Victory Girls: We Cannot Lose Hope In Our Republic
Volokh Conspiracy: Impeach & Remove
Weasel Zippers: Fox News Vote Totals Last Night Went Up, Down, Upside Down All Night, also, We Aren’t Going Away
The Federalist: Twitter Bans Users From Retweeting Trump’s Call For Peace, Rule Of Law, also, DC’s Mayor Bowser Told Federal Law Enforcement To Stand Down The Day Before The Violent Capitol Riot
Mark Steyn: The Madness Of Lockdowns

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Category: Linkagery

WTF Just Happened in D.C.?

Posted on | January 6, 2021 | Comments Off on WTF Just Happened in D.C.?

So, I was up late last night for the Georgia runoff election, then got up at 5:30 a.m. to write up the final result, after which I had some deadline project work to do until about noon. My grandchildren came over about 1 p.m. I had kind of noticed on Twitter some stuff about pro-Trump protesters breaching a security perimeter at the Capitol. But, OK, a few rowdy people got a little out of control, I figured. No big deal. And I was tired, so I decided to take a nap. My wife woke me up about 4 o’clock: “Did you see what’s happening?” Wow. Guess nap time is over:

Disturbing video captures the moment a woman was shot in the chest inside the US Capitol Building on Wednesday, as President Trump supporters intent on disrupting the certification of the presidential election stormed in.
The 30-second clip posted to Twitter captures the sound of a single gunshot, then shows the unidentified woman lying on the floor.
Blood poured from the mouth of the motionless woman, who was draped in red, white and blue, the video shows.
Fellow protesters can be seen tending to the woman, who was later seen being carried out of the building on a stretcher.
CNN reported that the woman was in critical condition.

I’m confused about what happened and why. Was she shot by police? What did she do? Did someone else have a gun?

Stephen Green at PJM nails my reaction:

Theory: My third cup of coffee was spiked with a small dose of LSD.

Except (a) I had four cups of coffee before 10 a.m. this morning, and (b) I am convinced that the acid dose was rather large.

UPDATE: Not making any excuses for anyone’s stupidity, but how could you not recognize the role of agents-provocateurs here?

Many years ago, an old police sergeant in Georgia told me, “If you ever go to a Klan meeting with five guys, one will be an undercover FBI man, and three others will be informants.” In other words, (a) extremist groups are so vigilantly monitored by law-enforcement that it is nearly impossible for kooks to get away with any serious violence, and (b) the use of undercover officers for such work is routine.

If you don’t know the story of Ruby Ridge, it’s this: An ATF informant asked Randy Weaver to saw off a shotgun to an illegal length. Weaver asked him, “You know this is below the legal limit?” And the guy was like, I don’t care, and Weaver — under the impression that he was doing a favor for a friend — did what his “friend” asked. This then became the pretext for a search warrant, and the rest is history. Think about it.

When I first started blogging, there was a big problem with so-called “Moby” trolls — left-wingers pretending to be conservative in order to spread disinformation and generally sow chaos. Because of that, and some subsequent experience with online trolls, I learned to be very careful about online behavior. Generally speaking, an agent-provocateur is the guy who is trying to convince you to engage in illegal activity, or trying to bait you into saying something you shouldn’t say. You have to beware of taking people at face value. Not everybody who says they’re your friend is actually your friend, and the easiest way to get deceived is to start thinking you’re too smart to be deceived.

There were almost certainly a lot of people on “our” side who willingly participated in that chaotic mob scene, but who were the instigators? At least one of the people involved was known to have attended climate change protests and Black Lives Matter rallies. So I don’t want to make excuses for any of “our” people who did the wrong thing, even if they were incited to illegal activity by agents-provocateurs. I just want to caution all my readers to beware of such false-flag operations.

UPDATE: News organizations are now confirming that the woman who got shot at the Capitol has died.




 

Category: Crime

Georgia: Mail-In Vote-Harvesting Election Theft Succeeds Again for Democrats

Posted on | January 6, 2021 | 2 Comments

Mail-in voting has proven to be an unbeatable trick for Democrats, who captured both U.S. Senate seats in Georgia in Tuesday’s runoff, thus making Chuck Schumer the de facto Senate Majority Leader.

It happened almost exactly as predicted last night. At 11 p.m., Republican Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler held small but significant leads. Then the metro Atlanta counties of Fulton and DeKalb suddenly reported gigantic batches of ballots, which gave Democrats the victory — Jon Osoff by about 16,000 votes, Raphael Warnock by about 50,000.

The machine-like precision of this operation was wondrous to behold. Give Democrats unlimited mail-in ballots, and they’ll do it every time.




 

Category: Election, Georgia

In The Mailbox: 01.05.21 (Evening Edition)

Posted on | January 6, 2021 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 01.05.21 (Evening Edition)

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Silicon Valley delenda est.

Is this not why you are here?

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Felony Murder By Any Other Name
EBL: Tanya Roberts, RIP
Twitchy: Radical Jackass Michael Pfleger Removed From Parish Duties After Child Sex Abuse Allegations
Louder With Crowder: Rowan Atkinson Calls Cancel Culture A “Medieval Mob”, Is Immediately Proven Right On Twitter
Vox Popoli: U.S. Attorney General For Georgia Resigns, also, The City Of The Damned
Stoic Observations:Are You Not Entertained?

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Conservative: How The 2020 Election Could Have Been Stolen
American Greatness: Antifa Scumbags Show Up At Josh Hawley’s House To Threaten His Wife & Newborn Daughter
American Power: Californians Ignoring Lockdown Orders – Just Like State’s Democratic “Leadership”
American Thinker: Some Hard Truths We Face As Patriotic Americans As January 6th Looms
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Defenders Of Civilization News
Babalu Blog: Senator Cruz Is Right To Force The Conversation
BattleSwarm: Did Corona-chan Escape From A Lab? also, Charter Schools Work. No Wonder Democrats Want To Kill Them
Cafe Hayek: An Inapt Analogy About COVID-19
Da Tech Guy: Conservatives Need To Defend Others In Free Speech Battle, also, Report From Louisiana – The Vaccine
Don Surber: Libs Worry about Losing Hispanic Vote, also, Your Cell Phone Is A Snitch
First Street Journal: If You Want To See More Conservative Political Victories, Go To Church! also, Killadelphia Reaches The Milestone
The Geller Report: IT Teams Confirm That Mail-In Ballots Were Received Pre-Filled By Machine, also, Dominion Machines In Three Largest GOP Precincts Break Down; Voting Hours Extended In Multiple Counties
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day, also, I’m Confused
Hollywood In Toto: Reporters Rush To Save Wonder Woman 1984 From Itself, also, Reaction To Daily Wire‘s Hollywood Debut Speaks Volumes
JustOneMinute: On To Georgia!
The Lid: Anti-Israel J Street Urges Biden To Reverse Trump’s Israel Policies, Including Peace Plan
Legal Insurrection: Looks Like Harris’ “Fweedom” Story Plagiarized From Martin Luther King Jr., also, Another Trump-Brokered Diplomatic Breakthrough
Nebraska Energy Observer: Seven Degrees Of Separation
Power Line: Has Trump Gone Nuts? also, The War On Standards, West Point Cheating Edition
Shark Tank: Chris Cuomo Mocks Rubio’s Faith
Shot In The Dark: Somewhere In The Afterlife, Walter Duranty Is Chuckling Like A Teenager Telling A Fart Joke
STUMP: Geeking Out
The Political Hat: Gender Madness In Congress
This Ain’t Hell: Warning Signs Ignored In SF Colonel’s Case Prior To His Armed Standoff With Police, also, SEAL Pleads Guilty In Death Of Green Beret
Victory Girls: Gaslighting Goes On Despite New Voting Irregularities
Volokh Conspiracy: Ohio Governor Signs Repeal of Duty To Retreat
Weasel Zippers: WI Legislature Puts Forth Bill To Decertify Election Results, also, Proud Boys Leader Released Without Bond; Judge Bans Him From DC
The Federalist: Why I Am Joining The January 6 March For Trump, also, Barstool Sports Raised $18 Million To Help Small Businesses, Putting Pathetic Federal Relief Efforts To Shame
Mark Steyn: Don Black – The Sanest Guy In The Room Part II, also, Peachy Keen?

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Category: Linkagery

Georgia: Republicans Perdue, Loeffler Lead, But Democrats Still Cheating

Posted on | January 5, 2021 | 3 Comments

UPDATE 11 p.m. ET: At this hour, both Republicans are leading by significant margins, Sen. David Perdue up by about 100,000 votes over Democrat challenger Jon Ossoff, and Sen. Kelly Loeffler leading Democrat Raphael Warnock by about 70,000 votes, with a little more than 90% reporting. However . . .

Fulton and DeKalb counties are likely to start dumping in vast truckloads of ballots. By the time we wake up in the morning, we’ll likely learn that Democrats have eked out “miraculous” victories — and by “miraculous,” of course I mean, fraudulent. Democrats will steal it, just the same way they stole it for Biden in November. Or that’s my expectation, anyway. If I wake up to find the Republicans have won, I’ll be surprised.

UPDATE 11:08 p.m. ET: Election officials in Chatham County (Savannah, a Democrat stronghold) have stopped counting, left the office, and say they’ll return at 8 a.m. There are reportedly 20,000 ballots left to count there.

This is obviously the Democrat Emergency Vote Fraud Backup Plan, just in case Democrats in Fulton and DeKalb counties can’t manufacture enough phony ballots to steal the election.

* * * PREVIOUSLY * * *

Polls closed at 7 p.m. ET in the Georgia Senate runoff elections, which means that the shenanigans have just begun. Far be it from me to insinuate that Democrats are going to try to steal the election. I mean, you’d have to be some kind of right-wing conspiracy theorist to believe that Democrats in Georgia are less than scrupulously honest.

They’re all honor students and Eagle Scouts, those Democrats.

Anyway, this will be where we compile the alleged election results.

UPDATE 7:20 p.m. ET: As predictable as clockwork:

Notice this — the most backwoods rural district up in the Appalachian hills will return 100% of its results by 9 p.m., meanwhile the wealthy urban counties can’t get their votes tabulated by midnight.

UPDATE 7:30 p.m. ET: So, I tried to watch Fox News election coverage, an experiment that lasted about 15 minutes, at which point they brought on Chris Wallace and I clicked the “off” button. I imagine that millions of others did the same thing. Perhaps I’ll give Fox News another try sometime, but I’m not going to watch Chris Wallace again, ever.

UPDATE 7:38 p.m. ET: With 8% of the vote counted:

UPDATE 7:49 p.m. ET: Now with 14% of the vote counted:

Notice that (a) the margin is narrowing as more votes are counted and (b) the numbers are roughly the same in both races. In other words, if the current trend continues, the Republican candidates should soon move into the lead, and a split in the results is unlikely.

UPDATE 8:10 p.m. ET: Now with 27% of the vote counted:

UPDATE 9:30 p.m. ET: Now with 67% of the vote counted:

You see the Republicans have both pulled ahead, but the margins are still not large enough to prevent Democrats from stealing it.




 

Category: Election, Georgia

In The Mailbox: 01.05.21 (Morning Edition)

Posted on | January 5, 2021 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Belated thanks to everyone who bought stuff through my Amazon links in December. It was (and is!) very much appreciated.
Silicon Valley delenda est.

It’s the Year of the Ox. Cow. Some kind of bovine.

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Carjacking Is Out Of Control In Chicago
EBL: Never Talk To The FBI Or The Feds
Twitchy: Jim Acosta’s Attempt To “Well Actually” The Daily Caller Over Their Piece On DeSantis Pwning A CNN Reporter Goes So Wrong
Louder With Crowder: Ted Cruz Hilariously Dunks On Democrats “Literally” In bed With Chicoms
Vox Popoli: Is Biden Conceding? also, A Trap Confirmed
Stoic Observations: American Panic

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Review – Reclaiming The Catholic Church
American Conservative: When American Democracy Was Worse
American Greatness: Defenders Of Civilization?
American Power: Cancel Abraham Lincoln?
American Thinker: The 2020 Insurrection
Animal Magnetism: Goodbye, Blue Monday
Babalu Blog: Another Cuban Priest Calls On Cubans To Rise Up, Free Themselves From Tyranny
BattleSwarm: Dear Judicial Watch, Stop Mailing Me So Much Crap, also, Tank Vs. Gun Safes
Cafe Hayek: Matt Zwolinski Replies
CDR Salamander: EMCON-Bravo
Da Tech Guy: Cause & Effect California Edition, also, Why Aren’t The Dems, Media, & GOPe Delighted At The Chance To Nip “Claims” Of Election Fraud In The Bud?
Don Surber: Democrats Scrape Antifa Off Their Shoes, also, The Case Against A Republican Senate
First Street Journal: Chicago Only Thinks It’s The Murder Capital
The Geller Report: Majority Of House GOP Expected To Stand With Trump On January 6, also, More Than 400 Former Intelligence Officers Investigating Election Irregularities
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day, also, A Star That’s Falling Apart
Hollywood In Toto: Lights! Camera! Revolution! The Daily Wire Goes Hollywood, also, Shadow In The Cloud Marks New Low For Feminist Cinema
JustOneMinute: “Can You Please Get A Grip?”
The Lid: The Washington Post Lied About What Trump Said To Raffensperger (Full Audio & Transcript)
Legal Insurrection: AOC & The Squad Sell Out, also, New House Rules Propose Elimination of “Gendered” Terms Like “Father” And “Daughter”
Nebraska Energy Observer: Random Observations
Power Line: A Case Study In Media Bias, also, How To Read A Society
Shark Tank: Stephanie Murphy Reelected To Lead House Blue Dog Democrats
Shot In The Dark: Today’s News, Delivered In 2013, As Usual
STUMP: Mortality With Meep
The Political Hat: De-Gendering Physiology In British Columbia For Abortions
This Ain’t Hell: Marine Rescues Infant From Burning Car, also, Another Accounted For
Victory Girls: Democrats Whine About Election Certification Challenges
Volokh Conspiracy: “All Pence Can Do Is Count”
Weasel Zippers: D.C. Mayor Calls Up The National Guard For Pro-Trump Rally, also, D.C. Police Arrest Proud Boys Leader For Burning BLM Banner Last Month
The Federalist: NY Bill Would Allow Governor To Imprison, Forcibly Medicate Persons Suspected Of Illness, also, Radical Democrats Are Turning Minneapolis Into An Urban Wasteland
Mark Steyn: The Film Of The Book Of The Children Of Men, also, Don Black, The Sanest Guy In The Room

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Category: Linkagery

‘Stolen Land’ and Fake Numbers: How SJWs Invented a ‘Genocide’ Myth

Posted on | January 5, 2021 | 2 Comments

In 1998, University of Wisconsin historian David Henige published Numbers from Nowhere: The American Indian Contact Population Debate, in which he examined how, during the late 20th century, academics began arguing that the indigenous population of the Western hemisphere before the arrival of Europeans was much larger than previously estimated. This origins of this argument can be located rather precisely, with the 1966 publication of an article by Henry F. Dobyns in the journal Current Anthropology. Dobyns cited evidence that the native population had been devastated by pandemic diseases — particularly smallpox but also influenza, diphtheria and other contagions — brought to the Americas by European explorers and colonists. Dobyns then extrapolated from this an astonishing claim:

If all those people died, how many had been living there to begin with? Before Columbus, Dobyns calculated, the Western Hemisphere held ninety to 112 million people. Another way of saying this is that in 1491 more people lived in the Americas than in Europe. . . .
What Dobyns realized was that such diseases could have swept from the coastlines initially visited by Europeans to inland areas controlled by Indians who had never seen a white person. The first whites to explore many parts of the Americas may therefore have encountered places that were already depopulated. Indeed, Dobyns argued, they must have done so. . . .
So many epidemics occurred in the Americas, Dobyns argued, that the old data used by [early 20th-century ethnographer James] Mooney and his successors represented population nadirs. From the few cases in which before-and-after totals are known with relative certainty, Dobyns estimated that in the first 130 years [i.e., from 1492 to the early 1600s] of contact about 95 percent of the people in the Americas died — the worst demographic calamity in recorded history.

Is this true? Were there more than 100 million people in the Western hemisphere before Columbus arrived? Did 95% of them die of disease?

Let me offer three answers to these questions:

  1. We don’t know;
    but
  2. Probably not;
    and
  3. It doesn’t really matter.

The point made by Henige in Numbers From Nowhere is that the population estimate by Dobyns was an extrapolation lacking solid factual basis, and that this gigantic number launched a debate that quickly became political, rather than scholarly. Those whom Henige called “High Counters” (insisting on a large pre-Columbian population) were engaged in a sort of anti-American propaganda, the effect of which was to accuse European colonists of perpetrating a holocaust of such enormous proportions as to make Auschwitz seem trivial by comparison.

The reason why I say this debate doesn’t really matter is that it has almost nothing to do with the history of the United States. There is a vast difference between what Dobyns originally asserted and what is now claimed by those who denounce Americans as possessors of “stolen land.”

Whatever the entire population of the Western hemisphere may have been in 1492, the bulk of this indigenous population was in Central and South America, not in what is now the United States. However many natives died of contagious disease in the century following Columbus’s expeditions, these diseases were not spread by our British ancestors, who at that time were busy killing each other and various European enemies, including the very same Spaniards who were devastating the Americas.

The point Dobyns made about the effect of pandemic disease is important to understanding why, when the English finally began settling along the east coast of North America in the early 1600s, they encountered a relatively sparse native population that had already been shrunk by pandemics. The entirety of what is today the continental United States, with a population of more than 300 million, was perhaps home to around 1 million natives when the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. Very few of those natives were living in the vicinity of the first English settlements here; most were living in territory claimed by the Spanish. What is made to disappear in the whole “stolen land” rhetoric of the social-justice crowd is the fact that when the first British settlers arrived at Jamestown and Plymouth, England was engaged in a colonial rivalry against Spain (to say nothing of the French, the Dutch and the Portuguese, all of whom were pursuing their own American colonial empires).

By the time our own ancestors began to establish what became the United States, the Spaniards had been conquering and colonizing the Western hemisphere for more than a century. The oldest permanent settlement in the U.S. is not Jamestown, Virginia, or Plymouth, Massachusetts, but St. Augustine, Florida, founded in 1565 by the Spanish conquistador Pedro Menéndez de Avilés. St. Augustine was founded by Menéndez, a commander of the Spanish treasure fleet, as an outpost against the French, who had sent an expedition to Florida led by Jean Ribault. Shortly after the founding of St. Augustine, Menéndez’s Spanish troops killed Ribault and about 350 of his men in two separate massacres.

What Menéndez did to Ribault’s Frenchmen was trivial in comparison to the unrelenting violence Spanish conquistadors inflicted on the native peoples of their American empire. Everybody knows about what Cortez did in Mexico and what Pizarro did in Peru, but have you ever studied what Hernando de Soto did in the present-day Southeast U.S.? De Soto brought along on his expedition a number of ferocious “war dogs,” giant mastiffs who were trained to disembowel their human prey. The natives along the path of De Soto’s expedition were certainly intimidated by their first encounters with men who had firearms and horses, but they were absolutely terrified by the Spanish war dogs.

Say what you will about the English settlers of the United States, they were not worse than the Spaniards who conquered Latin America.

Yet somehow, inflammatory rhetoric about “genocide” against natives has become a standard part of the anti-American discourse, accusing us of occupying “stolen land,” an effort to delegitimize our national sovereignty, so that we have no right to enforce our borders. Why isn’t this argument made against the countries conquered by Spain?

The SJWs can’t answer that question, and so they seek to silence their critics with accusations of “racism,” as if the descendants of Pilgrims owe an apology to descendants of Spanish conquistadors.

Anyone who thinks the natives of North America suffered a worse fate than other conquered peoples in other places at other times is simply ignorant of history, including the history of England. The original population of the British isles was first conquered by the Belgae, then by the Romans, who made it part of their empire for about 300 years. In the twilight of Roman power, the province of Britannia was invaded by seafaring Anglo-Saxon marauders, from the vicinity of modern-day Hamburg, Germany. The Anglo-Saxon conquest marked the beginning of the Dark Ages of England, two centuries where the light of civilization in the island was practically extinguished. Scarcely had this Anglo-Saxon realm become somewhat of a Christian civilization than England began to be raided by the heathen Vikings from Scandinavia. Once the Viking era had past, and the descendants of those piratical savages incorporated into the population of Britain, England was conquered by the Normans.

By the time William of Normandy crossed the Channel in 1066, his was the fifth conquest of England in the span of about 1,000 years. Every successive wave of conquest was attended by its share of massacres, atrocities and oppression, but this history of our English ancestors is apparently unknown to young Americans, who are taught to despise themselves as perpetrators of heinous violations of “human rights.”

The SJW belief in “America the Evil” — the idea of the United States as the worst country in world history — is really just a toxic residue of Soviet-era anti-American propaganda. Anyone who wishes to push back against this leftist narrative can begin with Thomas Sowell’s 1998 book Conquests and Cultures: An International History. Let me quote the first paragraph of Sowell’s chapter on Britain:

For about one-fifth of its recorded history, Britain was a conquered country, a province of the Roman Empire — and one of the more backward provinces at that. Men from other provinces ruled over Britain, but Britons did not rule other provinces. One measure of the backwardness of pre-Roman Britain was the ease with which it was conquered by greatly outnumbered Roman soldiers and held in subjugation, despite a massive and desperate uprising in 61 A.D. The Romans were simply far better equipped and far better organized. In many other ways as well, the Romans represented a much more advanced civilization than existed in Britain at that point in history. Indeed, after the Romans withdrew from Britain four centuries later, the Britons began to retrogress, and in many respects it was centuries after that before Britain regained the economic, social, or cultural levels it had reached as a province of the Roman Empire.

How many natives of Britain died as a result of the Roman conquest? The answer: We don’t know, and it doesn’t matter, because nobody is trying to make this a theme of political propaganda. The SJW myth of America as a uniquely evil nation founded on genocide and oppression requires us to ignore the history of the rest of the world, including the history of countries from which illegal aliens are now arriving here.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!




 

Category: History, Immigration, Racism
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