The Other McCain

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

‘Cognitive Partitioning’: The Real Reason Elizabeth Warren Never Had a Chance

Posted on | March 5, 2020 | 2 Comments

 

The news broke this morning that Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren will quit the presidential campaign. I’m sure everybody is sad about this, and by “everybody,” of course I mean Jessica Valenti:

 

I knew going into Super Tuesday that Elizabeth Warren was unlikely to win big. I had prepared myself for that. What did take me by surprise, though, was just how poorly she fared: Even in her home state of Massachusetts, she finished third. . . .
It’s enough to make me feel, well, despairing: that we had the candidate of a lifetime — someone with the energy, vision, and follow-through to lead the country out of our nightmarish era — and that the media and voters basically outright erased and ignored her. . . .
Whoever the nominee is, their campaign is going to have to come to terms with the intense misogyny so many female voters have dealt with — and understand that it’s an issue we care deeply about. And their supporters are going to have to let us be sad — depressed, even — that once again we’re going to watch a race to leadership between old white men.

Never bet against the patriarchy, sweetheart.

Notice that it’s not just men that Valenti singles out for contempt, but rather specifically old white men. One gets the impression that Valenti has been nursing hurt feelings ever since Hillary lost the 2008 nomination to Obama, but she couldn’t complain too loudly about that, because hating Obama would be racist. Conveniently, this time around, there were no black male political rising stars contending for the Democratic nomination — Corey Booker is a joke — and so Valenti invested completely in Warren as “the candidate of a lifetime,” ignoring her idol’s flaws that were so glaringly obvious to the rest of us.

Was it really “misogyny” that sank Warren’s campaign? Is it true that sexism among Democratic primary voters explains Warren’s defeat? Matthew Yglesias offers an alternative explanation:

Her supporters feel somewhat baffled: How did she evaporate from the top tier of contention, especially since so many of the people they know also like her? . . .
[I]f you, like many of my friends, find the situation puzzling, that is probably because you know a lot of people who are demographically similar to yourself. I’m a highly educated white person, and most of my friends and acquaintances are also highly educated white people. Elizabeth Warren is very popular with people like us.
The reality is that there aren’t that many people like us — and there’s a valuable lesson in that, not just about the Warren campaign specifically but about some of the larger dynamics in American politics. . . .
Even at a time when Warren had, in its estimate, fallen to fourth place in national polling, she was first with white college graduates and first with Democrats who have advanced degrees. . . .
The problem is that politics is a numbers game, and we are not in the majority. . . .
Validated data from the 2016 election, for example, suggests that only about one-third of 2016 voters had college degrees. The share among Hillary Clinton voters was higher, at 43 percent, but even among the more educated in the party, most people haven’t graduated college. And among college graduates, about 75 percent attend schools that accept more than half of applicants, rather than the kind of state university flagships or elite private universities whose graduates dominate the media. In my friend group, it’s not unusual for someone to be a lawyer or a doctor or to have a master’s degree in something or other. As a policy journalist, I speak to a lot of experts in academia or the think tank world who have advanced degrees.
But in the actual American population distribution, there are more high school dropouts than people with master’s degrees. The median American under the age of 30 has $0 in student loan debt, not because the median young person is superrich but because most people didn’t attend expensive higher education institutions in the first place. . . .
If you feel like Warren is very impressive and lots of people you know feel the same way, you’re not imagining it — lots of people just like you all across the country feel the same way.
It’s just that most Democrats aren’t all that much like you.

What Yglesias is describing here is a phenomenon that Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein described in their book The Bell Curve as “cognitive partitioning.” One tragic consequence of the controversy over the alleged racism of The Bell Curve is that it obscured what was, to me, the most valuable part of Murray and Herrnstein’s book. “The Emergence of a Cognitive Elite” (pp. 25-125) describes how, since World War II, the prevalence of standardized testing and the expansion of access to higher education has operated as a vast sorting machine. Brainy young people are identified at early ages, put onto an academic fast-track (“gifted” programs in elementary school, “honors” classes in high school) that leads them toward prestigious “selective” universities.

Once you carefully consider what Murray and Herrnstein demonstrate in that 100-page section of their book, a lot of things about our society that might otherwise be mysterious suddenly make perfect sense. Once upon a time — in my father’s youth — college education was almost exclusively for the children of the rich. There were no federally guaranteed student loans and no Pell Grants, and so if your parents couldn’t afford to send you to college, you might be able to work your way through, or maybe get a scholarship, but in general, college education was a status marker of the upper classes. However, beginning with the G.I. Bill (which sent my dad to the University of Alabama), college education became more widely available, and the postwar expansion of the middle class — the widespread prosperity of the Eisenhower/JFK era — made it possible for a much larger segment of young people to aspire to a college education. Thus the SAT and ACT gained greater importance as tools to separate the academic wheat from the chaff, as it were.

Yglesias takes note of the important distinction between merely “college educated” people — your Southwest/Northeast State University diploma — and those who attended “the kind of state university flagships or elite private universities whose graduates dominate the media.”

This distinction is not entirely about test scores. The average graduate of Georgia State or Georgia Southern has a lower SAT than the average graduate of Emory (or Yale or Stanford), but the real distinction is still largely one of socio-economic class. Yglesias attended an expensive private prep school and then went to Harvard ($69,607 a year, including room and board), and if your parents can’t afford to spend that kind of money (U.S. median household income is $61,937) you shouldn’t even bother applying to Harvard. Better you should go to your nearest state university, and graduate as close to debt-free as possible, than to mortgage your future for the experience of hanging around a bunch of “elite” snobs at Harvard for four years.

I was shocked the other day to learn that one of the Chapo Trap House podcasters, who goes by the pseudonym “Virgil Texas,” went $100,000 in debt to attend Cornell University. Dude, how stupid can an allegedly “smart” person be? You don’t even need a college degree to become podcaster, much less an Ivy League degree and, having visited Ithaca, N.Y., I can’t understand why anyone would borrow money to go to school there. If a young man with good SAT scores just wanted to spend a lot of money to go to college, what about surfing your way through Pepperdine or partying your way through Tulane? Like, you could actually live for four years — palm trees and sunshine and girls wearing short-shorts — instead of enduring those grim winters in upstate New York.

What the hell gets into the minds of these kids who borrow ridiculous sums of money to attend expensive private liberal arts colleges? Why don’t parents stop their kids from making these foolish decisions? Have we, as a society, become so over-awed by educational “prestige” that we are willing to sell our souls to obtain it? Why does it seem common sense has become so rare? But I digress . . .

While I almost never agree with Matthew Yglesias about anything, I think his analysis of the Elizabeth Warren phenomenon is correct. A Harvard professor ran a campaign that appealed to the kind of people who are impressed by Harvard professors. Such people are very numerous among the media elite, but not so much among the rank-and-file Democratic primary voters. So now Elizabeth Warren is packing it in, and the presidential campaign becomes a choice between old white guys.

Cosmic equilibrium has been restored. The patriarchy wins again.




 

Category: Elizabeth Warren, Intellectuals

Clown Car Campaign Nears Its Sad End

Posted on | March 5, 2020 | Comments Off on Clown Car Campaign Nears Its Sad End

 

Early last year, Lawrence Person dubbed the Democratic presidential campaign a “clown car,” and by summer 2019, there were so many candidates it was difficult for the DNC to narrow the TV debate field down to 20. Does anyone remember anything Tim Ryan, John Hickenlooper or John Delaney said during their brief sojourns on the campaign trail? At least my favorite candidate, Marianne Williamson, had a memorable message. Crazy? Perhaps, but memorable.

Alas, all good things must come to an end, and when Michael Bloomberg dropped out Wednesday morning, endorsing Joe Biden, the prospects of a “brokered convention” (which pundits had been jabbering about for the past month) dwindled to nearly zero. Jim Treacher mourns:

Bloomberg spent all that money to upend the establishment, more dough than most of us would ever see in a hundred lifetimes, and now he ends up standing on his tippy-toes to kiss the establishment’s butt. It really is terrific to watch. . . .
Mike Bloomberg provided a lot of high-paying jobs to soulless, unprincipled campaign hacks. So that’s not nothing. Unscrupulous drones need to put food on the table too.

As recently as Tuesday, Elizabeth Warren was saying she was still “in this fight,” but by Wednesday afternoon she was reportedly under pressure to drop out and support Bernie Sanders. Warren “had a plan for everything — except winning,” and even Ilhan Omar stuck the knife in her back:

Moral of the story? Never turn your back on Ilhan Omar.

Now that Creepy Uncle Joe appears to have the nomination within his grasp, we have passed a crucial phase of the election campaign:

After a month-long panic driven by fears of an unstoppable Bernie Sanders, the Democratic Party establishment breathed a sigh of relief last night. Joe Biden scored wins in nine of the 15 contests on Super Tuesday, capping a crucial four-day turnaround in which victory in his “firewall” state of South Carolina was quickly followed by withdrawals by three of his rivals, two of whom immediately endorsed his presidential bid. With the news Wednesday morning that billionaire Mike Bloomberg will quit the race and endorse Biden, it now appears that the man President Trump calls “Sleepy Joe” has a clear path to the Democratic nomination.
Biden’s rapid revival seems to have ended what I described, on the eve of the New Hampshire primary, as “The Great Liberal Freakout.” Anyone who watched CNN or MSNBC after the February 3 Iowa caucus could see that Biden’s dismal fourth-place finish in the Hawkeye State had inspired abject despair among the liberal pundits. The prospect that Sanders might win the Democratic nomination on a socialist platform was an omen of doom — guaranteed defeat in November — a scenario that longtime Clinton adviser James Carville called “the end of days.” . . .

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




 

Category: Democrats, Election, Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden

In The Mailbox: 03.04.20

Posted on | March 4, 2020 | 1 Comment

– compiled by Wombat-socho


Six more hours until I can freely Tweet again. If you don’t share this on Twitter, that pinche gordita Ana Navarro will have won.


OVER THE TRANSOM
Ninety Miles From Tyranny: The 90 Miles Mystery Box, Episode #915
357 Magnum: Just So You Know Where You Stand
Ammo.com: How The BATF Became Corrupt & Abusive
EBL: Joementum Is Happening – Sanders Gets Schlonged
Twitchy: Nation Correpsondent Tries To “But Trump!” Chief Justice Roberts After Statement On Chuck U. Schumer, Takes Rake To The Face Instead
Louder With Crowder: TYT’s Cenk Uygur Loses His Mind Over Biden’s Super Tuesday Victory

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: It Turns Out That Women Can Have It All
American Conservative: How Trump Could Still Lose
American Greatness: Sen. Schumer Threatens Supreme Court Justices Gorsuch & Kavanaugh, also, Man Released Under Chicago’s “Sanctuary City” Rules Attempts To Rape Three-Year-Old
American Thinker: The Canadian Health Care Myth
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Hump Day News
Babalu Blog: Sanders Picks Up Another Prominent Endorsement  – Venezuelan Dictator Maduro
BattleSwarm: Super Tuesday Results – Two And A Half Men
Cafe Hayek: Quotation Of The Day
Camp Of The Saints: Election 2020 – And The Plot Twisted From Side To Side
Da Tech Guy: Da Tech Guy’s Midnight Court Podcast Is Back – Mondays & Fridays 12:35 AM EST
Don Surber: Barbra Streisand’s Trump Obsession
The Geller Report: Mother Of San Bernardino Terrorist Pleads Guilty To Destroying Evidence, also, DOD Linguist Charged With Passing Highly Classified Intel To Hezbollah Operative
Hogewash: The Fireworks Galaxy, also, The Morning After Stupor Tuesday
Hollywood In Toto: Blacklist 2.0 – Hollywood Cancels Pro-Trump Sabato
JustOneMinute: Mulligan!
Legal Insurrection: Schumer Goes To War With SCOTUS Over Abortion, also, Warren’s Embarrassing Loss Exposes Her Fawning Media Fans
Megan McArdle: Elizabeth Warren Focused On Her Core Voters; There Weren’t Enough Of Them
Power Line: After Last Night, also, Chief Justice Roberts Throws Down On Chuck Schumer
Shark Tank: SolarTogether Gets Green Light In Florida, also, Elizabeth Warren’s Campaign Scalped, Canoe Sinks
Shot In The Dark: “So What, Precisely, Is 2+2?”
STUMP: Pandemic – Current Stats On COVID-19, Spanish Flu, & WASH YOUR HANDS
The Political Hat: All The News That Fits For Justin Trudeau
This Ain’t Hell: News From the Nork Missile Range, also, Gladys Mae West & The GPS
Victory Girls: Mike Bloomberg Finds Out He Can’t Buy The Presidency
Volokh Conspiracy: The CFPB Needed Better Friends
Weasel Zippers: MSNBC Shocked To Find Support For Trump Among California Latinos, also, Dem Rep Tammy Duckworth Claims VP Pence Will “Just Pray” About Coronavirus
Mark Steyn: The Plugs Are On But Nobody’s Home

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Category: Linkagery

Sanders Wins California, Biden Wins Texas, Brokered Convention Looms

Posted on | March 4, 2020 | Comments Off on Sanders Wins California, Biden Wins Texas, Brokered Convention Looms

 

As of 8 a.m., Maine remains “too close to call” — Joe Biden leads by about 2,200 votes with 83% of precincts reporting — but what matters more is the delegate count, and it will take another day or two before we have a complete total from Super Tuesday. Biden won 9 of 15 contests, including two states (Minnesota and Massachusetts) that had been considered a lock for Bernie Sanders, so you could say the “Joementum” is real:

Get ready for a long and grueling road ahead as Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders battle for the Democratic presidential nomination in a race that could possibly result in the country’s first contested major-party nominating convention in well over a half-century.
The former vice president, surging to victory in the five southern Super Tuesday states and beyond, crowed to supporters at a primary celebration speech in Los Angeles after most of the results were in.
“I’m here to report that we are very much alive,” Biden told a cheering crowd. “This campaign is taking off.”
Hours later, the Associated Press projected Biden the winner in Texas – which had the second-largest cache of delegates on Super Tuesday.
But Sanders, the populist senator from Vermont who’s making his second straight White House run, won California — the biggest prize on a day when one-third of all Democratic presidential convention delegates were up for grabs.
“Tonight I tell you with absolute confidence we’re going to win the Democratic nomination,” Sanders, the self-proclaimed democratic socialist lawmaker, predicted as he spoke to supporters in his home state of Vermont. . . .
Biden . . . was wounded after a lackluster fourth-place finish in Iowa’s caucuses and a disappointing fifth-place showing in New Hampshire’s primary. But a slight rebound in Nevada’s caucuses — where he came in a distant second to Sanders — was followed this past weekend with a landslide victory in South Carolina’s primary. . . .
Fox News contributor and former Democratic National Committee chairwoman Donna Brazile termed Biden’s comeback “the most impressive 72 hours I’ve ever seen in U.S. politics.”
That comeback was fuled by a tidal wave of establishment consolidation behind Biden over the past three days, which included rival moderate candidates Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg dropping out of the race and endorsing the former vice president.

On MSNBC last night, James Carville credited Rep. James Clyburn — the black South Carolina Democrat who gave an emotional endorsement to Biden last week — with saving the Democratic Party. This salvation is purely for the party establishment, and anyone who’s seen Biden’s public appearances lately knows that the doddering old fool is unlikely to be a formidable opponent to Trump in November.

We may not have seen the last plot twist in this story. What happened so far? Until Feb. 3, the campaign was about fundraising, TV debates and polls. Then you had the disastrous clusterfark of the Iowa caucus and eight days later, Biden placed fifth in New Hampshire. So by Feb. 12, everything that the pundits had been telling America during the debates-and-polls phase of the campaign was wiped out by the actual results. A three-week scramble ensued — “The Great Liberal Freakout” — during which there were two more debates, Feb. 19 in Las Vegas and Feb. 26 in Charleston, the first of which saw Mike Bloomberg get destroyed as an establishment alternative, and the second of which was a gang beatdown of Sanders. The next debate is March 15 in Phoenix, but by then we will have had another round of primaries (Idaho, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Washington State, and the North Dakota caucus) on March 10.

The next big prizes are Florida, Illinois, Ohio and Arizona on March 17, with a total of 577 delegates at stake. The questions are whether Bloomberg and Elizabeth Warren will stay in the race. Bloomberg’s team said they would “reassess” after Tuesday, when the billionaire’s big spending netted him 46 delegates. As long as a brokered convention scenario is possible, Bloomberg will probably decide to stay in it, but what about Warren? So far she’s done no better than third place in any state, and how much money does she have left? There’s no way she can compete statewide in big states like Florida or Ohio, so her only real incentive for continuing her campaign is the prospect that she could struggle on, gather a comparative handful of delegates (maybe 200 total by June) and have some influence in a brokered convention.

UPDATE: Feminists are butt-hurt:

(Hat-tip: Boris Badenoff on Twitter.)




 

Category: Bernie Sanders, Democrats, Election, Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden

In The Mailbox: 03.03.20

Posted on | March 3, 2020 | 1 Comment

– compiled by Wombat-socho


One day left in the Twitter GULAG. You know what you must do.


OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Leniency Leads To Crime Spree
EBL: SOOPER DOOPER TUESDAY
Twitchy: Ben Rhodes Lectures Dems About What Really Matters, Totally Pisses Off Bernie Bros
Louder With Crowder: Mike Bloomberg Gets Called Out For Anti-Gun Hypocrisy

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: It’s Not Economically Viable For Them To Protect Your Lives
American Conservative: The Census & Facebook, Working Hand In Hand To Censor The Internet
American Greatness: San Francisco Goes Viral – Coronavirus & Chaos
American Power: The Nation Endorses “Democratic Socialist” Bernie Sanders
American Thinker: The Only Thing Dems Have To Offer Is Fear Itself
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Fauxcahontas News
Babalu Blog: For Cubans Who Realized The Dream Of Freedom In America, Bernie Sanders Is A Nightmare
BattleSwarm: Texas Reminder – Vote Today!
Cafe Hayek: Creating Prosperity
Camp Of The Saints: Coronavirus Update
CDR Salamander: Airships, Now & Forever
Da Tech Guy: Five One-Liners Under The Fedora, also, The Socialist Republic Of Philadelphia
Don Surber: Does It Come In Mustang Size?
First Street Journal: Elizabeth Warren Tilts At Windmills
The Geller Report: Muslim Uber Driver Refuses To Give Blind Man With Guide Dog A Ride, also, Muslim Arrested For Running Over Four Youngsters In California
Hogewash: What’s Up For March 2020, also, Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day
Hollywood In Toto: CNN Says Friends Reunion Must Apologize For Problematic Jokes, also, Variety “Debunks #GetWokeGoBroke – Not So Fast
JustOneMinute: Wut Happened?
Legal Insurrection: Wuhan Virus Watch, also, Judge Demands Hillary Deposition On Emails, Private Server
Megan McArdle: The Government Should Cover Coronavirus Testing, And Conservatives Should Support It
Power Line: Coronavirus Has A Silver Lining, also, Abdi Nur Pleads For Help
Shark Tank: FL Braces For Potential Coronavirus Outbreak
Shot In The Dark: Be A Pain To Fight Pain
STUMP: Taxing Tuesday – New York Is Still #1!
The Political Hat: The Battle For Super Tuesday
This Ain’t Hell: Beta O’Rourke To Head Biden’s Gun Control Effort, also, Veterans Affairs Facing Increasing Number Of Elderly Veterans
Victory Girls: Donna Brazile Curses GOP Chairwoman On Fox
Volokh Conspiracy: Obamacare Returns To The Supreme Court – Yet Again
Weasel Zippers: LA DA’s Husband Pulls Gun On BLM Protesters On His Porch At 5 AM, also, Democrat Denver City Councilwoman Cheers Speading Coronavirus To Trump Supporters
Mark Steyn: The Geezer Apocalypse, also, Clifford The Big Red Dog’s Lesbian Neighbors

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Category: Linkagery

SUPER TUESDAY: Joe Biden Sweeps the South, Bernie Sanders Wins VT, CO, UT

Posted on | March 3, 2020 | Comments Off on SUPER TUESDAY: Joe Biden Sweeps the South, Bernie Sanders Wins VT, CO, UT

UPDATE 11:45 p.m. ET: OK, so far in California — about 15% of precincts reporting — it’s Sanders at 27%, Bloomberg 20%, Biden 18%, Buttigieg 12% and Warren 11%. You might say, “But I thought Buttigieg dropped out?” Yes, but early voting (an idea I’ve always opposed) means that many thousands of ballots were already cast before Buttigieg quit. Both Texas and Maine are still too close to call, but the “win” doesn’t really matter. What matters is the delegate count, and “too close to call” means that Biden and Bernie will more or less evenly split a majority of the delegates in those states. If Bernie manages to hang on for a win California, that will offset his losses elsewhere, and so the total delegate count should be nearly a dead-heat.

Still, tonight will be counted as a comeback victory for Joe Biden, whose campaign was written off for dead before he won South Carolina, and now he’s got momentum in a field that has swiftly shrunk from seven candidates to four. Warren has vowed to remain in the race, and Bloomberg’s campaign staff says they will “reassess” their situation tomorrow. My guess is that both of them hang around at least for the next debate on March 15, but that’s just a guess.

It was pointed out on MSNBC tonight that Biden won states where he never campaigned, ran no ads, and didn’t even have any staff or offices in the state. So a lot of inconceivable things have already happened, and I’m going to bed. We’ll sort it all out in the morning.

UPDATE 11:20 p.m. ET: Sanders wins Utah and leads by about 4 points in Texas, but it’s still too close to call there. Biden wins Massachusetts, where Warren placed third in her home state.

UPDATE 10:40 p.m. ET: Biden has won Minnesota and Arkansas, while Texas and Maine remain too close to call. Polls close in California at 11 p.m. ET.

UPDATE 9:30 p.m. ET: Tennessee has just been called for Joe Biden, adding to Virginia, North Carolina, Alabama and Oklahoma for the former vice president, while Bernie Sanders has added a win in Colorado to his previously announced victory in his home state of Vermont.

* * * PREVIOUSLY * * *

It’s 7 p.m. ET, and polls just closed in Virginia — which has already been called for Joe Biden — and in Vermont, where I’d say Bernie Sanders is the heavy favorite. A week ago, it looked like Biden was doomed, but he won big Saturday in South Carolina, forcing Tom Steyer, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar to quit the campaign. Buttigieg and Klobuchar both endorsed Biden, and so that leaves Biden, Sanders, Mike Bloomberg and Elizabeth Warren as the only real candidates left. My hunch is that Bloomberg is going to get completely wrecked tonight. He’s spent something around $500 million in a huge bet on Super Tuesday, and I doubt he’ll clear 10% in any of the 14 states voting today. We shall see.

UPDATE 7:15 p.m. ET: Yeah, this was an easy call:

What really counts, of course, is not who “wins” each state, but rather the total delegate haul for each candidate. Keep an eye on that.

UPDATE 7:35 p.m. ET: Fox News just called North Carolina for Biden.

UPDATE 7:50 p.m. ET: Damn those Samoans! I just lost a bet!

That’s six more delegates than I thought he’d get. I’m shocked to learn that if you throw around a few million bucks in Samoa, you get results.

UPDATE 8:05 p.m. ET: The Biden juggernaut rolls on:




 

Category: Bernie Sanders, Election, Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden

Bad Causes Attract Bad People: On the ‘Dirtbag Left’ of Chapo Trap House

Posted on | March 3, 2020 | 2 Comments

 

Perhaps the easiest (if not the most accurate) way to explain my politics is to call me a straight-up partisan: Whatever inflicts the maximum damage on the Democratic Party is what I want to happen. A more nuanced explanation is possible, but not necessary to understanding why I’m totally cheerleading the Bernie Bros in their kamikaze mission against the “moderate” Democratic Party establishment. Even though, as a conservative, I should probably want Democrats to be more moderate (i.e., amenable to compromising with Republicans on policy issues), the fact is that Democrats have a way of using “moderate” candidates to win majorities with which they then implement radical far-left policies. By contrast, when Democrats campaign openly as radicals, they lose elections and then Republicans have an opportunity to ram a right-wing agenda down their throats. So, yeah, go Bernie Bros, go!

Purging “moderates” from the Democratic Party helps to clarify the policy differences, and is therefore good, but this does not mean that the enemy of my enemy is actually my friend. Many of the Bernie Bros are the most selfish, scummy, irresponsible, amoral nihilst you could imagine, and this brings us to the subject of Chapo Trap House, a Bernie Bro podcast that is popular because its hosts defy “woke” political correctness and engage in vulgar mockery of establishment Democrats. It’s socialism for the Millennial hipster crew — and the New York Times is on it:

The fivesome of “Chapo Trap House” are not the only bards of the new American left . . . but they have led the way for a movement that together generates millions of dollars a year. They are on their way to becoming the socialist’s answer to right-wing shock jock radio. . . .
In blurring occasionally violent humor, jovial community meetups and radical politics, they are the Tea Party reborn for progressives, and for their fans the appeal is in a bawdy offensive balance to cautious mainstream liberal politics.

(Notice the comparison here — “right-wing shock jock radio” and “the Tea Party reborn for progressives” — even though the most popular talk-radio hosts, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, never engage in obscenity, and the Tea Party movement was always family-friendly, attracting middle-class suburbanites. But continue . . .)

They are known collectively as the Dirtbag Left, a shorthand they embrace that winkingly dispenses with any notion of liberal purity or inclusion, a defense mechanism that doubles as a nickname. . . .
“Chapo Trap House,” which started in 2016, typically runs between 60 and 90 minutes. Two episodes are released every week, one for free and one for the nearly 38,000 people who pay $5 a month through the crowdfunding site Patreon. It leads to a financial windfall for the self-professed socialists who are harnessing this rage: $168,800 a month from those subscribers alone. . . .
The Chapo co-host Virgil Texas (he lives and works under that pseudonym) went to a nearby bar for a beer.
“It’s a common experience to be someone with a crappy job who does not have an outlet for your set of beliefs and you feel insane because you’re surrounded by liberals or Evangelicals or whatever stultifying milieu,” he said. “And one day you find a piece of media with some folks who are articulating what you always believed: You’re not crazy, you’re right, this is exactly how the world works, and you’re getting screwed.” . . .
“Educating a generation and saddling them with debt and then not giving them jobs where they have the wage that they presume they should receive based on the amount of time they spent on education,” Virgil said. “That’s a pretty good way to turn them into radicals.”
He is a good example of his own target audience: He graduated with $100,000 of debt from Cornell and after college took freelance gigs from Craigslist, hoping to write.
While the Chapo hosts rail against the media establishment, they are also deeply entwined with it and largely beloved by it. ([co-host Will] Menaker, for example, grew up on the Upper West Side, the son of a New York Times editor and a New Yorker editor.)

Nobody forced you to go to Cornell, sir.

There are many excellent public universities in America which, if you had the grades and SAT scores to get into Cornell, would certainly have given you an academic scholarship, and yet you borrowed $100,000 to attend an Ivy League school, so you could be . . . a freelance writer?

As for Will Menaker, his grandfather was a Stalinist agent who may have been an accomplice to the assassination of Leon Trotsky, so I suppose he gets his Communist anti-American belief system honestly.

The fact that feminists (including Amanda Marcotte) hate the Chapo Trap House crew would normally be a recommendation in their favor, but what they are trying to do — what the whole Bernie Bro phenomenon is about — is to sell a brand of “progressivism” that white males can believe in. And that’s precisely what’s wrong with Chapo Trap House: Democrats have sold their soul for identity politics which is anti-white and anti-male, and they should be allowed to suffer the consequences. Why is Donald Trump president, after all? Have we forgotten Hillary Clinton’s shout-out to #BlackLivesMatter, endorsing the cop-hating race mobs that considered “social justice” a license for arson and looting? Have we forgotten the “campus rape epidemic” hysteria that inspired false accusations while depriving college boys of due-process rights?

Democrats have sown the wind and deserve to reap the whirlwind, and these hipsters trying to make socialism cool, to recruit young white guys to the Sanders campaign, are an obstacle to the kind of brutal electoral payback we need to collect from Democrats in November.

The Thrill of Playing Political ‘Bad Boy’

A Philadelphia feminist did a long Twitter takedown on Chapo Trap House, connecting the “Bernie Bro” phenomenon to the 2011 “Occupy” movement, and pointing out this curious coincidence: “Weev of Daily Stormer was an Occupier. Jason Kessler, the organizer of Unite the Right, traces his organizing career back to Occupy.” Some of the despicable radical scum of “Occupy” eventually became neo-Nazis, and it makes sense, really. Angry protest movements attract angry people, and ideological consistency is scarcely to be expected. Recall that Benito Mussolini had been the most prominent Communist in Italy before he created Fascism. What the radical wants (Ludwig von Mises explained this) is destruction — he despises the existing social order, asserting that nothing could be worse than a continuation of the hated status quo. The radical craves excitement, and wishes to possess greater influence than he can obtain within the existing bourgeois society, and his advocacy of revolution gives him, at the very least, the thrill of an outlaw identity.

The deliberate vulgarity of the Chapo Trap House crew can be viewed, from a psychological perspective, as part of an adolescent “bad boy” posture expressing the antisocial outlaw impulse of the would-be revolutionary. The Bernie Bros are disrespectful of what is considered “acceptable” norms of behavior within the milieu of college-educated liberals. Not everybody who mocks feminism does so for the right reasons, just as not everybody who rejects liberal ideology about “diversity” and “inclusion” does so for the right reasons. Honestly, I was shocked to discover that former Daily Caller staffer Katie McHugh had become part of a neo-Nazi subculture within the “alt right,” where some young people were cosplaying Norse paganism (“Wolves of Vinland”) and generally pursuing dangerous extremism. Anyone who has spent time among young political activists can recognize the tendency involved in that subculture, the effort to obtain status by being “more conservative than thou.” Follow that tendency far enough and pretty soon you’ll find yourself hanging out with people who speak of “ZOG,” at which point you ought to sit down and contemplate where you went wrong.

Now, I am deeply sympathetic to those who despise “Conservatism, Inc.,” the establishmentarian tendencies which my paleoconservative comrades have long criticized. As someone who counted myself a friend of the late Sam Francis, and who has been hate-listed by the SPLC, I cannot be accused of being afraid of political incorrectness. It has taken a lot of behind-the-scenes effort by a lot of people to move the Overton Window far enough that the Republican Party has a chance to escape the orbit of the corporate open-borders lobby. Some of the people who helped make this populist (or perhaps nationalist) shift possible could fairly be called “alt right,” in the sinister sense of that phrase, and this somewhat concerns me. Yet when we behold the legacy of Bushism — Bill Kristol, Rick Wilson, John Weaver, Max Boot, and the rest of the #NeverTrump crowd — we realize the conservative movement has jettisoned useless ballast that hindered its effectiveness. But I digress . . .

‘It Is History That Teaches Us to Hope’

There is no shortcut to an ideal society, whatever our ideals might be. Within a democratic polity, we are forced to work within the limits of the political system, to suffer setbacks and betrayals, and are apt to become discouraged whenever we contemplate the distance between what we have actually achieved and what we ideally would wish. It is from a mood of despair that radicalism arises, and we should never despair.

“My experience of men has neither disposed me to think worse of them nor indisposed me to serve them; nor, in spite of failures which I lament, of errors which I now see and acknowledge, or of the present aspect of affairs, do I despair of the future. The truth is this: The march of Providence is so slow and our desires so impatient; the life of humanity is so long, that of the individual so brief, that we often see only the ebb of the advancing wave and are thus discouraged. It is history that teaches us to hope.”

So wrote Robert E. Lee, in an 1870 letter to his former aide, Col. Charles Marshall, and if Lee could see hope even amid the wreckage of all his dreams, why should we today despair of the future?

Yet this is what drives the socialists of the “Dirtbag Left.” Things are so bad, they insist, that our existing civilization must be destroyed in order to create a socialist future. The observable fact that socialism only leads to tyranny and suffering is dismissed by the Left, which can always find some circumstance in the status quo — racist police, predatory lending, environmental damage, etc. — which they claim justifies their destructive agenda, no matter the historical proof of the evils of socialism. Consider this observation made by Ludwig von Mises nearly a century ago:

Socialism derives its strength from two different sources. On the one hand it is an ethical, political, and economico-political challenge. The socialist order of society, fulfilling the claims of higher morality, is to replace the “immoral” capitalist economy; the “economic rule” of the few over the many is to give way to a co-operative order which alone can make true democracy possible; planned economy, the only rational system working according to uniform principles, is to sweep away the irrational private economic order, the anarchical production for profit. Socialism thus appears as a goal towards which we ought to strive because it is morally and rationally desirable. The task therefore of men of good will is to defeat the resistance to it which is inspired by misunderstanding and prejudice. This is the basic idea of that Socialism which Marx and his school call Utopian.
On the other hand, however, Socialism is made to appear as the inevitable goal and end of historical evolution. An obscure force from which we cannot escape leads humanity step by step to higher planes of social and moral being. History is a progressive process of purification, with perfection, in the form of Socialism, at the end. This train of thought does not run counter to the ideas of Utopian Socialism. Rather it includes them, for it presupposes, as obviously self-evident, that the socialist condition would be better, nobler, and more beautiful than the non-socialist. But it goes farther; it sees the change to Socialism — envisioned as progress, an evolution to a higher stage — as something independent of human will. A necessity of Nature, Socialism is the inevitable outcome of the forces underlying social life: this is the fundamental idea of evolutionary socialism, which, in its Marxist form, has taken the proud name of “Scientific” Socialism.

Argued both as “higher morality” and as the “inevitable goal” of historical evolution, socialism is a nearly irresistible temptation, and the only argument against it is, it won’t work. After the Communists had spent a couple of decades proving Mises right (and after totalitarian parties had seized power in Italy and Germany), the defenders of socialism argued that what went wrong with the Bolshevik “experiment” was that the wrong people were in charge. This argument was debunked by Mises’ protégé Friedrich Hayek in a chapter of The Road to Serfdom entitled “Why the Worst Get on Top”:

There are strong reasons for believing that what to us appear the worst features of the existing totalitarian systems are not accidental byproducts, but phenomena which totalitarianism is certain sooner or later to produce. Just as the democratic statesman who sets out to plan economic life will soon be confronted with the alternative of either assuming dictatorial powers or abandoning his plans, so the totalitarian dictator would soon have to choose between disregard of ordinary morals and failure. It is for this reason that the unscrupulous and uninhibited are likely to be more successful in a society tending towards totalitarianism. . . .
The positions in a totalitarian society in which it is necessary to practice cruelty and intimidation, deliberate deception and spying, are numerous.
Neither the Gestapo nor the administration of a concentration camp, neither the Ministry of Propaganda nor the SA or SS (or their Italian or Russian counterparts) are suitable places for the exercise of humanitarian feelings. Yet it is through positions like these that the road to the highest positions in the totalitarian state leads.

As I have said in other contexts, bad causes attract bad people. If you join a political movement and notice that you are surrounded by degenerates and hoodlums, you have joined a bad movement.

If the Bernie Bros manage to wreck the Democratic Party, this is a good thing, but it doesn’t mean the Bernie Bros are good people.




 

Category: Democrats

#MeToo Takes Out Chris Matthews

Posted on | March 2, 2020 | 1 Comment

 

As a journalist, Chris Matthews has always been a joke. His only qualification is that he’s a Democrat who used to work for Tip O’Neill. That partisan credential was not enough to save him:

Longtime “Hardball” host Chris Matthews resigned from his post at MSNBC on Monday night. Matthews’s sudden exit was reported by the New York Times.
As the Times noted, Matthews “faced mounting criticism in recent days over a spate of embarrassing on-air moments, including a comparison of Senator Bernie Sanders’s campaign to the Nazi invasion of France and an interview with Senator Elizabeth Warren in which the anchor was criticized for a condescending and disbelieving tone.”
Over the weekend, GQ published a story by freelance journalist Laura Bassett, who accused Matthews of making several sexually charged comments to her behind-the-scenes of his show. Bassett reported her allegations without naming Matthews in a 2017 essay for HuffPost.
In his retirement announcement on air Monday night, Matthews said young people are improving standards in the work place, and about “how we talk to each other.”
“Compliments on a woman’s appearance that some men, including me, might have once incorrectly thought were OK, were never OK,” he said. “Not then and certainly not today, and for making such comments in the past, I’m sorry.”

Notice how the weasel implicates “some men” in his personal scandal. Where was this male solidarity from Matthews when Stormy Daniels was making the rounds with her smears against President Trump? Live by the #MeToo scandal, die by the #MeToo scandal, I suppose, and Matthews quit because the heat was about to get turned up:

It’s never one accusation. A guy like Matthews gets away with this stuff for years (he was reportedly reprimanded for some bad behavior in the late 1990s) and so, when one woman finally calls him out publicly, a dozen more will come out of the woodwork. Nobody will actually miss Chris Matthews, because nobody ever actually liked him.




 

Category: MSNBC
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