The Other McCain

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

In The Mailbox: 08.05.19

Posted on | August 5, 2019 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 08.05.19

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Never Underestimate the Power of Human Stupidity
EBL: The Boomtown Rats – “I Don’t Like Mondays”
Twitchy: They Flipped When Trump Called MS-13 Animals. Now They’re Upset he Called Mass Shooters Monsters.
Louder With Crowder: Why Mario Lopez Should Never Apologize, also, Neil DeGrasse Tyson Triggers Gun Grabber Zealots

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Greatness: Democratic Corruption, Not Racism, Ruined Baltimore, also, The Dream Team Loses To The Nobodies
American Power: Neera Tanden Ripped For Dancing On Bodies, Campaigning For Dems After Mass Shootings, also, 8chan Founder Says “Shut It Down”
American Thinker: Why Democrats Own El Paso, also, When The Left Snatches Our Kids
Animal Magnetism: Goodbye, Blue Monday
Babalu Blog: Remember When Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings Visited Cuba To Learn About Economic Development?, also, Young Americans Embracing Socialism Don’t Know Its History Or Understand Its Disastrous Consequences
Baldilocks: My July 2019 Post Digest For Da Tech Guy Blog
BattleSwarm: Philomena Cunk On Climate Change, also, Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update
Camp of the Saints: ProteinWisdom.com Is Back!!!
CDR Salamander: The War In Yemen, With Katherine Zimmerman On Midrats
Da Tech Guy: Mayim Bialik Unintentionally Explains The Price Women Have Paid For Feminism, also, Some Mass Shooting Thoughts Under The Fedora
Don Surber: Shedding Obama, also, Trump Is Arming Black People
Dustbury: Strange Search Engine Queries, also, But Will Boys Eat It?
First Street Journal: Saoirse Kennedy Hill (RIP), also, Tulsi Gabbard Is No Friend Of Conservatives Or Libertarians
The Geller Report: Muslim Who Murdered German On The Street With A Sword Posted Islamic Confession Before The Act, also, NYC Straphangers Take Down Muslim Shouting “Allahu Akbar” After He Pushes Commuter Onto The Tracks
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of The Day, also, Dayton, El Paso…And Chicago
Hollywood In Toto: Thirteen Questions The Press Must Ask The Hollywood “Resistance”
Joe For America: Dayton Shooter Was A Satanist Leftist Socialist Supporter Of Sanders, Warren, & Antifa – Media Silent
JustOneMinute: Evolve Or Die! also, Let’s Assault Logic
Legal Insurrection: Dayton Shooter Supported Liz Warren, Hated Trump & ICE, also, Democratic Socialists Of America Won’t Endorse Democratic Nominee If It’s Not Sanders
The PanAm Post: Hackers Steal Military, Diplomatic Intel From Maduro Regime
Power Line: Democratic Socialists Double Down On Crazy, also, Wind Energy Collapsing In Germany
Protein Wisdom: It’s Time To Declare War On Identity Politics
Shot In The Dark: Misery Loves Company
STUMP: Mortality With Meep – Chicago Homicides
The Political Hat: Ohio Vs. The Gaia Cult
This Ain’t Hell: World War I Movie Preview, also, In Our Last Episode…
Victory Girls: Mass Murder is A Societal Problem, also, Is This The Rise Of Joker Terrorism?
Volokh Conspiracy: Everyone Has A Right To Call Politicians Idiots
Weasel Zippers: Breaking – Trump Moving To Impose Total Embargo On Venezuela, also, Volunteers Clean Up Baltimore City Streets After Trump Criticism
Megan McArdle: What Republicans (And Washington) Are Losing With The Departure Of Will Hurd
Mark Steyn: Valley Of The Dolls, also, The Jazz-Handed Proletariat

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Category: Linkagery

‘Revenge of the Nerds,’ IRL?

Posted on | August 5, 2019 | Comments Off on ‘Revenge of the Nerds,’ IRL?

 

After our podcast Saturday night, John Hoge and I went out to dinner and he was telling me about his latest engineering project. He does very important work for NASA, but the way he talks about it is so low-key you aren’t likely to realize exactly how important his work is. So we’re sitting there in the restaurant, and he’s talking in a rather nerdy technical way about a project to do maintenance work on satellites using remote-controlled equipment and I’m like: “SPACE ROBOTS!”

This is really exciting stuff, to those of us who aren’t NASA engineers, but to Hoge, “It’s just my job five days a week,” you might say.

So I call the waitress over to our table. Hoge and I have become regulars at this place, so much that the waitress knows our orders by memory, and I point to John and say, “Can you guess what he does for a living?”

“A teacher?” she guesses.

“No — he builds space robots for NASA. Like, C3PO.”

“Actually, more like R2D2,” Hoge corrects me.

 

Because of my own professional experience, I understand that words matter. How you describe something makes a difference in how it is perceived. The whole point of Hunter S. Thompson’s career, a point he made explicitly in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, is how the media create the gap between reality and perception.

Hoge’s tendency to describe his work in a mealy-mouthed way — engineering contractor at Goddard, blah blah blah — is a typical example of this. I spent the early years of my career as a small-town sports writer, where the challenge is to write about the local high-school girls softball team’s tournament victory as if somebody actually cared:

ADAIRSVILLE — Becky Ann Randall slammed a seventh-inning double Saturday to give Red Bud High School a 12-10 victory over Fairmount in the semifinal round of the Early Bird Invitational Softball Tournament, advancing the Lady Cardinals to Sunday’s championship against host Adairsville.
Randall’s two-RBI double was one of three hits for Red Bud’s senior shortstop in Saturday’s semifinal.
“Becky Ann has really stepped us for us as a team leader,” said Lady Cardinals coach Ruth Talley, whose team graduated six players after last year’s 14-7 season. “She’s always been a competitor, and we’re counting on her to make a big difference this year.” . . .

Et cetera, et cetera. You’d illustrate the story with a photo of the “star” player of the game, and give it a headline and subhead that conveyed the idea that this was The Most Important Softball Game Ever, knowing that Becky Ann’s mama was going to buy six copies of the paper, cut out the article, laminate it, and send copies to all her relatives. Beyond this kind of scrapbook memorabilia function, I have no idea if anyone else ever paid attention to the local sports stories I wrote, but the coaches and players (and especially the players’ parents) loved the way I hyped up everything like it was really important. Why did I do it that way? Because I couldn’t see the point of doing it any other way. Like, why am I getting paid to cover these games, if the outcome doesn’t matter? Considering my own work to be valuable, I couldn’t maintain my self-esteem without trying to convince readers that the people and events I was writing about were important. Writing about high-school kids as if they were Athletic Superstars was essential to maintaining my morale as a journalist.

Words matter, and how we talk about ourselves affects how we are perceived by others. John Hoge was entirely honest with his low-key description of himself as an engineering contractor, but it’s also honest — and infinitely more impressive — for him to say he builds space robots.

True story: My son Jim was doing a home-remodeling job in Lynchburg, Virginia, and went out to have a few cold beverages. He got talking to a guy in the bar and when he introduced himself as Jim McCain, the guy said, “Like . .. The Other McCain?” Jim answered, “Yeah, that’s my dad,” and he didn’t have to pay for his drinks the rest of the night.

Oh, I’m just a blogger, in the same way Hoge’s just an engineer, but when I introduce myself to people, I tell them I’m a political correspondent for The American Spectator, which sounds more impressive.

Nobody ever paid serious attention to Santino Legan, Patrick Crusius or Connor Betts before they went on shooting rampages that have made national headlines. Legan killed three people and injured 13 others July 28 at a California food festival before killing himself. Crusius killed 20 people and injured 26 more Saturday in El Paso, Texas, before surrendering to police. Betts killed 9 people and injured 20 others in the wee hours of Sunday morning in Dayton, Ohio, before he was shot to death by police. None of these mass murderers had previous criminal records, and all three were young white men — Legan was 19, Crusius is 21, Betts was 24 — who might be described colloquially as nerds or losers. Politicians and pundits rushed to interpret these atrocities in a political context, but the rise of a genuine terrorist threat from such “lone wolf” killers — misfits or outcasts, filled with feelings of frustration and hopelessness — might better be understood from a sociological or psychological perspective. . . .

Read the whole thing at The American Spectator.



 

Category: American Spectator

Rule 5 Sunday: Claudia Cardinale

Posted on | August 5, 2019 | 2 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Claudia Cardinale, the glorious Tunisian/Italian actress who featured in a lot of spaghetti westerns, first came to my attention in perhaps the greatest of those not starring Clint Eastwood: Once Upon A Time In The West, where she played a beautiful widow beset by the eeeeevil Henry Fonda. More appropriately, she played the Algerian lover of Anthony Quinn’s Colonel Raspeguy in Lost Command, a mid-sixties film based on Pierre Larteguy’s famous novel The Centurions, which follows a group of French Army officers from Dien Bien Phu to the Battle of Algiers. Here’s Cardinale’s Aisha with her colonel.

The beginning of a tragic relationship.

On a far more cheerful note (and if you’ve read the book, you know exactly what I mean), Ninety Miles From Tyranny serves up something extra this week with Hot Pick of the Late Night, 90 Miles Mystery Box Episode 699, Morning Mistress, Girls With Guns, and the bonus 90 Miles Mystery Video – Nyctophilia #2. At Animal Magnetism, it’s Rule 5 UFO Kookery News and the Saturday Gingermageddon (the 250th!), while Bacon Time serves up Larsa Pippen.

This week, EBL brings us rats, National Chicken Wing Day, Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, Marianne Williamson, Harriet Tubman, Tulsi vs. Kamala, National Water Balloon Day, and Darleen Love.

A View From The Beach presents Little Miss Starlight – Erin Moriarty, “And Then He Kissed Me”, I Hope It Was At Least High End Luggage, Katy Loses Plagiarism Suit, “Backwater Blues”, A Shot of Salvation for Chesapeake Logperch, Blue Monday, Still Too Much Russiagate, Making Lemonade and Outlaw Artist Uses 225,000 Plastic Straws.

Proof Positive’s Friday Night Babe is Mariska Hargitay and his Vintage Babe is Jayne Mansfield. At Dustbury, it’s Birgitta Haukdal and Nadia Ali.

Thanks to everyone for all the luscious linkagery!

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Category: Rule 5

Two Mass Shootings in 14 Hours: Thoughts on ‘The Gamification of Terror’

Posted on | August 4, 2019 | 2 Comments

 

Saturday night on The Other Podcast with John Hoge, we opened the show discussing the shooting at an El Paso Wal Mart that left 20 people dead and 26 injured. The gunman, 21-year-old Patrick Crusius, evidently drove more than 600 miles from his family’s home near Dallas to commit this atrocity. He posted online a four-page manifesto citing the March massacre in New Zealand as his inspiration, and saying he expected to be killed. Instead, Crusius was “taken into custody without incident” and reportedly “told investigators he wanted to shoot as many Mexicans as possible.” Even as we were beginning to digest that news, however, there was another massacre in Ohio:

Nine people have been killed and at least 26 injured after a shooting at a bar in Ohio today in the second US massacre in 14 hours.
Police responded to calls about an active shooter in the area of East 5th Street in the Oregon District on Dayton, according to WHIO-TV.
The the gunman, who was using a ‘long gun’, was killed by police who were nearby in the early hours of this morning.
Customers said on social media many at Ned Peppers Bar were ‘piling on top of each other to get out’.
Witnesses described ‘casualties everywhere’ and an attacker who was a ‘white man dressed all in black’.

The Dayton shooter has been identified as 24-year-old Connor Betts, and this bloodbath would seem to fit the pattern of other recent incidents, including not only the El Paso shooting, but also last weekend’s massacre in Gilroy, California (see “The Poison Fruit of Radical Seeds”).

Young white men — the Gilroy shooter was 19, the El Paso shooter was 21, and the Dayton gunman fit the same profile — are succumbing to despair and rage, believing their lives are worthless, without meaning or purpose. Seeing no hope for their own future as individuals, they project their nihilistic sense of doom onto society at large, and resort to a sick “blaze of glory” fantasy, a suicidal impulse whereby they attempt to kill as many people as possible before they die.

While these massacres are characterized as “far right” or “white supremacist” in their ideology — the media wants to blame President Trump — Daniel Greenfield points out that the El Paso shooter’s manifesto also made an environmentalist argument:

“The American lifestyle affords our citizens an incredible quality of life. However, our lifestyle is destroying the environment of our country. The decimation of the environment is creating a massive burden for future generations,” the El Paso shooter wrote.
“This phenomenon is brilliantly portrayed in the decades old classic ‘The Lorax'”, Crusius wrote, citing a children’s story commonly used as a text by environmentalists.
“Fresh water is being polluted from farming and oil drilling operations. Consumer culture is creating thousands of tons of unnecessary plastic waste and electronic waste, and recycling to help slow this down is almost non-existent,” he ranted.
“We even use god knows how many trees worth of paper towels just wipe water off our hands. Everything I have seen and heard in my short life has led me to believe that the average American isn’t willing to change their lifestyle, even if the changes only cause a slight inconvenience. The government is unwilling to tackle these issues beyond empty promises since they are owned by corporations.”
At this point the El Paso shooter seems to be channeling Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders.
“Corporations that also like immigration because more people means a bigger market for their products. I just want to say that I love the people of this country, but god damn most of y’all are just too stubborn to change your lifestyle. So the next logical step is to decrease the number of people in America using resources. If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can become more sustainable.”

Anyone who has read Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer knows that, whatever the “cause” may be — left, right or otherwise — radicalism always attracts certain types of personalities, including “misfits” who for one reason or another are unable to obtain satisfaction in the ordinary pleasures of an ordinary life. Furthermore, the misfit who resorts to terroristic violence has, by his action, expressed a loss of hope in ordinary political activity as a means of influencing society in whatever direction he believes it should go. It is this hopelessness, a sense of inescapable doom, that distinguishes the terrorist from anyone engaged in ordinary politics, whatever their ideology might be.

There’s something else going on here, as online forums have created what journalist Robert Evans calls “The Gamification of Terror”:

In this discussion thread [on the 8chan forum], after one anon posts screenshots of the El Paso shooter’s thread, another asks, “Is nobody going to check these incredible digits?” This statement is likely a reference to the shooter’s substantial body count. . . .
Ever since the Christchurch shooting spree, 8chan users have commented regularly on Brenton Tarrant’s high bodycount, and made references to their desire to “beat his high score” . . .
What we see here is evidence of the only real innovation 8chan has brought to global terrorism: the gamification of mass violence. We see this not just in the references to “high scores”, but in the very way the Christchurch shooting was carried out. Brenton Tarrant livestreamed his massacre from a helmet cam in a way that made the shooting look almost exactly like a First Person Shooter video game. . . .
Until law enforcement, and the media, treat these shooters as part of a terrorist movement no less organized, or deadly, than ISIS or Al Qaeda, the violence will continue. There will be more killers, more gleeful celebration of body counts on 8chan, and more bloody attempts to beat the last killer’s “high score”.

In other words, the livestreamed New Zealand massacre functioned as a template upon which other angry misfits might model their own massacres, each attempting to exceed the “high score” of fatalities, a concept directly derived from first-person-shooter videogames. The nihilism and hopelessness of these killers is exacerbated by their social isolation, as spending endless hours playing videogames tends to prevent them from forming real-life friendships or romantic relationships.

We therefore have a “terrorist movement” of nerds and losers.

UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds recommends Loren Coleman’s 2004 book The Copycat Effect: How the Media and Popular Culture Trigger the Mayhem in Tomorrow’s Headlines and, speaking of books, has Professor Reynolds mentioned he’s got a book about the toxicity of social media?



 

Category: Crime, Terrorism

FMJRA 2.0: This Is My Rifle

Posted on | August 3, 2019 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Rule 5 Sunday: Victoria Baldessara
Animal Magnetism
Ninety Miles From Tyranny
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive
EBL

FMJRA 2.0: Kryptonite
A View From The Beach
EBL

Red Pill: Celebrity Pastor Josh Harris Divorces Wife, Renounces Christianity
Sticks, Stories, & Scotch
EBL

‘Avenge the Patriotic Gore That Flecked the Streets of Baltimore’
EBL

In The Mailbox: 07.29.19
357 Magnum
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive
EBL

Crazy People Are Dangerous
Dark Brightness
Pushing Rubber Downhill
EBL

MSNBC Guest Threatens ‘Civil War’
EBL

In The Mailbox: 07.30.19
357 Magnum
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive
EBL

‘Dark Psychic Forces’ 2020
357 Magnum
EBL

In The Mailbox: 07.31.19
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive
EBL

Crazy People Are Dangerous
Dark Brightness
EBL

In The Mailbox: 08.01.19
Proof Positive
EBL

‘Florida Man’ Strikes Again
Dark Brightness
EBL

Her Superhero Name Was ‘Whorella’
Da Tech Guy
Dark Brightness
357 Magnum
EBL

In The Mailbox: 08.02.19
Proof Positive

Top linkers for the week ending August 2nd:

  1.  EBL (14)
  2.  Proof Positive (6)
  3. A View From the Beach (5)

Honorable mention: Dark Brightness

Thanks to everyone for the linkagery!

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Category: FMJRA Award

How Dangerous Is Baltimore?

Posted on | August 3, 2019 | 1 Comment

It’s worse than the countries from which “refugees” are fleeing:

WJZ reviewed data from 2018, the last full year for which data is available. Data from the U.S. State Department’s Overseas Security Advisory Council lists El Salvador’s murder rate at 50 per 100,000 residents in 2018.
The council’s report listed Guatemala’s 2018 murder rate at 22 per 100,000.
Honduras’ 2018 murder rate was not included in OSAC’s annual crime and safety report published in April, but a report from the Observatory of Violence at the National Autonomous University of Honduras gave a figure of 41.4 murders per 100,000 residents.
HOW DOES BALTIMORE COMPARE?
Charm City ended 2018 with a total of 309 murders, according to the Baltimore Police Department. So far in 2019, police report 196 homicides have occurred. Using the U.S. Census Bureau’s July 2018 population estimate for the city of 602,495, Baltimore’s 2018 murder rate is 51.3 murders per 100,000 residents.

Not only is Baltimore more dangerous than El Salvador, Guatemala or Honduras, but in 2015, the Washington Post reported: “Fourteen Baltimore neighborhoods have lower life expectancies than North Korea. Eight are doing worse than Syria.” (Hat-tips: Hot Air, Instapundit.)



 

Category: Crime, Maryland

They Told Me If I Voted for Trump, Jews Would Suffer Legal Persecution …

Posted on | August 3, 2019 | Comments Off on They Told Me If I Voted for Trump, Jews Would Suffer Legal Persecution …

. . . and they were right!

A non-profit is fighting back against a lawsuit from the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which has forced its closure and shut down its crowdfunding platform.
Arthur Goldberg has been a target of SPLC since 2012. He and non-profits with which he is affiliated have been sued twice, once as the co-director of Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing (JONAH) — which offered counseling for those struggling with unwanted same-sex attraction — and most recently as co-director of Jewish Institute for Global Awareness (JIFGA), the parent organization for Funding Morality.
On Thursday, Hudson County, New Jersey Superior Court Judge Peter Bariso, Jr. slapped Goldberg and JIFGA with over $3.2 million in punitive fines and legal fees for allegedly violating a 2015 injunction and settlement agreement against JONAH that forbids him from providing counseling referrals.
In a move meant to “deter and punish,” he also barred Goldberg from serving as a director of any nonprofit organization in the state of New Jersey —–a condition that may violate Goldberg’s rights. As a result, JIFGA and the crowdfunding site, Funding Morality, will have to suspend operations. . . .
“We expect to appeal the decision, which we believe is at odds with the facts and infringes upon our constitutional rights to freedom of speech, religion, and association,” [Goldberg] said.
“Our appeal seeks to vindicate our constitutional right to promote biblical values,” he said. “Today’s politically correct progressive ideology seeks to eliminate the free exchange of ideas whenever certain views may be antithetical to current prevailing opinions.”
“This is part of the left-wing agenda to cut off conservative speech and shut down voices that disagree with them,” Goldberg said.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.)

Anyone with an iota of common sense can see that New Jersey’s law against “reparative therapy” (a/k/a “conversion therapy”) is an unconstitutional infringement of First Amendment religious liberty, when such counseling is provided through the auspices of a religious institution. Careful examination of the SPLC’s role in this case demonstrates how these tax-exempt totalitarians are endangering free speech, seeking to limit “acceptable” opinion and, in effect, to make it illegal to express disapproval of homosexuality.

“There shall be no whore of the daughters of Israel, nor a sodomite of the sons of Israel.”
— Deuteronomy 23:17 (KJV)

Do the courts of New Jersey intend to declare the Word of God illegal?



 

Category: Constitution, Gays, New Jersey, Religion

The Poison Fruit of Radical Seeds

Posted on | August 3, 2019 | 5 Comments

 

Last weekend a gunman opened fire on the annual Garlic Festival in Gilroy, California, killing three and injuring 12. The shooter was soon identified as Santino Legan, 19, and as to his motive, there was a cryptic Instagram reference to Might Is Right by Ragnar Redbeard.

We cannot ask the killer what he intended by this reference, because he committed suicide by shooting himself in the head. However, the text of the 1896 edition of Might Is Right is available online and its author, “Ragnar Redbeard,” has been identified as Arthur Desmond (1859-1929). A native of England, Desmond emigrated to New Zealand as a young man and became involved in radical politics there, before moving in 1892 to Australia, where he published a radical journal called Hard Cash. This made him a target of government investigation, and by 1895, Desmond had emigrated to the United States, taking up residence in Chicago. There, under a pseudonym — which also included the false claim of having a law degree from the University of Chicago — Desmond published Might Is Right, or The Survival of the Fittest.

To summarize its contents as briefly as possible, Desmond’s book combines the nihilistic atheism of Nietzsche with the “scientific” theory of Darwin in an attack on Christianity, particularly criticizing the themes of the Sermon on the Mount. Desmond mocks the dignity of labor: “All hireling labor is corroding, corrupting, degrading, devilish. . . . Labor performed for oneself is passable — when performed for others, it is utterly debasing — ruinous to brain and body” (pp. 163-164).

That is, as it was intended, antithetical to Christian belief — and to common sense, as well. Nothing is more conducive to health and happiness than hard work; the worker who commits himself wholeheartedly to his task, seeking to become more efficient and productive, has entered into a worthy competition: “Seest thou a man diligent in his business? he shall stand before kings; he shall not stand before mean men” (Proverbs 22:29 KJV). For all the political attacks on the alleged unfairness of a free economy — the demonization of the 1% and so forth — any honest and intelligent young man willing to work hard can still begin as a teenager in “hireling labor” and, by being “diligent in his business,” rise to wealth and influence in America.

Yet we need not indulge in the errors of the “prosperity gospel” to defend the dignity of labor. A man’s lot in life may be poverty and obscurity, a constant struggle to make ends meet, yet the diligent laborer has no cause for shame. However little he may have, he has earned it by hard work, and in supporting himself and his family he has accomplished a more noble task than anything done by the so-called “intellectual elite.”

Given the clear influence of Nietzsche on Desmond’s work — we can only Might Is Right as a crackpot exegesis of The Will to Power — we are not surprised to find him expressing a theory of racial supremacy, which was by no means unusual in that era:

“Purity of blood has played, (and is yet to play), a leading role in the drama of racial evolution. Races held in bondage are necessarily mongrelized, degraded, ‘equalized.’ . . .
“Our race cannot hope to maintain its predominance, if it goes on diluting its blood with Chinamen, Negros, Japanese, or debased Europeans. . . . The Latin race is hopelessly effete in both the old world and the new” (pp. 156-157).

There are innumerable treatises from the 19th and early 20th centuries that express a similar viewpoint, but what makes Might Is Right distinctive is the way Desmond merges an anarchist sentiment — a celebration of power expressed through violence — with racialist theory. It is as if Desmond had read Hobbes’s description of society without law as the “war of all against all” (Bellum omnium contra omnes) and said, “Isn’t that awesome?” The point that Hobbes intended to make, however, was that government and law are necessary for human beings to enjoy any sort of civilized existence, guaranteeing the security of our lives and property. That the wealthy and powerful have an interest in preserving the established order is obvious enough, but what recent history has shown is that the destructive forces of radicalism generally make life worse for the “masses” in whose name revolutionaries claim to act. From the French Revolution to modern-day Venezuela, radical promises of “liberation” for the oppressed have invariably produced nightmares of bloodshed and misery. However much any Third World peasant might have resented the yoke of European colonialism, was it worse than the terroristic dictatorships of Mao, Mengistu or Mugabe?

When the teenage killer Santino Legan’s endorsement of “Ragnar Redbeard” was reported, the media rushed to label him a “white supremacist,” and thus someone linked to the “far right” which, by the prestidigitation of journalistic smear tactics, might make it possible to blame President Trump and conservatives generally. Yet it is dishonest to suggest that any conservative, who as a basic premise is committed to upholding the constitutional order, would endorse random violence inspired by the work of a 19th-century anarchist crackpot.

A mature and responsible adult can study any piece of radical literature — The Communist Manifesto or whatever — without being drawn into a vortex of deadly madness. The danger of such literature is always its appeal to alienated and emotionally vulnerable young people. If you’ve never studied logic and rhetoric, if you are unfamiliar with history and have few years of experience upon which to base your judgment, it is easy to be seduced by the arguments of radical crackpots, whether they are as famous as Bernie Sanders or as obscure as Arthur Desmond.



 

Category: Crime, Intellectuals
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