The Other McCain

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

CNN Commentator Fired After U.N. Speech Endorsing Anti-Israel Violence

Posted on | December 1, 2018 | 1 Comment

 

The usual suspects on the Left are upset that Professor Mark Lamont Hill lost his contract as a CNN commentator Thursday — he remains on the payroll of Temple University — but he said what he said:

CNN Contributor Marc Lamont Hill told the United Nations on Wednesday that Israel should be replaced by a Palestinian state, and defended the Palestinian use of violence against Israel.
Hill was speaking at the “U.N. International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People,” which provides an annual platform for extremist rhetoric against Israel. He was present to express his views as an “invited representative of civil society.” . . .
Hill referred to the founding of Israel in May 1948 as “the great catastrophe,” borrowing the term “Nakba,” which is used by Palestinians. . . . Hill continued with various other accusations against Israel, adding that he had refused to drink “Israeli water” on a flight from “Palestine” to New York. . . .

[Quoting Hill’s speech:] Solidarity from the international community demands that we embrace boycotts, divestment, and sanctions as a critical means by which to hold Israel accountable for its treatment of Palestinian people. . . .
Black resistance to American apartheid did not come purely through Gandhi and nonviolence. Rather, slave revolts and self-defense and tactics otherwise divergent from Dr. King or Mahatma Gandhi were equally important to preserving safety and attaining freedom. We must allow—if we are to operate in true solidarity with Palestinian people, we must allow the Palestinian people the same range of opportunity and political possibility. If we are standing in solidarity with the Palestinian people, we must recognize the right of an occupied people to defend itself. We must prioritize peace. But we must not romanticize or fetishize it. . . .
So as we stand here on the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the tragic commemoration of the Nakba, we have an opportunity to not just offer solidarity in words but to commit to political action, grassroots action, local action, and international action that will give us what justice requires. And that is a free Palestine from the river to the sea.

Israel either has the right to exist, or it doesn’t, and Marc Lamont Hill quite clearly denies Israel’s right to exist. It would ill behoove Hill to claim his remarks were “taken out of context,” because we have the full transcript of his speech, and it does not exonerate him.

Many conservatives have been purged or marginalized for saying things less obviously hateful than what Hill said, and his known association with Louis Farrakhan adds weight to the charge of anti-Semitism.

If you’re going to demand that we “recognize the right of an occupied people to defend itself,” shouldn’t this principle extend beyond Israel? And if 70 years is not enough time to ratify Israel’s territorial sovereignty, how long will it take? What other historic conquests will you delegitimize? What other “occupied people” will you encourage to use violence to resist their conquerors? What about the people of Texas, a formerly independent republic? What about British rule in Northern Ireland? Would Mark Lamont Hill endorse a secessionist uprising in Texas or a renewal of anti-British terrorism by the IRA?

This is where everyone might benefit from reading Thomas Sowell’s Conquests and Cultures: An International History, which makes the point that being an “occupied people” isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Some conquests are objectively better than others. We might observe that the Germans were an “occupied people” after losing World War II, but the Allied occupation of Germany was better than the previous Nazi occupation of Poland. The fact that Stalin’s Soviet Union instituted a new totalitarian occupation of Eastern Europe after Hitler’s defeat is arguably the source of the confusion in Marc Lamont Hill’s mind. Why? Because Soviet propaganda justified the Iron Curtain and the Cold War by claiming America under Harry Truman was a “fascist” power, and this anti-American ideology took root on the Left. During the “long twilight struggle” of the Cold War, every U.S. ally was targeted for such smears by Soviet propaganda, which was parroted by the Left in America and other Western countries. This is how and why Palestinian nationalism became a cause célèbre on the Left in the late 1960s, becauses the Soviets were always eager to exploit any Third World conflict for their own advantage, and therefore furnished weapons to Israel’s enemies.

The Left’s hatred of Israel is a legacy of this Soviet propaganda, and you might notice that the British stopped having problems with IRA terrorism not long after the Soviet Union collapsed. Coincidence? No, it is a fact that the KGB smuggled weapons to the IRA, in the same way that they smuggled weapons to Palestinian terrorists in Israel.

More than 25 years after the Soviet Union ended up in “the ash heap of history,” just as Ronald Reagan had predicted, the poisonous seeds of Soviet propaganda continue to produce tainted fruit. In fact, this decaying fruit becomes more toxic with each passing year because of the “intersectionality” of identity politics promoted on our university campuses by left-wing academics like Professor Hill. Consider this passage from his speech Wednesday at the United Nations:

What I’m challenging us to do in the spirit of solidarity is not to embrace optimism but to embrace radical hope. Radical hope is a belief that despite the odds, despite the considerable measures against justice and peace, despite the legacy of hatred and imperialism and white supremacy and patriarchy and homophobia, despite these systems of power that have normalized settler colonialism, despite these structures, we can still win. We can still prevail.
One motivation for my hope in the liberation and ultimate self-determination of the Palestinian people comes in August of 2014. Black Americans were in Ferguson, Missouri in the Midwest of the United States protesting the death of a young man named Michael Brown, an unarmed African-American male who had been killed by a law enforcement agent. And as we protested, I saw two things that provided hope for the Palestinian struggle. One was that for the first time in my entire life of activism I saw a sea of Palestinian people. I saw a sea or Palestinian flags in the crowd saying that we must form a solidarity project. We must struggle together in order to resist because state violence in the United States and state violence in Brazil and state violence is Syria and state violence in Egypt and state violence in South Africa, and state violence in Palestine are all of the same sort. And we finally understood that we must work together and not turn on each other, but instead turn to each other.
And later that night when the police began to tear gas us, Mariam Barghouti tweeted us from Ramallah. She, along with other Palestinian youth activists, told us that they tear gas that we were experiencing was only temporary. They gave us tips for how to wash our eyes out. They told us how to make gas masks out of t-shirts. They gave us permission to think and dream beyond our local conditions by giving us a transnational or a global solidarity project.

If “global solidarity” were to yield “a free Palestine from the river to the sea,” as Professor Hill so ardently hopes, are we to suppose that this “liberated” Palestine would be free from “patriarchy and homophobia”? Perhaps the women and girls raped by ISIS and the homosexuals persecuted in Iran would disagree with Professor Hill’s “radical hope.”

Furthermore, what are we to conclude from Professor Hill’s assertion that the Ferguson riots were analogous to the Palestinian “struggle”? Couldn’t this be interpreted as an endorsement of anti-white terrorism in the United States? And if arresting a robbery suspect — which is what Michael Brown was — is intolerable “state violence,” then isn’t Professor Hill delegitimizing all law enforcement? Officer Darren Wilson was exonerated after evidence showed that Brown was shot after attempting to take the officer’s gun while resisting arrest. The “hands up, don’t shoot” narrative promoted by the #BlackLivesMatter movement was a lie — a bogus propaganda claim — and yet here we are, more than four years later, with Professor Hill preaching that lie at the United Nations!

CNN, which devoted many hours of coverage to promoting #BlackLivesMatter propaganda in Ferguson, Baltimore and elsewhere, has cut loose Professor Hill, but it has not repudiated its allegiance to the Left, and so we can expect still more poisoned fruit from that toxic tree.

UPDATE: Ace is on the warpath against Dan McLaughlin and other “conservatives” who defend CNN because of their totally-not-gay crushes on Jake Tapper.



 

Category: CNN, Israel, Racism

In The Mailbox: 11.30.18

Posted on | December 1, 2018 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 11.30.18

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Yukon Cornelius Is My Favorite Rudolph Character!
Twitchy: Michelle Malkin Rattles Code Pink Co-Director so Badly On Laura Ingraham’s Show, She Melts Down
Louder With Crowder: Kid Rock Says Be Cordial To Everyone – Except Joy Behar
According To Hoyt: Just Something
Vox Popoli: Unreliable Search

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Friday Hawt Chicks & Links – The Independent Is Lonely Edition
American Power: How Many Times Can You Justify The Murder Of Jews Before CNN Fires You? also, The Enduring Miracle of The U.S. Constitution, also, a lot of Rule 5 linkagery if you want a healthy start to your weekend. 🙂
American Thinker: Sharyl Attkisson, Veteran Journalist And Government Fighter, Opens Up
Animal Magnetism: Rule Five Mass Gun Confiscation Friday
BattleSwarm: LinkSwarm For November 30
Camp Of The Saints:
CDR Salamander: Fullbore Friday
Da Tech Guy: Thomas Jefferson – Racist Villain Or Abolitionist Hero? also, Plan Now For January’s March For Life
Don Surber: Red China Can’t Feed Itself
Dustbury: At Least It’s Easy To Spell
First Street Journal:
The Geller Report: The Flake Burns 21 Judicial Nominees To Protect Mueller, also, Temple University Stands By Marc Lamont Hill After CNN Fires Him For Calling For New Jewish Genocide
Hogewash: Star Clusters In A Galaxy Cluster, also, Don’t Be Weasels
Hollywood In Toto: HiT Episode 96 – Jonathan Green (Social Animals)
JustOneMinute: On To Moscow!
Legal Insurrection: Brenda Snipes’ Resignation Is Effective January 4, But Gov. Scott Just Preemptively Suspended Her, also, Texas Mom Says Six-Year-Old is Transgender; Dad Disagrees & Could Lose Custody
The PanAm Post: Chinese Companies Paid Huge Bribes To Win Major Infrastructure Contracts In Venezuela
Power Line: Happy Birthday, Sir Winston! also, Is It Something He Said?
Shark Tank: U.S. Imposes Sanctions On Daniel Ortega’s Wife
Shot In The Dark: Snivel Your Sidewalks – I Mean Shovel. Shovel Your Sidewalks.
The Political Hat: Yes, Western Civilization IS Superior
This Ain’t Hell: CBD About To Revolutionize The Vet Community & PTSD, also, Valor Friday
Victory Girls: Media Defends Marc Lamont Hill By Deception
Volokh Conspiracy: Short Circuit – A Roundup Of Recent Federal Court Decisions
Weasel Zippers: Democrats Stole The Election In California – Legally, Through “Ballot Harvesting”, also, FBI Raids Home Of Clinton Foundation Employee, Seize Foundation Documents.
Megan McArdle: When Washington Abandoned Policymaking, It Gave Up Trying To Improve Peoples’ Lives
Mark Steyn: Stormy & Weather


Cyber Monday Deals Week
Amazon Warehouse Deals
Amazon Renewed – Certified Refurbs

Category: Linkagery

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

Posted on | November 30, 2018 | Comments Off on Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

by Smitty


“We’d like to lodge a complaint about this ‘Unplugged Vacation’, right? There’s no Wifi. OK, We have 4G. But you brought us so far out that we haven’t got any bars.”
He stared.
“And speaking of coffee bars,” continued Biff, “there isn’t a Starbucks in Uber distance. And I’m not sure that the conceirge understood what I meant when I asked about Uber, because he pointed to an old horse in the field.”
He stared.
“How can you possibly live a prehistoric existence like this? Gwynnethia and I will be lodging a complaint with the Better Business Bureau.”
He stared.
—
via Darleen

Category: Friday Fiction

Science Superstar Neil deGrasse Tyson Exposed as Sexual ‘Predator’

Posted on | November 30, 2018 | Comments Off on Science Superstar Neil deGrasse Tyson Exposed as Sexual ‘Predator’

 

You may know Neil deGrasse Tyson from the PBS series Nova, the Fox series Cosmos and the National Geographic series Star Talk. However, now Tyson is starring in a new series called The Astrophysicist Who (Allegedly) Raped Me, co-starring Tchiya Amet, who says he raped her when they were both graduate students at the University of Texas. This week, two other women have come forward to make their own accusations against Tyson: Bucknell Professor Katelyn Allers, who says Tyson groped her at a party in 2009, and Ashley Watson, who says she quit her job as Tyson’s assistant because of “his inappropriate sexual advances.” Watson says Tyson has “predatory tendencies” and made “misogynistic comments.” So now I guess his career will implode like N6946-BH1.

 

Category: Science

Late Night With In The Mailbox: 11.29.18

Posted on | November 30, 2018 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: When You Realize A Lot Of #NeverTrumpers Are Looking For Money From The Left, It All Makes Sense
Twitchy: What? Ted Cruz Wasn’t Told To “F*ck Off” After Asking To Be On Nine Inch Nails Guest List?
Louder With Crowder: Alexandria Occasional Cortex Claims She’s An American Revolutionary

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: Migrants In Tijuana Regret The Caravan, also, Michelle Malkin On The Tijuana Border Invasion (Video)
American Thinker: Twitter’s Jack Dorsey Lied To Congress
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Vaping News
BattleSwarm: Nancy Pelosi Crushes Her (Democrat) Enemies, Drives Them Before Her, Hears The Lamentations Of Their Legislative Aides
CDR Salamander: Diversity Thursday
Da Tech Guy: Under The Fedora – Ten Years At DaTechGuyBlog, also, Sea Change – CNN Fires Marc Lamont Hill
Don Surber: Trump Has The Goods On Democrats, also, Mueller Bungles His Case
Dustbury: Thoroughly Hosed
The Geller Report: Black-Owned Restaurant Facing Boycott After Catering Trump Event, also, Nine-Year-Old Jewish Boy Attacked On NYC Street
Hogewash: Don’t Be Weasels, also, Team Kimberlin Post of The Day
Hollywood In Toto: Hollywood Rushes To Protect Ocasio-Cortez
JustOneMinute: Speed Chess
Legal Insurrection: CNN Fires Marc Lamont HIll After He Calls For Israel’s Destruction In UN Speech, also, More Woman Trouble For #CreepyPornLawyer – Stormy Daniels Turns On Him
The PanAm Post: In Colombia, Controversy Over Documentary That Describes Uribe As “Enemy of Peace”
Power Line: More Mueller Madness, also, Alex Acosta Reportedly Gave Notorious Pedophile “Deal Of A Lifetime”
Shark Tank: Gov. DeSantis Talks FL Supreme Court Picks
Shot In The Dark: ‘Splain Me This
STUMP: MEP Bailout Quickie – Collapses Like Flan In A Cupboard
The Jawa Report: African Taliban Murders Imam For Playing Music
The Political Hat: Transing Children – Eight-Year-Old Drag Queens, Purging Cis-Normative Foster Families, and Biological Pushback
This Ain’t Hell: No More Snatch, also, Antifa Activist Charged With Assault Against Reservists
Victory Girls: Suicide Rates Hit 50-Year High, But Why?
Weasel Zippers: One-Third Of Migrant Caravan Reportedly Sick With Chickenpox, HIV, & TB, also, Former Shell Oil President Says Obama Had Nothing To Do With Increased Oil Production
Megan McArdle: Lessons From The Limping Trump & Macron Revolutions
Mark Steyn: Bill & Hillary, Priced To Clear

Cyber Monday Deals Week
Amazon Warehouse Deals
Outlet Deals

Category: Linkagery, Uncategorized

National Review’s ‘Pro-Family’ Writer @xan_desanctis Insults Dennis Prager

Posted on | November 29, 2018 | Comments Off on National Review’s ‘Pro-Family’ Writer @xan_desanctis Insults Dennis Prager

Alexandra DeSanctis’s parents sent her to an ultra-Catholic all-girls school — Opus Dei! — in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., and thence to the University of Notre Dame, where she graduated two years ago and joined the staff of National Review. Somewhere along the way, Ms. DeSanctis acquired an unfortunate insolence, so that her reaction to an excellent column by Dennis Prager was to declare: “I’m as pro-marriage and pro-family as anyone, but I’m really ready for the ‘women need to avoid working so they can find a Nice Man to support them and make them happy’ genre of conservatism to fall out of fashion.”

 

This is a deliberate distortion of what the column was actually about — I’ll get to that momentarily — but perhaps more importantly, it is a 25-year-old presuming to stand in judgment of Dennis Prager, a conservative warrior who has suffered many wounds on behalf of the cause. The faculty at Oakcrest evidently failed to teach young Ms. DeSanctis to respect her elders and, were I her father, I would be outraged to find my daughter publicly disporting herself in a manner unbecoming a proper young Christian. This shocking insult was called to my attention by Rational Male author Rollo Tomassi, who read Ms. DeSanctis’s remark as an omen of future misfortune, referring to a genre of “38 year old Trad-Con spinsters” (i.e., unmarried traditional conservative women) who lament, “where have all the good men gone?”

 

This is a real phenomenon. There is an entire category of self-help books by Christian women whose devotion to “traditional family values” somehow never resulted in them walking down the aisle, and so they write about the “godly single” life and offer relationship advice (which would seem to be the blind leading the blind, so to speak). As Rollo says, the “38 year old Trad-Con spinsters” often blame men for their failure, complaining that men need to “man up.” The more likely explanation, of course, is that these women actually had matrimonial opportunities in their youth, but just didn’t play their cards right and, rather than confess their errors — “Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea máxima culpa” — instead rationalize their failure by scapegoating men.

Rollo Tomassi went on to accuse Ms. DeSanctis of “advocating for the Sandbergian plan,” a reference to Facebook executive Cheryl Sandberg, author of Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. Tomassi added: “The Sisterhood Über Alles recognizes no politics or ideology.”

 

In other words, even many self-declared “conservative” women now embrace a careerist worldview in which women must join an anti-male alliance — “Sisterhood Über Alles” — to defeat men in a ruthless competition for educational and employment opportunities. Believing that career achievement is the only measure of success, such women distrust males as implacable enemies both in the workplace and in their personal lives. Not only must the Sandbergian woman destroy any male coworker who might be her rival for advancement, but she must also eschew any serious heterosexual romantic involvement, because marriage and motherhood might impede her professional ambition.

Because I know absolutely zero about Ms. DeSanctis’s personal life, it would be foolish for me to presume she is so unpopular as to have never had a serious boyfriend, but we might infer from her vehement reaction to Prager’s column that she is quite sensitive about this subject. One can imagine that her Catholic parents are probably beginning to express concern about why their daughter hasn’t found a husband yet. So, what was it about Dennis Prager’s column that offended Ms. DeSanctis? He shared the comments of a woman who called in to his radio show:

I’m 50 years old with four college degrees. I was raised by a feminist mother with no father in the home. My mother told me get an education to the maximum level so that you can get out in the world, make a lot of money. And that’s the path I followed. I make adequate money. I don’t make a ton of money. But I do make enough to support my own household.
I want to tell women in their 20s: Do not follow the path that I followed. You are leading yourself to a life of loneliness. All of your friends will be getting married and having children, and you’re working to compete in the world, and what you’re doing is competing with men. Men don’t like competitors. Men want a partner. It took me until my late 40s to realize this. . . .
It’s hard to find a partner in your late 40s to date because you also start losing self-confidence about your looks, your body. It’s not the same as it was in your 20s. . . .
You sit home alone and you do nothing. I avoid my friends now that have children because I have nothing in common with them.
Somebody asked me the other day, “Why did you stay single and never have kids?” There’s answers: Because I was brainwashed by my mother into this. But it’s hard and it’s shameful to tell people, “I don’t know. I ran out of time.” . . .
I didn’t realize this until late in life. I want to tell women: Find someone in your 20s. That’s when you’re still very cute. That’s when you’re still amiable to working out problems with someone. It’s harder in your 50s, when you’ve lived alone, to compromise with someone, to have someone in your home and every little thing about them annoys you because you’re so used to being alone. It’s hard to undo that, so don’t do what I did. Find someone in your 20s.

Very good advice and, in truth, young men should be similarly advised. The carefree young bachelor who becomes accustomed to playing the field is apt to become “set in his ways,” as folks say down home, so that he finds it harder to accommodate himself to the compromises necessary to making a relationship work. Trust me on this, guys — I didn’t marry until I was 29, and the adjustment was more difficult than I expected, but the tale of how and why I didn’t marry earlier is a story for another time. My point now is that Ms. DeSanctis’s insolent attitude is unfortunately common among young people, who think old-fashioned common sense is obsolete, so that they can scoff at the advice of their elders.

While my devout Catholic friend Pete Da Tech Guy might wish to include Ms. DeSanctis in his prayers, I suspect she’s already a lost cause. Why? Well, in high school, she played varsity softball.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.



 

Category: Catholics, Marriage

Late Night With in The Mailbox: 11.28.18

Posted on | November 29, 2018 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Please welcome Hollywood In Toto to the lineup of blogs!

OVER THE TRANSOM
Ninety Miles From Tyranny: The 90 Miles Mystery Box, Episode #453
EBL: Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith Wins MS Senate Runoff
Twitchy: The Washington Post Won’t Let Go Of FLOTUS’ Horrifying “Nightmare Forest”
Louder With Crowder: Obama Takes Credit For American Oil Boom, Paris Climate Accord

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Women Need Men But Not Vice Versa
American Power: The Ugly Departure Of Max Boot, also, Millennial Poll Says America Is Racist
American Thinker: The Migrant Caravan Of Diseases
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Hump Day News
BattleSwarm: Dispatches From The Twitter Wars
CDR Salamander: Yes, Mexico Just Commissioned A Ship That Can Outfight Her American Counterpart
Da Tech Guy: Why The Navy Needs Sleep, also, Twitter And The Tina Brown Math
Don Surber: Trump’s Power Of Chaos
Dustbury: Not Exactly Prime Pantry
Fred On Everything: Comparing Red China To America
The Geller Report: Money Raised By Linda Sarsour For Synagogue After Pittsburgh Shooting Mostly Went To Islamic Org With Terror Ties, also, Swedish School Bans Centuries-old Christian Tradition While Celebrating Mohammed’s Journey To Heaven
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of The Day, also, Permanent Is Temporary
Hollywood In Toto: Instant Family Connects With Foster Care World, also, Survey Says Apolitical Stars Are Biggest Draws
JustOneMinute: We Are Not Alone!
Legal Insurrection: Activist Women Claim Trump’s Election Is Destroying Their Marriages, also, Outgoing Broward Elections Supervisor Snipes To Collect $130,000 Pension
Michelle Malkin: Silicon Valley Sharia
The PanAm Post: Trump Declares Nicaragua’s Ortega Regime A Threat To National Security
Power Line: Dissenting From The Leftist Party Line, also, Dystopia Now
Shark Tank: Buchanan Calls For Reauthorization Of Land & Water Conservation Fund
Shot In The Dark: Low Expectations
STUMP: Multi-Employer Pensions – Waiting For The Bailout Report
The Jawa Report: Ministry Of Boobies – Horrific Horrors Edition
The Political Hat: Dear Mexicans – Welcome To The Kyriarchy!
This Ain’t Hell: Some Mornings I Just Love This Site, also, The Fallacy of Relying On Computer Modeling
Victory Girls: Obama Claims He Built The U.S. Oil Boom
Volokh Conspiracy: Is SCOTUS About To Apply The Excessive Fines Clause To State Asset Forfeitures?
Weasel Zippers: Hillary Clinton Aide Philippe Reines Goes On Fox Without Pants, Unleashes Deranged Rant At Harlan Hill, also, Media Finally Gets Around To Exposing Jeffrey Epstein

Cyber Monday Deals Week
Amazon Warehouse Deals
Amazon Renewed – Certified Refurbs

Category: Linkagery

Ace vs. ‘Non-Binary Ben’

Posted on | November 28, 2018 | 1 Comment

Ace of Spades kills it on a daily basis and he’s been doing it for about 15 years now. Back around 2005, when the blogosphere was The New Hotness — and my Old School editors at The Washington Times totally didn’t get it — I started reading Ace habitually, laughing out loud in the newsroom and wishing I could have fun like the Moron crew did. Now that I think about it, 2005 was The Last Good Year, before the Iraq War went completely sideways, before Democrats took over Congress in 2006, before the Bush administration disintegrated into incoherence. Man, what fun it was in 2005, to laugh at the pathetic helplessness of libtards and moonbats, wallowing in their misery after “RatherGate” and the defeat of John Kerry, when every boy wanted a G.I. Joe for Christmas. But don’t look back, you can never look back . . .

Where was I? Yeah, Ace kills it every day and lately he’s been doing a regular riff against the “cucks” and “cruise ship conservatives” of the #NeverTrump variety who, honestly, I prefer to ignore. Like, I actually consider some of those guys friends, and their strutting display of their anti-Trump “principles” bothers me in several ways, so the easiest thing to do is just ignore them and go on about my business. It’s kind of like how I try not to think about the Roy Moore campaign in Alabama.

Dear God, how did that happen? Judge Moore had been a prominent figure in Alabama politics for more than a decade and nobody had ever heard a word, not even a whisper of sexual scandal against him, and then all those awful hanging-around-the-mall stories came tumbling out like an avalanche of yuck. Anyway, that’s how I feel about seeing some of my friends in the #NeverTrump camp — mortified with embarrassment — and my standard response is to avoid thinking about them. On the other hand, Ace keeps hammering away at them, and one of his favorite targets is “Non-Binary Ben” Shapiro. This epithet refers to the fact that elections in a two-party system are a binary choice, so that any Republican who didn’t support Trump was objectively and de facto pro-Hillary.

Ace is absolutely right about this, but Shapiro is an alumnus of Harvard Law where apparently they teach Advanced Quadrilateral Logic or some other kind of postmodernist thought process that makes it possible to believe that your opposition to the election of a Republican doesn’t mean you’re advocating the election of a Democrat. As someone who voted Libertarian in 2008 (because f–k John McCain and the open-borders globalist horse he rode in on), I’m probably not the guy to be making arguments for the virtues of Blind Party Loyalty, but watching Hillary Clinton’s supporters cry the tears of unfathomable sadness on Election Night 2016 was probably the most beautiful thing I’ve seen since the fall of the Berlin Wall. While Donald Trump isn’t exactly a Platonic Philosopher King, to put it mildly, he did beat Hillary, didn’t he? And I’m not sure any of the other GOP candidates could have done that.

So right now, Ace has a riff on the sidebar of his blog:

Hey John Hawkins,
My mention of you in that Ben Shapiro Quotes column was gratuitous and unwarranted.
But one thing: I said you had embraced being clickbaity because I just read an article by you which — forgive me if I misunderstood it — is all about how to get articles to go viral. Which is clickbait, right?
Or no? Maybe not. I’ve heard Buzzfeed Ben make a distinction.
Anyway, I did read most of that article so it was in my head that you had said — maybe I had this wrong in my memory — that you had played the game of clickbait, or virality at least, and had won. That’s why I thought you would have no objection to me saying the article seemed to be an example of just that. I thought you were okay with that.
In any event, I shouldn’t have called you out at all, and I’m genuinely sorry about that.
Anyway, I deleted the references to you or to the article being “embarrassing” or “obsequious.”
PS, I don’t think Trump is “perfect.” I think he’s a jackass, mostly. However, I also think he’s not Hillary Clinton, who was the other BINARY choice in the 2016 election. An election which was, like most, BINARY. No matter how badly Not-Binary Ben and his admirers need to lie about this.
I’m one of those few Republicans — just 88% of us — who chose to support him over Hillary Clinton, and who thought keeping a known serial very liberal felon out of the White House was more important than Twitter Virtue Signaling.
I know that makes me a rarity in the online right and not popular at all with the Twitter Set. But as unpopular as it might make me, I’m not willing to lie along with the Not-Binary Ben brigade and pretend that trying to get Trump defeated was totally not the same as trying to get Hillary Clinton elected, just because some people need this LOGIC-deficient and FACT-free impossibility to be true, for branding purposes.
You know how it goes — it’s hard for someone to brand himself as The World’s Most Super-Pure Conservative when he supported Hillary Clinton, though Ben Shapiro and a couple of thousand other Twitter-Based Life Forms do so every day.
I’m a little bit tired of this fucking lie and I wish the people pushing it — again, they push it for their pecuniary interests and branding purposes, not for any noble reason — would stop pushing it. They’re liars. And lies, though useful, have one big drawback: An honest man gets to call a liar a liar to his lying face.
Them’s the breaks. Them’s the risks. Anyway, sorry for the pointless shit-stirring.
Your Fake Internet Pal,

Ace

PS, you’re welcome for the Supreme Court Justices. And the economy. I know I went “crazy” when I helped bring that about, but I guess I’m comfortable with the trade.

Which sums it up pretty good. Obviously, I never would have written that, because I don’t like getting “in your face” with friends (and John Hawkins is a friend), but if you want to know what’s been grinding Ace’s gears lately, there you have it. Ace admits it was stupid for him to throw an elbow at Hawkins in the middle of beatdown on Shapiro, but what he had in mind was the “clickbait” modus operandi of blogging, which he sort of free-associated with the way Shapiro uses Twitter. Ace sees the posture of the #NeverTrump crowd being about “their pecuniary interests and branding purposes” — they want to be The Smart Guys™ as opposed to us Dumb Right-Wing Trumptards — and that’s an implicit insult to the nearly 63 million Americans who voted for Trump.

Politics is a team sport. If you’re a Crimson Tide fan, you don’t cheer for Auburn, and if you’re a Republican, you don’t want Democrats to win. What happened in 2016 was this: The Smart Guys™ didn’t believe Trump could possibly beat their favorite GOP candidate (Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush or whoever) and in the process of trying to convince others, they argued that Trump was such a bad candidate that he would lose to Hillary, in the process convince themselves of this. But guess what? GOP primary voters didn’t care what the The Smart Guys™ were saying. They liked Trump and voted for him and Trump won the nomination and The Smart Guys™ who had crawled out on that limb then sawed it off behind themselves, so to speak, predicting Trump’s defeat and positioning themselves to say “I told you so” after Hillary won. Except . . . she lost.

Pure morphine couldn’t alleviate the pain of that butt-hurt, because if you’ve got a Harvard Law degree, you’re supposed to be smart, right? And yet The Smart Guys™ were proven completely wrong, and they can’t come to grips with the consequences of their own failure. So the #NeverTrump cruise will continue as they sail together into the sunset, congratulating each other on their superiority to those Dumb Right-Wing Trumptards, as if their credibility has not been permanently damaged.

Well, the Last Good Year is long gone, and I’ve been convinced since 2012 we’re hopelessly doomed, which is another reason I just ignore the #NeverTrump crowd most of the time. If we are now in the Late Imperial stage of our national decline — wallowing in decadence while the Gothic hordes prepare to sweep down upon us — there’s no point making enemies over trivial crap that probably won’t deserve more than a footnote in some future historian’s Annals of Post-Christian America.

Sic transit gloria mundi.



 

Category: Ace of Spades, Intellectuals
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