The Other McCain

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

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

Posted on | October 19, 2018 | Comments Off on Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

by Smitty

He buried the accelerator pedal in the floorboard. The truck was already redlined.
He is concentration was all on the road; the destination, the hospital a few miles ahead, was a fixed point. He seemed to move the vehicle by force of will against the wind to get there.
The storm outside was reduced to flashy detail; the intricacies of the lightning were as flat as the road to his single-minded focus on the hospital.
Moaning in the passenger seat was his motive. If he could just get his pregnant, hemorrhaging wife there in time, his future might be saved.
—
via Darleen

Category: Friday Fiction

Democrats Put Down the Kool-Aid, Realize ‘Blue Wave’ Might Not Happen

Posted on | October 19, 2018 | Comments Off on Democrats Put Down the Kool-Aid, Realize ‘Blue Wave’ Might Not Happen

 

Two months ago, I wrote a story about Gina Ortiz Jones, the Democrat challenger to Texas Rep. Will Hurd, with this headline:

Democrats Nominate Pro-Abortion
Lesbian Feminist for Congress in Texas

In that item, I wrote:

She has been endorsed by all the usual suspects of left-wing extremism, including pro-abortion groups like Planned Parenthood and Emily’s List, pro-homosexual groups like Equality PAC, Human Rights Campaign and the LGBT Victory Fund, and the anti-Israel JStreetPAC, as well as the Feminist Majority, People for the American Way and the AFL-CIO. Her agenda includes socialized medicine, taxpayer funding for abortion, gun control, amnesty for illegal aliens, and every other issue you might expect from someone who attended elite Boston University.

It seemed to me unlikely that this largely rural Texas district would elect someone like that to Congress, if they knew the truth about her. But this is the case in district after district all across America this year: Democrats are running extremist candidates who are attempting to hide their radical agenda behind a façade of “moderate” rhetoric, hoping to ride an anti-Trump “Blue Wave” into Congress. If Americans are not paying close attention, they might be startled when they wake up Nov. 7 and discover that the House of Representatives has been taken over by a left-wing freak show. Fortunately, it seems the recent Kavanaugh confirmation circus has alerted the public to this danger, and in a widely-cited Politico article about diminishing prospects for a “Blue Wave,” I was happy to spot this passage:

Democrats have pulled money out of several districts that should be competitive, indicating that Republicans have solidified their leads in the closing days of the campaign. In the past two days, Democrats have retreated from an open seat in Minnesota where Democratic Rep. Rick Nolan is retiring and GOP recruit Pete Stauber is ahead in internal GOP polling.
Democrats are also taking money from the race to unseat GOP Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska, who, Republicans say, has a healthy lead. That came just days after Democrats pulled out of Hispanic-populated districts represented by Rep. David Valadao in central California and Rep. Will Hurd along the Texas border. And they’ve withdrawn $800,000 in planned ads from Rep. Vern Buchanan’s Florida district, where the Democratic challenger, David Shapiro, trails the incumbent.
Democrats should have had “these seats put away by now, and they don’t,” House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said in an interview. “I feel like they’ve hit a ceiling and held there — and we’re coming back.”

If the Democrats have actually surrendered their challenge to Will Hurd — in a majority-Hispanic district that is one of the most competitive in the country — there is still hope that Republicans can keep the House speaker’s gavel out of Nancy Pelosi’s hand:

Two weeks ago, Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman predicted Democrats could pick up 30 to 40 seats; now he puts the range at 25 to 35. Wasserman estimated that Republicans have a 30 percent chance of keeping the majority.

A 30 percent chance? The odds are only 2.3-to-1 against us? That’s not nearly as bad as the odds against Trump winning in 2016, which he did.

Speaking of President Trump, tonight he’ll be at a rally in Mesa, Arizona. Reports indicate a capacity crowd and this might drive a stake through the heart of Kyrsten Sinema, the radical Democrat who’s running for Senate in Arizona. There are also two crucial House races in Arizona: Republican Wendy Rogers, a retired Air Force pilot, is challenging Democrat Rep. Tom O’Halleran in AZ-1, a district Trump won; and Republican Lea Marquez Peterson is fighting to hold onto the AZ-2 seat being vacated by Rep. Martha McSally, who’s running for Senate.



 

 

Category: Congress, Democrats, Election, Republicans

‘Lotus Fields of Multicultural Delusion’

Posted on | October 19, 2018 | Comments Off on ‘Lotus Fields of Multicultural Delusion’

 

What would we know if we knew everything about this army of Honduran “migrants” marching toward our southern border? Whose idea was this? Who spent money to organize this pre-election publicity stunt?

The caravan has been growing steadily since it left the violent Honduran city of San Pedro Sula on Saturday. The migrants hope to reach Mexico and then cross its northern border with the United States, to seek refuge from endemic violence and poverty in Central America.
Several thousand people are now part of the caravan, according to a Reuters witness traveling with the group in Guatemala, where men women and children on foot and riding in trucks filled a road on their long journey to Mexico.
“We’ve lived in neighborhoods where our children have seen disaster after disaster,” said Daisy Turcios, resting briefly outside a school. “We have seen dead bodies thrown in front of us. So that’s my goal, in truth, to reach a country where life can change for my children.” . . .
U.S. President Donald Trump decried “horrendous weak and outdated immigration laws,” in a series of Twitter messages starting on Tuesday. He threatened to cut off aid to Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador if they fail to prevent undocumented immigrants from heading to the United States.
“Hard to believe that with thousands of people from South of the Border, walking unimpeded toward our country in the form of large Caravans, that the Democrats won’t approve legislation that will allow laws for the protection of our country,” Trump said on Twitter on Wednesday.
The Honduran government has urged citizens not to join the caravan, calling it politically motivated. On Wednesday morning near the Guatemalan border, authorities could be seen stopping Hondurans still hoping to join, with police in riot gear at one checkpoint halting buses carrying at least a hundred people.

If cities in Honduras are violent — “disaster after disaster” — who is responsible for those conditions? Is this a function of geography, so that anyone who sets foot in San Pedro Sula is suddenly overtaken by an urge to commit crimes? Or is this a reflection of something else?

Here’s a fact-bomb I dropped into a column a few weeks ago:

Of the top 10 cities in the world with the highest per-capita murder rates, half of them are in Mexico; the rest of the top 10 are in Brazil or Venezuela. Of the 50 cities with the highest murder rates, only four (St. Louis, Baltimore, New Orleans and Detroit) are in the United States; all the rest are either in Latin America or South Africa.

Who is killing whom? It’s a very simple matter to investigate. Whenever liberals start yammering on about gun control or “rape culture,” the proper response is to supply them with facts. Does your liberal friend really want to know why murder is more common in Baltimore than in Bethesda? Do liberals think the NRA is to blame for murders in Mexico or South Africa? Crime is a people problem, and until you spend some time thinking about what that means — until you have studied the demographics of crime — don’t presume to lecture me about public policy as if you are my moral and intellectual superior. This isn’t a field in which the Harvard alumnus has more knowledge and experience than I do and, while my background as an erstwhile juvenile delinquent isn’t likely to be recognized as a basis of expertise by Ivy League intellectuals, I can run circles around them in argument if they dare challenge me.

Steve Sailer coined the term “Dirt Gap” to express the common liberal belief that “oppressed” people are victims of geographic accident. Living in “tragic dirt” — places where crime, poverty and social dysfunction are prevalent — these people are victimized because they are excluded from “magic dirt,” places where prosperity and bourgeois norms prevail. If you don’t believe this theory, you’re a racist, according to liberals.

Now, it should go without saying that I do not believe that all residents of San Pedro Sula, Honduras, are bad people, no more so than I believe every resident of Baltimore is a bad person. However, when you begin talking about people in large numbers — as categories, about whom we can obtain statistical evidence and draw sociological conclusions — we must take group averages into consideration. And the fact is that the identity-politics formula of the modern Left forces us to evaluate people in this categorical way. Consider how allegations that Harvard University discriminates against Asian-American students have brought forth startling data about the failure of “diversity” initiatives in the Ivy League.

Speaking of Asians, a couple of weeks ago, I went to see Crazy Rich Asians, the themes of which are highly relevant to this topic:

Played by the adorable Constance Chu, Rachel is a latter-day Cinderella, and handsome Henry Golding as Nick is a 21st-century Prince Charming. There are plot twists aplenty, as Rachel struggles to win the approval of Nick’s mother, who thinks Rachel is too Americanized. And among the many things to love about this love story is that it is emphatically racist.
Americans are so used to hearing the word “racist” applied as a pejorative description of our own alleged sins that we forget the history of this word. First coined in France, racisme originally denoted a sense of national identity, and was employed by the French anarchist Charles Malato in 1897 to describe resistance to the internationalism that he advocated. Malato predicted that racisme, in the form of federations based on ethnic alliances (Latin, Slavic, Germanic, etc.), would precede l’avénement d’une humanité sans frontiers (“the advent of a humanity without borders”). From its French origin, “racism” was apparently imported into the English language by a U.S. Army veteran named Richard Henry Pratt who, among other things, strove to eradicate the vestiges of native culture among his students at Carlisle Indian Industrial School, which he founded in 1879. Both the French anarchist and the American educator saw racism as an obstacle to the assimilation of human beings into a homogenous global mass.
While most Americans think of racism in the historical context of chattel slavery and Jim Crow, the history of anti-racism is not exactly covered in glory. . . .

You can read the rest of that column at The American Spectator. My point is that the millions of American moviegoers who have laughed and cried at this delightful romantic comedy are unlikely to recognize the celebration of Chinese ethnic pride as “racism,” because Americans have been taught a liberal belief system that can be summarized thus:

1. Racism is the worst of all possible sins;
2. White people are uniquely guilty of racism;

and

3. No country in the world is more racist than America.

All three of these beliefs are arguably wrong, but the minute you attempt to speak reasonably on this subject — to discuss race relations in a factual and logical manner — liberals accuse you of racism. They have succumbed to a cult mentality, and are incapable of considering anything that calls into question their liberal belief system about race. Their fanaticism would be startling, except that nothing should startle us when dealing with people who take Keynesian economics seriously.

Part of the problem is that liberals are used to playing a game in which they determine the rules. Anyone accused of racism is automatically disqualified from the game, according to the liberal rulebook, which is why liberalism has lately become little more than an angry mob running around, pointing fingers and yelling “RAAAAACIST!”

“Few things infuriate me so much as the cringing defensiveness of Republicans who think they can concede every premise of the liberal syllogism and yet expect voters to come to some other conclusion than ‘Vote Democrat.’ Too many Republicans have that cowardly punk reflex where, whenever there’s a fight, their first concern is for their own safety, rather than trying to win the fight.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, March 28, 2009

Liberals are wrong about race in the same way, and for the same reasons, they are wrong about everything else. They are in thrall to what Thomas Sowell called The Vision of the Anointed, which makes it impossible for them to consider a simple hypothesis: “What if I’m wrong?”

Unless you are willing to consider the possibility of error — e.g., that at some point in the past America public policy took a turn in the wrong direction — you will never be able to view current events in an entirely objective manner. Our education system is guilty of promoting a false conception of progress that prevents most people from “thinking outside the box” in this manner. Younger Americans have been taught a cultural Marxist history that views our national past as uniquely disgraceful, stained by genocide, slavery and injustice. Thus, the advance of liberalism in the 20th century — from Woodrow Wilson to FDR to LBJ — is presented as a Triumph of Progress over the forces of reactionary evil.

Even most Americans who call themselves conservative are not entirely free of this delusional Triumph of Progress belief. In order to free your mind of this mythology, you have to dig around and read old books that are usually out of print and hard to find. For example, grab a copy of Blair Coan’s The Red Web, which describes how Communists and their allies subverted anti-Red efforts in the 1920s. Or go read Alan Stang’s It’s Very Simple, a critical examination of the 1960s civil rights movement. Both of these books might fairly be labeled “fringe” or “extremist” in some way, but what makes them worth reading is that they were written by contemporary witnesses of events who were not liberals. Coan argues that U.S. policy was being subverted by pro-Communist elements as early as the Harding administration, and Stang argues that the civil-rights movement was being manipulated by those who wished to weaken the United States in its Cold War struggle against Communist aggression. Whatever your opinion of these subjects might be, in Coan and Stang’s books you will encounter facts generally omitted from the history books.

Two weeks ago, I described (“At the Edge of the Abyss,” Oct. 3) the difficulties that confront “a professional trafficker in politically incorrect thought.” Knowing that the Thought Police are constantly on the lookout for Wrongthink, we must necessarily be cautious in our arguments and also in our associations. It is very easy for the SPLC types to use their habitual tactics — the “Ransom-Note Method” of selective quotation, and “links-and-ties” guilt-by-association smears — to falsely label any conservative a proponent of “hate.” And of course, there is always the danger that we may spend too much time staring into the abyss and end up like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness: “Exterminate the brutes!”

As we watch our society descending into madness, we must resist the temptation to despair and try to maintain our grip on sanity. There are always those who will counsel us to surrender to one alternative or the other — either to cease resisting the helpless drift into decadence, or else to join some kind of tiki-torch brownshirt movement. In warning against the latter danger, I cited the ZMan blog, written by an anonymous proponent of “race realism,” and he has volleyed back at me:

A point that cannot be made enough is just how scary it is for most normal white people to contemplate their future, even when they accept our demographic reality. Later in his post, McCain writes, “The prospect of a “permanent majority” alliance on the Left that disturbs ZMan is, indeed, a cause for concern. But despair is not a strategy. If we wish to summon to our banner all men of goodwill, we must be able to persuade them that we have hope of a better future. How about this: Discredit the institutions of the decadent elite.”
This is where most normal white people have been trained to veer from the road to reality into the lotus fields of multicultural delusion. Reading that line, I expected Ben Shapiro to pop up on my screen, lecturing me about how a nation is defined by its ideology, rather than the complexion of the people in it. It is that mental block that so many white people have which prevents them from taking the next step in their chain of logic. If the Left is going to be an explicitly anti-white coalition, then our side needs to be….libertarians!
Now, in fairness to Robert Stacy McCain, I don’t know much about him. He could be /ourguy/, but working as a missionary in the land of the normie. He could be a super normie guy who is struggling with the changing world around him. He could have been bitten by the werewolf of race realism and is starting to turn. I have some recollection of him being quoted by gentry conservatives, but I could be mistaken.

Certainly, no one who knows me would accuse me of cavorting in “the lotus fields of multicultural delusion.” Perhaps the ZMan is unaware that I’ve been hate-listed by the SPLC since 2003 (i.e., about 10 years longer than he has been blogging) and that I’ve been working as a journalist since 1986. I was a Wrongthinker before Wrongthink was cool.

It is false, however, to call me a “white supremacist,” a term that the liberal accuser is never expected to define. The first time someone slapped that label on me, I was shocked. After all, what can “white supremacy” possibly mean in the 21st century? Does anyone suppose that the United States is going to re-institute Jim Crow? We’re going to go back to segregated water fountains, etc.? This is absurd, and if anyone on the Right actually believes this is possible, they need to stop huffing paint fumes. At the same time, however, it is not “white supremacy” to point out that the racial policies of the Left are failing, and all you have to do is look at the homicide toll in Chicago (469 so far this year, an average of 11.2 murders per week) to get a hint of how wrong liberals are.

What does ZMan mean when he links me to “gentry conservatives” (???) and invokes a “demographic reality” we must “accept”? This is a sort of rhetorical gesture one notices among those who dislike the way two-party politics is a football game played between the 40-yard lines. During the 1960s, a certain populist politician remarked that there was not “a dime’s worth of difference” between Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon on the major issues of the day. Curiously enough, the radical New Left essentially agreed with Governor Wallace in that assessment, and threw a massive riot at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago that helped doom Humphrey’s candidacy. However, by 1980, it was apparent that there was at least 11 cents worth of difference between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, and this had world-historic consequences.

Reagan became president in a time of crisis — the economy was a wreck, and Carter’s foreign policy weakness had brought disaster around the world — but in his inaugural address he said something brave and wise: “I do not believe in a fate that will fall on us no matter what we do. I do believe in a fate that will fall on us if we do nothing.”

When someone invokes “demographic reality” in a way which seems to imply that our nation is hopelessly doomed to be swamped by an incoming tsunami of the “wretched refuse,” I feel insulted, as if the resourcefulness and intelligence of the American people are being underestimated. We have not yet exhausted our national reserve of courage and common sense, and even I am sometimes surprised to see that Americans are still capable of mustering their fighting spirit when they become aware of danger. What else can explain Donald Trump’s miraculous victory in 2016? Trump had the courage to put the immigration issue front and center in his campaign, to shrug off the attacks from his #NeverTrump Republican critics, and thereby attracted voters in states the GOP hadn’t won in more than 25 years.

 

 

 

Pennsylvania? Michigan? No one imagined that a Republican could win those states in the 21st century, and yet Trump did it. Why? Because Trump did not accept the status quo of bipartisan consensus on immigration, or on trade policy, or anything else, really. Trump was willing to think outside the box, to question the “Gang of Eight” consensus about amnesty for illegal aliens, to look at the various elements of post-Cold War internationalism and ask, “Why is this necessary?”

Trump disrupted a narrative that had been made to seem inevitable, and in doing so, has driven the Left into paroxysms of helpless rage. We do not know what the future holds, but we know that the possibilities are more hopeful than they were before Trump was elected. It is enormously frustrating to watch the slow-motion process of realignment, to see setbacks and blunders on a daily basis, and to wish that the talking heads on TV would speak about the issues that concern us with as much clarity as our favorite writers do. Yet we have reason to hope that “demographic reality” (whatever is meant by that phrase) will not proceed in the same direction and at the same speed that it was heading prior to Trump’s presidency. His success has shifted the Overton Window, however slightly, in such a way that it might be possible to halt our society’s descent into decadence. This is why liberals are so desperate.

Dems struggle to mobilize
Latino voters for midterms
— The Hill, Oct. 11

‘We’ve got a Latino problem’: Dems fret
midterm turnout in key House districts
— Politico, Oct. 13

Democrats have a Latino problem.
Can they fix it in time?
— NBC News, Oct. 14

Democrats need Latino voters —
but fret too many will skip the midterms
— CNN, Oct. 15

Weird. Last week, Democrats were wringing their hands about Latino turnout and this week — what a surprise! — several thousand people in Honduras decided to walk all the way to Texas. You’d have to be wandering through the “lotus fields of multiculturalism” to believe this was just another random coincidence. And that ain’t me, babe.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!



 

 

Category: Election, Immigration, Racism

Late Night With In The Mailbox: 10.18.18

Posted on | October 19, 2018 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: The #NPC Menace And Social Media Deplatforming
Twitchy: Beta O’Rourke Picks Up Coveted Vicente Fox Endorsement
Louder With Crowder: Watch Antifa Lowlife Berate 9/11 Widow

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Podcast #8 – The Literally Hitler Episode
American Power: The Democrats’ Left Turn, also, The Republican #WalkAway Moment
American Thinker: Illegal Caravans Encouraged By Honduras & Soros
Animal Magnetism: Hunting Season Totty IV
BattleSwarm: Central Texas Flooding – Worst May Be To Come
Camp Of The Saints: Reject The Wisdom In Favor Of The Whim
CDR Salamander: Targeting Problems & Fleet Defense Challenges? Welcome To Varsity Football, also, Diversity Thursday
Da Tech Guy: Five Keys To Ensure GOP Victory In The Midterms, also, Elizabeth Warren, Charlie Baker & I All Agree…
Don Surber: Ending U.S. Mail Subsidies Of Red China & Amazon
Dustbury: Save The Game
First Street Journal: “The Way To Stop Discrimination On The Basis Of Race Is To Stop Discriminating On The Basis Of Race” -Chief Justice John Roberts
The Geller Report: Islamic State Takes 700 Hostages After Raid On Syrian Refugee Camp, also, Dutch Company Gives Nine Syrian Refugees Jobs – None Return After First Week
Hogewash: This Seems Pretty One-Sided, also, Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day
JustOneMinute: Don’t Blame Me! also, Bringing Hope & Change To Missouri Democrats, Or Trying, Anyway
Legal Insurrection: Pelosi On Democrat Agenda – “If There’s Some Collateral Damage, So Be It,” also, DNA Disaster – Fauxcahontas Proves She Doesn’t Have What It Takes To Take On Trump
The PanAm Post: Rogue Element In Ecuadorian Army Accused Of Selling Arms To FARC Dissidents
Power Line: Jamal Khashoggi & The Washington Post, also, The Democrats Must Be Defeated
Shark Tank: Rep. Ros-Lehtinen Wants Julian Assange Extradited
Shot In The Dark: Time & Space
STUMP: Divestment Follies – Going After Facebook Again
The Jawa Report: Sandcrawler PSA – Wrong Goal, Wrong Strategy
The Political Hat: Academically Gay – Reading Queerly, Denaturalizing Heterosexuality, and Queering The Bible
This Ain’t Hell: Engineer Who Changed Navy Ship Design & Fought Discrimination Dies At 83, also, Navy Carrier Sailors To Get More Rest Under New Policy
Victory Girls: Kristen Bell Has Fears About Unwoke Disney Princess
Volokh Conspiracy: Secret Gag Order On Lawyers In Ohio Capital Murder Trial Supported By Secret Arguments
Weasel Zippers: Fauxcahontas Doubles Down On 1/1024, also, MSNBC Analyst Suggests Cherokee Nation Is Racist For Calling Out Sen. Warren
Megan McArdle: What Rising Interest Rates Mean For Homeowners, Buyers, & Renters


Category: Linkagery

‘The Idioms of Non-Argument’

Posted on | October 18, 2018 | 1 Comment

Harvard-educated totalitarian Moira Weigel.

Longtime readers know I’ve never been a fan of Conor Friedersdorf, who made himself obnoxious by his pro-Obama “conservatism” circa 2008. Friedersdorf’s basic problem is excessive sincerity — he was guilty of “insufficient cynicism,” as I said, and seemed to be engaged in a campaign to obtain the Most Serious Intellectual Award. While he’s still never cracked a joke during the entirety of his journalism career, Friedersdorf has in recent months turned his critical focus on the Left and its increasingly totalitarian tendencies. For example, left-wing extremist Moira Weigel wrote a “review” of the new book by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, which was not actually a review, but rather a partisan propaganda attack on the authors. Although neither Haidt nor Lukianoff identifies as a conservative, their book has been endorsed by many conservative critics of the campus Thought Police regime in academia. This has made them demonized Enemies of the People in the eyes of far-left ideologues like Ms. Weigel, a Harvard-educated feminist with a Ph.D.

Friedersdorf notes that Ms. Weigel’s “review” is an exercise in bad-faith rhetoric, full of guilt-by-association smears like this:

Hints of elective affinities between elite liberalism and the “alt-right” have been evident for a while now. The famous essay that Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos wrote in 2016, “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right,” cites Haidt approvingly. At one point Lukianoff and Haidt rehearse a narrative about Herbert Marcuse that has been a staple of white nationalist conspiracy theories about “cultural Marxism” for decades.
Nassim Taleb, whose book Antifragile Haidt and Lukianoff credit with one of their core beliefs and cite repeatedly as inspiration, is a fixture of the far right “manosphere” that gathers on Reddit/pol and returnofkings.com.
The commonality raises questions about the proximity of their enthusiasm for CBT [cognitive behavior therapy] to the vogue for “Stoic” self-help in the Red Pill community, founded on the principle that it is men, rather than women, who are oppressed by society.

Notice how Ms. Weigel puts scare-quotes around “cultural Marxism,” as if no such thing could possibly exist although, as a matter of fact, it is quite easy to trace a direct line from the identity politics of today’s intolerant Left back to the so-called “New Left” of the 1960s, and thus to Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, the Frankfurt School, Antonio Gramsci and, ultimately, to György Lukács and Bela Kun. Ms. Weigel deliberately (and falsely) associates the term with “white nationalist conspiracy theories” as if David Horowitz or Roger Kimball could be lumped in with a bunch of crackpot tinfoil-hat Jew-haters. But even the so-called “alt-right” writers Ms. Weigel names in this passage — Allum Bokhari, Milo Yiannopoulo anid Nassim Taleb — don’t fit within the description of promoters of “white nationalist conspiracy theories.” Friedersdorf points out that Ms. Weigel indulges in such tendentious mischaracterizations as this: “Enjoying the luxury of living free from discrimination and domination, [Lukianoff and Haidt] therefore insist that the crises moving young people to action are all in their heads” (emphasis added).

This is a variation on “kafkatrapping.” The first (and unstated) premise of Ms. Weigel’s syllogism is that everyone who is not a white male lives a life defined by “discrimination and domination”; all females and non-whites are victims of oppression, categorically. Because Lukianoff and Haidt are white males, the second premise of Ms. Weigel’s syllogism is that they have the “luxury” of living in a world entirely unlike the world within which the oppressed victims live. Ergo, the conclusion of Ms. Weigel’s syllogism: Nothing that Lukianoff and Haidt say has any validity; everything said by white males is false.

Of course, the moment you point out what Ms. Weigel is doing — i.e., dehumanizing entire categories of people, in quite the same way Stalin dehumanized the kulaks — she will deny the accusation, and assert that your objections to her insulting rhetoric are proof that you are a racist, sexist homophobe who wants to kill 6 million Jews. To criticize or disagree with a leftist is to become literally Hitler.

Any intelligent student of history sees the irony: Treating anyone suspected of pro-Trump sentiments as if they were crypto-Nazis, and thus a menace to democratic pluralism, Ms. Weigel adopts a totalitarian mentality that endorses suppressing the civil liberties of those who do not share her rabid anti-Trump mania. Her dishonest smears of Lukianoff and Haidt function as a justification for silencing them.

The other irony is that Moira Weigel is enormously privileged. The daughter of a Harvard-educated lawyer who made his fortune on Wall Street, she attended Harvard herself and married the scion of a political dynasty, her Harvard-educated husband being the son of two Carter administration officials. The perversity of this born-rich girl claiming to know that less-privileged people enjoy “the luxury of living free from discrimination and domination” simply because they are white males is the sort of insult that we grubby proles are expected not to notice.

 

“Don’t piss down my back and tell me it’s raining” — do not insult my intelligence by pretending you don’t know you’re screwing me over.

Well, I started off intending to praise Conor Friedsdorf for his article and went off on a wild tangent, but nobody would ever nominate me for the Most Serious Intellectual Award, so I don’t bother trying to compete. Guess I’m just another white guy in the basket of deplorables . . .

(Hat-tip: Robert Shibley at Instapundit.)



 

 

Category: Intellectuals, Journalism

Notorious Moonbat Mike Stark Arrested for Attacking GOP Campaign Staffer

Posted on | October 18, 2018 | Comments Off on Notorious Moonbat Mike Stark Arrested for Attacking GOP Campaign Staffer

 

Circa 2006, there was no left-wing moonbat more notorious than Mike Stark, who organized hoax callers to harass conservative radio shows and stalked George Allen’s Senate campaign in Virginia. Stark has no skill as a writer (or anything else) that would recommend his services, but was an aggressive nuisance who specialized in harassing people. Now he has finally gotten the national notoriety he deserves:

A Democratic operative for American Bridge 21st Century, a group founded by David Brock and funded by liberal billionaire George Soros, was arrested Tuesday after the female campaign manager for Nevada GOP gubernatorial nominee Adam Laxalt accused the operative of grabbing and yanking her arm and refusing to let go.
Kristin Davison and other officials for the Nevada attorney general’s campaign said the “battery” left her “terrified and traumatized” — and with bruises on her neck and arms.
“Politics is a little bit aggressive these days, but this is just insane. I’ve never seen anything like it,” Davison, 31, told Fox News on Wednesday.
According to the Laxalt campaign and local law enforcement, Wilfred Michael Stark III, 50, was arrested by the Las Vegas City Marshals on Tuesday evening and remains in custody in the Las Vegas city jail.

Mike Stark is a bad person. Keep him in jail, where he belongs.

UPDATE: Last October, during the gubernatorial campaign in Virginia, Mike Stark was arrested at a Halloween parade in Annandale, where he was “reporting” on Republican candidate Ed Gillespie, after police say he shouted obscenities and engaged in disorderly conduct.

 

 

Category: Crime, Democrats, Nevada

In The Mailbox: 10.17.18

Posted on | October 17, 2018 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 10.17.18

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
Ninety Miles From Tyranny: The 90 Miles Mystery Box – Episode #411
EBL: National Pasta Day 2018
Twitchy: Restaurant Owner Called Nazi Sympathizer For Renting Room To Marsha Blackburn
Louder With Crowder: TIME Article Defending Fauxcahontas Is Proof Of #FakeNews

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: The Civil War We Might Have To Have
American Power: The NPC Meme Is The Best! also, CNBC Poll – Don’t Expect Big Blue Wave In November
American Thinker: Gosnell – The Serial Killer The Media Ignore
Animal Magnetism: Hunting Season Totty III
BattleSwarm: The Onion On Bobby Francis
Camp Of The Saints: I Have A Few Questions…
CDR Salamander: The Dark And Costly Underside Of Unmanned Systems
Da Tech Guy: Everything NeverTrump Touches Is Destroyed, Stormy Daniels Edition
Don Surber: The Resistance Is Futile
Dustbury: No More Wish Books
First Street Journal: Vote Like Your Rights Depend Upon It
The Geller Report: Germany – Muslim Migrant Douses Hostage With Gas, Straps Bomb To Her, also, WordPress Is Shadowbanning Conservative Sites
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day, also, Unintended Victims
JustOneMinute: We Conquer Fear AGAIN!
Legal Insurrection: Two MN GOP Candidates Assaulted In Separate Incidents, also, Why Won’t Fauxcahontas Apologize To Native Americans?
Michelle Malkin: Sinking Sleaze-Bob Menendez
The PanAm Post: US, Israel, & Colombia Seek Maduro Front Man With Hezbollah Ties
Power Line: Democratic Mobs, Then & Now, also, This Morning From Gaza
Shark Tank: South FL GOP – Hold Maduro Regime Responsible For Fernando Alban’s Death
Shot In The Dark: Epidemic Of Mildness
The Jawa Report: Meanwhile In Somalia
The Political Hat: Unqueering The Northern Irish Cake
This Ain’t Hell: Army Moves To Hollow Point Ammo, also, Another Bit Of Embarrassment To Explain
Victory Girls: Treasury Official Arrested & Charged With Leaking Info On Russia, Manafort
Weasel Zippers: Trump Nominates Openly Gay Conservative To Federal Appeals Court, also, Beta O’Rourke Caught In Lie About “Lifelong Republican Mom” During Debate
Mark Steyn: Hoser Reefer Madness!


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Category: Linkagery

‘Transgender’ as Self-Harm

Posted on | October 17, 2018 | Comments Off on ‘Transgender’ as Self-Harm

 

Maddy is a fat girl with a self-harm problem. You can see on the photo above the scars on her arms from repeatedly cutting herself. While she provides little information on her Tumblr blog that would enable us to understand the sources of her mental health problems, we know that many adolescent girls struggle with body-image issues, including eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia, and that there is an epidemic of depression and anxiety among teenage girls and young women. Many observers have noted a correlation between mental illness and excessive use of social media, although we can’t say which of these is cause and which is effect. That is to say, it may be that some kids develop psychiatric problems because they spend too much time on Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, etc., or it may be that kids with psychiatric problems are somehow predisposed to excessive online usage, perhaps as an escape from unpleasant real-world social environments.

Whatever cause-and-effect relationship may exist between these two phenomena, certainly it is not therapeutic for the lonely fat girl to spend all her spare time locked in her room browsing Instagram profiles or reblogging gloom-and-doom messages on Tumblr. There is an observable tendency of young people to form online cliques or “affinity groups” based on shared interests, and the lonely fat girl with suicidal tendencies can easily find similarly situated peers on social media, thus submerging herself in a virtual world where the prevalent attitudes and beliefs are defined by lonely fat girls, where unhealthy minds define the norm.

Toxic environments attract toxic people with toxic ideas. Especially among impressionable and emotionally vulnerable young people, the existence of online communities full of like-minded peers can encourage an echo-chamber effect, a sort of cult mentality, where those who criticize the group consensus are excluded and demonized. This is how online transgender activism fosters Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD) in which teenagers — especially girls — who have never previously exhibited gender confusion rather suddenly become obsessed with pursuing “transition,” typically demanding that parents accept their newfound identity and approve them for hormone treatment and/or surgery to “confirm” their identity. This has become alarmingly common.

In November 2014, Maddy created a Tumblr blog announcing that she identified as “genderqueer and pansexual” and would be “getting top surgery” (i.e., double mastectomy) within two months. She was 19 then, and had previously blogged about her depression and self-harm.

WARNING: You cannot unsee this photo. Read more

Category: The Transgender Cult
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