The Other McCain

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

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

Illegal Alien MS-13 Suspect Pleads Guilty to Raping and Murdering Teenage Girl

Posted on | November 28, 2018 | 1 Comment

 

The headline from the local CBS-TV affiliate:

Man pleads guilty to murder, abduction
and rape of Muslim teen during Ramadan

So they lead with the fact that the victim was a Muslim, and she was killed during Ramadan, and her killer is just a “man” in the headline.

STERLING, Va. — The man charged with killing a Muslim teen during Ramadan last year pleaded guilty to murder, abduction and rape of Nabra Hassanen.
On June 18, 2017, the 17-year-old girl from Reston, Virginia was sexually assaulted and killed in Sterling as she and her friends walked to the ADAMS Center mosque in the early morning hours.
Darwin Martinez Torres of Sterling is charged with capital murder which carries the possibility of the death penalty.
Torres, an undocumented immigrant from El Salvador, was 22 at the time.

Yeah, you can’t make that the headline. It would be racist or something. You might even be tempted to vote Republican, considering what was previously reported in the Washington Post:

Prosecutors plan to introduce evidence during a capital murder trial that the man accused of the high-profile killing of a Muslim teen in Virginia last year had been suspected of being a member of the violent MS-13 street gang, according to recent court filings.
Darwin Martinez Torres’s brother-in-law “believed” the 23-year-old was an MS-13 associate as a juvenile in the years before authorities said he abducted, sexually assaulted and brutally killed 17-year-old Nabra Hassanen, according to the filings. . . .
News of a possible MS-13 angle in a case that grabbed national attention could have reverberations beyond the trial, since President Trump and his allies have highlighted violence committed by gang members and undocumented immigrants to advocate for hard-line immigration policies. . . .
Hassanen, of Reston, Va., was attacked as she and friends walked back to their Sterling mosque, following a pre-dawn meal during Ramadan in June 2017. Police said Torres approached the group in his car and got into an altercation with one of them, before getting out and chasing them with a baseball bat.
Torres eventually caught Hassanen and hit her with the bat, police said. He then abducted her, sexually assaulted her, killed her and dumped her body in a pond near his Sterling apartment, police said. . . .
The week before Hassanen was killed, a woman went to an emergency room at a Loudoun County hospital and reported that Torres had punched, choked and sexually assaulted her and was a member of MS-13, according to two people familiar with her account.

“They’re not sending their best,” as someone said, but this is just more of the kind of “violence against women” feminists will ignore.

 

Category: Immigration, Violence Against Women

Mississippi Elects First Female Senator, Liberal Media Blame Racism

Posted on | November 28, 2018 | 1 Comment

 

When Democrats lose, the explanations are never surprising:

The Republican senator for Mississippi has been re-elected following a bitterly divisive runoff which evoked the state’s dark history of racist violence.
Cindy Hyde-Smith survived controversy caused by her racially charged comments to defeat Democrat Mike Espy, who had hoped to become the state’s first African-American senator for more than 130 years.
Ms Hyde-Smith, first appointed to the seat in April, had initially been comfortable favourite to win the race until footage emerged of her saying about a supporter at an 11 November rally: “If he invited me to a public hanging, I’d be on the front row.”

Sen. Hyde-Smith’s “public hanging” comment had nothing to do with race. The attempt by Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) to turn this into something it wasn’t just goes to show how compulsively dishonest liberals are. They even manufacture racism as necessary:

A group of nooses discovered hanging off trees near the Mississippi state Capitol were not a warning from a white supremacist group, but rather a “protest” by leftists against Mississippi Republican Senate candidate Cindy Hyde-Smith.
Mainstream media organizations melted down on Monday after a number of nooses were found hanging in the vicinity of the capitol building, strung from trees as part of a “message” campaign — though the Associated Press, which first reported the story, didn’t give much more information about the “message” the nooses were trying to send, only that it was one of “hate.” . . .
Local news reported photos of the nooses, and, again, avoided printing the “messages” that were written on signs left near the ropes. . . .
Signs placed near the nooses but reported only as “hate” messages by the Associated Press and others, had plenty of information about who hung the nooses and why. But weirdly, the signs didn’t appear on anyone’s Twitter feed until late Monday evening, nearly 12 hours after news of the display went viral.
The signs indicated that the nooses were part of a protest by Democrats, warning against re-electing Hyde-Smith.

Unlike the liberal media, Mississippi voters aren’t stupid enough to be deceived by this obvious Democrat propaganda stunt. With 96% of precincts reporting last night, Hyde-Smith won 54%-46% over Espy.

When a white woman named Hillary Clinton lost the presidential election in 2016, Democrats blamed racism. When a white woman won a Senate election last night, Democrats blamed racism. So, whenever a Republican wins an election anywhere, racism is always to blame.

 

Category: Election, Mississippi, Senate

What David French Won’t Say

Posted on | November 28, 2018 | Comments Off on What David French Won’t Say

 

David French published a rather strange column at National Review entitled “The White-Supremacy Surge” that drags, among others, Milo Yiannopoulos, Allum Bokhari, Steve Bannon, Mytheos Holt, Corey Stewart and Rep. Steve King. Because I know David French and like him, despite his #NeverTrump politics, I don’t want to engage in ad hominem insults, as calling him a “cruise ship conservative” wouldn’t solve anything and would fail to accomplish my educational mission.

French cites an increase in “right-wing” racial violence as somehow linked to the sort of politics he despises, and doesn’t seem to have spent much time wondering about the connection between the two phenomena. Let us stipulate that the vast majority of racial violence, whatever its target or whoever its perpetrators, is committed by people who could justly be labeled losers or kooks. If racial violence usually reflects some combination of personal failure and mental illness, what does this tell us about the underlying causes of the “surge” French laments? He seems to allude to this in the conclusion of his column, describing “the immensely difficult task of cultural repair” he sees as necessary:

Faith and family can act as a vaccine against extremism. As much as we might wish that better politics could provide the cure, only a purpose be­yond politics can truly transform the human heart.

French fails to mention that the vast apparatus of “culture” is almost entirely in the hands of people who are anti-faith and anti-family. The people who staff our nation’s schools and universities, who produce our entertainment and journalism, are against Christianity. By the mid-1990s, it was apparent to me that the public-education system was irreparable in this regard, and the Columbine massacre ratified my judgment. The problems I perceived in K-12 education 25 years ago are now much worse, and the situation in America’s universities — Yale now has more homosexuals than Republicans on campus — is so hopeless that it is no exaggeration to speak of them as left-wing indoctrination centers.

What has the conservative movement, as represented by National Review, achieved in terms of “cultural repair”? While they were, in Buckley’s phrase, “standing athwart history, yelling Stop,” history didn’t seem to pay them much heed and, it should be pointed out, today’s NR cruise-ship crew would be embarrassed to be associated with many of their forebears in the movement. Barry Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Buckley himself said some things about civil rights that I doubt David French would defend, assuming he could actually be bothered to read Up From Liberalism. For my part, in studying the history of the conservative movement — Up From Liberalism was published in 1959, the year I was born, and Goldwater ran for president when I was in kindergarten — my instinct is to say that Goldwater and Buckley were correct to foresee trouble ahead and warn against it. One can trace a direct line from the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to the Boston busing riots of 1974, and thence down to the present day, when Democrats claim that “voter suppression” was responsible for the defeat of Stacey Abrams in Georgia. And what about the fact that the congressional map of Orange County, California is now solid blue? Can David French explain how “white supremacy” is to blame for that?

What is apparent to me — and I don’t think David French is too stupid to see this, although he may never have stopped to contemplate it at any length — is that the modern conservative movement, born in the early years of the Cold War crisis, failed to adjust to the circumstances that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. From 1968 to 1988, Republicans won five of six presidential elections, four of those (1972, 1980, 1984 and 1988) by landslide margins. Since then, however, Democrats have won four of seven presidential elections, and none of the three Republican victories (2000, 2004 and 2016) were landslides; indeed, in both 2000 and 2016, the Democrats (Al Gore and Hillary Clinton) won the popular vote. The enormous electoral advantage the GOP formerly enjoyed has been frittered away since the end of the Cold War, no one now employed at National Review seems capable of explaining why this has happened, and the only reason we have a Republican in the White House now is because voters ignored the defeatist #NeverTrump rhetoric of National Review.

Perhaps Peter Brimelow might have something to say about this, but Brimelow was purged from National Review 20 years ago for his opposition to their open-borders agenda, back in the day when so many conservative “intellectuals” argued that Hispanic immigrants, because they were mostly Catholic, were ready-made Republican “values voters.”

The National Review crew have lost their ability to influence politics because they have been so often wrong about so many things — especially about immigration — for the past 20 years. David French’s hand-wringing concern about “white supremacy” is a sermon preached to the #NeverTrump choir, and will do nothing to bridge the widening chasm of polarization from which this problem has emerged.

As the elite who shape American public opinion have succeeded in moving the Overton Window leftward, the editors and staff of National Review have passively followed in their wake, so that the “conservative” opposition is being towed to port, as it were. This is true on many issues — if David French does not now applaud same-sex marriage, it is unlikely Rich Lowry would permit him to condemn it too strongly — but unrestricted immigration is the legitimate grievance that has given rise to the “white supremacy” that concerns French, and Lowry has presided over the ruin of National Review’s credibility on this issue. Consider this passage of French’s column:

Then there’s Iowa Republican congressman Steve King. He recently endorsed Canadian alt-right activist Faith Goldy in the Toronto mayor’s race, dined in Austria with members of that country’s far-right Freedom Party, and has endorsed the “great replacement” conspiracy theory that’s popular with white supremacists. The theory rests on the belief that there is an intentional global effort to repopulate the predominantly white nations of the West with masses of immigrants.

Well, is it a “conspiracy theory” if there actually is such a conspiracy? Is it irrational paranoia for people to suppose that the visible effect of a policy is the same as the intent of the policy-makers? The demographic consequences of our immigration policy are plain enough, and Democrats now complain that any restriction on immigration is inherently “racist” (and unconstitutional, according to the Ninth Circuit).

Now consider Europe. News and commentary about what happened, and is still happening, in Europe in the wake of the 2015 “refugee crisis” (the scare-quotes signifying this phrase as the bogus propaganda term it is) was delivered to Americans by websites like Breitbart.com, Infowars and others that might be described as “Alt-Right” or “white nationalist.” The problems caused by the increasing influx of Muslim immigrants into Europe were likewise reported mainly by people like Pamela Geller, who have been condemned by the Left as “Islamophobic” extremists. Maybe I overlooked David French’s coverage of the Rotherham Horror, but if National Review was paying attention to the problem in Europe, they sure as hell weren’t drawing the correct conclusions as to what this might portend for us in America. Perhaps Rich Lowry should ask Raheem Kassam, author of No Go Zones: How Sharia Law Is Coming to a Neighborhood Near You, to explain it to their readers. However, I guess Raheem, being a known associate of Nigel Farage, is too much of a “white supremacist” to write for National Review. But I digress . . .

If the Americans succumbing to “white supremacy” lack the moorings of faith and family that might restrain them, why is this? In other words, what accounts for white people becoming kooks and losers in such numbers as to create the “surge” that David French laments? This relates to a question I asked last month: “Why Do We Know Almost Nothing About Pittsburgh Gunman Robert Bowers?” The background of the synagogue shooter was quite nearly blank, and journalists showed a strange lack of curiosity about how or why or when this 46-year-old high school dropout became a Jew-hating madman. If there is any connection between (a) the 2016 election of Trump and (b) the Pittsburgh massacre, what is it? According to Bowers himself, the connection was the role of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society in our own “refugee crisis.”

Now, I hope David French would agree with me that most Americans concerned about our immigration problem are not Jew-haters prone to terroristic violence, but why is it that if someone is interested in the institutional infrastructure of the open-borders lobby, National Review is not the most helpful source of information? Wouldn’t it be possible for Rich Lowry to assign his staff to compile a dossier on the various activist groups (most of them tax-exempt organizations) and individuals involved in . . . Well, “an intentional global effort to repopulate the predominantly white nations of the West with masses of immigrants,” so to speak?

Either this “global effort” exists or it doesn’t, and insofar as it does exist, why isn’t this being reported by National Review? Why is the concerned citizen more or less forced to seek out “fringe” sources for such information, so that it is unfortunately easy for an ill-educated simpleton like Robert Bowers to be drawn into the vortex of paranoid darkness where extremists tell him to blame the Jews? If Lowry wishes National Review to remain relevant, wouldn’t it behoove him to pay attention to the way in which his magazine’s failure in regard to the immigration problem has helped open this Pandora’s Box of “white supremacy”?

The blank biography of Robert Bowers also implicates the deeper “cultural repair” problem to which David French refers. We know almost nothing about Bowers’ family life, but it appears that he never married and had no children. Indeed, he may have been an “incel.” To quote the lyrics of Lennon and McCartney, “All the lonely people, where do they all come from?” It is foolish to expect politics to solve people’s personal problems. A loser is a loser, and a kook is a kook, and this reality is unaffected by whether a Democrat or a Republican is in the White House. We cannot make the crimes of violent maniacs the weathervane of politics, but if these kooks and losers are part of some pattern, we should try to figure out what this pattern actually means, and not let the SPLC do our thinking for us. What is happening, and what David French either doesn’t recognize or doesn’t want to admit, is that the conservative movement and the GOP are trailing by two touchdowns in the fourth quarter. The demographic trend is not their friend, and if they wish to do anything else except to keep collecting paychecks for presiding over the long funeral of the Republic, they had better wake the hell up.

Here are a few data points from the 2018 exit polls: White people, who were 72% of the electorate, voted Republican by a 10-point margin, 54% to 44%. They were the only racial group that did not favor Democrats. Latinos went 69% for Democrats. Among white voters who describe themselves as evangelical or “born again” Christians, 75% voted Republican, while 72% of Jews voted for Democrats, as did 70% of voters with “no religion. What were the results? Democrats gained 39 House seats, recording a combined congressional vote of 59.5 million (53%) to the GOP’s 51.5 million (45%) — an eight-point margin nationwide.

David French will acknowledge that 2018 was not a good year for Republicans, and would have us believe this has something to do with Donald Trump and “white supremacy.” However, 2006 wasn’t a good year for Republicans either, nor were 2008 and 2012 good years for Republicans, and those bad years cannot be blamed on Trump. The issue of changing demographics — “the ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory,” as David French calls it — is highly relevant to the GOP’s declining electoral fortunes, and if it is “white supremacy” to acknowledge this, then what about all those left-wing pundits celebrating this trend? Why is it that Ruy Teixeira can high-five his fellow Democrats about how the shrinking white population dooms the GOP, but any conservative who calls attention to this trend is denounced as a latter-day Eichmann?

Let me say something important about Republicans, immigration and racism: The GOP open-borders crowd can offer many rationalizations for their support of unrestricted immigration, but we all know its really because they’re beholden to corporate donors who want cheap labor. But if that explains the craven pro-amnesty stance of GOP politicians, what explains such enthusiasm for the “huddled masses” among the kind of people who still consider National Review conservative?

Well, to put it quite bluntly — racism, insofar as they believe immigrants are better people than African Americans. Many affluent white Republicans (who don’t consider themselves racist) are nonetheless convinced that, in terms of work ethic and other moral traits, the new arrival from Guatemala or Pakistan is superior to the American-born black descendant of slaves. Indeed, if you spend a little time listening to the unguarded conversations of such people, you’ll find that they consider black immigrants from Africa or the Caribbean to be superior to American-born black people. Not only that, many well-to-do white Republicans prefer immigrants of any race to “poor whites” (e.g., the kind of drug-addled, food-stamp-dependent hillbilly underclass Kevin Williamson profiled in “The White Ghetto”).

Whatever else we might say of these opinions, it does not appear that such pro-immigrant Republicans have done their political arithmetic. Because in their minds — a unstated premise of their open-borders arguments — these hard-working immigrants are being substituted for the existing U.S. population, rather than added to it. They seem to have confused economics with politics. Perhaps your local fast-food franchise has in recent decades substituted one group of employees for another in this manner, so that while white teenagers were staffing the McDonald’s in 1988, now your burgers and fries are served by Hispanic, Asian or black workers. But politics and employment policy are different things, and the addition of immigrants to the U.S. population does not diminish the size of the black electorate, 90% of whom voted Democrat in 2016.

Our immigration policy adds Hispanic voters (69% Democrat) and Asian voters (77% Democrat) to the existing electorate, and cui bono? Go ask black people in California (or those who have left California in the past couple of decades) if the influx of immigrants improved their lives. Many black people understand that pro-immigrant sentiment among white people is at least partly motivated by racism. Does David French realize that Donald Trump did better among black voters than did either John McCain or Mitt Romney? “Cast down your bucket where you are!”

If there is any hope to save our country from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Democratic Socialist horde, conservatives must first stop denying reality and begin to do the basic arithmetic. Continuing our current immigration policy will destroy the Republican Party, and all the blabber from the Wall Street Journal open-borders lobby about “Hispanic outreach” won’t change this arithmetic. As distasteful as we might find some personalities who oppose unlimited immigration (certainly I don’t enjoy thinking of myself as an ally of Alex Jones), conservatives are faced with an existential threat. Unless something is done to fix this problem, there will soon be no hope whatsoever of implementing conservative policy, and a sort of Venezuela/Zimbabwe future may unfold.

Having set sail with Rich Lowry’s open-borders National Review cruise crew, David French doesn’t want to acknowledge this reality:

What is happening? Some on the left have a straightforward explanation. Under Donald Trump, they say, the subtext is becoming text. In other words, the “dog whistle” racism that’s the foundation of GOP appeal to much of white America is now out in the open. And as the appeals to white identity become more acceptable, people will feel more comfortable coming out of their racist closet. . . .
The ranks of socially disconnected Americans are growing at alarming rates. Men and women, especially in white working-class populations, attend church less, their families fracture, and they check out of civil society. As Rich Lowry wrote after the Pittsburgh massacre, “the rise of mortality among a subset of working-class whites from suicide, drugs, and alcohol” represents “one of the most stunning trends in American life.” . . .
There’s something else at work also — a poison within the broader conservative movement. Hatred for political correctness has yielded an unhealthy fascination with and admiration for pure defiance. Young voices pride themselves on fearlessness and place attitude over thought in their words and deeds. They troll online and at school to “trigger the libs,” and nothing triggers the libs more than defiance on matters of race.

Question: Who is paying Rich Lowry to look down his nose at “working-class whites”? Isn’t condescending disdain for these people — i.e., the Trump voters who made the difference in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa — the problem of the GOP elite in a nutshell?

Rich Lowry loves him some “huddled masses,” so long as they’re foreigners, rather than “working-class whites,” and I repeat my question: Who is paying Rich Lowry for his open-borders activism? We know Bill Kristol has sold out to liberal billionaires, and the question is whether the #NeverTrump National Review crew are on the same payroll.

Well, far be it from me to “troll online,” but my hunch is that National Review‘s financial situation might be related to their editorial direction since they jettisoned John O’Sullivan and Peter Brimelow 20 years ago. And I suspect that paying the bills at National Review requires Lowry to satisfy deep-pocket donors who are of different opinions than the people who stopped reading National Review after Lowry went #NeverTrump and thereby tacitly endorsed the election of Hillary Clinton.

Like I keep saying, people need to wake the hell up.



 

Category: Immigration, Racism

In The Mailbox: 11.27.18

Posted on | November 27, 2018 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 11.27.18

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Cowtastic, also, First Twitter Came For…
Twitchy: Ben Shapiro Called It – Story of Man’s Attempt To Run Over Jews Dies A Quick Death
Louder With Crowder: The Internet Had Fun With The Newly Iconic “Fleeing Family” Picture

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Australians Are Addicted To Ponzi
American Power: MSNBC Reporter Busts Narrative On Migrant Caravan, also, You’d Think The Leftist Media Had An Agenda Or Something
American Thinker: Latest Global Warming Lies From US Global Change Research Program
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Blue Colorado News
BattleSwarm: Boko Haram Kills 100 Nigerian Soldiers In Attack On Base
Camp Of The Saints:
CDR Salamander: Eastern European NATO v. Russia – The Numbers
Da Tech Guy: On Being Catholic, also, Make Them Push You Off The Battlefield
Don Surber: His Own Justices Spank Obama
Dustbury: Miku Is Your Co-Pilot
First Street Journal: Orange Is The New Black – Kathleen Kane Finally Goes To Jail
The Geller Report: Muslim-Majority Indonesia Launches Heresy App, also, Islam, A Culture Of Rape
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day, also, Romney Was Right – Again
JustOneMinute: Manafort Violated Plea Agreement?
Legal Insurrection: Kavanaugh Accuser Ford Finally Ends Fundraising, also, Jesse Kelly’s Twitter Account Reinstated, Conspiracy Theories Abound
The PanAm Post: Maduro’s New Plan To Dollarize Tourism & Discriminate Against Venezuelans – Just Like Cuba
Power Line: Secretary Nielsen Reports, also, Trump v. Love
Shark Tank: DeSantis Team Finds Chief Of Staff
Shot In The Dark: Rena Moran & The Pro-Mutilation Lobby
STUMP: Taxing Tuesday – Putting The Black In Black Friday
The Political Hat: Canadian Hospital’s Urgent Care Waiting Room To Patients – Kill Yourself
This Ain’t Hell: How Christine Blasey Ford Used Her Fundraising Money, also, Was Tear Gas Use ON US/Mexico Border A Violation Of Chemical Weapons Treaty?
Victory Girls: Navy SEAL Accused Of War Crimes
Volokh Conspiracy: GM To Shut Down Factory Built On Land Seized In Controversial 1981 Poletown Taking
Weasel Zippers: Mom Says Six-Year-Old Is Transgender, Dad Disagrees, May Lose Son, also, Governor Moonbeam’s Train 13 Years Late, $44 Billion Over Budget
Megan McArdle: What’s Good For GM Isn’t Necessarily Good For America
Mark Steyn: Live Around The Planet, also, The Moral Narcissism Of Immigration “Compassion”


Cyber Monday Deals Week
Amazon Warehouse Deals
Outlet Deals

Category: Linkagery

The Twitter Necropolis

Posted on | November 27, 2018 | Comments Off on The Twitter Necropolis

by Smitty

Amon Goeth from Schindler's List

This is not @jack, suspenders alluding to some perceived
personal superiority, gazing down upon the masses
of Twitter with Olympian disdain.

Social media in general, and Twitter in particular, seem to have gone sideways of late. People tending to be on the right politically just seem to get whisked off to the cornfield. Stacy McCain’s largish account got whacked some time ago, though he still tweets on. Alex Jones, of course (never a fan) has been banned. Laura Loomer was busted, apparently, for being insufficiently down with Sharia Law and its proponents. Jesse Kelly’s ejection was enough to trigger Instapundit to deactivate his account in what I guess is a “autocornfieldification”.

I myself have felt that “somebody” is squelching my tweets for years. (It’s entirely possible that my stylings have alienated enough people that it’s all just so much muting.) My tweet activity has fallen off by about 50%. And I really don’t care. Schoolwork should be a higher priority anyway.

This morning it occurred to me that the Lefty Social Dystopia (LSD) crowd don’t really care much about any of us pipsqueak conservatives on our own. These cornfieldian whiskings are really just placeholders for the one person that they just can’t blow away, no matter how much testosterone collects in the the Ban Finger: @realDonaldTrump.

That’s right. Social Media was a fine means of tightening Progressive control of our society until DJT started to use it to bypass the Fourth Estate. Policies are mostly musical chairs; you can watch pretty much every Congresscritter argue with themselves over time on YouTube on a host of issues. But you let someone like Trump bypass the chain of command and treat social media like a fireside chat, and blaspheme the Fourth Estate while doing it, and all Portland breaks loose.

I wish I could tell where all of this ends up. The future is overcast, with some serious thunderheads rolling in. Trump ought to be cruising to a strong re-election showing. But the pointy-bearded Lefty overlords seem prepared to pull a Reverse Sherman, and just burn the whole country down, like Stacy Abrams in Georgia, instead of letting our Constitution just be itself.

Further, what we do after Trump is a vast unknown. He’s truly an American original, and nobody has any business trying to emulate him. To borrow an Instapunditism “We can do worse, and probably will.”

Category: Uncategorized
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