Rod Dreher's Blog, page 119

Design Mom, Bourgeois Totalitarian

Gabrielle Blair is a very popular women’s lifestyle blogger who writes at Design Mom. She has 122,000 Instagram followers. She is the mother of six, and now lives in France; she’s so well-known that her family’s arrival in France was covered by French media. She also hates Trump supporters, and believe that they should be driven to the margins of society. A reader sent me this absolutely unhinged rant by Blair. Excerpts:

The other day I saw a tweet where a person described that when they find out someone they know personally supports Trump, they lose all respect for them instantly. I liked the tweet and retweeted it, but stopped short of sharing it on Instagram.

Why?

I suppose it’s because, like the author of the tweet, I also know Trump supporters in real life. They already know I think Trump is gross, and they know that I frequently criticize Trump supporters as a group. But I’ve hesitated to tell them directly that I’ve lost respect for them individually.

But I woke up this morning, read reports of the final night of the Republican National Convention — an event where hundreds of federal employees broke many laws — grew deeply angry, and now my hesitation is gone.

Boy is it. She invites Trump supporters to get the hell off her blog:

It makes me sick to my stomach that you, a Trump supporter, ever read or watch or listen to anything I’ve created. This is true even if I know you in real life.

I see what you are trying to do. You want me to treat you like a decent human being. But you are not behaving like a decent human being.

A decent person doesn’t align themself with people who are proudly racist and who insist America doesn’t have a racism problem.

A decent person doesn’t align themself with people who believe viral right-wing stories on Facebook over trained journalists, who think Q is real, who think the pandemic is fake, who think the earth is flat.

A decent person doesn’t align themself with people who weep and faint over celebrity-child-trafficking-rings that don’t exist, but support the ICE family separations at the border that actually lead to child trafficking.

A decent person knows what it feels like to do a job and not get paid, and recognizes that Trump is first and foremost a con-man, liar, and thief.

A decent person knows and acknowledges that Trump only looks out for himself.

A decent person knows Trump raped a 13-year-old, has read her description of the rape, has read all the other accounts of Trump sexually assaulting girls and women, and never forgets Trump is a rapist who has never had to face consequences for his assaults.

I see you. Especially my fellow white women. You want to read what interesting people are reading, you want to see good movies, you want to know what the designers and artists are creating.

But you don’t want anyone to know you are voting for Trump.

You don’t like when people you follow talk politics. You say it’s because you want to “focus on the positive.” But really, it’s because it reminds you of your Trump shame.

You want to vote for Trump and experience no negative consequences.

But that’s not an option.

She goes on. And on:

Some of you will tell me you support Trump because of the stock market.

Well, that is certainly something a selfish a**hole would do.

A whopping 90% of Americans have no stake in the stock market. I’m one of them.

Gabrielle Blair has done so well at her labors, and her husband works online too, so she and her family can afford to live in Normandy, and take trips all over Europe, which she documents on her blog! But she’s a woman of the people, you know. Money doesn’t matter to her, she would have you know. I mean, good for them — I would love to live in France, and heaven knows I’m the last person in the world who has the right to criticize anybody for documenting online the fun places they go. But it’s awfully rich telling other Americans that they’re a bunch of money-grubbing haters because they’re voting in their perceived economic interests.

Here’s more:

Another consequence of your actions? I have a deep desire to withhold my community and my creations from you.

Instagram has data that could tell me exactly which of you support Trump. I wish they would give me that data. I would block every single one of you.

My Instagram followers request access to my life daily. You’re voting for Trump and you want to know the source for my daughter’s dress? My answer is: No. You want to know the paint color we chose for the attic renovation? No. You want to participate in a parenting discussion on Design Mom? No.

I want to shun you from my community.

If gatherings were safely happening, I want you to be shunned from all events hosted by decent people. No wedding invitations. No conference tickets. No backyard barbecues.

I want decent event hosts to send you a card, explaining you are not invited because you are a Trump supporter.

I wish stores like Ikea and Target wouldn’t let you buy their products.

I wish your internet provider (who for sure knows you’ll be voting for Trump), would cut you off as a customer.

I want to see you shunned by every person and organization that doesn’t support Trump. No more access to their books, movies, products, music, events, artists & influencers — till you are left with nothing but Smashmouth concerts, and Ben Shapiro talking about his sex life.

Read it all, if you can bear to. What an appalling, sanctimonious person. This Blair woman curates her international design lifestyle, yet if you are a woman back in America who lives in a trailer park, votes Trump, but also likes to read Design Mom, well, she thinks you can go to hell. She thinks you should not be permitted to participate in the economy, and shunned by society. She doesn’t want you to look at her pictures of her life in France. She probably wants to poke your eyes out with a salad fork to make sure you can’t.

Design Mom thinks you Trump voters should be unpersonned. And there are people who still don’t understand what I mean by soft totalitarianism as a real possibility for America. Bougie women like Gabrielle Blair would be very happy to be commissars.

I don’t like Trump either, but this is unhinged malice. Honestly, it is becoming so clear that this political season is class warfare, disguised as culture war. The reader who sent me the Design Mom link comments:

Her blog used to focus mainly on design and family life, but over the years, her blog has turned into her soapbox for woke politics. I stopped following years ago, but occasionally check in to see what’s going on. … The level of vitriol for anyone who doesn’t agree with her narrative is disturbing and if that’s how people on the left feel, I don’t know how we recover.

An academic friend told me today that he knows professors who are lying to their colleagues about who they’re going to vote for, because they believe their livelihoods will be at risk if it were known that they are Trump supporters. This is America.

UPDATE: Turns out that the comments under Design Mom’s blog are pure hathos! They would turn any of us into a Cosimanian Orthodox. For example:

The bravest thing! To call Donald Trump’s supporters turds on the Internet. Give that mommy blogger a Victoria’s Cross.

More:

“Honey, Mia says we can’t come over to her barbecue this weekend, because we voted for Trump.”

“Oh, thank God!”

More:

“Thank you for venting unshirted rage, and thereby being the voice of reason” — uh, whut?

Oh law, now I’m going to have to go read Design Mom’s Irresponsible Ejaculation post. O Fortuna! It’s showtime at the Prytania!

 

The post Design Mom, Bourgeois Totalitarian appeared first on The American Conservative.

Defending Andrew Sullivan

Headline on media critic Ben Smith’s long piece in today’s New York Times:

Well, I still read Andrew Sullivan, and I will defend him. I’m going to do so in this post. I do it as someone who has spend the last twenty years sparring with him over homosexuality and Christianity, and who has been the target of some of his most poisonous barbs. But he is a friend, and a writer I admire, and I am going to take this opportunity to stand with him against those who tried but failed to cancel him.

Smith writes that Sully has more than doubled his income — from less than $200,000 a year to $500,000 a year — after being pushed out of New York magazine, and going to a personal subscription model at Substack (I’m a subscriber). He also writes in some detail about how incredibly influential Sully was in getting the gay marriage cause into the mainstream. I remember back in 2015 or 2016, having coffee with Andrew in Boston, and learning from him that even though he is one of a handful of gay Americans most responsible for making gay marriage a fact, he could not at that time speak at many colleges. Why? He was thought too conservative, especially by the gay left.

It is hard to overstate the role Andrew Sullivan had in shifting elite opinion to the pro-marriage side. I know this because I argued with him publicly about it for over a decade, and lost. He was often my opponent, but never my enemy. He changed history, but now he is considered radioactive. Back then, as I recall, Andrew was considered radioactive for defending the religious liberty of the people he defeated — this, because he is a principled classical liberal. Today he is considered radioactive because of race. Here’s Smith:

The flap reminded his colleagues and critics of Mr. Sullivan’s original sin, his decision to put on the cover of the Oct. 31, 1994, New Republic a package titled “Race and I.Q.” The package led with an excerpt from the book “The Bell Curve” by the political scientist Charles Murray and psychologist Richard Herrnstein. They claimed that I.Q. test results are in large part hereditary and reveal differences among races; it produced piles of scientific debunkings. Many — including contributors whom Mr. Sullivan invited to object — saw the piece as a thinly veiled successor to the junk science used to justify American and European racism for decades. Politically, it offered elites an explanation for racial inequality that wasn’t the legacy of slavery, or class, or racism, or even culture, and thus absolved them of the responsibility to fix it. The authors “found a way for racists to rationalize their racism without losing sleep over it,” the political scientist Alan Wolfe wrote in a response in The New Republic.

More:

The new editor of New York, David Haskell, didn’t push him out because of any new controversy or organized staff revolt, the two New York employees said. Instead, the shift in culture had effectively made his publishing of “The Bell Curve” excerpt — and the fact that he never disavowed it — a firing offense, and Mr. Haskell showed Mr. Sullivan the door before the magazine experienced a blowup over race of the sort that have erupted at other publications.

So what does Mr. Sullivan believe about race? On his back porch looking over the bay, Mr. Sullivan said he was frustrated by the most extreme claims that biology has no connection to our lives. He believes, for instance, that Freudian theories that early childhood may push people toward homosexuality could have some merit, combined with genetics.

“Everything is environmental for the left except gays, where it’s totally genetic; and everything is genetic for the right, except for gays,” he said sarcastically.

I tried out my most charitable interpretation of his view on race and I.Q. (though I question the underpinnings of the whole intellectual project): that he is most frustrated by the notion that you can’t talk about the influence of biology and genetics on humanity. But that he’s not actually saying he thinks Black people as a group are less intelligent. He’d be equally open to the view, I suggested, that data exploring genetics and its connection to intelligence would find that Black people are on average smarter than other groups.

“It could be, although the evidence is not trending in that direction as far as I pay attention to it. But I don’t much,” he said. (He later told me he’s “open-minded” on the issue and thinks it’s “premature” to weigh the data.)

“I barely write about this,” he went on. “It’s not something I’m obsessed with.”

Ah, but being absolutely on side on racial issues is something that the left is obsessed with. Hence Andrew’s exile from decent company. Ben Smith recognizes how significant Andrew has been in journalism, and even on Smith’s own career, and he seems to like him. But:

I wish Mr. Sullivan would accept that the project of trying to link the biological fiction of race with the science of genetics ought, in fact, to be over.

Sullivan can’t say that, because he doesn’t believe it. It is remarkable that a journalist would bring up an editorial project from 25 years ago as a way to brain Andrew Sullivan today — especially because he almost never writes about race and genetics. It would be the easiest thing in the world for Andrew to disavow the Bell Curve issue of The New Republic, but he doesn’t do it because that’s not what he believes. I admire that. I mean, he might be quite wrong about the argument — I don’t know; more on this in a moment — but I admire the hell out of somebody who refuses to say what he doesn’t believe, just to keep the crowd off his back.

It is of vital importance that we live not by lies. In the opening chapter of my forthcoming book (out on 9/29; pre-order here), I write:

After the publication of his Gulag Archipelago exposed the rottenness of Soviet totalitarianism and made Solzhenitsyn a global hero, Moscow finally expelled him to the West. On the eve of his forced exile, Solzhenitsyn published a final message to the Soviet people, titled, “Live Not by Lies!” In the essay, Solzhenitsyn challenged the claim that the totalitarian system was so powerful that the ordinary man and woman cannot change it.

Nonsense, he said. The foundation of totalitarianism is an ideology made of lies. The system depends for its existence on a people’s fear of challenging the lies. Said the writer, “Our way must be: Never knowingly support lies!” You may not have the strength to stand up in public and say what you really believe, but you can at least refuse to affirm what you do not believe. You may not be able to overthrow totalitarianism, but you can find within yourself and your community the means to live in the dignity of truth. If we must live under the dictatorship of lies, the writer said, then our response must be: “Let their rule hold not through me!”

Understand what I’m saying: as far as I know, Andrew Sullivan could be 100 percent wrong about the Bell Curve argument. The point is, he’s standing by what he believes, even though it costs him something — and that is damned admirable in this day and age.



As longtime readers know, I try to keep discussion of race and genetics off of the comments section here. I have not read The Bell Curve, and am not interested in the discussions of race and genetics. Eugenics terrifies me. In a scientific, meritocratic culture like ours, it is far too easy for people to accept that someone who is genetically “inferior” is somehow also morally inferior. This was at the core of white supremacy. I am, in general, extremely anxious about genetics and society, given the history of the 20th century, and given that we are living in a post-Christian era.

But — and this is quite a “but” — I freely concede that my fears and concerns come from the possibility that what the geneticists are saying might be true. Not just about race, but about everything. I believe that there is a such thing as forbidden knowledge. In 2012, I posted this about it, and quoted Auden:

In our culture, we have all accepted the notion that the right to know is absolute and unlimited. The gossip column is one side of the medal; the cobalt bomb is the other. We are quite prepared to admit that, while food and sex are good in themselves, an uncontrolled pursuit of either is not, but it is difficult for us to believe that intellectual curiosity is a desire like any other, and to recognize that correct knowledge and truth are not identical. To apply a categorical imperative to knowing, so that, instead of asking, “What can I know?” we ask, “What, at this moment, am I meant to know?” — to entertain the possibility that the only knowledge which can be true for us is the knowledge that we can live up to — that seems to all of us crazy and almost immoral.

I do not trust humanity to handle genetic knowledge responsibly. I don’t think we can live up to it. I also recognize that my opinion is very much in the minority, and that nothing is stopping scientists. I do not believe that intelligent people talking openly about what genetic science implies for society should be forbidden, though that is not a conversation I want to have any part of, because it makes me extremely squeamish. If things are scientifically true, then suppressing them is not going to work. As Andrew tweeted, he and Ta-Nehisi Coates had a public exchange about it in 2011. Here is Sully’s final message to TNC. Back then, this is what I had to say about it:

Sullivan understands that just because the Nazis made bad use of this stuff doesn’t make it untrue, or unimportant. I get that. But I keep coming back to a point that seems to be the one TNC is making: of what use is this field of study, anyway? Where do we propose to go with it? Andrew’s view is that it’s worth knowing for the reason all truth is worth knowing, and pursuing. In an abstract world, that makes sense. But we don’t live in a world of pure disinterestedness. If I were a geneticist, I doubt I would want to work in this field, only because the experience of the 20th century, especially the Holocaust, makes me deeply mistrustful of what human beings will do with the scientific knowledge that this race is intellectually inferior to that race, and we can prove it genetically.

The only possible good I can see coming out of it is to knock down affirmative action programs as unjust — but you don’t need genetics to do that. The possible evils coming out of it? Legion.

Though I came down somewhere between Sully and TNC in that exchange from nine years ago, and though I am still quite divided in my thinking about the topic, in that final message Sully wrote to TNC, you can see how interesting Sully’s mind is, and why almost anything he writes is more interesting than 90 percent of what you’ll read on the Times op-ed page, with its grim, dull progressive orthodoxies.

Here’s the important thing about this Times attempted hit job on Andrew Sullivan: he refused to say what they wanted him to say, and for that, he deserves the support of all of us who value free thought and free expression, even if we think he’s wrong about this issue.

I mean, think about it: Sullivan is one of the most interesting and (because of his role in the gay marriage issue) influential journalists of his generation, and now he is once again pioneering new paths in journalism with his substack — but the Times dispatched a writer to interview him, who made the center of his piece Sullivan’s refusal to repent for an issue of a magazine he edited twenty-five years ago. Times media columnist Ben Smith declares him not worth defending because of something published when Ben Smith (b. 1976) was eighteen years old.

What a chickensh*t move. I hope this gets Sully 50,000 more subscribers (you can become one here). The left media mafia is going to do whatever they can to silence, smear, and otherwise discredit anyone who violates its orthodoxies — and that often means the most interesting and provocative writers.

I don’t subscribe to Andrew Sullivan’s weekly newsletter because I want to be told something I already agree with. I subscribe because he’s an interesting writer who often makes me cheer, sometimes makes me angry, and always makes me think. He also has a gift for pissing off the right people.

The post Defending Andrew Sullivan appeared first on The American Conservative.

Here Comes The Liberal Unwelcome Wagon

Behold:

A friend texts me this letter. It was left on their neighbor’s home because they have a Trump sign in their yard. The bad people here are those who wrote/approved this trash. The author(s) should look at themselves

Goodbye, Blue America

The New York Times has a piece today about how home sales in Manhattan are collapsing, but home sales in the suburbs around New York City are skyrocketing. Those people are just moving out of the city. Others are moving out of blue states to red states. I got this letter from a reader today, who of course asked me to withhold her name:

I thought I would drop a note and share some of the things that have been going on in my family and community in California that may have relevance to things in the national conversation. Caveat, caveat, this is all anecdotal, etc. Not sure if these things are part of larger trends.

Every day we hear of more people fleeing California for a red (or at least more rural) state. My next door neighbors are heading back to their native Ohio. A teacher friend just decided to move their family to Texas. Our best friends left a few days ago for Idaho. My sister and brother in law are looking into moving their business, and eventually their family, to Idaho. Last night, my parents told us they are putting up their house on the market and moving to Idaho as well.

Everyone is fed up with how the governor has handled COVID and the shutdowns. They are skeptical that COVID was as bad as the media and health officials were saying, and they are deeply angry about government overreach. Go and protest? Totally legit. Want to go to church? Absolutely not.

The food shortages in particular spooked them, and they want to be closer to food sources and more independent if shutdowns come back. They are also concerned about a coming economic depression, and don’t feel confident in supply chains.

Furthermore, they are very concerned about urban unrest, and don’t feel that cities or even suburban areas are going to be safe in the coming months and years. Part of this is due to COVID, and the fact that officials have released thousands upon thousands of criminals (including violent ones and sex offenders) back onto the streets at a time of historic unemployment levels. Our best friends particularly felt the need to urgently leave, as a flood of prisoners were directly released into their small town.

Part of this is due to the BLM unrest. This morning, I got a notice to pray from a family friend that BLM protesters were coming again to demonstrate in our suburban community. Hopefully it is “mostly peaceful” in reality. The images of the looting and rioting in other places on social media are really frightening. It is not just in the big cities.

My dad’s side of the family has been very military/police inclined, and my brother grew up idolizing the police since he was a boy. It’s all he’s ever wanted to do. He served in a local station for several years, super excited to serve the community. He has been a very proactive cop, not just sitting back and responding to calls, but going out and trying to stop crime in progress (for example, visiting places frequented by known drug dealers, high crime areas, etc).

This has been a terrible year for cops. Not only has he had to stand out day and night at protests and be screamed at, spit at, and have garbage thrown at him, but he has discovered that the politics inside the police force are terrible, too. Not only does the community spew hate, but the sheriff has given into some of the BLM demands and not supported his own deputies. He is an elected official with a background in the FBI, and never actually worked the streets.

Furthermore, my brother has had to deal with two trumped up IA (Internal Affairs) investigations in the past year. His superiors have all looked at the incidents and signed off on them, saying there was no infraction, but apparently there are some higher ups in the stations that want to get promoted, and you have to show a willingness to investigate your own officers to get the senior positions. One lieutenant alone has IA’d half his station. It’s all political, and they are literally doing quotas of IAs on their own officers just so they can show they are tough on their own guys. Unfortunately for them, this is much harder in the age of body cams on cops, so often they go after them on technicalities and paperwork errors, which DO happen when you’re short on sleep from working the streets at three in the morning.

But this creates an environment of extreme stress and a feeling of threat from in the department and without. Because of COVID and the desire to keep prisons emptier, they are not really supposed to be arresting people except for extremely dangerous crimes. Their hands are tied. They are just issuing tickets and court dates. Even if they encounter dangerous criminals, they know that any use of force will be an IA nightmare (and believe me, it is a nightmare) in this climate, so why risk your career?

Anyway, his father in law offered him a position working at his company, so my brother is leaving the force next month. Their family is trying to move their business to their other facility in Georgia or to Tennessee.

My little family is staying so far–we can’t leave our church and job– and we are just devastated to lose our loved ones to other states. We understand their reasons, though we don’t share all the same fears. Some hope that things will die down after the election. Some think these are all the reasons you should vote for Trump. I think the cultural rot goes deeper, the churches are weak, and we can’t put our trust in princes–whatever the party. Hard times are common to man. Civilizations rise and fall…though I admit I’m partial to this one. “Hope in God, for yet shall I praise Him, the hope of my countenance and my God.”

This is where things are at.

Are you seeing something similar where you live? Have you thought about doing this yourself? If so, what are you waiting for? If you thought about it, but decided to stay, tell me why. I’d like to hear stories from readers talking about what they have been thinking and doing on this question. For this thread, I’m not interested in people being polemical with each other. I’m just trying to get a sense of where people’s heads are.

UPDATE: A reader from New Jersey e-mails:

You asked for thoughts about people fleeing blue America and why some of us might stay, so here it goes.  I know it seems silly to open with this, but just some background on me. I consider myself right leaning, but I am a never Trumper.  I used to consider myself socially liberal until the trans movement and now BLM have taken over what it means to be socially liberal. I plan on voting this election and I honestly don’t know who I find more frightening to be in office.  I believe Trump is mostly just an ineffectual boob, but four more years could cause these riots to be even worse.  The flip side is electing Biden, who himself I think is an all right man, but just a tool of the left at this point, will put those, cheering riots in power.  I briefly planned to vote Biden after Trump’s bungling of Covid, but once the riots took over and were met with a Democratic shrug, I’m now voting third party.  People say I’m wasting my vote or a vote for third party is a vote for Trump, or a vote for Biden, but let’s face it, I live in New Jersey.  If Jesus Christ himself were running as the Republican, this state would still go Democrat.

So to the main point, are people leaving NJ, and why am I staying?  The answer to the first point is yes, people are leaving, I don’t know how significant it is, the looming threat of a mass NJ exodus has been bandied about for years, but has never seemed to come to fruition.  And right now, it seems like wealthy New Yorkers are more than happy to replace anyone who leaves.  Those who have left generally cite cost of living, but I have at least one friend who recently moved because he did not want his children to be inundated with liberal politics in the public schools.  I know plenty of others who also want to leave, but haven’t pulled the trigger.  They’re held here by inability to find adequate employment elsewhere or family.

So, I am choosing to stay in NJ.  Why?  It’s partly because I struggled to find work for many years post recession and I now finally have a very good job in a public school system, which has a very generous retirement plan.  Family is another reason, as a majority of mine lives nearby.  My left leaning girlfriend, God bless her, also has family and a good public school job anchoring her.  Despite my fears of what might happen in the coming months, on a street that features a few Trump flags, in a blue town, in a blue state, and my left leaning girlfriend not allowing me to purchase a weapon for self defense, I ultimately love New Jersey.  I may hate how it’s run by it’s progressive governor, but I love the general Northeastern attitude we have, I love that I can walk to the water from where I live and can easily drive to the woods or big city if I want.  And while I do feel I cannot speak out (I have been threatened for speaking out against Antifa taking root in a fan group of a sports team I follow) nothing at work or in most of my immediate life has been rammed down my throat just yet.  There are even a few left leaning people that I feel I can have an honest conversation with, but they are few.

I am afraid for the future well being of myself and girlfriend (future wife, God willing), that’s why I only criticized Antifa once, because I didn’t want them to hurt her.  But who I’m truly afraid for are my parents. Two of the kindest people you’ll ever meet who don’t have a racist bone in their body.  But I have no doubt they will vote for Donald Trump which will raise the ire of many.  They’ve already received a letter in the mail a few years back calling them “motherfuckers” for voting for Trump, my mother wanted to go to the police, I said to just throw it out.  I sometimes think back to that and second guess myself, because now, especially if Trump is re-elected, will it be more than letters coming their way.  That is what terrifies me the most.

I consider myself a Christian, though my faith isn’t very strong, I’m borderline agnostic.  But I nevertheless try to rely on my faith in these times.  I try to see the good in everyone, including the left whom I admittedly despise right now.  It’s just so damn hard.

Anyway, keep up the good work, I don’t agree with everything on The American Conservative or with you, but the site and particularly your blog are daily reading for me.  Thanks for reading my e-mail.

UPDATE.2: Folks in the comments section, I’d like to ask you again to please, let’s stay focused on telling stories.

UPDATE.3: This is a letter worth paying attention to. Even if the stuff at the end frightens or disgusts you, it’s important to know how racialized violence like this is having an equal effect on some whites:

Long time reader, first time writer. If you want to publish this, you don’t need to edit anything that follows, just leave my name off it.

I’m writing in response to your “Goodbye, Blue America” post, with its large “Leaving California” graphic. I left California four years ago. (It happens that I live in a different blue state now, and I want to leave this one, too.) There are so many reasons I left, but the urban unrest was a big part of it.

To tell my story in chronological order: In 2009, I was living with roommates in San Francisco when Oscar Grant was killed by transit police after some kind of brawl. There were protests about it in Oakland, and more protests when the officer was acquitted in mid-2010. At the time I thought very little of it. Of course there would be protests about something so local. I don’t remember anything about the scale of if, or if there was rioting. Oakland is psychologically distant for people living in SF. The protests happened “over there”, on the other side of the bay.

In 2011, my career was stable enough that I was able to move into my own apartment… in Downtown Oakland. Within months, the Occupy movement was in full swing. The plaza near the closest BART station was clogged with tents, and I saw what Oakland protests looked like up close. It’s the same “mostly peaceful” pattern that everybody knows about now: Gentle, righteous protests during the day followed by anarchist rioting after dark. I don’t remember ever hearing the word “antifa”, but I’m sure it’s the same people who would be labeled as such today, using the same tactics.

Oscar Grant’s face was everywhere, the same way George Floyd’s is now. He was the movement’s all-purpose icon. I remember scoffing at a sign with his face on it that read “JUSTICE FOR OSCAR GRANT. JUSTICE FOR PALESTINE.” Had Oscar Grant ever once in his short life expressed an opinion about the Israel-Palestine conflict? I doubt it, but no matter. Oscar would say whatever protestors wanted him to say, could be whatever they needed him to be, now that he was dead.

The BLM organization proper was founded in 2013, by three black lesbians. One of the founders was originally from Oakland and I believe she was living there at the time. It was BLM that staged protests again in Downtown Oakland late in 2014, after the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson. This was when I started to get a bit radicalized. Well, first just confused: “He didn’t live here. How do you get justice by protesting here?”

I kept paying attention as the truth emerged about how Michael Brown’s confrontation with the cop in Ferguson really went down. Given what I knew about Oscar Grant and Michael Brown, it was at this point that I decided to regard the claims of any high-profile “racial incident” as presumptively false. (This rule has not failed me yet. It led me to make correct snap calls about Jussie Smollet, George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, and now Jacob Blake.)

In 2015 there were yet more BLM protests in Downtown Oakland, for a man who also didn’t live there: Freddie Gray, who was shot in Baltimore. This is when I started to see the pattern. Whenever a black man gets himself killed by cops anywhere in America, my neighborhood was going to get “mostly peaceful” riotors, graffiti, broken windows. I won’t be able to go out at night while helicopters overhead keep me awake. After the election in 2016 the local Occupy/BLM/Antifa crowd ran their playbook again to protest… I dunno, democracy? It’s not about justice at all. They just love destroying. This is when I moved to a much smaller town, far away from big cities.

I haven’t looked back. If any of your readers are waffling about this, I say go for it. BLM didn’t come out of nowhere. I watched it grow in strength up close, and it’s so cruel, so ugly, so fraudulent. All cities are Oakland now and this movement, this hysteria is only growing larger. Kenosha is the most recent iteration of a pattern we will be trapped in indefinitely: a black man with a criminal record defies the cops to the point they have to put him down for their own safety, news of the incident spreads to Twitter with the presumption of “police brutality”, and BLM collaborates with Antifa to start burning things down before the truth comes out. As Jon Stokes of theprepared.com said on Twitter: “it was all a bunch of social media hype for the residents of Kenosha, WI up until the night it wasn’t.” [link: https://twitter.com/jonst0kes/status/1299441254514790400]

Finally, sadly, I agree with you that America is in a Weimar phase before something truly terrible happens. I described myself as radicalized above. I know where my own mind has been over these past years. It was ugly. By the grace of God, I had a conversion experience and I’ve stepped back from the worst of it. But I think every white man in America is running through the same experience a few years behind me and coming to those same conclusions. It’s not just about the rioting. It’s about all the scolding, gaslighting, grift and manipulation that pour from every media outlet, educational institution and corporate manager/spokesthing. It is simply not sustainable to humiliate so many competent people for long in an attempt to “turn the tables of oppression” (a favorite phrase of black radicals). There will be a blowup eventually.

Anyway, I’m hiding out in the woods and starting to patch together my BenOp life. Thank you so much for all that you write. Like your New Jersey respondent, I also don’t agree with all of it but I keep coming back.

The post Goodbye, Blue America appeared first on The American Conservative.

Election 2020: Duck Vs. Rabbit

Oh what fun they’re having in downtown DC tonight:

A BLM leader is encouraging this crowd of protesters to fight the DC cops on the frontlines. Saying he’s “ready to put them in their graves” – this may lead to another violent night in DC… pic.twitter.com/0LXTR69c2P

— Brendon Leslie (@_BrendonLeslie) August 30, 2020

I look forward to restaurant reviewers from NPR’s Code Switch team — the ones who brought us the sympathetic interview with the author who thinks rioting and looting is good — to explain how all the best joints feature progressives screaming at and abusing you:

Protesters are arguing with diners and mpd cops have showed up #dcprotest #dcprotests #blmprotest #ACAB #blm #Blacklivesmatter #JacobBlake #KenoshaProtests pic.twitter.com/sEc7XtLl0q

— RawsMedia (@rawsmedia) August 30, 2020

Yes, the activist left continues to win hearts and minds — for Donald Trump.

The blogger Policy Tensor has a good analysis of the present moment, and how events in Kenosha have become a “Duck-Rabbit” for the left and the right. Here’s a Duck-Rabbit:

Some see a duck, and some see a rabbit. Policy Tensor says that’s how both political teams regard Kenosha. PT has a good survey of the fiercely opposite conclusions both sides draw when they see what happened there with Jacob Blake, and then with Kyle Rittenhouse. Excerpt:

Branco Marcetic dismisses Rittenhouse as one of “many thousands of misguided, wide-eyed kids out there who idolize police and genuinely think a career in law enforcement will let them do some good in the world.” It is worth our while to pause and examine the class bias inherent in the claim. In the working-class, becoming a police officer or a firefighter is a source of honor and respect in the community. With the neoliberal decline, following the Clinton betrayal, of industrial work that formed the backbone of the American working-class, becoming a soldier, a police officer, or a fire-fighter are some of the few avenues still open to working-class boys for a life of responsibility, dignity and honor. Dismissing the motivations of these ‘wide-eyed kids’ is thinly disguised class work.

That’s a great insight from PT. The Washington Post had some interesting details about Kyle Rittenhouse in this story. He lives in a small apartment with his mom, and dropped out of high school. He seems to have been bullied. He tried to join the military not long ago, but was rejected. He idolized the police and the military, this pudgy boy who didn’t even have a high school diploma, and couldn’t get into the service. Like I’ve been saying, I don’t consider Kyle to be either a hero or a villain; I consider his story to be tragic. But I think Policy Tensor is absolutely spot on to say we mock the dreams of young working class men like Kyle at our peril. He was, by most measures, something of a loser in our society. They didn’t have money in his family. His dad wasn’t in the home (and maybe not in the picture, I don’t know). He had been bullied at school, and had dropped out. He was trying to gain honor by serving in some capacity with the police. That’s can be a beautiful, heartbreaking thing. I don’t think it is at all “misguided” for young men like him to think being a cop can let him do some good in the world. As PT indicates, that is exactly the kind of thing that only an educated leftist would sneer.

Some of you conservative readers will disagree, but I still say a boy that young, with no training, had no business in Kenosha that night with a gun. That said, he was not there to push people around, to playact as a white supremacist militiaman or some cruel and malicious thing. He was there to try to protect good people from bad ones. There’s an image from earlier in the day, of Kyle washing graffiti off a building in Kenosha. Whatever mistakes he made, and whatever price he has to pay for them, he wasn’t on the streets of that city trying to hurt people or damage property — unlike those others. His intentions, however misguided, were honorable.

That’s how most conservatives see it. Most liberals see Rittenhouse as a devil. Or a rabbit. Policy Tensor goes on:

The Kyle Rittenhouse Duck-Rabbit is a window into the confrontation over American culture. As recently as mid-May, it seemed that the election would be a referendum on Trump — a contest that he was nearly guaranteed to lose, particularly because his handling of the coronapanic. That was indeed where things were headed before May 25, 2020. Since then, BLM has taken center stage.

No one has any doubt that BLM activists are Dems or that Dems are dramatically more sympathetic to BLM than independents or Republicans. If there was any doubt, it vanished after mayor after mayor, governor after governor, came out in support for BLM. They were thinking it was excellent politics since BLM was enjoying a surge in support in the immediate aftermath of George Floyd’s killing. So, for better or for worse, the equation BLM=DEM is now pretty much backed into everyday perceptions.

PT says that two developments this summer have been important on this front. First, BLM made it clear that it’s not simply about addressing police brutality against black people. You have to take “the full Social Justice package” — including “defund the police,” which is not popular. Democrats find it difficult to disassociate themselves from the SJWs.

The second development is more important than the first. PT:

It was a development that could have been foreseen since it happens to every revolutionary movement. Namely, the balance rapidly shifted to violent extremists within the movement, with the result that, before we could say Mississippi, American cities descended into looting, violence and arson. However much Dems tried to distance themselves from the escalating violence on the streets, there was no way to sever the thread that linked Dems and liberal elites to the extremists burning down downtown Portland, Seattle and Kenosha.

This is really true. Joe Biden can and does condemn this violence, but it rings hollow with many people, because the Dems made themselves inseparable from BLM. I’m not sure how the Democrats can shake the rioters off as a political albatross. PT, once more:

The 2020 presidential election is no longer a referendum on Trump. Rather it has becomes closer to a referendum on the woke counterrevolution. This is not good news for Democrats. The shifting political context has, in fact, brought Trump’s reelection prospect back from the dead. Indeed, I am becoming more and more convinced that Trump will win again.

Read it all.

The post Election 2020: Duck Vs. Rabbit appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Rest Of The Jacob Blake Story

I saw this last night: the official criminal complaint against Jacob Blake — that is, the charges on which he was wanted when police were called out to deal with him in the incident in which he was shot . Details:

The three count criminal complaint filed on July 6, 2020 in Kenosha County, Wisconsin against Blake includes:

Criminal trespass, domestic abuse a Class A misdemeanor, and if convicted faces a fine of not more than $10,000 or imprisoned not more than 9 months or both.
Third Degree Sexual assault, Domestic Abuse a Class G Felony and if convicted faces a fine of not more than $25,000.00 or imprisoned not more than r 10 years, or both.
Disorderly Conduct, Domestic Abuse, a Class B Misdemeanor and if convicted faces a fine of not more than $1,000 or imprisoned not more than 90 days, or both.

According to the probable cause statement on May 3, 2020 a Kenosha police officer responded to the very same address where Blake was shot at on August 24, 2020 for a report that an ex-boyfriend had broken into the residence and stole vehicle keys, a vehicle debit card before fleeing.

The complainant is listed in the report only by initials met with officers, crying, visible shaken and dressed only in a nightgown.

The victim explained to police the previous evening she had left at approximately 8pm to attend a party in Milwaukee and had rented a vehicle for the weekend because she didn’t think her vehicle would make it up there and back because of mechanical issues.

The victim said she had her sister spend the night and watch her kids when she was gone.

She said she returned back home at about 4.11am, her sister was sleeping in the living room on the couch with numerous children. She said she took her son with her into the first bedroom down the hallway and went to sleep.

The report states at about 6am the victim was woken up by Jacob Blake.

Blake was standing over her saying, ‘I want my sh*t.’ As the victim laid on her back, Blake, ‘suddenly and without warning, reached his hand between her legs, penetrated her vaginally with a finger, pull it out and sniffed it, and said, ”Smells like you’ve been with other men.”

The officer noted in the report the victim had a very difficult time telling him this and cried as she told how the defendant (Blake) assaulted her and then the defendant immediately left the bedroom.

She told the police being penetrated digitally caused her pain and humiliation and was done without consent.

She also told the police after he left she realized her vehicle and debit card were missing.

After she had called 911, while waiting for officers the victim said she checked her account and found two fraudulent ATM withdrawals for $500 each.

She also told police that Blake was unemployed, has no vehicle and refused to tell her where he was currently living.

She said that over the past eight years the defendant has physically assaulted her twice a year ‘when he drinks heavily.’

This is the man who has become a saint in our media and pop culture, apotheosized by professional athletes and activists — this, on the basis of a decontextualized video. Nobody yet knows what led up to the Kenosha cop shooting Blake in the back seven times. Just to see the video, it obviously looks horrible. But by now we ought to have learned that you cannot understand what these videos mean without knowing what led up to them. This doesn’t mean the cop was right to do what he did; it only means that we need to have more information before we can judge the actions we see on the video.

The State of Wisconsin and the City of Kenosha have remained tight-lipped about the incident. But the Kenosha police union’s lawyer, Brendan Matthews, has given the cops’ side of the story. From the Kenosha News:

The DOJ [Wisconsin Department of Justice] stated that police were called to the 2800 block of 40th Street by a woman who said her boyfriend was present and was not supposed to be on the premises. They also have stated that Blake admitted that he had a knife in his possession and that a knife was found on the floor of his vehicle.

According to the statement from Matthews, officers were told before they arrived that Blake had a felony warrant for his arrest for a domestic violence incident that included a charge of third-degree sexual assault. Officers who encounter people with active warrants are required to take them into custody.

Although people at the scene told media that Blake was breaking up a fight between two women, the statement from the association disputes that. It also disputes statements that Blake was unarmed.

“Mr. Blake was not unarmed. He was armed with a knife. The officers did not see the knife initially,” Matthews said in his statement. “The officers issued repeated commands for Mr. Blake to drop the knife. He did not comply.”

Matthews stated that officers went “hands-on” with Blake and two officers used tasers. “Mr. Blake forcefully fought with the officers,” including putting one of the officers in a headlock.

So: under the law, the cops had to arrest this accused violent felon and accused rapist. He resisted arrest, physically fighting the cops (this was captured on a second bystander video), while armed with a knife. Tasers didn’t work on him. Then he stormed around the front of his car, with cops yelling, “Drop the knife!”, and opened the door of his minivan. That’s when the cop reached out to try to pull him out, then shot him.

How was that officer to know that Blake wasn’t reaching into the van to retrieve a gun? A lawyer friend told me that in light of what we know, the Kenosha cops in this case almost certainly will not be charged criminally, because they performed by the book.

The left in this country seems to believe that criminal suspects should not be arrested unless they want to be.

Anyway, we should await the results of the official DOJ investigation before drawing firm conclusions. Do not uncritically accept the media narrative, though. The media, professional athletes, activists and fellow travelers are tearing this country up over a case in which a violent accused felon armed with a knife violently resisted arrest, and put an officer in the position of reasonably fearing for his life. This does not mean that shooting Blake seven times was justified. Nor have the allegations in the felony complaint been proved in court (I believe that the charges were dropped yesterday). But they do indicate the kind of man the police were dealing with that day. They give context. And they indicate that absent more information, we should be skeptical of the media and activist narrative.

Similarly, more information is coming about about the shootings of protesters by Kyle Rittenhouse. A reader sends this intense, detailed analysis of all the available videos from that night. 

I learned from that analysis that Joseph D. Rosenbaum, the first person shot by Rittenhouse, was an ex-con. Did you know that? I knew only that he was on the sex offender registry, but I did not know that he had done hard time in Arizona. I found this online document of his long disciplinary record as an Arizona inmate. 

Why does this matter? Rittenhouse could not have known any of that about Rosenbaum, and anyway, it would not justify shooting him. But it does establish that Rosenbaum was a violent, aggressive man, and it could help Rittenhouse’s defense by establishing that Rittenhouse had reason to fear him. There is video taken prior to the shooting in which a cocky Rosenbaum is taunting an unseen person or persons with a gun, daring him or them to shoot. 

The analysis above makes a strong case that Rittenhouse will be found not guilty by reasons of self-defense. Whether or not Rittenhouse should have been out on the streets of Kenosha that night is a different question. I think he clearly should not have been. But that is not a criminal offense.

A reader sympathetic to Kyle Rittenhouse writes:

Rittenhouse is also being represented by Lin Wood who recently kicked ass and took names with Sandmann.

When a high profile attorney takes on such a case, it usually means one of couple things 1) defendant is wealthy, 2) attorney thinks it is very winnable. Occasionally one will take on a losing case to make a statement, but in my view this case is very winnable.

Here is the statement https://www.scribd.com/document/474027394/Pierce-Bainbridge-Statement-on-Kyle-Rittenhouse-8-28-20#from_embed

Major takeaways:

1) Kyle worked in Kenosha as a community lifeguard. He came to Kenosha on August 25th in order to work and he indeed worked a shift at the community pool. He initially stayed in Kenosha after work to help clean graffiti from the high school with some friends.

2) Kyle transported no weapons across state lines. The weapon was given to him in Kenosha by a friend and Wisconsin resident.

3) Kyle and his friend appeared on the scene armed that night at the behest of a mechanic shop which had put out a general call for help earlier in the day.

Now I’ll be the first to admit that attorneys lie, but these seem like statements that they would not put out unless they could bring forth evidence and witnesses to support them.

The whole media narrative of “omg he crossed state lines with a gun!” and gleefully reporting “he lived 30 miles away”–sometimes even adding in the distance by kilometers–looooooooooool is falling apart. Sorry, I just can’t get over the left emphasizing the state lines when 1) they don’t believe in borders and 2) their beloved rioters travel much longer distances to participate in mayhem.

Kyle did not strap on some gear and sojourn 30 mile across state lines in order to be at the riots. He strapped on no gear and drove to work. He was a servant of the Kenosha community who belonged in Kenosha that very day to work. He was at that mechanic shop standing sentry because the owner put out a general call for people to come guard his shop. While he may not have been invited individually, the owner invited good citizens to defend him. Kyle answered the call.

Now what does that say about Kenosha, Wisconsin, and America in general that 1) the police could not control the riots such that a business owner had to put out a plea to the general public to send people to protect him and 2) only teenagers were available to answer the call?  We have a deficit of strong men of a strong character. The older men of the town were apparently much better represented among the rioters, or they were cowering at home. If a bunch of guys my age had stood guard at that shop, there would have been no need for the teens and we would have told them to go home. This makes me feel a twinge of shame and makes me more likely to answer call for help like this in my state so that it does not fall to teenagers.

Here, from the Scribd document, is Rittenhouse’s attorney’s description of the Rosenbaum shooting:

As Kyle proceeded towards the second mechanic’s shop, he was accosted by multiple rioters who recognized that he had been attempting to protect a business the mob wanted to destroy. This outraged the rioters and created a mob now determined to hurt Kyle. They began chasing him down. Kyle attempted to get away, but he could not do so quickly enough. Upon the sound of a gunshot behind him,Kyle turned and was immediately faced with an attacker lunging towards him and reaching for his rifle. He reacted instantaneously and justifiably with his weapon to protect himself, firing and striking the attacker.

The attacker in this case was Rosenbaum. To me, this shooting is the only one about which there is question of its justification (the others, in my view, are clearly self-defense). If the Rittenhouse lawyer’s version is accurate, then Rittenhouse was defending himself. We will see in court, I suppose.

All three of the men shot by Rittenhouse were bad guys who were only out on the streets of Kenosha that night to cause trouble. They are violent men who died violently, or, in Grosskreutz’s case, will live maimed as the result of his violence. Kyle Rittenhouse seems like a good kid who got in way over his head, but who is not the villain here.

The Kyle Rittenhouses of America are not America’s problem; the Joseph Rosenbaums, Anthony Hubers, and Gaige Grosskreutzes are. So are the Jacob Blakes.

I believe that most Americans understand that. Or they will, despite what the media say.

UPDATE: A reader writes:

Initially, I shared your view that this definitely looked like self-defense, but I had an interaction on Twitter that made me think otherwise. (Shocking? No, really! Twitter can be used by reasonable, open-minded people to inform themselves! Believe it or not!)

I’ll post my exchange below. But the argument that made me question my conclusion was that Kyle went into a “conflict zone.” His presence was illegal because a curfew was in effect. In bringing a loaded weapon into that conflict zone in violation of the law, violence was a reasonably foreseeable outcome.

Imagine doing something illegal and trying to defend yourself. You just watched Breaking Bad. Imagine a drug deal gone bad and someone ends up dead, and one of the parties later accused of homicide invokes self-defense. Is that a valid legal defense in those circumstances? Double-check with your legal connections on this because I’m NOT an attorney, but I don’t think it is. It doesn’t matter that he was guarding a car dealership. It doesn’t matter that he was trying to assist cops. Legally, he did not have any authority to be there, and if he couldn’t be there legally, then the self-defense defense falls apart.

I won’t post the exchange because I don’t want to identify the reader. But is this a valid legal point? Lawyers, what do you think?

UPDATE.2: And, here we go. Armed citizens of Kenosha doing for their community what the authorities are unwilling to do, or (more likely) are unable to do. Excerpts:

About a 10-minute drive from Downtown Kenosha, two men stood this week with AR-15 firearms protecting their subdivision.

The armed men were Jason and Gilbert, part of a group of about 10 residents of the subdivision that have been out nights since Tuesday protecting their neighborhood in light of the unrest in Kenosha.

Despite the we-mean-business message the group conveys to passing motorists, The men were anything but threatening Thursday night. They were sincere in their concern for their neighbors and city.

“All we’re doing is making sure the community here is able to go asleep, sleep fine and are not worried about anything,” Gilbert said.

More:

Jason said a van with young females drove by the guards Thursday and yelled “Black Lives Matter.” And he said there was nothing wrong with that and that the group supports peaceful protest.

While on guard, the watch group keeps an ear on the police scanner and members keep in communication with each other via walkie talkies.

“Our approach is when we see a car coming through we flash the ground (with a flashlight) just to let them know there is a presence here,” Gilbert said.

The post The Rest Of The Jacob Blake Story appeared first on The American Conservative.

Left Summons Demons Of Ideological Terror

Look at this:

Silly me, I wasted an hour or so writing a post about a Christian radio host who delivered an uneventful, glancing punch to the helmet of an antifa cyclist, when oh my God, a Chicago union representing 28,000 public schoolteachers has endorsed the concept of guillotining the rich!

You know how I’ve been saying for years that these left-wingers have no idea at all what demons they are summoning up? I am screaming that into a bullhorn now. My God, think of it! We’re not talking about campus Maoist weirdoes associating themselves with public executions of the wealthy. We’re talking about public schoolteachers.

NPR published a lengthy interview with a woman who has written a book titled In Defense of Looting. I don’t want to blame NPR, exactly, for paying attention to this argument, but I do simply want to point out that here is a mainstream media outlet injecting into the mainstream a radical argument that should not be entertained. The left is talking itself into embracing and ratifying violence, anarchy, and theft.

And liberals wonder why so many people are buying guns and ammo. They wonder why some conservatives think that that Kyle Rittenhouse kid is a hero.

A reader e-mailed today to point me to a 2018 debate about political correctness. Speaking for the left was Michael Eric Dyson and Michelle Goldberg; for the right, Stephen Fry and Jordan Peterson. The reader suggested taking a look at the part in which Peterson asks the left-wing panelists how we are to know when the left goes too far. I’ve cued the two-hour video to that moment. Take a look:

Goldberg says censorship and violence. “I’m against violence, and I’m against censorship” — that’s it. No elaboration. Then she says that “there’s a lot of left-wing annoyance,” and that’s bad, but there’s nothing we can do about it, and anyway, a reasonable person cannot possibly believe that the radical left is more of a threat than the radical right. Dyson, who is black, behaves with shocking arrogance, accusing Jordan Peterson of being drunk on his own white privilege for even asking the question. “You’re a mean, mad, white man, and the viciousness is evident,” says Dyson.

Peterson responds by saying that “violence” is not enough. Everybody is against violence, but much of the the violence of the 20th century came out of certain left-wing ideas. These have to be accounted for.

It appears that neither Goldberg nor (especially) Dyson can conceive of the left going too far. This is how you get guillotines erected in front of the home of a rich man, and a Chicago teachers’ union tweeting its total “support for wherever this is headed.”

The Terror is where the first guillotines led France. The Red Terror, which took vastly more lives, was the same principle at work in the Soviet Union. The ideas that led to both Terrors — well, they’re right there in Dyson’s racist harangue, in which he refuses to answer Peterson’s perfectly legitimate and necessary question because it is posed by a white male.

I write about this stuff in Live Not By Lies. Check this passage, in which the late Sir Roger Scruton talks about how leftist ideologues cancel people:

“It’s just like ‘homophobia’ or ‘Islamophobia,’ these new thoughtcrimes,” Scruton continued. “What on earth do they mean? And then everyone can join in the throwing of electronic stones at the scapegoat and never be held to account for it, because you don’t have to prove the accusation.”

The reach of contemporary thoughtcrime expands constantly—homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia, biphobia, fat-phobia, racism, ableism, and on and on—making it difficult to know when one is treading on safe ground or about to step on a land mine. Yet Scruton is right: All of these thoughtcrimes derive from “doctrines”— his word — that are familiar to all of us. These doctrines inform the ideological thrust behind the soft totalitarianism of our own time as surely as Marxist doctrines of economic class struggle did the hard totalitarianism of the Soviet era.

One imagines an entry-level worker at a Fortune 500 firm, or an untenured university lecturer, suffering through the hundredth workshop on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and doing their very best not to be suspected of dissent. In fact, I don’t have to imagine it at all. As a journalist who writes about these issues, I often hear stories from people—always white-collar professionals like academics, doctors, lawyers, engineers—who live closeted lives as religious or social conservatives.

They know that to dissent from the progressive regime in the workplace, or even to be suspected of dissent, would likely mean burning their careers at the stake.

For example, an American academic who has studied Russian communism told me about being present at the meeting in which his humanities department decided to require from job applicants a formal statement of loyalty to the ideology of diversity—even though this has nothing to do with teaching ability or scholarship.

The professor characterized this as a McCarthyite way of eliminating dissenters from the employment pool, and putting those already on staff on notice that they will be monitored for deviation from the social-justice party line.

That is a soft form of totalitarianism. Here is the same logic laid down hard: in 1918, Lenin unleashed the Red Terror, a campaign of annihilation against those who resisted Bolshevik power. Martin Latsis, head of the secret police in Ukraine, instructed his agents as follows:

Do not look in the file of incriminating evidence to see whether or not the accused rose up against the Soviets with arms or words. Ask him instead to which class he belongs, what is his background, his education, his profession. These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning and essence of the Red Terror.

Note well that an individual’s words and deeds had nothing to do with determining one’s guilt or innocence. One was presumed guilty based entirely on one’s class and social status. A revolution that began as an attempt to right historical injustices quickly became an exterminationist exercise of raw power. Communists justified the imprisonment, ruin, and even the execution of people who stood in the way of Progress as necessary to achieve historical justice over alleged exploiters of privilege.

Live Not By Lies will be published one month from today. Please pre-order it — you’re going to want to read it to understand the meaning of this moment, and start building the resistance within yourself, your family, and your community.

Michael Eric Dyson is the kind of person who would make a first-rate commissar, sending people into exile or worse for being an enemy of the people — his kind of people, that is. And Michelle Goldberg would sit there justifying it by saying that the right is so much worse. This is what we’re dealing with today. The guillotine was an instrument of mass terror. If some right-wing loons had displayed a hangman’s noose on the streets of Washington DC, it would be front page news everywhere. These leftists parade a similar instrument of ideological terror, and not only do our media not much care, but a Chicago teachers’ union endorses it.

They do not see what’s happening, our leftists and liberals. They don’t believe the left can go too far. No enemies to the left. To object to it is to admit your guilt.

Eric Zorn, a liberal columnist at the Chicago Tribune, objected to the Chicago teachers’ union tweet, and the Black Lives Matter mob harassing peaceful diners in DC, not because it’s bad, necessarily, but because it stands to help Trump. Excerpt:

Yes, like the display of a mock guillotine, it was a peaceful protest in that nothing was thrown, broken or set on fire. But it was ugly, portentous and helped to sell the narrative the GOP was peddling all week about the looming threat of “left-wing anarchy and mayhem,” as President Donald Trump put it during his convention speech Thursday night.

Yes, there’s plenty for the agitators to be agitated about. But providing B-roll for Trump reelection commercials is tactically insane.

Tactically insane. Not morally wrong — “tactically insane.” Because these incidents show the contemporary left for what it really is.

Do not be fooled.

 

 

The post Left Summons Demons Of Ideological Terror appeared first on The American Conservative.

Christian Dandy Throws A Punch

Well, this clip of a street scene in Washington DC, after Trump’s speech, is making the social media rounds. Warning: there’s a guy rolling on his bike down the street, screaming “F–K YOU! F–K TRUMP!” So be warned about the sound:

Author and media personality Eric Metaxas @ericmetaxas assaults a protestor riding on a bike pic.twitter.com/5tIBPk1fy7

— Cherie

‘Weimar America’ Is Not Just A Slogan

Andrew Sullivan, who despises Donald Trump, writes that the Democrats are going to destroy themselves by being weak on law and order. Excerpt:

Here is a quote from Yoom Nguyen, owner of the Lotus Restaurant in Minneapolis, who just witnessed a second assault on his business: “Watching looters bust down our family restaurant is so heartbreaking. Senseless, they’re doing it while laughing and smirking. Not gonna lie, I damn near shot a man tonight. He threw that fucking rock at my family photo and looked right at me. I said ‘you motherfucker …’ tears immediately rolled down my face. I just can’t no more. I’m thankful I walked away but Fuck y’all.” This is how violence metastasizes. And as I’ve watched protests devolve over the summer into a series of riots, arson expeditions, and lawless occupations of city blocks, along with disgusting and often racist profanity, I’ve begun to feel similarly. And when I watched the Democratic Convention and heard close to nothing about ending this lawlessness, I noted the silence.

I don’t think I’m the only one, as even the Democrats seem now to realize. And this massive blindspot is not hard to understand. When a political party finds itself so wedded to a new and potent ideology it cannot call out violence when it sees it, then it is walking straight into a trap. When the discourse on the left has become one in which scholars and editors and Tweeters vie with one another to up the ante on how inherently evil America has always been, redescribe it as a slaveocracy, and endorse racist books that foment the most egregious stereotypes about “whiteness”, most ordinary people, who love their country and are mostly proud of its past, will rightly balk. One of the most devastating lines in president Trump’s convention speech last night was this: “Tonight, I ask you a very simple question: How can the Democrat Party ask to lead our country when it spends so much time tearing down our country?” A cheap shot, yes. But in the current context, a political bullseye.

I mentioned in my earlier post the incident from early summer in which an email list of Democratic party data professionals had driven David Shor, an Obama administration data whiz, out of the group because of his “racist tweet” (Shor had simply linked to an academic paper showing that violent protest helps Republicans but peaceful protest helps Democrats). I brought it up as an example of this bizarre attitude many on the left have of resenting information that doesn’t confirm their preferred narrative about the protests. But until I read it just now in Andrew’s column, I had forgotten about this:

Remember the pivotal moment earlier this summer when the New York Times caved to its activist staff and fired James Bennet? It’s no accident this was over an op-ed that argued that if New York City would not stop the rioting in the streets, the feds should step in to restore order. For the far left activists who now control that paper, the imposition of order was seen not as an indispensable baseline for restoring democratic debate, but as a potential physical attack on black staffers.

It’s a good column — I’m not sure if it’s available in full to the public (I’m a paid subscriber to his substack), but if it is, then read the whole thing. 

Andrew observes in it:

And let’s be frank about this and call this by its name: this is very Weimar. The center has collapsed. Armed street gangs of far right and far left are at war on the streets. Tribalism is intensifying in every nook and cranny of the culture. The establishment right and mainstream left tolerate their respective extremes because they hate each other so much.

The pattern is textbook, if you learn anything from history: an economic crisis resulting in mass unemployment; the pent-up psychological disorders a long period of lockdown can and will unleash; a failure of nerve on the part of liberals to defend the values and institutions of liberal democracy, and of conservatives to keep their own ranks free of raw demagogues and bigots. But critically: a growing sense of disorder and violence and rioting as simply the background noise; and a sense that authorities do not have the strength or the stomach to restore order. What most people want in that kind of nerve-wracking instability is a figure who will come in and stamp it out.

He’s exactly right. The term “Weimar America” has been bandied about on the Right for a few years, but now, it is less a pejorative description than a neutral one.

My book Live Not By Lies will be released a month from tomorrow. As you regular readers know, it’s about the present and coming soft totalitarianism, and how men and women of courage and integrity should prepare themselves to live under it as resisters. I started working on the book in February 2019. The publisher chose a late September release date long before the current crisis. It is our country’s unhappy fate that this book speaks directly to Weimar America, in a way that I could not have imagined as recently as a few months ago.

This is going to be old hat to you regular readers, but I want to repeat it in light of the turn the country has taken in just the past few days. In 1951, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt published The Origins Of Totalitarianism, a detailed study of why, in the twentieth century, nations had succumbed to Fascism and Communism. Though the two totalitarian systems were at opposite ideological poles, both emerged from similar social and political conditions, Arendt found – conditions that are strikingly present in America today. Among them:

Loneliness and social atomization. Totalitarian movements, said Arendt, are “mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals.”

“What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world,” she continued. “is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses of our century.”

She wrote those words in the early 1950s, now considered in these Bowling Alone decades to have been a golden age of communal solidarity. This past January, before the long Covid-19 emergency, health insurer Cigna released results of a survey finding that 61 percent of Americans consider themselves to be lonely. Young Americans are far lonelier than the old: seven in ten Millennials call themselves lonely, with nearly eight in 10 (79 percent) of Gen Zers self-diagnosing as such.

Loss of faith in hierarchies and institutions. Loneliness is politically significant because it leaves the masses hungry for a sense of community. In a healthy society, an individual could find fellowship and common purpose through the institutions of civil society – political parties, churches, civic clubs, sports leagues, and the like.

But Americans have been dropping out of mediating institutions steadily since the 1960s. Meanwhile trust in basic institutions – political, media, religious, legal, medical, and so forth – is at dramatic lows. Young adults under 40 are the most religiously unaffiliated generation in American history, and though strongly liberal and Democratic in their political preferences, are also the least likely to embrace a political party.

In Europe of the 1920s, said Arendt, the first indication of the coming totalitarianism was the failure of established parties to attract younger members, and the willingness of the passive masses to consider radical alternatives to discredited establishment parties. Socialism is still fairly outré among Generation X and older Americans, but those who came of age after the Cold War feel much more warmly towards the radical left.

Embracing transgressiveness. In both pre-Bolshevik Russia and pre-Nazi Germany, elites reveled in acts of rebellion that made fun of traditions and standards, moral and otherwise. They immersed themselves in baseness, and called it liberation. They also took pleasure in overturning institutions and established practices for the sake of outsiders.

“The members of the elite did not object at all to paying a price, the destruction of civilization, for the fun of seeing how those who had been excluded unjustly in the past forced their way into it,” wrote Arendt. Her words apply with eerie prescience to the upheaval on today’s university campuses, within the media, and elite culture in general.

Susceptibility to propaganda and ideology. Whether out of cynicism or misplaced idealism, the willingness to surrender one’s moral responsibility to be honest for the sake of a politically useful narrative opened the door to tyranny. In pre-totalitarian nations, wrote Arendt, hating “respectable society” was so narcotic that elites were willing to accept “monstrous forgeries in historiography” for the sake of striking back at those who, in their view, had “excluded the underprivileged and oppressed from the memory of mankind.”

One considers the New York Times’s Pulitzer-winning “1619 Project,” which declares that the United States was founded for the purpose of defending slavery. Despite heavy criticism, even from historians of the left, the 1619 Project has been adapted for thousands of classrooms, and optioned by Oprah Winfrey and Lionsgate studios for television and film projects.

Valuing loyalty over competence.  “Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first- rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intellect and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty,” wrote Arendt.

All politicians prize loyalty, but few would regard it as the most important quality in government, and even fewer would admit it. But President Donald Trump is a rule- breaker in many ways. He once said, “I value loyalty above everything else— more than brains, more than drive, and more than energy.”

Trump’s exaltation of personal loyalty over expertise is discreditable and corrupting. But how can liberals complain? Loyalty to the group or the tribe is at the core of leftist identity politics. Loyalty to an ideology over expertise is no less disturbing than loyalty to a personality. This is at the root of “cancel culture,” in which transgressors, however minor their infractions, find themselves cast into outer darkness.

Anyway, I write about these things at greater length in Live Not By Lies, as you will see. My point in bringing up Arendt here (and in that section of the book) is not to say “Trump is a proto-totalitarian figure” (though he is in some ways) or “the Social Justice Left is proto-totalitarian” (though it is in many ways). Rather, I want people to recognize that America today is in a pre-totalitarian condition. The Arendtian factors that are clearly observable in our culture and society make us vulnerable to a strongman, or to a strong party capable of restoring order.

Andrew Sullivan sees Trump positioning himself as that figure. I think this is correct, but I also think it is quite deceptive to people on the Right. All the social-justice totalitarian things I write about in Live Not By Lies are processes, institutions, and trends that have grown much worse under Trump, and he has done nothing to stop them. It is one thing to tweet your opposition to cancel culture. It is another thing to act meaningfully against it. If Trump is re-elected, I see no reason at all why this is going to go away. Don’t get me wrong — that’s not a reason to vote against Trump. But it is a warning not to think that just because you vote for Trump, that soft totalitarianism’s capture of the institutions will cease, and that its grip on American life will loosen.

True, it will undoubtedly get much worse under a Biden administration, as the SJWs march through the executive branch. That alone could be sufficient reason to vote for Trump. My point, though, is that voters should not be under the impression that the only thing standing between them and soft totalitarianism is Donald Trump. It is a dangerous mistake to believe the Cold War narrative that the state is the sole source of totalitarian power. In our situation, Big Business — that is, Woke Capitalism — is more of an enforcer of soft totalitarianism than the government. And the media and academia are as well. In Live Not By Lies, I explain how this works.

In a free-market democracy, the state is limited in what it can do to stop this stuff. If companies want to submit themselves to the ideological yoke of diversity, inclusion, and equity programs, the state cannot stop them. But here’s something Donald Trump can do, and should do, to show that his opposition to soft totalitarianism is not merely rhetorical.

Take a look at this tweetstorm by Christopher Rufo, over the outrageous Critical Race Theory training he and his sources uncovered at Sandia National Lab, a federal government facility. Excerpts:

Here’s the video:

More Rufo:

And:

Read it all. And if you haven’t read Rufo’s earlier investigation of the anti-white, anti-male bigotry that Sandia’s leadership is shoving down the throats of its employees, click here — and note the training materials.

Casey Peterson is a brave man. He is not willing to live by lies, and he put his career on the line to stand for truth. He is Havel’s greengrocer. He could use an ally in the White House. I hope President Trump will put a stop at once to this kind of bigotry within the federal government. Keep in mind that neither he nor any other president can control private industry’s commissariats — but the least he could do is purge this left-wing garbage from the agencies of the federal government. If he doesn’t, then when it comes to wokeness in the executive branch, what, exactly, would be the difference between a Trump presidency and a Biden one?

 

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Trump Vs. ‘Anarchists, Agitators, Criminals’

President Trump’s speech tonight was very, very long and dull as dishwater. It was a low-energy event; it felt like late-period Brezhnev reporting on the Ukraine wheat harvest to the Politburo. Megan McArdle nailed it when she tweeted that Trump’s words “sort of leaked out of the president’s mouth and evaporated.” Towards the end, he had some strong law-and-order rhetoric, more on which anon.

But look, the best argument for Trump’s re-election took place tonight not on the White House South Lawn, but on the streets of Washington near Lafayette Park, outside the White House. This was the scene there before the president’s speech:

Protesters in front of St Johns Church chanting if “we don’t get it (justice) burn it down!” pic.twitter.com/KDq73c0Knj

— Phillip Nieto (@nieto_phillip) August 28, 2020

Elderly man assaulted by protesters near St. John’s in DC. He appeared to be walking with another elderly female wearing pro-Trump gear. pic.twitter.com/LoharqhA60

— Phillip Nieto (@nieto_phillip) August 28, 2020

An elderly couple cannot walk the streets of the nation’s capital peaceably expressing support for the president without being assaulted by these left-wing goons. Think of it! Look at how they cursed him and punched the old man, knocking him to the ground. He said he and his wife were only walking toward the White House to watch the fireworks:

Elderly man assaulted by protesters near St. John’s in DC. He appeared to be walking with another elderly female wearing pro-Trump gear. pic.twitter.com/LoharqhA60

— Phillip Nieto (@nieto_phillip) August 28, 2020

This happened too, during the president’s speech:

Someone just put a fake Trump on the guillotine in front of the White House. There’s a piece of paper on him that says “Ticket – Fascist, Rapist, Criminal”@DailyCaller pic.twitter.com/zOmQ7DgIo0

— Shelby Talcott (@ShelbyTalcott) August 28, 2020

Law and order themes were big with Trump tonight, though they were nearly swallowed entire in this 69-minute Castroite bloviation. Nevertheless, these lines and phrases will land with lots of Americans. He said that we must not give “violent reign to anarchists, agitators, and criminals,” and that this election will be about “whether we defend the American way of life, or allow a radical movement to completely dismantle and destroy it.”

He called the Biden agenda an “attack on public safety.” “This country loves its law enforcement,” Trump said, and warned that “no one will be safe in Biden’s America.” Biden, he said, will make all American cities look like “the Democrat-run city of Portland, Oregon.”

“Just think of if the ‘peaceful demonstrators’ in the street were in charge of every level of the US Government,” the president said.

“We must never allow mob rule,” said Trump. He added that the problem of rioting and looting is the weakness of Democratic governors and mayors. “This problem could be easily fixed if they wanted to,” he said. “Just call, we’re ready to go in. We could take care of your problem in a matter of hours.”

Trump said that the GOP will “remain the party of the patriotic heroes who keep America safe, and who salute the American flag.” He expanded his critique to include cancel culture, and attacks on institutions by the radical left, who are trying to “scare you into saying what you know to be false, and scare you into not saying what you know to be true.”

“Always remember: they are coming after me because I am fighting for you,” he said.

That is strong rhetoric, and insofar as they lay out the themes of the fall campaign, I think he’s on very solid ground. Again, though, the actions of protesters and rioters make Trump’s case for him. The Democrats have a huge problem here — and many of them don’t want to recognize it. Remember the lively contretemps earlier this summer involving the big Democratic Party professionals e-mail list Progressphiles? How the radicals there drove out David Shor, the young Obama administration data guru? I wrote about it here. 

They accused Shor of putting out “a racist tweet.” This was the tweet:

That’s it! That’s all he said. He said that violent demonstrations hurt Democrats. You’d think that if you were trying to get Democrats elected, you would want to know that. Now, these data and the accompanying analysis come from the 1960s, so it is arguable as to how relevant they are to America in 2020. But it’s an important question if your job is to get Democrats into office during a period of civil unrest. The radicals on that list couldn’t even bear to have the question raised. Even to ask is to question the sanctity and the righteousness of the violent protests. Out with you, Shor!

My sense is that a lot of liberals have become so heavily invested in the narrative of the Cause that they fail to see what an increasing number of ordinary Americans are seeing: that the state and law enforcement are losing control, and cannot be counted on to defend them. Trump’s line about “just call us” cannily points to the fact that law enforcement is usually a state and local responsibility — and so far, the worst violence has occurred in cities and states controlled by Democrats.

Team Biden has a difficult task ahead of itself. It has to show itself to be fully supportive of the protests against police brutality while also strongly against the violence within the protest movement. It’s hard to do, given that they have no control over Antifa, looters, and other lawless elements. Yet the Democrats are going to be associated with them anyway — the GOP is going to see to that, and the public will naturally gravitate to the Republicans’ law and order theme.

So, a boring, seemingly endless convention address by a low-energy Donald Trump tonight. But the insanity and malice of the protesters on the streets of Washington, DC, speak more brusquely, and with far more force, than he did.

 

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