Embattled Secret Service head Kimberly Cheatle has revealed the fateful reason why her agency failed to position an agent on top of the building that a gunman used to carry out an assassination attempt on Donald Trump.
Cheatle, who is already facing calls to resign over what some lawmakers are calling a massive security failure, said Secret Service officials planning security for Trump’s rally in Butler, Pennsylvania considered the warehouse about 150 yards away from where Trump spoke to be a risky position for stationing an agent.
‘That building in particular has a sloped roof at its highest point. And so, you know, there’s a safety factor that would be considered there that we wouldn’t want to put somebody up on a sloped roof,’ she told ABC News in an interview Tuesday.
‘And so, you know, the decision was made to secure the building, from inside.’
What transpired instead was a security nightmare: Thomas Matthew Crooks was able to scale the building and secure his own position, while law enforcement struggled to locate him even amid pressing warnings from members of the Trump crowd. But there wasn’t sufficient time to act on the tips, she explalined.
‘The shooter was actually identified as a potential person of suspicion,’ Cheatle said. ‘Unfortunately, with the rapid succession of how things unfolded, by the time that individual was eventually located, they were on the rooftop and were able to fire off at the former president.’
They don’t put agents on the roof because it has a gentle slope? You’ve got to be kidding me!
There is a reason the press calls murderers “suspected” or “alleged” murderers before they’ve been tried and convicted. There is a reason that, when popping sounds are heard at a rally and blood streams down a former president’s face, the media reports just that – and doesn’t jump to the conclusion that those popping sounds were gunshots and the blood caused by a bullet. The reason is an absence of certainty.
Critics have also complained that some outlets refrained from immediately deeming the shooting an “assassination attempt.” But as NBC’s Kelly O’Donnell explained: “Our reporting guidelines require that we not use that term until law enforcement describes it as an assassination attempt if/when the investigation supports that designation. It is a measured approach for accuracy.”
Anyone familiar with high-powered rifles could have heard the pops on TV and seen the blood streaming on Trump’s face and realized within five seconds there was an assassination attempt. I don’t see the necessity of waiting for some law enforcement bureaucracy to make that pronouncement.
OJ Simpson murdered two people even though a criminal jury found him not guilty. Bureaucracies are not God. They are not the seal of truth. Sometimes they’re right and sometimes they’re wrong.
This is part of the neutralization of life that has taken off since the 30 Years War in the 17th Century. More and more of life has been removed from the political (religion, race, immigration, nationalism) and turned over to experts (see Stephen Turner’s book Liberal Democracy 3.0: Civil Society in an Age of Experts).
Posted inAmerica|Comments Off on DM: Secret Service director gives bizarre reason why an agent wasn’t on the roof where gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks opened fire on Trump as she rejects calls to resign
[T]he GOP is looking to make an appeal to anti-woke Silicon Valley or finance types to fill the void left by the Republican Party’s competency crisis.
Right now, there is tremendous asymmetry between the parties in policy positions. The Democrats have a massive bench of people whose traditional qualifications are through the roof. The Republicans simply don’t, and historically Trump has been pretty repugnant to what @powerfultakes calls elite human capital. But you need to fill political appointments from somewhere.
The Thiel-adjacent wing is one of the few exceptions here, and it’s expanding. You’re seeing endorsements from, and overtures to, Elon Musk, the All-In Podcast guys, and Bill Ackman. Republicans offer a sort of Faustian bargain to ambitious anti-woke secular sorts: make your peace with the evangelicals, pander to social conservatism, and gain sway in a coalition crying out for policy competence. More than a few will take that bargain. People are drawn to power voids.
Vance is of that class. He’s smart, ambitious, Thiel-aligned, and in tune with the online right. He’s cynical enough to flip 180 degrees on a dime, and the Trump-populists are desperate enough for competence that they’ll accept his flip. He knows more than almost anyone about the right’s human capital problem. If I had to guess, I suspect that whatever he talks about, from day 1 that will be the problem he focuses most on solving.
All in all, his appointment makes me take seriously the possibility that Trump’s second term will focus seriously on setting a policy foundation for the future versus just being cult-of-personality stuff.
Posted inPolitics|Comments Off on The JD Vance Pick
Evan Wright, a modern-day gonzo journalist who embedded with an elite U.S. Marine battalion in Iraq for prizewinning articles that were published in Rolling Stone and grew into the book and HBO miniseries “Generation Kill,” died July 12 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 59.
The cause was suicide, according to his family.
Mr. Wright wrote for magazines including Time and Vanity Fair but was perhaps best known for his contributions to Rolling Stone, the literary home beginning in the 1970s of Hunter S. Thompson, the renegade writer who embodied the personal, sometimes subversive brand of reportage known as gonzo journalism.
Mr. Wright rejected the frequent comparisons between him and Thompson.
“‘Gonzo’ speaks of writing that is more about the reporter than the subject,” he wrote in a book-length collection of his articles, “Hella Nation: Looking for Happy Meals in Kandahar, Rocking the Side Pipe, Wingnut’s War Against the Gap, and Other Adventures With the Totally Lost Tribes of America” (2009). “With few exceptions, my intent has always been to focus on my subjects in all of their imperfect glory.”
But for better or worse, the analogy stuck. To readers interested in the affairs of the world beyond those reported in the columns of more tradition-bound publications, Mr. Wright’s byline carried the promise of a riveting, insightful, visceral read. He infiltrated a gathering of neo-Nazis in Idaho, reported from the trenches of anarchist groups and chronicled the lives of sorority girls at Ohio State University, in addition to profiling show business celebrities including Shakira and Quentin Tarantino.
Mr. Wright was most celebrated, however, as a war correspondent, embedding first with the U.S. military during the Afghan war and then, in 2003, with the Marine First Reconnaissance Battalion in Iraq. His writings from Iraq, a three-part series published in Rolling Stone as “The Killer Elite,” received the 2004 National Magazine Award for reporting.
“Writer-photographer Evan Wright risked his life to get this story — a rollicking, profane, brutal look at the Marines of Bravo Company, who led the charge into Iraq last year,” read the citation. “In the course of myriad firefights, mortar shellings and ambushes, Wright won the trust of his subjects, but he remained clear-eyed, depicting the soldier’s cold-bloodedness as well as their humanity. Brilliant down to the last detail.”
Mr. Wright expanded his articles into the book “Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America and the New Face of American War,” published in 2004 and adapted in 2008 into an HBO miniseries that Mr. Wright co-wrote with David Simon and Ed Burns, both of “The Wire.” In a post on X after Mr. Wright’s death, Simon recalled him as “charming, funny and not a little bit feral, as many reporters are.”
I first met Evan Wright in 1996 when he was an editor at Larry Flynt’s porn magazines. He started publishing in Rolling Stone in 1999 and I only saw him occasionally after that.
We were always on good terms. In December of 1998, he paid me $1000 to write an essay about the Pope for a Seth Warshavsky publication. I was supposed to get paid $3000 but after I turned in my work, I settled for what I could get.
“Porn attracts a wacky element,” Luke Ford says. “Case A: Luke Ford.” Since April 1998, Ford, a thirty-three-year-old convert to Orthodox Judaism, has been writing a daily Web column covering the triple-X industry (lukeford.com). Ford exposes drug use, mob connections and murder plots, and details the operatic dramas of porn stars’ daily lives. Sometimes the column is about little more than Ford’s fascination with his own life. He posts naked pictures of himself cavorting with porn actresses, and when his stepmom sent him a letter calling him “devil possessed,” he put it on his site. (Ford’s father, a Christian evangelist, brands Luke “mentally unstable” as a result of a head injury he suffered as a teen.)
…When the leaders of the top adult video and Internet companies gathered at a secretive conference in Cancun, Mexico, in the spring, Ford was a prime topic. The owner of a chain of adult stores [Edward Wedelstedt] was reportedly heard saying not only that Ford is a “menace to society” but “no one should worry about him anymore – Luke’s going to end up as a spot on the pavement.”
Death threats notwithstanding, everybody in the adult business reads the column. The secret to his success? “People in the porn business are extremely self-involved,” says Michael Louis Albo, executive editor of Hustler Erotic Video Guide. “Luke angers them, but they love reading about themselves in his column.”
Evan wasn’t careful with his facts. I had journalist friends who despised Evan because they believed he was untrustworthy, they alleged he would paint dishonest narratives if they served him. I saw that Evan was playing a game that served Evan.
Evan’s career peaked with his publication of the book Generation Kill in 2004. Nothing he published after that had the same impact.
He was intermittently a heavy drug user.
Evan was an introvert. That we each spent so much time in the porn industry reveals our self-destructive sides. We enjoyed slumming it. In some ways, we felt more comfortable with the refuse of society rather than its best.
Smiling Arab emails me:
Thoughts on Evan Wright bro? Just saw that he died of suicide, seemingly lost amidst the vacuum suck of the last 3 days.
Supposedly he just appeared in an HBO Max doc about one of those schools that would take in “troubled” kids and beat the fuck out of them and sometimes fuck the fuck out of them too. Like I think it aired last week or something and he killed himself the next day. Shocking shit.
He was easily the one guy from your old interviews that seemed genuinely impressive. “Generation Kill” is about the only book from the Iraq War that is readable today. I have a bunch and they’re all trash. Even books about ISIS are total fucking garbage and it’s only been like 6 years since the Caliphate fell.
When I think about Evan Wright, it brings up this quote: “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” – Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (1886), Chapter IV. Apophthegms and Interludes, §146).
The one piece of advice I got from Evan was to pick my enemies carefully. He thought I was reckless with the way I went after everyone in power on my blog and he urged me to be more selective with my targets.
Evan appeared to be a gonzo journalist, but ultimately he was a careerist – he put his career before every other consideration. He played the game more carefully than I did by following the dictates of those with power such as Larry Flynt, Seth Warshavsky and Rolling Stone.
Posted inJournalism|Comments Off on WP: Evan Wright, unflinching author of ‘Generation Kill,’ dies at 59
Sometimes the media downplays stories like the Trump assassination attempt on Saturday night, making them sound dull. It makes you wonder why they’re underplaying it even days later.
A column by David Samuels states that mainstream media often acts as propaganda for the Democratic Party and tends to minimize news against their narrative. For example, when Donald Trump was shot at during a rally, there was initial confusion over whether it was a bullet or glass that hit him—media outlets reported with caution.
Reports indicate law enforcement had been warned about the shooter well before he fired at Trump but failed to act in time. This raises questions about security competence and intentions under the Biden administration since they oversee Secret Service appointments.
There are two main theories: either Trump received poor security due to incompetence or there’s an assassination plot involved. No one responsible for this failure has resigned or admitted fault yet.
It seems crucial now more than ever for an independent investigation into this matter, as relying solely on internal reviews might not yield transparent results given potential biases within current leadership structures.
The security at a recent event where former President Trump was speaking has raised serious questions. Was it incompetence or an inside assassination plot? The Secret Service’s failure to secure the perimeter and monitor threats is alarming. Surprisingly, those with knowledge of rifles quickly identified the shots fired as coming from a high-powered rifle at a distance—an obvious assassination attempt, something media guidelines won’t label without bureaucratic confirmation.
Where were the Secret Service when shots rang out? Video evidence shows their delayed response in covering Trump and apprehending the shooter. This level of incompetence suggests two possibilities: either gross negligence by security or complicity in an assassination attempt. Most experts on firearms tend to lean right politically, offering different insights than mainstream media.
Understanding the history of the Secret Service is crucial here. Once part of Treasury and focused on financial crimes, they’re now tasked with protecting dignitaries like the president—a duty they seemingly failed at during this incident.
This lapse has led some to speculate that there might be intentional sabotage within Biden’s administration—though I don’t subscribe to that theory myself. It’s hard for people to believe such staggering incompetence could occur without malice behind it.
As more details emerge about the shooter—who had explosives and purchased ammunition just hours before—the investigation raises further doubts about its thoroughness and objectivity. With past FBI failures fresh in memory, confidence wanes in their ability to uncover motives or prevent similar incidents.
Despite calls for accountability after what could have been a live execution caught on camera, no resignations are forthcoming from top officials like Secret Service Director Kim C., who insists she’ll stay on despite admitting responsibility for this fiasco.
In Washington D.C., words aren’t always matched by actions; even near disasters aren’t enough for leaders to step down or be dismissed. Now we wait anxiously for investigations that may never reveal if this was truly an act of ineptitude or something darker within our government’s ranks.
The committee investigating the assassination attempt on Donald Trump should take over from federal authorities and hold televised hearings under oath. They must question counter-snipers and others involved to ensure nothing is covered up.
Why didn’t the Secret Service neutralize the shooter, Crooks, who had a gun aimed at Trump for several seconds before firing? In standard law enforcement, an immediate threat like this would be met with lethal force. Yet it seems they allowed Crooks to fire eight shots before responding. This raises questions about their protocols compared to private security or other law enforcement agencies.
Alejandro Mayorkas of Homeland Security oversees the Secret Service, yet despite their failure during this incident, he expresses full confidence in them. This could imply either complicity in an assassination plot against Trump or a blatant lie given their incompetence.
Former FBI informants have been encouraged by the agency to cause chaos previously – what does that say about current events?
Experts knew immediately upon hearing gunfire that this was an attempt on Trump’s life; however, media waited for official confirmation before acknowledging it as such.
Once attacked, protection of President transitions from Secret Service to a DOJ investigation led by the FBI. Despite claims of effective protocols since 1981’s attack on Reagan, this event suggests otherwise.
Secret Service agents are trained extensively for various scenarios including perimeter defense and close-protection detail. Elon Musk’s support for Trump highlights these professionals’ bravery rather than any political bias they may hold.
Finally, personal spiritual revelations can lead one away from societal norms towards truth-seeking isolation—a journey not always understood by loved ones but significant nonetheless.
Kip calls in: At 38, I realized everything I thought was wrong. Your work made me appreciate things differently and now, I see you hold a key to questions that need answering. We’ve both seen how the media turned on Trump overnight despite his cognitive decline over years – it’s that same force. The richest people in America are pulling strings behind the scenes.
I’m past caring about Hollywood politics; what matters is who’s really in control and if those we’ve converted might be involved without veering into conspiracy theories. People act primarily out of self-interest; this explains why one day they love you and the next they don’t.
Luke: Groups have unique gifts but also downsides – like Ashkenazi Jews’ high verbal IQ or African Americans’ improvisational skills contrasted with higher crime rates. These traits affect how different groups navigate society.
Jewish law seems inflexible from outside, but living it reveals its flexibility – knowing what’s acceptable within their community has been crucial for survival as minorities throughout history.
Intelligence among Ashkenazi Jews surged a thousand years ago due to selective pressures in Europe where only the smartest survived and thrived, leading to their success today across various fields.
In conversations around intelligence, openness plays a significant role alongside other personality traits like extroversion and agreeableness which correlate with success in life. This could explain why certain groups seem more successful than others in particular areas.
Expert looking at Secret Service counter-sniper: I’m baffled by his actions. If I were using that scope, I’d first spot my target with my own eyes then use the scope to zoom in. It seems like when he lifted his eye from the scope, shots rang out and Trump was hit. The men on the roof seemed to be tracking the shooter for some time before engaging him after eight shots at Trump.
This raises questions about whether it was a Secret Service decision to delay responding. Positioned on a flat roof, one sniper kneeled – not ideal – while incoming fire killed one and injured others; they only engaged after significant delay.
There’s speculation that law enforcement knew of a threat to Trump for 26 minutes but did nothing, suggesting either an assassination plot or gross incompetence within the Secret Service.
Witnesses saw someone suspicious climbing onto a roof with a gun; however, despite reports, no action was taken by local or state partners present at the scene. This oversight begs whether it was deliberate ignorance due to an interest in seeing harm come to Trump.
Further complicating matters is how this person managed undetected access onto the roof with equipment despite being spotted by civilians who alerted authorities – all ignored or unaddressed by law enforcement communications channels including those of Secret Service.
The rules of engagement call for deadly force only under immediate threat which may explain hesitation if there were uncertainties about identifying friend from foe among non-uniformed individuals aiming weapons at Trump. However, given clear protocols against such scenarios, failure suggests possible complicity in an assassination attempt or profound systemic failures raising concerns over who orchestrated such inadequacies within presidential protection services.
Ultimately these events lead us back to questions regarding responsibility and accountability within security operations tasked with protecting former President Donald Trump during this incident where so much went wrong yet seemingly unnoticed until too late.
The BBC interviewed a man who claimed multiple people on the ground saw a threat near an event. Surprisingly, this didn’t reach the Secret Service in time to delay the individual’s stage access. CBS News reported that one sniper observed Thomas Matthew Crooks looking up at the building and then disappearing. Later, with a range finder and backpack in hand, he reappeared.
Snipers inside were watching for threats at a Trump rally when they spotted Crooks outside. Partygoers nearby also noticed him climbing onto the roof armed with a rifle. Questions arose about why perimeter surveillance failed to detect him sooner.
During an FBI press conference, there was no clear answer as to how Crooks got onto the roof or where aerial surveillance was during this incident. The media has been criticized for its handling of the story, with some outlets seemingly downplaying or misrepresenting it.
It is crucial to ask why there was no perimeter or aerial surveillance and why it took so long for snipers to engage the shooter once identified as a threat. Proper protective intelligence should have prevented such an incident from occurring close enough to endanger lives.
Posted inAmerica|Comments Off on Why Did The Biden Administration Give Trump Incompetent Security? (7-14-24)
Hey Luke, I have been pondering your question about Biden’s cognitive decline, even though that issue appears to have been at least temporarily superseded by the events of this weekend.
As to what’s going on with Biden, I think you need to look at Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression‘s discussion of the New Class and its contradictions, which are perhaps manifested in the shielding of Biden. I note Alvin Gouldner’s observation that:
The culture of the New Class exacts still other costs: since its discourse emphasizes the importance of carefully edited speech, this has the vices of its virtues: in its virtuous aspect, self-editing implies a commendable circumspection, carefulness, self-discipline and “seriousness.”
So, Biden clearly presents a problem on this front. But, of course, a lot of people have strong career interests in a second Biden term, as unlikely as that now appears, and will not sacrifice these for the greater good. This is because, as I write:
However, Gouldner also stressed that the New Class is no gathering of benign technocrats selflessly promoting the public good. For it is a morally ambiguous “flawed universal class” that is “elitist and self-seeking and uses its special knowledge to advance its own interests and power,” and so “embod[ies] the collective interest but partially and transiently.”
When you contrast Biden’s cognitive decline (and denial about it) with Trump’s triumphal, fist-raising defiance of death this weekend in Pennsylvania, you have the perfect symbolic embodiment of conservatives’ belief that a decadent liberalism is sapping the vitality of the country, with Trump carrying the flame of that endangered vitality.
Alvin Gouldner observes that higher education is the institution through which the “New Class is at first readied for contest against the old class.” Colleges and universities are “the finishing schools of the New Class’s resistance to the old class.” Taking this notion to its logical conclusion, conservative claimants of cultural oppression believe that the elite universities from which the liberal elites hail are more akin to social fraternities than to Platonic academies.
Admission to elite colleges is commonly seen as a marker of intellectual merit. But more important, writes [Angelo] Codevilla, is the candidate’s contribution to a “social profile that fits the school’s image of itself,” a commitment to “fit in,” to be “in with the right people,” and give “the required signs that one is on the right side, and joining in despising the Outs.” Academic merit is a social construction of the ruling liberal elites, an institutional filter designed to weed out conservatives and set the stage for widespread liberal domination. First inculcated in the university, the elites’ “tastes and habits” are later enforced with the threat of social ostracism. It is, writes Anderson, simply assumed in Rawls’s Cambridge or Manhattan’s Upper West Side or the CBS newsroom that one has “the correct liberal opinions,” and those who do not will simply stop receiving dinner invitations. In withholding these invitations, liberals are just doing what they were trained to do in the college classroom, where the ostracism of conservatives was first introduced to them as “progressive” behavior.
The elite university believes it has replaced an old WASP-regime of social virtue revolving around gentility and “character” with a new regime of intellectual virtue revolving around raw mental firepower. But conservative claimants of cultural oppression charge that the new intellectual virtues are social virtues in disguise, just as automatic and unreflective as those of the WASP ancien régime. It is the elite universities, laments Gelernter, that produced Obama, the “symbol of the new American elite, the new establishment, where left-liberal politics is no longer a conviction, no longer a way of thinking: it is built-in mind-furniture you take for granted without needing to think.” Consequently, the nation is “filling inexorably with Airheads, nominally educated yet ignorant; trained and groomed like prize puppies to be good liberals.”222To defend liberalism as a mere conviction is to refuse the role of the liberal prize puppy, to refuse liberalism as a social identity. But perversely, it is liberalism qua social identity, qua automatic social reflex, that has been culturally credentialed as the embodiment of a privileged intellectual acuity. Just as the classic finishing schools strove to inculcate a certain physical posture, so the elite universities now inculcate a certain mental and spiritual posture through which to announce oneself curious, broad-minded, given to scientific detachment and dispassionate analysis, etc.— that is, as a member of the anointed in good standing. With this training having tethered students’ self-esteem to liberalism, they become prize puppy liberals who cannot see that their intellectualism is really an exercise in social signaling…
But just as the Left relativizes the value of economic liberty to the interests of capitalists, so conservatives relativize the value of expressive autonomy to the New Class culture of wordsmiths, artists, and entertainers. Bork observes that the student radicals of the 1960s were later attracted to careers through which they could influence opinions and attitudes,73their ultimate passion. But not everyone shares this passion. And the radical expressive individualism liberalism celebrates will only resonate for those who share this powerful need for symbolic manipulation—and the social privilege that permits it. It is only the molders of opinion and sensibility whose career paths require an unqualified right to continually transgress the boundaries of decency and good taste. Liberals will sugarcoat this aggression in anodyne abstractions like self-expression or autonomy. But conservatives believe these abstractions are ideological instruments of elite domination, initiated in the 1960s and continuing to this day. The 1960s were, as Kimball says, a revolution “of the privileged, by the privileged, and for the privileged.”74Itwas a revolution, not of individualists against collectivists, but of one collective against another, of the people of fashion against the common people, whose cause has now been taken up by conservatives…
Gouldner argued that the New Class of professional knowledge workers is a progressive force in some ways. It has no truck with traditional hierarchies, including all the privileges of the old class of bourgeois capitalists. The New Class furthermore promotes a linguistic culture, the “culture of careful and critical discourse”(CCD), that de-authorizes “all speech grounded in traditional societal authority.” However, Gouldner also stressed that the New Classis not a group of benign technocrats selflessly promoting the public good.166Rather,it is a morally ambiguous “flawed universal class”167that is “elitist and self-seeking and uses its special knowledge to advance its own interests and power,”168and so “embod[ies] the collective interest but partially and transiently.” While the New Class is hostile to traditional bourgeois interests and values, it is itself a cultural bourgeoisie whose commitment to freedom is qualified by its interest in maintaining its cultural capital. It may be egalitarian when attacking the privileges of the old class, bourgeois conservatives. But it also seeks to maintain its own guild advantages, to which end it attempts to “control the supply and limit the production of its culture, to oppose any group that restricts its control over its culture, and to remove legal or moral restrictions on the uses for which its culture may be purchased.” As the defender of free thought and expression, the New Class opposes formal censorship. But as a cultural bourgeoisie, it has its own interests to protect, and practices unofficial censorship by limiting discussion to members of its own elite, dismissing those who have not been properly credentialed as irrelevant. Even as it subverts old inequalities, the New Class “silently inaugurates a new hierarchy of the knowing, the knowledgeable, the reflexive and insightful.”
What liberals interpret as conservatives’ primordial anti-intellectualism is better understood as a specific reaction to the New Class culture, to the cognitive privileges which that culture affords its liberal membership. The New Class’s cultural capital is ostensibly founded on the culture of careful and critical discourse, which is laudable if taken at face value. But as a culture, CCD must take on a life of its own in order to fulfill its cultural function as a hero-system, to which end its libertarian features will be compromised as necessary. Its membership seeks to be recognized, not merely as having been insightful on some particular occasion, but as “the reflexive and insightful.” They wish to see themselves as the kinds of people who make insightful observations. And this requires that the concrete meaning and function of their intellectual ideals be circumscribed accordingly, so that what qualifies as “serious” speech is defined by their identitarian needs—the “mainstream” as the Duke deconstructionist put it. Professionalism, writes Gouldner, is “among the public ideologies of the New Class, and is the genteel subversion of the old class by the new.”
Translated into our framework, this is a hierarchy between those who stand above the “peculiarly human emotions” and those who do not, between those capable of naturalistic disengagement and those whose sensibilities remain anthropocentricor “pre-modern.” This is the distinctively liberal “bigoted clause,” the distinctively liberal “Moral Order” in relation to which conservatism represents a form of contagion. The New Class may not feel disgust toward homosexuality or go out of their way to shame unwed mothers. But they nevertheless feel themselves emancipated from a certain kind of “lowness,” as Gouldner puts it, which they now identify with conservatism. Hence their conservaphobia, which is simply the corollary of the ethos of disengaged self-control and self-reflexivity. Conservaphobia is always couched in a utilitarian façade, as a response to the perniciousness of conservative ideas. But conservatives correctly sense that it is a source of intrinsic identitarian satisfactions, and this is why they claim cultural oppression.
The elitism of the liberal elite is an elitism, not of wealth, status, or even education, but of moral luck, the fact that they have been undeservedly blessed with the capacity to sublimate, intellectualize, and etherealize their illiberalism, and thus be illiberal with comparative impunity. Their illiberalism may be less pernicious by some measures. But this is nothing for which they deserve any credit, because this is a difference of social background and personal constitution, not individual courage or intrinsic virtue. Just like everyone else, they have been, as Heidegger says, thrown into a particular field of social meanings. And their good luck on this front is, from the cosmic viewpoint to which they themselves aspire, just as arbitrary as the inherited fortunes of third-generation plutocrats. Hence conservatives’ perverse sense that liberal equality taken to its logical conclusion would somehow redound to their cause. Their claims of cultural oppression transpose the categories which liberal discourse applies to the world onto that very discourse, because it is here that the sublimated conservatism of liberals can be discovered. These claims’ profound, ceaselessly innovative perversity, their ineluctably convoluted character, is the direct outcome of this effort to transpose the ideals of liberalism onto this meta-level. This is the philosophical meaning of what liberals mistake for mere rancor.
…Gouldner observes that the New Class demands “instinctual renunciation” of its members and that, moreover,
“The culture of the New Class exacts still other costs: since its discourse emphasizes the importance of carefully edited speech, this has the vices of its virtues: in its virtuous aspect, self-editing implies a commendable circumspection, carefulness, self-discipline and “seriousness.” In its negative modality, however, self-editing also disposes toward an unhealthy self-consciousness, toward stilted convoluted speech, an inhibition of play, imagination and passion, and continual pressure for expressive discipline. The new rationality thus becomes the source of a new alienation. Calling for watchfulness and self-discipline, CCD [culture of critical discourse] is productive of intellectual reflexivity and the loss of warmth and spontaneity. Moreover, that very reflexivity stresses the importance of adjusting action to some pattern of propriety. There is, therefore, a structured inflexibility when facing changing situations; there is a certain disregard of the differences in situations, and an insistence on hewing to the required rule.”
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
