Alt Right Safe Space in Berkeley

Posted on May 28, 2016 by Luke Ford

Anatoly Karlin writes: On May 6, Richard Spencer and the Bay Area Alt Right organized a “safe space” for Europeans at Sproul Plaza, U.C. Berkeley.

Although I do not strictly consider myself Alt Right (or NRx), I do support about 70% of their positions, so I was happy to turn up with them to troll my alma mater.

Richard Spencer was interviewed by a couple of student journalists, while the rest of us engaged slack-jawed passersby in discussions about identity, human biodiversity, and the necessity of becoming who you are. I suppose that means my “Far Right Recruiter” achievement trophy has been unlocked.

Apart from one SJW neckbeard, seen above delivering a spittle-flecked rant while an aloof shitlord looks on smugly, the event passed off peacefully. This was probably on account of it being announced on very short notice, which didn’t give local Antifa organizations the time to mount a coordinated response.

Otherwise, the crowd that gathered was very multicultural, as you might expect of UCB’s demographics. Vibrant. Diverse. The debates were vigorous, even if the two sides largely talked past each other. For many intelligent normies, even concepts as basic as the intellectual crisis of the blank slate model and the replication crisis in psychology, now widely accepted outside explicitly ideological university departments, came as big and incredible news. Meanwhile, the Alt Righters tended to come in too thick and too fast and triggered away potential sympathizers by frontloading too much overt European Identity in their talking points when a more exclusively data-based focus might have been more productive. That said, I’m not criticizing. It’s still good that these ideas are getting out there on the streets instead of just sitting on computer pixels.

There were some surprises too and from rather unexpected quarters. Richard Spencer had a highly cordial discussion with an Israeli woman, who agreed with his point that if Israel could have a wall then who was to say that America couldn’t? Common ground was found with Bernie supporters, who although highly highly averse to the race talk and predisposed to blame colonialism for the Third World’s ills were fully in line with the Alt Right’s desire to stop meddling abroad. And there was one Japanese student who revealed his astounding power level by quietly confiding his avid perusal of The Daily Stormer. The merchant fears the samurai, indeed.

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‘My students are know-nothings.’

Posted on May 28, 2016 by Luke Ford

I think most people who go to college in the USA do not belong in college.

A professor tells me: “You just wouldn’t believe what college is like now. No standards at all. It’s all about economics–it’s a business, and a bubble. And the only way to keep it going is to continue to accept and enroll more and more students.”

Friend: “With all this US college campus hysteria about gender pronouns how are they going to spread that to language classes like french where everything is ‘la’, ‘le’, ‘un’ and ‘une’?”

Professor Patrick J. Deneen writes: My students are know-nothings. They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent. But their minds are largely empty, devoid of any substantial knowledge that might be the fruits of an education in an inheritance and a gift of a previous generation. They are the culmination of western civilization, a civilization that has forgotten it origins and aims, and as a result, has achieved near-perfect indifference about itself.

It’s difficult to gain admissions to the schools where I’ve taught – Princeton, Georgetown, and now Notre Dame. Students at these institutions have done what has been demanded of them: they are superb test-takers, they know exactly what is needed to get an A in every class (meaning that they rarely allow themselves to become passionate and invested in any one subject), they build superb resumes. They are respectful and cordial to their elders, though with their peers (as snatches of passing conversation reveal), easygoing if crude. They respect diversity (without having the slightest clue what diversity is) and they are experts in the arts of non-judgmentalism (at least publically). They are the cream of their generation, the masters of the universe, a generation-in-waiting who will run America and the world.

But ask them some basic questions about the civilization they will be inheriting, and be prepared for averted eyes and somewhat panicked looks. Who fought in the Peloponnesian war? What was at stake at the Battle of Salamis? Who taught Plato, and whom did Plato teach? How did Socrates die? Raise your hand if you have read both the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Canterbury Tales? Paradise Lost? The Inferno?

Who was Saul of Tarsus? What were the 95 theses, who wrote them, and what was their effect? Why does the Magna Carta matter? How and where did Thomas Becket die? What happened to Charles I? Who was Guy Fawkes, and why is there a day named after him? What happened at Yorktown in 1781? What did Lincoln say in his Second Inaugural? His first Inaugural? How about his third Inaugural? Who can tell me one or two of the arguments that are made in Federalist 10? Who has read Federalist 10? What are the Federalist Papers?

Some students, due most often to serendipitous class choices or a quirky old-fashioned teacher, might know a few of these answers. But most students will not know many of them, or vast numbers like them, because they have not been educated to know them. At best they possess accidental knowledge, but otherwise are masters of systematic ignorance. They are not to be blamed for their pervasive ignorance of western and American history, civilization, politics, art and literature. It is the hallmark of their education. They have learned exactly what we have asked of them – to be like mayflies, alive by happenstance in a fleeting present.

Our students’ ignorance is not a failing of the educational system – it is its crowning achievement. Efforts by several generations of philosophers and reformers and public policy experts whom our students (and most of us) know nothing about have combined to produce a generation of know-nothings. The pervasive ignorance of our students is not a mere accident or unfortunate but correctible outcome, if only we hire better teachers or tweak the reading lists in high school. It is the consequence of a civilizational commitment to civilizational suicide. The end of history for our students signals the End of History for the West.

During my lifetime, lamentation over student ignorance has been sounded by the likes of E.D. Hirsch, Allan Bloom, Mark Bauerlein and Jay Leno, among many others. But these lamentations have been leavened with the hope that appeal to our and their better angels might reverse the trend (that’s an allusion to one of Lincoln’s inaugural addresses, by the way). E.D. Hirsch even worked up a self-help curriculum, a do-it yourself guide on how to become culturally literate, imbued with the can-do American spirit that cultural defenestration could be reversed by a good reading list in the appendix. Broadly missing is sufficient appreciation that this ignorance is the intended consequence of our educational system, a sign of its robust health and success.

We have fallen into the bad and unquestioned habit of thinking that our educational system is broken, but it is working on all cylinders. What our educational system aims to produce is cultural amnesia, a wholesale lack of curiosity, historyless free agents, and educational goals composed of contentless processes and unexamined buzz-words like “critical thinking,” “diversity,” “ways of knowing,” “social justice,” and “cultural competence.” Our students are the achievement of a systemic commitment to producing individuals without a past for whom the future is a foreign country, cultureless ciphers who can live anywhere and perform any kind of work without inquiring about its purposes or ends, perfected tools for an economic system that prizes “flexibility” (geographic, interpersonal, ethical). In such a world, possessing a culture, a history, an inheritance, a commitment to a place and particular people, specific forms of gratitude and indebtedness (rather than a generalized and deracinated commitment to “social justice), a strong set of ethical and moral norms that assert definite limits to what one ought and ought not to do (aside from being “judgmental”) are hindrances and handicaps. Regardless of major or course of study, the main object of modern education is to sand off remnants of any cultural or historical specificity and identity that might still stick to our students, to make them perfect company men and women for a modern polity and economy that penalizes deep commitments. Efforts first to foster appreciation for “multi-culturalism” signaled a dedication to eviscerate any particular cultural inheritance, while the current fad of “diversity” signals thoroughgoing commitment to de-cultured and relentless homogenization.

My students are the fruits of a longstanding project to liberate all humans from the accidents of birth and circumstance, to make a self-making humanity. Understanding liberty to be the absence of constraint, forms of cultural inheritance and concomitant gratitude were attacked as so many arbitrary limits on personal choice, and hence, matters of contingency that required systematic disassembly. Believing that the source of political and social division and war was residual commitment to religion and culture, widespread efforts were undertaken to eliminate such devotions in preference to a universalized embrace of toleration and detached selves. Perceiving that a globalizing economic system required deracinated workers who could live anywhere and perform any task without curiosity about ultimate goals and effects, a main task of education became instillation of certain dispositions rather than grounded knowledge – flexibility, non-judgmentalism, contentless “skills,” detached “ways of knowing,” praise for social justice even as students were girded for a winner-take-all economy, and a fetish for diversity that left unquestioned why it was that everyone was identically educated at indistinguishable institutions. At first this meant the hollowing of local, regional, and religious specificity in the name of national identity. Today it has came to mean the hollowing of national specificity in the name of globalized cosmopolitanism, which above all requires studied oblivion to anything culturally defining. The inability to answer basic questions about America or the West is not a consequence of bad education; it is a marker of a successful education.

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Dear Luke,

Posted on May 28, 2016 by Luke Ford

A goy professor writes:

One thing about Judaism is that if you hang out in there long enough, as you have, I imagine you don’t much rub shoulders with functionally illiterate 32-year old women… too bad for you, right? Haha. I’m joking around, but I do wonder how you keep up the faith it takes to motivate you to write as much and as well as you do. I suppose you have some confirmation that you’ve accumulated an audience, and what a sophisticated crowd it must be. By contrast, I just got an email from a woman who is probably about 32-years old. She was panicked. She’s in my summer class, where I’m trying to squeeze 16-weeks and 3 real college credits into a 4-week night class. We’re two weeks in, and so we’re getting through the Puritans. I’m out at work early tonight to meet her –oh, here she is now. Fortuitous. More in a bit.

Well, it’s a day and a half later. That’s how it goes for me. I guess if I didn’t have a wife and kids and job, maybe I could blog that much… but that all misses the point. The real point is, how do you believe that it’s “worth it?” That anyone will change his mind? It seems like changing one’s mind based on cogent arguments is a thing of the past, like the age of miracles.

Of course I try not to be simple and say things like, “Kids these days,” at least not with a tone that suggests doom. Maybe we’re witnessing the birth of something new–some new way of thinking. But just as the spread of literacy and the printing press changed the world, including probably precipitating Protestantism’s revolution of Europe and colonization of North America, the spread of illiteracy–or, if you feel offended by that–“new literacy,” is going to have major consequences. Two nights ago, teaching the Federalist Papers to adults taking summer class, I realized that in their minds, some significant break has taken place in the time between 1787 and now that makes them unashamed to say, “it’s like I’m reading another language” when I ask them what the following means:

Among the most formidable of the obstacles which the new Constitution will have to encounter may readily be distinguished the obvious interest of a certain class of men in every State to resist all changes which may hazard a diminution of the power, emolument, and consequence of the offices they hold under the State establishments; and the perverted ambition of another class of men, who will either hope to aggrandize themselves by the confusions of their country, or will flatter themselves with fairer prospects of elevation from the subdivision of the empire into several partial confederacies than from its union under one government.

And again I’m not trying to gloat or condescend, I’m just trying to pay attention to this change we’re witnessing. I tweeted that single sentence while they were trying to work out what it means (I had provided definitions for about a dozen words), and found that it took five tweets. In Twitter, we call that a “tweet storm,” and almost everyone avoids reading a thread like that. But it’s one single sentence. And I know some who would say maybe we’re better off–maybe we could express that same idea more concisely: “People will try to advantage themselves by writing the Constitution a certain way, so watch out.” Maybe that would be better. Hm.

But this is all preamble. What I mean to discuss is the seeming failure of education. I tweeted you a link the other day to an essay called Res Idiotica, by Patrick J. Deneen. I hope you read it–it was a kind of revelation for me. Deneen makes the case that education hasn’t failed at all; it is doing exactly what it was designed to do, namely: “to produce a generation of know-nothings.” Here’s part of Deneen’s big finish (I love this; it feels so accurate):

Above all, the one overarching lesson that students receive is to understand themselves to be radically autonomous selves within a comprehensive global system with a common commitment to mutual indifference. Our commitment to mutual indifference is what binds us together as a global people. Any remnant of a common culture would interfere with this prime directive: a common culture would imply that we share something thicker, an inheritance that we did not create, and a set of commitments that imply limits and particular devotions. Ancient philosophy and practice heaped praise upon res publica – a devotion to public things, things we share together. We have instead created the world’s first res idiotica – from the Greek word idiotes, meaning “private individual.” Our education system excels at producing solipsistic, self-contained selves whose only public commitment is an absence of commitment to a public, a common culture, a shared history. They are perfectly hollowed vessels, receptive and obedient, without any real obligations or devotions.

A remnant! Anyway, the point is, you would have to be almost willfully ignorant of history to believe that we are now in unprecedented times. There are dozens of precedents for this phase of history, and only the superficial manifestations of form are different. The Egyptians and Babylonians traversed this phase; the Greeks did, the Romans did shortly thereafter. The Ottomans, the Ming Dynasty, not to mention that India has endured this part of the cycle probably half a dozen times in the past 10,000 years. But who has bothered to read the Egyptian Book of the Dead and study the glyphs? Who has read Thucydides (except Victor Davis Hanson, and who reads him?)? Who reads Plutarch or Tacitus anymore? The point is, it is an embarrassing confession of historical illiteracy to so much as gesture in the direction of Hitler when discussing the rise of Trump; it is an assumption that all nationalism is akin to Nazism. One has to be ignorant of modern day Japan and Singapore and China and Israel to make such a claim, let alone harboring an ignorance of Chiang Kai Shek, Tokugawa, Napolean, etc. And who bothers to use wikipedia to learn about Anacharsis Cloots or Sergei Nechaev or Rosa Luxemburg or any number of other people who might have insight into our current crisis? The answer is, none but a few autistic users of the /pol/ board on 4Chan, apparently. The rest of the West is being carefully ushered through a scrubbing of all history, such that most high school graduates know little beyond a few talking points (pronounced in cave man voice): “Martin Luther King, Jr. was good. Hitler was bad.”

Now I’m more than a thousand words in and I have 100% confidence that the only people who might still be reading this are exceptions to my rule. So no matter what I intended to argue, it cannot be widely effective, because 95% of people won’t read 1000 words.

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Jewish Feminists: #Shoutyourabortion

Posted on May 27, 2016 by Luke Ford

The Forward tweets: “Have you had an abortion? We want to hear from you. #ShoutYourAbortion”

Forward: Last week, our own Larry Cohler-Esses shared his story of helping a close friend obtain an abortion in 1969, when it was still illegal and dangerous to do so. When Larry interviewed his friend decades later, she told him that “the experience for me was just an experience…I don’t believe it was life altering. I don’t believe it either guided my path or determined my path.”
Some women are sure of their choice.
In an amicus brief submitted to the Supreme Court by 26 women in connection with Whole Woman Health v. Hellerstedt, one of the signatories, Debra Hauser, explained that “In 1995, at age 35, I found myself alone, pregnant and caring for my six-month-old son. My husband had gone to work one day and did not return …. To this day, I am certain that choosing an abortion was the most responsible, moral, and loving action that I could have taken — for me and for my son.”
Others find themselves filled with regret.
In brief submitted by an anti-abortion rights group and “3,348 Women Injured By Abortion,” Mindy Atkinson wrote,“My life was a disaster. I self-medicated to hide the pain. I hated myself and wanted to die for three years afterward. It was awful!”
As the Supreme Court continues to deliberate, we want to hear from you.
Please send us, in 300-600 words, your abortion story. How did the procedure impact you? What went into making this decision? Where are you now? We are most eager to hear women’s stories, though we will also consider stories submitted by men. Your submission may remain anonymous if you choose.

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Hillary’s Gender Gap

Posted on May 27, 2016 by Luke Ford

Steve Sailer writes:

The concept of an electoral gender gap was introduced into public discourse by feminists shortly after the 1980 election. They pointed out that Reagan had done less well among women than among men. I pointed out in response that Reagan had just defeated a sitting president 51-41, so maybe Democrats should be wondering about their gender gap problem.

But the point of traditional feminist gender gap rhetoric is not to provide a tool for numerical analysis, it’s to delegitimize the other side’s voters as not quite deserving of human rights. How can Democratic candidates succeed with their strategy of demonizing men if are men still allowed to vote? Something must be done about male suffrage.

COMMENTS AT STEVE SAILER:

* HMS Hillary is leaking badly here in late May ’16. Everything about her campaign is bogus. Gender gap hysterics are a device to deflect attention from her own huge gender gap.

Sanders is protesting Kentucky results and why not?

Nobody really wants Billy Jeff back in the Whitehouse. It’s a big whiff the idea that he should be in charge of the economy.

The IG report on Hillary email server did some damage also. Her bff allies in big media are panicking. Could be a dramatic climax to this soap opera / food fight.

* Apparently, insulting European-American male culture, blaming it for all your problems, and making its members pay a Danegeld has consequences. Namely, that people in that group who like that group are going to get increasingly ornery at you the more you try to make the group into the underclass.

* Remember Hillary was going to make a big deal about gun-control? Well, her ally Katie Couric just stepped into it and it’s backfired spectacularly:

http://video.foxnews.com/v/4914427386001/katie-couric-accused-of-deceptively-editing-gun-documentary/

Even some people on the left are decrying the “creative editing” technique: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2016/05/25/audiotape-katie-couric-documentary-falsely-depicts-gun-supporters-as-idiots/

* … this is a realignment election, where the parties’ coalitions are openly forming new alliances. It’s happened many times in U.S. History. In Europe, what usually happens is a party disintegrates and new parties take over, but in the U.S. the parties just realign their bases.

The 1960-2012 coalitions:
-Dems coalition: white poor, blacks, women, unions, Jews, social lefties; large government; regulated trade; gun control, limited foreign intervention
-R’s coalition: social conservatives; white upper class non-Jews, white middle class; small government, free trade; strong foreign intervention.

The post-2016 realignment:
-D’s coalition: open borders, mass immigration, free trade with foreign countries, interventionism at all levels abroad; second-class citizenship to whitey, caste system protecting its voters (“more equal than others”); blatant quotas; punishment of wrongdoers based on their social category rather than individual crime; anti-Christian.
-R’s coalition: national borders, protectionism; unions (yes! unions!); non-interventionism abroad; destruction of caste system/quotas (affirmative action, hate crime laws); crime punished on the the individual level with no reference to your social class.

I’m an old Milton Friedman-enthusiast, but Friedman admits that unions are nothing new—the guild system is as old as time (the Romans and the Persians and the Egyptians had various guilds for their workers and artisans). The fact is, normal law-abiding folk organized themselves into labor cartels at every opportunity. It’s human nature. The best way societies can deal with it is to heavily regulate it., not outlaw it or not regulate it at all—that’s how the violence and organized crime come in.

I hate admitting it, but the NLRB / federal intervention into union-managment activity was probably a government expansion we needed as a nation. Without Teddy Roosevelt intervening in the coal strike of his presidency, half the Northeast might have frozen that winter.

Unions just need to be watched very carefully—as carefully as federal legal decisions should be watched.

* Almost all of the White men I know personally are either Donald Trump supporters, Bernie Sanders supporters, or don’t care about politics at all and don’t plan to vote for anybody. It’s mostly White males from the elites that like Hildabeast.

* Those Disney and California electric utility American employees who were forced to train their Imported Foreign Scab Labor H-1B replacements?

Were they “college-educated white men”?

Having already destroyed the U.S. middle class, the Globalist Imported Cheap Third World Scab Labor racket has also been biting ever more deeply into the wallets, ambitions, and social lives of “college educated white men.” The racket’s now squeezing those “college-educated white men” to rethink their political allegiances – so that white men’s political compass realigns from the pain they feel in their wallets, and from the racket-smashed dreams and hopes they’d had for their children.

* Unions also gave a lot of working-class guys a very real and important sense of belonging and of importance. You might just be a lowly coal shoveller, but you were part of a group, a group that protected you, a group you drank beer with every Friday and had hotdogs with every fourth of july, a group that donated blood when your kid was sick. You were valued by a group beyond your family, and they kept you safe. Like nationalism, that kind of camaraderie and self-worth has been ignored by the modern globalists—but it really meant something if all you were was a coal shoveller.

Remember the unions attacked the hippies a shit ton. The Hard Hat Riots were real, and around the nation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_Hat_Riot . They were D’s by convenience and coalition—a coalition that is breaking now.

Small wonder unions dovetailed with ethnic groups.

* The South always hated unions, perhaps because of the name-if they’d called themselves the Confederation of Workers or something maybe it would have been different, and maybe not.

As a kid I always wondered why the car plants didn’t build in the South instead of having all those “hillbillies and colored people”, as my dad always called autoworkers (okay, he used a different word for “colored people”) migrate north. It didn’t take long to figure it out once I started working in various places.

There is no question you can manufacture in the South. Hartley Peavey is living proof of that. But Peavey is definitely no one’s idea of a high end product.

* Generally speaking, the MSM seems a lot more reluctant to break down women down into categories according to class and race. I guess it could be problematic for the rainbow alliance if say, working class white women had different views to educated middle class women, or white women had different views to black women.

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