NAN comments: “Luke – Instead of speculating, why don’t you invite Richard on for another interview? Your interview with Spencer was the best interview he’s ever done. At the end of that interview, he even said that he’d like to interview with you ‘every six months.’ You ask the best questions and you don’t interrupt.”
My two previous interviews with Richard:
Posted inAlt Right, Richard Spencer|Comments Off on Response To Last Night’s Richard Spencer, JF Gariepy Live Stream
00:00 Trump’s enemies get pipe bombs
03:00 New York Times Published Trump Assassination Fantasy Before Mail Bomb Scare
10:00 Megyn Kelly is OUT at NBC just 48 hours after defending blackface
32:00 Dennis Prager: What I Learned About Young People While Trying to Buy a Car
43:00 Richard Spencer has a new GF – Megan Bobonick, 29 yo, leftist, single mom, gay rights supporter, loves PETA, pursuing a PhD.
53:00 Alt Right gets it own #MeToo movement with these sordid Richard Spencer divorce revelations.
54:00 Richard’s wife, Nina, is a survivor!
58:00 Brett Stevens: Christine Blasey Ford II: The Spencer Divorce
1:00:00 Few men can stand up to their wives
1:05:00 Mexican towns rally for migrants, who try to be good guests
1:07:00 Are people who read Drudge likely terrorists?
1:14:00 Theater Thursday: Robocop (1987)
2:30:00 Vox Day
2:43:00 Mike Cernovich
2:47:00 First the Unabomber, now the humor bomber
2:48:00 Everyone in the news media gets death threats, famous people are hated, people commit these crimes for attention.
Posted inRichard Spencer|Comments Off on Megan Bobonick | Richard’s Girlfriend, TPS #224
On March 4, 2018, after following around Richard Spencer and his alt-right entourage for months, Serena Tarr found herself in Michigan for the Foundation for the Marketplace of Ideas conference, organized by Kyle Bristow, the white nationalist attorney who used to sue colleges that rejected requests for Spencer to speak. But due to public pressure and possibly death threats, Bristow backed out at the last minute, and the “conference” was relocated from Detroit to a house in Ann Arbor.
Tarr followed.
One group that attended was the Traditionalist Worker Party, a self-styled neo-Nazi organization that has since imploded over a bizarre set of circumstances involving a love triangle within the leadership.
“These are not the suit-and-tie kind of guys,” she explained. “They wear all black, they’ve got an insignia. They were heavily armed with knives on them, weapons.”
Since she met Spencer, Tarr, an associate professor of sociology at Kirkwood Community College, found the white nationalist leader lived up to his reputation as a talkative attention-seeker. But the TWP were not the kind of people you walk up to with a pad of paper, asking for their digits.
Tarr wandered around the party, simply observing. She started conversing with one TWP member.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“I told you my name,” she replied.
“No, who are you.”
“I’m a researcher.”
Then he said something strange, Tarr recalls, something along the lines of, “I could smell your flirtation a mile away.”
She laughed. “You think I’m flirting with you?”
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s kind of like when a girl shows up at a party with a skirt that’s too short and she pretends like she wasn’t asking for it.”
“This conversation’s over,” Tarr said. She’d heard a lot of detestable language and ideas in the course of studying alt-right communities, but this was the first time she felt truly unsafe. As she turned to leave the party, people began stirring. The location of the gathering had been compromised, and anti-fascist militants were surrounding the house.
The alt-righters were tying handkerchiefs around their faces and grabbing guns — “they looked like something Rambo would carry,” Tarr said — to chase away the antifa. Tarr went outside to find nails had been scattered all over the driveway, blocking in her car. No violence ensued from the conflict, but it was another couple of hours before she was able to leave.
After nearly a year accompanying the alt-right, Tarr will be sharing stories like this with the public for the first time at the Englert Theatre on Saturday, Oct. 13 for the Witching Hour festival.
Tarr hails from Seattle, Washington, the daughter of a Marxist scholar father and mother who studied world systems theory. “I grew up with very leftist, radical politics in the home,” she said.
She received her bachelor’s degree in women’s studies and Spanish from Washington State University, where she also earned her master’s, studying fascism and gender. She held a number of positions in academia before arriving at Kirkwood in Iowa City.
Shocked by the election of Donald Trump, she sought and received an endowment to study the female Trump base in Iowa. At the same time, she was staying abreast of news related to Richard Spencer and his National Policy Institute (NPI), who advocate for “peaceful ethnic cleansing” and a separation of the races…
Tarr managed to contact Evan McLaren, then the executive director of NPI, who let her apply to attend their 2017 annual conference. Her application was accepted, and she was instructed to appear at a secret pick-up location in Arlington, Virginia on the Sunday before Thanksgiving. She did.
“A white van pulled up, a guy rolls down his window and asks me my name. I tell him my name, he told me to put my phone in the bag and get in the van. I complied.”
“I can feel every hair on my body, that kind of heightened awareness of my surroundings, all the while I’m trying to sort of seem calm and not say, ‘Oh my God, what the fuck. Did I really just get into a white van with white supremacists?’”
Her fellow passengers were six men and one woman, looking to be in their 20s or 30s.
“I quickly became aware that the normal sort of social rules governing polite conversation don’t apply,” Tarr said. “You can’t ask personal details, so your conversational toolkit is off the table.”
One of the men did disclose that he was an elementary school teacher in a poor urban area, with many students of color. “He explained to me his theory about behavior in the classroom and that it directly corresponded with skin color,” she recalled.
The van stopped at a “barn-slash-winery,” Tarr said, in what she later learned was Maryland. Along one wall was an omelet bar, attended by an African-American woman.
About 150-200 people, mostly young men, were in attendance. Tarr managed to secure eight interviewees during the conference and establish a relationship with the group’s “thought leaders,” including Spencer and McLeran. She was excited.
Her dean at Kirkwood helped fund her trip to the NDI conference, but the bulk of her alt-right study relied on contributions from Tarr’s family, including her parents…
These beliefs — and the harsh racist and sexist language that accompanies them — didn’t surprise Tarr in her interviews. What did surprise her were the demographics of those sharing them. They were college-educated, some at Ivy League schools. A few were well-traveled and spoke several languages. Many grew up in tolerant homes.
She discovered a good percentage of alt-righters and big-pocket donors to the movement are in the tech industry. Tarr can’t explain why guys in tech specifically are attracted to the alt-right, but she speculates a “lack of a good liberal arts education” may contribute. Some of her interviewees complained about the one diversity class they had to take in college. “Maybe we need to make that a more robust requirement,” she posited.
Tarr has identified three distinct pathways most alt-righters take to their beliefs. The first were online communities discussing how to pick up women, including involuntary celibates (incels), who blame women for denying them sex. The second was libertarianism. The third and most surprising was Bernie Sanders; more than half of her 30 subjects were disillusioned Sanders supporters.
The idea that the alt-right is anti-socialist is a misconception, Tarr says. In fact, she found many alt-righters in Spencer’s circle lean left on progressive issues such as climate change and universal healthcare, but are most concerned with securing progress for white people.
Witching Hour: Among the Bogeymen – a year with the alt-right @ The Englert
Spencer, an openly alt-right activist, is often credited for the resurfacing of this ideology. (It should be noted that although it hasn’t always been visible, the alt-right has always been present in the United States). Serena begins to talk to the participants, explaining that she must gain their trust through signing NDAs—which provide stipulations for both them and her.
Ultimately, however, the unapologetically misogynistic ideals of the group allow her to conduct interviews. Since she is a married woman, she is not taken as a threat because she is “another man’s property.” It feels comfortable to speak, she says, when “assured by anonymity and treated with the decency of human beings.”
An acquaintance sees Serena with Spencer and other known members of the alt-right and begins asking questions. She explains the purpose of her association, and when she refuses to share her research findings with him until she finishes the study, citing the NDAs as a major cause, he doxxes her. This puts her safety at risk and her study in jeopardy, but she continues.
After another convention called CPAC, heavy because of the views expressed and further dispiriting because of the “gratuitous and endless use of the n-word,” Serena falters. When she gets into an Uber to head home, the Black man driving asks her how she’s doing. Though she initially responds thatshe’s okay, she immediately retracts the statement by telling the truth. The whole truth.
In the back of the car, Serena breaks down. The driver pulls over and holds her as she cries and vents about the people and ideologies with which she is associating for her study. The two exchange numbers, and the man reasonably hesitates when he drops her off at her destination of the loft, the unofficial NPI headquarters.
He checks on her that night, and when she becomes nervous again, he reminds her of the importance of her work. “What you are doing matters. What you are doing matters to me and my babies.”
Serena goes to another convention. The attendees gather at a Staples, waiting to be ferried to the actual location. Serena and another woman pick up four men, two of whom are college-aged and two of whom are older. A younger man, whom Serena describes as looking like Ron Weasley, is an economics major at a university. An older man proudly states his family’s three-generation involvement with the Ku Klux Klan.
Approximately 150 attendees eventually convene at a house, the meeting point for this convention. When Spencer gives his speech, the house booms in proclamations of “Sieg heil! Sieg heil!” After the speech is over, while Serena speaks with a man making sexist and lewd comments toward her, the mood of the party suddenly shifts. People put on black masks and arm themselves as they flood out the door. Antifa discovered the meeting location.
Serena goes to two more conventions and even meets Spencer’s estranged wife and mother in Montana before ending her research. She creates a dialogue between members of the right and left but calls it only “a small success.”
The greater critique of Tarr and her research is the fact that she spent months cozying up to movement members, following Richard around the country, then provides conclusive statements that could have been authored by someone who spent 1 hr googling “Alt-Right.”
Truth will out! I still like the part where I was drunk. I don’t think I’ve ever made it through an Alt event sober. The Irish in me always gets offended and deals by drinking 8 gin and tonics. “Who wants to fight?!” https://t.co/zapZ5TPqWp
Posted inAlt Right, Richard Spencer|Comments Off on Guns, fascism, infighting and couch-surfing: Researcher Serena Tarr recounts a year studying the alt-right
00:00 Will Hillary Clinton run in 2020?
10:00 Stacy Abrams concedes in Georgia
11:00 Jim Acosta wins his WH press pass back in judge’s ruling
20:00 Kurds & Arabs in Iraq with Professor J. Otto Pohl
33:00 Nicholas Stix of VDARE joins us
35:00 The decline of FOX News
39:00 Megyn Kelly
50:00 Jews vs Jews, neo-cons
1:05:00 TRUMP WARNS ANTIFA — YOU COULD BE IN BIG TROUBLE
1:11:00 Nicholas Stix wishes Jeff Sessions was president
1:25:00 Guns, fascism, infighting and couch-surfing: Researcher Serena Tarr recounts a year studying the alt-right
1:26:00 Richard Spencer
1:35:00 BOOK CLUB: Kleinzeit novel
The danger in making Acosta out to be the new martyr for press freedom is that the public will be less able to recognize *legitimate* threats to press freedom, such as the prosecution of a publisher who has revealed more genuine secrets than the entire WH press corps put together
The greater critique of Tarr and her research is the fact that she spent months cozying up to movement members, following Richard around the country, then provides conclusive statements that could have been authored by someone who spent 1 hr googling “Alt-Right.”
Truth will out! I still like the part where I was drunk. I don’t think I’ve ever made it through an Alt event sober. The Irish in me always gets offended and deals by drinking 8 gin and tonics. “Who wants to fight?!” https://t.co/zapZ5TPqWp
Facebook employed a Republican opposition-research firm to discredit activist protesters, in part by linking them to the liberal financier George Soros. It also tapped its business relationships, lobbying a Jewish civil rights group to cast some criticism of the company as anti-Semitic…
Eddie Vale, a Democratic public relations strategist who led the protest, later said the image was meant to evoke old cartoons of Standard Oil, the Gilded Age monopoly. But a Facebook official quickly called the Anti-Defamation League, a leading Jewish civil rights organization, to flag the sign. Facebook and other tech companies had partnered with the civil rights group since late 2017 on an initiative to combat anti-Semitism and hate speech online.
That afternoon, the A.D.L. issued a warning from its Twitter account.
“Depicting Jews as an octopus encircling the globe is a classic anti-Semitic trope,” the organization wrote. “Protest Facebook — or anyone — all you want, but pick a different image.” The criticism was soon echoed in conservative outlets including The Washington Free Beacon, which has sought to tie Freedom from Facebook to what the publication calls “extreme anti-Israel groups.”
An A.D.L. spokeswoman, Betsaida Alcantara, said the group routinely fielded reports of anti-Semitic slurs from journalists, synagogues and others. “Our experts evaluate each one based on our years of experience, and we respond appropriately,” Ms. Alcantara said. (The group has at times sharply criticized Facebook, including when Mr. Zuckerberg suggested that his company should not censor Holocaust deniers.)
Facebook also used Definers to take on bigger opponents, such as Mr. Soros, a longtime boogeyman to mainstream conservatives and the target of intense anti-Semitic smears on the far right. A research document circulated by Definers to reporters this summer, just a month after the House hearing, cast Mr. Soros as the unacknowledged force behind what appeared to be a broad anti-Facebook movement.
Posted inFacebook|Comments Off on Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis
00:00 NYT’s expose of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg
16:25 to 19:47 “Luke begins an epic rant against Jewish leftwing pressure groups, social media, “whoring” the holocaust and destroying America as we knew it.”
40:00 Gay former Dallas Cowboy Jeff Rohrer is marrying his boyfriend this Sunday
50:00 Jair Bolsonaro And The Populist Crisis In Brazil
59:00 Brexit drama, Apple’s decline
1:01:00 Let’s cut to the chase and have the judges vote for us
1:04:00 Gay flag in Canada described as a totalitarian symbol, chaos ensues
1:07:00 James Corden accused of ‘cultural appropriation’ in FURIOUS rant by rapper Dizaster as he claims Drop the Mic skit exploits hip hop stars
1:11:00 KMG on Lil Pump’s Gucci Gang
1:15:00 Neo-Nazi’s attorney calls ruling dangerous for free speech
1:23:00 #MarcoRubio, Tuesday: “Trump is right about nationalism”
1:24:00 The Way of the GOPe is the Way of the Loser
#AZSenate #MarthaMcSally #KyrstenSinema
1:32:00 Here’s what’s in the prison reform bill Trump just backed
1:36:00 Prison rape
1:41:00 Three Colours: Red
Past movie reviews: https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=123863
* KMG: Beyond a certain point, which is yet unknown in American discourse, the problem of “social conservatism” becomes inseparable from the problem of law and order. Jair Bolsonaro And The Populist Crisis In Brazil
Donald #Trump, October 11, 2016: "Disloyal R's are far more difficult than Crooked Hillary. They come at you from all sides. They don’t know how to win – I will teach them!"#MarcoRubio, Tuesday: "Trump is right about nationalism"https://t.co/xvZxL5mXob
Big finance will no longer tolerate free speech online. Try to make a platform that’s as free as Twitter/YouTube used to be, and this will happen: https://t.co/mjr92QDEN6
00:00 April 8, 2017: Antifa: Richard Spencer, center, with Jeffrey Raphiel Clark, Jr., right, and Edward Clark during a rally put on by Spencer outside the White House.
03:00 Richard Spencer and the Clark brothers
27:00 Nazis and amphetamines
36:00 Michael Avenatti
38:00 Video shows Mexican caravan group climbing border fence
44:00 Mitt Romney — rootless cosmopolitan
46:00 Brundlefly vs Joachim of Heel Turn Twitter jihad this morning
49:00 Roosh V’s books banned from Amazon
51:00 Alt Right and reality
59:00 Should Richard Spencer have the nuclear codes?
1:05:00 How Luke recovered from CFS
1:10:00 KMG on French novelist Michel Houellebecq
1:27:00 Beatlejuice the movie
1:28:00 Brexit drama
1:36:00 NYT: First Rohingya Are to Be Returned to Myanmar Killing Grounds
1:39:00 Favorite Rohingya food?
1:43:00 How a Former Canadian Spy Helps Wall Street Mavens Think Smarter
1:47:00 NYT: The New Brothels: How Shady Landlords Play a Key Role in the Sex Trade
1:50:00 THR: ‘The Favourite’ Blows Up Gender Politics With the Year’s Most Outrageous Love Triangle
1:55:00 Amazon and Unaffordable Family Formation
1:59:00 Where Are the Facebook Advertisers’ Yachts?
2:01:00 Identity Politics for Non-Whites Only
2:08:00 Pelosi unfazed as unhappy Dems claim votes to block her rise
2:09:00 The $6 trillion price tag for the “War on Terror”
2:12:00 Little Mix pose NAKED with harsh insults scrawled across their skin as they share sultry and empowering snap to promote new track Strip
2:23:00 How your mum’s love life determines how many romantic partners you have
But then on the very same day offers up some videos about Fake News called Operation Infektion. The videos have a strange conversational, breezy tone that seems completely out of place in The New York Times. The word Bullshit is used liberally as if it is a term of art.
The first video explains that former KGB agents who defected to the United States revealed that the Soviet Union engaged in disinformation campaigns to subvert the United States. The entire exercise is rather flat and fails to contemplate that many other governments, corporations and institutions may also be engaging in disinformation campaigns, including, of course, the United States and The New York Times itself.
One of the KGB agents featured in the first documentary is Yuri Bezmenov who not only defected to the United States, but he also aligned himself with the John Birch Society and certain other fringe right wing elements. Yuri Bezmenov is quite popular on Youtube promoting somewhat convincingly the very same theory that Cultural Marxism is undermining the West that The New York Times is simultaneously condemning as historically farcical and hateful.
* National Geographic as a TV content producer went off the diversity deep end in recent years with Morgan Freeman narrating everything that Neil DeGrasse Tyson didn’t host. Of course those Freeman, Tyson productions got horrible ratings so it was not surprising to see Nat Geo snag the Canadian reality TV show ‘Highway to Hell’ from the Weather Channel that features toxically masculine heavy lift tow truck drivers recovering wrecked big rigs on snow covered highways. This fits in quite nicely with their other popular reality shows Life Below Zero, Wicked Tuna and Alaska State Troopers.
The other reality show channel, Discovery, has the same problem. Women and minorities just don’t do the kind of interesting, challenging and dangerous work that viewers enjoy seeing white men engaged in.
Posted inNew York Times|Comments Off on Operation Infektion
00:00 California’s fires
01:00 Are Progressives using California’s wildfires to preserve the global warming hypothesis?
28:00 CA’s homeless problem
30:00 Rodney Martin, long-time California resident, joins.
36:00 California and the end of civilization
58:00 Is Barack Obama a swish?
1:04:00 Bill Clinton’s 1989 interest in a statute of limitations for sexual misbehavior
1:06:00 The weirdness of Gary Hart
1:24:00 JFK’s reckless sex life and foreign policy
1:30:00 Brundlefly discusses his appearance tonight on Heel Turn, hosting Richard Spencer and four Jews Sunday night
1:40:00 Why is London’s homicide rate soaring? https://twitter.com/KMGVictoria/status/1062402956367028224
1:50:00 Bolsonaro’s sons show up in Mossad and IDF t-shirts, and the media melt down
1:53:00 Bibi Netanyahu is smart, he’s making alliances with popularists around the world, including with Bolsonaro in Brazil.
1:55:00 What were Ocasio-Cortez and 150 young activists doing in Nancy Pelosi’s office?
2:00:00 Climate change and global warming and the Paris Accords
2:03:00 Victoria, British Columbia is the Portland of Canada
2:11:00 Michelle Obama, Feminist Icon
2:14:00 China’s structural problems
2:21:00 Kevin doesn’t lift, homosexuals love to lift, Arnold Schwarzeneger talked about getting lavish gifts from homosexual admirers
2:23:00 Kevin walks 5-10 miles a day
2:33:00 KMG’s analysis of C.S. Lewis
Let me give a constructive suggestion to TV, online and print news outlets. Put the words “BREAKING NEWS: BILLIONS WILL DIE UNLESS FOSIL FUELS ARE BANNED” That’s actually a measured response to the data we’re seeing.
Holy moly, this is an incredible story about what Bill Clinton told Tom Fiedler, one of the reporters who broke the Gary Hart story for the @MiamiHerald. https://t.co/lTmFvsM9d0
And certainly the Herald story was soon followed by an impressive avalanche of sleaze. In 1989, the Washington Post, certain that new president George H.W. Bush had been carrying on a lengthy affair with his longtime aide, Jennifer Fitzgerald, but unable to prove it, published a story that started with this insinuation-riddled sentence:
“Jennifer Fitzgerald, who has served President-elect George Bush in a variety of positions, most recently running the vice presidential Senate offices, is expected to be named deputy chief of protocol in the new administration, sources said yesterday.”
From there it was on to Al Gore’s alleged groping of massage-parlor workers, John McCain’s maybe-or-not affair with a lobbyist, John Edwards’ cheating on his cancer-riddled wife, Eliot Spitzer’s expensive taste in hookers, and Anthony Weiner’s belief that much of the world’s female population craved pictures of his genitals.
“That was a tough call the Miami Herald made,” said Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh. “And there’s no question it changed things in terms of what gets reported and how.”
Hersh faced his own big call on reporting politicians’ sex lives in 1997, when he published a harshly critical biography of President John F. Kennedy, “The Dark Side Of Camelot.” Hersh, who among other things has uncovered the My Lai massacre and CIA domestic spying programs, undertook the book because of his interest in what he saw as Kennedy’s irresponsible behavior during the Cuban missile crisis.
“I never write about sex. Ever,” he said. “I was interested in how Kennedy drew this line in the sand during the Cuban missile crisis. He told [Soviet leader Nikita] Khrushchev, ‘Send any more weapons across this line and we go to war.’ And I always thought that was crazy because essentially you’re letting Khrushchev decide if there’s going to be a war that kills a huge number of Americans.”
When Hersh began asking his sources inside U.S. intelligence if there was something he didn’t understand about Kennedy, one of them suggested he talk to the president’s old Secret Service detail. What spilled out were voluminous tales of Kennedy’s sexual adventurism — with actresses, with White House staffers, with prostitutes; in hotels, alongside the White House swimming pool, even at a party at the Palm Springs home of Bing Crosby.
One of the objects of the president’s affection (or lust) was a young woman named Judith Campbell Exner, who was also sleeping with Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana. Another was an East German hooker named Ellen Rometsch, widely suspected (though never proven) to be a Communist spy.
“The Secret Service guys thought Kennedy’s cowboy foreign policy was related to his sex life,” recalled Hersh. “He was just a risk-taker. One of them told me that his first day on the job, in Seattle in 1961, this local sheriff came walking in with two women who were obvious hookers. The agent says, sorry, you can’t bring them in here, this is sealed off for the president. And the sheriff answered, ‘These women are for the president, he’s expecting them.’ “
As more and more agents went on the record about Kennedy’s partying and their belief that Kennedy was a daredevil in everything he did, the riskier the better, Hersh felt he had no choice but to use it in the book. “I had all kinds of stuff about the Bay of Pigs, Castro, the Mafia, but people were only interested in one chapter, the one on sex,” he recalled. “And in large part, that’s because nobody ever reported this kind of stuff before … Even though they knew all about it.”
Yet part of the lesson Clinton learned from Hart was that it’s better to keep cool about your bad behavior. Hart could never shake the perception that he was blaming others for his own transgressions. (He couldn’t shake it even if you did believe that the media had now gone too far.) And that’s one reason why his campaign never recovered from the scandal. The emotional subtext of Hart’s defensiveness was the humiliation he refused to own up to. He was shamed for having an affair, shamed for canoodling, and that must have felt harsh beyond all reason. Yet if he’d stood his ground and been willing to take it, who knows? Four years later, Bill Clinton — revealed, by the post-Gary Hart press, to be a serial adulterer who carried on many more affairs than Hart did — steadfastly refused to stand down, and he was elected anyway. (That said, a number of people who supported Clinton may now feel differently about him.)
It’s too easy to say that the American public does or does not care about a presidential candidate’s private behavior. It’s too easy to say that the media should or should not ignore it. The spirit and conduct of the media changed, fundamentally, during the Hart saga (a tectonic shift “The Front Runner” captures quite well), but the question of how the media should act isn’t black-or-white. It remains an ever-shifting grey zone. (Should the press not have reported on John Edwards’ affair? Or on the extramarital scandals of Donald Trump?)
Even if Gary Hart was “wronged” by seeing his affair outed by a cultural game change, the way he reacted to it wasn’t admirable — it was entitled. Yet those who are making a Hollywood docudrama about American political life may feel as if they can’t afford to have a petulant, dislikable hero. (I’m guessing that the Dick Cheney of Adam McKay’s upcoming “Vice” will be a scoundrel, but a strangely likable one.) So “The Front Runner,” in its way, tries to elevate who Gary Hart was. The movie captures all too accurately what went on during those three fateful weeks when the Hart campaign imploded in the face of a brave new world of tabloid-gone-mainstream media. Yet the film says that what changed during that pivotal moment wasn’t just media or politics but history itself. It says that the taking down of Hart was a tragedy that fundamentally influenced the course of America over the last 30 years.
The film wants us to think that if the Hart scandal had never occurred, the following events would have taken place. Hart would have won the Democratic nomination and would have defeated George H.W. Bush for the presidency. The Gulf War would never have happened. The presidency of George W. Bush would never have happened. The Iraq War would never have happened. And the programs believed in by Gary Hart — new ideas about the environment and technology that he insisted, like a mantra, on referring to ad nauseam as “new ideas” — would now be in place. All of which sounds just dandy, and all of which sounds like it came out of some domino theory of wish-fulfillment, like the political version of “Back to the Future.”
Wikipedia: “Shortly after he became the new frontrunner, it was revealed that Hart had changed his last name, had often listed 1937 instead of 1936 as his birth date and had changed his signature several times.”
* Is Obama gay? “She recently revealed that her children were born via IVF treatment. Sort of adds credibility to all the stories regarding her husband being light in the loafers.”
Britain knows how to lower crime but insists on doing the opposite: importing ever-more Muslims & Africans. And LOL at AA hire Cressida Dick touted as an expert. She knows how to kill innocents (Jean Charles de Menezes) but not how to protect them https://t.co/sqzcyhf3u4
* Only 4 of Germany’s 128 Eurofighter jets combat ready — report: “A recent report by the German military to the German parliament detailed the catastrophic readiness levels of the German military. Of its entire submarine fleet, zero boats are seaworthy. Of its fleet of Eurofighters (their most advanced fighter), only 4 are mission capable, zero of the German navy’s frigates are mission capable, none of its heavy transport planes are mission capable, only 39 of its 244 tanks are battle ready (that’s less than one US Army tank battalion’s worth of tanks capable of battle, with a grand total of less tanks than one US Army heavy division for their whole military). The rest of the stats look awful, and that doesn’t get into severe problems with morale and undermanning. All other Western European militaries are in more-or-less the same parlous state. They can’t fight anybody.”
* Posted 09 November 2018 – 06:23 AM
I saw that story. It makes no sense.
IVF is where eggs are extracted from the mom with surgery, fertilized in a lab and reintroduced to the uterus to grow. It overcomes problems conceiving, for example, someone whose fallopian tubes are blocked due to scarring from an ectopic pregnancy might use it.
It’s not going to do anything for you if your problem is carrying the pregnancy to term. Moreover, a single miscarriage, while sad, doesn’t really count as infertility. They’re common. Most women who have one go on to have successful pregnancies.
Quote
“I realized that as I was 34 and 35,” the famously fit Mrs. Obama said in excerpts from an ABC special set to air Sunday. “We had to do IVF.”
Again, that makes no sense. Nobody decides to do IVF just because they’re 34. Beyond the expense, the procedures are painful. I have friends who’ve done it.
Nationalism can grow into imperialism. We saw this with Athens, a city-state to be sure. At first, it was one city-state among others and got along. But as it got richer and stronger, it sought hegemony over other city-states and finally clashed with Sparta, another city-state that developed overweening ambitions.
Initially, Germans unified to create a nation. But it became the most powerful nation, and power has a way of expanding. So, nationalism can be the base of imperialism. British Empire and French Empire were cases of nationalism + imperialism. Britons were awful proud of their British Core and did everything to preserve it(like in DUNKIRK). But they were also imperialists who ruled 1/4 of the world.
The American colonies began as part of an imperialist project. But they broke away from the mother country. It was born of both imperialism and resistance to imperialism. But as the 13 colonies grew in power, it sought to expand, even waging war on Canada. That didn’t work, but it moved Westward to take land from Indians and then waged war on Mexico. So, the theme of US is both national independence from British Empire AND imperial expansion to become a great power. Once the continent was tamed, US waged war on Spain to grab more territory. While Anglo-America turned into an empire, Spain collapsed into nationhood. But the horrors and cost of WWI led many Americans to focus on the nation. There was a sense that ‘we have enough’ and meddling in other places will lead to more headaches. But then, WWII happened… followed by the Cold War. While the US developed some imperial institutions in the early 20th century, the sourness with the aftermath of WWI led most Americans, elites and masses, to not further develop them. But WWII and Cold War led to such elaborate and expensive development of imperial institutions of world hegemony that so many in the Deep State are addicted to them even in the absence of other Evil Empires to combat around the world.
For most of human history, as there were no international treaties bound by law, there was only regionalism, not nationalism. And political regions were always shifting and changing in accordance to power. So, the areas of Persian hegemony were expanding, shrinking, expanding, shrinking, etc. Now, tribalism is as old as mankind itself, but nationalism is more than tribalism. Tribalism is about a sense of unity with those whom know and feel closest with. It’s a gut instinct. In contrast, nationalism is about a sense of solidarity with many strangers whom you never meet in life. And nationalism can be premised on anything: ethnicity, ideology, religion, and etc. But history has shown that ethnicity is the soundest and most resilient foundation of nationhood. It is why capitalist West Germany united with communist East Germany than unite with capitalist Italy or France. West Germans and East Germans shared ethnicity. And in the US, black Christians feel closer to black Muslims than to white Christians.
Imperialism today would be insane, but it had its place in history as a constructive force. It’s like a forest fire. Very destructive but also clearing the ground for new saplings to grow. If not for European imperialism, nationalism wouldn’t exist around most of the world. Most of the world would be ruled by elites who regard their own folks essentially as subjects than as comrades. In the Middle East and Asia, the ruling elites were like big tall trees. They hogged most of the sunlight and power-nutrients. Little plants were beneath them and stunted in growth. It was with the Western imperialist fire that the old institutions of power began to fade away, and that led to the rise of new movements and new elites based on the Western nationalist model where the people would not be subjects but fellow countrymen of the elites.
Granted, the Western Imperialists did much to both strengthen and weaken local elites. As long as the local elites were willing to collaborate, the Western Imperialists protected and favored them. So, the Western fire was directed at the saplings and little plants while protecting the big old trees. The West actually backed the Manchu elites in the crushing of the Taiping Rebellion that called for something new. But because the native elites came to be seen as puppets of foreign overlords, they increasingly lost respect and legitimacy(the mandate) in the eyes of the people.
If not for Western Imperialism, the Middle East, South Asia, and East Asia would now probably be ruled by the old elites who prevent any change or progress. So, the rise of national orders around the world owed to Western Imperialism. Not only did local peoples learn of Western nationalism but developed their own nationalism to resist Western imperialism.
At any rate, whatever good imperialism did in the past, it is no longer necessary since all the world has been discovered and connected by trade and communication. Whatever crimes the Western Imperialists committed, they deserve acknowledgement as the makers of the Modern World. Also, non-whites know of each other only because of Western Imperialism. For 1000s of yrs, Indians and Chinese hardly knew each other as both tended to be insular and static. And non-whites in the Old World came to know of the New World only because the world was united by imperialism. So, we have to give imperialism its due.
Also, globalism would be fine as long as it meant the world trading and communicating with one another. But it has come to mean hegemony by the lone superpower that has gone morally degenerate with Homomania, insane Wars for Israel, and needless craziness like ‘new cold war with Russia’. It also means smashing of borders by masses of migrants who’ve been given the greenlight to trample into whatever nation, esp rich white ones.
Though nationalism vs imperialism is a useful dichotomy, history has also been about imperialism vs imperialism and nationalism vs nationalism. In the case of imperialism vs imperialism, one empire can be friend to nationalism at war with another empire. In LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, the hero is an agent of British Imperialism aiding nascent ‘Arab Nationalism’ against the Ottoman Empire. (The irony, of course, is that even as Lawrence berates the Arabs of being a divided Little People, the European Christendom in WWI is the stage of divided white folks slaughtering each other by the millions over inches of territory. Not much of pan-European/Christian unity either.)
French Empire was the greatest friend to American national independence. Soviet Empire backed Vietnamese nationalism against American imperialism, and American Empire gave moral support to Eastern European nationalisms against Soviet imperialism.
Though China and Japan are not at war, there are real national tensions between them. There are also tensions between China and Vietnam. This is nationalism vs nationalism. And in this case, the smaller nation seeks alliance with a great imperial power to gain leverage against the bigger national power. So, Vietnam now has good relations with US because it fears China. And Poland and Hungary, even though in nationalist mode, are allied with the US empire because they still fear the Russian Bear.
There have been cases where imperialism may have saved a people/nation from extinction. Thais and Vietnamese were carving up Cambodia for themselves, and Cambodia may have been saved as a distinct territorial entity only by the intervention of French Imperialism.
Anyway, that was then, this is now. It is possible for the world to have Universal Nationalism. Indeed, that was what United Nations was about. It was the idea that, no matter how weak or small a nation, its sovereignty-borders-and-culture would be respected. It did for nations what the Constitution did for individuals. In the US, the law ensures certain basic rights for everyone, no matter how poor or weak. Jeff Bezos has gazillions but if he murders a homeless person, he’s in big trouble. Through most of history, powerful people could do pretty much as they pleased toward the weak. And powerful peoples routinely invaded, conquered, and pushed around weaker peoples.
European Empire was the biggest the world had seen, and yet, it spread ideas that were ultimately anti-imperial. The reason why European empire had grown so powerful was because there was more respect between elites and peoples. Even prior to rise of democracy and concept of basic rights, Christian Europe had banned whites-enslaving-whites. So, even as European aristocrats did push white folks around, they didn’t enslave them. There was serfdom in Russia, but even there, the nobles didn’t feel proud of it and felt it was fundamentally wrong. Russia on its own abolished it in time. In contrast, other peoples still enslaved their own kind.
Even in European monarchies, the people had more rights and guarantees. So, there was greater unity between rulers and the ruled in Europe, and this led to explosive growth in power. And with this power, the great European nations conquered much of the world. But in the conquest, they spread the notion that rulers and ruled could be one united people instead of rulers just trampling on subjects. Then, over time, the non-West began to produce a new kind of elites who appealed to their masses as brothers and comrades, and this led to death knell of Western Imperialism.
Anyway, there was so much hope with the UN project. But the UN is now an anti-nationalist monstrosity Non-whites valued the UN as a platform to press for national rights. As the non-West was so less developed and poorer than the West, it feared White Power. What if the whites decide to seek hegemony over the non-West again? The Vietnamese, having experienced French Imperialism, couldn’t believe that the US would be any different. It was just the New Boss. During the Cold War, the USSR backed certain nations, and US did the same. Most non-aligned nations feared USSR or US or both. So, their message to the UN was that they had a right to be left alone and not be invaded/colonized again as in the Age of Empire.
But then, the non-West began to change its outlook when, in a spectacular failure of imagination and prophecy, the West began to welcome tons of non-white immigration-invasion. The non-West went from fearing the ‘Return of White Imperialists to Rob Us of Our Nationhood’ to ‘We can move to the West and take all that goody rich stuff from white folks who’ve grown old, decadent, soft, and stupid.’ So, now the UN runs propaganda films about how the West must welcome mass invasion. And as the West is now ruled by cuck-collaborators of the Glob, they play along. And so, the ideal of Universal Nationalism went to hell.
It’s been said that the slave trade ruined the African Kingdoms. The profits were so huge that the dropped everything and ran after Black Gold to sell to whitey. And Mass Immigration has had the same effect on much of the Third World. Too many people just gave up on nationalism, independence, pride, dignity, and hard work to make things better. Instead, they are glue to TV beaming false fantasies of US as paradise of Cool and Wealth. Or Europe as the Welfare State that doles out freebies to all comers. Mutter Merkel.
Though US and Cuba have been enemies, Cuba at least tried to develop their own national power and economy. Puerto Rico just placed all the bets on ‘Go to America and take from whitey’. Of course, there is shame in being a leech, so Puerto Ricans like Luis Guiterrez try to mask their shame with highfalutin talk of ‘justice’ and ‘compassion’. Anyway, all the Third World has gone from the Cuban Ideal to the Rican Ideal. From virtuous nationalism resisting the empire to venal globalism to leech off empire.
While it’s true that many immigrants in the West have done well for themselves, the globo-migration mindset has corrupted the souls of so many peoples in non-white nations. Instead of doing real stuff to make their nations better, they just watch TV and dream of making it to the West. They’ve become refugees from National Pride toward Global Dependence.
Posted inAmerica, China|Comments Off on #108 11-13-18 Why Are California’s Wildfires So Wild?
"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)