Luke Ford

If you go by what the TV networks and major newspapers say, Trump is blowing it. And yet when I weed out the propaganda and just concentrate on his actions, I am ecstatic.

So while I read the LA Times, NY Times, and Washington Post every day, my main ways of understanding this new world come through the following sources:

* Drudge Report
* Steve Sailer (and his commenters)
* Twitter

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* I remember the “Freedom for Soviet Jews” banners outside of every synagogue way back when. Of course, every liberal will say there’s a philosophical difference between a preference and a ban, but is there, really? Those who areprefered take the place in line of those who aren’t. And I don’t think the Constitution recognizes the difference between a preference and a ban. Regardless, the Constitution doesn’t apply to those who don’t live here. The “We the people,” phrase is a lie by omission. The more complete phrase reads, “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union….”

* “Save Soviet Jews” was a big enough phenomenon to become a meme,which was hard to do back in the late 70′s. But one would find it jokingly scribbled on men’s room walls everywhere in the form of a coupon promotion: “Save Soviet Jews – win valuable prizes!”

* Hold on now! You’re telling me that Julia Yoffe and Eugene Volokh were not expelled from their native villages and forced to live in the steppes? They weren’t gang-raped by Cossacks? They didn’t see their families tortured in front of them?

Are you telling me they were actually well-connected cosmopolitans with very good college educations and great prospects in Russia who abandoned their homeland because moving West (and NOT to Israel) was good for their careers?

And here I thought they were really suffering.

* Well, I suppose that if being asked to reimburse the state which provided them with a world-class tertiary level education the cost of said education prior to emigrating was persecution, they were persecuted, the poor souls.

* Is it just me, or has Ann Coulter become the primary conduit through which iStevean ideas reach our political discourse?

* I knew many Soviet Jews back in the ’70′s, the vast majority of them were not religious, nor, IIRC, were they particularly “Jewish” in the sense that many had non-Jewish spouses. Basically they came here because the career opportunities in Russia sucked, and this was a way out for them. But then the career opportunities sucked for a lot of people in Russia.

One can try to say that the definition was not “religious” but rather “ethnic” yet that doesn’t really change the equation; one could just as easily conflate “Muslim” and “Arab” in the present instance, in many cases it makes no difference (not for all, e.g., Iran, Sudan). The fact is, there was preferential open door policies for Jews for decades, and since Jews are both an ethnicity and a religious group, the same concept applies.

Furthermore, one could argue that Jews are an ethnicity only in terms of their religion, because it is the religion that encouraged endogamy; remove the religio-cultural taboo, and Jews marry out at the same very high rate as, say, Germans and Irish in America. Moreover, the idea of Soviet Jews getting out was so they would migrate to Israel, where “ethnicity” or “race” is defined and decided by religious authorities, which reinforces the link.

* I’d say Julia Ioffe is fairly good looking but that tweet she sent out alleging — even as a joke — incest in the Trump family was completely perverse. That would give me second thoughts about her even if I was in the market for a date.

* Dude, I use to work as a background investigator carrying fed creds. A statement like she made should immediately signal she’s got major emotional and psychological issues if not a full subscription and for you to stay the fuck away. A person like this would be capable of destroying your life pretty quickly and not give it a second thought. I’ve seen it over, and over, and over again. If you see just one tiny puff of smoke you can be sure there’s a raging inferno. As they say, reputation is based more on what’s hidden than on what’s done. Some people are good at hiding things, but it’s not possible in marriage unless one spouse chooses to ignore the obvious (vincible ignorance).

Forget eHarmony and the idea of compatibility. That’s bullshit. There’s only one criterion: marry someone with a good disposition and a rock solid moral character. Which assumes a clean record and a functional and normal family upbringing (mother and father still married and more siblings the better).

* The unifying theme of the “black bloc” types last night at Berkeley was cowardice.

Cowardly mob with sticks beating a single unarmed man.

Cowardly clocking a man from behind with a bike lock as he calmly looks the other way.

Pepper spraying the woman as she speaks to the reporter.

Breaking windows of the student union, and attempting to throw a flare through the hole from a distance, rather than having the gonads to run up and push it through.

All with masks on.

These people fear cops, even nice Berkeley cops with lots of video being recorded, even in Alameda county with its lax prosecution of crime.

Robert Oscar Lopez writes:

When we were fighting against gay marriage, we made a huge tactical error in thinking we had to fight in the courts and media first, trusting that the churches would be safe. I fell for this delusion as well. As I pointed out in a recent conference in London (“The New Normal”), I followed many others’ leads and minimized the churches’ influence on my position, for fear of being tied in people’s minds to “old church ladies telling people what to do.” After half a decade of this, I’ve realized that “old church ladies” are the most important group to get on our side, and we have to have their confidence first. Why? Unlike everybody else, they show up and bring food. On their often unacknowledged labor rested most of the breakthrough moments I saw in the fight against leftist propaganda, not only in the United States but also in France and the United Kingdom.

It is alluring but fanciful to dream of winning over secular feminists and prestigious men in suits, but these would-be partners are notoriously slippery. I tried, for instance to open up a dialogue with innumerable liberal feminists in hopes we could build a coalition. Queer feminists Yasmin Nair, Claire Potter, Cathy Brennan, Sheena Malhotra, and others all reacted to my attempts to engage them in authentic conversation with paranoid recoil, feeling the need to repudiate or even viciously attack me in public lest their liberal allies think they were really in league with me. Other liberal feminists such as Claudia Corrigan D’Arcy and Laura Kipnis were hot & cold interlocutors, willing at times to share thoughts but then prone to close doors on key positions such as defense of life and/or the opposition to sodomy.

From time to time, there would be gay men who looked willing to engage in real discussion. I brought queer theorist Tim Dean to my campus to deliver a speech on Tom Jones in 2013. I agreed to speak on a panel hosted by playwright Tony Abbatemarco after a performance of Forever House. I even exchanged some messages with Frank Ligtvoet, a gay adoptive father, and hired a gay actor to play the lead in the premier of the play I co-wrote with Michelle Shocked, Sunlight. All these attempts ended up leaving me drained and exhausted, because in the end, such crossover discussants always wanted a veto to block discussion of the central issues they considered non-starters. I call this phenomenon “lefty creep.”

Highly esteemed conservative straight men can be nearly as frustrating. If they have sinecures or some kind of emeritus status in the movement, most likely they only want new advocates to emerge if they have personally mentored them. The effect of this is that the movement remains small, incestuous, and dull.

The beauty of church-focused social movements is that they offer a quick route to the grassroots and rely on long-established networks of trust and familiarity. Churches are a good offense against propaganda because of the physical resources alone: for instance, the multitude of multipurpose rooms, reading rooms, furniture, and props that spend much of the American workweek unused. Additionally, churches are a badly needed defensive theater, because the left has spent large amounts of money on promoting a false theology favorable to their pet causes like same-sex marriage. If churches at the local level block people with false theological grounding from taking over pastorates, this will protect the whole conservative movement as anti-propagandists fight on other fronts, such as…