Luke Ford

Bill Kristol ‏tweets: Trying to figure out symbol for new non-Trump, non-Clinton party. Can do better than donkey and elephant. Lion? Australian shepherd? Ewok?

Mike McDaniel writes:

We often hear pundits bemoaning the sad state of America. Congress is embroiled in gridlock and nothing is getting done. Let’s put aside, just for the sake of this little missive, that Congress getting nothing done may be a very good, rather than a bad, thing. After all, it was our most astute political observer–Mark Twain–who said: “No man’s life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session.” Let us also ignore that the very structure of the Constitution foresees, indeed, embraces gridlock. It is an integral part of our system of checks and balances, and if we don’t like it, we can throw the bums out of office. Apparently, we like it. At least, for the moment, the form practiced by establishment Republicans, though the rise and surprising staying power of Donald Trump’s candidacy strongly suggests more and more Americans are developing a very strong “throw all of the bums out” sentiment.

What remains is the worthy observation that Americans are indeed a people divided. One can argue that it was Barack Obama that drove us apart. Despite his rhetoric about uniting all Americans and ending gridlock, he has surely and unmistakably done the opposite, and more quickly and devastatingly than any before him. He was not, however, the only president or force involved in our current state of philosophical and cultural division. The media bear substantial blame, as do both political parties. And so do we, common Americans, for listening to nitwits, thugs, race hustlers, politicians and con men and for not taking the time to be truly well informed. We know vacuous celebrities well, but don’t know the men and women whose philosophies and decisions regulate our very lives.

As Twain made so beautifully clear in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, con men cannot con an honest man.

The Freddie Gray case provides a stark example of the division roiling the body politic. So too, but to a much lesser degree, did the Trayvon Martin case, but not in ways one might suspect.

We are divided in a variety of ways: race, tribe, nationality, sexual orientation, environmentalism vs. civilization, vegans vs. carnivores, cat fanciers vs. dog lovers, “safe space” seekers vs. sentient beings, and in more additional ways than one can count. But what counts most, what divides us most is the chasm separating those that support the rule of law, and those that support social justice.

Black intellectual John McWhorter writes:

An anthropology article from 1956 used to get around more than it does now, “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema.” Because my mother gave it to me to read when I was 13, of course what I remember most from it is that among the Nacirema, women with especially large breasts get paid to travel and display them. Nacirema was “American” spelled backwards—get it?—and the idea was to show how revealing, and even peculiar, our society is if described from a clinical distance.

These days, there is something else about the Nacirema—they have developed a new religion. That religion is antiracism. Of course, most consider antiracism a position, or evidence of morality. However, in 2015, among educated Americans especially, Antiracism—it seriously merits capitalization at this point—is now what any naïve, unbiased anthropologist would describe as a new and increasingly dominant religion. It is what we worship, as sincerely and fervently as many worship God and Jesus and, among most Blue State Americans, more so.

To someone today making sense of the Nacirema, the category of person who, roughly, reads The New York Times and The New Yorker and listens to NPR, would be a deeply religious person indeed, but as an Antiracist. This is good in some ways—better than most are in a position to realize. This is also bad in other ways—worse than most are in a position to realize.

***

For example, Ta-Nehisi Coates, now anointed as James Baldwin’s heir by Toni Morrison, is formally classified as a celebrated writer. However, the particulars of his reception in our moment reveal that Coates is, in the Naciremian sense, a priest. Coates is “revered,” as New York magazine aptly puts it, as someone gifted at phrasing, repeating, and crafting artful variations upon points that are considered crucial—that is, scripture. Specifically, Coates is celebrated as the writer who most aptly expresses the scripture that America’s past was built on racism and that racism still permeates the national fabric.

This became especially clear last year with the rapturous reception of Coates’s essay, “The Case for Reparations.” It was beautifully written, of course, but the almost tearfully ardent praise the piece received was about more than composition. The idea was that the piece was important, weighty, big news. But let’s face it—no one, including Coates himself, I presume, has any hope that our current Congress is about to give reparations for slavery to black people in any significant way. Plus, reparations had been widely discussed, and ultimately put aside, as recently as 15 years ago in the wake of Randall Robinson’s The Debt. Yet Coates’s article was discussed almost as if he were bringing up reparations as a new topic.

It actually made perfect sense. People loved Coates’s article not as politics, since almost no one thinks reparations are actually going to happen. But belle-lettristic concerns weren’t the key either: Coates is hardly the only writer out there who has a way with the words. People were receiving “The Case for Reparations” as, quite simply, a sermon. Its audience sought not counsel, but proclamation. Coates does not write with this formal intention, but for his readers, he is a preacher. A.O. Scott perfectly demonstrates Coates’s now clerical role in our discourse in saying that his new book is “essential, like water or air”—this is the kind of thing one formerly said of the Greatest Story Ever Told.

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* “…backlash in countries with little experience of mass assimilation.”

I hear this a lot from the MSM in relation to Europe’s problems with immigration. They keep saying that the USA has an advantage because we’ve had a history of assimilating immigrants and Europe has not. But they fail to acknowledge that our so called success with assimilating immigrants was largely in the realm of assimilating fellow Europeans, albeit with different languages and cultures. But they were still more similar to the existing Americans than what is coming today.

Therefore they blame Europe’s immigration ills to its lack of history of assimilating immigrants rather than the fact that the immigrants coming are so dissimilar. Even the USA has had a heck of a time assimilating blacks who’ve been in this nation for 400 years! Yet it is blacks and other non-Europeans who are being brought into the First World in record numbers, not similar fellow Europeans. Is it any wonder that they (we) are going to have problems?

* A liberal believes–hopes–that Islamic and black men will be tender and merciful when they become the majority. He hopes by his preemptive groveling display of appeasement and submission to forestall retaliation for all of the (largely imagined) sins committed by his forefathers to which he is heir. In an effort to exonerate himself he repudiates his history–but it won’t work. In the eyes of blacks and Islam, he is condemned by his color and religion, ironically, mirroring the very intolerance for which he condemns his Father.

Too late he will realize that solidarity was his spear and shield and that his adversary intends to show no mercy. Without his cultural milieu, a human being is as naked and vulnerable as a solitary baboon without his troop. He is doomed to be the leopard’s next meal.

* Europe was at its best when it was choc-full of some rather tough, unsavory and decidedly ‘illiberal’ regimes.
Think of the Romans. Think of how Britain rose to greatness at the same time as the ‘autocratic’ King George.
The softness and flabbiness, if not downright stupidity of modern Europe – as typified by that stinking pile of blow-fly infested shit, the EU-, is of the distinctively recent vintage.
As recently as the 1960s the French army and security forces had the cojones to routinely apply handheld electrical generators to the couillons of Magrehbi rebels.
Guillotining only stopped in France in 1977. The last public guillotining was as recent as 1936. In the early 60s, the French police – in the heart of Paris – literally massacred scores of north African protestors and tossed their bodies into the Seine. And the got clean away with it.
Virtually all the European nations were just as tough and ruthless right up to the 1970s when a certain shittiness – perhaps American ‘civil rights’ crap or Swedish style insanity crept in. For example the UK waged its last colonial wars in Aden and Malaya with ruthlessness.

So, sorry the ‘liberal’ craziness that you laud in Europe is really only a very recent – and decadent – phenomenon.
The corollary is that the ‘old beast’ is still there, waiting to be awakened.

* Multiculturalism has immobilized our society. There are many things we know need to be done such as tightening up immigration but because there is now a built in opposition to every sensible idea we need to go through this vetting process where everybody’s feelings get heard. We will never have 100% consensus on any topic ever again.

In 2015, I think the Japanese would have to bomb Pearl Harbor twice before America would go to war.

* Left/liberalism/progressive-ism is about power.

They used to talk endlessly about the poor. We need to improve the lot of the poor. Now, there is not enough grinding poverty in America to be a voting block. They care nothing about the remaining poor.

The new dissatisfied are racial groups, women (gender), idealistic young (capitalism is evil because there are rich people), inequality (envy).

They hope to ride to power, preferably absolute power, by playing the dissatisfied against whatever resists their power now. And they are willing to fan the flames of dissatisfaction.

Since money is power, progressives naturally favor a centrally planned, managed economy.

They got it in health care, where everything is dictated by Washington, including what procedures are done (by being covered, everything else is prohibited), prices, compensation, business success or failure (guaranteed existence to health care companies with a profit and loss limits imposed by law), etc.

They took over the bank capital markets – merely the threat of an indictment is the death of any bank and there are many lesser tools used to tell banks exactly what to do. The banks are wards of the state with free returns on excessive reserves which are in turn borrowed from the fed.

Federal subsidies allow them to dictate to any college or university that takes federal money; same for the states. They favor a 55 MPH speed limit but have no authority to impose such a thing – states adopt it or lose fed highway money.

Things other than the economy they want to dictate by edict: character of neighborhoods (covered extensively here), sex breakdown of occupations, the definition of marriage, ability to purchase or carry guns, weight and efficiency of your car, source of your electric power (expensive solar instead of inexpensive coal) content of your children’s education (home schooling discouraged), whom you associate with, political donations, change of citizenship (exit taxes and rules prohibiting corporations to reincorporate abroad), movement of money ($10,000 limit on cash carried out of the country, reporting of cash withdrawals of your money from your bank account), and many more too numerous to name.

I’m reading the 2009 book by Neil Strauss — Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life.

On page 269, Neil writes:

A younger marine, Luke, was speaking. He had close-cropped black hair, thin lips, and small, sparkling brown eyes. “This is going out on a limb, but I think there will be a revolution in America in the next hundred years.”

“Where’s it going to come from?” I asked.

“Me,” he said without smiling. He paused, then explained. “If you ask anyone in the military, they hate the government. They have all these rules that hold us back and put our lives in danger.”