Escalation

The proverbial shit got real when demonstraters against President Trump's "Muslim ban" shutting down Portland's airport attacked a tiny group of counter-protesters and knocked a man unconscious.

The mob was barely contained as they cheered the assault (from Infowars):



News accounts are describing the counter-demonstrators as pro-Trump but that isn't entirely accurate. This is the same group of extreme evangelists I recorded harrying anti-Trump demonstrators previously at the Inaugural Day protests in downtown Portland:

 

Somehow these guys held out for over an hour, alone amid a hostile crowd of thousands, creating a virtual blizzard of triggered snowflakes. The last time I checked on them they had been splattered with refuse and some sort of thick red liquid. The speaker here who you can't quite see looks to me to be the same guy who was knocked out.

The video above I took with my camera. These poor quality videos are converted from Periscope broadcasts I took of the same event.




Some anti-Trump protesters created a cordon around the evangelists to keep their fellows off of them. One of the evangelicals' tormentors here I think is the same protest group leader who was charged a few days ago for sex with a minor (seventeen-year old twink via grindr, it appears--he's already a registered sex offender for his juvenile record):



And this has nothing to do with any of that specifically but I thought I should inform you that democracy is now a hate crime:



I encountered a similar group outside the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, employing the same means and rhetoric:



These groups are being described as "Westboro" wherever they're encountered, but as far as I can tell they're not affiliated with the notorious Westboro Baptist Church. Their defense of Trump appears to be mostly opportunistic. The still-active original Westboros, unsurprisingly judging from their anti-Americanism and anti-militarism, actually protested Trump's inauguration.

Our local Westboros, like the guys at the RNC, seem to have seized on a qualified pro-Trump narrative as a means of provoking their primary enemy, degeneracy, so well-represented by the social justice movement.

The airport assault represents an escalation to violence the local media appears uninterested in noting.

The Waiting

One more foul emanation of enforced diversity: that morbid interval after an act of mass violence, as we two increasingly divided sides of our split nation wait to learn the identity of the culprit and where the narrative impact will land. Diversity not only divides by placing entire communities of strangers in our midst, it divides us--what's left of "us"--by forcing us to take a stand regarding them.

Still, almost no one who's chosen sides already will be swayed either way. Whoever loses the coin toss feels it as a narrative setback, a blow to morale and a lost opportunity, but rarely if ever as a challenge to his assumptions. We continue, out of habit as much as anything else, as if there's still a fight for the acquiescence of the great distracted middle of apolitical citizens, the "normies". But as our political polarization continues and the atrocities pile up--both direct results of diversity--that middle becomes both smaller and increasingly numbed to the arguments. To the extent they consider it at all they assume they live equidistant between two extremes that can be reconciled, if only the zealous on both sides would calm down, by some splitting of the difference. That things might be the Manichean struggle between good and evil that we out here on the battle lines see defies common sense--and it should, but common sense is insufficient for understanding a deliberately distorted reality.

In this circumstance it takes a greater shock to move anyone in the middle either way. But with the Establishment's control of the Megaphone there is a profound disparity in the directional effect of those shocks. Not all crimes are equal; not all victims equally wronged. Through amplification of supposed right wing extremism and suppression of even the most heinous acts of, for two instances, Muslim terrorists and black criminals, we've long been in a situation where a drunken white's "racist" rant somewhere goes viral and becomes an occasion for white self-flagellation everywhere, while the vast majority of Americans don't know about such as the Bataclan massacre, and criminally rare is he who knows of its appalling nature. And as the terrorist attacks pile up and grow in brutality, the perceptual chasm widens, because it's been decreed beforehand that an equivalence exists.

It's a scam, by which white Americans surrender our notion of "us" and "them". Rest assured, they, whoever they happen to be, have not. The effect for intellectual callow American blacks, Muslims and others of this deliberate double standard has been to strengthen their in-group identity and demonize us as a hostile out-group.

And the extreme nature of the violence is not just telling of the depths of the hate we're up against, it's an outrage we're no longer allowed. The nature of the violence is entirely relevant, but we're supposed to equate a disaffected loner shooting up a church in outrage over a nonetheless accurate notion of the state of affairs--Dylann Roof--with a police assassin wound up by fantastic tales of a "war" being waged against him by racist cops. We can prosecute and condemn Roof's actions without denying reality. I'm not sure how many more Roofs can be prevented if we continue to deny that reality and fail to deal with it. Likewise the emergence of an angry loner--such as may be responsible for the Quebec mosque massacre--does nothing to negate or justify the continuing assault on our peace and heritage that Islam represents. Neither do I equate his actions with the torture of innocents by an organized band supported by a larger religious-political movement

This is the nature of tolerance: you aren't allowed proper disgust, revulsion and outrage. Its impulse is still there, however, and it gets channeled into our own destruction; witness the zealous anger of the social justice warrior.

Where the media has no option but to cover such atrocities it hedges with irrelevant or misleading  context about how terrorists don't represent all Muslims and "right wing Christian white men" represent a greater threat. The revealing disparity in the nature of the crimes--a bullied loner shooting up a church versus the gleeful barbarity of Muslims beheading their victims--is hidden in statistics, along with the reality the Muslim terrorist represents an organized effort which "moderate" Muslims seem utterly unconcerned with, until it lands on them--in which case their efforts against it are paraded as of a piece with our own struggle, when it is not. Muslims besieged by ISIS somewhere take up a protest and it's enthusiastically picked up in the global media as evidence of their solidarity with us. But moderate Muslims needn't even oppose their extremists--all they need to do is flee them (or pretend to be fleeing them) and a new theme arises, such as when terrorist attacks in Europe are deemed to have no relevance to the present "refugee" onslaught, for these migrants are, after all, fleeing the same thing back home.
All variety of reality goes into the Narrate-o-Matic, but only Narrative-friendly gruel comes out.

But what's utterly lost is what strikes me as the worst of it: the so-called "right wing" terrorist himself, the so-called "intolerance" and bigotry are all just more results of the enforced diversity of globalization, Muslim immigration and forced integration. Inevitable, predictable, understandable even--for the apologist stands ever-ready to understand the most heinous acts of the Other or of aggrieved minorities.
In light of the barbarous nature of Muslim terror, and the profound betrayal of its apologists, from moderate Muslims to Western elites, the reaction of the "right wing" is tepid.

And it gets worse still. The default, taken-for-granted position of the apologists is that any reaction--muted as it is still in the West compared to what would be provoked anywhere else in the world to such a threat and betrayal, to such a humiliation, to such barbarity--is evidence of the necessity to continue on course with the actions producing it. To finally squelch this Orwellian-describe "prejudice" and "phobia".

Ironic Christianity

Via Steve Sailer I see a New York Times headline that would have defied understanding before the ascendance of Current Year thinking:

 

I've heard the claims that Christians are being discriminated against in the refugee racket and have no idea if it is true. The Times:

But the claim is simply untrue. In 2016, the United States admitted almost as many Christian refugees (37,521) as Muslim refugees (38,901), according to the Pew Research Center. 

Which might actually suggest a favoring of Christians over Muslims--Christians make up only five percent of Syrians, for example, according to the cited Pew article (but only one percent of refugees from there). But without the total numbers of Muslim v Christian applicants and corresponding percentages of those accepted, none of this proves anything about discrimination. And I suspect the percentage of applicants from persecuted Christian minorities far outstrips that of Muslim majority populations.
Also, asylees--those who enter the US on their own and then seek asylum--aren't counted. The Pew article doesn't give any of that detail, and the NYT is plainly uninterested, intent on spinning the story as a fact-check on Trump.

But it seems to me the salient point is the Christians are persecuted by Muslims, and the Muslims are persecuted by other Muslims (and of course Christians are far more likely to be genuinely persecuted and not economic migrants posing as refugees). Furthermore the Christians are a tiny minority, genuinely in danger of being wiped out completely--the stated intention of radical Muslims--and the prevention of genocide is supposed to be what the refugee system is for. I suspect as Assad has managed to avert losing control of Syria Christians there are less likely to apply, but Christian communities outside of Assad-controlled Syrian and throughout the Middle East are probably seeking asylum en masse.

It would just be nice to be able to trust our media regarding this. Alas. As for Trump, his championing of Christian refugees distinguishes him from the Times et al in that he seeks to restore to us a semblance of our identity--by allowing us to frankly discriminate in favor of our own, as people the world over not yet under the yoke of hostile elites still do. The Christians are better than the Muslims, they are better for us (if we're to take in anyone) and they are in an important sense, above all, us. 
Globalization is about nothing so much as denying us--historic Western peoples--our point of view, our identity, our sense of us.

Hijab Hullabaloo

Steve Sailer has been speculating Shepard Fairey's current obsession with the hijab is something of a sexual fetish, and Fairey's choice of a beautiful woman in ruby red lipstick that might get her arrested in one of the more moderate Muslim countries certainly suggests it is, at least, for him and other young straight male social justice warriors:

But I think it emerges from a Platonic fixation on the hijab going back a few years now. As a practical matter, the hijab makes "Muslim" an immediately discernible identity for inclusion in the ubiquitous Bennetton-style imagery of the Diversity movement. Otherwise you've got an uncertain Mediterranean type who could be a mere Italian, yielding next to nothing in Diversity Pokemon points.

To find an image immediately discernible as Muslim it becomes slim pickings once you've abandoned the hijab; you're left with such as the unattractive, literally and figuratively, Angry Muslim Beard Man

whose inclusion destroys the purpose of presenting a positive, non-threatening image entirely; he's been memed so much by shitposters I couldn't even find the iconic original image of him I had in mind, without text. Fortunately the real-life Angry Muslim Beard Man has gotten around quite a bit himself--so much so I think I've seen a conspiracy theory out there purporting to out him as a Mossad agent provocateur; he's everywhere on the Internet. As for Mild Hijab Woman, she's so in demand Google images auto-completes at h.

Taken as a whole Hijab Woman is more mild-mannered in appearance than she is attractive--though she is more attractive than the real-life hijab women you see on the street, many of whom make you wonder if the full face veil option of the Burka is not solely about protecting the modesty of women but also the eyes of men

I suspect the hijab is popular precisely because it projects a comforting modesty. Hijab Woman provides a welcome, if unrecognized, mild corrective to the broader social justice movement, with its endless surfeit of gyrating gays, obese co-eds, angry androgynes in tattoos, gages, piercings and awkward, tasteless apparel.

There's probably an unease for the socially aware person whose commitment isn't derived from his own psychological issues--yes, I do believe they exist--regarding the affected decadence and endlessly varied bad taste that is increasingly dominant in the movement. Hijab Woman cleanses the palate in between doses of the tart, the bitter, the sickly-sweet.

Today in White Guilt

Another day, another ambitious Democrat abasing herself before blacks in a play for power. Sally Boynton Brown, as the nationally unknown forty year-old Democratic Party Chair from Republican Idaho, is a long, long shot candidate for national chair. Her instantly infamous cringe-video below probably isn't enough to make her a dark horse candidate (so to speak) but has raised her profile without causing her too much trouble within her dysfunctional party.



Either Keith Ellison or Thomas Perez, offering competing hues of anti-white demagogy, seem destined to be the next Democratic National Committee Chair, unless someone can do something about it without running afoul of identity politics piety. Perez has to be the establishment favorite, having more experience and connections than the callow token Ellison, without the 880-pound gorilla of Islam in his baggag. Are Hispanics already yesterday's primus inter pares minority? They failed to show up and swing the election for Hillary after all, and Muslims, by perverse virtue of the crisis Islam presents to the West and their more exotic image, seem poised to overtake them. Ellison's biggest problem after his obvious mediocrity is probably that he isn't a female in a hijab. There seems to be a sort of non-sexual fetish about the hijab, but that's a whole other subject.

Brown's comments should be seen for what they are, an attempt by an ambitious newcomer making up for her slim resume with greater ideological zeal This is how that is done now in the Democratic Party. Despite the failure of identity politics to sway the election, it remains the only game in Liberal Town, and the Democrats have good reason to assume it's ultimate primacy is still inevitable, once demographic change renders the white vote, as such, inconsequential.

So the Democrats are nearly powerless to arrest their spiral down the rabbit hole of identity politics. I have to assume there are adults still in the Democrats' barracks dismayed to see the direction the party has taken, but they can't openly address, or even name, the problem. Identity politics have worked very well for the Democratic Party after all, and Hillary Clinton was an uncommonly bad candidate (and very, very white). It's just there's not much Hispanic and black political talent. Hispanic America is dominated by one of the least political peoples in the world, mestizos originating in Mexico. This is a virtue as far as I'm concerned, and I suspect as far as the White and Jewish old guard of the Democrats are concerned as well, but it has presented the Democrats with the problem of finding qualified Hispanics to run for office. Muslims appear to be inherently political, as a result of Islam's intensely political nature and the Middle Eastern ethnic origins of the majority. Ellison of course is an American-born convert, but the act of conversion, especially for a black American, is itself a selection for political ambition.

So it seems the Democrats have painted themselves into an identity politics corner--ironically because us bigots and racists have always had a point: there isn't a lot of intellectual energy in black and brown America--and, somehow, Asians, despite wealth and achievement (or maybe because of it) remain the miscellaneous category in the rainbow coalition. Multiculturalism ensures a great deal of mediocrity. Perhaps this hasn't been thought through entirely by the cultural Marxists holding the Democratic Party hostage.

Hillary Clinton doubled down on identity politics, despite her husband's sound advice to abandon them and campaign on the economy. Her failure is a microcosm of her party's still unfolding failure: she presented her sex as her strength and it proved her weakness. She failed precisely because she behaved as a woman, thinking the way to victory was to get other women creeped-out about Donald Trump. She was thinking with her pussy, so to speak.

The strength of identity politics has always been its status as That Which Will Not be Challenged. Now it has become its weakness.

The Million Menses March

 The Women's March came to Portland yesterday. Tens of thousands turned out. The mood was festive and family-friendly (that is the kiddies' physical well-being wasn't immediately threatened), contrasting the march of the day before, which degenerated by late night into countless small standoffs with police who used tear gas and flash bangs to clear streets and protect businesses.

Affable--cloying even--foot police in small groups along the route fielded handshakes and thanks from marchers. They spent the night before in riot gear hustling from scene to scene as people hurled verbal abuse and the occasional projectile. I saw one pair of officers wearing the ubiquitous "pussy hats". Still, their very presence set off the occasional autistic screecher.



Many brought children. "Nasty girls" was one theme; one shoulder-borne very young child carried a sign saying "future nasty girl". Vagina was the overarching theme; women in vagina costumes complete with labia majora and minora and clitoris, signs playing on the word "pussy" or "grab em by the pussy" were everywhere, sketches of vaginas and fallopian tubes fashioned to look horns, one such formed into the "Don't Tread on Me" snake from the Gadsden Flag.
One group of young women performed a Pussy Riot-like dance routine to an obscene rap song as they moved along with the paraders. Lots of families with kids who wouldn't have looked out of place at Epcot center, if not for the signs they were carrying. Piles of trashed signs everywhere. As we passed City Hall I saw the mayor out front giving an interview to a lone reporter; no one paid him any mind except a small child, flush with all the indulgent treatment, telling her day she'd like to go meet the mayor.

Palestinian-Portland Solidarity

One recurring presence among the signs and symbols in any Portland demonstration is the Palestinian flag, of course. Here it is sharing space with one of the more common specific themes of the new Trump-out demonstrations, the upside-down American flag:

Portland has an active liberal Jewish community of course (I've suffered, and perversely enjoyed, the wrathful gaze of the yenta eavesdropping on my politically incorrect conversation at a local breakfast place at least once), and the Palestinian flag has caused controversy before between Jews and pro-Palestinian protesters.
The city is big on refugees and, contrary to its image as a liberal "whitopia", has a significant and growing Muslim community, many of them Africans brought in by Catholic Charities, which has a sizable operation in the city. The obvious disdain of the newcomers for Israel is just one of the many contradictions festering under the umbrella of Trump hate.

Later that day after the square mostly cleared out these fellows caused some confusion, but were not physically assaulted as far as I know, with their plain display of Old Glory:

Fire and Brimstone and Fire

Westboro Baptist Church style preachers showed up at the inauguration day protests in Portland. Just as they did at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, they staked out a spot and bravely harried the crowd with intentionally offensive rhetoric. This guy held out for well over an hour. There were no other counter-protesters there. They drew a hostile crowd immediately. Some of the anti-Trump protesters formed a cordon around them to prevent their fellows from assaulting them. The last time I checked I saw they had been pelted with some sort of thick red liquid. They managed at least to upstage the flag burning.

 

Trump Names the Tools

From the new administration's whitehouse.gov website:

Our job is not to make life more comfortable for the rioter, the looter, or the violent disrupter.

As if calling rioters rioters and looters looters wasn't triggering enough to the Establishment, in using the word "disrupter" the administration is calling out one of the pop-ideologies of the opposition that seeks to broaden from occasional rioting to "disrupting" daily life anywhere and everywhere, like last year's bizarre campaign against late breakfasts or hangovers, or something, called #BlackBrunch.

But the real trolling here lies in the fact that the Trump Administration--if it keeps its promise--constitutes the greatest disruption of the status quo in modern American history.

New World Order

Kevin MacDonald quotes from evolutionary anthropologist John Tooby's article about "coalitional instincts" in response this year's "annual question" at Edge.org, "What Scientific Concept Should be More Widely Known" (emphasis added):

Coalition-mindedness makes everyone, including scientists, far stupider in coalitional collectivities than as individuals. Paradoxically, a political party united by supernatural beliefs can revise its beliefs about economics or climate without revisers being bad coalition members. But people whose coalitional membership is constituted by their shared adherence to “rational,” scientific propositions have a problem when—as is generally the case—new information arises which requires belief revision. To question or disagree with coalitional precepts, even for rational reasons, makes one a bad and immoral coalition member—at risk of losing job offers, her friends, and her cherished group identity. This freezes belief revision.

I think Tooby's right, and maybe more than he knows or would care to admit (MacDonald writes that evolutionary psychology was created to bowdlerize sociobiology under another name and apply an evolutionary analysis of human behavior that circumvents difficult problems regarding racial differences in IQ).
Religious mystery in the West under Christianity became sufficiently remote from the worldly to allow incredible advances in science and technology, because those advances, for the most part, posed no threat to it. Western thinkers were given room to roam--not nearly total, but enough to create the modern world. Paradoxically, it seems the replacement of a religious moral order with a rational moral order (predicated on human equality) has taken away that room in the most exigent field of study there is: human behavior.
It reminds of something I wrote a couple of years back (in response to another Occidental Observer article about an academic proposing a ban on the study of genetic variation in intelligence among populations):

The religious believe a fantasy about God and the afterlife; the believer of the current state religion of human equality believes a fantasy about human biology with ongoing implications for the here and now. Which holds more potential for destruction?

Diary, January 19, 2017

The weather improved just in time for Portland's first scheduled anti-Inauguration protests, having gone from sub-freezing cold snap (the last three days have been the first days above freezing this year) to warming just enough to turn the precipitation into cold, sometimes freezing, rain, then today easing up to cool but dry, even sunny at times. I went downtown to witness the only protest I could find scheduled. Students from Portland State University were to march from the school's campus at the south end of downtown to Pioneer Courthouse Square a few blocks north, where they would speak against the nomination of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

A few people milled around waiting, mostly curious civilians like myself, for the scheduled four o'clock beginning. Sometime after four enough had gathered, arriving alone or in small groups rather than in a marching body, to begin. The specific reason for this particular protest was the nomination of Betsy Devos, charter school advocate, for Secretary of Education. Eventually a quorum was reached and people began making speeches with a bullhorn. I was watching a young woman try to excite the crowd with a little call and response, a black man approached and struck up a conversation.

He was heavyset and unremarkable looking; he could have fallen into any category, but the moment he began speaking I read him, with relief, as what some--certainly not me--would describe as a nerd. I was relieved he wasn't crazy--though I suspected still he was at the least flaky--or, I soon realized, a lefty. I didn't reveal myself right away as he cautiously sounded me out with some mild criticism of what was being said. Finally he just excused himself before asking me where I stood.
"Well, I'm definitely not with them." I said, indicating the protesters, still not entirely sure about him. The way thus cleared, he started in on a sort of running critique of the protesters and the whole "resistance". At some point I realized I had seen him before at a pro-Trump rally last May that was disrupted by anti-Trump protesters with noisemakers and sirens. He's a Trump supporter. He proceeded to impress me with his range of knowledge of current affairs. Good guy, maybe a little flaky. Just like me.

The protest was a bit of a dud. The real action is expected tomorrow. Business and the city's light rail are shutting down in anticipation. I shall be out there. No getting arrested this time.

The Curious Case of Bradley's Button

Yesterday Steve Sailer noted today how Chelsea (nee Bradley) Manning's gender dysphoria, having gone from footnote to forefront during his incarceration along with the rise of the trans rights movement, is now seen by fashionable convention as a legitimate sympathy factor favoring President Obama's commutation of his sentence, as evidenced by the New York Times:

It's a cliche that politics are mostly, if not entirely, about social identity, as individuals vote in line with their perceived in-group values and needs. Needless to say, in the US social identity in politics and beyond has so long been pathologized for whites and encouraged, even romanticized, in minorities until it has become unchallenged convention that majority interests are inherently suspect and white interests nonexistent or evil. An astounding notion. It's hard to say how much of this is cynical manipulation and how much is the obliviousness of the elites' true-believing middle management corps.

In a nation with a dominant ethnic majority social identity politics arrange along class lines. In ours for a long time now they've arranged themselves around ethnic (now sexual and sexual preference) identity. Obama promised his election would transcend this. There was a curious, very un-progressive appeal to order inherent in it; even, that progressive bugaboo nostalgia played a part (reeling from something like a national identity crisis after President Bush squandered so much national prestige in his ill-fated Iraq invasion, we were encouraged to revisit what has become, however stupidly, our imagined greatest achievement--black civil rights.) We would be one, finally by squaring the circle of racism.

 Over his time in office we've come not only to see the impossibility of this, but the fact the elite wants nothing to do with it. Division is the point--diversity after all means division. It was social identity for me but not for thee, white people. This is what half the country rejected with Trump's election.

With the reaction to Trump's success--itself a reaction to this long process--this shaming dynamic of de-legitimizing white majority interests and valorizing minority interests reached its nadir, and, after a half century of unopposed triumph, it failed grandly in last year's presidential election. Maybe the de-legitimization of white interests represents less a transformation of politics than the death thereof, part and parcel of the surrender, led by Buckleyite conservatism in America, to the globalist order that is at the moment reeling from the one-two punch of Trump and Brexit. The interests of white Americans and Europeans were the very problem, it is now openly declared (though it's important to note this would have been considered insane at the beginning of this progress of slow-walking us to our demise), as witnessed by American slavery and the Holocaust. Now it isn't just populism that is the  enemy, but the population--to be corrected by the demographic diversification of that population into competing ethnic groups under an imperial multi-pole represented by Washington DC, New York and Brussels.

It's part, maybe the essential part, of that death of meaningful democratic politics in the West. As Kevin Grace said, "politics, as conventionally understood, died in that bunker in Berlin when Hitler put a bullet in his brain."

But politics go on, divorced from policy and meaning (for it remains to be seen if the Trump phenomenon, as much as anything else an insurgency against this order, will pan out). And that means politics as advertising. Advertising itself is advanced political method. And advertising is less about social identity--that gauche recognition of practical reality and real interests--than it is about aspirational social identity. Buy this product and display your status, or front a higher status, or even ascend thereby to a higher status (for perception is all--politics has taken this quite to heart). Status of course includes moral status--show your social "awareness" by buying "green" or "non-conflict" diamonds (wealth and virtue combine in the ultimate display).

A short conversation with the average anti-Trump civilian will quickly illustrate for you how much politics have become, for the fashionably conventional, aspirational social identity striving.

But with the transformation of Bradly Manning, hero or traitor, to Chelsea Manning, unassailable virtue-victim, represents a new aspect of social identity in politics. Now we are expected to identify and apply a premium or penalty depending on the social identity of the subject class or individual. The classes warranting a political, cultural and--apparently now with official recognition of Manning's identity--can only be expected to grow (and compete with each other), while the classes for which a penalty is applied will remain static (and shrinking along with demographic and cultural change): white, male, straight. This does not end well--unless we end it now in defiance, somehow.

Friday fiction.