I speculated yesterday whether Geraldo would fall to the current sexual inquisition for his defense of Matt Lauer, and today Bette Midler, at least, says he should, for an act that was "unseemly" in 1991 (relating a story from the Seventies) and is now a hanging offense.
But most notable is Midler's referencing the Lauer defense. This is what he's being punished for; the transgression is cashed in like a chip in the Narrative casino.
Tomorrow is my birthday. I feel like this video was a gift from the universe to me. Geraldo may have apologized for his tweets supporting Matt Lauer, but he has yet to apologize for this. #MeToopic.twitter.com/TkcolFWfA2
I find it difficult to dislike Bette Midler even when she tries. But watching this one has to be struck by the decline in the quality of female celebrities. Even Barbra Walters comes across better than I remember. What happened to genuinely tough (and funny) broads? That's when women were women.
Older boomers who were adults in the Seventies are compromised as a class by this sudden sexual inquisition. Geraldo wrote a whole book boasting of his sexual escapades. So many out there remain vulnerable, the white ones already undergoing a sort of racial inquisition, with which this one blends seamlessly. The treadmill of white celebrity must be a harrowing experience at the moment. The New Cruelty isn't impressed.
Midler's cavalier attitude about Geraldo's act at the time--and, if true, it is disgraceful--and her bringing it up now reminds me of an earlier celebrity revelation's journey. MacKenzie Phillips, daughter of Michelle Phillips of sixties folk rock act The Mamas and the Papas, who was in a Seventies sitcom before becoming known as a troubled ex-celebrity and, she asserts, incest survivor, told a story on Howard Stern's radio program in the Nineties (I heard it; can't find it) about how, on her eighteenth birthday, she was maneuvered into a room by Mick Jagger, who closed the door behind him and said "I've been waiting for this for years."
She went on to say they spent the night together and it was "pretty terrific." Her attitude was casual and humorous, someone in recovery boasting of an escapade on the path of excess.
Fast forward to years later and Phillips is promoting her book. I see a clip of her on Oprah. She's wiping tears away and saying "...and then he said 'I've been waiting for this for years'..."
If language is violence "flirty business" is practically a hand wending its way to the proverbial pussy. Geraldo withdrew that hand hastily once he heard the gasp:
If they keep purging they're going to have quite a little fraternity of the ostracized out there to worry about.
Al Franken...did USO tours overseas...the show he did was broad comedy of a sort that goes back to the Middle Ages...If you thought that Al stood outdoors at bases in Iraq and Afghanistan and told stories about small-town life in the Midwest, you were wrong. On the flight home, in a spirit of low comedy, Al ogled Miss Tweeden and pretended to grab her and a picture was taken. Eleven years later, a talk show host in LA, she goes public, and there is talk of resignation. This is pure absurdity, and the atrocity it leads to is a code of public deadliness. No kidding.
The mild Minnesotan hasn't the energy to defend himself.
“It’s some sort of poetic irony to be knocked off the air by a story, having told so many of them myself, but I’m 75 and don’t have any interest in arguing about this,” he said. “And I cannot in conscience bring danger to a great organization I’ve worked hard for since 1969.”
His decency is genuine, his position untenable. At this stage in the panic/purge the accusations are convictions and the convicted gone in a cloud of dust:
Effective immediately, MPR said, it will no longer distribute and broadcast Mr. Keillor’s remaining programs, “The Writer’s Almanac” and “The Best of A Prairie Home Companion Hosted by Garrison Keillor.”
Keilor cancelled his public appearances, and MPR is moving swiftly to remove his trace:
It will also change the name of American Public Media’s current incarnation of the show, which Chris Thile, a songwriter and mandolinist, took over in October 2016, after Mr. Keillor stepped down.
We're thisclose to airbrushing people out of photos. In announcing the name change it's almost as if they're sending a signal, or rubbing it in at least. In his defense of Franken Keilor ridiculed the practice of renaming things out of political correctness:
My friend Pastor B.D. Christensen said something so good Sunday morning that I woke up and wrote it down: “[something something] . . . about making peace with the mistakes of the past [blah blah blah] and learning from them. It’s slippery ground, in general, to judge past actions by present standards and with a benefit of hindsight that is, morally, highly questionable.”
And immediately I thought about the Minneapolis Park Board voting to rename Lake Calhoun as Lake Bde Maka Ska because the man for whom it was named back in the early 1820s was a slavery enthusiast from South Carolina and an author of the Indian Removal Act and also, judging from his pictures, ugly as a mud fence.
Your critique of the effectiveness of renaming will be taken under consideration Mister...uh...Mis-ter...um...?
But that part about projecting present "standards" onto past acts is interesting--are they standards, exactly, we're invoking? Because that past, despite its presumed pre-feminist blight, is distinguishable from this one by people old enough to remember as having considerably higher standards.
“I’ve been fired over a story that I think is more interesting and more complicated than the version MPR heard. Most stories are" Keilor lamented. How true. Diversity and feminism are killing us--through the culture. Ever more groups to offend, to placate with unearned representation. Diversity is a web we're in.
The purge and social justice aren't interested in "interesting". They deplore it. That's a genuine tragedy--the dampening effect of diversity and political correctness on culture, where, just for starters, less and less can be said for greater and greater risk of giving offense.
But Keilor is above all else inoffensive--and liberal. So it makes me think again he's being punished for that op ed, which may soon be memory-holed along with Keilor. The Post attached this disclaimer to the (now) dangerous and suspect words:
Update, 1:14 p.m. Nov. 29: After we published this column, Minnesota Public Radio announced it was terminating its contracts with Garrison Keillor due to “allegations of his inappropriate behavior with an individual who worked with him.” The Post takes allegations of this kind seriously and is seeking more information about them.
The Current Year has been going on for years. The meme goes back to 2015, making that the first year of the Current Year. John Oliver's fallacy was born of a broader triumphal attitude on the Left following the ascent of Obama--that multiculturalism was irreversible. If the passage of time trumps all for you it's because you like the way things are going.
Those were the days we measured progress in days.
Then came the Trump "Resistance", postmodern anarcho-tyranny waged from the recording studios of Hollywood and Manhattan.
Despite nothing material changing since the election, and no real challenge to the cultural hegemony--other than that implied by Trump's election--the Left pushes for stricter limits on speech and behavior while doubling down on pro-Narrative propaganda. The genuine hysterics mask the totalitarian power grab. We have the first resistance practicing public purges. It's all very weird.
Having long ago banned too openly "conservative" people from participation in celebrity--yet, somehow, still, Trump!--there is nothing else now but to come for the silent or suspect. Taylor Swift counts as both. But they'd been after her for a long time--since she had the temerity to win one of Beyonce's awards, at least, but then Kanye only took the stage in outrage because Taylor was so provocatively white a persona in the first place. She was greeted with hostility by black America and artists from the get-go.
Black America adopted her as a white icon long before white nationalists, for the same reasons and without irony.
Swift's haters are taking advantage of the new, harsher cultural order mandated by the Resistance, to take her down if they can. Trump was their 9/11. The Resistance spawns various versions of the Iraq War, ginned up to milk the mania. One of those campaigns is turned on Swift. Steve Sailer's law of female journalism is very much in evidence and effect.
(That law, something like "most female journalism is dedicated to creating a world wherein the journalist herself will be considered hotter-looking" should come with the corollary that black women demonstrate the effect with a higher level of intensity.)
Along with this a diverse millennial generation is assuming the establishment media reigns. Salon and Slate have long nurtured the SJW thumbsucker genre, where young writers weave warm coats for their vanity out of critical race theory and the latest Current Year fads.
Being well into the Current Year the fossils of the old establishment are sounding more and more like Slate and Salon. Time and Newsweek, grasping for both solvency and relevance, have adopted critical theory and identity politics fads in analyses and editorials.
(It's telling that no mainstream outlet yet has even thought of dipping a toe into the alt right perspective; it's not that they're leaving money on the table, they don't even want to know if it's there.)
In the year since Donald Trump was elected, the entertainment world has been largely united in its disdain for his presidency. But a notable voice has been missing from the chorus: that of Taylor Swift, the world’s biggest pop star. Her silence is striking, highlighting the parallels between the singer and the president: their adept use of social media to foster a diehard support base; their solipsism; their laser focus on the bottom line; their support among the “alt-right”.
Is there a name for the "striking parallel" that isn't? Even if Trump and Swift were somehow alone in "adept use of social media" (Kim Kardashian is Hitler) it wouldn't tie them together ideologically.
But what struck me above all was this particle of oblivion:
Swift’s songs echo Mr Trump’s obsession with petty score-settling in their repeated references to her celebrity feuds, or report in painstaking detail on her failed romantic relationships (often, there is crossover). The message is quintessentially Trumpian: everyone is out to get me – but I win anyway. Seeded with clues to the identities of her famous associates, her lyrics reel in and solidify a hardcore fanbase – usually young, female followers known as “Swifties” – who passionately defend her honour on social media by attacking her detractors
As I wrote here before, Swift's "petty score-settling" is her adoption of the black model of popular music. Indeed, the pettiest and most prominent of those scores is that with Kanye West. Trump always appealed to black rappers especially, before he became a political figure in earnest, precisely for his style, which (you want to bang your head against the wall sometimes) he adopted in some part from black popular culture!
But even Trump didn't invent the posse of dedicated friends. That too is Harlem, not Queens or Taylor Swift's Reading, Pennsylvania.
The elite are operating the Megaphone out their ass.
48.20
Luke asks about the recent interrupted NPI conference which Richard describes as a success despite being "ejected from the facility" before they were able to finish.
54.15
Spencer tells about being threatened by Poland's defense minister and banned from the entire Schengen Zone.
1.14.30
Vivian asks about Faith Goldy, fired from The Rebel for giving an interview to a Daily Stormer linked podcast.
Spencer:"I think we could all kind of sense she had identitarian leanings...I'm not sure I want to make everyone alt right...I have bashed the alt lite but the reason I bash them is because they attack us...but if an alt lite could exist that wouldn't do that, that could recognize the truth of our movement...but we're still in the conservative matrix, the normie matrix...when I bash the alt lite I bash these particular individuals I don't like..."
Vivian asks about Gavin McGinnis "Well, he's really reaching out to the butt-plug community." He goes on to defend him somewhat, but he has a low opinion of most of the alt lite.
He's not impressed with the alt lite: “These people are not our friends — Mike Cernovich, Jack Posobiec, James O’Keefe, Gavin McInnes. They are all these weird personalities. They’re botched people. The Alt Lite is not sending us their best. They are these strange marginal people. They view us as stealing their thunder. They want to be the edgy no-holds-barred Alt Right. The young hip edgy people. I’ve never viewed them as friends. I viewed them as temporary allies in 2016.”
1.35.25
Luke: "Why are you the face of the alt right?"
"...I was willing to be out front...I was willing to use my face and name...I have been in this for the long haul, I didn't just jump on this train...I coined the phrase 'alt right'...if I don't say so myself I can be charming and charismatic and provocative..."
1.40.30
Luke asks about Greg Johnson. "He's attacked you fifteen different ways to Sunday...you almost never respond."
Spencer: "I really don't like him as a person, I think he is a bad person, I will be perfectly honest. He is a divisive person who thrives on creating internecine disputes...the kind of things he's done behind my back that are not public that are actually far more poisonous than anything he's written...using someone as your reverse compass...he seems to desire to take the opposite perspective on me even though he's clearly wrong...I actually think I've been rather polite in what I've had to say about him...I don't think people like that are good for any movement, they thrive on division..."
Spencer: "It actually did...I don't think it fundamentally change Andrew in a way was criticizing people like me who would say 'we don't have to talk about the homosexual question'...Joyce actually...did change my views...I was one of those 'live and let live' types."
1.45.10
Luke: "What can the average person who doesn't want to get exposed do to support your cause?"
Spencer: "...our cause generally needs funds...support what you like, there are a lot of personalities in this movement...I would say sharing our material with friends and family...at the very least not counter-signalling us to friends and family...a lot us in 2016 with the election of Trump I think we kind of got out ahead of our skis...we...were going to be mainstream...we were going to have people working in the Trump administration...come out of the shadows...that didn't really happen...we did make a major breakthrough...but...can someone come out to their coworkers as being alt right? ...no...I think people can be much more useful by being secret agents...not attending conferences actually...if they are someone in a position of power or influence...they probably should not even attend a conference...we're in this weird space...our movement is part of the mainstream...millions know there's an alternative...yet we're still taboo, maybe more taboo..."
1.51.15
Luke asks about Andrew Anglin. "...I'm not quite sure I quite know what to make of him...I would say this to a normie though, 'look, he is trolling to a large degree but there's some insight in there as well'...we do fundamentally different things...but I'm also not going to throw him under the bus...I think having a healthy distance between him and me is the best and he'd agree with that..."
1.55.00
The Daily Shoah. "A very down to earth show."
Regarding the "hail Trump, hail victory" controversy: "I certainly knew how provocative that would be...our movement should be about winning...
1.58.50
I ask Richard the "when did you get woke?" question. "I don't think there was one moment."
We talk about eugenics, China, technology. He rejects the rejection of empire. "...we're going to have to be engaged in determining the world order...little nationalist Poland will be bulldozed...by China or some other major power...we need to rule...if we don't someone else will...we need to think geopolitically or someone else will dominate us...we are going to have to think about our civilization on a geopolitical level..."
Luke: "Richard, where do you think Hitler was wrong?"
"I would just ask that we table that for a later time."
Taylor Swift hasn't come out and said she's okay with being white, of course, but she hasn't explicitly denied it either, and just look at her.
There is something to the coincidence of the "Okay to be White" trolling and the renewed intensity of the anti-Swift movement now. Like the other components of the Left, black advocacy is enlivened and a little manic after the election of Trump. An awful lot of people are taking advantage of that to indulge personal prejudices, such as those against skinny white Beckys for instance.
You have to hand it to Swift. She soldiers on, despite having virtually no defenders in a sub-genre of criticism dedicated to her. Somewhere there is a college course dedicated to her, and not the adulatory sort "studying" Beyonce.
It's been almost a decade since black America's campaign against her began in earnest, with Kanye West's public humiliation of her in an act that would have ruined his career not long before. As it is, he demonstrated a new level of acceptable public racial provocation, which continues to grow in malice.
West's cultural guerrilla warfare blew out the Overton Window for anti-white animus.
Indeed, black hostility toward Swift tracks Kanye's periodic acts of hostility toward her, and is subdued but still very evident during periods of Kanye-determined detente, demonstrating the astounding if unacknowledged privilege black America enjoys. Most of Swift's provocations of the black public come from her responses to West's random attacks. Swift's career has become intertwined with his. Every work of hers is scoured for references to him.
Indeed, in her relationship to West and black America Swift is drawn into the black model of popular music based on personal conflicts and self-aggrandizement.
Kanye tested America with his stunt. But the reaction to it--white America's shrug, corporate America's indifference, black America's approval--consecrated the thing. His petty act proved to be of great moment and hastened significantly the present untenable state of anti-white hatred in America.
West's eventual but complete victory over Swift laid waste to implicit limits on giving offense to whites, as well to as white notions of decorum. He thrived after and by the act, establishing a not just viable but attractive option for others. This has the effect of monetizing anti-white animus.
It was a watershed in the present pilfer-and-appropriate phase of the American civil rights movement. At the same time institutions and culture (and wealth) are being separated from their white progenitors in the name of diversity, blacks seek to banish whites from "black" culture, music, fashion. Other ethnicities follow suit--blacks are the real "model minority", in that theirs is the political model for racial group advocacy, universally if unevenly adopted (even by "model minority" Asian and South Asians, astutely seeing no need for their prosperity to deny them their share of American ruin).
Diversity is a spider's web; move this way offend one, move that way offend another. Whites hold still to avoid giving offense. Taking Kanye and his ilk for a joke we are like the man-in-the-burning-room: this is fine.
Even slang becomes proprietary. What's yours is ours, what's ours is ours is the present attitude of non-whites, with the vigorous approval of their white allies.
Trump doesn't challenge black America or its privileged status directly--he seems to accept it--but he challenges a status quo that greatly favors black America. Despite being made up of countless emotional and irrational individual expressions, collectively black resistance to Trump is rational self interest without emotional attachment (or recognition of) a broader national interest.
White spaces are a threat. White faces are a threat.
Where there was condescension for whites as a group safely displaced, if still hanging around and helpfully doing all the work, now there is paranoia. Like the old joke about racist cops finding a criminal conspiracy in three black guys standing on the street corner, any such concentration of whites is a hate crime. The difference of course being the former retains some connection to reality.
The unrealistic characterization of diversity in mainstream media propaganda--and it's all propaganda now--takes on a whole new urgency. White spaces are now potential hamlets of resistance. Individual whites are potential icons of resistance--as the humorous adoption of Taylor Swift by white nationalists demonstrates.
As with everything else the Left seems incapable of keeping track of the sequence of events. Taylor Swift was made into a figure of white supremacy by blacks for being too white long before Trump and the meme wars.
In advertising, film and television it's long been standard practice that no group can be too large without the mediating presence of non-whites. There is a number, probably around six, over which no group presented in a television ad, for instance, can be all white. A single family of whites is still allowed (but nearly discouraged, and balanced now by mixed-race families).
There are rules as well for the individual presentation of blacks and whites in media, all bent on portraying the former superior to the latter.
Against the backdrop of reality, where whites risk murder merely by setting foot in black neighborhoods from which occasionally issue raiding bands of murderous orc-like children, in a reality where the limits of black malice appear limited only by that same indulgence we grant Kanye West; in a time when it's not outrageous to imagine them slaughtering us in the streets if only given the encouragement and means, against these things the ongoing black supremacy kitsch of popular culture is barbaric and sickening.
It can't be much longer tolerated.
It's okay to be white. It's okay to be Taylor Swift.
The others parted before him with habitual respect, males in their fashion, females in theirs. Grace animated his powerful frame and ennobled his exquisite features.
The higher ones always paid him approving attention. Sometimes they stroked him, the music that issued from them growing warm and soft in approval. They brought him to mate with the best females, and fed him special delicacies. He was incapable of understanding his superiority, but he felt it.
They came one day out of the cold sharp sunshine, raising him up. Cooing, they carried him along. The others scattered in fear and respect as he rose and fell slightly in the higher one's embrace.
They placed him carefully on a pedestal, stroking him admiringly, humming and murmuring. Gently they laid his perfect head down. A streak of light drew his attention up, where the sun was eclipsed by the raised hand of the higher one, appearing as if its rays issued from it. He thrilled. He felt the crude beginnings of something like pride.
There, in the umbra within that crown of light, he saw the name, for a moment, the name stamped on the heel of the ax, before it disappeared in a flash of light and motion, as if it had been holding the sun itself back, the name that read: UNTETHERED
Anglin, meanwhile, gained infamy for his troll attacks. In 2015, he tormented the University of Missouri during student protests against racist incidents on campus. He used Twitter hashtags to seed fake news into the conversation, falsely reporting that members of the KKK had arrived to burn crosses on campus and were working with university police. He claimed that Klansmen had gunned down protesters and posted a random photo of a black man in a hospital bed. As his rumors spread, the campus freaked out.
The characterization "student protests against racist incidents on campus" is quite the contextual dodge for describing the shakedown of that school from which it has yet to recover.
Anglin may have been causing the university problems it didn't want by taking in the dopier student protesters, which is to say all of them, with his KKK hoax for one, but that was only because he did what the school wouldn't: defend it against patently absurd charges. One could go further and suggest the school has an obligation, as on any institution falsely accused of racism, to defend itself. It owes this to the next school to come under attack. It owes this to a slandered society, to, God forbid, a goodly race of people perpetually slandered by their intellectual and moral inferiors.
If Mizzou wanted nothing to do with Andrew Anglin it should have tried defending itself.
Atlantic author Luke O'Brien is all Narrative discipline. There will be no consideration of the legitimacy of a white working (and middle, for that matter) class complaint as such. But he's honest and perceptive enough within those respectable limits.
Still, Anglin’s mob was a terror. He sicced his trolls on American University’s first black female student-body president. He had them go after Erin Schrode, a Jewish woman running for Congress in California, as well as Jonah Goldberg and David French, writers for National Review. As I reported this story, Anglin sent his trolls after me, too, and my interactions with them confirmed my suspicions that they were, by and large, lost boys who felt rejected by society and, thanks to the internet, could lash out in new and destructive ways. When I tried to draw them out about their lives, some admitted that they struggled with women. One told me that he struggled with his own homosexuality. Most imagined they were rising up against an unchecked political correctness that maligned white males. The more the liberal establishment chose to revile them, the more they embraced their role as villains.
The villain role precedes the "villainy"; it's an important point.
In recent years, psychologists have found a powerful connection between trolling and what’s known as the “dark tetrad” of personality traits: psychopathy, sadism, narcissism, and Machiavellianism. The first two traits are significant predictors of trolling behavior, and all four traits correlate with enjoyment of trolling. Research published in June by Natalie Sest and Evita March, two Australian scholars, shows that trolls tend to be high in cognitive empathy, meaning they can understand emotional suffering in others, but low in affective empathy, meaning they don’t care about the pain they cause. They are, in short, skilled and ruthless manipulators.
This is plausible enough but it's also true the trolls see themselves as at war, and constitute a genuine resistance movement (in contrast to the elites' astro-turf anti-Trump "Resistance") already, operating anonymously and hiding from the law. Someone at war or convinced they're at war suppresses his affective empathy to fight. The real question is the validity of their cause.
Anglin was triumphant—here [Charlottesville] was his vision for the Whitefish march, come to fruition. He’d done as much as anyone to promote the rally, turning his site into a key organizing hub. “The Alt-Right has risen. There is no going back from this,” he wrote. “This was our Beer Hall Putsch.” And when Trump again refused to denounce the white nationalists, Anglin exulted. “No condemnation at all,” he wrote. “Really, really good. God bless him.”
...
Was Charlottesville the alt-right's beer hall putsch or the control-left's Reichstag fire?
It depends on whether or not the media can keep it framed as a right wing attack on innocents or Anglin can frame it as transcendent trolling.
This video's from the RNC in Cleveland last year. The woman with the wig posing as a tea party representative is a comedienne (if anyone knows her name please put it in comments) doing a Daily Show type routine.
This was ruined by the extreme evangelist offscreen bellowing into a bullhorn. I've tried salvaging it with subtitles now because Spencer will be joining us for Luke Ford's Torah Talk the Sunday after Thanksgiving. 9:00 AM Pacific.
Social justice is in constant need of adjustment. Police body-cameras used to be considered a no-brainer for the Left. Police resistance was predictable, but the practice has become widespread. Now that the Left has had a look at the results, it people are having second thoughts:
Because an officer’s memory of an event may be altered by watching body camera footage, doing so will likely alter what officers write in their reports. That, in turn, can make it more difficult for investigators or courts to assess whether the officer’s actions were reasonable based on what he or she perceived at the time of the incident, states the report, “The Illusion of Accuracy: How Body-Worn Camera Footage Can Distort Evidence.”
Bold added. Cops can't be as easily framed with "implicit bias".
Body-cams give police a chance to correct their own memory and, presumably, get their stories straight:
The vast majority of the nation’s biggest police departments allow officers to watch footage from body cameras whenever they want, including before they write their incident reports or make statements, said the report, which was released Tuesday by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
“Unrestricted footage review places civil rights at risk and undermines the goals of transparency and accountability,” said Vanita Gupta, former head of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division and current head of the Leadership Conference, in the report’s introduction.
The problem as activists see it is officers reviewing footage won't be tempted to make claims they can't back up. The referenced report cites an incident where a security video near an arrest revealed police beating a suspect where the cop's vest-cam that only indicated a struggle, backing up officers' claims. But here the cops allowed to review footage were actually tempted, if anything, to lie. Had they not known, perhaps they would have come clean. I'm not sure this is what bothers activists--unless it's in recognition it can only depress the numbers of successful prosecutions of cops.
Just as cops, if allowed, would control any and all footage, releasing only that which helps them, their critics would ultimately take the footage entirely out of the hands of police; cops would have no access at all.
The inevitable result of unchecked Leftist power would (will?) result in police having no access to their own body-cam footage; it would be entirely surveillance. Letting my imagination go I envision political officers, affirmative action hires out of the hood, monitoring cops in real time. Maybe administering an occasional shock.
That the same video is available to prosecutors and internal investigators undermines the activist stated argument. What does it mean that they feel undermined by a cop's opportunity to check his memory against video?
The only valid point I can see to the objection to police access to their own video is that cops reviewing such can see what they can get away with. It makes them more formidable in the spy v spy game of criminal v social justice.
If I was a police officer, of course, I would tell the Left: you wear the body cam on the street, then you can control what it records. Fair?
Via Steve Sailer, I see the ever-vigilant Ben and Jerry are now deploying critical race theory in a cunning marketing strategy that seems to be based on hectoring their core demographic as immoral for failing to solve the world's most intractable problem, black dysfunction.
From their website:
Ever hear someone say something like, “Hey, wow, great news everybody! Racism’s over! We fixed it!”
[no, not once over a long lifetime]
They’re genuinely excited that we elected an African-American president. They’ll tell you how the first mainstream black superhero character, Black Panther, just appeared in a big new movie. And by the way, P.K. Subban is a hockey star!
Does anyone, anywhere speak the way these millennial scribes working up their obnoxious "explainer" pieces think they do? I'm always appalled.
It's always your "racist uncle" uttering commonplaces not heard since All in the Family (which represents the last, final stage in the intellectual development of anti-racism", years before the average SJW was born) or earnest college students asking to touch the nappy head of their black classmates as if they're exotics; even the praise they put in the mouths of their fellow, less enlightened goodwhites sounds embarrassingly fake.
Ben and Jerry's tacks a video jointly produced by MoveOn.org and Demos to the end of the article.
Life after Politics offers the edited highlights of Demos, the think tank founded by Geoff Mulgan and Martin Jacques in 1993 to chart the course for a new kind of politics - sometimes called a postmodern politics - for the 21st century. Demos was founded as a self-conscious imitation of (and tribute to) the Institute of Economic Affairs, the mother of all modern think tanks, founded by Ralph Harris, Arthur Seldon and Mike Fisher in 1955 to find free-market solutions to what they saw as Britain's economic and social problems, known to their contemporaries as social democracy. The IEA survived on the fringes of politics for 20 years before their ideas were taken up with gusto by the Thatcherites and caused the IEA to flourish at the centre of politics during the 1980s.
Chayei Sarah today. Genesis 23 - 25:18
Abraham purchases the Cave of Macphelah to bury Sarah.
Luke opens with the searing question "is it, really, okay to be white?"
1:28 Steve Sailer is not alt right
4:46 The Goyim know, and are shutting it down.
7:40 Conspiracy theory Casey
17:15 Malcom X and YouTube's commenting policy
26:40 The Greatness that is Henry Louis Gates' Africa
27:50 The Beer Summit as presage of Trumpism
31:00 This week's portion. Sarah dies aged 120 years. Luke points out the personal tragedy: Abraham has to travel to Canaan where Sarah is to mourn her; they ended their lives estranged.
With her academic credentials and having authored a pair of books about something other than herself--the declining middle class, no less--Elizabeth Warren could have been a champion of the middle and working classes. I'm sure she would if that was where the political opportunity was. That hasn't been the case for a long time.
Warren, in the middle of railing against the Trump administration and Republicans, turned to the crowd to ask them for an “amen” of “approval” during her speech.
“So when the Trump administration and the Republicans take steps to undermine equal rights, to roll back economic opportunity or to subvert equal justice under law, then we’re going to call them out and we’re going to fight back every single time,” Warren declared, before asking “Can I have an amen on that?”
The crowd broke out into a round of applause. Warren also said the Trump administration was actively working to take the country back to a time when the government found discrimination acceptable, adding that the administration was trying blame issues on the “other.”
The increase in hoary Theory phrases and notions in politicians' speech, such as "the Other", I think points to the Democrats' problem: the universities are the lifeblood of the Left and the Democratic Party, and they've long descended into theoretic madness.
The reaction to Trump suggests there's no going back for them. Co-opting economic nationalism--as Bill Clinton would have done--is no longer possible.
It isn't that they don't have an answer for economic malaise or white discontentment. Of course they do. It's a few decades old in fact
“They’re working to turn back the clock to when discrimination was okay with our government. We know what they’re up to. This is the latest version of the old ‘divide and conquer’ strategy. Hate and racism have divided Americans for a long time. Failing schools? Blame it on the black and brown kids. Bad jobs? Blame the immigrants. The drugs and crime? Always find ‘them’ to blame. For those on top, divide and conquer is a great strategy because when we turn on each other, we can’t unite to fight against the system that is rigged in favor of the wealthy and the powerful, ” Warren added.
The cynical relationship between identity politics and globalism is on display here: the economic displacement of globalism is ascribed to white bigotry. How convenient.
The Democrats know Hillary lost by disdaining white economic concerns for identity politics, but they can't do anything about it. Tom Perez is DNC chair and leader of the diversity faction, Obama's remaining influence will be put in the service of whatever most promising black politicians they find, the current white and Jewish leadership is aging out and young Democrats are increasingly black, brown, gay, trans, female and furious.
