The Last White Celebrity

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.

Diversity's Third Act Problem

Via Steve Sailer, here's an ad for the Democratic candidate in Virginia's gubernatorial race depicting the state's whites as Jim Crow rednecks running down doe-eyed diversi-youth in pickup trucks flying Confederate flags, Gadsden plates and--like a punchline--Ed Gillespie for Governor stickers.



Each representative of the new diversity wakes up from the same nightmare! The nightmare of white supremacy!

The all-a-dream trope is bit of a cop-out: the authors aren't suggesting it's actually happening. They don't go that far. But it's too apt: the threat of violence from whites truly is the stuff of nightmares, not reality, nightmares conjured by the Democratic Party, of which this ad is an example. Sailer:

Thank God the Democrats are importing millions of future Democratic voters to demographically crush those pickup-driving yeehawing white racist Republican genocidal lynch mob maniacs who built this country and thus deserve to have it taken away from them. Haven’t you heard about how these lowbrow morons all belong to U. of Virginia fraternities that have an initiation ritual of gangrape on broken glass? Read a book!

Is this ad what we can expect from now on? Because this isn't the case of someone pulling out all the stops in a close contentious race, but in a close, boring race between two moderates.

Establishment Republican Ed Gillespie has covered a deficit to pull even on the issue of sanctuary cities, opposition to which is a winner for Republican candidates. Virginia has been rapidly diversifying, as part of the broader effort to establish Democratic dominance. It's also where a particularly ugly instance of narrative collapse occurred: a Salvadoran illegal killed a Muslim girl--apparently because he didn't like Muslims. [update: with a baseball bat]

(Things like this are ultimately blamed on white guys--the Democratic ad above sort of does that. In the film After Hours a protagonist stumbles through a series of misunderstandings by which he's blamed for one thing after another. He's hiding from a mob on a rooftop when he witnesses a murder in an apartment across the street. Shocked and unable to do anything about it, he just mutters, "I'll probably be blamed for that." That is the American white guy's plight at present.)



The Democratic Party imports non-whites so they can implement Democratic policies: universal health care, gun control, welfare. But ideology and policy bores them. What doesn't bore them are identity politics. But identity politics run on conflict. It should be enough that the Democrats will expand social programs, the affirmative action regime, the whole ethnic spoils system by which America is being parceled out. But it isn't. The new voters are like the black American voters after which their participation in the Party is modeled (blacks are the true Model Minority): admirably apathetic about details but by that same token not so good about getting to the polls.

In pulling the demagogic ripcord to win this, the Democrats condition their new voters for the future to associate whites, their historic symbols and even, for the love of God, pickup trucks with danger and bigotry. It would be good for them to lose this one and discourage them in the future, but I suspect we're just going to get more and more of this, commensurate with the extent white Americans and allies oppose demographic displacement. The program of ethnic diversification is a fait accompli being foisted on us: at some point resistance to it is political suicide. The cuckservatives long ago determined it's already upon us. But it remains to be seen.

Masters of the Moral Universe and the Leveraged Shakedown

Via Steve Sailer, the New York Times reports approvingly on members of the Congressional Black Caucus invoking black privilege to shake down Facebook.

For more than an hour, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s high-profile chief operating officer, sheepishly pledged to “do better” — over and over — as stern-faced members of the Congressional Black Caucus grilled her on Thursday about Russian ads aimed at exploiting racial divisions during last year’s election. 

For black lawmakers, it was a chance to vent — at the outrage they felt toward Russian intelligence and its efforts to foment racial unrest in the country; at the frustration they felt toward three separate congressional investigations into Russian interference that have plodded on and yielded little; and at Facebook itself, which has been long on promises and short on action. 

“She was checking the boxes. She said all the right things,” Representative Donald M. Payne Jr., Democrat of New Jersey, said of Ms. Sandberg. But he was not satisfied. “I had an uncle who hated when you said ‘gonna’: ‘I’m gonna do this, and I’m gonna do that.’ He used to say, ‘Don’t be a gonna.’ And that’s what I said to her, ‘Don’t be a gonna.’ " 

Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, after initially denying that Russians had exploited the company’s system, has reversed course and admitted that groups backed by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia paid Facebook to influence voters last year with ads designed to inflame and exploit racial, political and economic rifts in the United States. Russian-backed Facebook pages promoted anti-immigrant rallies, targeted the Black Lives Matter movement and focused attentions on critical election swing states like Wisconsin and Michigan.

While Facebook has yet to release any of the ads, it has hired three crisis communications firms, bought digital and newspaper ads and sent Ms. Sandberg to Washington last week to charm Congress and the public. 

A Russian propaganda outfit spent one hundred thousand dollars on ads, Facebook reported in a blog post:

The vast majority of ads run by these accounts didn’t specifically reference the US presidential election, voting or a particular candidate.  

Rather, the ads and accounts appeared to focus on amplifying divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum — touching on topics from LGBT matters to race issues to immigration to gun rights. [emph added]

About one-quarter of these ads were geographically targeted, and of those, more ran in 2015 than 2016.  

The behavior displayed by these accounts to amplify divisive messages was consistent with the techniques mentioned in the white paper we released in April about information operations.  

In this latest review, we also looked for ads that might have originated in Russia — even those with very weak signals of a connection and not associated with any known organized effort. This was a broad search, in cluding, for instance, ads bought from accounts with US IP addresses but with the language set to Russian — even though they didn’t necessarily violate any policy or law. In this part of our review, we found approximately $50,000 in potentially politically related ad spending on roughly 2,200 ads.

As Trump is viewed by the Establishment as a world-historic catastrophe, Facebook's lack of vigilance in opposing him earns it a punitive lap around the Narrative. And it wouldn't be that if it didn't begin and end with The Blacks.
Fake accounts mimicked real right wing accounts critical of Black Lives Matter and identity politics. From another New York Times article:

The Russian pages — with names like “Being Patriotic,” “Secured Borders” and “Blacktivist” — cribbed complaints about federal agents from one conservative website, and a gauzy article about a veteran who became an entrepreneur from People magazine. They took descriptions and videos of police beatings from genuine YouTube and Facebook accounts and reposted them, sometimes lightly edited for maximum effect.

This, says the Times, is how a Russian propaganda operation was able to "reshape American politics" using "the anger, passion and misinformation that real Americans were broadcasting across social media platforms". Link sharing and light editing.

The company hasn't even made clear that all the ads were implicitly pro-Trump (none were explicitly so). If there wasn't this all-hands-on-deck effort to get Trump the story here would be that Russian hackers' use of Facebook during the election was negligible. Of course we wouldn't be looking in the first place if not for the anti-Trump "resistance". Makes you wonder what the real extent of such propaganda operations are--who says the Chinese aren't a lot better? Even mentioning Hasbara is just the sort of hate speech all this is about eliminating, so it's better left out of it.

Because the effort now is less to get Trump than to get Facebook, and other platforms, to clamp down further and faster on right wing speech (I write this on one of those mornings we woke up to find Twitter had taken out a bunch of accounts).

As an ideological fellow traveler Facebook accepts the chastening--a more assertive company might point out the "penetration" of Russian trolls was so slight as to be meaningless, that is, as good as zero. A success under any other circumstances, but nobody--except some of the dopier members of the Congressional Black Caucus--really believes any of it.

An alternate myth: shitlords from Russia and around the world flocked to the cause like volunteers for the Spanish Civil War, forming an international brigade in the Great Meme War.

Other posts on the Russian pages used stilted language or phrases rarely found in American English. Yet their use of borrowed ideas and arguments from Americans, which were already resonating among conservatives and liberals, demonstrated a deft understanding of the political terrain. The Russians also paid Facebook to promote their posts in the feeds of American Facebook users, helping them test what content would circulate most widely, and among which audiences.

The Establishment can only lament the exploitation of our divisive politics helped Trump, but whose fault is that? If Black Lives Matter is not a just movement but a fraud, then foreign trolls taking advantage of the outrage generated by it are just another of its negative effects.

Black Lives Matter, more than any single entity, cost Hillary, the Democrats and the Establishment the presidency. It takes real nerve for black politicians to leverage that into more spoils for them. Black America and the Establishment are locked in an indulgence spiral that threatens to collapse the whole movement. Get the popcorn.

Cowboys and Insinuations

Congresswoman Frederica Wilson and allies have charged General Kelly's "empty barrel" remark is racist. Everyone laughed: there's no traditional connotation between the two. But I like to think Kelly's opponents get it, just like I do: an "empty barrel" making a lot of noise is a black mediocrity making of herself a spectacle. Weary whites know the type. Weary blacks know the type. You must not show you know the type. Perhaps if it was a little less common.
And that's the problem. Nothing is so evident as that which is so strenuously ignored.

Racial slurs not directed at whites are becoming rarer. But they help maintain the sustained moral panic that is "anti-racism." Sometimes slurs are repurposed as needed.

New slurs are being added all the time--not by racists, but by anti-racists. Honest people going about their business are often waylaid by some new, unexpected restriction. They should know better--it's been decades since "niggardly" became unacceptable for just sounding like a word with which it had no etymological relation.

Lack of racist intent is no excuse. Ignorance of the laws of racism are no excuse. This being racism, there is no reference too obscure, no connection too tenuous. It isn't enough to not be a racist, one is expected to fight racism, report it, to hate it with his very soul. Justice is diligence.

As a result of our hyper-sensitivity to black sensitivity, the target of any offense determines offense, not some objective social standard.

Criticizing a black person's intelligence is almost always construed as a criticism of black intelligence generally, revealing a lack of confidence in black intelligence, mostly. This is getting embarrassing. The brilliant black thinkers of television and cinema still aren't showing up. Hailing Ta Nehisi Coates, Neil de Grasse Tyson and Barack Obama as exemplars of the black intelligentsia is a bit of a back-handed compliment. The condescension is driving aware black intellectuals out of their minds, but the aware are increasingly rare.

But the insistence on the existence of a thriving black intellectualism is making its absence obvious.

People are still paying attention, even in their forced silence. The increasingly absurd charges and demands of anti-racism and attendant injustice erode the perceived legitimacy of the anti-racist movement. It's a crisis that can't be recognized because it reveals the corruption of the entire endeavor.

It's always better if you can find the use of a racial epithet. It's simple, it draws the flag and stops play immediately. A hush falls. There's no explaining what so-and-so is inferring, which is a lot more work and frankly embarrassing when you're working with such material as Congresswoman Cowboy Hat.

But the accusation that "empty barrel" is racist is not entirely baseless, just hipster-level obscure.
"There's this racial epithet, you've probably never heard of it, it's a little obscure..."
The source is out there, if one is willing to slog through the narrative/historic jungle like an explorer looking for the mouth of a river. But yes, empty barrels are empty of justice and full of hate.

Thomas Wictor is a science fiction author with expertise in warfare munitions who produces epic Twitter threads. He's an often vociferous Trump supporter without white nationalist, anti-Semitic or racist tendencies, but he's not humoring the congresswoman. He's been all over the Wilson-Kelly controversy.

Vachel Lindsay was a poet of the early 20th Century who innovated what he called "singing poetry"--his poems were designed to be read at certain tempos, cadences, intonations, etc according to instructions in the margins ("a deep rolling bass"; "shrilly, with heavily accented meter"; "like the wind in a chimney"). The works were designed to be performed. Wictor calls him the first rapper. He's also an early sort of performance artist.



His work was popular, and still familiar enough to make it into a 1964 edition of  "A Treasury of the Familiar" anthology I have at home. The poem above, The Congo, is the source of the "empty barrel" epithet says Wictor, and if this was anything but "racism" I would scoff. But I suspect he's right.

The poem is subtitled "A Study of the Negro Race" and is in three parts: "Their Basic Savagery", "Their Irrepressible High Spirits" and "The Hope of their Religion". The first part portrays black Americans as boisterous primitives ill-suited to the industrial world, and is the source of the supposed empty barrel epithet:

Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room,
Barrel-house kings, with feet unstable,
Sagged and reeled and pounded on the table,
Pounded on the table,
Beat an empty barrel with the handle of a broom,
Hard as they were able, Boom, boom, BOOM,
With a silk umbrella and the handle of a broom,
Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, BOOM.
THEN I had religion,
THEN I had a vision. I could not turn from their revel in derision.
THEN I SAW THE CONGO, CREEPING THROUGH THE BLACK,
CUTTING THROUGH THE FOREST WITH A GOLDEN TRACK.

The poems were meant to be performed and in accordance with margin notes for tempo, inflection, style "like the wind in a chimney" ; "with a philosophic pause", etc.

The first part portrays blacks in their most threatening light: bloodthirsty savages with a historic grudge:

Boom, steal the pygmies,
Boom, kill the Arabs,
Boom, kill the white men,
Listen to the yell of Leopold's Ghost
Burning in Hell for his hand-maimed host.
Hear how demons chuckle and yell
Cutting his hands off, down in Hell

Lindsay thought African brutish would be redeemed by Christianity.

In the third part the Apostles and "pioneer angels" cutting through the brush bring the Africans to Jesus, and the sinister "Mumbo-Jumbo" of voodoo is left in the jungle:

Mumbo-Jumbo is dead in the jungle.
Never again will he hoo-doo you.
Never again will he hoo-doo you.
Redeemed were the forests, the beasts and the men,
And only the vulture dared again
By the far, lone mountains of the moon
To cry, in the silence, the Congo tune:--
Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you,
Mumbo...Jumbo...will...hoo-doo...you."

I suspect Lindsay was too forthright and literal-minded for that last line--the vulture invoking voodoo after its defeat--to mean what I want it to mean: the vulture is foretelling the certain return of Mumbo Jumbo, in due time.

All of this is horribly racist now but Lindsay was sympathetic to the cause of black civil rights and some of his earlier work endeared him to such as W.E.B. Dubois.

The only thing I see him guilty of is naivete and condescension. In that way this bizarre character from another era is very much like your average earnest white liberal.

Mumbo Jumbo, for his part, is alive and well.

When Dindu Meets GI Joe

Those charging that General Flynn's criticism of Congresswoman Frederica Wilson is racist aren't entirely wrong.

I don't take racism as it's defined seriously, and I don't imagine the general is personally "racist" or motivated by racial animus. But in adding to his criticism of her behavior towards Trump the charge of an earlier graceless public act, and calling her a mediocre fraud ("empty barrel"), there is, just as the opposition sees it, an implied criticism of black America from a non-apologetically white perspective.

The congresswoman is a familiar stereotype that Must Not Be Named, the Black Buffoon. Public figures have had to be careful in criticizing such people, to steer clear of implication that they are noticing the type. Naming the Fool outright is out of the question of course for the time being.

Indulging blacks in this fashion has been bad for whites and is a steady, ongoing degradation of our national character. This grows along with black cultural power. Black culture and style is inseparable from the violence and hatred of the ghetto and emanates from the same deep well of true identity. I no longer accept the argument that a "black culture of violence" harms black America.

Black America chooses its more violent culture, despite all the wailing. When attacking the presumed injustice of the legal system and incarceration rates--seeking the release of as many of their own as they can manage by whatever political means--they act as a separate nation demanding autonomy. Arguments invoking civil rights now are all attempts to rationalize black norms as dysfunction imposed from without. Black civil rights are a racial supremacy movement disguised as an appeal to our own values.

Citing the statistics for such as wealth, parental involvement, education, crime, is applying white criteria to black culture. In the absence of whites, as in the ghetto, black norms default to a harsher order. This is autonomy. Black America is asserting itself, asserting its particular culture, liberated ("free at last") from more restrictive white norms and even displacing them in the broader shared culture, with considerable help from without, of course.

This is not to say black American culture is achieving some natural stasis in the absence of control. Black America still exists in a broader white order. Black culture can't help being deformed by white influence and technology. Black Americans assert a black culture deformed by the vastly different and more advanced white Western culture of liberalism and rights. It's kind of a monstrosity.

Damage isn't limited to the degradation of black-white relations, or to standards of behavior generally (a profound effect no one beyond the hard right mentions); it's also become a proven demagogic template for a growing list of grievance identities. The seeds of our destruction were sown in the noble ground of civil rights.

A more prosperous and well-adjusted black America would not have inspired the host of similarly modeled grievance identities (people always tryna be black!).Who knows? Diversity might have had a chance.Proponents of diversity should be the first to discourage our disastrous indulgence of black dysfunction.

All of this bears on this latest cultural skirmish.

When Trump engaged the NFL controversy he engaged the same explicitly racial movement the league has caved to, if only implicitly on the side of whites. This is just not done. Whites are getting uppity.

This asymmetrical (explicit v implicit narratives) civil war began with Trump's candidacy (or his challenging Obama's citizenship). He was an affront and remains intensely that to the constituent groups of the Narrative. He's a special affront to blacks, due to his "birther" roots, but more significantly due to his threat to the present order. Being the primary beneficiary of that order and its highest moral caste tends to quicken the mind when it's suddenly challenged. And despite all the bellyaching, rather because of it, blacks draw the most benefit for effort put in from the present social and political order.

Trump has evinced all the traits of the typically non-racist boomer over a lifetime in the public eye and he tends toward socially liberal. But he has an interlocutor problem: he doesn't know he's not supposed to say certain things. This is taken for obtuseness. There's a cynical aspect obscured by all the conspicuous outrage: the dope doesn't know to keep his mouth shut! What they're really criticizing is a curious lack of guile that must indicate a moron. Yet they keep losing these little fights. This is driving people insane.

But what you see is usually what you've got. And what I see is that Trump just didn't care if attacking Obama looked racist, he, Donald Trump in his considerable self-regard, knew it wasn't. He knows he isn't racist because he doesn't feel it. He reflects his generation in that regard. Where he differs--shockingly, to his stunned peers--is that he wants his due credit. Like a naif, he wants to behave as if race is just a social construct. The fact his fellow boomers view this sensible view with horror reveals a tragedy: an entire generation going to see God clinging to a humiliating and disastrous myth.

The general is a boomer too. They trusted black America, they've been faithful to equality, they've endured bitterness and violence--they've been patient. Now they're being ridiculed. They look to their children, better not to talk about the children, the children are being peeled away from them. White baby boomers were double-crossed. Do they know it? Young rightists hate the boomers for good reason. But if anyone should be mad it's the boomers: they are the great betrayed generation.

I like to think the general has developed some awareness of this vast con. And here comes this typically buffoonish black character. Sure, she's wielding the most powerful narrative weapon of all, the Numinous Negro, but she's inept, she's not even holding it right, and he's got what is maybe the only firepower to match it, Our Troops.
Bumbling into the fight he was cut down, she never had a chance. All she could manage were some potshots fired in retreat.

What is she saying when charging the general with racism? She's invoking the black premium which is added like affirmative action points added to minority college applications.

There's a standard invocation, in this case Lawrence O'Donnell applied it: "General Kelly called a black woman an empty barrel!" 

He called her stupid. One might call anyone stupid, of course. But not black people. Black people are not allowed to be stupid. That's exactly what O'Donnell is saying, it's exactly how his ilk thinks, and they behave as if utterly unaware of its implications or contradictions.

Also black people are really not allowed to be ignoble. The congresswoman is tacky and buffoonish, in a characteristically black way.

So when Kelly thought to get in an extra dig, calling out Wilson's showboating at a previous event that too involved the deaths of public servants, and the mortified reactions of the whites (I'm assuming) that day to it, is what struck me. The Narrative normally comes round to collect you if you dare such even oblique notice of black silliness and lack of decorum. It didn't this time.

That is a very good thing.

Convention is a Cult

Evangelical Christianity surged in the wake of the Sixties, providing a home for that decade's first casualties, and others. By 1976 it was mainstream enough that liberal Jimmy Carter could claim it without harm (there was a bit of snickering, I recall, as well as at the new term "Born Again Christianity").

At the time in my old neighborhood if someone turned up in this state he was viewed with horror. The transformation--early on, destined to wear off in most cases--was such that it seemed to leave little of the "old" person behind.

That it was often the more dissolute who found God in this way made the change all the more jarring. Suddenly an overnight spiritual wonder appears, all enthusiasm and warmth as he declares you hell-bound for your degenerate ways--and he knows all about it, having been there last week.

But that nauseating sense of alienation, sometimes from close friends, came to mind reading this New Yorker article about doxxed alt-righter Mike Enoch:

Billie wondered aloud how to tell their friends and family about Mike E. “What do you do?” she said. “Send a letter to your cousins—‘Haven’t spoken to you in twenty years, hope you’re doing well, and, oh, P.S., our son’s a Nazi now’?” She worried that people would wonder what she and Mike, Sr., had done wrong as parents. “Everyone wants it to be simple, to know who to blame,” one of Mike E.’s relatives told me later. “But lots of kids have parents who get divorced when they’re young. Lots of white kids have difficult personalities. They don’t all become Nazis.” 

A few people around town had already heard the news, mostly through Facebook, and some of them were talking about Mike E. as if he had been abducted by a cult, or tied down and injected with a serum of pure hatred. Other people assumed that there must be some key biographical fact—a chemical imbalance, a history of abuse—that would neatly unlock the mystery. But Mike E.’s conversion was more quotidian than that, and therefore more unsettling; somehow, over time, he had fallen into a particularly dark rabbit hole, where some of the most disturbing and discredited ideas in modern history were repackaged as the solution to twenty-first-century malaise.

"Racists" are the new child molesters, somebody has written elsewhere (I can't find it). That's the deliberate work of generations. But there's the little problem of the truth. It's easy to hold child molesters in low regard. The Narrative groans under the stress of contradicting reality even as the net dehumanizing "racists" is cast ever wider. Yet still, it holds somehow. Mike E could have robbed a bank and caused his family less embarrassment.

Way back when I endured entreaties from converted friends, and sat through those awful born-again sermons, what I could never shake was my resistance to the story of Christ as Messiah. I could see the value of belief, but I could not believe this. For me at the center of my alienation from my born-again peers was this idea that I found incomprehensible--that Jesus suffered on the cross for my sins.

That sense of alienation--I suspect--was there for most people, for the same reason: the converts believed something crazy. People didn't say this. The average person was nominally religious, even if he didn't practice. He said he believed in God. He appreciated the church. He appreciated and understood the need for moral order and saw the church's role there. But, again I suspect, he secretly saw the convert's obsession with Jesus on the Cross a little, or a lot, crazy.

Conventional, publicly enforced views on race are approaching the mythical, that is to say objectively they could be called crazy.

So the "racist" alienated from his family now is a sort of inversion of the zealot alienated from his family then. The latter was a source of concern because he was seen as believing crazy things. The former is a source of concern because he's seen as not believing crazy things.

And, per one of my pet crackpot peeves, widespread belief in the Resurrection demands no disbelief in the realities of the world we inhabit. I don't mean to belittle it when I say it is harmless. Whereas the widespread belief in Equality demands just that. It has implications in every aspect of life, everywhere, always, that depend on its truth. Its failure is evident in every aspect of life everywhere, always. Jesus is benignly absent, and Christians see their relationship to him as "personal"--that is private. Contrast that with the demands of Equality now, which intrude further into the private sphere.

The Christian's profession of belief is ritualized and set aside from from the worldly. Thus the mythology of Christianity is benignly absent from the practical. Marxism has sought to absorb everything from agriculture to mathematics, of course. Christianity might have felt threatened by scientific discovery, but it never saw the need for such as a Christian agriculture or physics.

The problem with the new civic religion is it's all worldly. If we could perform some ritual sacrifice to Equality and get on with our lives, it would be harmless.

This is why political correctness is far more severe than religion as it's been practiced in the West. Galileo, whose discoveries upended conventional and biblical interpretations of the natural world, had defenders even in the Church. The narrative of equality allows no such equanimity because it can't survive it. It can't survive it because it's a lie.

Gettin' Paid

The meek passivity with which the white Left has absorbed the aggressive entitlement of "black lives" wreckers harassing the Sanders campaign (the socialist has real-life counter-revolutionary wreckers, but he can't say it!) reveals a new stage in the ever-evolving Democratic coalition of the fringes.
Addicted to black outrage, the party is compelled to adopt an organizational model similar to the Mafia, where a dominant individual or "family" commands a percentage of all criminal activity in a given domain. The black faction (which is not to say black Democrats but everyone involved in black advocacy, including Soros the consilgiere manipulating a clueless, volatile godfather) is the crime boss and nothing goes down in the boss' territory without his approval--and nobody so much as sells a dime bag without the boss getting his taste. That's why you don't say "all lives matter"--you're cutting out the rightful originator of the grift.

Old Bernie was just getting the held-by-his-ankles-out-the-window treatment to remind him to whom he must "kick up".

The Importance of Legacy

From Steve Sailer:

ABN comments

I get the sense that there is a lot of psychic stress experienced by the Talented Tenth, i.e. bourgeois middle-class blacks like Ta-Nahesi Coates. They basically live among white people according to white norms, but this creates in them a need to “keep it real” by defending and excusing the dysfunction of underclass blacks. It’s like how the most anti-colonial element of society in the former European empires was the Westernized native elite rather than traditionalist tribal elders.  

 In a saner world, the Talented Tenth would have an aristocratic attitude of protective paternalism toward black proles, in the spirit of Booker Washington. In actuality, black ethnocentrism, despite being a fundamentally conservative trait, gets filtered through the ideology of the white liberals who run post-white America. 

So instead of straightforward tribal noblesse oblige, gentry blacks like TNC (and Obama) live by the fundamentally dishonest and passive-aggressive code of leftism: all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. They lie that D’Shawntavious is their social equal, and the implausibility of that claim means they have to lie again by claiming that Whitey is a wrecker. I actually kind of pity middle-class blacks who wish to be champions of their people even as they operate within an ideological framework created by leftists who despise their own people.

But the Talented Tenth patronizes its people as vociferously as any elite group and is probably less alienated from its poor relations than, say, Wasps before they undertook the Great Cuckolding. Whatever doubts the Tenth is capable of regarding defense of the murderous and the mediocre, it appears they are lessening over time along with the credibility of their arguments and theories, and are easily and readily sublimated into political action that, coming full circle, has become largely about translating black failure into political power. Failure, fed through enforced faith in the equality of the races, is black political power. The black elite and their white allies love black failure, even if they don't know it.

The Tenth is unique among elites in that their legacy has become suffering, and they hold fast to that legacy because it’s invaluable–the perception that black Americans have suffered uniquely among peoples has them dominating politics and culture; not despite a history of failure but because of it. It’s the greatest con ever. Combined with black dominance in culture and sports, it has this population hitting above its weight like no other. By "weight" of course I mean its contribution to the commonweal.

Conventional thinking on race doesn’t exaggerate the problem, it inverts it. Reverse the arrow of causation, reverse the arrow of moral responsibility. The uneasy Left senses this. It isn’t that white America cannot honor its debt to blacks because the sins are too profound, it’s that black America can’t honor its end of the bargain–to become peaceful and productive–due to a lack of human capital and will. Anchored to a moralistic fallacy--black intellectual inferiority is unthinkable ergo impossible--we can only go down, and we do, scrambling to define deviancy down and adapt mores to accommodate black behavior.

It’s also a proven political model, adopted to all manner of newcomers; black failure is the gift that keeps on giving. Some angry, Suge Knight type guy should be fuming through his cigar right now over how the brothers aren’t getting paid for this.

The Narrate-o-Matic and the Real Enemy

Alternet has found the remedy for the inconvenient politics of Craig Stephen Hicks. That remedy is to stop pretending politics--at least those of the killer--have anything to do with it. In "Angry, Armed and White" the mask slips:

We can safely say that Craig Stephen Hicks fits the profile of the most common type of domestic violent extremist—a white man with grievances and guns. Whether he was provoked by road rage, rage against neighbors who wore traditional Muslim clothing, or other simmering grudges and pathologies, his alleged killing of three young Muslims underscores a trend that mainstream U.S. media avoids: that the face of violent extremism in America since 9/11 is predominantly white. Muslims in America, while not exempt from crime, simply do not compare.

Accurate numbers of the Muslim population in America are hard to come by but the percentage of US residents who identify as Muslim has been estimated to be as low as .8 percent (in 2010):

According to the new poll, US citizens guessed the Muslim population of the US to be about 15 percent when asked “Out of every 100 people, how many do you think are Muslim?” This would mean that the US has 47.4 million Muslims. The reality is quite different, with current research putting the percentage of Muslims in the United States at about .8 percent of the population, with an estimated 2.6 million Muslims in the US as of 2010. Even higher estimates find that there are between five and eight million Muslims in the entire country.

In an article from last November Huffington Post says it's about one percent now. White Americans are still about 70 percent of the US population. To the folks at Alternet and the New America Foundation, there is an ongoing campaign in the media to demonize Muslims, with all the talk about "Islamization" and the like, but none to demonize whites, with such as the Ferguson pogrom and the endless, if premature, end-zone celebration of the end of white America. For a demographic that's repeatedly told the only decent contribution it has left is to die off, American white males seem not just passive, but compliant in comparison to their Muslim counterparts.

Still, Hicks can't be described as a political "extremist" at all, and can't be said to be acting from political motive. But if it was the religion of his victims that chose him to select them--as some so fervently hope--it was because of his hostility toward religion generally. Is that more a right- or left-wing thing? None of this matters. It only matters that he was white. More from Alternet:

Most assailants were not young like the Boston Marathon bombers, but “were clustered most heavily between 30 and 49 years of age, although a surprising number were older than that,” it said. “This suggests that perpetrators spend many years on the radical right, absorbing extremist ideology, before finally acting out violently.” That summation strongly resembles Craig Stephen Hicks. 

Yes, in every thing but the "radical right" part; that is, in everything but the central point of this argument.

Tied in Knots

"Ban the box" is a movement to outlaw employers asking applicants if they have a criminal history, motivated largely by the disparate impact it has on non-Asian minorities due to their higher rates of incarceration. According to the Guardian link above, it's necessary because of "research suggesting that three-quarters of employers admit to using a criminal conviction to discriminate against an applicant." Somehow different from discrimination on the basis of poor references, lack of relevant skills and giving a lousy interview, which only screens out the merely incompetent, not the physically dangerous.

But Britain's Labour Party is now pushing for a "blacklist"  to "warn" those same employers about those convicted of "hate crimes" and "tackle the UK’s soaring rise in antisemitism, Islamophobia, homophobia and abuse of people with disabilities." It appears to be part of a larger campaign to purge social media, such as Twitter, of the wrong kind of speech. So employers aren't allowed to protect themselves from, say, a convicted sex offender working in a shop, but must be vigilant against such as Britain's "Tube Racist" lady (convicted to 21 weeks in jail for a "racist rant").

People are going to have to think less about themselves and think more about me, Fareed Zakaria...

Fareed Zakaria was born into an elite Indian Muslim family and made his way into the global elite via Harvard and Yale. He's edited Foreign Affairs, Newsweek and Newsweek International; now he's a host on CNN. As you can imagine, this expertise and background have given him unique insight into the inexplicable horror of the Boston Marathon bombing by two young Muslim men whose family was welcomed into United States as refugees when they were children. Mr. Zakaria has had a whole week to apply his keen intellect and experience to the problem. What has he discerned? That we haven't done enough to "embrace" Muslims, and should take Europe, with its much larger, more hostile and separate Muslim communities, for our model:

Over the past two decades...European countries have recognized the dangers created by their indifference and have sought to integrate Muslim migrants. Governments at all levels have engaged with Islamic communities, taking steps to include Muslims in mainstream society but also to nurture a more modern, European version of Islam. In effect, many governments are now dealing with Islam as they have other religions, creating Islamic councils, providing funding for cultural activities, representation in public forums and being mindful of religious practices and holidays.

Note the use of "integrate" in place of "assimilate". This is a long-time trend that has been gaining steam as assimilation has failed due to the sheer number of newcomers, our regnant system of identity politics and the progressive elite's assault on the concept itself. Assimilation of immigrants is now considered either too ambitious or just so, I don't know, last millennium in its backwardness.

Of course I'm forgetting the most important question following the bombings. How does this affect the prospects of Fareed Zakaria and his progeny? Without a separate community (and the threat of violence and general social degradation coming therefrom) Zakaria cannot claim to be our diviner of intention, and his rougher poor relations ("Muslim leaders") cannot appropriate the role of intermediaries. All this talk of "fear" in the elite media--the average American wouldn't know he was in its throes if the Washington Post didn't tell him--is just wishful thinking. Your fear is desired, necessary even, and will be presumed whether you like it or not. The lad(ies) doth protest too much. This is all  leaving aside that Zakaria is nearly as alien to the average Muslim immigrant as Barack Obama is to the urban black.

Fareed goes on to reassure us that if we legitimize separate Muslim communities as such and deal with them through a new generation of Muslim political leaders, occasionally somebody will rat out the terrorists before they strike:

The lesson from Europe appears to be: Embrace Muslim communities. That’s a conclusion U.S. law enforcement agencies would confirm. The better the relationship with local Muslim groups, the more likely they are to provide useful information about potential jihadis.
An attack — apparently inspired but also perhaps directed by al-Qaeda — was foiled recently in Canada for just this reason. An imam in Toronto noticed one of his congregants behaving strangely and reported the behavior to the police, who followed up and arrested the man before he could execute his plan. Before briefing reporters on their collaboration, Canada’s top counterterrorism authorities invited Toronto’s Islamic leaders to a meeting and thanked them for their help. “But for the Muslim community’s intervention, we may not have had the success,” said the official, according to one lawyer invited to the meeting.

Of course a moratorium on immigration from Muslim countries is inconceivable. What would become of Fareed's CNN gig then?
Wait a minute, I think I've seen this bit before:

Comments Elsewhere, Edited, or, The Lamentations of the Womanish and Childlike

Comes now the latest attempt at silencing Matt Drudge's recurring Blacks Behaving Badly theme. Where Bill Maher deployed the pillory, this blogger attempts a plea in an "open letter", complete with flattery and concern trolling (thank God I'm surrounded by the apolitical; if anyone ever expresses concern for the "future of the Republican Party" in my presence I think I'll strangle them). Enjoy with me the sound of The Hill's plaintive wail:

A visit to the Drudge Report at any given time in recent months bears witness to story after story, time and time again, day after day, week after week, month after month, of a laundry list of stories with racial innuendo and suggestion and implication that I would like to believe are below the standards you would set for yourself and your profession. [apparently the author is doubly confused:  Matt Drudge is a "journalist", and journalism retains "standards"]

I couldn't resist:
Drudge's "race-baiting" operates within the context of a grand, deliberate lie. That lie: black people are no more violent, no less intelligent and no less industrious than the rest of us. On television and in film we are continually presented images of black humanity and competence that do not comport with the reality we all experience daily (who are you trying to kid, Hollywood?). The respectable media, as evidenced here, does its part by ignoring the black malice and lawlessness that is an unrelenting assault (as the author notes above, "day after day, week after week, month after month"--indeed). The endemic, bemusing buffoonery of black culture, infecting even black "intellectuals" and leaders, is met with a silent, condescending smile. 

Policy and law are made in the distorting light of this disinformation. Vast sums are spent trying to square the circle of black inadequacy (see the achievement gap). Discriminatory hiring degrades the quality of our organizations and professions. People are hurt, or worse, if they are foolish or uninformed enough to believe the lie.

 You want me to avert my eyes? Stop telling me black dysfunction is my fault and I'll stop exposing it as a lie. Stop robbing me and my kin. Stop slandering my race (I'll apologize for slavery once every black person in America thanks me for modern medicine, democracy, electric light, plumbing, sliced bread, etc). Drudge is allowed his intentions, biases and even bigotry. I don't care. A speaker's motives haven't the power to make a bad argument look good (indeed, they're usually impugned to make a good argument look bad, as above).

But it does take nerve to condemn Drudge's focus in the midst of all the racist glorying following the election (how many more times do we have to read about "old, white" etc?). And what are the anti-whites celebrating? What is the nature of their triumph? Did blacks and Hispanics become electoral power brokers by achievement? By out-sized contributions to the nation? No; it is only by their numbers, and the dysfunction that makes them the sick child of the American family, that they overcome the "old" and "white". They succeed by failing. It's fascinating really. Let's at least be honest about the nature of our transformation.

Drudge is a necessary corrective to the Grand Lie you worship. This lie, like any, cannot be made any more true by prevailing (even over the entire West); it can only become more and more obviously a lie. It is an article of faith: rigid, unchanging, impervious to reason and empiricism. Against this reality stands out in clear relief. This is only going to get worse. Get used to it. As you keep pointing out, it's your country now. Own it.

As for me I say: speak the truth, whatever it is. Let the heavens fall and the hacks tremble. And as for your concern trolling: let the Republican Party go to hell.

How Soon is Now?

When you say it's gonna happen now
 Well when exactly do you mean?
See I've already waited too long
 And all my hope is gone
--The Smiths

I don't expect this to stop. But can we at least stop pretending? I accept that history and the apparently inexhaustible malice of black America means a debt incurred in perpetuity. We will pay (as long as there is a "we"), in money, peace, dignity--with our lives, yes, for this deficit between our demonstrated humanity and theirs.

The wages of the sin of slavery are--another sort of slavery, visited upon the descendants of all. We are slaves to fear and loathing. We are silent as slaves before the endless  humiliations of the bulked-up, uninhibited brute descendants of the poor brutes our forefathers broke down and chained. Force the detachment on yourself, and marvel at the absurd symmetry of our tragedy. Imagine the hatred in the hearts of those slaves. Do they see its redemption? Do they smile? Could they ever have imagined?

But when do we get to just tell the truth? When will the last laughable shred of plausibility fall away from the tyrannical order? How much hell has to be raised before the heavens fall?

Meanwhile in Soviet America

Chick-fil-A's Vice President of public relations has died of a heart attack.
To be fair to the Soviets, despite looking I couldn't find a comparable example from Stalin's purges of someone succumbing to the strain of the show trial--a couple of poisonings maybe. It's kind of scary to think the Gays are just getting started.

Judging from his photo and bio, the late Don Perry was a member of Atlanta's mulatto elite, serving in a role typical for high-level executive diversity hires (but none so typical as the VP in charge of Diversity, of course--something will have to be done with that gauche cliche eventually).

Elsewhere: I think it was Steve Sailer who joked a more effective strategy for fixing black educational inadequacy would be to hit non-black students over the head with a ball-peen hammer. Go ahead, laugh it up. Like being careful what you wish for, in our time you should be careful what you joke about. Demanding racial equality in school discipline (and ignorance of the racial disparity in school misbehavior), the President's Advisory Committee on the Pursuit of the Grail White House Initiative On Educational Excellence is that hammer!

Tweeting the Revolution

On Twitter, Mr Sock-it-to-the-Man Chris Rock is angry he's been denied the opportunity to grow up in a mud hut in what is now Angola:

Happy white peoples independence day the slaves weren't free but I'm sure they enjoyed fireworks

The powerful have made the elevation of Rock's inept and untrustworthy relatives (the mocking of whom has made him rich) an impossible standard of justice. Detroit is in ruins. Hip hop has gone from coarse to bloodthirsty. And Chris bleats away in between tweets about the Knicks. On Independence Day. Well and safely removed, you can bet, from the ghetto blacks he lampoons. What a dick.

Could it be that Chris Rock doesn't understand the nature of his success? That, after all this time, he still doesn't get they joke? That he doesn't understand the consequences of his observations?

(Upon having his epiphany, fellow millionaire minstrel Dave Chapelle fled to Africa to consult with Lauryn Hill. Ms Hill is probably the least funny person on earth--but one of the few black Americans to actually give Africa an honest try; Chapelle went as if to be exorcised of his talent, and it may have worked.)

I think that over time every good Chris Rock joke will come back to haunt him, if he only has the awareness to catch on. I recall his take on the hyped token Colin Powell from 1996:



He's so busy taking exaggerated offense at white condescension he misses the real insight. Will Chris Rock ever acknowledge how comically wrong he was here? The irony--Chris bellows that despite this condescension white America would never elevate this man (Powell, who would be obscure if he were white; but "edgy" Chris ain't going there!) to the presidency; and then along comes Barack Hussein Obama (who himself thought his political career would be derailed by 9/11). And what is the mantra? "Oh he speaks so well." Rock mimicked the language of condescension perfectly, but understood it less--no mean feat--than the whites who originated it. They meant it. Rock missed it. That should be in the act. Imagine him pacing and shouting like he does, admitting:

"Not only did I get it wrong, but Barack Hussein Obama! Motherfuckin' Hu-ssein, Oh-fucking-Bah-ma! Colin Powell just came off too normal! I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about or white people have just gone crazy!"

He nailed the critique of Obama before Obama, but poor Chris doesn't know, because once Obama showed up Chris became one of the mewling patsies he excoriates.

It's remarkable how universal is the convention that everything must be hedged by the myth of white racism and the denial of black agency. The right-thinker has to compartmentalize aspects of the black American condition in ways he wouldn't when considering other questions, deliberately or subconsciously avoiding inferences he would be allowed if the question wasn't so loaded. Segregation is key!

So when the right-thinker sees, for instance, racial disparity in the professions he can only see discrimination by employers. He forgets that five minutes before he was condemning (with even less authority) the unfair racial disparity in educational achievement! No matter; the existence of a great, stifled class of black professionals, milling about outside the gates, is presumed; just as universities are cut no slack for the sorry state of black and brown high school achievement.

A cynical progressive has to appreciate the durability of disparity--an endless source of demagogy. Even as the earnest among them search out the source of minority underachievement like explorers seeking the source of the Nile (they're somewhere below pre-school by now; see Steve Sailer's Stolen Generation) progressives are conceding nothing. Where there is black failure there is white malice. Anything less acknowledges black inadequacy. When that happens, the scam is up.

But the unsubtle and incurious easily adopt the habits of faith over logic. So it's entirely possible that Chris Rock has been these many years chronicling black buffoonery yet taking it to be of no real consequence and anyone who says it is for a bigot! And because this attitude has been mandated by the convention of our dishonest age, Rock's tepid half-truths pass for coruscating honesty.

Bill's Bleeding Heart Show

Does Bill Maher think Matt Drudge is making up stories about black malice?

No. He condemns Drudge's editorial focus, not his veracity. Drudge pays undue attention to negative black behavior. Who decides what constitutes undue attention? Bill Maher says Bill Maher decides. But we already knew that.

Bill wants you to know Matt Drudge is a racist. Bill misses the point entirely. Who cares who's a racist anymore? It doesn't matter why Drudge insists on rubbing Bill's prominent proboscis in black misbehavior and violence (Maher "monitored" every disgusting post that week). Maher derides the relevance of Drudge's choices. But of what relevance is the reality of black malice?

Liberals will remind you violent crime generally remains down, and the average American still hasn't a reasonable fear of blacks as long as he stays out of their neighborhoods. So only the bad people, the Other White People, notice. It is a matter of proud indifference for Bill.  But the violence itself is the least of it; it's what that violence demonstrates: the Left's critique of race and civil rights is a thoroughgoing lie. Black, not white, Americans are failing at equality. Black America is rejecting the Western liberal tradition, to the extent it understands it.

Bill Maher thinks he's outraged by Matt Drudge's stereotyping of blacks; by his prejudice against them; by his lack of (what Bill refuses to call) Christian charity toward them and their problems. But we can see that's pure bunk.

What should fret Maher is what black violence and failure says about the myth of white racism, founding myth of the perverted Christianity that progressivism has become. Without it, and without its redemption fable--absolution by righting the ultimate wrong of white American slavery (with Barack Obama as a minor messiah)--the entire progressive edifice is threatened. As that messiah gives the tacit approval of silence to the violence while concurrently betraying every traditional (dread word!) progressive cause, it has to dawn, eventually, even on Bill, that black folk, and any elite that may come from them, want nothing whatsoever to do with his absolution. They can neither spell nor define the word. Bill is just another white chump taken in by the brothers. If only he was poor white trash he would have seen it coming.

Something John Derbyshire said in his Gawker interview  strikes me: the present anti-racist hysterics might be explained by the justified anxiety of the Left before the demographic carnage it has wrought. We all have to swim in the same waters. Or at least, insulation is expensive. But if one can't trust in that timeless American image of the noble, suffering black, if black America shoves him aside to celebrate such buffoonish monsters as, yes Bill, a Mike Tyson or Reverend Farrakhan, then what can one trust? The black-white reparations model has been adopted by all manner of political identity, culminating in the sudden domination of gay advocacy. All these other identities are invested in black Americans at least making a show of it.

When Bill snarls that Matt Drudge should look away or shut up, he is engaged in containment. Potential waves of disillusion threaten to cascade outward, leveling the theoretical architecture of the American Left. The oppression of the past explains the malice of the present, convention demands; the crime thinker wonders if the malice of the present doesn't in fact explain the oppression of the past. The Narrative wearies. The Left should be worried. They have created a model and a monster called Resentment, encouraging all to apply for a franchise.
Thee have conquered. Now what?

This presents an existential crisis for the individual. If black people really are their own worst enemy, and their neighbors' worst enemy, what's it all been about? For the faithful Bill Maher, all he's left with is a Godless world and a big lie.

Hate in the USA

Black folk on the Walker recall defeat.
Note how the site (Twitchy, which compiles political tweets from a Fox News-like "conservative" angle) sells this compendium as "angry libs" going off. Our furtive fascination with black American violence: the critique that dare not speak its name.

Criminalizing Context Recognition

It had to end here. The Trayvonicus lynch-meme sputters on, but is starting to look like a particularly depressing Al Sharpton hoax as we learn George Zimmerman's injuries were documented and consistent with a beating. Eyewitnesses testified to them from the start of course, but most Americans have only the legal discovery process to thank for the belated information. The networks were too busy with the sort of yellow journalism that had Marcia Clark declaring George Zimmerman sustained no injuries because, as the security camera video clearly shows, he retains powers of locomotion and isn't cradling his gutted entrails like a football just hours later (not since Bill Frist video-diagnosed Terri Schiavo...).  Of course this evidence was available to the special prosecutor brought in to bring Zimmerman up on charges. Didn't make it into the affidavit. Hey, I think I found that crime you been looking for!
But Zimmerman's real misfortune is to not have been born George Ramos. That's what so aroused the elite media, at first expecting nothing more than another ritual sacrifice to the national god of black resentment. Now they have this potential national race riot on their hands. So no matter if Zimmerman looks increasingly innocent; the thing must be seen to its (responsible elites hope) riot-defusing conclusion. As if by evil design then it will run alongside the president's election campaign of race-baiting demagogy--five more months, including summer, pumping the bellows of resentment (November or Bust!)--on one hand and the traditional summer season of black on white violence on the other. The diversity demagogues are fighting this one like there's no tomorrow. Maybe they're right.
 But they have a fallback position. At first they told us, and some (blessed naifs) believed George Zimmerman stalked and murdered a black boy. That position is no longer tenable. But there's no walking this one back down. So out comes the lamest of the stable of American white racism tropes: racial profiling. No matter what transpired, it all came as a result of Zimmerman's racist stereotyping. Cognition aforehand! Note that whether Zimmerman was right or not about Trayvon Martin isn't allowed in polite discussion; Martin's good nature is presumed. But a prosecution based on racial profiling would have to contend with this question, and the reality of statistical probabilities and black menace, in a high profile criminal trial. Does the left really want that?
It will get interesting, watching them argue this with a straight face against the backdrop of the traditional summer season of black on white violence. But of course they will. To maintain critical race theory's dominance over convention requires ever-greater powers of media denial, and the powers so far on display have been awe-inspiring. Ignoring violence such as last summer's flash-mobs in the age of Drudge and American Renaissance would seem impossible, but the respectable media did such a good job of it many of them truly don't even know it happened ("news to me" was one reporter's response, given as he defended censoring race out of a reported attack; and I'm willing to bet he still hasn't made the connection between his dereliction and his ignorance!).
And if they don't get to notice they'll be damned if we do either. So now George Zimmerman is a potential test-case for criminilazing "racial profiling", not by law enforcement (whatever validity that may have), but by a common citizen. The ABC News article linked ABC News article linked to above, revealing the extent of Zimmerman's injuries as well as Trayvon's (one set of bruised knuckles; one gunshot wound) gets around to it in the last paragraph:

However, the prosecution contends that Zimmerman instigated the confrontation after profiling the teen, who was walking home after buying skittles and ice tea. They prosecution says Martin was breaking no laws and was not disturbing anyone as he walked back to his father's girlfriend's home.

With the FBI now threatening hate crime charges, George Zimmerman may become the first American citizen convicted of racial stereotyping.

Comments Elsewhere, Edited and Expanded

Regarding John Derbyshire's instantly (in)famous The Talk: Nonblack Version piece in Taki's (contrasting the faddish meme "The Talk"* and its hoary assumptions about racial hostility, with the reality of the known world), Mr. Josh Barro in Forbes steps into the town sqaure to deliver the King's writ as he sees it ("National Review Must Fire John Derbyshire"), and helpfully remind conservatives of their priorities, as such (no higher calling than Republican branding, for the "serious"):

And this is the problem for Lowry and other conservatives who want to be taken seriously by broad audiences when they write about racial issues.

"taken seriously by broad audiences"?
This is called selling out.
I understand why the aspirational individual seeks this; for the life of me I don't understand why he encourages it in others. How does one sleep at night knowing he is both pimp and prostitute for a great lie? Your affected enlghtenment isn't enough? What will you do if and when you've routed the racists? Who's next in providing you with the opportunity to prove your religious devotion?

"The Talk" as black Americans and liberals present it (to wit: necessitated by white malice), is a comic affront--because no one is allowed (see Barro above) to notice the context in which black Americans are having run-ins with the law, each other, and others. The proper context for understanding this, and the mania that is the Trayvonicus for that matter, is the reasonable fear of violence. This is the single most exigent fact here--yet you decree it must not be spoken. You admit the reason for taking the topic off the table is that it offends. In your logic the one necessarily follows the other. Rarely does anyone in your well-heeled (and easily brought to heel) mob address points of fact; rarely do you make a pretense of showing where this argument is wrong. Your "acceptable discourse" is defined by an appeal to consequences.

But you're right, of course. Our discourse is not a search for truth; it's a battle--not of ideas, for they aspire and are vulnerable to the truth--but for power.

Shame on you. People are dying. Worse still, you bore us. Good for Derbyshire.

*

Steve Sailer in same thread:

I'm proud to stand with Josh Barro and the Atlantic's Elspeth Reeve and Matt O'Brien. Simply because somebody is playing the role of a "public intellectual" doesn't give them a license to write about ideas. Yes, they should feel relatively free to think private thoughts as they wish. But the vibrant tapestry of our current public discourse -- which ranges from Trotskyist anarchy on the Left all the way to SWPL Portlandia on the Right -- can only be damaged by the voicing of divisive notions.

Another commenter:

Strongly disagree that Derbyshire's article was "appalling". I thought that word was reserved for ninnyish liberals who overheard someone defend George Zimmerman.

Personally I find the core values of NR--lowering taxes on the wealthy and spilling American blood for Israel--personally repugnant, even "appalling". So I'm non-plussed by your take on Derb's honest, intelligent Taki piece. Looking forward to the decline of National Review as a mouthpiece for pseudo-conservatism.

*The supposedly routine "Talk" about the danger of racist white cops. You've seen it on TV: solemn black parent, wearing the dignity of hundreds of years' suffering, tells doe-eyed children you got to look out for the Man always and be on your best behavior, because white folk just mean ("Mama, why do they hate us so?").
See Skip Gates (“All the hairs stood up on the back of my neck, and I realized that I was in danger");
Tyler Perry ("it took a black cop to realize I was a Celebrity and allowed to drive my car in any damn direction I please! Can you imagine the indignity?");
and Chris Rock.

It also occurs to me that we cannot trust that black parents actually are sitting their children down to instruct them in safe police protocol. After all, it doesn't seem to be working very well. Hatred of police is a jealously guarded romance in black American life. Who's to say young blacks aren't more often told by hard-headed elders not to take any shit from cops, or whites, or hispanics (or white-hispanics).

The hush was almost deafening

From the Apotheosis:

The statue, representing a "Stone of Hope," sits forward from a "Mountain of Despair."

In reality it's made to appear as if MLK has split the mountain in two and is morphing out of the granite like some great, sullen chthonic deity. After complete societal collapse the site will be suitable for virgin sacrifices and the like.

Visitors pass through the mountain on their way to King's statue and an expanse along the basin rimmed with an inscription wall covered with stone carvings of some of his most famous quotes. The four-acre area will also feature the iconic cherry blossom trees that draw thousands of tourists to the Mall each spring.
"The very first time that I came to the site, I was almost overwhelmed," Martin Luther King III said. "I really was impressed by this artist. He was able to capture the essence of my dad."

What does he know?

Sculptor Ed Dwight, who has made seven statues of King, objects to the memorial's depiction of the icon -- and to the artist chosen to create it.

"This idea of having this 30-foot-tall sculpture of this man, and this confrontational look, he would not appreciate that, because that was not him," Dwight argues.

Dwight is a black American artist, which might have seemed to make him an ideal candidate for the job, but he doesn't have access to a Chinese quarry and the indentured laborers who come with it.

You try steal happy family lucky civil rights! And cigarette lighter! Good for you we no white racist! Stop looking at girl! Up against wall!

[Chinese artist Lei Yixin], for his part, said America did not have sole claim on King.
"Martin Luther King is not only a hero of America, he's also a hero of the world," he said.

They could not find a capable black sculptor. They would not have a white one. Or they simply didn't want to pay a decent wage. So the Chinese, who disdain democracy and embrace ethnic nationalism, who despise blacks and view America's experience with multiculturalism and diversity as "chaos" largely because of the civil rights movement, who have contributed nothing to the advancement of individual or minority rights--they have the same, or greater claim to the civil democratic tradition than an American of European descent, whose forefathers have been dying for centuries to advance the cause.

A Communist Chinese national creating an image of an African American to harry European Americans about legal and political rights. And none dare note the ironic affront. This is the inverted empire of American multiculturalism, where hypocritical foreigners use the perverted language of civil rights to impose upon us an oppressive mediocrity.

He's all yours, Mr. Lei. But just between you and me, he ain't really all that. Then again, I suspect you knew that already.