Author: VD

“Donald Trump has won the nomination”

Roger Simon throws in the towel and declares Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee:

La Serenissima may be among the most beautiful cities in the world but everything there seems to be done “for affect” as well. It’s all a stage set.

As was the debate Tuesday night, because, for all the back and forth, the chills and semi-thrills, the Rubio-Cruz-Paul contretemps,  the desperate pleadings of Jeb Bush, the reminder by Chris Christie of what might have been if he hadn’t kowtowed to Lord Obama, Carly Fiorina telling us again that she has met Putin, Frank Luntz and all his focus groups and all the thumb-sucking wise men and women in all the ships at sea and CNBC, as they say about a mile up the Strip from the Venetian at the Monte Carlo, “les jeux sont faits.“

No more bets, ladies and gentlemen.  The game is over.  Donald Trump has won the nomination.

Everyone acknowledged as much, heads nodding around me in the press room, when, nearly at the end of the debate, Hugh Hewitt served up by far the most serious, in the sense of fateful, question of the night by asking Trump to answer finally whether he will support the Republican candidate under any circumstances.

The Donald smiled, stared straight into the camera with the practiced skill of a Cronkite or a Murrow, though more playful and, one reluctantly admits, winning, and acknowledged that, yes, he will.  He has been treated well by all concerned and even come to like and admire many of the candidates on the stage with him.  Murmurs of approval all around.

And then he administered the coup de television. Looking square into the lens at America he promised to beat Hillary Clinton in November.  And he did so in full recognition by all concerned, barring force majeure, he already was the nominee and everybody knew it.  He was taking a graceful bow.

Game, set, match, tournament and whatever they say in bocce.

I wouldn’t count out the inevitable shenanigans on the part of the Republican establishment. But regardless of their best efforts, it is obvious that Trump has successfully defied every expectation and prediction of his collapse.

Of course, it didn’t help the establishment that they lined up behind Jeb Bush, arguably the worst mainstream candidate in recent history. 


“We can’t disassociate ourselves from peace-loving Muslims.” 
– Jeb Bush

 Or from rainbow-farting unicorns.

The acid that dissolves

Maurice Montaigne has an excellent column on multiculturalism at Everday Joe:

Multiculturalism is formally defined as the “acceptance or promotion of multiple cultural traditions within a single jurisdiction.”7 In practice, multiculturalism presents itself as a harmless commitment to tolerance that all well-intentioned people should share.

But in fact multiculturalism is an acid that dissolves nation-states. This is its purpose. Multiculturalism arose in the aftermath of the Second World War, a war launched by two ultranationalist states (National Socialist Germany and Imperial Japan) and characterized by the genocide of whole nations. The politicians and intellectuals of the post war era swore to never allow this to happen again, and multiculturalism was their solution. By promoting multiculturalism they hoped to destroy that which gave rise to total war. To save Western civilization, it was necessary to destroy it. Or so they believed.

How does multiculturalism destroy ethnic nation-state? We have already shown that an ethnic nation-state relies on its people’s common ancestry, language, and traditions – its unity – to provide social cohesion to its state. Multiculturalism erodes all three, by diversifying the ancestry, languages, and traditions. Where once stood a people united now stands a people divided. With the loss of unity go the social stability and social capital that unit brought and diversity destroys.

A civic nation relies on a particular expression of citizenship and individual rights, and as such seems like it would be protected from the acidic effects of multiculturalism. But from what source does a civic nation derive its particular expression of citizenship and rights? There are only two: from its religion or from its political philosophy. But both of these are deeply rooted in a people’s culture, language and tradition. Consider the difference between American and Chinese views on good governance. The former is rooted in Locke, Montesquieu, Jefferson, Madison and the theory of social contract. The latter is rooted in Confucius, Han Fei, Mozi, and the theory of Heaven’s Mandate. The former idealizes republican democracy; the latter idealizes benevolent monarchy. Multiculturalism insists that a Chinese immigrant can maintain the cultural traditions of Chinese Legalism while still being an American; but Chinese Legalism is incompatible with republican democracy. If being an American does not mean sharing the values upon which America was founded – what does it mean? A state can, for a time, survive a diversity of values. But a civic nation cannot.

This, then, is the state of things. Ethnic nation-states are unified and therefore enjoy high social capital and stability. Multiethnic states are diverse and their diversity destroys social capital. Shared values in the form of civic nationalism can in time restore social capital and stability by creating a civic nationalism that trumps ethnicity. But multiculturalism is ruinous of both, adding more ethnic diversity and weakening civic unity.

Many will argue that ethnic diversity is inevitable in today’s global society and therefore that multiculturalism is necessary. This is a lie. It is worse than a lie: It is offering up poison when medicine is at hand. The right way to overcome ethnic diversity already exists. Civic nationalism, characterized by the American melting pot, has proven effective for centuries, as had the Roman melting pot of antiquity. The genius of civic nationalism is that it replaces the genetic with the memetic. In this way, a Gaul became a Roman, and a Swede became an American, because Roman-ness and American-ness were divorced from ethnicity. But civic nationalism must be allowed to replicate. Memes can die, just like genes. To replicate, civic nationalism must be instilled in each new generation by those who are its stewards. If a nation’s own citizens do not love their shared civic values enough to demand that immigrants adopt them, it is a surety that the immigrants will look at that nation with contempt.

Chickenhawks go where the chickens are

Never, ever trust any man who actively prefers the company of children to adults. And just as psychiatrists are all crazy, be aware that more than a few of those who are publicly dedicated to the fight against child abuse have an unhealthy interest in it.

A Manassas City police detective, who was the lead investigator in a controversial teen “sexting” case last year, shot and killed himself outside his home Tuesday morning as police tried to arrest him for allegedly molesting two boys he met while coaching youth hockey in Prince William County.

David E. Abbott Jr., 39, was a member of the Northern Virginia-Washington D.C. Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force and had been an officer on the Manassas City force for 14 years. In his spare time he coached 13- and 14-year-old boys in travel hockey for the Potomac Patriots program at the Prince William Ice Center in Woodbridge, club officials said. When Prince William police learned Monday of the allegations of improper contact by Abbott over a period of years, they moved quickly.

Police said they learned that Abbott had sent inappropriate text messages and emails to a 13-year-old boy he met through the hockey program. By phone and social media, Abbott had been asking the boy for sex acts for more than two years, county police said.

Detectives then learned of a second potential victim, a boy who was 13 and was also part of the Patriots hockey club in 2008 when Abbott began sending him inappropriate messages, police said. Early Tuesday, Prince William police obtained a search warrant for Abbott’s townhouse on Senea Drive in Gainesville, where he lived with his mother. Police also obtained four felony arrest warrants — two counts of indecent liberties by a custodian and two counts of use of a communication device to solicit a sexual offense.

I spent a few years coaching scuola calcio; for the most part, the coaches at that level are young players on the first team who spend two or three years doing it, then move up the ranks. But there are a few old guys who never move on, and I got a creepy vibe from one of them in particular.

If I was a police chief, I would pay very close attention to any officer in a sex crimes unit who spent his free time volunteering to be around children. You can’t expect every wolf to look like a wolf; some of them are very good at mimicking the appearance of a sheep dog.

Instapundit adds: “MESSAGE TO PEOPLE WHO WANT MORE GOVERNMENT. THIS IS MORE GOVERNMENT.”

The benefits of foreign labor are a lie

In Cuckservative, John Red Eagle and I conclusively demonstrated, using official government statistics, that immigrant labor is a net negative to Americans and American workers. Others who are looking into the subject are reliably finding that the importation of foreign labor is harmful:

Last year, thousands of American companies won permission to bring a total of more than 150,000 people into the country as legal guest workers for unskilled jobs, under a federal program that grants them temporary work permits known as H-2 visas. Officially, the guest workers were invited here to fill positions no Americans want: The program is not supposed to deprive any American of a job, and before a company wins approval for a single H-2 visa, it must attest that it has already made every effort to hire domestically. Many companies abide by the law and make good-faith efforts to employ Americans.

Yet a BuzzFeed News investigation, based on Labor Department records, court filings, more than 100 interviews, inspector general reports, and analyses of state and federal data, has found that many businesses go to extraordinary lengths to skirt the law, deliberately denying jobs to American workers so they can hire foreign workers on H-2 visas instead….

At the same time, companies across the country in a variety of industries have made it all but impossible for U.S. workers to learn about job openings that they are supposed to be given first crack at. When workers do find out, they are discouraged from applying. And if, against all odds, Americans actually get hired, they often are treated worse and paid less than foreign workers doing the same job, in order to drive the Americans to quit.

What’s more, companies often do this with the complicity of government officials, records show. State and federal authorities have allowed companies to violate the spirit — and often the letter — of the law with bogus recruitment efforts that are clearly designed to keep Americans off the payroll. And when regulators are alerted to potential problems, the response is often ineffectual.

I know it’s painful for the devotees of free trade, who love nothing better than to compare 21st century analyses to 18th century dogma, to admit, but the increasingly undeniable empirical reality is that free trade, and the free movement of labor, are about as Marxist, globalist, socially destructive, and economically harmful as Communism.

I’ve read every single defense of free trade that I can find. None of them, not a single one of them, holds up. And as for those who babble childishly about a protectionist government picking winners, as if that suffices to make a rational case, what on Earth do they think is happening in the USA and in the EU now?

All that free trade accomplishes is that it allows governments to pick winners from around the world rather than from inside their own borders. And the winners are those who are willing to pay the most for the privilege, which is why the dominant figures in the U.S. media are a) an Australian and b) a Lebanese based in Mexico.

The heart of the debate

Donald Trump sums up the existential question:

“I have a very hardline position – we either have a country or we don’t have a country.”

That’s Trump, explaining why he might be the one candidate GOP voters can trust on immigration.

The problem, of course, is that far too many Americans have been convinced that their country is nothing more than an idea. A “proposition nation”. Which is to say that it doesn’t exist at all.

Those who are fixated on the various policies espoused by the different candidates are failing to grasp the situation: America is not a given. And after being invaded by 60 million foreigners, America is already not America.

That’s why they talk about New America. New America sounds very exciting and progressive and all, but the key thing is to understand that in this context, “new” is synonymous with “not”.

Social justice convergence on social media

It’s easy to see they are terrified of the rising tide of nationalism, because they are absolutely determined to try to stop the signal. But all they will do is guarantee their own demise:

The two largest social networks, Facebook and Twitter, and the world’s largest search engine, Google, have teamed up with German law enforcement to delete “hate speech” within 24 hours in what is being seen as a last-ditch effort to silence public dissent about a gigantic wave of Syrian immigration.

The partnership to crack down on what Germany deems illegal speech comes after German law enforcement’s reported concerns about “racist abuse” posted to social media after the country’s huge and extremely controversial import of over a million Syrian refugees.

Justice Minister Heiko Maas is reported to have warned social networks that they must not become “a funfair for the far-right” and that “the benchmark to be applied will be German law and no longer just the terms of use of each network.”

Specialist teams will be used to track down, examine, and remove offending posts, and the process is not to take more than 24 hours.

The only reason they think they can do this is because they believe they have a monopoly on the rightful use of force. But because they have betrayed the Westphalian bargain that granted it to the State, they have lost the necessary Mandate of Heaven. History suggests that events will proceed accordingly.

You’ve heard of technocratic government, but the Merkel regime is the first technostasic one.

Why John C. Wright is not a libertarian

In which Mr. Wright explains why he is no longer a libertarian:

I often introduce myself as a recovering libertarian. It is not an entirely serious introduction, but it is not entirely frivolous either.

Why “recovering”? Sad experience teaches that any ideology, even a sound one, like libertarianism, is intoxicating. The appeal of ideology is the appeal of elegance. Just as Newton reduced all motions from the orbits to apples falling to three expressions, every intellectual craves a simple formula to explain the human condition. Libertarianism is based on a single principle that limits the state’s use of force to retaliation against fraud and trespass.

Nearly all the natural moral rules all men carry in their hearts are satisfied by the simple rule that you may do as you like provided you leave your neighbor free to do as he likes. No neighbor may rob, defraud nor attack another.

The intoxication comes with each case that fits neatly to the theory. Natural morality agrees that wars to defend the innocent are permissible, as is killing in self defense. Natural morality agrees that a man should keep his contracts, and so on.

The theory says the state must remain carefully neutral in all cultural and moral questions: the use of intoxicating drugs for recreational use, suicide assisted or no, polygamy, prostitution, gambling, pornography, duels to the death (provided only all participants fully agree!) or, for that matter, copulating with a corpse on the roof of your house in plain view of the neighbors’ children playing in their backyards, and then eating the corpse, all must be legal.

For me, the intoxicating spell ended in three sharp realizations, each one as forceful as a thunderbolt.

Read the rest of it there.

As for me, I’ve always been a small-l libertarian rather than a large-L one. These days, I consider myself more of a Christian nationalist, or a Western Civilizationist than a libertarian per se. Human liberty is an important priority, but we now have a sound historical basis for understanding that a free and open society of the sort that Libertarianism assumed is simply not an option.

The self-lobotomizing of SF/F

Jeffro Johnson brings his epic series on Chapter N to a close with a sobering conclusion on the mental barriers being erected to separate entire generations of science fiction and fantasy readers from the genre’s history:

This estrangement between the generations… it isn’t normal. And it’s not just that people in the seventies would have read many of the same science fiction and fantasy authors that their parents and even grandparents did. The scope of things that fall within the black hole of the generation gap seems to be expanding almost exponentially now. Even things like Bugs Bunny and Tom & Jerry– I would have watched the same stuff that my big brother watched when I was a kid… and we were familiar with the same classic cartoons that out parents and grandparents would have watched. But that’s changed now. And it goes beyond these things just sort of quitely dropping off the radar for the moment. Millennials that will admit to never seeing them still “know” somehow that these things were racist or something and deserve to be erased. It might seem silly, maybe, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

When it was announced that the World Fantasy Award was replacing its iconic Lovecraft bust, Joyce Carol Oates declared that the literary canon is “saturated with racism, sexism, anti-semitism, anti-democracy… and lunacy.” Graciously she allows that “tossing it all out is no solution.” But why wouldn’t you toss it out…? If it really was as bad as people say, you probably would do just that. I mean really, why would people read the works of such terrible people…? They don’t. And if by some chance they do, the reaction can be almost physical sometimes, as this woman describes it:

    I read a lot of Bradbury as a teen and thought his stories were wonderful. Rereading his stories now is actively painful to me. I’m a lot more able to pick up on those subtle cues, and less able to make excuses for them, that the author doesn’t really see his female characters as important, or real, or three dimensional, or people.

Are we really so advanced a civilization now that The Martian Chronicles necessarily should make us ill?

Older people steeped in the classics will dismiss that as an outlier, but it really is a sign of the times. This attitude certainly shows up in a great many of the reviews of old works of fantasy and science fiction that pepper the internet. It’s almost as if there is a barrier in these peoples’ minds. As soon as they get to something they been trained to think of as being “problematic”, they shut down. Very little in the way of any kind of analysis of the material can even be done, because calling out and reviling everything from Madonna/Whore complexes to “black and white morality” is the sort of thing that passes for deep or sophisticated thinking.

The retiring of Lovecraft’s bust from the World Fantasy Awards is therefore not so much reminiscent of statues of Stalin being pulled down in post-Soviet Russia. It’s more a reflection of the Berlin wall… going up.

Social justice convergence destroys everything it touches and erases history because it can neither tolerate nor survive truth.

It burns! It BURNS!

Peggy Noonan, a “conservative” who voted for Obama in 2008 because reasons, can barely bring herself… to say…that terrible, terrible word.

Remember, the more they protest the term, the more they shriek “Nazi” and “fascist” and “racist” in an attempt to escape the burning flames, the more rhetorically effective you know it is. Calling a self-styled conservative a “cuckservative” is akin to brandishing a cross-shaped stake that was soaked in garlic and holy water in a vampire’s face.

Then driving that bad boy home.

That being said, if for tactical purposes you wish to have a calm and etymologically untainted dialectical term of use that they cannot reasonably protest in your arsenal, I suggest you utilize “demi-conservative”, as the cuckservative is an individual who only subscribes to three of Russell Kirk’s six conservative canons.

The three canons to which the demi-conservative observably fails to adhere are:

  • A conviction that society requires orders and classes that emphasize “natural” distinctions
  • A faith in custom, convention, and prescription
  • A recognition that innovation must be tied to existing traditions and customs, which entails a respect for the political value of prudence.

Their failure to do so may not be entirely clear by these summaries of Kirk’s canons, but I will write a more detailed post later which will make it eminently clear that this is unquestionably the case. As you can see, many of today’s “conservatives” are actually demi-conservatives who have rejected literally half of what the father of American conservatism declared to be the conservative mind.

In a word, they are cuckservatives.

Speaking of which, Greg Johnson interviewed me about the book. I’ll post the link to the transcript when it’s available.

The anti-nationalist conspiracy succeeds

The second-round defeat of the Front National in France is not surprising; as I said, it is going to take TWO election cycles before the nationalists can come to power. But for now, the alliance of the left and “center right”, which in American terms is similar to the alliance between liberals and cuckservatives, has been sufficient to keep the Front National out of power:

France’s far-right National Front (FN) has failed to win a single region in the second round of municipal polls. The party was beaten into third place, despite leading in six of 13 regions in the first round of voting a week ago.

The centre-right Republicans finished ahead of President Francois Hollande’s governing Socialist Party.

FN leader Marine Le Pen said that mainstream parties had colluded to keep it from power and vowed to keep on fighting.

“Nothing can stop us now,” she told supporters. “By tripling our number of councillors, we will be the main opposition force in most of the regions of France.”

Ms Le Pen said the party had been “disenfranchised in the most indecent of ways by a campaign of lies and disinformation”.

She had stood as a regional presidential candidate in the northern region of Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie, while her niece Marion Marechal-Le Pen was the FN’s candidate in the race in Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur, in the south.

After both led with more than 40% of the vote in the first round on 6 December, the Socialist candidates in those regions pulled out so their voters could support Republican candidates in the second round.

The FN actually increased its votes in the second round to more than 6.8 million, from 6.02 million on 6 December as more people voted, according to the ministry of the interior (In French). But the FN share of the vote went down slightly from 27.73% to 27.36%.

The anti-nationalists always call the nationalists “Nazis”. It’s nothing more than the usual DISQUALIFY write large. But of course, through their collusion and corruption of the democratic system, the anti-nationalists ensure that the real version, the ultranationalists, will come to power through non-democratic means as soon as the nationalists realize that the will of the people is defined as automatically excluding them, stop playing the game, and throw their support to the ultras.