Death camp for Boomers

I very much look forward to seeing how Boomers will attempt to defend their fellow Boomers from the charge of narcissism and lifelong immaturity given this city literally built to warehouse them and keep them away from any alarming reminders of their age and the evil consequences of their historical legacy:

The sprawling expanse of flat emptiness in central Florida is an unlikely place for America’s fastest growing metro area in the nation. Yet, just 70 miles northwest of Orlando sits ‘The Villages’ – the world’s largest retirement community that surpasses the size of Manhattan and encompasses five zip codes with an ever-growing population.

Spanning 32-square-miles, The Villages is a veritable boom-town for baby boomers aged 55+ who flock to the geriatric paradise in droves for its endless margarita mixers (happy hour starts at 11am), unlimited golf courses (50, to be exact), and notorious for its laissez-fair attitude towards sex, thriving swingers scene, and controversial politics. 

The rambling 33,000 acre property is made up of 78 smaller neighborhoods that range in size from 100 to 1550 houses. According to the US Census Bureau, population ballooned by 37.8{3549d4179a0cbfd35266a886b325f66920645bb4445f165578a9e086cbc22d08} (more than any other American city) between 2010 and 2019. In order to keep up with rapid growth, The Villages is always expanding with an average of 250 new homes and 200 pre-owned homes sold per month.

The self-contained AARPopolis has everything a boomer needs to sustain their twilight years in comfort: dozens upon dozens of restaurants, bars, nightclubs, gift shops, jewelry stores, churches, movie theaters, medical facilities, a Walmart Supercenter and even a ‘fountain of youth.’

From its inception, the gated complex was meticulously engineered to simulate the rose-tinted idea of Main Street, USA– predicated on convenience, leisure and good ol’ American values (even if it’s an illusion). It was tailor made for a demographic that mythologized a wholesome, suburban fantasyland evoked in ‘Father Knows Best’ and ‘Leave it to Beaver.’

‘They were very perceptive about how Baby Boomers actually craved an inorganically organized landscape, an alternate vision of what America used to be, or how they imagine it having been,’ said Oppenheim to InsideHook. ‘A utopia, but a fake utopia based on an America that doesn’t really exist.’

So strong is the gravitational pull of nostalgia – The Villages were imagineered to imitate old town squares like a theme park, complete with phony histories. ‘We needed to create this place not brand new. We wanted to create it old, we decided to bring the Baby Boomers to a home that they were familiar with when they were young,’ said Richard Schwartz.

Draconian rules and restrictions dictate every aspect of ‘life in the bubble.’ Repainting your home requires board approval, (and only then can you select from a bland pallet with 10-shades of beige). No more than two vehicles are allowed per driveway, all vehicles must be regularly used (defined as twice per week) or stored in the garage. Lawn ornaments are strictly prohibited including but not limited to: windmills, religious symbols, gnomes, animal figurines, Christmas decorations and flamingos (bummer!). Even the most tasteful decor can turn into a red button topic.

TV antennas and satellite dishes are forbidden; as are clothing lines, window air conditioners and commercial vehicles. There is a two pet maximum policy, weighing no more than 40 pounds each. Retractable leashes are illegal, and can be no longer than seven feet. Villagers must make sure their lawns are properly edged at all times and hedges can be no greater than four feet (planting new ones will require Home Owner’s Association approval).

The most controversial rule, is also the cardinal rule: no persons under the age of 55 are allowed to live in The Villages. That decree extends to children and grandchildren, who are not permitted to visit for more than 30 days within a calendar year.

It sounds rather like a sterile prelude to the Hell toward which they are hurtling headlong. And if you ever had any doubts about the charge of “radical, lifelong immaturity” applying to Boomers, this picture of the “cheerleading squad”, for which there is a two-year wait to join, should erase them for good.

The end of Instapundit

It’s genuinely tragic to observe the ongoing decline of Instapundit into irrelevance. Glenn is a smart man who made a suboptimal, but understandable decision to get involved with a petty wannabe media tycoon when Roger Simon launched Pajamas Media, mostly on the back of Instapundit’s popularity. The real problem is that Glenn exacerbated that poor decision with the horrendous one to give the execrable Ed Driscoll and the equally ridiculous Stephen Green posting privileges there for reasons that remain an utter mystery.

While I’m grateful to Glenn and Helen for supporting Castalia House in the early years by posting links to our new book releases, I first stopped reading there, and then actually removed my links to their site some time ago due to the incessant judeosatanist propaganda being relentlessly pushed by Driscoll and Green there. And now it’s evident that more than a few of Instapundit’s readers feel the same way.

Sheesh, reading some of these comments I wonder why I even bother with this place. Then again, that’s probably the aim.

No, Glenn, it’s the exact opposite of the aim. Listen to what your fans and supporters are telling you! Your site simply sucks now. Plain and simple. It’s literally unreadable, what with all the non-stop neoconnery and Never-Trumpism, to the point that it’s actually hard to distinguish it from National Review. It isn’t trolls who are hammering you, it is your longtime readers who dislike what you permitted Instapundit to become. They don’t want you to quit. They desperately want you to kick out Driscoll, Green, and Treacher and get back to doing what you once did better than everyone else.

  • “This place?” It’s YOUR place, remember? You built it. It seems like you sold off most of it to Driscoll, but despite some disagreements we may have, you’re an important voice. It’s sad that you only get paid on amazon clicks now. You deserve better.
  • This is beneath a man of your integrity. You associate your site with men of low character (Treacher), your partner (Driscoll) ignores good faith criticism of that, and then you wonder why your rep is taking a hit? Are you intending to treat your audience with disdain and contempt? Because that is how it is coming across to me, and I have read you (and Ace) almost every day for the last 20 years. You are just going to continue to ignore people like me? Loyal readers. Turn sheepdogs into wolves?

Partner? Sold off? Interesting. If it is true that Glenn permitted Driscoll to “invest” in Instapundit, that would certainly explain its ongoing, and inevitable, decline.

The books on Boomers

They’re now being written, and already it is very clear that history is not going to regard them or their dismal legacy well:

If you want to understand the Baby Boom generation you might start with this epigram: Extremism in the defense of vice is our liberty. I don’t think anyone ever put it quite that way, but it could be a Boomer slogan. And it’s part of unlocking the secrets to their generation and to many of the problems they have inflicted on America. Never has any generation in this country—or perhaps any other—so monopolized every aspect of society, for so long, and for such selfish ends while congratulating each other on their selfless righteousness.

Tear apart the family, the churches, the charities, the schools, and everything else in your path; encourage mass drug use, promiscuous sex, and spend, spend, spend-materialism; even saddle your kids and grandkids with tens of trillions of dollars of debt to make sure you can keep the party going “Big Chill”-style, until the very last Boomers depart for the Strawberry fields where it’s always 1967. 

Until the past few years, not many people noticed what the Boomers were doing. It’s no surprise—they started their victory tour, celebrating themselves while they were in college in the 1960s, and haven’t stopped since. It’s only now that many of them are in their 70s that space has opened for a reassessment.

If you want to really understand the full Boomer cycle (and I suggest you do, because their long ascendancy is a big part of the story of America from about 1960 until, well, right now), there are three books you need to read—the holy trilogy of Boomer pathologies. They are The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, written by Tom Wolfe in 1968, The Culture of Narcissism by Christopher Lasch published in 1979, and the Götterdämmerung of this cycle, Andrews’ Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster, published in January.

Boomers is an astounding book. Modeled on Eminent Victorians, Lytton Strachey’s sharp 1918 reassessment of the British generation that dominated the 19th and very early 20th centuries, Andrews examines six high-profile members of the Baby Boom generation: Steve Jobs, Aaron Sorkin, Jeffrey Sachs, Camille Paglia, Al Sharpton, and Sonia Sotomayor. Each represents an element of the essential Boomer character. None of them are natural villains. Rather, each is hobbled by a fatal flaw that leaves him permanently stunted. 

The one possible exception is Jobs. When compared to the others, Jobs seems like a man out of time: in some ways, the Apple co-founder is the essential Boomer. But while he shared—and in some ways defined—the Boomer aesthetic, his soul belonged to another generation. He did, after all, insist that the Apple MacIntosh be manufactured in the United States. It was Tim Cook who later shifted manufacturing to China. And Jobs kept porn out of the App Store. “We believe we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone” Jobs said in 2010. “Jobs had some very un-Boomerish views,” Andrews observes.

Every profile in the book is fascinating and Andrews is in her element. Her penetrating gaze leaves the subjects of these character portraits naked and vulnerable, but her elegant writing and humane style turn what could be acid takedowns of caricatures into the human, all too human, failures of the “Me” generation. 

Where Tom Wolfe described the Boomers in their rebellious, countercultural, drug-addled youth, Christopher Lasch picked up the thread as they were starting families, advancing in their careers, making some money, and taking over the institutions they had rebelled against just a few years before. But don’t worry—they didn’t sell out. No, not the Boomers. They put a deadhead sticker on their Cadillacs. And they parked the Caddy in front of a nice house in the suburbs that steadily rose in value. 

But the Boomers were the last generation that could support a middle-class family on one income. And that house they’re living in that has appreciated so nicely over the years? It’s become so expensive that their kids, the Millennials, can’t afford to buy one—let alone have kids. In fact, the Boomers had about four times the wealth the Millennials currently have as they enter their 40s.

Throughout the book, Andrews paints a picture not just of unrelenting narcissism, but of radical, lifelong immaturity. Her profile of Aaron Sorkin, creator of “The West Wing,” was striking in this regard. But the chapter on Camille Paglia is particularly jarring, mostly because it seems to hit dead center and lay her bare. She describes Paglia’s decadence as “a mauve decadence: corrupt but nonthreatening.” And her mimetic, yet one-sided, rivalry with Susan Sontag exposed a petty side to Paglia that diminishes her cultivated reputation for brassy independence.

And yet most of them are still confused that the younger generations fail to consider their music “the greatest ever recorded” and can’t grasp the way the younger generations gleefully anticipate “the Day of the Pillow”. But then, “unrelenting narcissism” does tend to inhibit accurate self-reflection.

The “dismal legacy” epitaph is actually more favorable than the Boomers deserve:

Ultimately, Andrews concludes that “the Boomers leave behind a dismal legacy. In all the fields touched by the six Boomers profiled here—technology, entertainment, economics, academia, politics, law—what they passed on to their children was worse than what they inherited. In some cases, as with Steve Jobs and his products or Camille Paglia and her books, they left behind accomplishments that are impressive and worthy of gratitude. But the overall effect of the Boomer generation has still been essentially destructive.”

The Moral Hypocrisy

This is the article by Gad Saad condemning celebrity virtue-signalers that was vanished by Psychology Today, most likely because it intellectually jiu-jitsued the historical communist tactic of medicalizing ideological opponents. Possibly also because he had the unseemly temerity to suggest that a celebrity actually read a book.

Back in 2009, I authored an article on this platform titled The Narcissism and Grandiosity of Celebrities.  Continuing this tradition, this past week on my social media platforms, I critiqued the virtue signalling that members of the privileged classes engage in. Here is what I wrote: 

“Let me explain yet again the source for all of the platitudinous virtue signalling. The truly privileged elites know that deep down they are frauds. They suffer from existential guilt. Hence, one of the ways by which they assuage the guilt albatross around their necks is to demonstrate to the world that they are truly compassionate, truly loving, truly caring, truly profound. Hence, they love all “undocumented” immigrants. They love Mother Earth. They love the ozone layer. They love BLM. They love socialism. They love inner cities. They hate the gentrification of neighbourhoods. They love mentors of color. They cherish diversity. They love LGBTQ movies. They adore queer architecture. They are better than you. More caring, more cultured, more empathetic. This permits them to sleep better at night. See, I’m not a fraud. I may be a gargantuan parasitic hedge fund bullshitter but I really care. I may be an overpaid BS actor but I fight for solar panels. Those fly over rubes deserve their lot in life. They are racists who bed their siblings. We are science supporters who fight against Mother Earth rapists whilst flying in our private jets. It is a classic ego defensive strategy that permits the ruling class to exist within their fractured selves. Save this thread. Memorize it. I’m offering you a deep psychological explanation of our times.”

Seth Rogen who had been tagged on Twitter regarding the latter, retorted as follows:

“I actually watched your video and it’s so stupid. Why was I a left wing socialist when I was broke and unemployed according to your brilliant theory?”

To which I replied:

“Thanks for watching. Many young people are socialists when they are driven by immature impulses of utopia. They then grow up. You are a grown man with tons of money. Your current stances are rooted in vacuous empty signalling rooted in a desire to belong in Hollywood. It takes zero courage to hold your stances within the entertainment ecosystem. You espouse bullshit rhetoric that wins you points at the cool kids’ parties but you are otherwise as ignorant as my out-of-order toaster. I’d be happy to chat with you on my show as you have a very large platform and as such you have the opportunity to actually make a difference. Stop succumbing to the herd mindset. Learn how to think critically. Learn the meaning and implications of socialism vs. capitalism. You are among the MOST privileged people in the history of humanity. And yet you walk around as though you are a Che Guevara revolutionary. You are the product of capitalism. If you are such a socialist, send me some of your money. I’m trying to build an interdisciplinary research institute. Live out your convictions. If you are a socialist, you have no business being the beneficiary of the most capitalist industry in the most capitalist country in the history of humanity. Don’t be a hypocritical fraud. Cheers amigo.”

In my recently released bestselling book The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense, I discuss the differences between virtue signalling and honest signalling. Here are two relevant excerpts from a section titled “Do Not Virtue-Signal”: 

“Each time that a terrorist attack takes place in some Western city, nauseating hordes of cowards do one of two things: 1) Change their social media handles to the flag of the country that was attacked; 2) Share a hashtag on Twitter to signal their solidarity with a given cause (#JeSuisCharlie following the terror killings at the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris; #BringBackOurGirls, made famous by Michelle Obama, in support of the Nigerian girls kidnapped by Boko Haram). Politicians seek to outdo one another in offering vacuous “heartfelt” condolences while in many cases continuing to enact policies that are directly responsible for the terror attacks in question. In the great majority of instances, these are utterly useless endeavors meant to do nothing but advertise one’s supposed virtue to the world (hence the term virtue-signaling). It is a form of cheap and costless self-aggrandizing that feeds one’s ego. I must be a good person who truly cares, as evidenced by my progressive hashtag. Nothing could be further from the truth. Those who engage in such platitudinous signaling are cowardly and meek.” (p. 178)

Later I added the following (pp. 180-181):

“During a highly publicized 2017 event held in Toronto, Oren Amitay, Jordan Peterson, and I were asked to identify our respective freedom of speech heroes. I responded that the ultimate heroes are those who risk their lives to defend such freedoms. I pointed to individuals from the Middle East (some of whom have been guests on my show) who are willing to defend these ideals knowing full well that they may pay the ultimate price. This is what having skin in the game looks like. This is costly virtue, not virtue-signaling. Over the past year or so, I have become good friends with Ensaf Haidar, the wife of jailed Saudi blogger Raif Badawi, and I had the pleasure of meeting her three lovely children at a dinner organized by the actor Mark Pellegrino and his wife. Raif is serving a ten-year prison sentence and was scheduled to receive one thousand lashes (“only” fifty of which have thus far been administered) for having the temerity to question, in a rather tepid manner, various religious and cultural realities in the region. Retweeting #JeSuisCharlie is impotent virtue-signaling; critiquing the Saudi regime from within Saudi Arabia is courage in action.”

Bottom line: In order for a signal to be an honest one, it must be handicapping; it must be costly to the one who emits the signal. Raif Badawi lived out his convictions. He engaged in costly signalling. Seth Rogen and other champagne socialists do not live out their convictions. They are vacuous parasitic virtue signallers who wear Che Guevara t-shirts from the luxury of their Malibu homes. Be the former and reject the latter.

Ten things about the Super Bowl

  1. Tom Brady cemented his status as the Greatest Of All Time. Not that it was actually in any doubt at this point, but he put Joe Montana further in the rear-view mirror with a near-flawless performance.  21-of-29 for 201 yards, 3 TD and 0 INT isn’t flashy, it’s just winning football.
  2. Patrick Mahomes is legitimately amazing and he can throw long, accurate passes from positions that no one else ever has. But I doubt he’ll have a long career in the NFL if he has to play that way.
  3. Shaq Barrett was the MVP, with honorable mention going to Devin White. No one, literally no one, expected Tampa to keep the Chiefs under twenty points, let alone ten. Barrett was most impactful player on the most important unit. The Buccaneers’ defense put pressure on Mahomes on 29 of 56 dropbacks, the most pressure in Super Bowl history.
  4. Brady greatness goes well beyond his own performance. He inspires other players to play better and in a more disciplined way. None of the three guys who scored touchdowns last night, Gronkowski, Fournette, and Brown, are even on the team if he’s not there. 
  5. Bruce Arians may not know how to fix broken toys, but he certainly knows how to make them work again, for at least a little while.
  6. I suspect the pandemic helped Tampa win the Super Bowl this year, by keeping its problem players away from temptation and out of trouble.
  7. The NFL can change all the rules it likes. Defense still wins championships.
  8. Sportswriters can stop crying about Eric Bienemy not being offered a head coaching job now. Todd Bowles proved that if they want to cry about a black man not being offered a job this year, he’s the better candidate.
  9. I’m pretty sure Mahomes actually threw three interceptions. The officials appeared to blow an early whistle on the one where the Chiefs’ WR had his hand between the ball and the ground.
  10. KC fans can complain all they want, but the Chiefs deserved every single flag that was thrown with the exception of the meaningless post-TD flag on Mathieu. Tony Romo actually described a holding call as “soft” when the LT tackled an OLB and took him to the ground while strangling him with his arm completely locked around his throat. The KC defense simply refused to adjust their play to the obvious fact that the referees were calling a moderately tight game.

I never watch the halftime show so I could have missed it, but it was interesting to see that the league appeared to keep the SJW nonsense to a minimum, with the exception of a female sideline reporter warbling about how important it was that there was a female referee on the crew.

Warning: anyone who feels the need to go off-topic by talking about themselves or their disapproval of the sport, the league, or sports in general will be spammed and banned.

A new book on Dante

I read Italian military historian Alessandro Barbero’s book on the lead-up to the battle of Adrianople, The Day of the Barbarian, and it was a fair, but eye-opening explication on the insanity of civic nationalism and the insidious danger of pro-immigrant elites. He has a new book out on Dante that I’ve been reading; unfortunately, it’s newly released in Italian so you’ll have to wait for it. 

I don’t have the time to translate this interview with the author in La Republicca, but the Google translator actually did a pretty good job translating it, at least well enough to understand most of it.

FLORENCE. It is only a little less mysterious than Cleopatra’s: but in short, Professor, did Dante have a hooked nose or not? “And who knows? All the portraits we have of him were made by people who had never seen him” smiles the historian Alessandro Barbero in the cloister of Santa Croce. We talk a stone’s throw from Alighieri’s cenotaph: that empty tomb that for centuries has been claiming the mortal remains of the Supreme unheeded, tenaciously guarded in Ravenna. In the statue that surmounts the Florentine sarcophagus, Dante has the usual frowning air. What made him so grim were the torments of exile or a temper enhanced by the proverbial Tuscan irascibility? “When I think of Dante, sympathy is not the first thing that comes to mind” admits Barbero. “But if they invited me to have a coffee with him, I would rush. A historian always falls in love with the subject he studies. Passion is to discover. Like a cop trying to catch a criminal. “

And in fact the Dante by Barbero, published by Laterza, is a 360-page stalking following a genius who remains elusive seven centuries after his death. Otherwise what genius would that be? Starting the book is enthralling. Also because the two great passions of Alessandro Barbero get married there: the Middle Ages and military history.

Saturday 11 June 1289: the Florentine troops move towards the clash with the Aretini in what will be remembered as the Battle of Campaldino. Dante is 24 years old. It is in the front row. He throws himself into the fray, but during the slaughter – he himself tells it – he is assailed by fear and runs away. A behavior that at the time was not necessarily considered dishonorable.

Was the principle that “soldier running away is good for another time” already valid?

“In a certain sense, yes. Let’s be clear: even in the Middle Ages the brave were appreciated and cowards were despised. But it was not thought that if you are brave you will not run away. Above all, the competence, the professionalism of those who understand what during the battle counted. is happening around. We are talking about people who knew wars well, who really waged them. We invented the knights without blemish and without fear much later. “

Dante belonged to the Florentine elite. His ancestors had made money by lending money. But even on the sinfulness of usury, the medieval people had elastic opinions. If you lent to a poor man you were a loan shark. While if you lent to a rich man you moved capitalism, you made GDP grow, you were a respectable businessman.

“Dante’s ancestors lent to everyone. But at the time a usurer was the one who lived only on loans. If he also did other activities, the matter changed. Both on the theological and on the social level, Dante’s world wonders about the problem of wear always looking for a balance, pragmatic solutions “.

Florence is the Wall Street of the time.

“More than Wall Street, a city-bank. In Italy in general and in Florence in particular, more cash circulated than in any other place in Europe. By itself, Florence had revenues comparable to those of a kingdom. Not even the comparison with New York gives an idea of ​​what its economic and financial power was then “.

Until he abandons it, Dante lives as a rentier in Florence .

“Yes, the income field. And its condition already refers to what will be the dramatic crisis of Italian capitalism in the Middle Ages”.

Crisis triggered by what?

“From the idea that once you become rich you no longer continue to invest, but you buy land and become lords. Dante belongs to the generation of those who stop working to sit down on income”.

He too is borrowing money.

“In those days, those who ask for it are not necessarily in economic difficulties. Usually, those who make large debts are because they can afford them. Even today, a poor person does not get loans of five hundred thousand euros”.

How to comport yourself

I remember this championship fight. I was deeply disappointed that Leon Spinks defeated The Greatest, Muhammed Ali. I still remember the 45 that the older neighbor kid down the street who years later drove me to school used to play.

Muhammed… Muhammed Ali

He floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee.

What I found fascinating about this article from the Sports Illustrated vault is the way the two boxing champions absolutely refused to engage in all the posturing and nonsense invited by their entourages, and instead insisted on exhibiting respect for their opponent.

Ali accepted the decision without complaint. Around him rose anguished cries of robbery, of a fix, of being had. Ali, now the ex-champion, walked to his dressing room. He was crying, but his head was held high. He ignored the madness all about him.

He sat down and sipped a glass of carrot juice. Sarrea, his face emotionless, kneeled and began to remove Ali’s shoes. Someone shouted, “It was robbery.”

Ali’s head came up. “Shut up. Nobody got robbed. I lost the fight.”

The door burst open, and Michael Dokes, one of Ali’s sparring partners, flew into the room. He was furious. Indicating Ali’s associates, he said to Ali, “They fed you a lot of crap. They told you you were in shape and you weren’t. You listened to all the wrong people.”

“That’s right, not in shape,” someone said, grabbing the excuse from the air.

“Oh, man,” Ali said in disgust. “First I was robbed and now I’m not in shape. Why don’t you listen? I was beaten. I lost. He won. Can’t you understand that?”

Even after beating Ali, Spinks refused to accept the idea that Ali’s mantle had been passed on to him.

“I’ll fight Ali just like I’d fight any other guy who challenged me in the street. But I’ll never say anything against him. I’m not going against the man, I’m just trying to beat him. He was my idol, he still is my idol—and when the fight is over he still will be.”

In his dressing room Spinks quieted a small gathering. “Celebrate later,” he said, “but now, first things first. Before anyone starts jiving we must give our thanks to the Lord.” The new heavyweight champion of the world led the prayer: “Dear God, thank you for answering my prayers. Thank you for my not getting hurt, and for my man not getting hurt. Thank you for the miracle. All praise sweet Jesus.”

Late Friday night, two days after the fight, Leon Spinks stood at his hotel room window, staring out at the lights of Las Vegas.

“The thing I don’t like,” he said, “is people calling me the greatest. I am not the greatest. I may be the best young heavyweight, but he was the greatest. And he is still the greatest.”

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you should do it.

Why is ANY conservative still on Twitter?

Cuck as hard as you like, submit as slavishly as you can, sooner or later, the Sostapo are still going to come for you.

The founder and editor of the right-wing Gateway Pundit website has been permanently banned from Twitter, leaving the liberal left “thrilled” and conservatives wondering who will be silenced next.

The @gatewaypundit Twitter handle belonging to Jim Hoft with more than 375,000 followers was abruptly banned on Saturday night. “The account was permanently suspended for repeated violations of our civic integrity policy,” a Twitter spokesperson confirmed in a brief statement.

Twitter did not clarify which violation was the last straw, as the account seemed to be not very active recently. The conservative publication itself has long faced criticism from the left for pushing “lies” and “conspiracies.” 

Twitter’s recently updated civic integrity policy introduces a system of strikes and increasingly severe punishments, among other things, for pushing “disputed claims that could undermine faith in the process itself, such as unverified information about election rigging, ballot tampering, vote tallying, or certification of election results.”

“Oh s**t they got my boss,” journalist and Pundit contributor Cassandra Fairbanks tweeted. In response to ‘you’re next!’ threats, she quipped that from now on she will be careful not to wrongthink and will only tweet the opposite of what she believes.

This is not exactly new. Instapundit was first suspended back in 2016. It’s remarkable, and more than a little bit contemptible, to see how desperate conservatives are to maintain even the barest modicum of tolerance from the people who make it very clear how much they hate them.

Why are there still 375,000 self-professed conservatives on Twitter in the first place? The best and most useful thing conservatives can do is to turn their back on all left-wing social media and entertainment. And yet, most of them simply refuse to do so, presumably for fear that someone, somewhere, might call them racist or anti-semitic.

Then they mock you

It’s amusing to see how the gammas in the media are resentful of the fact that people are beginning to understand what sigma males are:

This unresolvable friction — you have to realize your place on the ladder, but you are delusional if you put yourself outside and above it — is probably why the sigma offshoot has not achieved saturation. By providing an asterisk to the core dogma of dominance, it allows men to reframe antisocial tendencies as power rather than weakness. Texts like The Sigma Male Codex: Rules for the Sigma Male are ultra-flattering to the presumably sigma reader, telling him that he’s a deeply intelligent and effortlessly attractive guy… because he’s “the quietest man in the room,” “keeps a wall built up around him to keep certain people out and “would never dream of hanging out with a large group of males.”

It’s introversion and inaction rebranded as mysterious cool — the rōnin forging his path alone — whereas the rest of us see a loser who should get a life. Comparing yourself to John Wick, an action-movie assassin with a dead wife and the entire underworld trying to murder him for the full length of the franchise, shows a warped perspective at minimum.

In his heart of hearts, the red-pilled man doesn’t actually want to be an alpha. It’s too much bro performance, too many hours in the gym and at the office, too basic a profile. Therefore, he creates the inner world of the sigma — he is a unique and fearless Übermensch in his mind, and whether reality conforms to this projection is immaterial, as he can always convince himself it does.

You’d think that a sigma, allegedly uninterested in social class and convention, wouldn’t be this consumed with proving his freedom from these limitations; indeed, you might say that a true sigma is the man who has never heard of any of this cringe bullshit, as he’s happily off hiking in the desert or making experimental art or straight up fucking, and couldn’t possibly care besides. To judge by the internet, however, a sigma is a guy who huffs his own farts until they start to smell like transcendent wisdom, then tries to market this narcissism to the same pretentious twerps who were calling themselves “sapiosexuals” not long ago.

As should be more than obvious by my literally shutting down the blog that discussed these things and complete lack of effort to push anything related to the socio-sexual hierarchy on anyone, I wasn’t trying to market anything, let alone narcissism, when I categorized observable male behavior patterns. The SSH is nothing more than an organized set of observations that happens to permit one to usefully understand and anticipate the behavior of a wide variety of men. If one finds it useful, use it. If not, then don’t.

Furthermore, the point of defining the sigma male behavioral pattern was to highlight the obvious differences between two very different patterns that were both being identified as alpha by the more basic sexual hierarchy. It certainly wasn’t to give gammas, much less omegas, yet another avenue to indulge their delusional self-redefinitions.

And yes, getting one’s panties in a bunch over other people’s observations is quintessential gamma behavior. But then, if you’ve been reading here a while, you already knew that.

Don’t rely on surrender monkeys

Lawyers love to talk tough about how they’ll fight to death for their clients, in much the same way that journalists love to talk tough about their commitment to free speech. But both groups are not only made up of paper tigers, on average, both tend to have commitments that are best described as transient and mercenary, as this account of President Trump’s legal team demonstrates in an account that rings disturbingly true.

After some time (20-30 minutes), three lawyers appeared together. They did not introduce themselves, and stood huddling in the back of the Oval Office, listening. In addition, Mark Meadows and someone else joined us by speaker phone. Eventually the lawyers in the back began muttering things to make their displeasure and disagreement evident. Finally President Trump said something indicating this was new to him, wondering why no one had shown him this route through the impasse. I said again, “Sir, again, CEO to CEO, you are not being served well by those around you in the White House. I’ve gotten to know staffers in your White House, and they tell me they are being told that leadership here is telling them to get you to concede.”

Trump started to say something to Mike and Sidney, but he stopped himself and turned back towards me. “Who?” He asked angrily, “Who wants me to concede?”

I was taken aback by his anger, because I thought what I was telling him was common knowledge. I thought it was generally understood that about half the White House was in on the program of getting him to concede, for that was the estimate I was repeatedly told. “Sir, I am surprised you’re surprised…. In your White House leadership is telling junior staff this everywhere. I am told that this fellow Pat Cipollone [indicating the lawyers behind me as I spoke, not knowing which was Cipollone] has been telling people since November 4, ‘Just help us get the President to concede.’ And for the last couple of weeks, Mark Meadows has been telling staff, ‘Help get the President into transition mode.’”

Trump turned to White House General Counsel Pat Cipollone, who began sputtering. “Mr. President, you know how hard I work, you know how many hours I have been putting in…” Both of which were mealy-mouthed, and neither of which was a direct denial, as was obvious to everyone in the room.  Trump faced him, his face darkening in anger.

“Sir,” I continued, “in 30 minutes I can have a number of staffers from within your White House  here to tell you that those are quotes from Pat Cipollone and Mark Meadows. This guy is lying to you through his teeth. They want you to lose.”

Trump turned, knowing I was correct. He indicated one of the other lawyers, said, “Did you know that this is his last day? He has a job starting Monday at a law firm up the street, getting paid 10 times what I can pay him here.” He continued wistfully, “Pat, can you imagine what I could have gotten done here, if I had not been fighting my own people?”

Cipollone and the other two lawyers scurried out the back door of the Oval Office. I heard them stay out in the ante room, caucusing. Meanwhile, the President, Sidney, Mike, Alyssa, and myself continued for a while walking through more of the details, reviewing some of what we had said earlier. At some point Allyssa, that quiet but razor-sharp female lawyer assisting Sidney, took over for a few points, and concisely explained aspects of the executive order, always clarifying with great precision whatever needed to be clarified.

After 10 minutes the three lawyers walked back into the room and stood, this time not in the back, but abreast and to the left of we four visitors: Alyssa, myself, Mike, and Sidney, sitting in chairs in a half-moon in front of the Resolute desk. Mike continued taking operational questions that arose, while Sidney and Alyssa handled the legal questions that arose. The three male lawyers edged closer to the front, and then as though as some hidden signal, they all started being bitches.

First was some comment about it not being right to use the National Guard. “The optics are terrible, Mr. President,” said one. “It would have to be the DHS.”  I liked the National Guard idea because we needed to reestablish trust of the American people in the electoral process, and the US institution with the most trust is the one where people dress in military uniforms. Yet the National Guard is local, they are all around us, our colleagues at work, our “Citizen Soldiers”. But perhaps in a sign of flexibility, Flynn and Sidney allowed as how one could use the DHS instead of the National Guard.

“The press would tear your apart,” predicted Pat Cipollone at one turn in the conversation. Sidney said what Mike and I were both thinking: The press is going to tear him apart? Really? What are they doing now?

At some point Cipollone objected, “Never in American history has there been this kind of a challenge to an election!” Flynn responded, “Never in American history has there been a situation like this, with counting being shut down for hours, foreigners connecting to our equipment, …..” and so on.

“He does not have the authority to do this!” Cipollone thundered eventually. Sidney rejoined, “Of course he does,” citing EO 13848 (and something else signed by Obama). “Without question he has the authority.” Alyssa whipped out EO 13848 again and showed the relevant language that we had just covered. Trump looked at Cipollone with an expression that said, You never even brought this to my attention, Pat. He said to Cipolloner, “You know Pat, at least they want to fight for me. You don’t even fight for me. You just tell me everything I can’t do.”

Fortunately, you can reliably tell when a lawyer is BS’ing you, as they transition from discussing the genuine legal issues to the practical implications without even noticing that they have done so. Once they do that, you know you can safely disregard everything they are saying, since lawyers tend to know considerably less about the practical realities than their clients who actually work in the real world. 

The mistake most people make is allowing their lawyers to make strategic decisions for them, which usually doesn’t work out well for the obvious reason that lawyers are trained to think in a purely tactical manner. My advice is that if you have a lawyer who prefers telling you what you can’t do instead of helping you figuring out what you can do, don’t hesitate to get rid of him.