Tag: cuckservative

Specifically, they complain about the media SJWs treating them and the moderate leftists they admire the way that they treat everyone to their Right.

Jordan Peterson has become so effective a messenger—and not just in Canada—that it was inevitable that the MSM, the left, and academics (but I repeat myself) would put forth effort to discredit and discount him. So if you’ve been paying attention you’ll have noticed a recent spate of articles and statements saying just where he went so grievously wrong, how he draws his support from bigots and alt-righters (and/or is one himself), and fails to understand this or that or the other thing on which the critic/writer is an expert. Here’s a recent example of the latter (hat tip commenter Artfldgr), and there are plenty more of the former as well such as this one from NBC.

Watch that last video; it’s less than two minutes long, and it’s instructive—not about Peterson, but about the way the MSM approaches the topic of “explaining” him. Most of these hit pieces are relatively subtle, as is this one (“Who is Jordan Peterson, favorite figure of the alt-right”), which hardly talks about what Peterson actually says, gets some of that wrong when it does (beginning with saying he refuses to be pigeonholed and then offering as an example of that him speaking about an entirely different subject, his refusal to automatically use left-dictated pronouns for transgendered people), but quickly delivers its main message of “bigots love him, therefore he’s tainted.”

The goal is quite clearly to make him persona non grata to people who’ve never watched a video of his or read anything he’s written, making him so toxic that they will pigeonhole him (“alt-right bigot”) and never indulge whatever curiosity they might have by going to the source, Peterson. These pieces are not meant to actually inform; they’re meant to block any desire the listener might have to inform him/herself. After all, life is short, we have a finite amount of time here, and why waste it listening to a bigot or a figure beloved by bigots?

It’s particularly funny to see how the readers of this “neo-neocon” promptly make use of the very same tactics to try to make me persona non grata when someone points out that I have shown Jordan Peterson to be an evil left-wing globalist charlatan.

Johnny Ray:
Vox Day a true altrighty debunks JP on his blog as a fraud

om:
Oh noes, not Vox Day! As if Jordon Peterson has ever claimed to be of the alt-right. The left says it over and over, but saying a thing doesn’t make it so.

vanderleun:
Vox Day’s extreme jealousy of Peterson is transparent, vile and disgusting. He shows his true colors as an envious mental midget who is in love with only his own vapors. Basically, like the rotted pulp stuff he cranks out, he’s a comic book.

First, the point isn’t that Jordan Peterson isn’t of the alt-right. He’s not. The point is that he’s not of the Right at all, his philosophy is evil, his logic is incoherent, and his advice is bad. As for the constant accusations of envy, I am no more jealous of the haunted, suicidal, godless, mentally unbalanced Peterson than I was of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, PZ Myers, or that little doughball Scalzi. Those who believe all criticism is rooted in jealousy always reveal more than they realize about themselves.

penngineer
I was lucky enough to see JBP in Nashville at the Ryman last week, and luckier still to meet him (I couldn’t afford a VIP ticket, but waiting outside the theater for a long time afterwards paid off!). He really IS everything that you would hope and expect him to be. His gaze is so intense when he makes eye contact with you, and you can really see the genuine warmth and compassion in his eyes. Truly a great man.

These idiots genuinely deserve everything they are going to eventually experience. Sweet St. Darwin, but they are dumber than the dodos were. Because greatness truly depends upon the perception of compassion in one’s eyes.

Ed Driscoll will post links to Ben Shapiro on an hourly basis. Sorry, make that BEN SHAPIRO. From Instapundit:

As Ben Shapiro noted, during the Tony Awards on Sunday, “alleged comedian Michael Ian Black tweeted out a bumper sticker that could easily be taken as the slogan for the modern Left: ‘Theater is political. Sports is political. Life is political. Be political.’”
Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll 

BEN SHAPIRO: No, Star Wars Isn’t Failing Because Of Hateful Trolls. It’s Failing Because Kathleen Kennedy Has Done A Garbage Job.
Posted at 12:32 pm by Ed Driscoll

BEN SHAPIRO INTERVIEWS JONAH GOLDBERG (Video): “When does nationalism go too far? Is the ‘Never Trump’ movement still alive? Jonah Goldberg joins Ben Shapiro this week to discuss the first 18 months of Trump’s presidency, and how he’s shifted the culture since the election.” Plus plenty of discussion on Jonah’s new book, The Suicide of the West, a great read.
Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll 

The Littlest Chickenhawk’s masters must be paying Driscoll by the link.

Ron Unz describes how he was purged from The American Conservative in 2013:

On June 12th, 2013 I was having an unusually lengthy phone conversation with Daniel McCarthy, editor of The American Conservative (TAC). I live in Silicon Valley, three thousand miles away from DC, and despite holding the nominal title of publisher my involvement with TAC business operations had usually been negligible, amounting to just a few minutes a week on the phone. But I had grown alarmed over the lack of any major new donations since January, and had begun urging McCarthy to make the cuts in expenses necessary for the publication’s survival, while lobbying the board on the same subject. Web traffic had also been sharply declining for six or seven months, suggesting the need for a change in editorial focus. And several months earlier, TAC had cut its print frequency in half to just six issues a year while doubling the annual subscription rate to $60, thus quadrupling the per issue cost to an unreasonable $10, a pricing decision I’d strongly questioned at the time and now believed we needed to reverse.

Despite my tradition of operational disengagement, I felt comfortable pressing these points. Since late 2006 I had provided some 70{434e4795edb8718426f2262f16bc350bda72304c69f2c22d1de5754882bdf177} of TAC’s total funding, and even after converting the publication into a non-profit in 2010, I had still remained TAC’s largest donor during 2012, while also serving as chairman. TAC had come close to shutting down on a couple of previous occasions and I wanted to avoid taking such a risk again, especially since over the last year or two I had begun regularly publishing some of my own articles in the magazine.

Finally, at the end of the call I asked McCarthy whether he’d yet had a chance to prepare a redlined edit copy of the new article I’d submitted a couple of weeks earlier and on which he’d previously suggested one or two minor changes that I had subsequently made. To my enormous surprise, he informed me that he’d decided to flatly reject the entire piece—an analytical study of American urban crime rates—as representing the sort of racially-inflammatory material that had no place in a quality magazine such as TAC. He instead suggested that a more appropriate venue for my article would be one of the webzines categorized as White Nationalist hate-sites by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

After a few stunned words on my part, I hung up the phone and almost immediately received an emailing McCarthy had sent out to his undisclosed distribution list, harshly criticizing my behavior while repeating his same charges in more measured terms, describing the subject of my article as “a distraction from TAC’s mission” and something that would “fatally detract” from TAC’s advocacy of “the case for noninterventionism and restricting executive power.” I soon discovered that my TAC blogging privileges had also been terminated, banning me from the website. Later, my access to TAC’s ongoing website traffic information was eliminated. So more than six years after becoming TAC’s publisher, I had been summarily purged.

For several weeks I made frustrating attempts to gain support from the other members of TAC’s governing board. But they had spent years just as totally disengaged as myself from TAC’s operations and had absolutely no desire to involve themselves in what they perceived as some sort of rancorous personal dispute. During this period I did my best to avoid publicizing my situation, partly because I found it so humiliating, but finally in late July National Review learned of this simmering controversy and solicited an interview. Initially I hesitated, but seeing that TAC—after rejecting my article as “a distraction”—had covered its homepage for several days straight with articles about British rock bands, zombies, giant robots, and cartoon characters, I became angry enough to provide my side of the story to the media. Three days after NR ran its short he said-she said item, TAC’s board convened in a special Sunday phone session to remove me, formalizing what had already occurred.

No wonder conservatives never get anywhere, not with opinion leaders like these.

They’ve been roundly defeated by Donald Trump in the GOP and sent to the back of the bus in the Democratic Party. So, the NeverTrumpers, formerly the Neoconservatives, are now looking to create a third party. Since Israel First isn’t really appropriate for a party outside Israel, perhaps they could take a page from the American history that has absolutely nothing to do with them or their immigrant forebears and go with the Bullfeathers brand.

Bill Kristol has not given up on defeating Donald Trump.

He tried and failed once before to recruit an independent candidate to challenge Trump in 2016. Now, with 2020 on his mind, Kristol badly wants a Republican to primary the president. The conservative commentator has been traveling to Iowa and New Hampshire, running a campaign for a campaign, and evangelizing on behalf of a cause that’s less about policy and more, to him, about morals.

“I have a feeling,” Kristol said Wednesday at Politics & Eggs, a can’t-miss speaking engagement for White House prospects at Saint Anselm College, “that we are now entering … a turbulent era, when the character of both parties is up for grabs.”

He’s quick to note that challenges to sitting presidents had big consequences in other turbulent periods: In 1968, Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy chased then-president Lyndon Johnson from the race at the height of anti–Vietnam War sentiment; in 1976, Ronald Reagan nearly beat then-president Gerald Ford, a preview of the conservative Reagan Revolution to come; and in 1980, Ted Kennedy challenged then-president Jimmy Carter and helped define the liberal direction of the Democratic Party.

And so, armed with this history and fresh polling (Morning Consult and Politico found 38{434e4795edb8718426f2262f16bc350bda72304c69f2c22d1de5754882bdf177} of Republican voters want Trump to face a primary challenge), Kristol made his case this week to dozens of influential New Hampshire activists during a breakfast buffet beneath blown-up photos of past presidential candidates campaigning in the nation’s first primary state.

Many Republicans who voted for Trump in the general election last time around did so, Kristol asserts, out of concern over Supreme Court appointments and because they hated Hillary Clinton more.

I’m told Ben Shapiro is “wildly popular” with young conservatives. And he’ll be 35 by 2020. I hear he’s quite the fearsome debater too. It’s not like he’d be any less serious a presidential candidate than David French or Evan McMuffin was. Why not put him on the Bullfeathers ticket? And pair him with a woman of equal appeal to Left and Right, the whip-smart Jennifer Rubin, as Vice-President.

And who did Morning Consult and Politico poll anyhow, the National Review staff? Donald Trump is not only going to win reelection easily, he is going to wind up his second term more popular, and more lionized, than Ronald Reagan.

Ben Shapiro tries to speech police Pat Buchanan for telling the truth about American history:

In one of the more morally repugnant and historically egregious columns in recent memory, Pat Buchanan, godfather to the paleoconservative movement that forms a core piece of Trumpism, has now fully rejected the American credo: “All men are created equal.” Instead, he proposes that America embrace Western civilization’s history of white supremacism.

These anti-American liars always go running to Jefferson’s single rhetorical phrase and ignore literally everything about the Federalist Papers, the Preamble to the Constitution, and the 1790 Naturalization law… as well as the rest of the Declaration of Independence. It’s dishonest, it’s ahistorical, it’s transparent, and it’s pathetic.

As I previously wrote when dealing with yet another (((historical revisionist))), there is a conclusive preponderance of evidence that, like the U.S. Constitution, the Naturalization Act of 1790, the writings of John Jay, Ben Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and other Founding Fathers, and the Alt-Right nationalist position, the Declaration of Independence itself is directly opposed to the revisionist equalitarian interpretation, as the document also refers to:

• the connection between [the United Colonies] and the State of Great Britain
• the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages
• large Armies of foreign Mercenaries
• the present King of Great Britain
• the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners
• the free System of English Laws
• our British brethren

To rely upon a single phrase of a document in contradiction to the central theme of the entire document, which is that the People of the United Colonies are an English people, unique and distinct from foreigners, Indians, and the English people loyal to the King of Britain, is an outrageous attempt at deceit that relies entirely upon the historical ignorance of the audience. To say that anyone can become an American because “all men are created equal” is a shameless lie. One might as legitimately cite it as evidence to claim it means anyone can become Chinese.

Buchanan pointing out the devastating failure of the equalitarian attack on Western and American identity is what appears to have most upset the Littlest Chickenhawk.

Nor is a belief in the superiority of one’s race, religion, tribe and culture unique to the West. What is unique, what is an experiment without precedent, is what we are about today. We have condemned and renounced the scarlet sins of the men who made America and embraced diversity, inclusivity and equality. … “All men are created equal” is an ideological statement. Where is the scientific or historic proof for it? Are we building our utopia on a sandpile of ideology and hope?

You know who actually built that utopia on a supposed “sandpile of ideology and hope”? Our founding fathers. Abraham Lincoln. The great heroes of American history. That’s because “all men are created equal” isn’t a sandpile of hope at all: it’s a basic description of our common human value in the eyes of God and the law. It’s descriptive, not hopeful. Buchanan, like most other white supremacists, thinks “all men are created equal” refers to quality of human beings rather than innate value. But our founders never made that mistake. They just knew that human beings are all made from the same stuff, no matter our race and ethnicity. They knew that Western civilization can assimilate those who began as outsiders, and should do so.

That’s America.

No, Ben, that’s not America. And that’s absolutely not Western civilization. There is no us. The Founding Fathers of America are not the founding fathers of a third-generation immigrant infidel, no badly how much he might wish to be accepted for something he most certainly is not.

It’s always about “transformation” with these wormtongues. They always claim to be respecting tradition and relying upon history even as they seek to destroy both. They are shameless and unrepentant liars, and anyone who stands with any of them should not be taken seriously, as at the very least, they lack discernment.

I told you Benny Shapiro was a) a made man and b) bad news. Believe it or not, he’s now openly defending the Deep State’s shocking interference with the U.S. electoral system:

Ben Shapiro attacked the President and defended the Deep State spy embedded in Trump’s campaign.

Shapiro tweeted: Why? If campaign aides were meeting with Russian cut outs and then bragging about it (see Papadapolous), why would it be scandalous for an informant to meet with him?

Why? If campaign aides were meeting with Russian cut outs and then bragging about it (see Papadapolous), why would it be scandalous for an informant to meet with him? https://t.co/hj3AsSuHCk
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) May 18, 2018

Shapiro slammed Trump again saying the FBI would have been remiss not to investigate.

Several things can be true at once:
1. There was no collusion.
2. There was willingness to collude by Papadapolous, Trump Jr., and possibly Manafort.
3. FBI would have been remiss not to investigate, even if it eventually came up empty.
4. Post-election leaks are scandalous.
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) May 18, 2018

Ben Shapiro is defending the FBI informant who used cash to entice Papadopoulos to London. Ben Shapiro is defending Obama’s FBI even though they were spying on Trump before they opened the investigation.

As appalling as it is, Shapiro’s reaction is more than a little informative. Given the way in which his only consistent guiding principle is what he believes to be beneficial for his particular identity group, this defensive reaction gives us some idea of who Shapiro believes to be behind the very interference he is defending. That does not, of course, mean that he is correct.

It does, however, indicate that Shapiro is very likely a Swamp creature himself. That’s the connection that many people have failed to grasp: NeverTrump is a creation of the Swamp. It was a last-ditch attempt to derail what they were too late to realize was a threat. That is why all those self-proclaimed “principled conservatives” still refuse to support Trump despite all of his objectively conservative accomplishments. Trump is their enemy and they know it, even though most of the President’s supporters don’t.

This recent expansion of the special counsel’s investigation may help explain Swampy Shapiro’s bizarre outburst.

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe is looking more closely into Middle Eastern involvement during Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, as it is now exploring the role of an Israeli entrepreneur with ties to a Gulf monarchy, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. Mueller has been conducting interviews about the work of Joel Zamel, an Australia-born Israeli businessman with experience in social media and intelligence gathering. Mr. Zamel is the founder of several private consulting firms—including a crowdsourced analysis firm called Wikistrat as well as the Psy Group, a secretive private intelligence firm with the motto “shape reality.” 

UPDATE: The DOJ has just complied with the President’s public demand:

“The Department has asked the Inspector General to expand the ongoing review of the (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) application process to include determining whether there was any impropriety or political motivation in how the FBI conducted its counterintelligence investigation of persons suspected of involvement with the Russian agents who interfered in the 2016 presidential election. As always, the Inspector General will consult with the appropriate U.S. Attorney if there is any evidence of potential criminal conduct,” DOJ spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores told Fox News. 

UPDATE: Swamplings of a feather flock together.

Great chat between @benshapiro and @JonahNRO and I’m only tweeting this because as Jonah mentions, “In ten years we’re all going to be working for Ben.” 

Only because no one else will have any need to employ dishonest, talent-free fake Right media whores.

UPDATE: Yes, Jonah Goldberg is a confirmed Swampling.

On another front, the great fight to prove that either President Trump colluded with Russia to steal the election or that the “Deep State” conspired to in effect frame the president is really just an ugly contest of two groups of storytellers desperate to definitively print the legend — their legend.

SCARE QUOTES MEANS IT ISN’T TRUE!

In last night’s Darkstream, I mentioned the way in which the people of Tongling, China, impressed Douglas Adams with the size and speed of their unprecedented, and ultimately unsuccessful, attempt to save the now-extinct baiji, the Yangtze River Dolphin.

From Last Chance to See:

A little upstream of Tongling, opposite the town of Datong, there is an elbow-shaped bend in the river. In the crook of the elbow lie two triangular islands, between which runs a channel of water. The channel is about one and a half kilometres long, five metres deep, and between forty and two hundred metres wide, and this channel will be the dolphins’ semi-nature reserve.

Fences of bamboo and metal are being constructed at either end of the channel, through which water from the main river flows continuously. A huge amount of remodelling and construction work is being done to make this possible. A large artificial hospital and holding pools are being built on one of the islands to hold injured or newly captured dolphins. A fish farm is being built on the other to feed them.

The scale of the project is enormous.

It is very, very expensive, the committee said, solemnly, and they can’t even be sure that it will work. But they have to try. The baiji, they explained, is very important to them and it is their duty to protect it.

Mark asked them how on earth they raised the money to do it. It had all been put into operation in an extraordinarily short time.

Yes, they said, we have had to work very, very fast.

They had raised money from many sources. A substantial amount came from the central government, and more again from local government. Then there were many donations from local people and businesses. They had also, they said a little hesitantly, gone into the business of public relations, and they would welcome our comments on this. Chinese knew little of such matters, but we, as Westerners, must surely be experts.

First, they said, they had persuaded the local brewery to use the baiji as their trademark. Had we tried Baiji Beer? It was of a good quality, now much respected in all of China. Then others had followed. The committee had entered into . . . Here there was a bit of a vocabulary problem, which necessitated a little discussion with the interpreter before the right phrase at last emerged.

They had entered into licensing agreements. Local businesses had put money into the project, in return for which they were licensed to use the baiji. symbol, which in turn made good publicity for the baiji dolphin.

So now there was not only Baiji Beer, there was also the Baiji Hotel, Baiji shoes, Baiji Cola, Baiji computerised weighing scales, Baiji toilet paper, Baiji phosphorus fertiliser, and Baiji Bentonite. Bentonite was a new one on me, and I asked them what it was.

They explained that Bentonite was a mining product used in the production of toothpaste, iron and steel casting, and also as an additive for pig food. Baiji Bentonite was a very successful product. Did we, as experts, think that this public relations was good?

We said it was absolutely astonishing, and congratulated them.

They were very gratified to know this, they said, from Western experts in such matters.

We felt more than a little abashed at these encomiums. It was very hard to imagine anywhere in the Western world that would be capable of responding with such prodigious speed, imagination and communal determination to such a problem. Although the committee told us that they hoped that, since Tongling had recently been declared an open city to visitors for the first time, the dolphins and the semi-nature reserve might bring tourists and tourist money to the area, it was very clear that this was not the primary impulse.

At the end they said, ‘The residents in the area gain some profit – that’s natural – but we have more profound plans, that is to protect the dolphin as a species, not to let it become extinct in our generation. Its protection is our duty. As we know that only two hundred pieces of this animal survive it may go extinct if we don’t take measures to prevent it, and if that happens we will feel guilty for our descendants and later generations.’

We left the room feeling, for the first time in China, uplifted. It seemed that, for all the stilted and awkward formality of the meeting, we had had our first and only real glimpse of the Chinese mind. They took it as their natural duty to protect this animal, both for its own sake and for that of the future world.

An excerpt from the transcript of the Darkstream.

The main reason that the Chinese commissioners gave for these huge efforts that they were putting forth to try to save this animal was because they felt that a failure to do so, a failure to preserve the animal, was going to shame them in both the eyes of their ancestors and their descendants. You know, they viewed themselves as being part of this great chain of family, this chain of tribe and nation that had a responsibility for the land and the animals in their area, and it really struck me because this is exactly what the Fake Opposition like Ben Shapiro, like Jordan Peterson, stand against. You know, when Jordan Peterson is telling you that you have no right to take pride in the accomplishments of your ancestors, what he’s also telling you is that you have no responsibility whatsoever to your children and your descendants.

You know I’ve said repeatedly that the philosophy Jordan Peterson is pushing is an evil one, and it is, and one aspect of that evil, one way that we know that it is wrong, is that he and Shapiro and all these other Fake Opposition members are saying “oh all that matters is the individual, all that matters is you, you should only pay attention to your own needs, your own standards, you’ve no right to take pride in your legacy, you have no responsibility to instill those traditions and values into your children.” After all, if you have no responsibility to carry on the work of your parents, if you have no right to take pride in the legacy and the achievement of your parents, then neither do your children have any right or responsibility to do so with regards to you! I mean this is a very obvious transitive principle of logic at work, and so I think that it’s so important to understand that when conservatives are coming out against identity politics, you need to understand that they are simultaneously coming out against family values, tribal values, and national values.

You know they don’t want to admit that they’re doing this, but that’s exactly what they’re doing, and it’s also connected to the advice of people like Ben Shapiro to go and chase the young. He’s saying, “well the Republicans need to change their policies, they need to embrace things like gay marriage and they need to embrace things like abortion and whatever else it is that the young are okay with,” but that’s profoundly stupid because the young have no experience. The young don’t understand why the traditions existed in the first place and they don’t understand why the traditions are necessary to provide the very society and culture that they enjoy today.

And of course because these people do not want to preserve the West, you know the people who think that, Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson and the Weinsteins and all these other fake opposition folks, you know, the Sam Harrises, whatever, they don’t want to preserve the West, they do not want to preserve Western civilization. They’re not Christian, they’re either neutral on Christianity or they’re anti-Christian, they don’t want to preserve the European nations – to the contrast they want to replace the European nations – and so the more that you understand this, the more you realize how evil these people are, how evil their objectives are.

Those who have accomplished something as individuals feel no need to be proud of their race.
– Jordan Peterson

Real cultural appropriation — that’s when someone is proud of his culture despite having done nothing to support it, extend it or transform it: a message to the far right.
– Jordan Peterson

You shouldn’t be “proud” of your culture: you should be honored by the privilege of partaking in it, and grateful for its existence, despite your inadequacy. That is not at all the same thing.
– Jordan Peterson

Q: What’s the goal of the radical right? A: Unearned identity with the glories of the past.
– Jordan Peterson

Now the right-wing identitarians have their panties in a knot about what I’ve said about the pathology of racial pride…. Demonstrating (as if it is necessary) that the mirror reflection of malevolence is also…. malevolence. 
– Jordan Peterson

Jordan Peterson is a filthy liar – an absolutely shameless liar – and what passes for his “wisdom” doesn’t even rise to the level of that demonstrated by atheist Chinese communists. Most of the men and women of accomplishment I have known are proud of their race, proud of their nation, proud of their state, and proud of their tribe. Indeed, they often appeal to that pride in order to inspire their children and grandchildren to behave in a manner that is worthy of their race, nation, state, and tribe.

A man has more than a right, he has a responsibility to be proud of his race just as he should be proud of his military unit, his alma mater, or his soccer club, even before he has managed to meaningfully contribute to it or not. Indeed, why would a member of any group be moved to support or extend or contribute to it if one did not feel a sense of pride in belonging to it? These are the petty words of a very small man who has never worn a uniform of any kind, who has never walked into a stadium with the eyes of thousands of spectators upon him, knowing full well that he was not there to represent himself, but rather, all of those whom the colors he was wearing represented.

What this man is teaching a generation of rootless young men is absolute anathema to the core values that were instilled in me by my grandfather, the bravest man I ever knew, a man hailed as “the Marine’s Marine” by the Commandant of the USMC himself.

If you still don’t believe that Jordan Peterson is a sick, evil, and dishonest individual pushing an evil philosophy on the unsuspecting and the unsophisticated, remember, this is a man who claimed that his cousin is the most beautiful woman he has ever seen and dreamed about her being killed and cannibalized. Repeatedly.

Ron Unz reacts to The New York Times’s announcement of its list of approved Fake Opposition members. He is, to put it mildly, unimpressed.

Ha, ha, ha… Offhand it looks like something from this week’s forthcoming NYT Magazine, which I always prefer to read in hard-copy. But I glanced over it, and found it very, very amusing.

I was at least somewhat familiar with most of the names, and basically all the “Renegade Intellectuals of the Dark Web” described seem like semi-establishment Neocons. It’s a little like portraying Marco Rubio as a populist-insurgent Republican.

The author, Bari Weiss, is some WSJ Neocon who recently moved over to the NYT, and she’s presumably trying to rebrand some of her fellow Neocons as radical-rightists, thus giving them more appeal to the Daily Stormer crowd. Also, that way future conservative debates can include everyone from Neocon A to Neocon Z.

As an example, one of the most prominent figures is some YouTube psychology celebrity named Jordan Peterson, who first came to my attention when David Brooks described him as perhaps the most important intellectual in America or something like that. I guess that makes Brooks a “renegade intellectual” himself.

I think their “darkest” belief is that there might possibly exist *some* biological differences between men and women. Horrors! And although he’s some sort of psych professor, Peterson is so remarkably ignorant of IQ issues that his recent thing is explaining that the reason Jews control Wall Street, Hollywood, and the US government is because of their astonishing brilliance. I recently needed to jump into a very long comment-thread to set some facts straight.

Here’s the way to think about it. Neocon Robert Kagan was a leading foreign policy figure in the George W. Bush Administration. Then when Obama swept in to totally reverse all Bush’s failed policies, a leading figure ended up being Neocon Victoria Nuland…Kagan’s *wife*

Back in the 1990s, I was quite friendly with the Neocons, and worked closely with them. I remember that Christina Hoff Summers was a leading Neocon feminist-critic back then, speaking at their conferences, and writing for their publications, and she seems to have kept that same role in the quarter century since.

But characterizing her as some member of a new “radical right,” locked out of the existing media landscape is just totally ridiculous.

Maybe the next step is to re-brand Heritage and AEI as the central organs of the rising anti-Establishment Right…

The eyes, they roll. Even Jonah Goldberg, a card-carrying member of both NeverTrump and the previous Fake Opposition set, sees that this is nothing more than rehashed neoconnery:

Having read the essay twice, it seems to me this IDW thing isn’t actually an intellectual movement. It’s just a coalition of thinkers and journalists who happen to share a disdain for the keepers of the liberal orthodoxy. Weiss recounts a bunch of conversion tales where once-respected and iconoclastic liberal types run head-on into the groupthink or party line of the liberal establishment. They suddenly have a revelation about the enforced orthodoxy of their own side, and as they pull on these intellectual threads, they face blowback and reinforcement from unexpected places.

Where have we heard that before? Well, it’s the story of successive waves of neoconservatives in the 1960s and 1970s. It’s the story of former Communists — Burnham, Meyer, Eastman, et al. — who joined the founding generation of National Review. It’s the story Whittaker Chambers tells in Witness. It’s also the story of many of the progressive intellectuals who were disillusioned by the First World War. Are they exact parallels? Of course not — in part because these are different times. Irving Kristol famously said, “a neoconservative is a liberal who’s been mugged by reality.” New realities may create different muggings, but the pattern is awfully familiar. 

Vox Day Exposes Jordan Peterson And The Left’s Plan To Take Control Of The Nationalist Movement: Vox Day joins Alex Jones live via Skype to break down how Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson are puppets of the left, used to take control of the nationalist movement and destroy its potential. 

That is the name of the video that InfoWars posted on May 7, 2018. It inspired the sort of responses that you can probably anticipate by now.

Vox is obviously jealous of Peterson and Shapiro’s success. He’s trying to be as relevant as they are.

So, about that relevance…. The timing of the video was rather timely, and its title was rather prophetic, because the very next day, May 8, 2018, The New York Times posted an article entitled Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web: An alliance of heretics is making an end run around the mainstream conversation. Should we be listening?

What is the I.D.W. and who is a member of it? It’s hard to explain, which is both its beauty and its danger.

Most simply, it is a collection of iconoclastic thinkers, academic renegades and media personalities who are having a rolling conversation — on podcasts, YouTube and Twitter, and in sold-out auditoriums — that sound unlike anything else happening, at least publicly, in the culture right now. Feeling largely locked out of legacy outlets, they are rapidly building their own mass media channels.

The closest thing to a phone book for the I.D.W. is a sleek website that lists the dramatis personae of the network, including Mr. Harris; Mr. Weinstein and his brother and sister-in-law, the evolutionary biologists Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying; Jordan Peterson, the psychologist and best-selling author; the conservative commentators Ben Shapiro and Douglas Murray; Maajid Nawaz, the former Islamist turned anti-extremist activist; and the feminists Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Christina Hoff Sommers. But in typical dark web fashion, no one knows who put the website up.

The core members have little in common politically. Bret and Eric Weinstein and Ms. Heying were Bernie Sanders supporters. Mr. Harris was an outspoken Hillary voter. Ben Shapiro is an anti-Trump conservative.

But they all share three distinct qualities. First, they are willing to disagree ferociously, but talk civilly, about nearly every meaningful subject: religion, abortion, immigration, the nature of consciousness. Second, in an age in which popular feelings about the way things ought to be often override facts about the way things actually are, each is determined to resist parroting what’s politically convenient. And third, some have paid for this commitment by being purged from institutions that have become increasingly hostile to unorthodox thought — and have found receptive audiences elsewhere.

Actually, it’s not difficult to explain at all. The “Intellectual Dark Web” is the Fake Opposition, the roots of the Conservative Media 3.0. William F. Buckley’s Conservative Media 1.0 is literally bankrupt, Bill Kristol’s Conservative Media 2.0 lost its last vestiges of credibility due to the failures of the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, and now the mainstream media needs a new squad to put on the uniforms of the Washington Generals to go out in front of the public and take a dive.

It is NeverTrump: the media edition.

This is a familiar gambit. Not only are the dramatic portraits of the various Dark Webbers almost identical to those decorating the 2006 Wired piece entitled “The Church of the Non-Believers“, but they’ve even recycled both Sam Harris and Michael Shermer as Very Important Intellectuals du Jour. Frankly, I’m a little disappointed that they didn’t dig up the corpse of Christopher Hitchens and include him too while they were at it.

Who is a member of the IDW? Anyone who a) is not Christian, b) is not a nationalist, c) is vaguely palatable to the political Right, and most importantly, d) will not upset the mainstream media narrative.

Who put the website up? I would assume Eric Weinstein, Bret Weinstein, and Heather Heying, three media non-entities who are attempting to put themselves on par with far more recognizable media figures like Christina Hoff Summers and Sam Harris, in cooperation with Claire Lehmann, whose site is hosting the little clubhouse.

More significant figures such as Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos, Stefan Molyneaux, Mike Cernovich, Jack Posobiec, and Ivan Throne are conspicuously absent; one woman, Debra Soh, has less than one-fifteenth the number of Twitter followers that Cernovich has. Needless to say, I’m not exactly surprised by the identities of two of the leading members.

Before September 2016, Jordan Peterson was an obscure psychology professor at the University of Toronto. Then he spoke out against Canada’s Bill C-16, which proposed amending the country’s human-rights act to outlaw discrimination based on gender identity and expression. He resisted on the grounds that the bill risked curtailing free speech by compelling people to use alternative gender pronouns. He made YouTube videos about it. He went on news shows to protest it. He confronted protesters calling him a bigot. When the university asked him to stop talking about it, including sending two warning letters, he refused.

While most people in the group faced down comrades on the political left, Ben Shapiro confronted the right. He left his job as editor at large of Breitbart News two years ago because he believed it had become, under Steve Bannon’s leadership, “Trump’s personal Pravda.” In short order, he became a primary target of the alt-right and, according to the Anti-Defamation League, the No. 1 target of anti-Semitic tweets during the presidential election.

Now do you see? Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro are both Fake Opposition, media con artists to the core. In fact, the very event that reportedly made Peterson famous appears to have been based on a mischaracterization of the law by Peterson. So much for the courage of his much-vaunted stand.

Here is my question for conservatives. If it is correct to reject people for their associations, how can any Christian or conservative not reject Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro in light of their membership in this New York Times-approved club? Especially given that The New York Times is very clear about where the line of acceptable opposition is to be drawn.

Go a click in one direction and the group is enhanced by intellectuals with tony affiliations like Steven Pinker at Harvard. But go a click in another and you’ll find alt-right figures like Stefan Molyneux and Milo Yiannopoulos and conspiracy theorists like Mike Cernovich (the #PizzaGate huckster) and Alex Jones (the Sandy Hook shooting denier).

It’s hard to draw boundaries around an amorphous network, especially when each person in it has a different idea of who is beyond the pale.

“I don’t know that we are in the position to police it,” Mr. Rubin said. “If this thing becomes something massive — a political or social movement — then maybe we’d need to have some statement of principles. For now, we’re just a crew of people trying to have the kind of important conversations that the mainstream won’t.”

But is a statement of principles necessary to make a judgment call about people like Mr. Cernovich, Mr. Molyneux and Mr. Yiannopoulos? It seems to me that if you are willing to sit across from an Alex Jones or Mike Cernovich and take him seriously, there’s a high probability that you’re either cynical or stupid.

The Fake Opposition is not even Alt-Lite. They’re simply Not Right at all. And they’re not being invited to speak at Ivy League colleges, appearing on Fox, CNN, and the BBC, and being featured in The New York Times complete with flattering pictures featuring dramatic lighting because they are on our side.

I suspected Jordan Peterson not only lacked intellectual integrity, but was not even on the side of Western civilization at all. Yesterday, he contributed more documentation to the growing pile of evidence that he is an enemy of the truth and the West alike.

Jordan B Peterson@jordanbpeterson
Heavens to Murgatroyd! as Bugs Bunny had it: A misogynistic antisemitic right-wing identity-politics ideologue disapproves of me…

He’s referring to this piece by Adam Piggot, a soon-to-be former fan of his:

I have been an advocate of Peterson for a while and he speaks a great deal of truth. But on reflection I am beginning to reappraise my position on him. Did the alt right embrace him so readily because we thought we had finally found someone who taught in progressive universities who wasn’t a foaming at the mouth liberal? Peterson is most certainly not foaming at the mouth; but is it true that he is not a liberal? The assumption has been that but perhaps he is merely a liberal whom we find palatable.

Peterson seems to be the real deal because we desperately want him to be the real deal.

Another thing that I have noticed in his discussions and speeches, and particularly in the Q&A sessions, is that he constantly skirts around the subject of biological reality. Once again the assumption on our part has been that he doesn’t want to go there because it would make his position untenable within the prog system in which he works. But that is a comfortable and convenient assumption on our part. Perhaps the truth is that he doesn’t go there because he himself is a believer of the magic dirt theory of race.

Peterson’s fans have done their best to try to excuse his behavior, to little avail, as his generic and false accusation quoted above could have just as easily been produced by any other Canadian feminist left-wing academic globalist. Furthermore, we now know that Peterson is aware of my post addressing his inept appeal to the mythical “115 IQ”, as it is cited in the article to which he linked.

Recently Peterson wrote a piece titled On the so-called Jewish question. There was a good deal of push-back in the comments, but the real push-back he encountered was from Vox Day – The myth of Jordan Peterson’s integrity.

“I do not know Jordan Peterson, but his incorrect and deceitful arguments and his unfair, unjustified attacks on his critics show him to be an inept and integrity-challenged coward who lacks commitment to the truth. The combination of his sudden success with his observable intellectual ineptitude suggests that he has been elevated by the mainstream media in order to provide a harmless, toothless, and non-Christian alternative to the failed conservative movement of William F. Buckley and the failed neoconservative movement of Bill Kristol and Ben Shapiro.”

As of this time Peterson has not responded to Day’s demolition of his article. A live debate between the two will most probably not eventuate as Day would be too great a risk and the topics at hand are as we know are verboten for Peterson.

Ultimately I believe that Peterson is an elaborate and very clever deception to prevent young men from inadvertently straying off the progressive reservation.

It does rather look as if Peterson is little more than the newest member of the Approved Opposition to be anointed by the mainstream media, to go with “whip-smart” Benny Shapiro, George “now, that twists my bowtie” Will, and the Official Conservative of the Washington Post, Megan McCardle, collectively known as the Washington Generals, media edition. Don’t forget, William F. Buckley became the pope of the conservative movement back in the day on the basis of his show Firing Line and his public demolition of various leftist patsies such as Gore Vidal.

Yes, Peterson speaks certain truths, but only the easy and uncontroversial ones. From what I see, he is treading the broad and easy path that leads to public acclamation as well as other destinations. But the real problem with Peterson is that he is strategically irrelevant. The societal problems caused by modernism simply cannot be solved by a modernist fighting postmodernism.

At this point it is still possible that Peterson will take action to salvage his intellectual integrity. But I think it is increasingly unlikely, as this is the second time in a row that he has doubled-down and resorted to childish attempts to discredit and disqualify his critics rather than responding substantively to them. So, I anticipate that his future behavior, and his continued engagement of other lightweight leftists further to his left in lieu of the growing number of substantial critics to his right, will serve to confirm the opinion of skeptics like NN Taleb and me.

Jordan B Peterson@jordanbpeterson
And you call me a fascist? You sanctimonious prick. If you were in my room at the moment, I’d slap you happily. 

How very fierce. Truly the epitome of the courageous intellectual warrior. I find myself wondering this: if Jordan Peterson believes calling someone else “a fascist” makes one a sanctimonious prick, then what does calling someone “a misogynistic antisemitic right-wing identity-politics ideologue” make him?

“I’m worried always that I’ll make a mistake in what I say… impulsive mistake, careless mistake, that I won’t be on top of things in a combative interview, that sort of thing, that I’ll make a mistake. I’ve been worried about that, almost to the exclusion of everything else for the last 15 months.” 
– Jordan Peterson

Interesting. I am far more inclined to worry about the state of the nation and the survival of the West myself; if I make a mistake, then I will simply own up to it and correct it. In any event, you have made a big mistake, Dr. Peterson. And you’ve doubled down on it twice already.

UPDATE: Another informative Peterson quote demonstrating that he is not on the side of the West.

“I’m not anti-feminist.”
Facebook, August 10, 2017