Tag: politics

Why Jonah hates Milo

It’s not the plot of a new gay teen drama on Nickelodeon, it’s merely Caleb Q. Washington explaining the intergenerational conflict within the Right:

Liberal Fascism attacked left-wing identity in its very title and cover. It was an attack that demanded rebuttal by the left. In effect, it benefited from the forces which people like Milo Yiannopoulos and, dare I say it, Donald Trump, have explicitly made use of for their advantage.

If The Tyranny of Cliches had been re-titled, and I’m just spit-balling here, “The Left’s Biggest Lies” with a cartoon of Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama dressed as Pinocchio, it might have been more of a success.

Milo Yiannopoulos, on the other hand, has risen to prominence (eclipsing Goldberg’s Twitter follower count this spring) by harnessing these very same forces to his benefit. Milo first came to my attention when he dropped the first supportive piece on GamerGate from any well-known news outlet.

The political genius of this was entirely lost on the rest of the right. Becoming the champion of gamers against the worst elements of the left, he forced people on the left to defend their most despicable elements, stay silent, or join him. It forced the left to fight on its own turf.

He’s done the same thing with the zaniness on college campuses. With his speaking tour, Milo has repeatedly stirred controversy. This has led to forcing people on the left to distance itself from the worst of the craziness in a way no other conservative has done.

Milo has reaped huge dividends from this strategy, both as a proponent for the right, and personally.

So, why is there conflict?

The simple answer is that Jonah and Milo are avatars for each side of the generational schism on the right. While not an old man himself, Jonah is their representative. The old men on the right seek to hold the line in a conflict of attrition with the left over disputed ground. The young men seek to fight on what the left thought was safe turf.

This brings us to the specific conflict today.

There are two groups of people on the right Jonah, and the rest of the old men revile. The first are agitators who knowingly say extreme things aimed to upset the old men. They are getting trolled, and are looking bad as a result. The whole point of the activity is to make the old men angry, and in their anger for them to act in a way that turns people off from them. It’s a classical rhetorical move explained by Aristotle. They seek to inspire anger in their targets and succeed. The other group are simply people who take a more extreme right-wing view than is considered socially acceptable.

The old men and Jonah Goldberg hate these people more than they hate the left, as they seek a monopoly of right wing though, and Milo Yiannopoulos has no interest in condemning them. He even delivers apologia for them.

This also explains why I am on Milo’s side, despite being of an age with Jonah. Now, I actually like Jonah. I understand him, and I think his Liberal Fascism was a very good and important book. I even paid homage to it with the cover of SJWs Always Lie.

But being an editor at National Review, Jonah has always been allied with the Old Men of National Review, while I have always been Too Extreme for them despite being identified as the most talented right-wing columnist of my generation by Universal Press Syndicate and being signed as a prospective replacement for William F. Buckley by them.

And wow, did that ever fail!

I am middle-aged, but being a game designer, my heart is with the brash young gamers of #GamerGate, not the aging cuckservatives of National Review. I don’t pretend to be with it – I have no idea what the equivalent of early techno in the 1990s might be these days – and considering how long it took me to recover from an intra-club scrimmage with the prima squadra and having to defend 19-year-old wingers, I am VERY aware of my age these days.

But Jonah, Rod Lowry, Rod Dreher, and other 40-somethings need to realize that we are no longer the Young Turks of the Right, and it is time to either get with the #AltRight and support the up-and-coming new guys or wander off into the pastures of political irrelevance.

Disavowing #NeverTrump

Ace of Spades wonders if #NeverTrump “conservatives” were always just Democrats all along:

Please explain to me the continuing hardcore commitment to #NeverTrump.

Is it…

1. Disliking the fact that the Upper Middle College Educated Class controlled the party for decades, and made a sport of ignoring the Working Class, but now the Working Class has reasserted itself and taken over and the members of the displaced Upper Middle College Educated Class just can’t stand not being in a poll position any longer?

2. Showing off to one’s liberal comrades that one isn’t One Of That Kind of Conservative? That is, Virtue Signalling?

3. Attempting to save one’s professional reputation? I get this one myself — someone asked me why I was so anti-Trump, and I said the man was so vulgar, stupid, and crass that he made it necessary to oppose him simply to preserve one’s professional standing.

So I get that idea. I get that idea an awful lot.

But we happen to be talking about the Republic at this point.

One of two people will be president in January — Hillary Rodham Clinton, a sociopath who was a corrupt politician even before she entered politics (remember Whitewater? Her $100,000 cattles future trading) or Donald Trump.

What is the fear, here? That Donald Trump might be nearly as bad as Hillary Clinton certainly will be?

Name one issue on which Hillary Clinton is superior to Trump. The most I ever here is “We don’t know what Trump will do, he could be just as bad as Hillary.”

Oh? He could be that bad?

Look, Drew asked a while ago: What makes obviously liberal-cultural-values Republicans actually Republicans, apart from habit?

Maybe it’s time for the great re-sorting to begin. It’s time for actual Democrats, who are most comfortable with Democrats, and feel the most affinity for Democrats, to make their party allegiance official and simply declare for Hillary Clinton and join the Democratic Party…. all around me I see people who are far too over-proud of their Upper Middle Class Background willing to elect Hillary Clinton just to prove they graduated (or at least attended) college.

No one who votes for Hillary Clinton – or who voted for Barack Obama – can reasonably call themselves “conservative”. What, precisely, do you think you are conserving?

1238

Donald Trump officially has enough delegates to become the Republican nominee:

It’s official – Trump reaches the magic number of Republican delegates to clinch nomination. Donald Trump now has 1,238 delegates in the latest Associated Press tally of primary results and the intentions of the other party delegates. Trump was put over the top in the Associated Press delegate count by a small number of the party’s unbound delegates who told the AP they would support him at the convention.

Not for long

The globalist media is celebrating the “thwarting” of Austria’s “Far Right”:

Alexander Van der Bellen has won Austria’s presidential election, preventing Norbert Hofer from becoming the EU’s first far-right head of state.

Mr Hofer led narrowly after Sunday’s election but postal votes gave Mr Van der Bellen victory by 50.3% to 49.7%.

Mr Van der Bellen campaigned on a pro-EU platform backed by the Greens.

Mr Hofer, of the Freedom Party, tapped into anti-EU sentiment and fears about rising numbers of asylum seekers. He conceded victory on his Facebook page.

Mr Hofer, 45, said it was a sad day and that he would have gladly served as president.

“But please don’t be disheartened. The effort in this election campaign is not wasted, but is an investment for the future.”

I think it’s fascinating that they pretend to think Hofer and the Freedom Party are the “Far Right”. They are either being disingenuous or have no idea what is coming. And if they keep stealing elections, as appears to have been the case here, they will render the electoral process entirely irrelevant.

But as I said, it will take two election cycles for the nationalists to gain power. This is still the first. This is the phase in which the mainstream parties band together to maintain the status quo and keep out the nationalists. The next phase is when the nationalists overwhelm the united status quo.

It’s worth noting that the Freedom Party gained 13 points from the first round to the second one, from 36 percent to 49 percent.

The Donald has the Big Mo

Camille Paglia pointed out the rise of Donald Trump at Clinton’s expense out even before news of the polls that already show Trump beating Crooked Hillary by three points (Fox) and five points (Rasmussen):

Zap! If momentum were a surge of electromagnetic energy, Donald Trump against all odds has it now. The appalled GOP voters he is losing seem overwhelmed in number by independents and crossover Democrats increasingly attracted by his bumptious, raucous, smash-the-cucumber-frames style. While it’s both riveting and exhilarating to watch a fossilized American political party being blown up and remade, it’s also highly worrisome that a man with no prior political experience and little perceptible patience for serious study seems on a fast track to the White House. In a powder-keg world, erratic impulsiveness is far down the list of optimal presidential traits.

But the Democratic strategists who prophesy a Hillary landslide over Trump are blowing smoke. Hillary is a stodgily predictable product of the voluminous briefing books handed to her by a vast palace staff of researchers and pollsters—a staggeringly expensive luxury not enjoyed by her frugal, unmaterialistic opponent, Bernie Sanders (my candidate). Trump, in contrast, is his own publicist, a quick-draw scrapper and go-for-the-jugular brawler. He is a master of the unexpected (as the Egyptian commander Achillas calls Julius Caesar in the Liz Taylor Cleopatra). The massive size of Hillary’s imperialist operation makes her seem slow and heavy. Trump is like a raffish buccaneer, leaping about the rigging like the breezy Douglas Fairbanks or Errol Flynn, while Hillary is the stiff, sequestered admiral of a bullion-laden armada of Spanish galleons, a low-in-the-water easy mark as they creak and sway amid the rolling swells.

The drums had been beating for weeks about a major New York Times expose in the works that would demolish Trump once and for all by revealing his sordid lifetime of misogyny. When it finally appeared as a splashy front-page story this past Sunday (originally titled “Crossing the Line: Trump’s Private Conduct with Women”), I was off in the woods pursuing my Native American research. On Monday, after seeing countless exultant references to this virtuoso takedown, I finally read the article—and laughed out loud throughout. Can there be any finer demonstration of the insularity and mediocrity of today’s Manhattan prestige media? Wow, millionaire workaholic Donald Trump chased young, beautiful, willing women and liked to boast about it. Jail him now! Meanwhile, the New York Times remains mute about Bill Clinton’s long record of crude groping and grosser assaults—not one example of which could be found to taint Trump.

Mondalean proportions. That’s how bad it is going to be, assuming Hillary doesn’t admit her health issues and withdraw before she is subject to a historic humiliation.

Even the devil polls better

Than Hillary Clinton. I understand Satan himself got 21 percent when matched against Trump. As Mike Cernovich and I have been saying for months, Trump is going to slaughter Clinton. By the time he is done campaigning directly against her, she may not do as well as Mondale or Dukakis.

Nobody cares anymore

Much to its horror, the GOP establishment has realized that the American people no longer give a quantum of a damn about the conventional political narratives:

In a shocking moment of clarity, that should also send shivers up the spine of the Democratic party, Republican chairman (and implicity voice of ‘the establishment’) Reince Priebus admitted on various Sunday talk-shows that campaign traditions don’t apply to the so-called Teflon Don noting that “the public just wasn’t interested” in his taxes or the various ‘stories’ that the Deep State is throwing at him. “I don’t think the traditional playbook applies.. We’ve been down this road for a year. And it doesn’t apply,” Priebus exclaimed, and why the Clinton campaign is likely scrambling, “He’s rewritten the playbook.”

Summing up the reality of the current situation – with attacks coming at presumotive GOP nominee Trump from all sides – NBC News reports that Priebus said…

“I’ve got to tell you, I think that all these stories that come out – and they come out every couple weeks – people just don’t care.”

TL;DR: Trump, because fuck you!

We really don’t care about his myriad flaws. If Trump stripped naked in front of television cameras at the Washington monument, did a little pole dance, confessed to a daily cocaine-and-call-girl habit, then promised to put every Congressman and Senator on trial, he’d gain five points in the polls. Maybe ten.

We have watched the twin establishments of the bifactional ruling party methodically dismantle everything that the United States of America used to be for the last 24 years or more. They gave us Clinton, then Bush the Younger, and then the parody that is Soetoro/Obama. They could be selling the cure for cancer with one free Victoria’s Secret model in every box and the American public still wouldn’t buy it.

If all Donald Trump does is build a big beautiful wall and start sending Mexicans and Muslims back home, we don’t care if he gilds the White House, puts his logo on it, and turns it into a combination strip joint and head shop.

How to guarantee failure

It’s both amusing and a little annoying to see various AltRight figures freaking out about Heat Street running articles by me. Apparently the fear is that because it is a Dow Jones-owned outlet, it will somehow magically “coopt” the AltRight and make it disappear. Can you even imagine how terrible it would be if the New York Times gave me an op/ed column or if CNN gave Mike Cernovich a TV show?

This cooption concept is a fascinatingly stupid theory, in light of how the editor of Heat Street, Louise Mensch, has openly attacked the AltRight and is a card-carrying member of #NeverTrump. Heat Street is simply one of many media outlets, it isn’t the Tea Party 2.0. Unlike Dana Loesch, Dick Armey, and other conservatives who leaped to march in front of the Tea Party parade and were accepted as its public faces, literally no one, including Louise herself, is putting her or her site forward as an opinion leader of the Alt Right.

Here is the core problem with this cowardly paranoia: either the AltRight ideas can survive exposure to the mainstream or they cannot. There is only one way to find out, and that is to expose them to the mainstream. Therefore, those of us who are seen as “Alt Right figureheads” or influences of some kind should welcome every single outlet willing to consider them, whether it is friendly or hostile.

This really isn’t that difficult.

It is ironic that the Alt Right scolds worry rightly about SJW entryism while simultaneously refusing to dirty their delicate white hands by ever preaching to anyone who is not part of the choir, much less engaging in any entryism of their own. Apparently they prefer a purely defensive approach, which as every student of strategy or military history knows, virtually guarantees failure. This is also remarkably stupid, given that the Alt Right has seen how the determination of conservatives to remain solely on the defensive is one of the primary reasons for the catastrophic failure of conservatism.

It is a matter of public record that my articles and my interviews have appeared in everything from Pravda to the Guardian, from WorldNetDaily to the Wall Street Journal. Jews and SJWs condemn me for giving credibility to The Daily Shoah and Counter Currents. Alt Righters and white nationalists condemn me for giving credibility to Heat Street. Meanwhile, I have been reliably informed for 15 years now that I have no credibility of my own.

In case my position is not clear, let me state it outright: I reject the concept of credibility by association.

I am not a moderate, I am outlet-agnostic. No one owns me and no one dictates what I can and what I cannot say. And the Alt Right would do very well to learn from #GamerGate and stop trying to play tone-police or outlet-police.

Ideas stand alone, not on the basis of author, outlet, or association.

UPDATE: Some of these guys clearly don’t know me very well. I’m entirely happy to, as they suggest, GTFO of whatever they think their little movement happens to be. I’m not a joiner anyhow. Attempt to police me and I won’t hesitate to mute and ignore you.

And if you tell me I should not be contributing anywhere, then you will not be commenting here. Live by your professed principles, gentlemen. We wouldn’t want you being coopted by me, after all, and I can’t risk being coopted by you.

Wait, the rules apply to US?

Even people who claim to seek equality don’t believe in it:

Last week, Harvard announced that they were cracking down on “privilege” within their student community by banning members of single-gender organizations from holding school leadership positions.

But when Harvard announced its new policy, it stressed that the sanctions applied to both male and female single-gender organizations equally, since both male and female single-gender organizations thrived on their “privilege.”

Harvard’s resident feminists claim that all-female organizations, while just as gender-biased, are beneficial to the school’s community, whereas all-male organizations are merely breeding grounds for the present and future perpetrators of sexual crime.

On Monday, they demonstrated, accusing Harvard of, among other things, perpetuating the marginalization of female voices. “My women’s organization has been more than a social organization,” one student told the Boston Globe. “It has been a mental health respite, a place to discuss sexual assaults . . . where I became a feminist, and where I refound my voice.”

The students claimed that female-only clubs were more important than male-only clubs because women experience systematic oppression, and they repeated claims that such clubs were necessary because women “earn less” than male counterparts and because women are “targeted and shamed” for their sexuality.

Stop falling for appeals to equality. You might as reasonably be persuaded by appeals to unicorns, lumberjacks, or the Labor Theory of Value. Even those who make appeals to equality observably don’t believe in it.

Milo chooses Coulter over Cathy

That’s the nasty thing about cultural war. As with a civil war, sooner or later, whether one will or no, one is eventually forced to choose sides.

It’s dreadful when two people you admire start beating each other up. Sort of like childhood all over again!

But that’s primary season for you. Particularly this year, it has former allies at each others’ throats. It almost makes you miss the days when SJWs weren’t irrelevant! Almost.

The latest salvo in these internecine conflicts comes from Cathy Young, one of a growing number of libertarians and conservatives who are turning their guns on their own side. She’s gone after none other than Ann Coulter, my only rival for the throne as sassy blonde queen of conservative media.

This is a difficult column to write, as I know both women and enjoy them both in different ways. Both have grappled fearlessly with the worst elements of the left over the years. And now I have to take sides!

Still, it’s Cathy who was the aggressor in this instance, attacking Coulter with the disturbingly leftist tactic of guilt-by-association and unsubstantiated name-calling.

Because Coulter has written for VDARE, a website frequented by the alt-right, Cathy alleges that she must therefore endorse the worst of its authors’ opinions. A tired line of reasoning, one used by those who prefer to debate with shame and taboos instead of arguments.

I’m less interested in a lengthy rebuttal of Cathy’s allegations — so silly and overwrought that I won’t even say what they are! — as I am in understanding why she, and so many others in conservative and libertarian circles, have adopted the language and tactics of the left during this campaign season.

First, there are the obvious points. They’re in a panic because of the unstoppable rise of Donald Trump, who represents a serious risk to the influence of the DC think-tank set.

Then there’s the alternative right, who many mistakenly believe are as bad, if not worse, than the identitarians of the left.

Cathy Young probably shares both of these inclinations — she wrote a lengthy rebuttal last month after my colleague I decided to co-author an explainer on the alt-right that didn’t descend into meaningless virtue signalling.

But I think the problem runs deeper with Young. She’s often very sensible. But, ironically, that moderate impulse makes her susceptible to fallacies — in particular, her implicit assumption that the “extreme” of the regressive left’s opponents must be as bad as the extreme of the regressive left itself.

Coulter isn’t the first of Cathy’s targets, you see. There’s also Mike Cernovich, excommunicated in her Real Clear Politics column for “vile tweets,” and later blocked for using the word “cuck.” Then there’s Vox Day, an icon of the anti-SJW resistance, lambasted by Young as a racist and misogynist — a charge his wife no doubt stridently objects to.

None of these people is remotely so dreadful as the worst actors in the third-wave feminist movement or Black Lives Matter.

Anyone who has met Day or Cernovich in person — I have met both — knows that they harbour no animosity toward other races or genders. The same is true of almost everyone I’ve met in the much-lambasted alternative right.

Sure, they may be merrily outrageous in their blogs and on social media, but a few hours of conversation with them reveals none of the wild zealotry you see in the eyes of campus feminist or black activists. Yet, because Day and Cernovich also dabble in identity politics, Cathy treats them the same — if not worse.
The truth is, Cathy has never bothered to really get to know her targets, instead preferring to shame them with regressive-left buzzwords. I’m afraid that she isn’t really opposed to the left’s social ostracization machine: she just wants to choose where it’s aimed.

It’s a shame, because Cathy has frequently been a target of that machine herself. In the early 2010s, she was one of the few writers who dared to question the “rape culture” panic that was underway on American campuses.

Despite being vindicated in the wake of the UVA rape hoax and the collapse of the Columbia “mattress girl” case, she was repeatedly branded a “rape apologist” by her detractors on the left.

At the height of the new wave of sexual assault panic, the Federalist Society even dropped Cathy from their list of campus speakers, with a former president of the society citing pressure from feminist activists as the likely reason.

So it’s disappointing to see someone who has so often been a target of the irrational taboos that govern modern debate be so quick to use the same weapons in a vain attempt to appear balanced.

Because that, I suspect, is Cathy’s real motive — to be seen to be taking a stance that’s equidistant between the identitarians of the regressive left and the identitarians of the alternative right.

It’s a worthy goal, and Cathy is far from malicious. But there’s a problem. For her stance to be valid, you must first accept that both sides are equally powerful, equally dangerous and equally zealous. They’re simply not.

The rise of cultural libertarianism, the alt-right and Generation Trump is turning conservatives on each other like perhaps no other time in recent memory. At least there’s one glimmer of hope: history suggests that after their initial squabbles, American conservatives and libertarians tend to get over themselves and come together eventually.

It’s a uniquely American phenomenon, that, and one that terrifies the progressive left, which is more prone to permanent rifts. Let’s just hope the #NeverTrump types come to their senses soon…

I’m not friends with Cathy Young, nor do I admire her, nor do I find her to be even remotely honest. So, it would be very easy for me to side with Ann Coulter, the most courageous female commentator on the Right, even if I did not agree with her with regards to Trump and the dire danger posed to America by immigration.

People sometimes ask me why I stand by Roosh, or why I stand by Milo. If you read that column, it should be easy enough to understand. We’re standing in this cultural war together, and we know better than to fall for the inevitable divide-and-conquer tactics that are thrown at us by moderates of the Right and extremists of the Left alike.

And as for being “an icon of the anti-SJW resistance”, that’s certainly something I am proud to be. Of course, I’m even more proud of the Evil Legion of Evil, the Ilk, the Dread Ilk, and, of course, the VFM.

UPDATE: Fascinating. Breitbart appears to have deleted the piece. So, I’ve linked to the archive and reproduce the entire piece here.

UPDATE 2: Comments on the article are still up at Disqus.

UPDATE 3: It’s back up again.