Tag: politics

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.

Look out, SF fandom

Mike Cernovich is taking scalps:

Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska will not be running for President after his connection to pedophiles was revealed by Mike Cernovich of Danger & Play Media. (Read: Ben Sasse and #NeverTrump’s Pedophile Problem.)

This entire election season Sasse has building up his personal brand by attacking Trump. Sasse had not taken a principled stand against anyone else on the right, and thus he’s engaging in showmanship marketing in an effort to run for president.

His campaign for president began gaining momentum, with establishment conservatives hailing him as a hero. He was primed to run, and then I scalped him.

Sasse claimed to be a political outsider, so I began digging. Far
from being an everyman, Sasse was an insider’s insider, working at
companies like McKinsey and Company in between stints in Washington,
D.C. Yet what was not common knowledge was Sasse’s role as a tutor of
underage boys.

Sasse tutored and was sworn to protect underage boys working as
Congressional pages. Yet pages were constantly abused, and I suspected,
were abused under his watch. When I raise those concerns to Sasse, he
went radio silent.

Radio silence is a good way to describe the science fiction’s response to the considerable amount of smoke surrounding Samuel Delaney, just to specifically name one oft-celebrated individual. Notice that despite the science fiction community’s retroactive distancing from H.P. Lovecraft, Marion Zimmer Bradley has not yet been stripped of a single award or honor, DAW still publishes her Darkover books, and Tor Books still publishes her “Light” series.

So why are DAW and Tor Books still publishing Marion Zimmer Bradley in the full knowledge of her crimes? Do they endorse child abuse? It certainly puts a very dark spin on the title of Tor Books editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s blog, “Making Light”.

The Trumpening marches on

The Democratic race is getting interesting. Hillary is looking worse and worse as the Master Persuader turns his attention to Crooked Hillary, and it’s not at all impossible that Crazy Bernie will end up with more actual delegates than the presumptive nominee.

The ironically named Democrats have a superdelegate system to prevent democracy from getting in the way of the establishment’s selection, but it’s not unlikely that the pledged superdelegates will see losing the delegate contest as a reason to break their promises to Hillary Clinton. She is, after all, Crooked.

Democrats fear the Trumpening

And well they should:

Republicans are divided, the economy is improving, the demographics are increasingly in Democrats’ favor. The likeliest result of a Trump nomination is a Republican washout up and down the ballot.

I do get all that.

Still, when I hear smart people explaining why Trump cannot win, all I can think is: Aren’t you the ones who told us that he couldn’t top 30 percent, and then 40 percent, and then 50 percent in the Republican primaries? Weren’t you confident that he was finished after he called Mexicans rapists, and insulted prisoners of war, and dished out a menstruation insult?

Did you predict his nomination? If not, we don’t want to hear your certainty about his November defeat.

Nor is it reassuring to read how happy the Clinton camp must be to be facing such a weak opponent. They need to be running scared — smart, but scared — now and for the next six months.

Crooked Hillary Clinton is running scared of Dangerous Donald Trump. And it’s not going to do her any good at all.

#Trump2016 vs #NeverTrump

A short debate on Donald Trump’s victorious campaign for the Republican nomination and the nature of conservatism between me and Louise Mensch of Heat Street:

LM: This is obviously a sad day for me and a terrific day for you as Donald Trump is crowned the presumptive nominee by the GOP establishment. Last night, while we were talking with each other, we were discussing the nature of conservatism.

To me, my duty as a conservative is to oppose Donald Trump because he’s not a conservative. I said that, to me, conservatism stands for equality of opportunity. You said in your view, it never had done. How do you define conservatism?

VD: I define conservatism as an attitude more than a coherent ideology. If you look at the history of conservatism, which you as a British individual will be aware, it really is something different to the ideas that underlie the British Conservative Party or the Tory Party. Russell Kirk attempted to turn that inherited tradition into a more coherent ideology, and he came up with the 10 foundational points of what he terms conservatism. So it’s less an ideology than an attitude – and a relative posture.

 Equality of opportunity is merely something that fits that attitude more than it is a founding point of the ideology, in the way that the “labor theory of value” is something that underlies the ideology of socialism.

LM You think that leftism is ideological, but conservatism is only an attitude?

VD: To a certain extent. Socialism is clearly a distinctive set of ideologies. There are of course different socialisms, from Fabianism to Marxism. Progressivism – today’s liberalism – is also a coherent ideology. Conservatism is intrinsically a reaction to other ideologies rather than an ideology of its own.

LM: You don’t think Conservatism stands for anything apart from opposing Liberalism, to use that umbrella term for the left?

VD: Exactly correct. There’s a common saying that today’s conservative is yesterday’s liberal. Conservatism, if we look at the positions that it holds, is usually 20-25 years behind what yesterday’s liberals were. Today, John F. Kennedy would be regarded not only as a Republican – but one who was a little bit to the right.

LM: To me, that seems defeatist for a guy that I see, though I may differ with you on many things, at the very least as an alpha male go-getter. You’re not behind any particular set of principles. You just want to oppose somebody else! Doesn’t that put all the power in their hands?

VD: It does, but it’s not defeatist for me because, as I have repeatedly told people for well over a decade, I am not a conservative. I am an extremist and I’m a radical. That’s why I don’t identify with this conservatism that never conserves anything, that goes from one noble defeat to the next, and has completely failed to conserve anything, even the United States of America.

Read the whole thing there. It was an oral debate, not a written one, but I think I managed to avoid tripping over my convoluted sentence structures for the most part. The bet was funny; I don’t think she was quite expecting THAT!

The best argument for Trump

From a comment at Althouse:

Once you’ve allowed the barbarians through the gates, any swashbuckling
ruffian who is willing to pick up a sword and push them back out again
is an ally. We can worry about what the city should look like
once we’ve put out the fires and have stopped the barbarians from
actively setting more of them.

And, ideally, sent the barbarians back to their homelands. It’s not about “illegal aliens”. It’s not about documentation. It’s not about legality. It’s about the largest invasion in human history. It’s about the biggest mass migration in the recorded history of Man.

Mass repatriation or war. Those are the choices left to both America and the European nations now.

Choose wisely.

Speaker for the butthurt

Matt Walsh rage-quits the Republican Party because Donald Trump has won the nomination:

Goodbye, Republican Party.

I mean that in more ways than one. I’m leaving. You’re dying. I could stick around while you gasp your last pitiful breaths, but what would be the point? I’m certainly more pro-life than you ever were, but when it comes to political parties that have been overtaken by some kind of unintelligible, socially liberal populism, I say pull the plug.

Good riddance. Your wounds are self-inflicted anyway. Clearly you have no desire to live. So goodbye. I am abandoning you on your deathbed, and I feel no shame in it….

The Republican Party is host to many millions of people who fell prostrate before a flamboyant charlatan, despite, or perhaps even because of, his compulsive dishonesty, his moral cowardice, his cruelty and pettiness, his blatant and unapologetic ignorance and disinterest in the most important issues facing our country, his liberalism and so on. As Trump said himself, he could shoot someone in the middle of the street and these people would still follow him.

That’s why I’m leaving. It’s also why you’re dying. It’s not my fault, and it’s not even Trump’s fault. Trump is just a parasite who took advantage of a weakened immune system. He’s the violent case of dysentery that finally kills the frail man who was already sick with a thousand other exotic diseases. The untrained eye may say the man died because he was vomiting blood, but in truth he was vomiting blood because he was dying.

The Republican Party, we should remember, is made up of Republicans. And most of the Republicans are voters, not politicians. So even if nobody else will say it, I must make it clear that I’m leaving because of these voters. Whatever else can be said of citizens who want a man like Trump to run the country, it cannot be said that they’re anything resembling conservative. Nor can it be said that we have anything much in common.

Yesterday, a Republican in Indiana told the media she’s voting for Trump because he’s a “different kind of liar.” The day before, Cruz attempted to have a reasoned dialogue with a couple of Trump supporters who responded to all of the senator’s arguments by shouting slogans and pumping their fists. Trump fans perform even less admirably in cyberspace, where an impassioned collection of anti-Semites and white nationalists work tirelessly to confirm every negative and cartoonish stereotype liberals have ever concocted about Republicans.

I’m not saying they’re all like this, but I’m done answering for the antics and inanities of the Trump squad. They’re not in my party. Or, I suppose they’d respond, I’m not in theirs. And they’re right.

Remind Matt of this every single time he claims to be a Republican in the future. Rub it in Matt’s face every single time he claims to speak for Republicans. Remind Matt that he quit, that he very publicly left the party, when he claims to be its true voice.

Because, if there is one thing we have learned about gammas like Matt, it is that they always try to come back and pretend nothing happened.

The only thing that is more pathetic than Matt’s gamma rage is the losers in his comments encouraging him to self-immolate.