Disinformation War?

Tags

2020 election, Donald Trump, jenna ellis, rudy giuliani, sidney powell

I messaged a friend on last night. For some time now, he has been sharing memes and diatribes about the theft of the election by Joe Biden, as well as the apocalyptic consequences for America should the scam be allowed to succeed.

Though this sentiment puts him in a large crowd, he seems to me particularly devoted; real passion, real anger.

I asked him whether he thought it possible that Biden had won without fraud, noting the Pennsylvanian was backed by the combined forces of media and capital, and that polls, near worthless as they are, had predicted a strong showing for him.

He answered that it was impossible (he used that word). Trump’s rallies were too full, Biden’s too empty. Where did the eighty million votes come from? From what well of conviction was the motivation to vote in such numbers pulled up?

I suggested the Biden rallies were emptier because of advised precautions over Covid; and that social distancing was displayed excessively to project the image of a medically conscientious and sensible alternative to Trump.

But he wouldn’t have this either. The very fact that thousands of people defied medical advice to show their support for the president was significant evidence of the crookedness of the outcome. Americans, he explained, do not ordinarily behave like this over a political candidate; even Obama, with his millenarian context, enjoyed hardly a tenth of the enthusiasm on display in every state Trump visited. Ordinary working people, shivering in plaid jackets, exhaling vapor in the middle of a respiratory pandemic, employed their time and energy to encourage someone they devoutly believed in, against (indeed, happily against) the instructions of their supposed betters.

Later on, my friend added some weird speculation about Biden’s love of children, moving from there to his son Hunter Biden’s very real (but questionably relevant) libertinism during the Obama years. I discarded this, as it deserves to be discarded. I do not believe Joe Biden is anything so devilish (or interesting) as what he implied, nor that Hunter Biden’s private degeneracy should necessarily incriminate his father. (My friend didn’t mention the dodgy deals Hunter allegedly made while in Ukraine, possibly on his father’s behalf, which is quite another, more serious matter.) Still, the better points he put across deserve to be considered; as does, perhaps more than anything else, his closing remark that “anyway, at the end of the day, Trump is the only thing standing between America and collapse.”

I pay special attention to that phrase – ‘at the end of the day’. It doesn’t always negate or replace what has already been said by a person – but it sometimes marks the beginning of a different, simpler, more lucid analysis.

It made me wonder whether some of Trump’s hardcore champions, in supporting the fraud narrative, are simply trying to force an ultimatum; whether they don’t really believe in the Dominion theory advanced by Sidney Powell, or in the dozens of possibilities floated by Rudy Giuliani; whether for such people the goal justifies the method.

America will probably not collapse when/if Biden is sworn in on January 20th. There will not be a civil conflict of unmanageable proportions. The country will merely pick up pace along the same trajectory of decay and Brazilianization Trump was elected to slow or reverse.

Nonetheless, tens of millions of people are willing to do whatever it takes to prevent a return to this negative stability.

Whether any meaningful number are prepared to feign belief I cannot confidently say. But it isn’t impossible. There are many ‘at the end of the day’ clauses in Parler discourse.

The same, incidentally, is true the other way. I know personally of many liberals who knew full well that Trump did not conspire with the Russian government in the 2016 election. The theory was nonsense, supported by half-truths and downright lies. But Trump was the devil, and the devil was winning and had to be defeated. If democracy stood in the way, then democracy had to be overcome. In the name of emergency, normal rules were suspended. Lies could be noble.

***

What’s wrong with a disinformation war? Why not present a crafty narrative to subvert or prevent a process you believe to be evil? Is that ever appropriate?

In North Korea, would it not be justified to spread a rumour about the commanding party so offensive to the human spirit that it united the people, giving them sufficient courage to liberate themselves from kimilsungist tyranny?

You could certainly make the case. With the North Korean regime smashed and humiliated, and the people, in a state of nervous euphoria, walking on free land for the first time in more than half a century, who would criticise the tactic? Who would claim it wasn’t justified?

Disinformation can work for good – in exceptional cases.

But now imagine that North Korea, in the same nightmarish state as today, was split 50/50. Imagine that half the population supported the regime and half opposed it. The disinformation would strengthen the regime, not weaken it. If the incitement to revolt fell short, all advantage would be gifted to the enemy. Their lies would seem relatively truthful. The opposition would have wasted an opportunity by crying wolf. 

To use a less extreme – and non-hypothetical – example, Donald Trump benefited greatly from the Russia probe. For all his ‘gaffes’, the liberal crusade to implicate him in something so ridiculous coloured the president as an honest victim of persecution, even in the eyes of centrists initially frightened by him.

I am unconvinced that electoral fraud is to blame for Trump losing the election; and while I have no right to a say in American affairs, I would strongly advise against maintaining otherwise. In Georgia and elsewhere, the left is beginning to reap the benefits.

David

Advertisement

The Carlson and Powell Saga

Tags

biden, dominion, Election 2020, kraken, sidney powell, trump, tucker carlson

The Fox News host Tucker Carlson has gathered a dedicated following these past few years. Just a couple of weeks ago the 51 year old was widely regarded as the darling of both grassroot conservatives and the president himself. But whether he knew it or not, and despite a considerable overlap, his crowd was not as dedicated as the one he was about to provoke.

In a brief segment anyone interested in American politics will have seen by now, Carlson very gently cast doubt on the legitimacy of exotic claims by Sidney Powell, a late addition to the legal team Trump had charged with challenging the 2020 election result. These claims included speculations about an international communist plot to rob the president of victory by misusing voting technology; large accusations, then, whose revelation in court Powell insisted would be ‘Biblical’. Agreeing with her, Carlson remarked that they would count as the worst crime against American democracy in its history, if true.

Answering journalistic hunger, he had contacted Powell for comment, or for some foretaste of the evidence that was to be presented before a jury. But the attorney had rebuffed him, apparently angered by the request. Carlson related this rejection to his audience with the merest twinge of frustration, and then quite sensibly postponed the matter.

As I say, I do not know whether Carlson quite appreciated the nature of the reaction that was to follow, but it was coming either way. Twitter caught fire.

“You just ended your career, Tucker.”

“Tucker is deep state. Been saying this for years.”

“He was the last reason I was watching Fox. Guess the whole lot have sold-out. Buh-buy!”

Accusations of turncoatery and treason were thrown about with pitchfork enthusiasm. Viewers pledged never to watch the man’s show again, ending years of respect and admiration. The next video Carlson uploaded (on a different subject) received thousands of retaliatory downvotes. And even after another clip addressed the backlash, most refused to contemplate forgiveness.

“Apologise to Sidney!”

“Too little, too late, Friar-Tuck. Bye now!!”

“It isn’t just about you, young man! It’s about truth!”

Days later, the Trump legal team itself put daylight between their efforts and Ms Powell. Her claims were growing wilder by the hour, damaging the revisionist cause.

I haven’t seen many apologies to Carlson since then, though a few thousand are surely due; only some vindicated loyalists scolding those who too hastily turned their backs on him, and receiving few replies.

What, if anything, does this episode have to teach us?

For one, I’d say it confirms that the political right in America has as much of a problem with truth as the political left. Though, for some time, conservatives have delighted in watching the left violently divide itself into hostile factions of woke-corporatists and grassroots-realists – we might represent these two tendencies by personifying the former as Thomas Friedman and the latter as Matt Taibbi – the right now risks an equally disruptive tripartition of its ranks.

First, the Trump Fundamentalists – people for whom the man has replaced the agenda, or at least enjoys level billing with it; the exhilarated crowds at his rallies who adore his common wit, the way he draws blood from the detested liberal aristocracy. These crowds do not wish to hear contradictions of Trump’s narrative. They will boycott and oppose anything and anyone to protect it. Fox News is the most prominent entity to be gored so far. It won’t be the last.

Then there are the neo-cons, or corporate-internationalist right; cheerful war hawks, animated mostly by money and foreign policy. Think Marco Rubio, Charlie Kirk and what’s left of Lindsey Graham.

Thirdly, the Post-Trumpists; those who have reservations about the man, but hold fast to his principles; who want ‘Trumpism without Trump’. Prominent examples include Ann Coulter and (arguably) Pat Buchanan.

It would be bright-side thinking to believe these groups will soon settle their differences. Likelier, they will make for determined combatants in a jungle war of ideological succession; one that will absorb the energy of the Republican party for the foreseeable future.

Viewing the Powell dust-up in this light makes matters considerably clearer, though no less troubling. Foolishly or bravely, Tucker Carlson dared to deviate from the Trump line; and in doing so revealed a potentially crippling inflexibility.

Thumbing their noses at the old Republican mainstream, Trump Fundamentalists are already establishing a parallel media, manifesto and commentariat. QAnon, dark money, Satanism, George Soros, vaccines, 5G and electoral fraud are the central concerns – a far cry from the concrete disagreements over healthcare, immigration, and foreign policy that gave Trump his victory in 2016.

The Rubio-ist neoconservative faction will no doubt present its own case, making use of euphemisms for drone violence such as ‘ensuring stability’ or promoting ‘American leadership’; ultimately the same platform as Joe Biden, but with tokenistic dissent on healthcare and tax.

The Post-Trump deviation is the most interesting to me, and not just in an American context. Building on Trump’s victory over the corporate press, with its warped liberalism and mandatory denial of obvious truths; taking his better arguments further, tidying them up, separating the logic from the logician; walking back or denouncing his worst aspects; criticising his excesses; in other words, playing Khrushchev after the death of Stalin, seems to me plainly worthwhile.

What I fear will happen is that the right will shatter into fragments; incompatible factions, each with its own media, society and commentariat, drifting ever further apart, dividing and subdividing until no fight-ready unity is conceivable. Discord like this is ripe for exploitation.

If the ultra-loyalists and QAnonists are allowed to take the reins now, it will take years to dislodge them. Should Trumpism as a sentiment and set of ideas degenerate into the man’s whims and fantasies, any otherwise sturdy logic he rode to power on will be undermined.

Whatever the risks, a clash of conservative worldviews is sadly necessary.

I commend Tucker Carlson for not giving in completely to the wild panic engulfing the Trump right. He is doing a great service to conservatism, and to the goals the president promised originally to serve.

David

Where Do You Want to Go?

Tags

Donald Trump, Election 2020, joe biden, kamala harris, Pennsylvania, politics

Donald Trump, you’ll be aware, lost the election on Tuesday, or rather Saturday – kind of, we think – thereby making Joseph Biden, his uninspiring, moribund opponent, president-elect of the United States.

There is a lot to say about this, naturally, but I will try not to bore.

Firstly, Trump’s hastily presented allegations of fraud and posthumous voting will be investigated in due course; but I am not at all convinced these investigations will alter the final result. There is a very obvious note of bad faith about some of the charges, which should be available to conservative perception as well as liberal. Only time will tell, I suppose.

Secondly, and whatever the media claim, Biden’s victory does not represent a repudiation of what the president stood for; his ideology and platform. Seventy million votes were cast for Trump on Tuesday, in defiance of all kinds of weather, all kinds of pressure, all kinds of ridicule, in the middle of a serious pandemic. A significant number of rational Americans still believe in the movement he advertised.

Pat Buchanan agrees – “Trump may lose the presidency,” he writes, “but Trumpism was not rejected… if, by Trumpism, one means “America First” nationalism, securing our borders, using tariffs to bring back our manufacturing base, bidding goodbye to globalism, staying out of unnecessary wars and swearing off ideological crusades.”

Yes. Trumpism remains. I do not believe the Republican party will soon return to the socially liberal, fiscally conservative non-ideology of Marco Rubio or Mitt Romney, nor, as would be worse, to the sleazy, faux-Christian theatre of Ted Cruz. Trump has set a precedent of greater sincerity; a connection with the most base and natural and important instincts of the white electorate. Can these voters really be lured back to simple ‘red team good, blue team bad’ politics? I doubt it.

What appears to have lost the election for Trump is rather his character. Though they were given disproportionate emphasis by a hostile, coordinated press, the president’s personal flaws inevitably disposed many to overlook his novelty and merits. Threatening to run for a third term, casting pre-emptive doubt on the democratic system, appointing members of his own family to positions of global influence, sleazy rumours of extramarital sex with porn actresses, inane tweets and absurd tantrums, etc. The American ‘middle’ do have a limit, and the president overstepped it frequently and unnecessarily. 

Thirdly, we should talk about those who, as far as we know, are going to replace Trump and Pence at the Western summit.

Joe Biden, going by his statements and history, is a pedestrian centrist of the Obama-Clinton mould; nothing more glamourous or frightening than that – in theory. His danger derives from how this dopey conformity threatens to interact with the period in which we live; a time requiring of iron-like, brilliant men, not weak, corruptible puppets. Biden is a dusty slate on which donors will scratch their own priorities. Beer and tobacco Americans of the kind Donald Trump sought to remember will struggle to be heard.

And then there is Kamala Harris – young, Indo-Caribbean, haughty, greatly attractive to the corrupters of American politics in Washington, as well as to the severely myopic outside of it. I have written about this questionable woman elsewhere. Here, I will only repeat that she is firmly of the ‘kiss up, kick down’ school’ of Asian careerism; ruthless, energetic, corrupt and corrupting.

Both Biden and Harris are excited advocates of America’s downward trajectory; the decline of European America, and the rise of conceptual replacements for old American facts. As it did to the neo-conservatives before them, America appeals to corporate democrats as an international hub; the engine, university and military headquarters of post-historical liberalism.

In essential ways, their instincts are right on the money. America is all those things. And Donald Trump, to the living grief of his electorate, could not do anything about it.

Fourthly, and lastly, what does this mean for the United States and Europe going forward?

In the country itself, the result declared will considerably worsen existing divisions, especially along racial lines. European-Americans have become quite accustomed to having a voice at the highest level. They like it. They do not wish to let it go. Indeed, should they be forced to do so, America may suddenly feel like someone else’s country – hijacked, irretrievably lost, undeserving of their allegiance, service, taxes. That would be noteworthy.

I used to believe, in the worst years of the 9/11 era, that Europeans were considerably worse off than our cousins across the ocean. While in Europe, barbarian hordes were setting fire to the wages of a triumphant history, Americans could afford to relax in an atmosphere of relative calm. That was short-sighted.

Detroit, Michigan, is a warning few possess sufficient courage to heed. A European-American city, laurelled for its industrial dynamism and machine technology, armoury of the winning militaries of World War II, was burnt out by sudden demographic confusion. Now, in terrible clarity, it decays beyond remedy.

What if, you have every right to ask, Detroitification occurs to the nation as a whole? 

People have an unconquerable desire to live in suburbs, away from people they dislike, or from those they have good reason to believe they will not get on with. Suburbs are often the size of countries.

This is not – or is not merely – an issue of race, class or religion; but quality, consent, compatibility. 

And also identity – historical and individual. The United States is quite obviously no longer a single entity, having been divided in two by warring interpretations of what the national ends are supposed to be; homogeneity of appearance and culture? Homogeneity of values? Bright-blazing rainbow of every human type imaginable? Capitalist playground? Final, perfect realisation of social justice and human equality?

Parties gathered around different visions of long-term identity are the future of US politics, and will replace quaint concerns about four year reforms. After Trump has departed the White House to take up permanent residence on Twitter, the GOP would be sensible to conceptualise a grander vision of America; something they can agree on, and work for.

Pick your destination. Where do you want to go?

David

Prelude to Something

Tags

america election, Donald Trump, joe biden, politics, trump polls, us election 2020

Like the reader, I have spent a large part of this week studying the US presidential election polls, the contest being now just a few tantalising days away. Most of those I have seen predict a Biden win. A few expect a landslide or ‘blue wave’. Others see the Democrats just scraping through. But disagreement on the probable winner is rare.

Liberals have in some ways learnt from 2016 – that memorable, dramatic, gorgeous collapse of ill-deserved mainstream credibility. They are stressing this time that polls are not to be trusted, that elections are won solely by voting, not by media preference or stated intentions. And they are right on that score at least.

For all the poll advantages Biden enjoys, it is not impossible that another black swan will slide into view on November the 3rd; a sequel apocalypse, perhaps even more consequential than the last. Nonetheless, Trump goes into this contest as the underdog.

In other ways, Liberals have yet to take on board the deeper meaning of their defeat.

I have just visited the Biden campaign’s official Instagram account, and rather wish I hadn’t. It is chock-full of all you would expect – victim worship, empty slogans, feminist snark, retractably vague economic promises, and above all a disturbing fetishization of African people (especially women and children).

Of course, this soup of brainstormed concepts appeals to practically no-one. Biden and the unintelligent Left trust this will not matter on the night. They believe, perhaps with good reason, that people are so sick of the name ‘Trump’ appearing in every headline that they will vote it out of their lives for no better reason.

They are also banking on the dilution of the Trump brand. What was once fresh, exciting and radical is now repetitive and exhausting. The unending turbulence of the last four years has middle-of-the-road Americans longing for quieter days, which the white-haired, slow-talking Democrat seems to realistically offer. Joe Biden, even his friends concede, is tediously non-ideological, hardly even opinionated.

But this is not a zero-risk strategy. 2020 is not 2000. The internet has changed people more fundamentally than even tech entrepreneurs seem to appreciate. Modern politics is increasingly understood as a kind of showbusiness mixed with corporate and military cronyism. Faith in its humanity, its link with people and ideals, has been all but lost. Very few now believe (sincerely) that Joe Biden has a cause, or that Obama had one, or Bush, or Clinton, etc. The same cynics may have once invested in the messianism of these very presidents; but no longer. The internet has placed cameras behind the curtain dividing people from power. We overhear the actors rehearsing their lines, applying their makeup, practising their emotions.

Yes, even Obama, the great black hope, sent by providence to destroy racism on Earth, turned out to be a typically unscrupulous bureaucrat – a warmongering drone-assassin, happy to deal with ancient nations as if with chess pieces, as per an unfortunate American tradition dating back to the end of the Eisenhower administration. Democrats, blockheads were shocked to discover, are every bit as violent and compromised as Republicans. The differences are cosmetic; a few slogans here and there; a rainbow flag emoticon, a celebrity endorsement, late night propaganda. But no substantial disagreement. 

All the candidates Trump defeated in the Republican primaries suffer from the same crucial lack of humanity and belief. Ted Cruz, the educated Republican voter realises, represents nothing. He is a political nothing, as well as a rotten coward, which is even worse. We will not even talk of Rubio, Bush, Paul, Fiorina or Kasich; only remark that these were – and are – more like bank managers than statesmen.

Populism is the rejection of managerialism – the idea that countries are little more than flag-bearing economies, and that concepts of race, language and culture have no place in modern political discourse. In 2016, Trump obliterated this notion in fine style. (I still fondly recall the night of his victory; the surprise and embarrassment.)

Since his inauguration, Trump has done and said a lot of silly things. But he has also done a lot of good – considerably more than I am ordinarily willing to admit. He has kept America out of wars where no Western interest exists. He has consistently opposed the kind of lockdowns inflicted on Europe, and for exactly the right reasons – citing economic despair, alcoholism, depression, suicide and domestic violence. He has projected an image of unapologetic masculinity in a world where men are under constant attack. He has exposed the corruption and DPRK-like uniformity of the Western media. He has asked, though often in unnecessarily crude language, extremely important questions (“Why are we letting in people from shithole countries?”, etc.). He has set radical precedents on immigration, identity, abortion, political language and foreign policy. He has accelerated the demise of the legacy media, stimulating a massive alternative media subculture. He has demonstrated that the anything-is-possible narrative in American politics is not merely a nice thing to say to children, but a bright, inspiring reality; that anyone, provided they are straightforward enough, consistent enough and brave enough, can break the corporate-media alliance. 

Whether Trump loses or not, his legacy is destined to be a great one. The energies he has released will not soon be re-imprisoned in taboo. 

***

What will happen if the polls are correct this time? Various journalists foresee a violent showdown between far-right and far-left elements, similar to what has been witnessed on-and-off since the death of George Floyd earlier this year, only more intense and widespread.

This isn’t impossible. After so much divisive poison from the media, nothing, even a full-blown civil war, can be entirely ruled out. 

The QAnon believers, together with allied Facebook radicals, are disturbingly confident of their eschatology. Confident enough to perceive an electoral disappointment as sufficient cause for an apocalypse? Maybe. 

And even those not intoxicated by schizoid theories are vulnerable to being seduced by the drama of it all. Trump, they know, is a once in a lifetime phenomenon. When he goes, whatever should happen to his ideas, he goes for good. There will not soon be another president so friendly toward the working classes, so unpretentiously in love with his country, or as bold and entertaining in his style. A Trump loss will bring forth angry tears. The president enjoys not just political support in white working class America, but great personal affection.

Of course, if the result goes against the predictions of the polls, there is an equal danger of violence from the Left; militant ‘anti-racists’, BLM and simple nihilistic window-breakers have acquired much useful experience in recent months; hundreds of thousands – if not millions – of young people may be willing to fight – in a true sense – the prospect of four more years under the orange demon.

In closing, though I would love to play prophet, this swirling, haunting prelude to something offers only cryptic clues and contradictory messages. America requires revolutionary change. It will soon get it, from the state or from the people.

David

In Praise of Amy Coney Barrett

Tags

Abortion, amy coney barrett, RBG, supreme court, United States

Donald Trump didn’t have to nominate a woman to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg. There was nothing in law requiring it. But even if he did so in order to placate the wretched ‘girl power’ tendency in American society, for whom ‘RBG’ was a sacred figure, he has chosen remarkably well.

Profane things first – as you will have already discerned, Mrs Barrett is a decidedly attractive woman. It is alright to notice that, and to wonder whether it might have influenced the president’s selection. The nominee is elegant, feminine and relatively youthful. Trump, as we know, is the kind of person to take such things into account.

But Barrett is also impressive and authentic in a way that should command respect. She is a Roman Catholic; apparently a devout one. Her membership of a conservative evangelical group – now being stupidly but predictably compared to a plot element in the overrated feminist dystopia ‘A Handmaid’s Tale’ – implies someone with a belief, not merely an identity.

Barrett has attracted general and bipartisan praise for her character and ability. By both her left- and right-leaning colleagues we are told that the nominee rises early in the morning, maintains a strict health routine, overachieves in work and education, and all this in addition to performing the duties of a mother to seven children, including two adoptees from Haiti.

But that isn’t enough for her critics. And nothing could be. This is because Barrett opposes (or so we have reason to hope) the revolting practice of ‘abortion’.

For whatever reason, support for the ‘right’ to abortion, the termination and disposal of unborn children, has become a deal-breaker for the mainstream left in recent decades.

I say “for whatever reason” because this was never inevitable. Ending pregnancy has nothing obviously Marxian about it. There is no promised contribution to the triumph of proletarian fascism. (At their best, hard-line communists even opposed certain forms of feminism, believing them – correctly – to be a capitalist convenience). Still, it is now part of the standard liberal platform. With clever manoeuvres and widespread academic corruption, feminism’s darkest priority has attached itself to the left, and cannot now be easily cut away.

And that makes Mrs Barrett a fair target. Her work ethic doesn’t matter. Her charity towards otherwise hopeless black children doesn’t matter. Her punchy, can-do rise to influence does matter, but only in the sense that it can be turned inside-out and presented as a triumph of patriarchal brainwashing.

They won’t say it explicitly, but Barrett is imagined by progressives as a traitor to her gender. Women, if they are to be liberated, are to behave in a certain way, adopt a certain set of opinions, imposed from without, often from above. If they demonstrate agreement with traditional morality, even as the result of independent reasoning, they have fallen victim to manipulation and, like an addict, cannot be trusted until they are slapped sober.

In reality, women who fight for the protection of the unborn are exercising one of the divinest aspects of female nature; a heroinism innate to them, but awakened only by a healthy environment. In a society intoxicated by the influence of propaganda, that kind of environment is increasingly hard to find; and where it does exist, the foreheads of the resisters glow bright red in the target-beams of urban revolutionaries.  

The great majority of my peers I find to be disturbingly relaxed about abortion. A whole generation near enough, innocently convinced by absurd comparisons and non sequiturs, receive arguments any blockhead could reason away under normal conditions as obvious truth.

“Why don’t people who call themselves ‘pro-life’ care about children living in poverty NOW? Why does life not matter after it leaves the womb?”

Questions like this one are asked in all sincerity. The questioners are not working to confuse us. They believe that they are correct. And this can only be the result of environmental conditioning – an unhealthy normalisation of the grossly abnormal. 

The right to life and the right to a tolerable life are undeniably connected. But disagreement on the first is infinitely more radical than disagreement on the second. No one except the most vulgar and heartless disputes that poverty is something to address; disagreement comes only when methods of alleviation are discussed.

And does not Mrs Barrett go some way on that front herself? Her Haitian children are being given enviable lives as a result of her personal generosity. Is that not walking the walk?

Once again, it doesn’t matter. Pro-choice arguments are defended with religious inflexibility. Counter-arguments, however reasonable, cannot penetrate – because of a barrier created by nurture, not nature; society, not moral intuition. What one has been trained to think of as common sense is not easily recognised as madness. Such is the normalising power of a bad environment.

Mrs Barrett is not just a credit to the environment that moulded her, but a sufficient, many-splendored vindication of it. I will not be so offensive as to argue that she is what a woman ought to be. But a society in which her strength, integrity and discipline are considered normal is no paltry thing to dream of.

David

Some Words Against “Abortion”

Tags

Abortion, politics, Pro-Choice, Pro-Life, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, supreme court, trump

I don’t like the term ‘abortion’. Given the nature of what it refers to, I find the word insufficiently reverential, serious, dramatic.

Alas, alternatives are hard to come by. “Pregnancy termination” bases itself on pro-choice logic by making the mere fact of pregnancy, the symptomatic experience of the mother, the sole consideration, and not the developing life that creates our emotion and dissent. Abbreviations like ‘termination’ are also worthless; like ‘abortion’ they make something hotly unpleasant appear coldly practical, or even worse, lukewarmly everyday.

Abortion should not be called simple ‘murder’, either, even though it is, in practice, a kind of murder – the robbing of a living being of its future and potential, usually for no justifiable reason. However accurate, the word is regarded in this context as hyperbolic and manipulative; and we must be careful of using terms which allow for the cartoonification of a very serious argument.

So what to call it then? I really don’t know, and it is worthwhile reflecting on why.

We struggle to name a procedure like this, to integrate it into language to everyone’s satisfaction, primarily because the practice is so thoroughly unusual; a surreal cooperation of barbarism and modernity, riddled with all the contradictions that entails – messy but hygienic; brutal but honed to an art-form; horrific but anaesthetisingly common.

Still, we will call it here ‘abortion’, as technical and emotionless as that term is, for that is what most people know it by.

With the passing of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Saturday evening, America’s abortion debate, overshadowed in recent years by the extravaganza of race politics, is set for a dramatic revival. This is no bad thing, for America, for children – and also for Donald Trump, who stands to benefit from it significantly, I believe, provided he stands by his guns.

Trump’s performance over the last four years has left a lot to be desired, at least in this Ausländer’s irrelevant opinion; but on abortion, perhaps more than anything else, the president has been admirably solid, even coherent. The so-called “heartbeat bill” which prompted widespread un-righteous panic and handsome business for Handmaid’s Tale costume manufacturers, was a bold gesture in favour of the unborn, quite unlike any proposal in recent times (a period, don’t forget, that includes the allegedly ‘theocratic’ or Christian Nationalist regime of George W. Bush). The bill proposed – and still proposes – to contract the window in which an abortion can be performed, making it unlawful beyond the moment a developing child shows a pulse. (Though this precise point was chosen for symbolic reasons, it is a powerful and appropriate point at which to grant human rights.)

My late father, an Anglican rector, was rarely positive about Donald Trump, being embarrassed by the president’s sleaze, the accusations of past infidelities, involvement with a porn star, repeated marriages, and so forth. But I recall him praising the then Republican nominee for arguing powerfully against late-term abortions, so important was this principle to him and his interpretation of Christianity. I do not echo him now out of filial loyalty. My pro-life instincts are the result of private reflection, as well as the amazing weakness of the pro-‘choice’ argument.

The reader will know what I mean. Whenever the Roe v. Wade ruling is up for debate in the United States, or when, more rarely, the issue makes an appearance in British and European politics, a section of the left mobilises to deploy some of the worst arguments that can possibly be thought of.

“No uterus,” begins a popular meme pulled from the sitcom Friends, “no opinion!”

“Keep government out of my vagina!” screeches another.

“My body, my choice!”

And so on.

None of them can withstand even the slightest interrogative pressure, and are typically shared in the cause of mere female self-interest, rootless ideological conformity, or else male sexual strategy (“What a terrific point, m’lady. Those conservatives, unlike myself, are pathetic virgins”).

Of the cited examples, undoubtedly the most popular is the slogan “My body, my choice”; a petulant tantrum that adorns t-shirts, mugs and handbags across the United States. Very briefly, the problem with this phrase is that hardly anyone in the pro-life movement cares what a woman does with her body, as long as there isn’t another body to consider inside of it. When that second factor is absent, we care little if she bakes her temple of flesh into a birthday cake or bends it into a party balloon. 

When the talking-points mentioned fail, as they are sure to fail, defenders of abortion then resort to a tried-and-tested false dichotomy: abortion is a contest between religion and secularism. 

This works well enough in America, where advocates of faith and atheism are happy to make sport of any cause. But this is unfortunate, and destructive to the spirit of the debate as it exists separately from them. The author is not religious, and nor are the thousands if not millions of people who oppose abortion on purely moral grounds. Yes, the vastest horde of the pro-life movement still takes as its symbol the Cross of Jesus. But that says nothing of whether the practice can be justified under any other symbol or under none at all. 

In the opinion of this author, abortion, as we must describe the ghastly procedure, has only two proper indications. When a woman becomes pregnant through rape, a termination requires no other justification and must remain legal and safe. Secondly, when the health of the mother is gravely at risk, it is rightfully her choice whether she risks it further. 

But outside of these circumstances, I see no excuse for it; at least no morally satisfying excuse.

Good luck to whoever is nominated to take up this noble struggle. It is important beyond itself.

David

How 9/11 Finally Ended

Tags

9/11, America and Islam, Islam, September the 11th

September the 11th, as a political era, lasted approximately ten years, beginning with the attack itself in 2001, and ending with the massacre of left-wing youth in Norway in the summer of 2011.

It progressed in three stages: first, a period of Islamist aggression and Western shock, followed by an era of wars in the Middle East and Islamist retaliation, and finally a broad social and intellectual reaction against Islam in Europe, America and various other affected regions.

For these ten years, Islam was never far from the minds of anyone with a taste for politics, or simply for reality. A foreign religion, once rarely considered deeply outside of specialist academia, dominated the Western news cycle. There was hardly a day when it wasn’t mentioned.

The whole decade was like a movie; explosions, beheadings, tanks, protests, philosophical screeching, warring interpretations. September became everything. For millennials like this author, it defined our development, shaking us out of our youthful disinterest in all things serious.

My initial reaction to the attack was liberal, if not leftist. I gobbled up books by the likes of Noam Chomsky and William Blum, short-cutting my way to the conclusion that America had in some way ‘asked for it’. I was shocked by the extent of America’s past interference in the Middle East, the Western sponsorship of the Saudi police-state and the black helicopter autocracies in Egypt and Jordan. Why were we doing this to people so far away? For oil? How immoral.

That this was an over-simplification became clear several years into the decade, at university, where I came into contact with British Muslims. They were bolshy and serious. They advocated reactionary ideas about gender, sexuality and religious choice, completely (and ironically) in conflict with the worldview I had embraced in their defence. 

I was seized with a terror of being trapped with such people. I imagined dystopian scenarios in which they formed a majority. My politics flipped. 

In America, though with far less demographic urgency, millions were introduced to the same fear and the same confusion. Why were there any Muslims anywhere in the West? They were swimming against every positive current, commanded to do so by a faith that could never be reformed or questioned as a matter of doctrine. Then came theories of a Muslim conquest of Europe by prolific reproduction, and America hardened still further.

The effects on Americanism during this period are particularly interesting in light of current issues. Having suffered an attack by a completely foreign culture, for completely alien motives, America’s racial system was radically (though temporarily) unsettled. Black Americans were lifted from the bottom of the racial hierarchy, replaced by Arabs, Muslims and anyone resembling them. For much of the decade, a very pure kind of civic nationalism thrived on the American right, with dissensions from the likes of Pat Buchanan (now very much back en vogue) relegated to the far fringes. Black and Hispanic people were more comfortable than ever in identifying as conservative, and were welcomed as such, given their relative patriotism and relative harmlessness. Indeed, America’s traditional minorities all enjoyed a new warmth within Republican circles primarily due to this kind of comparison.

Arabs and Muslims were beheading hostages and blowing up trains for exotic theological ideas completely unrelated to reason. They wanted to enforce laws forbidding miniskirts and porn, music and alcohol, sport and hot dogs. By comparison, blacks and Hispanics, despite their flaws, were essentially benign. Black people made catchy music. They served in the military and killed America’s enemies. Hispanics liked carnivals and girls in bikinis. In a war of modernity against medieval darkness, all who were on the modern side, even primitively, were suddenly native everywhere modernity prevailed. If you were OK with naked women and pork, you were a patriot enough. (Similar weird shifts in right-wing priorities later occurred in Europe.)

Buoyed by this new acceptance, some black and Hispanic Americans, and also LGBT Americans, strode into areas of right-wing society they once felt were too hostile for them. Muslims were the new blacks, the new fags, the new antithesis of America, and not a few minorities were comfortable with this transformation.

The new emphasis of the mainstream Western right played a significant role in the election of Barack Obama in 2008. The greater acceptability of blackness in light of anti-Muslim sentiment meant that much of the popular anxiety the black candidate aroused was wasted on absurd theories about the senator’s religion and middle name. (Recall for illustration the old woman warning John McCain that Obama was an ‘Arab’).

But this could never last.

America wasn’t Sweden, let alone Lebanon, and though great effort might have been expended to keep them so, the inhabitants of suburban Illinois could not remain convinced that ISIS and al Qaeda were the greatest threat to their physical and cultural security.

In time, as the “smoke and dust” of 9/11 faded from popular memory, replaced in vividness and urgency by nearer hazards like Chicagoan gun fights, BLM and swelling illegal immigration from Mexico, people shifted back to traditional American anxieties about race, suburbia, history and the status of black people.

The alt-right subculture idiotically promoted by Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election represented in part a restlessness among right-wing youth to get away from 9/11-ism and return to broader themes of race and identity.

It may be counted as part of the historic character of the Trump phenomenon that it marks the beginning of true post-9/11 politics.

David

Trouble in the South

Tags

African migrants, Europe, Greece, migrants, Turkey

How much would it cost to stop the boats arriving? How many ships, specially tailored to the task, would need to be constructed? I do not believe it would cost the world; but even if it did, the world is what Europe is worth to some of us.

For all its value, our continent is pitifully unprepared for the realities of modern migration. Boatloads of third world cargo are washing up on our envied shores almost daily, in direct contravention of both public sentiment and common sense. 

What price can Rome justify? And Seville? Athens? I would say any one of them can pay us back handsomely, whether in tourism, grandeur or sunny days, for whatever expenditure is necessary.

We are not quite ready for the conversation that needs to be had about all this. We are still too squeamish, frightened of the implications. Christopher Caldwell, author of Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, broke some very hard ground with the subtitle of his widely admired, absurdly controversial book -“Can Europe be the same with different people in it?”

The answer is no, of course. If current flows of migration continue, Europe will be changed dramatically, and quite obviously for the worse. There are great qualitative differences between the cultures of the world. And for this reason Europe is best left with a solid European majority.

So we must stop the boats. Turn all of them back. Put in place a strong naval task force in the Mediterranean and Aegean seas, equipped with whatever is necessary to encourage foreign adventurers to reverse course, and to help get them safely home. 

We have a beautiful continent, a splendid variety of cultures all our own. To squander this would be unforgivable. 

David

Aristocrats and Peasants: The War Between the Genders

Tags

aristocracy, balance of power, female privilege, Feminism, French Revolution, gender

The slogan “The future is female” probably isn’t supposed to be embittering or chauvinistic. A pep talk in miniature, the sentiment is most often used to motivate young girls at nobody’s particular expense. All can use it in this way. The words emblazon shirts for boys as well as girls, men as well as women. They are, like ‘black lives matter’, open to amazing flexibility of meaning if challenged, which they are only rarely.

But now, with all that is happening and all that has happened, the slogan is increasingly taken as a taunt, a trumpet-blast of conquest, backed not only by dreamy aspiration, but cold, hard fact.

It is considerably better, I am quite sure, to be a woman than a man these days; certainly in the West, but perhaps even elsewhere, for the same dynamics and the same model generally apply.

I am surprised to have come to this conclusion. For much of my adolescence the dogma of female disadvantage seemed fairly watertight; women are physically weaker,  after all, which we must remember is a profound handicap, and so all the claims of feminism were made correct in that light; even if women didn’t obviously seem to be a class of victims, I knew they could become one at short notice, whenever the male temper changed. But that I now recognise as a major fallacy.

It is true that men ultimately have a veto on human destiny. If tomorrow we collectively decide to reimpose a patriarchy, nothing can possibly prevent us. The ‘kick-ass woman’ able to defeat men at their own game is a corporate fancy designed to sell pink running shoes. Men are stronger, more dynamic, and so on.

Nonetheless, this says nothing about quality of life or immediate power. It is true only theoretically; true in the same way the working classes can seize the means of production. True but unlikely, then, for much stands in their way.

The working classes are physically and numerically stronger than the capitalists. It isn’t science fiction to imagine ragged-trousered hordes trashing the headquarters of Barclays or Morgan Chase. But it is profoundly unlikely that they ever will; because society, with its guns and its norms and its trained manpower, stands against them, forbiddingly, menacingly.

In much the same way, natural male advantage is trapped in the imagination of radicals; outside of such space, even the mention of it is condemned as evil and terroristic. Theoretical power cannot feed a starving man, or prevent a family of hard-working proletarians from being thrown out of their houses, and nor can it lend consolation to the immiserated men of our current era. The theoretical (as a general rule) is immediately useless.

Men are handicapped today by several key social factors – most obviously the universal bias that exists in favour of the fairer sex. You, the reader, will have this bias. Most people do. We see women as more precious, more valuable and fundamentally worthier of our tenderness, restraint and generosity than men.

Evolutionary psychology makes this easily understandable. In a pure state of nature, it requires only one male to impregnate a hundred females, and so individual men are naturally considered less important than women.

But this is the inherited logic of a state of nature that no longer strictly exists. We are not living in the same jungle as our ancestors, with the same struggle for life day by day. Our societies are no longer even coherent; all kinds exist around us, friendly and hostile, and yet the instinct will not disappear any time soon.

To make matters worse – for men at least – fewer and fewer cultural objections to the exploitation of this instinct by young women are tolerated within liberal society. If a woman plays to this advantage for the purpose of manipulating others, for money or influence or fame or power, it is considered vulgar and bigoted to object, or even to notice it is happening.

Men are everywhere staying quiet, allowing taboos to harden around the discussion of very important imbalances, which in turn tempts more and more young women to take advantage of them, just as men would in the same position.

It must be understood that the charge of ‘misogyny’ today too often functions as a neutraliser of protest or even notice-taking of the runaway development of female privilege. The increasing gap between the genders is precisely the opposite of what polite society insists. And the toll on men is mounting.

Today it is increasingly easy to succeed as an ordinary woman, and increasingly impossible for an ordinary man. While feminists like to argue that the male elite, who invariably and necessarily work harder and with greater dynamism than the female elite, crowd them out at the pinnacle of meritocracy, even a small step down from that elite reveals the majority of men trapped below the majority of women.

Men have degenerated – though no-one’s fault but our own – into a peasant gender, while women have become aristocratic. Men must justify themselves, their portion of space and oxygen, with high intellectual achievement and / or crushing manual labour, or else be counted as worthless. Women, meanwhile, are self-justifying; and more than that, entitled to the protection, gallantry and subservience of the peasants.

One might point out, as feminists are wont to do, that women are markedly underrepresented in the governments of Western nations; but this, too, is fallacious. The whole meaning of the aristocracy in the modern sense is based on a distinction from the actively ruling class. Aristocrats sometimes govern, but only if they wish to. And they usually do not. Lord Byron quite understandably preferred his opium pipe and mistresses to the drudgery of parliament. The aristocrats of the ancien regime, similarly, tended to choose apolitical luxury over needless, bloody partisanship. Government is a job like any other, performed out of a lack of something. When nothing is lacking, what is there to be gained?

The new aristocrats have no war to fight. Indeed, quite like the aristocracy of old, the only time they engage themselves politically is for the defence of aristocratic privileges. The very last thing young women desire is an outbreak of sexual Bolshevism, a rebellion of the peasants, the men.

And that is no longer out of the question. The internet-enabled conversion by young women of sexual power into social, financial and political power is creating the necessary conditions for a future breakdown in relations between the genders.

Already we see the politics of younger generations greatly effected by the processes described. It is taken almost as a given that men at the radical extremes of ideology are motivated at least in part by gender resentment. Uncountable tired-out routines by liberal comedians play upon the theme of right-wing and conservative men having sexually unsatisfying lives, or of them suffering from ‘male fragility’; angry virgins, fragile men, stupid losers. The liberal men who join such accusations, who strive to make clear their lack of anxiety regarding female ’empowerment’, are indirectly boasting of having a relatively satisfying life, as part of a male elite, differentiated from the peasant majority. This is essentially slave-caste chauvinism (field over house) dressed up as moral sentiment.

In the new gender model, men who are not part of the male elite, but who nonetheless wish to enjoy privileges (access to media, publishing, general political and social viability) must stress their good behaviour and adjust to a modern, acceptably castrated type of maleness (the ‘soyboy’ / corporatised ‘nerd’ archetypes, for example).

What is most interesting for those of us who care about political matters is how much the gender breakdown confuses both left and right tendencies. The paleo-right are increasingly divided according to priorities. Here, male interest goes up against ethno-nationalism, with the former creating a pan-racial brotherhood of male solidarity that undermines the goals of the latter. On the left, the militantly castrated ‘woke’ left are falling out with men who wish to see male complaints taken more seriously, and who ultimately shift to the right when they find they cannot have a voice on any non-conservative platform.

This last point is especially noteworthy. Even the most conformist young Zoomer wishing to make a name for himself on the left of politics (in journalism or visual media, say) will likely find himself frustrated purely on gender grounds. Media work is an easy, desirable, aristocratic form of labour, eagerly sought out by women. A peasant may find very few opportunities left after his young female competitors have had their fill.

The liberal Zoomer mentioned may find openings only on the right, and his sympathies, nurtured by resentment, will travel with him.

This really cannot be stressed enough. The de-platforming of men by liberal media and society will drive more and more of them to the right, and when aristocrats begin to take over even those publications, to the far-right.

De-platforming authentic representatives of male interest is an incredibly stupid move. It will accelerate social breakdown and bring the prospect of gender conflict ever closer.

I will close by making clear I do not put the blame for this development on women, especially not on women from older generations, to whom the points made may seem absurd given their own life experiences. This is something effecting mostly younger people. And even in these generations, women are only taking advantage of a situation we have all allowed to come into being.

David

Radical Cosplay

Tags

ancap, fashion, politics, radical traditionalism, tradcath, trends

“Are you still ancap?”
“No. I’m not into that anymore.”
“What are you now?”
“Ecofash.”
“Oh.”
“You?”
“I was looking into natsoc and nazbol, but I think I’m going tradcath.”
“I thought you were radtrad?”
“I’m honestly just tired.”

This little exchange isn’t as unlikely as one might hope. In several important enclaves of discourse, a memetic, ironic way of thinking and talking currently prevails, reducing complex political systems to mere fashions and subcultures.

In case you didn’t know, ancap = anarcho-capitalist, ecofash = eco-fascist, natsoc = national socialist, nazbol = national Bolshevist (Strasserist), tradcath = traditionalist Catholic, and radtrad = radical traditionalist (ala Evola and Guenon). 

Few of the people using such abbreviations care to possess substantial knowledge or understanding of the movements they discuss. They are like emo, trap and iPhones to them; novel, shiny, exciting things; makeovers on a whim, each with its own aesthetic, lifestyle, parlance and millennium. They will be discarded in the same easy they were adopted.

Incidentally, I am not criticising any of the movements mentioned (though some obviously deserve it). I am increasingly a believer in the necessity of radical change. But I detest insincerity and unseriousness more than almost anything else. Politics I feel is degraded by this kind of consumption. (Consumption is the right word).

When one first discovers a form of political or philosophical radicalism, especially as an adolescent, there is a tendency to convert to it wholesale, with reckless zeal and little thought. A young man reads a book by some historical upstart, is hypnotised by his elegant prose and intellectual confidence, and very soon feels that his life has been given a new and coherent meaning; that there is another order, Utopian but not impossible, in which his biases can be perfectly realised. He may be right or wrong in this, but he goes badly astray if he considers only the merits and glamour of the idea.

We are entering a period of history in which society will either change radically or break down. The current order is going to be challenged, fought with, perhaps replaced. To prepare for that, it is certainly necessary to consider all possible alternatives. But ideologies are not products, and pin-balling from one to the next is a terrible way to undermine oneself.

David