John Scalzi’s Xmas Card

John Scalzi’s first Mil SciFi novel Old Man’s War featured a plot with a natural appeal to aging boomers, and with a helpful plug from Instapundit quickly broke through to become a best-seller in the genre.

Conservative readers with a liking for Scalzi were soon to be dismayed when the formerly seemingly sympatico author came out as an Obama supporter and Gun Control advocate. John Scalzi has since distinguished himself within the Science Fiction Fandom Community as one of the loudest voices on the Social Justice Warrior side.

Naturally, many of us just stopped buying Scalzi’s books, but some remain really bitter. Chateau Heartiste (an Alt-Right blog) yesterday took aim at Scalzi as a representative of the beta male phenomenon, publishing photos and Scalzi’s 2016 Xmas card which portray him as a nerd, shorter, frailer, and more sensitive-looking than his wife. CH has a lot of fun mocking Scalzi, and promises more:

Reading Scalzi is like bathing in a vat of menstrual blood and having pure estrogen injected straight into the scrotum. One must exit Scalzi’s world through a decontamination chamber of red meat and range shooting. His sickness can’t be allowed to spread to vulnerable men. His dildology worldview is a disfigured anti-reality that will yield like buttery goodness to the shiv every time, because nothing substantial underlies it. And the Chateau will flay him, over and over, until his ugliness of mind and spirit perishes from the earth.

Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, William F. Buckley, Jr.

Matthew Continetti, in a must-read essay, reviews the often-fraught relationship between mainstream intellectual Movement Conservatism and its populist New Right allies.

Republicans have walked this tightrope for decades. When the party has integrated the issues, goals, and tactics of the New Right into its campaigns, it has been remarkably successful. Think 1968, 1972, 1980, 1984, 1994, 2010, and 2014. But there also have been signs, on the presidential level most clearly, that the alliance with populism is bringing diminishing returns. The GOP is on the brink of losing the popular vote in six out of seven presidential elections despite its current nominee running precisely the type of campaign the New Right has wanted to see for years. And this election is likely to return to office a Republican House majority that is more anti-Establishment, more hostile to compromise, more suspicious of institutions and elites than the one we have today.

This is the crisis of the conservative intellectual. After years of aligning with, trying to explain, sympathizing with the causes, and occasionally ignoring the worst aspects of populism, he finds that populism has exiled him from his political home. He finds the détente between conservatism and populism abrogated. His models—Buckley, Burnham, Will, Charles Murray, Yuval Levin—are forgotten, attacked, or ignored by a large part of the conservative infrastructure they helped to build. He finds the prospect of a reform conservatism that adds to our strengths while ameliorating our weaknesses to be remarkably dim. …

From the Panama Canal to the Tea Party, from Phyllis Schlafly to Sarah Palin, the conservative intellectual has viewed the New Right as a sometimes annoying but ultimately worthy friend. New Right activists supplied the institutions, dollars and votes that helped the conservative intellectual reform tax, crime, welfare, and legal policy. But that is no longer the case. Donald Trump was the vehicle by which the New Right went from one part of the conservative coalition to the dominant ideological tendency of the Grand Old Party. …

Trump deploys New Right symbols and tropes. His antagonism toward the Eastern establishment is obvious. …

Immigration, which emerged as a social issue at the turn of the twenty-first century, was key to Trump’s success. So was his role as outsider, independent critic of the rigged system, scold of elites, avatar of reaction. The apocalyptic predictions, the dichotomy between makers and takers, even the idea of seizing Arab territory and “taking the oil” comes straight from Bill Rusher’s 1975 Making of the New Majority Party. The relentless hostility toward the media, both liberal and heterodox conservative, the accusation that it, the government, and the financial sector is engaged in a criminal conspiracy with Hillary Clinton, the denigration of Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, the appeal to supporters of democratic socialist Bernie Sanders, the charge that the “global power structure” has “stripped” manufacturing towns “bare and raided the wealth for themselves”—this is adversarianism in its purest, most conspiratorial, most totalistic form.

The attacks on National Review, on George Will, on conservatives with elite educations, on conservatives granted legitimacy by mainstream institutions is a replay of the New Right rhetoric of the 1970s. Names have been added to the list of Republicans in Name Only, of false, cuckolded conservatives, but the battle lines are the same. On the one hand are the effete intellectuals based on the East Coast, shuttling up and down the Acela corridor, removed from the suffering of the average American, ignorant of the social issues, amenable to social engineering, fat and happy on a diet of foundation grants, magazine sinecures, think tank projects, speaking engagements. On the other are the blue-collar radio and television hosts with million-dollar contracts, the speechwriter for Wall Street banks who uses a pseudonym to cast aspersions on the feckless conservative elite, the billionaire-supported populist website that attacks renegade Jews, the bloggers and commenters and trolls estranged from power, from influence, from notoriety, from relevance, fueled by resentment, lured by the specter of conspiracy, extrapolating terrifying and chiliastic scenarios from negative but solvable trends.

It is the same discourse, the same methods, the same antinomianism, the same reaction to demographic change and liberal overreach that we encountered in the 1970s. The difference is that Donald Trump is so noxious, so unhinged, so extremist in his rejection of democratic norms and political convention and basic manners that he has untethered the New Right politics he embodies from the descendants of William F. Buckley Jr.

The triumph of populism has left conservatism marooned, confused, uncertain, depressed, anxious, searching for a tradition, for a program, for viability. We might have to return to the beginning to understand where we have ended up.

Read the whole thing.

Meet Kevin, a 23-year-old ardent Hillary supporter.

A photo of Kevin looking adoringly at Hillary, taken last year in Cedar Rapids, Iowa at a pizza party where Hillary’s Iowa field workers got to meet the candidate, has gone viral since an Alt-Right 1488-er (who is probably himself an equally impressive specimen of masculinity) posted it in a tweet, wondering aloud if Kevin belongs to the same species as us.

Kevin, all 98 pounds of him, was not, however, dismayed and is apparent bearing up manfully (if that is the right word).

NY Mag:

So what was your initial reaction?
I screamed. My roommate actually came in to see what happened. Then I started laughing because it’s so amazing to me.

It is pretty great. You look very, um, angelic in that picture.
I’m beaming. I didn’t realize Hillary was going to stand right next to me until it happened, so I’m in full shock and awe.

So have you read any of the replies to the tweet?
Of course I’ve read the replies. I have a good sense of humor, so I read them for the absurd comedy. …

There are also a lot of replies from some charming-sounding folks very concerned about your testosterone levels. Care to comment?
I mean, if it was one person I’d think it was a weirdo. But a lot of people are worried about it! Maybe they see something I don’t. I’ll schedule a doctor’s appointment and say I was referred by the crack medical team of Trump Twitter supporters. …

So how does it feel to have unwittingly become the face of a meme?
It’s hilarious and inevitable. I’ve been a pretty obnoxious Hillary supporter online for the last year, so this honestly feels like karma. I’ve been asking for it. And Hillary retweeted me once last year, which caused another wave of angry people, so I’m familiar with the routine. Stay perfectly still until they lose the scent.

Hat tip to Ann Althouse.

Regular readers are undoubtedly aware that I am not a leading admirer of the Alt-Right. I do believe, however, in giving even the devil his due, and I was just reading this morning of a rather clever victory by the Alt-Right over commercial social media censorship.

The Alt-Right crowd on 4-chan has initiated “Operation Google” which aims to defeat social media algorithms designed to detect, identify, and punish postings deemed “sexist, racist, transphobic, Islamophobic,” etc.

Quartz has the story.

Here’s a list of code word substitutes for group pejoratives that would get the user censored or banned from Twitter and Facebook and the others:

Jewish = (((three parentheses around name))) or skype

Alt-Right = pepe

It is obviously impossible for commercial social media corporations to censor the names of big companies and services like Google and Yahoo.

Publius Decius Mus (aka Mousey) is back, lying on his klinÄ“ and being interviewed by one of those self-important Alt-Right blogs, which recently sprang into existence to repair the “exhausted soil” of the Conservative Movement with “fertilizing, re-sowing, and diligent cultivation.” Well, I am skeptical of their diligence, and I think the Alt-Right is bent on sowing only the most noxious and pestilential political weeds, but I will grant that they have plenty of male cattle manure to offer to fertilize the soil.

Read the rest of this entry »

Jesse Singal explains how and who they are.

“Why did he post a suicide note on livejournal before killing himself?” “I hear he did it for the lulz.”

The Chanterculture (as in 4chan –JDZ) predates the rise of Trump by years (Gamergate was obviously a big moment for it), but suffice it to say that the emergence of Trump, a larger-than-life walking middle finger to political correctness, hit this subculture like a mainlined bottle of Mountain Dew — Trump is their hero, and like so much else in their online world they have rendered him in cartoonish, superhero hues.

Part of what makes the Chanterculture confusing and difficult for outsiders to penetrate is that, as Bernstein puts it, “It unites two equally irrepressible camps behind an ironclad belief in the duty to say hideous things: the threatened white men of the internet and the ‘I have no soul’ lulzsters.” That is, some proportion of Chanterculture warriors actually believe the things they say — some dedicated real-life internet Nazis like Andrew Auernheimer, a.k.a. weev, came up in chan culture — while others are just in it for the outrage. (Many channers find the idea of having an actual ideology — or expressing it online, at least — rather distasteful, with the only exception being instances in which cloaking one’s online persona in an offensive ideology can elicit lulz.) …

Underlying chan culture is a fundamental hostility to earnestness and offense that plays out in how its members interact with each other and with outsiders. To wit: If you, a channer, post a meme in which Homer and Lisa Simpson are concentration camp guards about to execute Jewish prisoners, and I respond by pointing out that that’s fucked up, I’m the chump for getting upset. Nothing really matters to the average channer, at least not online. Feeling like stuff matters, in fact, is one of the original sins of “normies,” the people who use the internet but don’t really understand what it’s for (chaos and lulz) the way channers do. Normies, unlike channers — or the identity channers like to embrace — have normal lives and jobs and girlfriends and so on. They’re the boring mainstream. Normies don’t get it, and that’s why they’re so easily upset all the time. Triggering normies is a fundamental good in the chanverse.

And when channer and normie culture collide, normie culture indeed tends to spasm with offense. From the point of view of a normie, why would you post Holocaust imagery unless you actually hate Jews or want them to die? To which the channer responds internally, For the lulz. That is, for the sake of watching normies get outraged, and for recognition from their online buddies.

Read the whole thing.

“Publius Decius Mus”

Mousey is back, responding with feigned humility to the widespread attention his Grand Trumpkin Manifesto in the Claremont Review received, and making essentially lame efforts to respond to criticism.

In the first place, I did not notice a lot of people calling Mousey “cowardly” for using that pen-name out of Livy. I think most people agreed with me in simply finding it extravagantly pretentious and downright incongruous in combining the highfalutin’ display of Classical erudition in service to the sloping-simian-forehead preference for Know-Nothing-ism redivivus which is the ideological foundation of the Trump Movement.

Secondly, the problem with Mousey’s “Flight 93” analogy is its hysterical hyperbole. Yes, Hillary becoming president would be bad, but it would not really be quite as bad a Obama being elected. Obama was a red-diaper-baby from a no-kidding Communist family straight out of the extreme radical left-wing fringe with a personal background as professional agitator and close pal of Weatherman terrorist Bill Ayers. Obama was elected with the wind at his back, successfully promoted by the partisan media and entertainment industry into a Pop Culture phenomenon roughly as popular as the Beatles in 1964.

Hillary, by comparison, is just a greasy, greedy, cynical democrat pol, now old and wrinkled and with all the charisma of a Metropolitan Museum mummy. Obama walked into office with a revolutionary mandate. Hillary, if she wins, will really be a lame-duck, seat-filling an Obama Third Term that should never have occurred. The likelihood of her winning a second term is poor.

It’s always bad seeing a democrat elected, but consider the alternative.

Mousy is a delusional Trumpkin, who thinks that the Trump candidacy is actually about something political. He is obviously an idiot.

Donald Trump is not conservative. Donald Trump is not political. Donald Trump doesn’t love you or the other numbnuts and yobbos supporting him. Donald Trump knows from nothing about policy, political theory, the Constitution, the Administrative State, and he could care less.

Donald Trump is only about Donald Trump. He is the complete pragmatist. The Administrative State? Trump has been working in cahoots with the Administrative State all his life. Trump’s real estate projects were all built via special permits. concessions, and tax breaks from and political bargains with the Administrative State, and Donald has been paying off the politicians running it throughout his career. Donald Trump is an operator, not a revolutionary.

Yesterday, Trump announced a great big shiny new $159 billion unfunded Child Care entitlement, suggested by his daughter(!). There’s your revolutionary reformer of the Administrative State in action.

Does Mousey even really care about entitlements, deficits, and the Administrative State? I wonder.

He sums up his defense of Trump being not dangerous, prone to tyranny, or insane, thusly:

Trump by contrast promises not to launch misguided wars, to protect our borders, and to focus immigration policy on the well-being of the currently-constituted American people. Who is truly more moderate: the colorful loudmouth with the sensible agenda or the corrupt, icy careerist with the radical agenda?

So, the sensible agenda consists of Nativism and Isolationism?

I don’t disagree with the batrachian inhabitants of the Buchananite fever swamp about the absence of American responsibility and general undesirability of admitting Muslim “refugees.” But, I think myself that the hubbub about Hispanic laborers is foolish and misguided, and the notion of the same country that owns the Statue of Liberty building a thousand-mile anti-immigrant wall is self-contradictory.

The United States inherited from Britain, after WWII, the role of guarantor of Freedom of the Seas and Policeman of the World. It is not some kind of happy accident that the US has the dominant voice in international financial treaties, that the US dollar is the world reserve currency, and that US culture is the world standard. American economic prosperity is directly linked to America’s role of world leadership. Doubtless, White House Administrations could do a lot better job of devising coherent policies and defending them against foreign and domestic critics, but retreat and Isolationism would be a cowardly and lousy option.

And so, we arrive at the real crux of the matter. Donald Trump is not a conservative or really a Republican at all. Our ill-designed primary system misfired, our lamentable culture clocked in, the failures of our educational system were felt, and the crooked timber of humanity did it again. It should have been a landslide Republican year. There were plenty of worthy candidates, but demos gave away the nomination to a charlatan and a buffoon.

Demos prefers noise and excitement to gravity and substance every time. And, like Mousey there, a portion of demos has become infected with some ancient strains of American political pathologies, making them sick and mad.

We obviously lose whatever happens this year, but I think we probably have more to lose via the election of Donald Trump. There is the issue of Trump’s instability, irrationality, and unpredictability. You really ought not to give supreme power to a limitlessly spoiled narcissist. Rome did it a few times, and the results were not pretty.

But it’s even simpler than that. Both candidates are dishonest and gravely flawed. Either one of them, I think it is easy to predict, will preside over scandals and sensational disasters. Either one of them will soon become an albastross around that candidate’s respective party’s neck. I’d rather have the political corpse of Hillary around the democrat party’s neck. (Though I won’t vote for her.)

There is finally the danger that Trump’s election could empower within the Republican Party the stupid, primitive, grotesque Alt-Right elements which reject all real conservative principles in favor of fundamentally un-American, discredited, and reprehensible ideas. Rejecting the wise-ass morons of the Alt-Right is reason enough not to vote for Donald Trump all by itself.

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The Alt-Right rejects the conservative intellectual tradition and all serious ideas in favor of Populism, yet at the same time a number of its mouthpieces are prone to strike poses of learned Classicism, using pennames out of Livy like “Publius Decius Mus,” making reference to the strategic deficiencies of Hannibal, and throwing in a bit of Greek (thymos/θῡμός) for purposes of insult.

I’m afraid that trying to pretend to be Victor Davis Hanson, Donald Kagan, or Cato the Elder while trying to peddle a combination of the politics of Pat Buchanan and Millard Fillmore does not really impress anyone.

I am referring, of course, specifically to The Flight 93 Election, the latest grand Trumpkin manifesto, which Claremont Review ought to have been ashamed of publishing.

“Publish Decius Mus,” hereafter referred to as “Mousey,” inevitably commences with the most popular thesis in the Trumpshirt party line: the claim that this particular election is uniquely climactic and apocalyptic. Were Hillary to win, we are given to understand, her re-election is inevitable, the successful passage and implementation of heaven-only-knows-what next jolie cadeau de la Révolution française is inevitable, the Republic is doomed, and the war against the forces of darkness is lost forever.

Mousey’s thesis is, of course, arrant rubbish. Hillary is just another democrat, a democrat not even as leftist as the current 8-year inhabitant of the White House. Hillary isn’t nearly as ideological as Obama, nor is she nearly as slippery and competent as her spouse. Doubtless, were she to be elected, it would be a bad thing, and we could expect a re-play of the first Clinton presidential term. We should expect Hillary to try for One Big Leftwing Thing. If the Republicans in Congress turn back her assault, we again win the mid-term elections, Hillary pulls in her horns, and (blessed) governmental gridlock recurs. Hillary hasn’t got Bill’s gifts and there is no reason at all to assume that she would be a popular president or be likely to win re-election. On the contrary, I think there is an excellent chance that Hillary will screw the pooch, wind up buried in more scandals, and end her term putting the democrat party right behind the 8-ball for a long time to come.

Trump, on the other hand, is an extremely dangerous gamble. What might, or might not, an incredibly spoiled, willful, narcissistic 70-year-old millionaire, who may not be playing with a full deck, do? It is impossible to predict. That is the problem with making a geriatric Caligula president.

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Ben Shapiro, at Daily Wire, did a fine job of demolishing Mousey’s nonsense.

What sort of “fundamental” change is Publius looking for, you ask? (“Interesting choice of phrase, that.” — Barack Obama) Not conservatism – that’s failed: “Decentralization and federalism are all well and good, and as a conservative, I endorse them both without reservation. But how are they going to save, or even meaningfully improve, the America that Continetti describes? What can they do against a tidal wave of dysfunction, immorality, and corruption?”

No conservative would actually write this. Decentralization and federalism, combined with a renewed societal focus on virtue implemented at a familial and communal level, are the solution to an encroaching federal government. They are the only solution.

But what is Publius’ solution? Why, Trump, of course! “[Matthew] Continetti trips over a more promising approach when he writes of “stress[ing] the ‘national interest abroad and national solidarity at home’ through foreign-policy retrenchment, ‘support to workers buffeted by globalization,’ and setting ‘tax rates and immigration levels’ to foster social cohesion.’ That sounds a lot like Trumpism,” writes our Roman hero.

So in other words, screw conservatism, let’s get the Big Government corporatist ad hoc blue dog Democrat in here. The guy who donated to Hillary Clinton will surely fix things better than founding ideals ever have.

From there, Publius moves on to blame. Why won’t conservatives just agree with him? Because they must be paid off! “Pecuniary reasons also suggest themselves, but let us foreswear recourse to this explanation until we have disproved all the others…. So what do we have to lose by fighting back? Only our Washington Generals jerseys—and paychecks.” This is the last refuge of the desperate Trump advocate – everyone with whom they disagree has been bribed. The system is rigged. Someone ought to ask Sean Hannity or Laura Ingraham or Breitbart.com just how much money they’ve lost backing Trump with the ardently hot passion of a thousand smoldering suns. The answer: not a dime. And they’ve gained ratings and presumably, the massive money that comes along with such ratings. Some of us have actively foregone significant money not to worship at the Trumpian altar. It’s truly incredible how Trump supporters darkly suggest that Jonah Goldberg is somehow getting rich off of opposing Trump but simultaneously say National Review is going bankrupt. Which is it, dolts?

Read the whole thing.

If you find any of these signs, take immediate steps.

Walter Hudson contends that Alt-Right is evil and we have a duty to oppose it.

Collectivism is evil. That is why racism should be opposed, not because it offends, but because it denies the nature of human beings as individuals and places a group above them. Collectivism comes in many forms, with beneficiaries defined on different terms. But whether it’s the nation, the race, the faith, the tribe, or any other overriding entity, no group has the right to subordinate individuals, ever, under any circumstances. That is the American way of life. Far from preserving it, the alt right stands poised to crush it. The alt right acts as a hammer to the anvil of the regressive left. In the crossfire between the two, what remains of personal liberty will die.