Category Archive 'The Alt-Right'

28 Jul 2018

Harper’s Suddenly Finds Trump Supporters Are the Cool Kids

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“Who’s the cool kid now?”

Walter Kirin, in Harper’s (of all places), describes discovering that today, all the cool people, the rebels and outsiders, are the Trump supporters, while the sanctimonious, preachy types, the annoying conformist scolds are the liberals!

Puritanism, Mencken said, is “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy.” But liberal puritanism is slightly different. It fears that the wrong sort of people might be happy, or that their happiness might be of the wrong kind. I’d seen examples of it on Twitter, in snarling remarks about Trump’s porn-star mistress, his age difference with his wife, his multiple marriages, his rumored romps with Russian prostitutes. The ostensible charge was Trump’s hypocrisy and that of his evangelical supporters for pardoning such lewdness in their leader, but sometimes I sensed disgust in the attacks not only with Trump, but also with sex, in all its messiness. When Jimmy Kimmel recently referred to Trump as Pumpkin ­McPornHumper, the hint of sniffy distaste was unmistakable.

If Trump’s presidency is a national emergency and opposing it the equivalent of war—though I prefer sticking with the political process—then there isn’t much room for liberals to be liberal in the ways I found so attractive as a boy. Indeed, I see evidence that certain liberal principles, the ones that impressed me in the Seventies, have eroded. Back then, for example, the CIA was understood to be a nest of liars and psychopaths who toppled democratically chosen leaders, lied to the public to start wars, and ran sick experiments on innocents using drugs and mind-control techniques. In Three Days of the Condor, a thriller from the period, Robert Redford plays a lowly CIA officer who discovers that the agency is nothing more than a crime ring. These days, however, with Trump playing the heavy, the CIA is revered by many liberals as a bulwark of integrity, its missions sacred, its conclusions unimpeachable, and its former director, John Brennan, worthy of a high-profile cable news job. The FBI draws similar adulation, never mind its history of spying on the likes of Ernest Hemingway, John Lennon, and Martin Luther King Jr.

This great liberal switch from skepticism to sanctimony about the most powerful arms of the Establishment is matched by a viral fear of Russia that reminds me of the John Birch Society pamphlets I’d come across now and then when I was young. Somehow, instinct told me then that they were crazy, exaggerating the cunning of the enemy, the depravity of the collaborators, and the vulnerability of America. The liberal comedians who lampooned such claims on shows such as Laugh-In were my idols. They dared to speak the most radical truth of all in a time of panic and paranoia: the sneakiest adversary is the mind. The Cold War was real, of course, and deadly serious, as are the tensions with Putin’s Russia, but my liberal heroes of the Seventies discerned other dangers that were closer to home. Rigidity. Stridency. Shrillness. Self-righteousness. One way they answered the period’s harsh conservatism was to hang loose, not get uptight. Love, not war. Remember?

13 Aug 2017

Police Took Leftists’ Side in Charlottesville

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Erection of Lee Monument in Charlottesville, Virginia, 1924

VDare claims the police were on ANTIFA’s side.

[T]he police did not protect demonstrators from Antifa and did little to prevent confrontations. Attendees of the demonstration, rather than walking a clear path to the park, were instead forced to walk through a line of screaming protesters. Liberal clergyman and elderly women held signs about “peace” and “love” and smiled benevolently—as violent Leftist protesters attacked from the crowd. They are as culpable as the Antifa themselves for the violence unleashed.

But that was not close to the worst. Demonstrators did not need protection from Antifa. All the police would have had to do to ensure a safe demonstration was simply go home—which is what happened in Berkeley. Patriots equipped with shields, inured to Antifa tactics of throwing bricks and spraying mace, had secured Lee Park (excuse me, “Emancipation Park”) and may indeed have outnumbered both Antifa and counter-demonstrators in terms of pure numbers. Several were armed, and the city fathers should be offering Unite The Right activists tearful tributes for the latter’s saint-like restraint in not opening fire despite more than justified provocation.

If police had done nothing, the public would have been safer. Instead, unforgivably, the police attacked (not dispersed—attacked) the legal demonstration, threatening attendees with arrest if they stayed in Lee Park.

Then activists, totally unprotected by police, were deliberately funneled into a gauntlet of attacking Communists, in a kind of Kill Zone. Injuries on both sides were predictable. (Of course, much like cuckservatives who bow and scrape to the Main Stream Media, the police were then insulted by the Communists for their trouble.

This could have been a relatively stable situation: a patriot demonstration protected by its own shield wall (and ideally, by police who actually did their job) along with a separate group of Leftist protesters, with both groups enjoying the right to free speech supposedly guaranteed them by the Constitution.

Instead, the police precipitated a running battle which engulfed all of Charlottesville. The result: Antifa running wild and chasing down isolated pockets of Unite The Right attendees as the latter defended themselves as best they could, with bystanders were caught in the melee. Police showed no interest in doing anything other than threatening patriots with arrests for “unlawful assembly.”

In contrast, of course, Leftists were free to disobey the laws and marched merrily down the streets, many chanting “Black Lives Matter!”, causing chaos as they went. As Rebel Media’s Faith Goldy reported, this was an absurd “double standard.” Anarcho-Tyranny was the order of the day in C-Ville.

I don’t look upon VDare as an unimpeachable source, but we are not going to find a lot of descriptions of yesterday’s violence sympathetic to the demonstrators trying to defend the statue. It does make sense that the police would be on counter-demonstrators’ side, they are working for the same City Council that renamed the park and that voted to remove the statue of General Lee.

RTWT


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