David Gerlenter writing in the Wall Street Journal says something self-evidently true. The Left seems to have won every single culture battle fought.
Although the right reads the left, the left rarely reads the right. Why should it, when the left owns American culture? Nearly every university, newspaper, TV network, Hollywood studio, publisher, education school and museum in the nation. The left wrapped up the culture war two generations ago. Throughout my own adult lifetime, the right has never made one significant move against the liberal culture machine.
The late Andrew Breitbart noticed the same thing. Observing that “politics is downstream from culture,” he argued the Left has made us the villains of our own stories.
Our lives — indeed, our very species — has storytelling wound into our DNA. … Popular culture is delivered to us in the form of story via books, TV, film, music, video games, and new media. …
Thus we come to politics … the vast majority of those with the power of content creation are Liberals. … Liberals control story. …What is some of that messaging? Think about movies and TV. Corporations are evil — using unwitting poor Africans for pharmaceutical testing (Constant Gardener) or dumping toxic chemicals into nature (Erin Brockovich, A Civil Action) or responsible for the end of mankind (Rise of the Planet of the Apes). American soldiers are bloodthirsty lawbreaking maniacs (Any military film). The CIA conducts illegal, secret operations that have nothing to do with protecting America. Radical Muslim terrorists are never villains. Trial lawyers are crusading do-gooders. David Letterman and Saturday Night Live ridicule the Right 95% of the time. Jon Stewart pretends to be centrist, but in fact jumps all over the Right far more often than the Left.
Liberal political candidates are the embodiments of those Liberal tenets. The goal is to associate them in voter minds via the vehicle of popular culture.
Even before Breitbart’s warning there was Orwell, who understood that the Left’s ultimate ability was to uproot the past and plant their chosen seed for the future. His famous dictum “he who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past” is an unsurpassed indictment of groupthink totalitarianism. There seemed no doubt they would succeed. Within its bubble, the Left’s control of culture is so absolute they can watch 1984 without realizing it’s about them.
Yet the real mystery — one which even Orwell himself did not anticipate — is why,
Look around you. Every single country that adopted socialism as an economic system went bankrupt. The Soviet Union collapsed. Now the Western Gramscian project is self-immolating in the fires of its own absurdity. The current political crisis is the collective shudder of mortality passing through “every university, newspaper, TV network, Hollywood studio, publisher, education school and museum in the nation.” The left may have “wrapped up the culture war two generations ago,” but it is rotting inside the wrapping.
Bret Stevens contends that we are living in a time of broken politics because the Left petulantly refuses to face the reality that its ideas have all failed.
[T]he Left is playing a new game which involves trying to mentally separate the concepts of “neoliberalism†from the rest of the Left. They do not want to own the disaster they created, so they came up with a scapegoat: capitalism. In Leftist symbolic reality, capitalism took over the Left and created “neoliberalism,†where True Leftists resisted.
Perhaps the bigger story is that they do not want to point out that they created a managerial society, applying the tactics of business and the military toward ordering people around. This is what the Left do, because they are oriented toward control, or everyone doing the same things all the time so that those in power are secure.
This is typical of the one-dimensional categorical order in which Leftists think. To them, there are the True Believers who know what is right and must be done, and then the masses who must be ordered around. Instead of a hierarchy with multiple levels, for them there are only the controllers and the controlled.
Their strategy is utilitarianism, which is the opposite of having purpose. Utilitarians ask people what will make them happy, and people respond with short-term answers, scapegoats, justifications and the other products of the usual flow of neurotic insanity. They never connect the dots and see that having a thriving, stable civilization is what they need, and everything else are personal problems that they as individuals need to fix. Government cannot do that.
One of Steve Sailer’s many clever commenters has brilliantly named it WhateverGate—the frantic legalistic churning about who said what to whom in President Trump’s circle, and whether the thing that was or was not said warrants impeachment. Or whatever. But impeachment. Every week, I think things can’t get any crazier—the hysteria has to burn itself out, the temperature can’t get any higher, the fever has to break—and every week it’s worse. Boy, they really want to get this guy. That just gives us more reasons to defend him.
I don’t even bother much any more to focus on the actual thing that President Trump or one of his colleagues is supposed to have said or done. Every time, when you look closely, it’s basically nothing.
I’ve been reading news and memoirs about American presidents since the Kennedy administration. I swear that every single damn thing Trump is accused of, warranting special counsels, congressional enquiries, impeachment—every single thing has been done by other recent presidents, often to a much greater degree, with little or no comment.
This is great. I have been laughing all morning long. I have been laughing starting with last night. Can we agree that Donald Trump is probably enjoying this more than anybody wants to admit or that anybody knows? So he fires Comey yesterday. Who’s he meeting with today? (laughing) He’s meeting with the Soviet, the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov! I mean, what an epic troll this is. The Democrat Party is going bananas — completely, totally unhinged — on the road to literal insanity. …
This has gone beyond mere political posturing. These people on the left — led by the media and the Democrat Party and the political apparatus — I’m telling you, are sick. I have never seen… I wasn’t thinking about it last night. I’m 66 years old. I have been following politics honestly since I was 10. I’m not kidding. I have seen unhinged behavior. I have seen the wild allegations that Democrats make and repeated. I have never seen this degree of collective insanity. I have never seen this degree of so many people literally being out of touch, devoid reality, and unhinged.
I’ve never seen this degree of hate. I understand it because of what’s happened. Trump has totally embarrassed every one of these people inside the Washington Beltway, and he’s taunting them, meeting with the Soviet (chuckling) Russian ambassador today, after the Democrats are convinced the Russians stole the election! They have repeated it so many times; they actually believe it now. The only way this rage can exist is if they really believe this election was stolen, and if the really believe the Russians colluded with Trump.
Nine months and not a shred of evidence, and most recently this was acknowledged by Clapper and Sally Yates. It’s been acknowledged by Comey himself in recent congressional testimony. It’s been acknowledged by Dianne Feinstein. There isn’t any! It was acknowledged by Maxine Waters yesterday. There isn’t any. And yet they believe it. That’s all they’ve got. They cannot, will not blame themselves. So they literally believe that the Russians somehow colluded with Trump, even though there’s no evidence for it.
They really believe Trump fired Comey because he might have been getting close, under the assinine belief that firing Comey’s gonna stop the investigation? How many investigations are there? The House has one. The Senate has one. The FBI’s got their own. Do you know who’s running the FBI today? McCabe, a Democrat! His wife ran for the Senate or ran for governor of Virginia. He’s very close to The Punk, Terry McAuliffe. The guy is a hardened Democrat. He’s now running the FBI. He’s in charge of the investigation to get Trump.
Nothing comes to a screeching halt here just because Comey’s been let go. But the hysteria and the panic and the outrage is rooted in raw hate. The Democrats, wherever you find ’em — in the media, think tanks, don’t care where you find ’em — they’re being consumed by it, folks. They’re literally being eaten alive with an irrational, raw hatred literally absorbing them. Nothing good for them can come of this kind of hate and resulting derangement. Nothing good. This is not how you put together winning movements.
This is not how you build or grow anything, this kind of raw, unfettered hate that they now have lost total control over — and Trump is just taunting them. Trump is just feeding it. He’s doing everything he can to drive them even crazier, and they’re falling for it each and every occasion. Now, nobody’s focusing on the detail that Comey has told Trump three times there’s nothing there. Three times Comey has told Trump, “I’m not investigating you.†They’re looking past that. They’re not even seeing that.
All they’re seeing is that Trump put it in the letter, and that must mean that Trump’s got something to hide or he’s trying to put Comey on the spot or there’s some kind of power play going on. They’re incapable of rationality. They are incapable of reason. They are incapable of just taking a moment to absorb things. They are into knee-jerk reactions based on whatever triggers set them off, and they have stopped thinking, they have stopped pondering, they have stopped considering, and they’re just reacting like spoiled brat little kids.
Roger Simon observes that the Progressives’ national hysteria over Donald Trump is so out of proportion to anything he’s actually done that it constitutes proof of genuine dementia.
Since his inauguration, and to a great extent before, the whole country has gone more or less berserk. Just the other night, comedian Stephen Colbert, in what I presume we were supposed to take as an edgy witticism, accused our president of fellating Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Although I recall many bad things being said about LBJ back in the day (Barbara Garson wrote a play comparing him to Macbeth, and who can forget “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”), nothing approached Colbert’s angry joke in terms of pure unmitigated hostile vulgarity, not on late-night TV anyway.
But his was just the culmination (for now) of a modern Days of Rage which has metastasized into Months of Rage with no end in sight.
We all know the endless litany of events, from pussy hat parades to smashed windows and fires at our most famous public university to people marching through the streets of Philadelphia calling for the death of the president and his vice president, so I’m not going to bore you with them all. I am only going to ask the simple question: Why Trump?
If you were a visitor from a distant solar system come to our nation or even a time traveler from our own nineteenth century, I submit you would be perplexed. This Trump person (being?) doesn’t seem to be all that different from many leaders who have come before him. I mean, what has he done exactly? Enforced some immigration laws that were enacted by the Congress over several administrations? Tried to fix a mediocre healthcare plan with another plan that may or may not be as mediocre? Called for a tax reduction similar to those enacted by previous Republican and Democratic administrations? Cut back on some regulations that became overly burdensome? Called for a temporary halt to immigration from a half-dozen countries his predecessor had already cited as dangerous hotbeds of terrorism? Shot off a few dozen cruise missiles at the airfield of a dictator who was gassing his own people, but didn’t harm a single person in the process? …
And yet the rage is, if anything, greater and more consistent than it was during Vietnam. How do we explain that?
I don’t think we have a choice but to say the explanation is in the realm of human neurosis, not politics. And make that pretty severe neurosis, almost psychosis. Something about Trump’s character and appearance — what he says and does or, more accurately, what they think he says and does, because they are completely incapable of seeing it with any clarity — has set off multiple trip levers in the minds of a huge percentage of Americans, including the media, Hollywood, the academy, etc. This, however, says vastly more about them than it does about Trump.
Dan Greenfield says the current conflict differs from the 19th Century Civil War in that the Left does not wish to secede, it wishes to rule.
A civil war has begun.
This civil war is very different than the last one. There are no cannons or cavalry charges. The left doesn’t want to secede. It wants to rule. Political conflicts become civil wars when one side refuses to accept the existing authority. The left has rejected all forms of authority that it doesn’t control.
The left has rejected the outcome of the last two presidential elections won by Republicans. It has rejected the judicial authority of the Supreme Court when it decisions don’t accord with its agenda. It rejects the legislative authority of Congress when it is not dominated by the left.
It rejected the Constitution so long ago that it hardly bears mentioning.
It was for total unilateral executive authority under Obama. And now it’s for states unilaterally deciding what laws they will follow. (As long as that involves defying immigration laws under Trump, not following them under Obama.) It was for the sacrosanct authority of the Senate when it held the majority. Then it decried the Senate as an outmoded institution when the Republicans took it over.
It was for Obama defying the orders of Federal judges, no matter how well grounded in existing law, and it is for Federal judges overriding any order by Trump on any grounds whatsoever. It was for Obama penalizing whistleblowers, but now undermining the government from within has become “patrioticâ€.
There is no form of legal authority that the left accepts as a permanent institution. It only utilizes forms of authority selectively when it controls them.
Dystopic identifies Gramscian “Long March Through the Institutions” Marxism as the bug in an Edgar suit.
In the movie Men In Black, there’s a scene where an abusive farmer gets killed by the villain, some kind of giant alien cockroach. The alien then possesses his body and walks around in comic fashion, like some kind of rotting zombie. The farmer’s wife exclaims “like an Edgar suit.â€
Social Justice Marxists operate in the same manner. They take over institutions, groups, corporations, movements, whatever… and kill them. They then wear the skin of the destroyed, rotting institution like an Edgar suit, ambling around in comic fashion, expecting to be treated as if they were still the institution itself.
Only unlike the movie, there are a great many of these alien bugs on Earth. They are legion. And the thing is, most rightists suspect this is true, because the Edgar suit doesn’t act like Edgar. He acts like an alien cockroach. But they nonetheless give the benefit of the doubt, because they aren’t sure.
It is in that space of uncertainty that Marxism is permitted to spread, and infest every sizable organization. Once infected, forget bringing the organization back to life. It’s a rotting husk. It’s dead. You aren’t going to take it back, and even supposing you did, it’d still be a rotting sack of skin.
I think this is the greatest weakness of the political right. We permit Marxism to spread because we are not confident in our assessment that the people in question are Marxists. Most of them deny it, of course.
The person screaming at the police is called Rebecca Goyette, and this person of uncertain gender is demanding that they assault a Canadian comedian named Gavin McInnes, whom I had never heard of. McInnes denies being a Nazi-Holocaust Denier &c. here.
Goyotte’s claim to be a professor provoked skepticism, and investigation quickly found no asociation at all with New York University. Goyette’s own vitae, however, claims this person to have been from 2011 to the present: an Adjunct Professor in the Art Department at Montclair State University and from 2007 to the present, a Museum Educator for the Museum of Modern Art.
What sort of art? The Rebecca Goyette web-site explains:
Rebecca Goyette creates persona-based works that poke holes in Puritanical sexual mores. Working in a wide variety of media, her extensive artillery features figurative drawing, video, performance, and handmade sculptural elements made from fabric, clay and found materials used in a ritual fashion. Many know her as Lobsta Girl, and Goyette has filmed her interspecies pornos detailing the sex lives of lobsters internationally. Originally, Goyette adopted the sexually aggressive female lobster as a primary character she performed live to promote female agency. Another alter ego to Goyette is the ghost of her direct ancestor, Rebecca Nurse hanged as a Salem witch, who is re-imagined cycling through repetitive power dynamics in fits and foibles in the “New World.”
Situated within a largely queer, fantasy paradigm, her work is able to embrace a fruitful multiplicity of sexual desire and engage a panoply of non normative gender roles. As Judith Butler has articulated, in fantasy gender boundaries are transgressed with ease, there is no “single position within a fantasy; the identification is distributed among various elements of the scene.â€
For Goyette, sex is one gateway into the rich territory of psychology and human interaction, into the remotest ranges of the subconscious mind. Her schematic Lobsta Porn video series explores sexual fantasy scenarios with people playacting the magical sex lives of lobsters. Female species lobsters, for instance, approach and corner the strongest males, squirt them with aphrodisiac drugs out of their foreheads, and get inside their lobsta man-caves where they molt their shells in order to have sex. The males have two “dicks” that can impale the vulnerable lady flesh, meaning the female’s entire body sans shell functions as a threshold of sexual potentiality. By developing complex characters based partially in the real (scientific fact, Puritan history, herstory, the annals of witchcraft, Goddess worship and the paranormal) and partially in fiction – Goyette is reality seamstress par excellence. With climactic wit she recounts the psychosexual dramas of time immemorial.
Goyette is as shameless about her characters’ voracious sexual appetite as she is about connecting the female subject to nature and an animalistic lost Eden of sorts. Her videos function as titillating vignettes of a bawdry heroine in hot pursuit of total Love. Uncovering the truth of the mercurial nature of desire as she seeks blissful and eternal union with the “Other,†Goyette peppers her colorful imaginary worlds with complicated personal memories and whenever possible, willing participants in the flesh. Working with a gender fluid, multiracial cast of personae as collaborators and accomplices, her live action performances and performance videos feature human sexuality unleashed. Goyette’s work is a perfect illustration of how, as expressed by theorist Elizabeth Cowie desire “is most truly itself when it is most ‘other’ to social norms.â€
Ornately adorned in the absurd skins of her hand-sewn costumes, Goyette’s characters wreak havoc with traditional sexual mores in a playland where there are no experts and no actors. Their performative gestures and actions shine light on the myriad of curiosities lurking in truly intimate encounters – raw, vulnerable and at times, otherworldly.
For the contemporary Left, the road to privileged political insight and definitive moral superiority runs through Lobster porn.
SFGate reports that lefties are panicking. Trump’s first Supreme Court appointment will be nearly impossible to oppose succcessfully, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg is 83 and a survivor of two forms of cancer. Gorsuch on the Court restores the 4 liberals, 4 conservatives, and Anthony Kennedy who can go either way status quo prevailing prior to the death of Antonin Scalia. One more conservative and Roe v. Wade might be in trouble.
On Tuesday evening, President Donald Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch for deceased Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s long-empty seat. On Wednesday morning, liberals woke up, did the math and realized it was time to be concerned about Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s fiber intake. Also bone density. Also exposure to airborne viruses (Madame Justice, what is your flu shot status?), and salmonella, and slippery ice, and also: Has anyone heard how scientists are coming along with a Zika vaccine?
“I’m very interested in this.” says Jeanette Bavwidinski, a community organizer in Pennsylvania. “I’m interested in what her daily regimen is. Like, what are you all feeding RBG? Is she getting enough fresh air? Is she walking? Is she staying low-stress? What is she reading? Is she reading low-stress things?”
“Can she eat more kale?” asks Kim Landsbergen, a forest ecologist in Ohio. “Eat more kale, that’s all I can say. We love you. Eat more kale.
The facts in play: Ginsburg is 83 years old, the oldest justice by more than three years. She is one of the four reliably liberal jurists on the Supreme Court, and a mascot and hero to the left. There is one swing vote on the court, Anthony M. Kennedy, and there are three staunch conservatives. Adding Gorsuch would maintain the balance that existed when Scalia was alive: conservative replacing conservative.
But what if Ginsburg retires? What if Ginsburg gets sick and needs a leave of absence? What if Trump ends up replacing Ginsburg? In a week that has seen a relentless churn of White House news, liberal residents of the nation funneled their worst fears into a tiny, elderly woman.
“I kept thinking, you know, I could organize a bunch of gays,” says John Hagner, a consultant for Democratic campaigns who lives in Washington. “I could organize the gays, and we would just make a protective circle around her at all times. We could help her get up and down the stairs. We got this.”
With a rainbow phalanx protecting the justice against potential slips and falls, Hagner would then feel free to turn his attention away from external dangers, and toward microbial pathogens. “At that point,” he says, “what I’m mostly concerned about is the cancer. Is she getting her checkups? Do her doctors realize how important it is for her to get her checkups? Do they? The woman is 98 pounds.”
Ginsburg, appointed to the bench 23 years ago, has the endurance of a “Law & Order” franchise, but there are those YouTube clips of her nodding off during the State of the Union address, and she has already survived both colon and pancreatic cancer (a death sentence to many, though Ginsburg was back at work two weeks after surgery). And there are those people who remain furious that she didn’t step down during Barack Obama’s presidency: “Looking back, it was seriously dumb (and, frankly, selfish) of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer not to retire from #SCOTUS in 2013,” fumed a user on Twitter shortly after the Gorsuch announcement.
But! Bygones. Now was the time for liberals to work with the reality they had. Now was the time to channel the energy of thousands of anxious supporters into a solution for the Ruth Bader Ginsburg problem.
“I was just talking to a friend about this,” says Michael J. McClure, an associate professor of art history at the University of Wisconsin. “Like, what could we do? What could we do to help Ruth Bader Ginsburg? Could we protect her with packing peanuts? Then it turned into, ‘I need to become a vampire. Like in ‘Twilight.’ I need to become a vampire so I can make her a vampire with eternal life.’ If I’m damned to eternal life myself, so be it. It’s a sacrifice worth making.”
