MINING POLITICAL MINEFIELDS

 Forum-stuff again.

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The fanfic is your delusion that being opposed to Lib virtue signaling is White Nationalism. But I'm glad you concocted that argument that no news agency ever made when they circulated the Charlottsville Hoax. 

(general statement that the newsmen of the period were criticizing Trump for defending the pro-statue crowd in Chalottesville) 

I am glad of this exchange, though, because it's a much better example of your proclivity for untruth than the one in my old sig. Though I 'm still amused about the way you falsified another poster's post so that you could pretend you won an argument, I fully admit that no one here, not even the clear-headed Cons and Centrists, care about your petty distortion of some random member months ago. Yet the posters capable of understanding what the fake news media did may relate somewhat more to this lie you posted. Hence, the change to my sig. What the Mad Libs here think on the subject matters not at all.

The Lie You Posted: there is no support for your nonsensical claim that Fake News believed that Trump's moderate defense of the pro-statue contingent in Charlottesville was defending "White Supremacists." No Fake News reporters cared anything about that group. They cared about conflating DT with the alt-Right demonstrators, as is clear from the first question shot at DT:

Let me ask you, Mr. President, why did you wait so long to blast neo-Nazis?

I'm sure YOU have no compunctions about conflating the pro-statue residents with the alt-Right. I'm sure that the Fake News would have been CAPABLE of telling the same Lib lie, but they didn't tell your lie because they didn't care about the Charlottesville pro-statue, only the guys yelling "Jews will not replace us."

 (Which is funny because that became the Progressive rallying cry after Oct 7)

I challenge you, despite knowing your resistance to research, to show an example of a Fake News reporter saying, precisely, "We thought Trump was praising the pro-statue crowd, whom we deem to be Neo-Nazis." But you won't find a reporter making such a measured argument, because all they cared about was just tarring Trump for supposedly having defended the Neo-Nazis, despite his clear quote to the contrary.

As I said on — remember, Saturday — we condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence. It has no place in America. And then it went on from there.

The reporters kept harping on the "alt-Right," which you will probably PREFER to apply to the pro-statue crowd, but that's just your posturing; you cannot prove that from the Charlottesville transcript or from anything else. Trump advances the term "alt-Left," by which he clearly means not the Leftie anti-statue crowd but the counter-protestors who came to Charlottesville to fight the alt-Right demonstrators. The "equivalence" argument then gets advanced:

Q Sir, you’re not putting these protestors on the same level as neo-Nazis —

Q Is the alt-left as bad as white supremacy?

Why not put the counter-protestors. reportedly Antifa, on the same level as the alt-Right on the exact terms ST did: whether or not they were initiating fights? Answer: the Fake News had already decided that they wanted everyone against the alt-Right to be heroes. DT told the truth by saying the alt-Left did wrong, and that not everyone associated with the original protest was a Neo-Nazi. 

THE PRESIDENT: Those people — all of those people –excuse me, I’ve condemned neo-Nazis. I’ve condemned many different groups. But not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me. Not all of those people were white supremacists by any stretch. Those people were also there because they wanted to protest the taking down of a statue of Robert E. Lee.

Note in the next relevant section, DT references a "night before" the "Unite the Right rally" which began August 11.

THE PRESIDENT: Excuse me. If you take a look at some of the groups, and you see — and you’d know it if you were honest reporters, which in many cases you’re not — but many of those people were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee.

So this week it’s Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?

But they were there to protest — excuse me, if you take a look, the night before they were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee.

 DT may or may not be right on his dates re a "night before," since there had been protests in the city since May 2017. But again, no reporter cared about the local pro-statue crowd-- who in any event had been outvoted at the local level. The reporters also did not advance your stupid argument that statues of Lee, Washington and Jefferson were racist because they were "Slavers." The Fake News didn't care about that radical drivel; they only wanted to conflate DT with the alt-Right.

Another Fake News guy tries to deflect from DT's statement that both groups of protestors initiated violence:

Q The neo-Nazis started this. They showed up in Charlottesville to protest —

Then we get the statement that launched a thousand Fake News lies:              

They didn’t put themselves — and you had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides. You had people in that group.

No Fake News reporter cared that DT had condemned Neo-Nazis above, That didn't matter to them, and it doesn't matter to you.

But none of the reporters made your equivalence of the alt-Right and any pro-statue protesters not explicitly associated with the alt-Right. They loved to lie, but they didn't care about the lie you just floated.

So, thanks for the new sig. You're a fount of hilarity!

MINING POLITICAL MINEFIELDS

 Another blog-comment.

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I think the Liberal attitude toward Islam goes further than just deflection to the evils of Christianity.

Consider: the negative reaction toward colonialism in the West, while not confined to Liberals and/or Marxists, resulted in the idea that relatively helpless tribs, such as the Pacific Islanders, should have been protected from cultural pollution. A real-world, after the fact application of something like STAR TREK's Prime Directive.

Too often, though, Liberals act as if Islamic nations, often empowered by the technology of refining petroleum resources, deserve "protection" from the evils of Judeo-Christianity. Of course the Islamic nations practiced colonialism on a grand scale, as well as organizing the first trans-national slave trade. 

The valid question Daisy raised, as *I* would word it, is, "Is Islam more extreme than other major religions in terms of destructive rhetoric, and does thar rhetoric have real-world consequences?"  Someone mentioned the Catholic Church shielding pederasts. But does any of that result from Christian rhetoric? And aren't those crimes being kept secret precisely because many Christians would condemn such practices? In comparison, does anything in Shariya Law DIRECTLY condemn  suicide bombers?          

MINING POLITICAL MINEFIELDS

 For whatever reasons, I've never encountered the word "systemic" in any context but its current political meaning. So I was intrigued to learn, courtesy of Rachel Carson's 1962 SILENT SPRING, that it also had a biological connotation:

What makes an insecticide a systemic is its ability to permeate all the tissues of a plant or animal and make them toxic. -- Chapter 3

I know that the term "institutional racism" dates back to 1967, but a quick online search does not say when "systemic racism" came into vogue. I have no reason to think that the coiner of the term knew of the biological association, but it would be appropriate given the portrait of "whiteness" by authors like Kendi and Higginbotham is one of irredeemable toxicity. That amply explains why the "anti-racists" think it's OK to stigmatize white people even if they've committed no specific sins against POC, because they've all absorbed, as by cultural osmosis, the toxic nature of racists-- though the same authors would rage against "typing" POC by their cultures.

MINING POLITICAL MINEFIELDS

 More comment-preservation, re the Iran conflict.

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It's the Libs on this thread showing irrational paranoia. You want to celebrate Iran as the "good guys" in this geopolitical contest, simply because "they didn't attack first"-- even though Iran sent agents to assassinate a sitting US president, which in your world is not an "attack." 

And then there's the rush to assume that whatever Iran says is an honest representation of the facts on the ground, that they control the Straits because they say they do. Here's what they control: drones that can attack cargo ships if those ships don't pay up. Can other European and Middle Eastern countries choose to fight? Sure, but apparently, according to Louis Vittert (on a recent O'REILLY SHOW), they won't because Euro insurance companies have already rolled over, stating that they won't pay for cargo ships being attacked, but they will pony up for extortion. Vittert has a refreshingly practical take that you Libs could benefit from-- don't assume that either Iran or the US is telling the unvarnished truth, but judge what happens from the actual results. The constant carping of the media, Vittert points out, has strengthened Iran's position, not anything Trump did, because thanks to the Menace of the Midterms, the Iranians feel they can ask for more stuff despite their having been the aggressors in the conflict. To Trump it's like, "I'll use American resources to protect American interests, but I'm not doing squat for Europe. They can roll over and show their bellies, or they can fight."     

MINING POLITICAL MINEFIELDS

 Another messboard-mess.

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I doubt most Libs will have any interest in my subject. For many of you, "bravery," the opposite of "cowardice," inheres in giving in to superior numbers, or at least to influencers who appear to have the ear of government figures and/or big corporations. This is not usually the way BS has framed his idea of bravery, since I believe (though I have no quotes ready) that he has touted the bravery of the Israeli people for standing up to the greater numbers of their Muslim neighbors.

But for BS, based on that quote, it seems "cowardice" now means just not saying the name of one's opponent in some particular address. I saw BS use the same sophism on Michael Knowles when they debated the Iran conflict. But MK has not avoided Trump's name in her ongoing critiques of the conflict, so BS's claim seems particularly looney-toons.

I doubt that BS cares that much about MK's criticisms of Iran. I think he's still sore that MK wouldn't join him in condemning Candace and Tucker. the former being a figure who built her success in part on getting built up on BS's platform the Daily Wire. I personally think Candace and Tucker have said a lot of dumb things-- but are those opinions so pernicious that they can cause the entire Right to fall apart? BS must know that it makes no difference if Lefties can accurately quote particular speakers to make the Right look bad. Lefties are more content to shriek "Nazi Nazi Nazi" or "Pedo Pedo Pedo," they dont care about accuracy in the first place. I think MK would denounce Tucker and Candace if they were saying things that could really turn the "great middle" against the Right, and that is indeed one big reason MK opposes the Iran conflict. But they're really outliers. The middle doesn't care if Candace talks trash about Erika Kirk, and I frankly don't think BS cares about the Kirks either.  

MINING POLITICAL MINEFIELDS

 And here's another political post that I don't think quite fits THE ARCHIVE, if only because of its limited scope, responding to a forum poster posing the rhetorical question, "Do Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly have TDS" (because they oppose Trump's current Iran conflict)?

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Tucker and Megyn have WDS, "War Derangement Syndrome." They oppose interventionism on the part of the US without considering the consequences for allowing the interventionism by other nations-- Iran through state sponsored terrorism, China through the attempt to gain a hierarchy over world resources. 

Tucker's become a fanatic and his arguments are all over the place, when they're not made-up. But in his recent interview with Megyn, he said one true thing (paraphrasing), to the effect that he can understand Israel wanting to gain hegemony over the Middle East, given that every nation wants the best outcome for its own sovereignty. That's not always what's best for the citizens, and we've ample evidence that, say, Iran's rebellion against the Shah, whatever one thinks of Western imperialism, turned out worse for the Iranians than what they rebelled against. But it's true that no country, not even the US, can go around playing policeman indefinitely. But Tucker's disagreement with Trump's program-- that of trying to "push" nations in a perceived good direction-- does not mean that Tucker has some massive insight into world affairs. Tucker just has an opinion, that's all.

Megyn is much more nuanced, and one of her recent statements is that she feels (again paraphrasing) that interventionism is going to hurt the GOP in America. At least one of her fears is that in the midterms the Iran invasion will cause the GOP to lose the House and Senate to the vile Progressive Mad Libs, who will naturally seek to undo everything Trump has done out of TDS. This is a possibility that Cons must take seriously. and I don't doubt that some of them are worried, not just about keeping their jobs, but about the return of Mad Lib dominance to American politics. I know the Dems will eventually gain power again, but I'd like it to be delayed long enough that the Dem party might find its way to a more Centrist, less extreme position-- and for that to happen, the GOP needs to stay in control long enough to give their programs a fair test.    

MINING POLITICAL MINEFIELDS PART 2

 From a forum post:

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I concur that even if Dem politicians are motivated by representation, that sort of thing is too abstract to appeal to the rank and file. The question we have to ask is, what appeals to the protesters on a basic EMOTIONAL level?

I was thinking of saving this concept for its own thread, but you've made me curious as to whether we might be on the same page.

The emotional appeal motivating all the protesters is WHITE SAVIOR SYNDROME.

Despite the fact that for 20 years POC pundits have bloviated about the negative image of "White Saviors" in politics and culture, at base the Left is still motivated by the idea that Good White People can rescue their Little Brown Brothers from chaos. In the case of illegal migration, this has become attached to an Ethic of Diversification, that posits that the only way to get rid of the influence of Bad White People is to bring as many non-white people into the country as possible, so that, whether through political representation or intermarriage, White dominance will be expunged. Of course, Liberal thought never considers the possibility that their idealized Diverse Nation might be just as exclusionary in one way or another. 

The obvious retort is, "Oh, the Great Replacement Theory of Rightie Conspiracies." But it's not a conspiracy theory anymore. Just today I'm hearing some MN mayor blathering about "racial profiling." That's brilliant. You allow millions of people of diverse races to enter the country, and when the law tries to put them out, it's "racial profiling." I can't count the number of times that Leftie propagandists have championed this sort of forced diversification, as a Good In Itself. 

That's the sort of thing Renee Good stood for; the freedom to allow diverse people to stay in the country, no matter what crimes they commit, thereby to prove how generous the Good White People are, as against the Bad White People.           

     

MINING POLITICAL MINEFIELDS

 Since OD is a "junk-drawer" blog for stuff that doesn't totally fit the more developed theorizing of ARCHETYPAL ARCHIVE, here's a "thought-in-development" post spawned by my current watching of the controversial interview between Tucker Carlson and Hitler-fan Nick Fuentes.

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I'm about halfway through the Carlson-Fuentes interview. I see an additional reason Shapiro didn't like Tucker putting Fuentes out there; according to Fuentes he had a history with Shapiro going back to when Fuentes was just an up and coming Trump conservative, still in college. Though it doesn't sound like Fuentes was ever employed by Daily Wire, he formed various acquaintances there. But Fuentes got cancelled for his antipathy toward Israel, possibly by Shapiro himself, and for a brief time lost a podcast show because of DW cancellation.

Now, Fuentes could be lying as to how "reasonable" he was in questioning the US alliance to Israel. His questions, as HE HIMSELF represents them, sound extremely naive. Of course the US gives Israel money, and for the same reason they give money to the Saudis: dollar diplomacy, as a way to hold influence over a fractious nation. I can only assume, given Fuentes' insistence that the US "gets nothing" out of the connection to Israel, that he'd be in favor of dropping all connection with Israel. To Shapiro this could only be heresy, and deserving of cancellation, ASSUMING that Fuentes said nothing more than he claimed to have said. It's worth noting that Carlson has also butted heads with Shapiro over the whole "Israel is the bulwark of democracy" theme, and that, far more than "normalizing" Fuentes' idiotic racism, may be the main reason Carlson gave Fuentes an interview, DESPITE Fuentes having also insulted Carlson previous to the interview.

Of course it's possible that Shapiro might be 99% correct in all of his defenses of Israel, contrary to both the "America First" Right and the "America Last" Left, but in my view he would still not be right to cancel Fuentes. Yes, don't give him a job if you don't like his politics, but if you try to make him lose a job, then you're as corrupt as the Mad Lib Progressives.

I'm now at the point where Carlson is working his way toward mitigating Fuentes' "White people first" views. More on that later.    

PART 2--

So my verdict is that yes, Carlson did play down his opposition to Fuentes because of their fundamental agreement on opposing "Christian Zionists" who supported Israel's right to exist. Fuentes and Carlson may have very different reasons for that conviction, but yes, Carlson's idea of pushback against Fuentes' real racism was just to make very general comments about the wrongness of imputing racial guilt to any people. Since Carlson didn't challenge any particular Fuentes statement, Fuentes just let Carlson ramble on until they got back to what Fuentes wanted to talk about. 

Nothing Carlson did, however, counts as "normalization." I don't know if Ben Shapiro started that whole thing but it sounds very much like a Mad Lib talking point: "we can't allow this speech because it's RACIST." Shapiro would have better off doing as Dave Rubin did, keeping the objections on a purely moral level and not indulging in "If This Is Allowed to Go On" nonsense, because such rhetoric empowers the Corrupt Lefties, giving them talking points about a fragmented Right. Rubin disassembled much better than Shapiro did, highlighting Carlson's statement that he "hated Christian Zionists" worse than anyone, which would include all sorts of Jihadists and Communists who have been making many more people in the world miserable. 

PART 3-- During a televised conversation between Megyn Kelly and Ben Shapiro this week (following a convo between Kelly and Tucker Carlson the previous day), Ben Shapiro made the claim that another Con broadcaster, Candace Owens, had claimed that Erika Kirk was somehow complicit in her husband's death. Kelly was aghast at the time, but the next day came back on her show and stated that Owens had said nothing of the kind. The New York Post agreed with Owens in calling Shapiro a liar, and the Post hypothesized that Shapiro had over-invested in a narrative about Owens from another broadcaster, Stephen Crowder. As of 11-13 Shapiro has not produced evidence of his claim. Of course Owens is no stranger to rash claims, either, having recently claimed, with no evidence, that the Federal government had faked the messages Tyler Robinson sent to his trans lover. 

Additionally, to the "Christian Zionist" thing, I still think Carlson has over-invested in this narrative, but Kelly spoke to him and he admitted that he did not really mean his hyperbolic hatred for the Zionists.     

STOP ME IF YOU'VE HEARD THIS ONE

My most definitive statement on the rise of identity politics in the 21st century has been the three part TRUMP VS SHAME CULTURE, starting here. But I started thinking about the role of humor in culture, thanks to a Youtube podcast in which Michael Rowe interviewed Greg Gutfeld. 

Gutfeld's first contention was that for some forty years, Liberals working in American popular culture had largely succeeded in portraying Liberal characters as cool, compassionate and funny, while Conservative characters were mean and reactionary. Gutfeld's contention was not new, and finds support in Ben Shapiro's 2011 book PRIMETIME PROPAGANDA. For this book the author interviewed dozens of movie and TV professionals who were very candid (in the days before Shapiro's high visibility) about slanting their stories in order to make Liberals look good and Conservatives look bad. Gutfeld illustrated his point with the movie ANIMAL HOUSE, which pitted good natured slobs against the controlling Dean Wormer. But a better example of the political slanting would be IMO the 1982-89 sitcom FAMILY TIES, in which two middle-aged flower children gave birth to three teenagers, one of whom, Alex P. Keaton (Michael J. Fox), was the Conservative Who Was Always Wrong.

The meme of "cool Liberals vs. uncool Conservatives" continued through the later years of the 20th century. Reagan and Bush Senior appealed to voters who wanted constancy, but Bill Clinton grabbed the part of America that wanted a rockstar President. Conservatives were clearly horrified, and they tried every trick to make Clinton look like a swindler or a murderer. They did finally expose him an adulterer during his second term, but as far as I can tell, it did little to harm his general popularity, though we'll never know he could have won an election with that "blot" on his escutcheon. Throughout much of the first decade of the 2000s, the Left also seemed to control the sense of which group was cool in the school, and indeed George "Dubya" Bush was the Republican gift that kept on giving-- the gift being endless opportunities for satire.

Yet even though I held some Liberal sensibilities during the 2010s, I sensed a greater shrillness in many Liberal comedians of the time, though I blogged only about one, Larry Wilmore, in this ARCHIVE essay. And slowly pundits like Shapiro and Gutfeld were becoming cooler than ultraliberal puppets like Wilmore and Stephen Colbert. What caused the shift?

I think it was the election of Obama in 2009.

In theory, it should have made the Democrats the coolest kids in the political school, to have fostered the election of the country's first Black President. However, I think the Dems subconsciously shifted into the mindset that had dominated the Republicans in the nineties. THEY became the defenders of the faith, of the new order. 

Further, they hitched their collective stars to the idea that Obama was a great President because he was the first Black person to achieve the office. That in turn led them to make increasing investments in what we now call Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. And that's how we got a race-grifting zero like Kamala Harris as second in line to the Presidency.

On some level, they know they've done wrong by arguing that skin color and ethnicity should be factors in judging candidates. And that results in psuedo-comedians like Stephen Colbert rattling off monologues that are nothing but solid Trump-hatred putdowns, rather than anything resembling wit.

A POLITICAL RANT

 I'm going to devote a larger post to articulating the main flaw in Biden's rhetoric regarding white supremacist organizations. As it happens, poster HK227 in post #345 touches on my concerns regarding tribalism, though our interpretations of the matter may not be identical.

So for sake of argument, I will concede that if you go down a list of violent acts in the past four years-- the period roughly following Christopher Wray's 2019 remarks, from which Biden draws-- you are going to find a preponderance of white actors. This preponderance, though, is at least partly ascribable to there being more white people in the country. I don't think either Wray or Biden presented any proportional analysis; they present their argument on the basis of sheer quantity.

I will also concede that said violent acts, whether one labels them "terrorism" or not, probably have increased since 2019, and that even if all the perpetrators can't be linked to white supremacy rhetoric, there might well be a majority of them that are.

HOWEVER, does that mean that if, as you suggest, we could just somehow banish or even just marginalize the sources of white supremacy, these so-called acts of terror would just go away?

Here's a link to the DOJ's "Justice News" page, which I'm looking at through the filter of "Hate Crimes," since that's what we're talking about. Let's see if all of these fit the Wray-Biden paradigm.

​The newest link, dated May 11 2023, concerns a perpetrator, David Chou. a Taiwanese emigrant to America who formed a grudge against Taiwanese independence and assaulted a Laguna Woods church populated by Taiwanese emigrants, endangering forty-plus churchgoers and killing one.

In March, two "persons of color" on the Hawaiian island of Maui were sentenced for a 2022 assault on a white guy for moving into their neighborhood.

Curiously omitted-- and presumably slotted into some other list-- is the November 2022 assault by Anderson Lee Aldrich on an LGBT club. While Aldrich may have been triggered in part by conservative dialectic, the root cause of his attack appears to stem from his having experienced accusations of being homosexual himself.

Also omitted is the 2019 Jersey City shooting, in which several Jews, as well as policemen, were murdered by two members of the Black Hebrew Israelite cult. Possibly they didn't make the list because both fanatics were killed shooting it out with police.

Again-- yes, a lot more hate crimes by white people, like the Buffalo shooter from 2022. But what do these incidents, three of which were committed by nonwhites, have in common with the others? Clearly all are motivated by some form of tribalism, one that cannot be confined to the paradigm of "white supremacy/nationalism." 

Now, if Joe Biden cared about promoting racial harmony in America, he wouldn't just play to his base by stressing the numerically superior numbers of persons linked in some way to some form of supremacist thought. (The Buffalo shooter has not been shown to have been a member of any specific group, but was radicalized by supremacist thought on 4chan.) A President wanting racial harmony would attack tribalism in all its forms. But Biden is a political hack, whose only concern was to project the image of Not-Trump-- not an actual reaction to Trump himself, but to the Liberal construction of Trump as the Insidious Source of Racist Empowerment. 

And every time a politician rants about one only form of tribalism, or even seems to apologize for lawlessness by persons of color (paging Jordan Neely), the white supremacists say, "See, the Liberals are supporting White Replacement." Thus they're far more empowered by guys like Biden than they ever were by Trump.

Peyton Gendron proved himself to be garbage, but so too did David Chou and the two Black Hebrews. I've had posters here call me a tribalist because I have fun mocking Mad Liberals. But I'm a guy spouting off on a messboard, not a politician entrusted with the public good. Joe Biden is not only a racist, he's also the best friend white supremacists ever had.