Category: Ideas and Policy

Americans Oppose Illegal Immigration

The Portly Politico1 Comment

Today’s Number of the Day from pollster Scott Rasmussen notes that 76% of American voters believe that illegal immigration is bad for the country.  That is a substantial majority (and it makes you wonder about the other 24%).

When breaking that number down by partisan affiliation, it’s not surprising that 90% of Republicans believe that illegal immigration is bad.  What is somewhat surprising is that 63% of Democrats believe that illegal immigration is bad.  That suggests that opposing illegal immigration and border control continue to be winning issues.

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Remembering 1519

The Portly Politico10 Comments

The start of the school year always means the start of the grand narrative of American history.  It dawned on me some years ago that, over the course of roughly 180 days, I undertake an annual, oral retelling of the story of the United States.  One day, I plan to record my lectures, taking the best bits, and compiling them into a lengthy podcast series.  After that, I’ll never have to teach again!

Regardless, the story always starts the same:  a brief overview of the pre-Columbian Americans (what we used to call “Indians,” and more clumsily “Native Americans”), followed up with Spanish exploration from Christopher Columbus through Hernan Cortez and on.

A major part of those early lessons is the encounter of the bloodthirsty Aztecs and the gold-mad Spaniards.  Students love the story of the advanced Aztecs, sacrificing humans to ensure the sunrise, and the arrival of the fiery-haired Cortez and his ragtag band of conquistadors and buccaneers.

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Lazy Sunday XXV: Techno-Weirdos

The Portly Politico52 Comments

Big Tech companies routinely run roughshod over free speech, working hand-in-glove with the Deep State of our government to curtail our rights.  This kind of public-private tyranny is designed to allow the government to control speech when it legally and constitutionally cannot, by allowing large tech companies to write vague, ever-changing “terms of service” agreements that are weaponized to silence or smother conservative voices.

With the potential to control what citizens see or don’t see, Big Tech firms like Facebook and Google have the power—given their incredible market share—to suppress news favorable to the president (for example), burying news that doesn’t fit their hip, Leftist viewpoints.  Even when third party websites can exist, they face demonetization:  get dropped by PayPal, and your ability to take donations or collect subscription fees withers.

All that power means Big Tech companies will likely play a huge role in the outcome of the 2020 election.  President Trump and conservative Republicans will be fighting an uphill battle against a blackout of the techno-elites’ making.

As such, this week’s Lazy Sunday is dedicated to four pieces about the techno-weirdos that lord over our society like the robber barons of the Gilded Age:

  • “Banned! Techno-Elite Deplatform Alex Jones” – this piece chronicled the surreptitious, cross-platform, nearly simultaneous deplatforming of InfoWars, Alex Jones’s alternative news and commentary site.  The coordinated nature of Jones’s deplatforming was such a stark example of collusion across multiple companies in the same industry, it practically begged for a Department of Justice investigation.  As far as I know, the government never looked into it.  Naturally, I immediately purchased a bunch of InfoWars stickers, because now we pretty much have to support Alex Jones, even if he is a bit wacky.
  • “First They Came for Crowder” – earlier this summer, lisping, totalitarian gay apparatchik Carlos Maza convinced YouTube to demonetize conservative comedian Steven Crowder with a single limp flick of his wrist.  The fallout was that a number of content creators—even non-conservatives—began to see their videos demonetized, as clueless YouTube execs tried to figure out what to do.
  • “Creepy Techno-Elites Spy on Users” – as if all this malfeasance weren’t enough, Facebook—owned and operated by an autistic intellectual property thief—was paying scribblers to transcribe the contents of voice calls made over its Messenger app.  Even the NSA never (allegedly) listened to calls without a warrant, but Facebook “is a private company, so it can do whatever it wants,” scream the libertarians.  Even more shocking, Google is rewriting its algorithms to suppress search results related to conservative content.  Break ’em up, DoJ!
  • “Friday Reading – Dystopian Short Story” – this recent post is a review and summary of the story “Das Woke Capital,” a chilling vision of what is to come if we don’t disrupt the nexus of progressive governance and progressive corporations.  Just a day after writing that post, Terror House Magazine published a similar story, “Chip,” about a near-future in which users willingly get a cybernetic chip implant that allows them to share content mind-to-mind—only, the designers have taken control of users’ minds to put them to work on massive undertakings like uncovering light-speed hyper-drives.  Sound ludicrous?  Don’t be so hasty.

We’re living in strange times, when technology has the potential to destroy our fraying social fabric—and to suppress the views of anyone who disagrees with the mercurial beta soyboys that run these companies.  I am loathe to recommend government intervention, but these companies represent an existential threat.  Break them up!

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

SubscribeStar Saturday: Labor Day Weekend 2019 – The Beauty of Social Peace

The Portly Politico7 Comments

Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.

It’s Labor Day Weekend, which means a glorious three days of rusticating for yours portly.  The school year is back in full swing, but I’ve been slowly recovering from an extended cold that began as a sore throat, morphed into days of nose-blowing, and metastasized into a hacking cough.  The cough should—God willing—be the final phase, and it seems to be getting better with a combination of Mucinex, expired cough medicine, and rest.

The plan this weekend is—aside from some light grading—a lot of rest.  I’m also excited to watch the South Carolina Gamecocks play their season opener (kick-off is tantalizingly close as I write this post).  My girlfriend has come up to my little adopted hometown, and is feeding me all sorts of delicious things.  It’s a fairly idyllic weekend, minus the cough.

It’s these sorts of things—resting after a week of hard work, enjoying a good meal, reading interesting books, and watching college football (all with good company, of course)—that make social peace such a coveted prize, and so worth preserving.  There is so much hatred and insanity in the public square now, and I fear that the socket wrench of revolution is ratcheting up with ever-greater intensity.

To read the rest of this post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.

The Boiling Potential of the Right

The Portly Politico2 Comments

Blogger photog at Orion’s Cold Fire—the gift that keeps on giving—has yet another excellent post examining the state of the Right today.  In particular, photog poses the question:  “How Will the Deplorables Get Organized?”

photog uses the analogy of a sword forged from various “metals”—parts of the coalition of the Right and the non-progressive side of politics.  His argument is that, during the Cold War, some metals were included in this grand alloy that didn’t blend well with the others, but they forged together well enough to make the sword that vanquished Communism.

However, those poorly-blended alloys—which he identifies as the GOP Establishment of Conservatism, Inc.—weakened the sword in a post-Cold War context, making the weapon ineffective.  A new metallurgist—photog doesn’t name who this is, but I suspect he means Trump, or perhaps the Trumpian Right—has discarded those unassimilable lumps, and has brought back in some of the metals that were rejected in the old days (the paleoconservatives, for example).

The new sword is still being forged; right now, it’s all boiling, kinetic potential, but it hasn’t hardened into cold, steely weapon capable of dealing a death blow to progressive lunacy.  The challenge, as photog sees it, is to bring together this energetic, chaotic new coalition into a disciplined, populist-nationalist (my words, not photog’s) movement with coherent aims.

Of course, photog notes it will not be easy.  Here’s a key passage from his post:

I’ve said that it needs to be done but I’m not trying to kid anyone into thinking it will be easy.  When I said that the New Right is like a boiling pot I wasn’t kidding.  Chaos and kinetic energy are the only rules and there is absolutely no consensus between the various groups that make it up.  They range from radical separatists who are busy storing ammo for the shooting war, to Tea Party civic nationalists who can’t figure out why John McCain didn’t get elected in 2008, to religious businessmen who want the government to stop persecuting them for their beliefs, to Rust Belt forgotten men who want to stop the globalists from putting the last nail into their economic coffins.  Herding cats would be a cakewalk in comparison.  But it will need to be done if we hope to avoid being back at the mercy of the Stupid Party.

In short, the task ahead is difficult, but necessary.  Otherwise, cucky GOPe figures will come back into control, and the Republican Party will continue to be controlled opposition.

That’s another key point that photog makes, and with which I strongly agree:  a third party is suicide.  The Trumpian Right has to take control of the Republican Party.  Trump’s brilliance as that he ran a third party campaign inside one of the two major parties.  He has been at least partially successful in turning the Republican Party into a vehicle for his policies, but GOP swells have also reined in the President.

Regardless, it’s crucial that Trump wins in 2020 if we want to see the hardening of this boiling new coalition.  If Trump loses, the clucking scolds of National Review, et. al., will waste no time in saying, “we told you so!”  It may be a generation again before a populist Republican has a shot again at the highest office in the land—we’ll be consigned to thirty years of cucky Bush-cons losing meekly to increasingly insane Democrats.

On the other hand, if Trump wins, we have a golden opportunity to cement the roiling new coalition into something enduring—an FDR-style grand realignment.

2020 is going to be an interesting year.

Gelernter Gives up Darwinism

The Portly Politico6 Comments

Yale Computer Science professor and—as I found out today—Trump supporter David Gelernter has given up on Darwinism, finding it to be a “beautiful” but flawed theory.  Gelernter acknowledges that species make small adjustments based on their environment, etc.—adaptation—and that Darwin was correct in that regard, but that the process of new species developing from existing ones is mathematically impossible, even if the universe is trillions of years old.

For conservative Christians, skepticism of Darwin’s theory of evolution is something you keep quietly to yourself, lest you’re mocked roundly, or that you militantly espouse, which tends to turn people away—they tune out.  Regardless, the world at large has bought into Darwinism completely, even with holes in the theory (like the lack of a plethora of pre-Crambrian fossils that should, according to Darwin’s theory that all life descended from a common ancestor, be present given the Cambrian Explosion).

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Ratcheting up Towards Civil War

The Portly Politico7 Comments

I’ve been catching up on photog’s excellent blog Orion’s Cold Fire, and boy did I miss a doozy.  Good ol’ photog regularly presents his pick for American Greatness “Post of the Day,” and on August 7, he wrote about a sobering Angelo Codevilla piece, “Igniting Civil War.”

Meanwhile, Southern history think-tank The Abbeville Institute posted an essay Monday asking “Is Political Separation in Our Future?”  These pieces suggest that something cataclysmic is looming for the United States.  Are they right to be concerned?

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Trade War with China is Worth It

The Portly Politico9 Comments

There’s a lot of disingenuous scuttlebutt flying around about a looming recession, the inverted yield curve, and the costs of the trade war with China.  I can’t help but think such doom and gloom reporting is part of an effort to undermine President Trump.  Investor and consumer confidence are emotional, fickle things, based as much on feeling as they are on hard economic data.

As such, I suspect that major media outlets are attempting a bank-shot:  scare investors and consumers enough, and they panic into a recession.  President Trump’s greatest strength at present is the booming economy and low unemployment rate; take that away, and loopy, socialist Democrats have a much better shot in the 2020 elections.  With Leftists like Bill Maher actually hoping for a recession to unseat President Trump, that’s not a far-fetched speculation at all.

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Lazy Sunday XXIII: Richard Weaver

The Portly Politico55 Comments

I’ve been fan-boying a great deal lately about Richard Weaver.  He’s one of my favorite authors, even though I’ve read comparatively little of his work.  Weaver died during the prime of his academic career, but before his premature death he managed to bequeath a rich heritage of scholarly works about literature, religion, and his beloved Dixie.

As I’ve written again and again, I always enjoy rereading the introduction to Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences, and hope to reread the entire book again soon.  The introduction sums up the modern West’s maladies starkly and clearly, tracing their origins to the nominalism of William of Occam.

I found one podcast in which two conservative commentators summarize and discuss the book, chapter-by-chapter; it’s a good, quick overview if you’ve got fifty minutes in the car:

That said, while I reference Weaver quite a bit, I actually have not written as many posts about him and his work as I thought.  Nevertheless, while I’m in the midst of my annual Weaver Fest, I thought it would be the perfect time to give the great academic his own Lazy Sunday:

1.) “Capitalism Needs Social Conservatism” – a #TBT post from the TPP 2.0 era, this post was part of a series on social conservatism, which I dubbed the “red-headed stepchild” of modern conservatism.  The post is more inspired by Weaver than it is about him, but I mention the paradox of prosperity near the end when I discuss Weaver’s drunk.

That’s my phrase for a metaphor Weaver employs near the end of the introduction to Ideas Have Consequences in which he compares modern society to a drunk.  The more inebriated and alcoholic the drunk becomes, the less capable he is of doing the work necessary to feed his addiction.  So it is with modern man—the more he luxuriates in excess and comfort, the less willing he is to do the uncomfortable work necessary to sustain his opulence.

2.) “Back to School with Richard Weaver” – the subject of last Thursday’s TBT, this little piece was from a 2014 Facebook post in which I quoted from “The South and the American Union,” an essay from Weaver’s Southern Essays.  It contrasts the Southerner’s “Apollonian” worldview of fixed limits and “permanent settlement” to the ceaseless striving and progression of the Northern, “Faustian” worldview.  It’s a fascinating dichotomy that, while controversial, certainly rings true to Southerners like yours portly.

3.) “The Portly Politico Summer Reading List 2016” – my classic, original reading list; naturally, Ideas Have Consequences tops the list!  As I wrote at the time, if you’re going to read just one book this summer, make it Ideas Have Consequences!

4.) “Ideas Have Consequences – Introduction” – I wrote this little summary for my History of Conservative Thought course.  It’s my quick rundown to help breakdown the main ideas from the introduction to high school juniors.  Hopefully it worked!

Well, that’s it.  Enjoy Weaver Fest 2019!  It’s back to school for me tomorrow.

–TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

Creepy Techno-Elites Spy on Users

The Portly Politico4 Comments

If you weren’t convinced that techno-elites are working hand-in-glove with the Deep State, news that Facebook hired scribblers to transcribe voice calls on the Messenger app should wake you to the fact.

That’s a level of creepy beyond merely selling your data or using an algorithm to use facial recognition software.  That’s creepy, to be sure, but when it’s some faceless formula it doesn’t seem as bad.  When a living, breathing humanoid is pouring over your voice conversations (salacious or otherwise), it adds a whole other layer of skin-crawling chilliness to creepiness factor.

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