Tag: abortion

Paul Joseph Watson’s Case for Social Conservatism

The Portly Politico8 Comments

The Portly Politico is striving towards self-sufficiency.  If you would like to support my work, consider subscribing to my SubscribeStar page.  Your subscription of $1/month or more gains you access to exclusive content every Saturday, including annual #MAGAWeek posts.  If you’ve received any value from my scribblings, I would very much appreciate your support.

I’ve written before that social conservatism is the red-headed stepchild of modern conservatism.  Buckleyite fusionism threw a sop to the social conservatives, but largely in the context of the Cold War:  being a devout Christian was a middle-finger to those godless Commies in the Soviet Union, and so social conservatism represented another front in that conflict.

Since the end of the Cold War, when the battle against Marxism became more subtly a cultural one, social conservatives have been ejected in favor of economic conservatives and national security conservatives.  It’s square to insist that Americans should strive to live lives of chaste self-sufficiency and virtue, and self-restraint is bad for the bottom line.  Instead, let’s encourage all manner of degeneracy, so long as it helps GDP.

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The Desperate Search for Meaning, Part II

The Portly Politico6 Comments

A few weeks ago I wrote a piece about a New Age healer involved in a scam selling “healing crystals” and the like, and the women she employed.  Those women worked for this con artist with slavish devotion.  It was chilling how this Instagram thot used spirtualistic gobbledygook to influence those around her.

A similar example of women espousing dangerous ideas floated across my transom earlier this week.  Super controversial blog Chateau Heartiste shared a Tweet from James Woods.  Woods’s tweet features a video of two loons involved in some kind of energy channeling activity.  The older lady is delivering a discourse on overpopulation, telling women that having children is “not a good way” because it’s bad for the environment.  She also claims that the Earth can only support about one billion people (despite evidence to the contrary—we’re doing well enough with seven billion).

Next to the old crone is a younger women, who periodically toots—watch the video, and you’ll see how accurate that verb is—“That’s true!”  It’s creepy in that kind of unsettling, horror movie kind of way, like a scene where a disembodied child’s voice sings a nursery rhyme.

What’s even creepier is the death-centric, anti-life ideology that’s being espoused here.  Gavin McInnes played another clip from this New Age witch on a recent podcast, and explained that the women’s arm motions are a form of channeling, which these women believe pulls cancerous energy strands from their bodies.

My issue isn’t the alternative medicine (the old lady also calls Western medicine bad):  I’m open to all sorts of novel approaches to handling physical and mental illnesses, as I’m intellectually humble enough to know there are many things we still don’t understand.

Rather, my concern is that more and more women are falling for some seriously deadly notions.  “Don’t have children, it’s bad for the environment” inevitably leads to “let’s import Third World peasant cultures to keep Social Security solvent.”  It also deprives women of children.

I’m all for women having careers and being treated fairly in the workplace, etc., but let’s face it:  most women, whether they admit it or not, want to have children.  Children are a huge source of satisfaction and delight for women.  For every high-performing, Type-A go-getter like Nikki Haley (who does have children) or Angela Merkel (who does not), you probably have a thousand women who are (or would be) happiest raising children.

But what do I know?  I’m just a man.

Sanctimonious Leftism

The Portly Politico13 Comments

We’re all familiar with the lunacy of the Progressive Left, and its tendency toward insane and downright evil positions.  Issues like abortion (now, apparently, including babies that survive attempted murder against them) highlight the fundamentally different philosophical foundations of Progressivism and traditionalism.

That said, one of the more annoying aspects of modern Leftism is its sanctimonious virtue-signalling, which is part of the appeal of Progressivism:  you get “virtue” on the cheap, without any real sacrifice.

Case in point:  a letter to The Virginia Pilot about the Ralph Northam non-troversy.  Readers will know that I don’t much care about what costume Governor Northam wore three decades ago, but I do care that he advocates for infanticide both in and out of the womb.

But the letter in question is a prime of example of Leftist sanctimony in action, full of broad, vapory statements about how Northam can work towards reconciliation.  The letter is from Rich Harwood, who runs a policy think-tank of some kind called The Harwood Institute.

I only know about the Harwood Institute because, somehow, one of my e-mail addresses for one of the schools where I teach has ended up on their mailing list.  For about a year I thought it was the “Hardwood Institute,” and they were trying to sell me lumber.

Regardless, Rich Harwood, the namesake founder of this fairly bland, center-Left organization wrote a letter entitled “A suggested path toward reconciliation,” and blasted an abbreviated version out to the Harwood Institute’s e-mail list.

The entire letter is an exercise if blathering sanctimony.  He recommends five steps for Governor Northam, and how he can become, chillingly, an “instrument for society.”  One of those steps is—no joke—to “[m]ake room for deep sorrow.”

I think I just threw up in my mouth a little bit.

Here is an extended excerpt to give you the full flavor of Harwood’s virtue-signalling:

[Governor Northam] faces a fundamental choice: Is his reconciliation tour about his own political survival, or can he become an instrument of society? 

Choosing the latter requires him to exercise a ruthless humility, where he recognizes his own role is limited. Racial reconciliation cannot be led by a single leader, nor orchestrated by an elected official. It will come through a whole host of big and small actions, emerging over time, that include overlapping conversations, popular culture and music, the writing of new books and the illumination of painful history. 

So the governor must ask: What is my contribution in this moment? What can I do? What does it mean for me to be an instrument of society? ….

There may be those who say that Northam has made it past the worst of this crisis and that he should just hunker down and ride out the last of it. Perhaps that’s possible. But, for him, is that good enough? Can he live with that? Will that help him fulfill his personal calling, and more importantly gain a sense of redemption from Virginians? 

I urge Northam to choose the path of becoming an instrument of society.

Amid all of this feel-good crap is this phrase “instrument of society.”  That’s a terrifying concept, and one that is indicative of the totalitarian Left.  No one can just be—every individual must subsume himself into the mass.

Northam may have been an idiot thirty years ago; now, he’s a useful tool for the Left, except that the Left cannot forgive what may have been acceptable under yesterday’s morality.  For the Left, there IS no yesterday.  Everything that is bad now has always been bad, which is why their positions shift so constantly (remember when Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were opposed to gay marriage and supported border control?).

Harwood, too, is a useless tool for the Left, and he probably doesn’t even realize it.  He’s no-doubt marinated his entire life in a cloistered, East Coast liberalism that arrogantly believes it holds all the answers—if only we can get those rubes in flyover country to come to heel.

Racial issues in America are overblown and tiresome.  Civil rights have been secured for virtually every race and deviant lifestyle choice conceivable.  Instead of focusing on these silly side issues, let’s try to stop the mass slaughter of innocents.  That’s an area where we can—and should—make “room for deep sorrow.”

Northam Non-troversy and Abortion

The Portly Politico11 Comments

I’m going to be honest here:  I do not care about Virginia Governor Ralph Northam’s old yearbook photograph, in which he’s either in blackface or wearing a Klan hood.  I don’t support or endorse doing either of those outfits, but how does a photograph of a goofy costume from over thirty years ago affect the man’s ability to do his job now?  It’s not as though he has a track record of racist remarks that might bias his enforcement of Virginia’s laws against black, Jewish, or Catholic Virginians.

The problem with progressivism is that it eats its own with gusto, as the socially-acceptable behavior of yesteryear becomes the always-forbidden “hate” of today.  It was certainly in poor taste to wear blackface in the 1980s, but, give me a break.  When does the statute of limitations on poor decisions expire?  Are we allowed to never commit a mistake if we want to serve in public office?

What demonstrates how truly evil the Left is is that they don’t care about Northam’s endorsement, just a little over a week ago, of infanticide.  When asked in a radio interview what should be down with a child born alive that the mother initially wanted aborted, Northam replied that the mother and at least two physicians should consult about the baby’s fate while the baby was “kept comfortable.”

Where are the anguished cries about that?  Northam wearing a Klan hood to a beer bash in the 80s didn’t cost any black people their jobs or their lives.  Abortion kills them by the tens of thousands every year.

Pat Buchanan—ever-brilliant, ever-prescient and -insightful—has a piece exploring the implications of the Northam non-troversy that I highly recommend you read.  A representative excerpt:

We are at the beginning of a Kulturkampf to purge America of all monuments and tributes to the white males who created, built and ruled the country, and once believed that they, their nation, their faith, and their civilization were superior to all others. And, without apology, they so acted in the world.

Those two guys drinking beer in blackface and Klan robes and a hood thought they were being funny, but to the unamused members of a radicalized Democratic Party, there is nothing funny about them.

And, after Northam, these intolerant people will demand that the Democratic Party nominate a candidate who will echo their convictions about America’s past.

America will pay for its generations of infanticide if we don’t end it, and soon.  God is just, and delivers His judgment with swiftness and ferocity after long forbearance.  One reason the Philistines were destroyed was because of their worship of Baal, which required sacrificing babies.  Similarly, the Carthaginians were crushed, in part, because of their child sacrifices.

We’re sacrificing babies to the altar of progressive politics and the ethos of “if it feels good, do it—and don’t worry about the consequences.”  I can at least appreciate the hedonist who accepts the bad with the good of his lifestyle—say, the smoker who acknowledges it’s bad for him, but he enjoys doing it anyway.  But what kind of monster snuffs out a human life for convenience?

Northam needn’t resign over a picture.  But he and other Democrats should fall on their knees in repentance over their endorsement of the mass murder of innocents.