TBT: Self-Righteous Virtue-Signalling Lives On

The capacity of human beings to be busybodies never ceases to amaze me.  Aristotle wrote that “man is by nature a social animal,” and he is a political animal as well.  As such, virtue-signalling and puritanical social policing are probably here to stay, whether we like it or not.

Still, I’m always struck by how willing people are to butt into others lives—not just the curiosity of gossip, but the desire to control other people’s behavior, and even thoughts.  I’m all about enforcing social norms through the soft power of culture, and even I don’t want to hassle people.  I think hard drugs and prostitution should be illegal, sure, but only because those do demonstrable harm, physically, mentally, and spiritually, beyond the individual partaking in them.  Otherwise, I’m more than willing to let people make their own mistakes, and to believe whatever kooky nonsense they’d like, so long as I’m afforded the same courtesy.

Maybe I’m not the best spokesman for a laissez-faire social life, but a broadly Jeffersonian-Jacksonian, rural outlander mentality should apply to our daily lives:  you chase your squirrels, and I’ll chase mine.  Often the very last thing I want to do is to give someone else a hard time about their lifestyle, beliefs, or the like, so long as they’re not forcing their insanity on me.

Read More »

Sanford Announces Presidential Bid

Former South Carolina Governor and Congressman for SC-1, Mark Sanford, announced Sunday that he is seeking the Republican presidential nomination in 2020 against incumbent President Donald Trump.  When Fox News host Chris Wallace asked Sanford why, he said that “We need to have a conversation on what it means to be a Republican.”

Sanford’s ostensible desire is to draw attention to America’s massive national debt, and our political unwillingness to address the ever-expanding, elephantine gorilla in the room.  But as local radio personality and former Lieutenant Governor Ken Ard said on his show this morning, Sanford is shining a bright light on himself as much as he is on the national debt.

Read More »

Americans Oppose Illegal Immigration

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.

Read More »

Lazy Sunday XXV: Techno-Weirdos

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:

Silence on the Epstein “Suicide”

Has anyone else noticed that, after the flurry of headlines and memes, talk of Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged suicide has died down substantially?  The mainstream media’s uncritical acceptance of the autopsy results is not surprising, but the autopsy seems to have quieted down speculation considerably, even though homicides are often misidentified as suicides.

That’s unfortunate.  There’s a great deal about Epstein’s death that is unanswered.  So it was refreshing to read this excellent piece from Christopher Roach at American Greatness, “What Happened to the Epstein Story?

Read More »

The Boiling Potential of the Right

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.

Ratcheting up Towards Civil War

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?

Read More »

Friday Night Recommendation: The Abbeville Institute

The Internet is a vast place, with a niche for everything.  It’s interesting to consider how much import users put into their own little online worlds—they know everything about what makes their little corner of the web tick, or click—but, if you’re outside of that niche, it’s almost like it doesn’t exist.  It’s like planets filled with intelligent life that cannot perceive or know one another, except when one spunky interstellar craft stumbles upon a distant world.

Regardless, this phenomenon certainly exists online, which explains, in part, why some Americans know everything wicked the progressive Left is unleashing upon our world, while others are blissfully unaware of their impending dooms.  One website that is doing yeomen’s work on our side is the Abbeville Institute.

Read More »

TBT: Progressivism and Political Violence II: Candace Owens Attack and the Deficiency of Decorum

About a year ago I wrote about the Leftist attack on Candace Owens and Charlie Kirk while they were attempting to enjoy breakfast.  Last summer, all the rage was for Leftist activists to harass conservatives and Trump administration officials while they were trying to dine.

Fast forward one year and we have conservative journalists getting smashed over their heads with concrete-filled milkshakes and guys in MAGA hats assaulted in the streets.  Nevertheless, the ranks of Conservatism, Inc., stubbornly insist on taking the high road, ruthlessly policing any threats to their Right, while shrugging helplessly—perhaps accompanied by a schoolmarmish finger wagging—as the Left ratchets up its wanton, unabashed violence.

Read More »

Unspeakable Fear

Scott Rasmussen’s Number of the Day for August 2 demonstrates the fear and distrust that grip our public discourse.  According to Rasmussen’s polling, 22% of voters are afraid to share their political views most of the time, with another 25% fearing to do so some of that time.  That means that 47% of voters are afraid to discuss politics with their co-workers, friends, neighbors, etc.

Of those voters polled, 39% who strongly approve of President Trump believe they are discriminated against because of their political views.

Read More »