We laughed at the Republican busybody who couldn't joke, declared war on dirty paintings, and peered through your bedroom window. Now that person has switched sides, and nobody's laughing
You keep adding to your knowledge base but need to release those things you “knew” that never were really true.
What do I mean by “really true”? For example, hardcore evangelicals who have not found a way to balance their faith with reality can be embarrassing. That said, the occasional eruption of a small town school board that oversteps its bounds is not worthy of armies of journalists and has not been a legitimate threat to our liberties for decades. It is appropriate to oppose it but the risk and the response has never been proportionate to outrages from the left. In this sense, that threat was never really true - it was gnat biting an elephant.
The fascist, racist, anti-intellectual nature of the American political left has been on display (to those open to seeing it) since at least the 1960s. After a pretty good run in the 50’s, working with the majority of Republican leaders to make serious improvements in civil rights, leftists succumbed to their ingrained belief that people of color could only thrive under widespread government control of their lives.. A welfare state initiated by demonstrably racist Democrats and (reportedly) acknowledged by LBJ to have been created to subjugate Blacks was one of the earliest signs.
Bizarre, Malthusian claims about impending environmental demise (that has been routinely refuted by the passage of time), followed along with ever increasing demands for control of the means of production by governmental central planners. Dependence on dubious court decisions and executive orders increasingly replaced the legislative process (and the related inconvenience of open debate and compromise – instead, let’s just allow 1-5 people to dictate fundamental changes to government policy). A mind shattering devolution of the education system was also part of the leftist agenda, vastly expanding the number of innumerate people, unschooled in critical thought and indoctrinated to anti-historical and unscientific dogma.
So, when you preface your belated recognition of the current terrible risks to our republic with “Things we once despised about the right have been amplified a thousand-fold on the flip”; you are missing the historical reality of the last 50-60 years. The faults on the right – as legitimate as it was to acknowledge and oppose them – were vastly exaggerated (often by your employers) while the leftist behaviors you are just seeing now have always been 100s of times worse (I will concede that breaking 1000 times is a recent development).
This did not happen overnight or even during the Trump administration. This has been something that 40-60% of the American people have seen – and warned you about – to varying degrees for a long time. Until you acknowledge this, you will not understand the degree of risk the country faces.
If you go back and read the piece that I wrote about that trial, you'll see that I was troubled and a little confused by the one-sided nature of the situation. I thought the argument for ID was wrong but the point the defense lawyers were trying to make -- that the famous scientists were profoundly anti-religion -- was interesting and got more interesting the more the witnesses refused to answer those questions. Part of the reason I wrote "Hate Inc." was to talk about the increasing discomfort I felt at doing the same kinds of stories about dumb Republicans over and over again. As time passed it all became more complicated and there was no real way to address certain questions.
I became a republican because at the time they were the party of the practical.
I became less enamored of the party as it bowed to the religious right.
I became even less enamored of it as it stupidly embraced neoliberal economic theory and "maximizing shareholder value" and sacrificed the national interest for the interests of Wall Street.
THEN...along comes Bill Clinton and wow....now I get the same crap only now I get it with crazies on the left. Only difference between him and the republicans on economics was that Clinton thought about Silicon Valley and Hollywood in addition to Wall Street.
ALL HAIL THE H1B program and offshoring and union busting.
Hillary was more of the same only with the addition of being a war monger.
Now? Now I can choose between Trump, who at least gives lip service to American workers AND HAS curbed H1B's and made offshoring less pleasant AND has kept us out of more wars but who is a loon with an obnoxious mouth and a bad Twitter habit.
OR
A man, Biden, that will only get elected because the crazies think they can control him and so far they seem to be right.
But, ya know, we honestly have a real chance at a revolution. No joke.
Got two sides, almost equally divided, that hate each other, honestly hate each other.
The support programs like the expanded unemployment and the PPP are about to run out, the eviction moratoriums are about to run out. Gonna see a surge in unemployment over the next two or three months and a surge in the uninsured even as the COVID virus re-surges and we have more lock downs.
Right about then, we have an election that neither side is going to accept losing. This will be made worse by issues with mail in voting and lots of lawyers and stories of miscounts or missing ballots amplified by the media.
Toss in the cuts in police and local government jobs because of the lost tax revenue from the shutdowns....
We have seen what has already happened in our streets. Think we can safely say that that will be amplified multi fold.
OF COURSE we are on the verge of revolution. When you tell people you intend to make their lives intolerable, they revolt.
There used to be a solution for this, known as federalism. People were allowed to run their local communities as they wished. Now, the country is to be homogenized. People who live wrongly are to be crushed. The only surprising thing is that the country isn't aflame already.
Funny you say that. I was just telling my daughter the other day that the biggest problem this country has is that so many people want to impose their views of how to live on others.
Kansas is not California. Massachusetts is not Alabama.
If MO wants to make abortion impossible to get and MA wants to make it on demand and paid for by the state then let each make its own choice. If you disagree strongly enough then you can move.
VA wants to have open carry or easy to obtain concealed carry and MA wants to make both nearly impossible, then so be it.
If blue states want to have high taxes for services then they should not be able to deduct that from federal taxes.
PA wants frakking and Oregon is against it, then so be it.
LIMIT what the feds do and get involved with.
Going a bit further, do not be an asshole.
If you do not believe in gay marriage thats fine, just do not interfere, just stay out of it. On the other hand, if your a gay couple do not try to compel an evangelical baker to make your wedding cake. Find another baker.
Really, people need to just learn to leave each other alone, stop vilifying those that disagree with them, stop trying to compel others to accept or participate in things they vehemently disagree with.
The problem today is that everyone is determined to impose their views on others, and winning an argument is not enough, they need the other side to bow down and acknowledge a moral or intellectual shortcoming, to be humiliated.
The golden rule...Treat others as you would wish to be treated and do it regardless of their stance.
Just try and find a kosher baker/caterer when you want to have a wedding reception at a Conservative or Orthodox Jewish synagogue. After jumping through all those rules when I got married in 2011 I have little sympathy for people who get turned away by one baker. Yeah, just go find another one. Don't sue the one who won't provide the service.
It’s an absurd fixation to destroy the baker for personal glee. Disagree with his hyper-ideology, by why torment him? There are at least 29 bakers within a 3 mile radius who would happily design the cake of their choice, likely with far greater creative dazzle.
What has been completely excluded from the coverage is really important. A citizen expose’ journalist visited more than 20 Muslim owned bakeries, requesting the same cakes. He was denied by all of them.
The compulsion to rule others is a fundamental trait of collectivists. It is at the core of their beliefs. And in America the collectivists, who Governmetn is always the answer are on the left.
Good post Daniel. My initial reaction is that some actions have costs (environmental damages for example). Some areas will be more responsible, and yet suffer the fallout because of the lazier areas. When the results of actions permeate outward, laissez-faire loses sheen.
But then, I suppose we can hope for a discourse that reaches into areas and makes them change their minds themselves-- rather than decreeing everything for the whole country.
But we all know federalism is a sham. You mean localized laws and governance. And without an actual federal edict that says this (fuck Trump’s all on your own nonsense) we are all left, whatever non offsensive genital designation you want hanging in the wind.
By the way Matt, fix the lag on posting please. It’s honestly keeping me from posting more
Federalism has been rendered a sham by those determined to impose their will on us. But we could easily restore it, IF we are willing to let deplorable people live by their disgusting and loathsome customs.
Not even Trump would call Democrats Deplorable. That there was a slip of her filthy mouth. Keep bringing it up and the Senate will go ALL REPUBLICAN. The more you denigrate people, the more gestapo mandates you contrive, "The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers. "
Sorry! Trump is correct. There was no Welfare when this country was settled right Up to the 60s. Welfare was for women who lost their husbands in WAR.
I was never supposed be used as an international Advertisement to invite people of the world to become institutionally dependent on the US government.
WIC February 9 , 2010 USDA informs the Mexican Embassy that an agreement reached between the State Department and ICE, the Women, Infants & Children (WIC) food voucher program does not violate immigration laws prohibiting immigrants from becoming a “public charge.”
“SNAP” (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), includes a Spanish-language flyer provided to the Mexican Embassy by the USDA with a statement advising Mexicans in the U.S. that they do not need to declare their immigration status in order to receive financial assistance. “Come get free SSI money”
Immigrant families caught illegally crossing the Mexican border told U.S. immigration agents they made the trip because they believed they would be permitted to stay in the United States and collect public benefits.
You seem to be one of very few who are aware of the WEF globalist NWO support for shareholder corporatism.I’m pro-capitalism, but this in no way aligns with what capitalism was meant to represent. It was fair trade and the ability for every American to grab the brass ring, free from government bureaucratic hyper-regulation, outsourcing American jobs, cronyism and multinational monopolies that crush competition and entrepreneurialism.The duopoly has been selling us out for decades and getting filthy rich on the backs of the middle class who no longer have the opportunity to build or manufacture anything, small business owners who can no longer afford to keep their doors open or afford to purchase a home of any sort.
They created a nation of consumers who can no kinder afford to purchase anything and our ability to manufacture anything to mercantile tyrannical oppressive regimes, ie China.And now they own us.Literally. We don’t even have the mineral components necessary to provide life saving medicines, vitamins or OTC basics like Advil,antihistamines,antacids,aspirin, toothpaste,eyedrops, antibiotic ointments.. nothing
Even sold out our uranium.
We rely on China for everything, including toilet paper. And now our shelves are bare, we are feeling the first pangs of hyper-inflation, yet We The People are the selfish, arrogant whiners.
Are you familiar with The Quincy Institute? A “think tank”co-founded by Soros and Koch.Profoundly antisemitic,pro-Nazi, anti-National sovereignty, anti-American and pro-illegal , unvetted mass migration via open borders. The latest unabashedly corrupt cartel-The Familes Bush, Clinton,Obama, with Soros big bugs are bringing 50,000 unvetted Afghans to the US without any claim to seeking asylum
Perhaps they were peeping and you failed to hear it.
Union Bosses contributed to Biden.
Union "Rank and File" voted for Trump.
Biden got twice the corporate contributions as Trump and his new wars are Quid Pro Quo for those military Contractors' contributions.
It seems to me a wall was started and Biden refused to finish it even though the SCOTUS said Trump could use military money to defend against invasion. BIDEN allowed all the construction to be carried off by his beloved Mexican Cartel who is bringing him all the single mothers and kids he could possible want in a plan to economically bring the US to it's knees for the One World Government. Look at all the money he as spent.
To date, Bidden has let over 4,000,000 Welfare headed people into the US and only deported 33,000 in 2021.
There are 24,000,000 unauthorized and their Birthright Citizen children. States who don't want to subsidize this, shouldn't have to since it's against the law anyway:
212(a)(4) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), an individual seeking admission to the United States or seeking to adjust status to that of an individual lawfully admitted for permanent residence (green card) is INADMISSIBLE if the individual, "at the time of application for admission or adjustment of status, is likely at any time to become a public charge.” That's clear don't you think?
Biden SCOTUS Slap Downs:
NO green cards for unauthorized
NO work Permits for unauthorized
NO welfare for 1.5 million border busters
NO Pathway to Citizenship for deported DACA
NO Open Border - wait in Mexico
NO Biden changing Senate rules
NO Race based COVID relief
NO Biden Vaccine mandates for business
NO Vaccine Mandate for Federal Workers
NO Extension of eviction Ban
NO Repeal of “Wait in Mexico”
NO Parole temporary admitted does not get permanent residence
NO can not extend Parole stay in US
NO to Biden climate accounting measure
NO to Biden Punishing Unvaccinated Air Force Members
It was the SCOTUS that saved US against the LAWLESS Democrats.
Biden has put US back into Afghanistan (to drag more Refugees into the US public assistance program) IRAQ, Somalia, Syria, All to dilute the AMERICAN DREAM?
Tho I've personally seen (esp. in the last 10-15 years) plenty of B.S. from the Woke upper-middle class, I'm still stunned at the level of degeneracy they (esp. those in the MSM) have publicly shown these last few years, *esp.* on Trump/Russia/FISA.
To paraphrase Churchill, never have so many hyper-privileged brats gotten so much so quickly and clearly wrong (of such huge consequence), with such stupendous arrogance.
That they've proceeded to continue to tee off on, not only Trump, but his Deplorable backers (incl. a 16-year-old, N. Sandman), shows a level of inhumanity I never expected to see in the US.
So, as RRDRRD says, it is indeed important for everyone to understand, the degree of risk the country faces from these degenerates.
Biden got twice the corporate contributions as Trump and his new wars (Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Syria) are Quid Pro Quo for those military Contractors' contributions.
Workers are the deplorables because only 30% pay more taxes than the suck up and only HALF of the population is working which makes it %15 of the total population paying taxes for 85% of the population. How long do you think that's going to last?
Matt, this is a thoughtful answer. While I haven't read your original work on the ID trial, I certainly saw in your tone in this piece that you were disgusted with journalists who treated it like a visit to the zoo.
But you're still stuck in both-sideism. Is it really authoritarian for the feds to intervene in Portland after 5 weeks of rioting? While there have been a couple of troubling incidents amidst all the violence and mayhem, do we really have evidence that peaceful protestors are being targeted by law enforcement?
You can help cooler heads to prevail through your precise and vivid writing.
Having been a life long Portlander got all but the last two and half years of my life, i agree. PDX, a city I love and always enjoy boating, has become the quintessential Emperor Has No Clothes situation.
The 5 person council along with their predilection to elect a new Chief of Police is a damning indictment on the way my beloved city is run.
Not surprised you responded to this reply. It is remarkably sophisticated. While RRDRRD is correct to point out that the Dover, PA incident is a woefully pathetic counterpoint to the left's expansive authoritarianism, he does not try to contend with your reality. If you did not add some sugar to the bitter medicine, you would not be long for your billet.
Greta Thunberg has far more cache with the left than James Hansen. This is because the left has lost it to a dangerous extent and your main audience is a subset of these people. You're good enough for my purposes. I look forward to the day when you are truly free.
Just keep in mind that there is nothing more contemptible than an American talking like a North Korean. They have a good excuse. What's ours?
Your last paragraph +100. Methinks that NK is not so much a bogeyman, but a model to be envied and emulated by those pulling the strings and those revolutionaries thirsting for power.
I acknowledge that you have seen the issues and are moving in the right direction. Your commentary still leaves me believing that there are significant assumptions you make that you will want to cast off in the long run. I think you have a lot of unsupportable moral equivalency between left and right... but I say that only relatively recent writings from this venue and Rolling Stone.
For what it is worth, I just downloaded Hate Inc and will see if it alters my perspective.
Matt: I did get the nuance in your piece. But the title suggests an equivalence between ancient discrediting conduct of fringe conservatives that is, in actuality, nowhere near the danger and scope of contemporary and mainstream leftist behavior. For me, the title of your piece is not fair.
You are concerned about what the left is doing, but you profoundly disrespect the right.
You also oscillate between insulting Republicans and conservatives as if they are one and the same- were they then? They aren't now.
You betray the classic distaste for believes of anything except pure science - even thou science has become the manipulable 'religion' of the left. Sprinkle the term onto anything and it become unassailable. (Surgical mask for virus spread prevention anyone?)
Very hard to read the first half of this because of it's strong negative emotional underpinnings.
I disagree with anyone who feels the need to condemn those who take comfort in the community of faith. Lots of rebels are religious. That said, group think, as this piece conveys, can produce ignorance.
The left has combined the hideous , murderous ideologies of Stalinism,Nazism,Maoism,Fundamentalist Islamism,NoKo,Jim Jones,Malthus,Vlad The Impaler,Attila The Hun,Emperor Hirohito,Ted Bundy,Manson,Mengele,the psychopathic tell-animal torture,Orwell’s Surveillace State, The Man.
The Cult Of Scientism,Faucism,McCarthyism and the global Pharma/Multinational Shareholder Vulture Kleptocracy / Silicon Valley Techno-BureaucraticTranshumist militarism.
Everything they purportedly hate is what they’ve become on steroids. Including cheering for Fauci and Collins grotesque animal torture.Though they’re never valued human life, they once loved dogs.It was something that crossed party politics.They’ve transcended the point of no return
You really ought to get back on the education beat to see what the newest versions of the Scopes Trial are all about. If school board members were just yelling at people it’d be a relief. Now you can get yelled at, then maybe arrested for coming to the meeting or visited by CPS. Meanwhile, the teachers are saying one thing to you and something completely different to your kids, such two-faced mendacity not only being encouraged by the district, but required by policy.
The biggest difference between church lady scolding and cat lady scolding is that the latter is backed by the full power and authority of government (and probably your employer’s HR department), and the scolds are downright eager, even happy, to destroy their enemies along with anyone who expresses mild skepticism or dares ask a question. This sounds like an exaggeration, I know. It’s not, and furthermore, these people show every sign of doubling down post-election.
Fantastic exchange here. And, Matt clarified something in his response that I had a questioned in my comment above. This is the kind of rich, open-minded exchange that happens too rarely these days - even in the online journals - and that so many of us are thirsty for. So, just wanted to say thanks.
This is LOL-worthy and nearly content-free libertarian-ism, and I'm sad Matt wasted his time replying. I can't tell you why without a longer text than you wrote. Your writing is also about 50 percent lard, overburdened with adjectives and adverbs. "Leftist conspiracies" did give me a laugh though. As if the left in the U.S. could organize a barbecue.
"Bizarre, Malthusian claims about impending environmental demise (that has been routinely refuted by the passage of time)"
You are not paying attention. Humans are supposed to live on the interest of the bounty of nature. We're in the process of squandering the principal (a process that was already remarkably far along in the US by the end of the 19th century.) Civilizations have done this before. It did end well for them.
Still waiting for that population bomb and ice age they assured us of in the 70s. "Experts" have predicted our impending doom before. It did not end well for them.
Glib sarcasm on this issue only gets a chortle from an audience of other ignoramuses.
The predictions of an Ice Age in the 1970s were more like trivial speculation than a consensus position that was reinforced over time by an accumulation of hard evidence, as with the current conditions of global warming and climate instability. Those conditions are presently seen most dramatically in the increase in carbonic acid in the oceans, and the effects are not trivial. Smoldering peat fires and raging forest fires north of the Arctic Circle don't support the basis for your mockery very well. Neither does the undermining of the Antarctic ice fields by upwelling of the warming seas.
As to Malthus being refuted: I'd like that to be so. (Just as I wish that anthropogenic global warming wasn't a real thing, despite the mounting evidence to the contrary that's has by now been acknowledged by some of the largest oil companies on the planet.) But until the total human population of the planet reaches a peak and then stabilizes without a crash, the possibility of a catastrophic reckoning can only be said to have been delayed, not refuted..
My observation that the natural bounty found in the territory of the US has been squandered is a matter of historical fact. I can refer to the peak years of the American bison and passenger pigeon harvest in the last quarter of the 19th century. Just before the bison went commercially extinct, and the passenger pigeon became completely extinct. Wild populations of Atlantic salmon are practically extinct in American waters. The other sea-running fish species are a small fraction of their former populations. The Chesapeake Bay- the largest estuary in the world- is a vestige of its former abundance, it's waters largely degraded by the factory farming of poultry. Much of the Gulf of Mexico has suffered a similar fate as the downstream consequences of monocrop farming of soy, corn, and animal fodder with petrochemicals and pesticides.
Production of plastic, an inherently durable synthetic substance, boomed over the past 30 years for use as a throwaway substance, as the ultimate artifact of a modern material culture that enshrines disposability for convenience. Now microplastics are being increasingly absorbed along the entire food chain from plankton to humans, long-term effects unknown. And the enormous resource trove that originally propelled the European settlement of the US, its productive capacity, and its prosperity is largely used up. Oil reservoirs that practically pumped themselves, high-grade lodes of iron, nickel, copper, silver, and gold, top-grade lumber...depleted, or gone entirely. But those losses are relatively insignificant compared to the looming consequences from depletion of the fertile soil and underground water reserves that supply a large fraction of American agricultural production.
I'm not offering any of those observations as hypothetical scenarios projected decades into the future as a possible outcome, the way speculations about a possible Ice Age occasionally popped up in an insignificant number of news and magazine articles in the 1970s. I'm speaking of historical fact and present-day circumstance. And we'd better do something about the problems while we're still a comfortable and affluent society.
Actually glib sarcasm is a highly effective magnet for silly yet pedantic responses from ignoramuses. BTW, the upcoming ice age predictions were literally in textbooks back in the 70s. Don't kid yourself, the current alarmists are just as wrong as Erlich, Holdren, and Malthus.
Speaking as someone who was reading high school and college textbooks in the 1970s, forecasts of a coming Ice Age might have warranted a half-page sidebar that brought it up as a possibility.
And for what it's worth, even if a consensus of meteorologists and geographers from 50 years ago had made incorrect predictions of a looming Ice Age (to repeat, that did not happen), it doesn't impeach the credibility of present-day climate science, any more than the errors found in 1960s era timelines of hominid evolution discredit the entire discipline of physical anthropology today.
I have my comfortably literate, numerate, and historically accurate jacket on right now. And it does insulate me from irrational beliefs whether coming from climate alarmists or creationists.
@Mascott I think this is brilliant, and thoroughly depressing, of course. I would like to add to it, only because I find that self-congratulatory tone of the doubters who say "we ain't dead yet" so galling. We (the worriers) may be guilty of pessimism in the face of the rampant stupidity and short-sightedness of the human race. We sometimes don't allow for individual brilliance that keeps total annihilation at bay. So, we didn't anticipate Norman Borlaug's genius that increased wheat yields to forestall Malthus, or the vast scientific interventions that worked/work to counter the effects of fossil fuel consumption (including plastics). And lab-grown meat means that we don't have to mourn all the wildlife that has perished. But for all the Jeremiah's that maybe forget to hope, there are thousands of ostriches who say it can't happen because it hasn't happened yet, and lead us into peril. All those who argued that low numbers of deaths from Covid meant that we should re-open, because - money, now see that there were fewer deaths because we sheltered in place, and the disease is now out of control. But that's OK, because some scientists are working themselves to death to come up with vaccines, (from which drug companies will make billions) that will save our bacon; too late for the hundreds of thousands who perished.
Just above someone commented (excitedly) that we are approaching a revolution, because both sides are so entrenched that compromise is becoming impossible - yay! I guess maybe our time is up.
Malthus actually made two points. 1) The birth rate is always greater than replacement rate over any period of a decade or so. 2) The human population invariably tends to increase faster than the food supply. From this it follows logically that human misery and want is inescapable.
History has refuted both contentions. Websearch "birth dearth" and "green revolution."
My point is that history is not over and done yet. It's a few decades too early to rest assured that Malthus has been finally refuted.
Don't get me wrong; I want his prediction to be refuted. I want the camel to still be standing strong when that last straw is added to the burden. But even the most optimistic predictions only have us about 80% of the way to planetary ZPG.
Malthus's predictions were absolutes. People would ALWAYS outbreed the food supply.
With an absolute prediction that A is always followed by B, any failure of B to occur after A refutes the prediction.
It's odd. Thirty years ago, a college professor teaching a class I was in gave me materials showing the birth rate had been falling relentlessly for about a half-century, and that the population explosion was due to the death rate falling faster. (Those pesky brown people's failure to die in great numbers being particularly marked). Yet he was certain that overpopulation doom was upon us. Yet a belief that the death rate would always be less than the birth rate was ridiculous. There was no prospect of people living to be hundreds of years old.
Currently, the world's population is expected to top out at about 10 billion. A decade or so ago, it was expected to top out at 15 billion. Thirty years ago, the idea of a population peak was almost unheard of. Yet the anxiety continues. Why?
While I am replying to you, much of this is also directed to the other 1 or 2 misguided posters trying to rewrite history regarding “Bizarre Malthusian claims about impending environmental demise.”
You can keep trying to edge away from reality but the truth remains that academia and the political left (they were somewhat more distinct entities back then) widely accepted and promoted a belief in the imminent demise of civilization as we know it though mass starvation and/or climate change in the form of an impending ice age. The Population Bomb was a bestseller and Ehrlich was called upon by myriad government and nonprofit committees, panels, for his “expert” testimony. Smithsonian Magazine called it “one of the most influential books of the 20th century” (JANUARY 2018).
I’ll direct you to “The Global Cooling Scare Revisited (‘Ice Age’ Holdren Had Plenty of Company)” by Robert Bradley Jr September 26, 2009 with an extensive list of quotes indicating prominent individuals, organizations, and publication that were on the global cooling bandwagon {FYI, I am not certain if this site allows links and I don’t intend to retype this. You can find these.).
Did some people disagree? Of course, That does not change the fact that these were mainstream ideas, particularly with the political left; to pretend they were outliers is absurd. Does the abject failure of these concepts utterly refute the current “consensus” – no. What it does is severely undermine the credibility of the fields of science related to the environment. They represent an ongoing pattern of failure in these fields that, for all intents and purposes starts with Malthus.
Malthus has been refuted because his underlying premise was that food production could not possibly keep up population growth. It has, in fact, outstripped it. Ehrlich specifically predicted the death by starvation of hundreds of million in the 1970s – clearly refuted. As for the Ice Age, what can I say, the new “consensus” is AGW (at least for the moment).
The underlying point of the original post was that the political left has a pattern of buying into dubious science and then trying to impose large scale interventions for problems that are somewhere between exaggerated and non-existent. There may be reasonable arguments about the degree to which this is true but historical reality supports the general premise.
I have come to think of it as a bacterial colony in a petri dish, which poisons itself before it can ever achieve maximum population density. I suppose one can just wait for the bitter end; I choose to try to live responsibly for the rest of the culture. Others may differ.
Humans aren't bacteria, or yeast. We have self-aware consciousness and free will, of the sort that provides enough latitude and agency to allow us to escape the trap. At least potentially.
I'm also aware of the human tendencies toward bot behavior, somnambulism, self-pitying egotism, self-exalting egotism, and all the rest of it, including the potential to behave in ways too sickening to relate. I've been around. Been there, and done a bit of it myself. But the hour is getting late.
The line between resource use and abuse are defined by our current knowledge base, and only that. You might have had a sharper point with resource shortage arguments in the 2000s when we knew less about producing resources than we do today, but in the era where American petroleum engineers did the impossible and squeezed oil out of a rock, this line of thinking falls remarkably flat. The knowledge base and the tool base that we have available to us compared to even 2010 is staggeringly large, and is not only growing, the rate of growth itself is accelerating. Malthus may not be put off, but he's never yet won and in just American shale formations alone, peak oil *globally* has been shoved back almost a century.
You're making it sound as if I was arguing in favor of Malthus. I wasn't. I was pointing out that his proposition remains in dispute.
The line between resource use and abuse or overuse is ultimately defined by physical limits. The growth in human knowledge has a demonstrated capacity to increase the activation of the latent potential of resources- sometimes dramatically. But past performance is not a guarantee of future success.
The real heart of the effort to refute Malthus has little to do with oil, at least not directly. Or with other inert substances like strategic elements and precious metals, either. It's about sustainable food production: soil, water, and climate (and aquatic habitat, which is crucial to produce an abundance of fish and shellfish species.) I realize that petrochemical-based agriculture was crucial to the "Green Revolution", but it hasn't had a positive effect on any of those foundational elements of food production.
In that regard, it would be interesting to attempt to model the amount of food resources lost to the fishing and shellfish harvesting industries as a result of the "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico, vs. the amount of food produced by the upstream petrochemical agriculture that accounts for the majority of the nutrient pollution that's caused it. And I'd like to see much the same cost-benefit analysis applied to the Chesapeake Bay.
This comment, much like most of your offerings to this forum, is a testament to the informed reason and patience you display; even when sadly confronted by the haplessly uninformed or gleefully assailed by the zealous false prophets and propagandists of pseudo-intellectualism. The latter group, of course, seem unable to resist employing their dissembling nonsense in perpetually failing attempts to refute factual constructs with fictitious magical theory.
It has always perplexed me how a person can fear almost comical biblical authoritarianism more than hardcore leftist radicalism working it's way into every facet of government with all of it's monopoly on power. And yet, now that a tiny handful of the left's finest popular writer's are willing to openly attack woke-mania, some seem pissed that they're late to the party. I myself am quite happy to actually have real liberal writers who's pieces I anticipate. And here's the dirty secret. Wokeness cannot move conservatives leftward. But guess who and what can?
I respectfully and strongly disagree that any push to promote theology, and bad theology at that, in schools should be perceived as harmless. Your commentary is loaded with bias that deserves its own medium for debate.
It doesn’t matter how late he came to the party. The fact is that he came and ditto Glenn Greenwald. Those of us who were raised by or were for most of our youth leftists didn’t understand all at once. It takes years and Taibbi deserves credit.
The unfortunate realties about global warming haven’t been disproven with the passage of time. Glaciers are melting rapidly. Weather is more and more erratic. Life as we know it is hanging in the precarious imbalance.
What exactly are you trying to say? You use way to many ten cent words and phrases when pennies will do. I will concede that I haven’t yet read the replies, but holy hell man, you sound like Joey in Friends trying to pimp Chandler and Monica for adoption.
Apologies if that reference is too hip for some, but damn, succinctness is the key
Not trying to be rude but when a post receives as many positive responses as this one, including a response from the editor, it is obviously written effectively for the audience at hand. Perhaps the issue is with you.
Agree on all counts. It's a one-sided power imbalance in favor of the left. To sic the IRS on conservatives all Obama had to do is flip the switch. His leftist allies were already long in place in those positions. Same with 90% of every government agency donating to and voting Democrat. It may look that way to someone like Matt who's career focused on the right's absurdities, but it's nowhere close to a fair fight. Bothsidesism only clouds the issue.
The only reason this has grown to proportions never before seen is the Republican Establishment covering up the roles of the role in the IRS Scandal of McCain, his pit Bull Henry Kerner ( stupidly appointed Office Of Special Council) and McCain’s campaign advisors team’s role. They continue to point out only Obama and the Dem’s criminal weaponization of the IRS. Nobody was punished, the “ investigation” never came to resolution. Why not? Ditto Benghazi. Because McCain, Graham, Flake, Corker were all involved.
We should demand better. Hold EVERY player accountable! This is the toxic corrupt byproduct of the duplicity UniParty Establishment Deep Stat duopoly.
Google “ McCain/ Kerner IRS Scandal”. Judicial Watch, Daniel Greenfield are among those who explicitly exposed it and they aren’t exactly liberal operatives.
For my life, I can’t understand why they refuse to eat them out. Judicial Watch exposed it long ago as did several really good investigative journalists
The problem with the Taibbi camp is that they think the Left "has become as bad as the Right" when in fact their notion of the evil Right was only ever propaganda from the dishonest Left.
They were part of the problem until recently, and now pride compels them to insist that the problem didn't begin until they, in their noble wisdom, noticed it. To protect their delusions of innocence, they aggressively slander all who noticed the problem before they did as having genuinely been the evil that the woke described them as.
Taibbi will never acknowledge that Rush Limbaugh was RIGHT all those years (and he was wrong). No, Limbaugh was a MONSTER, and the Left didn't start also being monstrous until precisely the moment that Matt Taibbi started criticizing it!
I've long been a fan, but the vitriol of the comments on your twitter post finally pushed me into subscribing and supporting you.
I share your skepticism of both the political left and right, and probably for similar reasons. It seems that moderate liberals—in the traditional sense—might find a better home with conservatives at the moment? They seem to at least have respect for my perspective and I see more hope for compromise, moderation, and positive evolution, especially in a post Trump world. Thoughts?
I've been an active democratic socialist and am a long-time radical feminist and have found much more thoughtful conversation at American Conservative, National Review, and Spiked over the past eight weeks than I've seen in most "leftist" circles for awhile. My radical feminist views have long aligned with those of conservative women (except for keeping abortion safe and legal--I agree on the keeping it rare part, which leads to some liberal feminists tearing me apart), and the extreme danger of transactivism on multiple levels had already led me to part with a lot of the "Left." But watching the misappropriation of critical race theory as well to harm and surveil people drove me over the edge. In May I had this feeling that the whole white fragility thing, as it was playing out among my acquaintances and the text itself, seemed very dehumanizing to black people and extremely self-serving to the many white people I knew adopting it. I began looking around to see if any black people disagreed, and I've discovered DOZENS of amazing black "conservative" intellectuals whom I'd never heard because I'd been living in a left-wing bubble. That was two months ago, and my mind has just been blown. I highly recommend hanging out at a few of those sites I mentioned, as well as Public Discourse, Reason, etc. I appreciate Matt's willingness to call this out.
I am a lifelong moderate conservative. From my perspective, I've seen the bullshit we are dealing with now coming for a long time. I've tried to talk about it, but nobody would listen. Because I was that Republican busybody that people like Matt liked to laugh at.
The US Constitution is a liberal document. Wanting to respect and preserve it is considered conservative in the US, but is really liberal in the classic sense. So if you are wondering why conservatives are more open to your ideas than liberals, it's because conservatives are really liberal, and today’s liberals are really closed-minded authoritarians.
A long time coming indeed. The combo of self-righteousness, hypocrisy, and vicious attacks on enemies goes back to the Clinton administration at least - that’s where my first-hand political memory starts - and all the wild ideas and behaviors we see now were on display then if you were attentive to them. Just the other day, I was remembering how a coupe of early Clinton appointees were derailed when it was revealed that, even though they were both rich and liberal, they were employing illegal immigrant nannies and servants on the cheap. “Luxury beliefs” is a new term, but on the left it’s an old idea indeed.
My views are similar to yours but I identify myself as a conservative now. I've long left the dem train in the previous round of cancel exercise a few years ago.
I've gone through a similar journey over the last few years. I'm still believe most of the same things (though I'm more likely to talk your ear off about occupational licensing reform in addition to the need for UBI and M4A), but I gotta say I really didn't know how much of a bubble I was in.
Most Americans are socially conservative and economically liberal when compared with the opinion-makers of the country. This goes for both parties, incidentally.
I'm kinda socially conservative and economically liberal, and although I'm not a Catholic, there are something like 68 million Catholics in the USA, largely socially conservative and economically liberal. I don't have the numbers on how many Catholics are socially conservative and economically liberal.
I meant politically---I fit in no cubbyhole, but take each issue on its own. Years ago writer Richard Adams came to the U.S.
on a mission and I joined him. Along the way, his observations were telling-- Americans defined themselves mainly by their work; many were short on fuller lives, interests from soft paste china to art, history, and literature. We could be pushy, but we were an open, welcoming, industrious people. In his tour of America, Dickens had already skewered slavery-- his recitation especially of newspaper ads seeking the return of escaped slaves, listing missing fingers and toes, scarred backs, was devastating and heartbreaking. So many escaped to be with husbands or wives or children who'd been sold off.
Today, that single emphasis is a toxic identity, limiting and defining people, before anything else, not by what they do, by what kind of human beings they are,
or their nonpolitical interests, but by immutable characteristics soldered to a cheesy Marxism that spreads the dehumanization and division we see daily. The pathology at the core of wokeness may bring down free countries, leaving failed states that the performing, entitled wokes couldn't handle for six hours ---and China, and Russia. Like nobody else ever could, Matt takes a power saw to the bizarre demands and culpable media too intimidated, too lazy or too stupid to take on the daily insanity and open revolt raining down on them. That's where a lot of the blame lies.
Thanks for these comments. I am a Clinton-Gore ish left of center person who has ended up sharing all your concerns over time. Also, I have the same experience - I will read National Review or the Federalist on a libertarian issue and then balk at some abortion article on the site, funny. If you do not already read the news aggregator RealClearPolitics, check it out. It can be a source of reasonable right of center criticism and it highlights some of the brilliant black conservatives out there.
I could have written this very comment in 2005. I never read conservative media prior to 2003. My trigger point was 9/11...when I didn't care about party or politics, I just wanted to know what the hell happened. It has been a revelation. And while I'm not a cheerleader--they don't get everything right--they aren't basically a wing of the Republican Party. They have serious debates among themselves, even draw blood when necessary. I don't recognize the left at all any more.
Thank you for your comment. In the last five years the entire left/right continuum has moved so far leftwards it's nuts. Standing still has turned many 2010-era liberals into 2020 reactionaries.
I think it's becoming more common among "gender critical" feminists, especially after our 65,000 person international support group on the Reddit platform, plus all of the related subreddits that documented transgenderism abuse, was shut down without warning for the "hate speech" of assuming that men cannot become women. That's it. This group helped so many women and girls--including women in Islamic countries writing in, young women questioning whether to transition, people dealing with abuse, etc. Meanwhile, Reddit kept up their rape porn subreddits and deeply misogynistic incel ones, because apparently that isn't hate speech.
I also have a few old friends/acquaintances (highly educated professors, psychologists, etc.) who have been secretly looking into this stuff and are moving over too. Still, I'm disappointed at how cowed so many of my former colleagues are on social media. I think half of them even agree with it. They just knee-jerk assume that trans women are women and anyone who questions BLM is immediately a racist.
That's awful and sorry to hear. Once I read Two-Xchromosomes subreddit and felt like I could contribute (I'm also a bit feminist if you will) so I tried to post, but as it turned out, as a then frequent visitor of the_donald, I was not allowed to post on the Two-X forum. It really made no sense to me.
I also agree with you that transwomen are not women. My bar on bathroom usage is simple: if one has a penis he goes to mensroom.
Oh, I think that one--like most "lesbian" sites on Reddit--is moderated by males identifying as women and a few handmaiden females. Go to Women are Human, 4th Wave Now, Feminist Current, and Gender Critical (on Said.it) for serious feminism--you know, the kind grounded in addressing violence against women and children, not theoretical navel-gazing or performative autogynephiliac femininity. But how would you know? We used to know that xx and lesbian referred to biological women. But saying that gets you banned from Twitter and Reddit now.
I am no longer shocked when I discover that most people calling themselves women on those sites were transgender. It seems as if trans women congregate in online spaces and take over - .001% of the population is pushing 50% of it out. And it's "hate" to say anything about it.
I've heard that too. Don't know if it's true--but I heard the moderators on TwoXChromosomes are (I don't know the proper term) Trans women who haven't had surgery?
Wow, yes. My post above in response to your first post, is about precisely this and I am sure that my questioning of BLM has many thinking I'm a racist too.
Same here to some extent, although Hell will freeze over before I vote Republican. I still truly think the issues that make me stay Democrat are more important ... although the language police, de-platforming, and cancel culture are super annoying and in some cases getting people fired.
Awesome! You could check out the new Gender Critical on the platform said.it and also Women are Human and Meghan Murphy's feminist current, if you haven't already.
Love this post, Leculdesac. I'm a feminist Dem, but think of myself as pretty centrist, and many of my values align with yours (esp. re abortion).
I was recently attacked hard by a vocal mob of anti-racists (the anti-racist committee to be exact, and you'd better call them exactly that or be called out in a "reply-all" email) at my church!! for vocalizing my point that hanging a giant Black Lives Matter banner in front of our church might make people assume that we are associated with the BLM Global Movement, whose leaders have not been quick to condemn violence (some have, but not all, and some sort of encourage it) and that not condemning violence was not in the spirit of Jesus (nor in the spirit of John Lewis or George Floyd's girlfriend, seemingly pretty good authorities on the topic).
I thought perhaps a sign with slightly different words or one that didn't have the same font or style of the BLM Global Network would be more appropriate for a church. Of course I agree with the sentiment that Black lives matter and I think it's important for our church to make a statement about it, but I struggle with the potential association with the their global network. I also suggested that the entire congregation should have the opportunity to weigh in on this decision (it is a Congregational church, after all).
I was LAMBASTED by this group to the point of tears (and I'm pretty tough). They need the sign up NOW, anyone who doesn't want the sign is an IDIOT, and it has to say precisely BLACK LIVES MATTER, they are not going to let the congregation weigh in, and the anti-racist group has already chosen the sign. I've been at this church for 16 years, as a pretty active member, serving on various committees, including the chair of the Board of Trustees. I preach in the summer sometimes! These people know me and they know my character (or I thought they did) but this did not stop the hostility. It has been unpleasant, surprising, and frankly disappointing.
I spent 2 days in a rabbit hole researching Black Lives Matter (the organization), reading many of the same conservative publications you mention (which I had avoided in the past), and found that while I do not always agree with their conclusions, many of the facts/stories that they reported were nowhere to be seen (or barely mentioned) in the mainstream publications I usually favor. It has been eye-opening as well!!!
I found Matt in my search for intelligent and thoughtful discourse on this issue. That, plus conversations with many of my friends on both sides of the political aisle, assuring me that I haven't lost my mind, have been a true gift for me right now (including your post). So, yes, huge props to Matt for his honest, fair, and quite refreshing reading.
I am having the same experience as your first sentence but trying to find somewhere on the left where I can find a home! Also I don't want to lose "obamacare" or social security. In addition to Matt's site I like Areo magazine online. Also I assume you may have already found this, it is a great discussion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHGt733yw3g
As an outside observer, I don't want to stick my nose too far into your conversation but NO ONE is trying to take away Social Security (although it badly needs fixing - neither left nor right is going to end their payments to the people who vote the most unless there is a bone-crushing, worse than the Great Depression economic collapse).
As for Obamacare, that has been a moving target from the beginning but I suspect that whatever it is that you like about it is just something that existed already before he took office. Almost all expanded coverage relates to expanded Medicaid, something that could have been done without adding a costly level of bureaucracy and red tape to the private sector coverage that applies to the overwhelming majority of Americans. I can't promise this but I'd bet heavily that ending Obamacare officially will not end whatever facet you find helpful to you.
Spot on. It's been earth shattering to see how conservatives now are welcoming all types of people with open arms while the left demonizes everyone at the same time. It really feels like bizarro world.
I know that and unfortunately didn't care enough for a while to notice. I suspect there are many like me that tapped out sometime between 2000 - 2020 and have recently been presented with some obvious truths you just don't see unless you search outside the MSM.
Thanks! 😉 The one consolation I have is that I never was willing to accept that half (or ALL as is now being implied) our country was racist simply by voting for one of two candidates in 2016. I quickly tapped out after that because I couldn't take the news anymore. Once you realize it isn't actually news, things become A LOT easier to understand.
Around 1965, I read Heinlein's 1941 novel METHUSELAH'S CHILDREN, with the headlines from "the Crazy Years," and boggled at the weirdness of his imagination. By 1975, those headlines didn't sound so unusual, and I realized we were living in the Crazy Years. Since then, we've moved into the Very VERY Crazy Years.
Welcome! I'm a conservative, so take my suggestion with that bias in mind, but:
Support Republicans across the board in November. Punish the left for embracing or tolerating illiberalism. Tell your local Democratic Party what you did, and why.
If you're liberal, you won't like a lot of the policy that will result. But free speech on campus and throughout society will expand, due process on campus and elsewhere will be protected, and likely laws and regulations will be implemented to force Big Tech to honor free speech.
Cancel culture will suffer a body blow. The structure of freedom will be preserved.
Then, if you're not happy with other policies, vote to throw the bastards out.
Given the fact that the GOP is arguaably racist and definitely homophobic, not a chance in hell. In fact, as much as I despise "woke" and "cancel" culture, even as a right of center voter, I will never forget nor forgive the GOP for its role using homophobia to win votes and codify discrimination against me. These 4 months of radical left wing "terror" are nothing compared to the decades-long reign of terror the GOP inflicted upon millions of defenseless Americans, immigrants, Iraqis, Afghanis, etc..
The RNC anointed him your leader, reluctantly at first, but eventually like addlepated school girls wholly embraced him. The GOP has been laying the ground for Trump since the 1970s - cultivating its relationships with racist yellow-dog Democrats, and literalist religious fanatics. The GOP then moved on to a page from Minister Goebbels's book on propaganda and built a radio, TV, and print empire to spew misinformation, innuendo, and outright lies. No, Trump is 1000% Republican.
Slow down your breathing there now. Number 1, leader has nothing to do with it. No body leads me. You may operate on a different level. If you are talking about Fox, yes, they were conceived as a propaganda outlet. I haven't watched television since 1980, but from the development of the invasions into Afghanistan and Iraq, it was obvious Fox was pure propaganda. I despise them. Yet, CNN and MSNBC outdo Fox in the "we love Joe Goebbels" competition. Pretty tough to reconcile that?
The Repubs and Democrats are both obsolete and eventually to be replaced.
I don't see why the things you predict would necessarily happen in the event of a substantial Republican electoral victory. For one thing, the established leadership of both major parties are not very interested in ideology; they are mostly interested in getting along with their donors. Ideology is simply a tool to manipulate the suckers with. For another, at least in the case of the Democratic Party, defeat does not lead to reconsideration and reform but to doubling down; as it was said of another ruling class, 'They have forgotten nothing and learned nothing.' One might find someone local to vote for, but the national parties seem entirely hopeless.
Over the long run, the educational system is the biggest danger to freedom and civil liberties. It's there that kids and particularly college students are being indoctrinated en masse in illiberalism, with ideas like speech is violence if it makes someone feel uncomfortable, or allowing a young man who has been accused basic procedural protections like presumption of innocence and the right to cross-examine his accuser is being "pro-rape."
People who have been taught this in school are now reaching critical mass and starting to dominate all of our institutions. Once that process is complete, freedom is done.
Republicans, despite their innumerable faults and hypocrisies, have pushed back on this. This administration pushed back against the college kangaroo court system. In general, Republicans favor educational reform that will provide more choice, ideological diversity, and free speech.
I am shocked to learn that students, at least in America, are learning anything but the basics and enough STEM subject material to get a crap job after they are cycled out. Are you sure about this? In any case, I still don't see what the Republicans are going to do about it. They've had the presidency, the Supreme Court, the Senate, sometimes the House of Representatives, numerous state governments; and all that gave rise to what you're complaining about. They've had a conservative, pusillanimous opposition party that seems easily frightened and pushed around and is in any case subject to the same plutocrats as themselves. What's going to change that?
Democrats, despite rare moments of GOP Presidents with any level of Congressional power, had essentially unfettered control of the Federal Government for roughly 60 years until the mid-1990s. In the 25 years since, Republicans have had six years where they held House/Senate/POTUS. They have not had the time to offset an Augean stable level of manure accumulation.
There are too many RINOs who fit your description and they need to be weeded out but the GOP is the only realistic alternative to the Democrats who actually gave rise to this state of affairs and who would simply stomp on the gas to accelerate these problems if given the opportunity.
I'm a conservative who previously grew up as a progressive in Canada, and I do enjoy being friends with progressives. I've come to better understand their position, even if I don't agree with them. On the flip side, I've lost countless of "friends" on Facebook of real people I knew once who Unfriended me because of my conservative views. Only through honest discourse and a respect for the other person can we find common ground. You sound like just such a person.
I'm a progressive who grew up as a conservative in the state of Georgia. I have many conservative family members who refuse to talk to me about politics, and many former FB connections who defriended me for commenting on a few truly wackadoodle "conservative" posts with a brief, friendly, fact-based (verifiable, legitimate facts) counter. No responses from them, just unfriending. I too am finding Matt and his readers refreshingly open to ideas from both sides of the aisle (or neither side). Just subscribed and hopeful that this microcosm of open-mindedness finds a larger audience. Like, say, an America-sized audience.
I am anti-Trump and have been since the beginning. But I can't do anything that would put Biden in office. And that is not because of Biden. As an individual, he's far better than Trump. But I see him as a Trojan Horse for the woke Maoists. Can't do that.
I think is a generous assumption, but let's say Biden has as many "woke Maoist" followers as Trump has "selfish misogynistic racist" followers. Even though you've stated you're anti-Trump and see him as a better individual than Biden, you would still vote for Trump because you view his most radical followers to less harmful to our democracy? Or do you plan to just not vote at all? Genuinely curious as I know a lot of people in your position.
First off to clarify, I said I see Biden as a better individual than Trump.
I reject your premise that most of Trump's followers are selfish racist misogynists. If that's what you believe, I'd say you've been watching too much MSNBC. I do acknowledge that Trump has some voters who are radical in ways that I do not support. But I don't think they have any power in this country.
Woke Maoists (or Marxists or Jacobins) on the other hand are driving the agenda at every major US media outlet (except Fox), every major corporation, every entertainment company, every sports club, and almost all of academia. And at least half the Democratic Party. Biden, Pelosi, and Schumer are already bowing to them. So rather than Biden having Woke Maoist followers, I'd say that Biden is following the Woke Maoists.
If Democrats had nominated somebody with enough control of his own mind and a stiff enough spine to tell them NO, I might have been willing to vote for him or her (let’s say Mark Warner for example). As it is, I live in California so it doesn't matter who I vote for. It's already a done deal. So I probably just won't vote. Or maybe I'll write in my own name. Or yours. Or anyone’s. If I lived in a swing state, I would probably be forced to hold my nose and vote for Trump. I would see it as a choice between four more years of a dumpster fire versus ending the country forever. I would be forced to choose the former.
I don't believe that most of Trump's loyalists are selfish racist misogynists (and I haven't watched MSNBC or any other news networks for several years now). I do think that more selfish, racist, misogynist Americans identify with Trump than with any other president in history, but I don't have a comprehensive study to prove that so we'll just leave that there.
I do totally accept your premise that it's less about the characteristics of the followers and more about how much collective power/influence they hold. I'm having trouble accepting the idea that "Woke Maoists" drive the agenda at every major corporation. If by "Woke Maoist" you mean people who have more liberal social views, I'll give you entertainment and academia for sure. But maybe I don't fully understand what you mean by "Woke Maoist"? If as a thinking conservative voter (not a MAGA hat-wearing cult member) your greatest concern is a leader with a "Woke Maoist" agenda, would you mind elaborating on what that agenda might entail? Again, I really appreciate your thoughtful response as I'm genuinely astounded by the depths of the divide in our country and I want to understand any threat that could be more damaging than another four years of raging dumpster fire.
If you want to have serious conversations, you’ll have to dispense with the name-calling. Those terms you're using have had new meanings assigned to them recently, so I really don't know what you're talking about. Those epithets are used so wantonly they have turned into a joke in conservative circles. If I was born like this, why bother trying to change anything?
I will start by modifying my statement about the agenda at corporations. Their agenda is to make a profit. That hasn't changed, and it shouldn't. It is their appropriate reason for existing. What's changed is that they believe that sponsoring an organization like BLM and embracing programs like Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility training is necessary in order for them to keep making a profit.
Woke Maoist may not be the best label, but I'm surprised you act like you don't know what I'm talking about. I am talking about BLM, SJW, CRT, and Antifa. I am talking about The Squad. Even though it's another old white man who's getting the presidential nomination, the party is going to have to bow to the demands of these movements if they are going to keep their elected positions.
As for the agenda, just look at what AOC is asking for. Just look at the Green New Deal. Just look at the current street protester demands, that are being taken very seriously by elected Democrat representatives. All that is a big fat NO. Sorry.
Someone (everyone) needs to be talking about this. I’ve been making this case to everyone lately, but it’s not getting enough visibility.
I grew up in the Midwest and ran away to the coast to avoid the stifling conservative and evangelical mindset. But the left has lifted the playbook and perfected it. Instead of “born again” you’re “woke”. Instead of “saints and sinners”, we have “antiracist and racist”. For Scripture we have the Gospel of Intersectionality.
These folks are blinded and motivated by the same religious fervor, but unfortunately they’ve infiltrated the major institutions of our culture. It’s also harder to reject. Freedom of Religion preserved a modest escape from the prior putsch, but now one has to accept the badge of racist to reject this movement.
I disagree this doesn’t impact all of us. I’ve traveled across the former Yugoslavia and walked under thirteen foot walls in Belfast. People can be motivated to see only their “kind” and cleave society along ethnic and sectarian lines. If Trump is using racist “dog whistles”, the left has upgraded to explicit and mandatory curriculum. These things never end well. Ask the residents of the former Yugoslavia.
I’ve also visited the Torture Museum in Budapest. It’s a nondescript office building on a tree lined boulevard. It was the Gestapo headquarters in WWII, clearly one of the most racist, right wing governments ever. The building is full of white tiled cells with floors sloping to the center, to better drain the blood off the beatings. Banks of phone desks fill other floors, where operators could eavesdrop on anyone. After World War 2, the KGB took over and kept the operation going without a hiccup. So both a far right and far left government employed the same tactics against their citizens to enforce obedience.
Here we sit at the beginning of the 21st Century, with a nascent surveillance state powered by ubiquitous technology being built. Our politics are being driven by radical authoritarians on either side. I’m not sure I want either of these movements to win and control those levers of power. At this point the far left looks as frightening as the right - maybe more.
We need to confront these busy bodies with a revival of liberal philosophy and humor. Humor helped take the edge of the right wing, and we need a new class of comics who can take these folks down a step or three. More writers need to make this case the way Matt does. And hopefully we will see politicians and other leaders step up to reassert some key principles of our liberal heritage before it’s too late.
I'm not a Christian, but I'd note that unlike the woke religion, Christianity includes the concepts of mercy, forgiveness, and redemption. The woke religion offers nothing but unrelenting anger, vengeance, and abasement. It's the coldest and bleakest of religions.
In fact what it offers is the opposite of redemption. People who bow before the mob end up dogpiled even worse than before. Every apology is a further admission of guilt - and as guilt is innate to one's identity, it cannot ever be fully cleansed.
The social sciences further show that those who accuse the most - those who scream the most, those who pronounce others less holy to be incorrigible sinners - gain the social benefit of seeming above suspicion themselves.
Altogether, the current discourse penalizes honesty, penalizes forgiveness, and gives significant social benefits to those who enforce its rules.
I think your comment touches on one valuable distinction between the woke and the Christian fundamentalists:
The woke divide us into 2 broad groups: the guilty and the innocent. It's a hierarchy determined greatly by birth.
Christianity starts with the egalitarian premise that we're *all* born guilty. This pushes fundamentalist Christians toward equality, leading to such Christian sayings as, "All are equal at the foot of the cross," and Jesus's own, "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone." (Some Christians need to be dragged really hard to equality, that's true, but it's usually other Christians doing the dragging.)
Try telling some BLM that we're all equal at the foot of anything and you're likely to get shot (eg. Jessica Doty Whitaker). Tell them, "He who is without guilt should fire the first round," and every BLM with black skin thinks he's qualified.
This is why the woke are more dangerous than the born again.
Any display of "white guilt" in this environment is a death sentence. It's not just someone like me- who will never be able to trust you- that the guilty need concern themselves with. It's those they confess to, for they now own you. And that is a pitiful place to be.
The attitudes are like religious fanatics. The Spanish Inquisition comes to mind. Fanatical participants on the hunt for blasphemy, willing to torture and strip their victims of wealth and dignity, and finding it wherever it is convenient. These are the lefty leaders, the crazy academics, the leaders on Twitter.
Then you have the supportive monks, those who walk from place to place flailing themselves and wearing hair shirts. These are your worker bees, your hyperventilating teens (largely white) of today who engage in self loathing.
Then there are the victims, burned at the stake, nails pulled, who are being asked to sign a confession before they are burned in hopes of absolution in the after life but really to make the torture stop.
That said, the hysteria reminds me more of the Salem Witch Trials.
Tell a paranoid that no one is plotting against him, and he just decides you are part of the plot. Tell a Critical Race Theorist that "people of color" aren't being held back by systemic racism, and it proves you're one of the racists.
This is why I'm actually glad that I was terrible at doing school. But it was different in the 1970s. ...
I worked at a state university for about 7 years around the turn of the millennium, and didn't really see the rot yet. I think it's worse at the elite schools than public ones. Their graduates produce things like The Guardian's "Skyscrapers are part of the patriarchy" and take themselves seriously. But these tend to be inbred academicists. Once they have to talk an ordinary person, like a reporter, they clearly appear to be demented or ridiculous.
Apparently part of it has to do with the philosophy known as deconstructionism. (I got a D in philosophy, proudly.) And because it breeds in English departments and the soft social sciences, it appeals to "the left." Here's an example of how to get a paper published in a woke, post-modern journal. These pubs have been fooled multiple times into publishing gibberish. This was the first time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
So we end up with questions like "Is gravity a patriarchal construct meant to keep women down?" Of course, that's a joke, but it's not far from "reality" to these poor people.
Quite right. The thing about the "Left" is that they are dedicated to the destruction of the existing society, and its replacement by one in which they hold totalitarian power.
Telling people this outright has proven to be a loser, politically. 'My goal is to be able to order you around, inflict suffering on you, and kill you any time I want to' does not win much support. So they have to come up with stories about how destroying the existing society will lead to Utopia, though of course first there will need to be a brief period in which the Leftists have totalitarian power, wielded for your own good, of course. And the stories have to fool them, as well as everyone else, because admitting to yourself that you only desire power so you can hurt people is not sustainable for most.
And then comes the additional problem that sometimes the Left acquires totalitarian power, and proceeds to create a Hell on Earth. So new stories about why the existing society needs to be destroyed must be produced, with new motives for the destruction.
Thus they end up sounding demented because they are. They have rendered themselves insane. Sucks to be hard Left, but what else can they do?
We need a sense of humor in these times Matt. You’ve got that style partner, with intelligence. However, I don’t agree with your categorization of the Portland “protests” which is the latest woke nonsense, to equate the destruction of property on a wholesale and mindless basis as “protesting.” The people who are defacing my city are in my opinion, being protected and furthered to put a black eye on the president. The mayor and the governor and neither US senator can find anything to criticize about every federal building in portland being horribly defaced, including the Pioneer Federal Courthouse which I assisted in renovating, but now they’ve got a big problem with Federal law enforcement stepping in to protect Federal property. This wasn’t the whole of your essay Matt, which I believe is very relevant and important, but I thought I’d step up on the soapbox on this one issue which is very troubling to me as a citizen of Portland.
As a resident of Seattle and former resident of Portland, I think it can be hard for folks who aren't close to our politics to see some of the detail, but a few searches should be helpful and the results won't be surprising to anyone who's followed the "resist" politics. Andy Ngo has been documenting this for a long time, and the behavior of the "protestors" has been very consistent with respect to street level violence.
Over the past few years we can follow the initial attempts of the Portland PD to intervene, then being called off by Mayor Ted Wheeler, who just happened to name himself Police Commissioner. The current total and complete absence of PPD is completely understandable as the actions of a Mayor (and Governor) who don't want to poke the hornets nest of the left, but find political capital in making the federal government (aka Orange Man) the fall guy. What could possibly go wrong?
In Seattle we had the mayor, nee former US Atty, follow a similar strategy by overriding the SPD chief (Carmen Best) to pull out of the East precinct and let my very own neighborhood demonstrate what an autonomous zone can be. One irony is that the current recall movement is being led by those who think she isn't left enough.
I absolutely get it about how the murder of a man (George Floyd) can epitomize discriminatory racial violence. And I get it about being dis enfranchised and feeling like counter violence is the only available means of expression. And I do get it about the mis use of police power. But this movement has been hijacked by people with the sole intent of capturing more power and has little to do with Mr. Floyd at this point, nor much to do with actual justice.
The recent conversation between Matt and Bret Weinstein about the Evergreen experience captured the progression and outcome of this essentially totalitarian movement very well. A policy of destruction goes well beyond being called protesting.
Excellent post. People who haven't lived here, or at least spent a lot of time researching here, just won't get it. Portland has been protest central for years and years and years, but what we're seeing now is new. It's a confluence of PNW college culture going mainstream and of votebank politics.
It's a cunt-fest. Seattle had some Italian anarchists there in the early 1900s, and after they set off bombs around the country in a coordinated attack, the response was for a harsh crackdown.
That's what these idiots are going to bring down. There will be less change because of it and more brutality.
There are people in power and they won't share that power with a bunch of precariats.
I like Matt's writing - I wouldn't be a paying subscriber if I didn't - but he's disingenuous when it comes to the crimes and terror of antifa. Violence has been a fixture of nearly every one of the 55 days that they've attempted a violent insurrection against the United States. If this was a peaceful protest - and people who didn't airdrop in last week will know that there have been downtown protests and semi-permanent camps in Portland for *decades*, and that there were *actually* peaceful - then they could easily have rooted out the bad actors by now. The reason they haven't done so is because, well, the current "protests" comprise bad actors and their black bloc accomplices.
Terror' - I must have missed the car bombs, nail bombs, kidnappings, knee-cappings, executions, suicide bombings and planes flying into buildings carried out by these antifa terrorists over the last five weeks. Or maybe the Marxist media is deliberately ignoring it. Spraypainting ACAB, smashing windows and setting dumpsters on fire is not terrorism - it's vandalism. Dry your eyes, you hysterical ninny.
And burning people's businesses is arson. The problem is not that they are terrorists, but that they are destructive thugs who are given political cover by the well meaning instead of being properly denounced for hijacking a real movement for social change. When I look at Antifa, what I see is the battology of DeSade: long and tedious tracts about power whose only real purpose was to place a sheen of ideology over his desire to let his appetites run uncontrolled.
So handing out AR15s to 18 yr old kids from the trunk of a car in Seattle in order to provide "a security force" of LARPers doesn't resonate at all with you? Even after they shot an unarmed black kid to death in a white Jeep Cherokee?
Wow.
I do agree though, that hysteria is rampant everywhere and there are certainly people playing up these "events" as genuine hostile takeovers... but when they're all funded by huge corporate money -the same huge corporate money that pushed its weight around fomenting dissent around the world in the wake of the 2016 elections in the UK and the US., it begs the obvious question: who are these puppetmasters and why will they stop at nothing to seize power back?
@Scott Current conventional thinking is that the donor class is the only one who benefits. But I can't fathom how anyone can posit that owning 99.9% will make them any happier than owning 99%. Unfortunately, I'm beginning to think that this is really just a struggle between war lords.
99.9 is not enough. Nothing ever is "enough" for the 1/10th of 1% that rules this world.
Of course we're all on our own. The post-industrial boom the US and the world experienced may never happen again at the same scale.
We're heading toward another dark age... Carl Sagan said it, history screams it.
I've been studying the ancient Greeks lately and wouldn't you know it -they had multiple cycles of prosperity and decline before they finally dispersed and were overtaken by the grist wheel of human history.
The fact that this "grand experiment" ever made it this far is truly astounding to me.
You're counting on people not knowing how terrorism is defined at the federal level. This may work on comments sections, but I think you'll be a bit less smug when you see the kind of sentences that will - correctly - be given to the several people caught on camera this weekend throwing explosives at federal forces.
No, I was defining terrorism in terms of having lived with the threat of terrorism on a daily basis, rather than playing fast and loose with semantics to embroider a feeble bit of point-scoring. Must be nice to have the government define language for you, albeit somewhat limiting. How would define 'tyranny', for example?
"Jamie's Very Special And Not-At-All Made-Up Daily Experience of Ultra-Super Terrorism", or Chapter 18 of the US Code. Hmm, which will the courts go with? "Themanticth!", lisps Jamie's comrade, as zhe begins a 15-year sentence.
How I'd define tyranny isn't especially relevant when we're discussing the terrorist acts of antifa members in Portland. If I wanted to have a college dorm "but, like, what about X?" conversation with you or someone like you, I'd post on Twitter.
So, nothing but lame, Limbaugh-grade ad hominems then? I think it's one of the great ironies that those that sanctify the tenets of free speech and weep about its degradation at the hands of evil Marxists generally turn out to be rather wanting when given free rein to say whatever comes to mind.
Hmmm, tell me the difference between blowing up a car and setting it on fire. Also, if a would be terrorist only commits non-fatal assaults, arson, and property crimes, does that person not meet this definition, "a person who uses unlawful violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims"?
If 'political aim' means 'ideological aim', then the definition is not met by people who are rioting or otherwise causing trouble because a member of their tribe was murdered in public. The ideology has been pasted on later, a good deal of it borrowed from the police and other government agencies.
I don't know if I would say terrorism. But, we 100% have a violent leftist problem. Leftists reportedly shot THREE HUNDRED rounds into Antonio May Jr.'s vehicle. Here in Wisconsin, violent leftists beat the tar out of a state senator (a democrat if it matters to you) because he was taking photographs. What's notable is that in both of these crimes there certainly dozens--dozens--of eyewitnesses. No arrests. And, there doesn't seem to be any real appetite to find and arrest the murderers and perpetrators.
I don't think it makes me a "hysterical ninny" to say it's a bit more serious than "vandalism."
I STILL do not want federal agents working the crowds in cities where they are not invited. But, can we cool it with the apologia for intimidation, arson, and murder? You are not helping as much as you think you are.
What makes a protester a 'bad actor'? I'm positive you can't define it. You're filtering the protests through your ideology, which is assuredly libertarian and therefore incoherent. Anyone has the right to protest. The government is infringing on that right and doing so with violence. Yet the protesters are the violent ones? How do you manage to type complete sentences with so much cognitive dissonance.
Being funded by shady money or aided, shielded or given hep by forces that have been trying to conduct a non-military coup here in the US for the past three years.
There's enough evidence that Democrats in city halls and across the board are only using this bullshit as a platform to further their party's cause. (of course, the Republicans are doing the same and so they are no different, but for the sake of your question in this context... it stands,)/
Breaking stuff that isn't theirs, taking stuff that isn't theirs and denying others their freedom of movement. I don't care whether you're marching against the police, Planned Parenthood or the Ku Klux Klan, having a cause does not give you the right to violate other people's right's to life, liberty and property.
A protestor is a bad actor when they move beyond peaceable assembly towards violence and coercive behavior; ir when they shield others who do these things.
Admittedly, peaceable assembly is an I-know-it-when-I-see-it idea, but it's best to err on the side of caution. Raucous, tumultuous crowds are not necessarily violent. One person throwing a bottle or a rock doesn't make a protest a riot. But the use of weaponry (improvised or otherwise), mobbing tactics, storming buildings etc would by any reasonable onlooker be considered bad actions in the context of an otherwise-peaceful protest.
I reckon you see libertarians in your sleep. There's no libertarian in this discussion between us.
They're under the bed. Hiding behind your curtains when you come home tired from work... They're not just libertarians though!!!! They're ALL WHITE PEOPLE!
Really relieved to hear another Portlander say some of the things I'm feeling about this extended "protest". What exactly are they protesting? What are their goals? How do they hope to achieve them? If they don't have a clear idea about all of those things, then why are they out there?
Because they want a fight and they are bringing it by setting fires and throwing projectiles and damaging federal buildings. They are baiting the right. And guess what? Trump just took the bait... I'm terrified about this.
But I can't talk to my partner or my friends because they think the Feds are 100% in the wrong. They can't see that the "protesters" want anarchy, they want violence. So does Trump.
I am 100% anti violence, and I understand that violence begets violence. I hope this isn't true, but I feel it's going to get worse in this town.
Unfortunately, centuries of history show that violence is often the most effective means of ending violence. I know this is a little bit cliched but violence was the only way to stop Germany and Japan in the middle of the 20th century - its an extreme example but it makes the point.
More directly to the point, these riots are clearly not spontaneous and the only way to end them will be the arrest and incarceration of those who lead and organize them. Arrests do not have to be violent and are not in the overwhelming majority of cases. However, as these people are committed to violent resistance, their arrests will almost always be violent. Does Trump really want violence or does he just acknowledge its inevitability? Are your local leaders just too feckless to make that same acknowledgement and deal with it quickly and effectively?
You are right, bt in the context of black civil rights and fair treatment, history shows that nonviolence worked and that the civil rights era ended when things turned violent (Black Power movement). The violence of the late 60's ended the layperson's support for change.
Our leaders are incompetent, but are now using Trump as an excuse for the city's problems. Trump, meanwhile is using the city to run his Law and Order presidential campaign to distract us from the country's problems.
So here's what's happening right now in Portland: There are a small number of people who are willing to use violence to provoke violence, and they are being enabled and encouraged by the media and politicians, who stand to benefit in various ways.
That is the entire story. Anything else you hear is somebody working an angle.
I do wish people around here would realize that our local anarchists would love it if Trump won the election. Because they are...you know...anarchists.
So, your leaders are feckless. Oh, and Portland's lawlessness is a microcosm of our country's biggest problems, so if the President wanted to distract us, he'd leave Portland to its own devices. Instead, he is attacking the problem head on - anything else is just working an angle.
I'm not too sure what we're disagreeing about here, but in the spirit of conversation, I'd say that it'd probably be better to just arrest people who commit acts of violence instead of making them nationally famous.
I see your point. Thanks for sharing with me in a reasoned way.
I wholeheartedly agree that our local leaders are incompetent, and some of them are outright dangerous for the future of our city. Unfortunately, there is not a single centrist, let alone conservative, candidate on the ballot in the autumn. We desperately need more balance on our city council, some people who understand fiscal responsibility and city planning, etc.
Mike B, I find your comment about feeling threatened to be threatening in its own right. Your plan to speak with Matt’s manager could lead to someone threatening to speak with my one remaining friend, thus ruining my life. Remove the comment at once or run the risk of being cancelled here and everywhere.
Be very careful for your own safety, Louis. Should you fail to dress yourself this morning, your extreme whiteness on full display may be interpreted as a taunt. The reaction could be extreme.
Getting up out of bed is most certainly a manifestation of "white supremacy culture," implying as it does a focus on "urgency" and "individualism." The fact that Louis wrote in a grammatically correct sentence is definitive proof. This comments section is a genocidal organization.
As the amazing and prolific theoretician / intellectual giant Dr. Robin DiAngelo states in her society-convulsing magnus opus, we are all racist and our first step is to (let her) acknowledge this in ourselves unconsciously.
So bravo to all of us. We should all pat ourselves on the back, here. We've made huge strides. Remember, it's a lifelong struggle.
This trend has been going on for a long time, except it focused on gender, not race. Women (mostly) have lost jobs, been banned from social media, lost publishing contracts, etc., for refusing to go along with gender identity nonsense. Some of the statements that can get you into hot water: biological sex is real; men don't become women because they say so; men don't belong in women's changing rooms because they say that they are women; gender is an oppressive social construct, not an identity. Women who have had the temerity to point out these truisms have been accused of killing trans people with their words, hating trans people, and a range of other absurdities. Why don't you write about this? Why did leftists and liberals, who have the courage to stand up to this insanity when it is focused on race, remain silent when the hysterical censors were hellbent on making us all kowtow to insane gender theories?
Absolutely. I wonder when he's going to. It says a lot if someone's willing to stand up to the trans mob. And even when a man does, like Graham Lineham, he doesn't get thousands of rape and death threats. That's saved for feminist women who step out of line. Of course, as you know Alice, part of the kick of transgenderism for the heterosexual males who engage in it is the autogynephiliac thrill of forcing a woman to acknowledge him as a "woman." They literally are physically aroused by it. Nice to know that we've got a group of sexually violating paraphiliacs masquerading as a civil rights movement, targeted right at women and girls.
I don't believe that transgenderism is entirely about autogynephilia, but I do believe that it is one element of it. Blanchard's work shows this and is scientifically sound, despite it and its author being maligned. Had journos who are now appalled by the authoritarian insanity unfurling before them taken a greater interest in the Ken Zucker, Alice Dreger, and others we may have been able to mount a better resistance earlier. At this point this anti-intellectual, authoritarian craziness has gained such an institutional foothold that I fear the worst is yet to come.
Here in Canada, it's already happened. "Gender identity" is a protected characteristic in law now. A friend's gym sent out an email last year that they're allowing members to use the showers of whatever gender they identify as, in accordance with this law. Policies like these are spreading everywhere now.
LOL if a woman went into a men's locker room and said, "I identify as a man so it's OK." the guys in there would laugh and probably fart MORE, scratch balls and generally enjoy seeing just how "man" that woman was.
Stick a gross old man in a woman's locker room and it's a totally different scene.
Men and women are different, and should both be celebrated for things they bring to the party that the others just can't.
Strengths and weaknesses.
Everyone's got them, and we all benefit when strengths are relied upon and weaknesses assisted in an effort to raise the entire group up -for survival.
Maybe it's just a telling sign that we have way too much free time nowadays that we can sit here and actually entertain these concepts.
Oh, there have been a few hundred cases, AT LEAST, of incarcerated males identifying as women being moved to women's prisons and then sexually assaulting them. And there are many cases of these guys literally harassing/assaulting females in these settings (the famous Jonathan/Jessica Yaniv of testicle-waxing fame who talked about giving tampons to 10-year-old girls in the bathroom). But we don't hear about it unless you go to Women are Human or the former Subreddit #thisneverhappens that used to document it before being closed by Reddit because documenting their abuse was "hate speech.") That's where women around the world are aggregating local stories to show patterns, but we can't get any stories published in the mainstream.
When "trans women" say they're afraid of male violence, I'm like, so are we--that's _your_ problem, guys, not ours. Why is it our problem to solve male violence? We've worked for decades to have these sex-protected spaces. We can ally with you to build your own, but why is male violence the responsibility of biological women? No "TERF" has ever murdered a transperson--if it's not intimate partner violence, it's violence by straight men.
Thanks for your support and please keep speaking out to other men. We absolutely need resolute men on our side to stand up against this terrifying madness.
I sympathize with your plight, but in order to fix it, you will have to acknowledge your own contribution to it.
It used to be easily possible to have women-only spaces, because we could also have men-only spaces. But those were declared hateful discrimination, and outlawed. You shot yourselves in the foot there.
I'm not sure how to help, but one idea: pool money, buy social media ads with a teaser that stays within their boundaries (i know, i know but it's the world we live in), and then get people to click thru to a site they can't stifle to show people the truth.
The Progressive Left has gone vicious and rigid but the conversation has become muddled so it's hard to talk.
It's frustrating as a 'left-leaning' person. What happens is, if you talk about the clampdown on speech in academia and in the newsrooms, where people with wrongthink are excommunicated, you're told, heh, but M, there are far bigger problems. Like Trump. And you're asked so who's really getting canceled anyway who doesn't deserve it. They're racists anyway. You're told, freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences. Also, Trump cancels people. "But Trump."
What happens is if you talk about riots in Manhattan that occurred, Minneapolis, or the absurd 'zone' in Seattle, you're reminded that the overall protest was peaceful and that it's a small minority of protesters. (Also, the police are mean.) If you raise that there's a huge crime spike, with murders up even in NYC by 30%, with a one year old girl shot last weekend, you're reminded that you sound like a racist by raising black-on-black crime - nevermind that there were more murders in Chicago during July 4 weekend than 'Floyd-like events' in the entire year of 2019 committed by cops. If you ask why there have been riots in Portland for 50+ days including a torching of a cop station, you're told, "But Trump." Trump sent in the Gestapo to drag innocents into black vans. But Trump.
If you ask why small businesses had to forcibly shut and go out of business while hundreds of thousands of people marched for 10 days, you're told, But Trump. If you point out that DeBlasio had no mask as recently as a week ago when he painted his mural, you're told, But Republicans and Trump.
If you point out an increasingly anti-science attitude among the liberal left, you're reminded about Trump and the GOP.
It goes on and on. I don't like Trump, but the more I hear "But Trump" the more I want to vote for him if ONLY as a protest vote against people who read the NYT and Guardian, perhaps watch the Daily Show, and live, breathe, sleep and dream Trump nonstop. And those people are called Progressives.
Trump owns way too much real estate in a lot of people's heads. Really hard to discuss an issue with those people. Even trying to point out the separation between State vs Federal authority and examining the problems that division created in the response to the Covid pandemic always starts and ends with "It's Trump's fault!"...and I'm like, well, OK but perhaps we could peer a little deeper
I think the political discourse in this country would be greatly improved if no one mentioned Trump except when discussing the actions of Trump, and no one mentioned the "right" except when discussing the actions of the "right." Defend (or condemn) BLM protests on their own terms, without bringing up Orange Man Bad.
Because this rhetoric of 'the other side is worse' is basically war propaganda. 'The Axis bombs civilians, so we Allies are justified in bombing civilians in retaliation' is the way you behave towards enemies you are determined to crush, not fellow citizens you going to live with peacefully.
As a student of history, today's rhetoric reminds me a lot of that before the Civil War. I would prefer to avoid Civil War II ('This time, with nukes!'®).
I have serious disdain for Trump but you're 100% right about this. A lot of people view everything through the lens of Trump, whether he supports something, how an event reflects on him or makes him feels, etc. This goes for his supporters and detractors in seemingly equal measure. It's exhausting and we always end up where we started. Hell, an hour ago, the Washington Posts' above the fold story was Trump tweeting about a guy kneeling during a baseball game. Fire me into the sun.
The thing I worry about most is that Trump will be the excuse for every flaccid, lame thing Biden and the DNC attempt should he win.
Continued outsourcing of American jobs? Trump's worse. Incoherent budget that prioritizes the rich over normal people who need a hand after a pandemic? Trump was orange and dumb. No healthcare plan? Trump didn't have one either. More drone strikes? What do you want, Trump again?
That said, I'm not gonna pretend any of that makes me wanna vote *for* Trump. I mean, he's still a gigantic piece of shit.
I agree. For me it's the attempted gutting of the ACA and lowering corp tax while increasing taxes for people in the blue states that was a telltale sign that this guy's a pile of garbage. But Trump. :-(
To be clear, they call themselves progressive. I've long since called them the regressives they are. Quickest way I know of to get a quizzical, befuddled look on a lefty's face.
There are so many classic liberal and neo-liberal commenters in this thread that share a similar point of view and mutual respect. I honestly can't think of the last time that I have seen anything like that in an online medium. It gives me some sense of hope.
The intellectual level of the average poster on here seems to be several rungs-at least-above that of the typical “I’m triggered/that’s racist” vs “A black/Hispanic did something awful” generalities bandied about in most comments sections.
The BLM protests that sprung up after George Floyd's murder seemed to start a lot of this racial reckoning. Those protests were about police overreach, brutality, and how unaccountable law enforcement is in America.
Months later, we have no remedies for any of those ills. In fact, we have unidentified soldiers whisking citizens into unmarked vans in Portland. Instead, we have this weak, ultimately toothless cultural war.
Which is to say: because reforming the police is an incredibly hard thing to do, we get this potemkin village progress instead of the thing a lot of our population actually demanded. White ladies won't voice black ladies on cartoons anymore but you can still get clubbed in the street for exercising your first amendment rights.
They had an insignia and are operating under clear lines of authority. The fact that the van was un-marked made for a good headline but didn't actually indicate much.
The “Antifa” on the West Coast are simply the latest incarnation of violent, anarchist leftists going back over a century. The Wobblies blew up the LA Times building in 1910 or so. They have always had a presence in Berkeley, Portland, Seattle-remember the WTO riots in 2000 or so.
As for the idiots elsewhere in the country, I think they are dumb kids-or twenty somethings-who got overexcited when things got hot after the Floyd tragedy.
It's been my experience that people who whinge about "antifa" don't actually understand what it is they're upset about. This comment does little to dissuade me of that belief.
Antifa Means Anti-Fascist. Hitler, Mussolini and Trump are great examples.
In 1933-34 a fascist group tried to take over the FDR government and failed due to the heroism of Marine General Smedly Butler who also said "War is a racket" as there was great money to be made by it.
If you have not noticed, the Military Industrial Complex is Trumps favorite charity.
A lot of rightwing nut jobs claim they are patriots - just like leftwing nutjobs claim they are anti-fascist. Both groups' claims are clearly contradicted by their actions.
Yes, it means Anti-Fascist. There is no Fascist Party in the USA for them to fight, so they instead direct their violence against anyone they don't like -- which, ironically, is what most people identify as "fascism." Also: the original Anti-Fascist group was part of the Communist Party of Germany. This is merely a historical fact, yet ALWAYS goes unmentioned by Antifa's many defenders on the Internet. Why is that?
"Also: the original Anti-Fascist group was part of the Communist Party of Germany. This is merely a historical fact, yet ALWAYS goes unmentioned by Antifa's many defenders on the Internet. Why is that?"
Mentioning it would interfere with The Narrative, and make it harder to bamboozle people.
I'm surprised I have to point that out. Is my "rhetorical question" detector is busted?
Traditionally, yes, that's what it means. Unfortunately, because we have a left in the U.S. that has so lost its way, we now have street fighters who don't understand the difference between fascism and disagreement. This is a problem and leftists refusing to talk about it is, arguable, a bigger problem.
The ultimate basis for that "bigger problem" though, is a journalist class that has tossed out any commitment they might once have had to reporting facts, opting instead for advocacy; to the point of mendacity in the service of "virtuous" activism. If that doesn't bother someone, they ARE the problem.
So these 'anti-fascists" can lie at will, stage photo-ops that misrepresent events and be comfortable in the surety that the press will go right along with them. Just like they can screech about "Gestapo tactics" and "black sites" with zero fear, as it is obvious the Fed response has been very measured and responsible.
Let's put those two points together and we see, whatever their political claims and self-definition, that they are gutless liars. Not the side I'd ever want to be on.
I, personally, think the group that calls themselves Antifa are a bunch of knucklehead young people who are bored and (mostly) filled with testosterone who are looking for any reason to act like bored, young (mostly) men everywhere - raise a ruckus and smash things. They don't have any coherent cause or strategy they can enunciate, other than burn everything down. In other words, they are not exactly freedom riders/counter sitters from the early days of the 50-60's civil rights movement. Unfortunately, they have some older, very cynical people with power and money behind them and resourcing them who believe it's in their political interests to sow mayhem. So, that's who I think they are. What they call themselves doesn't matter. They could call themselves the pro-puppy brigade and if they were burning down neighborhoods, smashing windows and accosting people on the streets I'd still think they were dangerous, aimless youth who need to face consequences. (The Nazi's called themselves Socialists, so you can see that nothing really is in a name..)
Is your argument "it's good that unaccountable armed feds arrest Americans and take them to black sites if there's looting going on"? Because I think that's a shitty argument. Kinda think the fourth amendment is an important one myself.
I'm sorry but please don't buy into the media narrative without question on this one. If you have watched video of these arrests you know that these people clearly have "POLICE - DEPT OF HOMELAND SECURITY" markings so that hardly blocks institutional accountability. Plus it's hard to argue with not having personal name IDs in a world of doxxing. Some LA cops had too many personal retributions for doing their jobs because their names were on their backs in sports uniform style.
First, how are they unaccountable? The U.S. Attorney in Oregon became concerned of the possibility that in two instances (in the midst of violence and mayhem) people may have been arrested without probable cause, so he immediately launched an investigation, while emphasizing that the federal officers are being attacked with all manner of projectiles.
Second, black sites? What does that mean? Does that mean they were taken away from where other rioters were for brief questioning? Do you have any evidence that anyone was held longer than the constitution allows?
Third, and most importantly, do you acknowledge that some people (including Antifa) are acting violently, and this violence needs to be addressed somehow? Otherwise, frankly, I'll stop wasting time, and hope that one day you grow up.
He's lying. He knows exactly what's going on, but also knows what buzzwords (black sites, unidentified, arbitrary) get a reaction. The federal response has been very restrained - too restrained, in my view - and they are sending out tagged officers on a peaceful operation.
The sad thing is, I can well imagine after a few more years of this, the thing he pretends to wring his hands over will actually happen for real. And when it dies the citizenry will be half tired of the cry-wolf, and half glad that someone's finally cracking skulls. A free people will look the other way from this if it means they get these anarchists out and their cities back.
I'm not lying and in fact recanted the "black sites" thing below because I was wrong. I like it around here because most people have intelligent conversations with you instead of assuming the worst (as you did here). Peace.
1- They're unaccountable because they have faced no consequences and I believe they will not face any. An "investigation" isn't a consequence.
2- That was how I originally saw it reported and have been educated by Louis below. I'd delete that part of the comment, but Substack doesn't allow that. Rescinded.
3- Setting aside that "Antifa" isn't real and is just a blanket term the right uses for "undesirables," yes, of course some protesters are violent. Some police are violent. I don't think the former justifies the latter, especially with the preponderance of evidence we've seen of police attacking demonstrably peaceful protesters for having the nerve to use their first amendment rights.
1- If an investigation isn't a consequence then neither is a temporary detention and a release.
2- You 'rescind' this small aspect of it without rethinking your entire thesis. You're plainly disingenuous. The snake oil you're peddling about *actual real stormtroopers you guys* is woefully weak.
3- Again, to say antifa isn't real is just dishonest. At least tens of thousands of people across the US identify with it, call themselves part of it, adopt its tactics, protect its sympathizers etc. Because it doesn't have a national leader or a website doesn't make it fake - it makes it smart. It makes it hard - but not impossible - to cut the head off the hydra, to infiltrate, and to identify its assets. These are all strengths for a decentralized, paramilitary movement operating in a surveillance state like yours.
And it has the added bonus of giving plausible deniability to liars like you.
If a protester is violent, then police violence is absolutely justified. If you like it or not, government having a complete monopoly on the justified use of force is a marker of government. If you want citizens to be able to use force against the government, you are wanting anarchy. If you go an kill a murderer yourself, you have committed murder. If the state kills a murderer, it is justice.
I have to disagree with you, for example, on accountability (if they intended to be lawless, they wouldn't bother with the investigation). But your tone is reasonable, so I apologize for mine in my last sentence. I value the fact that people of wide viewpoints can talk to each other here. We need this.
This is a genuine question: without all the emotion, what is the law here? Either DHS has the legal authority to arrest folks or they don't. Which is it? Does anyone know? I honestly don't understand why this is so unclear.
It's not unclear. I want to answer your earnest question with earnestness. DHS has legal authority to arrest anyone they have reasonable suspicion committed a federal crime. So, for example, if they observed or have video of them vandalizing a federal building. They can arrest that person anywhere they find them, including blocks away 30 mins later, or at their home days later.
What some want to do is confuse the issue for political purposes. Trump wants his people to protect the federal buidlings and they are going too far in some ways, like tear gassing in streets that are not federal property. But Dems/media are politicizing and painting any arrest as out of bounds, which is just silly. They play up the "unmarked vans" as a way to claim it's police state activity instead of just not having your van burned by protestors.
1- My reply to you was kinda sarcastic/shitty so apologies re: that.
2- The issue I have with your post is pretty easy to articulate: you're saying that you shouldn't protest because the guys you're protesting against will crack your skull. I.e. don't protest the bad thing or the bad thing will happen to you. I know you don't condone it but I'm at a loss for what the remedy is, especially for regular citizens, many of who have lost their livelihood in the past three or four months and are feeling rightfully frustrated by the anemic response from their supposed "leaders."
They are no different than the federal LE officers who Eric Holder (on Obama's orders) sent to Nevada to deal with cattle ranchers (Clive Bundy et al) whose stock was grazing on federal land. The ranchers refused to move off BLM land. The feds made an criminal arrest. And, they, too, were accountable. That case was litigated all the way to the Supreme Court (a liberal majority.) The feds lost.
I support defunding and certainly demilitarizing the police and I think they should be brought under community control, but this is more a complicated issue than current popular discussion allows for. The only way this could be done successfully is if social programs that actually prevent violence were funded more heavily (or at all). This is unlikely to happen in the current neo-liberal environment. What would happen, I believe, if we defund and/or abolish the police in our current economic climate is that we would see the rise of privately funded police and security forces by the rich and we would lose even the possibility of ever bringing the police under community control. I think you are spot on about where this insane culture war is coming from.
"The only way this could be done successfully is if social programs that actually prevent violence were funded more heavily (or at all)"
100% agree with this. As an example: I live in San Francisco. We have a bad homelessness problem that is largely a mental health crisis. Investing in mental health services would be far more ethical and far more effective than calling the cops on disturbances where no one's actually in danger. The cops don't have training for this and I'd much rather them be looking into actual crimes. Better use of funding and a reduced scope of responsibility for law enforcement feels like a win-win.
More magic words. "Investing in mental health services" will provide well-paid jobs for some people (mostly white ones, btw), but most of the "homeless" won't use the "services."
You can hold people responsible for their behavior, or you can let them misbehave. San Francisco has chosen to let them misbehave.
My general issue with all the pontificating is the law of unforeseen consequences and also as you say, the "magic words". Some mentally ill people are not dangerous. I know non-violent schizophrenic people who just get scared and call the cops because they don't know what else to do. They need a social worker.
However, some folks are violent. I had a relative who was a paranoid schizophrenic. He broke into a house and tried to strangle someone (a family member). He ultimately shot and killed a neighbor and then killed himself. The reason why family members call the cops is that mentally ill people are unpredictable.
So the devil is all in the detailed execution. So the 911 operator better ask the family member calling if the person needs physical restraints or not before deciding who to send out. If you can execute well, if might work, if not it won't.
Second we can talk about funding mental health all you want, but that means there has to be available budget there. How many municipalities have all this budget excess? If the budget doesn't actually exist it's just pandering.
For example I know someone who works in SF City government. The Tenderloin (an area with massive issues with homeless mentally ill people) was in fact created by locating all the mental health and social services in a single geographic region. Unless you actually house people there may not be a lot that can be done. Or what if you choose to build housing for the homeless in SF, homeless people steam in, while the average tech worker can barely afford to pay rent? How will that eventually play out?
This isn't to say do nothing. But sometimes we have to live with some kind of trade- offs. There might be small tweaks, such as enforcing duty to intervene or better training on why not to sit on someone neck for 8 minutes, that might have better effect then all these overhauls.
"How many municipalities have all this budget excess? If the budget doesn't actually exist it's just pandering."
This is the crux of the "defund the police" idea. You remove some of their outsized budget and redirect it to social services. We need mental health services more than we need cops with military vehicles, right?
On the other point, I live in SF and the homeless problem here is nuanced and tough to discuss in comments. My cousin is a social worker here who does free healthcare in the Loin (among other hot spots) and says a ton of people really do use the services and really do pull themselves out of homelessness. It's just there are always new people coming in to avail themselves of those services because most neighboring cities don't have similar services. So you get an influx of homelessness because you're trying to do your best to solve the problem. Then there's the subsection of people who simply refuse to get help, the actual violent crowd, addicts, and on and on. It's incredibly complex.
Cops are just simply not the right person to deal with most of the non-violent population here. They have no training and no desire to police homelessness either.
I’m sure most cops would gladly give up mentally ill service calls, shall we say. The question is if social workers are prepared to deal w/ the 5%(just throwing a number out, I don’t have the stats) of such calls that turn physical/dangerous.
Yes, good points. It's very nuanced out there. My budget points are more about that I would suspect a lot of cities can't even afford decent basic policing. SF is a very wealthy community. I don't how much their city budget reflect the rest of the country. But I really don't have data one way or the other.
But I wish to point out that the issue isn't just violent vs. non-violent mentally ill people. People who shit in the street are a public health menace, regardless of why they do it. People who scream obscenities at passers-by are degrading the quality of life of the majority, even they do it because of bad brain chemistry. Societies have to make choices about which behaviors they will tolerate, and enforce their rules.
Yes, I think they are misbehaving. Because they are.
I understand that a lot of this is due to brain diseases that make them arguably not responsible for their actions. So what? The fact remains that most of them will behave in an anti-social manner. And the only real choice we have is allow them to do so, or force them to stop.
How do you define "community control"? I define it as voters electing councilmembers, and the council in turn controlling the police. Based on that, the police are already under community control. The glitch is the union. If the union is powerful enough then it becomes uncontrollable. So this is the main problem with the police, and we have the exact same problem with teachers. So if we want true community control, let's ban public employee unions.
How do you define "defund"? If you mean transfer an incremental portion of funding to a different entity that would in turn take on certain responsibilities, that makes some sense. If you mean starve them for cash so they can't operate then no. It makes no sense.
The proponents of "defund the police" have been pretty clear that the goal is to redirect parts of the police budget to different social programs. No one serious is arguing the latter.
And, as much as I'm staunchy pro-union in most areas, I agree re: police unions. Teachers absolutely still need theirs though---the problem with our country certainly isn't that workers have too many rights.
I do believe there are lots of people seriously arguing the latter. I don't think they should be taken seriously, but I believe they are. It's pretty much what Minneapolis council voted on.
The problem with teacher and police unions is when the worker "rights" conflict with the public need, and the purpose for their existence in the first place.
These unions buy elections to make sure they aren't held accountable.
The realities of teaching in America vs. policing in America show where our priorities actually are. Pretty difficult for me to group those unions together for anything other than bland, surface-level concerns.
Those unions can be grouped under the heading: Takes our money and uses it to hire their own bosses, then take actions that aren't in our best interests.
Agreed our priorities are off. Are you old enough to remember the ad line "Pay me now or pay me later?" We tend to choose to pay more later.
The House passed a bill in late June that was similarly unloved and ignored in the Senate. We need to tackle these problems locally if we have any chance of solving them. Hell, both Trump and Biden's solutions involved *more* funding for police.
After all, nothing like the consequence of an increased budget to sort out a problem.
Never insinuated that most people want the police "removed" (whatever it is you think that means). All I pointed out was that the first domino in this whole discussion---the murder of Floyd---has been ignored in service of easy change and fugazi progress. Point also remains that smaller, local action is going to be more successful than praying the most feeble part of the US government will attempt to fix any part of the problem.
The movement was hijacked almost from the beginning.
It's an election year, after all.
Maybe I'm still a little optimistic that SOME change can come of this, because the black community has been getting it right up the ass since the 13th amendment and after the 1960s, the police became more and more militarized.
I want to see an end to the painful merry-go-round they are stuck on.
The militarization of our police forces has ratcheted up significantly since 9/11. This is the first real national reckoning with that fact and I share a little of your optimism because of that. Can't fix what we don't acknowledge.
Of course, the most likely outcome nationally is the GOP ignoring it while the Dems kneel in kente cloth and then ignore it afterwards.
The police officers who were present at Floyd's death are on suspension and face murder and accomplice to murder charges.
It will of course take forever to try them, but that is an inescapable consequence of previous "reforms" of the court system. It was over a year between filing charges in the murder of Justine Damond and the conviction of Mohamed Noor.
...and yes: people need to take these concerns directly to City Hall. The mayors, the city councils, the chiefs of police -they are the ones responsible for all of this.
This comment is more coherent than Taibbi's post. Matt doesn't close the circle as to why this happening. He equates the left with Corporate Democrat Neoliberals who take activist language and leave the class and systemic analysis. Pretty disappointing piece by Taibbi, he's grifting off the anti-woke (whatever that means) backlash. It's like Gamergate all over again.
Also worth wondering how much of this phenomena is in academia and the media vs. the rest of society. Being that so many of us (including Taibbi) are stuck inside staring at our screens all day, it's hard to figure how widespread any of this is in the normal world most of us inhabit.
I think a lot of it started in academia and the development of post-modern ideas from philosophies that described the world to ones that should be the basis of policy. There is a lot to say about how the over-producution of phds, neo-liberalism, the defeat of the traditional left, and the corporatization of the university converged and gave rise to what we're now seeing.
I've noticed all manner of toothless BLM statements from companies with lily white board rooms, certainly.
In California, we have to do harassment trainings once your company hits a certain size. They're genuinely boring things where you sit at your computer and learn that you should grab your coworkers' ass. I can see the anti-racism training programs becoming mandatory as corporate CYAs too.
I'll just say that I don't exactly trust corporate America's commitment to any of these principles and assume they're making noises for a few months and will do nothing substantive at all.
Yes, the major beneficiaries of BLM are going to be charlatans like Robin DiAngelo who make bank for, essentially, teaching corporations a) how to better police workers and b) how to avoid any responsibility in a lawsuit.
The worst part is I've worked at several companies that did these trainings *and* covered up or ignored harassment at the executive level. I was deposed as a witness in that case and everything!
America has this pathological way of forcing everything onto a job. You get your healthcare through a job. You get diversity and harassment training from your job. Offices around my way have near-mandatory "bonding" trips and happy hours. Corporate racism training is another step in this direction. It's infantile and lame.
I'm in CA and have done the harassment trainings. I agree it's a joke and mostly for corporate CYA.
But I do not agree all the large corporate measures are toothless. Consider what they are doing to FB to force it to censor speech in a certain preferred way. Consider why Matt has this site.
I have a friend who works at Starbuck's who now fears for her job because she won't wear their corporate BLM shirt.
These measures are real and will hurt people. I consider it harassment.
Me again...wanted to add: I think one big reason is that upper-middles don't want to be thought or called racist, so they go along with every new accusation of wrongthink. Not always, of course. But also, corporations are very keen on keeping their youngest employees happy. And this is what the youngest employees want and expect.
This is scary stuff, and that’s just the nonviolent idiots. The more vicious morons, I believe CNN dubbed them “peaceful protestors”, don’t care to hear your side of the story. They just want to do you physical harm and destroy your livelihood. And because I’m certain Joe Biden will gleefully placate these jackals if they let him pretend he’s president, I will vote for the lesser of two evils.
I have a sneaking suspicion that the single most important photo of this political year is going to be the one of the McClosky's on their front stoop with pink polo, khaki's and sandals with an AR pointed at protesters that broke through their gate.
LOT of middle class, upper middle class and wealthy liberals saw that, the kinds of people who give money to the dems (like the McClosky's) and who support a lot of leftish policies while sitting home safe, comfortable and well fed. Those people are used to moralizing at dinner parties and barbecues and but they are NOT going to tolerate the unwashed masses for whom they claim to empathize coming into their neighborhoods and disturbing their tranquility and sense of security.
Betting a LOT of those people either do not turn out to vote OR the quietly vote for Trump and then act shocked and horrified when he does.
They were never threatened in any way. The idea you have a right to threaten people with guns for walking down your street is more insane than the mob who finally figured out who to afflict instead of destroying their own neighborhood.
You have an absolutely hilarious viewpoint on rioters breaking down the gate to private property and then flooding that property with armed trespassers.
What system do you propose to replace "corporate property" with?
It remains a fact of existence that things can only be in one place at a time, and generally can only do one thing at a time. If everyone unanimously agreed on what that thing should be, ALWAYS, we would have no need for property. But people do disagree, and some decision making process is necessary.
I never mentioned Soros. I’ll deal in absolutes. I can tell by your taking offense to me calling those jaggoffs exactly what they are that you’ve got a little stinky, sweaty, godless autodidact in you as well.
The people you describe- those like the McCloskeys- didn't get to where they are because they make emotional decisions. Tactical, intelligent and sane choices would be accurate. And come election day? How many see that the Trump campaign is being given a gift?
It doesn’t matter who their neighbors are, or who the morons were on their way to see. That is a gated, private neighborhood. And once you tear down the gate, you are committing a crime.
The MOB broke down a gate that marked the property as PRIVATE.
Once they did that they were trespassing and destroying property.
Given the history of MOBS lately, the McCloskys were not out of line to assume that the MOB might well decide to go after their home.
Given the violence of these MOBS, attacking police, attacking store owners, attacking reporters, not unreasonable of them to think they might be attacked.
SO...not a fan of their gun safety but I absolutley believe they were right.
K....I admit it. Gonna have to vote for Trump again.
The alternative is to support the other insanity, which, for just the reasons outlined here, are far far more dangerous. Trump is too lazy to be that dangerous.
Of course, and I hope I am wrong, I think we have the makings of a violent uprising this fall. No matter who wins the other side is going to claim the win was illegitimate and the mail in voting and the lawyers are just gonna make it worse and then it will be amplified by the media and social media.
Top that all off with what is likely going to be a far worse economic picture and a resurgence of COVID and closed schools again.....?
No....I think things are going to explode in crazy, real violence come November
He's also too stupid to be THAT much of a problem. He's just not a brilliant guy. He acts exactly how you'd expect a guy who lives in his own skyscraper in NYC to act: like a cunt.
He's still a lot less scary than the establishment, even if he directly benefits from and bolsters their systems.
Ya know...your right, he is NOT a brilliant guy in the way that we normally think of such a thing.
That said, he has really good instincts about economic issues and where the public is on those things.
He got elected not on racism but on economic nationalism. I think our political and economic leaders / elites got too far down the globalization rabbit hole and they were making out like bandits but totally missed that their countrymen were paying a huge price economically and therefore socially.
The southern border has been porous not because we cannot secure it but because there are too many economic interests vested in expanding the labor force to keep wages down. Both parties have been complicit, the dems just have the added motivation of trying to expand their voting base.
Same with the H1B program. It is just a means for US firms to create competition among tech workers and to enable Indian outsourcing firms to bid super low on support contracts.
Our trade agreements have never taken into account the impact to the country as a whole but have always focused on the interests of the stock market. Again, largely based on labor arbitrage and not competitive advantage. One could argue that it has also been based on environmental arbitrage as well.
Trump was right on these issues even if he was only following the unwashed masses.
Say what you like, he also understood that the people of this country are sick and tired of being at war all over the globe. I realized the other day that my 20 yr old daughter has never known a time where the US was not deploying troops. The neocons in both parties were more than happy to keep going and to keep making enemies all over the globe and spending TRILLIONS on warfare.
Really, at the end of the day, he understood or understands that the two single most important things the majority care about is economic security and peace.
Now, whether or not that is really how he feels, and I am inclined to believe that at some level he is an old school patriot but a plutocrat on top of that, is almost irrelevant. What politician gets elected on what they entirely believe on a personal level?
When you consider that he used to be a democrat you almost have to wonder what he COULD have achieved had he been able to work with Pelosi and Schummer as opposed to spending the last 4 years bouncing from Russiagate to impeachment, both of which were bogus. Could they have done infrastructure? Could they have shut down the wars overseas and trimmed the military? Could they have redone out trade agreements and maybe boosted security for workers here at home?
I almost wonder if the Never Trump neocons and neoliberals set out to prevent precisely the possibility of that happening. How much of all this was stirred up by people who's money or influence were threatened by the policies of the unwashed masses that Trump represented?
Here is the tragedy of Trump. He had good instincts on some important issues but he squandered his opportunity to address them by allowing himself to get into all kinds of stupid controversies with his mouth and thumb. Granted, he had a hysterical left, hostile media and a government of bureaucrats that were determined to keep him from being elected or get rid of him if he was and at the very least stop his policies.
NOTE: The TRILLIONS spend on these wars across the globe go into somebody's pockets. Just look upstream from whoever squeals the loudest about troop withdrawals and a gov't unwillingness to "teach Tyrant X a lesson".
And anyone that thinks that Trump could hold authoritarian power beyond his remit from voters, and worries about such things, is a being ruled by emotional fear stoked by an irresponsible media.
Matt, I've been a fan since the Bush Administration. While I no longer consider myself a liberal (and have become a traditionalist), your dedication to truth is enduring. If there is an abuse of power, you call it out. And that's exactly what this is.
My biggest concern is the utter contempt among many university & media people for any people with different views. It is ok to heap ridicule, scorn and derision on anyone who has conservative ideas. I've stopped interacting with these former friends because they so hate anyone not in lock-step (also they all forward the same things to me from NYT,Atlantic, NPR). It is not the beliefs that bother me (I share many), but the mean, ugly hate of anyone who does not. Of late they have started forwarding images, too. "Ignorant hillbillies" was given coinage by Peter Strzok and his views seem to be widely shared and assumed to be ok.
"Contempt" -- nails it. When it was contempt by the right against non-conformists on the left, it was reprehensible. We should be similarly scandalized by the left now. Enforcement of political orthodoxy is unacceptable.
>"Republicans were once despised because they were anti-intellectuals and hopeless neurotics. Trained to disbelieve in peaceful coexistence with the liberal enemy, the average Rush Limbaugh fan couldn’t make it through a dinner without interrogating you about your political inclinations.
>"If you tried to laugh it off, that didn’t work; if you tried to engage, what came back was a list of talking points. When all else failed and you offered what you thought would be an olive branch of blunt truth, i.e. “Honestly, I just don’t give that much of a shit,” that was the worst insult of all, because they thought you were being condescending. (You were, but that’s beside the point). The defining quality of this personality was the inability to let things go. Families broke apart over these situations. It was a serious and tragic thing."
Seems like there's a little bothsidesism going on here, Matt. In the '00's there may have been a few conservatives crazy enough to impose their views on everyone and sever relationships over political differences, but it's nothing like the epidemic of hysteria coming from the Left these days. The difference in scale may be due to the endorsement of Leftism by news and opinion sources widely recognized as "mainstream." It's bad when Fox News and AM radio are crazy; it's much, much worse when the NY Times, Washington Post, CNN, ABC, NBC, and CBS go crazy.
Another excellent piece! I'm very disturbed by the humorless, authoritarian trend on the left (though of course, as you observe, we won't see a concomitant mocking of that given the left's capture of most media institutions). I expect inevitable counterculture trends and the obvious nature of the overreach will produce a substantial pushback sooner or later, but it's set to be an exhausting few years.
Nice piece, Matt. True enough that the scolds on the right and the scolds on the left have switched places. But I think you understate the magnitude of the problem. The problem is that the old McCarthyites never rose to much more than an historical sideshow whereas the new McCarthyites are now the main attraction. The old McCarthyism never mounted much more than a tepid and buffoonish challenge to the classic liberal ideals and institutions of individualism whereas the new McCarthyism now seeks to obliterate those same ideals and institutions. And they now have the power to do so. Indeed, the new McCarthyites yield a level of power and sophistication that the old McCarthyites could only fantasize about. In my latest short article, "White Noise Matters" (now on digitalapostate.com), about the rise of virtue signalling ads as a discrete advertising category, I cite the essential imperative of popular culture: to obliterate institutional history and replace it with addiction. History suggests that scolds are only problematic when they have the cultural power and permission to enforce their own puritanism. These scolds do. Not only is popular culture now behind them 100%, they own the primary mechanism of addiction. Keep up the good work.
Thanks for your response, Buster. McCarthyism was a very big deal for those caught up in the drama at the time, but never succeeded in systemically corrupting the structural or ideological integrity of the institutions it sought to purge, in no small measure because a) the old McCarthyites -- unlike their 21st-century counterparts -- were too clumsy to infiltrate them, and b) because the institutional and cultural culture of individual liberty in post-WWII America was still robust enough to repel the onslaught. Not so today.
All told, the old McCarthyism was but one (relatively brief) chapter in a four-decade Cold War between nuclear superpowers with competing world ideologies. By contrast, the new McCarthyites -- now with global reach -- are institutionally ensconced, heavily financed and just getting started...
I'm listening, but I still don't see how the new McCarthyism represents any sea change in challenging "classic liberal ideals and institutions of individualism," much less mounting any kind of structural challenge. As MT points out in his piece, this language-policing garbage used to be the provenance of the right, but in no cases has any of it been critical of the larger manufacture of consent. Jon Schwartz has a good piece in the Intercept about the rather narrow boundaries of permissible discourse: for example, you cannot be an atheist and get elected to office, but nobody ever talks about this.
Thanks, Yawny. My original objection to MT's article was that his description of the current situation as a simple swap of roles dismisses the real danger. The new McCarthyites don't just challenge the institutions built on Enlightenment principles, they now own and run them. That's the sea change.
BTW, happy to discuss with you why I think atheists don't get elected in this country (and it has nothing to do with politics), maybe another time...
Critical theory does indeed undermine enlightenment principles. I was all about that as an intellectual exercise and "humility" check when considering the subjectivity of someone who developed these theories--yes, "freedom" and "rational man" mean something very different if you're a dude who's had a lot of invisible labor done around you. There were legit feminist and minority questions in all disciplines about how knowledge is constructed. But it's a METHOD--it's a FRAMEWORK. It's not supposed to be a mode of governance, no more than Freudian theory or hermeneutics.
When you understand the "epistemic closure" that occurs when one applies a dumbed down version of critical theory to the constitution, you'll realize that this is a much more invasive ideology. Of course, McCarthyism hurt a lot of people, but it was a sort of add-on to an existing world-view, not something that converts believes plausibly calls into question our Bill of Rights.
I don't at all disagree with the idea that critical theory undermines certain enlightenment principles. w/r/t the Constitution, I take it you have primarily freedom of speech in mind. But wasn't McCarthyism all about prohibiting not just certain forms of speech, but certain forms of thought (e.g. "sympathising")?
There will certainly be little argument among any readers here about the virulent nature of the current witchhunting climate. I ran away from academia last year to escape it. But what I'm saying is, at the end of the woke rainbow, we'll still have the Kochs' / Mellons' / DeVoses' minions writing policy, we'll still have military bases all over the world, and every 4 years we'll still always be choosing between a douche and a turd.
Thanks for your comments, Yawny. Yes, the old McCarthyites sought prohibitions against certain forms of thought and speech. But they failed to institutionalize those prohibitions because they couldn't sufficiently penetrate the institutions they wanted to control. The new McCarthyites, however, are doing the same thing from inside the institutions themselves. As you know, they already exert control over academia and have for the past couple of generations at least. The same is true of commercial media (including the entire entertainment industry), not to mention the municipal governments and workforces in the biggest American cities. Working from the inside, they understand that thought control is a natural and simple consequence of prohibiting some words and phrases and inventing new ones over time. The old McCarthyites didn't have the luxury of time. The new ones do.
In the battle of Kochs and Mellons and DeVoses versus Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Comcast, the Ivy League and every municipal union in every major urban center, it ain't hard to imagine who wins. But you're right about the military bases and Tweedledee/Tweedledum.
"But wasn't McCarthyism all about prohibiting not just certain forms of speech, but certain forms of thought (e.g. sympathising')?"
No, it wasn't. What McCarthyism was about was the fact that communists and sympathizers were willing to break the law to aid the Soviet Union in its cold war against the U.S. They were active agents of a hostile foreign power. And Harry Truman (whom I consider a great man and a great President) couldn't see the necessity of saying 'FDR made a huge mistake about communism, and let the government be infiltrated by traitors.' Party loyalty led Truman to publicly downgrade the communist threat, and McCarthy capitalized on the doubts Truman ended up engendering.
"Jon Schwartz has a good piece in the Intercept about the rather narrow boundaries of permissible discourse: for example, you cannot be an atheist and get elected to office, but nobody ever talks about this."
This is the kind of nonsense I typically see on the Left. A "limit on discourse" would be forbidding the advocacy of atheism. Such a limit existed in colonial Massachusetts, in the 17th Century, but the battle for advocacy of atheism was won a century-and-a-half ago, as the career of Robert Ingersoll demonstrated.
If the voters refuse to elect atheists to office, that is not a "limit on discourse." It is a judgment that atheist office holders are bad for the country. Those who believe that <i>should</i> refuse to vote for atheists. They are doing their duty as citizens.
Of course we're not talking about a legislated limit on discourse. It's internalized, this entire discussion is about manufacture of consent. With something like 25% of Americans claiming to be agnostic, atheist or non-religious--and separation of church and state enshrined in the Constitution--you'd think that occasionally we'd see some measureable number of officials elected to higher office who don't pretend to be religious when they're not. Just like in every other Western country.
The limit on discourse (and thought) is that it's considered out of bounds for candidates (or elected officials) to profess a non-religious orientation. The idea that non-religious people cannot act morally or ethically is, to use your words, the kind of nonsense I typically see on the right.
BTW, you may not be talking about a legislated limit on discourse, but plenty of others are. They call it "hate speech," and they would be happy to make it against the law.
Meanwhile, they are happy to use social pressure to ruin the life of anyone who disagrees with them.
"With something like 25% of Americans claiming to be agnostic, atheist or non-religious--and separation of church and state enshrined in the Constitution--you'd think that occasionally we'd see some measureable number of officials elected to higher office who don't pretend to be religious when they're not."
Other Western countries have a rather higher proportion of the non-religious, and almost all of them have parliamentary systems, rather than "first past the post" systems like ours.
In a system where 50% plus 1 vote wins you everything, a small minority can exercise an effective veto power over who will be elected.
That is not "manufacture of consent," that is the religious exercising their pre-existing principles.
Still waiting for some admission of reality: that McCarthy was right about the presence of Soviet operatives infiltrating our government. NOT just "communist-sympathetic" people, but actual paid agents. Now, McCarthy was a drunk, an asshole and an idiot who thought membership in the CPUSA was the same as being a Soviet agent, but he really didn't have the chops to damage too many people, despite the decades of Hollywood self-glorification.
Or has the actual history been rewritten to more closely match the simplistic villain/hero narrative?
The whole Soviet agent issue was complicated by partisan politics, and denial of reality.
Being a member of the CPUSA was automatically sufficient grounds for assuming disloyalty to the U.S., and loyalty to the USSR. But Franklin Roosevelt had a blind spot on this, and couldn't see it.
Harry Truman could and did see it, and moved to throw the Commies out of govt. His blind spot was failing to see that it was necessary to admit that FDR had been wrong. So he simultaneously attempted to purge the disloyal while denying the disloyal had ever existed.
Once Eisenhower was president, the security regulations were tightened to what they should have been all along, pretty much, and the Communists in Government issue quickly collapsed.
Is this a grift? Where's the systemic analysis here? The left is not HR departments at fortune 500 companies. The left are the people that voted for Sanders. Centrists co-opt activist language and then do nothing about police brutality or systemic racism. Cancelling someone is just a way to distract so people don't demand actual change. No one fucking cares about this, it's such an insular phenomenon. The only people that care are those that feel as if they are at threat of being "cancelled", which tends to be educated conservatives. Kudos to you Matt for taking their money, but I'd hoped for more astute analysis when I signed up. Instead I get hand holding of ideologically incoherent readers with a 'There, there - you'll never be cancelled to me'. Cancel culture is taking a systemic issue about power and turning it into a cultural issue with no end.
I recently retired. Something like 30 years ago, a Jewish employee made a "Hitler Garfield" cartoon and accidentally printed it out on the wrong printer. He joked that he'd be fired but basically everyone laughed. About ten years ago, another guy sent a link to a "Hipster Hitler" blog and got called on the carpet and almost fired. Also about ten years ago there was a teapot designed that accidentally looked like Hitler. It was considered funny.
These days, your younger co-workers would think you designed that teapot on purpose and HR would make you go to a White Fragility training where you were instructed not to defend yourself (that the teapot was an accident.) A young designer had just such a situation happen where she used an ancient Greek Key design that accidentally had a swastika (not intended to be such) (just the way the lines crossed) and she wasn't allowed to defend herself before her peers and say it had been unintentional. People thought it had to be subconsciously intentional and she had to sit there during the White Fragility training in silence, being accused of having chosen this design subconsciously-on-purpose.
She didn't get fired, but I think chances are she would have had she tried to defend herself during the White Fragility training. Not sure. But the guy where I worked came damn near to being fired for sending a link to a Hipster Hitler blog. It wasn't a hate blog. It was making fun of hipsters.
These days, no one believes someone made a simple mistake or wasn't aware what the latest approved term is. If you make a mistake, you are thought to have done so intentionally and be a secret hater.
All of that said, just recently Tucker Carlson's head writer got caught and outed for posting on an alt-right or white-supremacist hate blog. Blake Neff on Autoadmit. That blog or site is so vile I quickly got over being so mad over cancel culture. The stuff on the real hate sites is so much worse. People are getting fired, but over on the blog Blake Neff was caught posting on, it is vile enough to dwarf anything on the cancel-culture side. Look for yourself. (Auto Admit)
One of the major issues now is that "the left" is _not_ clearly defined. I've been a Sanders supporter since before he ran for POTUS and I detest the misappropriation of critical theory (as well as the transactivist movement). Many of us care about reducing income inequality but do buy into the identitarian crap, which to my mind complements (and reflects, in its obsession with self) neoliberal values and actions.
The "cancellation" is not insular because if Biden/DNC wins and both houses are in Dem hands we may very well see "anti-racist" and "pro-trans" legislation that literally criminalizes wrong think. There are already hints of this in Canada (it's illegal to "misgender" someone, I believe) and the UK where police show up at your house for stating biological facts on Twitter. Beyond ruining a few people's lives--including that blue-collar worker who's hand position was interpreted as 'hate speech"--the Neo-Maoist criminalization of behavior that right now is being used to fire people (like saying you'll collect work from white artists) will become a reality and I assure you will NOT be insular. The Neo-Maoism, to my mind, keeps corporate America happy and distracts from actual class issues (and the abuses against women and children entailed by transactivism).
Running everything by legal is shielding the company from legal liability. Promoting a diverse C-Suite is just optics, it's marketing. The military does the same thing. It is not political, it is cultural.
You have no idea what left wing politics actually entails. Opinions vary, but left wing ideology tends to promote decommodification of industry and distribution of those assets. Everyone pays into the same pool for services and everyone receives a base line of services that allow the poorest person to live with enough food, water, and shelter. That's left wing politics, not Bank of America sponsoring a Gay Pride parade. That's just a reflection of culture.
You are confusing culture and politics. The two are intertwined, but they are very different.
What is comical is seeing Google and other companies' diversity executives they hired for marketing purposes call them out on transgressions after leaving.
Matt,
You keep adding to your knowledge base but need to release those things you “knew” that never were really true.
What do I mean by “really true”? For example, hardcore evangelicals who have not found a way to balance their faith with reality can be embarrassing. That said, the occasional eruption of a small town school board that oversteps its bounds is not worthy of armies of journalists and has not been a legitimate threat to our liberties for decades. It is appropriate to oppose it but the risk and the response has never been proportionate to outrages from the left. In this sense, that threat was never really true - it was gnat biting an elephant.
The fascist, racist, anti-intellectual nature of the American political left has been on display (to those open to seeing it) since at least the 1960s. After a pretty good run in the 50’s, working with the majority of Republican leaders to make serious improvements in civil rights, leftists succumbed to their ingrained belief that people of color could only thrive under widespread government control of their lives.. A welfare state initiated by demonstrably racist Democrats and (reportedly) acknowledged by LBJ to have been created to subjugate Blacks was one of the earliest signs.
Bizarre, Malthusian claims about impending environmental demise (that has been routinely refuted by the passage of time), followed along with ever increasing demands for control of the means of production by governmental central planners. Dependence on dubious court decisions and executive orders increasingly replaced the legislative process (and the related inconvenience of open debate and compromise – instead, let’s just allow 1-5 people to dictate fundamental changes to government policy). A mind shattering devolution of the education system was also part of the leftist agenda, vastly expanding the number of innumerate people, unschooled in critical thought and indoctrinated to anti-historical and unscientific dogma.
So, when you preface your belated recognition of the current terrible risks to our republic with “Things we once despised about the right have been amplified a thousand-fold on the flip”; you are missing the historical reality of the last 50-60 years. The faults on the right – as legitimate as it was to acknowledge and oppose them – were vastly exaggerated (often by your employers) while the leftist behaviors you are just seeing now have always been 100s of times worse (I will concede that breaking 1000 times is a recent development).
This did not happen overnight or even during the Trump administration. This has been something that 40-60% of the American people have seen – and warned you about – to varying degrees for a long time. Until you acknowledge this, you will not understand the degree of risk the country faces.
If you go back and read the piece that I wrote about that trial, you'll see that I was troubled and a little confused by the one-sided nature of the situation. I thought the argument for ID was wrong but the point the defense lawyers were trying to make -- that the famous scientists were profoundly anti-religion -- was interesting and got more interesting the more the witnesses refused to answer those questions. Part of the reason I wrote "Hate Inc." was to talk about the increasing discomfort I felt at doing the same kinds of stories about dumb Republicans over and over again. As time passed it all became more complicated and there was no real way to address certain questions.
I became a republican because at the time they were the party of the practical.
I became less enamored of the party as it bowed to the religious right.
I became even less enamored of it as it stupidly embraced neoliberal economic theory and "maximizing shareholder value" and sacrificed the national interest for the interests of Wall Street.
THEN...along comes Bill Clinton and wow....now I get the same crap only now I get it with crazies on the left. Only difference between him and the republicans on economics was that Clinton thought about Silicon Valley and Hollywood in addition to Wall Street.
ALL HAIL THE H1B program and offshoring and union busting.
Hillary was more of the same only with the addition of being a war monger.
Now? Now I can choose between Trump, who at least gives lip service to American workers AND HAS curbed H1B's and made offshoring less pleasant AND has kept us out of more wars but who is a loon with an obnoxious mouth and a bad Twitter habit.
OR
A man, Biden, that will only get elected because the crazies think they can control him and so far they seem to be right.
But, ya know, we honestly have a real chance at a revolution. No joke.
Got two sides, almost equally divided, that hate each other, honestly hate each other.
The support programs like the expanded unemployment and the PPP are about to run out, the eviction moratoriums are about to run out. Gonna see a surge in unemployment over the next two or three months and a surge in the uninsured even as the COVID virus re-surges and we have more lock downs.
Right about then, we have an election that neither side is going to accept losing. This will be made worse by issues with mail in voting and lots of lawyers and stories of miscounts or missing ballots amplified by the media.
Toss in the cuts in police and local government jobs because of the lost tax revenue from the shutdowns....
We have seen what has already happened in our streets. Think we can safely say that that will be amplified multi fold.
OF COURSE we are on the verge of revolution. When you tell people you intend to make their lives intolerable, they revolt.
There used to be a solution for this, known as federalism. People were allowed to run their local communities as they wished. Now, the country is to be homogenized. People who live wrongly are to be crushed. The only surprising thing is that the country isn't aflame already.
Funny you say that. I was just telling my daughter the other day that the biggest problem this country has is that so many people want to impose their views of how to live on others.
Kansas is not California. Massachusetts is not Alabama.
If MO wants to make abortion impossible to get and MA wants to make it on demand and paid for by the state then let each make its own choice. If you disagree strongly enough then you can move.
VA wants to have open carry or easy to obtain concealed carry and MA wants to make both nearly impossible, then so be it.
If blue states want to have high taxes for services then they should not be able to deduct that from federal taxes.
PA wants frakking and Oregon is against it, then so be it.
LIMIT what the feds do and get involved with.
Going a bit further, do not be an asshole.
If you do not believe in gay marriage thats fine, just do not interfere, just stay out of it. On the other hand, if your a gay couple do not try to compel an evangelical baker to make your wedding cake. Find another baker.
Really, people need to just learn to leave each other alone, stop vilifying those that disagree with them, stop trying to compel others to accept or participate in things they vehemently disagree with.
The problem today is that everyone is determined to impose their views on others, and winning an argument is not enough, they need the other side to bow down and acknowledge a moral or intellectual shortcoming, to be humiliated.
The golden rule...Treat others as you would wish to be treated and do it regardless of their stance.
Just try and find a kosher baker/caterer when you want to have a wedding reception at a Conservative or Orthodox Jewish synagogue. After jumping through all those rules when I got married in 2011 I have little sympathy for people who get turned away by one baker. Yeah, just go find another one. Don't sue the one who won't provide the service.
It’s an absurd fixation to destroy the baker for personal glee. Disagree with his hyper-ideology, by why torment him? There are at least 29 bakers within a 3 mile radius who would happily design the cake of their choice, likely with far greater creative dazzle.
What has been completely excluded from the coverage is really important. A citizen expose’ journalist visited more than 20 Muslim owned bakeries, requesting the same cakes. He was denied by all of them.
Agreed, but this goes against the whole thrust of the "reformist" impulse. The determination to rule others is ubiquitous.
The compulsion to rule others is a fundamental trait of collectivists. It is at the core of their beliefs. And in America the collectivists, who Governmetn is always the answer are on the left.
Good post Daniel. My initial reaction is that some actions have costs (environmental damages for example). Some areas will be more responsible, and yet suffer the fallout because of the lazier areas. When the results of actions permeate outward, laissez-faire loses sheen.
But then, I suppose we can hope for a discourse that reaches into areas and makes them change their minds themselves-- rather than decreeing everything for the whole country.
Lots to think about-- thanks Daniel.
A good analysis of cultural trends that have been growing stronger and more devastating during the past few decades.
If only more people shared your views Daniel . . .
Oh well.
I would be in favor of that, but the last time we tried it, it did not go so well.
But we all know federalism is a sham. You mean localized laws and governance. And without an actual federal edict that says this (fuck Trump’s all on your own nonsense) we are all left, whatever non offsensive genital designation you want hanging in the wind.
By the way Matt, fix the lag on posting please. It’s honestly keeping me from posting more
Federalism has been rendered a sham by those determined to impose their will on us. But we could easily restore it, IF we are willing to let deplorable people live by their disgusting and loathsome customs.
Not even Trump would call Democrats Deplorable. That there was a slip of her filthy mouth. Keep bringing it up and the Senate will go ALL REPUBLICAN. The more you denigrate people, the more gestapo mandates you contrive, "The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers. "
Goodness gracious. You want me to live in a national where half the folks are deplorable basket cases 🙄
Thank you for your clever satire, saintonge235.
Sorry! Trump is correct. There was no Welfare when this country was settled right Up to the 60s. Welfare was for women who lost their husbands in WAR.
I was never supposed be used as an international Advertisement to invite people of the world to become institutionally dependent on the US government.
WIC February 9 , 2010 USDA informs the Mexican Embassy that an agreement reached between the State Department and ICE, the Women, Infants & Children (WIC) food voucher program does not violate immigration laws prohibiting immigrants from becoming a “public charge.”
https://thehill.com/latino/515504-mexico-rerouted-funds-meant-for-regional-development-to-migration-containment-report#:~:text=WIC%20February%209%20%2C%202010%20USDA,becoming%20a%20%E2%80%9Cpublic%20charge.%E2%80%9D
“SNAP” (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), includes a Spanish-language flyer provided to the Mexican Embassy by the USDA with a statement advising Mexicans in the U.S. that they do not need to declare their immigration status in order to receive financial assistance. “Come get free SSI money”
https://www.scribd.com/user/512247/document
Immigrant families caught illegally crossing the Mexican border told U.S. immigration agents they made the trip because they believed they would be permitted to stay in the United States and collect public benefits.
https://apnews.com/article/3ef53d48e1544f54b1572d736b1f0852
https://www.gopusa.com/63-of-hispanic-u-s-immigrants-not-literate-in-english/
I don't think special laws should be constructed around your sexual proclivities. I just can't imagine a parade for the missionary position.
You seem to be one of very few who are aware of the WEF globalist NWO support for shareholder corporatism.I’m pro-capitalism, but this in no way aligns with what capitalism was meant to represent. It was fair trade and the ability for every American to grab the brass ring, free from government bureaucratic hyper-regulation, outsourcing American jobs, cronyism and multinational monopolies that crush competition and entrepreneurialism.The duopoly has been selling us out for decades and getting filthy rich on the backs of the middle class who no longer have the opportunity to build or manufacture anything, small business owners who can no longer afford to keep their doors open or afford to purchase a home of any sort.
They created a nation of consumers who can no kinder afford to purchase anything and our ability to manufacture anything to mercantile tyrannical oppressive regimes, ie China.And now they own us.Literally. We don’t even have the mineral components necessary to provide life saving medicines, vitamins or OTC basics like Advil,antihistamines,antacids,aspirin, toothpaste,eyedrops, antibiotic ointments.. nothing
Even sold out our uranium.
We rely on China for everything, including toilet paper. And now our shelves are bare, we are feeling the first pangs of hyper-inflation, yet We The People are the selfish, arrogant whiners.
And so few realize this was long planned.
Are you familiar with The Quincy Institute? A “think tank”co-founded by Soros and Koch.Profoundly antisemitic,pro-Nazi, anti-National sovereignty, anti-American and pro-illegal , unvetted mass migration via open borders. The latest unabashedly corrupt cartel-The Familes Bush, Clinton,Obama, with Soros big bugs are bringing 50,000 unvetted Afghans to the US without any claim to seeking asylum
And I haven’t heard a peep from the Republicans. Even those who claim to despise the Bush Cartel
Perhaps they were peeping and you failed to hear it.
Union Bosses contributed to Biden.
Union "Rank and File" voted for Trump.
Biden got twice the corporate contributions as Trump and his new wars are Quid Pro Quo for those military Contractors' contributions.
It seems to me a wall was started and Biden refused to finish it even though the SCOTUS said Trump could use military money to defend against invasion. BIDEN allowed all the construction to be carried off by his beloved Mexican Cartel who is bringing him all the single mothers and kids he could possible want in a plan to economically bring the US to it's knees for the One World Government. Look at all the money he as spent.
To date, Bidden has let over 4,000,000 Welfare headed people into the US and only deported 33,000 in 2021.
https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/southwest-land-border-encounters
We are on our Knees, now what?
There are 24,000,000 unauthorized and their Birthright Citizen children. States who don't want to subsidize this, shouldn't have to since it's against the law anyway:
212(a)(4) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), an individual seeking admission to the United States or seeking to adjust status to that of an individual lawfully admitted for permanent residence (green card) is INADMISSIBLE if the individual, "at the time of application for admission or adjustment of status, is likely at any time to become a public charge.” That's clear don't you think?
Biden SCOTUS Slap Downs:
NO green cards for unauthorized
NO work Permits for unauthorized
NO welfare for 1.5 million border busters
NO Pathway to Citizenship for deported DACA
NO Open Border - wait in Mexico
NO Biden changing Senate rules
NO Race based COVID relief
NO Biden Vaccine mandates for business
NO Vaccine Mandate for Federal Workers
NO Extension of eviction Ban
NO Repeal of “Wait in Mexico”
NO Parole temporary admitted does not get permanent residence
NO can not extend Parole stay in US
NO to Biden climate accounting measure
NO to Biden Punishing Unvaccinated Air Force Members
It was the SCOTUS that saved US against the LAWLESS Democrats.
Biden has put US back into Afghanistan (to drag more Refugees into the US public assistance program) IRAQ, Somalia, Syria, All to dilute the AMERICAN DREAM?
Tho I've personally seen (esp. in the last 10-15 years) plenty of B.S. from the Woke upper-middle class, I'm still stunned at the level of degeneracy they (esp. those in the MSM) have publicly shown these last few years, *esp.* on Trump/Russia/FISA.
To paraphrase Churchill, never have so many hyper-privileged brats gotten so much so quickly and clearly wrong (of such huge consequence), with such stupendous arrogance.
That they've proceeded to continue to tee off on, not only Trump, but his Deplorable backers (incl. a 16-year-old, N. Sandman), shows a level of inhumanity I never expected to see in the US.
So, as RRDRRD says, it is indeed important for everyone to understand, the degree of risk the country faces from these degenerates.
Thank You,
Union Bosses contributed to Biden.
Union "Rank and File" voted for Trump.
Biden got twice the corporate contributions as Trump and his new wars (Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Syria) are Quid Pro Quo for those military Contractors' contributions.
Workers are the deplorables because only 30% pay more taxes than the suck up and only HALF of the population is working which makes it %15 of the total population paying taxes for 85% of the population. How long do you think that's going to last?
I am also upset when Dems attack our children. So hard to see it. What are they thinking? Very sad. 😢
Matt, this is a thoughtful answer. While I haven't read your original work on the ID trial, I certainly saw in your tone in this piece that you were disgusted with journalists who treated it like a visit to the zoo.
But you're still stuck in both-sideism. Is it really authoritarian for the feds to intervene in Portland after 5 weeks of rioting? While there have been a couple of troubling incidents amidst all the violence and mayhem, do we really have evidence that peaceful protestors are being targeted by law enforcement?
You can help cooler heads to prevail through your precise and vivid writing.
Having been a life long Portlander got all but the last two and half years of my life, i agree. PDX, a city I love and always enjoy boating, has become the quintessential Emperor Has No Clothes situation.
The 5 person council along with their predilection to elect a new Chief of Police is a damning indictment on the way my beloved city is run.
Not surprised you responded to this reply. It is remarkably sophisticated. While RRDRRD is correct to point out that the Dover, PA incident is a woefully pathetic counterpoint to the left's expansive authoritarianism, he does not try to contend with your reality. If you did not add some sugar to the bitter medicine, you would not be long for your billet.
Greta Thunberg has far more cache with the left than James Hansen. This is because the left has lost it to a dangerous extent and your main audience is a subset of these people. You're good enough for my purposes. I look forward to the day when you are truly free.
Just keep in mind that there is nothing more contemptible than an American talking like a North Korean. They have a good excuse. What's ours?
Your last paragraph +100. Methinks that NK is not so much a bogeyman, but a model to be envied and emulated by those pulling the strings and those revolutionaries thirsting for power.
I acknowledge that you have seen the issues and are moving in the right direction. Your commentary still leaves me believing that there are significant assumptions you make that you will want to cast off in the long run. I think you have a lot of unsupportable moral equivalency between left and right... but I say that only relatively recent writings from this venue and Rolling Stone.
For what it is worth, I just downloaded Hate Inc and will see if it alters my perspective.
I earned my reporter chops back in the mid 60's while working at a mid-sized newspaper in Maine.
Back then, accurately reporting all sides of an issue was considered good reporting, if only because very few issues are binary.
Personally, I appreciate present day reporters and commentators who have the guts to at least attempt the daunting task of being accurate.
Matt is part of an endangered species.
Matt: I did get the nuance in your piece. But the title suggests an equivalence between ancient discrediting conduct of fringe conservatives that is, in actuality, nowhere near the danger and scope of contemporary and mainstream leftist behavior. For me, the title of your piece is not fair.
You are concerned about what the left is doing, but you profoundly disrespect the right.
You also oscillate between insulting Republicans and conservatives as if they are one and the same- were they then? They aren't now.
You betray the classic distaste for believes of anything except pure science - even thou science has become the manipulable 'religion' of the left. Sprinkle the term onto anything and it become unassailable. (Surgical mask for virus spread prevention anyone?)
Very hard to read the first half of this because of it's strong negative emotional underpinnings.
I disagree with anyone who feels the need to condemn those who take comfort in the community of faith. Lots of rebels are religious. That said, group think, as this piece conveys, can produce ignorance.
The left has combined the hideous , murderous ideologies of Stalinism,Nazism,Maoism,Fundamentalist Islamism,NoKo,Jim Jones,Malthus,Vlad The Impaler,Attila The Hun,Emperor Hirohito,Ted Bundy,Manson,Mengele,the psychopathic tell-animal torture,Orwell’s Surveillace State, The Man.
The Cult Of Scientism,Faucism,McCarthyism and the global Pharma/Multinational Shareholder Vulture Kleptocracy / Silicon Valley Techno-BureaucraticTranshumist militarism.
Everything they purportedly hate is what they’ve become on steroids. Including cheering for Fauci and Collins grotesque animal torture.Though they’re never valued human life, they once loved dogs.It was something that crossed party politics.They’ve transcended the point of no return
You really ought to get back on the education beat to see what the newest versions of the Scopes Trial are all about. If school board members were just yelling at people it’d be a relief. Now you can get yelled at, then maybe arrested for coming to the meeting or visited by CPS. Meanwhile, the teachers are saying one thing to you and something completely different to your kids, such two-faced mendacity not only being encouraged by the district, but required by policy.
The biggest difference between church lady scolding and cat lady scolding is that the latter is backed by the full power and authority of government (and probably your employer’s HR department), and the scolds are downright eager, even happy, to destroy their enemies along with anyone who expresses mild skepticism or dares ask a question. This sounds like an exaggeration, I know. It’s not, and furthermore, these people show every sign of doubling down post-election.
Fantastic exchange here. And, Matt clarified something in his response that I had a questioned in my comment above. This is the kind of rich, open-minded exchange that happens too rarely these days - even in the online journals - and that so many of us are thirsty for. So, just wanted to say thanks.
This is LOL-worthy and nearly content-free libertarian-ism, and I'm sad Matt wasted his time replying. I can't tell you why without a longer text than you wrote. Your writing is also about 50 percent lard, overburdened with adjectives and adverbs. "Leftist conspiracies" did give me a laugh though. As if the left in the U.S. could organize a barbecue.
Hillary conspired with Russian Duchenko and UK Steele to create the DOSSIER which under minded the entire Trump Administration.
Conspiracies Pass as Wisdom on the Left:
Russian Bounty on US forces
Trump - hawk, "Red Button" president. LMAO
Fire extinguisher killer (NYT)
Trump kept Nuclear codes
Trump colluded with Russia
DOSSIER
Constitutional Crisis
Trump the Russian Spy (NYT)
Trump Sent His Attorney to Prague to Meet With Kremlin Officials
Trump Told People to Drink Bleach to Get Rid of Coronavirus
Capitol Riot was insurrection (only one killed was demonstrator)
"fine" Nazis or Ku Klux Klansmen
BORDER SECURITY IS RACIST
Constitution says Tax Payers must pay for abortions.
"Bizarre, Malthusian claims about impending environmental demise (that has been routinely refuted by the passage of time)"
You are not paying attention. Humans are supposed to live on the interest of the bounty of nature. We're in the process of squandering the principal (a process that was already remarkably far along in the US by the end of the 19th century.) Civilizations have done this before. It did end well for them.
Still waiting for that population bomb and ice age they assured us of in the 70s. "Experts" have predicted our impending doom before. It did not end well for them.
Glib sarcasm on this issue only gets a chortle from an audience of other ignoramuses.
The predictions of an Ice Age in the 1970s were more like trivial speculation than a consensus position that was reinforced over time by an accumulation of hard evidence, as with the current conditions of global warming and climate instability. Those conditions are presently seen most dramatically in the increase in carbonic acid in the oceans, and the effects are not trivial. Smoldering peat fires and raging forest fires north of the Arctic Circle don't support the basis for your mockery very well. Neither does the undermining of the Antarctic ice fields by upwelling of the warming seas.
As to Malthus being refuted: I'd like that to be so. (Just as I wish that anthropogenic global warming wasn't a real thing, despite the mounting evidence to the contrary that's has by now been acknowledged by some of the largest oil companies on the planet.) But until the total human population of the planet reaches a peak and then stabilizes without a crash, the possibility of a catastrophic reckoning can only be said to have been delayed, not refuted..
My observation that the natural bounty found in the territory of the US has been squandered is a matter of historical fact. I can refer to the peak years of the American bison and passenger pigeon harvest in the last quarter of the 19th century. Just before the bison went commercially extinct, and the passenger pigeon became completely extinct. Wild populations of Atlantic salmon are practically extinct in American waters. The other sea-running fish species are a small fraction of their former populations. The Chesapeake Bay- the largest estuary in the world- is a vestige of its former abundance, it's waters largely degraded by the factory farming of poultry. Much of the Gulf of Mexico has suffered a similar fate as the downstream consequences of monocrop farming of soy, corn, and animal fodder with petrochemicals and pesticides.
Now we're in the era of overfishing cod, bluefin tuna, orange roughy, Atlantic halibut, beluga sturgeon, abalone... https://deepoceanfacts.com/endangered-fish-species
Production of plastic, an inherently durable synthetic substance, boomed over the past 30 years for use as a throwaway substance, as the ultimate artifact of a modern material culture that enshrines disposability for convenience. Now microplastics are being increasingly absorbed along the entire food chain from plankton to humans, long-term effects unknown. And the enormous resource trove that originally propelled the European settlement of the US, its productive capacity, and its prosperity is largely used up. Oil reservoirs that practically pumped themselves, high-grade lodes of iron, nickel, copper, silver, and gold, top-grade lumber...depleted, or gone entirely. But those losses are relatively insignificant compared to the looming consequences from depletion of the fertile soil and underground water reserves that supply a large fraction of American agricultural production.
I'm not offering any of those observations as hypothetical scenarios projected decades into the future as a possible outcome, the way speculations about a possible Ice Age occasionally popped up in an insignificant number of news and magazine articles in the 1970s. I'm speaking of historical fact and present-day circumstance. And we'd better do something about the problems while we're still a comfortable and affluent society.
Actually glib sarcasm is a highly effective magnet for silly yet pedantic responses from ignoramuses. BTW, the upcoming ice age predictions were literally in textbooks back in the 70s. Don't kid yourself, the current alarmists are just as wrong as Erlich, Holdren, and Malthus.
Speaking as someone who was reading high school and college textbooks in the 1970s, forecasts of a coming Ice Age might have warranted a half-page sidebar that brought it up as a possibility.
And for what it's worth, even if a consensus of meteorologists and geographers from 50 years ago had made incorrect predictions of a looming Ice Age (to repeat, that did not happen), it doesn't impeach the credibility of present-day climate science, any more than the errors found in 1960s era timelines of hominid evolution discredit the entire discipline of physical anthropology today.
You sure do have your comfortably smug smoking jacket on. Well then, don't worry, be happy.
I have my comfortably literate, numerate, and historically accurate jacket on right now. And it does insulate me from irrational beliefs whether coming from climate alarmists or creationists.
I'm an still searching the internet for those "raging forest fires north of the Arctic Circle." 🔍
@Mascott I think this is brilliant, and thoroughly depressing, of course. I would like to add to it, only because I find that self-congratulatory tone of the doubters who say "we ain't dead yet" so galling. We (the worriers) may be guilty of pessimism in the face of the rampant stupidity and short-sightedness of the human race. We sometimes don't allow for individual brilliance that keeps total annihilation at bay. So, we didn't anticipate Norman Borlaug's genius that increased wheat yields to forestall Malthus, or the vast scientific interventions that worked/work to counter the effects of fossil fuel consumption (including plastics). And lab-grown meat means that we don't have to mourn all the wildlife that has perished. But for all the Jeremiah's that maybe forget to hope, there are thousands of ostriches who say it can't happen because it hasn't happened yet, and lead us into peril. All those who argued that low numbers of deaths from Covid meant that we should re-open, because - money, now see that there were fewer deaths because we sheltered in place, and the disease is now out of control. But that's OK, because some scientists are working themselves to death to come up with vaccines, (from which drug companies will make billions) that will save our bacon; too late for the hundreds of thousands who perished.
Just above someone commented (excitedly) that we are approaching a revolution, because both sides are so entrenched that compromise is becoming impossible - yay! I guess maybe our time is up.
Malthus actually made two points. 1) The birth rate is always greater than replacement rate over any period of a decade or so. 2) The human population invariably tends to increase faster than the food supply. From this it follows logically that human misery and want is inescapable.
History has refuted both contentions. Websearch "birth dearth" and "green revolution."
My point is that history is not over and done yet. It's a few decades too early to rest assured that Malthus has been finally refuted.
Don't get me wrong; I want his prediction to be refuted. I want the camel to still be standing strong when that last straw is added to the burden. But even the most optimistic predictions only have us about 80% of the way to planetary ZPG.
Malthus's predictions were absolutes. People would ALWAYS outbreed the food supply.
With an absolute prediction that A is always followed by B, any failure of B to occur after A refutes the prediction.
It's odd. Thirty years ago, a college professor teaching a class I was in gave me materials showing the birth rate had been falling relentlessly for about a half-century, and that the population explosion was due to the death rate falling faster. (Those pesky brown people's failure to die in great numbers being particularly marked). Yet he was certain that overpopulation doom was upon us. Yet a belief that the death rate would always be less than the birth rate was ridiculous. There was no prospect of people living to be hundreds of years old.
Currently, the world's population is expected to top out at about 10 billion. A decade or so ago, it was expected to top out at 15 billion. Thirty years ago, the idea of a population peak was almost unheard of. Yet the anxiety continues. Why?
While I am replying to you, much of this is also directed to the other 1 or 2 misguided posters trying to rewrite history regarding “Bizarre Malthusian claims about impending environmental demise.”
You can keep trying to edge away from reality but the truth remains that academia and the political left (they were somewhat more distinct entities back then) widely accepted and promoted a belief in the imminent demise of civilization as we know it though mass starvation and/or climate change in the form of an impending ice age. The Population Bomb was a bestseller and Ehrlich was called upon by myriad government and nonprofit committees, panels, for his “expert” testimony. Smithsonian Magazine called it “one of the most influential books of the 20th century” (JANUARY 2018).
I’ll direct you to “The Global Cooling Scare Revisited (‘Ice Age’ Holdren Had Plenty of Company)” by Robert Bradley Jr September 26, 2009 with an extensive list of quotes indicating prominent individuals, organizations, and publication that were on the global cooling bandwagon {FYI, I am not certain if this site allows links and I don’t intend to retype this. You can find these.).
Did some people disagree? Of course, That does not change the fact that these were mainstream ideas, particularly with the political left; to pretend they were outliers is absurd. Does the abject failure of these concepts utterly refute the current “consensus” – no. What it does is severely undermine the credibility of the fields of science related to the environment. They represent an ongoing pattern of failure in these fields that, for all intents and purposes starts with Malthus.
Malthus has been refuted because his underlying premise was that food production could not possibly keep up population growth. It has, in fact, outstripped it. Ehrlich specifically predicted the death by starvation of hundreds of million in the 1970s – clearly refuted. As for the Ice Age, what can I say, the new “consensus” is AGW (at least for the moment).
The underlying point of the original post was that the political left has a pattern of buying into dubious science and then trying to impose large scale interventions for problems that are somewhere between exaggerated and non-existent. There may be reasonable arguments about the degree to which this is true but historical reality supports the general premise.
I have come to think of it as a bacterial colony in a petri dish, which poisons itself before it can ever achieve maximum population density. I suppose one can just wait for the bitter end; I choose to try to live responsibly for the rest of the culture. Others may differ.
Humans aren't bacteria, or yeast. We have self-aware consciousness and free will, of the sort that provides enough latitude and agency to allow us to escape the trap. At least potentially.
I'm also aware of the human tendencies toward bot behavior, somnambulism, self-pitying egotism, self-exalting egotism, and all the rest of it, including the potential to behave in ways too sickening to relate. I've been around. Been there, and done a bit of it myself. But the hour is getting late.
Actually keeping alive civilization that can not govern or sustain themselves is ANTI-SCIENCE. We should use the Star Trek Prim Directive which
"prohibits its members from interfering with the natural development of alien civilizations."
Allow them to FAIL or we wind up subsidizing their failure in our own country. Nature implements collateral damage for a reason!
The line between resource use and abuse are defined by our current knowledge base, and only that. You might have had a sharper point with resource shortage arguments in the 2000s when we knew less about producing resources than we do today, but in the era where American petroleum engineers did the impossible and squeezed oil out of a rock, this line of thinking falls remarkably flat. The knowledge base and the tool base that we have available to us compared to even 2010 is staggeringly large, and is not only growing, the rate of growth itself is accelerating. Malthus may not be put off, but he's never yet won and in just American shale formations alone, peak oil *globally* has been shoved back almost a century.
You're making it sound as if I was arguing in favor of Malthus. I wasn't. I was pointing out that his proposition remains in dispute.
The line between resource use and abuse or overuse is ultimately defined by physical limits. The growth in human knowledge has a demonstrated capacity to increase the activation of the latent potential of resources- sometimes dramatically. But past performance is not a guarantee of future success.
The real heart of the effort to refute Malthus has little to do with oil, at least not directly. Or with other inert substances like strategic elements and precious metals, either. It's about sustainable food production: soil, water, and climate (and aquatic habitat, which is crucial to produce an abundance of fish and shellfish species.) I realize that petrochemical-based agriculture was crucial to the "Green Revolution", but it hasn't had a positive effect on any of those foundational elements of food production.
In that regard, it would be interesting to attempt to model the amount of food resources lost to the fishing and shellfish harvesting industries as a result of the "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico, vs. the amount of food produced by the upstream petrochemical agriculture that accounts for the majority of the nutrient pollution that's caused it. And I'd like to see much the same cost-benefit analysis applied to the Chesapeake Bay.
@Mascot as posted on Jul 23
This comment, much like most of your offerings to this forum, is a testament to the informed reason and patience you display; even when sadly confronted by the haplessly uninformed or gleefully assailed by the zealous false prophets and propagandists of pseudo-intellectualism. The latter group, of course, seem unable to resist employing their dissembling nonsense in perpetually failing attempts to refute factual constructs with fictitious magical theory.
As Usual,
EA
"Use" and "abuse" are not scientific or technical terms. They are value judgments.
Oh yeah, I remember that New Ice Age being right around the corner in 1975.
Let us know when you've gotten $40 worth of attention, OK?
Our "new" expert was Bill Nye, the Science Guy...
Now you're giving all us old timers a hint at your age RRDRRD 😏
It has always perplexed me how a person can fear almost comical biblical authoritarianism more than hardcore leftist radicalism working it's way into every facet of government with all of it's monopoly on power. And yet, now that a tiny handful of the left's finest popular writer's are willing to openly attack woke-mania, some seem pissed that they're late to the party. I myself am quite happy to actually have real liberal writers who's pieces I anticipate. And here's the dirty secret. Wokeness cannot move conservatives leftward. But guess who and what can?
I respectfully and strongly disagree that any push to promote theology, and bad theology at that, in schools should be perceived as harmless. Your commentary is loaded with bias that deserves its own medium for debate.
It doesn’t matter how late he came to the party. The fact is that he came and ditto Glenn Greenwald. Those of us who were raised by or were for most of our youth leftists didn’t understand all at once. It takes years and Taibbi deserves credit.
The unfortunate realties about global warming haven’t been disproven with the passage of time. Glaciers are melting rapidly. Weather is more and more erratic. Life as we know it is hanging in the precarious imbalance.
What exactly are you trying to say? You use way to many ten cent words and phrases when pennies will do. I will concede that I haven’t yet read the replies, but holy hell man, you sound like Joey in Friends trying to pimp Chandler and Monica for adoption.
Apologies if that reference is too hip for some, but damn, succinctness is the key
Not trying to be rude but when a post receives as many positive responses as this one, including a response from the editor, it is obviously written effectively for the audience at hand. Perhaps the issue is with you.
Agree on all counts. It's a one-sided power imbalance in favor of the left. To sic the IRS on conservatives all Obama had to do is flip the switch. His leftist allies were already long in place in those positions. Same with 90% of every government agency donating to and voting Democrat. It may look that way to someone like Matt who's career focused on the right's absurdities, but it's nowhere close to a fair fight. Bothsidesism only clouds the issue.
The only reason this has grown to proportions never before seen is the Republican Establishment covering up the roles of the role in the IRS Scandal of McCain, his pit Bull Henry Kerner ( stupidly appointed Office Of Special Council) and McCain’s campaign advisors team’s role. They continue to point out only Obama and the Dem’s criminal weaponization of the IRS. Nobody was punished, the “ investigation” never came to resolution. Why not? Ditto Benghazi. Because McCain, Graham, Flake, Corker were all involved.
We should demand better. Hold EVERY player accountable! This is the toxic corrupt byproduct of the duplicity UniParty Establishment Deep Stat duopoly.
Google “ McCain/ Kerner IRS Scandal”. Judicial Watch, Daniel Greenfield are among those who explicitly exposed it and they aren’t exactly liberal operatives.
For my life, I can’t understand why they refuse to eat them out. Judicial Watch exposed it long ago as did several really good investigative journalists
Fabulous insight and factual historical knowledge. Couldn’t have better expressed your well laid out observations and pragmatism.
The problem with the Taibbi camp is that they think the Left "has become as bad as the Right" when in fact their notion of the evil Right was only ever propaganda from the dishonest Left.
They were part of the problem until recently, and now pride compels them to insist that the problem didn't begin until they, in their noble wisdom, noticed it. To protect their delusions of innocence, they aggressively slander all who noticed the problem before they did as having genuinely been the evil that the woke described them as.
Taibbi will never acknowledge that Rush Limbaugh was RIGHT all those years (and he was wrong). No, Limbaugh was a MONSTER, and the Left didn't start also being monstrous until precisely the moment that Matt Taibbi started criticizing it!
I've long been a fan, but the vitriol of the comments on your twitter post finally pushed me into subscribing and supporting you.
I share your skepticism of both the political left and right, and probably for similar reasons. It seems that moderate liberals—in the traditional sense—might find a better home with conservatives at the moment? They seem to at least have respect for my perspective and I see more hope for compromise, moderation, and positive evolution, especially in a post Trump world. Thoughts?
I've been an active democratic socialist and am a long-time radical feminist and have found much more thoughtful conversation at American Conservative, National Review, and Spiked over the past eight weeks than I've seen in most "leftist" circles for awhile. My radical feminist views have long aligned with those of conservative women (except for keeping abortion safe and legal--I agree on the keeping it rare part, which leads to some liberal feminists tearing me apart), and the extreme danger of transactivism on multiple levels had already led me to part with a lot of the "Left." But watching the misappropriation of critical race theory as well to harm and surveil people drove me over the edge. In May I had this feeling that the whole white fragility thing, as it was playing out among my acquaintances and the text itself, seemed very dehumanizing to black people and extremely self-serving to the many white people I knew adopting it. I began looking around to see if any black people disagreed, and I've discovered DOZENS of amazing black "conservative" intellectuals whom I'd never heard because I'd been living in a left-wing bubble. That was two months ago, and my mind has just been blown. I highly recommend hanging out at a few of those sites I mentioned, as well as Public Discourse, Reason, etc. I appreciate Matt's willingness to call this out.
I am a lifelong moderate conservative. From my perspective, I've seen the bullshit we are dealing with now coming for a long time. I've tried to talk about it, but nobody would listen. Because I was that Republican busybody that people like Matt liked to laugh at.
The US Constitution is a liberal document. Wanting to respect and preserve it is considered conservative in the US, but is really liberal in the classic sense. So if you are wondering why conservatives are more open to your ideas than liberals, it's because conservatives are really liberal, and today’s liberals are really closed-minded authoritarians.
Oh my, did this ever hit the mark. Classic value vs modern garbage. Which one will this country embrace?
A long time coming indeed. The combo of self-righteousness, hypocrisy, and vicious attacks on enemies goes back to the Clinton administration at least - that’s where my first-hand political memory starts - and all the wild ideas and behaviors we see now were on display then if you were attentive to them. Just the other day, I was remembering how a coupe of early Clinton appointees were derailed when it was revealed that, even though they were both rich and liberal, they were employing illegal immigrant nannies and servants on the cheap. “Luxury beliefs” is a new term, but on the left it’s an old idea indeed.
My views are similar to yours but I identify myself as a conservative now. I've long left the dem train in the previous round of cancel exercise a few years ago.
On behalf of all the conservatives I know, we welcome you and are so glad you popped the bubble!
I've gone through a similar journey over the last few years. I'm still believe most of the same things (though I'm more likely to talk your ear off about occupational licensing reform in addition to the need for UBI and M4A), but I gotta say I really didn't know how much of a bubble I was in.
Most Americans are socially conservative and economically liberal when compared with the opinion-makers of the country. This goes for both parties, incidentally.
I'm kinda socially conservative and economically liberal, and although I'm not a Catholic, there are something like 68 million Catholics in the USA, largely socially conservative and economically liberal. I don't have the numbers on how many Catholics are socially conservative and economically liberal.
Refreshing. It's kind of like Kindergarten, at least in my case -- so many of us don't fit into any cubbyhole.
I meant politically---I fit in no cubbyhole, but take each issue on its own. Years ago writer Richard Adams came to the U.S.
on a mission and I joined him. Along the way, his observations were telling-- Americans defined themselves mainly by their work; many were short on fuller lives, interests from soft paste china to art, history, and literature. We could be pushy, but we were an open, welcoming, industrious people. In his tour of America, Dickens had already skewered slavery-- his recitation especially of newspaper ads seeking the return of escaped slaves, listing missing fingers and toes, scarred backs, was devastating and heartbreaking. So many escaped to be with husbands or wives or children who'd been sold off.
Today, that single emphasis is a toxic identity, limiting and defining people, before anything else, not by what they do, by what kind of human beings they are,
or their nonpolitical interests, but by immutable characteristics soldered to a cheesy Marxism that spreads the dehumanization and division we see daily. The pathology at the core of wokeness may bring down free countries, leaving failed states that the performing, entitled wokes couldn't handle for six hours ---and China, and Russia. Like nobody else ever could, Matt takes a power saw to the bizarre demands and culpable media too intimidated, too lazy or too stupid to take on the daily insanity and open revolt raining down on them. That's where a lot of the blame lies.
Thanks for these comments. I am a Clinton-Gore ish left of center person who has ended up sharing all your concerns over time. Also, I have the same experience - I will read National Review or the Federalist on a libertarian issue and then balk at some abortion article on the site, funny. If you do not already read the news aggregator RealClearPolitics, check it out. It can be a source of reasonable right of center criticism and it highlights some of the brilliant black conservatives out there.
I could have written this very comment in 2005. I never read conservative media prior to 2003. My trigger point was 9/11...when I didn't care about party or politics, I just wanted to know what the hell happened. It has been a revelation. And while I'm not a cheerleader--they don't get everything right--they aren't basically a wing of the Republican Party. They have serious debates among themselves, even draw blood when necessary. I don't recognize the left at all any more.
Thank you for your comment. In the last five years the entire left/right continuum has moved so far leftwards it's nuts. Standing still has turned many 2010-era liberals into 2020 reactionaries.
Great comment. Do you think your perspective is unusual, or it spreading among feminist women, and if so, how much?
I think it's becoming more common among "gender critical" feminists, especially after our 65,000 person international support group on the Reddit platform, plus all of the related subreddits that documented transgenderism abuse, was shut down without warning for the "hate speech" of assuming that men cannot become women. That's it. This group helped so many women and girls--including women in Islamic countries writing in, young women questioning whether to transition, people dealing with abuse, etc. Meanwhile, Reddit kept up their rape porn subreddits and deeply misogynistic incel ones, because apparently that isn't hate speech.
I also have a few old friends/acquaintances (highly educated professors, psychologists, etc.) who have been secretly looking into this stuff and are moving over too. Still, I'm disappointed at how cowed so many of my former colleagues are on social media. I think half of them even agree with it. They just knee-jerk assume that trans women are women and anyone who questions BLM is immediately a racist.
That's awful and sorry to hear. Once I read Two-Xchromosomes subreddit and felt like I could contribute (I'm also a bit feminist if you will) so I tried to post, but as it turned out, as a then frequent visitor of the_donald, I was not allowed to post on the Two-X forum. It really made no sense to me.
I also agree with you that transwomen are not women. My bar on bathroom usage is simple: if one has a penis he goes to mensroom.
Oh, I think that one--like most "lesbian" sites on Reddit--is moderated by males identifying as women and a few handmaiden females. Go to Women are Human, 4th Wave Now, Feminist Current, and Gender Critical (on Said.it) for serious feminism--you know, the kind grounded in addressing violence against women and children, not theoretical navel-gazing or performative autogynephiliac femininity. But how would you know? We used to know that xx and lesbian referred to biological women. But saying that gets you banned from Twitter and Reddit now.
I am no longer shocked when I discover that most people calling themselves women on those sites were transgender. It seems as if trans women congregate in online spaces and take over - .001% of the population is pushing 50% of it out. And it's "hate" to say anything about it.
I've heard that too. Don't know if it's true--but I heard the moderators on TwoXChromosomes are (I don't know the proper term) Trans women who haven't had surgery?
Boy I had no idea!
Wow, yes. My post above in response to your first post, is about precisely this and I am sure that my questioning of BLM has many thinking I'm a racist too.
As a feminist woman who has also been a long time democratic socialist and radical feminist, I am finding myself in the same boat.
Same here to some extent, although Hell will freeze over before I vote Republican. I still truly think the issues that make me stay Democrat are more important ... although the language police, de-platforming, and cancel culture are super annoying and in some cases getting people fired.
We need to take back the left. https://areomagazine.com/2020/07/08/debating-the-future-of-leftism/
Awesome! You could check out the new Gender Critical on the platform said.it and also Women are Human and Meghan Murphy's feminist current, if you haven't already.
I'm here for Meghan Murphy!
I'm in the same boat! I'll check it out. I am enjoying reading American Conservative. Can't stand either party.
Love this post, Leculdesac. I'm a feminist Dem, but think of myself as pretty centrist, and many of my values align with yours (esp. re abortion).
I was recently attacked hard by a vocal mob of anti-racists (the anti-racist committee to be exact, and you'd better call them exactly that or be called out in a "reply-all" email) at my church!! for vocalizing my point that hanging a giant Black Lives Matter banner in front of our church might make people assume that we are associated with the BLM Global Movement, whose leaders have not been quick to condemn violence (some have, but not all, and some sort of encourage it) and that not condemning violence was not in the spirit of Jesus (nor in the spirit of John Lewis or George Floyd's girlfriend, seemingly pretty good authorities on the topic).
I thought perhaps a sign with slightly different words or one that didn't have the same font or style of the BLM Global Network would be more appropriate for a church. Of course I agree with the sentiment that Black lives matter and I think it's important for our church to make a statement about it, but I struggle with the potential association with the their global network. I also suggested that the entire congregation should have the opportunity to weigh in on this decision (it is a Congregational church, after all).
I was LAMBASTED by this group to the point of tears (and I'm pretty tough). They need the sign up NOW, anyone who doesn't want the sign is an IDIOT, and it has to say precisely BLACK LIVES MATTER, they are not going to let the congregation weigh in, and the anti-racist group has already chosen the sign. I've been at this church for 16 years, as a pretty active member, serving on various committees, including the chair of the Board of Trustees. I preach in the summer sometimes! These people know me and they know my character (or I thought they did) but this did not stop the hostility. It has been unpleasant, surprising, and frankly disappointing.
I spent 2 days in a rabbit hole researching Black Lives Matter (the organization), reading many of the same conservative publications you mention (which I had avoided in the past), and found that while I do not always agree with their conclusions, many of the facts/stories that they reported were nowhere to be seen (or barely mentioned) in the mainstream publications I usually favor. It has been eye-opening as well!!!
I found Matt in my search for intelligent and thoughtful discourse on this issue. That, plus conversations with many of my friends on both sides of the political aisle, assuring me that I haven't lost my mind, have been a true gift for me right now (including your post). So, yes, huge props to Matt for his honest, fair, and quite refreshing reading.
This comment needs to be shared.
Honestly curious: what radical feminist views do you hold that are aligned with those of conservative women?
May I suggest checking out the Rubin Report group at locals.com?
I am having the same experience as your first sentence but trying to find somewhere on the left where I can find a home! Also I don't want to lose "obamacare" or social security. In addition to Matt's site I like Areo magazine online. Also I assume you may have already found this, it is a great discussion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHGt733yw3g
As an outside observer, I don't want to stick my nose too far into your conversation but NO ONE is trying to take away Social Security (although it badly needs fixing - neither left nor right is going to end their payments to the people who vote the most unless there is a bone-crushing, worse than the Great Depression economic collapse).
As for Obamacare, that has been a moving target from the beginning but I suspect that whatever it is that you like about it is just something that existed already before he took office. Almost all expanded coverage relates to expanded Medicaid, something that could have been done without adding a costly level of bureaucracy and red tape to the private sector coverage that applies to the overwhelming majority of Americans. I can't promise this but I'd bet heavily that ending Obamacare officially will not end whatever facet you find helpful to you.
Spot on. It's been earth shattering to see how conservatives now are welcoming all types of people with open arms while the left demonizes everyone at the same time. It really feels like bizarro world.
"conservatives now are welcoming all types of people with open arms while the left demonizes everyone"
Welcome... but that statement has been true for a lot longer than you were aware of it.
I know that and unfortunately didn't care enough for a while to notice. I suspect there are many like me that tapped out sometime between 2000 - 2020 and have recently been presented with some obvious truths you just don't see unless you search outside the MSM.
"obvious truths you just don't see unless you search outside the MSM."
Amen to that!
We can probably forgive Tommy since these regressives have been painting with the same broad brush for decades.
Thanks! 😉 The one consolation I have is that I never was willing to accept that half (or ALL as is now being implied) our country was racist simply by voting for one of two candidates in 2016. I quickly tapped out after that because I couldn't take the news anymore. Once you realize it isn't actually news, things become A LOT easier to understand.
Clown world.
Around 1965, I read Heinlein's 1941 novel METHUSELAH'S CHILDREN, with the headlines from "the Crazy Years," and boggled at the weirdness of his imagination. By 1975, those headlines didn't sound so unusual, and I realized we were living in the Crazy Years. Since then, we've moved into the Very VERY Crazy Years.
Welcome! I'm a conservative, so take my suggestion with that bias in mind, but:
Support Republicans across the board in November. Punish the left for embracing or tolerating illiberalism. Tell your local Democratic Party what you did, and why.
If you're liberal, you won't like a lot of the policy that will result. But free speech on campus and throughout society will expand, due process on campus and elsewhere will be protected, and likely laws and regulations will be implemented to force Big Tech to honor free speech.
Cancel culture will suffer a body blow. The structure of freedom will be preserved.
Then, if you're not happy with other policies, vote to throw the bastards out.
Given the fact that the GOP is arguaably racist and definitely homophobic, not a chance in hell. In fact, as much as I despise "woke" and "cancel" culture, even as a right of center voter, I will never forget nor forgive the GOP for its role using homophobia to win votes and codify discrimination against me. These 4 months of radical left wing "terror" are nothing compared to the decades-long reign of terror the GOP inflicted upon millions of defenseless Americans, immigrants, Iraqis, Afghanis, etc..
What is it makes you think Trump is a Republican?
The RNC anointed him your leader, reluctantly at first, but eventually like addlepated school girls wholly embraced him. The GOP has been laying the ground for Trump since the 1970s - cultivating its relationships with racist yellow-dog Democrats, and literalist religious fanatics. The GOP then moved on to a page from Minister Goebbels's book on propaganda and built a radio, TV, and print empire to spew misinformation, innuendo, and outright lies. No, Trump is 1000% Republican.
Slow down your breathing there now. Number 1, leader has nothing to do with it. No body leads me. You may operate on a different level. If you are talking about Fox, yes, they were conceived as a propaganda outlet. I haven't watched television since 1980, but from the development of the invasions into Afghanistan and Iraq, it was obvious Fox was pure propaganda. I despise them. Yet, CNN and MSNBC outdo Fox in the "we love Joe Goebbels" competition. Pretty tough to reconcile that?
The Repubs and Democrats are both obsolete and eventually to be replaced.
Take the red pill and call me in the morning.
I'm not sure I can pull the lever for either Trump or Biden, but I plan to vote Republican for my competitive local house race.
I don't see why the things you predict would necessarily happen in the event of a substantial Republican electoral victory. For one thing, the established leadership of both major parties are not very interested in ideology; they are mostly interested in getting along with their donors. Ideology is simply a tool to manipulate the suckers with. For another, at least in the case of the Democratic Party, defeat does not lead to reconsideration and reform but to doubling down; as it was said of another ruling class, 'They have forgotten nothing and learned nothing.' One might find someone local to vote for, but the national parties seem entirely hopeless.
Over the long run, the educational system is the biggest danger to freedom and civil liberties. It's there that kids and particularly college students are being indoctrinated en masse in illiberalism, with ideas like speech is violence if it makes someone feel uncomfortable, or allowing a young man who has been accused basic procedural protections like presumption of innocence and the right to cross-examine his accuser is being "pro-rape."
People who have been taught this in school are now reaching critical mass and starting to dominate all of our institutions. Once that process is complete, freedom is done.
Republicans, despite their innumerable faults and hypocrisies, have pushed back on this. This administration pushed back against the college kangaroo court system. In general, Republicans favor educational reform that will provide more choice, ideological diversity, and free speech.
I am shocked to learn that students, at least in America, are learning anything but the basics and enough STEM subject material to get a crap job after they are cycled out. Are you sure about this? In any case, I still don't see what the Republicans are going to do about it. They've had the presidency, the Supreme Court, the Senate, sometimes the House of Representatives, numerous state governments; and all that gave rise to what you're complaining about. They've had a conservative, pusillanimous opposition party that seems easily frightened and pushed around and is in any case subject to the same plutocrats as themselves. What's going to change that?
Democrats, despite rare moments of GOP Presidents with any level of Congressional power, had essentially unfettered control of the Federal Government for roughly 60 years until the mid-1990s. In the 25 years since, Republicans have had six years where they held House/Senate/POTUS. They have not had the time to offset an Augean stable level of manure accumulation.
There are too many RINOs who fit your description and they need to be weeded out but the GOP is the only realistic alternative to the Democrats who actually gave rise to this state of affairs and who would simply stomp on the gas to accelerate these problems if given the opportunity.
I'm a conservative who previously grew up as a progressive in Canada, and I do enjoy being friends with progressives. I've come to better understand their position, even if I don't agree with them. On the flip side, I've lost countless of "friends" on Facebook of real people I knew once who Unfriended me because of my conservative views. Only through honest discourse and a respect for the other person can we find common ground. You sound like just such a person.
I'm a progressive who grew up as a conservative in the state of Georgia. I have many conservative family members who refuse to talk to me about politics, and many former FB connections who defriended me for commenting on a few truly wackadoodle "conservative" posts with a brief, friendly, fact-based (verifiable, legitimate facts) counter. No responses from them, just unfriending. I too am finding Matt and his readers refreshingly open to ideas from both sides of the aisle (or neither side). Just subscribed and hopeful that this microcosm of open-mindedness finds a larger audience. Like, say, an America-sized audience.
Funny, I was just thinking the same thing.
I recently subscribed to Matt's substack as well. I also like Areo magazine: https://areomagazine.com/2018/08/23/no-we-are-not-right-wing-we-are-liberal-lefties-and-we-are-many/?fbclid=IwAR0x_TLbsb5OkuPwAP3MSY-_qBkeK6stIWTGjjuW4YS3awcu0u88SidSb0E
That is a pretty solid article.
That's where I'm at, myself
I am finding a place with the Lincoln Project. Feverishly anti-Trumpian former Republicans. America needs a Center Party.
I am anti-Trump and have been since the beginning. But I can't do anything that would put Biden in office. And that is not because of Biden. As an individual, he's far better than Trump. But I see him as a Trojan Horse for the woke Maoists. Can't do that.
I think is a generous assumption, but let's say Biden has as many "woke Maoist" followers as Trump has "selfish misogynistic racist" followers. Even though you've stated you're anti-Trump and see him as a better individual than Biden, you would still vote for Trump because you view his most radical followers to less harmful to our democracy? Or do you plan to just not vote at all? Genuinely curious as I know a lot of people in your position.
First off to clarify, I said I see Biden as a better individual than Trump.
I reject your premise that most of Trump's followers are selfish racist misogynists. If that's what you believe, I'd say you've been watching too much MSNBC. I do acknowledge that Trump has some voters who are radical in ways that I do not support. But I don't think they have any power in this country.
Woke Maoists (or Marxists or Jacobins) on the other hand are driving the agenda at every major US media outlet (except Fox), every major corporation, every entertainment company, every sports club, and almost all of academia. And at least half the Democratic Party. Biden, Pelosi, and Schumer are already bowing to them. So rather than Biden having Woke Maoist followers, I'd say that Biden is following the Woke Maoists.
If Democrats had nominated somebody with enough control of his own mind and a stiff enough spine to tell them NO, I might have been willing to vote for him or her (let’s say Mark Warner for example). As it is, I live in California so it doesn't matter who I vote for. It's already a done deal. So I probably just won't vote. Or maybe I'll write in my own name. Or yours. Or anyone’s. If I lived in a swing state, I would probably be forced to hold my nose and vote for Trump. I would see it as a choice between four more years of a dumpster fire versus ending the country forever. I would be forced to choose the former.
I don't believe that most of Trump's loyalists are selfish racist misogynists (and I haven't watched MSNBC or any other news networks for several years now). I do think that more selfish, racist, misogynist Americans identify with Trump than with any other president in history, but I don't have a comprehensive study to prove that so we'll just leave that there.
I do totally accept your premise that it's less about the characteristics of the followers and more about how much collective power/influence they hold. I'm having trouble accepting the idea that "Woke Maoists" drive the agenda at every major corporation. If by "Woke Maoist" you mean people who have more liberal social views, I'll give you entertainment and academia for sure. But maybe I don't fully understand what you mean by "Woke Maoist"? If as a thinking conservative voter (not a MAGA hat-wearing cult member) your greatest concern is a leader with a "Woke Maoist" agenda, would you mind elaborating on what that agenda might entail? Again, I really appreciate your thoughtful response as I'm genuinely astounded by the depths of the divide in our country and I want to understand any threat that could be more damaging than another four years of raging dumpster fire.
If you want to have serious conversations, you’ll have to dispense with the name-calling. Those terms you're using have had new meanings assigned to them recently, so I really don't know what you're talking about. Those epithets are used so wantonly they have turned into a joke in conservative circles. If I was born like this, why bother trying to change anything?
I will start by modifying my statement about the agenda at corporations. Their agenda is to make a profit. That hasn't changed, and it shouldn't. It is their appropriate reason for existing. What's changed is that they believe that sponsoring an organization like BLM and embracing programs like Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility training is necessary in order for them to keep making a profit.
Woke Maoist may not be the best label, but I'm surprised you act like you don't know what I'm talking about. I am talking about BLM, SJW, CRT, and Antifa. I am talking about The Squad. Even though it's another old white man who's getting the presidential nomination, the party is going to have to bow to the demands of these movements if they are going to keep their elected positions.
As for the agenda, just look at what AOC is asking for. Just look at the Green New Deal. Just look at the current street protester demands, that are being taken very seriously by elected Democrat representatives. All that is a big fat NO. Sorry.
Finally!
Someone (everyone) needs to be talking about this. I’ve been making this case to everyone lately, but it’s not getting enough visibility.
I grew up in the Midwest and ran away to the coast to avoid the stifling conservative and evangelical mindset. But the left has lifted the playbook and perfected it. Instead of “born again” you’re “woke”. Instead of “saints and sinners”, we have “antiracist and racist”. For Scripture we have the Gospel of Intersectionality.
These folks are blinded and motivated by the same religious fervor, but unfortunately they’ve infiltrated the major institutions of our culture. It’s also harder to reject. Freedom of Religion preserved a modest escape from the prior putsch, but now one has to accept the badge of racist to reject this movement.
I disagree this doesn’t impact all of us. I’ve traveled across the former Yugoslavia and walked under thirteen foot walls in Belfast. People can be motivated to see only their “kind” and cleave society along ethnic and sectarian lines. If Trump is using racist “dog whistles”, the left has upgraded to explicit and mandatory curriculum. These things never end well. Ask the residents of the former Yugoslavia.
I’ve also visited the Torture Museum in Budapest. It’s a nondescript office building on a tree lined boulevard. It was the Gestapo headquarters in WWII, clearly one of the most racist, right wing governments ever. The building is full of white tiled cells with floors sloping to the center, to better drain the blood off the beatings. Banks of phone desks fill other floors, where operators could eavesdrop on anyone. After World War 2, the KGB took over and kept the operation going without a hiccup. So both a far right and far left government employed the same tactics against their citizens to enforce obedience.
Here we sit at the beginning of the 21st Century, with a nascent surveillance state powered by ubiquitous technology being built. Our politics are being driven by radical authoritarians on either side. I’m not sure I want either of these movements to win and control those levers of power. At this point the far left looks as frightening as the right - maybe more.
We need to confront these busy bodies with a revival of liberal philosophy and humor. Humor helped take the edge of the right wing, and we need a new class of comics who can take these folks down a step or three. More writers need to make this case the way Matt does. And hopefully we will see politicians and other leaders step up to reassert some key principles of our liberal heritage before it’s too late.
I'm not a Christian, but I'd note that unlike the woke religion, Christianity includes the concepts of mercy, forgiveness, and redemption. The woke religion offers nothing but unrelenting anger, vengeance, and abasement. It's the coldest and bleakest of religions.
In fact what it offers is the opposite of redemption. People who bow before the mob end up dogpiled even worse than before. Every apology is a further admission of guilt - and as guilt is innate to one's identity, it cannot ever be fully cleansed.
The social sciences further show that those who accuse the most - those who scream the most, those who pronounce others less holy to be incorrigible sinners - gain the social benefit of seeming above suspicion themselves.
Altogether, the current discourse penalizes honesty, penalizes forgiveness, and gives significant social benefits to those who enforce its rules.
I think your comment touches on one valuable distinction between the woke and the Christian fundamentalists:
The woke divide us into 2 broad groups: the guilty and the innocent. It's a hierarchy determined greatly by birth.
Christianity starts with the egalitarian premise that we're *all* born guilty. This pushes fundamentalist Christians toward equality, leading to such Christian sayings as, "All are equal at the foot of the cross," and Jesus's own, "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone." (Some Christians need to be dragged really hard to equality, that's true, but it's usually other Christians doing the dragging.)
Try telling some BLM that we're all equal at the foot of anything and you're likely to get shot (eg. Jessica Doty Whitaker). Tell them, "He who is without guilt should fire the first round," and every BLM with black skin thinks he's qualified.
This is why the woke are more dangerous than the born again.
Any display of "white guilt" in this environment is a death sentence. It's not just someone like me- who will never be able to trust you- that the guilty need concern themselves with. It's those they confess to, for they now own you. And that is a pitiful place to be.
There is a religeous fervor to what is happening.
The attitudes are like religious fanatics. The Spanish Inquisition comes to mind. Fanatical participants on the hunt for blasphemy, willing to torture and strip their victims of wealth and dignity, and finding it wherever it is convenient. These are the lefty leaders, the crazy academics, the leaders on Twitter.
Then you have the supportive monks, those who walk from place to place flailing themselves and wearing hair shirts. These are your worker bees, your hyperventilating teens (largely white) of today who engage in self loathing.
Then there are the victims, burned at the stake, nails pulled, who are being asked to sign a confession before they are burned in hopes of absolution in the after life but really to make the torture stop.
That said, the hysteria reminds me more of the Salem Witch Trials.
"A lack of belief in white fragility is proof of white fragility" sounds an awful lot like "If you don't believe in witches you must be a witch!"
Exactly. Neither belief is falsifiable.
Tell a paranoid that no one is plotting against him, and he just decides you are part of the plot. Tell a Critical Race Theorist that "people of color" aren't being held back by systemic racism, and it proves you're one of the racists.
"People who bow before the mob end up dogpiled even worse than before." Yes, witness the grovelling Oakland mayor's house trashed the other night.
Nice post. I only quibble with the surveillance state as "nascent." I'm still getting ads for toilets 4 years after a remodel.
Just wait until you have a smart toilet.
Metamucil ads?
This is why I'm actually glad that I was terrible at doing school. But it was different in the 1970s. ...
I worked at a state university for about 7 years around the turn of the millennium, and didn't really see the rot yet. I think it's worse at the elite schools than public ones. Their graduates produce things like The Guardian's "Skyscrapers are part of the patriarchy" and take themselves seriously. But these tend to be inbred academicists. Once they have to talk an ordinary person, like a reporter, they clearly appear to be demented or ridiculous.
Apparently part of it has to do with the philosophy known as deconstructionism. (I got a D in philosophy, proudly.) And because it breeds in English departments and the soft social sciences, it appeals to "the left." Here's an example of how to get a paper published in a woke, post-modern journal. These pubs have been fooled multiple times into publishing gibberish. This was the first time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
So we end up with questions like "Is gravity a patriarchal construct meant to keep women down?" Of course, that's a joke, but it's not far from "reality" to these poor people.
Quite right. The thing about the "Left" is that they are dedicated to the destruction of the existing society, and its replacement by one in which they hold totalitarian power.
Telling people this outright has proven to be a loser, politically. 'My goal is to be able to order you around, inflict suffering on you, and kill you any time I want to' does not win much support. So they have to come up with stories about how destroying the existing society will lead to Utopia, though of course first there will need to be a brief period in which the Leftists have totalitarian power, wielded for your own good, of course. And the stories have to fool them, as well as everyone else, because admitting to yourself that you only desire power so you can hurt people is not sustainable for most.
And then comes the additional problem that sometimes the Left acquires totalitarian power, and proceeds to create a Hell on Earth. So new stories about why the existing society needs to be destroyed must be produced, with new motives for the destruction.
Thus they end up sounding demented because they are. They have rendered themselves insane. Sucks to be hard Left, but what else can they do?
Well said
We need a sense of humor in these times Matt. You’ve got that style partner, with intelligence. However, I don’t agree with your categorization of the Portland “protests” which is the latest woke nonsense, to equate the destruction of property on a wholesale and mindless basis as “protesting.” The people who are defacing my city are in my opinion, being protected and furthered to put a black eye on the president. The mayor and the governor and neither US senator can find anything to criticize about every federal building in portland being horribly defaced, including the Pioneer Federal Courthouse which I assisted in renovating, but now they’ve got a big problem with Federal law enforcement stepping in to protect Federal property. This wasn’t the whole of your essay Matt, which I believe is very relevant and important, but I thought I’d step up on the soapbox on this one issue which is very troubling to me as a citizen of Portland.
As a resident of Seattle and former resident of Portland, I think it can be hard for folks who aren't close to our politics to see some of the detail, but a few searches should be helpful and the results won't be surprising to anyone who's followed the "resist" politics. Andy Ngo has been documenting this for a long time, and the behavior of the "protestors" has been very consistent with respect to street level violence.
Over the past few years we can follow the initial attempts of the Portland PD to intervene, then being called off by Mayor Ted Wheeler, who just happened to name himself Police Commissioner. The current total and complete absence of PPD is completely understandable as the actions of a Mayor (and Governor) who don't want to poke the hornets nest of the left, but find political capital in making the federal government (aka Orange Man) the fall guy. What could possibly go wrong?
In Seattle we had the mayor, nee former US Atty, follow a similar strategy by overriding the SPD chief (Carmen Best) to pull out of the East precinct and let my very own neighborhood demonstrate what an autonomous zone can be. One irony is that the current recall movement is being led by those who think she isn't left enough.
I absolutely get it about how the murder of a man (George Floyd) can epitomize discriminatory racial violence. And I get it about being dis enfranchised and feeling like counter violence is the only available means of expression. And I do get it about the mis use of police power. But this movement has been hijacked by people with the sole intent of capturing more power and has little to do with Mr. Floyd at this point, nor much to do with actual justice.
The recent conversation between Matt and Bret Weinstein about the Evergreen experience captured the progression and outcome of this essentially totalitarian movement very well. A policy of destruction goes well beyond being called protesting.
Excellent post. People who haven't lived here, or at least spent a lot of time researching here, just won't get it. Portland has been protest central for years and years and years, but what we're seeing now is new. It's a confluence of PNW college culture going mainstream and of votebank politics.
It's a cunt-fest. Seattle had some Italian anarchists there in the early 1900s, and after they set off bombs around the country in a coordinated attack, the response was for a harsh crackdown.
That's what these idiots are going to bring down. There will be less change because of it and more brutality.
There are people in power and they won't share that power with a bunch of precariats.
While I think it would be preferable to leave out the "C word", I appreciate being introduced to the word "precariat".
I think he should respect the word _cunt_ and not take it in vain.
I like Matt's writing - I wouldn't be a paying subscriber if I didn't - but he's disingenuous when it comes to the crimes and terror of antifa. Violence has been a fixture of nearly every one of the 55 days that they've attempted a violent insurrection against the United States. If this was a peaceful protest - and people who didn't airdrop in last week will know that there have been downtown protests and semi-permanent camps in Portland for *decades*, and that there were *actually* peaceful - then they could easily have rooted out the bad actors by now. The reason they haven't done so is because, well, the current "protests" comprise bad actors and their black bloc accomplices.
Terror' - I must have missed the car bombs, nail bombs, kidnappings, knee-cappings, executions, suicide bombings and planes flying into buildings carried out by these antifa terrorists over the last five weeks. Or maybe the Marxist media is deliberately ignoring it. Spraypainting ACAB, smashing windows and setting dumpsters on fire is not terrorism - it's vandalism. Dry your eyes, you hysterical ninny.
And burning people's businesses is arson. The problem is not that they are terrorists, but that they are destructive thugs who are given political cover by the well meaning instead of being properly denounced for hijacking a real movement for social change. When I look at Antifa, what I see is the battology of DeSade: long and tedious tracts about power whose only real purpose was to place a sheen of ideology over his desire to let his appetites run uncontrolled.
but... but.... muh ORANGE MAN BAD!
So handing out AR15s to 18 yr old kids from the trunk of a car in Seattle in order to provide "a security force" of LARPers doesn't resonate at all with you? Even after they shot an unarmed black kid to death in a white Jeep Cherokee?
Wow.
I do agree though, that hysteria is rampant everywhere and there are certainly people playing up these "events" as genuine hostile takeovers... but when they're all funded by huge corporate money -the same huge corporate money that pushed its weight around fomenting dissent around the world in the wake of the 2016 elections in the UK and the US., it begs the obvious question: who are these puppetmasters and why will they stop at nothing to seize power back?
@Scott Current conventional thinking is that the donor class is the only one who benefits. But I can't fathom how anyone can posit that owning 99.9% will make them any happier than owning 99%. Unfortunately, I'm beginning to think that this is really just a struggle between war lords.
No one's coming. We're on our own.
99.9 is not enough. Nothing ever is "enough" for the 1/10th of 1% that rules this world.
Of course we're all on our own. The post-industrial boom the US and the world experienced may never happen again at the same scale.
We're heading toward another dark age... Carl Sagan said it, history screams it.
I've been studying the ancient Greeks lately and wouldn't you know it -they had multiple cycles of prosperity and decline before they finally dispersed and were overtaken by the grist wheel of human history.
The fact that this "grand experiment" ever made it this far is truly astounding to me.
It was fun while it lasted.
You're counting on people not knowing how terrorism is defined at the federal level. This may work on comments sections, but I think you'll be a bit less smug when you see the kind of sentences that will - correctly - be given to the several people caught on camera this weekend throwing explosives at federal forces.
No, I was defining terrorism in terms of having lived with the threat of terrorism on a daily basis, rather than playing fast and loose with semantics to embroider a feeble bit of point-scoring. Must be nice to have the government define language for you, albeit somewhat limiting. How would define 'tyranny', for example?
"Jamie's Very Special And Not-At-All Made-Up Daily Experience of Ultra-Super Terrorism", or Chapter 18 of the US Code. Hmm, which will the courts go with? "Themanticth!", lisps Jamie's comrade, as zhe begins a 15-year sentence.
How I'd define tyranny isn't especially relevant when we're discussing the terrorist acts of antifa members in Portland. If I wanted to have a college dorm "but, like, what about X?" conversation with you or someone like you, I'd post on Twitter.
So, nothing but lame, Limbaugh-grade ad hominems then? I think it's one of the great ironies that those that sanctify the tenets of free speech and weep about its degradation at the hands of evil Marxists generally turn out to be rather wanting when given free rein to say whatever comes to mind.
Hmmm, tell me the difference between blowing up a car and setting it on fire. Also, if a would be terrorist only commits non-fatal assaults, arson, and property crimes, does that person not meet this definition, "a person who uses unlawful violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims"?
If 'political aim' means 'ideological aim', then the definition is not met by people who are rioting or otherwise causing trouble because a member of their tribe was murdered in public. The ideology has been pasted on later, a good deal of it borrowed from the police and other government agencies.
I don't know if I would say terrorism. But, we 100% have a violent leftist problem. Leftists reportedly shot THREE HUNDRED rounds into Antonio May Jr.'s vehicle. Here in Wisconsin, violent leftists beat the tar out of a state senator (a democrat if it matters to you) because he was taking photographs. What's notable is that in both of these crimes there certainly dozens--dozens--of eyewitnesses. No arrests. And, there doesn't seem to be any real appetite to find and arrest the murderers and perpetrators.
I don't think it makes me a "hysterical ninny" to say it's a bit more serious than "vandalism."
I STILL do not want federal agents working the crowds in cities where they are not invited. But, can we cool it with the apologia for intimidation, arson, and murder? You are not helping as much as you think you are.
Just one follow-up to drive home exactly what we are dealing with.
https://twitter.com/MaliceBD/status/1277564600473403393
"Beautiful shot placement," says the Antifa Superstripper.
What makes a protester a 'bad actor'? I'm positive you can't define it. You're filtering the protests through your ideology, which is assuredly libertarian and therefore incoherent. Anyone has the right to protest. The government is infringing on that right and doing so with violence. Yet the protesters are the violent ones? How do you manage to type complete sentences with so much cognitive dissonance.
"What makes a protester a 'bad actor'?"
Being funded by shady money or aided, shielded or given hep by forces that have been trying to conduct a non-military coup here in the US for the past three years.
There's enough evidence that Democrats in city halls and across the board are only using this bullshit as a platform to further their party's cause. (of course, the Republicans are doing the same and so they are no different, but for the sake of your question in this context... it stands,)/
Breaking stuff that isn't theirs, taking stuff that isn't theirs and denying others their freedom of movement. I don't care whether you're marching against the police, Planned Parenthood or the Ku Klux Klan, having a cause does not give you the right to violate other people's right's to life, liberty and property.
A protestor is a bad actor when they move beyond peaceable assembly towards violence and coercive behavior; ir when they shield others who do these things.
Admittedly, peaceable assembly is an I-know-it-when-I-see-it idea, but it's best to err on the side of caution. Raucous, tumultuous crowds are not necessarily violent. One person throwing a bottle or a rock doesn't make a protest a riot. But the use of weaponry (improvised or otherwise), mobbing tactics, storming buildings etc would by any reasonable onlooker be considered bad actions in the context of an otherwise-peaceful protest.
I reckon you see libertarians in your sleep. There's no libertarian in this discussion between us.
Libertarians are racists... the Party told me so.
They're under the bed. Hiding behind your curtains when you come home tired from work... They're not just libertarians though!!!! They're ALL WHITE PEOPLE!
Black officer describes incidents of active anti-black racism of "black lives matter" (actually white opportunistic anarchists/other forces) protestors in Portland: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/07/17/portland_police_officer_what_its_like_to_be_a_black_officer_policing_portland_protests.html
Really relieved to hear another Portlander say some of the things I'm feeling about this extended "protest". What exactly are they protesting? What are their goals? How do they hope to achieve them? If they don't have a clear idea about all of those things, then why are they out there?
Because they want a fight and they are bringing it by setting fires and throwing projectiles and damaging federal buildings. They are baiting the right. And guess what? Trump just took the bait... I'm terrified about this.
But I can't talk to my partner or my friends because they think the Feds are 100% in the wrong. They can't see that the "protesters" want anarchy, they want violence. So does Trump.
I am 100% anti violence, and I understand that violence begets violence. I hope this isn't true, but I feel it's going to get worse in this town.
Unfortunately, centuries of history show that violence is often the most effective means of ending violence. I know this is a little bit cliched but violence was the only way to stop Germany and Japan in the middle of the 20th century - its an extreme example but it makes the point.
More directly to the point, these riots are clearly not spontaneous and the only way to end them will be the arrest and incarceration of those who lead and organize them. Arrests do not have to be violent and are not in the overwhelming majority of cases. However, as these people are committed to violent resistance, their arrests will almost always be violent. Does Trump really want violence or does he just acknowledge its inevitability? Are your local leaders just too feckless to make that same acknowledgement and deal with it quickly and effectively?
You are right, bt in the context of black civil rights and fair treatment, history shows that nonviolence worked and that the civil rights era ended when things turned violent (Black Power movement). The violence of the late 60's ended the layperson's support for change.
Our leaders are incompetent, but are now using Trump as an excuse for the city's problems. Trump, meanwhile is using the city to run his Law and Order presidential campaign to distract us from the country's problems.
So here's what's happening right now in Portland: There are a small number of people who are willing to use violence to provoke violence, and they are being enabled and encouraged by the media and politicians, who stand to benefit in various ways.
That is the entire story. Anything else you hear is somebody working an angle.
I do wish people around here would realize that our local anarchists would love it if Trump won the election. Because they are...you know...anarchists.
So, your leaders are feckless. Oh, and Portland's lawlessness is a microcosm of our country's biggest problems, so if the President wanted to distract us, he'd leave Portland to its own devices. Instead, he is attacking the problem head on - anything else is just working an angle.
I'm not too sure what we're disagreeing about here, but in the spirit of conversation, I'd say that it'd probably be better to just arrest people who commit acts of violence instead of making them nationally famous.
I see your point. Thanks for sharing with me in a reasoned way.
I wholeheartedly agree that our local leaders are incompetent, and some of them are outright dangerous for the future of our city. Unfortunately, there is not a single centrist, let alone conservative, candidate on the ballot in the autumn. We desperately need more balance on our city council, some people who understand fiscal responsibility and city planning, etc.
I personally view public order and safety as absolutely critical to a just society where everyone has a reasonable shot at a good or better life.
I'm sorry Matt, I feel threatened by your argument. I'll need to speak to your manager.
Mike B, I find your comment about feeling threatened to be threatening in its own right. Your plan to speak with Matt’s manager could lead to someone threatening to speak with my one remaining friend, thus ruining my life. Remove the comment at once or run the risk of being cancelled here and everywhere.
Be very careful for your own safety, Louis. Should you fail to dress yourself this morning, your extreme whiteness on full display may be interpreted as a taunt. The reaction could be extreme.
Getting up out of bed is most certainly a manifestation of "white supremacy culture," implying as it does a focus on "urgency" and "individualism." The fact that Louis wrote in a grammatically correct sentence is definitive proof. This comments section is a genocidal organization.
As the amazing and prolific theoretician / intellectual giant Dr. Robin DiAngelo states in her society-convulsing magnus opus, we are all racist and our first step is to (let her) acknowledge this in ourselves unconsciously.
So bravo to all of us. We should all pat ourselves on the back, here. We've made huge strides. Remember, it's a lifelong struggle.
What religion?
I find a spray tan helps. Just tone enough to be racially ambiguous.
Allows you to feel included.
This trend has been going on for a long time, except it focused on gender, not race. Women (mostly) have lost jobs, been banned from social media, lost publishing contracts, etc., for refusing to go along with gender identity nonsense. Some of the statements that can get you into hot water: biological sex is real; men don't become women because they say so; men don't belong in women's changing rooms because they say that they are women; gender is an oppressive social construct, not an identity. Women who have had the temerity to point out these truisms have been accused of killing trans people with their words, hating trans people, and a range of other absurdities. Why don't you write about this? Why did leftists and liberals, who have the courage to stand up to this insanity when it is focused on race, remain silent when the hysterical censors were hellbent on making us all kowtow to insane gender theories?
Absolutely. I wonder when he's going to. It says a lot if someone's willing to stand up to the trans mob. And even when a man does, like Graham Lineham, he doesn't get thousands of rape and death threats. That's saved for feminist women who step out of line. Of course, as you know Alice, part of the kick of transgenderism for the heterosexual males who engage in it is the autogynephiliac thrill of forcing a woman to acknowledge him as a "woman." They literally are physically aroused by it. Nice to know that we've got a group of sexually violating paraphiliacs masquerading as a civil rights movement, targeted right at women and girls.
I don't believe that transgenderism is entirely about autogynephilia, but I do believe that it is one element of it. Blanchard's work shows this and is scientifically sound, despite it and its author being maligned. Had journos who are now appalled by the authoritarian insanity unfurling before them taken a greater interest in the Ken Zucker, Alice Dreger, and others we may have been able to mount a better resistance earlier. At this point this anti-intellectual, authoritarian craziness has gained such an institutional foothold that I fear the worst is yet to come.
Here in Canada, it's already happened. "Gender identity" is a protected characteristic in law now. A friend's gym sent out an email last year that they're allowing members to use the showers of whatever gender they identify as, in accordance with this law. Policies like these are spreading everywhere now.
Yes, I know. It's outrageous.
LOL if a woman went into a men's locker room and said, "I identify as a man so it's OK." the guys in there would laugh and probably fart MORE, scratch balls and generally enjoy seeing just how "man" that woman was.
Stick a gross old man in a woman's locker room and it's a totally different scene.
Men and women are different, and should both be celebrated for things they bring to the party that the others just can't.
Strengths and weaknesses.
Everyone's got them, and we all benefit when strengths are relied upon and weaknesses assisted in an effort to raise the entire group up -for survival.
Maybe it's just a telling sign that we have way too much free time nowadays that we can sit here and actually entertain these concepts.
Oh, there have been a few hundred cases, AT LEAST, of incarcerated males identifying as women being moved to women's prisons and then sexually assaulting them. And there are many cases of these guys literally harassing/assaulting females in these settings (the famous Jonathan/Jessica Yaniv of testicle-waxing fame who talked about giving tampons to 10-year-old girls in the bathroom). But we don't hear about it unless you go to Women are Human or the former Subreddit #thisneverhappens that used to document it before being closed by Reddit because documenting their abuse was "hate speech.") That's where women around the world are aggregating local stories to show patterns, but we can't get any stories published in the mainstream.
When "trans women" say they're afraid of male violence, I'm like, so are we--that's _your_ problem, guys, not ours. Why is it our problem to solve male violence? We've worked for decades to have these sex-protected spaces. We can ally with you to build your own, but why is male violence the responsibility of biological women? No "TERF" has ever murdered a transperson--if it's not intimate partner violence, it's violence by straight men.
Thanks for your support and please keep speaking out to other men. We absolutely need resolute men on our side to stand up against this terrifying madness.
I sympathize with your plight, but in order to fix it, you will have to acknowledge your own contribution to it.
It used to be easily possible to have women-only spaces, because we could also have men-only spaces. But those were declared hateful discrimination, and outlawed. You shot yourselves in the foot there.
I'm not sure how to help, but one idea: pool money, buy social media ads with a teaser that stays within their boundaries (i know, i know but it's the world we live in), and then get people to click thru to a site they can't stifle to show people the truth.
I like this idea!
Idle hands and all that..... the woke BS will disappear when survival is the priority.
I doubt it was on Matt's radar, but hopefully it is now.
The Progressive Left has gone vicious and rigid but the conversation has become muddled so it's hard to talk.
It's frustrating as a 'left-leaning' person. What happens is, if you talk about the clampdown on speech in academia and in the newsrooms, where people with wrongthink are excommunicated, you're told, heh, but M, there are far bigger problems. Like Trump. And you're asked so who's really getting canceled anyway who doesn't deserve it. They're racists anyway. You're told, freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences. Also, Trump cancels people. "But Trump."
What happens is if you talk about riots in Manhattan that occurred, Minneapolis, or the absurd 'zone' in Seattle, you're reminded that the overall protest was peaceful and that it's a small minority of protesters. (Also, the police are mean.) If you raise that there's a huge crime spike, with murders up even in NYC by 30%, with a one year old girl shot last weekend, you're reminded that you sound like a racist by raising black-on-black crime - nevermind that there were more murders in Chicago during July 4 weekend than 'Floyd-like events' in the entire year of 2019 committed by cops. If you ask why there have been riots in Portland for 50+ days including a torching of a cop station, you're told, "But Trump." Trump sent in the Gestapo to drag innocents into black vans. But Trump.
If you ask why small businesses had to forcibly shut and go out of business while hundreds of thousands of people marched for 10 days, you're told, But Trump. If you point out that DeBlasio had no mask as recently as a week ago when he painted his mural, you're told, But Republicans and Trump.
If you point out an increasingly anti-science attitude among the liberal left, you're reminded about Trump and the GOP.
It goes on and on. I don't like Trump, but the more I hear "But Trump" the more I want to vote for him if ONLY as a protest vote against people who read the NYT and Guardian, perhaps watch the Daily Show, and live, breathe, sleep and dream Trump nonstop. And those people are called Progressives.
Trump owns way too much real estate in a lot of people's heads. Really hard to discuss an issue with those people. Even trying to point out the separation between State vs Federal authority and examining the problems that division created in the response to the Covid pandemic always starts and ends with "It's Trump's fault!"...and I'm like, well, OK but perhaps we could peer a little deeper
I think the political discourse in this country would be greatly improved if no one mentioned Trump except when discussing the actions of Trump, and no one mentioned the "right" except when discussing the actions of the "right." Defend (or condemn) BLM protests on their own terms, without bringing up Orange Man Bad.
Because this rhetoric of 'the other side is worse' is basically war propaganda. 'The Axis bombs civilians, so we Allies are justified in bombing civilians in retaliation' is the way you behave towards enemies you are determined to crush, not fellow citizens you going to live with peacefully.
As a student of history, today's rhetoric reminds me a lot of that before the Civil War. I would prefer to avoid Civil War II ('This time, with nukes!'®).
I have serious disdain for Trump but you're 100% right about this. A lot of people view everything through the lens of Trump, whether he supports something, how an event reflects on him or makes him feels, etc. This goes for his supporters and detractors in seemingly equal measure. It's exhausting and we always end up where we started. Hell, an hour ago, the Washington Posts' above the fold story was Trump tweeting about a guy kneeling during a baseball game. Fire me into the sun.
The thing I worry about most is that Trump will be the excuse for every flaccid, lame thing Biden and the DNC attempt should he win.
Continued outsourcing of American jobs? Trump's worse. Incoherent budget that prioritizes the rich over normal people who need a hand after a pandemic? Trump was orange and dumb. No healthcare plan? Trump didn't have one either. More drone strikes? What do you want, Trump again?
That said, I'm not gonna pretend any of that makes me wanna vote *for* Trump. I mean, he's still a gigantic piece of shit.
I agree. For me it's the attempted gutting of the ACA and lowering corp tax while increasing taxes for people in the blue states that was a telltale sign that this guy's a pile of garbage. But Trump. :-(
It's almost as if Trump is deliberately placed there as a means of distracting you from all those other things.
"It's a trap!" - Tim Pool
To be clear, they call themselves progressive. I've long since called them the regressives they are. Quickest way I know of to get a quizzical, befuddled look on a lefty's face.
M, your entire argument is completely wrong, because Trump.
There are so many classic liberal and neo-liberal commenters in this thread that share a similar point of view and mutual respect. I honestly can't think of the last time that I have seen anything like that in an online medium. It gives me some sense of hope.
The intellectual level of the average poster on here seems to be several rungs-at least-above that of the typical “I’m triggered/that’s racist” vs “A black/Hispanic did something awful” generalities bandied about in most comments sections.
I have no such hope for humanity.
Taibbi's blog isn't being seen by even 5% of the US population -most are hypnotized.
It's a sliding scale of hope.
You are certainly entitled. :)
Why?
The BLM protests that sprung up after George Floyd's murder seemed to start a lot of this racial reckoning. Those protests were about police overreach, brutality, and how unaccountable law enforcement is in America.
Months later, we have no remedies for any of those ills. In fact, we have unidentified soldiers whisking citizens into unmarked vans in Portland. Instead, we have this weak, ultimately toothless cultural war.
Which is to say: because reforming the police is an incredibly hard thing to do, we get this potemkin village progress instead of the thing a lot of our population actually demanded. White ladies won't voice black ladies on cartoons anymore but you can still get clubbed in the street for exercising your first amendment rights.
I believe the federal officers in Portland actually do have insignia. If that turns out to be wrong, I will have a concern.
But as for unmarked vehicles: Antifa is rampaging in Portland. What do they do when they see a marked police vehicle?
They had an insignia and are operating under clear lines of authority. The fact that the van was un-marked made for a good headline but didn't actually indicate much.
Honest question: what do you personally think "Antifa" is?
The “Antifa” on the West Coast are simply the latest incarnation of violent, anarchist leftists going back over a century. The Wobblies blew up the LA Times building in 1910 or so. They have always had a presence in Berkeley, Portland, Seattle-remember the WTO riots in 2000 or so.
As for the idiots elsewhere in the country, I think they are dumb kids-or twenty somethings-who got overexcited when things got hot after the Floyd tragedy.
Total ignorance. Go to a dictionary or Wickipedia.
Useful idiots sums it up for me.
It's been my experience that people who whinge about "antifa" don't actually understand what it is they're upset about. This comment does little to dissuade me of that belief.
It been my experience that defenders of the so-called antifa have a limited grasp on reality.
But it works for them, reality or not. Again, a problem with the irresponsible, compliant press.
Antifa Means Anti-Fascist. Hitler, Mussolini and Trump are great examples.
In 1933-34 a fascist group tried to take over the FDR government and failed due to the heroism of Marine General Smedly Butler who also said "War is a racket" as there was great money to be made by it.
If you have not noticed, the Military Industrial Complex is Trumps favorite charity.
A lot of rightwing nut jobs claim they are patriots - just like leftwing nutjobs claim they are anti-fascist. Both groups' claims are clearly contradicted by their actions.
Yes, it means Anti-Fascist. There is no Fascist Party in the USA for them to fight, so they instead direct their violence against anyone they don't like -- which, ironically, is what most people identify as "fascism." Also: the original Anti-Fascist group was part of the Communist Party of Germany. This is merely a historical fact, yet ALWAYS goes unmentioned by Antifa's many defenders on the Internet. Why is that?
"Also: the original Anti-Fascist group was part of the Communist Party of Germany. This is merely a historical fact, yet ALWAYS goes unmentioned by Antifa's many defenders on the Internet. Why is that?"
Mentioning it would interfere with The Narrative, and make it harder to bamboozle people.
I'm surprised I have to point that out. Is my "rhetorical question" detector is busted?
Traditionally, yes, that's what it means. Unfortunately, because we have a left in the U.S. that has so lost its way, we now have street fighters who don't understand the difference between fascism and disagreement. This is a problem and leftists refusing to talk about it is, arguable, a bigger problem.
The ultimate basis for that "bigger problem" though, is a journalist class that has tossed out any commitment they might once have had to reporting facts, opting instead for advocacy; to the point of mendacity in the service of "virtuous" activism. If that doesn't bother someone, they ARE the problem.
So these 'anti-fascists" can lie at will, stage photo-ops that misrepresent events and be comfortable in the surety that the press will go right along with them. Just like they can screech about "Gestapo tactics" and "black sites" with zero fear, as it is obvious the Fed response has been very measured and responsible.
Let's put those two points together and we see, whatever their political claims and self-definition, that they are gutless liars. Not the side I'd ever want to be on.
I, personally, think the group that calls themselves Antifa are a bunch of knucklehead young people who are bored and (mostly) filled with testosterone who are looking for any reason to act like bored, young (mostly) men everywhere - raise a ruckus and smash things. They don't have any coherent cause or strategy they can enunciate, other than burn everything down. In other words, they are not exactly freedom riders/counter sitters from the early days of the 50-60's civil rights movement. Unfortunately, they have some older, very cynical people with power and money behind them and resourcing them who believe it's in their political interests to sow mayhem. So, that's who I think they are. What they call themselves doesn't matter. They could call themselves the pro-puppy brigade and if they were burning down neighborhoods, smashing windows and accosting people on the streets I'd still think they were dangerous, aimless youth who need to face consequences. (The Nazi's called themselves Socialists, so you can see that nothing really is in a name..)
They have a website: itsgoingdown.org
Is your argument "it's good that unaccountable armed feds arrest Americans and take them to black sites if there's looting going on"? Because I think that's a shitty argument. Kinda think the fourth amendment is an important one myself.
I'm sorry but please don't buy into the media narrative without question on this one. If you have watched video of these arrests you know that these people clearly have "POLICE - DEPT OF HOMELAND SECURITY" markings so that hardly blocks institutional accountability. Plus it's hard to argue with not having personal name IDs in a world of doxxing. Some LA cops had too many personal retributions for doing their jobs because their names were on their backs in sports uniform style.
And "black sites" seems completely unfounded. They take them into the federal building they arrest them next to.
First, how are they unaccountable? The U.S. Attorney in Oregon became concerned of the possibility that in two instances (in the midst of violence and mayhem) people may have been arrested without probable cause, so he immediately launched an investigation, while emphasizing that the federal officers are being attacked with all manner of projectiles.
Second, black sites? What does that mean? Does that mean they were taken away from where other rioters were for brief questioning? Do you have any evidence that anyone was held longer than the constitution allows?
Third, and most importantly, do you acknowledge that some people (including Antifa) are acting violently, and this violence needs to be addressed somehow? Otherwise, frankly, I'll stop wasting time, and hope that one day you grow up.
He's lying. He knows exactly what's going on, but also knows what buzzwords (black sites, unidentified, arbitrary) get a reaction. The federal response has been very restrained - too restrained, in my view - and they are sending out tagged officers on a peaceful operation.
The sad thing is, I can well imagine after a few more years of this, the thing he pretends to wring his hands over will actually happen for real. And when it dies the citizenry will be half tired of the cry-wolf, and half glad that someone's finally cracking skulls. A free people will look the other way from this if it means they get these anarchists out and their cities back.
I'm not lying and in fact recanted the "black sites" thing below because I was wrong. I like it around here because most people have intelligent conversations with you instead of assuming the worst (as you did here). Peace.
1- They're unaccountable because they have faced no consequences and I believe they will not face any. An "investigation" isn't a consequence.
2- That was how I originally saw it reported and have been educated by Louis below. I'd delete that part of the comment, but Substack doesn't allow that. Rescinded.
3- Setting aside that "Antifa" isn't real and is just a blanket term the right uses for "undesirables," yes, of course some protesters are violent. Some police are violent. I don't think the former justifies the latter, especially with the preponderance of evidence we've seen of police attacking demonstrably peaceful protesters for having the nerve to use their first amendment rights.
1- If an investigation isn't a consequence then neither is a temporary detention and a release.
2- You 'rescind' this small aspect of it without rethinking your entire thesis. You're plainly disingenuous. The snake oil you're peddling about *actual real stormtroopers you guys* is woefully weak.
3- Again, to say antifa isn't real is just dishonest. At least tens of thousands of people across the US identify with it, call themselves part of it, adopt its tactics, protect its sympathizers etc. Because it doesn't have a national leader or a website doesn't make it fake - it makes it smart. It makes it hard - but not impossible - to cut the head off the hydra, to infiltrate, and to identify its assets. These are all strengths for a decentralized, paramilitary movement operating in a surveillance state like yours.
And it has the added bonus of giving plausible deniability to liars like you.
If a protester is violent, then police violence is absolutely justified. If you like it or not, government having a complete monopoly on the justified use of force is a marker of government. If you want citizens to be able to use force against the government, you are wanting anarchy. If you go an kill a murderer yourself, you have committed murder. If the state kills a murderer, it is justice.
I have to disagree with you, for example, on accountability (if they intended to be lawless, they wouldn't bother with the investigation). But your tone is reasonable, so I apologize for mine in my last sentence. I value the fact that people of wide viewpoints can talk to each other here. We need this.
This is a genuine question: without all the emotion, what is the law here? Either DHS has the legal authority to arrest folks or they don't. Which is it? Does anyone know? I honestly don't understand why this is so unclear.
It's not unclear. I want to answer your earnest question with earnestness. DHS has legal authority to arrest anyone they have reasonable suspicion committed a federal crime. So, for example, if they observed or have video of them vandalizing a federal building. They can arrest that person anywhere they find them, including blocks away 30 mins later, or at their home days later.
What some want to do is confuse the issue for political purposes. Trump wants his people to protect the federal buidlings and they are going too far in some ways, like tear gassing in streets that are not federal property. But Dems/media are politicizing and painting any arrest as out of bounds, which is just silly. They play up the "unmarked vans" as a way to claim it's police state activity instead of just not having your van burned by protestors.
That relic was repealed decades ago.
(4th amendment)
1- My reply to you was kinda sarcastic/shitty so apologies re: that.
2- The issue I have with your post is pretty easy to articulate: you're saying that you shouldn't protest because the guys you're protesting against will crack your skull. I.e. don't protest the bad thing or the bad thing will happen to you. I know you don't condone it but I'm at a loss for what the remedy is, especially for regular citizens, many of who have lost their livelihood in the past three or four months and are feeling rightfully frustrated by the anemic response from their supposed "leaders."
They are no different than the federal LE officers who Eric Holder (on Obama's orders) sent to Nevada to deal with cattle ranchers (Clive Bundy et al) whose stock was grazing on federal land. The ranchers refused to move off BLM land. The feds made an criminal arrest. And, they, too, were accountable. That case was litigated all the way to the Supreme Court (a liberal majority.) The feds lost.
I support defunding and certainly demilitarizing the police and I think they should be brought under community control, but this is more a complicated issue than current popular discussion allows for. The only way this could be done successfully is if social programs that actually prevent violence were funded more heavily (or at all). This is unlikely to happen in the current neo-liberal environment. What would happen, I believe, if we defund and/or abolish the police in our current economic climate is that we would see the rise of privately funded police and security forces by the rich and we would lose even the possibility of ever bringing the police under community control. I think you are spot on about where this insane culture war is coming from.
"The only way this could be done successfully is if social programs that actually prevent violence were funded more heavily (or at all)"
100% agree with this. As an example: I live in San Francisco. We have a bad homelessness problem that is largely a mental health crisis. Investing in mental health services would be far more ethical and far more effective than calling the cops on disturbances where no one's actually in danger. The cops don't have training for this and I'd much rather them be looking into actual crimes. Better use of funding and a reduced scope of responsibility for law enforcement feels like a win-win.
More magic words. "Investing in mental health services" will provide well-paid jobs for some people (mostly white ones, btw), but most of the "homeless" won't use the "services."
You can hold people responsible for their behavior, or you can let them misbehave. San Francisco has chosen to let them misbehave.
My general issue with all the pontificating is the law of unforeseen consequences and also as you say, the "magic words". Some mentally ill people are not dangerous. I know non-violent schizophrenic people who just get scared and call the cops because they don't know what else to do. They need a social worker.
However, some folks are violent. I had a relative who was a paranoid schizophrenic. He broke into a house and tried to strangle someone (a family member). He ultimately shot and killed a neighbor and then killed himself. The reason why family members call the cops is that mentally ill people are unpredictable.
So the devil is all in the detailed execution. So the 911 operator better ask the family member calling if the person needs physical restraints or not before deciding who to send out. If you can execute well, if might work, if not it won't.
Second we can talk about funding mental health all you want, but that means there has to be available budget there. How many municipalities have all this budget excess? If the budget doesn't actually exist it's just pandering.
For example I know someone who works in SF City government. The Tenderloin (an area with massive issues with homeless mentally ill people) was in fact created by locating all the mental health and social services in a single geographic region. Unless you actually house people there may not be a lot that can be done. Or what if you choose to build housing for the homeless in SF, homeless people steam in, while the average tech worker can barely afford to pay rent? How will that eventually play out?
This isn't to say do nothing. But sometimes we have to live with some kind of trade- offs. There might be small tweaks, such as enforcing duty to intervene or better training on why not to sit on someone neck for 8 minutes, that might have better effect then all these overhauls.
"How many municipalities have all this budget excess? If the budget doesn't actually exist it's just pandering."
This is the crux of the "defund the police" idea. You remove some of their outsized budget and redirect it to social services. We need mental health services more than we need cops with military vehicles, right?
On the other point, I live in SF and the homeless problem here is nuanced and tough to discuss in comments. My cousin is a social worker here who does free healthcare in the Loin (among other hot spots) and says a ton of people really do use the services and really do pull themselves out of homelessness. It's just there are always new people coming in to avail themselves of those services because most neighboring cities don't have similar services. So you get an influx of homelessness because you're trying to do your best to solve the problem. Then there's the subsection of people who simply refuse to get help, the actual violent crowd, addicts, and on and on. It's incredibly complex.
Cops are just simply not the right person to deal with most of the non-violent population here. They have no training and no desire to police homelessness either.
I’m sure most cops would gladly give up mentally ill service calls, shall we say. The question is if social workers are prepared to deal w/ the 5%(just throwing a number out, I don’t have the stats) of such calls that turn physical/dangerous.
Yes, good points. It's very nuanced out there. My budget points are more about that I would suspect a lot of cities can't even afford decent basic policing. SF is a very wealthy community. I don't how much their city budget reflect the rest of the country. But I really don't have data one way or the other.
Good points.
But I wish to point out that the issue isn't just violent vs. non-violent mentally ill people. People who shit in the street are a public health menace, regardless of why they do it. People who scream obscenities at passers-by are degrading the quality of life of the majority, even they do it because of bad brain chemistry. Societies have to make choices about which behaviors they will tolerate, and enforce their rules.
You think schizophrenics are "misbehaving," huh? What a simple world you must live in.
Yes, I think they are misbehaving. Because they are.
I understand that a lot of this is due to brain diseases that make them arguably not responsible for their actions. So what? The fact remains that most of them will behave in an anti-social manner. And the only real choice we have is allow them to do so, or force them to stop.
So which do you choose?
Giving them treatment and not siccing the cops on them. This isn't a complex idea.
Most definitely we should not be expecting cops to be our mental health system. That is the root of much of our trouble.
How do you define "community control"? I define it as voters electing councilmembers, and the council in turn controlling the police. Based on that, the police are already under community control. The glitch is the union. If the union is powerful enough then it becomes uncontrollable. So this is the main problem with the police, and we have the exact same problem with teachers. So if we want true community control, let's ban public employee unions.
How do you define "defund"? If you mean transfer an incremental portion of funding to a different entity that would in turn take on certain responsibilities, that makes some sense. If you mean starve them for cash so they can't operate then no. It makes no sense.
The proponents of "defund the police" have been pretty clear that the goal is to redirect parts of the police budget to different social programs. No one serious is arguing the latter.
And, as much as I'm staunchy pro-union in most areas, I agree re: police unions. Teachers absolutely still need theirs though---the problem with our country certainly isn't that workers have too many rights.
I do believe there are lots of people seriously arguing the latter. I don't think they should be taken seriously, but I believe they are. It's pretty much what Minneapolis council voted on.
The problem with teacher and police unions is when the worker "rights" conflict with the public need, and the purpose for their existence in the first place.
These unions buy elections to make sure they aren't held accountable.
The realities of teaching in America vs. policing in America show where our priorities actually are. Pretty difficult for me to group those unions together for anything other than bland, surface-level concerns.
Those unions can be grouped under the heading: Takes our money and uses it to hire their own bosses, then take actions that aren't in our best interests.
Agreed our priorities are off. Are you old enough to remember the ad line "Pay me now or pay me later?" We tend to choose to pay more later.
Police unions sponsor Democrat candidates.
Somebody wants their inconvenient truth back.
I saw a Black Twitter tweet to the same effect. All this changing of brand names, and fine but what about reforming police brutality? Crickets?
Tim Scott did have a bill, but his dem colleagues refused to discuss in public. Therefore, nothing was done on the legislative front.
The House passed a bill in late June that was similarly unloved and ignored in the Senate. We need to tackle these problems locally if we have any chance of solving them. Hell, both Trump and Biden's solutions involved *more* funding for police.
After all, nothing like the consequence of an increased budget to sort out a problem.
Well... here's a news flash for you: the majority of your fellow wage-slaves don't WANT the police removed or even partially neutered at this time.
Moreover, the ruling class wouldn't be funding this shit show if it didn't serve their efforts at maintaining the concentration of wealth.
It's a scam and the poor are the punchline. It has nothing to do with race, even if "law" has been used to keep certain races down more than others.
It's never been so clear as it is now.
After the 1960s, business giants in the US and UK re-circled the wagons and doubled down on this.
They've got the consent now... and they're going to go for it. We'll end up like China.
Never insinuated that most people want the police "removed" (whatever it is you think that means). All I pointed out was that the first domino in this whole discussion---the murder of Floyd---has been ignored in service of easy change and fugazi progress. Point also remains that smaller, local action is going to be more successful than praying the most feeble part of the US government will attempt to fix any part of the problem.
Oh, I agree with you here.
The movement was hijacked almost from the beginning.
It's an election year, after all.
Maybe I'm still a little optimistic that SOME change can come of this, because the black community has been getting it right up the ass since the 13th amendment and after the 1960s, the police became more and more militarized.
I want to see an end to the painful merry-go-round they are stuck on.
The militarization of our police forces has ratcheted up significantly since 9/11. This is the first real national reckoning with that fact and I share a little of your optimism because of that. Can't fix what we don't acknowledge.
Of course, the most likely outcome nationally is the GOP ignoring it while the Dems kneel in kente cloth and then ignore it afterwards.
The police officers who were present at Floyd's death are on suspension and face murder and accomplice to murder charges.
It will of course take forever to try them, but that is an inescapable consequence of previous "reforms" of the court system. It was over a year between filing charges in the murder of Justine Damond and the conviction of Mohamed Noor.
...and yes: people need to take these concerns directly to City Hall. The mayors, the city councils, the chiefs of police -they are the ones responsible for all of this.
Token senator? jeez...you see no issue with your statement above?
This comment is more coherent than Taibbi's post. Matt doesn't close the circle as to why this happening. He equates the left with Corporate Democrat Neoliberals who take activist language and leave the class and systemic analysis. Pretty disappointing piece by Taibbi, he's grifting off the anti-woke (whatever that means) backlash. It's like Gamergate all over again.
Also worth wondering how much of this phenomena is in academia and the media vs. the rest of society. Being that so many of us (including Taibbi) are stuck inside staring at our screens all day, it's hard to figure how widespread any of this is in the normal world most of us inhabit.
I think a lot of it started in academia and the development of post-modern ideas from philosophies that described the world to ones that should be the basis of policy. There is a lot to say about how the over-producution of phds, neo-liberalism, the defeat of the traditional left, and the corporatization of the university converged and gave rise to what we're now seeing.
You haven't noticed all the American corporations jumping on the bandwagon?
I've noticed all manner of toothless BLM statements from companies with lily white board rooms, certainly.
In California, we have to do harassment trainings once your company hits a certain size. They're genuinely boring things where you sit at your computer and learn that you should grab your coworkers' ass. I can see the anti-racism training programs becoming mandatory as corporate CYAs too.
I'll just say that I don't exactly trust corporate America's commitment to any of these principles and assume they're making noises for a few months and will do nothing substantive at all.
Yes, the major beneficiaries of BLM are going to be charlatans like Robin DiAngelo who make bank for, essentially, teaching corporations a) how to better police workers and b) how to avoid any responsibility in a lawsuit.
The worst part is I've worked at several companies that did these trainings *and* covered up or ignored harassment at the executive level. I was deposed as a witness in that case and everything!
America has this pathological way of forcing everything onto a job. You get your healthcare through a job. You get diversity and harassment training from your job. Offices around my way have near-mandatory "bonding" trips and happy hours. Corporate racism training is another step in this direction. It's infantile and lame.
I'm in CA and have done the harassment trainings. I agree it's a joke and mostly for corporate CYA.
But I do not agree all the large corporate measures are toothless. Consider what they are doing to FB to force it to censor speech in a certain preferred way. Consider why Matt has this site.
I have a friend who works at Starbuck's who now fears for her job because she won't wear their corporate BLM shirt.
These measures are real and will hurt people. I consider it harassment.
Oh trust me it's in the corporations nowadays.
Me again...wanted to add: I think one big reason is that upper-middles don't want to be thought or called racist, so they go along with every new accusation of wrongthink. Not always, of course. But also, corporations are very keen on keeping their youngest employees happy. And this is what the youngest employees want and expect.
Do you really not know what "woke" means? Have you tried a websearch?
This is scary stuff, and that’s just the nonviolent idiots. The more vicious morons, I believe CNN dubbed them “peaceful protestors”, don’t care to hear your side of the story. They just want to do you physical harm and destroy your livelihood. And because I’m certain Joe Biden will gleefully placate these jackals if they let him pretend he’s president, I will vote for the lesser of two evils.
Already there.
I have a sneaking suspicion that the single most important photo of this political year is going to be the one of the McClosky's on their front stoop with pink polo, khaki's and sandals with an AR pointed at protesters that broke through their gate.
LOT of middle class, upper middle class and wealthy liberals saw that, the kinds of people who give money to the dems (like the McClosky's) and who support a lot of leftish policies while sitting home safe, comfortable and well fed. Those people are used to moralizing at dinner parties and barbecues and but they are NOT going to tolerate the unwashed masses for whom they claim to empathize coming into their neighborhoods and disturbing their tranquility and sense of security.
Betting a LOT of those people either do not turn out to vote OR the quietly vote for Trump and then act shocked and horrified when he does.
Or maybe they are just people who weren't glad to have a mob of angry class-race-warriors show up and start threatening them and their dog?
The second amendment isn't to protect peoples' hunting rights.
It's to protect YOU when the police either aren't coming or aren't there yet.
"When seconds count, the police can only be there in a few minutes."
They were never threatened in any way. The idea you have a right to threaten people with guns for walking down your street is more insane than the mob who finally figured out who to afflict instead of destroying their own neighborhood.
You have an absolutely hilarious viewpoint on rioters breaking down the gate to private property and then flooding that property with armed trespassers.
Also a pretty comedic viewpoint that holding a gun constitutes a threat.
Nice straw man RRDrrD
Corporate property designed to divide society.
Nice non sequitur, Skutch!
What system do you propose to replace "corporate property" with?
It remains a fact of existence that things can only be in one place at a time, and generally can only do one thing at a time. If everyone unanimously agreed on what that thing should be, ALWAYS, we would have no need for property. But people do disagree, and some decision making process is necessary.
So what do you propose?
Uhh bullshit. That’s a gated community. And the stinky, sweaty, uneducated wannabe commies broke down that gate.
I thought they were paid Soros mercenaries ?? Make up your mind already. I can tell by the ad hominen attack you know you're wrong.
I never mentioned Soros. I’ll deal in absolutes. I can tell by your taking offense to me calling those jaggoffs exactly what they are that you’ve got a little stinky, sweaty, godless autodidact in you as well.
The people you describe- those like the McCloskeys- didn't get to where they are because they make emotional decisions. Tactical, intelligent and sane choices would be accurate. And come election day? How many see that the Trump campaign is being given a gift?
How do you know how they got to where they are ? They could be part of the Epstein ring just as well as being legit.
I see. So, we should make the assumption that they got where they are via whatever route best supports my made-up argument, like you do? Gotcha.
Yes, like you did. Got it ?
They were literally trying to have a BBQ before the woke mob came along.
The mob was headed to the mayor or governors house and posed no threat to them.
It doesn’t matter who their neighbors are, or who the morons were on their way to see. That is a gated, private neighborhood. And once you tear down the gate, you are committing a crime.
The MOB broke down a gate that marked the property as PRIVATE.
Once they did that they were trespassing and destroying property.
Given the history of MOBS lately, the McCloskys were not out of line to assume that the MOB might well decide to go after their home.
Given the violence of these MOBS, attacking police, attacking store owners, attacking reporters, not unreasonable of them to think they might be attacked.
SO...not a fan of their gun safety but I absolutley believe they were right.
Too bad they didn't shoot each other based on an "assumption" someone "might go after" their property.
K....I admit it. Gonna have to vote for Trump again.
The alternative is to support the other insanity, which, for just the reasons outlined here, are far far more dangerous. Trump is too lazy to be that dangerous.
Of course, and I hope I am wrong, I think we have the makings of a violent uprising this fall. No matter who wins the other side is going to claim the win was illegitimate and the mail in voting and the lawyers are just gonna make it worse and then it will be amplified by the media and social media.
Top that all off with what is likely going to be a far worse economic picture and a resurgence of COVID and closed schools again.....?
No....I think things are going to explode in crazy, real violence come November
He's also too stupid to be THAT much of a problem. He's just not a brilliant guy. He acts exactly how you'd expect a guy who lives in his own skyscraper in NYC to act: like a cunt.
He's still a lot less scary than the establishment, even if he directly benefits from and bolsters their systems.
Ya know...your right, he is NOT a brilliant guy in the way that we normally think of such a thing.
That said, he has really good instincts about economic issues and where the public is on those things.
He got elected not on racism but on economic nationalism. I think our political and economic leaders / elites got too far down the globalization rabbit hole and they were making out like bandits but totally missed that their countrymen were paying a huge price economically and therefore socially.
The southern border has been porous not because we cannot secure it but because there are too many economic interests vested in expanding the labor force to keep wages down. Both parties have been complicit, the dems just have the added motivation of trying to expand their voting base.
Same with the H1B program. It is just a means for US firms to create competition among tech workers and to enable Indian outsourcing firms to bid super low on support contracts.
Our trade agreements have never taken into account the impact to the country as a whole but have always focused on the interests of the stock market. Again, largely based on labor arbitrage and not competitive advantage. One could argue that it has also been based on environmental arbitrage as well.
Trump was right on these issues even if he was only following the unwashed masses.
Say what you like, he also understood that the people of this country are sick and tired of being at war all over the globe. I realized the other day that my 20 yr old daughter has never known a time where the US was not deploying troops. The neocons in both parties were more than happy to keep going and to keep making enemies all over the globe and spending TRILLIONS on warfare.
Really, at the end of the day, he understood or understands that the two single most important things the majority care about is economic security and peace.
Now, whether or not that is really how he feels, and I am inclined to believe that at some level he is an old school patriot but a plutocrat on top of that, is almost irrelevant. What politician gets elected on what they entirely believe on a personal level?
When you consider that he used to be a democrat you almost have to wonder what he COULD have achieved had he been able to work with Pelosi and Schummer as opposed to spending the last 4 years bouncing from Russiagate to impeachment, both of which were bogus. Could they have done infrastructure? Could they have shut down the wars overseas and trimmed the military? Could they have redone out trade agreements and maybe boosted security for workers here at home?
I almost wonder if the Never Trump neocons and neoliberals set out to prevent precisely the possibility of that happening. How much of all this was stirred up by people who's money or influence were threatened by the policies of the unwashed masses that Trump represented?
Here is the tragedy of Trump. He had good instincts on some important issues but he squandered his opportunity to address them by allowing himself to get into all kinds of stupid controversies with his mouth and thumb. Granted, he had a hysterical left, hostile media and a government of bureaucrats that were determined to keep him from being elected or get rid of him if he was and at the very least stop his policies.
NOTE: The TRILLIONS spend on these wars across the globe go into somebody's pockets. Just look upstream from whoever squeals the loudest about troop withdrawals and a gov't unwillingness to "teach Tyrant X a lesson".
And anyone that thinks that Trump could hold authoritarian power beyond his remit from voters, and worries about such things, is a being ruled by emotional fear stoked by an irresponsible media.
The establishment has been after his scalp for 4 years. What more contrast do you need?
Matt, I've been a fan since the Bush Administration. While I no longer consider myself a liberal (and have become a traditionalist), your dedication to truth is enduring. If there is an abuse of power, you call it out. And that's exactly what this is.
My biggest concern is the utter contempt among many university & media people for any people with different views. It is ok to heap ridicule, scorn and derision on anyone who has conservative ideas. I've stopped interacting with these former friends because they so hate anyone not in lock-step (also they all forward the same things to me from NYT,Atlantic, NPR). It is not the beliefs that bother me (I share many), but the mean, ugly hate of anyone who does not. Of late they have started forwarding images, too. "Ignorant hillbillies" was given coinage by Peter Strzok and his views seem to be widely shared and assumed to be ok.
"Contempt" -- nails it. When it was contempt by the right against non-conformists on the left, it was reprehensible. We should be similarly scandalized by the left now. Enforcement of political orthodoxy is unacceptable.
Contempt for the deplorable!
Agree.....though...in the literal sense...that might mean your conservative
>"Republicans were once despised because they were anti-intellectuals and hopeless neurotics. Trained to disbelieve in peaceful coexistence with the liberal enemy, the average Rush Limbaugh fan couldn’t make it through a dinner without interrogating you about your political inclinations.
>"If you tried to laugh it off, that didn’t work; if you tried to engage, what came back was a list of talking points. When all else failed and you offered what you thought would be an olive branch of blunt truth, i.e. “Honestly, I just don’t give that much of a shit,” that was the worst insult of all, because they thought you were being condescending. (You were, but that’s beside the point). The defining quality of this personality was the inability to let things go. Families broke apart over these situations. It was a serious and tragic thing."
Seems like there's a little bothsidesism going on here, Matt. In the '00's there may have been a few conservatives crazy enough to impose their views on everyone and sever relationships over political differences, but it's nothing like the epidemic of hysteria coming from the Left these days. The difference in scale may be due to the endorsement of Leftism by news and opinion sources widely recognized as "mainstream." It's bad when Fox News and AM radio are crazy; it's much, much worse when the NY Times, Washington Post, CNN, ABC, NBC, and CBS go crazy.
Another excellent piece! I'm very disturbed by the humorless, authoritarian trend on the left (though of course, as you observe, we won't see a concomitant mocking of that given the left's capture of most media institutions). I expect inevitable counterculture trends and the obvious nature of the overreach will produce a substantial pushback sooner or later, but it's set to be an exhausting few years.
Nice piece, Matt. True enough that the scolds on the right and the scolds on the left have switched places. But I think you understate the magnitude of the problem. The problem is that the old McCarthyites never rose to much more than an historical sideshow whereas the new McCarthyites are now the main attraction. The old McCarthyism never mounted much more than a tepid and buffoonish challenge to the classic liberal ideals and institutions of individualism whereas the new McCarthyism now seeks to obliterate those same ideals and institutions. And they now have the power to do so. Indeed, the new McCarthyites yield a level of power and sophistication that the old McCarthyites could only fantasize about. In my latest short article, "White Noise Matters" (now on digitalapostate.com), about the rise of virtue signalling ads as a discrete advertising category, I cite the essential imperative of popular culture: to obliterate institutional history and replace it with addiction. History suggests that scolds are only problematic when they have the cultural power and permission to enforce their own puritanism. These scolds do. Not only is popular culture now behind them 100%, they own the primary mechanism of addiction. Keep up the good work.
.
Thanks for your response, Buster. McCarthyism was a very big deal for those caught up in the drama at the time, but never succeeded in systemically corrupting the structural or ideological integrity of the institutions it sought to purge, in no small measure because a) the old McCarthyites -- unlike their 21st-century counterparts -- were too clumsy to infiltrate them, and b) because the institutional and cultural culture of individual liberty in post-WWII America was still robust enough to repel the onslaught. Not so today.
All told, the old McCarthyism was but one (relatively brief) chapter in a four-decade Cold War between nuclear superpowers with competing world ideologies. By contrast, the new McCarthyites -- now with global reach -- are institutionally ensconced, heavily financed and just getting started...
I'm listening, but I still don't see how the new McCarthyism represents any sea change in challenging "classic liberal ideals and institutions of individualism," much less mounting any kind of structural challenge. As MT points out in his piece, this language-policing garbage used to be the provenance of the right, but in no cases has any of it been critical of the larger manufacture of consent. Jon Schwartz has a good piece in the Intercept about the rather narrow boundaries of permissible discourse: for example, you cannot be an atheist and get elected to office, but nobody ever talks about this.
tl;dr-- meet the new boss, same as the old boss
Thanks, Yawny. My original objection to MT's article was that his description of the current situation as a simple swap of roles dismisses the real danger. The new McCarthyites don't just challenge the institutions built on Enlightenment principles, they now own and run them. That's the sea change.
BTW, happy to discuss with you why I think atheists don't get elected in this country (and it has nothing to do with politics), maybe another time...
Critical theory does indeed undermine enlightenment principles. I was all about that as an intellectual exercise and "humility" check when considering the subjectivity of someone who developed these theories--yes, "freedom" and "rational man" mean something very different if you're a dude who's had a lot of invisible labor done around you. There were legit feminist and minority questions in all disciplines about how knowledge is constructed. But it's a METHOD--it's a FRAMEWORK. It's not supposed to be a mode of governance, no more than Freudian theory or hermeneutics.
When you understand the "epistemic closure" that occurs when one applies a dumbed down version of critical theory to the constitution, you'll realize that this is a much more invasive ideology. Of course, McCarthyism hurt a lot of people, but it was a sort of add-on to an existing world-view, not something that converts believes plausibly calls into question our Bill of Rights.
I don't at all disagree with the idea that critical theory undermines certain enlightenment principles. w/r/t the Constitution, I take it you have primarily freedom of speech in mind. But wasn't McCarthyism all about prohibiting not just certain forms of speech, but certain forms of thought (e.g. "sympathising")?
There will certainly be little argument among any readers here about the virulent nature of the current witchhunting climate. I ran away from academia last year to escape it. But what I'm saying is, at the end of the woke rainbow, we'll still have the Kochs' / Mellons' / DeVoses' minions writing policy, we'll still have military bases all over the world, and every 4 years we'll still always be choosing between a douche and a turd.
Thanks for your comments, Yawny. Yes, the old McCarthyites sought prohibitions against certain forms of thought and speech. But they failed to institutionalize those prohibitions because they couldn't sufficiently penetrate the institutions they wanted to control. The new McCarthyites, however, are doing the same thing from inside the institutions themselves. As you know, they already exert control over academia and have for the past couple of generations at least. The same is true of commercial media (including the entire entertainment industry), not to mention the municipal governments and workforces in the biggest American cities. Working from the inside, they understand that thought control is a natural and simple consequence of prohibiting some words and phrases and inventing new ones over time. The old McCarthyites didn't have the luxury of time. The new ones do.
In the battle of Kochs and Mellons and DeVoses versus Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Comcast, the Ivy League and every municipal union in every major urban center, it ain't hard to imagine who wins. But you're right about the military bases and Tweedledee/Tweedledum.
"But wasn't McCarthyism all about prohibiting not just certain forms of speech, but certain forms of thought (e.g. sympathising')?"
No, it wasn't. What McCarthyism was about was the fact that communists and sympathizers were willing to break the law to aid the Soviet Union in its cold war against the U.S. They were active agents of a hostile foreign power. And Harry Truman (whom I consider a great man and a great President) couldn't see the necessity of saying 'FDR made a huge mistake about communism, and let the government be infiltrated by traitors.' Party loyalty led Truman to publicly downgrade the communist threat, and McCarthy capitalized on the doubts Truman ended up engendering.
"Jon Schwartz has a good piece in the Intercept about the rather narrow boundaries of permissible discourse: for example, you cannot be an atheist and get elected to office, but nobody ever talks about this."
This is the kind of nonsense I typically see on the Left. A "limit on discourse" would be forbidding the advocacy of atheism. Such a limit existed in colonial Massachusetts, in the 17th Century, but the battle for advocacy of atheism was won a century-and-a-half ago, as the career of Robert Ingersoll demonstrated.
If the voters refuse to elect atheists to office, that is not a "limit on discourse." It is a judgment that atheist office holders are bad for the country. Those who believe that <i>should</i> refuse to vote for atheists. They are doing their duty as citizens.
Of course we're not talking about a legislated limit on discourse. It's internalized, this entire discussion is about manufacture of consent. With something like 25% of Americans claiming to be agnostic, atheist or non-religious--and separation of church and state enshrined in the Constitution--you'd think that occasionally we'd see some measureable number of officials elected to higher office who don't pretend to be religious when they're not. Just like in every other Western country.
The limit on discourse (and thought) is that it's considered out of bounds for candidates (or elected officials) to profess a non-religious orientation. The idea that non-religious people cannot act morally or ethically is, to use your words, the kind of nonsense I typically see on the right.
BTW, you may not be talking about a legislated limit on discourse, but plenty of others are. They call it "hate speech," and they would be happy to make it against the law.
Meanwhile, they are happy to use social pressure to ruin the life of anyone who disagrees with them.
"With something like 25% of Americans claiming to be agnostic, atheist or non-religious--and separation of church and state enshrined in the Constitution--you'd think that occasionally we'd see some measureable number of officials elected to higher office who don't pretend to be religious when they're not."
Other Western countries have a rather higher proportion of the non-religious, and almost all of them have parliamentary systems, rather than "first past the post" systems like ours.
In a system where 50% plus 1 vote wins you everything, a small minority can exercise an effective veto power over who will be elected.
That is not "manufacture of consent," that is the religious exercising their pre-existing principles.
Registered voter: "No Party Preference", FWIW
Still waiting for some admission of reality: that McCarthy was right about the presence of Soviet operatives infiltrating our government. NOT just "communist-sympathetic" people, but actual paid agents. Now, McCarthy was a drunk, an asshole and an idiot who thought membership in the CPUSA was the same as being a Soviet agent, but he really didn't have the chops to damage too many people, despite the decades of Hollywood self-glorification.
Or has the actual history been rewritten to more closely match the simplistic villain/hero narrative?
The whole Soviet agent issue was complicated by partisan politics, and denial of reality.
Being a member of the CPUSA was automatically sufficient grounds for assuming disloyalty to the U.S., and loyalty to the USSR. But Franklin Roosevelt had a blind spot on this, and couldn't see it.
Harry Truman could and did see it, and moved to throw the Commies out of govt. His blind spot was failing to see that it was necessary to admit that FDR had been wrong. So he simultaneously attempted to purge the disloyal while denying the disloyal had ever existed.
Once Eisenhower was president, the security regulations were tightened to what they should have been all along, pretty much, and the Communists in Government issue quickly collapsed.
Is this a grift? Where's the systemic analysis here? The left is not HR departments at fortune 500 companies. The left are the people that voted for Sanders. Centrists co-opt activist language and then do nothing about police brutality or systemic racism. Cancelling someone is just a way to distract so people don't demand actual change. No one fucking cares about this, it's such an insular phenomenon. The only people that care are those that feel as if they are at threat of being "cancelled", which tends to be educated conservatives. Kudos to you Matt for taking their money, but I'd hoped for more astute analysis when I signed up. Instead I get hand holding of ideologically incoherent readers with a 'There, there - you'll never be cancelled to me'. Cancel culture is taking a systemic issue about power and turning it into a cultural issue with no end.
You obviously have not dealt with any HR departments at Fortune 500 companies.
Obviously not.
Anything remotely opening the company up to liability is immediately shunned and dismissed with prejudice.
What does that mean? What are you trying to say?
I recently retired. Something like 30 years ago, a Jewish employee made a "Hitler Garfield" cartoon and accidentally printed it out on the wrong printer. He joked that he'd be fired but basically everyone laughed. About ten years ago, another guy sent a link to a "Hipster Hitler" blog and got called on the carpet and almost fired. Also about ten years ago there was a teapot designed that accidentally looked like Hitler. It was considered funny.
These days, your younger co-workers would think you designed that teapot on purpose and HR would make you go to a White Fragility training where you were instructed not to defend yourself (that the teapot was an accident.) A young designer had just such a situation happen where she used an ancient Greek Key design that accidentally had a swastika (not intended to be such) (just the way the lines crossed) and she wasn't allowed to defend herself before her peers and say it had been unintentional. People thought it had to be subconsciously intentional and she had to sit there during the White Fragility training in silence, being accused of having chosen this design subconsciously-on-purpose.
She didn't get fired, but I think chances are she would have had she tried to defend herself during the White Fragility training. Not sure. But the guy where I worked came damn near to being fired for sending a link to a Hipster Hitler blog. It wasn't a hate blog. It was making fun of hipsters.
These days, no one believes someone made a simple mistake or wasn't aware what the latest approved term is. If you make a mistake, you are thought to have done so intentionally and be a secret hater.
All of that said, just recently Tucker Carlson's head writer got caught and outed for posting on an alt-right or white-supremacist hate blog. Blake Neff on Autoadmit. That blog or site is so vile I quickly got over being so mad over cancel culture. The stuff on the real hate sites is so much worse. People are getting fired, but over on the blog Blake Neff was caught posting on, it is vile enough to dwarf anything on the cancel-culture side. Look for yourself. (Auto Admit)
One of the major issues now is that "the left" is _not_ clearly defined. I've been a Sanders supporter since before he ran for POTUS and I detest the misappropriation of critical theory (as well as the transactivist movement). Many of us care about reducing income inequality but do buy into the identitarian crap, which to my mind complements (and reflects, in its obsession with self) neoliberal values and actions.
The "cancellation" is not insular because if Biden/DNC wins and both houses are in Dem hands we may very well see "anti-racist" and "pro-trans" legislation that literally criminalizes wrong think. There are already hints of this in Canada (it's illegal to "misgender" someone, I believe) and the UK where police show up at your house for stating biological facts on Twitter. Beyond ruining a few people's lives--including that blue-collar worker who's hand position was interpreted as 'hate speech"--the Neo-Maoist criminalization of behavior that right now is being used to fire people (like saying you'll collect work from white artists) will become a reality and I assure you will NOT be insular. The Neo-Maoism, to my mind, keeps corporate America happy and distracts from actual class issues (and the abuses against women and children entailed by transactivism).
Running everything by legal is shielding the company from legal liability. Promoting a diverse C-Suite is just optics, it's marketing. The military does the same thing. It is not political, it is cultural.
You have no idea what left wing politics actually entails. Opinions vary, but left wing ideology tends to promote decommodification of industry and distribution of those assets. Everyone pays into the same pool for services and everyone receives a base line of services that allow the poorest person to live with enough food, water, and shelter. That's left wing politics, not Bank of America sponsoring a Gay Pride parade. That's just a reflection of culture.
You are confusing culture and politics. The two are intertwined, but they are very different.
What is comical is seeing Google and other companies' diversity executives they hired for marketing purposes call them out on transgressions after leaving.