Showing posts from January, 2016

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The Left's Manufactured Muslim Crisis

Men and women, some whose clothes were still marked with gray ash, walked dazedly toward Union Square. Many did not know what to do or where to go. So they kept on walking. They knew the country was under attack, but they did not know how bad it was or what might still be heading for them. Behind them lay a changed city and thousands of American dead. Ahead was the bronze statue of George Washington, facing into the devastation and raising his hand to lead his men forward in victory. Around its base, with the destruction of the World Trade Center as their backdrop, leftists had set up shop, coloring anti-war posters even while rescue workers were risking their lives at Ground Zero. In the coming days, the statue of Washington would be repeatedly vandalized by leftists drawing peace signs and “No War” and “War is Not the Answer” slogans on it. But that moment crystallized my realization that while Muslim terrorists had carried out the attack, it was the left we would have to fight.

Conservatism Isn't Dead

No, conservatism isn't dead. It just isn't nearly as influential as some conservatives thought it was. This shouldn't have come as a surprise after two Obama victories, the failures of the Tea Party and the warping of conservative institutions and politicians to serve entirely different agendas. Ideas only have power when they're vested in organizations that have power. Conservative organizations have very little institutional power. Those that do are not particularly conservative, but serve the agendas of an establishment that has self-interested goals. Conservative organizations lean heavily on messaging, but their messaging is really about influencing those who do have power. Their most effective messaging is filtered through populist and viral mediums that have the conservative brand, but are not really ideologically conservative. Conservatives interface with FOX News or the Chamber of Commerce, which have institutional power and which provide a forum for cons

Trolling is the New Politics

Your classic troll was an amoral sociopath or played one on the internet. His only cause was his own amusement. He advocated horrible and contradictory causes because it amused him to infuriate people. If he could get an entire group howling for his blood, he won. If an outraged media reported on his antics, he was a prince among trolls. Chaos and absurdity were his only agendas. But eventually the trolls who did it for the "Lulz" gave way to the "Moralfags" sincere trolls who were sincerely terrible people. They had the same style as trolls, but there was nothing to deconstruct there. Trolling was just how they advocated for their agenda. It was like the difference between Andy Kaufman and David Letterman. When you actually have an agenda and a program, your surreal deconstruction isn't deconstructing anything. It's just a stylistic choice, it's how you present your agenda. It's the difference between Dadaists dumping a kitchen sink in a fashio

Understanding the Caliphate Curve

A report by the Tony Blair Faith Foundation found that the Syrian rebels were mostly Islamic Jihadists and that even if ISIS were defeated there were 15 other groups sharing its worldview that were ready to take its place. And that’s just in Syria. The official ISIS story, the one that we read in the newspapers, watch on television and hear on the radio, is that it’s a unique group whose brand of extremism is so extreme that there is no comparing it to anything else. ISIS has nothing to do with Islam. Or with anything else. It’s a complete aberration. Except for the 15 other Jihadist groups ready to step into its shoes in just one country. Islamic Supremacist organizations like ISIS can be graded on the “Caliphate curve”. The Caliphate curve is based on how quickly an Islamic organization wants to achieve the Caliphate. What we describe as “extreme” or “moderate” is really the speed at which an Islamic group seeks to recreate the Caliphate. ISIS is at the extreme end of th

Why Feminism Failed Cologne's Women

Big Feminism, fresh from fighting pitched battles against swimsuit posters in European subways and other phantoms of "rape culture", failed the women who were attacked by violent Muslim migrant mobs in Cologne, Berlin and Hamburg who were the products of an actual rape culture dating back to Mohammed's injunction to his men that Muslim women must wear burqas to avoid being "molested" while non-Muslim women captured in the House of War could be raped by Muslim Jihadis at will. Big Feminism has a great deal of interest in rape as an abstract idea that can be unpacked to represent everything the left hates from Valentine's Day to environmental degradation to the college frat, but it has little interest in rape as a crime or rape victims as people. Eve Ensler exploited the idea of rape to build up her brand while her PR was being handled by Trevor FitzGibbon, a progressive sexual predator who was also representing Julian Assange, another progressive rapist. Ev

Bernie Sanders and the Threat to the Left's Aspirational Brand

A big part of how the left won was by transforming its image. Go back a hundred years and the left had much the same makeup as it does now. But the image of a typical leftist was ragged, angry and unstable. A ranting bombthrower at best. A ridiculous leafletter at worst. One step away from a criminal. Not at all the sort of person you wanted to be. And the "sort of person you want to be" is how the left makes over the country in its image. One of the things this season of South Park has been good at is capturing how people unthinkingly embrace left-wing ideas and attitudes because they are aspirational. They know very little of the theory of the political correctness they embrace. All they know is that they represent the values and attitudes of a higher social class. A social class that shops for organic fair trade stuff at Whole Foods. It's a class issue. The left originally wanted to be seen as associated with the lower class, even though it actually came out of

The Tribal War with Islam

All wars are wars of equals. That's true in the sense that each side attacks the other in terms of how it defines itself as an entity. States try to destroy other states. Religions fight other religions. Ethnic groups and races engage in genocide. They do this even when the other side does not see itself in the same terms. The United States tried to fight guerrillas and terrorists as if they were modern states with their own industrial military organizations protecting their industrial core. This tactic made no sense in Vietnam or even Iraq because that wasn't the enemy we were facing. But states are built to fight other states. Tribes are built to fight other tribes. Religions are built to fight other religions. The modern multicultural super-tolerant western state of this century takes stock of its strongest point, and decides that it's not the old industrial machine, which destroys the environment, its traditional heritage, which is problematic, or its problem solv

America Doesn't Have a Gun Problem, It Has a Democrat Problem

America's mass shooting capital isn't somewhere out west where you can get a gun at the corner store. It's in Obama's own hometown. Chicago is America's mass shooting capital. There were over 400 shootings with more than one victim. In 95 of those shootings, 3 or more people were shot.  2,995 people were shot in Chicago last year. Shootings were up, way up, in Baltimore. With an assist from Al Sharpton and #BlackLivesMatter, Baltimore beat out Detroit. But Detroit is still in the running. Chicago, Baltimore and Detroit all have something in common, they're all run by the party of gun control which somehow can't seem to manage to control the criminals who have the guns. The murder rate in Washington, D.C., home of the progressive boys and girls who can solve it all, is up 54%. The capital of the national bureaucracy has also been the country's murder capital. These cities are the heartland of America’s real gun culture. It isn’t the bitter gun-and