Mimsy Were the Borogoves

Editorials: Where I rant to the wall about politics. And sometimes the wall rants back.

Vicious intimidation by the extreme left

Jerry Stratton, January 12, 2011

“There’s a lot of good people out there. That’s what we’re going to take away from this.”

What could be worse than losing your daughter to a mad killer? Having media elites try to use your daughter for political gain, to viciously smear their political opponents has to be in the running.

Edging up on that, however, must be being on the receiving end of that viciousness when you had nothing remotely to do with the tragedy. By people who are obviously inciting hatred against you for political gain, and a media that is happy to help spread the hate.

These people know that they are being viciously dishonest. They are doing it to intimidate. And they’re being very clear that they are not going to stop. Their targets on the right and the bystanders in the middle are expressing surprise that even when it turns out the guy was just nuts, and that more of his crazyiness coincided with the extreme left than with the extreme right, the vicious left is doubling down on their accusations. But they’re not doubling down—they knew it was likely to turn out this way from the start. It doesn’t matter. Bill Ayers himself could take up nail bombs again, and they’d still blame it on the tea party movement and conservatives.

The goal of the vicious left is intimidation. They want everyone from Palin to the families attending rallies to decide that this viciousness isn’t worth taking a stand, and that it’s best to just stay home. That however horrible it is for the left to wave this bloody flag, they’re going to do it every time a tragedy happens, until the average person shuts up and goes back to the kitchen, back to the factory, back to the farm, back to their computer terminal, and lets the left have their way.

It’s about making sane politicians afraid to say that job-killing legislation kills jobs.1

To them, politics is all-out war and anything goes. Capitalizing on tragedy is a game. Their behaviour now is a manifestation of that. My original title for this post was “The Amazing Projection of the American Left”, but I changed it, because the more I read, the more obvious it became that they’re not projecting. They knew and know exactly what they’re doing.

First they create a climate of hate. Then when tragedy strikes, even completely random tragedy, they blame people who had no part; after pushing lies for a day or so, they demand apologies for incitements that never occurred. They’re nasty, whining creeps. They lost in the last election and are trying to turn the narrative in whatever way works. Hey, it’s war—anything goes, as long as they can regain the narrative:

The narrative is what leftists believe in instead of the truth. If they can blame George W. Bush for the economic crisis, if they can make Sarah Palin out to be an idiot, if they can call the Tea Party racist until you think it must be true, they might yet retain power in spite of the international disgrace of their ideas. And though they still mostly dominate the narrative on the three broadcast networks, most cable stations, most newspapers, and much of Hollywood, nonetheless Fox News, talk radio, the Internet, and the Wall Street Journal have begun to respond in ways they can’t ignore.

That’s the hateful rhetoric they’re talking about: conservatives interrupting the stream of leftist invective in order to dismantle their arguments with the facts.

They want to control speech again, and the mainstream media is fully complicity. Jonah Goldbert put it well in A Point of Clarification:

Every journalistic outfit who thinks they’re being fair by covering the “debate” evenhandedly misses this basic point. You can’t cover a debate that shouldn’t exist in the first place “fairly.” It’s like covering the “debate” over whether the Jews secretly launched the 9/11 attacks. Once you’ve engaged a yes-v-no argument that takes both “sides” seriously, you’ve done more harm than good.

Or, as I commonly say, If you try to balance between truth and lies, you always end up with lies. Facts are not a compromise.

One-fourth of life is intelligible, the other three-fourths is unintelligible darkness, and our earliest duty is to cultivate the habit of not looking round the corner. — Mark Rutherford (The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford)

May 10, 2023: The Bedrock Belief of DEI
Frederick Douglass: contented slaves: Frederick Douglass: “To make a contented slave, you must make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate his power of reason.”; education; slavery; reason; Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass would recognize every argument of DEI.

I recently received an email from the Texas Public Policy Foundation decrying DEI as being anti-American. By all appearances TPPF is a good organization that does good work in Texas, but like many mainstream organizations they are afraid to speak the blunt truth about evil. While they are not alone in their refusal to face the reality of what DEI is, Monday morning’s email epitomized this blindness. Recognizing evil and calling it what it is has become embarrassing. No one wants to be mean; no one wants to lower the discourse.

And so we get statements like this, criticism in name only, that strive so hard to be reasonable that they forget what they are criticizing:

What to know: Chris Rufo, writing in City Journal, reports that the University of Texas at Austin’s College of Communication promotes the idea that “objectivity,” “individualism,” and “worship of the written word” were all “characteristics of white supremacy culture.”

The TPPF take: What is “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI), really?

“The bedrock belief of DEI is that racism is not an individual act of evil, it is a structural system, geared toward preserving white supremacy,” says TPPF’s Sherry Sylvester.

This is bullshit. The bedrock of DEI is that racism is right and that the racists of the past were right to segregate minorities and manage their affairs for them. They’re not even trying to hide it.

Read the full post and comments

July 22, 2020: White Supremacy: The Reincarnation of Stephen Douglas
White culture thumbnail: White culture means individualism, the scientific method, and a work ethic.; white left; Smithsonian

According to the Smithsonian, it is acting white to be rational, independent, and decisive.

The ideological parallels between Democrats in Lincoln’s time and the establishment white left today continue to amaze me. That non-whites are shiftless, aimless, unable to manage their resources, and so need a government overseer to make decisions for them, to direct their work, and that they, the white left, are ready and willing to take on this thankless job and so deserve the fruits of their charges’ labor, could have come straight from the mouth of a George Fitzhugh or a Stephen Douglas.

Douglas, the Democrat famous for the pro-slavery side of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, argued that “the Negro” needed government overseers, because they were inferior to whites. They were incapable of “self-government”, he said. They couldn’t manage their affairs as whites could, they didn’t have the work ethic of whites, they couldn’t reason as well as whites.

All history has proved that in no part of the world, or the world's history, had the Negro ever shown himself capable of self-government… whenever any one man or set of men were incapable of taking care of themselves, they should consent to be governed by those who are capable of managing their affairs for them.

Surely, he rhetorically asked his Republican opponent, you wouldn’t say that blacks and whites are equal?

Yes I would, said Lincoln, although he did so in an I come here not to praise Caesar but to bury him sort of way.

…there is no reason in the world why the Negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence—the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man… in the right to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man. — Abraham Lincoln (First Joint Debate at Ottawa)

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June 17, 2020: White privilege is not the nail
Black Lives Matter: “Black lives only matter when a white person takes a life.”—The Hodge Twins; Black Lives Matter

The chance of getting killed by cops if you’re black is only disparate in cities dominated by the left—Chicago, New York, St. Louis, Houston, Los Angeles, etc., in order by danger to blacks. So of course the left complains about white privilege instead. But it isn’t white privilege. It’s not dominated by the left privilege. Anyone of any skin tone can benefit from this privilege.

If you live in an area where police are fired when they commit crimes that fall short of murder, you don’t have to worry about being murdered by a police officer. Just as, if you live in an area that fires teachers who abuse children, your kids will get a better and safer education.

Everyone can enjoy not dominated by the left privilege, by not being dominated by the left. But pointing that out tends to elicit a retreat to generic complaints about feeling uncomfortable. I do not want to belittle complaints about anxiety, but used in this context they divert attention away from fixing the problem, that people are being killed under color of law.

This is painful to watch, but also true: there are causes that shouldn’t be fixed in personal relationships. Causes where the only appropriate response is to commiserate and continue to live with the effects, perhaps even blame a fake cause. That is not true of murder.

It begins to sound a lot like the it’s not about the nail video. It’s a question of whether we want to solve a problem or merely commiserate about it.

If we want to solve the problem, it’s not about the white privilege.

Attributing something to white privilege that is not caused by white privilege means that we will never be able to fix this particular nail. And I think we do want to fix it, because this nail is killing people. That means we need to understand where this happens and where it doesn’t happen, what policies cause it to happen and not happen, and so what we can do to ensure it doesn’t happen again. Invoking “white privilege” when people talk about real solutions seems to me a lot like asserting that “it’s not about the nail!”

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  1. In the view of the extreme left, the kid who told people the emperor was naked was an anti-worker hatemonger. The king was just trying to lay down some qualitative easing on the textile industry!

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  1. <- State punch cards
  2. Social Security lies ->