Allahpundit looked into this on Tuesday, but the story behind Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s massively popular Instagram video where she describes her experience during the January 6th Capitol Hill riot keeps growing more convoluted. Despite claiming that she thought she “was going to die” and at least insinuating that rioters were attempting to break into her office, AOC wasn’t even in the actual Capitol Building when all of the action went down. Over at RedState, Nick Arama breaks down the distinctions between reality and perception. AOC’s office is in the Cannon Building which was never breached during the riot. She was briefly evacuated along with everyone else there, but other members were in immediate danger inside the Capitol Building and were far more at risk.
The writer – Jazz Shaw at Hot Air – points out he believes the #AlexandriaOcasioSmollett hashtag that erupted earlier this week on Twitter may have been a little off target – the Representative certainly didn’t concoct the riot from whole cloth.
I’m sure that AOC was legitimately afraid during the riot and with good reason. Assuming there’s a television in her office and she had the news on she would have known that hundreds of angry people were busting up the Capitol Building and acting in a threatening fashion. Given her unusually high profile for a very junior member, it would be reasonable for her to believe that some of the rioters could present a physical danger to her.
With all of that said, however, AOC failed to make one thing clear in her video (which quickly amassed more than six million views). At no time did any rioters enter the hallway where her office is located and it’s not clear that any of them ever entered any part of the Cannon Building at all. The one person who did reach her office was a Capitol Hill Police officer who was coming to evacuate her and her staffer. They had located a suspicious package (which was later cleared as being random and mundane) so they were getting everyone out of the building in an abundance of caution.
Leaving aside the sliming of the Capitol cop – who had a whole building to evacuate as his colleagues were being overrun a few blocks away – and even if you don’t make the Smollett comparison, I do find one thing intensely troubling.
The whole episode – the assault on the electoral process as well as a riot that led to five deaths, directly or indirectly – to her is nothing but a stage for…
…Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. Her feelings, her sense of assumed victimnood…her.
To AOC, AOC is always the real story – by way of using that story to slime her boogeymen-du-jour.
UPDATE: I’m going to expand on this just a tad.
AOC was about as far from the Capitol riot as I was from the pharmacy that burned down, about 1000 feet from my house, during the riots.
Were either of us under immediate threat? No. Were both of us right to be nervous? Yep.
Should either of us be appropriating the experiences of those who were in immediate danger?
Let’s just call it emotionally manipulative overkill and hope everyone can do better in the future.
the numbers: The National Shooting Sports Foundation tallied more than 37,600 statewide requests to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System in January — nearly double from 18,990 in January 2020.
It wasn’t just January: More than 380,000 background checks were recorded here in 2020, up 49% from the previous year.
380,000 NICS checks in 2020 is more than one for every ten eligible Minnesotans (over 21 with a clean criminal record).
Modern American “progressivism”, like all its many forebears in the past 200 years, has been all about rallying people against boogeymen. From “monarchists” in the French Revolution, to “Wreckers” in Stalin’s USSR to the Wobbly’s “Bosses”, up through “the patriarchy” and “the man” and “counterrevolutionaries” in Red China and San Francisco in the sixties and seventies, and if you have a hard time distinguishing between ’em, join the club.
Today, the boogeymen…er, boogiepeople on the left are pretty much all the things that people who are included are told to be “anti”. “Anti-Racism” “Anti-Misogyny” (not just sexism, anymore – it’s the more active, more malevolent noun these days), “Anti-Fascism”, “Anti-Transphobia”, and on and on – all of which sounds like good things to be “anti”…
…and, unsurprisingly, when you dig into the “Root Causes” of all those nouns, all things trace back to “Western Civilization” in all its particulars: the Judeo-Christian value on the individual and their worth, value, rights and responsibilities and potential of each and every person, as a person with a mind, a point of view, and at the end of the day an indivisible soul of personal, societal, political, intellectual and metaphysical worth.
Those aspects of humanity are anathema to progressivism in all its flavors. The focus is on the group – the Marxists “classes”, the Nazi’s irreducible focus on race, the modern academic Left’s obsession with a byzantine network of intersectional identity groups. The individual is nothing but a vote (for now), an appetite, a widget to be moved through the production line of life (like Obamacare’s awful caricature of Progressive humanity, “Julia”). Progressivism is “Materialist”. Souls, individual intellects and thoughts and reams, all are ephemeral; humans are widgets that consume and produce, and whose worth and value (to those in power) is expressed via their membership in the collective.
Those widgets have a term. “Bodies”. Not people. Not brains. Not souls.
She’s “a gun owner herself” – which might be seen in several ways. Is “P”M moderating? Are they realizing that the culture war has slipped far enough away from them, especially over this past year, that they have to start speaking to people who need to be convinced?
And she’s apparently incredibly famous, since she apparently just goes by “Rashmi”. I’ve turned “Protect” Minnesota’s website, Facebook feed and other social media upside down, and not been able to find any reference to a last name, which is Seneviratne, by the way.
But even during the reign of the serial fabulist the Reverend Nord Bence, “Protect” MN wasn’t nearly extreme enough in its hatred of guns and (law-abiding) gun owners, enough for some people.
“P”M spawned a breakway group, “Survivors Lead” – basically a woman, Rachel Joseph, with a long history of progressive activism and a story; an aunt who was murdered, according to Ms. Joseph’s story, by a gun.
Quick aside: I don’t minimize anyone’s trauma over having a loved one murdered. But in the many times I’ve heard Ms. Joseph’s story, she’s never once mentioned a perpetrator, someone actually holding and using the gun that killed her aunt; that persons evil motivation, the legal fallout from the murder, whether that person was sentenced or not. It’d be wrong to crack wise – “what, did the gun animate itself?” – but omitting a perpetrator, his/her motives and the like from the conversation is incredibly intellectually dishonest.
Anyway – “Rashmi” and her apparent moderation are not going over well with “Survivors Lead”:
The extreme heckling the not-as-extreme about getting less extreme. That qualifies as “dog bites man”, at the very most.
Rather less so? There followed some more, er, ethnically pointed traffic on one social media feed (from which I’ve long been blocked) or another.
After which “P”M – operating through its usual social media persona, the omniscient third person that used to be Martens and Nord Bence – responded:
On the one hand, watching the agents of Big Left eating each other is one of my favorite spectator sports.
And if the biggest semi-organic anti-gun group in MInnesota (shaddap about Moms Want Action already) is pivoting from pushing Linda Slocum’s gun grab bill to highlighting the inequity of gun control (“Race, class and geography all play into who gets to have a gun and who doesn’t” – which is something every Second Amendment activist has known for 50 years) and speaking in the first “person” to the prudence of victims of violence to arm up, then in culture war terms that’s the sound of the first tank crossing the pontoon bridge at Remagen.
But…”white bodied privilege?”
What the flaming hootie hoo?
I thought for a moment – is this a shot back at the Rachel Dolezals and Elizabeth Warrens of the world, with their flip-flopping identities, by “actual” “people of color”, reinforcing the idea that while you might “identify” with one degree melanin or another, your apparent appearance still wins out in the great privilege lottery (which will, I suspect, get pilloried hard by the Trans crowd, for whom perceived identity is everything? I’ll let the fight that one out).
But no. It’s much less hilarious than that.
It’s “inclusion language” – slang or argot that one class of people use to track who is in, and who is “out” – to be sure. That’s part of it, and people are noticing:
Referring to people as bodies is a reminder, writer Elizabeth Barnes says in an interview, that “racism isn’t just about the ideas that you have in your head.” Barnes is the author of “The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability, The Girl Behind the Wall.” In intellectual discussions, theories about social oppression sound almost disembodied; “we talk about prejudice,” Barnes says, “like it’s just a matter of ideas.” The point is to emphasize the physical violence done to black people through slavery, lynching, and police brutality. In the case of women, the term “bodies” highlights “what happens to women’s bodies in health care contexts, in sexual contexts, in reproductive contexts.”
But behond that?
It’s a nod to the materialism of the left – that the mind, the thoughts, the indivisible soul of the indivisual human being is not merely irrelevant, but inconvenient to the obsession with identity.
Your melanin defines you.
In some ways its a cheap ad hominem – “of course you’d think that, you are (add a reference to your target’s melanin, or lack thereof)”. But pointing logical fallacies out to the foot soldiers of Big Left is a little like arguing salinity with sharks; it’s just part of the water they swim in.
So – gun groups eating each other? Good.
The debate contributing to the ongoing hijacking of the language? Bad.
The whole thing participating, in its own little way, in the further erosion of one of the ideals that’s made Western Civilization the most successful, and humane , civilization in human history?
A new article in New Yorkerchronicles the “Cultural Revolution” – the Chinese Communist Party’s revolving round of purges that wracked China in the decade before Mao’s death in 1976.
Tell me – what does this scene look like?
Red Guards—a pseudo-military designation adopted by secondary-school and university students who saw themselves as the Chairman’s sentinels—soon appeared all over China, charging people with manifestly ridiculous crimes and physically assaulting them before jeering crowds. Much murderous insanity erupted after 1966, but the Cultural Revolution’s most iconic images remain those of the struggle sessions: victims with bowed heads in dunce caps, the outlandish accusations against them scrawled on heavy signboards hanging from their necks. Such pictures, and others, in “Forbidden Memory” (Potomac), by the Tibetan activist and poet Tsering Woeser, show that even Tibet, the far-flung region that China had occupied since 1950, did not escape the turmoil. Woeser describes the devastation wrought on Tibet’s Buddhist traditions by a campaign to humiliate the elderly and to obliterate what were known as the Four Olds—“old thinking, old culture, old customs, and old habits of the exploiting classes.” The photographs in Woeser’s book were taken by her father, a soldier in the Chinese military, and found by her after he died. There are vandalized monasteries and bonfires of books and manuscripts—a rare pictorial record of a tragedy in which ideological delirium turned ordinary people into monsters who devoured their own. (Notably, almost all the persecutors in the photographs are Tibetan, not Han Chinese.) In one revealing photo, Tibet’s most famous female lama, once hailed as a true patriot for spurning the Dalai Lama, cowers before a young Tibetan woman who has her fists raised.
Does it remind you of…:
A “Struggle Session” at in the humanities department of an exquisitely expensive private university – like Hamline or Saint Thomas?
A Pacific Consulting Group workshop on cis-privilege
An “Anti”-Fa coffee shop after hours?
Hah, silliy peasants. It reminds the New Yorker of…
Trumpism!
Why did a rich and powerful society suddenly start destroying itself?
The Trumpian assault on the West’s “olds” has long been in the making, and it is, at least partly, a consequence of political decay and intellectual ossification—akin to what Mao diagnosed in his own party. Beginning in the nineteen-eighties, a consensus about the virtues of deregulation, financialization, privatization, and international trade bound Democrats to Republicans (and Tories to New Labour in Britain). Political parties steadily lost their old and distinctive identities as representatives of particular classes and groups; they were no longer political antagonists working to leverage their basic principles—social welfare for the liberal left, stability and continuity for the conservative right—into policies. Instead, they became bureaucratic machines, working primarily to advance the interests of a few politicians and their sponsors.
In 2010, Tony Judt warned, not long before his death, that the traditional way of doing politics in the West—through “mass movements, communities organized around an ideology, even religious or political ideas, trade unions and political parties”—had become dangerously extinct. There were, Judt wrote, “no external inputs, no new kinds of people, only the political class breeding itself.” Trump emerged six years later, channelling an iconoclastic fury at this inbred ruling class and its cherished monuments.
I suppose in the interest of intellectual self-review, I need to ask – is it gaslighting? Or is it just the sort of stupendous self-unawareness that seems to be a condition for joining today’s “elites”?
Point toward the “lack of self-awareness” thesis – they don’t seem to realize this sort of cultural slander is how we got Donald Trump in the first place.
Henco attorney Mike Freeman isn’t happy about the “Minnesota Freedom Fund” repeatedly bailing out violent offenders who can be linked, however tenuously, to political protest.
Hennepin County Attorney publicly calls out MN Freedom Fund for bailing out a man its charging today w/ three new felonies. FF previously posted a $5K and $60K. Thomas Moseley arrested at Oct 15 Floyd protest at Gov't Ctr w/ a Glock. Previous case damage to 5th Pct. pic.twitter.com/JL5jOYvBsR
But have you noticed, in the wake of all the collective slander about “white supremacists” being “the real culprits” behind last spring’s riots, that not a single media report or government objection notes that the “Minnesota Freedom Fund” is financed by progressive plutocrats and aristocrats,
And why would they be bailing out “white supremacists?”
I keep asking Twin Cities media figured “reporting” on the story, to the extent anyone ever does.
Kind of a good news, bad news situation here. But maybe not in the way you think.
A teachers union president in Washington State refers to reopening schools as a “white supremacist” initiative.
A WA teacher's union president says reopening schools is an example of "white supremacy," concern over a child's mental health or suicide risk is "white privilege," and push to reopen schools is like rioters pushing to enter the U.S. Capitol.
The good – or “good” – news: this is an example of the type of rhetorical, social and policy overreach one can expect when “progressives” – in this case invariably white, middle-class, and visibly “progressive” – find themselves in power. This statement – literally, “wanting your kids back in schools, and wanting some sense of stability and normalcy for their mental health, at a time when teenage suicide is exploding all over the country, is racist” is the very definition of “2+2=5” – mental health is mental illness, concern for kids is a pathology, truth is lies. (And the ability to say it without having ones own peers pelt one with rocks and garbage is Urban Progressive Privilege).
ut another way, evil – no scare quotes. Inverting moral truth and moral falsehood is as textbook a definition of venial evil as exists.
That’s the “good” news.
The bad news? About half the country, as this is written, doesn’t know any better, or just doesn’t want to think about it that hard.
Maybe if I brush up my Rosetta Stone Spanish, I can get some yard work done cheap.
Joe Doakes
Unless, of course, they wind up subject to the $15 an hour minimum wage – which means most of them will never find legal work, and will wind up on the dole.
According to plan.
Joe, you might have to hire a neighborhood kid. If American neighborhood kids still do yard work…
Need an Orwell reference? Authoritarians always need a boogieman. And like Orwell’s Eurasia and Eastasia, or Hitler’s “Reichstag arsonists” or the “Polish soldiers who attacked the Gleiwitz radio station” or “Jews”, or generations of Soviet “wreckers” and “counter-revolutionaries”, having a conspiracy to flog can certainly take peoples’ minds off of the bread lines or endless mask mandates, wouldn’t it?
Of course, the Democrats chose half the country for their boogieman.
And it’s time to be intellectually honest – to today’s Big Left, if he were alive, he’d have been canceled decades ago.
Because the historical record – one you have all seen, over and over, the “I Have A Dream” speech – flies in the face of the Critical Race Theory that dominates all “progressive” “thought” these days:
Anyway – it’s not like you don’t hear “I Have A Dream” constantly these days, but for this speech teacher’s kid’s money, “I Have Been To The Mountain” is the one I measure his, and nearly everyone else’s, oratory by.
Democracy can’t survive if we can’t trust our institutions.
We’ll come back to that.
Steamed
In Tom Wolfe’s 1987 satire Bonfire of the Vanities, a young black man is run over by a car driven y a millionaire bond trader. A Bronx DA and couple of New York cops investigate.
In one part of the story, a huckster minister, clearly modeled after Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton or some such, explains his role in the community to the investigators.
In his metaphor, community anger is “steam”, building inexorably as the heat rises, ready to blow the boiler sky high if something isn’t done. That “something”, naturally, is the good reverend plying his services, as a “steam valve”.
For a price.
The book was head, shoulders and ankles better than the movie – a box office bomb that nearly ended Tom Hanks as an A-lister, thirty years back – but this scene more or less gets the point across:
The reference I’m calling out is 2:00 minutes into the clip
But remember – they’re the ones that cover the newsto the highest of standards.
We’ll come back to that.
Answering Their Master
Republicans since Richard Nixon have known that the media was biased to the left. Over this past twenty years, it’s been almost beyond parody. Over the past five years, literally, parody has been more accurate than journalism.
But there’s a level of parody beyond which even The Onion or The Babylon Bee would feel awkward going. Our “elite” media has no such limits:
BREAKING: @PBS Principal Counsel Michael Beller Incites Political Violence In Radical Left-Wing Agenda
“Go to the White House & throw Molotov cocktails…”
More locally? I could go back a bit, to the media’s response to conservative protest and the Tea Party – and that was the least of the problems. The IRS abused its power to try to shut the Tea Party down.
And there was nary a peep from the establishment media. “Law enforcement” under the Obama administration did nothing at all. The agent of the scandal, Lois Lerner, retired with her full government pension and the tacit thanks of the Obama regime.
More recently, there’ve been two episodes that show how very, very unequal we are in this country, depending on your politics.
And how did the justice system in Ramsey County work? Like a fraternity hazing. Without the hazing. The defendants – including the son of Hillary Clinton’s VP nominee, weren’t so much prosectuted as féted. Had John Choi done otherwise, he’d have never done lunch at the Lex again.
This, of course, after a series of citywide riots for whichi justice was slow, dilatory and diverted by stories of “white supremacists with umbrellas” doing improbable feats of mischief.
And, behind it all, a long trail of elaborate rationalizations for the rioting: after centuries of (checks notes) systemic racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, economic and environmental racism and mansplaining, a riot was a positive public health good, to deal with all that built up “steam”.
But only the correct rioting.
Because if Pro-Life Action tried to block a freeway, Jacob Frey would have water cannon and attack dogs out there before the protesters got over the fence. And everyone involved knows it.
As re protesting, there are Two Americas.
But only one America gets to release its “steam” in polite company.
What About
I’ve mentioned this to others in the past week.
Some have said “mind the ‘whataboutism'”.
This isn’t whataboutism.
This is pointing out that when sides perceive, correctly, that the deck is stacked against them, they will find coloring outside the lines more and more acceptable.
Which is the exact rationalization the left uses for BLM’s shenanigans; inequality begets rage!
A few people have asked me why those wacko idiot Trump supporters don’t believe Biden won the election fair and square. I can’t speak for other wacko idiot Trump supporters, only for myself:
An election is announced. Voters cast ballots in person and by mail. Election observers gather to watch the ballots being counted, to ensure it’s done fairly. Election officials order observers out of the counting room. Election officials put cardboard over the windows so observers can’t see in. Election officials secretly count the ballots by machine and announce a result. The losing candidate doubts the result. The losing candidate requests a manual recount with ballots individually verified. Instead, election officials run the same ballots through the same machines again. The losing candidate requests access to the software to verify the result. Election officials order the software logs wiped. The losing candidate requests access to the paper ballots to verify the result. Election officials order the paper ballots shredded. Citizens post videos and swear affidavits that election fraud occurred. Statisticians and computer techs give expert opinions that election fraud occurred. The court declines to review any evidence from the losing candidate for lack of ‘standing’ meaning he can’t bring his case until the Secretary of State certifies the election results. The Secretary of State certifies the machine results. The court declines to review any evidence from the losing candidate on the grounds of ‘laches,’ meaning he waited too long to bring his case. The state legislature de-certifies the machine result and sends its own result to DC. Bureaucrats in the National Archives decide to accept only the machine results. Congress accepts the machine results and declares the losing candidate lost. The ‘losing’ candidate and his supporters exercise their First Amendment rights to protest. Violence breaks out, which is blamed on the ‘losing’ candidate despite his calls for peace.
After seeing these events, millions of Americans join the ‘losing’ candidate in doubting the machine results and suspecting the ‘losing’ candidate actually won the election but his victory was stolen from him by fraud committed by Election Officials. Liberals declare people who question the machine results are obtuse, they’re dumb, they’re idiots and retarded. People who question the machine results are banned from Facebook, Twitter and Instagram; blocked from Google ads and YouTube videos; accused by prominent politicians of plotting to overthrow the government; a national media figure declares the government should take away their children to be sent to re-education camps; a congresswoman demands they be blacklisted from future employment; and the media calls for the ‘losing’ candidate’ family to be criminally prosecuted, their assets confiscated, their business forfeited.
My response my questioner is: seeing the chicanery, the coverup and the vicious vindictiveness toward all who seek to verify the election results, how can you believe Biden won the election fair and square?
Joe Doakes
The usual answer is “why are you a Nazi”.
Let’s see how the usual suspects in the comment section manage.
Donald Trump inspired clichés by the big-box store-load long before he dipped his toe into politics. Even back when he was a pop-culture hero of sorts among the crowd that worshipped blinged-out idols, even before MC Hammer brought it to the mainstream:
Y’know – back when he was a Democrat.
You don’t need me to list Trump’s faults as a person, politician and President – indeed, we have a multi-billion dollar industry devoted entirely not only to cataloging them, but making up new ones out of thin air.
We’ll come back to them.
The Usual Bla Bla Bla
But along with all of the faults imagined from whole cloth (the “Fine People” slander hops to mind – which, again, we’ll come back to later), and his many offenses against the supposed decorum of the Presidency (real or imagined – and I’ll skip past Bill Clinton’s desporting himself in the Oval Office to jump back to Woodrow Wilson using it as a de facto Ku Klux Klan field office to try to introduce a little context into the notion of decorum), he had some real ones; I can’t help but think if he’d just turned his Twitter feed over to a moderately clever mid-level staffer, he could have kept the “outflank the media” aspects of his social presence without the, let’s be honest, crazy and intemperate and, God help me for saying it, unpresidential parts of hispublic presence. Enough to have won the election? I wouldn’t bet against it.
Of course, to be intellectually honest, you – and by “you”, I mean “the Never Trump clacque” – need to admit he did some things very, very well. For starters, he did the one thing I, a Trump skeptic, had hoped for, and exceeded my hopes by half; he empaneled a genuine originalist majroitiy on the SCOTUS. And in foreign policy terms, he may have been the most successful President we’ve had since George HW Bush, and Reagan’st first term before him.
Never Never Land
The previous paragraph might be read as a swipe at the “Never Trump” crowd – which includes some people I respect very much, and some I never really did, and some for whom I’ve gradually lost regard over time.
“Never Trump” largely, if not completely, devolved into a bunch of scolds of no more political use than the Libertarian Party, chanting “I Told You So” with all the convincing authority of that “Karen” who yaps at you about putting your groceries on the conveyor before the cashier has sanitized it.
I say this as someone who has been an active Trump skeptic since 1986 – back when most Democrats and Never-Trumpers were making Trump a TV star through most of the 2000s, as I’m fond of pointing out – and who was actively interested in “Never Trump” activities up to and including reviving the Federalist party around this time five years ago.
The Real Deplorable Thing
But the biggest problem with Trump isn’t Trump. The media and pop culture would have said many of the same things about Mitt Romney or John McCain or Marco Rubio, or most likely Martin Luther King if he were alive today and voting Republican.
Trump won in the first place because he saw the left’s strategy – harness the populist power of identity politics – and, for five years, did it better than the Progressives. He turned blue collar whites, and people in Red state in general, into an identity group and fairly coherent voting bloc – finally ending the 100 year old notion that Democrats were “the party of the working man” once and for all.
So populism was the car that drove him to the White House. Where he governed in some ways as a conservative (in foreign policy terms, on the SCOTUS, in slashing regulation), and in some ways as the most profligate “progressive” in history (he spent like the Democrat he used to be).
But there was something worse.
Personality
Remember Ron Paul? In 2008 and 2012, a lot of Republicans, especially younger ones, staged and insurgency in the GOP behind the Texas Libertarian-Republican. Much as I supported much of what Paul stood for (domestically, at least – his foreign and defense policies were just as historically ignorant as the Libertarian Party’s), looking at his mobs of idealistic acolytes, I asked more than once “You do realize that even if he’s elected, he’ll be able to do nothing he promises, since there’s not a majority of Paulite House and Senate candidates running to help push the agenda, right? And that the only way to enact that idealistic vision of government would be for Paul to stage a libertarian coup, and impose an absolute Libertarian dictatorship, and force Liberty on the people against their will.
There was no telling that to the Paul Kids – not back then, anyway. Such is the allure of the personality cult, among those who haven’t really paid attention to how much drag and lag and need for consensus is (as of 2020) built into the system.
And Trump certainly developed his own personality cult in the GOP.
On the one hand – the Never Trumpers remind us – Trumpism is not conservatism. And they’re right. It’s populism, and populism, giving people what they want now, is only rhetorically distinguishable between the Left and the Right. “Trumpism” tramples the principles of conservatism behind which the GOP…
…er…
…I was going to say “behind which the GOP stands”. Of course, the GOP, at least in DC, hasn’t for a long time.
We’ll come back to that.
Anyway – “Trumpism” turned, at least at the point of the retail-political sphere, into a personality cult, no less impervious to logic than the Hillary or Obama cults, no less focused on the person rather than the policy than the Ron Paul fan club.
To far too many Trump supporters in all of our social circles, policy wasn’t the goal; Trump was.
And given the GOP’s behavior over the past decade, why wouldn’t someone who didn’t care about how the political sausage was made, but how awful it tasted, see it any differently?
We’ll come back to that two episodes down the road.
It’d be easy, and facile, but no more than a little inaccurate, to say last week’s riot at the Capitol was about keeping the person in office (assuming you discount the notion that “Anti”-Fa provocateurs did the job – and for purposes of this argument, I do), rather than the policies and the repudiation of the oppression of Big Left. To way too many people, Trump doesn’t lead the effort against the toxic, narcissistic marginalization that Democrats relentless focus on identity politics brings; he is that effort.
It’s a toxic perception – indeed, a toxic reality. Democracy dies in cultism.
I spent a lot of time thinking about this scene last week:
I first started paying serious attention to politics in about 1980. Like a lot of high school kids, then and now, I was somewhere out on what would be called “the left”; I wrote a platform for North Dakota Boys State (a statewide mock government program put on by the decidedly conservative American Legion) that called for systematic redistribution of wealth, abolishing nuclear energy and nuclear disarmament, and a whole bunch of stuff that would be pretty mainstream among the Bernie Bros today.
Three years later, due to the good graces of my English professor, Dr. Jim Blake, I had re-evaluated most of my assumptions. I voted for Ronald Reagan in 1984, and never really looked back.
And I had no reason to. None of us did. Although the history books, all being written from the perspective of the Left, will never admit it, the two decades from 1980 to 2000 were, objectively, the last American Golden Age. I’ll squeak out an optimistic coda and add “so far”, but I’ll be honest – I haven’t been feeling it, but I’m a firm believer in acting like you want to feel, and so there is is. “So far”.
I’ll come back to that.
There’s no denying it was one of the high points of American history. We led an economic surge that brought more wealth to more people than any in history. We, as a nation, led a political surge that led to the collapse of one of the most evil regimes in history (although not the other one – so far).
Maybe it’s just the perspective of one guy’s lifetime – but I suspect you’d have to look long and hard to find a place and time when it was generally better to be a human.
Not just in material terms, but in terms of the tension between freedom and order, one of the hardest things about running a self-governing society, being in relative balance – and, more importantly, the general commitment to the system and process that kept all those moving parts in balance.
And it’s been downhill from there.
The arc from Morning in America in 1980 to last week’s skirmish at the Capitol – which, loathe as I am to come even close to Democrat chanting points, was a form of coup, not against President-Elect Biden, but against the states’ constitutional power to select electors – peaked…somewhere in the late ’90s – when one of the glories of the American system, gridlocked government, combined with a Peace Dividend brought about by the end of the Cold War (thanks, President Reagan), led to an outburst of technological, entrepreneurial and market power that brought so much wealth, and security, and general well-being, to so many people that it may have been as close to a uptopia, in some ways, as humanity can get. Because of the gridlock in government.
Somewhere between 1998 and 2005, things started to turn back south again. It’d be easy to point to the polarization of American politics, starting with the various Clinton scandals, through the fiasco of the 2000 election, the near-decade of squabbling over the War on Terror and the 2008 government-caused financial meltdown, as the cause – but it went in parallel with a lot of other changes in our nation’s political, moral and social lives that have led to their…
…I was going to say “culmination” last week at the Capitol. But of course, that’s not true. Last week’s sorry episode was, like last summer’s riots, and the social back and forth that gave us Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Trump himself, and the movements that supported them all in a way that was increasingly “un-American” (I’m still claiming a meaning for that term), and if you think that was the peak, or trough, or any sort of ending to the story, you just haven’t paid attention to 20,000 years of human nature.
So let’s not call it a culmination. Let’s call it a checkpoint, on a path that may be going up, or down, but control over which We The People need to take before the phrase “We The People” is forever relegated to the museum.
How have we gotten from the peak of Western Civilization to…this, in my adult lifetime?
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
President Trump got elected despite the near universal opposition of legacy media by going around them, using social media to communicate with the public. President Trump believes he was re-elected despite the near universal opposition of legacy and social media, but his victory was stolen from him.
Twitter has banned President Trump, Michael Flynn, Sidney Powell, and other Trump supporters. It has banned discussion of the disputed election results.
Apple and Microsoft have banned Parler, a Twitter alternative, so President Trump and his supporters cannot simply switch software to get his message out. Facebook has a history of shadow banning, throttling and now outright banning Conservative voices such as Alex Jones, Milo Yainnopoulos, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, #WalkAway and President Trump himself.When the quote was uttered nearly a century ago, the State directly controlled the legacy media and social media did not exist. Nowadays, the State doesn’t need to control anything: willing collaborators and eager fellow-travellers control all the information outlets. The Big Lie has been spoken. It is endlessly repeated in Liberal messaging and dissent ruthlessly suppressed.
Democracy dies in darkness and Liberals are thrilled to be doing it. My question: what comes after democracy?
And just to help remind you how “we’re all in it together”, here’s a parade of society’s useless celebrity mouths, from last spring, telling all of us plebs to be patient, because socialism is on the way, ho ho ho:
Ashli Babbit was shot and killed in the United States Capitol during a demonstration to protest the election. Early reports indicate Ashli was married and a veteran,she was unarmed, and she was shot by a police officer.
Other early reports and photos suggest Antifa infiltrators caused the major damage to provoke a backlash against President Trump supporters and that the violence was successful in convincing Senators to lay aside concerns about the stolen election in order to rush through certification of Joe Biden as President.
Early reports are always confused; I urge application of Berg’s Eighteenth Law of Media Latency.
And remember that even if a few dozen agitators spoiled the party, hundreds of thousands showed up to engage in lawful political protest and millions more wish they could have. Congress, RINOs, the media and the Deep State can huff and puff about decorum and attempt to shame us with double standards but in the end, it boils down to Never-Trumpers sneering, “Let them eat cake.”
We’ll remember that.
Joe Doakes
First things first – as a practical suggestion, Republican / conservative / Trump groups need to make a point of having saturation level surveillance of their events, especially demonstrations. This is something we learned during the Tea Party – when someone shows up in a racist T-shirt, it’s good to be able to crowd-source them and prove that they were actually a Democrat operative (which happened during the Tea Party A lot).
More on this, likely, tomorrow on the show and next week in the blog.
Q: “Mitch – you said during the campaign that Biden – and, indeed, all Democrats – were campaigning on messages that couldn’t possibly be true, but that it didn’t matter, because people susceptible to voting Democrat are gullible herd animals with no critical thinking skills who vote based on knee-jerk emotion and reaction to chanting points, knowing that nobody will ever call them to account on their promises once the dust settles and everyone gets inaugurated. Why?
Dennis Prager has a great line – “Relationships can survive a lot, but no relationship can survive contempt”
When parties can’t see one another as human, forget about reaching common ground on differing ideas and ideals, can there be any point to trying to live together? I wouldn’t work for couples – why would it work for a nation?
It dawned on the world too late that when the Nazis actively portrayed the Jews as not very human…
…they meant it.
If there’s one thing more useful than one eliminationist Nazi cartoon, its’ two. Here goes:
Wait.
That wasn’t even in German.
That wasthe Washington Post.
On Christmas Eve.
This is up there with “bitter, gun-clinging Jeebus freaks” and “Deplorables” and the rest of the litany of conceits Blue America holds on Red America.
But most importantly? It’s about contempt.
I’ve been pointing out examples of Blue America’s contempt for the rest of us in this space since the beginning, really. And if the Trump era has done anything, it’s helped parts of the right come out of their shells (yes, some, like our friend Pete Strunk, haven’t been in their shells fir a very long time, but its fair to say Pete’s always been an outlier)
I don’t really like having police departments barricaded. But, I understand it. I look at [Saint Paul city councilwoman] Nelsie Yang’s post and I really don’t see a lot of support for her demand that the barricade be torn down, especially from non-White constituents, the very people she claims to be supporting in this action-
To social justice warriors like Yang and, let’s be honest, most of the Saint Paul and the entire Minneapolis City Councils, “social justice” with all its intellectual and political trappings is an abstract, academic concept that has little to do with the lives of their constituents – or at least the ones not employed in non-profits and academic humanities and soft science departments.
Rarely do people like Yang allow themselves to come into contact with the real life concerns of those they “represent”
Democrats conspired with Deep State bureaucrats to prevent Trump’s election with the phony dossier. Didn’t work.
Democrats conspired with Deep State bureaucrats to impeach Trump based on claims Russian Facebook ads influenced the election. Didn’t work.
Democrats conspired with Deep State bureaucrats to steal the election by falsifying the machine count (as well as by stuffing the ballot box with truckloads of illegal ballots).
Democrat Governors used the false election result to certify a slate of Electors.
Republican legislatures adopted their own Electors.
When Congress meets in joint session to count the Electors’ votes, Republicans will challenge Democrat Electors from the fraudulent states. Under the Counting Electors Act, the House and Senate will separately debate the challenge, Democrats will refuse to concede they cheated because that would blow the whole plan to win by cheating. Instead, Congress will be deadlocked so under the Act, the Governors’ slates will be counted. A Chinese puppet will be elected President.
To prevent that, President Trump declares there was foreign interference in this election and Democrat governors conspired with the foreigners to deprive Americans of their fundamental right to elect their government; therefore, the Governors are engaged in an act of insurrection and rebellion against the United States. The Governors’ slates of electors are illegal and cannot be accepted.
Liberals already have a tame federal judge lined up to sign a nation-wide injunction declaring the President’s actions illegal and directing Congress to accept the Governors’ slates of electors. Trump will declare civil courts have no jurisdiction over states in rebellion. The Supreme Court will order him to stand down. Trump will declare it’s a separation of powers issue wherein the Judicial Branch has no authority over the Executive Branch exercising his Constitutional Duty to defend the nation from insurrection. The President will ignore the Supreme Court. If they send US Marshals to arrest him, he will order military troops to arrest the Marshals and also arrest the justices who are conspiring with the rebels.
The President will announce that his exercise of authority under the Insurrection Act will be temporary and will last only so long as necessary to correct the damage done by the rebellion. He will order the military to take charge of all ballots in the disputed states and count them by hand, in the presence of observers who can challenge any ballot. Protestors or demonstrators attempting to interfere with the recount or intimidate witnesses will be arrested as insurrectionists and held indefinitely without trial. The right of habeus corpus will be suspended in rebel territories until the rebellion ends.
When the ballot contests are decided, and the hand recount of paper ballots is completed, the President will announce the results of the election and will end the restrictions. If he loses, he will leave office gracefully. If he wins, he will appoint Special Prosecutors to root out the insurgents and insurrectionists.
Democrats, professors, students, the media will scream that the President has engaged in a coup to overthrow the government, that he is Literally Hitler, and that everyone who supports him should be fired from their jobs before their homes are burned down and their children shot. The names and home addresses of suspected Trump supporters will be published on the internet. Stores will be burned and looted. A few looters will stray into residential neighborhoods where they will be shot dead by homeowners. Law enforcement who arrest those homeowners, and County Attorneys who prosecute them, will find their own homes firebombed, their own staff and officers shot by snipers at home, in their cars and on the streets.
Governors will attempt to call out the National Guard to restore order but President Trump will have nationalized them to serve under his command. They will be ordered to protect federal properties and let the rest of the insurrectionist state burn.
This is the Good scenario. Only a few people die. We avoid the massive casualties of total civil war. But people will die.
Unless Joe Biden concedes.
Joe Doakes
What seemed far-fetched a year ago seems “enh, not unimaginable” today.
c”A Minnesota court recently agreed to an uncommon approach to resolve criminal charges filed after the statue of Christopher Columbus was toppled at the Minnesota Capitol on June 10, 2020.
Ramsey County Chief Judge Leonardo Castro accepted the restorative justice approach proposed by the Ramsey County Attorney’s Office. Under the arrangement, a suspended prosecution would end in no conviction for defendant Mike Forcia.”
So in other words, if you’re fashionably “progressive” in Ramsey County, you can commit a crime, and be “punished” by telling school kids why the crime you committed was a good thing.
I can’t have been the only one to think of this episode:
