Category Archives: Celebrity

UPDATED (4/25): LETTER: Quite A Few Conservatives Agree That J.D. Vance Is Vile

America, Celebrity, Conservatism, Critique, Intelligence, Literature

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I love my readers. They get it. Writes Mr. K, a longtime reader and a lawyer, about the column, “On The Backs Of Poor Whites? How J.D. Vance Elites Become Elites“:

Thank God. You are the FIRST person I have seen with the courage to call J.D. Vance out for what I also saw when reading his book years ago: His unbelievable willingness to throw anyone, including his family, etc., under the bus also to serve his, ultimately by definition, desire for self-promotion.
And in general, I have NEVER gotten what people saw in that book that elevated it so high. [Indeed. He’s nothing great.] As you kind of say, he found a niche in demand, I guess, that also was not too particular about the quality of what it would celebrate.

As for conservative TV hosts who’ve dubbed J.D. Vance “one of the smartest people around.” That’s hilarious. This says all you need to know about conservatism’s intelligentsia.

James Burnham, Hans Hoppe, Samuel Huntington (A Democrat, actually) of the brilliant, unequaled Clash of Civilizations fame, and Samuel Johnson, Russell Kirk, Clyde Wilson, von Mises, Rothbard, Chris Matthew Sciabarra (what a writer he is!): They all live happily on the shelves of my library, pictured above. It would be sacrilegious—and an affront—to place Vance in their literary vicinity. Stupid, too.

READ: “On The Backs Of Poor Whites? How J.D. Vance Elites Become Elites“:

…Vance is a sellout. Not that they were asked for their take, but the archetypical folks depicted in Hillbilly Elegy contend, justifiably, that “Vance [is] not an authentic hillbilly or an example of the working class.”

Cassie Chambers Armstrong’s Aunt Ruth, for example.

Aunt Ruth didn’t think much of Vance’s endeavor. Her niece is an Appalachian and author of a redeeming tale, Hill Women: Finding Family and a Way Forward in the Appalachian Mountains.

“Hillbilly Elegy’s portrayal of Appalachia,” explains Chambers, “is designed to elevate Vance above the community from which he came … it seeks to tell his story in a way that aligns with a simplistic rags-to-riches narrative. Think critically about how that narrative influences the way we are taught to think about poverty, progress, and identity.” …

UPDATE (4/25): Jeff Deist: “Agreed. For a more thoughtful defense of Appalachia and poor whites this is a great read– by former US Senator Jim Webb.”

UPDATED (5/7/021): NEW COLUMN: On The Backs Of Poor Whites? How J.D. Vance Elites Become Elites

Celebrity, Conservatism, Critique, IMMIGRATION, Morality, Multiculturalism, Nationhood, Political Correctness, Race, Racism, Relatives, Republicans

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NEW COLUMN IS “On The Backs Of Poor Whites? How J.D.-Vance Elites Become Elites“. It’s currently on WND.COM and The Unz Review.

“On The Backs Of Poor Whites?” was briefly featured on the American Greatness, to approving reader commentary—then it vanished. Pulled? As the column indicated, Soy Boy Vance has some powerful friends. Nothing else would muscle my brave publishers. Con Ick. (Conservatism Inc.) likely wants to run Vance as a political candidate. This likely means Con Ick. has no time for Appalachian Aunt Ruth’s bitter feelings about his kind of elites.

An excerpt:

The country is fast descending into a Dantean hell.

The Circles of Hell into which we’ve been signed, sealed and delivered are mass migration, diversity, multiculturalism, and zealous, institutionalized anti-whiteness, with its attendant de-civilization and inversion of long-held societal morals and mores.

The guiding ghost of Virgil is nowhere to be found. To ostensibly shepherd us out of hell, however, assorted serpents have slithered forth.

Beware! All the more so when they speak to you from bastions of the establishment—Newsweek is one—as J. D. Vance does in, “True ‘Compassion’ Requires Secure Borders and Stopping Illegal Immigration.”

His is the typically conciliatory, “conservative” argument we’ve come to expect from the gilded elite, regarding America’s promiscuous immigration policy, under Republicans and Democrats alike.

Vance is the best-selling author of Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, which is a culturally compliant—namely unflattering—account of poor, white America.

Provided your thesis allows for a cozy convergence of agreeable storylines—you are well-positioned to peddle a national bestseller to the approving the left, libertarian, neoconservative and pseudo-conservative smart-set.

Yes, Vance is a sellout. Not that they were asked for their take, but the archetypal folks depicted in Hillbilly Elegy contend, justifiably, that “Vance [is] not an authentic hillbilly or an example of the working class.”

Cassie Chambers Armstrong’s Aunt Ruth, for example.

Aunt Ruth didn’t think much of Vance’s endeavor. Her niece is an Appalachian and author of a redeeming tale, Hill Women: Finding Family and a Way Forward in the Appalachian Mountains.

“Hillbilly Elegy’s portrayal of Appalachia,” explains Chambers, “is designed to elevate Vance above the community from which he came … it seeks to tell his story in a way that aligns with a simplistic rags-to-riches narrative. Think critically about how that narrative influences the way we are taught to think about poverty, progress, and identity.”

Chambers is perceptively correct. It’s cringe worthy—Uriah Heep slimy—but Vance all but advertises that the Indian-American Brahmin he wed has helped “rid him of his hillbilly ways.” To that end, he tells of a mild exchange with his wife: “Don’t make excuses for weakness. I didn’t get here by making excuses for failure,” he “hollers” at her.

These unremarkable, muted words Vance had with wife Usha Chilukuri he frames, self-servingly, as “the baggage of his tumultuous upbringing.” Wow!

Self-deprecation over nothing much at all amounts to very clever self-aggrandizement. Vance’s casuistry resembles a kind of Argument From Fake Modesty.

Indeed, in smug self-aggrandizement, Vance slimes his hillbilly relatives, even naming names. Credits and kudos go to the Chilukuris, wife Usha’s relatives, for “[teaching] him what a functional family looked like.”

From family unit to family unification policy: When discussing immigration, J. D. Vance is just as nimble …

…Read the rest. NEW COLUMN IS “On The Backs Of Poor Whites? How J.D.-Vance Elites Become Elites“. It appeared on WND.COM and The Unz Review.

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*Image via CapX

UPDATE (5/7/021):

 

UPDATED (4/20): Rest In Peace, Prince Philip; Burn In Hell Meghan Markle

America, Britain, Celebrity, Family, Psychology & Pop-Psychology

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Bide your time, lovely Kate Middleton, Duchess of Cambridge. You’ll be queen one day, a beautiful and benevolent queen, and then you can dispatch the manipulative and malevolent schemer, Meghan Markle, to The Tower of London (“Mighty fortress. Royal palace. Infamous prison”), if she dare set foot in England.

It’s time for the royals to reclaim the moxie of Queen Elizabeth I (1533–1603).

This hopeful exhortation comes against the backdrop of the passing of “Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, at the age of 99, [which] marks both a moment of personal grief for the Queen and the royal family and a moment of national mourning for a man who dedicated his life to public service.”

Prince Philip had been teetering when Markle gave her performance with the Queen of Kitsch, Oprah Winfrey. Meghan Markle’s sordid little Oprah psycho-drama dwarfs, in this context. She has shown herself as a tacky, tawdry, Hollywood c-list actress, who is a disgrace to the decent Americans.

In 2017, I had predicated, too hastily, that Meghan Markle, American actress, would finish what Diana Spencer had begun: destroy the Monarchy. Markle was a divorced, left-liberal feminist out of Hollywood. It screams degeneracy. She’s pathologically manipulative, too. The signs were there. Check out video footage I posted then of the Child Snake.

When Markle erupted, the cretins of American media proved too corrupt and stupid to look at the bare-bones of reality: who was doing the trashing, dividing and bad-mouthing? ‘Twas trashy Meghan Markle.

Peddling hearsay: That was Meghan Markle, who’s turned her houseboy on his family, the monarchy. The latter are refined, something trash-bag Markle doesn’t get. Even if the Queen and her family thought “improper” thoughts about her, they’d never express them.

Incidentally, Markle’s narcissism is not a mental disorder, it needs no diagnosis; it’s a fault and a flaw. Over this space, we do not medicalize bad, ugly behavior. That lefty mode of thinking is another erroneous thinking adopted by conservatives from the Left. Evil is not an illness.

A brother comes out with it: That empty suit, Meghan Markle, has unleashed insignificance on an anguished world, says “Suits” co-star Wendell Pierce. Well said. That’s narcissism, now isn’t it? Foisting your solipsistic, inconsequential self on the cosmos.

The queen won’t outlive Meghan Markle, but she dwarfs that ditz.

Comparing Biden (sadly dim) and Queen Elizabeth (sharp), as she conducts a Zoom call with The Kingdom, Mark Steyn performed brilliant satire on the Tucker Carlson Show, calling the Queen—read about some of her feats in “Mobocracy Vs. Monarchy“—Bret Baier in a tiara.

Heartfelt condolences, your Majesty.

UPDATED (4/20): No wonder we get on so well, David. Not a redundant word in this YouTube. And no milquetoast words, either. I liked “vile” for the specter of the great lady, The Queen, alone in the pews.  A picture paints a ….

CNN Self-Aggrandizing Mediocrity, Brooke Baldwin, Steps Down

Celebrity, Ethics, Etiquette, Feminism, Gender, Journalism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Propaganda

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Brooke Baldwin, you will never be, as you boast here, “innovative, creative, or [an agent for] change.” Never.

To deploy the idiom of the Bell Curve distribution, Brooke seems to me to be the Mode, the most common value in a set, her opinions and range of ideas falling comfortably with the most frequently occurring among her tribe.

Baldwin is an ego in an anchor’s chair. She has shown herself over the years to be indistinguishable from the condescending, arrogant cretins with whom she has worked. Now she has an announcement so important that she tells all. After all, she is not merely a cog in the CNN org …

If you doubt what I say, here is the Barely-A-Blog Brooke Baldwin dossier of dastardly positions and poses, such as when the “humorless CNN anchor berated Border Patrol for joking with sainted, separated kids.”