Category Archives: Conservatism

NEW COLUMN: Bernie’s Degeneracy: That’s Democracy For Ya

Conservatism, Constitution, Democracy, Democrats, Egalitarianism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Morality, Political Philosophy

NEW COLUMN, “Bernie’s Degeneracy: That’s Democracy For Ya,” is now on WND.COM and the Unz Review.

An excerpt:

BERNIE SANDERS, the senator from Vermont, said he thinks “everyone should have the right to vote—even the Boston Marathon bomber … even for terrible people, because once you start chipping away and you say, ‘Well, that guy committed a terrible crime, not going to let him vote,’ you’re running down a slippery slope.”

Bernie is right about a “slippery slope.” But the befuddled Bernie is worried about the wrong slope.

Denying the vote to some and conferring it on others is not a “slippery slope.” It’s exercising good judgment.

Insisting that the vote in America belongs to everyone, irrespective: now that’s a slippery slope, down which the slide is well underway.

As it stands, there are almost no moral or ethical obligations attached to citizenship in our near-unfettered Democracy.

Multiculturalism means that you confer political privileges on many an individual whose illiberal practices run counter to, even undermine, the American political tradition.

Radical leaders across the U.S. quite seriously consider Illegal immigrants as candidates for the vote—and for every other financial benefit that comes from the work of American citizens.

The rights of all able-bodied idle individuals to an income derived from labor not their own: That, too, is a debate that has arisen in democracy, where the demos rules like a despot.

But then moral degeneracy is inherent in raw democracy. The best political thinkers, including America’s constitution-makers, warned a long time ago that mass, egalitarian society would thus degenerate.

What Bernie Sanders prescribes for the country—unconditional voting—is but an extension of “mass franchise,” which was feared by the greatest thinkers on Democracy. Prime Minister George Canning of Britain, for instance. …

… READ THE REST. NEW COLUMN, “Bernie’s Degeneracy: That’s Democracy For Ya,” is now on WND.COM and the Unz Review.

 

NEW COLUMN: Kamala’s Collectivist Values Village

Argument, Classical Liberalism, Conservatism, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Justice, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Morality, The State

NEW COLUMN is “Kamala’s Collectivist Values Village.” It’s now on WND.COM, The Unz Review and Townhall.com.

An excerpt:

Sen. Kamala Harris talks a lot about “our American values.” Ditto the rest of the female candidates who’ve declared for president in the busy Democratic field. They all lecture us about “values.”

“Our American values are under attack,” Harris has tweeted. “Babies are being ripped from their parents at the border …”

As her own proud “know your values moment,” the Democrat from California pinpoints the U.S. Senate Supreme Court confirmation proceedings inflicted on Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

To manipulate Americans, politicians have always used the values cudgel.

With respect to immigration, the idea is to impress upon gullible Americans that the world has a global Right of Return to the U.S. Fail to accept egalitarian immigration for all into America; and you are flouting the very essence of Americanism. (Or, to use liberal argumentation, you’re Hitler.)

When politicians pule about the importance of preserving “our values,” they mean their values: Barack Obama’s values, Hillary Clinton’s values, Angela Merkel’s values, Chucky Schumer’s values, Jeff Bezos’ values, the late John McMussolini’s values, Lindsey Graham’s values, and Jared and Ivanka’s values (but not Trump’s).

When a politician preaches about “the values that make our country great,” to quote Mrs. Clinton, chances are they mean multiculturalism, pluralism, wide-swung borders, Islam as peace, communities divided by diversity as a net positive, and the Constitution (it mandates all the above, just ask Ruth Bader Ginsburg) as a living, breathing, mutating philosophical malignancy.

For them, “protecting” the abstraction that is “our way of life” trumps the protection of real individual lives. “We must guard against a weakening of the values that make us who we are,” dissembled Obama in the waning weeks before he was gone. The empty phrase is meant to make the sovereign citizen—you—forget that government’s most important role, if not its only role, is to protect individual life.

In his last few addresses, Obama promised to speak up on “certain issues,” in times when he imagined “our core values may be at stake.” Likewise, in delivering her Control-Alt-Delete speech against the Deplorables, Clinton had asserted that “our country is great because we’re good. … Donald Trump disregards the values that make our country great.” The two’s groupthink, notwithstanding, only individuals can be virtuous, not collectives.

Self-government, and not imposed government, implies that society, and not The State, is to develop value systems. The State’s role is to protect citizens as they go about their business peacefully, living in accordance with their peaceful values. …

… READ THE REST. NEW COLUMN is “Kamala’s Collectivist Values Village.” It’s now on WND.COM, The Unz Review and Townhall.com.

NEW COLUMN: Lara Logan: ‘Conservative’ Media’s Latest Blond Ambition

Celebrity, Conservatism, Critique, Gender, Journalism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media

NEW COLUMN is “Lara Logan: ‘Conservative’ Media’s Latest Blond Ambition.” It’s currently on WND.COM and The Unz Review.

An excerpt:

In 2018, Lara Logan left her perch as foreign correspondent for CBS’s “highest-rated, most profitable and best-known program, ‘60 Minutes.’”

She is currently doing the rounds, assuaging “conservative” media’s appetite for celebrity. The latter have a Uriah-Heep like propensity to fawn over swamp-based, defecting, big-name media celebs.

It’s as though Logan is job hunting, on a blond-ambition tour—for she certainly has no news to impart other than a few banal catchphrases. Logan has “revealed,” first to Breitbart podcaster Mike Ritland, that—OMG! —the media are “mostly liberal.”

Yes, Logan has been pontificating about the tritest of truths: the media are liberal.

Ever in search of defecting celebrities around whom to create buzz, the pack dogs of “conservative” media picked up Logan’s scent and gave chase. Mission accomplished.

In a lovey-dovey, public tête-à-tête, Fox News’ Sean Hannity hinted to his higherups at Fox that they should hire Logan. One wishes they’d do this self-congratulatory cable-news porn behind closed doors. Like we don’t already suffer an abundance of Fake News, No-News and salacious news.

Most remarkable was how quick cons were to decorate Logan with a journalistic purple heart for stating-the-obvious-while-filthy-rich—“a hero, she’s committing professional suicide” went their hyperbole.

Again: Logan left CBS in 2018. She always ran with the intellectual herd. It’s now time to reinvent herself after, likely, blowing up one too many roads.

Is it not obvious that Logan is hoping to fill Megyn Kelly’s stilettoes at Fox News? For there is no way in which she could aspire to emulate old-school journalists like Sharyl Attkisson and Sarah Carter for whom Logan offered plaudits on “Hannity.”

Indeed, it would appear that Logan’s blond-ambition tour is to make herself over in the image of women reporters who’ve always embodied a conservative ethos by doing their work with great refinement. For Attkisson and Carter, it’s about the story; not the cleavage.

Not so with Logan, whose career has been marred by a showy exhibitionism as good as Kelly’s—except that Logan is far and away the less brainy of the two celebrity journalists and the more scandal prone (not that scandal would deter “conservatives,” who’ve practically capitulated to the elastic moral standards of the liberals).

In 2008, the former swimwear model made headlines for her role as … “home-wrecker.” Logan had become embroiled in an affair with a married man, while carrying on simultaneously with talented war correspondent Michael Ware (“just a one-night stand”). Her CBS  employers knew the drill: They relocated their wayward correspondent from Baghdad to Washington.

As implied, “the drill” had been rehearsed …

… READ THE REST. NEW COLUMN, “Lara Logan: ‘Conservative’ Media’s Latest Blond Ambition,” is currently on WND.COM and The Unz Review.

UPDATE (2/22):

About the Lara Logan expose, Bill Meyer, brilliant radio man out of Oregon, commented at WND (scroll down): "Ilana, THIS…

Posted by Ilana Mercer on Friday, February 22, 2019

 

UPDATED (3/6/019): Republican Women Over 65 Are The Most Anti-#MeToo Group. SMART.

Conservatism, Democrats, Feminism, Gender, Republicans, Sex

Believe it or not, liberal Republican women berate their older, #MeToo skeptical sisters. Beware Republican Women for Progress, especially. Just as Democrats do, these prog Republican fems patronize older Republican ladies, depicting them as afraid to even talk to progressive GOPers like themselves. Republican Women for Progress also claim older ladies who vote Republican are afraid to break free, instead, letting “their (Republican-voting) husbands fill in their ballots.” Needless to say, there is little daylight between prog Republicans and Democrats.

#METOO And Conservatism
The Economist

NO GROUP HAS swung against #MeToo more than older women who voted for Donald Trump. They have gone from barely worrying about false accusations of sexual assault, with only 8% agreeing in November 2017 that these were worse than unreported assaults, to 42% saying so, according to two polls conducted for The Economist by YouGov, a pollster. They are now the most likely group to agree that a man who harassed a woman 20 years ago should keep his job, and that a woman who complains about harassment causes more problems than she solves.

Two things stand out. First, even though Americans on average, and Republicans in particular, have become more negative about #MeToo over the past year, the change among this particular group is spectacular (chart). Second, a generational gap now yawns between Republican women who are over 65 and those under 30, the cohort least hostile to #MeToo within the Republican Party.
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One obvious difference between the two groups is that many of the over-65s have grown-up sons. In 2018 some of them fell off their pedestals as hundreds of men were publicly named and shamed over sexual misconduct allegations. Many more feared that “some lady” from the past could, with one accusation, destroy them and their family. This lady became personified in Christine Blasey Ford, when in September 2018 she accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault, threatening to derail his nomination to the Supreme Court. All this helped fuel a backlash against #MeToo, and not just among men. Many Twitter threads on #HimToo, the hashtag about false accusations, were posted by worried mothers.

“We saw the split among Republican women widen around the Kavanaugh hearings. A lot of the rhetoric illustrated the generational gap,” remembers Jennifer Pierotti Lim, from Republican Women for Progress, a campaign group. “There’s a feeling amongst that generation that a little light sexual assault is no big deal. For women of our generation that’s hard to understand.”

Carrie Lukas of the Independent Women’s Forum, a conservative advocacy group, recognises what the movement has done in encouraging people to speak out against prominent men who “people have known were problems”, but wonders whether it has gone too far. “I don’t think the mantra ‘believe all women’ is sufficient,” she says. “Men need to be able to make mistakes, and have conversations with women and not be walking on eggshells.”

Yet the biggest split on #MeToo, as with any question pollsters ask about gender is not between genders or generations but between political affiliations, says Juliana Horowitz from the Pew Research Centre. Democrats have barely changed their views on #MeToo over the past year, even as Republicans have grown more sceptical. No split separates the generation of Nancy Pelosi and Elizabeth Warren from younger female Democrats. In fact boomer Clinton-voting women have increased their support for #MeToo over the past year.

The partisan gender gap has already widened. In 2016 Hillary Clinton won 54% of women voters; in the 2018 mid-terms 59% of women voted for Democrats. Republicans appear unconcerned: a recent poll found that 71% of likely primary voters expressed no concern that only 13 of the party’s 200 House members are women (the lowest number in 25 years) and 60% said nothing had to be done to recruit more female candidates.

One explanation of this partisan gap is that it reflects a difference of opinion over what true feminism is. Some conservative women resist what they see as special treatment for women as vaguely patronising. There is another explanation, too. Ms Pierotti Lim of Republican Women for Progress remembers campaigning in Wisconsin and Michigan in 2016 and being astonished by the number of older women who were afraid to even talk to her and who let their (Republican-voting) husbands fill in their ballots.

RELATED: “Truth and consequences: American politics after a year of #MeToo.“

UPDATE (3/6/019): R. Kelly.