Category Archives: Paleoconservatism

UPDATED (10/17/022): The Sea Has Parted: Candace Owens Gives Whites Permission To Matter

Argument, Paleoconservatism, Race, Racism, Republicans

Tucker Carlson is the only mainstream, massively popular exponent of the paleoconservative political philosophy. He is a smart thought leader. For this reason I anatomize Mr. Carlson’s thinking. It’s important. My own commentary over 22 years is distinctly analytical—I deconstruct argument for my readers—premise, conclusion, non sequitur, etc.

Today’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight” (10/10/022) featured Tucker’s go-to black person, Candace Owens. This is the GOP/Fox News MO. Invite a black person on to expatiate on anti-white hatred, for this act absolves conservatives from racism. It’s in the tradition of “Showing Off How Black-Focused They Are, which is Republicans’ Main Focus.”

Duly, and “magnanimously,” Candace gave whites permission to matter.

Note that what undergirds this pigmental production—friendly, GOP-approved, blacks opposing anti-whitism—is that, first, the statement “white lives matter” is considered, if not racist, politically incorrect or insensitive. Another premise is that virtuous whites should not defend themselves, for to defend white interests is improper, even racist.

Her collaboration with Ye West to affirm that white lives aren’t forfeit Candace now depicts as nothing less than a “cultural moment.” The seas have parted.

Candace and Ye put on a T-shirt to signal that, “White American you are a part of this too” (by which Candace means that whites are part of the lives matter movement).

I don’t want to be part of the Black Lives matter movement. And I do not need permission from Candace to advocate against an endemically anti-white society, something myself and other White Lives Matter thought leaders have done thanklessly for a very long time.

“The results of black lives matter,” Owens further asserts, “is white supremacy, assuming that blacks are so stupid as to ‘riot’ their own communities to fulfill a narrative about police brutality.”

My, my, is that a stupid thing to say or what! Truly stupid. On the one hand, Owens fully concedes that society is anti-white; on the other hand, Owens positions herself as a warrior for black interests. Blacks are suffering due to BLM, says she. Nonsense, they are not. Blacks are given enormous latitude and advantages over whites and most seem to revel in and love the leverage afforded by the BLM story-line. At least Ye West admits to working for black interests.

Owens has portrayed herself before in messianic terms.  “When she and Charlie Kirk spoke for Brexit in London, circa 2018, they dubbed their visit ‘the most important American philosophical arrival to [sic] Europe since Thomas Jefferson arrived in Paris.’ That was Charlie Kirk, not Russell Kirk.” (See “Candace On Tucker Is Wrong About ‘Riot And Rut’ Crowd.)

Thus did Owens’ mental mishmash end with our leading lady as a focal point in a “farmer’s market,” where whites flock to her, as she tells it; congregate around her, thanking her for giving whites “their voice back.”

UPDATED:

Kanye West dissed the Kushners, Ivanka included. He told Tucker that Ivanka owes everything to Trump, yet was a slick handler who messed with Trump’s mission. Very good.

Exactly what I said in all my columns on The 1st-Couple-In-Waiting.?

As I put it, “the oddly plastic-looking Kushner couple has suctioned itself to the West Wing and is blowing up the Trump agenda.”

https://www.ilanamercer.com/2019/07/donalds-peculiar-problem-ivanka/

https://www.ilanamercer.com/2017/04/ivanka-wants-ivanka-gets/

https://gettr.com/post/p1tf7li3388

UPDATE (10/17/022):

Great comment here on BAB by Juvenal, about Candace Owens’ “blacksplaining,” as he puts it, facilitated erroneously by Tucker Carlson.

“They never get to the heart of the matter, which is that blacks have pathologies for which they keep finding scapegoats to blame…”

Juvenal: I don’t think American conservatives have the spinal and intellectual wherewithal to get to the race-realist truth.

UPDATE III (7/4/022): NEW COLUMN: Should Deranged, Moronic Females Really Be Procreating?

Abortion, Argument, Conservatism, Constitution, COVID-19, Crime, Gender, Government, libertarianism, Morality, Paleoconservatism, Sex, Taxation

New column is, “Should Deranged, Moronic Females Really Be Procreating?” It’s featured on WND.COM and was the feature article on The Unz Review.

Excerpt:

The ethical elegance of the libertarian argument was voiced before in this space:

However much one disdains abortion, one can’t get away from the matter of self-ownership. You simply have no right to take custody of an adult’s body. An adult woman, however loathsome, either owns herself and everything inside her or doesn’t. You can’t “own” yourself with the exception of your uterus or in conjunction with other busybodies.

Thus, theoretically, “Women have the right to screw and scrape out their insides to their heart’s content.” With a proviso: Americans who oppose abortion must be similarly respected in their rights of self-ownership. Taxpayers who oppose the procedure ought to have an equal right to dispense of what is theirs—their property—in accordance with the dictates of their conscience.

Trojans, Trivora or termination: An American woman has the right to purchase contraception, abortifacients and abortions, provided … she pays for them. For like herself, America is packed with many other sovereign individuals, some of whom do not approve of these products and procedures.

So, while adult women ought to be able to terminate their pregnancies—always to the exclusion of late-term infanticide—what America’s manifestly silly sex does not have the right to do is to rope conscientious objectors into supplying them with or paying for their reproductive choices. The rights of self-ownership and freedom of conscience ought to apply on both sides of the abortion debate.

Late-term abortion, generally, must always be outlawed. (I realize, dear reader, that I owe you argument, not assertion, which, alas, is what I’ve provided.) One could argue that, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the deciding case brought before the SCOTUS, did concern late-term abortion, with the state of Mississippi banning abortion after 15 weeks, pursuant to which, “The Jackson clinic and one of its doctors sued Mississippi officials in federal court, saying the state’s law was unconstitutional. A federal district court and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the clinic, blocking Mississippi’s law. But the state appealed to the Supreme Court, which put the case on its docket.” …

… MORE. New column is, “Should Deranged, Moronic Females Really Be Procreating?” It’s on WND.COM and The Unz Review.

Abelard Lindsey writes: “This article makes clear that conservatives can be as off in la-la land as the liberal-left.”

Writes @Lisalazuli on GETTR: “@ILANAMercer, “You tackled the abortion issue very bravely, this is the most sane [sic] opinion I’ve heard.”

Juvenal Early: Chronicles’ Playboy Taki Presses Flesh With Racism-Spotting ‘Poofter’

BAB's A List, Conservatism, Journalism, Juvenal Early's Archive, Literature, Paleoconservatism, Populism, South-Africa

“Murray, from what I can tell, is the latest manifestation of what Tom Wolfe once labeled ‘The Mid-Atlantic Man,’ i.e., the foppish Englishman who makes a generous living off the Americans he’s bamboozled into thinking he’s brilliant.”—Juvenal Early

By Juvenal Early

So, what in the Sam Hill is going on over at Chronicles Magazine?

The June issue features back-page gossip columnist (and reputed Moneybags) Taki extolling the virtues of his friend Douglas Murray’s latest book, The War on the West (another unoriginal title to add to the Murray canon; here’s the first, also extolled by Chronicles).

Though math geek John Derbyshire lamented the book’s lack of numbers and graphs, and said it had nothing new to offer, Taki terms it a “dozey.”  I assume he meant doozy; dozey sounds like a nighttime sleep-aid.

But, but, but. Wasn’t it only back in January that Murray called out Chronicles Wunderkind Pedro Gonzalez for anti-semitism?  And haven’t there been a dearth of Gonzalez appearances in the last few months on Tucker Carlson Tonight? And didn’t Chronicles call out the heavy peashooters in counterattack to the bitchy Brit? In short, hadn’t Murray’s name become persona non grata in the halls of the Charlemagne Institute (publisher of Chronicles)?

Let me back up a little and give some context.

It starts with Tucker, where else?  If you were following his show with any degree of regularity over the past few years, you no doubt became acquainted with Douglas Murray and Pedro Gonzalez, two of Tuck’s go-to guys, when it comes to having opinions on politics and culture. Tucker has even anointed them (unjustly we think) as public intellectuals in extended gingham-shirt interviews on his FoxNation streaming show.

Pedro writes for several outlets, principally for Chronicles, where he’s an editor and also their current Wonder Boy. Though not without talent, he has a track record of expropriating the ideas of others without giving them credit.

Murray, from what I can tell, is the latest manifestation of what Tom Wolfe once labeled “The Mid-Atlantic Man,” i.e., the foppish Englishman who makes a generous living off the Americans he’s bamboozled into thinking he’s brilliant. With aspirations to be the latest Roger Scruton, if not Michael Oakeshott, Doug’s ended up being “Con-Oink’s” House Poofter. Not bad work, if you can get it. Seems like all the Fox hosts are calling on him now. Barely-a-Blog and the “Hard Truth” Podcast have both devoted column space and air time to Murray’s sins. (Also here and here.)

So, when Murray wrote his hit piece on Bari Weiss’s Substack page, maybe he didn’t know that he was castigating a fellow Tucker-bro.  Or maybe he did, and that’s the whole point. It’s dog eat dog in what currently passes for America’s conservative intellectual battlefield.

Enter Taki and his literal PR job on behalf of Douglas Murray. Taki’s June 2022 “Under the Black Flag” column begins: “Douglas Murray’s book The War on the West has just been published, and it’s a dozey [sic]. He is a friend and fellow columnist in the London Spectator, the oldest magazine in the English-speaking world.”

What are we to think? Maybe it’s a sign of health that a polemical magazine offers differing opinions.  Or maybe it was just an oversight that it made it to print.  Or maybe the deep pockets of which Taki’s always reminding us had something to do with it. By all reports, Chronicles has survived hand-to-mouth since Leopold Tyrmand founded it. Maybe they’re not anxious to upset an important patron. Just spitballing here.

As for Taki’s literary output, it is gossip, you know, albeit, high-class gossip, as the brilliant writer and jet-set doyenne Barbara Amiel says in her memoirs.  (Hmm. Pot. Kettle. Black?) He was, she said, maybe capable of better things: “…really, had he put his mind to it, he could have been a significant writer.” Certainly, he was always invoking his heroes—Hemingway and Mailer come to mind—enough that you knew he had more than a passing acquaintance with the best writers of the 20th Century. You get the idea that he aspired to that level.

But perhaps all that money and all those yachts and all those women and all that tennis and all that judo and all that vodka sapped his talent, left him with no more than his platform at the Spectator—or wherever else he could find an eager publisher.

Indeed, the proper term for what Taki became might be writer manqué.

So where did he come by his affinity for Murray?

Well, if you’ve aspired to greatness, but fallen short, the next best thing is to find yourself in the company of the best available option. Which is often just a flavor of the month, like Dougie-boy. For Murray’s part, I imagine he likes having someone colorful picking-up the checks.

As previously mentioned, Taki is always reminding us of his colorfulness and his ability to pick-up checks. Then there’s the fortune, yachts, the houses, the women—the “candyfloss,” in the words of Barbara Amiel (before she turned around and squandered her talent on Conrad and the high-life).

Yes, money, Taki does have. He’s been telling us for well over 40 years how much better his life is than ours. He’ll get down and slum with the people, now and then, but don’t try to insinuate yourself into his world. A friend was once at conference featuring Taki. He was part of a group that surrounded Taki at a cocktail reception. Taki was holding forth on Gstaad, the ski retreat in Switzerland where he owns a house. My friend, upper middle class, well-read, well-traveled, a first-rate financial analyst, mentioned that he’d been in Gstaad recently, and had been very impressed with the place’s beauty. Taki sized him up, and replied dismissively: “you were never in Gstaad.” Why’d he do that? Push comes to shove, he’s probably just a snob at heart

And he’s just the kind of white whale a bloke like Murray dreams of hooking. Murray’s a punch-down kinda guy, or at least that’s the impression I have. He’ll suck up to who he has to, but I can’t see him sharing a pint with Joe Sixpack. A custom fit for the Greek Boy? Snobs of a feather?  Just asking.

********************************************************************************
“Juvenal Early” is a contributor to Barely A Blog. His 2020 piece, “The Dissident Right Has An Idiocracy Problem,” created quite a buzz.

When Juvenal approached me about the above piece, I applauded his instincts. Taki is, after all, quoted in Into The Cannibal’s Pot (p.18), enthusing over South Africa being “the greatest triumph of chatter over machine-gun clatter. It’s not perfect, and crime is at an all-time high in South African cities,” babbled Taki, “but at least the massacres are a thing of the past and life goes on much better than before.”

The loss of my homeland lauded … The Nasionale Party trashed by the so-called Smart Set. 

Once upon a time, the epistolary fluff ensconced at The American Conservative was detonated daily by the “pugnacious” Lawrence Auster. When Auster died, a void opened up. The “typically shapeless pieces” coming out of paleoconservative quarters, at once “weird and solipsistic”—Auster’s delicious descriptions—have escaped scrutiny. Going by the pen name “Juvenal Early,” a disillusioned former donor to Chronicles has stepped up to clear the same “shapeless” thickets once hacked down to size by Lawrence Auster.
Enjoy.
ilana

 

* Douglas pic credit

Sigh. Tucker Bashes Biden For The Two Things He’s Doing Right: Iran And Yemen

Foreign Policy, Iran, Middle East, Neoconservatism, Paleoconservatism, Political Philosophy, Republicans, The Establishment, War

Tucker Carlson does splendid work from his mainstream perch, but because of his philosophical limitations and many blind-spots—the kind that had him join the neoconerie in killing Iraq, in the first place; the kind that saw him laud the murder of Iranian major general Qassim Soleimani; the kind that has him bash The South; and call on Canadian truckers to prove a negative, namely, that they aren’t racists; the kind that whined, whined, whined non-stop about Harvey Weinstein, in effect talking-up the MeToo fraud—he stumbles all the time. All the time. Without fail.

Thus did I urge ideological caution on a good friend who got carried away in giving too much street cred to Tucker, and, by extension, enthusing about a Tucker-endorsed Iranian warmonger, Sohrab Ahmari, who has reinvented himself and now peddles retread banalities (or stuff the Old Right—myself included—had espoused decades ago). At best, Ahmari, this ex-agitator for war in Iran, is an unoriginal second hander.

Today (4/12/022), Tucker played a piss-poor satirical skit—just plain bad—of Biden and Harris  being lampooned in Saudi Arabia.

The Saudis, explained Tucker, are angry with the awful Biden Administration over Iran and the war in Yemen. I imagine Biden is perceived by the Saudis—and ConOink—to be insufficiently belligerent about destroying Iran, a longtime mission the Saudis share with the neocons. As is Biden considered to be unhelpful to the Saudis in his impetus (albeit weak) to end Saudi Arabia’s protracted war on an impoverished Yemen.

Both these Biden positions, as limp as they are, are better than the positions adopted by ConInc and, yes, Trump. The Saudi war on Yemen is a scandal.

Likewise the unchanging agitation against Iran.

MORE CONTEXT on regional Sunni-Shia squabbles: “Lies About Putin, Syria & The Alawite Alliance