Category Archives: Race

The Woke Conservatism Of Ben Domenech And Fox News

Conservatism, Democrats, History, Populism, Propaganda, Pseudo-history, Race, Racism, Republicans, The State

2 Replies

Ben Domenech continues to sell soothing, snake-oil conservatism on FOX News Primetime.

In fact, Woke conservatism is a good moniker for Domenech’s conservatism .

Fox News, sometimes mistaken for the real deal, has signed this John McCain clan member on as a contributor. It’s how Beltway conservatives keep the wealth and the consensus in the political family.

When TV admits outsiders in, it’s only ever if, like J.D. Vance type elites, they’ve slithered  up through the Ivy League, or the military-industrial-complex; have gotten elected, preferably in moderate districts. There isn’t an independent thinker in the District of Columbia radius.

This time, On August 2, in dulcet tones, Domenech—who has a great speaking voice—was selling some court historian’s idea that Lincoln and his supporters were the quintessential populists.

That is quite funny. Lincoln was “a wealthy railroad lawyer”; “a card-carrying member of the Northern corporate elite“:

Via Tom DiLorenzo:

Lincoln proudly boasted that he had made more speeches promoting protectionism or legal plunder than on any other subject. He stumped for Whig party protectionist candidates for decades, and established himself as the most rabid mercantilist in American politics, the political son of Alexander Hamilton. As the general counsel of the Illinois Central Railroad who had represented all the major railroad corporations in the Mid-West, he was a card-carrying member of the Northern corporate elite who traveled on the legal circuit in a private train car courtesy of the Illinois Central, accompanied by an entourage of Illinois Central executives (See John Starr, Lincoln and the Railroads). As such, the Illinois plutocracy sponsored and financed his candidacy. A key part of their strategy was to use Lincoln’s protectionist credentials to win over the steel-manufacturing state of Pennsylvania which had the second-largest number of electoral votes at the time. Joseph Medill, the influential editor of the Chicago Press and Tribune, sold the Lincoln candidacy to the Pennsylvania Republican party by pointing out what a slick politician he was, “an old [Henry] Clay Whig, right on the tariff and . . . exactly right on all other issues.”

“DiLorenzo and His Critics on the Lincoln Myth” is pretty neat, especially as Jim Ostrowski mentions the upheaval caused by the publication, in 2002, in WND of my review of Tom’s The Real Lincoln.

With two of the leading political websites in the world heralding his tome, Mises.org and LewRockwell.com, and his book selling like statist intellectuals’ souls, the Church of Lincoln could not ignore DiLorenzo. When Ilana Mercer fired her starter’s pistol, the congregation raced to attack the book before it was even published.

 

UPDATED (8/1): Unheard Of In America: British Parliamentary Committee Issues Report About Underprivileged Whites

America, Argument, Britain, Conservatism, Government, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Race, Racism

Leave a reply

It could not happen in the USA!

The Economist reports that “a [British] parliamentary committee,” no less, has issued a report about the difficulties of  “working-class white pupils.” They are underperforming.

The magazine covers evenhandedly  how “the use of the phrase ‘white privilege’ may harm poor white youngsters who, by definition, are nearer the bottom of the socioeconomic pyramid than the top.”

More crucially, can you imagine a US Congressional committee even commissioning such a report? I can’t. The Republicans would certainly not push for such long-overdue fact-finding. They have not! Why not? UPDATED (8/1): Humor: Question: Why have Republicans not got a congressional committee looking into white underprivilege and disadvantage, as the British have? Answer: Because Republicans “think” JD Vance’s novel, Hillbilly Elegy, is social science. 

Why, there would be riots in the streets if white poverty and underprivilege got attention from the representatives of those poor, underprivileged whites.

The Johnson column calmly explains what each side means when it asserts or rejects “white privilege”:

As is often the case, the two sides of this debate seem to mean very different things by this concise but explosive term. Sensible folk who give credence to the idea of “white privilege” argue that, whatever their other problems, white people do not face the same race-based disadvantages as ethnic minorities, from the minor (a shopkeeper training a wary eye on them) to the more serious (teachers reflexively judging them to be less capable than they really are).

But some sceptics of “white privilege” think it implies that every white person is privileged in an overall way—or even that, merely by existing, white people are complicit in the discrimination suffered by minorities. For some who interpret it this way, the concept is discredited by the existence of poor white people.

In recent years, however, the word has been widely used to refer to the advantages enjoyed by the white majority in countries such as Britain and America. In the raging culture wars, “white privilege” is now among the many phrases lobbed like online grenades between opposing camps. Since the combatants cannot agree on what it means, it is not surprising that there is no consensus on whether it exists and what should be done about it.

The problem with these terms is their compression. They are signposts rather than arguments, only making sense in the context of more elaborate reasoning. Those who use them often seem to hope that the catchphrases invoke all the nuances of the underlying concepts. In the vituperative, tweet-length exchanges that now pass for political debate, that is usually wishful thinking.

Kind of banal and sanctimonious. The take-away news here being that a British “parliamentary committee [actually] released a report into under-performing working-class white pupils.”

Unheard of in American halls of power.

FROM: “Culture-war terms can compress complex ideas in an unhelpful way:In discussions of group differences and grievances, nuance is vital.”

Menstrual America: Culture Of Crying, Quitting And Kneeling

America, Etiquette, Gender, Human Accomplishment, Race, Racism, Sport

Leave a reply

Culture of Crybabies: When the Crybaby is King

Tucker Carlson mocked the weeping and abreacting congressmen and Capitol police force, who are without shame or dignity, during the Jan 6 hearings, now underway.

But you see, in American culture, weeping, sniveling and making ugly faces in public is considered a display of authenticity, true grief and hence virtue.

In English-influenced cultures like South Africa and Canada, crying in public is more likely to be considered tacky, showy and often insincere.

Personally, sharing grief with strangers would be difficult, phony and futile.

The Insider:

Police officers, who were attacked by a pro-Trump mob that descended on the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the election, delivered emotional testimonies of their experiences on January 6, pushing some lawmakers to tears.

Video shows House lawmakers, including Reps. Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, and Zoe Lofgren tearing up at the accounts of the officers who were at the Capitol and at footage of the insurrection. Rep. Ann McLane Kuster, a Democrat from New Hampshire, was also seen wiping away tears as she left the hearing on Tuesday.

The “Protectors” still can’t cope:

“The four officers testifying — DC Metropolitan Police Officers Daniel Hodges and Michael Fanone, plus Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn and Sgt. Aquilino Gonell …
More than six months later, January 6 still isn’t over for me,” Dunn, a Black officer who endured racist attacks from insurrectionists during the assault, told the panel. “I know so many other officers continue to hurt, both physically and emotionally,”

Culture of Quitters:

Part of the Olympian spirit is grit: Showing up, and dealing with the stress of performance, if only for your teammates. But American women are perfecting, displaying on the world stage, and likely exporting and normalizing our therapeutic culture.

Simone Biles, who shocked the Olympic world Tuesday when she pulled out of the U.S. team gymnastics finals, said the emotional toll of the Tokyo Games, not a physical injury, prompted her withdrawal.
“Physically, I feel good. I’m in shape,” she told Hoda Kotb on NBC’s “TODAY” show following her exit. “Emotionally, it varies on the time and moment. Coming to the Olympics and being head star isn’t an easy feat.”
She explained further to NBC’s Andrea Joyce that her struggle was “more mental, and we’re just dealing with a couple of things internally.” NBC)

The progressive media, run by silly women (many with the Y chromosome), are praising the quitting as an incontestable personal triumph. How standards have been inverted! What was once considered a failure is now a triumph. See, if anxiety makes performance impossible, there is no need to frame failure as a win. We can sympathize and commiserate, but let us applaud those who BRING IT despite the jitters.

Japan might rethink letting an American-minded primadonna represent them. The media is  obfuscating what went down with tennis player Naomi Osaka, so I am unsure as to whether she has withdrawn from the 2020 Olympics competition, of if she just lost. She had, however, withdrawn from “the French Open in May after refusing to participate in media availabilities.”

Culture of Kneeling

American athletes are becoming real killjoys. It is they who started the dumbass kneeling or taking a knee, and have now infected the world with it.

Read: “Taking a Knee is Akin To Taking A Pee.”

*Image courtesy CNN

UPDATED (7/13/021): America As Architect Of The South-African Catastrophe Is Truly Minority Opinion

America, History, Ilana Mercer, Morality, Race, South-Africa

2 Replies

Americans as architects of The South-African catastrophe” is part of the analysis I effect in my 2011 book, Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa.

This perspective is highly unusual. It is far from acceptable narrative or received wisdom among historians, certainly not in the United States—or by any historian that I know to be writing today.

My good friend, the brilliant Dan Roodt, whom I long to see on Tucker Carlson, shares this perspective. None of the sorts Tucker ordinarily has on would take this tack.

Yet, Tucker Carlson hinted today that he might be taking this tack in covering the riots and the collapse in South Africa.  Really? UPDATE (7/13/021): I’ll just say it: If it’s not Dan Roodt, PhD, or me—it’s likely worth shit.

Here are a couple spin-off articles, excerpted from my book, expounding the theme aforementioned, and published widely, to their great credit, in familiar conservative outlets:

*  “America’s Radical, Foreign-Policy Alinskyites Destroyed South Africa!” Ilana Mercer, March 25, 2021

* “The American Architects of The South-African Catastrophe” Ilana Mercer, June 9, 2017, published widely, including at the Mises Institute.

“30 Years Since F. W. de Klerk’s Great Betrayal,” Ilana Mercer, February 6, 2020

* Image: President F.W. de Klerk and Nelson Mandela shake hands during negotiations between the South African government and the ANC (Getty Images).

UPDATES (7/13/021):

1.

2.

Good of VDARE to share: