Category Archives: Relatives

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 (9/23): Americans Importing Black Babies

Celebrity, Critique, Culture, Ethics, Family, Race, Relatives

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Mitt Romney’s son did it. So did Madonna. Angelina Jolie pioneered the social art of color-coding her family, even disclosing her intention to acquire a designer, United Colors of Benetton family. About her quest for color-coordinated couture kids she said this to Anderson Cooper:

We don’t know which—which country. But we’re looking at different countries. And we’re—I’m just—it’s gonna be the balance of what would be the best for Mad[dox] and for Z. right now. It’s, you know, another boy, another girl, which country, which race would fit best with the kids.

Clearly, some of the most sanctimonious, white, virtue-preeners around us go abroad in search of black kids to adopt. It’s almost as though these people seek an amulet with which to elevate and immunize themselves against any fault-finding. Look at me: I’m perfect.

There is so much poverty in the US, in general. There is so much child poverty in the US, in particular. There is so much poverty among white American children. On the facts, adopting across racial lines often proves to be fraught for both adopted and adopting parties. A minefield of sorts.

Amy Coney Barrett, a much-touted candidate for the Supreme Court, has a child or two from Haiti. Is one ever permitted to question public figures who sidestep their country’s poor, and go in search of kids with more exotic identities? Can we even ask?

UPDATE (9/23): Our reader below instructs that we dare not pose questions about a cohort that is distinguished by its phoniness. No can’t do.

I doubt very much that Madonna is able to love anyone but herself. Check out the demeaning way in which she displays the poor kid. The black child looks like a gangster, not like a girl, tongue hanging out, gesturing, while Madonna decks herself up to look feminine. Unkind. Horrid.

 

NEW: America Has A Con Woman In Congress—But Where’s The Law?

Crime, Democrats, Europe, IMMIGRATION, Politics, Relatives

THIS WEEK’S COLUMN, “America Has A Con Woman In Congress—But Where’s The Law?”, first appeared on Townhall.com and is currently featured on American Greatness, where you can read it.

An excerpt:

The FBI, which Americans are meant to trust with matters of life and death, is unable—or unwilling—to confirm whether U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) perpetrated fraud by marrying her brother, Ahmed Elmi, to enable him to obtain a coveted green card, thus granting him permanent-resident status in the United States, and a path to citizenship. But the bureau is said to be “investigating.”

Conversely, the Daily Mail, a British tabloid, had little difficulty gathering a critical mass of facts, enough to conclude that, in 2009, Omar did indeed secretly wed said sibling. The newspaper, and anyone else suggesting the same, has yet to be sued by Omar. Could the story be true?

As it happens, a Somali community leader has also outed Ilhan Omar as an outlaw. Abdihaikm Osman Nur contends that the Somali-born freshman congresswoman “had indeed married her brother.” So reported Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

Despite “a lack of paperwork in war-torn Somalia,” which complicates an investigation and a definitive determination, the British tabloid dug up the requisite information that the FBI has yet to release. The young man whom Omar is alleged to have married certainly bears a remarkable resemblance to the congresswoman. They’re both … pretty (although Elmi looks happier and a lot more festive).

It was in August of 2016 that Mr. Nur, aforementioned, seconded the story first published by Scott Johnson, of the Power Line blog: Omar had married her sibling, ostensibly to allow him to stay in the U.S.  As the Daily Mail had relayed, Mr. Nur took issue with Omar’s alleged marriage-cum-immigration fraud. It would appear that the British tabloid was more vested in the truth, as this patriotic Somali told it, than was the FBI.

To date, these are the facts on the fraud alleged to have been committed by a member of the U.S congress. Yet nobody is likely to do more than mutter at the striking absence of scruples in Ilhan Omar. For not only does she appear to flout the law, but she also offends sensibilities: Omar had first married Ahmed Hirsi, father of her children, in 2002. Bigamy and incest (even if the relationship is unconsummated) are cultural taboos.

Contrast Omar’s treatment in the United States with the manner in which the Dutch government treated a lesser form of immigration fraud committed by another Somali, Dutch lawmaker Ayaan Hirsi Ali. …

… READ THE REST. THIS WEEK’S COLUMN, “America Has A Con Woman In Congress—But Where’s The Law?”, is currently featured on American Greatness.

 

UPDATE (2/22/021): American Society’s Unnatural Attitude to Aging Naturally

Culture, Ethics, Family, Morality, Psychiatry, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, Relatives, The Zeitgeist

In “No Country for Old Age,” The Hedgehog Review’s Joseph E. Davis writes, in essence, of the cruel biological reductionism and medicalization of old age, a natural stage of life that ought to be valued:

“When it comes to old age, illness, and death, little remains to us of common meaning or shared social rituals.”

Here are some of many profundities excerpted:

… In our society, to come directly to my point, old age is understood and framed in ways that lead inevitably to its devaluation. Its status is low and arguably is falling.
… old age [is seen as having] no value in itself. ‘Old’ signifies bodily decline, while “success” involves a ceaseless battle to defeat degeneration, and hope is always invested in the prospect of overcoming limits through self-reliance and technological interventions.

There is no space here for stillness or release, no sense of value or consolation in the evening of life. Even cultivating spirituality is framed instrumentally in terms of promoting ‘better physical and mental health in old age.’ An imperative to defeat aging and even death can only consign these realities to fear, shame, and avoidance.

…Representations of old age that add censure and shame to greater dependence and loss of one’s powers can only make matters worse.

… the sociologist Norbert Elias argues that, over time, these weakened bonds and other common features of the later years have been compounded by increased individualization and the isolation of the “ageing and dying from the community of the living.” In contemporary society, Elias argues, older people are “pushed more and more behind the scenes of social life,” a process that intensifies their devaluation, emotional seclusion, and loss of social significance. A physical and institutional sequestering and a pervasive cultural tendency to “conceal the irrevocable finitude of human existence” have made it harder for them and those around them to relate to, understand, and interact with one another. The aged and dying are less likely to receive the help and affection they need, and more prone to different forms of loneliness and painful feelings of irrelevance. “Never before,” Elias writes, “have people died as noiselessly and hygienically as today in [more developed] societies, and never in social conditions so much fostering solitude.”

… Health and longevity are the ends to which remedial action is directed and by which outcomes are evaluated. Even in discussions that include exhortations to build strong connections and communities, loneliness and isolation are treated as individual conditions, and references to community easily coexist with talk of genetic hardwiring, the role of the prefrontal cortex, and the ways in which neural mechanisms might generate feelings of loneliness.

… Typical advice is often some form of self-help: “take a class,” “get a dog,” “volunteer”; build your confidence with social skills training; seek out behavioral therapy. With therapy—highlighted for its positive “impact”—the aged lonely can be helped to see that their low self-worth, perceived isolation, or feelings of being unwanted are probably just cognitive misapprehensions that need to be “restructured.” Once this restructuring is accomplished, the aged can better match what they want in social life with what they have and get on with aging with more success. The status quo can now appear in a new, more uplifting light.

… Current constructions of old age in individualistic terms of self-reliance, the fit body, productive accomplishments, or an imperative to deny or defeat aging technologically cannot but deepen our predicament and the need to render it invisible. This is what makes the cultural logic of these constructions irredeemable. They leave us in a cul-de-sac, hemmed in by a predatory commercial culture, a punishing ideology of health, fewer and weaker social ties, an ethic of active striving and mastery, and a mechanistic picture of ourselves. Moving beyond the devaluation of old age requires other orientations and other practices for which we must look elsewhere—to other societies, past or present, and to older traditions. …

… The social orientation of the evening of life need not be individualistic, but toward family and the localization and strengthening of social relations. Similarly, the view of the life cycle need not take its bearings from youth and middle age but from roles and identities appropriate to old age, with their own norms and rewards. These norms and rewards need not be defined in terms of active striving and productivity, but in terms of release, such as from social climbing, and a more contemplative attitude toward the world.

“No Country for Old Age,” by Joseph E. Davis, The Hedgehog Review.

UPDATE (2/22/021): And the good about aging in America.