It is absolutely delicious watching the Elites panic at the remarkable, troll-driven ascent of the Alt Right.
The NYT is now resorting to giving desirable op-ed space to leftist college students to help them make sense of sh*t-posting.
In the NYT, James Angelos writes a long piece on “The Prophet of Germany’s New Right”. The piece begins:
Götz Kubitschek, a self-proclaimed “rightist intellectual,” lives in a medieval manor house in Schnellroda, a rural village in eastern Germany. From this isolated, antique outpost, Kubitschek, who is 47, wields considerable influence over far-right thinkers, activists and politicians across Germany, who make regular pilgrimages to Schnellroda for an audience with him. The manor serves as the headquarters for the magazine and publishing house that Kubitschek runs with his wife, the writer Ellen Kositza, and also for a rightist think tank, the plainly named Institute for State Policy, and a small organic farm where he raises rabbits and goats. Kubitschek calls himself a conservative, battling to preserve Germany’s “ethno-cultural identity,” which he says is threatened by immigration and the alienating effects of modernity. He identifies as part of the German “New Right,” which seeks to dissociate itself from the “old right,” which in Germany means Nazis. German political scientists, by contrast, classify the brand of thinking Kubitschek ascribes to as either an ideological “hinge” between conservatism and right-wing extremism, or as simply extremist — not vastly different, in other words, from the old right. Kubitschek, however, presents his views with a disarming, Teutonic idealism that recalls a Germany that long preceded the rise of Hitler. The German magazine Der Spiegel once referred to him as a “dark knight.”
There is this gem:
Kubitschek was immediately recognizable, a towering black-clad figure with a well-trimmed goatee and the upright posture of a military officer.
Wow, project much?
For the most part, however, the piece is an informative albeit liberal take on Alt-Right political developments in Germany. For example, of der Flügel, the ethnonationalist wing of AfD:
Flügel politicians are now ascendant within the party — and they are increasingly mixing their nationalism with the antiliberalism agenda of the New Right. Before the election, I attended an Alternative for Germany rally in Artern, a depressed-looking town not very far from Schnellroda. There, I was struck by how Flügel politicians devoted much of their speeches to a number of economic issues traditionally though of as leftist — low wages, poverty in old age, insufficient social benefits, rhetoric designed to shift the party away from its roots in economic liberalism. One of the politicians, a man named Jürgen Pohl, who was subsequently elected into Parliament, denounced the claim that Germany is doing “better than ever” economically. Should Angela Merkel and “our new African citizens” come to the former East Germany, he said, they’d see the “poor house of Germany.” Another speaker, André Poggenburg, the head of the party in Saxony-Anhalt, declared Alternative for Germany to be “the new party of social justice.” The message was simple enough: more benefits for the Volk, and fewer foreigners to take those benefits away. In the former East, where unemployment remains higher and salaries remain lower than in the former West, that message seems to resonate, helping the party peel away hundreds of thousands of voters from die Linke, the descendant of the East German Communist Party.
The shift is not entirely surprising. New Right thinkers often entertain the idea of establishing a querfront, or a “cross front” that would unite opponents of liberalism on both extremes of the political spectrum. During my talks with Kubitschek, I often found myself detecting what at first seemed to me a perplexing leftist bent, an aversion to American-style materialism. You had only to go the shopping center on a Saturday morning, he once told me, and observe people in their “consumption temple” to see how there is “nothing at all there, spiritually.” For Kubitschek and other New Right thinkers, American liberalism — with its emphasis on individual rights and the individual pursuit of happiness — is perhaps the most corrosive force eating away at the identity of the Volk,replacing a sense of “we” with individualism and profit-seeking self-interest.
Sound familiar?
This same dynamic is happening all over the West.
Kubitschek casually mentioned that he would not mind at all if a strongman came to replace Merkel, if that was the only way to correct her decision to allow the migrants to enter Germany. In a time of great peril, he noted soberly, a leader must act beyond the law. He cited Carl Schmitt, the conservative political theorist who criticized parliamentary democracy and aligned with the Nazis after they took power: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” Merkel herself had acted outside the law by opening the border, Kubitschek said, and that proved she was sovereign. And yet, he continued, “I’d have absolutely nothing against it if someone came along and with the same sovereignty did the opposite. Someone who would say: ‘The experiment is over. The Parliament won’t be consulted. I will prop up with my power the administration, the organs of the state, the police’ — who would in any case be supportive — ‘the border patrol, the military, and we will end this experiment.’ That means: borders shut. Test to see who can be assimilated; they can stay. Those who can’t be assimilated, they’ve got to go.”
It was clear the Kubitschek considers “refugee” a misnomer. These were not, for the most part, refugees fleeing persecution or war, but opportunists — mostly “hungry young men,” as he put it — acting “very rationally” to improve their lot. These migrants arrived in an “insecure” country, he said, where the people “don’t know who they are or what belongs to them.” The migrants, he said, therefore begin to think, Doesn’t everything here belong to everyone? “And then the waves are set into motion, and they say: ‘All right, here we have a country, a fallow country, and it’s a country that must be conquered, and it can be conquered. And it won’t be conquered with ladders for storming fortresses or with machetes, but with sheer presence.’ ” Everyone at the table seemed to agree that the consequences of this conquering were dire. Crime, they argued, was on the rise; women could no longer feel safe walking alone outside at night. “We all know the dystopian stories,” Kubitschek said. Matters might get “supercharged in a hyper-identitarian way,” he added. “If it once again becomes really brutal or cruel, we don’t know. It can also transition over into a country that is no longer Germany.”
Things are moving fast.
In The New Yorker, Andrew Marantz pens a comically self-righteous piece on Mike Enoch (“Birth of a White Supremacist”). Marantz gloats and gives ample space to convey how Enoch’s progressive parents (his father “lives in an upper-middle-class New Jersey suburb that is often listed among the most progressive towns in the country”, his study containing “contemporary books such as Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me”), have essentially disowned him.
There are sanctimonious passages like this, in which the locals of Mike’s childhood town ‘struggle’ to make sense of his red-pilling:
A few people around town had already heard the news, mostly through Facebook, and some of them were talking about Mike E. as if he had been abducted by a cult, or tied down and injected with a serum of pure hatred. Other people assumed that there must be some key biographical fact—a chemical imbalance, a history of abuse—that would neatly unlock the mystery. But Mike E.’s conversion was more quotidian than that, and therefore more unsettling; somehow, over time, he had fallen into a particularly dark rabbit hole, where some of the most disturbing and discredited ideas in modern history were repackaged as the solution to twenty-first-century malaise.
Marantz charts Enoch’s intellectual journey from Marxism to libertarianism to paleoconservatism to HBD to Alt-Right (a path for many Alt-Righters) yet manages to characterize Enoch’s penchant for logical argumentation to be, clearly, a troubling trait:
Gradually, he learned to insulate himself with jokes and insults. He was clever, and found strength in contrarianism. His ideology shifted over time, but his approach was always the same: exposing and attacking the flaws in commonplace arguments, often without any sense of proportion. Even when he agreed with someone’s opinion, he still loved to engage in rhetorical battle—not to advance any particular agenda, one of his relatives told me, but “to stir up resentment. He strikes me as someone without a core, who only knows how to oppose and who chooses his positions based on what will be most upsetting to people around him.”
The money shot, though, is this:
Then, in January, 2015, Enoch read “The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements,” by Kevin MacDonald, a former psychology professor at California State University, Long Beach. The book—published in 1998, heavily footnoted, and roundly debunked by mainstream social scientists—is a touchstone of contemporary intellectualized anti-Semitism. On “The Daily Shoah,” Enoch called it “important and devastating, something I urge everybody to read,” and then offered even higher praise: “It triggered me so hard.”
KMac’s CoC was the major red pill that qualitatively changed me as well. And, by the way, the book was not ‘roundly debunked’ by critics challenging MacDonald’s theses and sub-theses, but rather received grunts and shrieks from the usual suspects, emotional ad hominem attacks levied against the author.
The New Yorker piece on Harvey Weinstein (written by Ronan Farrow, of all people) is at least as salacious and detailed as the earlier NYT piece.
What comes through in the Farrow piece is just how complicit others in the degenerate Hollywood star-making industry were in facilitating Harvey’s sexual attacks.
This passage struck me:
Often, she was asked to keep track of the women, who, in keeping with a practice established by Weinstein’s assistants, were all filed under the same label in her phone: F.O.H., which stood for “Friend of Harvey.”
… as does the piece’s creepy final paragraph:
“He’s been systematically doing this for a very long time,” the former employee who had been made to act as a “honeypot” told me. She said that she often thinks of something Weinstein whispered—to himself, as far as she could tell—after one of his many shouting sprees at the office. It so unnerved her that she pulled out her iPhone and tapped it into a memo, word for word: “There are things I’ve done that nobody knows.”
The amount of cover this guy received from fellow Tribe members is disgusting.
Meanwhile, Tablet surprisingly publishes “The Specifically Jewy Perviness of Harvey Weinstein” by Mark Oppenheimer. The byline reads: “The disgraced film producer is a character straight out of Philip Roth, playing out his revenge fantasies on the Goyim.”
Better than perhaps any other author, Roth captured the particular anxiety of the Jewish American man in the twentieth century, finally coming into power but, having not grown up with it, unsure of what he’s supposed to do now. All those years craving unattainable Gentiles, but never before the means to entice them. The result is Alexander Portnoy of Portnoy’s Complaint, a grown man whose emotional and sexual life is still all one big performance piece, just as it had been when he was a teenager and pleasured himself with a piece of liver…
Harvey is cut from the same cloth. Growing up in Queens, he fantasized of fame and fortune, and, once he got them, he struggled to maintain them by building himself into a larger-than-life figure. He yelled at employees like he was a studio boss from the 1920s—the only thing missing was a riding crop. He ran Oscars campaigns like they used to in Old Hollywood. And he harassed women not necessarily to use them as instruments of his pleasure, but to use them as instruments of his power.
It goes without saying that nearly every one of these women—Rose McGowan, Ambra Batillana, Laura Madden, Ashley Judd, etc.—was a Gentile, all the better to feed Weinstein’s revenge-tinged fantasy of having risen above his outer-borough, bridge-and-tunnel Semitic origins. But it turns out there was a Jew(ess) in the bunch, none other than Lauren Sivan, of the potted-plant episode. In that small way, he inadvertently broke out of the Portnoy mold, performing his inadequacies not for the great all-American odeon but for a woman who could be his cousin. Harvey can run from who he is, but he can’t hide.
Miracles never cease.
The NYT takes the longstanding Muslim tradition of child marriages in Yemen and turns it into an ‘economic deprivation’ story:
CAIRO — The girl did not know whether it was night or day when she plotted her escape from a house in Yemen. Her husband had locked the girl in a windowless room.
“He was mean to me because I didn’t want to touch him,” she said.
He was 35. She was 14.
But the girl, Mohsina, was not only a victim of child marriage. She was a casualty of a war that has plunged her country into a humanitarian catastrophe. For Mohsina’s family, marrying off their underage daughter earned a $1,300 dowry — enough to feed them for a year.
We learn later that her husband is “a distant cousin”. That’s nice.
But none of this would be happening, apparently, if not for war:
Yemen is a country in crisis. After more than two years of war, its infrastructure has been badly damaged and its people impoverished, with hundreds of thousands sickened with cholera. But hidden among the numbing statistics of death and destruction is another insidious scourge: Desperate families are increasingly selling their daughters off as child brides or letting their boys be recruited as child soldiers.
Did the war also cause the institutionalization of child marriage, as buried in the NYT story with this sentence?
Yemeni law does not set a legal age for marriage, nor does it criminalize marital rape.
A Google search on “Yemen Child Marriage” pulls up an awful lot of new stories, many from years ago, about child bride stories. The search also retrieves the interesting YouTube video The Child Brides Of Yemen (2014), where we learn that over 40% of marriages in some areas of Yemen involve girls younger than age 15.
Move along.
Nothing to see here.
I mean, it’s now every single day that a story like this comes out, isn’t it? From The Daily Mail:
Oxford University students have banned a Christian union from their college freshers’ fair after saying the religion is ‘damaging’ and ‘an excuse for homophobia and neo-colonialism’.
Student union officials at Balliol prevented representatives from attending and warned that the society could cause ‘harm’ by setting up a stall at the event.
The decision was revealed in a leaked email chain that has sparked fury across the college.
Vice president Frederick Potts told Christian union representatives: ‘Christianity’s influence on many marginalised communities has been damaging in its methods of conversion and rules of practice.
‘It is still used in many places as an excuse for homophobia and certain forms of neo-colonialism.’
James Kirkpatrick notes:
If Columbus Day is abolished and the campaign to rob America of its heritage is successful, European-Americans will be deracinated, atomized, cultureless and consumerist nonentities who only exist to be farmed as tax revenue by a government which despises white people but depends on its wealth and skills. The battle over symbols, language and history will determine the realities of political power in the future.
I can’t remember what the exact site was I trolled (I had read about the group in a news article), but some months back I used the email Contact Form to an SJW, identity politics, consulting group on, seriously, intersectionality:
Hi – Would you be able to assist in my effort to self-identify as a Dorito chip? The problem I am having is that, while I strongly identify with the classic Dorito chip, its orange-ish color sometimes triggers a micro-trauma for obvious reasons. I am seeking assistance and funding to consolidate a more optimal, corn chip, intersectionality in perhaps a Cool Ranch Dorito. While that has its own problems (a more caucasian skin tone color), it does get around the orange issue.
CA is burning, both literally and figuratively, but this is what their Legislature is concerned with:
California health care workers who “willfully and repeatedly” decline to use a senior transgender patient’s “preferred name or pronouns” could face punishments ranging from a fine to jail time under a newly signed law.
California Gov. Jerry Brown signed the legislation last week…
The bill itself is aimed at protecting transgender and other LGBT individuals in hospitals, retirement homes and assisted living facilities. The bill would ensure those facilities accommodate transgender people and their needs, including letting them decide which gender-specific bathroom they prefer to use.
“It shall be unlawful for a long-term care facility or facility staff to take any of the following actions wholly or partially on the basis of a person’s actual or perceived sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, or human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) status,” the bill reads.
Normism: The Philosophy of Norm Macdonald, a short book I wrote about the late great comedian, is available on Amazon.
