HALF-FULL REPORT 04/21/18: REPORTS FROM THE FRONT LINES
“Life is pain. Pain teaches fear, which keeps us alive.
But then there are three ways to respond to fear: fight, flight, and freeze. To fight fear is to seek meaning from the pain. To flee is to abnegate all responsibility, and preferring to be set apart in isolation and safety. To freeze is to submit to an overwhelming force and suffer the anxiety of the powerless, who don’t know when the next lash will fall.
The cuckservative submits, the libertarian sets himself apart, and the Alt-Right fights.
– Aeoli Pera
The Flight 93 Election was only the beginning. We live in an era of total political war, and even outsiders can see it clearly. To fully understand where we stand, read “What Then, Is To Be Our War?” which kind of ate me up this week. This week’s HFR begins our answer.
Build
Angelo Codevilla, whose landmark diagnosis of our ruling class helped to change our political landscape, has a prescription for winning the War Against the Left. He is only partly right.
“The ruling class has conquered commanding heights over every part of American society. Because, as it did so, this class convinced itself unalterably that the rest of us are a lower class of beings, re-conquering those heights could not restore citizenship among us. The prize would be costly and worthless.
Best for all is for we Indians to leave the chiefs alone on their hills as we build better villages.”
Yes, we must build. Destruction alone will win us nothing, and a doctrine of fake political opposition while conceding the high ground everywhere else has brought America to the brink of ruin. You may have noticed that at least one senior Republican gets what I call Frankfurt’s Ladder: Politics is downstream from Culture, which is downstream from the Mating and Status Market. That’s why guys want to learn guitar and not viola, right? But you can’t channel the stream without infrastructure. So, who’s building some?
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The New Yorker’s freak out over Chick-fil-A’s growing popularity in NYC is a delicious example, in more ways than one. The Christian chain that closes on The Lord’s Day and was the subject of a famous campaign buy-cott is about to become the #3 fast food chain in the USA. That’s economic power, and also cultural power.
The Left losing its minds and looking like complete morons to normal people who just like good chicken sandwiches? That’s just gravy.
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On the Alt-Tech front, building Infogalactic.com to rival and surpass Wikipedia will turn out to be a big, big deal. They’ve found a technical way to compete at less than 1/3 the cost of Wikipedia’s systems, while keeping up to date with Wikipedia’s archives and readying new features that will be very attractive. Help them build!
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Building a new comics imprint using star personnel from the existing comics world, then figuring out how to break the industry’s distribution monopoly and offering that service to independent artists, is going to have ripples that will change the movie industry down the road. Since the titles that are coming to Arkhaven tend to be from talented people blacklisted by the Left, you can imagine that the downstream opportunities will be the kind we like.
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Some people are already making good movies. The new documentary Little Pink House, about the Kelo case’s theft of a woman’s house by a greedy city, is an excellent movie and is doing very well for its genre. The Chappaquidick movie… I’ll just let Variety Magazine, of all people, praise it for me.
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And props to Michael Walsh. After taking on Cultural Marxism in The Devil’s Pleasure Palace, he has a new book “The Fiery Angel.” It’s all about about taking up the power and beauty of Western Culture, which the Left has stupidly rejected. Great idea, and we don’t even have to build it. By abandoning their long role as Western Culture’s supposed guardians in favor of identity-politics intersectional hate, they’ve left us a huge weapon to pick up and use. Because every time we do, it’s immediately (a) transgressive and (b) attractive. In a country where the political sides are using a Bad Boys (Right) vs. Mean Girls (Left) strategy set? I’ll take that combination! Walsh adds that:
“As part of a new campaign to reconnect the arts and public policy, my partners and I have formed The Imprimatur Group, the nation’s first and only cultural-political consultancy (preliminary contact via Julianne Shinto at the link). We combine classical Western principles with modern narrative storytelling and political savvy to transform public figures and candidates for high office into the personal embodiments of the virtues and qualities they wish to project and that voters and audiences seek.”
I have no idea how that will go for him. And this is all pretty guerrilla stuff. But it’s exactly the right spirit.
Be like Mike. Or at least, find people like that to support.
Foreign News
I’m going to keep this very short. First, the North Korea talks. Three months ago, I would never have guessed that I’d hear the statements we’re now hearing from North Korea. We’ll see how it goes, by my goodness this is remarkable. And the South Koreans, who are major players in this effort, and giving Trump a lot of the credit.
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Second, there has been talk about the Chinese using their rare earths stranglehold to cripple American technology sectors, as retaliation for tariffs. This was always dumb, because rare earths are only rare in the sense of “low density, pain in the ass to mine and refine.” We have ’em, Australia has ’em… and lookee here, say the Japanese!
We let the Chinese dominate this market because it’s a dirty job, and under globalization it was easier to give this strategic capability to a competitor in order to avoid ruffling the environmental lobby. Yes, that was and is stupid. Now everyone can’t live without their smartphones etc., which means the moment China tries to put the squeeze on there will be alternatives, fast. I hope China tries a move; the “never let a crisis go to waste” rule most definitely applies to the American West, and could be done by Executive Order as a national security emergency.
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Third, Hungary’s nationalist Fidesz party won a sweeping victory. Once again, second place went to the far-right Jobbik, with the socialists in 3rd place at under 15%. The Visegrad push-back against the EU and its evil policies will remain strong.
I began writing about how Fidesz crushed the Left back in 2014. As the Left makes it increasingly clear that peaceful resolution within normal politics is less and less likely, it may be time to start looking at the Hungarian example more closely, as a peaceful but forceful option.
As a bonus, George Soros is now moving his planned “university” from Hungary to Vienna, in anticipation of further laws targeting his foreign-funded NGOs. Mind you, doesn’t Austria have a nationalist government now? Grab the popcorn.
Fight: Political Realm
Codevilla is wrong. We cannot just run, and we cannot just build. The Left will never leave us in peace, will destroy anything they can reach, and are more than prepared to use mass violence. What we’re beginning to learn, however, is that the psychological types that make up much of the Left leave themselves wide-open for counter-punches. Also, they often have glass jaws. It’s just that no-one had ever really punched them before.
Take the body blow Trump gave the media. The effects continue, according to a recent Monmouth poll:
More than 3-in-4 Americans believe that traditional major TV and newspaper media outlets report “fake news,” including 31% who believe this happens regularly and 46% who say it happens occasionally. The 77% who believe fake news reporting happens at least occasionally has increased significantly from 63% of the public who felt that way last year.Just 25% say the term “fake news” applies only to stories where the facts are wrong. Most Americans (65%), on the other hand, say that “fake news” also applies to how news outlets make editorial decisions about what they choose to report….The belief that major media outlets disseminate fake news at least occasionally has increased among every partisan group over the past year, including Republicans (89% up from 79% in 2017), independents (82% up from 66%), and Democrats (61% up from 43%). In addition to the fact that a clear majority of Democrats now believe that traditional media outlets report fake news at least occasionally, the poll also finds that a majority of Republicans (53%) feel this happens on a regular basis (up from 37% in 2017).
Finally, hats off to James Comey for making all of this so much more entertaining. After an intensive ghostwriting period by what appears to have been a 13-year old girl, his book tour is nicely on track to eclipse the Titanic for “failed launches.” The NY Times is panning his book tour, Loretta Lynch is in major CYA mode and leaving him exposed, and even Andrew McCabe couldn’t resist piling on. The Hill magazine is running an article titled: “Comey’s Last Stand for the Deep State.”
No wonder this week’s TTP is running articles like “The McCabe Report is Just the Appetizer” and “After The Mccabe Appetizer, Comey And Lynch Are On The Menu.” I’d like to say “faster, please” like another well-known TTPer, but that isn’t how these things work.
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In other news, the feds worked with a number of states to take down Backpage.com. You’ve probably never heard of it. Think of it as the Uber for prostitutes. Perhaps it would not surprise you to find that Backpage was also used for human trafficking. Of course, the famous Women’s March, who use a Sharia advocate as their spokescreature, chimed in:
“The shutting down of #Backpage is an absolute crisis for sex workers who rely on the site to safely get in touch with clients. Sex workers rights are women’s rights.”
They probably don’t want to be reminded of this 2017 New Yorker article, which packs quite the wallop. What crosses my mind is: did no-one ever consider that Backpage might be a honeypot? These people are stupid. And after the Ashley Madison revelations, one has to wonder just who will end up caught in the net. Sentences have begun, Backpage’s CEO is reportedly pleading out and cooperating, and this was apparently one of the (now) 20,000+ sealed federal indictments.
Could get veddy interesting.
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The ticking clock in the room is the 2018 mid-terms.
If they go very badly, a Cataline Conspiracy worth of treason and corruption could essentially skate free under cover from The Party; the Deep State coup attempt would ramp up (note especially the number of intel-related individuals the Dems are running); and America would be sailing in very deep and uncharted waters.
As it happens, even though the Republicans aren’t taking any of Kurt Schlichter’s truly excellent suggestions, that tide is turning and the gap is narrowing. It turns out that David Hogg and his band of astroturf drama students aren’t just great recruiters for the NRA. They also seem to be recruiting for the GOP, as voters are saying that gun rights are an important issue for them.
It’s just a start – the GOP will have to get it butts in gear and produce results that energize its base and demoralize the Left. Do that, and 2018 can be all about more winning.
The existential question is: Do they want to win?
McConnell’s refusal to take an opportunity to energize the GOP base and cut $60B from the Omnibus atrocity bodes poorly.
We The People may need to step into the breach. It galls me to support traitors, but think about what’s happening here. Buy the time, avert the possibility of serious civil strife in America, make sure the retiring RINOs are replaced by people who are better, and wait for a chance at true revenge. If we can hold the line, it’ll come.
Fight: The Culture War
Away from The Potomac War, you can see how small-scale and guerrilla our efforts are. Harsh reality check. But it sure can be fun!
First, Starbucks. After the obviously staged and bogus provocation, wherein black protesters sat in the Starbucks, used a megaphone, didn’t buy anything, refused to leave, and then were rude to the cops, the company that launched the disastrous #RaceTogether campaign… fired the store manager, announced a day of store closure and mandatory “unconscious bias” (read: hate whitey) training for the whole company, and apologized profusely. The flip side of white privilege is black entitlement, you say?
Game on for the meme warriors – mine is up above, but it wasn’t the best. No, the best was the wags who started creating realistic-looking coupons that entitled people of color to free coffee:
Let’s count the winning. First, this made papers like the Washington Post write articles, warning about the fake coupons. Thus tricking Fake News into covering the campaign. Of course, people also tried to collect. A great guy whose Twitter moniker is “Hotep Jesus” walked in without the coupon, demanded a coffee as “Starbucks Reparations” – and got it (video here). He then went on the Laura Ingraham show, whose viewership is apparently up 20% since the gun-grabbers pushed an advertiser boycott. Hilarious!
After seeing initial success, the meme masters were inspired further. This one is the next out. Can you imagine the reaction of their hipster-striver clientele to the presence of the homeless on a daily basis?
The technical term for this (yes, there is one) is “black knighting.” It looks like white knighting, but it consciously uses the enemy’s idiotic rules against them. Preferably in a public way, where it’s uncomfortable to back out. Conserva-blogger Ace of Spades, who has worked as a waiter, has an excellent take – including the idea that conservatives should monitor Starbucks locations for their treatment of homeless people, and publicly complain if Starbucks tries to backslide on the new rules they just made up.
But never forget the real prize in these situations. It’s actually extremely similar to a common foreign policy dynamic. As law prof. Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds explains:
“…the response to these things has to be understood not so much as a business decision by the firm as a whole, as the product of internal competition for power within the firm. The result will be more influence, and an established, hard-to-get-rid-of institutional fiefdom, for the woke warriors. That’s what it’s really all about.”
That means the goal must be either to either hurt the personal careers of the faction creating these situations, or “black knight” the hostile entity into giving the nut jobs so much power that it badly hurts or kills itself. It all depends on whether you wish to preserve and recover the entity in question, or kill it.
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Which brings us to Fresno State professor Randa Jarrar, who made herself a short-term celebrity by tweeting how glad she was about Barbara Bush’s death. Mrs. Bush was supposedly some racist, horrible person (SJW Lule 1: Leftists always lie). When challenged, Jarrar said that she was tenured, made over $100k a year, and couldn’t be fired (SJW Law 2: Leftists always double down). Uh, not so fast, says Fresno State. Meanwhile, after receiving more than 2,400 replies, her Twitter account was locked, and her brief profile bio changed to, “Currently on leave from Fresno State. this [sic] is my private account and represents my opinions.” No doubt we’ll be hearing whining soon about persecuting people for their political views (SJW Law 3: Leftists always project).
I understand where groups like FIRE.org are coming from when they defend Jarrar’s right to free speech. They’re great people, and they do excellent work in the campus gulags. But I can’t defend something that isn’t there. We don’t have free speech. Not in America, not any more. So the same excuses used to fire conservative professors, software developers, et. al. can and should be used to fire her. Shove the Left’s rules back in their ugly, hateful faces.
Isn’t that extreme? No. It’s moral, and pragmatic. Here’s a red pill for libertarian types and the “that isn’t who we are” Bowtie Brigade:
All propositions come with presuppositions. When the presuppositions are not met, the proposition fails.
Freedom of speech and conscience are human rights. Andrei Sakharov exercised them from jail in the USSR. But he was in jail. The enforcement and public status of these rights in Western society was the result of an important presupposition: a truce that ended centuries of extremely bloody religious warfare in Europe. Having squandered this Christian Peace, it must now be re-established. And to get there, the factions attacking that peace must bleed. Ian Miles Cheong explains:
When you use someone’s social rules against themselves, the point isn’t to be vengeful.
No, it’s to make the rules untenable—too painful and damaging to follow that they must be nullified and revoked.
It isn’t hypocrisy. It’s pragmatic.
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Or how about NYU? Another day, another campus protest occupying a building. The school was unamused:
“The phone calls advised parents that students who interfered with campus functions could be suspended, and that suspensions can carry penalties of revoked financial aid or housing…. Flustered NYU students, unfamiliar with the proposition that open hostility to the university could be repaid in kind, reeled [and ended the protest].”
You know it’s National Review reporting because they mourn that “Instead of maintaining order, the default position on many campuses is to cower before the mob.” No-one’s cowering before anything. Playing along with such fictions, in order to avoid soiling their bowties by actually fighting (“that’s not who we are!”), is why NRO is left with a shrunken subscriber base and cruise tours into irrelevance. The mob are the university administration’s tools. The moment they don’t want the mob to be their tools, look what happens.
When you use external pressure to make the crazy hater games too expensive for the administrators, you’ll see many more responses like NYU’s, and far fewer crazy haters.
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For bigger game, how about that racist fraud the Southern Poverty Law Center? SPLC caved and removed the “Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists” from their website. Maajid Nawaz, a practicing Muslim and prominent Islamic reformer, retained Tom Clare of Clare Locke (the firm who proved Rolling Stone committed libel in their fake UVA “rape” story) and threatened legal action. People on the SPLC’s list included Pamela Geller, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, David Horowitz, Daniel Pipes and others.
Lawfare works, and a serious opposition would be putting inserts in all kinds of bills that made suing leftists simpler and more lucrative. Take Col. Schlichter’s idea about a “Discrimination Against Citizens Exercising Their Constitutional Rights Act,” which would make refusing to do business with any individual or group exercising an enumerated constitutional right a tort (i.e. an offense you can get sued for). The optics of opposing it would be awful. Citibank? Bank of America? Delta Airlines? Yeah, that’d be over in a hurry, but not until some trial lawyers and patriots got rich.
Libfascists, Bake The Cake!
GOP: give us the recipes!
Fight: Big Tech and STEM Trends
What, Then, Is To Be Our War has already discussed the Twitter CEO’s endorsement of an article about waging a ‘civil war’ that would remove the Republican Party from civil life, in favor of a one-party state. Even as Zuckerberg appeared on Capitol Hill, with testimony that somehow avoided the period from 2008-2012, during which Facebook gave the Obama campaign all of Facebook.
Oh, and Facebook has been scraping your call history on Android phones with Facebook loaded. Visited hospitals to propose “information sharing” agreements. And is mining information about young students, alongside Google and others.
A Panopticon is inherently feudal, and as much as you’ve read here? We’re about to be shocked to discover just how deep this Stasi rabbit-hole has already gone.
There’s also very little doubt that Twitter, Facebook, and Google have strongly stepped up censorship of conservative voices, often in ways like “shadow banning” where you don’t kick someone off of your platform, you just ensure that most of their supporters and subscribers can’t see messages and notifications from that source. There are other forms of manipulation, too. Google “American inventors” and choose “Images”; you’ll see what I mean.
Not is this confined to the USA. Facebook recently decided that interfering in Brazil’s election was a good idea.
While censorship at YouTube has led to some promising blockchain-powered rivals (I quite like Bitchute’s performance), the reality is that these companies have strong “network effects.” The presence of so many people creates a form of lock-in. Just as you wouldn’t embrace a much cheaper, much better phone network that didn’t let you call your relatives, rival companies will find it extremely difficult to compete in this utility space. Meanwhile, even established media sources like ABC, NBC et. al. get a huge chunk of their traffic from social media, making Big Social a key gateway to the legacy media as well.
Aeon Magazine’s must-read “How the Internet Flips Elections and Alters Our Thoughts” explains the danger level.
The current level of abuse from a small oligarchy of politically-slanted firms, who use opaque algorithms that choke conversations in premeditated directions cannot be supported in a democratic society, or indeed by any sovereign government.
They are essentially setting themselves up as global political kingmakers and spy agencies, with a media arm, for sale to the highest bidder.
Their activities to date within the USA clearly constitute electoral interference, and undeclared in-kind contributions to political candidates. This is ramping up in preparation for 2018 mid-terms, as a key part of the American Deep State’s power play to exonerate itself.
Twitter, Facebook, and Google need to be broken up by anti-trust or other legal enforcement, with their pieces heavily regulated as common carriers. Your power company can’t cut off your power because they don’t like your politics, and it’s a private company. Your phone company can’t disconnect calls to your family because they don’t like your language during the call, and they’re a private company. Why should Facebook be allowed to cut your content off from the digital public square?
Over the longer term, as I mentioned in a past HFR, we have to adopt technology and a legal regime that makes Surveillance Capitalism too expensive, while providing enough throughput performance from the technology. Not simple. But nothing else is more important to our long-term future.
Artificial Intelligence (per Mike Ryan’s recent HFR) and Robotics are the other 2 legs of the stool, and come with their own challenges, but these things are also interlinked. Ubiquitous robotic sensors + panopticon + AI to interpret it and raise flags (the latter is already being done for censorship)… that’s a recipe for certain dystopia. So, at minimum:
- We need to make Surveillance Capitalism too expensive, and then create legal barriers on top.
- We need an open-source AI (already in the works, thanks Elon), and then we must find ways to let people give their A.I.s inputs at the required scale.
- We need a right to own and use robots that’s modeled on the 2nd Amendment, or exists as an extension of it.
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I’ll close with some good news. The Left goes on all the time about how much they love science. First, the video below makes an excellent case that absent Christianity or something that performs all of its functions, the Left can’t even maintain science.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0cKuFfYnVw
Second, in the modern era, nothing is about to be less the Left’s friend than human genetics. Nothing. Even worse for them, it’s unstoppable because its research holds the key to finding cures and living longer. But the more research we do, the more we discover that traits far beyond intelligence are significantly influenced by genetics. And that in the aggregate, they vary by group. I’m talking about traits like time preference (ability to delay gratification), and even empathy.
This will be the same kind of death blow to the Leftist equalist religion that evolution was to creationism, and ultimately to the literal biblical worldview.
A caveat: since many ‘conservatives’ share this same equalist religion, it will be equally wrenching to them. But this can’t be stopped. Accept the science, adapt before the Left does, and win.
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Right, I’m tapping out for the week. Thanks to all for reading, and feel free to save this for later perusal as well. Until next time, which will be a rather shorter HFR!
Your friend,
Joe
Joe Katzman is a long time TTPer and contributor. He is the Editor Emeritus of Defense Industry Daily This article originally ran in The Daily Caller. If you’d like to help Joe out, click on the Daily Caller link and then use their toolbar to Tweet the article, post it to your Facebook feed, or email the article to a friend. That drives the numbers they measure, and good numbers = more articles by Joe.