This started out as a reply to MBlanc46, below, but I figure it’d be a good conversation-starter up here.

Most people on our side are dubious about Trump’s reelection chances.  After all, the argument goes, he wasn’t supposed to win anyway — if his opponent hadn’t been an unprecedentedly awful candidate, running a beyond-slipshod campaign, he would’ve been toast in 2016.

Worse, now that he’s in office, he’s revealed as just another lying politician.  Is a big beautiful wall currently under construction on the southern border?  No?  Then what’s the point of giving him another four years to not build it?  When you screw up your signature issue, you’re toast — ask George H.W. “read my lips, no new taxes” Bush.

Worst, the Dems will at least bother to campaign in the Midwest this time.  And as they always do, they’ll bring their illegals, their dead relatives, their pets, and their dead relatives’ dead pets to the polls with them.  Republican candidates have needed to win outside the margin of fraud since 1868, but that margin gets bigger every year.  Even Kim Jong Un would be embarrassed to win as heavily as the typical Democratic candidate does in places like Detroit.

All that is true.  However, as noted in the post below, our side certainly isn’t immune to discounting the human factor.  I’m not real optimistic myself about Trump’s chances, but I think they’re a lot better than we fear.

First, Hillary may have been an unprecedentedly awful candidate — no argument there! — but despite being older than Methuselah she’s the Democrats’ future in one key respect.  Just as she had no reason for running other than “It’s my turn to be president,” so the Democratic Party as a whole has no reason to exist anymore.  They’ve won, on every front that matters, and as much as Nancy Pelosi et al keep trying to get the band back together for one more show, it ain’t Woodstock anymore.  The current crop of stick-it-to-The-Man Democrats have themselves been The Man for so long, they got senior citizen discounts at Jeffrey Epstein’s Pedo Island resort.  The ditzy idiots in “The Squad” know this very well, even if Hillary and Nancy and Slow Joe Biden don’t.  That’s why some big-titted goof who probably still gets carded back in el barrio roams the halls of Congress like she runs the place — because she does, and she’s as tired as the rest of us at listening to drooling senile Boomers and their delusions of peace love and understanding.

Under the circumstances, Hillary’s “Avert your eyes as you vote for me, filthy peons!” campaign strategy might actually have been the best bet.  The only realistic alternative was “Fuck you, pay me!“, which, while it meshes perfectly with Her Thighness’s utterly venal soul, really belongs to the younger crowd.  Folks like, say, Pete Bootycall or “Beto” or anyone who isn’t a whiter shade of pale.  It’ll be AOC’s campaign slogan in 2024, but since they’ll need those drooling senile boomers one last time in 2020, whoever wins will have to go with “#OrangeManBad.”  It’s all they’ve got to keep the coalition of the fringes together.*

Which segues nicely into point #2.  Trump is, undoubtedly and in actual fact, just another lying politician.  If I were running the Democrats’ campaign — and I’d be happy to, guys, for a modest low-seven-figure salary, please call me — I’d hammer that nonstop.  The Fourteen Readers will recall that I offered the Dems this exact advice all the way back in 2015.  The Media could’ve schlonged Trump’s campaign any time it chose, simply by covering him like a normal politician.  They wouldn’t have to be fair — that’s a bridge too far — but simply covering Trump with no more blatant bias than they do for any other Republican candidate would’ve finished him.

But they didn’t, of course, because they’re stupid, and because they’re catastrophically stupid they volunteered to be the centerpiece of Trump’s campaign.  He all but said “A vote for me is a ‘fuck you!’ to The Media,” but for all their well-tuned ears for “dog whistles” and such, The Media never heard it… which is why screenshots of CNN anchors looking terrified started making the social media rounds even before the polls closed.

In short: If any of Mike Dukakis’s people are still around, the Democrats absolutely should give them a call.  Dukakis was a pretty terrible candidate, but at least he knew how to run a bread-and-butter, talk-about-the-issues type campaign.  The fact that the Dems would have to go back that far, though, tells you just how deep the rot goes.  Orange Man thrives on driving NPCs nuts.  He wasn’t a New York tabloid fixture because of his antics — any one of the zillion guys making a phone number on Wall Street back in the 80s had similar stories — but because of his personality.  Orange Man drives a certain type of limpwristed freak absolutely bonkers, and he takes great, sadistic pleasure in that.  Running a point-and-shriek campaign against a guy who lives to be pointed-and-shrieked at is the dumbest thing they could possibly do…

…but it’s the only thing they know how to do.  I’m sure there’s a pithy Sun Tzu quote for this situation, but you don’t have to be Napoleon to realize that charging straight up the chute at the enemy’s strongest point is a bad idea.  But since everyone involved is one of the aforesaid limpwristed freaks, they can do no other.

Which brings us to voter fraud.  Trump’s very narrow victories in key states like Michigan can’t be replicated, the black pill analysis goes, because this time the Dems will bother to “campaign there.”  Combine the base-depressing effects of Trump selling out on his signature issue with the inevitable appearance of Al Franken’s car, and you’ve got traditional blue states going blue again…

Indulge me on a trip down memory lane, won’t you?  I promise there’s a point at the end of it.

Back in college I had what should’ve been a little summer fling between my sophomore and junior years.  I was working one of those country club-type jobs that comes with a prefab social circle — nothing bonds a bunch of hungry scholarship kids together faster than scuffling for tips from rich pricks and their trophy wives and their spoiled asshole kids.  My “girlfriend” was a lot of fun, but utterly unsuitable for anything other than a fling — not only did she live several states away and go to a different college, but we were as different as two people can get.  Opposites attract, and teenage pheromones seal the deal, and we both knew it…

…until one night we all got drunk on some booze one of our friends liberated from a wedding celebration.  This buddy, drunk as only a 19 year old scholarship kid on summer break can be, sat my “girlfriend” and me down for a Very Serious Talk.  We were actually terrible for each other, he said, and if we weren’t bored and broke and horny and pretty much high all the time, we couldn’t hardly stand to be in the same room together.  If we’d been grownups, we’d have laughed it off, because of course he was right, and we knew it better than he did. But we weren’t grownups, so you know what happened next — it was True Love, and it took a semester’s worth of awkward phone calls and one very expensive trip to her ritzy private school to remind me that I never actually liked her all that much in the first place.

That’s Donald Trump, as seen from the perspective of the American electorate.  Which “fact” about yourself is easier to swallow:

• that you got duped by a not-particularly-convincing orange con man with the world’s worst comb-over; or
• that it’s really True Love?

Now throw in the sanctimonious drunk buddy — this is The Media — self-righteously lecturing you on how stupid you are for having anything to do with this person.  What do you think?  What do you think the average American voter thinks?  And remember, this thought experiment takes place in a vacuum — in the real world, it won’t just be The Media lecturing you.  Imagine if the Democratic nominee is, say, Elizabeth Warren.  I think I speak for a lot of Average Americans when I say I’d light myself on fire and jump off a bridge if Fauxcahontas told me it was a bad idea, because anything that walking toothache thinks is bad must be good…

I’m not optimistic, comrades, but I’m not despairing either.  We’re in a lot better shape than we think we are.  Keep your chins up, and if I’m wrong, well, you can tell me all about it when we meet in the reeducation camp.

*This assumes they’re acting rationally, of course, which with Democrats is never a safe bet.  There’s a pretty solid chance their convention in Milwaukee goes kerflooey if “The Squad” gets impatient… and Millennials are hardly known for their impulse control.  If that happens, Trump will have to roll in the tanks for real, and Shiloh II: Electric Boogaloo will be opening soon in a theater near you.

Why is there so much bullshit in academia?

I get asked that one a lot.  “Cultural Marxism” is a sufficient answer, but there are other factors, of course.  Like social life, or lack thereof.

Grad students spend most of their time in the library, and because of the peculiar ecology of college towns, even their non-library hours are spent almost exclusively with other academics.  You have to work very, very hard to have any kind of “normal” life in a college town, in other words, so even if you’re not a goofball when you arrive, pretty soon Stockholm Syndrome kicks in and you find yourself, if not liking, then at least tolerating, experimental theater and milk made from plants.

After a few years of this, you forget what normal life is even like.  You come to understand the deep and longstanding grievances the Poststructuralist Feminist Marxists have with the Marxist Feminist Poststructuralists.  Oh, there’s scads of “diversity” on campus — all those recruiting brochures they mail to dumb parents in the ‘burbs aren’t lying — but there’s one thing you’ll never, ever find: The thought that maybe politics doesn’t matter all that much.

That’s the answer, right there.  Academic “humanities” work is mostly bullshit because most people just don’t care about politics.  To normals, if they think about “politics” at all, it’s in Schoolhouse Rock terms — some guys in Washington vote on some stuff, and that’s how a bill becomes a law.  They certainly don’t mean ideology, which is pretty much the only thing academics mean.  That a normal person could walk into the voting booth without really knowing if he’s going to pull the lever for Trump or Hillary fries an egghead’s circuits….

… and yet, as we all know, the majority of American voters do this, every single time.  There’s something profound about normal person behavior that academics just can’t — or won’t — grasp.

Which leads to stuff like this.  Some caveats: I generally enjoy this “Agnostic” guy’s posts.  His archives are well worth a trawl, as he looks at big social changes among American youngsters over decades.  But he’s also some kind of academic, and so falls into the typical academic trap of thinking only in big-idea terms.

If you didn’t click, his assertion is that the GOP is going to swap out nominees at the 2020 convention.  As the Democrats, media, academia, Hollywood, et al (hereafter, “the Democrats”) have been doing nothing but raging at Trump for the last four years, they’ll be completely disarmed.  We all know that no matter who the Dems run, he, she, or xzyhr will do nothing but chant “Orange Man Bad!” on the campaign trail… but Orange Man won’t be there, so the Republican will cruise to victory.

As Machiavellian political schemes go, that one’s a doozy.  Not only would it work on paper, but as Agnostic points out (indeed, it’s one of the key parts of his argument), everyone in the Republican Party not named “Donald Trump” would be totally on board with dropping Donald Trump as the nominee.  If they’re determined to get someone like Yeb Bush back in the saddle, that’s the quickest and surest way to do it…

But it’ll never happen, because people, especially political people, just don’t work that way.  Machiavellian schemes, after all, require Machiavellian schemers to plan and execute.  Any of those in the GOP?

As Orange Man himself has shown us, you don’t have to be some kind of multidimensional chess master to defeat the Democrats.  The Democrats are profoundly stupid.  They score more own goals than policy victories, and have done so for years.  Only profoundly stupid people would let Elizabeth Warren near a DNA lab, for instance, or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez near a smartphone.  And yet, here we are.  All you need to do to beat the Democrats is:

• show up,
• throw a punch, and
• not be utterly, incandescently retarded.

Does that sound like any Republican other than Donald Trump?

But let’s be generous and assume that, like all Official Conservatives, the GOP are ready willing and able to fight against their own.  So… how do you think Donald Trump is going to take the news that he’s been sidelined?  Is he going to quietly hang up his jock and hit the showers?

See what I mean with this stuff?

Of course, it’s not confined to academia.  The more you like to chew on ideas, it seems, the likelier it is that your pet theories require people to be other than they are.  Marxism is the best example — it’d work great with a different species — but our side is far from immune (indeed Agnostic, despite his apparent belief that Bernie Sanders (yes, really) is the savior of Legacy America, is on our side).  I’ll prove it:

Since this is the Internet, everyone loves to fantasize about how World War II could’ve gone.  Alas for all those fun fantasies, the war really couldn’t have gone a whole lot differently than it did.  Leave economic, technological, even military factors aside.  The reason it went down like it did was the same reason it couldn’t have gone down very much differently: The personality of Adolf Hitler.

Hitler called the shots; everyone else, even Stalin, was just reacting to Hitler’s decisions.*  Hitler’s decisions all make sense in the light of his very odd, very distinctive personality, one that was shaped by years of trench warfare on the Western Front, plus a meteoric rise from obscurity.  He was the same guy in 1945 that he was in 1933, which was for all intents and purposes the same guy he was in 1921.  Read any competent biography.  That guy couldn’t have done anything but what he did.  Men make history, but they do not make it as they please, as Karl Marx said.  You can’t know the history without knowing the man….

… but since academics don’t know any men, all their stuff is dreck.

*Though I am not qualified to evaluate Suvorov‘s evidence, I am convinced that if Germany somehow didn’t attack the USSR in 1941 (e.g. the entire top Nazi brass drank some tainted schnapps and some middle-management goober ended up as the new Fuhrer), Stalin would’ve attacked Germany by 1950.  And, of course, I say this not because I’m some kind of expert on the Red Army — see above — but I’ve read up on Stalin.  His personality is as weird, distinctive, and inflexible as Hitler’s, and though the same academic historians who wonder if Stalin was really a communist would no doubt be baffled by it, launching a war on Nazi Germany (and the rest of the world) would be perfectly in character.

Don’t ever not remember to forget that.  (Ace of Spades link).  The headline says it all:

Monsters, men and magic: why feminists turned to witchcraft to oppose Trump.

I’ve said before that I was something of a hippie in college.  I’ve also said that I did it mostly to get laid, and for one beautiful summer just after graduation, it all meshed together.  Her name wasn’t Sky Moonbeam Ravenhawke, but it might as well have been.  She was only a few years older than me, but already getting cougar-y (living the “all natural” lifestyle seems to really put the miles on a woman; have you noticed?), so she was ready willing and able to help me get in touch with my, ummm, “spirit essence” in all kinds of inventive ways.  I’ve never had it so good, before or since….

…. fun as that was, though, I couldn’t help but notice something weird about her and her friends.  Well, ok, pretty much everything about her and her friends was weird, but this seemed weird even by the standards of a gal who called herself Sky Moonbeam Ravenhawke: When they weren’t channeling crystals or chanting in drum circles to save the rainforest, they all were patting themselves on the back about how much they loved science.

For the benefit of younger readers: If you think Lefties Fucking Love Science(TM) now, you have no idea of the torrid affair they carried on with it back when the USSR was still a going concern.  Karl Marx, of course, pretended that his sub-Hegelian flatulence was the only truly scientific world view, and his disciples have been playing along ever since.  “The facts have a liberal bias,” you’d routinely be informed, by people who spent $200 to have their chakras cleansed by a Navajo shaman once every two months.

I can’t think of a better illustration of what I call (for lack of a better term) the Left’s grammar problem.  Lefties tend to get nouns and verbs mixed up.  “Science,” for instance.  I’m not going to go all Vox Day here and start making up words, but when normal people say “science,” we generally mean it as a verb:

• “Science” is what scientists do; it’s shorthand for “applying the scientific method.”

This is why, when we’re presented with a startling new find from the white coat guys — that the polar ice caps have all melted, say — we ask to see the lab work.  If it’s really science, then we should be able to replicate the experiment ourselves.  Or, at the very least, you should be able to show us the satellite photos….

Which nicely highlights the Left’s notion of “science.”  To them, it’s a noun:

• “Science” is a fixed body of knowledge; upon which “scientists” operate the way theologians work on the Bible.

What “scientists” do in the Left’s world, then, is what normal people call “hermeneutics.” This is why the bizarre phrase “the science is settled!” makes sense to Leftists.  You don’t get to see God’s lab work, after all, and you’re not allowed to make up new Scriptures.  To them, an ordinary person challenging a “scientist” on a point of “science” is like a layman challenging the Pope on a point of theology.

Right and Left really do communicate in different “frames,” as the very very leftwing George Lakoff would have it.

According to him people view the world through the lens of their metaphors, which he thinks provide them with the framework of their thought. Since the 1980s, liberals have allowed conservative metaphors to take over their own metaphoric framework, so that all discussions or arguments about social policy are carried out on conservative terms. Liberals waste their time and effort in arguing from the evidence (conservatives, of course, can have no evidence); they should instead be working to get conservatives to accept a different metaphoric framework.

That’s Theodore Dalrymple giving Lakoff both barrels, and you should definitely read the whole thing, but later.  For now, focus on the word “evidence.”  I love Dalrymple, but he’s actually missing a trick here.  If you accept Lakoff’s ideas, then yes, of course “conservatives…can have no evidence,” because conservatives operate in an entirely different mental world.  “Social policy,” for instance, often means “poverty,” and we use “poverty” like a verb: Poverty is what poor people do.  There are certain decisions and behaviors that land you in poverty.  Change your ways of thinking and acting, and you will no longer be poor.  

For the Left, “poverty” is a noun.  Poor people simply are poor, now and forever.  That’s why the “poverty” statistics never change, even though American “poor” people keel over from heart disease while fiddling around with smartphones.  The “poor” can only be made not-poor through divine fiat — raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, for instance, and “the poor” will become not-poor, because the only difference between “poor” and “not poor” is a buck fifty an hour.  (See also “the rich,” who don’t pay their “fair share.”  President Obama, peace be upon Him, did us a great service there:  “The rich” make $200,000 per year.  $199,999 per year = “middle class,” because…. well, because of that noun/verb problem.  Take a McDonald’s fry guy, raise his salary to $200K, and all of a sudden he’s part of the problem, even though he’s still slinging grease at Mickey D’s).

Of course, “social policy” can also mean “race,” and this is where Our Thing fails to understand normal people almost as badly as the Left does.  To normals, “race” is a verb, too.  Normals think their attitude towards Blacks is: “Pull up your pants, turn your hat around, and stop blasting rap music at 120 decibels every time you drive, and you’d be welcome in our neighborhoods.”  In other words, “Black” means “acting like a thugged-out ghetto banger.”  It’s not racist to want Black people to stop doing that, because we don’t anyone doing that…

Getting the grammar right won’t solve all our problems, but at least we could talk about them productively.

….this is how they get you (autoplay video link).

That video has been making the rounds on our side of the Internet for a while now.  It’s the national meeting of the Democratic Socialists of America, and it’s as sad and hilarious as you’d expect — goofballs calling each other “comrade,” insisting on “points of personal privilege,” and demanding the use of jazz hands in lieu of clapping (no, really) because some people are triggered by the noise.  If these…organisms… are “The Revolution,” then what could we possibly have to worry about?

Lots.  Not to toot my own horn too much, but I’ve written on this before.  Comrade Stalin is an excellent example.  We all know what he did as dictator, but unless you’re a fairly serious student of the Russian Revolution, you probably don’t know that before becoming the vozhd, his primary duty was… paperwork.  Tons and tons and tons of paperwork.

His brief stint as a Red Army commissar was a disaster — he was, as you might expect, aces at having dissidents rounded up and shot, but his few actual military(-ish) decisions were widely blamed for the loss of important cities to the Poles.  Here too, his decisions were all paperwork — in this case, refusing to countersign orders because they didn’t follow proper procedure.  After the Civil War he was the “People’s Commissar for Nationalities,” hardly a glamour post (by contrast, Lenin’s heir presumptive, Leon Trotsky, was in charge of the Red Army… which he created from scratch).  Even Stalin’s participation in the Tiflis Bank Robbery of 1907, the one “direct action” he was involved with, is disputed — his only known role was as an organizer.

In short, the guy was a pen pusher, and very little more than a pen pusher, up to the moment he seized power.

His plan was simple and obvious: Build up an organization by inserting his loyalists into every possible post, while maneuvering to get anyone who opposed him transferred (or shot).  The execution was even simpler: Meetings, meetings, and more meetings. Stalin didn’t seize power; he ground all his rivals down with sheer tedium.  “Stalin” means “man of steel,” but he won by having a cast-iron bladder and a leather ass.

Probably everyone who has worked for a large organization has been in a meeting with one of those people.  She (and these days it’s almost always a woman) has some pet issue that she just will not let go, and so the meeting drags on interminably.  Since her pet issue is invariably petty chick shit — posting an official sign on the break room fridge about labeling your lunch bag or whatever — everyone shrugs and agrees to it, just to get the damn meeting over with.

With me?  Now imagine that scaled up just one notch.  Google up your town’s library board.  Municipal public libraries have Boards of Trustees; those Boards have regularly-scheduled meetings that are open to the public.  Almost nobody in the community knows about this, because nobody with a normal life cares.  After all, who has the time and energy to think about the minutiae of library policy?

And then one day you walk in, and the shelves are nothing but Hillary and Chelsea’s children’s book and A People’s History of the United States. Nothing has been banned.  Everything was done legally, indeed democratically.  It’s just that, when it came time to hire a new assistant librarian, the three people who showed up to the board meeting nominated the blue-haired, nose-ringed, trans-woman with the face tattoos, and nobody objected, because nobody who would’ve objected was there.

Scale that up another notch, and you’ve got the local school system.  I saw this one firsthand.  I grew up in the New New South created by the regional tech boom that started in the late 1970s.  My sleepy little burg on the edge of a slightly bigger sleepy little burg in Yoknapatawpha County transformed, in the space of a decade or two, into a gleaming prefab yuppie paradise on the edge of a bustling metropolis.  Since this was due to a tech boom, though, half the yuppies had names like “Prajneet” and “Kung Pao.”  Those fine folks certainly weren’t going to have their precious kids getting their hands dirty in gym class… but alas, gym was still a requirement in our school district.  So Prajneet and Kung Pao staged a sit-in, and by the time they were done, not only were their kids getting gym class credit for playing in the school orchestra, they were getting academic credit for it, too — at “honors” level, natch.  Who the hell was going to schlep on down to the school board meetings, night after night after night, to object?  The football coach?

Scale that up another notch, and you’ve got the American university system. Hiring one self-proclaimed radical is no big deal, right?  After all, the mission of the university is to encourage the free discussion of ideas etc.  But while the other faculty members had lives and families and hobbies and whatnot, all the radical had was his radicalism.  So when the rest of the faculty didn’t feel like doing the twelve reams of paperwork that some new administration policy required, the radical volunteered…. and hired a few of his buddies to help.

Scale that up another notch….

That’s how they win, comrades.  Anyone who has the patience to sit through a meeting where “points of personal privilege” are invoked, and jazz hands made mandatory, has more free time than you and I will ever have.  They have more patience than all the Fourteen Readers combined.  And they use it, because they’ve got nothing else in their lives.  That’s how you win in a democracy — infiltrate your people into all the low-level positions, and then, when it comes up for a vote, have all your people vote to abolish democracy.

Ask Koba.

If you’ve been anywhere near a college campus in the last 75 years, you know that’s a rhetorical question.

In much the same way we’re instructed to ignore the “Socialist” part of “National Socialist German Workers’ Party,” Our Betters in academia have instructed us to ignore the fact that Stalin believed, with all his heart and soul, that he was a communist.  The catechism is: Stalin was a one-off, a psychopath, a tsar-in-Marxist-clothing who tapped into the Russian soul’s deep, centuries-old yearning to be ruled by a despot.  All that Foundations of Leninism-type stuff Stalin wrote, his authorship of the Party’s official hagiography, all that… it’s all just eyewash, saith the dogma.  That pretty much everything Stalin did makes sense in the light of Marxism/Leninism is just a coinkydink.*

It also helps that the CIA isn’t hiring “Kremlinologists” anymore.  Back in the days, a lot of academic historians worked for the Feds.  The problem, of course, was that the Feds needed those academics to be right, which meant dispensing with the “true Communism has never been tried!” baloney which, then as now, was the standard line in the ivory tower.  Guys like Richard Pipes and Robert Conquest (and gals like Condoleeza Rice) assumed that Soviet leaders were all singing off the Marxist  hymnal, and so got at least in the ballpark with their analyses of Soviet actions.  With the USSR gone, there’s no need for academic historians to test themselves against reality anymore, and so academic Russian history now goes like this:

mumble mumble something EVIL STALIN! mumble mumble something PUTIN STOLE THE ELECTION!!!

All this isn’t just more egghead-bashing, fun as that is.  The point is that ideology is — or, crucially, used to be— a good predictor of behavior.  This was true for analysts as well as actors.  The only people surprised by Hitler’s actions, for instance, were the ideologically enstupidated.  That is to say, guys like Stalin.  The Wehrmacht all but hung big neon signs over their troop movements.  It couldn’t have been otherwise — Operation Barbarossa involved over three million men, not to mention conquering several other countries along the invasion route.  Junior high boys playing Risk have pulled off less obvious maneuvers.** And yet Stalin got caught with his pants down, because the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was the distilled essence of fraternal socialism and any NKVD analyst dumb enough to point out the panzers massing on the borders would swiftly find himself in Siberia.

What happens, though, when there’s no ideology?

It seems badly wrong to say this, but that’s the point we’re at now.  Our PoMo, Cult-Marx Left sure seems to have an ideology:  “Intersectionality,” let’s call it, for convenience.  But when you look at how it plays out in practice, its predictive power is pretty much zero.  Then as now, eggheads hated guys like Pipes and Conquest; “the Hoover Institution,” then as now, was a swear word in academia.  And yet, Pipes and Conquest got it at least in the ballpark most of the time, as we’ve noted, because they took the Soviet leadership’s proclamations of fealty to Marxism/Leninism at face value.  But even if we take, say, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at her word, that puts us…. where, exactly?

As far as I can tell, “intersectionality” boils down to: Hate Whitey.  Given the choice, the Intersectional will do whatever does the most damage to White people, especially White males.  However, and crucially, the predictive power of that observation is fading fast.  In majority-minority America — which we have certainly achieved electorally, if not quite yet demographically — all the fights that matter are going to be Intersectional civil wars.  Worse, several important parts of the Intersectional coalition utterly depend on the continued existence of Whitey as an important socio-cultural force.  “African-Americans,” for instance, construct their entire worldview around being not-White.  It’s so obvious that even Black people joke about it — if we ceded the entire American South to the Blacks as slavery reparations, the first thing Black folks would do, according to Blacks themselves, would be: Move North.

Without us, there is no them.  Most importantly: This seems to be true of the Intersectional as a whole.  What the hell are they going to do when they win?

That’s what makes people like AOC so terrifying.  Marxism is a bone-stupid, anti-human creed, but at least it’s consistent.  “Intersectionality,” by contrast, is nothing more than the momentary whims of Basic College Girls…..

*Which of course should raise the fascinating question of whether Lenin was a communist… but you’ll never hear that one discussed.  There are very few world-historical figures with longer shadows than V.I. Lenin, yet he’s the forgotten man of 20th century history.  If you’re one of those folks who read the footnotes before the rest of the article, spoiler alert: Yes, Lenin was unquestionably a communist, which is why nobody wants to talk about him.  By heaping the blame for all the awful shit the Soviets did onto Stalin, the cultural Marxists in the ivory tower can pretend that famines, gulags, censorship, torture, secret police, and all the rest of it are bugs, not features, of Leftism in power.  In reality, of course, Lenin did all that and then some — read any halfway honest account of the Red/White Civil War.  But, of course, all those atrocities were just exigencies of wartime, comrade, and had nothing to do with Marxism….

**In my hilarious alternate-history version of academia, there are a zillion books asking the question “Was Hitler really a Nazi?”  The only reason “Nazi” is a swear word and “Communist” is still respectable, of course, is that the Reds won the war.  Had Germany won, Alfred Rosenberg’s ooga-booga sub-Heglian mystical bullshit would be all the rage among the “I fucking love science” crowd, while Karl Marx’s ooga-booga sub-Heglian mystical bullshit — Lysenkoism, anyone? — would be derided for the hateful nonsense it is.

Since I haven’t posted in a while, a placeholder.

Y’all are doubtless familiar with “Hanlon’s Razor:”

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

A while back I wrote that this needs an update, and being a humble guy, I named it the “Severian Corollary:”

There’s a level of stupidity so profound, you actually hope it’s malice.

That’s where we’re at with this (Ace of Spades link).  It seems as if the FBI’s Andrew McCabe and a high-ranking member of MI-5 (British counterintelligence) actually believe this “Russiagate” shit that they themselves concocted.

These people selectively leak to the media so that the media will report a false impression of the contours of reality, and then, incredibly, they believe the false impression of reality that they know they themselves helped conjure up from ideology, fantasy, and lies.

When President Obama famously proclaimed he believed his own bullshit, we took that as either a joke or a taunt, depending on how we ourselves felt about Obama’s bullshit.  But he wasn’t kidding, and here’s the proof.  What would Dunning and Kruger have to say about people who are dumb enough to believe fantasias on their own bullshit, peddled by glorified stenographers?

Our leaders are terrifyingly stupid.  I’m starting to think that all our worries are groundless, comrades.  When the Thought Police finally come for us, just tell them we live at 123 Fake Street, Springfield USA.  They’ll never catch us.

In one of his great essays, Orwell describes a joke in the satirical magazine Punch, making fun of pretentious wannabe-littérateurs (see what I did there?).  The pompous young man announces to his aunt that he’s going to be a writer.  The aunt asks what he’s going to write about.  The dork replies, “My dear, one doesn’t write about anything; one simply writes.”

Blogging in a nutshell, amirite?

But bloggers don’t get paid, and even if they do, it’s probably nowhere near commensurate with the effort.  For instance, here’s the Z Man’s advice to aspiring bloggers:

As far as material, post something every day, even if it is just a couple of paragraphs. That way, you get better and you get into the habit of running a blog. If after a few months it is no longer fun, you’re out a hundred bucks and you learned something about yourself.

Left implied is the actual time spent cranking out a few paragraphs.  You’ll have to take my word for this, but when I’m on my game I’m a blazing-fast writer (and even when I’m off, I’m pretty speedy).  Not quite up to Henry Morton Stanley standards — he apparently crashed out one of his umpteen-hundred-page travel books in something like three weeks — but pretty fast nonetheless.  Still, I bet my “average” blog post — tossed off with few or no links (meaning little to no research), no revisions, bare-bones on-the-fly editing, etc. — takes between 30 minutes and an hour.  Anything that takes sustained work — research, redrafting — can take all afternoon.  A quick search on “how much do contract computer programmers make?” comes back with a range between $35 and $400 an hour.  Assuming my stuff is low- but not bottom-end (and that I’ve taken the advice of Our now-unemployed Betters in journalism and learned to code), a day’s post costs me something between $50 and $250.

Obviously I don’t actually get paid squat, and there’s no legitimate comparison between blog posts and contract code, but the point is, “writing” is one of those “prestige-only” occupations.  Even those writers who are good enough to make a living solely off their authorial voice (the H-list, according to D-Lister Larry Correia’s hilarious official rankings) are so few and far between that it’s just statistical noise – you undoubtedly have a better chance of meeting a professional athlete than you do a professional writer.  Even if you make a buck or two off blog ads, or sell a novel or three on Amazon, writing is just a hobby, for 99.9998% of the people who do it.  When you take all the money your self-published novel made on Amazon and divide it by the umpteen hours you spent writing it, you get the kind of wage college kids stage protests about (be sure to pick up your authentic logo gear at the bookstore!).

Education works like that, too.  Nobody scoffs at teachers’ claims of being overworked and underpaid more than I do, but they’ve got a point for all that.  Teachers work iceberg-style — the work you actually get paid for is about 20% of the work you actually do.  It’s true no matter where you are on the academic food chain.  We joke that teaching is a 24/7 job — 24 hours a week, 7 months a year — but even the tenured work hard.  As I’ve tried to show, above, even those incomprehensible “gender studies” gibberish books represent a significant time investment.  Throw in committee meetings, all the other “university service” bullshit, and the umpteen zillion voluntary-yet-mandatory things the tenured are required to do, and if you’re not exactly at “Indonesian child laborer” wage levels, your plumber still out-earns you by several orders of magnitude.

Why do it, then?  Well, consider medicine.  Medicine is the ultimate iceberg profession.  Now, I’m not saying docs aren’t well-paid; of course they are.  What I am saying, though, is that if a machinist were capable of working 120-hour weeks — as medical residents routinely do — they’d be bringing in way more than doctors.  And those 120 hours are the hours actually in the hospital; they don’t get paid for writing notes, reviewing charts, studying for exams, and the million other things they do.  Dating a medical resident was, in fact, one of the great eye-opening experiences of my life.  When we finally did manage to get together, our “dates” usually consisted of a brief talk over takeout Chinese before she fell asleep on my couch.

Docs don’t do it for the money, in other words.  They do it to be doctors, in the same way professors do it to be professors, and writers do it to be writers.  I know lots of doctors and professors, and none of them — not one — has ever wanted to be anything else.  They’d still do it for half the pay.

This is a key weakness for attacking the Left.

As C.S. Lewis said, the Devil can’t stand to be mocked.  That’s no longer true in this brave new social media world — mocking a Millennial means “ur h8in,” which means you’re thinking about her more than she’s thinking about you, which means she wins — so let’s modify it: The Devil can’t stand to be ignored.  Ace of Spades — no mean Twitter addict himself — points out all the time that the Jonah Goldbergs and David Frenches of the world pretty much live on Twitter.  This is because they know all the stuff I’ve written above is true.

Whatever they get paid, it’s nowhere near a “living wage” for the amount of work they do, if you include “basically living on Twitter” as work.  Which it is, of course, since opportunity cost is a thing and living the Twitter life basically precludes doing anything else.  To this type of person, “I have 100,000 Twitter followers!” isn’t a childish boast; it’s an existential claim.  Deny them that, and they are literally nothing.

It’s crucial that we understand the difference.  Oscar Wilde nailed these goobers’ psychology over 100 years ago: “There’s no such thing as bad publicity.”  Goldberg et al would rather be praised than mocked, of course, but: Mockery serves the exact same psychological function.  In a very real sense, these people are terrified they’re NPCs — they’re not real, because they’ve dedicated their lives not to doing something, but to being something… and that “something” rests entirely on external attention.  That’s why they’ll write anything, say anything, do anything, so long as they can keep telling themselves they’re “writers.”

Cut that off, and they’ll self-immolate.  It must be a horrible way to “live.”

As these are our rulers, we should get to know them.  Disclaimers, if you must: I’m retired, so I’m not entirely up on the new trends.  But do you really need to ask if things have gotten better or worse since then?

You don’t need to bother with the link.  It’s from a site called “The Odyssey Online,” which apparently is a place where Millennial girls can write about the only thing that matters: their very own special selves.  How it has not collapsed into a supermassive singularity of solipsism is a problem I leave for the theoretical physicists among the Fourteen Readers.  The list includes stuff like “avocados” and “ripped jeans” and “Post Malone” (apparently a singer).  Fair warning: If you click, expect to lose a few brain cells.

The first thing to note is that such a list exists at all.  I (and, I strongly suspect, the people who coined the phrase) intend the word “basic” as an insult — a synonym for “standard-issue,” i.e. “conformist,” i.e. “boring.”  Basic college girls use it with pride.  Though they are all special and unique snowflakes, they are also out-and-proud trend-surfing herd animals.  Unraveling that contradiction is above my pay grade, but I have a guess that I think gets us in the ballpark:

Those of us on the back nine of our lives remember high school as a process of differential diagnosis.  You try on a certain set of social roles to see which, if any, fit.  You don’t go out for the baseball team because it’s the first step to making the Majors.  Really, you might not even like playing baseball all that much.  You go out for the baseball team because you want to be a Jock.  If you make the team, you’re a Jock for a while, leading the Jock life and learning its lessons.  If you don’t make the team, you go find something else — the Debate Club, heavy metal music, whatever — and learn the lessons those lifestyles teach.

You didn’t understand this back then, of course, but your parents did, and — crucially — your teachers did.  If you wanted to be a Metalhead this semester, they’d treat you like a Metalhead, complete with the “Why are you wasting your potential (and ruining your ears) with that godawful noise?”  They’d make a show of having a Very Serious Conversation with you about the dangers of drugs and satanism…. knowing full well that you weren’t on drugs, weren’t sacrificing virgins to Moloch (if for no other reason than you didn’t actually know any girls), and would, in fact, come back as a clean-scrubbed Preppie after summer break your junior year.

The key word in “adolescent rebellion,” after all, is adolescent.  All of that stuff was just practice.  If it proceeded in the normal way, what going through all the permutations of high school identity taught you was:

• you’re a fairly normal person; and
• that’s ok.

In other words, you are not a collection of externals — clothes, music, hairstyles.  You’re you.  The externals can change, fairly radically — remember that one summer you broke your nose trying to be a skater? — but there’s a core in there that’s you.  Which is great, because it means that you are just person who takes customer service calls in a cubicle farm to pay the bills; they’re not going to put “Here lies Bill, a Customer Service Representative” on your tombstone.

Self-esteem culture changes all that.  What’s the point of being a Metalhead these days?  At best, you’ll get a gold sticker and a participation trophy like everyone else.  At worst, you’ll get diagnosed with some bullshit “learning disorder” and they’ll zombie you out on powerful prescription psychotropics.  The only lesson this teaches is: Come to the attention of the authorities at your peril.

That’s the effect on guys, at any rate.  Bad as that is, it’s far worse on girls.  Guys establish social hierarchy through conflict; when they can’t compete with each other, they drop out and embrace the Ritalin Zombie lifestyle of video games and onanism.  Girls compete through approval-seeking, which, since nowadays nobody’s different from anybody and everyone’s the best at everything, is easily channeled into conspicuous consumption.  Hence all the items on that list.

For the Basic College Girl, then, conformism is a virtue.  In fact, it’s the highest virtue — the “winner” is the one who does nothing, says nothing, thinks nothing but that which gets upvoted on social media….

….or downvoted on social media, as the case may be.  Self-esteem culture has completely bypassed the normal feedback loops.  Back in the days of meatspace-only communication, strong signals of disapproval from your peers were, 99 times out of 100, clear indicators that you’re doing it wrong.  If the kids are making fun of your personal hygiene, then unless your name really is “Dick Smelley,” you need to take a long hard look at your showering habits.  Kids can be horribly cruel, but most of the time they’re not wrong.  And yes, bullying can (and often did) go overboard, but generally “stop being such a dork!” is great life advice, and the process of figuring out just what you’re doing that’s so dorky, and how to stop it, is crucial for one’s social development.

Social media changes all that.  Anyone who has ever written a blog post — really, anyone who has ever made a substantive comment on a blog post — has had the experience of some drive-by troll shitting on you.  As functional adults who grew up in meatspace we recognize this for what it is, and ignore it.  But imagine that you hadn’t grown up in meatspace.  What if you mistake this for substantive criticism?  As it’s not psychologically sustainable to take it that way for long, you do what the Basic College Girl does: You call the commenter a “h8r” and, crucially, you consider having “h8rs” as confirmation that whatever you’re doing is right.  After all, they couldn’t “h8” if they weren’t thinking about you.

Thus “approval-seeking,” a.k.a. chick competition, curdles into an attitude where you actively seek out “h8rs” to annoy.

This is where Normals grossly underestimate women like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.  I’m personally terrified of AOC, because she is the embodiment of the Basic College Girl.  Basic College Girls can’t be bargained with, they can’t be reasoned with, and the reason for both is: Both “bargaining” and “reasoning” imply that you think she’s doing something wrong, which is “h8.”  And since “ur h8in,” that means you’re thinking about her more than she’s thinking about you, which means she’s validated, which means she wins.  Which means she’s not only going to keep on doing what she’s doing, but will crank it up past 11, in order get more h8, to attract more h8rz.

This is our future.  Since the only way to deal with a Basic College Girl is to say “no” — all the time, to everything, unconditionally — and we as a society have lost the ability to do that, we’re screwed.  Get to know your new mistress.  Xzhyr name is Becky, and she’s everywhere.

Here’s a surprising report: President Trump’s support is actually rising after his attack on “The Squad.”

The rise in support isn’t the surprising part.  The surprising part is that the Media still find this surprising.

Not to toot my own horn too much here, but I’ve been writing about this since 2015 (seriously – check the archives!).  “Make America Great Again” was the Trump campaign’s official slogan, but unofficially — and much, much more effectively — it was: “Fuck the Media.”  The 2016 election is known far and wide as “The Great Fuck You,” but somehow, some way, almost everyone still fails to grasp that it wasn’t the Democrats who got told to fuck off.  It wasn’t even the “Progressives.”  It was The Media.  The Great Fuck You was aimed entirely at the Media.

The reason is, back in 1968 the Media convinced themselves they held the whip.  Between the “Chicago Police Riot” (in reality a bunch of SDS goons finally goading the cops into cracking down) and the Tet Offensive (in reality, a communist catastrophe that all but destroyed the Viet Cong as a fighting force), the Media convinced themselves they truly were the shapers of the nation’s hearts and minds.  From then on out, the Media assumed their primary job was not to report the news, but to instruct us how to feel about the news.  They anointed themselves as a secular priesthood, and from that moment forward, people went into “journalism” specifically to change the world.

That suited the Democrats’ short-term interests just fine.  Then as now, the Democrats were a bunch of fellow-traveling wannabe-totalitarians.  The difference, though, is that in 1968 grownups were still in charge of the party.  Being intimately familiar with the concept of “useful idiots,” the grownup Dems were happy to encourage the journo-kids’ delusions of grandeur.  The kids might not have been able to stir up enough shit to get Hubert Humphrey elected — that would’ve been a tough sell for Josef Goebbels — but they could make life hot for Richard Nixon.  In other words, the Democrats thought they held the whip.

1972 should’ve been a wakeup call, but to be fair, all the campaign wonks were still reeling from The Great Magic Party Switch of 1964.  Both halves of the failed Democratic ticket from 1968 ran in the 1972 primaries, and so did George Wallace (who actually won more primaries than either Humphrey or Muskie — 6 to 5 and 4, respectively).  Which left George McGovern, a goofy hippie from a nothing state who was so bad at politics that he got outflanked as a peacenik by Richard Nixon, the man who was right at that moment actually running the goddamn war.  How did he ever end up at the head of a major party ticket?  Well, here’s Wiki:

During his primary victories, McGovern used an approach that stressed grassroots-level organization while bypassing conventional campaign techniques and traditional party power centers.  He capitalized on support from antiwar activists and reform liberals; thousands of students engaged in door-to-door campaigning for him.  He benefited by the eight primaries he won being those the press focused on the most…

Uh huh.  Emphasis mine, but it doesn’t really need emphasizing.  Especially when you add in this:

McGovern ran on a platform that advocated withdrawal from the Vietnam War in exchange for the return of American prisoners of war and amnesty for draft evaders who had left the country.  McGovern’s platform also included an across-the-board 37-percent reduction in defense spending over three years.  He proposed a “demogrant” program that would give a $1,000 payment to every citizen in America.  Based around existing ideas such as the negative income tax and intended to replace the welfare bureaucracy and complicated maze of existing public-assistance programs, it nonetheless garnered considerable derision as a poorly thought-out “liberal giveaway” and was dropped from the platform in August.

Or, in short, “amnesty, abortion, and acid,” a Donald Trump-level linguistic killshot if ever there was one.

The point isn’t that McGovern was a goofy hippie.  The point is that McGovern was The Media’s fair-haired boy.  Hubert Humphrey was no one’s idea of a steely-eyed realist, but he was a grown-up.  When he attacked McGovern as too radical during their primary debates, he was expressing America’s frustration with bratty, coddled, know-nothing college kids and their bong-addled, patchouli-soaked nonsense.  But since it was the aforesaid spoiled, stoned college kids who wrote the election coverage….

Viewed from this perspective, Democratic Party politics up to now can be seen as the increasingly desperate attempts of the few remaining grownups to fend off The Media’s increasingly frantic grabs for the whip.  Take a gander at these goofballs from 1976.  Remember the “Scoop Jackson Democrats” all the National Review types kept gushing about when they needed some Democratic cover for W’s imperial misadventures?  “Scoop” Jackson was a real guy, and probably the only adult in the room in 1976.  Jimmy Carter, the eventual nominee, could at least fake being a serious, mature human being when he wasn’t being chased by enraged, swimming bunnies.  The Jerry Brown of 1976 is the very same Jerry Brown who is putting the finishing touches on the shitholization of California here in 2019, and guess who The Media just loooooooved back in the ’76 primaries?

See also: Every other election through 2016.  Sometimes The Media and the Party moved in tandem — e.g. Bill Clinton  — but more often it played out like 1988, when the Party had to drag a bland nonentity (Mike Dukakis) over the finish line in the face of a Media darling (Jesse Jackson).  This dynamic also explains the weird “enthusiasm gap” of Democratic voters starting in 2000 — nobody actually liked Al Gore or John Kerry, but since W. made The Media lose their tiny little minds, they went all-in on painting those two human toothaches as The Saviors of Mankind.   We’ve covered 2008 before, and that’s where the split between Party and Media really became obvious — the Party desperately wanted the only “adult” (by 21st century Democratic Party standards) in the room to be the nominee, but The Media wouldn’t hear of it.  It seemed as though the struggle for the whip hand was finally over…

But then Donald Trump happened, as my students would’ve written.  Though it’s only a few years in the past, we’ve already forgotten just how much The Media loved Bernie Sanders when the Republican nomination was still in doubt.  Trump, of course, made The Media lose their shit so egregiously that what they did to W. looked like the happy ending to an Oriental massage, but virtually nobody was cheerleading for Hillary qua Hillary.  It took the specter of The Donald as president to get them all on the same page.

Which brings us to now.  The Democratic Party can read a poli-sci textbook.  They know how difficult it is to beat an incumbent president in a good economy.  Hell, it’s almost impossible to beat an incumbent president in a bad economy — see 2004 and 2012.  It takes a major systemic shock to turf out an incumbent in the modern era — a catastrophe on the magnitude of a serious third party challenge (Ross Perot in ’92), or the incumbent being Jimmy Carter.  The poli-sci textbooks say that the Dems’ only hope is to run the closest thing to the Antimatter Donald Trump they can find.  That is to say:  the blandest, SWPL-iest Goodwhite on their roster.

Alas for them, The Media will be having none of that.  Trump somehow triggers them even more than he did in 2016 — don’t ask me how; it violates several important laws of thermodynamics — so they’re going all-in on goofballs like AOC and her “Squad.”  The Media loves “the Squad,” and since The Media have convinced themselves that theirs is the whip hand, they’re ordering us to love “the Squad” too.  To which Trump replies with a version of “lol get fucked,” and since “you’re free to leave this country if you hate it so much” seems forehead-slappingly obvious to anyone without a journalism degree, Trump’s poll numbers rise.  Which prompts another stern lecture from The Media, which receives another “lol get fucked,” and around and around and around we go…..

But here’s the thing: The battle for the whip is a battle royale.  There are more than just two combatants.  The Party still thinks it’s in charge.  The Media, with 2008, 2012, and 2016 in its pocket, think they’re in charge.  Nobody bothered to ask “the Squad,” though, and that’s the truly terrifying thing: “The Squad” thinks they’re in charge, and they might actually be right.

We’ve already got Congress voting to condemn Trump’s tweets.  Set aside how brain-bogglingly infantile that is — and how petty and retarded it appears to the American public.  Consider just how badly Nancy Pelosi et al, aka The Party, had to screw up to find themselves in this situation.  Then consider that some idiot named Al Green (warning: autoplay video), riding “The Squad’s” coattails, has just filed a motion to impeach Trump, which will require a floor vote.  It doesn’t matter which way that vote goes.  If it happens at all — and given the “condemn the tweets” vote, Pelosi may not have the juice left to stop it — that’s pretty much game over.  There are few faster ways to get to an actual shooting civil war than by impeaching Trump, because no matter how it goes, someone goes to the gun….

…with the full, active connivance of “The Squad.”  Do you think those fools are going to somehow keep their mouths shut during impeachment?  Will theirs be the voices of moderation, urging us to respect the Constitutional processes, however they turn out?

Or will they be inciting people to flip cars and throw molotovs in the street?  People who suddenly find themselves holding the whip in their hands aren’t known for their restraint.

We talk a lot about the “John Brown Moment” around here.  Here it is, for the record:

In the run-up to the Civil War, lots of Americans thought the country was in thrall to what they called the “slave power conspiracy.”  There was some truth to this, in that thanks to equal representation in the Senate, slaveholders held a perpetual veto — since only vehement defenders of slavery would ever be sent to the Senate by Southern states (senators being appointed, not elected, in those days), no law affecting the “peculiar institution” would ever be passed.  As slavery was an all-encompassing socioeconomic system, though, virtually nothing the government did failed to affect it in some way.  The partisan politics of the 1850s were legendarily nasty, in large part because of this Southern-imposed gridlock.

But the “slave power conspiracy” was a misnomer.  Oh, the Southern senators all voted together, but that’s not a conspiracy.  “Conspiracy” implies an end, a goal, and the slave power simply didn’t have one.  Their actions were purely negative, and if that meant absolutely nothing got done, well, so be it.  They were deeply skeptical of federal power anyway; if vetoing anything and everything that might somehow affect slavery meant that the nation would simply drift along, directionless, that suited them just fine.

But there was another conspiracy afoot in the 1850s: The abolition conspiracy.  You don’t hear about this one in high school history because the victors write the textbooks, but it was quite real.  And this one really was a conspiracy, in that they had a clear goal: The end of chattel slavery.  And it was a conspiracy in a more fundamental sense, in that it was illegal.  The so-called “slave power conspiracy” was obstructionist to the bone, but it’s perfectly legal for legislators to vote against proposed legislation.  It’s not legal to advocate armed insurrection but that’s what the abolitionists did.

On October 16, 1859, a lunatic abolitionist named John Brown led a partisan band in an attack on the Federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia.  He wanted to distribute the stolen guns to local slaves, thus sparking a race war.  We know this because Brown was captured alive, and the great state of Virginia put him on trial, as they were legally required to do.  Being a fanatic, and knowing that he was a dead man already, Brown took the opportunity to advertise his cause to the world….

At which point it became obvious that not only did Brown have the financial backing of several prominent Northerners, but he had the moral backing of a large segment of the Northern population.  Brown became a martyr, literally — he was frequently compared to Jesus Christ in Northern periodicals.  The important thing to note is this: Brown was captured in armed insurrection against the United States, and lots of the country was ok with it.  This man simply decided that the legal processes could never result in the outcome he deemed morally necessary, so he took the law into his own hands — with the active connivance of prominent Northern financiers and intellectuals, and the avid approval of many Northern citizens.

Remember that, and Southern belligerency makes a whole lot more sense.  The North was obviously ready to go to the gun in 1861, because they’d already gone to the gun in 1859.  The “John Brown Moment,” then, is the point at which violence becomes inevitable, because one significant, influential segment of the country not only passively tolerates it, but actively cheers it.

Are we there yet?  Hard to say, but recall that just this weekend, an “Antifa” got himself killed trying to firebomb an ICE installation.  How many of our fellow Americans even know about this?  Of those, how many approve?

I don’t know, but I guarantee you, something like this will happen again.  It has to, because there’s only one way to deal with a John Brown that doesn’t involve lots of future bloodshed — immediate, brutal reprisal, and repudiation by the entire political, cultural, and social elite.  That obviously didn’t happen this weekend.  Indeed, how many of our “elite” were silently cheering this guy on?  How many of them would have, had they known about it?  How many of them will cheer on the next guy, who does something bigger?

There’s no coming back from a John Brown Moment, because that’s when a significant fraction of the people who matter give up on the very idea of peaceful grievance resolution.  I don’t know who our John Brown is (or will be), but he’s coming — of that, there’s no doubt whatsoever.