Sadly, word comes that the Negro Bitching Association has decided, after much soul-searching, to continue with their playoffs. I was hoping they’d stick to their guns — you know, like Kyle Rittenhouse did — and maybe, if we were really lucky, they’d take Major League Bitches and the Negro Felon League with them in solidarity. Alas, it’s not to be.

You won’t see this reported in the Media, of course, but it seems to be common knowledge among basketball fans that the reason Saint LeBron et al caved was: since viewership is already down something like 50%, they were told they’d lose something like a quarter of their pay if they didn’t get out there and finish for the cameras. All we can hope for now is that it was made clear to them that, since

• a) China accounts for some huge percentage of their revenue, and
• b) the Chinese are the most racist people on earth, who
• c) would’ve probably given the Kenosha cops a medal for dusting Jacob Blake if they ran the place; therefore
• d) you’d best just be thankful Big Daddy Xi didn’t make you lick his balls, too, because you greedy little hoes would’ve done it.*

I guess when it comes to a hard choice between “standing up for social justice” and “buying another Bentley for all the homies in your posse,” well, Bentley dealers need some social justice too. I sure hope those things hang on to their resale value.

Such is principle in the Current Year, I guess. But there’s still hope, kameraden. As we’ve noted before, the Left is badly overplaying their hand by going after sports. In fact, it’s worse than that for them, as “the Left” really has nothing do with much of anything anymore. The dogs have slipped the leash and, being stupid, are busy doing stupid-dog things like threatening to boycott themselves.

Yeah, they really did that.

Either way that plays out is a massive own-goal; nobody within shouting distance of sanity would’ve let them even make the threat if it were possible to prevent it. But the threat was made, ergo, nobody’s in control. As with the universities — who, to be fair, make the Negro Bitching Association look like rocket scientists — they’re willing to go down with the ship for The Cause, whatever “The Cause” happens to be this week. Here again, they’re so dumb or ideologically enstupidated (a distinction without a difference) that it all seems to have blended together in their tiny little minds — we shall only have racial harmony when we’ve eliminated COVID, or maybe it’s vice versa, but either way we’re so mad we’re going to hop up and down on this land mine until we get what we want.

So, you know, not the optimal outcome — that would be the end of sportsball, professional and collegiate, as we know it — but still not too shabby. At least it shows that even grossly overpaid, over-privileged POCs can figure out their own best interests when the consequences of not figuring it out are dire enough.

*As far as I’m concerned, I’m almost to the point of cheering for our liberation by the Red Chinese. It’ll suck, sure, but I can’t describe the joy I’d feel, watching multi-gazillionaires who bitch about “systemic racism” trying to pull that shit on the Han, whose book report on King Leopold’s Ghost reads “a decent start; needs improvement.”

You’ll have to trust me on this, I guess, but way back in Rotten Chestnuts’ early days I had a post about “moonwalking.” This was my attempt at… meme generation, I guess, although it was really just shorthand for some things we were dealing with at the time (anyone who came over from House of Eratosthenes remembers the Cuttlefish infestation). “Motte and Bailey” seems to have caught on as a way to describe this Leftist rhetorical tactic, so you may have seen it described that way, but even if not you know the kind of thing I’m talking about:

From the totally 100% true scientific fact that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, Lefty will, if you let xhyzer, insist on the whole “Green New Deal” schmear. If you point out all the problems with the GND, though, and Lefty feels like xhzyr is losing the argument, xzhe scuttles back to “carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas!!,” then calls you a “science denier” — as if all the flaws you pointed out with the Green New Deal only exist if you deny, as no literate person could, that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas.  It’s such a bizarrely stylized gesture — didja really think we didn’t notice, Snowflake? — that it looks like a dance move. Hence, moonwalking.

You see it pretty much every time the Left confronts reality. It’s been SOP in academia for decades, so much so that they’ve perfected the trick of slipping “just” in and out of their conversation unconsciously. So, from the 100% true historical fact that “real men” acted differently in Medieval Saxony than they do on campus, eggheads assert that — all together now — “gender is just a social construction.” Meaning, of course, that there no no differences between the sexes, absolutely none, that aren’t attributable to “the Patriarchy.” But when you call them on it — threatening to cut off their funding for teaching absurdities, say, or simply by telling them to move that goddamn couch their own selves — the word “just” mysteriously disappears from their vocabulary. Then they’re just pointing out a historical commonplace, and why do you hate science etc.

Sh’mon! Hee hee!!

Given their total control of  the culture, the Left have made more money off moonwalking in just the last decade, I’d imagine, than Mr. Jackson made in his entire career. But it’s not perfect. Sometimes xzhey have to disguise a tactical retreat. Liberals can never, ever be wrong of course — because they are Smart — but they can hold their tongues for a while if they’re sufficiently motivated.

Take “gun control,” for instance. The Left feels that no one should be armed but the State. But that’s a problem, because even if you eliminate all the non-Maoists from government, the police still seem to have this habit of shooting innocent Joggers for, like, no reason when they, the Joggers, are just minding their own business after AP Calculus on their way to their piano recitals. Worse yet, those innocent Joggers might actually… but no, for decency’s sake let’s leave the Left weeping in their shame closet, and just note that lots of #woke persyns are suddenly thinking they might actually need to defend themselves from… well, from something. What to do, when they can’t instantly buy a bazooka because of their own stupid laws?

Obviously Lefties aren’t going to go back and rethink all their shrieking about “gun control.” Because that would entail that they were wrong about something, and as we all know, Smart people can never ever ever be wrong. So they’ll just…kinda… shut up about it for a while. Oh, you know, Joe Biden still has to say something about “gun control,” but you’ll have to go pretty deep into the platform to find it — see here, for instance, where you have to go into the drop-down menu, and even there all you’ll see is bromides like “voluntary buybacks” and “universal background checks.” If he wins, God forbid, gun-grabbing will be right back at the top of the agenda, because then the State can roll in the tanks on those uppity Negroes and make Minneapolis great for organic shade grown free trade tofu again.* But until then, they’ll just quietly drop the subject and hope you won’t notice… and, because they control Newsywood, you won’t.

All of which leads to the last, and most fascinatingly terrifying scenario: What happens when they have to bail out on one of the Dogmas of the Faith?

Like with COVID, for instance.

If you live in the Twitter/ivory tower bubble — I truly don’t think there’s a difference anymore — you can still, just barely, convince yourself that the pandemic is raging and the deadcarts are rolling down suburban streets. Out in the real world, though, even the dullest of dullards are starting to realize it’s all a big nothingburger, and always has been. The Left are willing to destroy such bastions of their power as the academic-industrial complex (that number is 4 billion, with a B… and that’s from May) in order to keep the faith…

…but even that won’t propitiate the only god they truly fear: Mockery.

We know Smart people can never ever ever ever be wrong… but when it comes to COVID these Smart people look like a bunch of fucking idiots, and the longer this goes on, the worse they look. Moonwalking won’t save them, since “OMG we’re all gonna DIE!!!!!!!” was their opening bid. Nor will tactical silence, gun control-style, thanks to those stupid fucking masks. Maybe people won’t notice that you’re suddenly dead quiet about gun control, but everyone can see you’re no longer wearing the Birkenstock Burqa.

What to do? As I’ve suggested before, Smart people can’t be wrong, but they can be fooled, so long as the fooling also allows them to pat themselves on the back. Call it “More in sadness than in anger,” and the classic example was the 2004 election — Liberals just cared too much to realize what raging idiots you people really are. But how’s that going to work here?

I dunno, but it sure looks like they’re setting up some fall guys. If I were Dr. Fauci, I’d make sure my pension was fully vested… hell, if I were him, I’d have a jet smoking on the runway in the early dawn hours of November 4, ready to spirit me away to a hidden hideout in a country with no extradition treaty. Because COVID’s over after the election no matter how it goes, and if Trump wins, the mob of kind caring Liberals might well rip him limb from limb.

*What, seriously, y’all think they actually care about Black lives? Hahahaha! You guys are useful tools to them at the best of times; they’ll squash you like lice if they ever get power again. For your own good, of course, because they care.

Because we all need some culture in our lives. No other reason. None at all.

THE WRATH OF THE AWAKENED SAXON
by Rudyard Kipling

It was not part of their blood,
It came to them very late,
With long arrears to make good,
When the Saxon began to hate.

They were not easily moved,
They were icy — willing to wait
Till every count should be proved,
Ere the Saxon began to hate.

Their voices were even and low.
Their eyes were level and straight.
There was neither sign nor show
When the Saxon began to hate.

It was not preached to the crowd.
It was not taught by the state.
No man spoke it aloud
When the Saxon began to hate.

It was not suddently bred.
It will not swiftly abate.
Through the chilled years ahead,
When Time shall count from the date
That the Saxon began to hate.

“This destiny does not tire, nor can it be broken, and its mantle of
strength descends upon those in its service.” – Francis Parker Yockey,
IMPERIUM

We’ve all been wondering for some… this is probably it. This is our John Brown Kyle Rittenhouse moment.

I see the citizens of Kenosha have started opening fire.

That’s what it’s going to come to, nationwide.

Folks who fancy themselves cynics like to say that the Powers That Be don’t want the riots stopped — they’re SJW True Believers, and nothing gets their thighs moister, faster, than a good race riot. But look, y’all: nobody’s that stupid. Not even a tertiary-educated ovulating White Democrat from a gated community. They like being in charge, and even they have finally figured out that if this goes on much longer, there won’t be anything left for them to be in charge of — see the recent, widely-reported mass exoduses from California, New York City, Minneapolis, etc.

No, the truth is much more sordid than that. They know that eventually, someone’s going to start shooting. They’re just trying to make sure their name isn’t on it.

The only reason stuff is still going on in Portland is because the Portland PTB have made it clear that the cops are powerless. Whether they’ve been all-but-ordered to stand down, or have concluded that they can’t maintain order, is largely irrelevant. Portland cops must all be sure, down to the marrow of their bones, that the PTB will throw them to the wolves if they use deadly force, and since deadly force is now the only thing that’s gonna work, that leaves the National Guard…

…and that’s where it gets really interesting. City mayors are desperately trying to pass the buck up the chain, but the governors, being rat bastard SJW Democrats (I honestly can’t count all the ways that’s redundant), have no more courage than their mayors. From their perspective, it’s an insoluble dilemma. They can’t authorize deadly force… but deadly force is literally what the National Guard is for. Like all Leftists, the governors of Wisconsin, Oregon, Washington, etc. are stuck in a time warp. They’re the truly dangerous types we’ve discussed ad nauseam here — the ones who are certain they would’ve made truly excellent hippies, if only they hadn’t been in fifth grade in the Summer of Love.* To them, “calling out the National Guard” will always and forever equal “Kent State.”

Their nightmare scenario is “Crispus Attucks vs. the Nuremberg Defense.” Given that most readers here are on life’s back nine, y’all might not recall that Crispus Attucks was one of the people killed in the 1770 Boston Massacre. He was Black, which makes “Crispus Attucks” the only name people under 40 know from the American Revolution, but whatever, I digress, the point is: if when the National Guard is forced to open fire, chances are good they’re going to hit a Negro. At which point the howling idiot SJW governor is going to try to throw the on-the-spot commander to the wolves… and the commander, natch, is going to pull the Nuremberg Defense: “I was just following your orders, Governor Moonbeam.”

[Let’s leave aside for the moment  the fact — irrelevant to us, but crucial to the governors — that the National Guard, being a modern American institution, is itself full of ferals, fugs, and other assorted freakazoids. The officer on the spot is likely to be some 5’2″, 200lb. lesbian cosplaying as a panzer comanderette. If in the course of burning down a record store one of the rioters scratches an Indigo Girls CD, she’ll probably call in an airstrike].

What they’re really hoping for, of course, is that the Bad Orange Fascist will roll in the tanks. Which impulse — credit where it’s due — he has so far manfully resisted, and seeing as how his poll numbers keep going up the longer this goes on…

Yeah. Thus cities will continue to burn until the citizenry, realizing that a State which can’t or won’t provide basic protection for its residents has broken the social contract, decides to look to its own defense. Interesting times ahead.

Jenny Durkan, Seattle’s idiot SJW mayor, was born in 1958. Wisconsin governor Tony Evers was born in 1951, Oregon gov. Kate Brown was born in 1960, Washington governor Jay Inslee was born in 1951… see what I mean?

[brief side note: Thanks to everyone for the well-wishes. The crisis has largely passed; should be back to normal in a day or two. As much as I’d like to claim I’m selflessly posting here for you guys, the reality is, I’m doing it for me – it passes the time while “hurrying up and waiting.” I’m just grateful, as always, that anyone reads this stuff in the first place].

As Maus points out in the comments on yesterday’s post, Ignatian-type “spiritual exercises” aren’t to be undertaken lightly. I myself have never tried the real thing, not least because of my instinctive urge to punch Jesuits (and it’s gratifying to hear from a former religious professional that I’m on the right track there). What I’m suggesting is a pale, completely secular imitation of the real thing. Most of us, being on the back nine of our lives, already know how to disconnect… and, most importantly, why to disconnect. We might not actually do what’s best for us at all times, but we at least understand that it’s a good idea.

The young folks, however, don’t. Long observation of ignoramus studentus has led me to conclude that they’re just different from us old fogies, in ways we can’t really grasp. Losing internet connectivity is, for us, an inconvenience. It might be a major inconvenience, what with the work-from-home thing and all, but ultimately just an inconvenience for all that. For lack of a better term, we know how to be bored. We have hobbies and interests with which to pass the time, and when all else fails, we’re able to, you know, just go out and talk to people. Trap a group of people over age 40 in a building with no internet, and pretty soon you’ll hear a lot of conversations about the weather. Trap a group of people under 40 in the same situation, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they resorted to human sacrifice in an attempt to propitiate the fiber optic gods.

The possibility of constant stimulation becomes, inevitably, the certainty of constant stimulation. The other day I came back in from the wild and went to the store. Music on the overhead, tvs playing on every other aisle. Ads within ads, all making reference to other ads… and the kicker: This was a grocery store. You can’t even buy a box of corn flakes these days without downloading an app. Ten minutes of this, and I started worrying about epilepsy…

… but this is the kids’ world, y’all. This is how they grew up. It’s even worse online, and the more online you are, the worse it gets. For them, unplugging is a serious penance. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn it causes them actual physical pain, the kind we fogies feel when we switch to decaf or finally kick cigarettes. For the kids, the whole Ignatian schmear isn’t necessary — the jones will tell them everything they need to know about how being constantly wired in affects them.

Which brings us to the 1999 film Fight Club (Rotten Chestnuts’ suggested motto: Come for the parenthetical asides, stay for the non sequiturs).

It’s an interesting example of SJWs sending the opposite message from the one they’d intended — a subsidiary case, perhaps, of the 2nd Law of SJW (“SJWs always project”). Screenwriter Jim Uhls probably, and original novelist Chuck Palahniuk certainly, intended it as a comedy — they didn’t use the phrase “toxic masculinity” back then, but that’s what the meatheads in Fight Club were supposed to illustrate: the knuckle-dragging, ball-scratching, sub-literate pseudo-Nietzschean nihilism with which (not-so-secretly gay) hat-backwards frat bros responded to the enlightened sexual politics of The New Millennium* (Palahniuk, to the surprise of exactly no one who’d seen the movie, came out of the closet not long after). So, you know, if you don’t want to bother yourself reading the wiki summary of Gender Trouble, just rent Fight Club.

But a funny thing happened to this supposed comedy: Nobody got it. The film critics of 1999, being born circa 1960, focused — natch — on the ham-handed “anti-consumerism.” When Brad Pitt yelled “fuck Martha Stewart!,” the resulting jizz explosion from America’s movie critics could’ve drowned a chihuahua. It turns out — get ready to have your mind blown! — that manhood itself has been turned into a commodity. As if Charles Atlas hadn’t been selling exercise equipment in the back pages of comic books since the 1940s, but whatever, point is, 1999 was the heydey of cultural critics who were sure they would’ve ended racism and the Vietnam War if only they hadn’t been in junior high at the time. Who cares what those cavemen up on the screen say they want? They’re making soap from liposuction clinics!

The average contemporary Fight Club viewer, meanwhile, focused on an entirely different scene: The bathtub scene (yeah… big surprise Palahniuk is gay). In case you don’t remember, this is the one where Brad Pitt shares his father’s advice with Ed Norton (really Norton’s father’s advice, of course**). It’s “go to college,” followed by “I dunno… get married!” and ending with Pitt’s famous verdict: “I’m wondering if another [emphasis added, and sic] woman is really what we need.” Powerful stuff, if you’re one of those aimlessly drifting twentysomething males who went to college for no apparent reason, and are now… I dunno… contemplating marriage, often while sitting on the toilet paging through Ikea catalogs.

The fact that this is something no father would ever say to his son — but is exactly the kind of thing your mother would say — was completely lost on the critics… but not on the viewers.

Fast forward a few years, and recall the exponentially accelerated feminization of American culture. Get a load of this:

In case you’re too young to remember — and young man, I’m writing this post specifically for you — that’s President George W. Bush, circa 2002, “working” on his “ranch” in Texas. All the usual suspects in the “conservative” media got weak-kneed over it, of course, and the usual suspects in the rest of Newsywood got apoplectic. Both of which were entirely the point at the time, of course, but looking at it two decades on, can you believe this shit? Specifically, can you believe that anyone, anywhere, thought that this man — Yale grad, Harvard Business School grad, the fortunate son to end all fortunate sons — really spent his weekends clearing brush in the backcountry?

Well, they did. Or they pretended to, anyway, which was functionally the same thing. We — liberal and conservative alike — were supposed to view doofy ol’ George W. as some kind of macho manly man, and be horny or horrified, as our voter registration dictated.

Is “daydreaming of being an all-powerful, all-destructive übermensch” starting to make a little more sense now? Is it any wonder that the smarmy, sociopathic PUA who ruins everything in The Game (2005)– a book you absolutely must read, but not as a how-to manual — calls himself “Tyler Durden”?

Which brings us to the last important scene, the only one with contemporary relevance, the one all this talk of “values” and “spiritual exercises” has been building to: The one where Brad Pitt threatens to run the car off the road. He asks his brain-dead disciples in the back seat “What do you regret not doing with your life?”, and they have an immediate answer — “paint a picture” and “build a house.” Note how mundane those are. Back in 1999, that was supposed to clue you in (if you somehow missed all the other times they tried to browbeat it into you) that those guys were, in fact, brain-dead disciples of some smarmy svengali. Those are — deliberately — very minor achievements. What the hell is stopping you, other than the fact that you’re hanging out with that loser Brad Pitt in his creepy homoerotic cult?

By 2005, the very fact that they had an answer, no matter how mundane it was intended to be, was the point. In a world where moving some tree branches around in a cowboy hat was supposed to make you some kind of terrifying(ly sexy) götterdämmerung figure, just having the vaguest idea of what you wanted to do with your life was a major achievement.

That’s what you need to focus on, gentlemen. Achievement, any achievement, so long as it’s the work of your own two hands. It doesn’t matter how minor, how silly it might seem to anyone else. So long as it’s not on some blinking screen somewhere, it’s yours. Do that. Watch how it makes you feel. Then start thinking about that…

*seriously, get a load of that review, from hipster retail site The AV Club. “Everything about it conveys a smug, adolescent nihilism that’s as emotionally powerful as it is shallow…draws most of its power from the same conformist, hyper-masculine ideology…Like a bile-filled adolescent, Fight Club concerns itself primarily with daydreaming of being an all-powerful, all-destructive übermensch.” Just in case, you know, you thought poseurs hyperventilating over a functioning set of testicles is somehow new.

**This is either brilliant, or completely cack-handed, depending on how many credit hours you’ve earned towards that English Literature PhD. “I am Jack’s raging bile duct”… and, of course, Tyler Durden is Jack’s raging id. The grad student jizz tsunami from the “I am Jack’s…” narrative device could’ve drowned a slightly larger chihuahua.

[War, the old saying goes, is 99% sheer boredom, 1% sheer terror. Family emergencies are a lot like that — “hurry up and wait.” I found an open internet hookup, so I’m passing the time this way. You get what you pay for around here].

What comes after conservatism? That’s the essence of Z Man’s column today. Nietzsche said that the formula for happiness is “a straight line, a goal,” and though Leftists are among the unhappiest critters in captivity, it’s not for lack of following Nietzsche’s advice. They’ve got a goal; that’s the key to their enduring appeal. It’s a stupid, self-contradictory, impossible goal; that’s the key to their unhappiness. Meanwhile, the Right’s got nothin’.

As Z Man says, we inhabit the Left’s moral order. But since the Left can’t create, only destroy, it’s a thoroughly Postmodern moral order, a “moral” order without morality.* This is the key to defeating them, the key to whatever comes after conservatism.

Let’s leave aside the question of morality’s ultimate origin. We’re concerned with practicalities here. For our purposes, “morality” = “values.” How do we discover values here in this Postmodern world?

I suggest something along the lines of Loyola’s “spiritual exercises.” If you’re not familiar with his procedure, the idea is to pay close attention to your emotional state when performing any action. If you “bracket out” (to steal (I think) Husserl’s phrase) all the extraneous stuff and just focus on the motions of your soul, you’ll find you feel a clear attraction or aversion to whatever it is that you’re doing. It helps to do this in isolation and silence, of course, and the whole Ignatian schmear is properly done via a long religious retreat, but it’s easy enough to get an idea of what he means. I haven’t done an Ignatian retreat myself (my first reaction to a Jesuit is to punch him), but just recently I’ve been without tv, internet, etc. for several days…

…not that I was much of a tv watcher to begin with, but I was in a situation where even the ambient tv you see in stores and whatnot was gone. Same thing with internet. Not only was I too busy to check it, I couldn’t check it.  So when I was able to, after a couple days, I had a very strong, obvious reaction to it. Even checking email — responding to routine, work-related stuff — was an almost intolerable chore. It wasn’t just the “why the hell are you bothering me with this?” factor; it was the brute fact of email itself. Why the hell should I be available for this pettifogging bullshit, 24/7? I told everyone who needed to know that I’d be out of contact for a few days. It’s not like we’re declaring war here — if you can’t handle X without my input, then either X can wait a few days, or you’re a worthless employee.

Ditto voicemail, text messages, etc. If it’s not an emergency, don’t call me… and if it IS an emergency, then handle it like an emergency — you’re the man on the spot, you deal with it, and if you can’t, then what fucking good are you?

The very fact that I’m getting so worked up over routine office bullshit, in other words, tells me that routine office bullshit is, in itself, bad for the soul… and email, cell phones, social media, etc. are Satan’s jockstrap, because they enable routine office bullshit to reach us anywhere on the globe, 24 hours a day.

“Personal autonomy,” then, turns out to be one of my fundamental values.

Work this procedure for other aspects of your life, Loyola-style, and pretty soon you’ll discover a whole constellation of values you’ve either forgotten, or never knew. THIS is what we should be preaching to the young people, this process of values-discovery.

*Further examples, if you need them: virtue-signaling without virtue (“do as I say, not as I do” is the essence of Karen); cults of personality without the personality, e.g. the attempts to deify Hillary Clinton and (wait for it) Joe Biden. Being, at bottom, moralizers without morals, they can’t stand to vote for a candidate on purely instrumentalist grounds — even the cuckiest of cucks can’t admit what’s obvious to everyone else, that they’re voting for Biden because he’s not Trump (i.e. their pockets get fatter when they can pretend to be “conservatives” again). They have to make noises about “the dignity of the office” and whatnot — they were the only people in America who didn’t burst out laughing when Bill Clinton lectured Trump on decorous Oval Office behavior. They’re T.S. Eliot’s hollow men — “Shape without form, shade without colour / Paralysed force, gesture without motion,” etc.

Or, another upside to the “let’s all freak out about mail-in voting” story.

If by some miracle massive fraud Joe Biden wins in November, of course, COVID will be declared cured faster than you can say “get back to work so we can tax all your income to give to the incoming horde of illegal aliens, peasants!!”

But it won’t last much past November even when Trump wins.

It’s a mainstay of Leftist psychology that they can never, ever be wrong, because they are Smart and Smart People, by definition, are always right about everything. Indeed, that’s the real explanation for the “Russian collusion” thing. If 2016 had been a normal election — if they’d only been 60% confident, say, that Hillary was going to win — they would’ve explained her loss the way they always do whenever a Democrat loses: The American people, those racist sexist homophobic Bible-thumpin’ cousin-pokin’ redneck idiots, threw another temper tantrum. But this time they were certain, absolutely certain, their gal was gonna win. All the very Smartest people said so. They joked about it with each other, in public — “the only question is, will she get ALL the electoral votes, or just most of them?”

Now, a Smart person can be fooled by a Dumb person, so long as the outcome is still flattering to the Smart person. See Bush over Kerry in 2004, for example — the Smart people, being not just Smart but ever so generous and willing to believe the best of everyone, simply couldn’t fathom how Dumb the Dumb people actually were. Hence the infamous, but now standard, “How can the American people be so stupid?” headline peddled by one of the British papers.

Trump over Clinton wasn’t like that, though. There’s no way they could fall back on the head-wagging, tut-tutting, “we expected better of you people” thing — not after all those very public sneers about Hillary getting ALL the votes. They can’t have been fooled, so they must’ve been robbed. Hence, Russiagate.

That’s what it’s going to come to with COVID. As it stands, the True Believers can’t give up. There simply must be bodies rotting in the streets, overflowing hospitals, overwhelmed morgues, secret mass graves on Long Island or in the Florida Everglades… there have to be, because if there aren’t, that means the Smart people were wrong, and see above. So any minute now, millions of people are going to start keeling over. Any…minute…now….

Hence, the Great Mail-In Ballot Fraud of 2020. Just wait. After all, if the Trump administration can pull that off, then it will have been child’s play for them to have pulled the wool over all the Smart People’s eyes about COVID… which, of course, they suspected all along was nothing more than a bad flu, but damn that Dr. Fauci… who, of course, being Smart, is also blameless. It was the Trump admin’s buddies in Big Pharma, of course!!….

Word comes that the Democrats, in their ongoing effort to become the perfect caricature of themselves, actually used that goofy old hippie tune “For What It’s Worth” at their convention (I guess “Fortunate Son” was a bit too on the nose). If you need any more evidence that they’re just going through the motions this year, there you go — after all, if anyone can appreciate a campus hit from the early days of the Johnson administration, it’s LaQueesha and Prajneet and Jose and Kung Pao. “If you can’t think of anything else to do, just pat yourself on the back” has been the Boomer modus operandi since… well, since “For What It’s Worth” was on the radio the first time. Here’s hoping that dynamic young stud-muffin Joe Biden has a plan to stabilize the situation in French Indo-China….

The point, though, isn’t to make fun of the Democrats as hopelessly out-of-touch fossils (well, ok, it’s not just that). Rather, it’s yet another white pill. As much as we all acknowledge we’re not voting our way out of this, the now all-but-inevitable Trump victory this fall buys us time… and as the Democrats’ convention shows us, time is a valuable ally. It’s more than possible that, given another four years, they turn on themselves before they’re able to turn on us.

Confession time: I didn’t watch the convention. I’m still dealing with fallout from a family thing, bandwidth is limited, and I’m old enough that I’ve got to keep an eye on my blood pressure. But I saw the highlights, and boy were they a hoot. For example: They gave Toothy McTits — who, being young enough that people actually want to look at her tits, speaks to more people than the Dems’ top “leadership” combined — a mere 60 seconds to speak…

….in which she seconded the nomination of Bernie Sanders….

…after which, she rushed to Twitter to “explain” that this was just some pettifogging technical procedural thing.

Ladies and gentlemen, your 2020 Democrats!! Give ’em a hand!!!!

Again, the point isn’t (just) to make fun of these retards. The point is, these are terrifyingly silly people. As a historian, I like to play a game I call “What would a real leader do?” It’s a blast, and quite illuminating. John C. Calhoun, for instance, would have AOC’s hands broken if she even looked at a smartphone. He’d have to let her speak — JCC understood coalition-building — but he’d have one of her family members just offstage, surrounded by men with loaded revolvers, to keep her on point. She’d endorse Biden, at fulsome length, with a big bucktoothed grin the entire time. If someone did, indeed, have to second Sanders’ nomination — JCC was a stickler for the rules — he’d make sure it was the most obscure, electorally-insignificant nobody he could find.

In other words: JCC would know every word every single speaker would utter, down to the precise intonation and facial expression, because that’s what real leaders do in serious public situations.

But JCC is only half the picture. Consider Toothy McTits herself. There are only two possibilities here: either she planned to do this, or she didn’t. If the former — if she planned on dropping some truth-bombs on these old fogies by “nominating” Sanders, then tweeting the “technical procedural” explanation — that’s bad enough, as it shows she’s frighteningly tin-eared. Bernie Sanders is a) older than dirt, b) a Jew, and c) an older-than-dirt Jew. LaQueesha and Jose and Prajneet and Kung Pao were probably just baffled by “For What It’s Worth,” to be honest — unless some rapper has “sampled” it in the last few years, they have no idea what it is — but they know a fossilized Member of the Tribe when they see one. Bad enough that she’s selling out by nominating Shylock; infuriating that she’s doing it because of some White Man’s rules. They’ll probably forgive her… maybe… but that’s the kind of rookie mistake most kids running for junior high class president know to avoid.

If she didn’t plan it, though — if she honestly didn’t know that “nominating” Sanders would get her into all kinds of hot water with the Party — then she’s not just frighteningly tin-eared, she’s almost too stupid to live. Think about that for a second.

Horrifying, I know, but listen: That could be a big break for us, yuuuge. Stupid people by definition have poor impulse control. When Trump wins, who are they going to blame? Trump himself, certainty. “White supremacists,” undoubtedly. And the Post Office and Russia, of course, and the Illuminati and the Freemasons and the Designated Hitter too, because hey, why not? That’s what they’ll say, but what they’ll do is turn on each other.

Look at what happened to the bong-huffing, patchouli-reeking retards who spent their college years listening to “For What It’s Worth” the first time around. All Woodstock and the Days of Rage got them was another term of Richard Nixon, via one of the most lopsided electoral defeats in American history. After which, the New Left imploded. Jerry Rubin wrote a cookbook, Tom Hayden got himself a Porsche dealership, and the Democratic Party put forth as a dynamic young savior….. Jimmy Carter.

The Ace of Spades crowd likes to characterize Pelosi et al as the Stalinist wing of the Democrats, and AOC’s “squad” as the Trotskyite wing. That’s a bit overblown — even Stalin at his most megalomaniacal wouldn’t force the Politburo to endure “For What It’s Worth” lip-synced by a Black trannie — but it’s worth remembering that Trotsky was a bloodthirsty fanatic by 1920s Soviet standards. It’s also worth remembering how Trotsky ended. Commies always slaughter each other eventually. When they lose in 2020, can they keep it together until 2024? Or will they start purging each other in the best Maoist style?

Time will tell, but for what it’s worth, I know which way I’m betting.

Still dealing with family emergency stuff, but real fast:

I’m loving the “Trump’s going to steal the election via mail fraud!” thing the entire Media has suddenly, spontaneously decided to freak out about. It’s that kind of not-at-all-obvious JournoListing that makes Pravda circa 1972 look like a beacon of integrity…

But I digress. Point is, the standard take on this is that the Opposite Rule of Liberalism is in effect, and since it has been obvious since the idea was first mooted that the Democrats intend to try to steal the election this way… well, there you have it. And there’s some of that going on, no doubt. The Left have been doing this sort of thing since Lenin. It’s a game to them — you score Bolshie Bingo points by being the first to figure out that some goofy theoretical article in a no-name journal of a recondite subject signals some big shift in the Party line. Given the Left’s obvious, catastrophic mental deterioration over the last hundred years, it’s no surprise that they announce their intentions in big blinking neon letters.

As I say, there’s some of that going on… but mostly, I believe, it’s battlespace preparation for their inevitable crushing loss in November. Pretty much everything the Dems have done since the start of their primaries has been damage control. Starting with the nomination of Sundown Joe himself. If they really intended to make a run at the White House in 2020, they would’ve chosen someone different. Anyone different.

Consider that former VPs do terribly in presidential contests. There have been exactly two former veeps in the modern era who have won presidential elections outright: Richard Nixon and Bush Senior.* Nixon had the tremendous advantage of running in 1968, when LBJ’s surprise dropout and the assassination of the only legit challenger in the primaries (RFK) left him running against Hubert Humphrey… who, let us note, was the incumbent vice president. Bush Senior, by contrast, was able to run as the “third term” of a very popular president, while facing off against one of the all-time ham-handed challengers, Mike Dukakis. I’m pretty sure a guy in an elephant suit, or the actual Elephant Man, would’ve won both those contests.

Now, it’s possible to argue that Nixon’s 1968 win gives Biden a fighting chance, as it’s the only example we have of a former veep running as anything other than an incumbent (that is, with a presidential administration between his vice presidency and his presidential candidacy). But see above: He was running against a third-stringer, and an eleventh-hour substitution at that. Trump isn’t the most popular incumbent ever to run for reelection, but the equivalent 2020 scenario would be Biden running against Mike Pence… but only after some other, much more popular and charismatic challenger got himself killed at the tail end of primary season.

In other words, the scenario we discussed a while back is much more likely: Knowing they’re going to get clobbered, the opposition party is running the most anodyne candidate they can find, such that the electoral pasting can be blamed on the candidate, personally, not the platform. The paradigm cases here are Bob Dole in 1996 and Walter Mondale in 1984 — since the incumbent wasn’t losing unless he got caught in a hotel room with a dead girl and a live boy (and maybe not even then, in Clinton’s case), the opposition ran the most milquetoast old warhorse they could find.

Postmodern Kremlinology adduces further evidence. Though here on Planet Earth we know that Barack Obama was, in fact, a deeply unpopular and highly polarizing figure, to the Media he was the Lightworker, a racial healer who deserved to win with 110% of the vote. Given that the Media and the Democratic Party are one and the same, the Party believes this about Obama, too. Which means Joe Biden can’t help but suffer by comparison. Maybe he’s Solon reincarnated, but how can even that hold a candle to President Sort-of-God? Any attempt to run on Obama’s record — which, again, according to the Media is nothing but a Chanel-scented chronicle of Skittle-shitting unicorns — will inevitably highlight all the ways Slow Joe isn’t Obama.

Finally, Biden’s veep pick. Even before the Floyd thing, it was all but certain he’d have to pick a female minority. Their roster isn’t real deep with Constitutionally-eligible candidates, and they’re four years away from being able to just ignore the stupid thing, but even so, if they were actually trying to win they’d go with somebody, anybody, other than Kamala Harris. Even the screeching harridans in the Media find her tough to take, and the Blacks — the one constituency they absolutely have to have — outright loathe her, what with the being the descendant of a major West Indian slaveholder and all (not to mention all the brothers she put in jail for rinky-dink offenses back when she was a DA).

Add it all up, and it’s clear that the Dems are battening down the hatches for defeat. The “mail fraud” freakout isn’t about them announcing their intentions to try it (though, of course, they will). Rather, it’s about pre-delegitimizing Trump’s victory. We wuz robbed!!

*Coolidge took over from Harding; LBJ took over from JFK, making them the incumbent when they ran at the top of the ticket.