Lutherans and the Alt-Right

 

"Green Lives Matter"

Xerxes, my larboard columnist friend, is impressed of late that President Harrison of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod in the US has come out in opposition to the “alt-right,” condemning it in members of his congregation. Xerxes thinks this is impressive because the LCMS has a reputation as a conservative denomination.

Xerxes is wrong to be impressed. It is no surprise if a conservative Christian denomination denounces the “alt-right.” This is dog-bites-man. 

There is a reason why the “alt-right” calls itself and is called the “alt-right.” Because it is an alternative to the right. There is no reason for a conservative denomination to love it.

Conservatism means wanting to conserve established traditions. In the US that means, pre-eminently, equality and civil rights: respecting and preserving the ideals of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence. American conservatism is thus necessarily liberal, in the true sense of that word. It believes in democracy, equality, and limited government. It is anti-authoritarian. An authoritarian or totalitarian American right is therefore a contradiction in terms. Authoritarianism and totalitarianism is a plausible position only on the left. Hence the term “alt-right” for those eccentric American individuals who embrace ideas of a non-orthodox-Marxist but autocratic regime. Not to say that, even in European terms, Nazism or fascism are clearly on the right. An autocratic monarchy might be.

There’s not a big constituency for making America a kingdom.

Accordingly, in condemning the “alt-right,” or “Christian nationalism,” President Harrison of the LCMS is doing nothing surprising or bold; any more than coming out against vampires and werewolves. 

There is nothing so alarming about Christian nationalism. It is the status quo in such liberal democratic countries as the United Kingdom or Denmark. Because of the First Amendment, it has no support among conservatives in the US. I am a news hound, and regularly sample media outlets often accused by the left of being “far right,” like Fox News, Daily Wire, Small Dead Animals, Instapundit, and so forth. Nobody there is talking about Christian nationalism. Nobody there uses the term. The concept seems to exist only on the left.

President Harrison, in condemning the perhaps two or three members of his denomination who are alt-right and have active Twitter accounts, cites advocacy for “white supremacy, Nazism, pro-slavery, anti-interracial marriage, women as property, fascism, death for homosexuals, and genocide.”

Most of what is considered the alt-right is actually trolling; it is practical joking by juveniles to make authorities look foolish for taking it seriously. It is fun, at a certain age, to show up your elders as gullible idiots. Actually, it is fun at any age. I’d guess that is true of all the items Harrison lists here—someone is pulling his leg. 

More alarming than this semi-mythical “alt-right” is the tendency on the left—and not some tiny “alt-left”--to associate such absurd gag views with anyone who is—to quote Xerxes’s own charges--“pro-Bible, anti-gay, anti-feminist, anti-abortion, anti-newcomer, anti-vaccine, anti-mask, anti-Trudeau.” 

This is far more nefarious. Take the charge that anyone who is “anti-Trudeau” is “alt-right.” This means calling the majority of Canadians alt-right, and charging them with supporting slavery and genocide. After all, a super-majority of Canadians are anti-Trudeau. They always have been; they have been for the past three elections. 

Being opposed to the current government, and organizing to bring it down, is how democracy works. Oppose this, and it is you who are demanding a totalitarian, fascist government. Not as a gag—in all seriousness.

All Canadians also have a right to freedom of conscience, as the right would insist, and therefore a right to hold and proclaim pro-Bible views. Since all major world religions teach that homosexual sex is a sin, they have a right to hold and proclaim this view as well—just as anyone else has the right to argue the opposite. Feminism is a particular political ideology, a set of political demands, with which, in a free society, people have a right to disagree, and have a right to resist. In a non-totalitarian society, politics may be openly discussed, and people may dissent. So too with abortion; it is an issue we must legislate on, and must discuss, if we are a democracy. So too with immigration levels. Finally, we have a right, as the right insists, to decide for ourselves any medical treatment; this is security of the person. 

It is those on the left who seem to be subverting our rights and freedoms. This is creeping fascism; or perhaps galloping fascism.

BBC vs. Nigel Farage

Now another BBC interviewer has tried exactly the same character assassination technique against Nigel Farage that Andrew Neil used a couple of days ago against Ben Shapiro. Dredging up old quotes instead of addressing the current issue or his arguments. Farage reacts in a similar fashion, although more temperately.

This blog has been very active recently. More active than I would like; I have other things to do. But it seems to me we are witnessing a revolution, and matters are changing now almost moment by moment. The real establishment, the professional elite, the "deep state," the ancien regime, is panicked, and is discarding any pretense of ethics or good will. We are more or less at the moment at which the Czar's troops fire on the crowd.

How bad is it going to get before the inevitable collapse?

Latest polls suggest Farage's newly created "Brexit" Party may blow away both Conservatives and Labour at the upcoming EU vote. A party only weeks old. If a national election were held today, polls suggest he might even defeat them both and become PM. It looks as though the Tories could not even salvage the situation by quickly turning to Boris Johnson. Too late. There is no more patience for such a moderate.

At the same time the establishment has been declaring Farage a "racist," a "Nazi," an "extremist," and so on, the majority of the people support him. At the same time they have been demanding he be silenced, and deplatforming and even jailing people with similar opinions left and right. Or rather, right to moderate left. But such labels hardly even matter any more.

The ruling class have, in other words, lost the confidence of the people. The BBC has lost the confidence of the people. The Conservative Party has lost the confidence of the people. The Labour Party has lost the confidence of  the people. The academy has lost the confidence of the people. The schools have lost the confidence of the people. They are locked in their palace, talking only to themselves. Nobody else is listening.

The rise of Farage's Brexit Party is a sudden and dramatic, even historically unprecedented, turn. When Brexit passed, it was a surprise to almost everyone. It passed by only a thin margin.

But now the lines seem to have emerged plainly: it is not "left" vs. "right." There is no "alt-right." That was always a fraud. It is the people vs. the government and the grey elite.

Let's just hope Britain ends up being run by someone as responsible as Nigel Farage. Revolutions rarely end well.

But the fault lies, in the beginning and the end, with the corrupt establishment which forces things to such a pass rather than surrender power.

The Liberal Strategy Revealed

Justin Trudeau seems to have declared his line of attack for the next election. Every time now, in the Commons, he is asked anything about the SNC-Lavalin scandal, he responds by demanding that Andrew Scheer denounce white supremacy. At last Friday’s Liberal Party convention in Mississauga, he accused the Conservatives of planning to cut the federal budget, abandon the fight against global warming, and embrace white nationalism.

I expect that the Conservatives would have little quibble with Trudeau’s claims that they want to cut government costs and kill the carbon tax. Fair enough. Here Liberals and Conservatives disagree.

But Trudeau’s attribution to the Conservative Party of white nationalism and white supremacy is dishonest.

Are there any white supremacists in North America? No doubt; but no more than might fit in a clubhouse up some backyard tree. To denounce them is therefore counter-productive, if your intent is to oppose white supremacy. You are giving the position publicity and respectability. You are forcing it to the public’s attention. Some will want to know what all the fuss is about. If it is immediately and self-evidently false, then no harm done. And nothing useful done. In any other case, you are promoting it.

This Trudeau is blatantly doing for short-term political gain—to distract from scandal. Scheer would be irresponsible to do likewise.

There is another fundamental problem with denouncing “white supremacy.” It is the inclusion of that modifier, “white.” To denounce “white supremacy” as a stand-alone item is to imply that other forms of racial supremacy are fine: black supremacy, Asian supremacy, Muslim supremacy, aboriginal supremacy. The problem is not with supremacy, then; it is with whites. That is extreme racism. And should be called out as such.

There is a vital distinction to be made here, between white supremacist and white nationalists. Not the same thing.

Are there any white nationalists in North America? That’s a more interesting question: it illustrates the likely effects of Trudeau’s strategy. Just a few years ago, say 2015, there was apparently also no “white nationalist” movement to speak of in Canada, or for that matter in the US. When the term “alt-right” was first coined and aggressively promoted on the left, the people it was referring to and demonizing were only geeky kids on the Internet playing with memes, just yanking legs. But the aggressive promotion of the term―on the left―seems to have now summoned up such a movement for real. Faith Goldy, for example, seems to be a genuine white nationalist; as was the guy who shot up mosques in Christchurch. Before the left invented the “alt-right,” they probably would not have come out with their views, even if they entertained them in private. It may well have been the left that suggested to them that others apparently felt the same way. All I can say about that is that I followed conventional right-wing news sites and aggregators throughout the relevant period, and heard for months not a peep about the alt-right, nor any views endorsing anything like white nationalism. For months, all the noise about it was coming exclusively from left-wing sources. Only eventually did right-wing sources begin to be heard—all either dismissing the alt-right, or condemning it. 

An early "alt-right" meme: the flag of Kekistan.

Nice job, lefties. White nationalism is your baby, not Scheer’s.

Now Trudeau and his like are hell-bent to up the ante to promoting white supremacy. And, by declaring any view on any issue and any person with which they disagree “white supremacist” and “alt-right,” the left suggests real white supremacy is equally reasonable. If everyone is Hitler, including really nice people, what’s wrong with Hitler?

And the white nationalists are creatures of the left, of the Trudeaus of the world, in yet a third and more direct sense. Nationalism of all kinds, or, more accurately, tribalism rather than nationalism, has been aggressively promoted by the left over the past forty years. They call it “multiculturalism,” and even make it legally mandatory. They have long insisted on black tribalism, and Cree tribalism, and Inuit tribalism, and Iroquois tribalism, and Innu tribalism, and Muslim tribalism, and Quebec tribalism, and Irish tribalism, and Greek tribalism, and Ukrainian tribalism, and Sikh tribalism, and Hispanic tribalism, and Portuguese tribalism. Even gay tribalism, and transgender tribalism. It is obviously arbitrary, discriminatory, and dishonest for them to object only to white tribalism. They have been promoting it all along, the only distinction being the substitution of the word “white” for more specific ethnic categories.

It’s Trudeau’s tarbaby. Scheer and the Conservatives have nothing to do with it, and they have no call to sully their hands with it. It is up to Trudeau to denounce tribalism in all forms.

Nor is this playing this “white supremacy” or “white nationalism” card hard likely to work for Trudeau. To begin with, it seems unlikely that the public are gullible enough to be distracted by this from the SNC-Lavalin scandal. But even if they are: is it even by itself a winning issue? The Liberal government has suddenly reversed its policy on accepting refugees. From open borders and an open invitation, now they are proposing to deport everybody. Their own opinion polls are apparently telling them something. Apparently unhindered by principles, they are pandering to “white nationalism” themselves.

Hard to do that while scapegoating the Conservatives for hypothetically wanting to do the same. And it looks as though, arrogant and utterly out of touch, they are trying just like Hillary Clinton to insult as “white nationalists” and racists the very average voters they are expecting to vote for them.

Wild in the Streets

Antifa member fights "Fascist." 

I used to follow Warren Kinsella’s blog. He has recently tweeted something remarkably dumb, or sinister:

“’Antifa’ is short for anti-fascist. The only ones who should oppose antifa are fascists.”

There is an exact historical parallel:

“The Fascists are anti-Bolshevik. Nobody should oppose them except Bolsheviks.”

And that is exactly how Hitler and Mussolini got into power.

First they came for the Communists. But I was not Communist...

Whether he knows it or is just naive, Kinsella’s advice serves Fascist objectives perfectly.

Is he that naive? Does he really believe that simply saying something is so makes it so?

Yes, I think. I think this comes from a chain of prior assumptions, common on the left.

1. There is no objective reality

2. We each, therefore, have the right to “construct” our own reality.

It follows from this that, if I say a thing is so, it is so. It is my reality.

So if I say I am “anti-Fascist,” I am necessarily “anti-Fascist.” This cannot be questioned.

If you question it, this is an act of aggression against me. You are violating my rights to define myself. Similarly, if I say I am a woman, this cannot be questioned. If you will not use the pronoun I specify, you are committing an act of aggression against me.

This immediately means that free speech is no longer possible. Anything said can count as an “aggression.” Now to say something upsetting to someone is just as troublesome as punching them in the nose. And it is up to the listener to decide: there can be no objective standard for this. If I say I feel offended, the case is made. You have committed a violation of my rights.

We are all criminals now. Anyone can be declared an enemy of the people. Perhaps, for example, a disliked minority. Hearing Jews speak in their own behalf offends me. Or hearing straight white males.

But that is only the beginning of our problem. It is necessarily true that, if we each get to invent our own reality, these realities will quickly and regularly come into conflict. In your mind, you are a woman. In my mind, you are a man. If I refer to you as “he,” I am aggressing on your reality. But, equally, if you require me to refer to you as “she,” you are aggressing on my reality.

So whose rights prevail?

You might say, relying on that old distinction we used when we believed in an objective reality, that your rights end where my body begins. But that does not work when there is no agreed reality. That would include bodies, or selves. I could choose to say your body is not separate; it is just a “clump of tissues.” And it is in my way. I could choose to believe that your body is not there, or you are not. I could decide to believe you are not human in the same sense I am.

The only option left at this point is “might makes right”; and this point is inherent and inevitable in the initial premise. Whoever has power, in sum, gets to do whatever they want to whoever does not have power.

This is what we now see on the streets of America.

One side defines itself as “Anti-Fascist.” This justifies any action whatsoever against “Fascists.” But this side also reserves to itself the absolute right to declare who is Fascist and who is not.

Along with “Fascist,” you see the term “white supremacist” a lot recently. Its common usage is interesting, because in fact, there is probably no group anywhere in the US today who would call themselves “white supremacist.” At most, they would say that are “white nationalists.” Perhaps one or two small bodies, granted, would accept the term “Fascist” or “National Socialist.”

If they are not objectively correct, if they are lying, you would need to make the argument. You would have to demonstrate from things they say that they are in fact calling for the legislated superiority of people with pale skin.

Nobody seems to be doing this. Why?

Because whether or not they are objectively telling the truth is irrelevant. There is no truth. In my reality, they are white supremacists. Case closed. Lock and load.

But wait. If there is no objective truth, don’t they have the same right you do to define their own reality? If I say I am a woman, I am a woman. So if they say they are not white supremacists, they are not white supremacists, right?

Of course not, you fool. White supremacists have no rights.

In other words, might makes right. Each one of us is now, by this logic, in a struggle to the death to impose our will on everyone else. By any means necessary: by violence, by fake news (as if there were some objective standard!), by shouting opponents down, by falsely characterising their views, whatever.

And here we are.

So far, the right has been handicapped by feeling itself bound by all the old rules. This has given the left an immense tactical advantage. One thinks of poor Chamberlain and Daladier at Munich—naively thinking that everyone wanted peace, compromise was possible, and treaties meant something.

But where must this inevitably lead?

Foxhunt News Network

Rumours are percolating of a new news network being formed in the US. Some say Steve Bannon is not simply going back to Breitbart, but that he has backing to launch a Breitbart News Network. Gavin McInnis, in leaving Rebel Media, says he will soon be able to announce something big, somethingh multimedia, “including television.”

I would be surprised in these rumours are not true. There is a huge business opportunity for someone here, and someone with money, surely, is smart enough to take it.

Fox News has demonstrated that there is a huge otherwise unmet appetite for news coverage and commentary on the right. They have been able to regularly dominate all other channels in viewership.

But recently, Fox has left themselves hugely vulnerable to competition on their right. Concerned about losing advertisers, they have been tacking left and dropping some of their most popular TV faces and most experienced executives.

Leaving them free agents for anyone else to scoop up who wants to challenge Fox for their audience.

In management, aside from Bannon, they could grab Bill Shine. Dropped by Fox May 1.

Bill O’Reilly, the network’s top star, is available. They dropped him over claims of sexual harassment. I suspect his fan base is still there. It was the advertisers who dropped him. Taking him on despite the allegations would, to a certain audience, cement the new network’s bona fides as the voice of the right. Bob Beckel is similarly free, for similar reasons. Sean Hannity has said on air that he was not sure he could stat with Fox if they fired Bill Shine. They fired Bill Shine. Judge Andrew Napolitano has reason to feel the network has not been loyal to him; they pulled him off the air.

Were a new network to snag all of these, they would immediately set themselves up as the “new Fox,” and probably snag a huge proportion of the established network’s viewership.

It seems reasonable to assume that, given the viewers, sooner or later the advertisers would follow.

There are also a lot of female stars that Fox has let go. But there the new network probably faces a choice: if they go with O’Reilly, they probably forfeit the female stars, who generally say they left because of a climate of sexual harassment.

Leaving aside the rights and wrongs, O’Reilly is far more valuable.

Up north, the recent troubles of The Rebel have shaken free some figures with appeal below the border. Gavin McInnis most notably: he was The Rebel’s star attraction. But aside from him, there are a couple of female stars shaken loose from the firmament who could well supply this need to emulate Fox: Lauren Southern and Faith Goldy are also free agents. They have the sort of visual appeal, shall we say, that worked so well for Fox for years.

Glenn Beck was dropped long ago, but was wildly popular when he left. He has been running his own little media empire, The Blaze, but it seems to have had its problems recently. He might be persuaded to climb aboard. I think he has a huge constituency on the religious right.

Mark Steyn is all set up with a studio, and has been using it freelance. Perhaps that is what he prefers. But he could make a huge addition.

There is also, of course, Milo Yiannopoulos. He is a big draw, and he, like Bannon, is vaguely associated with the alt-right. They were old colleagues at Breitbart. He could be the poster boy for the proposition that this new network spoke to a constituency that considered Fox too hidebound and establishmentarian.

Granted, he was too hot for even Breitbart to handle when he left a few months ago. But that was a Bretibart without Bannon; his view may differ. Yiannopoulos has apologized for what seems to have been a slip. I could see him working out for them, so long as they kept him cordoned off from the rest of the lineup.

There are a huge number of lesser-known figures who have made a mark on YouTube, and so have built up a constituency, which they could now bring to such a new network. Pewdiepie, most notably. He is not a political figure, but he nevertheless was pilloried in the media and fired by Disney for political reasons. He is the number one most popular YouTuber, and has cause now to want to join a new network to take his persecutors down. And then there are a batch of YouTube commentators: Steve Crowder, Sargon of Akkad, Stefan Molyneaux, and so forth. These are the folks the alt-right, and, more broadly, younger conservatives, listen to. Bringing on board a selection of them in addition to Yiannopoulos could establish the new network as the up and coming thing, and tar Fox with being old and sclerotic by comparison.

Surely someone is smart enough to seize the opportunity.

Nothing necessarily political about it. It would just be good business.

Even this is just the beginning of the opportunity. What Fox News has demonstrated to be true of television is also true of almost every other medium. Book publishing, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, are all vulnerable at the moment to being quickly destroyed by new competition building from a customer base on the political right. New ventures in each of these fields could be built out from the TV venture.

Multimedia indeed.

Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlottesville

Robert E. Lee, in what is now Charlottesvilles "Emancipation Park"

The recent atrocity in Charlottesville, Virginia, is a useful lesson for American Conservatives in what it is like to be a Muslim these days.

We often complain that Muslims should speak out more loudly against Islamic terrorism. Now Conservatives are in the same position: have we spoken out loudly enough against the killer who drove his car into a crowd of Antifa protestors?

Yet if we do condemn, we are buying in to an offensive, bigoted premise: that these Islamist terrorists, that this driver, have something to do with us and with what we believe. That we bear responsibility, more than more than Baptists or Democrats do. It is a perfect Catch-22. Either way, we are scapegoated.

At the same time, it seems to herd us unwilling into accepting and endorsing a claim that the other side, which we oppose, holds some moral high ground. The truth is, Muslims really do believe, with cause, that modern Western culture is morally depraved. Similarly, those of us on the right believe that the current resort to public violence began on the left, and so the left must take responsibility, indeed, primary responsibility, for this. We believe that racism is a general problem on the left, and vanishingly rare on the right. We believe that the left is morally depraved on matters such as abortion. Why must we feed this monster?

Nevertheless, we must not remain innocent bystanders. Let me get my condemnations in:

I condemn the city of Charlottesville, in the first place, for planning to remove the statue of Robert E. Lee. This provoked the entire affair, and it was an unprovoked act of aggression against the heritage of an identifiable group among its citizens. It was founded on anti-white prejudice.

I condemn the views of some of the groups that organized the protest against this, if the reports are true that some of them were racist. I read that participants included the KKK. As a Catholic, I obviously oppose the traditional views of the KKK. As a Christian, I necessarily condemn all racism. We must use caution here, however, because it has become standard practice on the left to declare any group on the right “racist.” So we never know when we are being fed false information.

I condemn equally the well-known racist groups on the other side, such as “Black Lives Matter.”

I support the right of all such groups to hold a public demonstration. This is an issue of freedom of speech and of assembly. That said, public demonstrations are generally not helpful or useful in a functioning democracy. And there is no justification for a riot.

I condemn in stronger terms holding “counter-demonstrations.” This looks like an attempt to interfere with another’s free speech. If and when held, such counter-demonstrations must be kept far away from the original demonstration they seek to “counter.”

I condemn, therefore, if the charges are true, the “stand-down” of the Charlottesville police, allowing the two groups to clash. This is exactly the factor that led to the rise of the Nazis in Germany: the police and authorities would not interfere, allowing the stronger gang to work their will.

I condemn the driver of the car, who is, so far as we can see from the available evidence, a murderer. He should be prosecuted for this, as should anyone else who did likewise. I oppose the death penalty, but life in prison seems just.

I condemn those who try to make all the other “right-wing” protestors, who in all probability are entirely innocent of this crime, collectively guilty because they presumably share roughly the same political views as the perpetrator. This is simple bigotry and prejudice.

I condemn those who try to use this to scapegoat. The mayor of Charlottesville, for example, blamed it all on Donald Trump. This ought to be actionable as slander.

I condemn those who have condemned Trump for condemning the apparent hatred on “many sides.” This was the only honourable line to take, in the circumstances.

This was not like a “terrorist” incident, in which violence is unleashed on unsuspecting civilians going about their lives. This was a clash of two opposing sides. That is a different moral equation. Although it does not make escalation okay.

The alt-right

Having turned into an Old Person while I was not paying attention, I was until recently unaware of the alt-right. I think it first entered my consciousness when Trump named Steve Bannon as his chief White House strategist, and people on Facebook began lamenting that Bannon was a racist and a neo-Nazi.

So I am no authority on the alt-right.

But it appears to me to be a movement very like the “counter culture” of the Sixties.

The world is full of average people—necessarily so. This so, the world is made entirely for average people. In most times and places, there is no useful place for anyone who is too intelligent. In terms of IQ, given a norm of 100, and a bell curve, you are going to do well up to an IQ of about 120 (“superior”); beyond that, you are out of the game. You have turned into a Vulcan. Nobody is going to give you command of a starship.

This is a fundamental problem for humanity; perhaps the fundamental problem. We would all be infinitely better off if the best and the brightest were in charge of things. But nobody has ever invented a reliable mechanism to make this happen—and gotten it past the vast majority of average intelligence. An aristocracy is meant to do it, but does not. Nothing makes the average aristocrat any brighter, on average, than the average human. Plato proposed an intellectual meritocracy, and Confucianism largely implemented it, based on standardized tests. With marked success for a couple of thousand years. But the same problem appears: even leaving aside the corruption that crept into the Confucian system over time, no mechanism makes the people who first set and mark the tests brighter than average. And so, above a certain point, they cannot reliably judge. Catch-22.

And so the typical genius in most times and places lives life underground, in his mother’s basement, or starving in a garret. Or, often, they are considered insane.

Every now and then, though, there is a crack in the tectonic crust of the establishment, and they briefly burst out free.

These are the moments of creative ferment. These are the moments when civilization is able to progress.

It happened most recently in the Sixties. And if the legacy of the Sixties has ended up being unfortunate, it is not the fault of those who first fomented it. They were, beyond all else, free thinkers. They would have been horrified by political correctness. Kerouac was a Taft supporter. Dylan backed Goldwater. The problem was becoming fashionable, so that the “weekend hippies” wanted in, and then the yuppies—the mediocre. The creative ferment then quickly died.

This happens every time. Once the bright have done something impressive, the mediocre want in. Everyone wants to be thought of as smart. They will appropriate it and claim it as their own, and destroy it in the process. The first thing they will kill is the free thought, because it is the part that is a barrier to them. Real hippies and beatniks were almost immediately replaced by phony hippies who were just aping it all. The original diggers organized a public funeral of the real hippie as early as October, 1967.

But while it lasted, it was a moment of renaissance in the arts: pop art, pop music. They have been moribund ever since. Most artists at any moment are phony artists. As Kerouac constantly pointed out.

The early days of home computing were a similar although smaller opportunity for the genuinely smart—back in the day when you could start up in your garage. And the system was too dumb to figure out what was going on. That door too seems to have closed, as the computer world has grown increasingly corporate. And the phony geeks have taken over: the black hat hackers, the virus inventors, and the guys who try to control the IT system in the name of stopping them.

So now, at least for this brief shining moment, we have the alt-right.

Being bright, they delight in free thought and new ideas. That is what interests the smart. This naturally panics the mediocrities in charge, because they cannot understand them, it shows them up, and it rocks the system that puts them in power. It frightens them; it threatens them. Hence the charges of “racism” and “neo-Nazis.”

That may eventually become true, as the mediocrities hijack the movement and simplify it into a set of dogmas they can understand and imitate. But it is no more true of the true alt-right than it would have been of the Sixties counterculture.

The smart also delight in showing up the establishment as the mendacious fools they are—trolling them, in Internet terms, so that other bright people who can understand the joke can see how dopey and incompetent they really are.

Consider this parody of MSNBC.

I think not a word of it is true. It is all an inside joke, that only the "woke" will get.

Storm Warning

In addition to Anne Coulter, Milo Yiannopoulos has now announced an intention to head back to Berkeley. He intends to hold a “Free Speech Week.”

The right is itching for a fight now.

In the meantime, the hackers at 4Chan and elsewhere on the net have been taking up the challenge of identifying some of the masked Antifa brawlers at the last Battle of Berkeley. The guy who was filmed reaching an arm out from behind a woman to hit someone on the head with a bicycle lock turns out to be a college professor. A woman next to him is a public school teacher. It turns out the mayor of Berkeley follows her Trotskyite Facebook group. A woman who was punched in the forehead is a nude model.

These are not members of the proletariat. These are often people who have their hands on the levers of power. They are all upper or upper middle class.

It is staggering arrogance and cluelessness on their part to nevertheless try to take it all to the streets and use mob force. It seems almost deliberately suicidal.

Now, inevitably, discussion on the Reddit anarchist forum is that Antifa needs to get guns and a strong leader.

Some comments:

“A shocking number of our comrades went in there with absolute no combat training. We need to set up seminars or something of the sort.”

“what is our opinion on a ‘leader’ someone to rally our troops, direct the flow and keep everything organized?”

“Having a leader could immensely improve tactical organization and can prevent the amount of disorganization that happened today. Having someone to help with the commandeering of resources could help us greatly.”

You may have heard of this notion before. It is the Fuhrer principle.

“we need more than flags and bats. We need to take notes from the John Brown Gun Club and get firearms and training.”

Great. Armed battles in the streets. It has worked so well for Syria.

At this point, and given that the local authorities are in on the fight, it seems to me that the only chance to avert civil chaos, not to say civil war, is for Trump to send in the National Guard.

Let Steve Bannon Speak for Himself

Pretty racist, eh?