As I’ve noted in each of these posts, the fundamental claim we are evaluating here is this one, made baldly by George R.R. Martin:
The Dothraki were actually fashioned as an amalgam of a number of steppe and plains cultures … Mongols and Huns, certainly, but also Alans, Sioux, Cheyenne, and various other Amerindian tribes … seasoned with a dash of pure fantasy.
We may, I think, now safely dismiss this statement as false. What we have found is that the Dothraki do not meaningfully mirror either Steppe or Plains cultures. They do not mirror them in dress, nor in systems of subsistence, nor in diet, nor in housing, nor in music, nor in art, nor in social structures, nor in leadership structures, nor in family structures, nor in demographics, nor in economics, nor in trade practices, nor in laws, nor in marriage customs, nor in attitudes towards violence, nor in weapons, nor in armor, nor in strategic way of war, nor in battle tactics.
We might say he has added “dashes” of pure fantasy until the “dash” is the entire soup, but the truth is clearly the reverse: Martin has sprinkled a little bit of water on a barrel of salt and called it just a dash of salt. There is no historical root source here, but instead pure fantasy which – because racist stereotypes sometimes connect, in thin and useless ways, to actual history – occasionally, in broken-clock fashion, manages to resemble the real thing.
It seems as though the best we might say of what Martin has right is that these are people who are nomads that ride horses and occasionally shoot bows. The rest – which as you can see from the list above there, is the overwhelming majority – has functionally no connection to the actual historical people. And stunningly, somehow, the show – despite its absolutely massive budget, despite the legions of scrutiny and oversight such a massive venture brings – somehow is even worse, while being just as explicit in tying its bald collection of 1930s racist stereotypes to real people who really exist today.
Instead, the primary inspiration for George R.R. Martin’s Dothraki seems to come from deeply flawed Hollywood depictions of nomadic peoples, rather than any real knowledge about the peoples themselves. The Dothraki are not an amalgam of the Sioux or the Mongols, but rather an amalgam of Stagecoach (1939) and The Conqueror (1956). When it comes to the major attributes of the Dothraki – their singular focus on violent, especially sexual violence, their lack of art or expression, their position as a culture we primarily see “from the outside” as almost uniformly brutal (and in need of literally the whitest of all women to tame and reform it) – what we see is not reflected in the historical people at all but is absolutely of a piece with this Hollywood legacy.
But Martin has done more damage than simply watching The Mongols (1961) would today. He has taken those old, inaccurate, racially tinged stereotypes and repackaged them, with an extra dash of contemporary cynicism to lend them the feeling of “reality” and then used his reputation as a writer of more historically grounded fantasy (a reputation, I think we may say at this point, which ought to be discarded; Martin is an engaging writer but a poor historian) to give those old stereotypes the air of “real history” and how things “really were”. And so, just as Westeros became the vision of the Middle Ages that inhabits the mind of so many people (including quite a few of my students), the Dothraki become the mental model for the Generic Nomad: brutal, sexually violent, uncreative, unartistic, uncivilized.
And as I noted at the beginning of this series, Martin’s fans have understood that framing perfectly well. The argument given by both the creators themselves, often parroted by fans and even repeated by journalists is that A Song of Ice and Fire‘s historical basis is both a strike in favor of the book because they present a “more real” vision of the past but also a flawless defense against any qualms anyone might have over the way that the fiction presents violence (especially its voyeuristic take on sexual violence) or its cultures. No doubt part of you are tired of seeing that same “amalgam” quote over and over again at the beginning of every single one of these essays, but I did that for a reason, because it was essential to note that this assertion is not merely part of the subtext of how Martin presents his work (although it is that too), but part of the actual text of his promotion of his work.
And it is a lie. And I want to be clear here, it is not a misunderstanding. It is not a regrettable implication. It is not an unfortunate blind-spot of ignorance. It is a lie, made repeatedly, now by many people in both the promotion of the books and the show who ought to have known better. And it is a lie that has been believed by millions of fans.
One thing that I hope is clear from this treatment is just how trivial the amount of research I’ve done here was. Certainly, it helped that I was familiar with Steppe nomads already and that I knew who to ask to be pointed in the direction of information. Nevertheless, everything I’ve cited here is available in English and it is all relatively affordable (I actually own all of the books cited here; thanks to my Patrons for making that possible, especially since getting materials from the library is slower in the days of COVID-19; nevertheless, the point here is that they are not obscure tomes). Much of it – Ratchnevsky on Chinggis Khan, Secoy and McGinnis on Great Plains warfare – were already available well before the 1996 publication of A Game of Thrones. 1996 was not some wasteland of ignorance that might have made it impossible for Martin to get good information! For an easy sense of what a dedicated amateur with film connections might have learned in 1996, you could simply watch Ken Burns’ The West, which came out the same year. I am not asking Martin to become a historian (though I am asking him to stop representing himself as something like one), I am asking him to read a historian.
Instead of doing that basic amount of research, or simply saying that the peoples of Essos were made up cultures unconnected with the real thing, Martin and the vast promotional apparatus at HBO opted to lie about some real cultures and then to put hundreds of millions of dollars into promoting that lie.
And I want to be clear, these are real people! I know, depending on where you live, “Mongols” and “Sioux” and “Cheyenne” may feel as distant and fanciful as “Rohirrim” or “Hobbits” or else they may feel like “long-lost” peoples. But these were real people, whose real descendants are alive today. And almost all of them face discrimination and abuse, sometimes informally, sometimes through state action, often as a result of these very lingering racist stereotypes.
In that context, declaring that the Dothraki really do reflect the real world (I cannot stress that enough) cultures of the Plains Native Americans or Eurasian Steppe Nomads is not merely a lie, but it is an irresponsible lie that can do real harm to real people in the real world. And that irresponsible lie has been accepted by Martin’s fans; he has done a grave disservice to his own fans by lying to them in this way. And of course the worst of it is that the lie – backed by the vast apparatus that is HBO prestige television – will have more reach and more enduring influence than this or any number of historical “debunking” essays. It will befuddle the valiant efforts of teachers in their classrooms (and yes, I frequently encounter students hindered by bad pop-pseudo-history they believe to be true; it is often devilishly hard to get students to leave those preconceptions behind), it will plague efforts to educate the public about these cultures of their histories. And it will probably, in the long run, hurt the real descendants of nomads.
But this is exactly why I think it is important for historians to engage with the culture and to engage with depictions like this. Because these lies have consequences and someone ought to at least try to tell the truth. With luck, even with my only rudimentary knowledge, I have done some of that here, by presenting a bit more of the richness and variety of historical (and in some cases, present-day) horse-borne nomadic life, in both North America and Eurasia.
Because there is and was a lot more to nomads than just “that Dothraki horde”.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: That Dothraki Horde, Part IV: Screamers and Howlers”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-01-08.
August 5, 2024
QotD: George R.R. Martin’s Dothraki rank with the lazy racial sterotypes of Hollywood’s “Golden Age” westerns
August 4, 2024
“Generation loss” in the game Telephone … and in real life
Ted Gioia explains how you can tell if you’re living in what he calls a “doom loop”:
You might have played an old party game called Telephone — in which people sit in a circle, and whisper a simple phrase from ear to ear.
By the time the information has moved around the entire circle, the words have changed. That’s because people mishear and misinterpret.
So when a game of Telephone was played in 2012 with 237 individuals, the starting phrase was: “Life must be lived by play” (a quote from Plato). But when it reached the end of the circle, the words had turned into: “He bites snails”.
Here’s how it progressed:
In other instances, people have started with the phrase “Only the good die young” and end up with “The three Vikings visit Christ”. Or “Today the library is hot” somehow morphs into “Sharon Stone is my girlfriend”.
Perhaps a degree of wish fulfillment enters into the game. Or as my mother used to say: “People hear what they want to hear”.
There’s a technical term for this process. It’s called generation loss.
It has nothing to do with a lost generation — which is how Gertrude Stein described the Jazz Age. She famously told Ernest Hemingway: “You are all a lost generation”.
I’m not talking about those kinds of generations.
The generation loss we’re dealing with here refers to deteriorating data quality when a signal is repeated over and over again.
Each time it’s generated, the information gets a little more corrupted.
And it’s not just hearing that leads us astray. You can also measure generation loss if you make a photocopy of a photocopy. Each time you do it, the quality of the image gets worse. If you do it enough times, you can’t recognize what was in the original.
Even digital data — which is supposedly copied and pasted with perfection — deteriorates with each repetition.
Photos that are shared from account to account on Instagram get worse over time. In one experiment, a photo that was copied and reposted 90 times gradually turned into an unrecognizable blur.
August 2, 2024
46-second beatdown in Paris – Olympic hypocrisy on full, disgusting display
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR reacts to the Olympic boxing travesty of a male boxer being in the ring with a female boxer:
I have mixed feelings about the beatdown of Angela Carini at the Olympics and the feminists complaining that she should never have been put in the ring with a biological male.
On the one hand, yes, it’s disgusting that a man pretending to be a woman battered Carini to the point where she threw the match in justified fear of being killed in the ring.
On the other hand, this travesty seems like such an obvious consequence of feminist doctrine and the feminization of politics that I think most of the women (and “male feminist” allies) decrying it should shut the hell up until they seriously rethink their premises.
It wasn’t “the patriarchy” or defenders of traditional gender roles pushing for this. It was a consequence of decades of insistence that men and women are interchangeable, that gender roles are “socially constructed” – mutable at whim, and that people’s feelings about their own victimization and self-assigned identity trump objective facts.
Feminism and political correctness put Carini’s face in the path of Imane Kelif’s fists. It’s the same ideological cluster that has led to an epidemic of rapes by biological males in women’s prisons and homeless shelters.
Most women – and far too many weak-kneed men – said nothing for decades as this fantasy ideology of feelz laid waste to our cultural norms. And in news that I’m completely sure is utterly unrelated, over 50% of young women identifying as “liberal” have a diagnosed mental disorder.
Maybe, just maybe, feminists and postmodernists and critical theorists ought to stop punching Angela Carini’s face?
QotD: The essential target of ideological propaganda
The Third Reich didn’t last long enough to figure it out, but in their 70-odd years the Soviets learned that “the masses” can be more or less ignored. They’re no threat to the regime. Your average Soviet “citizen” — Ivan Sixpack — would follow pretty much any rule, so long as he had a steady and predictable life course. That’s no slander on Ivan; it’s just the way people are. If you want proof, go look around — if I’d told you, back in the summer of 2019, about all the masks and the social distancing and the lockdowns and everything else, you’d have laughed at me. “There will be blood in the streets! No one will stand for it!”
The reaction of “the masses” (a term I hate; it’s patronizing, but it’ll have to do) to COVID was instructive: They either did as they were told, with nary a peep of complaint, or they simply ignored it … with nary a peep of complaint. From the rulers’ perspective, either one was fine, because they’re functionally the same thing. We all know that whatever the ruling class thought they were going to get out of the Kung Flu panic — and it’s not at all clear; we’ll get there — “public health”, as in the actual health of real members of the public, was nowhere on the list. As with “climate change” and all their other “crises”, their highly visible behavior showed how seriously they took it — which was, of course, not at all.
Indeed, from the rulers’ perspective, it was actually better that some large fraction of the underclass didn’t comply — that way, the mental energy of the Karens was channeled down, not up. Karen could start complaining about Whitmer, Newsom, and the rest not living by their own rules, and had she done so, that might’ve posed a problem for the rulers. But thanks to the maskless proles (and, of course, asshole class traitors like me), Karen always had a bunch of much softer targets to hector.
That’s the function of “propaganda” in my sense. It’s designed to create a narrative, the purpose of which is to channel dissatisfaction down the social scale.
What the Soviets learned, and their SJWs successors have internalized, is that you really only need a small cadre of “middle class” (for lack of a better term) producers to keep things running. Those are the targets of narrative-reinforcing propaganda.
Indeed, it’s only a subset of that already small fraction that needs to be propagandized. As the Soviets quickly learned, true technical experts are more or less ideology-proof. That’s because their technical expertise takes up all their time; they’ve oriented their personalities around it. You could read a novel like Red Plenty to get the sense of it (Z Man has a review somewhere if you want it), but I suggest a much easier path: Watch the fun old movie Boiler Room, with Giovanni Ribisi, Vin Diesel, and in a brief but memorable scene, Ben Affleck. I’m sure that seems odd — it’s a movie about sell-at-all-costs stockbrokers, based loosely on Jordan Belfort’s Stratton Oakmont scam; what could be more explicitly capitalist?
But note how they live: They own ludicrous cars and live in huge mansions, but the cars hardly get driven, and the mansions are unfurnished. There’s a scene where they all get together in Vin Diesel’s living room to watch a movie (Wall Street, natch). There’s a huge tv and a couch, but everything else is boxed up, and they’re eating takeout pizza. Giovanni Ribisi says something like “did you just move in this weekend?” and the other guys say no, he’s been living here for years, he just never got around to unpacking his stuff. That’s the mindset of the true technical intelligentsia. Those stockbrokers think they’re doing it for the money, and so they have the outward trappings of rich people, but they’re really doing it because that’s who they are — they’d be just as deliriously happy competing for subway tokens or scraps of confetti, so long as they had one more scrap than the guy on the next phone.
Given that, the only group that really needs to be propagandized is — you guessed it — Karen. The entire narrative of COVID was very obviously designed by hormonal cat ladies, for hormonal cat ladies. Cards on the table: Though I thought Kung Flu was overblown and ridiculous from the beginning, since I know a little history, I didn’t base my conclusions on my reading in the medical journals. I didn’t read medical journals, and unless you’re a doctor I bet you didn’t, either. My opposition to the Kung Flu panic was entirely visceral: THIS IS MEAN GIRL SHIT.
Severian, “Narrative Collapse III: Magic Masks”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-07.
August 1, 2024
“Donald Trump isn’t a real man, because Hulk Hogan”
It’s always appropriate to criticize public figures — it goes with the job — but you actually should find things to criticize when you do it, otherwise it comes across as lazy bitching:
I’m a charter member of the “no one is above criticism” club. Everyone is fair game. People who run for office are really fair game. So I think it’s just fine to criticize Donald Trump, and to criticize JD Vance, and to criticize Trump/Vance 2024.
But what’s so obvious, over and over again, is that the people writing the most insistent criticism are playing critic. They know that they’re supposed to say that Donald Trump is very very very bad, so they … do that? A lot? But the substance of the criticism tends, with remarkable frequency, to be a set of non-sequiturs and self-refuting rhetorical dead-ends. They’re criticizing because they’re supposed to, not because they have criticisms to offer.
Take David French. Please. Here’s his latest: Donald Trump isn’t a real man, because Hulk Hogan.
The I-didn’t-think-this-through flavor of this piece can’t be exaggerated. It makes so little sense, so poorly, with such odd structure and framing, that it nears the level of Thomas Friedmanism. David French doesn’t know anything, or understand anything, but he really throws himself into it.
So.
Hulk Hogan, Kid Rock, and Dana White were at the Republican National Convention, French writes, so the Republicans are being macho, unlike Democrats, who are demonstrating a style of manhood that focuses on being kind, decent, and nurturing. Republican manhood is about complaints and empty rage; Democratic manhood is about building things and caring for others. Making the comparison concrete, French explicitly compares the macho grievance artist Trump to precisely four wonderfully gentle and caring men: Admiral William McRaven, the US Senator and former astronaut and fighter pilot Mark Kelly, “Mark Hertling, my former division commander in Iraq”, and the former Marine Corps General and Secretary of Defense James Mattis. Those four men are the model of a masculinity that nurtures, loves, and builds; Trump is the model of a masculinity that only destroys and tears down. David French hates machismo, so the list of men he admires is made up entirely of combat arms officers.
Do you … see the problem? Because David French doesn’t. At all. Donald Trump is a real estate developer, someone who spent his entire adult life actually building things:
It’s just fine to criticize Trump as a businessman, if you feel inclined to do that. But he’s a builder and a developer; that’s his actual background. He makes things. He spent his life making things. And his political message is about making things and protecting people who make things, whether you agree with the specifics of his policy arguments or not
QotD: Sex and dating in the internet dating age
In 1996, Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones helped women realise that half the human race (men) might usefully be called “fuckwits” when it came to dating and romance. The dynamics of internet dating, with its illusion of graspable sexual paradise, has either created a new tsunami of apparent fuckwits, or it has made the sheer extent of them inescapable.
Meanwhile, the boredom and jadedness stitched into heavy use of apps (“nope”, “like”, “nope”, “nope”, “nope”, “like”) has produced a ubiquitous undercurrent of queasy unpleasantness. The result is that men, formerly seen as an alternating source of fun, trouble and heartbreak, become “men: ugh”. Women, once the promised land for many a Romeo, become bitches, gold-diggers, game-players, and, most significantly, for a depressing bloc known as “women: meh”.
This sexual stand-off, characterised by simmering distrust and putrid fatigue, oozes off internet dating portals. I’ve often found myself, after a night of binge-scrolling, surprised to remember that dating is filed under “romance”, which is supposed to be — at least at the start — a little about positive, fuzzy feelings or the potential to develop them.
Zoe Strimpel, “Why the young are falling out of love with sex”, UnHerd, 2019-11-25.
July 31, 2024
“You really can’t hate them enough”
Elizabeth Nickson links to a short excerpt from Michael Walsh’s introduction to his upcoming Against the Corporate Media:
Today’s journalists now openly celebrate the death of objectivity, arguing that reporters have biases like everybody else, so why pretend that they don’t? In clear violation of their own — and now very much outmoded — Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics, they happily ignore such tenets as:
- Identify sources clearly.
- Consider sources’ motives before promising anonymity.
- Avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived.
- Expose unethical conduct in journalism, including within their organizations.
Thus, after nearly a century’s consensus about journalistic best practices, we have come full circle to the days of naked partisanship that marked the earliest American newspapers. Gossip has become news, journalistic crusades are fabricated out of whole cloth and attributed to anonymous sources as justification. It’s noteworthy that the word “objectivity” nowhere appears in the current SPJ code, which was revised in 2014. Why would it? Objectivity has become the mortal enemy of the current vogue for “explanatory” or “advocacy” journalism — otherwise generally known as propaganda.
The transformation of journalism from rank advocacy to lukewarm “objectivity” and back to even ranker political propaganda (nearly all news stories today are couched in political terms, including those about pop music and sports) is one of the principal subjects of this book. Accordingly we have assembled a corps of forty-two journalists — some grizzled veterans, some newcomers, some of whose primary occupations lie in the wider fields of book publishing, fiction, non-fiction, television, and even Hollywood — to analyze the startling changes that have come over the profession in our lifetimes.
You really can’t hate them enough.
Even greater than the abandonment of “objectivity” as a pernicious influence on journalism is the internet, the great destroyer of printed periodicals, which has laid waste to the newspaper and magazine industry and has fallen under the control of the social-media giants, such as X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook, and is now subject to favoritism and even censorship by near-monopolies like Google, a search engine that also now controls visual media via its ownership of YouTube. Whether the patrician Walter Lippmann would have admired his wishful handiwork now that it is a reality is open to question, but surely he would celebrate the intrusion of the American federal government, along with governments around the world, into both de facto and de jure informational control of cyberspace. In many countries around the world, the press and attendant broadcast media are now directly and unabashedly controlled by government entities which, in many cases, openly fund and censor them.
Even in a work of this length, it is of course impossible to touch upon every aspect of the current state of the media. From the point of view of one who has labored in it, off and on, for more than half a century, it is parlous and getting worse. Ask someone with less than ten years’ experience in the field and you may well — very likely will — get a different answer: that it’s liberated, responsive, unfettered. Still, my work as a historian has convinced me of the truth of Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr’s famous axiom, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. (The Paris-born Karr, who lived from 1808 to 1890, was, of course, a journalist himself, in addition to being a critic, novelist, and flora-culturalist. But that was back in the day when “journalists” were men of accomplishment in other fields.) That is to say, the fundamental things apply in all walks of human endeavor, and among these things is mankind’s innate desire to convince others of the rightness of his position on any given subject. The question always has been: What’s the best way to go about it?
July 29, 2024
“Queering” the Olympics
The 2024 Summer Olympic Games in Paris have started, with the traditional “fuck you!” to those the elites most disdain, who in this case are apparently the more than two billion Christians around the globe:
At Spiked, Brendan O’Neill notes that our kakistocratic elites are still not tired of “queering” everything they possibly can, especially if it gets up the noses of those disgusting dirt people in the provinces:
Is anyone else bored of “queering”? Everything’s getting “queered” these days. We’ve had “Queering the Curriculum“. “Queering the Arts“. And my personal favourite: “Queering Palestine“. This entails academics “unpack[ing] the multiple intersections of queer politics and the Palestinian struggle”. Hot tip for these profs: if Hamas ever invites you to discuss your theories, don’t agree to meet them on the high floor of a building. “Queering the Pavement” is the only thing they’re interested in.
Now, with soul-zapping inevitability, we’ve had the “queering” of the Olympic Games. Yesterday’s rain-sodden opening ceremony in Paris was super LGBTQIAzzz. There were drag acts everywhere. A bearded bloke twerked for the world. A bollock-naked man in blue paint was served on a platter of fruit to a gaggle of diet-dodging drag queens. Look, if I wanted to be exposed to the camp debauchery of drag culture, I’d go to a kindergarten.
It really was a naff, dispiriting affair. It was the first opening ceremony to take place, not in a stadium, but in the heart of the hosting city. Boat after boat after boat carried the Games’ athletes along the Seine as 300,000 spectators in soaked plastic macs craned their necks for a glimpse. It seemed to go on forever. It was so bad that even square liberals on X started using the favoured slogan of the right: “STOP THE BOATS”.
The weather didn’t help. The lashing rain hampered the audio, making it hard to hear the ceremony’s star turns, Celine Dion and Lady Gaga (an upside of the downpour, I suppose). What we could hear was just weird. Like when a headless Marie Antoinette sang the opening bars to an ear-splitting heavy-metal ditty. The ceremony organiser, Thomas Jolly, said he wanted his spectacle to be a “celebration of being alive” – here we had a celebration of being dead.
Then there was the “queering”. Just as you can’t switch on the BBC, visit a library or have a quiet pray these days without encountering a drag queen, so you can’t watch the opening ceremony of the Olympics without seeing portly men in moob-hugging outfits voguing and gloating. It was more Eurovision than Olympian. More Ru Paul than Ancient Greece. More “Sashay away” than “Citius, Altius, Fortius“. That’s the original Olympic motto. It means “Faster, higher, stronger”. Because, believe it or not, we were once a species that celebrated the moral beauty of sporting heroism rather than the ability of a middle-aged man to lard himself into a sequined gown.
The part of the ceremony that caused the biggest stink was the camp Last Supper. A bunch of drag acts gathered around a buxom woman adorned in an aureole halo crown in an unmistakable mimicking of da Vinci’s painting of Christ and the apostles at their final meal. Wearing the smug look of all glib performance artists who love nothing more than to piss off “normies” – because they lack the talent for anything else – the drag queens giddily got into their disciple positions and heaped holy adoration on the lady Jesus. You could almost hear their thoughts: “Ooh boy, this is going to piss off old farts – yes!”
“… those who aren’t on board with your side are assumed to simply be deficient human beings”
Elizabeth Nolan Brown on the increasing, conscious racial segregation of supporters of Kamala Harris, in this case the “Karens for Kamala” Zoom call for white women:
Screencaps from the Zoom call.
Reason magazine.
“Karens for Kamala?” actress Connie Britton joked.
Britton was one of two celebrities, several politicians, and, reportedly, more than 100,000 others on a Zoom call advertised as a way for white women to “show up for Kamala Harris”. What transpired echoed advocacy around Hillary Clinton eight years ago. It was also oddly reminiscent in tone, if not substance, of missteps we’ve seen from conservatives like Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio), in which those who aren’t on board with your side are assumed to simply be deficient human beings.
Also, pop star Pink was there. And Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D–N.Y.) told a story about her and Britton having to drink toad venom after eating bad seafood.
The virtual gathering was organized by gun control activist and Moms Demand Action founder Shannon Watts, who modeled the meeting after recent calls set up by and for black women and black men who want Harris for president.
According to Elizabeth Minnella, who served as a sort of master of ceremonies of the call, more than $1.8 million was raised last night. Urging viewers to group chat their friends with a fundraising link, Minnella said she would be dropping it into her favorite group chat, titled “Witches for Harris”.
“I am here tonight, embracing myself in your incredible, profound white women midst, because we’ve got a fucking job to do, y’all,” said Britton, who has starred in shows like Nashville, American Horror Story, and The White Lotus. She went on to suggest that because Vice President Kamala Harris is a woman, she will “listen. And lead with empathy, integrity, and the power of the truth”. When President Joe Biden stepped down as the Democratic Party’s 2024 presidential nominee and endorsed Harris to take his place, “the world blew up. Did you feel it?” asked Britton. “It was seismic. Cosmic, even. And since then — have you seen it? Have you seen Kamala glisten in the brilliance and shine of her true power and leadership? And what does that feel like? Feels like self-love.”
“Women, when we are capable of opening up to our own voices and gifts, can access a love of self that is reflective … and can shine outward to unknown depths,” Britton continued. “Which brings me back to us. Beautiful, beautiful white women. Here we are gathered together.”
If Britton sounds a bit gender essentialist, a bit patronizing, a bit woo-woo — well, that was just in keeping with the overall vibes of the call. At least Britton’s “Karens for Kamala” joke was one of the few moments in which speakers weren’t positively radiating self-seriousness.
If there was an underlying theme, it was that white women needed to use their privilege to elect Harris — or else.
“White women, we have 100 days to help save the world!” Watts said.
July 28, 2024
The “Michelangelo of fake news”
The latest anonymous reviewer in Astral Codex Ten‘s “Your Book Review” series considers the work of Michael Baxter and his Real Raw News site, your go-to source of unfiltered unfake news about America:
If you’re a follower of U.S. news outlets, you’ve seen some big stories unfolding over the past year: The unprecedented four criminal indictments lodged against former President Trump. The ongoing AI explosion. The backlash against “DEI”, “woke”, and “cancel culture” as exemplified by Elon Musk’s purchase and rebranding of Twitter to “X”.
Visit a hundred different news sites, and you’ll get varying takes on these stories. Some will be liberal, some centrist, some conservative, some libertarian or neoreactionary or third-way or whatever. Most will attempt or feign objectivity (most badly). But all will largely be discussing the same stories.
And then there is one site where a very different narrative is unfolding:
The admiral and several other officers were already in position when guards delivered [Merrick] Garland to the gallows at 10:05 a.m. He was led to the platform where the hangman and a rabbi awaited his arrival, one lowering the circle of rope and the other asking whether Garland wanted prayers recited as he transitioned to the afterlife.
“Go f*** yourself,” Garland told the rabbi.
Admiral Crandall asked Garland if he had any last words—besides insulting the rabbi.
“I do, Crandall,” Garland said.
A lengthy silence followed.
“We don’t have all day,” the admiral said.
Garland sneered. “You’re so far up Trump’s ass I can see the soles of your shoes.”
“Clever,” the admiral said.
The hangman put the noose around Garland’s neck and a cloth sack over his head.
“Let’s do it,” the admiral said.
The floor beneath Garland’s feet fell away, and he dropped. His neck snapped, ending his miserable life.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Real Raw News.1
The World According to Michael Baxter
Some people write fanfics about Harry Potter. Some people write fanfics about Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And then, well, some people write fanfics about Donald Trump.
Spewing forth from a single WordPress site that doesn’t even display properly in mobile, Real Raw News presents itself as the lone bastion telling the real story of what is going on in America, for everyone who isn’t fooled by the fake news of all the other media outlets.
The articles of RRN are all the work of one Michael Baxter, and after enough time spent reading the site, one realizes that Baxter is no crank – he is instead a creative genius, the Michelangelo of fake news. Just as Michelangelo took four years to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling, Baxter has spent three and a half building his own elaborate world of plots, counterplots, and bloody, implacable justice.
At Real Raw News, Donald Trump is still president – just a temporarily embarrassed one, who has had to abandon the public-facing side of his job in order to lure the “Deep State” out of hiding into its own annihilation.
In the world of Real Raw News, at least, it’s working. In this corner of the World Wide Web, America is going through a revolutionary purge rivaled only by the worst excesses of Joseph Stalin’s government – with the important difference that this time, the perpetrators thankfully all deserve it.
The basic summary of the past four years of world history, according to RRN, are as follows:
- Following widespread and blatant fraud in the 2020 election, endorsed as legitimate by the media, Donald Trump pretended to surrender power to Joe Biden. In reality, though, he retained the support of the U.S. military, and continues to exercise presidential power from a secret bunker at Mar-a-Lago.
- Military forces loyal to Trump, empowered by the Insurrection Act and other executive orders secretly placing the country under martial law, have been conducting special forces operations to hunt down and secretly arrest various high-profile Americans on charges of treason.
- Joe Biden, who is not really president and perhaps not really Joe Biden either, is somehow still exerting dictatorial powers over much of America, assisted by Deep State-aligned government agencies like the IRS, the FBI, and of course, FEMA. Any time there is a natural disaster, Trump-loyal military forces do battle with FEMA operatives. These battles have killed hundreds.
- A chief goal of Biden’s not-really-in-power dictatorship is spreading Covid-19 vaccines, which are an evil plot to do … something. They contain ingredients like the “zombie drug” scopolamine, pesticides, HIV, and wasp venom. Vaccines variously cause heart attacks, mass sudden death, or berserker rage.
- Vladimir Putin launched the war in Ukraine to hunt down a network of child-trafficking pedophiles. The Deep State has some kind of weird plan to merge America with Ukraine.
- The lack of evidence that all this is happening is entirely explained through coordinated media silence as well as the widespread use of body doubles and clones.
The heart of Real Raw News, and the source of most of its entertainment value, is its accounts of the supposed secret military tribunals occurring at America’s Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba, better known as Gitmo2. For more than three years, the site has produced one article after another describing the arrest, trial, and execution of dozens of major and not-so-major figures in American life.
1. “Wait a minute, this is about a fake news website? Why is it in this contest?”
Excellent question! To that, I offer several answers:
- A collection of fake news blog posts may as well be considered a long-running series of short stories, and I hope that we’d be allowed to review the collected short stories of an author even if they were never technically compiled into a book.
- Scott told us to be less conventional in our choices.
- I am a liberal arts graduate and I’m definitely not going to make the finals reviewing some nerdy non-fiction book.
2. Baxter also places a few tribunals in Guam.
J.D. Vance is an ideological extremist who has pushed an idea also supported by … Canadian deputy PM Chrystia Freeland
There’s much viewing-with-alarm and pearl-clutching going on over some of J.D. Vance’s more outré notions floated before he became Trump’s running mate:
U.S. Senator J.D. Vance speaking with attendees at The People’s Convention at Huntington Place in Detroit, Michigan, 16 June, 2024.
Detail of a photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.
One of the amusing features of this week’s U.S. election turbulence has been sudden media scrutiny of Ohio Republican Senator J.D. Vance, a former author and pundit newly named as Donald Trump’s running mate. Readers will know I’m a sadistic student of electoral reform crusades, and in 2021 Vance advocated for one of the myriad of utopian ideas that has never quite reached prime time: parents should be given extra votes that they can exercise on behalf of their minor children.
[…]
Critics of Vance are screaming about the sacred principle of “one person, one vote” — but of course the centrists and liberals who have toyed with the same idea support it precisely because children are persons who deserve political representation. (They would be represented second-hand by their parents until the age of majority, but us adults are all represented that way in democratic decision-making now, right?) Earlier this week Reason magazine published a short excerpt from a pro-Demeny paper by two American law professors with strong conservative, originalist credentials: there isn’t all that much daylight between their arguments and Corak’s.
Are the arguments actually any good? Some of them seem circumstantial or even aesthetic. We’re in a transitory era of gerontocracy because of a baby boom that happened eighty years ago, and nobody under 70, whatever their ideology, likes this universal predicament much. But on the grounds of revealed preference, the lack of actual real-world Demeny experiments is a big problem.
If we want the proxy votes to go to custodial parents who are involved with a real child and conscious of its particular interests, you’re suddenly talking about integrating election systems with family law. I.e., an unfathomable technical nightmare. But assigning control of the extra child votes automatically to biological parents, including deadbeats and those who have surrendered children to adoptees or foster families, seems like a non-starter. (And would also be an unfathomable technical nightmare.)
You can say that the democratic principle is more important than the mere design details of a child-voting system, and this is the kind of thing election reformers say all the time — but would you book a seat on an airplane that was built on aerodynamic principles with no attention to detail?
July 27, 2024
More Kamalamentum
At Spiked, Fraser Myers examines what he calls “Kamala’s Ministry of Truth”:
“Kamala Harris” by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 
.
Did I just fall out of a coconut tree? How else to explain the dizziness so many of us are feeling at the speed of Kamala Harris’s coronation – and at the contortions now being performed to present her as the saviour of the beleaguered Democrats, if not of American democracy itself.
Within 48 hours of Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the US presidential race on Sunday, Vice-President Harris had clinched enough delegates, donors and Democratic power-brokers to ensure her an unchallenged, uncontested path to becoming the Democratic nominee to face Donald Trump this autumn. The last dominos to fall, Barack and Michelle Obama, today offered a full-throated endorsement of Harris, claiming she has the “vision, the character, and the strength that this critical moment demands”.
Since Harris emerged as the frontrunner, the Democrats’ media cheerleaders appear to have been gripped by a nasty bout of Kamalamania. “Kamala Harris will be the 47th President of the United States. Democracy will survive”, declared one Hollywood celeb. She brings the “political power of joy” and “effervescent vibes” to US politics, according to a New York Times columnist. CNN reporters have been gushing over her choice of hoodie and sneakers. As Jenny Holland wrote on spiked earlier this week, the media are eager to present Harris as “Martin Luther King, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, all rolled into one”.
We need to remember who we’re talking about here. The newly anointed Democratic nominee was someone few believed could win the presidency, only a few weeks ago. Indeed, this is widely understood to be behind the Obamas’ hesitancy to back her – and Biden’s own reluctance to hand over the baton to his veep.
It’s not hard to see why. Harris is a politician who exudes negative charisma. She speaks like a cross between a Calfornian self-help guru – her favoured aphorism is “What can be, unburdened by what has been” – and a primary-school teacher who enjoys a few too many glasses of wine at lunchtime. She laughs and cackles at inopportune moments, often to herself. At times, her speech is as incoherent as the mentally frail Joe Biden’s. Who could forget her nonsensical remarks last year at a White House function in which she asked: “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.” Good luck translating that into English for swing voters in Pennsylvania.
We know that Harris is unpopular with the public, because she has been tested before. Her campaign for the Democratic nomination in 2020 had to be suspended two months before the first primary vote in order to avoid total humiliation at the ballot box. Nationally, Harris was polling at just three per cent. Even in her home state of California, she could only muster eight per cent. Yet now she is about to become the Democratic contender for the White House, with zero input from the public or the party grassroots.
At Founding Questions, Severian responds to a few questions from readers about the Kamala Harris candidacy and what it might indicate about what is happening behind the scenes among the Democratic movers and shakers:
My read is that 2024 is going to be Fortified to hell and back — that’s a certainty — but the extent of the Fortification, and probably its eventual outcome, is tied to the Robber Barons. I agree with William Briggs or whoever it is who suggests a “Thermidorian faction” (I prefer “competent fraction”) of Juggs within the Apparat who are trying desperately to slam on the brakes. IF they can do it — and I’m honestly not sure they can, not at this late date — it’ll be because the Robber Barons put the resources behind it.
I get a sense that there are more than a few Robber Barons making their peace with the BOM. There are, of course, a lot more Robber Barons who hate him and will never reconcile themselves to him … but that doesn’t mean they want Kamala Harris as President. As I wrote in the comments yesterday, if they’d wanted Harris as President, she’d be President by now. Pretty much all the Uniparty’s current problems go away if Biden resigns the Presidency, and if they can force him to drop his reelection bid, they can certainly force his resignation — he’s out in five months no matter what, so why not pass the reins to Harris? She’d be in a far, far stronger position going into 2024 as the incumbent.
No, really. I know that sounds badly wrong to people in contact with Reality, but look at it from the dumbass perspective. The Media has been telling us for four years that the Biden Administration is the greatest ever. Despite your lying eyes, there’s no inflation, no border crisis, no crime problem, and so forth. Harris is going to try to take credit for that on the campaign trail, of course, but it rings a weensy bit hollow coming from a Vice-President. From Madam President xzyrzelf, though? Different story. At least, that’s how the dumbfucks out there in Normie-land would see it, and those are the stupid bastards who will be voting in the fall.
As Vice-President, she gets no credit for the Biden Administration’s accomplishments (I know, I know, stop laughing) … but she gets tarred with all their failures, plus her fuckups as “border czar” (that’s gonna be fun), plus her role in the very obvious and ongoing coverup of Dementia Joe’s galloping dementia.
Make her President, and all that shit goes away. For her first official act, she appoints someone, anyone, as the new “border czar”, and tells that persyn to fall on xzheyr sword. Or, better yet, just never mention the border again. Tell the Media to blast nothing but Historic First Female President!! shit from now until Fortification Day. They will be happy to comply, and it’ll drive most of the bad news off the front page.
This is such a no-brainer that there are only two possible explanations for why they haven’t done it: Either they’re even more terrifyingly stupid than they seem, and so it never occurred to them; or it did occur to them, but Kamala Harris is such a repulsive retard that they can’t risk it — despite it all, Chomo Joe and his galloping dementia are still, somehow, the safer bet.
My guess is that, as Pickle Rick posited the other day, they all give her a pro-forma endorsement, then quietly pull the funding plug. They all pretty much have to endorse her at this point, if for no other reason than the Spiteful Mutants are already going to go apeshit in Chicago; an actual primary fight might burn the city to the ground.
But who knows? These are Juggs. Plus, as I’ve written, this is their moment — every grievance group in AINO will be going for it, as the Uniparty in general, and Harris in particular, will have to promise them the earth and stars to keep them onside. Consider that she has to get both the Bagels and their shekels, and the Pali-bros, in order to make the whole thing go. That would test the political skill of a Metternich, to say nothing of a woman who literally slept her way to the top. She can’t blow ’em all, so she’s going to have to deliver the goods in some other way.
It’ll be a hoot, that’s for sure. Keeping an eye on the funding is probably the best indicator we have.
And in an answer to a different reader:
Welcome to Late Soviet America. Expect a lot more of this, as obvious, ham-handed repression is SOP for flailing, collapsing regimes. We’ve entered the Andropov / Chernenko phase of the festivities, when the phrase “decrepit old man” refers to both the “leader” and his nation. And yeah, I realize that makes Kamala Harris the fake and gay Gorbachev, but that’s actually pretty close — Gorby, too, destroyed what was left of his country because he really believed in all that “openness” and “democracy” bullshit they taught him at the Higher Party Academies. Harris is a far worse moonbat race-baiter than even Bathhouse Barry ever dreamed of being; we’ll get the whole Gorby-Yeltsin-we’re fucked decade in about six weeks once she’s Fortified into office.
And on the power politics uncertainties for both America’s allies and adversaries when it’s not clear exactly who is in charge in Washington DC, the temptation to press a temporary advantage may become overwhelming:
Had Brandon resigned, it wouldn’t be ideal for the Juggs — Harris is still largely holding the bag for Chomo’s failures — but it’d be a hell of a lot better than this, because at least there is someone nominally in charge. Putin or Xi or whoever can pick up the phone and demand to speak to President Harris, and at the very least, he can be assured that President Harris will remember their discussion a few hours later. She might decide to do some incredibly stupid shit, of course — in fact that’s almost guaranteed — but at least Xi, Putin, whoever will know that it’s a bad decision …
… and not just some random drooling lunacy by a guy who thinks it’s 1971 and he’s sticking it to Corn Pop. If anything, the problem just got worse, because they’ve all but openly admitted what everybody already knew: We’re under the Do Long Bridge. There ain’t no fuckin’ CO. But now, instead of just ignoring Harris as per usual when decisions have to be made by … well, by whomever, now they pretty much have to loop her stupid ass in, even though she has no official power to make anything happen. They’ve added yet another layer of retarded dysfunction to an already FUBAR process.
And at The Free Press, Suzy Weiss explains a few Kamalamemes that her campaign has decided to “lean into” (note that the rest is behind a paywall):
→ Kamala is brat, Biden is boots, please God send the asteroid today: I’ve learned the hard way — and by that I mean my parents once asked me what “WAP” meant — that certain things should never be explained with words. It’s not that it’s impossible, it’s just that it embarrasses everyone.
That’s how I feel about the whole Kamala-is-brat thing. Brat is a good album about partying and getting older and having anxiety that was released earlier this summer by Charli XCX. But it’s since been adopted by too-online and very young people as a personality, and by Kamala Harris’s campaign as a mode to relate to those very young people. Her campaign is leaning into the whole green look of the album to try and win over Gen Z, and generally recasting her many viral moments—”You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” “I love Venn diagrams” “What can be, unburdened by what has been” — as calling cards. It’s like when Hillary went on Broad City, only this time more cringe.
And now we have Jake Tapper and Greg Gutfeld grappling with the “essence” and the “aesthetic” and overall vibe of brat girl summer. We used to be a serious country. We used to make things.
Here’s the thing about Kamla: she is hilarious and campy, but unintentionally so. Any goodwill that her goofy dances or weird turns of phrase garner should be considered bonus points, not game play. Was there ever any doubt that Fire Island would go blue? We’ve been debating whether Kamala’s meme campaign is a good move for her prospects in the Free Press Slack, and here I’ll borrow from my older and wiser colleague Peter Savodnik: “There is nothing more pathetic than an older person who cares what a younger person thinks is cool”.
→ Boomer behavior: While Kamala’s campaign is being run by a 24-year-old twink with an Adderall prescription, J.D. Vance’s speechwriter seems to be a drunk boomer who just got kicked out of a 7-Eleven. Vance, appearing this week at a rally in Middletown, Ohio, riffed, “Democrats say that it is racist to believe … well, they say it’s racist to do anything. I had a Diet Mountain Dew yesterday and one today, and I’m sure they’re going to call that racist too.” Crickets. Horror. Major “Thanks, Obama” energy. There was also a bit on fried bologna sandwiches and a lot of “lemme tell you another story”. The guy is 39 but sounds older than Biden.
Fresher, 35-to-60-year-old blood is exactly what we’ve been begging for. Let the boomers boom, let the Zoomers zoom. Kamala and J.D.: act your age.
July 26, 2024
Getting meta on “cancelling the cancellers”
Nearly a week ago, I posted an excerpt from John Carter’s essay at Postcards From Barsoom called “Right Wing Cancel Squads“. As sometimes happens, this particular essay caught the attention of a lot of folks online and triggered much discussion pro and con. John did his best to summarize and respond here, and (as I post links to Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten now and again), I thought John’s response to Scott’s criticism was worth highlighting:
Somehow, Scott Alexander took interest in my essay, and addressed it at length. I’m not deeply familiar with Alexander, aside from a vague awareness that he’s a big deal in the rationalist community, to say nothing of being a much bigger deal than I am, and that he’s dealt with lying journalists and hysterical wokoids enough himself to have a healthy distaste for them. Alexander is characteristically calm and thorough, starting with a selection of screenshotted posts on Notes from various writers and commenters who take the pro-fight-the-enemy side, before presenting an extensive set of excerpts from my own essay.
Scott sidesteps the ethical question, to focus instead on the practical considerations, on the grounds of which he comes down (as expected, given his ideological niche) on the don’t-cancel side. He enumerates a series of objections, which can be approximately summarized as1:
1) cancellation will not, in fact, teach anyone anything – after all, just look at how eager the right is to cancel;
2) this has been going on forever, e.g. the Red Scare, so one more whirl ‘bout the merry-go-round isn’t likely to stop the wheel a turnin’;
3) If you act like the woke, you are the woke;
4) Most cancellations have been of liberals, by liberals, so if the right starts doing this it is likely to turn on itself;
5) cancellation destroys competence, because avoiding cancellation takes on a higher salience to people than doing their damn jobs;
6) embracing cancel culture has ruined the left’s name, which is why it is struggling despite holding all of the institutional power;
7) going mad with power before you actually have power is probably stupid;
And finally
8) there are better options.
The better options Alexander describes are mostly at the policy and tech level, such as better moderation tools that take the personal politics of platform moderators out of the equation, or dismantling those aspects of the regulatory state, such as the sillier and more self-contradictory elements of Civil Rights law, which nourish cancel culture in the first place. Alexander’s policy proposals are all great, and I completely agree that the most effective long-term solution is to tear the legal basis of cancel culture up by the roots, set those roots on fire, and salt the earth in which they were planted.
Regarding power, and the simple fact that the right does not have it in any formal sense, Charles Haywood and Bennett’s Phylactery made the same very cogent point. I don’t think any sane person could disagree.
I’m not convinced by some of Alexander’s other points. For instance, the right is an extremely contentious place, with the modal rightist being pretty low in agreeableness, which probably makes it hard for circular firing squads to be terribly effective. That isn’t to say that rightists don’t have strong beliefs – there are fanatics all over the place – but those beliefs are so contradictory between the various factions that the ideology of the right is infamously difficult to describe. Just look at the perennial holy war between Christians and pagans/Nietzscheans/vitalists.
As to the Red Scare, it’s probably worth pointing out that McCarthy was actually right: there really were communists trying to infiltrate the Western social order; tragically for us, the communists succeeded, which is a large part of the reason why we are where we are now.
As to the unpopularity of the left, I do not think this is only because of their po-faced censoriousness, although there is no question that that contributes. It probably also has something to do with their vicious racial and sexual hatred, their contemptuous hostility towards Western civilization, and their propensity to emotionally abuse children to the point that those children demand that they be allowed to mutilate their genitalia, amongst a great number of other horrors.
Finally, as to Alexander’s first point, that cancellation does not teach anyone anything. Au contraire. Look around at how society has changed in just the last decade. Sure, if you’re an autistic rationalist, a contrarian ideologue, or a Bohemian free spirit, cancel culture has only made you hate the left more. But this is a fairly small fraction of the population. What about the normies? In a remarkably short period of time, they went from opposing gay marriage, to supporting it. Why? Because examples were made of a few people who opposed it, and the rest got into line. Most people are basically NPCs: they don’t follow a praxis emerging from carefully thought out philosophical systems, but simply go along with whatever they perceive the prevailing morality to be. They are not rational, nor are they principled. They simply respond to incentives, which is to say, to rewards and to punishments. Put a few heads on pikes to demarcate new social boundaries, and the normies will in general respect them.2
There are limits to the ability to enact social change via incentive structure manipulation, because if the social boundaries you establish don’t map to the eternal verities of human nature, the resulting social order will generate a lot of friction and consequently destabilize … as our society observably is. However, the social boundaries the right intends to enforce do, in fact, map to human nature. The left has been figuratively beheading the people who object to the surgical genital mutilation and chemical sterilization of children; the right intends to metaphorically behead the people who have been advocating and carrying out that child abuse in the first place. There’s a profound moral asymmetry there, but I think there’s also a practical asymmetry, because the right isn’t demanding that everyone publicly agree sadomasochistic psychosis is healthy.
1. I skipped one in the middle because it looked redundant.
2. [NR] Sarah Hoyt is one of the folks most likely to describe herself as being on Team Heads-On-Pikes, and I suspect she has a non-trivial following who share in that inclination.
Vance, the harbinger
In City Journal, Christopher Rufo explains why Trump selected a VP candidate that goes against the “usual” ticket balance criteria for a presidential team:
U.S. Senator J.D. Vance speaking with attendees at The People’s Convention at Huntington Place in Detroit, Michigan, 16 June, 2024.
Detail of a photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.
The Vance selection is not a gambit to secure a particular demographic or region — white men are Trump’s base; Ohio is a safe red state — but an effort to cultivate an emerging counter-elite that could make the second Trump administration substantially more effective than the first.
This story is built into J. D. Vance’s biographical arc. He was the all-American kid who rose from humble beginnings to make his way in the world: the Marines; Yale Law; venture capital; a best-selling book. He learned the language of the prestige institutions, cultivated powerful patrons, and quickly climbed the ladder in academia, finance, and business. He had made it.
Then, his story takes a turn. Having entered the ranks of America’s elite, Vance became disillusioned and disenchanted with it, correctly identifying it as a force of hypocrisy and corruption. He defected — first, by parting ways with the respectable conservatism of the Beltway, and then by embracing Donald Trump.
Some have criticized this as a cynical move, but my sense is that it is the opposite. A cynic would have continued to build an elite résumé; Vance sacrificed his respectability within a certain stratum, assumed considerable risk by moving toward Trump, and, in my view, was genuinely convinced that the establishment, both Left and Right, had exhausted itself and had to be opposed.
Now, not only has Vance been selected as a vice-presidential nominee; more significantly, he has charted the path for an emerging new conservative counter-elite.
The political balance is beginning to shift. A significant cohort of power brokers in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street have publicly moved toward Trump in this election cycle. Some of the names are familiar: Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, David Sacks, Bill Ackman. But hundreds of other influential figures are assembling behind the scenes to support Trump’s campaign. Even some of Trump’s former adversaries, such as Mark Zuckerberg, have expressed cautious admiration for the former president.
Vance can now position himself at the center of this counter-elite. He has been in the boardrooms, made the pitches, and built the relationships. He speaks their language. They can do business together.
This could represent a sea-change. During the first Trump administration, especially following the death of George Floyd, institutional elites could neither express admiration for nor devote public support to Trump without paying a significant political price. Now the market has shifted, with a dissident elite moving along a similar path as Vance.
Latest Liberal ad totally DESTROYS Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives
If you’re new here, you may not recognize my headline as being sarcastic. Here’s Chris Selley‘s attempt to figure out what the Liberal brain trust is up to with their latest anti-Tory ad:
“The CEO of Elections Canada has indicated his opposition to it, and let me just say I’m at peace with that.”
These words, spoken by Pierre Poilievre a decade ago, are part of an absolutely bizarre 46-second video the Liberal Party of Canada released in recent days trying to convince us — a very novel approach — that the Conservative leader is too wacky and full of dangerous ideas to vote for.
Read that sentence again. It’s supposed to be a scare quote. Are you scared? Or, more likely, do you not know what the hell he’s talking about? Removed from its context it’s not just uncontroversial; it barely even exists. It’s like someone negotiating the return date on their dry cleaning, or asking for no mayonnaise on their Whopper.
There’s another quote like that in the same 46-second video: “We’re Conservatives, so we don’t believe in that”.
Believe in what? No idea. Keynesian economics? The curse of the Oak Island treasure? Could be anything.
The notion that communications is the Liberals’ “problem” is as laughable as ever, but good grief are they ever terrible at communicating.
Usually politicians take other politicians’ quotes out of context to make them look bad. Here the Liberals have done … I really have no idea what. It’s like they’re so hopelessly ensconced in their echo chamber that they can’t tell which echoes have even escaped the chamber into the real world … if the real world even still exists.
Those intimately familiar with Poilievre’s parliamentary record (which is what, maybe 90 people in the world?) might surmise, correctly, that in the first instance he was talking in his role as minister of state for democratic reform in the Harper government about Bill C-23. That was the 2014 legislation that, most controversially, toughened voter-ID requirements: Your voter-information card, delivered by mail, would no longer be sufficient proof of your identity to cast your ballot. You wouldn’t be able to “vouch” for another voter.
This was unnecessary, I felt at the time, and I might still, though the prospect of electoral fraud doesn’t make Liberal eyes roll quite as theatrically as it used to. But it seems clear the serious foreign interference in play is considerably smarter and more insidious than just sending some people to vote without proof of citizenship (which few of us offer up to vote as it stands).
Anyway, Poilievre was telling a Senate committee, on April 8, 2014, that he understood then chief electoral officer Marc Mayrand disagreed with the bill, and that he disagreed with Mayrand, and that he was “at peace with it.”
I do hope you were sitting down for that bombshell.
