Quotulatiousness

July 8, 2024

All the conspiracists seem to find room for the Rockefellers in their theories

Filed under: Environment, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Elizabeth Nickson on a new book by Jacob Nordangård that illustrates just how important Rockefeller funding is to so many activists and the environmental pressure groups that deploy them:

In the climate change arena, the Rockefellers call the shots. The whole thing was their idea, they took a silly but interesting theory and amped it up with hundreds and hundreds of million of dollars. They founded institutions and linked the survival of those institutions to promoting climate change and population reduction. They adopted one likely politician after another.

The Rockefellers have created 990 Climate Change activist organizations. They give them directions, financing, and launch them on the world. The Green Movement was started, financed, organized, and militarized by the Rockefellers. By the late 40’s the family was all in, on the same page. In the 50’s they began to stand up countless institutions, committees, university departments, university institutes, foundations, and policy shops gathered around this one idea, as below:

Let’s just pause here and recognize that the United States and Canada are 5% developed. If it were 50%, then maybe we would have reason to worry about the effects of trace gas that takes up .04% of the atmosphere, of which 3% is currently contributed to by humans. But were we to have that level of development, our science would have long ago solved the problem. Our sense of proportion, size and consequence has been twisted, propagandized via hundreds of billions of purposed dollars. And all of it is exaggerated science done by scientists compromised by Rockefeller money.

By 1998, the Rockefeller family had swept the table clean of any opposition to this one idea. Any scientist not on board with the agenda was imperiled. Any university department not working towards this one artificial goal, was in danger of being marginalized. Infiltration had begun into every media organization, every entertainment division of every major corporation. This, as stated below, would be a generational goal. For everyone. Or get off the bus.

What is evidentiary, what can be proved in a court of law, rather than opinion, however, is that the Fabians started the idea of this whole one-world, no nation state. It is clear too that after the First World War, the Fabians roped in the second generation of Rockefellers. It was a major catch. It meant they had America. And it was spiritual. It was meant to change mankind, to kill off Homo Sapiens and turn us to Homo Universalis.

The New Man would be not-Christian, quietist, and self-obsessed. The economy would trend towards zero-growth if not de-growth. There is a preponderance of data, many many publications that laid out their plans. They twisted education away from practical science, engineering and building things towards social movements, the humanities, the arts, and pleasure. And via Laurance Rockefeller’s money and organizational skill, they devised and invented the discipline of cybernetics from which the internet flows.

July 5, 2024

“Private property rights? How do they work?” (U of T students, probably)

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Law, Middle East, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In The Line, Josh Dehaas rounds up the concept of private property rights for the University of Toronto students (and non-student antisemitic fellow occupiers) who have been squatting for Palestinian terrorists on university property for the last while:

University College, University of Toronto, 31 July, 2008.
Photo by “SurlyDuff” via Wikimedia Commons.

After Justice Koehnen delivered his ruling Tuesday ordering the occupiers to dismantle the People’s Circle for Palestine at the University of Toronto, one of the protesters accused the school of hypocrisy.

“It’s quite interesting that a university that claims to practice decolonization is falling back on this claim of private property,” master’s student Sarah Rasikh told a journalist on the day before the students began taking down their tents.

“U of T and the Court more specifically is quite literally telling Indigenous students to leave and get off of their own land,” she added.

Rasikh has a point, sort of.

As someone who did law school relatively recently, I can attest that many university professors are downright hostile to the concept of private property. They commonly claim that all of Canada belongs to Indigenous people and that Indigenous peoples don’t believe in private property. Rather, they believe in “sharing”. Decolonization therefore requires that land be treated communally, or so the theory goes. University administrators who pay lip service to the concept of decolonization shouldn’t be surprised when students try to turn theory into action.

Thankfully the law still protects private property rights. Students who didn’t get taught how that works by their professors ought to give Justice Koehnen’s decision a read.

As Justice Koehnen explained, “in our society we have decided that the owner of property generally gets to decide what happens on the property”.

“If the protesters can take that power for themselves by seizing Front Campus, there is nothing to stop a stronger group from coming and taking the space over from the current protesters,” he went on. “That leads to chaos. Society needs an orderly way of addressing competing demands on space. The system we have agreed to is that the owner gets to decide how to use the space.”

“If it is not the owner who gets to determine what happens on the property it will become a brutal free-for-all,” Justice Koehnen added.

July 1, 2024

Welcome to the “Omnicause” (aka “the Fatberg of Activism”)

Filed under: Australia, Education, Media, Middle East, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Helen Dale first encountered the Omnicause as a university student council member:

For my sins — in 1991 — I spent a year on the University of Queensland Student Union Council. Yes, I was elected, which means I was a volunteer. It ranks up there among the more pointless activities I’ve undertaken. I was 19, that’s my excuse.

Because I’m conscientious, I took it seriously. I turned up to the monthly meetings. I researched the motions to be debated and voted on in advance. I tried to say not-stupid-things when I thought it was worth making a comment. One side benefit: I learnt meeting procedure.

I also had my first encounter with the Omnicause.

Every single student union council meeting had a Palestine motion, sometimes more than one. These were long, detailed, and competently drafted. They routinely dominated more typical student union fare: budgetary allocations to fix the Rec Club roof, say, or complaints about tuition fees. I wondered what the union’s employed secretarial staff thought of typing up and then photocopying pages upon pages of tedious detail about Middle Eastern geopolitics. I remember picking up copies of both minutes and agendas and boggling at the amount of work involved.

There, in miniature — in sleepy meetings in hot rooms where dust particles danced in stray sunbeams as those of us reading law or STEM subjects tried to make sense of it all — was the Omnicause we now see in campuses all over the developed world. My earliest memories of it involve Aboriginal activists describing Australia as a “settler-colonial state” which had been “invaded” — just like Israel. Australia also had no right to exist.

During one meeting, a Palestine-obsessive buttonholed an engineering student known for his commitment to conservation, bending his ear about the Nakba. I misunderstood the exchange, and congratulated my Greens fellow councillor on recruiting a new party member.

“I’m not sure we want her,” he said. “She doesn’t know or care about the environment, just this Israel thing.”

Already, in 1991, the infant Omnicause had learnt to crawl. It was possible to see — albeit dimly — what would happen to genuine conservationists as single-issue lunatics took over their movement and rotted its political party from within. Darren Johnson — whom I’d call a “Green Green” — and his cri de coeur captures the process well:

    Terrible haircut I know, but here’s me in the Hull Daily Mail running for the Green Party in 1990. I stood on a platform of male rapists in female prisons, hormone drugs for 10yos and rebranding women as uterus-owners. No, don’t be silly, it was housing, environment & poll tax.

Darren Johnson, recall, was the UK Green Party’s former principal speaker, its first-ever London councillor, twice its London mayoral candidate, and is a former chair of the London Assembly.

The Omnicause: what writer Hadley Freeman calls “the fatberg of activism”. This is a genuine flyer, by the way. I admit to suspecting the work of Mole at the Counter, General Boles, Famous Artist Birdy Rose, or Burnside Not Tosh — so I checked.

The Greens in both Australia and the UK have become a vector for much of the worst nonsense: trans and Gaza and chucking orange paint around an art gallery near you have displaced saving the Fluffy Antechinus1 or improving biodiversity, quite apart from anything else. Trans, in my view, is also part of the Omnicause, albeit a junior partner. Like Palestine, it’s capable of colonising major political movements focussed on something else entirely, as this (justifiably angry) supporter of Scottish independence points out.

    1. This animal does not exist, although the Antechinus does.

June 15, 2024

The Ford Foundation and the far left

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

N.S. Lyons looks at the vast amount of money the “philanthropic” Ford Foundation donates to organizations pushing far left agendas:

It’s November 2023, and, following the October 7 attacks by Hamas terrorists that killed some 1,400 Israelis and at least 31 Americans, thousands of demonstrators march through New York City, calling for the destruction of the Jewish state. Chants of “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” echo through the streets, along with “there is only one solution: intifada revolution”. Among the crowd is the infamous Palestinian American activist Linda Sarsour, who warns through a megaphone that a cabal of wily Jews has conspired to place “their little posters” (of kidnapped Israeli civilians) across the city, seeking to entice people to rip them down. While many onlookers might look like “ordinary people”, she says, the Jews have “their little people all around the city”, surveilling others. Sarsour is there to deliver such rhetoric in part because she’s been paid to be there: her nonprofit, MPower Change, has received $300,000 in grant funding from the Ford Foundation “to build grassroots Muslim power”.

It’s May 2023, and protesters have stormed the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., to demand that lawmakers not accept spending cuts during negotiations to lift the debt ceiling. Many are so disruptive that the police arrest them and drag them out. These are activists of the Center for Popular Democracy, an extreme left-wing organization that has collected $35.2 million from the Ford Foundation since 2012. Four months later, they will be imitated by 150 youth activists from the “climate revolution” group the Sunrise Movement, 18 of whom will be arrested after occupying the Speaker of the House’s office. The Sunrise Movement also receives Ford Foundation money—$650,000 for “training and organizing”.

It’s April 2023, and, a world away, the China Development Research Foundation (CDRF), a think tank set up and directed by the Chinese state, is hosting a conference in Beijing to discuss how to “promote the formation of an internationally accepted ESG system with Chinese characteristics”, including through China’s globe-spanning influence and infrastructure plan, the Belt and Road Initiative. But this effort by America’s top geopolitical adversary isn’t too far afield for the Ford Foundation to fund; it has given CDRF $600,000 to help realize its ambitions.

These examples from just the last year — collected via a semi-random tour of the Ford Foundation’s vast Grants Database — represent a tiny fraction of the nearly $1 billion that the foundation gives away yearly, on average. Almost a century old and sitting on a mountainous $16.4 billion endowment in 2022, the foundation is a “philanthropic” giant — one of the five largest in the U.S. If it were a for-profit firm, its market capitalization would rank it among the Fortune 500. Instead, “guided by a vision of social justice”, as its mission statement puts it, the Ford Foundation’s enormous flood of untaxed money flows annually to an immense ecosystem of overwhelmingly left-wing — and often outright revolutionary — causes.

Yet the foundation’s activities remain largely below the public’s radar, the extent of its malign history mostly unknown. This should change. America today faces a multitude of escalating sociopolitical crises that are rapidly tearing apart the body politic: a rapacious strain of tribal identity politics; spreading legal, cultural, and moral chaos; lawlessness in the streets; and the entrenchment of an oligarchic managerial elite, increasingly willing to cast aside any remaining shred of democratic or national sovereignty in its pursuit of top-down global “progress”. Behind every one of these fractures, one finds the ongoing work of the Ford Foundation.

In 2020, following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, a “racial reckoning” swept the United States, kindling fiery riots across the nation, abrupt moves by municipalities to defund police departments, and the near-wholesale capitulation of public institutions — from universities to government agencies to major corporations — to a culturally revolutionary ideology of identitarian grievance and racial separatism. To some, this came as a shock. To the Ford Foundation, it marked the fulfillment of decades of effort.

The foundation has long seen itself as uniquely dedicated to progress and social justice, its stated mission from as early as the 1950s being the “general purpose of advancing human welfare” and to “eradicate the causes of suffering” worldwide. But after current president Darren Walker took the helm in 2013, it began more fully to embrace a public identity as a “social justice foundation” and reoriented its mission to “disrupt the drivers of inequality” in every sphere of life and across the globe.

May 29, 2024

“The more they rant, scream and lecture, the more cool singing ‘Ausländer raus‘ and ‘Deutschland den Deutschen‘ will become”

Filed under: Germany, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Our deep undercover secret informant in Deutschland, eugyppius, recounts the latest scary outbreak of deadly neofascist singing in the beleaguered country:

The latest threat to German democracy including “one of the men in the video can be seen offering a slack, distinctly metrosexual Roman salute and giving himself a two-fingered Hitler moustache”

“Fascism”, as popularly understood, is both very bad and also very ill-defined, being a negative political vice characterised primarily in opposition to that equally ill-defined political virtue known as “democracy”. This “democracy”, whatever it may be, is distinguished above all by its fuzzy associations with a wide array of other virtues, like diversity, inclusiveness, equity and transsexuality. Fascism is mostly the opposite of all of these things, which sounds bad enough, but it gets much worse: Because democracy is a very fragile virtue, forever requiring vigilant defence and social fertiliser, fascism has become the most ineradicable and indestructible of weeds.

Or perhaps it is better, in our post-pandemic era, to say that fascism is like a virus. It is always spreading, despite (or because of?) our best efforts to kill it off. We vaccinate children against the fascist virus with years of indoctrination about the evils of National Socialism in school, but to judge from the present state of our political discourse, this programme has worked about as well as the mRNA jabs worked against Covid. Never have we preached so stridently against fascism, and never has it been so omnipresent.

Another curious property of fascism, is that it does not merely infect human brains. It can also taint cultural artefacts, like phrases. All of the very best people can use a specific phrase, but that does not matter at all should the fascists get ahold of it. Once they have run the benign words through their evil fascist mouths, anyone who utters them afterwards – whatever his intentions – may well be guilty of fascism. If only democracy were that effective and powerful.

As we’ve learned from the events of the past week, the Germ Theory of Fascism applies also to songs, even vacuous pop music. All of the most democratic people in Germany have worked themselves up into a collective outrage against an unremarkable 1999 Italodance tune called “L’amour toujours” (“Love always”) by Gigi D’Agostino, because some very bad fascists have been caught singing some very naughty lyrics to its indifferent melody. The fascists themselves have been cancelled of course, and the song is on its way to its own separate cancellation as well.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

[…]

The SPD only deepened their performative self-parody by posting this graphic to Instagram:

The Sylt revellers had chanted “Germany for the Germans”, but in this image the SPD proposed an improvement: “Germany for those Germans who defend our democracy”. Checkmate fascists! Except, “Germany for the Germans” is a slogan most closely identified with Der Heimat (formerly the NPD), an “ultranationalist” and “neo-Nazi” party. Realising that they had unwittingly reproduced the forbidden Nazi incantation, and were therefore guilty of spreading this horror virus, our crack SPD social media team swiftly deleted their post and threw up a hasty apology:

    We just published a post condemning in the strongest possible terms what we all saw in a video from Sylt. We did not manage to strike a tone that would resonate with everyone. We would like to sincerely apologise for this. Our aim is to make it clear that we do not want to leave this country to the far right and hate preachers. We want to defend our democracy and our freedom. Let’s continue this fight together in solidarity!

This is one of those missteps that really leaves you scratching your head. After hours of foaming at the mouth about “neo-Nazi slogans”, our virtue-mongering social democrats posted their own version of those very same tainted words to Instagram, in apparent ignorance of their origins and deeper significance. We are left to ask what they imagined they were angry about in the first place.

It’s hard not to agree with eugyppius’ conclusion:

I have my own theory about all of this.

Once upon a time, teenagers sustained a vibrant countercultural leftism, which was all about telling the establishment to go fuck itself, ingesting inadvisable quantities of drugs and engaging in a lot of inadvisable sex. All of that was very transgressive and exciting, directed as it was against a much more conservative and straight-laced German society. They shocked people, and that was the point. In the decades since, all of those hippies have grown old, and the most ideologically committed of them have become that which they used to hate, namely a lot of insufferable shrivelled scolds. As is the way with scolds everywhere, they’ve unwittingly inspired a new countercultural movement on the opposite side of the political spectrum. The more they rant, scream and lecture, the more cool singing “Ausländer raus” and “Deutschland den Deutschen” will become. Maybe, if they don’t like these words, they should try chilling out and finally shutting the fuck up about fascism. God knows there are more important things to screech about.

In the meantime, our new fascist anthem L’amour toujours has hit the top of the German charts.

May 14, 2024

Tesla versus the German green activists

Filed under: Business, Environment, Germany, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

It’s not surprising that environmental activists would dislike a large factory, but this weekend’s attempted storming of Tesla’s Gigafactory in Germany must have raised a few eyebrows:

Tesla Gigafactory Berlin-Brandenburg, 28 July 2023.
Photo by Michael Wolf via Wikimedia Commons.

Grünheide is a small town in Brandenburg and the site of Europe’s only Tesla factory. It is a rare bright point in a German economy that is otherwise rapidly deindustrialising thanks to fruitless Green environmental policies, and so it has become a flashpoint for leftist activism. You might think that the German left would have no problem with Tesla, as e-vehicles are an important pillar of the energy transition, but here you would be very wrong. Happy fairy tales about the bright future of electromobility emanate primarily from the leftist political establishment; their activist militias have different ideas, often preferring broad crusades against everything related to industry, capitalism and profit.

The Grünheide factory employs 12,000 people and contributes millions of Euros every year in taxes, which is bad enough from the activists’ point of view. Still worse, production has caused some water pollution, and Tesla plans to expand the factory, which will entail cutting down some trees. A bunch of “water justice” advocates and forest saviours have therefore crawled out of their Berlin squats and made their way to Grünheide to defend humanity from the scourge of car production.

One of them is a 25 year-old named Luis, who we read “has been committed to climate protection since 2019” and who is “concerned about drinking water”. He also doesn’t like the fact that Brandenburg has moved heaven and earth to stimulate the local economy by incentivising Tesla to set up their factory:

    Luis is bothered that many special permits were granted for the construction of the electric car factory. Tesla sometimes constructed its factory on the basis of premature approvals: “You can just tell how interested the state of Brandenburg was in having Tesla set up shop here.”

It is terrifying indeed, the extent to which regional politicians will go to attract industry and employment to their states. Somebody must put a stop to this.

Back in March, when we were all reading long think-pieces about the grave threat posed by the “extreme right” and hundreds of thousands of dim idiots were taking to the streets to denounce non-existent Nazis, a gaggle of arsonists (or, in media patois, “activists”) calling themselves the “Volcano Group” burned down an electricity pole, stopping production at the Grünheide facility for days and cutting off power to various nearby villages. Because the Volcano Group are on the left, this was not an example of escalating political violence or the fruit of brutalised social media discourse.

Yesterday, our activist heroes returned to further their bold stance against industrial production, which is something nobody has ever thought of doing before. Some of them hail from a group called “Turn off Tesla’s tap.” They have partnered with “Disrupt,” which the Süddeutsche Zeitung calls a “platform” but which appears to be little more than a Twitter account with 1,784 followers, which is so deeply reviled they have had to turn off comments on all of their posts.

May 8, 2024

ESR on the shambolic response of the “elite” universities to the protests

Filed under: Education, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

ESR finds a silver lining to the storm clouds of all the ongoing pro-terrorist campus protests we’re seeing these days:

What I’m thinking as I watch the shitshow elite universities are making of their response to violent pro-Hamas demonstrations and the systematic terrorization of Jewish students:

All my life I’ve been watching Marxist infiltrators capture more and more of our institutions, and been terrified of the moment when they achieved primacy, because our f*cking useless conservatives ran away from that fight after the Army-McCarthy hearings, a few years before I was born.

The moment of victory for the Long March is here, or as close to it as makes no difference, but I’m feeling curiously relieved. Because it turns out that what they discarded in order to sock-puppet every institution in sight was *competence* (which is white supremacy, doncha know, they keep telling us that themselves), and then public trust in those institutions.

Their triumph is collapsing around them because they are literally too dysfunctional and insane to run what they have captured. I was expecting competent totalitarianism, not this. I like this better.

Of course there is the problem that the wider civilization might not survive the collapse of everything they’ve corrupted. But as long as we can avoid that, I actually feel more hopeful about the future than I did 20 years ago.

And the thing elite academia has become is certainly something we can watch collapse into rubble without worrying that it’s going to take civilization down with it.

May 5, 2024

The protests “will help Trump get an Electoral College landslide, just as the new left handily elected Nixon in 1968 and 1972”

Filed under: Media, Middle East, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Andrew Sullivan, the very model of a never-Trumper, sees the ongoing student protests feeding into a repeat of the 1968 and 1972 US Presidential elections:

“Patriotic students hung up an American Flag at George Washington University after pro-Palestine protesters trashed the campus, defaced the statue of George Washington, and removed an American Flag.”
Twitter image posted by Chaya Raichik – https://twitter.com/ChayaRaichik10/status/1786504098746958103/photo/1

As readers know, I’m deeply sympathetic to the argument that Israel has over-reached, over-bombed, and over-reacted in its near-unhinged overkill of Palestinian civilians, especially children, in the wake of 10/7’s horrors. It has been truly horrifying. I begrudge no one demonstrating passionately to protest this. But as I watch the rhetoric and tactics of many — but not all — of these students, I’m struck by how this humane concern is less prominent than the rank illiberalism and ideological extremism among many.

Preventing students from attending classes, taking exams, or even walking around their own campus freely is not a protest; it’s a crime. So is the destruction of property, and the use of physical intimidation and violence against dissenting students. The use of masks to conceal identity is reminiscent of the Klan, and antithetical to non-violent civil disobedience. It’s a way for outsiders to easily infiltrate and a way to escape responsibility for thuggishness. It’s menacing, ugly and cowardly.

It did not have to be this way. Imagine if students simply demonstrated peacefully for a cease-fire, placed the victims and hostages at the forefront of the narrative, and allowed themselves to be arrested proudly on camera and face legal consequences for their actions, as the civil rights movement did. Imagine if they were emphatically non-violent and always open to debate.

But they aren’t, because they are not the inheritors of the Christian, universalist civil rights movement but its illiberal, blood-and-soil nemesis, long curated in the Ivy League. The key group behind the protests, Students For Justice in Palestine, doesn’t mince words. It celebrated the explicitly genocidal murder of Jews on October 7:

    National liberation is near — glory to our resistance, to our martyrs, and to our steadfast people! … Resistance comes in all forms — armed struggle, general strikes, and popular demonstrations. All of it is legitimate, and all of it is necessary.

The “our” is interesting. If you think these protests are only about Gaza — and not America — you’re missing the deeper context. Here’s a masked, keffiyeh-wearing spokeswoman for the UCLA protest:

    Given the fact that the University of California is founded on colonialism, it’s inherently a violent institution. There needs to be an addressment of US imperialism and its ties to the UC system and how it perpetuates war and violence aboard — not only abroad, but also here, locally.

So violence is justified in response. Here’s a keffiyeh-clad spokesman at CUNY:

    This revolution, which includes the mass demonstrations and encampments, are not just exclusively for students. It is for the masses. … It is for the free people of the world who are able to resist however you can — whether it be with a rock and other tools of liberation.

These are not fringe figures; they have been chosen to speak to the public. They believe in violence because there is nothing in their worldview that could prohibit it against certain “oppressor” races of people. As one of the “queer” leaders of the Columbia protest has said: “Zionists don’t deserve to live”, and “Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists”. He took his classes in decolonization seriously, even if he is now backtracking from their logical conclusion.

The illiberalism is deep and endemic. The civil rights movement was desperate for the press to show up; these thugs follow observers menacingly around, holding up barriers to prevent even fellow students from filming them. The civil rights movement ended physical borders between groups of human beings; these thugs create borders and police dissent. The civil rights movement asked America to live up to its ideals; the woke believe America is a source of evil in the world, and needs to be “decolonized”. “I love Osama [bin Laden]”, one pro-Palestinian demonstrator in New York City said. “I want to suck his dick”. That mix of evil and scatology is a woke trademark.

And these protests are clearly as much about the abolition of the Jewish state as they are the horror of Gaza. They are driven by the neoracist idea that “white-people-are-bad-but-black-and-brown-people-are-good”; they are about a blood-and-soil “anti-imperialism” that requires the abolition of any state not reflective of ancient indigenous populations. (The SJP refers to the US as “Turtle Island”, an allegedly indigenous name.) They are against “cultural appropriation” but prance around in keffiyehs. They glibly use the word “genocide” to trigger and re-traumatize Jews, while ignoring the genocidal goals of Hamas; and chants of “There Is Only One Solution: Intifada Revolution!” ring with echoes of Nazism.

And they will help Trump get an Electoral College landslide, just as the new left handily elected Nixon in 1968 and 1972.

It tells you something when even Al Sharpton is rattled by these violent fanatics. “How do the Democrats — how do all of us on that side — say January 6th was wrong if you can have the same pictures going on on college campuses?” he asked on MSNBC. It feels like 2020 again. Replacing Old Glory with the Palestinian flag or defacing a statue of George Washington (see above), is not how you win over the country. But the more you know about these fanatics the more you realize they don’t want to win over the country; they want to destroy it as mindlessly as the pro-Trump fringe. And they’d welcome the even deeper polarization he’d bring.

May 3, 2024

“Columbia Delenda Est“

Filed under: Education, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

From late last month, Robert Graboyes, who is an alumni of Columbia University, thought it appropriate to follow Cato the Elder’s prescription for Carthage in this case:

Low Memorial Library, Columbia University, 1921.
From Wikimedia. Textured and rendered as ruins by Robert Graboyes.

As an alumnus of Columbia University (MPhil and PhD), I recommend that every peaceful, legal means available be employed to destroy the reputation of my alma mater — an institution that has chosen to make itself Ground Zero for Jew-hatred in America. Paraphrasing Cato the Elder:

    “Columbia Delenda Est” — “Columbia Must Be Destroyed.”

Cato’s entreaty — “Carthago Delenda Est” — was intended not only to punish the Carthaginians, but also to warn other states from behaving as Carthage had. Laying waste to Columbia’s prestige would send a chilling message to other institutions choosing to tolerate, appease, and celebrate threats and acts against Jews.

WHY COLUMBIA SPECIFICALLY?

America’s elite universities are awash in antisemitism. When Rep. Elise Stefanik repeatedly asked the presidents of Harvard, Pennsylvania, and MIT whether they would discipline students calling for the genocide of Jews, the feckless trio humiliated themselves before an international audience — though they seem unaware of that fact.

Recently, a Jewish student at Yale was stabbed in the eye by a protestor wielding a Palestinian flag. At Berkeley, students invited to the (Jewish) law school dean’s home decided that was an appropriate setting for a pro-Hamas demonstration and refused to desist or leave when asked. Encampments similar to Columbia’s are ongoing at Emerson College, MIT, NYU, Rutgers, the New School, Tufts, UMaryland, UMichigan, UNC-Chapel Hill, Vanderbilt, Washington U, and Yale. Thousands of antisemitic incidents have been recorded at hundreds of schools. The University of Southern California has surrendered to the mob by canceling this year’s commencement ceremony.

Use the wrong pronoun or wear a sombrero on Cinco de Mayo, and your university will consider bringing out the firehoses and German shepherds; but assault Jewish students and call for their extermination (along with the eradication of a sovereign nation), and the same university will defend your actions as representing the sacred right to free and open speech. Antisemitism has spread like ebola across American Academia. But there are at least three good reasons to single out Columbia.

FIRST: With antisemitism blooming at so many American universities, it is impractical to try attacking the phenomenon everywhere all at once. It is better to choose one prestigious university, inflict as much pain as possible on that lone institution, and let the stinking carcass of its reputation stand as a warning to other universities — leaving all of them to wonder which university is second on the list. This strategy reminds me of a passage from Hagakure: Way of the Samurai:

    According to what one of the elders said, taking an enemy on the battlefield is like a hawk taking a bird. Even though it enters into the midst of a thousand of them, it gives no attention to any bird other than the one that it has first marked.

Or, more prosaically, as activist Saul Alinsky wrote in his Rules for Radicals:

    Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

SECOND: Columbia is located in New York City — the world’s leading media market. No doubt, that geographic locale has contributed to the school’s outsized prominence in the current wave of on-campus pogroms. Any blowback falling on Columbia as a result of its moral collapse will also will attract blaring coverage by the press and/or by the denizens of social media. The school’s locale will guarantee maximum publicity as the school’s reputation crumbles, brick by brick.

THIRD: The offenses at Columbia have been especially egregious. Even by today’s standards, the number of offenses at Columbia (some violent and threatening, some merely hateful) are breathtaking. The examples reported on a single day (April 20) illustrate the lie that “anti-Zionism” is anything other than rebranded Jew-hatred:

  • A protestor holding a sign saying “Al-Qasam’s [sic] next target” who stood in front of a group of Jewish students holding Israeli flags and singing
  • A Jewish student wearing a yarmulke being shoved and screamed at by protestors, “you’ve got blood on your hands!” when he attempted to recover an Israeli flag stolen by a protestor, who then ran to a cheering crowd of anti-Israel protestors that attempted to burn the flag. (The student additionally claims a rock was thrown at his face and protestors screamed, “Kill the Zionist”)
  • Protestors screaming “go back to Poland!” and “yehudim, yehudim [which translates to Jews, Jews]” at Jewish Columbia students trying to leave campus
  • Protestors circling around the main gates and entrance to campus, with one stating, “I am Hamas”, which was documented in video
  • Crowds screaming “tear down the gates” and various hateful chants in English and Arabic as individuals unaffiliated with the university climbed the University’s gates
  • A Jewish Columbia student being splashed with water by a protestor
  • Protestors chanting, “Al-Qassam you make us proud! Take another soldier out!”, “We say justice, you say how? Burn Tel Aviv to the ground!”, and “Hamas we love you. We support your rockets too!”
  • A protestor delivering a speech on campus that exclaimed, “We are here today because on October 7 the Palestinian resistance in Gaza broke through the walls of their open air prison, shattering the illusion of the invincibility of their occupiers. [Cheers from the crowd.] By setting up this encampment in the heart of the Zionist stronghold of Columbia University, we intend to do the same”
  • A protestor standing immediately outside Columbia’s gates leading a crowd in Arabic chants glorifying terrorism and encouraging students to become terrorist “martyrs” after which he explained in English that the chant translated to “mother of the shahid, mother of the martyr, I wish my mother was in your place”.

Columbia has allowed the mobs and tents to linger, rather than speedily removing them and restoring order and safety to campus. Professors have endorsed and participated in the encampment, as have legions of students. The university chose to shut down in-person classes rather than taking steps to assure the safety of Jewish students. Recognizing this, a rabbi associated with the university urged Jewish students to leave for the sake of their safety.

April 26, 2024

Out – “GenZ”: In – “Waffen ZZ“

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Peachy Keenan invites us to meet the new hotness, the Zoomerwaffen:

These crazy Zoomer kids are bringing back all the old trends: baggy jeans, the band Sublime, and casual, no-big-deal, fanatical anti-semitism. When I was in college, the only people who still hated Jews were Arabs and skinheads. In 2024, hating Jews is even cooler than having retarded pronouns!

“Never again” was the promise Jews made to themselves after the Holocaust and it held for almost 80 years, but it looks like we are in fact about to do it again. It’s starting, ironically, on the same elite college campuses that were the birthplaces of the “inclusion” movement of recent years. Our finest universities have spent the last 30-odd years “abolishing hate”, establishing “safe spaces”, and forcing tolerance down students’ throats until they gagged on it.

Columbia’s Hamas encampment is a safe space. Not for Jews, though.

But also we have to acknowledge that demands from Jewish students for special protections against hate speech, harassment, violence, and bigotry, while totally justified, tend to stick in the craw of other identity groups who have been the target of widespread vilification and hate on campus for years, right here in the United States.

The Zoomerwaffen are here and they are coming for the Jews — the same way their college came for the straight white males.

Zoomerwaffen SS officer Klaus Von Chad in his Amazon keffiyeh cheers as the American flag is taken down and burned.

Yes, some of the Zoomerwaffen even look like Nazis, apparently. These wild-eyed Ivy League coeds have taken a break from rizzing each other up and accidentally overdosing on fentanyl so they can goof around in keffiyahs, call for the slaughter of a persecuted religious minority, and ululate in their Lululemons as they are arrested for insurrection. (Insurrection is good now, Grandpa!).

I had to laugh when I saw Ilhan Omar’s unfortunate daughter arrested at Columbia for leading some anti-semitic protest. Bit on the nose, even for the Omar family, isn’t it? Ilhan’s little nepo meeskite got kicked out of her dorm and suspended from school, which means she can expect a job offer from MSNBC any minute now.

Since October 7th, Jews have been under attack everywhere and literally Hamas has replaced BLM as the coolest club in America for progressive, “love is love”, white kids.

Welcome to the Swiftie-to-Jihadi pipeline!

March 29, 2024

“TamponGate” at Vanderbilt

Filed under: Education, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Suzy Weiss at The Free Press relates a story that’s just too weird not to share:

No one is ever going to let me guest-host this digest again, so I might as well tell you about some Vanderbilt girl’s tampon. This all started yesterday morning, when a wave of undergrad students rushed Kirkland Hall, where Vanderbilt’s chancellor’s office is located. Thus began their sit-in — a response to the college administration shutting down a student government vote over whether the school should divest funds from Israel.

The protesters remained there for nearly 21.5 hours — blowing Harvard’s 12-hour “hunger strike“, also known as a good night’s sleep — out of the water, before police began removing and arresting students, some of whom have since been suspended.

There are many dumbfounding moments from this latest campus frenzy — for example, when the students, arms linked, called the black police officers protecting the chancellor “puppets”. When food was brought in from Panera Bread by the administration for the officers but not the students, it was treated like a human-rights abuse.

But the tampon takes the cake. (Major props to Steve McGuire for compiling the best episode of the internet since yesterday.)

Here’s what went down: during one of those 21.5 hours of the protest, probably at an ungodly one, a few of the student demonstrators decided to call 911. That’s because their friend, who was part of the sit-in, had to change her tampon.

Specifically, she was “being denied the right to change her tampon that has been in for multiple hours, which leads to an increased risk of toxic shock syndrome.”

The frankly Zen-like 911 operator, who deserves a raise, was understandably confused. “Ma’am, do you have an emergency?”

Um, yes?! The student on the phone requests urgent medical assistance.

“You’re telling me your friend in Kirkland needs an ambulance. Is that what you’re telling me?”

Then in another video, one of the protesters—in a keffiyeh and a mask—approaches the police and an administrator, who was indeed in a sweater vest, demanding to know WHAT. WILL. HAPPEN. to her friend, should she leave the sit-in to change the tampon in question. The adults calmly explain that she won’t be arrested if she leaves the building. But can they confirm that she will never be arrested, ever?!

“She does not feel safe,” someone says off-screen, punctuating it with claps.

This whole thing makes the Nick Christakis Halloween costume struggle session look like a teachable moment. It must be seen to be believed. Watch all the videos in Steve’s thread here.

For starters, if having a tampon in for “multiple hours” is grounds to call for an ambulance, I should have been dead years ago. Second, this student was being denied no such right. All she had to do was get up, leave the protest, and find one of the hundreds of bathrooms that she had access to elsewhere on campus. Pro tip: wear a pad to the all-night protest. The First Amendment doesn’t come with a heating pad.

It’s all very Karen, to borrow a trope from 2020, especially when a protester demands the administrator find someone who can get them some answers. Just like middle-aged women who think dressing down the manager will somehow earn them a full refund, these students have convinced themselves that by linking arms and screaming “shame” at their college’s chancellor, they are stopping a war in the Middle East.

Don’t these authority figures realize they are standing in the way of a global intifada, which is also — obviously — a totally good thing?

We find out in a subsequent video that indeed the tampon was removed, though not in any bathroom. Reader, it came out at the sit-in, like so much urine in so many plastic water bottles. A woman on the microphone calls it “the most depraved shit I’ve seen in my entire life”.

Hard agree.

Politics on the fringe – “Every Single Grassroots Political Movement is populated by cranks of various amounts of semi-retardation”

Filed under: Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Kulak went to a political rally and came back with some thoughts on non-mainstream political gatherings of all flavours:

Kim Kelly on X: The chatter over Jake “Q Shaman” Angeli’s identity is missing a key element: his tattoos. He’s covered in Odinist symbols — Yggdrasil, Mjolnir, and, significantly, the valknut.

I attended a political event recently in my country, that a mainstream party had vaguely endorsed, but more of a general right wing-anti-tax protest. You had people from the fringe parties, and people and speakers from the fringe of the fringe parties.

We did the protests, then all ended at a large venue where there were coffee, donuts, and speeches … My god the speeches.

Some admittedly were well prepared, the representative of the mainstream party who showed up at the end was very professional befitting a former and probably future politician. But in-between you had rolling, unprepared, barely understandable speeches about chemtrails, sovereign citizenship, and UN Agenda 2030 conspiracies, all mixed with real concerns about local government taking property rights …

And I’ll admit I got damned frustrated. “This is why we lose”, I thought. Echoing a dozen different think pieces on the “Stupid Right” many from right wingers themselves. I was embarrassed that this was the state of political organization and human capital on the “far right”.

What is wrong with these people? I thought, and I’m sure many of have thought.

Well nothing. The problem is with you!

Unlike most online right wing intellectuals I’ve been involved in various type of organized politics, and I had friends who were involved in Left Wing politics who, when I was still an ideological niaf, I humored and attended their meetings.

Every Single Grassroots Political Movement is populated by cranks of various amounts of semi-retardation, and every single one spends an inordinate amount of time at best humouring them, or worse, taking them 100% seriously.

I’ve seen this in mainstream political parties when you talk to any of the volunteers. And I’ve seen this on University campuses where if you let your left wing friends drag you to one of their meetings you’ll be serenaded by barely articulate native activists, feminist extremists who want everyone to pray to Gaia, Black “we wuz” radicals, and every kind of queer identity you can possibly imagine, giving just as if not more retarded takes in even worse coherence, but seemingly actively trying to derail every attempt at meaningful policy advancement or coalition building in favour of struggle sessions and “consciousness raising”.

Say what you will about the sovereign citizen guy … He had a whole list of meaningful proposal with direct actions to take which, setting aside the theory, would actually make public employees and local councillors probably cave out of the sheer misery of dealing with it.

The queer, native, and black activists? Their proposals ranged from non-existent, to actively crippling the groups own organizational capacity in some purity/diversity spiral.

Beyond that however, this collection of right wing weirdos and concerned citizens was meeting in an ex-urban industrial building one of the organizer’s friends let them use. The left wing losers (of whom most were activists in the city, not students) were meeting in a limestone university campus with cathedral ceilings and snacks provided out of student dues and tax dollars.

The immediate organizers of the right wing protester were mechanics, the organizers of these left wing meetings were Professors, several of whom were even lest coherent or policy oriented.

What was their excuse?

Part of me thinks this is why Left wing organizers are perpetually convinced they’re the little guys fighting against a vast right-wing Koch Funded machine out to crush them … because, in spite of getting state funding for protests and stainglassed cathedral high rooms to organize from … They spend 80+% of their time listening to the losers of the losers.

So then why is it right wing intellectuals are convinced their side is stupid?

Well because left wing stupidity doesn’t count, in fact you’re racist for noticing it.

March 28, 2024

Why European farmers are revolting

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Environment, Europe, Government, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

spiked
Published Mar 27, 2024

Europe’s farmers are rising up – and the elites are terrified. From the Netherlands to Germany to Ireland, farmers are taking to the streets, parking their tractors on the establishment’s lawn, spraying buildings with manure and bringing life to a standstill. The reason? Because unhinged green regulations, dreamt up by European Union bureaucrats, are immiserating them. In this spiked video polemic, Fraser Myers explores the roots of the farmers’ revolt across the continent – and explains why it must succeed. Watch, share and let us know what you think in the comments.

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March 19, 2024

QotD: “Not In Our Name”

Filed under: Humour, Middle East, Military, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Meanwhile, the Worldwide Sisterhood Against Terrorism And War, which includes Susan Sarandon, Gloria Steinem, Alice Walker and about 75 other sisters and is “Worldwide” mainly in the sense the World Series is, organized a petition called “Not In Our Name”. “We will not support the bombing,” they declared, and who can blame them? I dropped out of women’s studies in Grade Two, but, as I recall, a bombing campaign is a quintessential act of patriarchal oppression and sexual domination. The male pilot, looming over the curvy undulating form of the Third World hillside, unzips his bomb carriage and unleashes his phallic ordinance to penetrate his target. Needless to say, he explodes on contact, typical bloody men.

Mark Steyn, “Omar’s Girls”, National Post, 2001-11-29.

March 3, 2024

The five “generations” of warfare

Filed under: History, Middle East, Military, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Postcards from Barsoom, John Carter outlines the definitions for the way wars have been waged from pre-history down to today:

Warfare is fundamentally about breaking the enemy’s will to fight. This can be done with violence, or without it – before the fight even starts, through raw intimidation. Working from this understanding, military theorists have divided the history of warfare into five generations.

First Generation Warfare, abbreviated 1GW, was war as it was waged from the dawn of civilization up through roughly the Civil War. This style of conflict involved massed line infantry, equipped with spears, pikes, swords, or line-of-sight ranged weapons such as longbows, crossbows, or muskets. The basic tactic was to draw up two large groups of armed men, bring them into close contact, and have them hack at one another until one side grew demoralized by the slaughter, at which point their line would break and the real slaughter could begin.

These defined “generations” of war apply only to states, as Bret Devereaux described warfare before states (and between early states and non-state groups) this way:

The oldest way of war was what Native North Americans called – evocatively – the “cutting off” way of war (a phrase I am borrowing from W. Lee, “The Military Revolution of Native North America” in Empires and Indigines, ed. W. Lee (2011)), but which was common among non-state peoples everywhere in the world for the vast stretch of human history (and one may easily argue much of modern insurgency and terrorism is merely this same toolkit, updated with modern weapons). The goal of such warfare was not to subjugate a population but to drive them off, forcing them to vacate resource-rich land which could then be exploited by your group. To do this, you wanted to inflict maximum damage (casualties inflicted, animals rustled, goods stolen, people captured) at minimum risk, until the lopsided balance of pain you inflicted forced the enemy to simply move away from you to get out of your operational range.

[…]

We may call this the first system of war. It is the oldest, but as noted above, never entirely goes away. We tend to call this style “asymmetric” or “unconventional” war, but it is the most conventional war – it was the first convention, after all. It is also sometimes denigrated as primitive, but should not be judged so quickly – first system armies have managed to frustrate far stronger opponents when terrain and politics were favorable.

That (important, IMO) digression aside, back to John Carter’s definitions:

Industrial or Second Generation Warfare (2GW) brought rifled firearms, machine-guns, and indirect artillery. Men could now be killed at a great distance, without ever seeing the enemy. Camouflage, concealment, and cover became the keys to victory. Its heyday was roughly from the Civil War to the Great War.

Mechanized warfare or 3GW arrived with the internal combustion engine and powered flight. Tactics now depended on speed and manoeuvrability. It dawned with the Second World War and reached its apogee with the invasion of Iraq.

Mechanized warfare created an overwhelming advantage for large industrial states. Small states and non-state actors responded with 4GW, which can be thought of as televisual warfare – combat via propaganda. This is war as fought with cameras and media distribution networks. It is guerrilla warfare via weaponized morality: using the enemy’s own military actions against it by showing the consequences of war for one’s civilian population to the enemy civilian population. Bait the enemy into killing babies, then ask them how many more babies they’re willing to murder. Think Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq.

The response to 4GW is 5GW – warfare by psyop, utilizing misinformation and sentiment engineering. Its characteristic weapons platform is the social network. Where 4GW seeks to use the enemy’s own morality against it, 5GW seeks to change that morality, to transform the enemy’s inner nature, getting the enemy to attack themselves for you, to surrender with open arms and smiles on their faces … ideally, without the enemy even realizing that they’re under attack.

An excellent introduction to the 5GW campaign that is being waged against us as we speak was provided by Tucker Carlson’s interview with Mike Benz. Robert W Malone MD, MS has provided it on his blog, complete with transcript: The End of Democracy: “What I’m Describing is Military Rule”. This is worth watching in full. It provides a cogent, lucid description of what’s been happening to our precious networks over the last decade.

Benz argues that until 2014, a free and open Internet was seen by the Western spook state as a powerful tool of foreign policy. Uncensorable many-to-many telecommunications networks could be leveraged to foment and guide colour revolutions against “authoritarian” regimes, meaning any country that was not yet fully on board with the rules-based international new world order of post-Cold War liberal democracy. Thus, in the early oughts we saw the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia, the 2004 Orange Revolution in the Ukraine, the 2005 Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan, and the 2005 Cedar Revolution in Lebanon. The subsequent development of social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter in the mid-oughts, followed by their rapid, mass global adoption, set the stage for these tactics to be taken to the next level, with the Arab Spring spreading across the Middle East in the early 2010s, toppling governments in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen, and destabilizing Morocco, Iraq, Algeria, Lebanon, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Sudan, and especially Syria.

The zenith of this strategy as an offensive foreign policy implement came in 2014, when the Euro-Maidan protests unseated the elected government of Ukraine, prizing the post-Soviet rump state away from the political orbit of Mother Russia.

Russia responded to America’s 5GW triumph in Ukraine immediately, swooping in and annexing the Crimean peninsula. Russia’s geopolitical imperative was clear – no Crimea, no access to the Black Sea – as was its moral justification, the population of the Crimea being almost entirely ethnically Russian. There was also a democratic justification: the Crimean populace held a referendum, and chose overwhelmingly to rejoin their traditional homeland, rather than remain at the tender mercies of the dubious new regime in “Keev” and its Neo-Nazi battalions.

NATO didn’t buy the referendum results at all. Having spent the last two decades knocking over one country after another by destabilizing their governments with carefully orchestrated popular uprisings, their assumption was that the FSB had finally figured out how to play the game. That meant that an open Internet was now a strategic vulnerability: if Moscow could brainwash adjacent populations into rejecting the obvious superiority of the Hegemony at the End of History, maybe they could do the same to the West’s domestic populations1.

The next few years provided apparently abundant justification for the Regime’s paranoia: Brexit; Trump, Bolsonaro, and most recently Milei; populist opposition to the European migrant invasion; repeated failures to gather support for an invasion of Syria (while Russia was defending the Assad government); stubbornly persistent, widespread skepticism towards both the supposed scientific consensus regarding climate change, as well as the policies supposedly intended to prevent it; and most recently, the push-back against the pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical interventions mandated in the name of mitigating SARS-CoV-2. In each case the mantra from the Regime has been the same: failures on the part of the consumer-residents of Western states to show appropriate enthusiasm for the Regime’s preferred policies and favoured political candidates could not possibly be organic, but could only be explained as results of misinformation seeded by Russian influence operations, Putler’s troll farms hacking Our Democracy with bot swarms.

The Regime responded with the Great Shuttening.

    1. Benz doesn’t mention it, but Occupy Wall Street was probably the establishment’s first “oh shit” moment regarding the politically disruptive potential of social media. It came out of nowhere, within no time at all it was everywhere, and it brought together a broad spectrum of malcontents across traditional ideological boundaries. Occupy is left-coded now, so people forget that in its gestational phase tankies and anarcho-syndicalists were marching alongside End-the-Fed Ron Paulists and techno-libertarians, all of them united against the extractive criminality of Wall Street and its cozy, too-big-to-fail relationship with FedGov. The Regime put the uprising down in short order, and then opportunistically hijacked the movement’s cultural momentum to inject Woke into the everyone’s veins. That said, it should not be ruled out that Occupy was not spontaneous: it’s possible that it was a 5GW op from the beginning, intended to harness popular outrage against the bailouts following the real estate implosions, and direct it towards popularization of the race communism that took over the West over the past decade.

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