Self-Righteous Virtue-Signalling Lives On

The Right prides itself on its ability and willingness to police its own, and that impulse is usually healthy.  It would be inconceivable, for example, for congressional Democrats to overwhelmingly support investigation and even impeachment of a Democratic president the way congressional Republicans did with President Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal (for what it’s worth, I think Nixon was railroaded—more on that another time).

That impulse, though, can easily morph into SJW-esque virtue-signalling, which is exactly what happened in response to the Covington Catholic non-troversy over the weekend.

Remember, every time there is some accusation in the news of conservatives or Trumpists behaving badly—especially if the allegations involve some form of bigotry against protected classes of the rainbow coalition—wait 24-48 hours, and it will invariably be revealed to be either a hoax or a willful misrepresentation of the facts.

There is some truly lurid stuff circulating about the high school students who were attending a pro-life march.  The iconic image is of a young man smirking as an elderly Native American war vet bangs a drum in his face.  Somehow, that smirk is a form of aggression, while an aging hippie provocatively banging a drum inches from your face is peaceful protest.

I expect swift denunciations and lengthy, navel-gazing think-pieces from Leftists about the “male gaze” and “white privilege.”  I don’t expect them from National Review (except for famed hand-wringer David French).

Of course, I should have learned by now, just as noodle-wristed neocons should have learned to wait for all the facts to come out before rendering judgment:  a substantial portion of the Right, sadly, simply seems to be “loyal opposition” to the Left.  That is, they accept the paradigm the progressive Left has foisted upon us, and instead of trying to chuck that paradigm, merely attempt to exist in a tiny corner of (barely) permitted dissent within it.

Nicholas Frankovich, a deputy managing editor at NR, wrote a piece comparing the elderly Native American man to Jesus Christ, and the pro-life Catholic students who almost literally turned the other cheek to the wicked Roman soldiers that crucified our Lord.  Never have I seen a more egregious example of virtue-signalling:  Frankovich, from the first sentence, is saying, “I’m holier than you because I take the Gospel account of the Crucifixion so seriously that I see it everywhere; the rest of you have just forgotten it.”  That pithy paraphrasing is not far from what he actually writes (from the second paragraph):

For some of us, the gospel stories of Jesus’s passion and death are so familiar we no longer hear them. The evangelists are terse in their descriptions of the humiliations heaped on Jesus in the final hours before his crucifixion, the consummate humiliation. Read the accounts again or, if you’d rather not, watch the video. The human capacity for sadism is too great.

John Nolte of Breitbart gives a humorous but accurate analysis of Frankovich’s melodramatic piece, which you can read here:  https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2019/01/21/fake-news-never-sleeps-national-review-falls-for-more-anti-trump-media-hoaxes/

Of course, if you listened to conservative talk radio at all yesterday, all of the hosts relayed the full story (I heard, throughout the course of the day, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Mark “The Great One” Levin cover the events).  Here is my quick recap:

Essentially, this group of teenagers was waiting for their bus, when an extreme black nationalist fringe group, the Black Hebrew Israelites, began pelting them with obscenities.  That apparently went on for some time, before Nathan Phillips, the Native American activist and war veteran, came between the young men and the BHIs.  The boys were unsure whose “side” Phillips was on, but when he began some kind of war chant, they began to sing school songs (the source of the media’s claim that the young men were “mocking” Phillips and his Native American heritage).  Then someone snapped the picture of the young man “smirking”—and, out of context, it does look like a sh*t-eating grin—at the Native American, and the rest is revisionist history.

The truth about these events came out very quickly, to the shame of National Review and notorious Never Trumper Bill Kristol.  A member of the Polish Parliament has invited the boys to speak there in a sign of solidarity and to help get out the truth.

Sadly, rush-to-judgment virtue-signalling continues to live on.  Why play the Left’s game?  Are you that desperate to get a spot on morning talk shows?  Conservatives shouldn’t fall for it.  Ethically, we should at the very least wait for the full facts to come out about any negative story, whether it involves a conservative or a progressive.

Frankovich, Kristol, and their ilk might gain some temporary encomiums from the Left, but—as I’ve written before—their accolades will be short-lived.  The hot knife of progressive perfidy will find its way into their bent backs as soon as their political usefulness is dried up.

Happy MLK Day 2019 – Suggested Reading

Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, TPP readers!  I don’t have a full post today, just this quick message wishing you all a happy and safe day off (for those of you fortunate enough to be off).  Last Monday’s post about race would probably have been better saved for today, so feel free to go back and read it.

If you’re looking for some good reading on your day off, check out my list of favorite writers, or my old 2016 Summer Reading List.  In case you missed it, I’d also recommend this piece on Marxist infiltration in Great Britain.  And blogger photog at Orion’s Cold Fire is reviewing EVERY episode of The Twilight Zone, which is quite entertaining (read the first episode review).

Also in Great Britain/Brexit news:  Conrad Black has an optimistic piece about Brexit that I’ve yet to digest; stay tuned for analysis.

Finally, if you haven’t yet gotten around to it, check out Tucker Carlson’s 3 January 2019 monologue (a nice birthday present for yours truly).

We’ll be back to our regularly scheduled bloviating tomorrow.

The Impermanence of Pop Culture

File this under “obvious but profound”:  culture critic Kyle Smith at National Review writes about the impermanence of pop culture icons in his piece “The Great Forgetting.”  His thesis is simple:  the household names of today will almost universally be forgotten within two generations, lacking the immediate import and significance they currently hold.

An interesting point that Smith makes is that some of the biggest films, books, and music of a given age are often quickly forgotten, and we never know which particular work of art or artist will become the “shorthand” for the entire time period.  He poses the question:  which rock band will be the one that serves as the “definitive” stand-in?  My money would be on Led Zeppelin, but even giants of past genres are swiftly lost to time, with only a shrinking handful of fastidious acolytes discussing their works.

I’ve witnessed this phenomenon first-hand with my students.  Teaching keeps you young in some ways, but it has a knack for reminding you of the inexorable march of time.  Pop culture references that would resonate with students a decade ago are now almost completely foreign to them, outside of a few well-trod, well-remembered classics.

When I first began teaching, I could make South Park references (surprisingly germane when you’re teaching US Government classes) and probably half of students understood and appreciated them.  Now, I’m lucky if one or two students in a class of fifteen or twenty have ever seen an episode of the show, much less the specific episode I’m referencing.

What I’ve found cuts against this “Great Forgetting” is music.  Current acts follow the broad trend:  they’re all the rage for a year or two, then are forgotten.  But “classic” acts—by which I mean music from the 60s-80s (and, increasingly, the 90s) are remembered (at least, their songs are) better and more enduringly than acts from other ages.  Almost every middle school boy I’ve ever taught has, among the list of forgettable rap and country acts of their time, loved AC/DC (perhaps regrettable in and of itself).

I suspect that has more to do with trends in the music industry than with any particular purchase bands like AC/DC have on popular culture.  The economics of big label touring have changed to benefit legacy acts (see also:  The Rolling Stones), and the AOR or classic rock radio format hasn’t changed much since I first started listening to Eagle 102.3 FM as a junior in high school nearly 20 years ago (example:  classic rock stations still play too much Lynyrd Skynyrd).  Grandparents are taking their grandchildren to see KISS.

Besides notable exceptions in music, this trend seems even more intense in the other fine arts.  Don’t get me started on the visual arts, which produce politically-correct garbage more than actual artists these days (lest you think I’m a rube, I more-or-less taught myself art history by visiting the Columbia Museum of Art’s excellent permanent exhibit on Sundays, when it’s free, and Roger Kimball’s Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art eruditely backs up this position).  Film stars fade from memory with shocking rapidity—remember when Ben Stiller was in every movie?—and I doubt anyone outside of the ballet world can name many current dancers, much less ones from fifty year ago.

Further, we live in an age in which all of the information we could ever want about any artists is immediately available at our fingertips.  Of course, we have to know what to look for in order to find it—the paradox and conundrum of life in the Internet Age.

Most of what Smith writes about probably deserves to be forgotten, not because it’s bad, but because it’s not particularly great or memorable inherently.  But there is much excellent art that fades away, like tears in rain.  As I’ve grown older and have listened to more classical music, I’ve come to realize there’s much more than “The Big Three” of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven.

One final reflection:  Smith’s piece touches on a desire of many, if not all, humans:  the desire to be remembered, to be immortalized.  This idea has preoccupied me as I’ve grown older, and begun to think about what kind of mark I might leave on the world (hopefully, I still have ample to leave such a mark, but there’s no guarantee of tomorrow).  We can approach that question with a sense of hopelessness—no matter we do, eventually it will be forgotten—or with carefree aplomb—do what you have to do for those around you, and don’t worry about the fleeting evanescence of fame.

The latter is the only reasonable response.  Fame is fleeting.  Do what you can to help your fellow man for the sake of building Christ’s Kingdom—the only thing that is truly eternal—and not to build up your own.  Enduring greatness in man’s eyes is the private reserve of a small few.  Eternal fulfillment in Christ is for everyone.

Championship Beef

One of my favorite writers, Roger Kimball, offers up a beefy analysis of President Trump’s fast food feast for the National Championship Clemson Tigers (the hardest words I’ve ever had to write); you can read it here:  https://spectator.us/trump-burger-masterpiece/

Naturally, the Left is up in arms because, well, it’s Trump.  If President Barack Obama had served fast food burgers, we’d be reading think-pieces on The Root about the historical significance of fast food in the African-American community, and how the meal demonstrates Obama’s “cool, hip” side and authentic blackness.  Of course, because Trump does it, it’s probably racist.

I’ve seen all kinds of criticisms of this fun feast from Leftists.  One of the shots of the spread showed food in plastic containers, and—I kid you not—a Facebook Lefty with whom I’m acquainted complained about all the plastic, presumably because it’s bad for the environment (classist subtext:  food in plastic containers is for backwards rubes).

The president is also catching flak because he joked that if the First Lady had been in charge, the players would be eating salad.  Apparently, that’s a sexist remark.  Gimme a break.

You know these players loved eating Junior Bacon Cheeseburgers, Whoppers, and Big Macs in the White House.

I sure would.  There are few things I enjoy more than a classic cheeseburger from McDonald’s.  It’s got everything you need (those onions are perfect), and it’s a no-fuss, quick, cost-effective meal.  Indeed, the McDonald’s McDouble cheeseburger is probably the most calories-per-dollar meal in human history.

Of course, progressives not-so-secretly find poverty distasteful—thus the abundance of the soy latte set among limousine liberals—and shudder at the food of us common folks.

Kudos to the president for this clever, whimsical gesture.

Fire Furloughed Feds?

In a remarkable op-ed for The Daily Caller, an anonymous “senior Trump administration official” blows the lid off the Deep State in the most sensible of ways: he talks about the good the government shutdown can do for the federal government’s efficiency, and how President Trump can use a prolonged shutdown to drain the swamp effectively.

The explosive piece argues that roughly 15% of workers in Washington, D.C.’s sprawling bureaucracy are committed patriots who want to fulfill the president’s agenda (after all, that is their job). 80% are unmotivated to do anything, because it’s virtually impossible to fire them.

The remaining 5% are Marxian change agents (my description) that are actively involved in the Resistance and are seeking to undermine Trump’s agenda with bureaucratic rigmarole. These are the folks that believe it is they, not the American people, who know best how to manage and direct our lives. Trump represents an existential threat to these sleeper agents for Cultural Marxism and technocratic elitism.

Apparently, an extended government shutdown empowers agency heads and the president to remove non-essential personnel far more easily—they can simply be fired like anyone else, instead of having recourse to a lengthy appeals process that can take years.

Perhaps the most absurd and chilling part of this op-ed is when the writer discusses the mindless fealty to “process,” which fuels agency growth—the bureaucracy exists to expand the bureaucracy:

They do nothing that warrants punishment and nothing of external value. That is their workday: errands for the sake of errands — administering, refining, following and collaborating on process. “Process is your friend” is what delusional civil servants tell themselves. Even senior officials must gain approval from every rank across their department, other agencies and work units for basic administrative chores.

Process is what we serve, process keeps us safe, process is our core value. It takes a lot of people to maintain the process. Process provides jobs. In fact, there are process experts and certified process managers who protect the process. Then there are the 5 percent with moxie (career managers). At any given time they can change, clarify or add to the process — even to distort or block policy counsel for the president.

I can’t help but think that many of these federal gigs are just overpriced ways to give excessively-credentialed but essentially useless workers something to do to keep them busy for forty years. No doubt there are plenty of good, hardworking civil servants in the federal government, but they would seem to constitute the minority. The incentives clearly favor inertia and lack of initiative over real drive and pluck. Indeed, there seem to be strong disincentives against making any changes.

As I wrote recently about education, one of the biggest problems any institution can face is excessive bureaucratization. Yes, as an organization grows, administrative oversight and the establishment of procedures—the dreaded “process”—must grow alongside it.

I’ve experienced this necessity first-hand working in a small private school that ballooned from just shy of 100 students eight years ago to about 285 now. That’s still a small school compared to large public high schools and middle schools, and we still get a lot done through what we might call “informal” procedures and custom, but we’ve increasingly had to adopt more standardized procedures to complete certain duties more efficiently.

But there’s streamlining, and then there’s needless obfuscation. Of course, the byzantine structure of the administrative state is designed to protect its beneficiaries and to expand its size and scope. The more arcane and confusing its procedures, the more folks must be hired to tend to the holy cow of process.

Let’s hope President Trump is listening to whoever this official is, and takes an ax to the loafers and traitors that make up 85% of our federal workforce, then let the Freedom Fifteen Make America Great Again!

National Review Carries Water for The Rock

The cuckier writers at National Review are apparently obsessed with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as a potential Republican presidential candidate.  It’s almost as if they acknowledge that a charismatic celebrity with massive name recognition is a political boon, they just don’t like the guy that had the guts to pull it off.

The publication ran a cover story about The Rock—by noodle-wristed particularist and moral scold David French—back in 2017, and Jim Geraghty wrote glowingly about him in 11 January 2019’s “Morning Jolt” newsletter.  The occasion for Geraghty’s blurb was an interview in which The Rock gave a “full-throated defense of freedom of speech”; however, Johnson now says the entire interview was fabricated.

I don’t have anything against The Rock.  He makes movies that people enjoy and is personable.  That said, I know precious little about his politics (everyone’s favorite source, Wikipedia, isn’t much help).  The NR guys seem to think he’s a “natural conservative” (not a direct quotation), and we all know how that works out.

This plumping for The Rock may very well be part of Conservatism, Inc.’s tendency to declare progressive ideas actually conservative, something The Z-Man discusses in his various podcasts (unfortunately, I can’t find a specific example quickly on his blog, though I’ve heard him make this point in numerous podcasts).  As conservatives, I don’t think we can really trust anyone who isn’t explicitly conservative.

Granted, Trump isn’t so much conservative as he is anti-Leftist, but his instincts are fundamentally conservative; his Supreme Court and federal judge nominees are constitutionalists; and he’s surrounded himself with solid conservatives.  Trump possesses a gut-level conservatism, the kind that is more practical than philosophical.

Maybe The Rock has that, too—Trump certainly surprised us—but I don’t get the fascination with him here in 2019.  Of course, I was dead-wrong about Trump back in 2015, so what do I know?  If he runs as a Republican in 2024, I’ll hear him out.  Despite my purist ravings, I’ll take a flawed, uncertain Republican over a Democrat 9999 out of 10,000 times.

100th Post

A little late-night post, this being the 100th of this blog since relaunching on WordPress last summer (excluding the old Blogger archives):

Thanks to everyone for your continued support.  I’m attempting to get at least one post up every day, even something quick, like a reblog with some mild commentary (because everyone loves tertiary-level commentary on someone else’s commentary of a more famous pundit’s commentary on the actual news).  Arbitrary deadlines are marvelously effective at keeping up one’s productivity.

Leave a comment and let me know what you’d like to see more of in the future, and if you have any other recommendations for the blog.  All feedback is welcome.

God Bless,

TPP

Fictitious Frogs and Bureaucratic Despotism

Thanks to blogger photog at Orion’s Cold Fire for sharing this piece about federal overreach and Chevron deference, “The Celebrated Fake Frog that is Taking Down the Deep State” by Karin McQuillan:  https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/14/the-celebrated-fake-frog-that-is-taking-down-the-deep-state/

One of the key problems conservatives face today is the unelected, unaccountable “fourth branch” of the government, the massive federal bureaucracy.  This bureaucracy is so vast, even presidents can’t seem to rein it in (although President Trump is making an effort to drain the swamp).

The size and scope of it wouldn’t be so terrible if it weren’t so powerful.  Thanks to bad Supreme Court rulings and Congress’s willingness to give the hard task of legislating to federal agencies, bureaucrats have the power to write regulatory rules that have the force of law.  As McQuillan details in her piece, Congress passes vague, broad laws that leave politically-costly questions for the agencies to answer.  In turn, those agencies—shielded as they are from accountability to the voters—write whatever rules they wish, and the American people bear the brunt of these technocratic fiats.

That’s one source of President Trump’s woes from within the government:  there is surely an insulated, upper-crust of old Beltway hands that fully expect that they will call the shots.  McQuillan’s piece describes the absolutely wicked absurdity of this overreach, as exemplified by that most heinous of federal agencies, the Environmental Protection Agency.

Seasoned conservatives are familiar with the EPA’s history of insane, downright anti-human rulings, like preventing farmers in drought-stricken California from receiving much-needed water because they sought to protect the tiny delta smelt (fun fact:  the EPA killed more delta smelt when taking samples of their population sizes than would have died had irrigation systems been activated).

McQuillan’s piece details an example of a Louisiana farmer who was unable to use his privately-held land because it was a potential habitat for species of endangered frog—except that biologists argued the land could not support the frog even if someone put it there!  The farmer won against the EPA at the Supreme Court, setting the stage for potential dismantling of some of the Deep State, and its odious grant of power from Chevron deference.

It’s no wonder that the Deep State tried so hard to oust former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, and that it continues to punish President Trump with the pointless, costly, politically-motivated Mueller investigation.

As such, let’s continue to encourage President Trump—and the farmers in Louisiana, playing host to fictitious frogs on their dewy lands—to DRAIN THE SWAMP!

Proud Boys

An enduring challenge for conservatives is the constant campaign of disinformation from the Left regarding our organizations, tactics, and beliefs.  Conservatives are limited to a few bastions of barely-tolerated resistance:  the Republican Party, the Cato Institute, National Review, etc., organizations that fastidiously hold to an ever-more-narrow range of acceptable discourse.

That, of course, is a huge source of President Trump’s appeal—he smashed through the barriers the Right’s enemies imposed upon it, and it won him the presidency.  You could feel Americans breathing a nearly-audible sigh of relief that, finally, someone was saying the things we were all told we weren’t supposed to say.

It was in the heady days of 2016, then, that edgy, fun-loving dissidents like Milo Yiannopoulos and Gavin McInnes rose to prominence in the conservative movement.  McInnes tells some sordid stories about his wild, punk rock past, but largely his advice would have been deemed commonsensical just sixty years ago:  get married, have kids, work hard, love God, love Western civilization and the freedom it brings.

Now, uttering some of those same tenants gets you sent to the cultural gulags.  Take, for instance, McInnes’s fraternal organization, the cheekily-named Proud Boys.  The organization has come under fire lately as an allegedly sexist, racist, xenophobic order (it allows men, women, immigrants, and all races to join), and because it is proudly “Western chauvinist,” meaning it champions Western civilization as the best civilization.  Given Western civilization’s inherently universalist claims to human rights and liberty, it’s clearly open to all peoples of all backgrounds who accept its basic premises.

Primarily, however, it’s been criticized for engaging in self-defense.  Instead of taking beatings from radical, violent Antifa terrorists, the Proud Boys fight back.  Their whole maxim is that they don’t start fights, but they will fight back in self-defense.

Not surprisingly, noodle-wristed hand-wringers of the NR persuasion foppishly bemoan this completely reasonable response to unwarranted assaults with their usual appeals to decorum (the comments on that linked piece are instructive of how out-of-touch NR has become even with its own readers).  “Just take the beating” is apparently the primary admonishment.

While we could certainly have some discussion about Christ’s famous instruction to “turn the other cheek,” it seems completely permissible to strike back at the masked hooligan waving a piece of rebar at you.

At the risk of breaking my general injunction against telling people to watch lengthy videos twice in one month, I’d refer you to this excellent explanation from McInnes himself:

To alleviate the unnecessary legal suffering of some of the group’s members, McInnes reluctantly but decisively backs out of the organization.

For further reading, here is Milo’s piece about the libelous death of the Proud Boys:  https://www.dangerous.com/50463/i-too-must-bid-adieu-to-the-proud-boys-a-spunky-pro-western-mens-club-defamed-to-death/