Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option

At Amazon, Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation.

The Woke Left's Boycott Industry Eats Its Own

At great piece from Mark Hemingway, at Real Clear Investigations, "The High-Pressure Business of Selling Woke Corporate Armor."  

Leftists Destroy Everything (VIDEO)

Fantastic video!

Dennis Prager is a national treasure.

Watch:

Gramscian Damage

A great 11-year-old essay, from Eric Raymond.

Hat Tip: Instapundit.

Hannah Smothers, Feminist Psycho

These people are seriously weird.

And notice the woman's selfie with feminist icon Gloria Steinem.

At the Other McCain, "Feminist @HannahSmothers_ Confirms the Worst Stereotypes of Feminism."

There's No Feminism Without the Baby-Killing

From Twitter the other day:

Feminism is an anti-male, anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-capitalist hate movement controlled by the Democrat Party. pic.twitter.com/pcNKfyBapM

— The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) March 9, 2017

Heh. Can you tell me what feminism's all about, lol? https://t.co/40AizcJ0JT

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) March 10, 2017

You don't need a Ph.D. in gender studies to understand what "crazy" means. https://t.co/AaaSHW2d5a pic.twitter.com/qO1wotXgHV

— The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) March 10, 2017

And today, from Katha Pollitt, at the Nation, "Can a Feminist Be Pro-Life?"

Is there pro-life feminism? @kathapollitt replies to @LNEnriquez and @dleonhardt https://t.co/j1iuZemHvY

— The Nation (@thenation) March 10, 2017

These are bad people. Very bad.

A Literary Guide to Our Orwellian Nightmare

From Marc Fitch, at the Federalist, "We live in an age where the individual has to combat mass society and groupthink, and the individual is losing. Here's a brief overview of writers whose insights can help you fight back."

'Apocalypse Store' Offers Essential Survival Goods to Survive Doomsday (VIDEO)

This reminds me of the post I wrote right after Obama's inauguration, "Worst Case Scenario? Preparing for Anarchy in America."

There's probably more of a worst case scenario today than there was back in 2009, heh.

Via Russia Toay (who else?):

Once You've Declared 'War' on Bourgeois Values, You're Pretty Much Screwed

Postcards from the nihilist left. See David Thompson, via Ed Driscoll, at Instapundit:

“LEFTIST POSTURING IS OFTEN ANTITHETICAL TO PRACTICAL SUCCESS AND PRACTICAL HAPPINESS,” David Thompson writes:

To take a vivid and familiar example, imagine if your children, nieces and nephews took to heart the operatic blatherings of Laurie Penny, who tells her readers to “Fuck social mobility… Fuck money. Fuck rising above your class… Fuck marriage, mortgage, monogamy, and every other small, ugly ambition.” These, she says, are things “we should have abandoned.”

Well, okay. But where exactly does that leave a young person, or a person not-so-young? Once you’ve declared “war” on bourgeois values, once you’ve abandoned the conventional foundations of material and emotional reward, where do you go? How will that radicalism serve you later in life, when you’re no longer a stroppy teenager or a twenty-something poseur? Is a mix of contrarianism, hypocrisy, resentment and a colossal sense of entitlement a sound footing for an adult life? After all, those “small, ugly ambitions” are what gave Laurie her own comfortable upbringing and advantages in life, such that she can now flit around the world tweeting about how oppressed she is.

As noted before, it’s one of the classic problems for self-imagined radicals. In denouncing bourgeois habits (usually while enjoying the benefits of such behaviour, at least residually), they have little of practical use to offer their followers. If you do away with marriage, monogamy, responsibility, deferred gratification, personal territory, etc., you’re basically left with a recipe for failure, dependency and unhappiness. Though of course the resentment that follows can be very useful to would-be prophets of the left. If encouraging needless misery, and then exploiting it, is your thing...

The hideous prog-trolls who used to comment here used to hate being called nihilists, but that's exactly what they are.

Still more.

Million Mask March Anarchists 'Glassed' Six Police Horses, Stabbed Them in the Eye With Sticks (VIDEO)

At London's Daily Mail, "Scotland Yard chief slams 'despicable' Million Man Mask protesters who glassed six police horses and rammed them in the eye with sticks," and "Chaos on the streets of London: Million Mask March anarchist - in a £500 jacket - trashes police car as fireworks are aimed at horses in clashes outside Buckingham Palace and Hunger Games premiere."

Also at the Mirror UK, "Million Mask thugs burned and cut police horses and tried to gouge eyes out with sticks."

Western Civilization is Slipping Away

From Victor Davis Hanson, at National Review, "Is the West Slip, Slip, Slipping Away?":

Sometimes a culture disappears with a whimper, not a bang. Institutions age and are ignored, and the complacent public insidiously lowers its expectations of state performance.

Infrastructure, the rule of law, and civility erode — and yet people are not sure why and how their own changing (and pathological) individual behavior is leading to the collective deterioration that they deplore.

There is still a “West” in the sense of the physical entities of North America, Europe, many of the former British dominions, and parts of Westernized Asia. The infrastructure of our cities and states looks about as it did in the recent past. But is it the West as we once knew it — a unique civilization predicated on free expression, human rights, self-criticism, vibrant free markets, and the rule of law?

Or, instead, is the West reduced to a wealthy but unfree leisure zone, driven on autopilot by computerized affluence, technological determinism, and a growing equality-of-result, omnipotent state? Tens of thousands of migrants — reminiscent of the great southward and westward treks of Germanic tribes in the late fifth century, at the end of the Roman Empire — are overwhelming the borders of Europe. Such an influx should be a reminder that the West attracts people, while the non-West drives them out, and thus should spark inquiries about why that is so. But that discussion would be not only impolite, but beyond the comprehension of most present-day Westerners, who take for granted — though they cannot define, much less defend — their own institutions.

No one claims that such mass immigration into Europe is legal. No one wonders what happened to the fossilized idea of legal immigration, much less the legal immigrant who went through what has now been rendered the pretense of bureaucratic application for legal entry into Europe. Germany, which lectures others on law, is lawless. In theory, Westerners have the power to stop the mostly young males from the Middle East from swarming their borders, but in fact they apparently lack the will. Or is it worse than that?

Without confidence in their own values, much less pride in their accomplishments, are they assuaging the guilt over their privilege by symbolic acts of undermining the foundations of their own culture? Certainly, Germany, which insists on European Union laws of finance applying to its fellow European nation Greece, has no compunction about destroying, for its own particular purposes, the Union’s immigration statutes as they apply to Middle Easterners.

The same is true in the United States. Millions of foreign nationals from Latin America, and Mexico in particular, simply have crossed the border without even the pretense of legality. They assume Americans not only won’t enforce their own laws, but also will find ways to demonize any who suggest that they should. If there is now no such thing as an “illegal alien,” what in theory prevents anyone from arriving from anywhere at any time and making claims on the American state?

Again, the irony is not just that millions of Mexican nationals want into the U.S., but that, ostensibly, no one in Mexico or even the United States knows why that is so (certainly not the National Council of La Raza [“the Race”]) — much less wonders whether Mexico might learn from the U.S. about ways to make a nation’s own people become content enough to stay in their homeland. Only in the West does a migrant fault his host for insufficient hospitality while exempting his homeland, which drove him out.

Sanctuary cities illustrate how progressive doctrine can by itself nullify the rule of law. In the new West, breaking statutes is backed or ignored by the state if it is branded with race, class, or gender advocacy. By that I mean that if a solitary U.S. citizen seeks to leave and then reenter America without a passport, he will likely be either arrested or turned back, whereas if an illegal alien manages to cross our border, he is unlikely to be sent back as long as he has claims on victimhood of the type that are sanctioned by the Western liberal state.

Do we really enjoy free speech in the West any more? If you think we do, try to use vocabulary that is precise and not pejorative, but does not serve the current engine of social advocacy — terms such as “Islamic terrorist,” “illegal alien,” or “transvestite.” I doubt that a writer for a major newspaper or a politician could use those terms, which were common currency just four or five years ago, without incurring, privately or publicly, the sort of censure that we might associate with the thought police of the former Soviet Union...

Still more.

Leftist Humanities Professoriate Abandons and Excoriates Traditional Curriculum

Here's Heather Mac Donald, for Prager University.

The video reminds me of an earlier entry, "Increasingly Leftist Colleges Abandon Greats and Teach Garbage."

Monica Crowley on Today’s Totalitarian Left

This is great!

Mark Tapson has an interview with the brilliant Monica Crowley, at FrontPage Magazine.

Her book's a freakin' classic, What the (Bleep) Just Happened . . . Again?: The Happy Warrior's Guide to the Great American Comeback.

Shakira Performs 'Imagine' for the Pope at the United Nations

Debra Burlingame, whose brother Charles "Chic" Burlingame was the pilot of American Airlines Flight 77 (which crashed into the Pentagon on September 11), slams "Imagine" as "the anthem for anti-religious nihilists," on Facebook.

Indeed.

But then, Shakira sang it to welcome the Pope to the U.N., which when you think about it, makes sense, considering how the U.N. sows chaos around the world.

Here, "Shakira (UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador) performing Imagine (by John Lennon)." (Turn down your volume; it's loud.)

'We must abandon almost everything we thought we knew about the goods of progress, happiness and growth...'

I'm reading Adbusters, just as a lesson and reminder of who the enemy is.

Frankly, they're everywhere. The leftist culture has metastasized. It's seeped into the unconscious of the up and coming generations, to the point that young people and their unreconstructed '60s rejects are actively opposed to the preservation of society and culture. And I mean preservation of the society and culture that has generated the highest levels of freedom and prosperity the world has ever known. The radical left of today's cultural Marxist social justice warriors, Democrat pajama boys, and the boot-licking enablers in the Obama-loving media will not stop until the "fundamental transformation" promised five days before election '08 has been achieved.

As you hear every four years, this next presidential election is the most important ever, the most important in our country's history. Just think how much better off we'd be had Barack Obama lost reelection in 2012. It's going to take decades to reverse the damage, which is why stopping the Democrat collectivists in 2016 has become a truly existential proposition.

From Kalle Lasn, publisher and editor of Adbusters, "Thought Control":

Unbridled neocon capitalism has been riding the back of humankind without opposition for nearly two generations now. It has provided no answer yet and it has no answer for the most pressing threat of the future, namely climate change. We economics students and heterodox economists must rise up in universities everywhere and demand a shift in the theoretical foundations of economic science. We must abandon almost everything we thought we knew about the goods of progress, happiness and growth. We have to re-imagine industry, nutrition, communication, transportation, housing and money and pioneer a new kind of economics, a bionomics, a psychonomics, an ecological economics that is up to the job of managing our planetary household.

— From Meme Wars: The Creative Destruction of Neoclassical Economics.

What Caused the Civil War?

Well, the Stogie/Donald debates have fizzled out by now, and Stogie's announced that I'm his "enemy." But man, I've freakin' never seen someone go off the rails so rapidly.

My old friend turned into a loon and conspiracy whack job. Sad.

Anyways, the debate's never gonna be settled, obviously. But as it goes on, Marxists and radical libertarians will no doubt be growing tinfoil out of their ears.

Watch, at Prager University, "Colonel Ty Seidule, Professor of History at the United States Military Academy at West Point, settles the debate":

California Black Lawmakers Urge Fort Bragg Name Change

Okay, here we go.

Taking down the Confederate flag won't be enough. The left is insatiable. It's like "1984."

At the Sacramento Bee:

The California Legislative Black Caucus has joined the nascent campaign to rename the small coastal community of Fort Bragg in Mendocino County.

In a letter Thursday, eight members of the caucus urged Mayor Dave Turner to “engage your community in a serious re-examination of the historical implications of your city’s name and come to the conclusion that now is the time to end your ties to such a disgraced and treasonous figure in our nation’s history.”

Fort Bragg was originally a 19th-century Army outpost named for officer Braxton Bragg, who later became a high-ranking general and adviser to Confederate States of America President Jefferson Davis, as well as the owner of more than 100 slaves.

Questions over whether the town would be forced to rebrand itself recently emerged after the introduction of Senate Bill 539, which would prohibit public entities in California from bearing the name of Confederate leaders.

Sen. Steve Glazer, D-Orinda, amended the bill this week to explicitly exclude cities, but not before asking Fort Bragg officials to consider a voluntary name change. So far, residents have expressed little interest in the idea.

It's a Democrat majority in Sacramento, so no doubt leftists will get this through and move on to the next memory-hole target.

Remember the controversy over the Robert E. Lee Elementary School in Long Beach? Well, leftists are turning up the pressure. See, "Activists demand renaming of Robert E. Lee Elementary in Long Beach."

Ku Klux Klan Rallies for Confederate Flag in South Carolina (VIDEO)

Stogie keeps posting photos of Southern blacks hoisting the Confederate flag.

To each his own, I guess. Some blacks were down with slavery, feared being free men. That's the tradition they're upholding.

And remember, Stogie threatened to block me if I pressed him about why the Klan proudly boosts the Confederate banner. Cowardly.

Stormfront Founder Don Black Pictured Seated Next to Confederate Flag at New York Times Story on White Supremacists in the Internet Age

Nothing pisses off old Stogie at Saberpoint more than asking him why the Ku Klan Klan flies the Confederate flag. He threatened to ban me from his comments after I asked him about it at his blog.

From what I gather, the standard line, among Stogie and others, is that "only a small number" of people who support the Confederacy today are Klansman. By this time folks know how I feel about it. The heritage argument is fine so long as those advocating it don't completely discount (or lie about) the racist slaveholding foundations of the Confederacy. Stupidly alleging that the North was even more racist just doesn't cut it. Northerners long banned slavery above the Mason-Dixon line and by the 1850s they opposed expansion of slavery in the territories. Only Southerners sought to protect states' rights to own property in slaves. All the rest is bullshit, dumped by the Marxists and radical libertarians who hate the United States.

In any case, Stogie won't like this piece at the Old Gray Lady, but it is what it is, "White Supremacists Extend Their Reach Through Websites":

White Supremacists Extend Their Reach Through Websites http://t.co/UWhe33oU10 #newyorktimes

— Diego Palma (@1milhaodetweets) July 6, 2015

In late June, as much of the nation mourned the killing of nine parishioners in a Charleston, S.C., church, The Daily Stormer, a white supremacist website, was busy posting articles on a different issue: black crime against white people. “Adolescent Ape Jailed for Murdering White Man Out of Boredom,” one headline blared.

And after Dylann Roof, a white 21-year-old high school dropout and the apparent author of a vitriolic anti-black diatribe, was arrested and charged with the killings, commenters on another white supremacist site, Stormfront.org, lamented something else: the possibility of the massacre’s leading to gun control. “Jews want the white man’s guns. End of story,” one person wrote from Utah.

In the wake of the church massacre, many white supremacist groups have rushed to disavow any link to Mr. Roof and any role in the murders. And while Mr. Roof appears to have been in contact with some white supremacists online, investigators say it does not appear that those people encouraged or assisted in the deadly shootings.

Still, the authorities say, Mr. Roof had clearly embraced their worldview. As investigators comb through the data streams of Mr. Roof’s electronic equipment, a four-page manifesto apparently written by him before the killings offers a virtual road map to modern-day white supremacy. It contains bitter complaints about black crime and immigration, espousing the virtues of segregation and debating the viability of an all-white enclave in the Pacific Northwest.

That manifesto has refocused attention on a shadowy movement that, for all its ideological connections to the white racists of the past, is more regionally diverse and sophisticated than its predecessors, experts say.

They say it is capable, through its robust online presence, of reaching an audience far wider than the small number of actual members attributed to it.

“There’s really not a lot out there as far as membership organizations,” said Don Black, who runs Stormfront.org. “But there is a huge number, I think more than ever, as far as people actively working in some way to promote our cause. Because they don’t have to join an organization now that we have this newfangled Internet.”

Experts dispute the number of movement supporters but agree about its efforts to modernize. While the virulent racism of old can still be found online, the movement today also includes more button-down websites run by white nationalism think tanks with vanity publishing units. Most of the best-known organizations also claim to have disavowed the violence of groups like the Ku Klux Klan.

Richard B. Spencer, the 37-year-old president of the white nationalist National Policy Institute in Whitefish, Mont., embodies this new generation.

He holds a master’s degree from the University of Chicago and studied for a doctorate in history at Duke University. Now he runs an organization that produces papers on issues like racial differences in intelligence and the crime rate among Hispanic immigrants.

“America as it is currently constituted — and I don’t just mean the government; I mean America as constituted spiritually and ideologically — is the fundamental problem,” he said in an interview. “I don’t support and agree with much of anything America is doing in the world.”

But precisely because the movement is more atomized and has been rendered more anonymous by the Internet, law enforcement officials say it has become harder to track potentially violent lone-wolf terrorists who might draw inspiration from white supremacist sites without being actively involved in the organizations.

“White supremacist lone wolves pose the most significant domestic terrorist threat because of their low profile and autonomy — separate from any formalized group — which hampers warning efforts,” said a Department of Homeland Security report issued in 2009. The report came under fierce criticism from conservatives, who said it unfairly painted them as terrorists.

If the movement has a leading edge, it is Stormfront.org, an online discussion forum. With about 40,000 visitors a day, it is perhaps the most popular supremacist site in the world based on page views, with more than a million a month (a figure that includes repeat visitors).

Mr. Black, its 61-year-old proprietor, straddles the movement’s generational divide: a grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama decades ago, he later ushered in the movement’s Internet era with Stormfront.org in 1995, and followed up with a two-hour weekday Internet radio show.

Stormfront’s website, operated by Mr. Black out of his home in West Palm Beach, Fla., features the slogan “White Pride World Wide.” It is primarily a chat room, with discussion threads that range from innocuous cooking tips to diatribes against gays, immigrants, Jews and blacks.

Mr. Black said he had broken from the Klan because it had a history of “random and senseless violence.” But he also said he could not rule out violent conflict as white people tried to promote what he called “our heritage, our values,” and attempted to realize the dream of a separate all-white enclave.

“I personally would like to see it play out peacefully,” he said. “Unfortunately I took too many history classes, and history is not filled with a lot of peace. America is becoming balkanized just like the Balkans; we are breaking apart because of Hispanics — particularly in the Southwest — and other races.”

More.

You can see the Confederate flag at the tweet embedded above, but it's very prominent at the photo accompanying the article.

It doesn't matter how many of these idiots pose with the flag. That's just going to ruin it for everyone else, all the "heritage buffs" and so forth, because it feeds into the most terrible associations people have with white supremacy. Unfortunately, Stogie and his ilk simply help the left and its attacks on conservatives. Indeed, Stogie's a leftist as far as I'm concerned, particularly in his postmodernist Derridean social constructionist relationship to the truth.

BONUS: "What the Left, and Sadly, Some Conservatives Just Do Not Grasp."

PREVIOUSLY: "Dylann Roof, Southern Democrat Throwback, is Drug-Addled 'Wannabe Emo Anarchist' with Androgynous Haircut," and "Crazy Emo-Prog Dylann Roof Doesn't Fit the Left's 'Right-Wing Racist White Supremacist' Narrative."

Leftist Stogie at Saberpoint Joins Marxists and Radical Libertarians on Civil War Revisionism

If you've been following the Stogie-Donald debates on the origins of the Civil War, one clear pattern you've seen is Stogie's vehement ideological hostility to facts that disprove his cherished yet deranged view that the South stands for all that's good in the world and the North is the epitome of evil. In fact, history does not conform neatly to partisan, ideological debates, and those who want it to must distort the truth to conform to their historical revisionism and partisan blindness.

Frankly, as I've pointed out, Stogie's basically a leftist. He's been deploying classic postmodernist Derridean social constructionist interpretations of the Civil War that are in fact grounded in Marxist and radical libertarian programs. It's pretty sick and disgusting, when you boil down to it. But Stogie's views are based on hatred and unreason. Indeed, he declared me an enemy in the comments at his blog last week --- this after us being good friends online for 8 years!

In any case, Professor Larry Schweikart, the conservative author of the extremely popular anti-revisionist textbook, A Patriot's History of the United States, is an historian of the Civil War who's published widely in peer-reviewed outlets, including the Journal of Southern History, Southern Studies, and Civil War History. Schweikart took his professional training at Arizona State University and the University of California at Santa Barbara, two institutions not widely known as bastions of "Yankee-biased" historical research.

Another popular book Schweikart's published is 48 Liberal Lies About American History: (That You Probably Learned in School). There you'll find a penetrating discussion whereby Professor Schweikart demolishes Stogie's lunatic ravings on the coming of the war. See for yourself at the photos below, "Lie #39: Northern Capitalist Greed --- Not Slavery --- Drove the Civil War":

"It's hard to believe that with all the available evidence a fusion of Marxists and radical libertarians still want to discount the central place of slavery as the causative factor in the Civil War."

Actually, it's not that hard to believe at this point. Stogie's been offering a full repertoire of far-left, radical libertarian fever-swamp talking points that only a tinfoil crackpot could love.

As always, I'll continue to debate in good cheer. So, don't miss future iterations of the Stogie-Donald debates!