Float Like a Butterfly, Sting Like a Bee

Posted on October 3, 2020 by leslie

Ilana Mercer, on the first Presidential Debate

The first presidential debate, on Tuesday 29, was the first bit of fun we’ve had in a while. True, President Donald J. Trump failed to air his theory about that “big fat shot in the ass” Joe Biden likely got from his handlers, to allow the Democratic candidate to nimbly prance onto the debate stage and, “for two hours,” be “better than ever before.”

But, like Muhammad Ali, the heavyweight boxing legend, POTUS floated like a butterfly and stung like a bee. A masculine force at full tilt, Mr. Trump provided plenty of energy and entertainment as he blattered Joe Biden, while being funny in the process.

“If you didn’t enjoy that debate, you are a soy-boy, beta cuck,” a fun-loving fella tweeted out. Soy-boy Shapiro was having none of the fun stuff. Glum and sanctimonious, Ben tweeted out: “I literally have no idea who won this debate. I just know we all lost.” Deep, man. The self-styled philosopher-king’s funereal pronouncement received the benefit of a Michelle Malkin reenacted. Don’t miss that hilarity, 3:40 minutes into her post-debate podcast. In letting out a collective primal groan that was music to MAGA ears, Ben-Shap was joined by every liberal and Never Trumpster on the left-wing game reserve. Continue reading →

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Law and Order Unites Main Street

Posted on September 28, 2020 by leslie

Antiques Loot and Get Shot. (Wikimedia Commons)

Law and Order Unites Main Street

by Ilana Mercer

The book In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action has become emblematic of the times we’re living through. Its “thesis” is that looting is “joyous” and can produce “community cohesion.” Shortly before the mad-hatter media became hip to the socially redeeming aspects of looting, I briefly blogged, on August 28, about In Defense of Looting not imagining it would become such a hit.

The reason for this early mention was the Economist. The news magazine -read religiously – had dignified author Vicky Osterweil’s argument for criminality, calling it “a live debate,” which is good English for, “We need to have a conversation.” These usually smart people wrote:

A few radical activists, including some associated with Black Lives Matter in Chicago, argued that looting can be legitimate. One woman, protesting at a police station that held arrested looters, called it a form of ‘reparations’ for white oppression.

Vicky Osterweil, author of In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action, published this month, sets out the same argument at book length. Looting by the poor, black or otherwise repressed is a radical tactic that brings welcome change, in her view. Peaceful civil-rights demonstrations are too easily ignored, whereas ‘riots and looting are more effective at attracting attention to a cause.’ The shared experience of looting can also be ‘joyous,’ produce ‘community cohesion,’ count as a small act of ‘direct redistribution of wealth’ and, she reckons, does little harm to those who have insurance. She thinks it also leads people to question high levels of inequality. Continue reading →

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Ganging up on London

Posted on September 24, 2020 by leslie

Ganging up on London

Gangs of London, Sky Atlantic, series one, directed by Gareth Evans and Matt Flannery, 2020, reviewed by AR Kneen

‘You could build an empire; you could be a king’ – so Finn Wallace (Colm Meaney) informs his young son Sean during a ‘hands on tutorial’. Finn is trying to get Sean to shoot a man buried up to his neck in the ground. This formative episode haunted Sean throughout his life; perhaps not least because he could not pull the trigger, and instead his younger brother Billy shot the man dead. But if a king does not inherit his title, then he has to obtain it via conquest – conquest of a land and of its people.

Gangs of London tells the story of the various immigrant groups who have come to London and of their struggles to attain power, profit and glory – largely through the heroin trade. The plot revolves around the Wallace family – headed by Finn Wallace, who immigrated to London from Ireland, aged 12. A major part of Finn’s crime business is laundering the profits from heroin, through property and construction, for a number of drug lords. There are the Albanians, headed by ruthless and murdering Luan. Mosi leads the Nigerians who specialise in machete attacks. Asif is the Pakistani crime boss and heroin-importer, the father of Nasir – Nasir eventually becoming the Mayor of London, after his father bankrolls his political campaign. Lale is a female Kurdish PKK member who imports heroin and runs the Kurdish criminal gang. The elderly, reserved and bespectacled Li runs the Chinese. There are also the Welsh travellers, the leader of whom is Kinney Edwards, father of Danny, although the travellers are the one group not involved with the heroin trade. Continue reading →

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Tricoteurs Occupy Bowes Museum

Posted on September 20, 2020 by leslie

Bowes Museum, credit Wikipedia

Tricoteurs Occupy Bowes Museum

by Bill Hartley

Barnard Castle has an earlier claim to fame. It’s the home of the Bowes Museum, incongruously perched on a valley side in what looks like a huge French chateau. In the nineteenth century, local landowner John Bowes and his wife used their great wealth to amass a large collection of paintings, furniture and fine art. A significant amount of the Bowes wealth came from Durham coal mining royalties.

Exhibitions and events can be the lifeblood of a museum and the Bowes currently has two. It might be expected that this venerable institution would stage exhibitions which dovetail with its role as the repository of so many artistic treasures. These days though the Bowes is prepared to take in some peculiar lodgers. Perhaps in a building groaning with artistic treasures, many originally designed to fit the grandest rooms, there is a need to dispel any notion of elitism and ensure a connection with modern society. Imagine then entering one of the museum’s galleries, the walls adorned with 18th and 19th century pictures, many hung in massive gilt frames. In the midst of this, a collection of female mannequins have been placed, each wearing a denim jacket onto which have been sewn numerous identical patches. An awful realisation strikes the visitor. He must forget the quiet contemplation of artworks painted in an age when draughtsmanship was prized. Now he is confronted by an attempt to be relevant. Continue reading →

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Critical Race Theory Transcends Reality

Posted on September 20, 2020 by leslie

Ilana Mercer

Critical Race Theory Transcends Reality

by Ilana Mercer

Inciting racial hatred against whites is all in a day’s work on CNN. It devolves into a more festive affair when a celebrity like DL Hughley joins the network’s conga-line of cretins. In a July segment, the comedian, author of Surrender, White People, regaled those CNN viewers with a masochistic mindset, by comparing “racism” to COVID19. Whitey, belched Hughley—who used to be witty and is now a drag—can be an asymptomatic carrier of racism. Just because you haven’t done anything racist, doesn’t mean you aren’t racist.

Pay no attention to the COVID-race comparison. It’s the Left’s lowbrow idea of an intellectual quip. Be mindful, however, of the “guilty if you do, guilty if you don’t” pop-jurisprudence. Collectively convicting an entire racial group for metaphysical crimes is the cornerstone of the Critical Race Theory (CRT). Flouting Western judicial philosophy, Critical Race Theory says that you are a racist without having committed racism, which is like being a murderer, robber or rapist without having murdered, robbed or raped. How does that jurisprudence strike you? It strikes the reasonable, fair-minded member of society as “less than human, less than coherent, less than sane.”

Deconstructed, racism, as deployed by Critical Race theorists, is purely a metaphysical affair. It doesn’t survive contact with reality, relying for its validation on a loose relationship with the real world. You might say Critical Race Theory is anchored in symbolism and not realism. Ditto Critical Race Feminism (CRF), a subspecies of CRT, the symbolic nature of which this writer had traced in a 2001, Ottawa Citizen column. Continue reading →

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Arguing with Racists

Posted on September 17, 2020 by leslie

Letter to the Editor: Arguing with Racists

Sir  

The transformation of the Eugenics Education Society into the Galton Institute has not been as radical as the “political correction” of the Royal Anthropological Institute, let alone the Institute of Race Relations. Nevertheless, the latest issue of The Galton Review carries a surprisingly naïve endorsement of Adam Rutherford’s How to Argue with a Racist (2020), by Emeritus Professor Dallas Swallow of UCL, written with the BLM “demonstrations” in mind. It repeats the evasive semantic mantra that the “very concept” of “race” is a genetic “fallacy”, and states that every individual currently alive on earth shares ancestors in common with “all others” as recently as the 14th century.

Contextual clarity regarding umbrella words like “racism” and “racists” is urgently required, especially in view of a currently politicised focus on “definitions” confining responsibility to white-skinned people. The disputable allegation that “racial classification” arose as a superstructural “legitimisation” of Western imperialism is linked to the recent denunciation of (among others) James Watson, Tatu Vanhanen, Vincent Sarich, Garrett Hardin, Cyril Darlington, Carleton Coon, John Baker, Ruggles Gates, Ellsworth Huntington, Ronald Fisher, Joseph Deniker, Francis Galton, Thomas Malthus, Carl Linnaeus – and inevitably (notwithstanding his anti-slavery opinions) Charles Darwin himself. Continue reading →

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Cesare Bourgeois

Posted on September 16, 2020 by leslie

Benito Mussolini, Bundesarchiv Bild 102-08300

Cesare Bourgeois

John Gooch, Mussolini’s War: Fascist Italy from Triumph to Collapse, 1935-1943, Allen Lane, London, 2020, maps, illustrations, bibliography, notes, index, pp.vii-xxiv + pp.1-410, ISBN 978-0-241-18570-4, review essay by Frank Ellis

Fidarsi è bene, ma non fidarsi è meglio

How could it be that a nation one of whose most illustrious sons gave the world Il Principe (The Prince, 1532) and Dell’arte della Guerra (The Art of War, 1521) could, in turn, have produced a leader, who allowed himself to get swept away with dreams of imperial neo-Roman glory, whose incompetence transformed Italy into a vassal of Germany and led the country to defeat, humiliation and destitution? Part of the answer lies in the nature of power. Those who wield power want to expand its range and one way to achieve this aim is by suppression of domestic opposition and by pursuing wars abroad, behaviour which is certainly not confined to authoritarian or totalitarian regimes. Revolutionary regimes – and Fascist Italy and National-Socialist Germany were, in essence, revolutionary not reactionary – are driven by an impulse to remake their states and the world in a hurry. Wars of conquest and territorial expansion are the chosen means. Better still, external wars can also be used to justify greater control over the lives of citizens (pandemics can serve the same purpose). Further, war expressed one of the core ideas of Fascism and National Socialism: the necessity and nobility of permanent struggle.

An obvious preliminary in a book dedicated to the wars of Fascist Italy – one not satisfied by Gooch – would be to consider what constitutes the nature of Fascism and how it shaped Italian foreign policy under Mussolini. This is important since it would discriminate between Fascism (Italian or Spanish) and National Socialism, eliminating the propagandistic conflation of the two and would serve to distinguish Fascism from the more aggressive and successful manifestation of National Socialism. Clear differences, for example, emerge in the way the two states prepared for, and executed, their military campaigns and how they fought when the tide turned in favour of the Allies. For an ideology that placed so much faith in war and struggle as a part of statecraft, there was a definite mismatch between Fascist theory and real-existing Fascism. Continue reading →

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All over it, like White on Rice

Posted on September 13, 2020 by leslie

Derrick Bell, pioneer of Critical Race Theory, photo by David Shankbone

All over it, like White on Rice

Ilana Mercer critiques Critical Race Theory

Critical Race Theory is the supposedly “remedial” lens through which America’s race reality is refracted. Look hard enough and the need for this theoretical concoction becomes abundantly clear: it’s on the playground and in the classroom – watch for the bossy white kids. It’s in businesses and boardrooms, where microaggressions tumble from the mouths of their white mothers and fathers. It’s in government departments, brought about by the few whites who haven’t been weeded out by quotas and set-asides for “oppressed” minorities.

There, this irredeemably uppity demographic persists in strutting its “oppressor stuff,”  emitting up to 15 “microinequities” per minute, by the estimation of human-resource department sickos. It’s in the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation), wherein workshops on intersectionality only just keep the plague of white privilege at bay, among bureau agents who haven’t yet been deluged by Trump derangement syndrome. Critical Race Theory, reports Christopher Rufo, contributing editor at City Journal, has even reached the battle field—on a mission of mercy. Introducing the Critical Race Theory chimera to the U.S. military falls within the mission of this vast, global welfariate. The military must keep the enemy in good mirth during the COVID lockdown. And there is nothing that makes Jihadis laugh harder than the idea of white soldiers—a mere 55% of the force—walking meekly. The U.S. Military might no longer know Matthew 5:5, but to the enemy, they look like they know who’ll inherit the earth. Continue reading →

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ENDNOTES, September 2020

Posted on September 10, 2020 by leslie

Falklands War, HMS Antelope Explodes
Creator: MARTIN CLEAVER
Credit: AP

ENDNOTES, September 2020

In this edition: as the BBC reinstates ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ to the Proms season finale, Stuart Millson recalls the Last Night of the Proms, 1982

Back in the days of Sir Malcolm Sargent, Basil Cameron and Dame Myra Hess, the era when the Third Programme was re-forming into Radio 3, Penguin Books published a regular music magazine, in which there appeared a feature about the Promenade concerts – the annual classical music festival known to everyone as “the Proms”, founded in 1895 by conductor Henry Wood, and impresario, Robert Newman, but since 1927 run by the BBC. Evocative black-and-white pictures showed the promenade audience gathering at the Royal Albert Hall – an audience distinguished by its youthful and informal appearance, a trait which continues to this day, although the audience has aged somewhat, a depressing indication that many young people in our era do not attend “serious” cultural events. Penguin’s writer commented on the Proms “types”: the group which turn up every night and quickly forms a “clique” (season-ticket holders – of which I was one – are guilty of this), but also the music-lover who was once fanatical, but now goes only occasionally, but still loves and cherishes his or her visits in the ripeness of middle age. Continue reading →

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When Kyle Came to Kenosha

Posted on September 7, 2020 by leslie

Minute Man Statue, Lexington, Massachusetts

When Kyle Came to Kenosha

Ilana Mercer, from embattled America

Having done an about face against rioting, the sanctimonious Don Lemon, at CNN, giggled and smirked his way through a segment about “racist” white suburbanites, who imagined any decent rioter would bother with their ugly abodes. Hey, racists, there is no Gucci merchandise where you bunk down, taunted CNN’s pin up boy.

Desperate, suddenly, to appear on the side of normies, the Fourth Estate is currently yearning for a Sister Souljah moment. Sister Souljah had expressed sympathy for the 1992, L.A. rioters. If only black people would turn to killing whites instead of one another, lamented that eponymous rapper. Back then, Bill Clinton—a master politician, and a conservative by the standards of Democrats today—deconstructed her weasel words. Candidate Clinton called the rapper a racist as bad as David Duke. As a master of triangulation, he managed at once to appease whites (who mattered back then) without alienating black Americans. And, unlike Anderson Cooper, Bill Clinton felt your pain.

Behold the puzzled look on Cooper’s bewildered face, as he is told by an ordinary, working American what it means to lose your life’s work to louts and looters. The silver-haired Mr. Cooper, also a CNN celebrity anchor, is the son of heiress Gloria Vanderbilt. Private property owners defending their modest residences and meager businesses is not something someone who grew up in a castle can comprehend. Continue reading →

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