Angling in the Atlantic

The Atlantic profiles Andrew Anglin of the Daily Stormer website:

Anglin, meanwhile, gained infamy for his troll attacks. In 2015, he tormented the University of Missouri during student protests against racist incidents on campus. He used Twitter hashtags to seed fake news into the conversation, falsely reporting that members of the KKK had arrived to burn crosses on campus and were working with university police. He claimed that Klansmen had gunned down protesters and posted a random photo of a black man in a hospital bed. As his rumors spread, the campus freaked out. 

The characterization “student protests against racist incidents on campus” is quite the contextual dodge for describing the shakedown of that school from which it has yet to recover.

Anglin may have been causing the university problems it didn’t want by taking in the dopier student protesters, which is to say all of them, with his KKK hoax for one, but that was only because he did what the school wouldn’t: defend it against patently absurd charges. One could go further and suggest the school has an obligation, as on any institution falsely accused of racism, to defend itself. It owes this to the next school to come under attack. It owes this to a slandered society, to, God forbid, a goodly race of people perpetually slandered by their intellectual and moral inferiors.

If Mizzou wanted nothing to do with Andrew Anglin it should have tried defending itself.

Atlantic author Luke O’Brien is all Narrative discipline. There will be no consideration of the legitimacy of a white working (and middle, for that matter) class complaint as such. But he’s honest and perceptive enough within those respectable limits.

Still, Anglin’s mob was a terror. He sicced his trolls on American University’s first black female student-body president. He had them go after Erin Schrode, a Jewish woman running for Congress in California, as well as Jonah Goldberg and David French, writers for National Review. As I reported this story, Anglin sent his trolls after me, too, and my interactions with them confirmed my suspicions that they were, by and large, lost boys who felt rejected by society and, thanks to the internet, could lash out in new and destructive ways. When I tried to draw them out about their lives, some admitted that they struggled with women. One told me that he struggled with his own homosexuality. Most imagined they were rising up against an unchecked political correctness that maligned white males. The more the liberal establishment chose to revile them, the more they embraced their role as villains.

The villain role precedes the “villainy”; it’s an important point.

In recent years, psychologists have found a powerful connection between trolling and what’s known as the “dark tetrad” of personality traits: psychopathy, sadism, narcissism, and Machiavellianism. The first two traits are significant predictors of trolling behavior, and all four traits correlate with enjoyment of trolling. Research published in June by Natalie Sest and Evita March, two Australian scholars, shows that trolls tend to be high in cognitive empathy, meaning they can understand emotional suffering in others, but low in affective empathy, meaning they don’t care about the pain they cause. They are, in short, skilled and ruthless manipulators.

This is plausible enough but it’s also true the trolls see themselves as at war, and constitute a genuine resistance movement (in contrast to the elites’ astro-turf anti-Trump “Resistance”) already, operating anonymously and hiding from the law. Someone at war or convinced they’re at war suppresses his affective empathy to fight. The real question is the validity of their cause.

Anglin was triumphant—here [Charlottesville] was his vision for the Whitefish march, come to fruition. He’d done as much as anyone to promote the rally, turning his site into a key organizing hub. “The Alt-Right has risen. There is no going back from this,” he wrote. “This was our Beer Hall Putsch.” And when Trump again refused to denounce the white nationalists, Anglin exulted. “No condemnation at all,” he wrote. “Really, really good. God bless him.” …

Was Charlottesville the alt-right’s beer hall putsch or the control-left’s Reichstag fire?

It depends on whether or not the media can keep it framed as a right wing attack on innocents or Anglin can frame it as transcendent trolling.

Richard Spencer at the RNC

This video’s from the RNC in Cleveland last year. The woman with the wig posing as a tea party representative is a comedienne (if anyone knows her name please put it in comments) doing a Daily Show type routine.

This was ruined by the extreme evangelist offscreen bellowing into a bullhorn. I’ve tried salvaging it with subtitles now because Spencer will be joining us for Luke Ford’s Torah Talk the Sunday after Thanksgiving. 9:00 AM Pacific.

Sight Unseen

Social justice is in constant need of adjustment. Police body-cameras used to be considered a no-brainer for the Left. Police resistance was predictable, but the practice has become widespread. Now that the Left has had a look at the results, it people are having second thoughts:

 Because an officer’s memory of an event may be altered by watching body camera footage, doing so will likely alter what officers write in their reports. That, in turn, can make it more difficult for investigators or courts to assess whether the officer’s actions were reasonable based on what he or she perceived at the time of the incident, states the report, “The Illusion of Accuracy: How Body-Worn Camera Footage Can Distort Evidence.”

Bold added. Cops can’t be as easily framed with “implicit bias”.

Body-cams give police a chance to correct their own memory and, presumably, get their stories straight:

The vast majority of the nation’s biggest police departments allow officers to watch footage from body cameras whenever they want, including before they write their incident reports or make statements, said the report, which was released Tuesday by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. 

“Unrestricted footage review places civil rights at risk and undermines the goals of transparency and accountability,” said Vanita Gupta, former head of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division and current head of the Leadership Conference, in the report’s introduction.

The problem as activists see it is officers reviewing footage won’t be tempted to make claims they can’t back up. The referenced report cites an incident where a security video near an arrest revealed police beating a suspect where the cop’s vest-cam that only indicated a struggle, backing up officers’ claims. But here the cops allowed to review footage were actually tempted, if anything, to lie. Had they not known, perhaps they would have come clean. I’m not sure this is what bothers activists–unless it’s in recognition it can only depress the numbers of successful prosecutions of cops.

Just as cops, if allowed, would control any and all footage, releasing only that which helps them, their critics would ultimately take the footage entirely out of the hands of police; cops would have no access at all.
The inevitable result of unchecked Leftist power would (will?) result in police having no access to their own body-cam footage; it would be entirely surveillance. Letting my imagination go I envision political officers, affirmative action hires out of the hood, monitoring cops in real time. Maybe administering an occasional shock.

That the same video is available to prosecutors and internal investigators undermines the activist stated argument. What does it mean that they feel undermined by a cop’s opportunity to check his memory against video?

The only valid point I can see to the objection to police access to their own video is that cops reviewing such can see what they can get away with. It makes them more formidable in the spy v spy game of criminal v social justice.

If I was a police officer, of course, I would tell the Left: you wear the body cam on the street, then you can control what it records. Fair?

I scream, you scream, we all scream for justice…

Via Steve Sailer, I see the ever-vigilant Ben and Jerry are now deploying critical race theory in a cunning marketing strategy that seems to be based on hectoring their core demographic as immoral for failing to solve the world’s most intractable problem, black dysfunction.

From their website:

Ever hear someone say something like, “Hey, wow, great news everybody! Racism’s over! We fixed it!”
[no, not once over a long lifetime]
 They’re genuinely excited that we elected an African-American president. They’ll tell you how the first mainstream black superhero character, Black Panther, just appeared in a big new movie. And by the way, P.K. Subban is a hockey star!  

Does anyone, anywhere speak the way these millennial scribes working up their obnoxious “explainer” pieces think they do? I’m always appalled.

It’s always your “racist uncle” uttering commonplaces not heard since All in the Family (which represents the last, final stage in the intellectual development of anti-racism”, years before the average SJW was born) or earnest college students asking to touch the nappy head of their black classmates as if they’re exotics; even the praise they put in the mouths of their fellow, less enlightened goodwhites sounds embarrassingly fake.

Ben and Jerry’s tacks a video jointly produced by MoveOn.org and Demos to the end of the article.

Demos is a neoliberal UK think tank started by a former “Marxism Today” editor and a policy hand from Tony Blair’s cabinet:

Life after Politics offers the edited highlights of Demos, the think tank founded by Geoff Mulgan and Martin Jacques in 1993 to chart the course for a new kind of politics – sometimes called a postmodern politics – for the 21st century. Demos was founded as a self-conscious imitation of (and tribute to) the Institute of Economic Affairs, the mother of all modern think tanks, founded by Ralph Harris, Arthur Seldon and Mike Fisher in 1955 to find free-market solutions to what they saw as Britain’s economic and social problems, known to their contemporaries as social democracy. The IEA survived on the fringes of politics for 20 years before their ideas were taken up with gusto by the Thatcherites and caused the IEA to flourish at the centre of politics during the 1980s.

Alt Right Torah Talk

Chayei Sarah today. Genesis 23 – 25:18
Abraham purchases the Cave of Macphelah to bury Sarah.

Luke opens with the searing question “is it, really, okay to be white?”

1:28 Steve Sailer is not alt right

4:46 The Goyim know, and are shutting it down.

7:40 Conspiracy theory Casey

17:15 Malcom X and YouTube’s commenting policy

26:40 The Greatness that is Henry Louis Gates’ Africa

27:50 The Beer Summit as presage of Trumpism

31:00 This week’s portion. Sarah dies aged 120 years. Luke points out the personal tragedy: Abraham has to travel to Canaan where Sarah is to mourn her; they ended their lives estranged.

Can I get a ho-hum?

With her academic credentials and having authored a pair of books about something other than herself–the declining middle class, no less–Elizabeth Warren could have been a champion of the middle and working classes. I’m sure she would if that was where the political opportunity was. That hasn’t been the case for a long time.

So Elizabeth is reduced to embarrassing herself by asking for an Amen. 

Warren, in the middle of railing against the Trump administration and Republicans, turned to the crowd to ask them for an “amen” of “approval” during her speech.
“So when the Trump administration and the Republicans take steps to undermine equal rights, to roll back economic opportunity or to subvert equal justice under law, then we’re going to call them out and we’re going to fight back every single time,” Warren declared, before asking “Can I have an amen on that?”
The crowd broke out into a round of applause. Warren also said the Trump administration was actively working to take the country back to a time when the government found discrimination acceptable, adding that the administration was trying blame issues on the “other.”

The increase in hoary Theory phrases and notions in politicians’ speech, such as “the Other”, I think points to the Democrats’ problem: the universities are the lifeblood of the Left and the Democratic Party, and they’ve long descended into theoretic madness.

The reaction to Trump suggests there’s no going back for them. Co-opting economic nationalism–as Bill Clinton would have done–is no longer possible.

It isn’t that they don’t have an answer for economic malaise or white discontentment. Of course they do. It’s a few decades old in fact

“They’re working to turn back the clock to when discrimination was okay with our government. We know what they’re up to. This is the latest version of the old ‘divide and conquer’ strategy. Hate and racism have divided Americans for a long time. Failing schools? Blame it on the black and brown kids. Bad jobs? Blame the immigrants. The drugs and crime? Always find ‘them’ to blame. For those on top, divide and conquer is a great strategy because when we turn on each other, we can’t unite to fight against the system that is rigged in favor of the wealthy and the powerful, ” Warren added.

The cynical relationship between identity politics and globalism is on display here: the economic displacement of globalism is ascribed to white bigotry. How convenient.

The Democrats know Hillary lost by disdaining white economic concerns for identity politics, but they can’t do anything about it. Tom Perez is DNC chair and leader of the diversity faction, Obama’s remaining influence will be put in the service of whatever most promising black politicians they find, the current white and Jewish leadership is aging out and young Democrats are increasingly black, brown, gay, trans, female and furious.

 They’re riding the diversity whirlwind now.

Diversity’s Third Act Problem

Via Steve Sailer, here’s an ad for the Democratic candidate in Virginia’s gubernatorial race depicting the state’s whites as Jim Crow rednecks running down doe-eyed diversi-youth in pickup trucks flying Confederate flags, Gadsden plates and–like a punchline–Ed Gillespie for Governor stickers.

Each representative of the new diversity wakes up from the same nightmare! The nightmare of white supremacy!

The all-a-dream trope is bit of a cop-out: the authors aren’t suggesting it’s actually happening. They don’t go that far. But it’s too apt: the threat of violence from whites truly is the stuff of nightmares, not reality, nightmares conjured by the Democratic Party, of which this ad is an example. Sailer:

Thank God the Democrats are importing millions of future Democratic voters to demographically crush those pickup-driving yeehawing white racist Republican genocidal lynch mob maniacs who built this country and thus deserve to have it taken away from them. Haven’t you heard about how these lowbrow morons all belong to U. of Virginia fraternities that have an initiation ritual of gangrape on broken glass? Read a book!

Is this ad what we can expect from now on? Because this isn’t the case of someone pulling out all the stops in a close contentious race, but in a close, boring race between two moderates.

Establishment Republican Ed Gillespie has covered a deficit to pull even on the issue of sanctuary cities, opposition to which is a winner for Republican candidates. Virginia has been rapidly diversifying, as part of the broader effort to establish Democratic dominance. It’s also where a particularly ugly instance of narrative collapse occurred: a Salvadoran illegal killed a Muslim girl–apparently because he didn’t like Muslims. [update: with a baseball bat]

(Things like this are ultimately blamed on white guys–the Democratic ad above sort of does that. In the film After Hours a protagonist stumbles through a series of misunderstandings by which he’s blamed for one thing after another. He’s hiding from a mob on a rooftop when he witnesses a murder in an apartment across the street. Shocked and unable to do anything about it, he just mutters, “I’ll probably be blamed for that.” That is the American white guy’s plight at present.)

The Democratic Party imports non-whites so they can implement Democratic policies: universal health care, gun control, welfare. But ideology and policy bores them. What doesn’t bore them are identity politics. But identity politics run on conflict. It should be enough that the Democrats will expand social programs, the affirmative action regime, the whole ethnic spoils system by which America is being parceled out. But it isn’t. The new voters are like the black American voters after which their participation in the Party is modeled (blacks are the true Model Minority): admirably apathetic about details but by that same token not so good about getting to the polls.

In pulling the demagogic ripcord to win this, the Democrats condition their new voters for the future to associate whites, their historic symbols and even, for the love of God, pickup trucks with danger and bigotry. It would be good for them to lose this one and discourage them in the future, but I suspect we’re just going to get more and more of this, commensurate with the extent white Americans and allies oppose demographic displacement. The program of ethnic diversification is a fait accompli being foisted on us: at some point resistance to it is political suicide. The cuckservatives long ago determined it’s already upon us. But it remains to be seen.

Torah Talk

Today’s Torah portion is Parasha Vayeira (Genesis 18-22)
Sodom and Gomorrah are destroyed in this one.
Luke’s notes on the show and all the stuff we didn’t manage to get to.

Vivian (Vivian Veritas on Twitter) joins us today. Now we’re the four coolest, smartest people you know, and considerably more attractive.

First up: do white lives matter?

2:10: Dennis Prager video on Alt Right (I haven’t watched it):

21:50:
Luke’s tells of his conversion to Judaism with an impressive, succinct apologetic. He also tells of his red-pilling. He converted before he was red-pilled. I wonder: had he been red-pilled before converting would he have not converted, and would he be out here with us flailing, homeless white nationalists? Having converted before, however, the red-pill reinforces him in his faith. The timing of his red-pilling was good for the Jews, because they won

27:00 Judaism: a light unto the Alt Right, showing the way out of the globalist miasma.

37:00 Vivian arrives, with infant child. Three men and a baby.

54:28 Jesse Lee Peterson interviews Richard Spencer (scheduled to join us on Torah Talk November 26), is adorably clueless:

Here’s Spencer talking about his portrayal on a CSI-like television show, The Wisdom of Crowds:

2:31:50 Vivian on Jenna Jameson and her biography. Luke is a friend, sends her an invite to the show.

Masters of the Moral Universe and the Leveraged Shakedown

Via Steve Sailer, the New York Times reports approvingly on members of the Congressional Black Caucus invoking black privilege to shake down Facebook.

For more than an hour, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s high-profile chief operating officer, sheepishly pledged to “do better” — over and over — as stern-faced members of the Congressional Black Caucus grilled her on Thursday about Russian ads aimed at exploiting racial divisions during last year’s election. 

For black lawmakers, it was a chance to vent — at the outrage they felt toward Russian intelligence and its efforts to foment racial unrest in the country; at the frustration they felt toward three separate congressional investigations into Russian interference that have plodded on and yielded little; and at Facebook itself, which has been long on promises and short on action. 

“She was checking the boxes. She said all the right things,” Representative Donald M. Payne Jr., Democrat of New Jersey, said of Ms. Sandberg. But he was not satisfied. “I had an uncle who hated when you said ‘gonna’: ‘I’m gonna do this, and I’m gonna do that.’ He used to say, ‘Don’t be a gonna.’ And that’s what I said to her, ‘Don’t be a gonna.’ ” 

Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, after initially denying that Russians had exploited the company’s system, has reversed course and admitted that groups backed by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia paid Facebook to influence voters last year with ads designed to inflame and exploit racial, political and economic rifts in the United States. Russian-backed Facebook pages promoted anti-immigrant rallies, targeted the Black Lives Matter movement and focused attentions on critical election swing states like Wisconsin and Michigan.

While Facebook has yet to release any of the ads, it has hired three crisis communications firms, bought digital and newspaper ads and sent Ms. Sandberg to Washington last week to charm Congress and the public. 

A Russian propaganda outfit spent one hundred thousand dollars on ads, Facebook reported in a blog post:

The vast majority of ads run by these accounts didn’t specifically reference the US presidential election, voting or a particular candidate.  

Rather, the ads and accounts appeared to focus on amplifying divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum — touching on topics from LGBT matters to race issues to immigration to gun rights. [emph added]

About one-quarter of these ads were geographically targeted, and of those, more ran in 2015 than 2016.  

The behavior displayed by these accounts to amplify divisive messages was consistent with the techniques mentioned in the white paper we released in April about information operations.  

In this latest review, we also looked for ads that might have originated in Russia — even those with very weak signals of a connection and not associated with any known organized effort. This was a broad search, in cluding, for instance, ads bought from accounts with US IP addresses but with the language set to Russian — even though they didn’t necessarily violate any policy or law. In this part of our review, we found approximately $50,000 in potentially politically related ad spending on roughly 2,200 ads.

As Trump is viewed by the Establishment as a world-historic catastrophe, Facebook’s lack of vigilance in opposing him earns it a punitive lap around the Narrative. And it wouldn’t be that if it didn’t begin and end with The Blacks.
Fake accounts mimicked real right wing accounts critical of Black Lives Matter and identity politics. From another New York Times article:

The Russian pages — with names like “Being Patriotic,” “Secured Borders” and “Blacktivist” — cribbed complaints about federal agents from one conservative website, and a gauzy article about a veteran who became an entrepreneur from People magazine. They took descriptions and videos of police beatings from genuine YouTube and Facebook accounts and reposted them, sometimes lightly edited for maximum effect.

This, says the Times, is how a Russian propaganda operation was able to “reshape American politics” using “the anger, passion and misinformation that real Americans were broadcasting across social media platforms”. Link sharing and light editing.

The company hasn’t even made clear that all the ads were implicitly pro-Trump (none were explicitly so). If there wasn’t this all-hands-on-deck effort to get Trump the story here would be that Russian hackers’ use of Facebook during the election was negligible. Of course we wouldn’t be looking in the first place if not for the anti-Trump “resistance”. Makes you wonder what the real extent of such propaganda operations are–who says the Chinese aren’t a lot better? Even mentioning Hasbara is just the sort of hate speech all this is about eliminating, so it’s better left out of it.

Because the effort now is less to get Trump than to get Facebook, and other platforms, to clamp down further and faster on right wing speech (I write this on one of those mornings we woke up to find Twitter had taken out a bunch of accounts).

As an ideological fellow traveler Facebook accepts the chastening–a more assertive company might point out the “penetration” of Russian trolls was so slight as to be meaningless, that is, as good as zero. A success under any other circumstances, but nobody–except some of the dopier members of the Congressional Black Caucus–really believes any of it.

An alternate myth: shitlords from Russia and around the world flocked to the cause like volunteers for the Spanish Civil War, forming an international brigade in the Great Meme War.

Other posts on the Russian pages used stilted language or phrases rarely found in American English. Yet their use of borrowed ideas and arguments from Americans, which were already resonating among conservatives and liberals, demonstrated a deft understanding of the political terrain. The Russians also paid Facebook to promote their posts in the feeds of American Facebook users, helping them test what content would circulate most widely, and among which audiences.

The Establishment can only lament the exploitation of our divisive politics helped Trump, but whose fault is that? If Black Lives Matter is not a just movement but a fraud, then foreign trolls taking advantage of the outrage generated by it are just another of its negative effects.

Black Lives Matter, more than any single entity, cost Hillary, the Democrats and the Establishment the presidency. It takes real nerve for black politicians to leverage that into more spoils for them. Black America and the Establishment are locked in an indulgence spiral that threatens to collapse the whole movement. Get the popcorn.