"Keep clear of the dupes that talk democracy,
And the dogs that bark revolution.
Drunk with talk, liars and believers.
I believe in my tusks. Long live freedom and damn the ideologies!"
(Robinson Jeffers)
Deliberate intent and prudence ensures we avoid failure. The course, is thoughtful vigilance; it is a strategy devoid of emotion. The media can call us anything they want, it really doesn’t matter…. we’re far beyond the place where labels matter.
Foolishness and betrayal of our nation have served to reveal dangers within our present condition. Misplaced corrective action, regardless of intent, is neither safe nor wise. We know exactly who Donald Trump is, and we also know what he’s not. He is exactly what we need at this moment. He is a necessary glorious bastard.
He is our weapon.
Cold Anger is not driven to act in spite of itself; it drives a reckoning.
Stunning from first word to last. Please read it all.
I’ve written at least once before that to become genuinely powerful, the Right must harness its anger rather than suppressing it. Anger, especially when morally or ethically informed, is one of the most potent motivating tools. Moreover, an angry advocate tends to intimidate the typical “reasonable man;” sensing that violence is not far off, he will usually seek to defuse the other person’s anger, often by offering a compromise position. Indeed, there’s no other explanation for how the Left, which is now in a badly shrunken minority position, continues to exert substantial influence in American politics.
However, I’m not the only loudmouth out here who knows this. The Left knows it too, which is why they seek to delegitimize conservatives’ anger while sanctifying their own. Their media allies are fully enlisted in that cause:
Hodgkinson’s attempted massacre was not part of media coverage of GA-6 despite his act of intimidation having clear implications there. Targeting a specific population for its beliefs usually has a secondary consequence—to cow the members of the community the murderer didn’t succeed in killing. Would Republican voters be intimidated into staying home or emboldened by this attack on elected Republicans? It seems like an interesting question in a special election where turnout is important and unpredictable, yet it was rarely if ever discussed.
Instead, the only time the shooting came up in national media coverage of GA-6 was when an outside group ran a small, ham-handed ad tying Democratic rhetoric to the shooting. The ad was promptly, rightly denounced by Handel, but the scolding coverage of the ad went on for a day. My, how quickly we move in the news cycle from Republicans literally shot to Republican overreach about Republicans being literally shot.
Pay special attention to the last paragraph. Not only did the media lavish a great deal of “scolding coverage” on an ad that – in my opinion, at least – was substantively correct, they targeted Republican Congressional candidate Karen Handel and conservative writer Mary Katherine Ham approved of the media’s decision to do so. That’s how deeply embedded in the Right’s consciousness the media have driven the “anger isn’t acceptable” postulate...a nonsensical notion that gets no respect whatsoever from the Left.
This is a political auto da fe in progress.
Asking an angry man “Why are you so angry?” is an indirect way of challenging his rationality and his priorities. The subtext is always “You’re making a mountain out of a molehill.” Dial it back, dude! You’re harshing our mellow. There are better ways to expend your energy, Bubba, so take a chill pill. Gotta go with the flow, y’know, Joe?
How anyone could imagine that he has the necessary stature or perspective to rule on the validity or the appropriateness of someone else’s emotions is beyond me. Yet it happens too frequently to bear enumeration – and the media are involved more often than not.
(Full disclosure: I, a lowly software engineer, once chased a vice president of marketing out of my office while screaming at the top of my lungs that he was wasting my time. Not only did I get away with it, the head of my department complimented me on being so forthright and my group took me out to lunch to celebrate. There weren’t any media around at the time, though.)
Consider the wildly asymmetric media treatment of Islamic terror events. Immediately afterward the media are all over us, counseling us against “disproportion” while donating endless air time and column-inches to Muslim mouthpieces to wring their hands about “backlash against Muslims.” But who’s doing the dying? Whose children are being cut down by jihadists? And when has anything a hundredth as bad as mass murder ever been visited upon Muslims in America, England, Europe, or Australia?
Disarming a populace ready to rise in righteous fury has often seems the highest priority of our media. We ought to tell them to stuff it where the moon don’t shine...but so far we’ve done nothing of the sort.
The greater part of the problem can be credited to two factors:
The general delegitimization of anger as such;
The Left’s superior skill at treating its causes as moral issues.
Two recent movies will serve to dramatize the matter.
If you haven’t seen the Adam Sandler / Jack Nicholson tour de forceAnger Management, I strongly urge you to do so. Sandler is underappreciated as an actor, and Nicholson, of course, is one of the immortals. Though the movie is billed as a comedy, it’s practically a sermonette on the unwisdom of our society’s contemporary attitude toward anger. It depicts how ordinary pique, fully justified by circumstances and in no way threatening to anyone, as something that deserves to be sentenced to mandatory therapeutic remediation. Today we’re practically no allowed to be angry. The natural censoriousness of Man has seized upon this new excuse for criticizing others and turned it into a social crusade.
Did I say that “we’re not allowed to be angry?” Why yes, I did...with one categorical exception: moral issues. But they must be the Left’s moral issues; the media will not permit the Right to have any such.
Time was, Americans got angry:
At obscene public demonstrations by homosexuals;
At sexual indoctrination in the public schools;
At having their taxes go to foreign satraps;
At having to fund abortion on demand;
At being lied to by the media.
Virtually all such anger has “gone underground.” No one wants to be castigated for “letting his emotions run away with him.” Unless, that is, those emotions have been harnessed to a media-approved cause.
A recent example of great importance is Cassie Jaye’s remarkable documentary The Red Pill, about the Men’s Rights movement and the Left’s attempt to silence it. Not one of the men’s rights activists Cassie interviewed allowed himself even a trace of visible or audible anger. Yet the Left has strained to demonize the movie as merely agitprop for “angry white nationalists” who have no right to have any grievances...nor to receive any attention. A recent interview of Miss Jaye on Australian television highlights the media’s alignment:
As difficult as it is to endure that clip, I hope you’ll steel yourself to it. Miss Jaye is an honest documentarian: her film presents both sides of a painful social division as plainly and as factually as I’ve ever seen done in a video format. But the “interviewers” in the clip above are openly determined to slander the film, despite their admission that they hadn’t seen it. How Miss Jaye maintained her composure is difficult to imagine...but had she allowed any anger to surface, it surely would have been highlighted and used as “evidence against her.”
That makes me furious...but how would the media treat my anger over their deceitfulness?
There’s a great deal more to say on this subject, but I’ll close with one final exhortation: If you believe you have a just cause for anger but feel you’re not allowed to be, ask yourself who did that to you, and how...and why. The answers point the way forward not just politically, but for many who suffer countless depredations and humiliations in silence, personally as well.
Quite a bit of our political discourse is, to put it non-discoursively, nothing but shouting. The participants, whether consciously or otherwise, simply reject the use of facts and reasoning. They shout by preference.
Time was, this was not considered acceptable conduct in a discussion intended to establish which of two policy directions was the preferable one. Today it appears to be the default route. Moreover, Left-inclined persons typically adopt it from the outset of any exchange, under the pretense of having been “triggered.”
This video, supplied by commenter Brinster, provides an example. Though it’s unpleasant to watch, the illustration it provides is valuable:
The young black woman who leaps into the fray screeching about how she’ll owe a substantial amount of money for her college education while her white contemporaries won’t – a dubious assertion, to say the least – is practicing the Anger Gambit. It’s a tough thrust to parry, because for some decades now whites have been conditioned to respond to an angry outburst with conciliation, especially when the angry person is black. This overlooks the tactical nature of the outburst. It is essentially tactical rather than sincere even if the speaker is sincerely angry.
There is no calm-yet-profitable way to reply to such an outburst. Conciliation is the least desirable route, as it tends to ratify the speaker’s complaint as legitimate and relevant. That is seldom the case in political discourse.
Yet consider the roots of the speaker’s complaint, assuming it’s factual:
She attends a college that charges tuition and fees, as most such do.
Her earnings and savings aren’t adequate to meet those charges.
Her parents, assuming they’re alive, can’t or won’t defray the balance.
Look at the assumptions behind those assertions:
She assumes she has a right to attend that college.
She assumes that other people have an obligation to pay for it.
She assumes that being black will protect her from counterfire.
The appalling thing is that such assumptions go unquestioned far more often than not. But would it be effective to respond as follows:
“What makes you think you have a right to go to college?”
“Why didn’t you work and save for a few years, so you could afford it?”
“Why are white people responsible for giving you what you want at no cost to you?”
Scorn and laughter will occasionally carry the day against the Anger Gambit – but seldom. They must issue from someone of impervious confidence and bearing. White men with such qualifications are rare in our time.
Central to all this is our reluctance to meet anger with anger.
I am a racist, a sexist, an ableist, a homophobe, and an Islamophobe. I admit it freely. Able-bodied white Christian heterosexual males built Western Civilization. Non-whites, non-Christians, homosexuals, the handicapped, and women have made only minor contributions, though they enjoy the benefits. If they can’t afford or partake of some of the benefits, it’s no fault of ours.
That attitude equips me to meet the Anger Gambit with heavy counterfire of a sort that’s rare in such exchanges. It’s also why I rarely involve myself in such exchanges. They have a nasty habit of descending to violence. I dislike the consequences of interpersonal violence, even when all the bleeding and broken limbs accrue to the other party.
But counterfire, even when the consequences are successfully weathered, doesn’t change anyone’s mind. If third parties, unpersuaded prior to the exchange, are listening, they’re likely to walk away thinking “A pox on both their houses.” So from the perspective of one who seeks improvement rather than the mere visceral satisfaction of meeting provocation with a good vent, there’s no point.
In consequence, there’s essentially no discourse remaining. Instead, the Left keeps screeching to “keep the hate alive.” The reaction on the Right is usually something like this:
I’m increasingly pissed off by what I’m seeing and I resent the people behind it. Guys like Juan Williams should be on TV demanding the cops round up every last Charlotte rioter and pack them off to Africa. The rich black guys on TV talking sportsball should be mortified that their co-ethnics are embarrassing their race with these antics. If the roles were reversed and it was whites making asses of themselves, you can be sure the honkies on TV would be furious and embarrassed, demanding a halt to it.
That’s not how it works and that’s what is getting tiresome. Those two black girls get the idea in their heads to make a nuisance of themselves in the street and I’m supposed to feel guilty about it. Frankly, Glenn Reynolds was right. Let’s have a few motorists drive over these people and then we can talk about feeling guilty. Let’s have the cops unleash the dogs and water cannon on these rioters and then talk to me about feeling guilty. I’ll be happy to feel guilty as long as the streets are clear.
I’ve simply had enough.
Open-if-insincere anger versus repressed-but-justified anger. Who wins?
Mind you, this is not an argument against getting angry. It’s about what anger-in-discourse means and how it can be used.
The Left’s adoption of a politics of division compels them to brandish anger as their principal weapon. And to the extent that it gains its objectives, it will be emulated and intensified.
To prevent Leftist anger-in-discourse from gaining its objectives, we must meet anger with anger – and our anger must be of incomparably greater magnitude.
There’s already a perceptible movement in that direction. Whites are sick and tired for being blamed for the myriad failures of American blacks. Christians are sick and tired of being persecuted de facto for their beliefs. Men have pretty much had it with feminists and their endless shrill denunciations. And so on.
It’s a start, but only a start. It must grow, and become vocal, and to the extent required by circumstances – girls, hold onto your boyfriends -- it must meet violence with superior force.
That will be a sticking point for many, who prefer to leave “that sort of thing” to the politicians, organizers, and commentators (and the superior force part, of course, to “the authorities”). However, dealing ourselves out because we’re private persons who “just want to be left alone” is no longer viable...especially as “the authorities” are tacitly complicit in the Left’s tactics. Consider the “official” reactions to the rioting in Ferguson, Baltimore, Charlotte, and Milwaukee.
Paddy Chayevsky’s Howard Beale had the right idea:
I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TV's while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be.
We know things are bad - worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone.' Well, I'm not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot - I don't want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you've got to get mad. You've got to say, 'I'm a HUMAN BEING, God damn it! My life has VALUE!'
So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, 'I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!' I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell - 'I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Things have got to change. But first, you've gotta get mad!... You've got to say, 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Then we'll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it: "I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!"
But yelling out the window mustn’t be the end of it. The Anger Gambit is too resilient to be defeated that way.
