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“Defounding America” — 23 Comments

  1. I don’t think race explains much of anything. Social fictions about race are tools for one class in society (largely though not completely white) to use in abusing another part of society (white, not fancy, vernacular). The question is what is the origin of this vicious antagonism. (And why do you see analogues of it in Europe)?

  2. Magnet is certainly all too correct in his assertion that the Trump administration never managed to drain the swamp of identity-politics bureaucrats, apparatchiks of the D.I.E. “diversity” racket, HR “wokesters” and social-justice administrators, not to mention all the many race-hustling grifters in education, in the MSM, and in the universities, but this was perhaps a task even beyond the might of Heracles in his cleansing of the Augean stables.

  3. Art Deco:

    Author Myron Magnet is not saying that race explains anything, much less everything. He’s saying that “Culture War II” SAYS that everything comes down to race and racism as a rot infecting our society from the start. Magnet doesn’t agree.

  4. I cannot help but think reading Magnet’s article that it seems utterly familiar and rather misplaced.

  5. Art Deco:

    “Familiar” to a tiny percentage of the population. And why “misplaced”? Do you mean that, where it is, it’s only preaching to the choir? Or won’t get much circulation? If that’s what you mean, I agree, but outlets that cater to the population it would need to reach almost certainly wouldn’t publish it.

  6. Have Marvel not self desttucted by becoming #Woke, I would propose that the name Myron Magnet deserves a marvel comics character. The person does as well.

  7. “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.” (Thomas Jefferson, 1788)

    Add to that dynamic Marxism’s “March Through the Institutions” and you’ve got the basic dynamics that have led to the situation we face.

  8. there are a lot of poor in the US… a lot and of all races..
    so Art+Deco, explain why only one group acts like animals when they protest, and gangs up like packs even when they are not part of the fight… stomps on heads, etc..

  9. Well now that Myron Magnet has come out and said it, I guess that all the Bad White Folks who said it 5, 10, 20 years or more back are forgiven and that’s OK.

    So if we just stop the process of defaming the Founders and Implement Perfect Communism, oops, Constitutionalism and run the clock forward, it’ll all be OK? Or do we need a Council of Guardians (hmmm… vaguely familiar ring) of scholarly Myron Magnets and Roger Kimballs to keep an eye on it all?

    Not going to work. As he says, it’s a system of lies. There are truths he cannot tell, too, or even be suspected of thinking; not if he wants to survive the week. In any organisation Lies accumulate until they bring it down. It’s too late, far too late to prevent some very big troubles. There *is* a lot of ruin in a nation, but as Lenin said “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” Let’s hope it’s decades still. Been decades already, though.

  10. Ideas Don’t Have Consequences:

    https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/ideas-dont-have-consequences/

    “But conservative media isn’t the real world. Here, ideas don’t have consequences. You can be consistently wrong on every major political issue of the century and be absolutely certain that you’ll keep your magazine column, your think-tank fellowship, and your cushy book deal. Ideas don’t have consequences.

    What’s more, you can be consistently right on every major political issue of the century and still be considered a pariah. Look at Pat Buchanan. The man coined the phrase “culture wars.” He founded this magazine in 2002 to oppose regime change in the Middle East. He was talking about raising tariffs and securing the border before Donald Trump launched The Apprentice. He has been warning us about the economic and security threat posed by China for decades. The same folks who would eventually go on to form the GOP’s pro-war, NeverTrump wing have been trying to cancel Pat since at least 1991. Have they ever apologized? Of course not. Because ideas don’t have consequences. Not even good ideas.”

  11. Don’t worry folks, Charlie Kirk has the solution:

    “Of course, I love the Grand Canyon. I love the Rocky Mountains. And I love Boston. And I love Chicago. But if all that disappeared, if all I had was ideas, and we were on an island, that’s America. That’s Israel. And that’s what people have to realize. America’s just a placeholder for timeless ideas. And if you fall too in love with, oh, the specific place, and all this… that’s not what it is.”

    Blut und Erde sind augenscheinlich verboten, nicht war?

    Well, there’s certainly nothing more Christian than to willingly and joyfully die out as a people whilst being dispossessed of the lands of ones ancestors for the sins of others elsewhere on other continents, now, is there? 😀 Scans much better with Blut und Boden… but gotta make concessions… always the concessions.

    ‘Proposition Nation’ — You hear that, you reach for your Browning or your progeny dies out.

  12. Sarah Hoyt has been at the Phtyo- and Xeno-Estrogens again. Her already always brimming cup runneth over.

    https://accordingtohoyt.com/2021/04/28/everywhere/

    There are bits here I agree with and bits I don’t, of course. That don’t signify. Posting it so that others may read and see if they can extract any useful marrow from it. We’re all blind men feeling out the Elephant bit by bit at our own individual paces.

  13. Zaphod,

    On the tone deafness on the left, Hoyt hits the nail right on the head here;

    “their paradigm is broken and they can’t see it because they’ve done everything possible to insulate themselves from input coming from outside the paradigm.

    When this happens and the people of the dead paradigm still have some power, the result is kind of like when you fill a container with gasoline, then drop a match in. It’s best to be in the places they think don’t matter.”

  14. Magnet’s essay is a welcome salvo. I agree with 95% of the descriptive portion. However, as is often the case with conservative intellectuals, his prescriptive is woefully incomplete. Yes, the current state of our civil society and institutions (specifically that almost all civic institutions have been infiltrated by the left) puts conservatives in a bind. Yes, we need to follow Buckley (carried to the Nth degree) in yelling “STOP”.

    But that’s not enough. Not even remotely.

    Most importantly, we need to call out the left (which includes most liberals, fools or knaves the may be) for what there are: Cultural Marxists with totalitarian desires; wannabe tinpot dictators, who exploit racial grievances for personal gain. They hate white people out of envy. They exploit ‘black and brown’ people for greed. They want to destroy every aspect of our historical society, so they can recreate a utopia (for them) where they have dictatorial power. If they fail, so be it; at least they will have levelled the America they so despise. They are self-absorbed, narcissistic, sociopaths. If you care about your future, your family’s future, your neighbor’s future, your country’s future, you need to oppose them with ever fiber of your being.

    That’s what needs to be said. Trump came closer than any GOP politician ever could, or would, in saying it. But we need to go far beyond even what he attempted to express.

  15. Face it. The LAST truly great PotUS we had was a Dem — Grover Cleveland.

    Teddy was also the source of much of what we have today — many of the alphabet agencies came from his admin.

    Cleveland understood the proper limits of government power:

    In 1887, Cleveland issued his most well-known veto, that of the Texas Seed Bill.[115] After a drought had ruined crops in several Texas counties, Congress appropriated $100,000 (equivalent to $2,845,556 in 2019) to purchase seed grain for farmers there.[115] Cleveland vetoed the expenditure. In his veto message, he espoused a theory of limited government:

    I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution, and I do not believe that the power and duty of the general government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering which is in no manner properly related to the public service or benefit. A prevalent tendency to disregard the limited mission of this power and duty should, I think, be steadfastly resisted, to the end that the lesson should be constantly enforced that, though the people support the government, the government should not support the people. The friendliness and charity of our countrymen can always be relied upon to relieve their fellow-citizens in misfortune. This has been repeatedly and quite lately demonstrated. Federal aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character, while it prevents the indulgence among our people of that kindly sentiment and conduct which strengthens the bonds of a common brotherhood.[116]

    He also made similar noises in his third SOTU address:


    “When we consider that the theory of our institutions guarantees to every citizen the full enjoyment of all the fruits of his industry and enterprise, with only such deduction as may be his share toward the careful and economical maintenance of the Government which protects him, it is plain that the exaction of more than this is indefensible extortion and a culpable betrayal of American fairness and justice … The public Treasury, which should only exist as a conduit conveying the people’s tribute to its legitimate objects of expenditure, becomes a hoarding place for money needlessly withdrawn from trade and the people’s use, thus crippling our national energies, suspending our country’s development, preventing investment in productive enterprise, threatening financial disturbance, and inviting schemes of public plunder.”
    Cleveland’s third annual message to Congress,
    December 6, 1887.[124]

    Not a single man elected to the office since then has truly worked with that ideal in almost any regard. Probably the next-best since Cleveland was Coolidge.

  16. Art Deco: The question is what is the origin of this vicious antagonism. (And why do you see analogues of it in Europe)?

    ME (Minta): BLM and Antifa are, and have been for a few years, all over Europe and elsewhere. The pattern is Marxist: instead of the proletariate vs the owners they have substituted the non-white vs the white “supremacists”.

    Artfldgr: there are a lot of poor in the US… a lot and of all races..
    so Art+Deco, explain why only one group acts like animals when they protest, and gangs up like packs even when they are not part of the fight… stomps on heads, etc..

    ME (Minta): There are a lot of whites—often college age females—in both Antifa and BLM. They act exactly like the others. There are Latinos in MS 13. They act like the BLM and Antifa, in terms of viciousness and pacts and acting like animals. There are others, in the middle and Far East. People in Ruwanda and Yugoslavia, and Nazi’s on Kristol Nacht, etc. Given the adequate indoctrination, passionate motivation, and a crowd of like-minded humans, all bets are off.

  17. Ok, Zaphod. I enjoy Sarah Hoyt. But I’ve read her “Everything” piece, and other than vengeance and somehow the US will be transformed in a few years — and at less blood than the rest of the world — I cannot tell what she’s going on about!

    Anyone else gotta clue?

    I did read Michael Yon’s post (which inspired her, apparently), too. He’s confident of violent pushback because the Left is shooting at National Guard troops in Minneapolis.

    At least Yon’s more concrete! But nowhere as forthcoming except about his long track record of getting coming mayhem right.

    Any other opioniobs? Am I wrong?

  18. Magnet’s essay is a welcome salvo. I agree with 95% of the descriptive portion.

    It’s the 1,000 th time I’ve read something like that in the last 35 years. And it has a ‘wet streets cause rain’ notion of cause and effect.

  19. Race is the soul of Culture War II. It explains everything…

    No, diversity [dogma], inequity, and exclusion, not limited to racism (sexism before that), is merely a means to stoke division and manufacture sustainable, renewable, ideally green (i.e. stochastically naive) leverage in a Hutu/Tutsi cycle of redistributive and retributive change. #HateLovesAbortion

  20. “Take the war in Iraq, the greatest policy snafu in American history.”

    The first, intermediate, second, third, or fourth? The first was a response to transnational war, the intermediate sustained the first, the second ended both, the third was progressive, and the fourth was a response to transnational terrorism that followed with the third.

  21. n.n.:

    Magnet is not saying race explains everything. He’s saying that the “anti-racism” group says that everything is the fault of racists – that they use it to explain everything, or just about everything. It’s a tool for “anti-racist” culture warriors.

  22. Of course, “anti-racist” is in quotes. They’re anti a lot of things but racism isn’t one of them.
    Maybe one question could be how long until the obvious lie stops convincing people? One may call an action “anti-racist” when it is obviously something else. But how long until the armor, the shield, the protection of the term becomes obsolete?

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