The American Conservative Is Increasingly Insane

[goldenvalley]

Dec 28, 2021 20:06:06 GMT LFC said:

Here's another wild piece at TAC on the use of plastic barriers to prevent COVID spread. I hate to overuse the word "unhinged" but it's just so perfect for so much of the American right. They have cut loose any tether to reality and, in this case, can go on and on eloquently spewing utter nonsense. The line on contraceptives (bold mine) jumped out like a wingnut flare to me.

What reports like this miss are that it’s not just seeing loved ones, but touching them—knowing them, in short—that has robbed these elderly folks’ lives of the joy that this season promises. A “touch” through plastic is not enough. How many more grandparents must be made miserable before we admit this?

In some sense, all of this estrangement is not entirely new. Plastic has been used as a barrier in human relationships ever since modern contraceptives were invented. But in the last year and a half it has ratcheted up to a fever pitch. Plastic walls between you and the checkout lady, plastic shields over your face, bread in plastic takeout containers rather than broken together by human hands. Forget for a minute about the immense waste, and failed stewardship, of this obsessive-compulsive tendency, and think about how inhuman it is to touch only one another through an impenetrable substance. At that point, don’t even bother embracing. Accept your dualistic fate.

Because in trying desperately to rewire the human being to commune in spirit but not in the flesh, we are engaging in that same old ghost dualism, which changes the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak to the spirit can only live when the flesh is slain. The fresh perfume of the biomedical security state (formaldehyde) can’t hide the reek of death.

Human life was so much better when we knew nothing of how disease spread.  Get sick and die young...it's the only way to preserve the spirit of humanity?

[LFC]

Dec 28, 2021 21:31:46 GMT goldenvalley said:

Human life was so much better when we knew nothing of how disease spread.  Get sick and die young...it's the only way to preserve the spirit of humanity?

Well aren't you just the f***ing libtard god-hater with no respect for tradition, morality, and God's Plan(tm).

[pnwguy]

Dec 28, 2021 20:02:32 GMT LFC said:

HeadspacenTiming • 4 hours ago
It's precisely this sort of thing that'd make me stand aside if a right-wing dictatorship on the level of Francisco Franco ever came to the U.S.

No quarter for insurrectionists and groomer teachers. None.

Those Jan 6th Capitol "tourists" don't count as insurrectionists, of course.  

[AnBr]

Dec 28, 2021 22:21:19 GMT LFC said:

Dec 28, 2021 21:31:46 GMT goldenvalley said:

Human life was so much better when we knew nothing of how disease spread.  Get sick and die young...it's the only way to preserve the spirit of humanity?

Well aren't you just the f***ing libtard god-hater with no respect for tradition, morality, and God's Plan(tm).

You forgot socialist.

[LFC]

From the COVID thread:

Jan 31, 2022 17:35:25 GMT LFC said:

Canada proves that the U.S. isn't the only place with a bunch of f***ing morons.

Police in Canada’s capital said Sunday they are investigating possible criminal charges after anti-vaccine protesters urinated on the National War Memorial, danced on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and used the statue of Canadian hero Terry Fox to display an anti-vaccine statement.

I didn't even bother reading these but TAC has two headlines on this. "Overwrought" doesn't even seem to scratch the childish, selfish squealing.

The Truckers Fighting Dystopia

Canadian Truckers Over Covid Tyrants

[LFC]

I took a peek over at TAC to see if they're remotely willing to address the avalanche of stories surrounding the attempted Republican coup or Trump's illegal theft and destruction of presidential records. (Nope, of course.) But Dreher, being Dreher, never fails to disappoint. He wrote a sane piece on the pending probable invasion of Ukraine by Russia. It was refreshing to see ... and then I got about 2/3 into it.

Ask yourself: is this same leadership elite that is pushing progressivist racism and gender ideology at every level (including politicizing the military), waging culture war on a huge number of ordinary Americans whose damnable sin is to be white, male, heterosexual, and/or Christian, and presiding over the slow-motion ruin of our country really to be trusted in this new conflict? If in the unlikely event that we got into a shooting war with the Russians, who do you think is going to be on the front lines? Deplorables, mostly. Men (and maybe some women) for whom the emerging woke social and economic order does not work, but who are expected to salute the ruling class and prepare to risk their lives for … Ukraine.

(You might say: What about black American soldiers in Vietnam? They went to fight, even though parts of America were living under apartheid. Yes, they did go to fight, because as draftees, they had no choice. But had they been draft resisters, I say today that they would have been damn right to have demanded to know why they were being sent abroad to fight this war of choice on behalf of a ruling class that either oppressed them at home, or didn’t do enough to lift the yoke of injustice from their necks.)

This is a radical thing for a conservative like me to say, but the past two decades have radicalized me to a certain extent. In my book Live Not By Lies, I talk about how the Marxists never could really get a foothold in imperial Russia, until the Tsarist government’s bad handling of the 1891-92 famine revealed a degree of incompetence that shook the faith of many Russians in the system. For me, that has happened with the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the 2008 financial crash, and now the establishment’s intellectual and moral collapse in the face of wokeness, in which the elites in every institution surrendered their beliefs in bedrock American values for the sake of … what, exactly?

The crazy train continues from there. I'm convinced that Rod's childhood experiences, one of which he was bullied and his pants pulled down by some boys, have twisted his brain into an irreparable mess. His loathing of gays, something he'd deny with his dying breath, continues to be displayed more blatantly and more frequently (almost constantly) as he ages. I suspect that if he's still writing a decade or two from now his defensive walls meant to hide his hate from public view will crumble almost completely.

[LFC]

Today the ratio of insane to sane is relatively low for recent TAC fare but the top article is a real doozy titled The New McCarthyism. It is a full-throated apologist's screed for the real victims of the Jan. 6 insurrection who are, of course, the insurrectionists themselves.

Since the storming of the U.S. Capitol by outraged supporters of President Donald Trump on January 6, 2021, the growth of political intolerance in the United States has reached toxic levels. Trump’s adversaries immediately branded the incident as an insurrection and accused the lame duck president of trying to stage a coup to invalidate the results of the 2020 election. Los Angeles Times columnist Doyle McManus warned, in a column headlined “Warning: Jan. 6 was not a one-time event,” that Trump and his right-wing backers might use similar tactics to overturn future elections. With rare exceptions, both the mainstream legacy media and the newer social media powerhouses fully embraced the “insurrection” narrative.

Proponents of that narrative also engaged in a concerted effort to silence Trump and key supporters and denigrate anyone who continued to support his allegations of vote fraud. Twitter and Facebook moved to terminate Trump’s access to their platforms, as well as the accounts of several of his advisers and prominent supporters. It was an extraordinary display of raw politicized power. Two private companies had successfully silenced the president of the United States.

Even ordinary Americans who participated in the much larger peaceful rally on the National Mall that preceded the riot soon found themselves targeted for retaliation. Paul Davis, an attorney from Texas, was fired from his position when he was identified as having attended the rally, even though there was no evidence that he engaged in the violence at the Capitol. Other people reported experiencing similar retaliation for activity that is explicitly protected under the First Amendment. Frequently, statements justifying punitive responses merely asserted that the individual was “at” or “near” the Capitol on that day—not that they had illegally entered the building.

Some demonstrators even reported menacing visits from FBI investigators in the following weeks and months. It is indisputable that the FBI was scrutinizing several extreme right-wing organizations and their members, and the definition of “extreme” seemed to be expanding. Media efforts to blur the distinction between peaceful protesters and rioters continued. A New York Times story typified that tactic. “In the year since the attack, many [protestors] have plunged into new fights and new conspiracy theories sown in the bloody chaos of that day,” it stated. Typically, the Times profile focused on one man who expressed regrets that more people had not brought weapons to the Mall rally.

The growing authoritarian behavior characterizing the self-proclaimed defenders of democracy is more than a little worrying. The social media platforms not only barred speech that advocated or seemed to advocate violence, they targeted websites and posts that dared to argue that vote fraud had occurred in the 2020 presidential election, a major theme of Trump’s post-election message and the rationale for the rally at the Mall. Leading Democrats enthusiastically endorsed the decisions to bar such messages and suspend or close the media accounts of Trump and his followers.

Under Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s direction, the House of Representatives created a select committee to investigate the January 6 events, a committee that Democrats utterly dominated along with token neoconservative Republicans Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger. Predictably, the investigation soon became a fishing expedition to “prove” that the January 6 episode constituted an insurrection. The committee even targeted fellow House members who had worked with organizers of the National Mall rally or asserted that vote fraud had taken place.

It goes on much the same, painting the insurrection as not an insurrection but rather legitimate political discourse, without using the much mocked term. Then the author goes on with a laundry list of supposed Democratic tyranny and assaults of free speech. It's a real beaut!

[LFC]

And how is any day of op-eds complete without a shrill whine about how the Democrats are going to continue to used COVID as an excuse to take away all the right-wingers' rights. The author might as well be shrieking "I'm a pathetic little child!" at the top of his lungs. Bold complete and utter stupidity mine. How am I keeping score on that? Hospitalizations and death.

Stealth Omicron, also known as Omicron BA.2, first emerged in Europe in late January. Since then, it has become the predominant strain of Covid-19 in at least 18 countries, and has reportedly been detected in all 50 states.

The media is already laying the groundwork for stealth Omicron to be at fault for the next round of Covid mandates, citing preliminary studies that show stealth Omicron is more transmissible than its not-so-stealth cousin or other relatives like Delta. A study from Japan, for example, found that stealth Omicron was 30% more transmissible than the already highly transmissible regular Omicron. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, stealth Omicron was responsible for 8% of all new cases of Covid-19 in the U.S., a figure that was doubling every week.

To make matters worse, other early studies, such as one Danish study, found that reinfections from stealth Omicron were four times as common for individuals who previously recovered from the Delta variant compared to those who previously had Omicron.

What they omit, however, is that this is how viruses typically mutate. They become more transmissible and less deadly overtime in search of suitable hosts. So, no wonder Delta was more transmissible than the original, Omicron more contagious than Delta, and you can bet that whatever comes after stealth Omicron will be more transmissible than all its predecessors.

As Democrat-run states and liberal metropolises scrap their vaccine and mask mandates, it’s tempting for conservatives to make pithy comments about “the science” or outright declare victory over Covid. While time has vindicated those who were skeptical about Covid and strategies to contain it from the beginning, these are just small battles in a war that is likely to continue for years to come.

Over a million people, an inordinate number from red areas that ignored those containment strategies, disagree. Well, they would if they were still alive.

[goldenvalley]

Mar 7, 2022 18:54:56 GMT LFC said:

Today the ratio of insane to sane is relatively low for recent TAC fare but the top article is a real doozy titled The New McCarthyism. It is a full-throated apologist's screed for the real victims of the Jan. 6 insurrection who are, of course, the insurrectionists themselves.

****

It goes on much the same, painting the insurrection as not an insurrection but rather legitimate political discourse, without using the much mocked term. Then the author goes on with a laundry list of supposed Democratic tyranny and assaults of free speech. It's a real beaut!

These folks aren't used to having cops talk to them so they react very defensively when the FBI knocks on the door...these people aren't criminals, just patriots, how dare law enforcement come to their doors to ask questions?

And how dare a private employer fire an employee!  How dare Twitter and Facebook de-platform these folks for speaking out! They really don't understand that the 1st Amendment addresses only governmental behavior.

[pnwguy]

I hadn't looked at TAC's site in ages, so I wandered over there today. Holy smokes they are all-in for Putin, I guess because he champions anti-LGBT rhetoric to rally the oldsters who make up the Russians that miss the USSR.

[LFC]

Mar 23, 2022 17:54:22 GMT pnwguy said:

I hadn't looked at TAC's site in ages, so I wandered over there today. Holy smokes they are all-in for Putin, I guess because he champions anti-LGBT rhetoric to rally the oldsters who make up the Russians that miss the USSR.

The comments at TAC are insane. There are repeated meltdowns about the Azov Battalion and how they're proof that Ukraine is morally equivalent to Russia. To put them in perspective there were an estimate 900 members in 2022 in a nation of 43M and 233,000 square miles. At its peak that was around 2,500.  There are 6,300 police officers in Philadelphia, population 5.8M taking up 42 square miles. The commenters simply can't do math that requires them to count beyond 10 (10-1/2 if they're male).

[goldenvalley]

Mar 23, 2022 21:21:37 GMT LFC said:

Mar 23, 2022 17:54:22 GMT pnwguy said:

I hadn't looked at TAC's site in ages, so I wandered over there today. Holy smokes they are all-in for Putin, I guess because he champions anti-LGBT rhetoric to rally the oldsters who make up the Russians that miss the USSR.

The comments at TAC are insane. There are repeated meltdowns about the Azov Battalion and how they're proof that Ukraine is morally equivalent to Russia. To put them in perspective there were an estimate 900 members in 2022 in a nation of 43M and 233,000 square miles. At its peak that was around 2,500.  There are 6,300 police officers in Philadelphia, population 5.8M taking up 42 square miles. The commenters simply can't do math that requires them to count beyond 10 (10-1/2 if they're male).

Facts like yours are irrelevant.  The outrage is the only thing that is real.

[pnwguy]

Mar 23, 2022 21:49:23 GMT goldenvalley said:

Mar 23, 2022 21:21:37 GMT LFC said:

The comments at TAC are insane. There are repeated meltdowns about the Azov Battalion and how they're proof that Ukraine is morally equivalent to Russia. To put them in perspective there were an estimate 900 members in 2022 in a nation of 43M and 233,000 square miles. At its peak that was around 2,500.  There are 6,300 police officers in Philadelphia, population 5.8M taking up 42 square miles. The commenters simply can't do math that requires them to count beyond 10 (10-1/2 if they're male).

Facts like yours are irrelevant.  The outrage is the only thing that is real.

www.stephenhicks.org/2015/06/08/a-russian-joke-about-petty-envy/

Evil men (and historically they are almost always men) have fomented outrage and jealousy for power for 1000's of years

[LFC]

I took a look over at TAC today (April 5) and they haven't published anything new since March 30. Maybe they just have an unannounced week off but I wonder if they're crumbling. They certainly have collapsed into the same kind of right-wing cesspool that you can find all over the place so I don't see them offering anything different anymore.

[goldenvalley]

Looks like Rod Dreher at TAC has a divorce on his horizon and he writes about it while saying he isn't going to write about it...but he has an interesting photo at the top of the article.  

[andydp]

Apr 21, 2022 19:15:38 GMT goldenvalley said:

Looks like Rod Dreher at TAC has a divorce on his horizon and he writes about it while saying he isn't going to write about it...but he has an interesting photo at the top of the article

Could he be hinting the divorce won't be so "amicable" ?

[LFC]

Apr 21, 2022 19:15:38 GMT goldenvalley said:

Looks like Rod Dreher at TAC has a divorce on his horizon and he writes about it while saying he isn't going to write about it...but he has an interesting photo at the top of the article.  

He's gone off the deep end. I can't imagine that being easy for a spouse to take. I've known of a few breakups over religion and the inflexible, absolutist nature of the true believer must be like hitting a wall.

One friend was happy for a while but then their spouse increasingly became more of a zealot. Despite knowing he didn't believe when they got married, and having accepted it back then, she began pushing for him to come to church more and more often. It eventually became a massive problem. He said he knew it was over at the end of one big blow up. In the midst of shouting match she screamed "Wouldn't you throw a life preserver to a drowning man?" In the heat of things he didn't see the setup and yelled "Of course I would!" She then went dead calm and said, "That's what I'm doing for you." He said he knew at that instant the marriage was doomed.

I suspect Rod's wife finally had a moment where it clicked that he was gone, he was consumed by the culture wars, and there was no getting him back. He's basically a MAGAt of religion and is in a never ending quest to find another confirming "truth" no matter how trivial it is. No evidence to the contrary can make it through his defenses.

[pnwguy]

Apr 21, 2022 19:46:14 GMT LFC said:

Apr 21, 2022 19:15:38 GMT goldenvalley said:

Looks like Rod Dreher at TAC has a divorce on his horizon and he writes about it while saying he isn't going to write about it...but he has an interesting photo at the top of the article.  

He's gone off the deep end. I can't imagine that being easy for a spouse to take. I've known of a few breakups over religion and the inflexible, absolutist nature of the true believer must be like hitting a wall.

One friend was happy for a while but then their spouse increasingly became more of a zealot. Despite knowing he didn't believe when they got married, and having accepted it back then, she began pushing for him to come to church more and more often. It eventually became a massive problem. He said he knew it was over at the end of one big blow up. In the midst of shouting match she screamed "Wouldn't you throw a life preserver to a drowning man?" In the heat of things he didn't see the setup and yelled "Of course I would!" She then went dead calm and said, "That's what I'm doing for you." He said he knew at that instant the marriage was doomed.

I suspect Rod's wife finally had a moment where it clicked that he was gone, he was consumed by the culture wars, and there was no getting him back. He's basically a MAGAt of religion and is in a never ending quest to find another confirming "truth" no matter how trivial it is. No evidence to the contrary can make it through his defenses.

If only Rod had tanned his testicles, he could have kept her subdued by his enhanced testosterone...

[LFC]

Apr 21, 2022 19:59:06 GMT pnwguy said:

If only Rod had tanned his testicles, he could have kept her subdued by his enhanced testosterone...

F***, man! Just ... F***! It's even funnier because Rod has made rumblings in the past about Tucker potentially running for president. Never a full out endorsement, of course, but rather more than a little ... Tuck-curious.

[AnBr]

♫Chestnuts roasting on an open fire♫

[LFC]

On the upside Tucker fans who keep toasting their testicles may very well make themselves less fertile and incapable of breeding. As Martha Stewart would say, "And that's a good thing."

[goldenvalley]

Apr 21, 2022 23:53:57 GMT LFC said:

On the upside Tucker fans who keep toasting their testicles may very well make themselves less fertile and incapable of breeding. As Martha Stewart would say, "And that's a good thing."

I wondered about that.  Seems like the consensus was no hot tubs if you want to father a child...no tighty whiteys either.  Too much heat is not good.

[LFC]

LG&M has a Rod Dreher divorce thread. You have to cull a bit but some of the comments are gold. This is one from somebody who knows him and Eric Metaxas, Rod's friend who went too far into the right-wing fever swamp even for him. It's a very good explanation of their ilk.

hisownfool • a day ago

I have known Rod for nearly three decades. I met him through another old friend, Eric Metaxas.

I have not spoken with either much in the past five years. There are many reasons but the biggest is that their extreme ideological turns have pulled them away from other friends.

I won't deny that these turns were present, albeit in embryonic forms, when I had regular contact with both. They are both cultural catastrophists. Before the culture war stuff, Rod was obsessed with William Howard Kunstler and the whole "peak oil" thing. Eric, with his neo-Pentecostal background, talked in apocalyptic terms.

As hard it is to believe, they're good guys, at least when I knew them better, albeit, like me, more than a bit neurotic.

What happened was that they "drank their own kool-aid," "got high off their own supply," etc.

What they couldn't grok is an understanding of Christian faith that is centered on works of charity and the cultivation of an inner spiritual life that is unconcerned with "saving the culture," whatever that means. Instead of being at peace regardless of what the world is doing, they let current events shape their attitudes.

Their stories are a metaphor for what has happened to American Christianity, at least the white conservative variety. It's one of the reasons I'm grateful that I sold my inside-the-beltway home and move to western N.Y.

[LFC]

Articles one, two, and three gushing over JD Vance who, as has been chronicled here at TRS, is batshit insane. He's exactly their kind of guy.

[LFC]

Rod Dreher continues his open movement towards the sweet embrace of fascism and authoritarianism and using the state to force people to obey the "morals" he wants them to have. No shock. People who embrace the type of religion he does have already proven their support of authoritarianism. He'll never understand his hypocrisy of his shrill years-long screeching about "the woke mob" versus the fact that every turn he supports the same brand of state control, just for the "right" reasons. Here he's quoting a writer at The European Conservative.

And:

Central European conservatism, after the fall of communism, has been—and still is today—anti-communist and patriotic, focusing on national traditions and Christianity. It stands for national independence. For us, freedom means national freedom. Anglo-American conservatives, on the other hand, fear government intervention, in part because of its association with connotations of ‘social engineering.’ But how can a nation respond to decades of leftist social engineering, especially when it was as aggressive as communism? Using state power, communism destroyed our local, organic communities and our traditional elites. Today we have to use state power to rebuild those communities and create new national elites. Society will not heal itself—nor will the free market heal it. If your house is destroyed, you must actively rebuild it; it won’t be rebuilt by an ‘invisible hand.’
Read it all.

That last quoted graf is really important for us Americans to grasp in the era of Woke Capitalism, and the general capture of every institution in American life by woke ideologues. If not for the state stepping in to protect families and institutions from the predation of entities like the Walt Disney Company, who will? The forces arrayed against the family, religion, and tradition are so powerful that only the state can offer a meaningful measure of protection. Think about it: Woke Capitalist entities are accountable to no one, but at least the people have a say in who represents them. American conservatives have got to become less squeamish about using the state in this way. As Szilvay’s opening story indicates, grassroots conservatives already are fine with it, but the leadership and intellectual class on the American Right disagree. That, of course, is changing. See Ron DeSantis. See J.D. Vance. See Josh Hawley. And see the rise of the so-called “New Right” thinkers in the US.

Does he consider these three evil, corrupt, serial lying idiots to be part of the "New Right" "thinkers?"

And read these words he approvingly quotes again. This is the very definition of the authoritarian state and state sponsored religion. Is it any wonder he has such a boner for Orbán?

Today we have to use state power to rebuild those communities and create new national elites. Society will not heal itself—nor will the free market heal it. If your house is destroyed, you must actively rebuild it; it won’t be rebuilt by an ‘invisible hand.’

Got that? The state will "rebuild those communities" and "create new national elites." Yeah, that's not scary at all.