H.L. Mencken’s become one of my favorites over the last 3-years for many reasons, not the least of which because he was fearless and said what he thought, feelings be damned. Because he was unfiltered, he was destined to become one of the first ones hoisted upon Kancel Kultur’s guillotine. One of Mencken’s least famous books is Minority Report, a collection of unpublished blurbs taken from his notebooks and bins; thoughts scribbled down as reminders of things to possibly publish in his columns. The book is a collection of what was left over and reads like a collection of social media posts written a century ahead of time! It’s an excellent bathroom/nightstand reader. “Stealing” sounds so coarse! Let’s say I’m “borrowing” it, name and all. We can even call it “paying tribute!”
Expect to hear M.R. material in the podcast and I’ll certainly expand some of the ongoing content into their own pieces. Here’s the first to get my feet wet.
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In no particular order…
Don't ask me why or how, but I watched Oprah's interview with The Ginger Prince and his wife tonight. A few things stood out. First, if Meghan Markle is a "woman of color," the .4% North African/Egyptian and the tenth-percent American Indian heritage that Ancestry and 23 & Me scraped from the depths of my otherwise lily-white DNA demand their reparations. Should I be expecting my NAACP welcome packet in the mail? I'd love to advance the "colored" part of my peopleness. Shall I start on my tribal-ambiguous vision quest in the meantime?
Being a freshly minted a Todd of Color raises all sorts of complications. Does all this mean the whiteness polluting my blood is oppressing my colored and disadvantaged spleen? How does that work for "we" mixed race folk? Does coloredness act as an antidote miraculously curing one's whiteness? If I want to really pursue historical justice, how do I figure out which African tribe captured and traded my Ancestors of Color to slavers? Personally, tracing the injustice done to my people all the way back to the original source seems like the responsible thing to do. I want to be sure everyone gets their Reparations Invoice of Justice!
These are confusing times, even for a Zilla of Good Intention. Ideologically produced pseudoscience is tricky!
Far more importantly, I crawled onto Twitter afterwards. I endured that mostly because I'm trying to cut my sudden cutting habit. Twitter's misanthropic psychological damage is a tough tradeoff, but physical scars are hideous and swimsuit season is coming.
The abuse being directed at them was of a special inhumane flavor tonight, even for Twitter and it drove home something I've been pondering for quite a long time:
What's posing as "We the People" populism and fueling the direct democracy rhetorical orgy is just run of the mill schoolyard envy; the drooling herd's jealousy and a spiteful resentment of what Mencken called "their betters."
Diana's Ginger Prince was hatched into wealth, privilege, and birthright prestige; the Trailer Park Twitterati wasn't. Meghan hit the hubby Powerball and they're pissed about the unfairness of it all! I really do wonder how much populism has to do with "justice" as opposed to, "I feel entitled to everything they have." More than a few of my old FB "friends" reeked of that!
One other thing re: Meghan. Toward the end, she said something to the effect of, "what matters are the stories." Narratives. Narratives. Imagined orders, grand designs, religions, ideologies, or political campaigns. It all comes down to the same thing. Meg's got some good shit going on upstairs.
I watched the Allen v Farrow hit job, too. One of the lines Mia attributed to Woody was this: "It doesn't matter what's true. It's what's believed that matters." Practically speaking, he was right (propaganda's effectiveness is damning) and this, combined with contemporary info-tech, scares the fuck outta me.
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“The really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits “atrocities” but that it attacks the concept of objective truth: it claims to control the past as well as the future. Man is unique because he has his free will and the capacity to choose. When this is suppressed he is no longer a man but an animal. Therefore the only enemy is totalitarianism, in any guise: communistic, socialistic, capitalistic, militaristic, or moralistic. If even a few hundred thousand people can be got to grasp that it is useless to overthrow Tweedledum in order to set up Tweedledee, the talk of “democracy versus Fascism” with which our ears are deafened may begin to mean something. Or, maybe not. For millennia, the wisest among us have known that the heart of darkness lay not in some error of social organization but in man’s own blood. No truth is more self-evident than that.”
That’s a collection of a few of my favorite quotes with a couple of my own edits, additions, and tweaks. It’s also an over-simplified beginning of a kind of mission statement. One that will put me at odds with virtually everyone belonging to one of your binary political cults before long.
We all hear people claiming to just be “standing up for what they believe in!” That’s fine, but eventually the real gauge of our mutually exclusive would-be totalitarian theocracies might be whether you are allowed NOT to believe something.
We’re already halfway there.
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First, Dr. Seuss now Pepe LePew? Really, Wokeflakes? I know you think PMRC-style puritanical purges are the path to spiritual atonement for America's flawed and barbaric ways; a wonderful way to declare yours as the Official Religion of North America. But, let me clue you in on something important before you learn it the hard way…again: you're making things far, far worse. I PROMISE you this: beneath the surface or silently standing off to the side as you convulse and scream at the Woke Wailing Wall, black lives and feminist concerns "matter" far less to vast swaths of this fucking country than they did a year ago. Trans "issues?" Holy shit! "Who fucking cares?", said most of the country. Until you insisted your son must be allowed to compete against their daughter because, why again? Because an imaginary gender voice in its head said so. Then? "Who cares" becomes "fuck 'em."
Take that bitcoin of American insight to the muthafukin' bank.
Something like 4-years ago, about the time I ran away from The Resistance, I coined the phrase Equal & Opposite Bilateral Radicalization™. Bush begat Obama who begat the Tea Party and Trumpism which in turn begat the Green Tea Party and Woke totalitarianism. Before you recite something you read on Slate or HuffPo, Moonbeam, I am quite aware of how moral certitudes become imperatives and justify self-righteous totalitarianism. Totalitarianism is exactly what this is.
Do you somehow still imagine, dear Granola Rainbow Warrior, that after beginning an all-out propaganda and censorship assault not only on celebrities and FUCKING CARTOONS (!) but also a scapegoating campaign against not only the founders but the clear national majority, another backlash isn't coming? Really?
I began typing, "how do you figure that?" but I know! It's the toxified incense-polluted air inside the Wokecho Chamber! Ever see Total Recall? When Cohaagen shuts off the hookers' air? That's what's happening to the rational side of the Woke Brain. Just like the Trumptowner's, it's suffocating on the sweet smell of its own sectarian flatulence.
I said long ago and have repeated often that eventually circumstances would demand a choice; that staying conveniently aloof trying to avoid both fanatical armies would become impossible for anyone not living in a Kaczynski Kabin.
Choosing Day has arrived, Toddzillaphiles.
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In case you’re confused, the Woke and most of the supplicant media complex have begun using “privilege” and “supremacy” interchangeably. That’s why it sounds like “white supremacists” are on every street corner instead of being more accurately portrayed as the tiny fringe group they still are. The one having weekly, secret, self-loathing gay orgies at rural cabins around metaphorical Coeur d’Alene. Is that true? Am I wallowing in hyperbole? My sources tell me Idaho is ground zero for denialist buttstuff and you can’t prove it’s not. I digress.
The problem, of course, is that whites, especially white men whom God made to enjoy vaginas, are not allowed to advocate for themselves the way every other “identity” group is encouraged to. This bastardized application of revenge, retribution, and historical scapegoating being spun as “equality” and cosmic “justice” is enraging. As enraging as the asinine expectation that “we” should somehow be expected to happily sacrifice “our” own self-interest, and that of our children, to the incredibly special interests of the protected-identity-of-the-week.
*NEVER-EXPLAIN-YOURSELF TANGENT: I put ‘we’ and ‘our’ in quotes to highlight how yes, you’re right. Identity politics does create equal-and-opposite identity actions and defensive reactions. This is yet another oblivious and massive violence/agitation-miscalculation on the Woke’s part, since 60% of the country is still white.
I cannot quantify it, but I strongly suspect black lives (yes, it’s still a small ‘b’) silently matter far less to a large part of the population than they did a year ago. Supposedly, Wokedom is fighting an agitating battle for hearts and minds. I'm afraid they have failed so badly on that front that whips and chains coercion will eventually be the only means left to pursue their fanatical utopian ends.
Trump was not rock bottom nor is this iteration of leftist fanaticism. It can always get worse, and it will.
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As a species we're storytellers, not truth seekers. Social media, from the sanitized versions of life to plagiarized wisdom to ideological fictions to outright conspiracies to social media "influencers' using toilet seats to fake the shot from the plane, social media is story time for big kids. Adult Swim is more realistic than the fantasy land this has become. #FleecingTheFucktards