{"id":58881,"date":"2020-08-28T20:43:03","date_gmt":"2020-08-29T01:43:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=58881"},"modified":"2020-08-28T20:58:04","modified_gmt":"2020-08-29T01:58:04","slug":"58881","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=58881","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Born and raised in Britain, Sullivan is the quintessential leftist Brit, but he is<\/em> <\/strong>spot on that the demoncraps have gone and done it to themselves.
\nThis just goes to show that, on occasion, even idiots can have moments of clear thinking.<\/p>\n

\n

BLUF:
\nI don\u2019t think I\u2019m the only one, as even the Democrats seem now to realize. And this massive blindspot is not hard to understand.<\/em>
\nWhen a political party finds itself so wedded to a new and potent ideology it cannot call out violence when it sees it, then it is walking straight into a trap.<\/em><\/p>\n

When the discourse on the left has become one in which scholars and editors and Tweeters vie with one another to up the ante on how inherently evil America has always been, redescribe it as a slaveocracy, and endorse racist books that foment the most egregious stereotypes about \u201cwhiteness\u201d, most ordinary people, who love their country and are mostly proud of its past, will rightly balk.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

One of the most devastating lines in president Trump\u2019s convention speech last night was this: \u201cTonight, I ask you a very simple question: How can the Democrat Party ask to lead our country when it spends so much time tearing down our country?\u201d\u00a0<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The Trap The Democrats Walked Right Into<\/a>
\nIf law and order are what this election is about, they will lose it.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

It finally happened. We have lethal battles in the streets between the two tribes of our polarized politics. This week, a 17-year-old man, Kyle Rittenhouse, brought a rifle to Kenosha, Wisconsin, in order,\u00a0it appears<\/a>, to protect the businesses that were being burned down or ransacked by rioters after the police shooting of\u00a0alleged rapist<\/a>, Jacob Blake. In a series of skirmishes between Rittenhouse and BLM and Antifa activists on the streets of Kenosha, three men pursuing Rittenhouse were shot and two killed by the vigilante in what appears to be some kind of self-defense.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m doing my best to convey the gist of what happened \u2014 and there\u2019s an excellent,\u00a0detailed report<\/a>\u00a0of the incident from the NYT \u2014 without justifying\u00a0any<\/em>\u00a0of it. No excuse for vigilantism; no excuse for looting, rioting and arson. The truth is: even a few minutes of chaos and violence can contain a universe of confusing events, motives and dynamics that are extremely hard to parse immediately. And yet it is the imperative of our current culture that we defend one side as blameless and the other as the source of all evil.<\/p>\n

In the current chaos, I\u2019ve come to appreciate Marcus Aurelius\u2019s maxim that \u201cThe object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.\u201d And I have to say I\u2019m horribly conflicted on some issues. I\u2019m supportive of attempts to interrogate the sins of the past, in particular the gruesome legacy of slavery and segregation, and their persistent impact on the present. And in that sense, I\u2019m a supporter of the motives of the good folks involved with the Black Lives Matter movement. But I\u2019m equally repelled by the insistent attempt by BLM and its ideological founders to malign and dismiss the huge progress we\u2019ve made, to re-describe the American experiment in freedom as one utterly defined by racism, and to call the most tolerant country on the planet, with unprecedented demographic diversity, a form of \u201cwhite supremacy\u201d. I\u2019m tired of hearing Kamala Harris say, as she did yesterday: \u201cThe reality is that the life of a black person in America has never been treated as fully human.\u201d This is what Trump has long defended as \u201ctruthful hyperbole\u201d \u2014 which is a euphemism for a lie.<\/p>\n

But here\u2019s one thing I have absolutely no conflict about. Rioting and lawlessness is evil. And any civil authority that permits, condones or dismisses violence, looting and mayhem in the streets disqualifies itself from any legitimacy. This comes first. If one party supports everything I believe in but doesn\u2019t believe in maintaining law and order all the time and everywhere, I\u2019ll back a party that does. In that sense, I\u2019m a one-issue voter, because without order, there is no room for any other issue. Disorder always and everywhere begets more disorder; the minute the authorities appear to permit such violence, it is destined to grow.\u00a0And if liberals do not defend order, fascists will.<\/p>\n

Here is a quote from\u00a0Yoom Nguyen<\/a>, owner of the Lotus Restaurant in Minneapolis, who just witnessed a second assault on his business: \u201cWatching looters bust down our family restaurant is so heartbreaking. Senseless, they\u2019re doing it while laughing and smirking. Not gonna lie, I damn near shot a man tonight. He threw that fucking rock at my family photo and looked right at me. I said \u2018you motherfucker \u2026\u2019 tears immediately rolled down my face. I just can\u2019t no more. I\u2019m thankful I walked away but Fuck y\u2019all.\u201d This is how violence metastasizes. And as I\u2019ve watched protests devolve over the summer into a series of riots, arson expeditions, and lawless occupations of city blocks, along with disgusting and often racist profanity, I\u2019ve begun to feel similarly. And when I watched the Democratic Convention and heard close to nothing about ending this lawlessness, I noted the silence.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think I\u2019m the only one, as even the Democrats seem now to realize. And this massive blindspot is not hard to understand. When a political party finds itself so wedded to a new and potent ideology it cannot call out violence when it sees it, then it is walking straight into a trap. When the discourse on the left has become one in which scholars and editors and Tweeters vie with one another to up the ante on how inherently evil America has always been, redescribe it as a slaveocracy, and endorse racist books that foment the most egregious stereotypes about \u201cwhiteness\u201d, most ordinary people, who love their country and are mostly proud of its past, will rightly balk. One of the most devastating lines in president Trump\u2019s convention speech last night was this: \u201cTonight, I ask you a very simple question: How can the Democrat Party ask to lead our country when it spends so much time tearing down our country?\u201d A cheap shot, yes. But in the current context, a political bullseye.<\/p>\n

The key theme of the RNC was reminding people of the American narrative that once was. Yes, it was unbelievably vulgar. Yes, it looked like a cross between a sophisticated CGI video-game and a crude car dealer ad with a dollop of Leni Riefenstahl. But it was extremely effective. To see that, you have to remove your frontal cortex and put it in a jar, accept that it\u2019s all going to be a series of lies so massive they stupefy us into stutters, and then cop the feels. Pence gave us a vision of America that was a souped up Disney special from the early 1960s \u2014 from Fort McHenry no less. And look at the icons Trump invoked: Wyatt Earp, Annie Oakley, Davy Crockett, and Buffalo Bill. You can mock. But in the midst of a culture being redescribed by the left as a form of foul and relentless \u201cwhite supremacy\u201d, and in a moment of arson and rioting, it felt like a kind of balm.<\/p>\n

All this reassurance played out against a backdrop of Kenosha, which was burning, and Minneapolis, where a\u00a0suicide<\/em>\u00a0led to a bout of opportunistic looting, and Washington DC, where mobs of wokesters went through the city chanting obscenities, invading others\u2019 spaces, demanding bystanders raise fists in solidarity, with occasional spasms of violence. These despicable fanatics, like it or not, are now in part the face of the Democrats: a snarling bunch of self-righteous, entitled bigots, chanting slogans rooted in pseudo-Marxist claptrap, erecting guillotines \u2014 guillotines! \u2014 in the streets as emblems of their agenda. They are not arguing; they are attempting to coerce. And liberals, from the Biden campaign to the New York Times, are too cowardly and intimidated to call out these bullies and expel them from the ranks.<\/p>\n

Remember the pivotal moment earlier this summer when the New York Times caved to its activist staff and fired James Bennet? It\u2019s no accident this was over an op-ed that argued that if New York City would not stop the rioting in the streets, the feds should step in to restore order. For the far left activists who now control that paper, the imposition of order was seen not as an indispensable baseline for restoring democratic debate, but as a potential physical attack on black staffers. They saw restoring order within the prism of their own critical race ideology, which stipulates that the police are enforcers of white supremacy, and not enforcers of the rule of law in a liberal society. It was a sign that the establishment left were willing to tolerate disorder and chaos if they were directed toward the ideologically correct ends \u2014 which is how Democratic establishments in Minneapolis and Seattle and Portland responded. The NYT, CNN and the rest tried to ignore the inexcusable, and find increasingly pathetic ways to dismiss it. This week, their staggering bias was exposed as absurd.<\/p>\n

It is just as true, of course, that the president has shown a similarly cavalier and even more cynical attitude to urban unrest. In the case of the protests outside the White House earlier this summer, he deployed law enforcement so crudely and counter-productively that he seemed to want to inflame it still further for political reasons. He\u2019s more than usually aware that chaos is always good for authoritarians, and has delighted in excoriating Democratic mayors and governors for tolerating it. He has also sent signals to law enforcement that he supports abuse of suspects, and ignored the real threat of white nationalism in police and military ranks, and of terroristic white nationalist movements in general.<\/p>\n

I find the interaction between some cops and vigilantes in Kenosha deeply, deeply disturbing. Non-college-educated white men make up a lot of the police forces and military in the US \u2014 and Trump has big margins of support among them, counts them as his own cops and soldiers, and signals that he will always have their back. As the far left has indiscriminately smeared the police, and promised to abolish or defund them, they have helped Trump co-opt them in a terrifying dynamic. As Trump was eulogizing a murdered policeman, the leftist mob outside was in the midst of a \u201cFuck The Police\u201d demonstration.\u00a0If the Dems want to fight an election on that choice \u2014 and some do \u2014 they\u2019re engaged on a suicide mission.<\/p>\n

And let\u2019s be frank about this and call this by its name: this is very Weimar. The center has collapsed. Armed street gangs of far right and far left are at war on the streets. Tribalism is intensifying in every nook and cranny of the culture. The establishment right and mainstream left tolerate their respective extremes because they hate each other so much.<\/p>\n

The pattern is textbook, if you learn anything from history: an economic crisis resulting in mass unemployment; the pent-up psychological disorders a long period of lockdown can and will unleash; a failure of nerve on the part of liberals to defend the values and institutions of liberal democracy, and of conservatives to keep their own ranks free of raw demagogues and bigots. But critically: a growing sense of disorder and violence and rioting as simply the background noise; and a sense that authorities do not have the strength or the stomach to restore order. What most people want in that kind of nerve-wracking instability is a figure who will come in and stamp it out. In Trump, we have someone who would happily trample any liberal democratic norm to do it. And the left seems to be all but begging him to do it \u2014 if only to prove them right.<\/p>\n

A long time ago, I was mocked for saying that I believed that the election of Donald Trump was an extinction-level event for liberal democracy. But this is where we are. There is no place for liberal debate or dissent, just competing mobs deploying propaganda, intimidation and mutual racial hatred. Norms are trashed, from the shameful cooptation of national monuments for partisan purposes, to violating the privacy and peace of ordinary citizens because they are not in the ranks of agitators. Liberals are now illiberal; conservatives are revolutionaries. The Republican convention we are witnessing makes no pretense of even publishing a platform \u2014 all to demonstrate total and unfailing fealty to the leader whose own family is now assumed to succeed him. What about this pattern of events do we not already understand?<\/p>\n

Yes, we still have an election. But barring a landslide victory for either party, it will be the beginning and not the end of the raw struggle for power in a fast-collapsing republic. In a close race, Trump will never concede, and if he is somehow forced to, he will mount a campaign from the outside to delegitimize the incoming president, backed by street-gangs and propaganda outfits. If Biden wins, we may have one last chance for the center to hold \u2014 and what few hopes I have rest on this.<\/p>\n

But Biden, let\u2019s face it, is weak and a party man to his core, and has surrendered to the far left at almost every single turn \u2014 from abortion to immigration to race. You\u2019d be a fool I think, to believe he could resist their fanaticism in office, or that if he does, he won\u2019t be toast in a struggle to succeed him. He remains the only choice in this election. But on the central question of civil order, he blew it last week and so did the Dems. Biden needs a gesture of real\u00a0Sister Souljah clarity<\/a>\u00a0to put daylight between him and the violent left. He has indeed condemned the riots, with caveats. But at some point, the caveats have to go. And the sooner the better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Born and raised in Britain, Sullivan is the quintessential leftist Brit, but he is spot on that the demoncraps have gone and done it to themselves. This just goes to show that, on occasion, even idiots can have moments of clear thinking. BLUF: I don\u2019t think I\u2019m the only one, as even the Democrats seem … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-58881","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58881","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=58881"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58881\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58886,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58881\/revisions\/58886"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=58881"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=58881"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=58881"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}