Monday, July 13, 2020

Position Statement

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Clusterfuck Nation
For your reading pleasure Mondays and Fridays

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Nothing moves and nothing wants to move, or even think about moving, under the punishing heat-dome. For the moment, the sore beset nation stews in a dreadful stillness. The mysterious consensus of the BLM mob has hit the “pause” button on street tantrums, though plenty of damage has been done to businesses, personal lives, undefended monuments, and the public interest. Each day is another frightful step in the creep toward mass default as rents, mortgages, car loans, insurance premiums, electric bills, business debts, and other common obligations go unpaid. It’s like one of those eerie interludes on a battlefield when forces stop to gather their wounded and reassess their positions.

Perhaps you, like me, are skeptical of the news reports about the surge in Covid-19 cases — or, more to the point, what it actually means. Cases may be surging, but deaths are way down. Media megaphones such as CNN and The New York Times eagerly retail maximum hysteria to provoke renewed business lock-downs, ensuring further destruction to the old service economy and, more importantly, to disparage Mr. Trump. I wonder if the virus is, in fact, close to burning itself out and the surge in cases signifies that it will soon run out of new victims. How many asymptomatic carriers are out there?  We just don’t know, but by August we’ll have an idea.

It’s certainly in the interest of the Woke Resistance and its inquisitors in the Woke media to keep the volume up on Covid-19 hysteria. It’s crucial to their strategy of forcing a vote-by-mail system that would easily invite voter fraud. It also provides a cover for keeping their mummified lead candidate, Joe Biden, moldering silently in his basement like the ghost of Hubert Humphrey, as well as an excuse to avoid a real convention in Milwaukee, which would force Mr. Biden to step up and speak before a huge, live audience. Imagine the mortification.

Just as I’m unconvinced about the meaning of the Covid-19 surge, I don’t buy the polls that show Mr. Biden ten points up on Mr. Trump. I suspect many actual voters were not pleased by the June reign of terror unleashed by Democratic mayors and governors, and did not fail to notice exactly how all that went down. And it is well-known now, four years after the last election and its janky polling, that many voters won’t reveal their true intentions to pollsters — fearing the vilification they’d invite.

I’ve gotten a lot of letters and comments lately condemning my failure to go all-out against Mr. Trump. So, I’ll state my current position plainly: I didn’t vote for him last time, but I would vote for him this time to keep the Democratic Party out of power. There’s a lot to not love about Mr. Trump in his persona and manner. There’s a great deal more to fear about the prospect of Democratic Party control of government. Their enmity to free speech cannot be doubted after a decade of promoting cancel culture. Their appetite for coercion is at odds with the Bill of Rights. Their bad faith and dishonesty have been on display through all the concocted melodramas of RussiaGate and its offshoots. Their economic program is a mashup of all the failed central planning regimes from the bygone 20th century and is wholly inconsistent with the new imperatives to downscale and re-localize the real productive activities of daily life in this country.

Beyond Mr. Trump’s deformities of personal presentation, I am more in favor with the blunt outlines of his policies. I’m for strict control of the nations borders and frankly for reduced immigration. Globalism is clearly winding down and Mr. Trump’s drive to produce more of what we need here in America is in step with that reality. Mr. Trump has been careful to avoid new foreign misadventures — though the military establishment and their pals in the war industries have obstructed the president’s will to quit the old adventures still being prosecuted in places across the Middle East and West Asia. I suspect Mr. Trump might have accomplished more in the nation’s interest if he hadn’t been hounded, harried, and sabotaged by the ceaseless bad faith hostilities of his opponents since Nov 3, 2016.

I’m not confident about Mr. Trump’s management of the nation’s financial quandaries, and especially the racking-up of epic new debt, but there’s plenty of evidence that the Democratic Party would do a lot worse in terms of spending money that doesn’t exist and destroying what’s left of the country’s productive capacity, along with what remains of the middle class. I believe anybody who has managed to stay sane through the travails of the past four years cannot fail to see that the clinically incompetent Joe Biden is an obvious stalking horse for something more sinister. I think we will learn what that is before much longer.

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You are labeled a “dangerous anti-vaxxer” if you dare mention vaccine injury, so who is behind this coercive push to conceal it?



(Natural News) If you dare mention vaccine injury, talk about the risks of vaccination, or point out corruption in the vaccine industry, you are quickly branded as an “anti-vaxxer” who is engaged in “dangerous” anti-vaccination activity.

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BOMBSHELL : Covid-19 infection rate may be 440% higher among children who received FLU SHOTS... while health "authorities" madly push more shots for the coming flu season



(Natural News) A new study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases (https://www.oxfordjournals.org/our_journals/cid/) finds that children who received inactivated influenza vaccines were 440% more likely (relative risk: 4.40; 95% confidence interval: 1.31-14.

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Europe: Rape Victims Accused Of Racism

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Europe: Rape Victims Accused Of Racism Tyler Durden Mon, 07/13/2020 - 02:00

Authored by Raymond Ibrahim via The Gatestone Institute,

An increasingly popular idea is that whenever races clash, only minorities can be victims. The notion is hardly limited to the recent riots in America. Elements of such thinking often appear in other contexts.

British women, for instance, including rape victims who drew attention to "Asian" (Pakistani and South Asian) sex grooming gangs, are also being attacked by the "woke" establishment.

Earlier this month in the UK, Sarah Champion, a Labor politician and MP for Rotherham (the epicenter of sex grooming), was accused of "fanning the flames of racial hatred" and "acting like a neo-fascist murderer."

Her crime? She had dared to assert that "Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls."

The same elements accusing Champion of being a "murderer" also characterized the UK's anti-extremism program, Prevent, as being "built upon a foundation of Islamophobia and racism."

A few weeks earlier, an article titled, "I was raped by Rotherham grooming gang—now I still face racist abuse online," appeared. In it, a British woman (alias, "Ella") revealed that her Muslim rapists called her "a white whore, a white b***h," during the more than 100 times she was raped in her youth by the Pakistani grooming gang.

"We need to understand racially and religiously aggravated crime if we are going to prevent it and protect people from it and if we are going to prosecute correctly for it," Champion said in a recent interview.

"Prevention, protection and prosecution—all of them are being hindered because we are neglecting to properly address the religious and racist aspects of grooming gang crimes.... It's telling them that it's OK to hate white people."

Ella's attempts to highlight the "religious and racist aspects" of her and many other girls' similar abuse led only to "a lot of abuse from far-left extremists, and radical feminist academics," she said. Such groups "go online and they try to resist anyone they consider to be a Nazi, racist, fascist or white supremacist".

"They don't care about anti-white racism, because they appear to believe that it doesn't exist. They have tried to floor me and criticise me continually and this has been going on for a couple of months. They tried to shut me down, shut me up ... I've never experienced such hate online in my life. They accuse me of 'advocating for white paedophiles' and being a 'sinister demonic entity.'"

Placing the blame -- or at least responsibility -- on the victim is not limited to the UK. According to an August 9, 2019 report, "in the Swedish city of Uppsala ... four women were raped in as many days." Although police failed to issue descriptions of the rapists -- usually a sure sign of their origins -- they did issue warnings for women to "think how they behave," to "think ahead," and not "go out alone."

Advice against alcohol, drugs, and reckless behavior would be more compelling if it were not made under duress.

After mobs of Muslim migrants sexually assaulted as many as a thousand women on New Year's Eve 2016 in Cologne, Germany, the city's mayor, Henriette Reker, called on women to "be better prepared, especially with the Cologne carnival coming up. For this, we will publish online guidelines that these young women can read through to prepare themselves."

In Austria, after a 20-year-old woman waiting at a bus stop in Vienna was attacked, beaten and robbed by four Muslim men -- including one who "started [by] putting his hands through my hair and made it clear that in his cultural background there were hardly any blonde women" -- police responded by telling the victim to dye her hair.

"At first I was scared, but now I'm more angry than anything. After the attack they told me that women shouldn't be alone on the streets after 8pm. And they also gave me other advice, telling me I should dye my hair dark and also not dress in such a provocative way. Indirectly that means I was partly to blame for what happened to me. That is a massive insult."

In Norway, Unni Wikan, a female professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo, insists that "Norwegian women must take their share of responsibility for these rapes," because Muslim men found their manner of dress provocative. So much for the feminist claim that women are free to dress as seductively as they want -- and woe to the man who misinterprets this, unless he is from a racial or religious minority group.

Professor Wikan's conclusion was not that Muslim men living in the West need to adjust to Western norms, but the exact opposite: "Norwegian women must realize that we live in a Multicultural society and adapt themselves to it."

Even when it comes to rape, then, if the victim is white and the rapist is not, she is no victim at all; worse, she is a "racist" and "hater" who, if anything, apparently deserves what she got and more. "Blame the victim" is back with a vengeance and gaining ground throughout the West.



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Covid-19 has increased “deaths of despair” in the US

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Dubbed “deaths of despair”, opioid deaths are a significant reason why the life expectancy of Americans is falling.  In 2017, the rate of drug overdose deaths (21.7 per 100,000) has increased to 3.6 times the rate in 1999. 

The demographic of America’s opioid epidemic is non-Hispanic white Americans, Native Americans and the working class, and it is shortening life expectancy for the first time in a century.  As Nicholas Eberstadt wrote back in 2017:

“the opioid epidemic of pain pills and heroin that has been ravaging and shortening lives from coast to coast is a new plague for our new century”.

Many drug counsellors will tell you that they are deaths caused by a lack of connection, fuelled by loneliness and a lack of hope.  It is telling that Covid-19 lockdowns and job losses appear to be hugely increasing death rates.  The Guardian reports:

Now coronavirus looks to be undoing the advances made against a drug epidemic that has claimed close to 600,000 lives in the US over the past two decades.

Worse, it is also laying the ground for a long-term resurgence of addiction by exacerbating many of the conditions, including unemployment, low incomes and isolation, that contributed to the rise of the opioid epidemic and “deaths of despair”.

…“The number of opioid overdoses is skyrocketing and I don’t think it will be easily turned back,” said Dr Mike Brumage, former director of the West Virginia office of drug control policy. 

“I’m a firm adherent to the idea that the opposite of addiction is not sobriety, the opposite of addiction is connection. Clearly, what we have lost with the pandemic is a loss of connection,” he said.

Modern lifestyles, family breakdown, and the extremely low fertility rates experienced by the majority of the world puts so many of us at risk of loneliness.  And none more so than the increasing elderly. 

There is a tendency to think that older drug users are more likely to have chosen their lifestyle and be in greater control of their habit than younger users.  Yet, research shows this is not the case.  From 1999 to 2017, the greatest percentage change in drug overdose death rates occurred among adults aged 55–64, increasing from 4.2 per 100,000 in 1999 to 28.0 in 2017, a more than 6-fold increase, according to the Center for Disease Control.

Due to the large population size and high substance use rate of the baby-boom cohort, the number of adults aged 50 or older with substance use disorder is projected to double from 2.8 million (annual average) in 2002-06 to 5.7 million in 2020, according to the United States Department of Health and Human Services. 

Synthetic opioids in particular are of increasing concern, with deaths increasing from roughly 3,000 in 2013 to more than 30,000 in 2018, two-thirds of all opioid deaths.  This rise is fuelled in large part by the drug fentanyl, a synthetic opioid painkiller that is 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine and 30 to 50 times more potent than heroin. 

It seems that, before we solve the opioid crisis that is killing and affecting the lives of so many, we must first increase hope, purpose, family and connection. The combination of increased amounts of potent synthetic opioids, increased loneliness, increasing elderly, and increasing job losses does not bode well.

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Sunday, July 12, 2020

'People Are Going To Be Shocked': Bannon Claims Wuhan Lab Employees Have Defected, Are Working With FBI

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'People Are Going To Be Shocked': Bannon Claims Wuhan Lab Employees Have Defected, Are Working With FBI Tyler Durden Sun, 07/12/2020 - 21:30

One day after a report that a respected Chinese virologist fled Hong Kong to accuse Beijing of a COVID cover-up, former Trump strategist Steve Bannon told the Daily Mail that scientists from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and other labs have defected to the West and are "turning over evidence" against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for their role in the COVID-19 pandemic which has claimed over 560,000 lives worldwide since last December.

"People are going to be shocked," Bannon told the  Mail ("from a yacht off the East coast of America," the Mail would like us to know).

The 66-year-old then said that defectors are cooperating with intelligence agencies in America, Europe and the UK, which have been assembling evidence to challenge the CCP claim that the pandemic originated in a wet market - not in a lab home to scientists who have come under fire for manipulating bat coronavirus to be more transmissible to humans.

"I think that they [spy agencies] have electronic intelligence, and that they have done a full inventory of who has provided access to that lab. I think they have very compelling evidence. And there have also been defectors," he said. "People around these labs have been leaving China and Hong Kong since mid-February. [US intelligence] along with MI5 and MI6 are trying to build a very thorough legal case, which may take a long time. It’s not like James Bond."

Mr Bannon even suggested that the French government, which helped to build the institute, had left behind monitoring systems after Beijing shut them out of the project before it opened in 2017. -Daily Mail

"The thing was built with French help, so don’t think that there aren’t some monitoring devices in there. I think what you are going to find out is that these guys were doing experiments which they weren’t fully authorized [for] or knew what they were doing and that somehow, either through an inadvertent mistake, or on a lab technician, one of these things got out," Bannon continued. "It’s not that hard for these viruses to get out. That is why these labs are so dangerous."

"You essentially had a biological Chernobyl in Wuhan, but the center of gravity, the Ground Zero, was around the Wuhan lab, in terms of the casualty rates. And like Chernobyl, you also had the cover-up – the state apparatus reports to itself and just protects itself."

Mr Bannon, who has close links to Guo Wengui, an exiled Chinese billionaire, told this newspaper: ‘Regardless of whether it came out of the market or the Wuhan lab, the Chinese Communist party’s subsequent decisions hold them guilty of pre-meditated murder.

‘We know this because Taiwan formally informed the WHO on December 31 that there was some sort of epidemic coming out of Hubei province [where Wuhan is]. The CDC in Beijing was informed on January 2 or 3, and they decided to withhold that information and then sign a trade deal [with the US on January 15].

‘If they had been straightforward and truthful in the last week of December, 95 per cent of the lives lost and the economic carnage would have been contained. -Daily Mail

Bannon continues:

"That is the tragedy here. They used the time to scoop up all the world’s personal protective equipment. This is a murderous dictatorship. The blood is [also] on the hands of the world’s corporations – the investment banks, the hedge funds and the pension funds – and it is time to start calling it out before it leads to the destruction of the West," Bannon elaborated. "We are in the most extraordinary crisis in modern American history, more than Vietnam, the Cold War, even the Second World War. A global pandemic and an economic inferno. I have no faith in the WHO, the leadership should face criminal charges and be shut down."

One has to wonder if China will respond with whistleblowers from Ft. Detrick to support their narrative?



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Saturday, July 11, 2020

Coronavirus: The Under-40s Dilemma

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Coronavirus: The Under-40s Dilemma Tyler Durden Sat, 07/11/2020 - 22:00

Last week, Deutsche Bank's Jim Reid made a striking observation, one which threw all coronavirus comparisons to the Spanish Flu, and the coming second wave of the pandemic, in for a loop.

Specifically, Reid cited a paper that influenced market thinking in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic looked at the effect of non-pharmaceutical interventions like social distancing and school closures during the Spanish flu (link here). The paper found that the US cities that implemented these measures tended to have better economic outcomes over the medium term. This offered historical support to the argument that there wasn’t such a big trade-off between economic activity and public health, because you needed to suppress the virus to enable consumers to be more confident and for businesses to operate as normal.

However, a major difference between Spanish flu and Covid-19 was the age distribution of fatalities, as shown in the chart below:

Here is the punchline: for Covid-19, the elderly have been overwhelmingly the worst hit. For the Spanish flu of 1918, the young working-age population were severely affected too. In fact, the death rate from pneumonia and influenza that year among 25-34 year olds in the United States was more than 50% higher than that for 65-74 year olds, "a remarkable difference to Covid-19."

Now, in a follow up observation from Reid, the DB credit strategist points out another coronavirus peculiarity: the fact that the virus leads to virtually no fatalities of people below 45.

As Reid writes, the UK has been one of the worst-hit countries in the world when it comes to fatalities per head from Covid-19. The country has seen around 60,000 excess deaths relative to the previous 5-year average. But given the scale of these numbers, Reid points out a "remarkable fact" that among those aged under around 40, deaths have been roughly the same as for the previous 5-year baseline (using England and Wales data). This backs up previous observations on how age-discriminant Covid-19 has been.

It's not just the UK: in Sweden (pop. 10.25m), where there was no lockdown, huge international criticism of its strategy, and one of the highest fatalities per head in the world – only 70 people under 49 years old have died of Covid-19, out of 5,482 total virus deaths (1.3%) so far. For context, average annual deaths in Sweden over the last 5 years for under-49-year-olds have been 3,417.

And yet, while the coronavirus has lead to virtually no excess deaths in younger age cohorts, it is the younger strata of society that are the most impact by the economic shutdowns that have resulted in tens of millions of unemployed Millennials.

Indeed, as the second DB chart below shows, lockdowns will likely lead to 2020 being the worst year for the UK economy for 310 years.

As Reid provocatively puts it, "younger people will be suffering most from the economic impact of Covid-19 for many years to come, we wonder how history will judge the global response." That said, since the economic crisis resulting from Covid-19 has also unleashed full-blown helicopter money as well as the biggest round of corporate bailouts of insolvent and zombie companies in history, we are confident that the tsunami of global moral hazard - which will leave tens of millions of young workers without a job - will allow central bankers to sleep soundly at night.

Reid's conclusion: "the debate is more nuanced than a 250-word email can capture (e.g. the potential long-term implications of Covid-19 on individual health, the need to protect healthcare systems, etc.), but it’s a good discussion to have."

Alas, the die has already been cast and it is now far too late.



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Liberals Are Crazy Idiots

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Whenever John McCain is trending on Twitter I like to try and float a reminder of what a disgusting warmonger he was on top of the trend to disrupt the worshipful hagiography within the mainstream liberal echo chamber.

 — @caitoz

It’s a provocation. I freely admit this. But it’s a provocation with a fuse that should not exist (nobody should object to someone speaking ill of a killer with a body count like McCain’s), and the charge it sets off is just fascinatingly disproportionate to what’s being said.

I mean check out the hundreds of responses to my latest act of blasphemy where I said that McCain was a bloodthirsty warmongering psychopath and the world is better off without him. There are liberals on there saying I deserve to die for saying this, that there’s a special place in hell for people who say such things, that my parents should have aborted me, that karma is going to get me for this.

They always babble about “karma”. Before I was temporarily banned from Twitter in 2018 after outraged Democrats mass-reported me for comments I’d made about McCain, my mentions were full of people telling me over and over again that “karma” is going to give me cancer and kill me for saying the world will be better off without a psychopathic facilitator of mass murder.

And I just think that says so much about the way mainstream liberals tend to see the world. “Karma”, the way westerners tend to understand the word, would just mean that someone will say a mean thing about me someday, in the same way I said a mean thing about John McCain. That would be an equal and proportionate pushback from karma. Yet that’s not what they’re saying karma will do. They’re saying they believe karma punishing me with death (and in some cases hell) would be the appropriate response from the universe for uttering sacreligious words about one of their elite rulers. Because that’s how much more important, valuable and sacred some dead senator is to them than the life of an ordinary person.

 — @mtaibbi

Liberals are such crazy idiots. They pretend to stand for truth and logic then spend years promoting the fact-free Trump-Russia collusion narrative. They pretend to stand for social justice then drop those values the second it becomes politically convenient, like making homophobic jokes about Trump and Putin, calling Lindsey Graham “Lady G” for being a closeted gay man, and lecturing black political leaders about how black people should think and vote. They pretend to stand for the little guy, then support austerity and war while literally worshipping John McCain.

Just last night on MSNBC Chris Hayes was talking about Trump’s controversial commuting of Roger Stone’s prison sentence and he parroted the completely false and utterly baseless claim that Stone was a “go between” for WikiLeaks and the Trump campaign.

“Roger Stone was what he looked like: a go-between between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks, and then he lied about it, which is what he was convicted for,” Hayes said.

This is just completely untrue. The only communications between Stone and WikiLeaks prior to the November 2016 presidential election were WikiLeaks telling Stone to stop falsely claiming that he was in communication with the outlet and had been getting information from them. Stone told the Trump campaign to expect WikiLeaks to publish damning leaks after it was already public knowledge that this was to be expected. Everyone involved in the story has denied that there was ever any back channel to WikiLeaks, and there is no evidence that they are lying.

 — @aaronjmate

But Hayes said it like it’s a fact anyway. One of the most popular reporters on on the most virulently pro-Democrat network in America told his audience an objectively false thing, will suffer no consequences for doing so, and will probably never even have to issue a correction, because lying about anything even remotely related to Russia is considered normal and acceptable in today’s liberal mainstream media.

Yet this same political faction will lament the “post-truth era” they claim Trump has ushered in.

Liberals (or “neoliberals” or “corporate liberals” or “centrists” or whatever word you think everyone should be using for this ideology that nobody can agree on a label for) are just a fake imitation of the thing that actual leftists are. Leftists actually fight for justice, equality, peace, truth and anti-authoritarianism, while liberals are cheerleading Joe Biden and sociopathic intelligence agencies and throwing endless inertia on any movement toward real change. Leftists are the thing that liberals pretend to be.

And that’s why liberals hate the true left: because leftists are a constant reminder that liberals aren’t what they pretend to be. That they are just conservatives wearing a fake plastic mask of justice and sanity. That their lives are a crude crayon drawing of the values they pretend to espouse, a layer of feel-good narratives and podcasts and Hamilton songs wallpapered over a rapacious omnicidal machine of endless war, ecocide and oppression.

And of course that’s not entirely their fault; they’ve been psychologically brutalized into their position by generations of mass media propaganda. But it is ultimately everyone’s own responsibility to expand their own consciousness to the point that they can be useful to the world. At some point, liberals, you’ve got to wake the hell up.

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Friday, July 10, 2020

University deletes 'disgusting' tweet affirming conservative students

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A message from Penn State's liberal arts department declaring it welcomed the viewpoints of conservative students was deleted after an intense backlash.

The offending tweet had a picture with the title "Dear Students: You Belong Here" followed by affirmations of black, Muslim, Latinx and LGBTQ+ students. It also assured, "Dear conservative students, your viewpoints are important."

It was the last line that blew up social media, reported College Reform.

Penn State deleted the tweet after a swift social media backlash.

The student newspaper, The Daily Collegian, published some of the reactions of students.

"Conservatives in the United States do not live in a system that was built from the blood and trauma of their ancestors — a system that continues to put down people who look like [their ancestors] every day," wrote one.

Another student said the tweeted drowned out her voice as an African-American.

"The fact that Penn State cannot even come up with their own flyer to spew their lies of solidarity and support is disgusting," the student said.

A third student insisted the university's administration must "combat racism with a comprehensive plan" or suffer "unbearable consequences."

Penn State Director of Strategic Communications William Hessert, Jr told Campus Reform the message was deleted because it "was not being received well, and it is important for us that our messages be received as intended."

"While we do not believe in deleting our posts, given the sensitivities of the matter we felt that it was better to remove it," Hessert said.

'Perfectly Orwellian'

Constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley called Penn State's withdrawal of affirmation to conservative students "perfectly Orwellian."

Commenting on the spokesman's concern that the "message was not being received well," Turley wrote that Penn State essentially was saying "we wanted to assure conservative students with other students that they are welcomed but many disagreed with their inclusion in that sentiment. So we deleted the welcome."

Turley pointed out "polling shows that conservative students are much more fearful of expressing themselves in classes and on campuses due to a lack of support – and often outright hostility – from administrators and faculty."

The university's "gesture of inclusivity," he wrote, turned into "a chilling messaging of hostility for conservative students who want to join their community."

wnd-donation-graphic-2-2019

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Matt Taibbi: "It Was Like Watching Bruce Springsteen And Dionne Warwick Be Pelted With Dogshit For Singing We Are the World"

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Matt Taibbi: "It Was Like Watching Bruce Springsteen And Dionne Warwick Be Pelted With Dogshit For Singing We Are the World" Tyler Durden Fri, 07/10/2020 - 21:45

Authored by Matt Taibbi

As excerpted from "If it’s Not “Cancel Culture,” What Kind of Culture is it?"

Any attempt to build bridges between the two mindsets falls apart, often spectacularly, as we saw this week in an online fight over free speech that could not possibly have been more comic in its unraveling.

A group of high-profile writers and thinkers, including Pinker, Noam Chomsky, Wynton Marsalis, Salman Rushdie, Gloria Steinem and Anne Appelbaum, signed a letter in Harper’s calling for an end to callouts and cancelations.

“We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom,” the authors wrote, adding, “We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences.”

This Hallmark-card-level inoffensive sentiment naturally inspired peals of outrage across the Internet, mainly directed at a handful of signatories deemed hypocrites for having called for the firings of various persons before.

Then a few signatories withdrew their names when they found out that they would be sharing space on the letterhead with people they disliked.

“I thought I was endorsing a well meaning, if vague, message against internet shaming. I did know Chomsky, Steinem, and Atwood were in, and I thought, good company,” tweeted Jennifer Finney Boylan, adding, “The consequences are mine to bear. I am so sorry.”

Translation: I had no idea my group statement against intellectual monoculture would be signed by people with different views!

In the predictable next development – no dialogue between American intellectuals is complete these days without someone complaining to the boss – Vox writer Emily VanDerWerff declared herself literally threatened by co-worker Matt Yglesias’s decision to sign the statement. The public as well as Vox editors were told:

The letter, signed as it is by several prominent anti-trans voices and containing as many dog whistles towards anti-trans positions as it does, ideally would not have been signed by anybody at Vox… His signature on the letter makes me feel less safe.

Naturally, this declaration impelled Vox co-founder Ezra Klein to take VanDerWerff’s side and publicly denounce the Harper’s letter as a status-defending con.

“A lot of debates that sell themselves as being about free speech are actually about power,” tweeted Klein, clearly referencing his old pal Yglesias. “And there’s a lot of power in being able to claim, and hold, the mantle of free speech defender.” 

This Marxian denunciation of the defense of free speech as cynical capitalist ruse was brought to you by the same Ezra Klein who once worked with Yglesias to help Vox raise $300 million. This was just one of many weirdly petty storylines. Writer Thomas Chatterton Williams, who organized the letter, found himself described as a “mixed race man heavily invested in respectability politics,” once he defended the letter, one of many transparent insults directed toward the letter’s nonwhite signatories by ostensible antiracist voices.

The whole episode was nuts. It was like watching Bruce Springsteen and Dionne Warwick be pelted with dogshit for trying to sing We Are the World.

This being America in the Trump era, where the only art form to enjoy wide acceptance is the verbose monograph written in condemnation of the obvious, the Harper’s fiasco inspired multiple entries in the vast literature decrying the rumored existence of “cancel culture.” The two most common themes of such essays are a) the illiberal left is a Trumpian myth, and b) if the illiberal left does exist, it’s a good thing because all of those people they’re smearing/getting fired deserved it.

In this conception there’s nothing to worry about when a Dean of Nursing at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell is dismissed for writing “Black Lives Matter, but also, everyone’s life matters” in an email, or when an Indiana University Medical School professor has to apologize for asking students how they would treat a patient who says ‘I can’t breathe!’ in a clinical setting, or when someone is fired for retweeting a study suggesting nonviolent protest is effective. The people affected are always eventually judged to be “bad,” or to have promoted “bad research,” or guilty of making “bad arguments,” etc.

In this case, Current Affairs hastened to remind us that the people signing the Harper’s letter were many varieties of bad! They included Questioners of Politically Correct Culture like “Pinker, Jesse Singal, Zaid Jilani, John McWhorter, Nicholas A. Christakis, Caitlin Flanagan, Jonathan Haidt, and Bari Weiss,” as well as “chess champion and proponent of the bizarre conspiracy theory that the Middle Ages did not happen, Garry Kasparov,” and “right wing blowhards known for being wrong about everything” in David Frum and Francis Fukuyama, as well as – this is my favorite line – “problematic novelists Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, and J.K. Rowling.”

Where on the irony-o-meter does one rate an essay that decries the “right-wing myth” of cancel culture by mass-denouncing a gymnasium full of intellectuals as problematic? 

Continued reading on Matt Taibbi's Substack



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