A Selection of Recent Findings in the Mainstream Conservative Press

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It’s quite obvious that the leftist mainstream media is a big clown show. As for the mainstream conservative media, which generally includes subsidiaries of the News Corp conglomerate, it’s a mixed bag. There are two ways to look at them. One could view them as positive for having a healthy outlook on certain subjects, bringing the audience somewhere toward the right direction. On the other hand, the “glass half empty” take is that they lack clarity on key perspectives, sometimes mislead their audience by omission, and effectively serve as a controlled opposition.

How To Evaluate Conservative Media

The answer is to determine if a mainstream conservative commentator or media outlet is acting as a bridge builder, or as an ideological gatekeeper. Do they bring their audience closer to the right direction, or are they in the habit of punching right? Some examples:

• Tucker Carlson stayed pretty well on-message, and plausibly knows the score. He did his best within the constraints of what he could get away with at FOX News, until one day the bigwigs behind the scenes decided that their most popular commentator was getting too hot to handle.
• Jonah Goldberg of Townhall is more enlightened than the usual sort of neocon and certainly has his moments, but isn’t always batting 1,000. Regrettably, a few of his takes are rather unhelpful.
• William F. Buckley, the founder of National Review, was the archetypal ideological goalie. He was quite talented, somehow keeping his wits sharp despite smoking more marijuana than The Beatles, and had some positive accomplishments. Unfortunately, he was a snake who positioned himself as the non plus ultra of conservatism. His next act was defining it basically as centrism for the sake of centrism. One of the many writers purged from National Review told me personally that Buckley had CIA ties and was tasked to be the gatekeeper for American conservatism. That figures!
• Norman Podhoretz – enough said.

All told, muggle-grade conservatism is the junior varsity league. Although their hearts are usually in the right place, they still all too often make rookie mistakes. A common example is bolstering unhelpful CivNat talking points with cringey invocations of “the ideals of the late St. Dr. Rev. MLK Jr.” They think they’re scoring points, but nobody cares. Thus, mainstream conservative media is like watching a junior varsity sports game. It’s not the greatest, and occasionally you’ll see some epic fails, but at other times there’s some decent action. That said, here’s a selection of their offerings that bubbled into my newsfeed.

Not Our Kind of People, Dear

A while back, the Daily Caller featured “Rich Liberal Suburbs Use Invisible ‘Border Wall’ To Keep Out Poor Minorities, Report Finds.” This begins:

A new think tank report shows how liberal New York suburbs use restrictive zoning laws to drive up housing prices and prevent poor minorities from moving into their neighborhoods.

The Century Foundation released a study about zoning laws and educational opportunities in Scarsdale and Port Chester, liberal suburban areas in Westchester County, New York, located north of New York City. The study compares zoning laws, demographics and public school performance in the neighboring towns as a case study for how liberal suburbs prevent low-income people and racial minorities from moving in.

So the type of people who lecture us about diversity don’t care to immerse themselves in diversity? Shocker, that. . . So these are the NIMBY liberals. As the proverb goes, if leftists didn’t have double standards, then they wouldn’t have any standards at all. That one is both funny and a bit infuriating at the same time.

Then it describes in further depth the exceedingly liberal city of Scarsdale, majority white and with an average household income of $250,000 “with 90.7% of adults having attained a bachelor’s degree or more,” contrasted with nearby Port Chester, majority Hispanic and with an average household income of $88,093 and “with 31.1% of adults attaining at least a bachelor’s degree.”

Anyway, the Daily Caller item wasn’t bad, but it could have been more hard-hitting. It focused mainly on the hypocrisy; more or less “DR3,” or in full – “The Democrats are the real racists.” So it’s left up to me to fill in all the rest. Here goes.

For a proletarian district, I’d say that Port Chester is not doing too badly in Flyover Country terms, though the cost of living is surely much more punishing in Yankee-Land. Other than that, they seem a bit overeducated. In my earlier days, only the top fifth of students went to college. Back then, you didn’t need a Ph.D. in gender studies to be a barista at Fivebucks Coffee.

In earlier times, it was better yet. America produced half the world’s consumer goods before globalization gutted our industry. Back then, a guy freshly demobilized from the military or with the ink barely dry on his high school diploma could get a well-paying unionized factory job. Soon he’d be able to buy a house and start a family, conditions which made the Baby Boom possible.

As for the overpaid Scarsdaleites, they’ve pulled off something pretty clever. They managed to segregate themselves, at least to some degree, while sparing themselves a torrent of bile from Good Liberal Opinion such as was dumped on Dixie and South Africa in earlier times. Ironically, back then, people like this looked down their noses at their faraway brethren and agitated to force integration on them. Scarsdale accomplished their quiet redlining through zoning, such as prohibiting apartments, and pricing the plebs out of the housing market.

Still, I can see that the problem illustrates a disturbing trend. If you want to live in a nice neighborhood, often that means buying a larger house than necessary out in the ‘burbs. (To be specific, this is somewhere with low crime, decent schools, and the sort of orderliness that we once could take for granted.) Average dwelling sizes have doubled approximately since the 1950s, and there are reasons for this other than simple affluenza. Since the government stopped being on our side long ago, the chief method of escaping encroaching vibrancy has been to abandon ship and move to overpriced real estate. That obviously makes it difficult for our young couples to start families. Besides that, constant retreat is a lousy strategy.

I do indeed understand that Scarsdale’s bougie yuppies want to live among people like themselves. That’s normal human nature, and I won’t criticize them for it. The thing is that the rest of us want to live among people like ourselves too. Unfortunately, these are the type of sanctimonious limousine leftists who certainly would criticize us for wanting what they have. Worse, they support politicians who go out of their way to culturally enrich nice white communities.

Poking Fun at BIPOC Bellyachers

One pestilential phenomenon of the Internet age is the proliferation of snotty laundry lists containing imperious demands for how one group expects to be interacted with by another. One example is the usual sort of “umpteen ways to be a male feminist ally” article. Since that’s how radical feminists treat their allies, it’s a wonder why their psychologically abused purple poodles haven’t abandoned them.

When the badgering is about race, these laundry lists of how to be subservient can get quite haughty indeed. Matt Vespa of Townhall poked fun at one of them with “VICE Posted a List on How White People Can Behave Better. . . and It’s Unintentionally Hilarious.” For those who haven’t had the pleasure of viewing VICE, sometimes it gets just about as pestilential as Buzzfeed. The item in question contains a staggering hundred ways of “how to be a white ally to people of color.” The Townhall article excerpts some of them, letting them speak for themselves. That includes the following whoppers:

93. Remember that your queerness/womanhood/transness/class background/disability doesn’t exclude you from white privilege.

94. Make your feminism useful to all women rather than calling yourself an ‘intersectional feminist’. Show, don’t tell.

95. Don’t assume, full stop, that you can understand what it’s like to experience racism. You can’t. That’s the whole point.

96. Understand that nothing in your life has been untouched by your whiteness. Everything you have would have been harder to come by if you had not been born white.

Whew! Yes, surely indeed being white made it so much easier for me to get a blacks-only scholarship, an Affirmative Action job, and a minority set-aside contract, among lots of other goodies granted to the precious People of Color. The author concludes:

No wonder why these people are humorless souls. How can you live like this? The chardonnay-drinking white suburban womenfolk, many of whom would eat this list up, add another level of cringe since they’re the ones who would enforce these protocols like the South African Police under apartheid. Be miserable and be cognizant of the ever-present, ever-engulfing oppressed/oppressor dichotomy the Left promulgates daily.

As far as an anti-anti-white article goes, that’s pretty good, even if the ending isn’t quite what it could be.

A Mermaid Criticizes an Evolutionary Biologist – Yes, Really!

A while back, the New York Post covered a minor Ivory Tower squabble, “Harvard lecturer blasted by colleague for defending existence of biological sex.” The opener begins:

Harvard lecturer Carole Hooven took heat from her own colleague after an appearance on Fox News this week in which she asserted that biological sex is real and defended the continued use of terms like ‘pregnant women’ and “male and female.”

And then:

The whole thing didn’t sit well with Laura Simone Lewis, the Director of the Diversity and Inclusion Task Force at Harvard’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology.

Lewis, who identifies on Twitter as a “Blewish feminist mermaid,” called Hooven’s defense of science “dangerous.”

Anyway, this reminds me of a post on a Wiccan message board long ago by a fluffy bunny. (That means an adherent to the cotton candy school of Paganism.) She asked for a spell that would transform her into a mermaid. Someone wittily wrote up a brief enchantment, the culmination of which is to get underwater in a bathtub, hold her breath as long as possible, and then deeply inhale water. Then she’d become a mermaid, but it would work only if she had no doubt about it whatsoever. Someone else then scolded the respondent for giving the fluffy bunny dangerous advice.

Now that I see that Harvard, America’s leading university, has a mermaid on its payroll, I have to wonder. Is this the fluffy bunny from long ago, and a miracle truly did occur? More seriously, Ms. Lewis probably doesn’t mean the “Blewish feminist mermaid” stuff quite like that, but one never knows these days. Heck, if a man can become a woman simply by believing it’s true, then why can’t people become mermaids?

Anyway, that was a good find by the New York Post. My only quibble is that they could’ve gone further with it, like I did. This stuff reads like Babylon Bee material, yet isn’t even satire!

We Wuz Scientists ‘n Shiet!

FOX News came through with a doozy, “Rice University mocked for ‘afrochemistry’ course on ‘inequities in chemistry and chemical education’.” This begins:

Rice University has been mocked in recent days for offering a course titled, “Afrochemistry: The Study of Black-Life Matter,” that addresses “inequities in chemistry and chemical education.”

The course, which is posted on the Rice University’s spring 2024 course schedule, is for undergraduate students and does not include a final exam. Since being publicized on social media, critics have slammed the class for combining diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives with chemistry.

No final exam? I’m beginning to suspect that this has less to do with academics and is more of an overpriced, semester-long sermon in Afro-dyspepsia. In case you have any doubt about that, FOX News quotes a course description:

“Students will apply chemical tools and analysis to understand Black life in the U.S. and students will implement African American sensibilities to analyze chemistry. Diverse historical and contemporary scientists, intellectuals, and chemical discoveries will inform personal reflections and proposals for addressing inequities in chemistry and chemical education,” the university wrote to describe the class.

Toward the end, it notes that “Rice University, located in Houston, Texas, is ranked among America’s top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report.” Ouch! I’d have to wonder how long their elite reputation will last with shenanigans like this. Perhaps not, though. After all, the Ivy League itself somehow managed to maintain its status as America’s top-tier universities. This is despite becoming a “No Jewish Child Left Behind” program since the 1960s, and then a chain of woke indoctrination mills, and now having a “Blewish feminist mermaid” on the payroll of their flagship university’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology.

All told, it’s a pretty solid hit for FOX News. Still, I’ll go a little further with it, of course. I’ll add that the wealthy businessman, William Marsh Rice, endowed it to offer a tuition-free elite education, so long as the university remained all-white. Then this golden opportunity got ruined forever when Rice was integrated in 1963. With this “Afrochemistry” thing, surely the founder is turning in his grave.

Henry VIII Wouldn’t Have Dumped His Starter Wife if He’d Known it Would Come to This

Something is rotten in the Church of England. The Daily Telegraph describes this in “CofE to hire ‘deconstructing whiteness’ officer.” It explains:

The £36,000-a-year role is part of a new 11-person “racial justice unit” being set up by the Diocese of Birmingham to work across the West Midlands.

The job advertisement comes just a week after the General Synod, the Church’s legislative body, approved a motion that told all parishes to draw up “race action plans”.

The Rt Rev Rose Hudson-Wilkin, the Bishop of Dover, told Synod on Feb 25 that Anglicans needed to “further embed racial justice” and should not be afraid of being called “woke”.

After that introduction, there’s some tepid criticism of the project. All told, it’s not a bad take, though I’ll fill in some necessary blanks here. This is accompanied by a picture of the aforementioned Right Reverend Bishop. I’m not sure if that’s a man or a woman, but whatever that is doesn’t even belong in Britain. Then this:

Proponents of “deconstructing whiteness” argue that white people are more privileged than those of other ethnicities, that there are characteristics and habits which are distinctly “white” and that these are deemed by society to be the norm.

They argue that “deconstructing”, or dismantling, these ideas is the only way to end racism.

The job, whose advertisement does not itself define “deconstructing whiteness”, is one of 11 being funded by the Church of England’s national “racial justice unit”.

That unit is part of the Archbishops’ Council, an executive body which is led by the archbishops of Canterbury and York.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev Justin Welby, has previously called the Church, which he has led since 2013, “institutionally racist”.

I’m not going to rehash the whole “grandmother of Bolshevism” controversy here. Suffice it to say that Christianity sometimes gets criticism in our circles for universalist tendencies. Stated briefly and without the usual leftist casuistry, the basic idea is that divine grace is available to all mankind. However, universalism certainly does not mean that “whiteness” is bad and needs “deconstructing.” That doesn’t come from scripture, nor may it be reasonably implied. Rather, it comes from the late-stage critical theory that sprouted from the warm manure in academia’s teeming ideological hothouses. In plainer terms, it’s the very same woke rubbish that’s infected all our opinion-forming institutions by now. The Bible likewise doesn’t say anything about ordained political commissars. The closest thing, although a stretch yet, is some rather pointed remarks about Pharisees.

Note well, I’m not here to endorse any particular denomination or theology. I will simply note that heresy is a grave error, from the standpoint of their own religion. Adulterating it with grotesquery like moldy cultural Marxism surely is an example. Those who do so are Sons of Perdition. That’s something for many guilty parties to consider, all the way up to The Most Reverend and Right Honourable Archbishop of Canterbury. Does he lay awake at night trembling and sweating at the eternal fate that could await him for allowing his faith to be distorted on his watch – and actively encouraging it at that? I doubt it – but he should.

What Does This Have To Do With Modern Art, Anyway?

Early this year, the Daily Mail had an interesting feature, “MoMA hires non-binary ‘Woke Kindergarten’ activist who calls Israel a ‘made-up place’ to give children’s workshop on MLK and climate change: Previously said kids could use the pronoun ‘tree’.” Whew! I remember the days when kindergarten was about teaching ankle-biters how to read and count. (Do they even do that now?) For that matter, New York’s Museum of Modern Art used to be about entartete Kunst. The feature explains:

Woke Kindergarten is a pedagogy that is pro-black, queer and transgender liberation created by abolitionist early educator Akiea ‘Ki’ Gross, who uses they/them pronouns. They have previously made headlines for an audiobook that said children can use ‘tree’ as a pronoun.

Gross was hired by MoMA to host a workshop about Martin Luther King Jr’s relationship to climate justice on Saturday as part of their MLK Family Day.

Score one for the Daily Mail. They included a pair of photos featuring Akiea Gross in all “their” mocha-complexioned, pink-haired, nose-pierced, gender-nonconforming glory. This is someone who would’ve made Prince seem remarkably square. With just a bit of imagination, this could be a stranded interstellar wayfarer from Epsilon Eridani. There’s also a design from the Woke Kindergarten project with the following inscription:

One place that people are demanding a permanent ceasefire for is in Palestine because they are being occupied, or controlled, by a made up place called Israel that has settlers called Zionists who are harming and killing the Palestinian people who have always lived on the land.

Interesting – the situation seems almost familiar, doesn’t it? Still, lest anyone get the idea that this is someone who has a clue, the FOX News article “‘Woke Kindergarten’ teacher calls for destruction of America: ‘We’ve been trying to end y’all’” makes it clear that this is just an annoying ass-clown who says much worse about us.

Perhaps the lèse-majesté is the most irritating facet of the story for the Daily Mail writer, Rachel Bowman. I even can understand her perspective too. Anti-Zionist propaganda for kindergarteners just didn’t happen until recently. Of course, indoctrinating them in radical gender theory and a lot of other things would’ve been unthinkable as well not all that long ago.

It’s quite unfortunate, then, that the Zionists throughout modern times made such great efforts to promote the liberal-minority coalition and agitate them against us. The golems have started to become self-aware and are turning on their masters. That includes being slagged off by this recent batch of woke intersectional squidlings who behave like space aliens and sometimes look the part too. For the rest of us, the constant barrage of badmouthing from the likes of them seems like background noise. For (((our betters))), it’s much different, and surely they’re getting nervous now that they’re experiencing the most open criticism they’ve had in the Western world since nearly eight decades. What a bad idea it was to empower the orc hordes! Maybe they should just stop doing that.