Episode 39 of my podcast is now posted here (with copious links). In Part 1, I speak with frequent VDARE contributor Paul Gottfried. We begin with a consideration of his latest book, Fascism: The Career of a Concept. Nearly 70 years after Orwell admonished those who insisted on defining “fascist” as merely “something not desirable,” the word has become a reflexive term of abuse, much like “racist,” “sexist” and “homophobe.” And, as we have seen with Jonah Goldberg, this historical ignorance wielded as a cudgel is now as common among “conservatives” as it is on the Left.
I then nominate Prof. Gottfried as the “godfather of the AltRight” because he doesn’t play nice or, worse, by the enemy’s rules. Having considered it, he recognizes three reasons why this designation might be fitting:
Having spent the first half of the interview in agreement, we spend the second in dispute. Unlike the good professor, I do not regard “white nationalism” as integral to the AltRight. Neither do I regard the paper tiger that is the conservative media as any kind of threat to Donald Trump or the movement he has galvanized. Indeed, just as Rupert Murdoch endorsed Tony Blair and “New Labour” in 1997, I fully expect him to endorse Trump and “Make America Great Again” in 2016.
Betting on continued decline has distinguished the clever punter for decades. When I asked Prof. Gottfried whether his pessimism was conditioned by the (decadent) age he has lived though, he denied being a pessimist. What is ironic is that his pessimism (or what you will) is characterized by an optimistic view of American might, while my optimism follows from my belief that the American economy in now little more than a Potemkin village.
In Part 2, we violate one of our programming rules to deliver a report from the front lines of Clown World, the Country (formerly known as the Dominion of Canada). Our fabulous Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau AKA Princess Rockstar, is the Dunning-Kruger Effect made flesh. Justin is the son of Pierre, PM from 1968-1984, and his bonkers wife, Margaret. They were as fabulous a couple as Justin and his wife, Sophie, but their marriage existed before the Internet, before society was condemned to the death of a thousand clicks.
Even as Trudeau fils muses about Canada becoming the world’s “first post-national state,” all important decisions are made by the Supreme Court of Canada. (And increasingly by the lesser courts.) The SCC has recently legalized prostitution and euthanasia, and who knows what it will decree tomorrow. Probably that Christian churches must perform “gay marriage” ceremonies. Don’t expect any opposition from the “Conservative” Party, which recently announced its support for transsexuals joining Canada’s Section 15 class of superior beings and for making criticism of trannies a federal hate crime.
Post-national? How about post-sane? After Trudeau decided to hurry along a House of Commons euthanasia vote by striding into a group of MPs while snarling, “Get the f— out of my way” and assaulting the Conservative Whip by dragging him across the room, the entire country went meta. You see, during the melee, the breast of a hapless NDP MP called Ruth Ellen Brosseau, AKA “Vegas Girl,” made incidental contact with one of Trudeau’s elbows. It’s all on video, but much like the Michelle Fields affair, there’s really nothing to see. Nevertheless, Brosseau, a self-styled “tough woman,” began crying and was compelled to seek a dark room in which to recover; she missed the vote. Intersectionality then abounded, as Trudeau’s feminist contingent blamed Brosseau for being where she shouldn’t oughta, while the media argued whether it was appropriate to view “Elbowgate” (aargh!) through a feminist or gendered “lens” and, if so, how strong those lenses should be.
In Part 3, we take a fond look back at the two-hour-hate I recently endured at the hands of Twitter feministas and their white-knight male allies. It all began when I objected to writer Stacey May Fowles’ demand that Major League Baseball abolish its informal, on-field honor code because “violence, in whatever form, is a problem.” Within a couple of hours, more than 200 Social Justice Warriors popped up to tell me how horrible I am: old, failed, ugly, a likely homosexual (because my Twitter avatar shows me smoking a Dutch cigar) and a probable suicide. I was accused of subjecting women to “harassment” and “threats,” and a few dozen users attempted formally to have me banned from Twitter. My experience confirmed what I had long suspected, that feminist complaints of brutal online abuse are, at best, exaggerated and, at worst, wholly false. No publicity is bad publicity, as they say, and the effort to silence me served only to make me more popular, with my Twitter page ringing up more than 50,000 impressions (page views) over a 24-hour period.
