THAT’S WHAT THEY WANT TO MAKE IT: Don’t Let the Capitol Riot Become a 9/11-Style Excuse for Authoritarianism.
Notice that our ruling class is offering none of the “why do they hate us?” rhetoric that followed 9/11, though. They know perfectly well why.
WISE WORDS FROM A FRIEND: “Most people are scared right now, one way or the other, but I think that makes it even more important to act kindly and rationally.”
IMPEACHMENT: Dershowitz: Impeaching Trump After Presidency Is ‘Plainly Unconstitutional,’ Senate Shouldn’t Accept. “It will be unconstitutional, but that probably won’t bother the senators.” To be fair, it seldom does.
Note: If you are 22, you have lived through 3/4 of all the presidential impeachments in American history. If you are 1 year old, you have lived through half of them.
ICYMI: An Open Letter To Sen. Joe Manchin: It’s Time To Change Parties.. He’s probably afraid he’ll be assassinated if he does. His character, at the very least.
NEVER GIVE UP, NEVER SURRENDER: Parler’s website back online with a message from its CEO.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Frightening Question—Who Will Be Running Biden’s Brain? “One thing that shouldn’t be overlooked is the influence of Barack Obama. With the Biden administration being little more than Obama 2.0, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that President Momjeans could be crafting policy from afar.”
ANTITRUST QUESTION OF THE YEAR: Why was Parler censored by a cabal of its competitors?
I’ve been a big fan of Medium, although I’ve learned quickly there are certain “publications” — essentially sub-blogs — that it’s best to avoid. Today I saw a piece published two days ago, The Moderation War Is Coming to Spotify, Substack, and Clubhouse, that addressed how Parler was censored and destroyed by Apple, Google, Twitter, Facebook, and Amazon, and then warned that Parler won’t be the last.
The given reason, of course, was people were saying violent things on Parler and all the biens pissants are, of course, shocked, shocked that this was “permitted.”
It might be different if the double standard weren’t so glaring. As Amazon was canceling Parler’s hosting — in apparent violation of their contract — they were selling “Kill All Republicans” tee-shirts, and it turns out that while Twitter and Facebook were canceling Parler, the actual mob was coordinating on Twitter and Facebook.
It’s a conspiracy in restraint of trade, straight up.
Plus: “It’s worth noting that Amazon deplatformed Parler after members of Congress demanded it. That makes it a real First Amendment violation as well as a violation of the right to free speech which the First Amendment exists to protect. So somehow competitors are being shut down in a coordinated fashion by effective monopolies with governmental support.”
Related: Parler CEO and family in hiding after receiving death threats. All in the name of fighting “violence” and “hate.”
RICHARD FERNANDEZ: Maybe the Deplorables Are Today’s People of Color. “Back in 1988 Bill Moyers was recalling Lyndon Johnson explaining how to keep whites poor by encouraging them to look down on ‘colored men’. . . Today, as Rana Dasgupta argues in Harper’s, the Western middle class including those with gender studies and critical theory degrees — especially them — are the new unemployables, made redundant by cheap Chinese and robotic labor. The only way to make the destitute Woke feel good about themselves is to let them look down on the Deplorables.”
I’m reminded of what Kenneth Anderson said about the Occupy movement:
In social theory, OWS is best understood not as a populist movement against the bankers, but instead as the breakdown of the New Class into its two increasingly disconnected parts. The upper tier, the bankers-government bankers-super credentialed elites. But also the lower tier, those who saw themselves entitled to a white collar job in the Virtue Industries of government and non-profits – the helping professions, the culture industry, the virtueocracies, the industries of therapeutic social control, as Christopher Lasch pointed out in his final book, The Revolt of the Elites.
The two tiers of the New Class have always had different sources of rents, however. For the upper tier, since 1990, it has come through its ability to take the benefits of generations of US social investment in education and sell that expertise across global markets – leveraging expertise and access to capital and technological markets in the 1990s to places in Asia and the former communist world in desperate need of it. As Lasch said, the revolt and flight of the elites, to marketize themselves globally as free agents – to take the social capital derived over many generations by American society, and to go live in the jet stream and extract returns on a global scale for that expertise. But that expertise is now largely commodified – to paraphrase David Swenson on financial engineering, that kind of universal expertise is commodified, cheaply available, and no longer commands much premium. As those returns have come under pressure, the Global New Class has come home, looking to command premiums through privileged access to the public-private divide – access most visible at the moment as virtuous new technology projects that turn out to be mere crony capitalism.
The lower tier is in a different situation and always has been. It is characterized by status-income disequilibrium, to borrow from David Brooks; it cultivates the sensibilities of the upper tier New Class, but does not have the ability to globalize its rent extraction. The helping professions, the professions of therapeutic authoritarianism (the social workers as well as the public safety workers), the virtuecrats, the regulatory class, etc., have a problem – they mostly service and manage individuals, the client-consumers of the welfare state. Their rents are not leveraged very much, certainly not globally, and are limited to what amounts to an hourly wage. The method of ramping up wages, however, is through public employee unions and their own special ability to access the public-private divide. But, as everyone understands, that model no longer works, because it has overreached and overleveraged, to the point that even the system’s most sympathetic politicians understand that it cannot pay up.
The upper tier is still doing pretty well. But the lower tier of the New Class – the machine by which universities trained young people to become minor regulators and then delivered them into white collar positions on the basis of credentials in history, political science, literature, ethnic and women’s studies – with or without the benefit of law school – has broken down. The supply is uninterrupted, but the demand has dried up. The agony of the students getting dumped at the far end of the supply chain is in large part the OWS. As Above the Law points out, here is “John,” who got out of undergrad, spent a year unemployed and living at home, and is now apparently at University of Vermont law school, with its top ranked environmental law program – John wants to work at a “nonprofit.”
Indeed. Plus, just a reminder: In America, class war is disguised as cultural warfare, and cultural warfare is usually cloaked in talk of race.
Related: A New Class Problem.
PRICE FIXING: New lawsuit accuses Amazon of e-book price fixing. “The lawsuit filed by law firm Hagens Berman in a federal district court in New York, alleges that the publishers pay high commissions and other costs to Amazon, which in turn increases the retail price of e-books sold on the platform. Due to the deal between Amazon and the publishers— HarperCollins Publishers, Hachette Book Group, Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, and Macmillan — the Amazon price is the price the publishers charge other retailers as well, preventing other sellers from offering the e-books at lower prices, according to the lawsuit.”
THE ELECTIONS WERE SO FRAUD-FREE THAT MEMBERS OF CONGRESS AREN’T EVEN ALLOWED TO CRITICIZE: Twitter suspends Marjorie Taylor Greene.
ANTITRUST: Facebook and Google allegedly cut a deal that reduced ad competition. “It hurts their chances of surviving antitrust cases.”
THAT’S BECAUSE THEY’RE NOT SERIOUS: The House and Senate are making unforced errors in laying the groundwork for an impeachment trial. “The House’s slow process has weakened its own rhetorical framing of the need for impeachment.”
FLASHBACK: Trump and the State of Nato.
MICHAEL BARONE: The left now just wants to silence conservatives — all of them. “It threatens to be the most effective speech suppression here since Democratic postmasters in the antebellum South deep-sixed anti-slavery material.”
The left always tries to silence — and criminalize — its opposition.
They have to do this because their ideas are too stupid and self-serving to withstand honest criticism.
UPDATE: Related:
HMM: Protests, Armed Or Otherwise. “Boycott the inauguration. Don’t acknowledge it, don’t view it, don’t listen to it, ignore it. Make the ratings tank. It is the most powerful thing we can do. That includes not protesting it, which sends several messages while preventing anything but a staged incident that could be used to further cement their power and erode our remaining freedoms.”
NO, THE ALAMO IS NOT A SYMBOL OF ‘WHITENESS:’ Do not miss Bryan Preston’s superb deconstruction of the claims that those famous 13 days at the Alamo were not a “tactically significant battle” and that the siege was later turned into a racist symbol. In case you wonder why I care, and deeply, about this issue, it’s because I was born an Okie of Texas blood and am immensely proud of both.
NEWS FROM THE AMERICA THAT WORKS: SpaceX Hopes to Launch And Land Starship No. 9 This Week.
POINTS AND FIGURES: Social Media and Taking Risk. “Social media has bigger ramifications than just changing societal norms for the worse. It limits risk-taking. It limits innovation. It eliminates the will to discover and try. Social media makes everything public.”
MLK WOULD BE REPULSED BY CRT: Honest celebration of the man requires recognition of the truths he proclaimed, including the one that black and white Americans “cannot walk alone.”
And that means also recognizing, as retired Vanderbilt Professor Carol Swain explains, that Critical Race Theory (CRT) is a poison. So today would be a good day to give King’s “I Have a Dream” speech a good, close reading.
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