ANDREW KLAVAN: Purity or Strategy: The Debate We Need To Have.

Just to let you know where I stand emotionally, here’s a true story. The first time I made a speech before a Tea Party crowd, I felt as if I were floating two feet off the ground. I respected, admired and agreed with the Tea Partiers so completely, that my heart rose up and I began to believe that despite the Obama debacle, the country would ultimately be fine. As I was leaving the rally, I got a call from a friend asking me to come by for a drink with a couple of the highest ranking Republicans in Washington. It was me and them, having a glass together, eye to eye. By the time I left that gathering, I was so depressed by the establishment GOP’s blindness and philosophical corruption I could barely see straight. I phoned Andrew Breitbart for moral support. “I’ve just had a drink with [blank] and [blank],” I began. And he responded immediately, “Are they ***holes or what?”

All my sympathies, in other words, are with the tea party. And I would truly love to see the RINO’s skewered on their own horns.

And yet… In general, Tea Party candidates tend to do well in congressional races where small, homogenous districts are in play. In Senate races where you need votes across an entire state, a primary victory for someone like Christine O’Donnell or Todd Akin may briefly fill the conservative heart with joy, but the loss of a Senate seat that could have been won is simply too high a price to pay for that momentary triumph.

We need to talk this out with good sense and without pompous ranting. Politics is the art of the possible. Writing belligerently purist articles, blog posts or comments is relatively easy. Winning elections is hard. Barack Obama is one of the most destructive presidents this country has ever seen, but a talented politician. If stopping him in his tracks requires stomaching some RINO’s here and there, it seems a no brainer: It must be done.

Yeah, I agree. Also, a GOP-controlled Senate is necessary to block potentially horrible Supreme Court nominees. To get there requires that Tea Party activists sometimes grit their teeth. But it also requires establishment GOP types to treat the Tea Party base with respect, because when they don’t, you get 2012. This will be a test of maturity all around.

PUNISHMENT: ESPN’s Parker Suspended For Conducting Racial Purity Test On RGIII.

THOUGHTS ON libertarian purity.

CHANGE: The Hill: Members seek earmark purity ahead of hotly contested 2012 races. The goal of PorkBusters was, as a start, to change earmarks from things that politicians brag about, to things that they’re ashamed of. Mission accomplished?

IN SLATE: “The guardians of feminist purity are not amused by the idea of right-wing girl power.” Reading the various other comments, the question of whether you can call yourself a feminist seems to be pretty much all about abortion.

Related: Kirsten Powers: Jerry Brown and the women-hating liberal women. “While we, sadly, are all too familiar with the casual misogynistic comment, what perhaps is more surprising is where these slurs lately have been coming from—progressive bastions like the Brown camp, and liberal women.” It’s like Mean Girls without Lindsay Lohan.

NOBODY CAN PASS THE PURITY TEST: Kentucky libertarians: Rand Paul might not be libertarian enough.

VDH: Are Iran’s Nine Lives Nearing an End?

Iran’s only hope is to get a bomb and, with it, nuclear deterrence to prevent retaliation when it increases its terrorist surrogate attacks on Israel, the West, and international commerce.

Yet now Iran may have jumped the shark by attacking the Israeli homeland for the first time. It is learning that it has almost no sympathetic allies.

Does even the Lebanese Hezbollah really want to take revenge against Israel on behalf of Persian Iran, only to see its Shiite neighborhoods in Lebanon reduced to rubble?

Do all the pro-Hamas protestors on American campuses and in the streets really want to show Americans they celebrate Iranian attacks and a potential Iranian war against the United States?

Does Iran really believe 99 percent of any future Israel barrage against Iranian targets would fail to hit targets in the fashion that its own recent launches failed?

Does Iran really believe that its sheer incompetence in attacking Israel warrants them a pardon — as if they should be excused for trying, but not succeeding, to kill thousands of Jews?

In sum, by unleashing a terrorist war in the Middle East and targeting the Israeli homeland, Iran may wake up soon and learn Israel, or America, or both might retaliate for a half-century of its terrorist aggression — and mostly to the indifference or even the delight of most of the world.

But where will all those leftist Americans on their New York Times “holidays in hell” tourist junket visit instead?

Related: Soviet-era tech and 1970s American jets: inside Iran’s ageing air defenses.

Iran’s air force is a particularly weak point in any potential conflict with Israel. Tehran is believed to only have a few dozen working strike aircraft, including Russian jets and US-made F-4s and F-5s that were acquired before the 1979 revolution.

[The International Institute for Strategic Studies] has reported that it has a squadron of nine F-4 and F-5 fighter jets, one squadron of Russian-made Sukhoi-24 jets, and some MiG-29s, F7 and F14 aircraft.

The Sukhoi-24 jets were first developed in the 1960s. Amir Vahedi, Iran’s air force commander, said this week they were in their “best state of preparedness” to counter any Israeli strikes.

Israel has hundreds of F-15, F-16 and F-35 jets, which all played a role in counter-mining Iranian drones.

Iran’s strength is believed to lie in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ stockpiles of ballistic and cruise missiles.

At least half of the missiles that Iran fired at the weekend were said to have failed before reaching Israel, raising doubts over the claimed ability of its domestically built air defenses.

No wonder the Iranian mullahs lust after owning the bomb: The Growing Biden Incentive to Go Nuclear. “Everyone who watched that 2011 operation understood that the US and EU would have never attacked Qaddafi if he had nukes. That includes Iran.”

And they could be very close to getting it: “Iran is now enriching uranium to up to 60% purity and has enough material enriched to that level, if enriched further, for two nuclear weapons, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency’s theoretical definition. That means Iran’s so-called ‘breakout time’ — the time it would need to produce enough weapons-grade uranium for a nuclear bomb — is close to zero, likely a matter of weeks or days,” Reuters reported on Thursday.

MAKE THEM PAY: Canada’s Laurentian Elite Cry Uncle.

And just like that, Canada’s storied Liberal Party, in power for one hundred years, the country’s self-described “natural governing party,” is done. Before the ruling this week, Pierre Polievre’s Conservatives were projected to win 222 seats, according to Angus Reid’s January 21st poll, with the Liberals at 53 seats. Trudeau’s partner-in-crime, the fetching champagne socialist Jagmeet Singh, he of the mauve headwraps and Rolex watch? Twenty-five seats. With the decision, handed down by a federal judge, that Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act illegally, to end the truckers’ protest in Ottawa and at border crossings in Ontario and Alberta, Canada’s ruling elite has given up. They cannot continue the fiction any longer.

To illustrate how ridiculous Canada’s public life is, the findings by the RCMP and government were entirely driven by a government-funded Non-Governmental Organization, the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, or CAHN. The group was used in a perfect illustration of the Iron Triangle of government and bureaucratic action. The government funds an anti-hate group, which immediately identifies opposition to the government, labels it as hate, feeds it to the police which proceeds to investigate.

The astroturfed outfit accused a podcaster of being a “white supremacist” and an “accelerationist.” The RCMP then provided CAHN’s “evidence” to legislators who then fed it to the subsidized media. Like a very, very good little girl, Canadian senator Paula Simons said he (the podcaster) wanted to “accelerate racial conflict to lead to the eventual creation of a White ethnostate,” during a debate in the house. None of this was found in any of the hundreds of hours of said podcast. Nevertheless, it was reported widely across the media as cold hard fact.

As in every single western democracy now staggering under unsustainable government-caused debt, the “natural ruling party” stood up for the thousands upon thousands of activist groups who besiege citizens with scare- and sob-stories meant only to increase the tax base for the Liberal elite. In recent years, to combat growing anti-government populism, elites in every western democracy have also supported political action groups meant to drive its enemies into the dirt. As reported by Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi, these are coordinated through the Five Eyes and gamed at the World Economic Forum, in a cross-cultural assault by the elites on the people.

In short, CAHN drove virtually 100 percent of the evidence used to invoke the Emergencies Act. All of its accusations were found to be fake, fictionalized or exaggerated, as the attached FOIA documentation demonstrated. The outfit is a typical attack dog, staffed by members of the hard left, like this character, its face: Sue Gardner. These people are sent around the Stations of the Activist Cross, acquiring credits, awards and citations, to give themselves credibility, without having creating anything of value in the real world. The marshalling of the greedy hard left by corporatists to force ideological purity upon the middle and working classes was a masterful strategy. It, and its international cadres, are entirely focused on destroying the political power of the middle and working classes by accusing them of “racism” and “hate.”

The most egregious finding of the court was that the RCMP faked intelligence that identified the protestors as being funded by MAGA in the U.S., because they wanted to “take over” Canada. Documents obtained under FOIA discovered the following, from Michael Schellenberger’s Public substack.

So the consequences for this misbehavior need to be biblical. If the ruling class faces no consequences, it will do it again. And no, losing an election isn’t enough. There need to be crushing personal consequences for the individuals involved in this.

It’s not as if their misrule hasn’t already imposed consequences on their citizenry: “Let’s put it this way, if Canada were a state, it would be poorer than West Virginia or Mississippi, despite being the second-largest country, with abundant natural resources, in the world, blessed with a highly educated populace. The courts decision may mean that Canada is emerging from its half- century stasis and its massive grifting class on its way to the abattoir.”

NIALL FERGUSON: THE TREASON OF THE INTELLECTUALS.

It might be thought extraordinary that the most prestigious universities in the world should have been infected so rapidly with a politics imbued with antisemitism. Yet exactly the same thing has happened before.

A hundred years ago, in the 1920s, by far the best universities in the world were in Germany. By comparison with Heidelberg and Tübingen, Harvard and Yale were gentlemen’s clubs, where students paid more attention to football than to physics. More than a quarter of all the Nobel prizes awarded in the sciences between 1901 and 1940 were awarded to Germans; only 11 percent went to Americans. Albert Einstein reached the pinnacle of his profession not in 1933, when he moved to Princeton, but from 1914 to 1917, when he was appointed professor at the University of Berlin, director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics, and as a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. Even the finest scientists produced by Cambridge felt obliged to do a tour of duty in Germany.

Yet the German professoriat had a fatal weakness. For reasons that may be traced back to the foundation of the Bismarckian Reich or perhaps even further into Prussian history, academically educated Germans were unusually ready to prostrate themselves before a charismatic leader, in the belief that only such a leader could preserve the purity of the German nationalist project.

Today’s progressives engage in racism in the name of diversity. The nationalist academics of interwar Germany were at least overt about their desire for homogeneity and exclusion.

Marianne Weber recalled how, in the wake of the 1918 Revolution, her husband Max had explained his theory of democracy to the former supreme military commander, General Erich Ludendorff:

Weber: Do you think that I regard the Schweinerei that we now have as democracy?

Ludendorff: What is your idea of a democracy, then?

Weber: In a democracy, the people choose a leader whom they trust. Then the chosen man says, “Now shut your mouths and obey me.” The people and the parties are no longer free to interfere in the leader’s business.

Ludendorff: I should like such a “democracy.”

Weber: Later, the people can sit in judgment. If the leader has made mistakes—to the gallows with him!

Rudy Koshar’s study of the university town of Marburg in Hesse illustrates the way this culture led German academia toward the Nazis. The mainly Protestant student fraternities already excluded Jews from membership before World War I. In March 1920, in the turbulent aftermath of the revolution that had overthrown the imperial regime and established the Weimar Republic, a student paramilitary group was involved in a murderous attack on Communist workers. In the national elections held four years later, the Völkisch-Sozialer Bloc—of which the early Nazi Party (the NSDAP) was a key part—won 17.7 percent of the Marburg vote.

Lawyers and doctors, all credentialed with university degrees, were substantially overrepresented within the NSDAP, as were university students (then a far narrower section of society than today). To middle-aged lawyers, Hitler was the heir to Bismarck. For their sons, he was the Wagnerian hero Rienzi, the demagogue who unites the people of Rome.

Even a man who considered himself a liberal, as Max Weber surely did, was susceptible to the allure of charismatic leadership when the fledgling democracy seemed so weak. Three years after Weber’s death in 1920, Germany was plunged into disastrous hyperinflation. For many German academics, Hitler’s appointment as chancellor in January 1933 was a moment of national salvation.

Related: An ‘Eichmann Trial’ for Hamas’s Crimes. “The Oct. 7 version of Holocaust deniers have come out of the woodwork already, existing as they do in a postmodern world of ‘living your truth.’ The library of evidence that Israel is currently building is the proper antidote to the lobotomizing poison of such a world.”

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY:  ‘Interior Race Theory:’ Your Home Is Likely ‘Racist,’ White People.

According to interior designer Jacquelyn Ogorchukwu Iyamah, people can creatively resist “structures of domination in their homes by challenging themselves to think about the various ways that politics are embedded into the built environment and encouraging more ‘racial wellness’ within the spaces they create” — particularly concerning the objects they display.

Iyamah also warns that people of color shouldn’t emulate white people in the interior design of their homes.

* * * * * * * * *

The Use of the Color White

You knew we’d get around to this, right?

In addition to the unforgivable sin of decorating a home with “racist objects” like “mammy jars, colonial busts, war memorabilia, and Confederate flags,” Iyamah argues that the use of white paint is just as “racist.”

The use of the color white has been weaponized to symbolize purity…. There’s [sic] a lot of ways that this theory can deconstruct conservative values that really align with whiteness.

So there you have it. Before you buy that next can of white paint to, say, repaint your kitchen, remember: the color white has been “weaponized to symbolize purity.”

In the introduction to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Furniture and Furniture Drawings, written by Ludwig Glaeser in 1977 and available for decades afterward in the book shop in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Glaeser wrote:

It is hard for anyone today to realize how obsessed the modern revolutionaries were with all aspects of hygiene. It was not just a rationalization but firmly held belief that the ever-larger picture windows would guarantee healthier living conditions. For the same reason, the flat roofs decreed by modern architecture were to serve as sun decks and exercise facilities, which, for instance, in a preliminary scheme for Le Corbusier’s Villa Stein at Garches even Included a jogging track. The psycho-history of modern furniture still has to be written, but one can easily imagine the childhood experiences shared by the generation of Gropius, Mies, and Le Corbusier. The bourgeois interiors of the 1880s, the decade of their births, must have appeared from the toddler’s vantage point, like a rainforest: innumerable richly machine-carved legs of pseudo-Renaissance chairs and tables, tasseled plush velvet upholstery and curtains, which kept rooms in a permanent penumbra. The great clean-up the founders of modern architecture were to conduct assumed all the dimensions of a classic confrontation between generations, and as such was also steeped in adolescent morality. Stucco facades, stuffy interiors, and ornament per se were seen as equal to bourgeois hypocrisy, while beauty, if still acceptable at all, was only valid as the “splendor of truth,” in the apocryphal words that Mies liked to quote.

The result, as Tom Wolfe wrote in his classic 1981 polemic From Bauhaus to Our House were plenty of white upon white upon white rooms:

Every new $900,000 summer house in the north woods of Michigan or on the shore of Long Island has so many pipe railings, ramps, hob-tread metal spiral stairways, sheets of industrial plate glass, banks of tungsten-halogen lamps, and white cylindrical shapes, it looks like an insecticide refinery. I once saw the owners of such a place driven to the edge of sensory deprivation by the whiteness & lightness & leanness & cleanness & bareness & spareness of it all. They became desperate for an antidote, such as coziness & color. They tried to bury the obligatory white sofas under Thai-silk throw pillows of every rebellious, iridescent shade of magenta, pink, and tropical green imaginable. But the architect returned, as he always does, like the conscience of a Calvinist, and he lectured them and hectored them and chucked the shimmering little sweet things out. 

In 2015, Jonathan Petropoulos wrote Artists Under Hitler: Collaboration and Survival in Nazi Germany. Petropoulos noted how eager Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus, and Mies van der Rohe, its last director, were in the mid-1930s to make the switch from international socialism to National Socialism, if only the latter ideology’s boss had called upon them to do so. When he didn’t, both men went on to long and distinguished careers in the US, with Gropius teaching at Harvard, and Mies at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.

Wolfe was attacked by numerous architectural critics for his broadside against modernism, particularly its founding fathers such as Mies and Gropius, whom Wolfe described as being thought of by American academics, when they arrived in the 1930s as “The White Gods! Come from the skies at last!” But perhaps unwittingly, Iyamah looks to finish the job. On Saturday, we linked to a column headlined, “Why does no one write like Tom Wolfe anymore?” They’re out there – though some don’t even know it yet. Will the Bauhaus survive this latest fusillade on its reputation and design goals?

JEFF JACOBY: Why they rip down the ‘Kidnapped from Israel’ fliers.

The posters were the brainchild of two Israeli artists, Nitzan Mintz and Dede Bandaid, who were visiting New York when Hamas carried out its bloodbath. Aching to help in some way, they drew on their art backgrounds to design the eye-catching fliers. Each is topped with the word “KIDNAPPED” in large white letters on an orange background; below that heading is the name, age, nationality, and photo of one of the hostages, who range in age from 3 months to 85 years.

The posters went viral overnight. Within days they were appearing everywhere, a powerful symbol of Israel’s anguish and of the desperate yearning for the captives’ safe return. Then came the backlash. “Within minutes or hours of going up,” reported the New York Jewish Week, “many of them had been partially ripped off the subway station’s walls, tears obscuring the victims’ faces or details about their lives, while others were defaced with marker or surrounded by messages such as “Free Palestine.” On a poster of two of the youngest hostages, 3-year-old twins Emma and Yuli Cunio, Hitler mustaches were drawn on the girls’ faces. On other posters, the words “Lies” or “Actors” were scrawled.

Those ripping down or damaging the signs are by no means abashed about doing so. Some have filmed themselves attacking the fliers and posted the video online. Others, when asked why they were trashing the pictures of civilian hostages, have yelled about “genocide,” declared their support for “Palestinian civilians,” claimed the fliers contained “inaccurate information,” or simply cursed out the person filming them.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is intensely controversial and generates great emotion on both sides. But these assaults on the “Kidnapped” posters have nothing to do with the merits of the dispute. The sole purpose of the fliers is to emphasize the humanity of the innocent hostages seized by Hamas (many of whom, as it happens, were peace activists deeply committed to Arab-Israeli coexistence). What drives the people ripping down the posters or adding Hitler mustaches to the pictures is a pathological need to deny the humanity of those kidnapped Jews.

A core principle of antisemites in all times and places is that Jews are not fully human and are never innocent. A thousand years ago, Jews were slaughtered by Crusaders for being satanic Christ-killers who consumed the blood of children; a century ago Hitler preached that they were subhumans who polluted the racial purity of Aryan Europe. Today the Jewish state is accused of committing the demonic crimes of genocide and apartheid. The poison never changes, only the vial it comes in.

The “Kidnapped” fliers are intolerable to the haters because they so urgently challenge the antisemitic paradigm. They make it vividly clear that in the war between barbarism and civilization, between oppressor and oppressed, it is Jews who are under attack. That infuriates those whose worldview revolves around the certainty that Israel and its supporters are the victimizers. The outpouring of sympathy for Jews kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists — and the moral force of that sympathy — is anathema to them.

In response, the left is blaming the posters for triggering anti-Semites. The Daily Dot asks: ‘Like a trap:’ Are posters of Israeli hostages drawing awareness or baiting pro-Palestinians into getting canceled when they tear them down?

The Gray Lady similarly explores:

Why would the posters do this? pic.twitter.com/ZVpocUPpYY

— Jon Gabriel (@exjon) November 1, 2023

WHOM THE GODS WOULD DESTROY, THEY FIRST MAKE RIDICULOUS: How to Kill the Incompetocracy: Ruling class legitimacy is built on academic prestige. That’s a fatal weakness ripe for disruption.

As I’ve written before, the ruling class ultimately derives its assumed right to rule from the prestige of academic institutions. The idea is that the smartest kids are admitted to the best schools, where they’re taught by the top minds in the sciences, philosophy, law, medicine, and the arts. They therefore possess both the highest degree of natural aptitude, and have been provided with the best possible training, meaning that they are naturally the most suited to take society’s reigns. As a result, the most powerful institutions recruit primarily from these top universities, meaning that the top universities are the gatekeepers to power. Once one has obtained a degree from the right school, and as long as one does not rock the boat too much, the doors to the halls of power open, and the money follows.

If it worked properly, it would be quite noble. The problem is, it doesn’t. . . .

Credentials are meant to serve a crucial social function. They’re supposed to be a guarantee that a potential employee or professional has mastered the skills for which his services are being retained. When you walk into a doctor’s office, you don’t want to spend three hours grilling him on his knowledge of molecular biology and skeletal anatomy; you want to assume he knows his stuff, so you can get on with the business of figuring out whether or why you’re sick and what to do about it. The credential outsources professional quality control to a third party, making it easier for both of you to conduct business. . . .

At some point over the last generation, the ruling class shifted its emphasis from competence to ideological loyalty. Some degree of indoctrination was always a factor, of course, but until recently the idea was to take the smartest recruits you could find, and then make them loyal. That was the purpose of the Rhodes scholarships, for instance. It was widely understood that while you needed your leadership cadre to be team players, it was absolutely crucial that they also be good at what they do. In practice, that meant sacrificing a certain degree of unity of purpose, because smart, ruthless people also tend to be independent-minded and outspoken. Still, whatever amount of friction that was caused by the ruling class sometimes operating at cross-purposes with itself was more than compensated for by the competitive advantages of a truly meritorious elite.

It doesn’t work that way anymore. Now, entrance into the top schools depends far less on grades, which is to say far less on ability, and more far on ideological purity. The ruling class has prioritized loyalty above all else.

Absolutely. My Post column for tomorrow sounds a similar theme.

Plus:

The result is the incompetocracy: a ruling class exhibiting near perfect unity of rigidly disciplined ideological purpose, able to move in synch with one another like a school of hungry piranhas, but composed of unimpressive cretins who are individually incapable of doing whatever task is assigned to them.

Look at Biden’s train wreck of a regime. These people all attended the best schools. I wrote that last sentence without actually knowing, I just assumed it was probably true, but sure enough: the new press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, went to a Long Island prep school, and has a master’s degree from Columbia. Despite that, she’s barely able to string enough coherent words together to form a half-convincing deception. The mumbling non-entity of a Secretary of State Antony Blinken is a Harvard man, which is no defense against being regularly humiliated by his international counterparts. Treasury Secretary Yellen attended Brown and got her PhD from Yale, which does nothing at all to stop shortages and inflation from nuking the economy. Attorney-General Merrick Garland has a law degree from Harvard, and presides over a steady dissolution in the rule of law. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo is a Rhodes Scholar. And so on and so forth. They’re an impressively credentialed group of people, but the country is rotting like a dead raccoon on the highway.

Look at the total failure of the public health system over the last two years, the absolute pointless nightmare we’ve all lived through, and are still living through.

They really are almost incomprehensibly awful.

Plus:

So long as membership into the ruling class is regulated by admission to top universities, however, the ruling class can’t be changed, because the universities are specifically designed to make sure that only the ideologically pure can get through. It’s a cozy relationship they’ve got and none of them have any intention of changing it.

Therefore, we need to break the monopoly of the universities.

Since the universities don’t sell education, but credentials, we need a new system of credentialing.

We do, and we’re seeing more competency-based hiring starting to appear. Not at the top, of course, but disruptors usually start at the bottom and work their way up.

And despite my long excerpts, click through and read the whole thing.

IF I CAN’T TELL WHAT IT IS FROM THIS ARTICLE OR A WEB SEARCH, IT’S ALREADY FAILING:  ‘Anti-Woke’ Alternative to Amazon to go Public This Month.

And if it’s “connecting” people, it’s more Etsy than Amazon.

Listen, I hate to shatter bubbles, but if you want to compete with the woke giants, just saying “but we’re right wing” won’t do it. You need to be better: more convenient, more expansive, easier to access. Yes, it’s tough. But that’s what you need. People are too busy and too broke to sacrifice too far for ideological purity. This has been shown again and again. I’m sorry.