Navigating the nonsense is going to get harder, not easier

We can see the new, post-election contours of our society's cultural implosion shaping up.  Leftists are going to take victim-mongering to levels of shrillness we've heretofore only glimpsed in our nightmares. Squirrel-Hair's populist-nationalist devotees are going to push their flimsy ideology with no regard for the fodder they provide to the aforementioned leftists. The statistically inevitable handful of actual bigots will scrawl juvenile taunts on church edifices, providing even more effective fodder for the aforementioned leftists. Well-meaning, erudite, principled conservative economists will push for a good agenda - low tax rates, regulatory rollback, repealing and replacing the "A"CA - but it will get mixed in with the protectionist nonsense spouted by the aforementioned populist-nationalist S-H devotees. Post-American Christianity will further rupture as left-leaning denominations rush to coddle those claiming the victim mantle, and conservative churches hunker down with their eyes glued to Scripture.

And the danger level of the resulting sum total is going to keep rising.

Jamelle Bouile  had a piece at Slate today to which I won't even grant the dignity of a link. That's how toxic it is. The title is "There's No Such Thing as a Good Trump Voter." He takes exception to the position held by some fellow left-leaners that a sizable percentage of S-H voters deserve honest consideration. No way, says Bouile. He cites incidents that have occurred around the country in the last week by the aforementioned handful of actual bigots, and then goes on to try to make something bigoted out of S-H's own rhetoric during the campaign.

As LITD, your #NeverTrump source for clarity and intellectual rigor, stated many times over the last year-plus, Squirrel-Hair's calls for halting Muslim immigration to this country were based on advisable caution given the relentless continuance of jihadist attacks here and elsewhere in the West. His calls for strict enforcement of immigration law on the southern border was just that - an insistence on the rule of law and the primacy of national sovereignty.

Of course, coming from S-H, it came out in an embarrassingly boneheaded way, which made it easy to distort.

There, I'm done defending Squirrel-Hair for now.

Let's move on to the Left's latest target: Steve Bannon. Is he an antisemite, and a bigot more broadly speaking?

Wolf Howling, guest blogging at Bookworm Room, catalogues a roundup of strong MSM insinuations of such:

CNN:  White nationalists see advocate in Steve Bannon who will hold Trump to his campaign promises.

Forward.com:  Will Steve Bannon Be The Anti-Semitic Firebrand In Trump’s Inner Circle?

Salon.com:  Steve Bannon runs an anti-Semitic website, is a misogynist and will be one of Donald Trump’s senior advisors

Slate.com:  How Some Outlets Are Avoiding Calling Steve Bannon A Racist Propagandist

Tablet:  Trump’s appointment of Stephen Bannon is a Call to Arms for American Jews and Muslims

The Guardian:  Steve Bannon appointment of ‘white nationalist’ must be reversed, critics declare

NPR:  Ex-Breitbart Executive Brings Alt-Right Ties To The White House

Wow, this joker Steve Bannon must be evil with a capital “E.”

He then provides as clear a refutation as you could ask for:

Let’s deal first with the charge that Bannon is an anti-semite.  It has two factual bases.  The first is that Steve Bannon’s ex wife made unsubstantiated charges in her divorce pleadings — charges that Bannon has denied.  This from The Hill:

Donald Trump campaign CEO Steve Bannon’s ex-wife said in divorce proceedings that he didn’t want their daughters to attend a Los Angeles school because of “the number of Jews.”

The former Brietbart News executive’s ex-wife signed a court document in 2007, the New York Daily News reported, that Bannon was concerned about the effect Jewish students at the Archer School for Girls would have on their twins.

“The biggest problem he had with Archer is the number of Jews that attend,” read the woman’s June 2007 statement.

“He said that he doesn’t like the way they raise their kids to be ‘whiny brats’ and that he didn’t want the girls going to school with Jews.”

The woman said that he asked for numbers on the population of Jewish students at a competing private school.

In a statement to BuzzFeed News, Bannon’s spokeswoman Alexandra Preate denied that he ever made such comments and said the girls did end up attending the school.

“Mr. Bannon said he never said anything like that and proudly sent the girls to Archer for their middle school and high school education,” Preate said.

Seems like an incredibly big jump to go from that to the claim that Bannon is a frothing anti-Semite.  So what about the people who have worked with Bannon over a period of years?  They should know if there is anything to suggest Bannon is anti-Semitic.  The answer is there is nothing at all.  Not the tiniest squeak from the any of them, including Ben Shapiro, a former Breitbart editor, a Jew, and a person with an open and intense personal dislike for Bannon.  Says Shapiro flatly, “I have no evidence that Bannon’s a racist or that he’s an anti-Semite.”

And you can look to other Jewish figures who take such allegations extremely seriously and have either personal knowledge or have investigated for themselves.  They include Pam Geller, David Goldman, Jeff Dunetz, Robert Avrech and Alan Dershowitz.  So if about now you are detecting that delicate aroma of bullshit from these allegations in the media, well, you’re warranted.

The one other factual allegation is that Bannon supposedly ran an anti-Semitic article at Breitbart.  The article, written by the conservative Jew David Horowitz, was Bill Krystol, Republican Spoiler, Renegade Jew.  Very few of the prog media outlets mentioning this article as proof of anti-semitism also include the link.  The reason why is obvious.  Though perhaps it was a poor choice of words for the title, there is nothing in the article that remotely promotes anti-semitism.  Here are the opening two paragraphs of that article:

While millions of Republican primary voters have chosen Donald Trump as the party’s nominee, Bill Kristol and a small but well-heeled group of Washington insiders are preparing a third party effort to block Trump’s path to the White House.

Their plan is to run a candidate who could win three states and enough votes in the electoral college to deny both parties the needed majority. This would throw the election into the House of Representatives, which would then elect a candidate the Kristol group found acceptable. The fact that this would nullify the largest vote ever registered for a Republican primary candidate, the fact that it would jeopardize the Republican majorities in both the House and Senate, and more than likely make Hillary Clinton president, apparently doesn’t faze Kristol and company at all. This is to give elitism a bad name. . . .

The word Jew does not appear in the article until the last paragraph.  It is there and in the prior paragraph that the title is implicitly explained by Mr. Horowitz:

All these dishonesties and flim-flam excuses pale by comparison with the consequences Kristol and his “Never Trump” cohorts are willing to risk by splitting the Republican vote. Obama has provided America’s mortal enemy, Iran, with a path to nuclear weapons, $150 billiondollars, and the freedom to develop intercontinental ballistic missiles to deliver the lethal payloads. Trump has promised to abandon the Iran deal, while Hillary Clinton and all but a handful of Democrats have supported this treachery from start to finish. Kristol is now one of their allies.

I am a Jew who has never been to Israel and has never been a Zionist in the sense of believing that Jews can rid themselves of Jew hatred by having their own nation state. But half of world Jewry now lives in Israel, and the enemies whom Obama and Hillary have empowered — Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, ISIS, and Hamas — have openly sworn to exterminate the Jews. I am also an American (and an American first), whose country is threatened with destruction by the same enemies. To weaken the only party that stands between the Jews and their annihilation, and between America and the forces intent on destroying her, is a political miscalculation so great and a betrayal so profound as to not be easily forgiven.

This is the opposite of anti-Semitism. Neither Horowitz in writing the article, nor Breitbart in publishing it, is smearing those of the Jewish faith.  To the contrary, Horowitz is indicting Bill Kristol, a Jewish man who strongly supports Israel and Zionism, for engaging in behavior that has the practical effect of aligning himself with anti-Semitic forces. 

Wolf Howling then delves into the question of just what the alt-right is. It's a vague term that seems to shape-shift according to its application.  Therefore, I reserve the right to apply it in my own way. I hereby declare that, for purposes of polemical assertions at LITD, "alt-right" refers to those figures formerly commonly recognized as conservatives who early on got on the Squirrel-Hair train and not only overlooked his wince-inducing traits, but got all excited about some kind of populist-nationalist phenomenon that was heavy on protectionist economics.

Josh Kraushaar at the National Journal points out that there is a genuinely conservative element in the populist groundswell that culminated in S-H's victory last week. The leftists had not counted on the size of the portion of the post-American public that still adhered to the standards of normalcy of ten years ago:

No one is point­ing a fin­ger at the most glar­ing vul­ner­ab­il­ity—the party’s cul­tur­al dis­con­nect from much of the coun­try. On is­sues ran­ging from the pres­id­ent’s hes­it­ance to la­bel ter­ror­ism by its name to an un­will­ing­ness to cri­ti­cize ex­trem­ist ele­ments of protest groups like Black Lives Mat­ter to ex­ec­ut­ive or­ders man­dat­ing trans­gender bath­rooms, the ad­min­is­tra­tion of­fen­ded the sens­ib­il­it­ies of the Amer­ic­an pub­lic. Among lib­er­al-minded mil­len­ni­als, Pres­id­ent Obama’s ac­tions were a sign that he was chart­ing “an arc of his­tory that bends to­wards justice.” But to older, more-con­ser­vat­ive Amer­ic­ans, it was a sign that the ad­min­is­tra­tion’s views were well out­side the Amer­ic­an main­stream.

But, true to the way various strains of thought get tossed in the blender in our times, many of those folks found the argument that only a complete outsider like S-H could address the grotesque morphing of their country compelling.

Personality sells, these days more than ever.

The problem with Steve Bannon, and with Squirrel-Hair himself, is not bigotry or racism. It's just that they are complete jerks as human beings, with strong track records of pettiness, getting even and being enamored of power for its own sake.

That's a real shortcoming in the two of them, and it merits ample and in-depth discussion. But, like so many things that merit discussion, it gets drowned in the cacophony of identity politics, which really has little to do with our present set of circumstances.

Or rather, would have little to do with it if the victocrat whiners and the true bigoted idiots would each knock it off and act like grownups.

But, in a culture that has undergone decades of a steady process of rot, there are precious few examples for them to base such a reversal of behavior on.

And so, to paraphrase Churchill, the truth is still getting one leg into its trousers while the lies zip around this world like bullet trains.

Winter looks to be stormy in post-America.