Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
We’re Moving to a Faster Pace
Look out, here comes the Master Race! Warning: language, because AUTHENTIC PEOPLE who have THE RAGE always swear.
This fellow went on quite a tear about the Wisconsin case. While you can wave away most of the effervescent fulminations on Twitter, it’s always fun to see what the Verified Voices are saying.
So: second wave. I think he means a global Second Wave, which is lapping at the shores of every nation. Note that that ol’ goose stepper Youngkin is a standard-bearer for the new nightmare.
What seemed to be the big issue towards the end of the VA election? Education, and the rights of the parents vs. the ideology of the state. But since the statists were the good people – they just wanted to teach about history and racism and marginalized sexual identities! – the parents were fascists who wanted sanitized panegyrics to whiteness.
Progs: whiteness is a systemic evil!
Ordinary Americans, perplexed: that seems like a rather racist worldview.
Progs: oh look who’s imagining he’s being persecuted
Same dude:
Perhaps the “American Right” was focused on the self-defense issue, but sure: there were people who did not mourn “Jojo,” as actor Mark Ruffalo called the child rapist, and regarded the violent rioters as, well, violent rioters. This is the peculiar moral inversion of the era: it is meet and right to burn and destroy, but the people who object to the destruction are the shock-troops of fascism. It is noble to deface a building with a painted slogan; the very act of spraying graffiti is sanctified by the rightness of your cause. The only possible explanation for someone preventing you from defacing the building, or washing it off later, is because they disagree with you, and if they do, then voila: they are fascists. It’s really that simple.
A reminder: if Rittenhouse had been killed that night, no one would remember his name. The trial of his killer would not have been national news. (Like Gosnell, a “local story.”) Killing him would have been necessary, Because Fascism.
Why, perhaps it still is.
Another verified genius weighs in, with a reminder.
Should this happen, it will not be a sign that street violence is a terrible thing to countenance, and leads to hideous ends; it’s a sign that the horrible system under which we labor produces injustices that produce lamentable, but understandable, reactions. I mean, if you don’t want judges shot down in the streets, elect better judges, y’know?
Oh by the way he didn’t mean it like that you idiots.
We continue:
One might say that the summer of 2020, with its impotent reactions to criminal destruction of American cities, might, in some tortured sense, be defined as “anarchy.” The left’s defense of destruction For Great Justice, and waving away of the plight of the “victims” might also be construed as a “validation” of “mayhem.”
I mean, it’s not an unreasonable idea, is it?
It is? Sorry. I guess that’s the sort of blinkered foolishness you’d expect from someone who is not making plans to flee:
The left is completely powerless to prevent this, it seems. They have no power. The government, the educational establishment, the media: all weak as Parvo-stricken puppies, unable to muster anything more than a feeble bleat of disapproval. Soon the streets will fill with angry men who want to break store windows and set cars on fire.
No no not those guys, they’re good! We mean the bad ones.
There will be mobs who attack Jews. No no not those guys, they’re angry about colonialism or acting out whiteness doctrines of otherizing, please keep up.
There will be throngs of white men in positions of authority demanding that Asians be suppressed in academic admissions –
What? No, no, that’s different. Please, you’re not conversant in the prismatic subtleties of the intersectional matrix, so maybe sit this one out? Once you’ve done the work, then perhaps you will be alert to the neo-Fascist elements who will restructure society to otherize those who do not have pure blood –
What? No, no, that’s different. That’s a matter of public health. Of course, you should have to show your papers. Point is, America is a lost cause. Soon, very soon, a group of people will try to burn down a city because they saw some tweets about a thing, and there will be a horrifying moment when the authorities prevent it. The nascent subterranean Fascist instinct ignites in the citizens, and they will join the police to prevent the people from smashing the store windows and burning down the legislature building.
When the morning rises and the streets are not twinkling with broken glass – Kristall-not! – and the legislature is not a smoldering heap – well, then you’ll know. The Second Wave of Fascism has crashed on the shores of America, and engulfed us all.
Published in General
I’m pretty sure that Umair person is the same guy who was spewing hate and poison on Medium when I had a subscription. For some reason, Medium thought his articles were worth calling to my attention. He hasn’t changed.
I don’t use the word ‘Genius’ often, and I won’t use it now. But this is good. Damn good.
They’re in charge of everything and…running scared?
I guess the only way they know how to express things is through anger and fear. Certainly plenty of evidence of that with their on-air talent.
That’s how they stay in power. They have to convince half the country that Republicans are all secretly white supremacist fascists. When elections are about actual issues, such as parental control of public schools, they tend to lose.
I put on the intellectual waders (note to self: make a liquor store run) and hit Twitter. Mr. Umair is protected. I’m sure he finds solace in that. Which is good, because after visiting his Medium website, he needs all the happiness he can get. He is upset because capitalism maximizes profits, not happiness. Somebody should clue him into that “pursuit of happiness” stuff does not imply anybody is going to be delivering any. You’ve got to go get it yourself, or I suppose pay someone else to bring it to you. (Like the liquor store.)
Man, I should check out this dude, Umair. He’s encouraging the hell out of me.
It occurred to me today that perhaps my general sense of optimism is…
wait for it…
insufficient for the occasion.
Seriously. I was thinking about the miserable dynamics of the modern hard-left progressive woke. These people can handle neither victory nor defeat with anything other than outrageous excess. In victory they feel emboldened to rocket ahead, further alienating the vast middle of America. In defeat they lash out and destroy… further alienating that same vast middle.
I don’t think the left can rein in their crazies. They fed this tiger and now they’re stuck riding it.
Of course, it all still depends on there being honest elections next year, and in 2024.
They’ve pushed out as far as they can, and it hasn’t been enough. They are overextended.
Of course the biggest problem is that passing election reforms doesn’t really matter if they’re not enforced. And not just in terms of prosecuting anyone who violates them, but also potentially throwing out tainted voting results from compromised precincts etc. There are people who appear willing to go to jail to elect Bidens etc, they need to not have their damage be accepted even if they do go to jail for doing it. And any objections based on “disenfranchisement” need to be thrown right back: not counting tainted precincts isn’t what “disenfranchises” people, it’s the shenanigans that do that.
Anyone who, for example, taints the results of a precinct with, say, 1000 votes that are thrown out as a result, should be prosecuted on 1000 counts of “voter fraud” or “disenfranchisement” or whatever.
Most of the people here will get the reference; most of the people not here wouldn’t.
Ha, ha, ha.
Shouldn’t it be Kristall-Nicht? I might need to brush up on my German.
To those on the left who believe they need an “exit plan”, I say, no sense in waiting until it might be too late – save yourselves and leave now. Please.
Promises, promises. We have heard that one before.
Projections all the way down. When you see into the fevered brain it is really scary to know what is lurking there.
I get that this internet thing is supposed to connect us all with what every other person in the world is thinking at any given moment, but I wonder if this is really a good idea. Are we really equipped for this? This dude’s contribution is depressing.
I’m just trying to drink my coffee and love my fellow man this morning. This cat is making it difficult.
America would collapse a lot more slowly if people like Umair would exercise their escape plans and leave the country.
Nacht = night/evening.
nicht = not.
James was using some poetic license.
I can’t decide whether to fear and loathe the malice more than the stupid. [Usage note: In honor of the era, I now routinely use “stupid” as a noun. ]
I fear the malice. Hands down.
This is exactly the sort of thinking that causes them to push even harder and pushes closer To the start of purges. Is they in fact control a lot of the power and if you’re this scared of us with that power they can really use it to hurt us.
All those fascists are just trying to oppose socialism, which the nation desperately needs.
If only there were a term that could be used as shorthand for National Socialism.
The greatest failure of the supply chain is that it never provides a shortage of idiots.
Umair’s talk is somewhat generic in its thrust even if it is stands out for its stridency. I despair for a few reasons. 1) Open racism is never good and 2) it is amazing how politicized this event has become given that it has nothing to do with partisan politics. I can see how people torture this into partisan politics using “just so” and “imagine if” arguments but the points of contention were not partisan or even ideological. Indeed, it is a sign of how racist many on the left are that they immediately jump to race. Because that is one of the things that racists (at least as compared to bigots) do. They jump to race. They also fused it with partisanship because they can’t stand to even consider that “the otherside” got a “win” (not the correct way to think about it but here we are). Is everything now an excuse for the left to run around saying outrageously racist things about anyone who disagrees with them? This type of behavior– the impulse to be and normalize open racism, and rely on anger as a means of holding one’s coalition together– is not sustainable.
The open racism won’t cause the left’s coalition to fall apart. It isn’t sustainable because there will be a similarly strident correcting response from the people that realize they have been defined against. It is human nature. “Common Good Constitutionalism” is the belated very faculty lounge intellectual response (led by Harvard and UChicago minted lawyers– hardly firebrands) to the perceived failures of “right liberalism” to combat the excesses of Liberalism– but it can always get more illiberal. This is exactly how you get outsider candidates who run on destroying their perceived enemies (“seize the endowments!”) elected to office. When people who’s major claim to membership in the class of “public intellectual” is that “they should know better” (Ivy League PhD/JD studies “terrorism”) sit back and either participate in or don’t say anything about their fellow travelers calling America a land of Nazi’s cause a kid (on camera! quite obviously and correctly) defended himself from several attacks on his life– that’s a huge problem. And an unsustainable one.
There have always been angry, violent, stupid people. When they get themselves into a lather, gather in groups and act out, the only thing that will stop them is superior force. Our prisons are filled with men like that. Communists in history have encouraged this element, used it to gain power. The “defund” movement is meant to help this element gain momentum. There are a few problems with that in America; first is we bear arms and have the right to defend our persons and property. That lesson was just reinforced. And second, we are not weak; we are courageous, and we will not tolerate lawlessness and mayhem. Funny how certain leaders of the Left have nothing but fear and loathing for the majority of hard working Americans, I mean real paranoia, however, at best they ignore (and they most often encourage) the violent anarchists who riot in the streets. When you encourage the worst among us (like the people who assaulted Rittenhouse) you get what you ask for.
Since no one has gone there, I will.
Those people wouldn’t recognize fascism if it locked them in their homes, closed their businesses, made them wear a piece of cloth, and inject themselves with an experimental drug.