The proof of your racism is the fact that we see it. You can deny it — as “investigative journalists” we’ll fight for your right to burn a flag or shit on a police car or burn Bushhitler puppetes in effigy, after all — but once you hang a folding chair from a tree, regardless of whether or not you used twine or a lynching rope complete with noose, well, we all know what that means. It means you’re racist.
And by that we mean that, even if you aren’t, you’ve nevertheless provided us the raw material to pretend that you must be, and that your dislike of Obama’s empty-chaired presidency is really just your backwood, unreconstructed view of race, whereby a Negro man and his uppity Negress wife have no business lording it over you. Cracker.
Note the intro to the report, where the “journalists” notes she “tracked the man down” to “ask him what he meant” — and yet her questions suggest she’s already decided what was meant. The empty chair is clearly Obama. But the string used to put it up? That becomes a “lynching,” the same descriptor used by NBC News in its coverage of the story.
So, see? You need to be very very careful with how you metaphorically or emblematically display your criticisms of Obama. Specifically if you are white. And those you criticize are either black, Muslim, homosexual, or (on occasion) womyn.
Reasonable people — one offended African-American in another report asked, “what does that say about me?”, to which the easy answer is, why would you presume it says anything about you, save that you yourself are so committed to racial politics that you equate a political statement regarding Obama’s failures as President with race, and consequently don’t see either him or yourself as disparate individuals? — can conclude reasonably that you heart is filled with the most racisty of hateful racism. And they will have concluded correctly — regardless of whether or not they are actually correct, which in point of fact depends on whether or not you hung the chair to suggest your racialist malice; because it is just as reasonable to assume you merely did it symbolically in a way that would be seen, lest the whole political statement (or, you know, hate crime) be, well, merely an empty folding chair sitting unattended in a front yard, which I suspect is quite common in front yards in which no one is currently sitting in them, or in which those who have been sitting in the just got up and left them empty as a result.
The message from Moveon.org, and the race-baiting “tolerance” crowd in the media, let’s face it, is this: We are entitled to take your meaning the way we like, and to insist that you meant what it is we are going to claim you meant in order to take the fangs out of the actual protest itself by deflecting it into an indictment of the protester. Why ask you about you really meant, after all? Frankly, we don’t care. We have reasonable suspicion, and the raw materials, to turn your free political speech into a possible hate crime — because, when used by the right, all twine is lynching rope, and all knots nooses. Sorry, cooter, but you’re white and you don’t like the President’s policies. Ergo, you’re most likely racist.
And no, of course it’s not racist on our part to make such an assumption, run a news story on it implying that you’re a violent old racist, or show you or your house or your angry reaction to our “investigative journalism” that essentially begins with images of your guilt and then demands you prove your innocence. After all, citizen: we’re just asking questions. If you aren’t guilty, why the need to avoid our loaded, goading, leading queries…?
Meanwhile, in other news, somewhere between 15-20 years of Obama’s life remains stubbornly missing. No word yet if Austin, Chicago, Hawaiian, Washington State, or Indonesian reporters have taken to checking trees or dangling twine or unused folding chairs for clues.
…
…
I’m going to say it again: the way to beat back this incoherent view of language, and the defensiveness and stink that is then collecting to apply to all conservatives / classical liberals with a big thick brush, is to reject the very kernel assumptions used to coalesce these kinds of public lynchings.
Because the fact is, it’s the media and left wielding the noose here. And they see all of us as empty chairs waiting to be strung up — all because we’ve institutionalized as legitimate the semantic and hermeneutic tools for them to do so.
Rob them of that — by making the forceful case for how and why the semantic assumptions now ascendant and spread through the academy and feel-good popular culture and pop-psychology are in very tools that are being used to take apart the Enlightenment, and with it, all the foundational assumptions of our country’s nascent principles.
Again, to any TEA Party leaders, organizers, etc., out there: I am willing and able to put together a series of lectures on these subjects that I am certain will, once internalized, enable us to explain to our fellow citizens how, by way of language and the assumptions about its usage, we are having our liberties stolen from us; I can show how our most cherished ideals are being deconstructed and then re-imagined as their precise opposites (eg., “tolerance,” “fairness,” “investment”); and if the past is any indication, I will be able to do so using such simple texts as Curious George.
I’ve been putting this message out for years, and watching with increasing sadness as the right largely ignores the basis of our own classical liberal demise. Gramsci, the reader-response leftists, the anti-foundationalists, the deconstructionists, et al: they weren’t all acting politically to gain power. But some were, and there is absolutely no doubt that the current establishment theoretical view of meaning making, “truth,” and what comes to be regarded as legitimate hermeneutics is an attack on the Enlightenment principles that undergird our republic and help secure our individual autonomy and natural rights.
The politically-activated anti-foundationalists in the progressive movement, in fact, are so secure in the entrenchment and cultural acceptance of their faulty and malignant ideas concerning epistemology, meaning, and interpretation — and so convinced it is now inexorably moving toward the PC tyranny that uses “consensus communities” and the like to determine truths and individual claims to ethnic authenticity — that they no longer ever hide the fact that charges of “hypocrisy” have no effect, structurally, whatever on their plans.
When your linguistic and rhetorical worldview is in fact a modern embrace of sophistry and anti-intellectual relativism rebranded as intellectual high-mindedness and semantic nuance, what care do you have that some may wish to point out your “hypocrisies.” After all, why be constrained by some rigid use of reason when, as with all totalitarian endeavors, the ends justify the means.
I offer my services to combat this. I’ve been doing it here for years.
But a bunch of petty bullshit from some “our side” — many of whom, since taking the reins as our most prominent online spokespeople, have proven persistently feckless and consistently wrong in both their promoted tactics and strategies — has kept me somewhat marginalized. Often times through coordinated agreements and secret missives, a whisper campaign, and unofficial deals with shady characters whose job it was, presumably, to elevate attacks on my supposedly malignant character while depressing my site’s visibility in search engine results, etc. Combined with the linking freeze-0ut of the past 4-years — recall, this all began when I rejected rather forcefully the idea that Obama was in any way a good but misguided pragmatist and centrist — I have been forced to reassert myself as a blogger, slowly building back up an audience.
And as I rebuild my own brand, I once again do so on the very message I’ve always preached: it’s not the polls, it’s not the Party; it’s the kernel assumptions that underlie the epistemology and therefore are permitted to insinuate themselves into every aspect of our lives, where it becomes entrenched thanks to easy bromides: “the democraticization of meaning!” “It says what it says!” “Well, that may not be what you meant, but it sure sounded that way to me.”
This is the poison that has been injected into the roots of liberty’s tree.
If we don’t stop it, the game is already over, and our country — the greatest political experiment in the history of man — is gone, just as sure as you’re reading this. Losing more slowly is still losing.
I can only do so much from here. I’m a resource. Use me.
Beyond that, what’s really left to say?
… but is it racist hate if I, like the Iranians, merely don’t discriminate and hate everybody ?
If A says “B”, and C says “B really means D”,
then why can’t E say “C really means F”,
and then G can say “E really means H”.
so that it’s turtles all the way down?
Power. Which is what it’s about, getting, keeping, and increasing it. All else are not ends but only means to that one clear end.
I ran into this a few weeks ago when the NY Slimes ran a piece about how Google Fiber in KC isn’t doing anything about the Digital Divide, because the part of town that’s 3/4 black wasn’t getting enough people to sign up (for $10) to reach the threshold to build in the “fiberhoods” in question.
I called into the local afternoon talk show that follows Limbaugh, and asked what more Google could do, especially since they offer one plan that provides 5 MB/s broadband (comparable to what Time-Warner charges $40/mo or more for now) for a minimum of 7 years with no recurring charges if the customer will pay the $300 cost of building out the fiber to their house, and even that could be spread out over 12 monthly $25 payments.
To put that in perspective, I chose to relate it to the cost of eating at a well-known low-priced fast food joint that has locations in the area in question. But as soon as I said “$25 is what, two trips to Popeye’s?” the radio people went nuts, hit the Dump button so my racisty racist remarks could never befoul their airwaves, and spend the next two minutes telling their audience that what I said was so horribly racist that if I’d said it at work I should lose my job, and certainly they’d lose theirs if they allowed it on the air.
Now, that’s bad enough, but it’s not really the point of what I’m saying, which is that the two times since that I’ve called the same show to refute the stupid crap the liberal co-host says, she has explicitly stated that she can’t really focus on the substance of my objections because she remembers how horribly racist I am, and seems to imply that it is beneath her dignity to respond to any point I may make, no matter how cogent it would be if anyone else had said it.
To his credit, the somewhat conservative co-host responded in both cases by backing up what I was saying, but I don’t think he realizes that he enabled the ad hominem nonsense by his initial willingness to join her in condemning my comment as racist.
The irony is that the Left using a “conviction” of “racism” (or sexism, homophobia, etc.) as a reason to forever more ignore anything the convict says even if someone else says it, is exactly the sort of “logic” used by lynch mobs to discount the need to hear any exculpatory evidence from, say, the suspect’s girlfriend who might testify he was with her when the crime is alleged to happen. “We don’t need to hear nothin’ from no n—–!”.
The Left does not need to hear any evidence from us, because being able to brand us “racist” conveniently allows them to avoid thinking about what we have to say.
The Left does not need to hear any evidence from us, because being able to brand us “racist” conveniently allows them to avoid thinking about what we have to say.
They were never going to think about it anyway.
They just don’t want anyone else to think about it.
turtles all the way down
That’s another way to describe Derrida’s doctrine of deconstruction and differénce: every time you look up a word in a dictionary, all you get is more words, not reality itself; ergo, language only points to more language and never actually approaches reality.
It’s also all about undermining hierarchies, such as the primacy of speech.
And as an extension, the intent of the speaker.
Which disappeared from consideration long before Derrida came along, BTW. This stuff is so entrenched that its proponents can’t even articulate the alternative.
Ok, I’ll help fund it. How does a series of reasonably well produced 5-30 minute segments that can be posted on Youtube sound? With the help of a few graphic artists this could be a useful tool for codifying and disseminating your message.
FWIW, my kids are 15 and 22. They’ve picked up on some things but not others, so having some good reference material for the basics is something I’m keen on supporting.
At this point, anything is better than nothing. Though if possible I’d like whoever is involved in whatever way to help get us partnered up with an organization that has some clout when it comes to dissemination of messages.
Lord knows I can’t count on the “big” right bloggers other than maybe Glenn and a few others. Once Malkin wrote me off — and I have a very good idea now why that is — that signaled to the rest of that high end clique that I could be ostracized without residual guilt.
I hope some people are circumspect about why they’ve done what they’ve done, especially in light of new evidence provided by people currently under FBI “supervision” for being a bit, well, “manic” and destructive of the property of others.
You know I’m a long time supporter of your message Jeff, but good God, listen to what we’re up against…
Ten years on you may have the right message at the right time, JG.
Today we learn that among the middle class, Romney is polling fourteen points ahead of Little Man, thus confirming Forty-Seven Percent™ with a vengeance. This is wholly intuitive and so naturally the Press is screaming BUNNIES again.
In other words the only sound coming out of the only meme the left has been able to gin up in weeks is that of that same left…looking anywhere but at it.
People do get it. Little man, on the other hand, is making a fool of himself at every turn — today the buck stops on the Resolute Desk except for when it does not stop on the Resolute Desk.
Tomorrow it’ll be something else.
He’s lost this election. He knows it. It’s 1979. He’s phoning it in.
Neither Barry or the Press are controlling this thing anymore. There’s not a better time to do a bit of brand-buliding (and I think charlesaustin here in the comments has a good idea about that).
Jeff, if you have it in you, have you considered reviving some protein wisdom classics? I’m sure some of them — Red Pills, Billy Jack, the pw Interviews (my favorite) — could be turned into offshoots to pollinate other online channels.
Scarlett Johansen’s nipples must have a new book out, or something. Surely we can hear from them!
What kind of chair was it? If it was an Ikea or some such then yeah, the racism thing is just silly.
But now if it were a Lazy Boy, well…
Hanging Mussolini was racist.
JHo —
Those come from whimsy. I’m too angered and dispirited and ostracized and hated to bother with those. I tried Billy Jack, but we’ve switch WP format so many times that I can get the template to work any more. And my Photoshop “license” expired, which means I have to reload discs from ages ago whose registration numbers I doubt I still have.
Lee —
Most of those people have been so dumbed down they are mere parrots for bits and pieces of soundbite, and can be (as shown) led with weighted questions. But note how the weight always assumed malfeasance on the side of the GOP, that the right, by its very nature, must be capable of all these wrongs because we’ve learned that every victim group with a grievance has had success screaming at the right.
It can be changed. I believe that. And frankly, the most difficult obstacle is that I’m not convinced that many on the right want it changed, because they use the same tools when they are in power if and when they can get away with it.
Humor, especially of your kind, works. There are practical obstacles but if the whimsy fails, it is what it is. I’m just trying to find or suggest something to sell the site in new audience minds before they get into the meat.
I started reading PW for the nutso stuff — glad to see it sidebarred, still — and stayed for the learning. I had my own term for liberal preemptive striking so I was already onboard.
How to get the new audience built, is the thing. In retail, that’s all about, dare I say it, the optics…
Jeff: Just tangentially, I really appreciate how you capitalize “TEA” Party. Almost no one does that. It is, after all, an acronym, though a lot of folks probably don’t know that, or choose to ignore it. So, Thank You!
Just to be a contrarian, I think the notion of Tea Party occurred before someone applied an acronym to it.
Now, that’s bad enough, but it’s not really the point of what I’m saying, which is that the two times since that I’ve called the same show to refute the stupid crap the liberal co-host says, she has explicitly stated that she can’t really focus on the substance of my objections because she remembers how horribly racist I am, and seems to imply that it is beneath her dignity to respond to any point I may make, no matter how cogent it would be if anyone else had said it
Silly you, thinking she’d want to know her building was on fire, and that she should try to escape while she could. Oh well, maybe if a non-racist comes along to tell her the same thing, her life can still be saved.
I’m sorry man, that tree looked just like the President. Swaying in the wind, full of bugs… nuts… that guy needs to be sent up the river.
In the future, hang all chairs with perforated pipe strap screwed to the tree limb. That will confuse the media. They know what rope is, they’re too stupid to know what pipe strap is.
Totally second JHo on the “nutso stuff,” it’s what drew me here. The message stuff of course is what kept me here.
Come for the GAYPORNCOCKOFLIES (swidt), stay for the intentionalism!
I believe I’ll use that one too.
I’d already planned on telling her she’d better never drive on an Interstate highway, or buy any products shipped on them, since Eisenhower pushed for it after seeing Hitler’s Autobahnen.
– Guess I’ll have to change all the ropes on my hanging plants to pipe wrap, and that waternellon from a rope is a non-starter.
“and that waternellon from a rope is a non-starter.” Not for nothin’, but what in the Sam Hill is a “waternellon”? There’s your problem; you didn’t choke your “waternellon” before you pulled the rope non-starter. (Nyuk, Nyuk, Nyuk).
I have an idea for a profit-making online business that will incorporate an online community for conservatives only. I have no technical skills at all, so need help getting the web site built. I have some money, but am looking for a partner who has skills and I’m willing to split the profits. Email me if you’re interested, but I have to warn you I have no fucking use for Ron Paul libertarians so if that pisses you off then don’t bother. I’m an ex-liberal in the Andrew Breitbart mode, consider him and Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin my heroes. I love this country and everything it stands for and I’m sick and tired of being assaulted by stupid liberals and the Beta Male Dickless Wonders who have taken over the conservative blogs. Email me if you want details.
“That becomes a “lynching,” the same descriptor used by NBC News in its coverage of the story.”
The man did not use a hangman’s noose to tie the chair and used clothesline instead of 1/4″ or above rope. He used what looks like a square knot. Squares have four 90 degree angles and are made of lines in orthogonal intersection. This suggests that the motives for hanging the chair in effigy were more masonic or pythagorean than racist. And the hanging is supportive. No gibbet or gallows was constructed. There was no chair in evidence for the chair to stand on that could be kicked out to cause strangulation as the original chair dropped. Rather than hanging for treason after a trial, or a mob lynching the the char was harmlessly suspended, nor was its chair neck broken. Perhaps the chair was into masturbating with asphyxiation and something went wrong. Nor has a conceptual autopsy determined the chair’s actual cause of representative or symbolic death or even if it is symbolically dead.
Perhaps the man hung the chair up in the hopes of creating an unconventional ersatz pinata, and cheerfully hit it with a mop handle until he realized that no candy would ever come out of it and so disappointed lost interest in it.
Me? I’d have bought a huge transparent trash can filled it halfway with with a yellow fluid, tossed the chair in and called it ” Piss 0NE”.
I still can’t seem to get my attention diverted from Scarlett Johansson’s nipples.
We have some really old wooden folding chairs that I painted red (apropos, yes?) that are just ripe for hanging.
That would be painful, wouldn’t it?
Oh. Not talking about nipples?
ScarJo’s nipples only want you for your money, Slart. They’re golddiggers.