Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

I think I was 12 or 13 when I first became acquainted with the concept of “the silly season” i.e. the idea that as the weather grows hot and people are on vacation, there are no real news happening, and both the things that tend to happen and what gets published in the paper gets weirder and weird, which in turn feeds the stranger things happening, which in turn—

Recently, when one of us, in a group of friends, complained about the strangeness of the left—if you don’t think them strange, consider that a congresswoman under suspicion of being anti-America and anti-Semitic chose to make a big display of being both. Or let’s consider the left bringing in a real anti-Semite and real white supremacist to condemn Trump and say he stood with aforementioned dim bulb congresswoman. Or consider the democrat candidates: all of them. A multiplication of dwarves, a concatenation of mental midgets, each trying to fun to the left of the other as though he were convinced, as a leftist journalist trying to call them to sense said “that he was running in a country slightly to the left of Sweden.”—a journalist friend said “it’s just the silly season.”

But it is not. If it were just the silly season, the long hot summer of political silliness, it wouldn’t be sending people who used to be leftist but reasonable off their rocker, stomping all over public spaces demanding that you admit you’re racist if you support Trump—even though (and I didn’t know this when I ran Tom’s post about the brouhaha) Trump never named anyone of any color and simply said that if certain congresswomen (there was even no certainty he meant more than one. It could be a rhetorical flourish, like when I tell my husband that if certain husbands expect me to cook dinner they might want to help me medicate the cat/move furniture/setup a website) prefer the shitholes they came from to the country they now live in, they can go back and show us what to do.

And as for the complete idiot who came to my facebook echo of that post to say that the “woman of color” only wanted America to live up to her promise, and if I didn’t like it it was because I was racist: bullshit, with bells on. The woman of color (which I don’t give a fuck about except for her being tinged deep red) on her website enjoins us to abolish private property, in public says that Al Qaeda is not bad or evil, but the US army is, and says the Jews are all “about the benjamins.” What about that sounds like the promise of America? Unless she took the wrong turn and really had meant to immigrate to the former USSR (someone get her a time machine, stat.)

This is not nor has it ever been—any of it—the promise of America. And no matter how much she says she loves what America “could be” she is exactly as Trump said: someone who loves the country from which she fled and holds on to its values. She should go there, abolish private property (is she going to fight the warlords single handed? let’s put it on payperview) and see how long it lasts.

What this has to do with her race, I don’t know.

Technically I probably have a lot ethnicity wise in common with another of the idiots who identified with that tweet—as though Trump had entered into a crowded bar and said “hey stupid” and these four had taken offense, even though no one had been named—than I do with most of my readers. I suspect I have a lot in common gene-wise with Alexandria of the very Occasional Cortex. As an aristocratic Latin she’s probably mostly Spanish and because of the timing of the colonization of the Americas has a good bit of Northern Portuguese blood (because it was easier to get rid of the hotheads in the occupied country that way.) Does this mean I’m self-hating when I hate and despise her half-witted Marxism?

No. While I think Portuguese culture for various reasons is not suited to wide spread prosperity and doesn’t suit me particularly, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with my Portuguese blood or even (groan, I hate you 23 and me) my Spanish blood. In moments of amusement, amid friends of the same ancestry I’ve been known to shout “Mediterranean peoples uber alas.” (Note that’s a joke. I don’t believe in any racial supremacy nor inherent racial inferiority. Unlike the racialists of the left I know the difference between race and culture.)

I do think there is something completely wrong and despicable about Marxist beliefs.

I’m willing to be friends with Marxists who are the sort of idealist Marxist who know it will never work in real life, but oh, they wish it could. I presume they are Odds, were raised in books, and couldn’t figure out how real humans are with two hands and a seeing eye dog. So I’ll argue them to them, but not despise them. Or we’ll ignore politics, if they’re willing and talk of the things we have in common: writing, or sewing, or painting, or— A dozen things that make me me besides my hatred of Marxist ideology and a dozen things that make them them despite their misguided love of it.

BUT I could never be friends with Alexandria Misfiring Cortex because she’s one of those who is trying to put those words into practice and is either too stupid to realize what results every time—100 million dead int he 20th century—too blinkered not to realize the stupidity of “Capitalism is even worse” (because, look, yes, free market is not perfect because humans aren’t perfect, and surely there are injustices. OTOH one on one and man on man or woman on woman your chances in a free country are 99% better than in any controlled economy from the suffocating elitist socialism of Europe to the deadly authoritarianism of North Korea or Cuba.) The alternative is that she’s so venal she doesn’t care. She knows those at the top of such a system get wealthy (see, the Castro brothers) and she thinks she can sell the high fallutin’ ideals to maleducated youth, and she couldn’t care less how the mass graves are filled, provided she has the aristocratic lifestyle and the money.

In any case, I see nothing to like or even forgive in any of those options. I don’t hate her because of her skin color (more or less like mine, depending on the amount of sun) but because of the deep red hue of her beliefs. The red of the 100 million eggs broken in the name of Marxism without a single omelet in sight.

So, why can’t sane people on the left see that? And these are or were sane people. But now all they can do is yell about racism and threaten to block those who try to explain why they make the choices they do, and why it’s not racist.

And it’s happening everywhere, even in crochet and sewing groups. Even in miniature groups even in painting and drawing groups (why I haven’t taken a class in years.)

This is not the silly season. Foxfier pinned it when she said this is the monkey dance. The left is doing the dance primates do to work themselves up to a physical attack or to make the opponent back down before the fight.

That means they’re both scared and threatened. But we know that. They’ve been getting more and more scared since this internet thing allowed us to talk back. You see, they thought their view was universal. This wasn’t just self-delusion or drinking their own ink. Those of their type in control of every means of mass communication, from education to newspapers were all agreed, and they’d steadily portrayed anyone who disagreed as crazy.

Their control first started to slip with Reagan’s election. I know the rest of you don’t see that, or not as clearly, but in the seventies, in Europe, we thought high inflation/high unemployment/steadily decreasing conditions of living were NORMAL and the result of “too many people” and it would get steadily worse. Then Reagan was elected and for a brief time, things turned around in the US, and things were otherwise. And even though the mass media tried to vilify/obfuscate what happened, enough people remembered that even Clinton had to pretend to be fiscally responsible, and it took a long slide to get us to Obama, who—still stuck in the seventies like all Carter Groupies—kept telling us we should get used to things getting worse.

And you know, despite the internet, they did everything they could, including an amazing amount of fraud, to put Hillary in power. They thought they had us back under control and with her in power they could bring the state in to stomp us out. Or wait for us to die. As in the mess in SF/F these people always imagine they’re the youth, though most of them are older than us.

Then Trump won, and they’ve lost their minds. They’ve dismissed us, they’ve laughed at us, yet we refused to go away. The Monkey-Brain is in control. And the monkey brain is not very smart. From this article:

The thing is, of course, we’re not retreating. We can’t retreat because what they want from us it to go back to things how they were before the internet. They want each of us who disagrees with them to think OURSELVES alone and probably crazy.

They want us to think that for reasons (including never proven reasons, like over population or scarcity) socialism is the only way for civilized humans to live, and therefore we must lump its severe flaws.

They want to go back to the time when the media was the only megaphone, and none of us knew there were others who held our opinions (or thought we were a small and dwindling minority.)

We can’t do that. If they kicked all of us off social media tomorrow, and silenced all of us, it would still not accomplish that. We’d KNOW we’re not alone, and next thing you know someone would be building a catapult to fling flaming Smart Cars at the statehouse and the rest of us would find him and help him. (Catapult probably a him. I’d be the crazy person painting over street names or writing scathing political verses in public toilets.)

They would know that, if they disengaged long enough to think it over. They would also know that—since you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube—perhaps engaging in rational dialogue would be better. They’d also—at some point—realize they’re not the majority that their possession of the megaphone led them to believe they were. In fact, they might be a much smaller minority than they thought.

The problem is they CAN’T do that. All they know is they want us to retreat. They want the threat to go away. And they’re going to continue escalating the—for now verbal, with outbreaks of antifa—violence until we do.

Only we can’t do that, because we’re fighting for our lives and the lives of our descendants and the fate of the last great nation on Earth.

So—

This is not the silly season. This is the howling-insane season.

And it will keep ramping up and up.

Where it stops nobody knows.

Pray, pray very constantly. Pray for America. Pray for the world. Even if you don’t believe, pray. There is a chance that there is someone on the other end of that phone. And we need a miracle.

And fight. Fight in every way you can to rebuild the culture, to talk back, to snatch from the fire of stupidity as-yet uncommitted brands or maleducated brands.

We should have spoken up long before this.

But it is the nature of the left to seek to control communication and to destroy those that disagree, so even 30 or 40 years ago, the price of talking back was very high.

It’s going to get higher.

There is no way out of this. The only way out is through.

In the end we win, they lose, but it’s going to get horrible in the meantime.

 

Reprinted from https://accordingtohoyt.com/ for July 20, 2019