This past weekend, a friend of mine recounted a visit he paid to his wife’s family in Arkansas around the time McCain had scheduled his much-awaited announcement of who his running-mate would be. Watching the coverage on TV, my friend was struck by just how quickly his Southern in-laws empathized with the then-unknown governor of Alaska. She was their gal, even though they weren’t yet sure how to pronounce her last name. 

Sarah Palin is, put simply, the goddess of implicit whiteness. She represents the “Real America” as it’s understood, most often tacitly, by the founding stock of the country from Juno, Alaska, to Jasper, Texas. This is, of course, a dangerous thing in many ways, for so far her powers have been used to mobilize white Christian support for John McCain. But even the man who think he’s Palin’s handler and eminence grise must realize that the woman represents a force he cannot totally control, and that someday she might really “go rogue,” as it were.       

Or maybe not. No one as of yet has been able to capture her inner personality. And I certainly haven’t learned anything watching her recent television interviews, in which Oprah and Barbara have been fishing for headline quotes about how mad she was at McCain for not letting her make a concession speech yadayadayada... My guess is that Sarah is probably a profound narcissist, most beauty pageant contestants are, but then she also has a flexibility and openness of mind that allows her to embrace, at one time or another, Buchananism, Zionism, Kenyan anti-witchcraft, and the Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle. 

I should read her book and write something about it. At the very least, one can make do with its many tales from the campaign trail, like this one about GOP operative Nicolle Wallace‘s ingenious idea of booking Sarah for an interview with Katie Couric, Wallace’s one-time colleague at CBS News. 

From the beginning, Nicolle [Wallace] pushed for Katie Couric and the CBS Evening News. The campaign’s general strategy involved coming out with a network anchor, someone they felt had treated John well on the trail thus far. My suggestion was that we be consistent with that strategy and start talking to outlets like FOX and the Wall Street Journal. I really didn’t have a say in which press I was going to talk to, but for some reason Nicolle seemed compelled to get me on the Katie bandwagon.

“Katie really likes you,” she said to me one day. “she’s a working mom and admires you as a working mom. She has teenage daughter like you. She just relates to you,” Nicolle said. “believe me, I know her very well. I’ve worked with her.” Nicolle had left her gig at CBS just a few months earlier to hook up with the McCain campaign. I had to trust her experience, as she had dealt with national politics more than I had. But something always struck me as peculiar about the way she recalled her days in the White House, when she was speaking on behalf of President George W. Bush. She didn’t have much to say that was positive about her former boss or the job in general. Whenever I wanted to give a shout-out to the White House’s homeland security efforts after 9/11, we were told we couldn’t do it. I didn’t know if that was Nicolle’s call.

Nicolle went on to explain that Katie really needed a career boost. “She just has such low self-esteem,” Nicolle said. She added that Katie was going through a tough time. “She just feels she can’t trust anybody.”

I was thinking, And this has to do with John McCain’s campaign how?

Nicolle said. “She wants you to like her.”

Hearing all that, I almost started to feel sorry for her. Katie had tried to make a bold move from lively morning gal to serious anchor, but the new assignment wasn’t going very well.

“You know what? We’ll schedule a segment with her,” Nicolle said. “If it doesn’t go well, if there’s no chemistry, we won’t do any others.”

Don’t you love how Palinese translates to the page!  What I also find interesting is that while the media would depict the McCain camp as a mean old gathering of cantankerous blackshirts, in reality it was staffed by third-wave feminists who made Oprah-style evocations of female solidarity and you-go-girl spirit.  According to Wallace, it was a good idea to be interviewed by Katie because “she’s a working mom and admires you as a working mom”; “She just has such low self-esteem”; “She just feels she can’t trust anybody.” All that was lacking was my favorite therapy cliché, “Katie’s in a bad place right now.” 

As we know, the interview turned into a catastrophe, with Katie questioning Sarah in a cold, contemptuous, almost sarcastic manner that made the governor produce responses that were even more convoluted than usual. Working-mom solidarity was easily trumped by Katie’s snootiness towards a non-east coast, pro-life Christian. In many ways, Wallace reminds me a lot of Marcia Clark, the prosecuting attorney in the OJ Simpson trial who worked hard to select a mostly female jury, hoping that women would empathize with Nicole Brown Simpson and lock up the abusive OJ. The sly Jonny Cochrian went along with the scheme, but made sure that they were all black women. The final composition was 10 women, 2 men; 9 blacks, 1 hispanic, and 2 whites. As it turns out, the battle between “sisterhood” and black racial ideology is no contest.

And as Katie’s interview with Sarah shows, women are meaner, pettier, more jealous and unfair around other women than they are around men.

But then, this isn’t exactly a shocking revelation for anyone who’s ever attended high school.     

With all this talk of Black Metal, I hope we don’t lose sight of another truly conservative popular art form.

Note that Steve Sailer’s new book makes an appearance around minute two. And you say that conservatives ain’t cool? 

Last weekend, I wrote,

Whenever a terrible televised tragedy takes place (the Virginia Tech shootings, the Knoxville murders, last week’s bloodbath) many of the harder-edged neocons, paleos, and immigration restrictionists hope that this will be the last straw—finally people will “wake up” and the establishment will seal the borders and/or halt Muslim immigration and/or cease with the multiculti dreaming.

In a few days from now, all these activists will invariably be chagrined to discover that nothing has changed and that most have instead reached the conclusion “We need Muslims in the military—now more than ever!”

It didn’t take too long for this to come true. Here, for instance, is Gen. George Casey, the U.S. Army Chief of Staff:

Our diversity, not only in our Army, but in our country, is a strength. And as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.

General Casey is exactly the kind of gray-haired, square-jawed, always frowning general that many conservatives imagine to be among the last representatives of Duty, Honor, & Valor left in the country. What those well intentioned conservative admirers of people like this don’t understand is that the Top Brass has imbibed a “patriotic” version of the multiculti creed to the point that they believe not having Muslims serve in the military is far worse than mass murder. Think as well of how many average soldiers failed to turn Hasan in after hearing him lecture on the need to cut infidel throats because they thought this might rock the great global-democratic boat that is the U.S. military. The multiculti religion has believers everywhere, even in places thought to be conservative bastions. 

[Hat tip: Auster]

Well, Stacy, if I’m able to dissuade but one Takimag reader from taking part in Republican politics, then I think I will have performed a great service to my country, the Right, and Western Civilization. 

Sam Francis was surely correct when he noted a certain asymmetry between the Right and Left in America (and, in many European countries as well.) Among Democrats, the party leadership is to the left of its voters (think “Hillary Democrats” (mostly Midwest Catholics) who voted for Obama and Biden because they thought they were two decent guys who’d stick up for the folks.) With the GOP, it’s the opposite: the rank-and-file is to right, often far to the right, of the people in charge. Most everyday Republicans view mass immigration as an outright invasion of their country that must be halted immediately and Obama’s expansion of government as not only an attempt to run their lives but a massive wealth redistribution from the productive savers towards the underclass and well connected financial elite. They are certainly justified in feeling this way.

The problem is, of course, that the Tea Party people, as Kevin has pointed out, have no place to go but into the arms of the GOP and Newt (who, of course, sparked this whole controversy with his endorsement of Mrs. Scozzafava in New York’s 23rd.) The fact that Señor Hoffman took typically milk toast positions on major issues even though he essentially had nothing to lose—six weeks ago he was polling in the single digits—proves just how widely the Newt-cancer has metastasized within the GOP establishment: even unknown long-shots running as “conservative” outsiders are completely worthless wimps.

It’s also worth pointing out that in his response, Stacy describes well how the base essentially sells itself out to the Republicans year in, year out: Activists thump their chests over thwarting wicked, unpatriotic liberals like Scozzafava and New York Times editorialists—never mind that the politicians who benefit, whether it be Hoffman, Bush, or McCain, have no interest whatsoever in countering the therapeutic managerial state or the gradual displacement of the traditional American nation by Third World migrants.

And it’s gone on like this for years!

If one were to measure “conservatism” by the amount of bestselling books published in support of the cause, by the amount of functionaries making a living working in a movement that bears this name, and by self-identification, then surely one would conclude that America must be some über-traditionalist, authoritarian order that puts Franco’s Spain to shame or perhaps rivals Galt’s Gulch in laissez-faire. “Conservatism” is, without question, the biggest ideological business out there. 

But is America actually a “center-right nation,” as so many people tell me it is? Who knows? Who cares? What’s important is that the Constitution has been rendered irrelevant, every citizen is burdened with tens of trillions in debt and liabilities, our cultural and artistic productions are vulgar and risible to the extreme, a quarter of the population is obese, and national demographics are pointing towards Brazil, if not something worse. “Conservatism” has failed utterly and conspicuously on all these fronts and more; and before a real alternative can arise, the “conservative” movement, and the lesser-of-two-evils logic the undergirds it, must be brought to an end.

But it’d, of course, be unfair of me if I didn’t mention that one area in which “conservatism” has been wildly successful—making sure America never stops invading the world. If one would like a glimpse of how the movement has been brought on board this agenda, look no further than this photo, which I found displayed proudly on the blog of a one Robert Stacy McCain: it’s of the “conservative” activist embracing the great William Kristol on the occasion of some old WASPy foundation’s bestowing on him a quarter million for services rendered to democracy and the Republican Party. 

Keep fighting the good fight, Stacy! 

A reader in the Army offers an interesting perspective: 

I enjoyed your latest offering at Takimag. I was stationed at Ft. Hood and the shootings happened a couple blocks from where I used to live. The cop who brought him down had to be a woman, didn’t it? I love that detail: its like liberalism rolled what D&D geeks call a “saving throw”. Regrettably, Im afraid the case against diversity will get no easier even as the problems become more acute: indeed, the deeper its claws sink into our vital national institutions, the harder it gets to argue for their extraction, as both the heroes and the villians of every drama will be of the socially favored backgrounds. We’re doomed.

Though I’ve never played D & D, I think this characterization of Hasan’s female vanquisher is quite apt.

I also wasn’t surprised to see that the neocons’ fancy lady blogger, Pamela Geller, is rejoicing at feminism’s triumph over Islamo-fascism: 

This is poetic justice. The jihadi mass slaughterer was taken down by a ... woman! Think about that. Let’s blast that shiz through the caves of Tora Bora. 

That’s the real story. It should be wall to wall on Al Jizz.

Yes! The West’s willingness to enlist women in the military and police forces and put them in harm’s way. Isn’t that really what separates us from terrorists?

It’s difficult to make out exactly what happened in Texas last Thursday in a grisly incident that’s coming to be known as “the Fort Hood massacre.” As things stand, three men besides Nidal Malik Hasan are in custody. The ultimate cause of the shooting, however, should not be in doubt. As Tom Fleming wrote on the morning after, “By his own lights and according to his own religious traditions ... Hasan is not mentally disturbed, only a man who has done his religious duty.” That Hasan acted according to his faith—and not because some mean old corporal called him a “raghead” or because he was a principled non-interventionist who just took things too far—must be obvious to everyone whose brains haven’t yet been rotted out by PC.

Which means this fact will go mostly unmentioned in the mainstream media.

Whenever a terrible televised tragedy takes place (the Virginia Tech shootings, the Knoxville murders, last week’s bloodbath) many of the harder-edged neocons, paleos, and immigration restrictionists hope that this will be the last straw—finally people will “wake up” and the establishment will seal the borders and/or halt Muslim immigration and/or cease with the multiculti dreaming.

In a few days from now, all these activists will invariably be chagrined to discover that nothing has changed and that most have instead reached the conclusion “We need Muslims in the military—now more than ever!” It would probably take the hijacking of a nuclear weapon by a enlisted North African Muslim to lead America’s national leaders to surmise that we should probably restrict whom we allow into our country and institutions and that, No, more “diversity training” won’t help the matter. But I’m not sure even this would do it.

It’s being reported that someone named “Nidal Malik Hasan” frequently made webposts praising Islamic suicide bombers; the FBI had picked up on them and certainly the Army should have investigated Hasan more thoroughly. But even damning evidence such this doesn’t really get at a much larger problem with the U.S. military, one that, in my mind, will lead to countless other Nidal Malik Hasan-like disasters in the near future.   

Just last month, the U.S. Navy’s released a new recruitment commercial that’s loaded with the kind Top Gun and Saving Private Ryan images and John Williams-y music you’d expect. It also depicts its current force as mostly non-white and close to half-female. These multiculti midshipmen, the Navy promises, will fight on “until the anguish of those less fortunate has been soothed.”

The Navy’s new slogan, “A Global Force For Good,” is, on one level, a holdover from the evangelical Bush-speak that made us cringe for most of the last decade. It also bespeaks a military complex on the forefront of multiculturalism—in which “defense” has given way to the more expansive “national security” and finally “helping people in need.”

This is the kind of military in which someone named Nidal Malik Hasan could hope to find work as a “Psychiatrist Major.” 

MISH has picked up on an important aspect of the recent job numbers that shouldn’t be overlooked. Not all sectors are shrinking…

190,000 jobs were lost in total vs. 263,000 jobs last month.
62,000 construction jobs were lost vs. 64,000 last month.
61,000 manufacturing jobs were lost vs. 51,000 last month.

Whereas,

45,000 education and health services jobs were added vs. 3,000 added last month.

Government jobs stayed steady, but, as MISH notes, “this trend is likely to reverse in a major way with as of yet unannounced son-of-stimulus and grandson-of-stimulus jobs packages.” Making stuff is out, working in hospitals and public schools is in. If the U.S. economy ever does recover, it will be changed utterly—and socialized to the hilt.   

Larry Auster offers a helpful digest version of the New York Times‘s coverage of the Fort Hood massacre:

A proud first generation American, born in Virginia, Nidal Hasan wanted nothing other than to serve his country. But the bigotry against Muslims that he encountered in the Army, plus the American occupation of Iraq, plus, finally, his anguish at being ordered to deploy to Iraq as part of the U.S. forces there, drove this deeply patriotic son of the Old Dominion to the point where he felt he had no choice but to launch a martydom operation against the U.S. Army and shoot down scores of his fellow soldiers.

The neopagan takeover of the GOP has begun.

Village Voice
Steven Thrasher, Nov. 4 2009

Holy Tyr! Queens voters made American history tonight, when they chose Dan Halloran as the nation’s first openly heathen elected official.

Halloran will serve as the City Council member from the 19th district, representing Bayside, Auburndale and part of Flushing. He and Kevin Kim were involved in a bruising campaign to the finish, which included many religious and racial fights and allegations.

Trips to both campaigns’ offices on Election Night revealed how different the two were. Shortly before the polls closed at the Kim campaign office, there was not one white person working there. Beneath a Shepard Fairey poster, a couple dozen Mandarin speaking volunteers hustled up rides to the polls on cell phones.

At Halloran HQ, there was hardly one non-white person, and the walls were adorned with ads for Tea Party protests.

And then comes my favorite two lines from the piece:

Ironically, one of the first things Halloran said when addressing his supporters after Kim conceded was “I could never have believed in my wildest dreams of the coalition we have put together.” It didn’t look like much of a diverse ‘coalition’ to us, unless you count the mix of heathens and Roman Catholics.

It’s called the “Takimag Strategy,” and apparently it can win in Queens!

(Our recent discussion of paganism and Christianity can be read here, here, and here.)

It’s worth noting that Halloran is a “King” (that is, high priest) of a New York sect of Theodism, also known as Ásatrú. No postmodern New Ager, Halloran, a former Roman Catholic, appears genuinely dedicated to re-discovering the original spirituality of Europe, and not simply embracing one more religious metaphor for egalitarianism.

So reports the website Religious Dispatches:

He received his BA from the City University of New York in History and Anthropology, and conducted archaeological field research in Ireland on the Norman and Viking periods. Like many Neopagans, who tend to read more and have higher levels of education than the average American, Halloran was drawn to the mythology and lore of ancient cultures that exposed him to an entirely different religious world than the one in which he was raised. Halloran’s particular fascination with ancient Germanic culture led him to Heathenism, a branch of contemporary Paganism devoted to the beliefs and practices of Northern European cultures.

We should learn more about Halloran before deeming him some kind of AltRight champion; however, from the little I’ve learned so far, Halloran already strikes me as infinitely more interesting then this Doug Hoffman fellow, whom the conservative movement has fetishized in the most stupid and embarrassing of ways. As I wrote yesterday, Hoffman represents less of a “conservative insurgency” then a reminder of just how widespread mainstream Republican milk-toastology actually is. Embracing Third World immigrants, promoting consumerism, and practicing fiscal responsibility by doing something as meaningless as cutting earmarks isn’t just the platform of John McCain and George Bush, but also of independent candidates who claim to run to right of the GOP. In this mild-mannered accountant, Stacy McCain and friends have appeared to have found a new guru.

One of the great benefits of living in a city full of vibrant cultural diversity and hyper liberal white people is being relieved of the feeling of a civic responsibility to vote. When primaries were held here in my New York City enclave of Park Slope back in September, I took a glance at the slate of candidates and what they supposedly stood for, mostly out of curiosity, and came to the conclusion that I didn’t want to be governed by any of those damn people. I vowed never to take part in the New York electoral process. I momentarily considered voting against Bloomberg yesterday in the mayoral, just to teach that arrogant killjoy a lesson, but the race was too close, and I was afraid Bloomberg’s black liberal, Sharpton-endorsed opponent, Bill Thompson, might actually win. I surmised that abstinence was still the best policy. (Unfortunately the Constitution Party, or a similar type outfit, hasn’t made any inroads up here, which would have allowed me to have at least lodged a principled protest vote of some kind.)*

My frustration aside, it’s hard for me to summon even one cheer for the supposed nation-wide “conservative revival” I’ve been reading about perusing the right-of-center blogosphere. Robert Stacy McCain, for instance, has annoucned, “the [Doug] Hoffman congressional campaign has ignited a revolution within the Republican Party, the results of which are already being felt.” A “revolution”? Really? Let’s look at where this accountant from New York’s 23rd stands on the issues:

Health care reform

Although universal health care sounds great in theory, we can’t afford to do everything at once… especially when it means adding an additional trillion dollars to the deficit we are handing to our children and grandchildren. I believe our first step should be to bring the spiraling costs of healthcare under control so the cost of healthcare does not destroy the budgets of hardworking families and retirees. Then, as the economy picks up we can work to insure everyone.

Socialism, just not all at once.

Immigration:

There is no question that our immigration policies are flawed. The answer, though, is not to put up a wall and stop all immigration. The answer is to create an easier path for immigrants to enter the United States—and to work here—while at the same time getting tough on illegal immigrants who commit crimes.

This is a typical Republican pose in which the illegality of mass immigration is opposed, and yet the candidate expresses his desire to make it even easier for Third World migrants to enter the country. 

Spending

I would cut the pork and wasteful earmarks.

Oh yes, we wouldn’t want to touch anything else. And clearly, cutting earmarks for bike trails and pet projects would make a big dint in the $70-100 trillion in unfunded liabilities that will be coming due in the next few years.

Stacy also quotes Erick Erickson of RedState.com, who claims that the Hoffman campaign “demonstrated to the GOP that it must not take conservatives for granted. … The GOP had better pay attention.” Ooh! Taken for granted no more!  Well, perhaps Newt can’t count on the Tea Parties to follow his every order, as I feared might be the case. But to me, this recent episode proves just how few politicians—even ones like Hoffman, who, one would think, have absolutely nothing to lose—and professional conservatives understand the crisis we’re in, or are willing to talk about it.

Perhaps Obama has “lost the middle class” with his spending programs and inept comments about his good friend at Harvard, HL Gates (though I think it’s far too early to date the end of the white middle-class’s willingness to vote for someone like our Multiculti Messiah.) But if the Middle American Radicals have no alternative force to turn to, then their incipient rebellion at the Tea Parties and Obamacare town halls is nothing but noise. 

*Why someone with my views would ever live in this city remains a mystery to many. Not too long ago, the Times did a special report on the one family in my neighborhood that dared display a McCain-Palin yard sign—the estate seemingly “as lonely an outpost as the Alamo.” And the Observer has investigated the disquieting rumor that an active Republican was a member of the renowned Food Co-op on Union St. Without question, I’m the only ones in Park Slope who’s ever made a tax-deductible donation to VDARE.com.