Smoke and Fire

Guest Post by Jim Kunstler

Cue the corn pone Nazis. Enter, stage left. Well, what did you expect?

With the various authorities in this culture incessantly applying “white privilege” noogies to the public’s skull, sooner or later they were sure to provoke a lizard-brain response from the more limbic-oriented low orders of honkeydom. Of course, you couldn’t stage-manage a more stupidly arrant provocative act in the State of Virginia, guaranteed to bring out the raging yahoos, than threatening to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee.

There’s a depressingly tragic overtone to this whole affair that suggests the arc of history itself is driving this story — a dark animus in the national soul struggling to resolve its contradictions. And the Charlottesville incident, which left a woman dead and many others badly injured from a car-ramming, has the flavor of a “first shot” in a new civil war.

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The echo civil rights campaign of the moment — a strange brew of Black Lives Matter, “Antifa” (anti-fascist), latest-wave feminism, illegal immigrant sanctuary politics, and LGBTQQ agitation — emanates from the college campuses and creeps through the culture-at-large like a miasma, poisoning group against group, in an orgy of victimization claims of the sort that inevitably lead to violence. This is how tribal and religious wars start in primitive societies.

There is also a funk of phoniness about this campaign that should alert the higher centers of judgment in the brain. The Michael Brown killing in Ferguson, MO, that kicked off the BLM movement was never a convincing case of injustice, but has been widely regarded as if it was, despite state and federal inquiries (under Obama’s DOJ), that concluded otherwise. The figment of “white privilege” is not responsible for the extraordinary black-on-black homicide rates in Chicago and Baltimore or the black teen flash mobs in malls around the country. What is suspiciously at the bottom of it all is the spectacular failure of the original civil rights campaign of the 1960s to alter the structures of poverty in black America, as well as the grinding guilt among white Democratic Progressives over the failures of their own well-intentioned policies — converted perversely into racial self-flagellation.

The latest iteration of feminism comes out of campuses that have been largely taken over by female Boomer pedagogues, especially the non-STEM departments, and is now fait accompli, so that the grievances still pouring out seem manufactured and hysterical. It also has a strong odor of simple misandry, and the whole package of ideology is wrapped in impenetrable grad school jargon designed to give it an intellectual sheen that is unearned and dishonest. The grim fact is that sooner or later even some intelligent men might notice this, and get pissed off about it.

The “Antifa” movement would be funny if it wasn’t itself prone to violence, since it espouses exactly the same kind of despotism against free thought that it pretends to fight against. It wants to shut down and stamp out debate in the public arena and trample over principles that make it uncomfortable, for instance, the First Amendment asserting the right to free speech. It makes a mockery of the battle cry for “diversity” (diversity only for Antifa-approved ideas). That so many current college students subscribe to the movement ought to make thoughtful people very uneasy about the politics of the coming generation. In their black battle garb and masks, they resemble the very fascist mobs of the 1930s that the name “Antifa” supposedly evokes as its enemy.

The illegal immigrant sanctuary movement is just plain insane, starting with the refusal by officials to even make a distinction between citizens and non-citizens. There is every reason to think that mayors of “sanctuary cities” and administrators on “sanctuary campuses” should be prosecuted under federal law. It has reached such a pitch in California, where state college deans are shepherding “undocumented” students into special programs, that they are sure to provoke the cutoff of funds and perhaps the destruction of their own institutions. The movement is the very essence of lawlessness and a disgrace to the supposedly thinking class.

The LGBTQQ movement, an offshoot of Feminism 3.0, seeks to erase biology itself as applied to human mammalian sexuality, at the same time that it wants to create new special social and political entitlements — based on various categories of sexual desire that they insist are biologically-driven, such as the urge of a man to equip himself via surgery to behave like a woman. The movement has now gone so far as to try to shame people who place themselves in the original biological categories (“cis-gender,” another grad school metaphysical jargon clot), and especially heterosexual men. Everybody else gets brownie points for being “cutting edge.” One really has to wonder how long this nonsense goes on before it provokes a reaction among the biology-literate.

If we’re entering a new civil war, don’t make the mistake of thinking that it is the product solely of extreme right-wing yahooism. These Nazi and KKK bozos are rising up because the thinking-enabled people of the center have been too cowardly to stand up against the rising tide of idiocy festering at both ends of the spectrum, and particularly on the Left with its direct wiring to the policy-making centers of American life, dictating how people must think and act, and what they should care about.

What we can’t really tell yet is whether these battles will remain joined and even escalate after the financial clusterfuck that the nation is sleepwalking into, or if the financial crisis will overwhelm them like a tsunami and leave all the stupid, tattered battle flags washed up on a lonely beach.