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~ Thoughts on Red States and "Deplorables."

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Category Archives: Mainstream Media

A Ruling Class of Ciphers, Flim-Flam Artists and Pinheads

14 Tuesday Dec 2021

Posted by Jim Langcuster in Imperial Decline, Mainstream Media, The Passing Scene

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Elites, Jim Langcuster, Ruling Class, Victor Hanson Davis, Wizard of Oz

This time of year I am invariably reminded of The Wizard of Oz.

You see, during my childhood, we – at least, before the advent of cable, Betamax and VHS – were afforded only a handful of TV stations: CBS-, NBC- and ABC-affiliated local TV stations. Consequently, we were assured of viewing favorite programs – “The Charley Brown Christmas Special,” “Frosty, the Snowman,” and, most significant of all, “The Wizard of Oz” – only once a year.

My parents invariably recalled, far into my adulthood, how I would cry at the end of the “Wizard of Oz,” knowing that a full year would pass before I could view it again. And I can still remember the glee I would feel whenever I spotted one of the early November issues of “TV Guide,” the cover of which typically carried a screen shot from the movie as a teaser for the upcoming broadcast, which invariably occurred on the Sunday evening following Thanksgiving.

Still, despite my sheer fascination with this 1939 classic, I invariably found the last few minutes of the film, when Dorothy and her fellow travelers discover the real nature of Oz, well, rather disappointing and even a bit jarring.

We are exposed all through the film to an entity who seems magical, omnipotent, even godlike, in some respects, only to discover that he was a flim-flam artist from the American Midwest who had employed his wiles and verbal acuity to deceive an entire kingdom.

I was reminded of this childhood reaction reading Victor Davis Hanson’s latest piece on what amounts to the unmasking of the leftist elite class, which once struck millions of ordinary Americans not too long ago as standing at the cusp history – a talented vanguard of this nation’s elite-educated best and brightest who would finally consummate St. Barack’s call for a fundamental transformation of what they regard as a flawed American Experiment.

As Hanson argues so brilliantly, we now have seen the left for what it is: a relatively small legion of weak, immoral, self-serving, sniveling ciphers – not talented or principled people at all, merely mediocre, grasping people not that much different than the mythical Oscar Zoroaster Phadrig Isaac Norman Henkle Emmannuel Ambroise Diggs, who shortened his name to OZ after it occurred to him that the first letters of his names spelled out “O.Z.P.I.N.H.E.A.D.”

Pinhead, after all, is a self-defeating term for a flim-flam artist with lofty aspirations.

But it’s a term that fits our benighted ruling class pretty well.

The Irony, Oh, the Irony!

24 Wednesday Mar 2021

Posted by Jim Langcuster in Mainstream Media, The Passing Scene, U.S. Politics

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anti-whiteness, Jim Langcuster, parody, wokism

Screen capture of The Nation Article

Why is it that so much of what is written today in the victimhood genre strikes me and many others as parody?

One of the most notable examples of late is a screed in The Nation written by a person of color who describes how he has ensconced himself within a dense web of material and technological comforts while anticipating the day, the dreaded day, when he reluctantly will have to emerge from this cocoon to confront once again all the indignities of white society.

Incidentally, he refers to this cocoon as his “whiteness-free castle.”

Hell, forget the parody and consider for a moment the irony bound up in all of this. But then, I doubt that he perceives any irony at at all – the fact that virtually all of the contemporary comforts in which he has enveloped himself all these months were achieved by the very civilization that he so obviously despises.

It’s also worth mentioning that this writer also possesses a singular educational pedigree, having graduated with a B.A. and J.D. from the educational institution that most embodies historic whiteness: Harvard.

Well, let’s just hope that the screen door, invented in 1887 by an Iowan named Elizabeth C Harger, presumably of European extraction, and, for that matter, refined over the past century and mass produced and marketed within a global economic system regarded as one of many crowning achievements of Western civilization doesn’t hit him in the ass on his to way to his first post-covid outing.

He Should Know Better

13 Saturday Feb 2021

Posted by Jim Langcuster in Censorship, Conservatism, Mainstream Media, The Passing Scene

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Andrew Sullivan, Censorship, Jim Langcuster, Public Intellectuals, The Left, The Ruling Class

Andrew Sullivan

I have always admired Andrew Sullivan’s erudition and rhetorical gifts and his remarkably nimble mind. I think that his self-identification as a conservative throughout his adult life is a courageous one. His book The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How to Get It Back was a tour de force, especially his brilliant summary of the life and legacy of Michael Oakeshott.

Yet, I am struck by how he apparently has allowed his addiction to fame and court culture acceptance to blind him to the utter debasement of the American ruling class.

Predictably, Sullivan’s worst animus is reserved for Donald J. Trump, who is now facing his second and unprecedented impeachment trial. Sullivan should know better. Granted, the 45th president is no saint. I and millions of other heartlanders find much of what the former president says to be maddening, intemperate and self-destructive. But Trump speaks on behalf of a deeply and legitimately grieved segment of American society, one whose anger and alienation is every bit as real and as legitimate as the groups that our oligarchical class has assigned accredited victimhood. To pander to a segment of society, which evinces the rankest form of hypocrisy – denigrating a deeply and increasingly alienated segment of society not only to signal its sophistication but also to preserve its own singular advantages – well, does not befit a man of Sullivan’s intellectual integrity, ethical foresight and essentially conservative convictions.

Sullivan is especially one among the cognoscenti who should know better. A quarter century ago, as editor of New Republic, he published an account of Richard Hernstein’s and Charles Murray’s “The Bell Curve.” He editorial decision was something that any responsible editor should have applauded, given that the text offered a well-reasoned, researched and entirely legitimate critique of the previous quarter century of government social policy.

That courageous but responsible decision – one that any editor in his shoes should have endorsed – has haunted his career ever since. Indeed, because of this decision, now regarded by our elites as a serious breach of etiquette, Sullivan’s career has suffered egregiously. And this should serve as a lesson to him and to any other reasonably independent-minded member of the real nature of our oligarchy as well as of the Mandarin class that sustains it.

Donald Trump may not be a pleasant man, but the elites who despise and denigrate him are the principal reason why he wields so much clout, if not adulation, among roughly half of the American electorate. Some 74 million Americans have utterly washed their hands of the regnant managerial liberal class, and the spectacular ascent of Donald Trump has been a major driving force behind this rejection. And that is why our debased ruling class, consumed by a cloying sense of virtue and entitlement and enraged by this obstreperous act of rebellious contempt, is determined to erase Trump’s legacy and, ultimately, to marginalize and silence his electoral base.

Heartlanders know who the real enemies of ordered liberty are. They’re not the bedraggled, angry protestors who breached U.S. Capitol security last month. No, the real enemies are the ones in power who have used their agit/prop arm to transform this breach into the American equivalent of the Reichstag fire.

As I said, Andrew Sullivan should know who the real enemies are.

He very likely does.

MSM: American Pravda

27 Tuesday Mar 2018

Posted by Jim Langcuster in Mainstream Media, U.S. Politics, Uncategorized

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Digital Surveillance, Jim Langcuster, Monopolies, MSM, Muckraking, Pravda, Stormy Daniels, Victor Davis Hanson

zuckerberg

One can always count on the perspicacious Victor Davis Hanson to put the issues of the day into sharp perspective.

And he’s right as rain on this one: The MSM’s refusal to soldier on in its traditional role as nonpartisan muckraker is deeply troubling.

A Hanson observes, “High-tech corporations have acquired massive power and wealth, dwarfing the might of the robber barons of the past.” Yet, MSM seem to have abrogated their traditional role of investigating corporations whose influence threaten the very sinews of a free society.

Yet, this seems to reflect the wholesale decline of media standards in general.

I watched part of the Anderson Cooper’s Stormy interview and was deeply appalled and, yes, troubled. As Sean Hannity recently observed, it sounded like a Jerry Springer interview. It was simply red meat thrown to the MSM’s liberal base. And ponder, for a moment, the outrage that the left would have expressed if Fox News had employed the same voyeuristic treatment of one of Clinton’s detractors some 20 years ago.

Yes, right-wing media have their own problems with marching in ideological lockstep, but, honestly, MSM’s editorial practices are coming to bear a striking resemblance to Pravada’s in the last years of the Soviet Union – simply put, they seem to regard facts as true only so long as the right people (the accredited segments of society) say that they’re true.

Pushed into a Corner

26 Thursday Oct 2017

Posted by Jim Langcuster in Mainstream Media, The Passing Scene, Uncategorized

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Demographics, Douglas Murray, Elites, immigration, Jim Langcuster, Red States, Sasha_Polakow-Suransky, The Strange Death of Europe, Tucker Carlson

tucker-carlson“You get a volatile society when you change it overnight, and you don’t give people a chance to weigh-in on whether they like it or not.”

This was Tucker Carlson’s response last night to Sasha Polakow-Suransky, a journalist who contends that white nationalists David Duke and Richard Spencer constitute a bigger threat to democracy than Islamic Jihadism.

I’m no more of a Duke or Spencer fan or white supremacist (whatever the hell that means) than anyone else who values simple human fairness and decency.

Even so, within the last decade elites in America and Europe, often using extralegal means, have undertaken a rapid and virtually wholesale demographic transformation of the West. And this has been accompanied with a strategy of using official or quasi-official media sources to call out any dissent as rank expressions of racism and white supremacy.  Recall the widely reported account of Angela Merkel asking Mark Zuckerberg near an open microphone about what could be done to repress Facebook criticism of her immigration policies.

These elites have placed all of us firmly on terra incognita. To my knowledge, no demographic change in history has taken place this rapidly and on such a vast scale. We can scarcely predict the social and cultural upheaval that will follow this change, though it sure strikes me as excellent cover for the imposition of more soft authoritarianism on the part of our elites.

Equally disturbing, most of this has taken place with comparatively little public input or debate. And on the few occasions when dialogue has occurred, dissidents haven even been told to emigrate themselves if they do not find this demographic upheaval to their liking. (Read Douglas Murray’s “The Strange Death of Europe” for more details).

When people, especially free people in societies that purport to be democracies, are pushed into a corner, their natural response is to express anger and outrage. Yet, virtually all protest is countered by elites with allegations of racism and white supremacy.

Small wonder why the little people in Deplorablia are growing so restive.

What Cancer?

06 Friday Oct 2017

Posted by Jim Langcuster in Mainstream Media, The Passing Scene, Uncategorized

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Jim Langcuster, Second Amendment, Three-Fifths Compromise, Timothy Egan

In the aftermath of this horrible tragedy in Las Vegas, New York Times columnist Timothy Egan has characterized the Second Amendment as the “cancer in the Constitution,” essentially no different than the “three-fifths” compromise in the constitution that enabled slaveholding states to count a portion of their slave population toward congressional seat apportionment.

“We tried to fix that (the three-fifths provision) through our bloodiest war and a series of amendments that followed,” Egan contends.

The “cancer in the Constitution?” Two truly remarkable facets of the Constitution are the Second and Tenth amendments, which were conceived to underscore to those who governed on our behalf that there were barriers over which they could not step. Far from cancers, they have served, along with other constitutional provisions, as safeguards that have kept tyranny at bay for almost a quarter of a millennium. I often wonder: What will be left of liberty when the left is finished with us? Of course, they will never finish because perpetual revolution defines the very nature of the left.

Of Electoral College Coups and Popular Uprisings

19 Monday Dec 2016

Posted by Jim Langcuster in American Federalism, Mainstream Media, U.S. Politics, Uncategorized

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Donald Trump, Electoral College, Jim Langcuster, Mainstream Media, Political Uprising, Ukrainian Revolution, West Coast

ukrainian-uprising-2014

2014 Ukrainian Revolution. Reference Photo Credit 

There are a few things associated with this media-driven Electoral College spectacle that really intrigue me.

First, the electors who vote today in their respective states  have been verbally harassed and, in some cases, even threatened with bodily harm.

Imagine if electoral fortunes were reversed and Hillary had won under identical circumstances – an Electoral College victory but a popular vote deficit.  Likewise, imagine that red state Americans were engaging in the same sort of angry behavior, bombarding electors with harassing e-mails and even threatening physical harm. The Obama Administration, characterizing all this outlandish behavior as a full-blown crisis, would have fully mobilized all of the resources of the Justice Department.

Within this electoral reality, however, the President has  focused solely on the specter of Russian interference in the presidential election, which remains more speculation than hard fact, while entirely ignoring what, in constitutional terms, should be his first priority: to ensure a safe environment for the 538 individuals charged with undertaking one of this country’s most critical constitutional tasks.

Second, who among thoughtful conservatives isn’t amused by the newfound affinity of Hollywood for the Founding Fathers and the hallowed institution of the Electoral College.

Ponder this irony for a moment: The Electoral College was conceived roughly a quarter millennium ago by these reactionary white-privileged WASPS to thwart the unbridled democratic impulses – the very impulses to which the vast majority of glitterati have paid such perfervid lip service for generations, certainly since the advent of FDR’s New Deal.

Talk about elite political discourse turning on a dime!

Third, I’m shocked that mainstream media are actually indulging talk of incipient revolution – a popular uprising that could topple Trump, much the same way that Ukrainians deposed ex-President Viktor Yanukovych.

Red state Americans raised similar concerns about what could follow a Hillary Clinton presidency throughout the election cycle, and many of their arguments were valid. Clinton Foundation shenanigans, the underhanded dealings of the Democratic National Committee to throw the nomination in favor of Hillary, and the Obama Administration’s politicization of the Justice Department and intelligence gathering apparatus really pointed to a regime resembling far more a Latin American banana republic than the historic Anglo-American republic bound by an ironclad commitment to the rule of law.

Yet, imagine the outrage within the mainstream media that would follow if the the specter of an popular insurgency were raised by right-leaning news sources and opinionators in the aftermath of a Hillary victory.  And to add an extra layer of irony to all of this: These are the same people who are devoting serious discussion to the topic secession, now that West Coast progressives have evinced an interest in the topic.

Fourth and finally, I am no less intrigued by the lengths to which the New York Times and other elite media have underscored the smallness of the Trump win.  Quite conveniently, as as the Electoral College meets today in state capitals throughout the country,  the New York Times posted an article with considerable graphic enhancement illustrating that Trump’s electoral victory ranks 46th among 58 presidential elections.  The Times stresses that among presidential victors Trump edges out only the rock-bottomed ranked Rutherford B. Hayes and John Quincy Adams in his popular vote share.

Yet, there is really nothing small at all about this election outcome when one considers it within the wider context of American  political history.  The biggest political maverick among all presidential contenders, minimized, scorned and denigrated by elites as the mouthpiece of the most socially and culturally marginalized segment of the electorate – Flyover Americans – overcame a series of what were considered at the time mortal blows to win what will likely be recalled by historians as the biggest political upset in American history.

In that respect, Trump’s victory was not a small one, not by a long shot.

The only other presidential maverick/victor who comes anywhere close to this electoral upset is Andrew Jackson.  And almost two centuries since Jackson’s victory, we still recall how he completely re-sifted the American political and cultural landscape.

Donald Trump presents an immediate, perhaps even mortal, threat to the interests of the American ruling class.  And I believe it’s this existential threat that accounts for all this talk within Establishment media of Electoral College coups and popular uprisings.

A Libertarian Perspective on Donald Trump

16 Friday Dec 2016

Posted by Jim Langcuster in Mainstream Media, U.S. Politics

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Jim Langcuster, Llewellyn Rockwell, MARs, Middle American Radicals, The U.S. Political Class

lew-rockwell

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.. Photo: Courtesy of Gage Skidmore.

I’ll preface my acclaim for Llewellyn Rockwell, Jr.’s most recent praise of Donald Trump with this disclaimer: Rockwell is on the PropORNot blacklist –  whatever the hell PropOrNot is – though Rockwell would be the first to consider that listing as something akin to placement in a hall of fame in defense of traditional American liberty.

Aside from that, much of what Rockwell relates in this article is quite valid, at least, from my vantage point.

For starters, the Establishment media’s claim that a Donald Trump presidency will leave in its wake the utter wreckage of the New Deal and Great Society programs is utterly uniformed within the context of the last 50 years of U.S. political history.

MARs, the Middle American Radicals who provided the margin for Trump’s upset are not anti-entitlement. Quite the contrary: the MARs backbone is comprised of working-class whites who have always been favorably disposed to entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare.

No, the part about Trump’s base that frightens the willies out of the U.S. political class – and should, frankly – is that MARs regard the U.S. ruling class with the same profound and unmitigated contempt with which the elites regard them. And this deep contempt presents a potentially mortal threat to everything this class holds dear – all the major sources of coercion and control on which they rely: the federal courts, the federal bureaucracy, open borders, the #CorruptMedia monopoly, and left-wing academia, to name only a few.

From his perspective as a libertarian, Rockwell concedes that the Trump presidency will be characterized by its share of “statist idiocy and outrages,” as have all U.S. presidencies  to one degree or another within the last century.  Even so, he contends that the Trump era potentially could go a long way toward awakening the public mind to true nature of the elite institutions that “have poisoned the public mind against liberty.”

 In the view of many Americans, not just libertarians, that is precisely why elite media, academia and entertainment are characterizing  Donald Trump as the greatest threat to the American Republic since Aaron Burr.

No More Lecturing about Blacklisting

11 Sunday Dec 2016

Posted by Jim Langcuster in American History, Mainstream Media, Uncategorized

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Blacklisting, Donald Trump, Election 2016, Fake News, Hillary Clinton, Jim Langcuster, McCarthyism, PropOrNot, Russian propagandists, The Washington Post

joseph-mccarthy
Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy

The Daily Beast’s title pretty much summarizes the situation: The Washington Post has placed itself, however unwittingly, on a fake news hot seat.  And it may emerge from this debacle not only with a badly reddened backside but also with a deeply tarnished reputation.

By now, most informed Americans know the drill: A Post article published over the Thanksgiving holidays maintains that deft Russian propagandists have actively colluded with or deluded certain news U.S. news sources to disseminate fake news and with the goal of destabilizing American democracy and, in the course of which, undermining Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and electing Donald Trump.

Several of the news sites targeted by the article are enraged and threatening legal action.

The focus of the outrage stems from the Post’s use of a highly specious and secretive source, PropOrNot, whose media blacklist was posted online only a few days after the group launched its Twitter feed, according to The Daily Beast.

From my prospective, what has transpired almost exceeds the bounds of belief. As a late Baby Boomer, I was brought up within an educational environment in which the whole premise of blacklisting was roundly condemned and characterized as one of the more odious penchants of the American Right.

Now, of all people, The Washington Post, which built a journalistic legacy reporting on and condemning McCarthyist blacklists and Nixonian enemies lists, appears to have employed slipshod journalism – if this even qualifies as conventional journalism – to construct a blacklist of its own.

In the aftermath of all of this, I’ll say this to my liberal friends and acquaintances and left-wing posters to this site: Please don’t lecture me anymore about the authoritarian proclivities of the right unless you are willing to concede an inconvenient truth, namely that the left-leaning Establishment appears to harbor a few authoritarian aspirations of its own.

A Warning that Should Be Heeded

06 Tuesday Dec 2016

Posted by Jim Langcuster in Mainstream Media, U.S. Politics

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', Business Insider, Culture Wars, Mainstream Media, Media Bias, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Tucker Carlson

tucker-carlson

Tucker Carlson, Host of Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight”

A couple of very thoughtful friends have chided me occasionally because I have had the temerity to post partisan pieces to social media. But despite my professional communications background, I do regard much of mainstream media with profound ambivalence. My personal view is superbly expressed by libertarian-conservative Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson in a recent Business Insider interview.

As I see it, there arguably is very little news that should be regarded as nonpartisan and unbiased. Borrowing from techie parlance, this is because the filters of even so-called elite news entities are as badly contaminated as others.

I, for one, subscribe to the digital editions of The New York Times and Washington Post and read those papers faithfully.  I’ll even concede that I find much of this reading deeply enlightening and informative.  But I take much of it with a grain of salt  and balance it with other sources regarded as partisan, most of which I garner from RealClearPolitics.com, an excellent source of political news.

As I see it, this sort of eclectic reading is required of all of us in a digital media age that more closely resembles the freewheeling reportage in the Age of Andrew Jackson than the slow, methodical, even plodding reporting associated with the age of Walter Cronkite.

Why?  Because I think that Carlson and other media observers make the strong case that so-called mainstream media are largely unreliable because they reflect the opinions of elites who operate with their own badly damaged filters.  They believe nothing “unless it comes from The New Yorker, [The] New York Times editorial page, or The Washington Post.” And to add an extra layer of complication to all of this, many of our elites operate with a profound contempt for many for many of us, namely the ones who occupy the deep-dyed red American heartland.

Yes, plenty of red state Americans despise the Establishment, but this animus is more than compensated by the contempt in which our elites hold us, as Carlson stresses in this interview.

Quoting Carlson: “What bothers me is the lack of self-awareness. I don’t know if I have ever met a group less self-aware than political reporters. They honestly don’t believe that there are legitimate alternative views of anything. And like most small-minded and dumb people they are very, very quick to dismiss anything they don’t understand as crazy.”

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