Chapter five - The Diversity Diversion

Carlson starts off this chapter by saying that identity politics is being incited as a way to distract the populous from important economic problems that our ruling class is creating.

He gives numerous examples of the growth of racial identity politics in the U.S., including college segregation and growing anti-white discrimination. He also spends several pages talking about Ta-Nehisi Coates, his career, his thoroughly unimpressive book Between the World and Me. Although the book is poorly written and not especially insightful, it received raving praise from white leftists. Indeed, the only prominent "mainstream" voices who disagreed with this assessment were black intellectuals, several of whom Carlson quotes denigrating the book. (Any day now "denigrating" will be declared an unacceptably racist term, by the way.)

Carlson also documents how, for all their talk about loving diversity, leftists with the resources to do so strive to avoid it, showing how they all live in neighborhoods much whiter and safer than the kind they advocate for. This, by the way, includes prominent black politicians like Barack Obama and the execrable Maxine Waters.

As one last example of the problems created by identity politics, Carlson describes the breakdown of the "March for Science" because, shocker, actual scientists (even what passes for scientists today), are overwhelmingly white and male.

Finally, Carlson anticipates the rise of white identity politics and worries what this could do to our country.

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I haven't gotten to look at all of the book suggestions yet. I'll have to review those and do a midweek post to see what we want to cover next.

Thanks for your contributions. I'll talk with you soon.

Chapter Four - Shut Up, They Explained

Carlson says that liberals in America used to support free speech, regardless of whether they agreed with the cause. He gives several examples of this, including the ACLU, which most famously defended a Nazi group's right to march in a largely Jewish neighborhood in Skokie, Illinois. Another example was the Berkeley free speech movement, where students protested the arrest of Jack Weinberg for passing out unauthorized political literature, blocking the police car for over a day.

Today, says Carlson, the left, including Berkeley, has completely reversed itself on the issue. When Milo Yiannopoulos attempted to speak at Berkeley, students rioted (and the administration and local police allowed the riots) until his speech was cancelled. Other speakers similarly driven from the halls of intellectual debate include Ann Coulter, Condaleeza Rice, and Charles Murray. (I'm aware of more than a few on the right today who would similarly condemn Murray, although they'd half-heartedly agree he should still be allowed to speak.)

The problem extends beyond university campuses, says Carlson, showing up prominently in big tech companies, such as Google, where James Damore was fired for an inoffensive memo which documented quite a bit of science and data saying that "discrimination" was not the primary cause of some people not faring as well in such environments. Brandon Eich, in another case, was driven out of the company he helped found for a minor donation to a Prop. 8 in California, which said that marriage was between a man and a woman.

Carlson ends the chapter talking about the disturbing merger of "journalism" and government power and how this bodes ill for all of us.

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So we're already nearing the end of this book and it's time to pick our next. The first question is should we continue the previous policy of alternating fiction and non-fiction? I enjoy them, but the fiction books seem to get noticably less engagement.

After that comes the question: What should be our next book? I'll look back over previous lists, but I'm open to suggestion and we'll see what the group, as a whole, thinks. No mail-in ballots, though.

Chapter Three - Foolish Wars

Tucker Carlson documents our ruling class's infatuation with getting the United States into wars which have little to no connection to the interests of the people of the U.S.

Carlson starts off by reporting the warmongering of one Max Boot. From the year 2000 all the way up through today, Boot has advocated over and over for the United States to attack country after country with no clear overall purpose, or at least no purpose relevant to the American people. Countries on Boot's hit list include Iraq, Afghanistan, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Syria, and Russia.

Boot, by the way, who is so eager to throw the U.S. military, largely composed of white Christians, into the meatgrinder, is Jewish.

Carlson documents the collapse of the anti-war left from the end of the Vietnam war to today. Although there used to be a faction of liberals fervently opposed to the violence of war, that has evaporated over the past 50 years. They made a brief resurgence during George W. Bush's presidency, but as evidenced by their disinterest in Obama's wars, this was strictly about partisan politics, not opposition to war.

Carlson then turns the spotlight to the biggest warmonger of the nominal right: Bill Kristol. Kristol is a never-Trump "conservative." He was initially a supporter of Donald Trump's campaign, but was infuriated when Trump said that the Iraq war was a disaster we should never have taken part in. Kristol seems to imagine himself as the kingmaker of the conservative movement, and has had some success, including sidelining Pat Buchanan. He also has a consistent track record of cheering on war here, there, and everywhere.

Bill Kristol, eager to start wars he and his will take no part in, is also Jewish. Carlson neglects to mention this, nor that he shares it in common with Max Boot.

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I just wanted to say thank you to all the regular commenters here. I realize I am sometimes slow in putting up my own thoughts on a chapter. But I really enjoy reading all of your thoughts and watching the discussion. So thank you WanderingWonderer, Wiffiely, Mark Taylor, Lugnuts, and anyone I missed.

Keep up the interesting conversation.

You're totally not being replaced, and if you are, you deserve it.

I used to like Andrew Klavan. I really did. He was funny and explained and defended well a lot of things that mattered to me. I didn't agree with him on everything, but you don't agree with anyone on everything.

But this was the last straw.

First off, and this bit of dishonesty is just tiring: when said by a group, it's almost impossible to distinguish "you" from "Jew." And because anyone who doesn't like Jews is scary and evil, the anti-racists decided they were saying "Jews will not replace us."

But let's get beyond that. Why is it wrong to object to being replaced in your homeland? Why is it wrong to say, "This is my home. These are my people. We don't want to be invaded and displaced by a different people"? Isn't this what patriotism meant throughout history?

But no, now expressing this sentiment is bad and evil and makes you a Nazi who masturbates to pictures of Adolf Hitler (that's Klavan, not me).

So what's he saying here? Oh, this totally isn't happening to you and you're a paranoid lunatic to even think that anyone would do that. But it totally should happen to you. Ha ha! Chuckles, chuckles!

And yes, he says "white supremacists," but all that means these days is a white person who doesn't hate himself and his ancestors.

And anyone who objects to the protestors at the U.S. Capitol being called "insurrectionists" and "rioters," if you didn’t object to the gross mischaracterization, the absolute demonization, of the protestors at Charlottesville, you helped set the stage for what is being done to us today.

And now I'm going to think about something else so I can stop being angry.

 

Chapter Two - Importing a Serf Class

In this chapter, Carlson describes the consensus on immigration and how the left has shifted on the issue. It used to be understood that the primary purpose of our government was to serve those who were, in fact, already Americans. Now, however, government policy, affirmed and encouraged by major corporations, is to be far more concerned with the well-being of the populations of every third-world country, whose well-being is apparently best served by importing them to the U.S.

Carlson provides several examples, including hero of the American left today, Hugo Chavez (a hero mostly because he's not white). Chavez, though an immigrant himself, was a harsh immigration restrictionist, understanding that a constant inflow of new immigrants could only drive down wages. However, while still venerating him and adopting his slogan "Yes, we can!" today's left completely denies this basic fact of economics.

Other examples of this shift include the labor unions, and the environmentalist group the Sierra Club, both of which, for differing reasons used to oppose increased immigration, and both of which, in recent decades, have turned a complete 180 on the issue.