Author: J. Arthur Bloom

J. Arthur Bloom is the blog's editor, opinion editor of the Daily Caller, and an occasional contributor to the Umlaut. He was formerly associate editor of the American Conservative and a music reviewer at Tiny Mix Tapes, and graduated from William and Mary in 2011. He lives in Washington, DC, and can be found, far too often, on Twitter.

Armed civil disobedience and the patriot movement

I wrote a column this week over at TheDC about the Las Vegas shooters, and how, after the media has gone to great pains to trump up any connection between spree killers and the right, they’ve finally got one that seems to fit the profile:

For Sunday morning’s shooting in Las Vegas, in which Jerad and Amanda Miller allegedly shot two police officers and a bystander before the latter took both of their lives, no such dissembling is required. We appear to have on our hands a pair of bona fide right-wing terrorists — cosplaying Cliven Bundy supporters, Mickey and Mallory with a head full of meth and Alex Jones. Amanda Miller even claimed on her Facebook that she worked for Hobby Lobby. They’re just perfect.

Read the whole thing, it goes into some other cases and notes another shooting with a Gadsden motif. Dishonest movement bloggers like the neocon Jim Hoft react to this news by sticking their fingers in their ears and going ‘nyah nyah he was a socialist.’ But in this case, at least, it doesn’t appear that way.

One of the more interesting wrinkles in the story is their apparent support for the III Percenters — so named because that is supposedly the percentage of American colonists who took up arms against the crown. We can’t necessarily infer the significance of the connection from the fact that they ‘liked’ them on Facebook — I do too, for one thing — but they were supposedly Adam Kokesh fans too, and made it down to Cliven Bundy’s ranch, so there’s a lot of circumstantial evidence that they’ve taken up significant parts of III Percenter ideology.

Who are the III Percenters? Well, have a look at this speech in Connecticut by the man who created it, Mike Vanderboegh:

I’m fascinated by Vanderboegh, for a lot of reasons. He broke the Fast and Furious scandal to Sharyl Attkisson and introduced her to the whistleblowers, for one thing. For another, when he speaks, he says very radical things, but doesn’t come across as hateful or crazy, unlike, say Adam Kokesh’s bizarre libertarian headspace in which killing cops is implicitly an act of self-defense. For what it’s worth, it’s also hard to see him abide the Millers’ fanboy bullshit; the far right is unbecoming when clothed in V for Vendetta slogans and Batman haberdashery. This isn’t about fame, or martyrdom, or the new world order, or any of that. It’s about letting those in government know that their is a limit to what the armed populace will take lying down, telling them, in the hope that it will make them change their minds, that “if you try to take our firearms, we will kill you.”

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Orwell identifies ‘neo-reactionaries’ in 1943

A big h/t to Brad Birzer on Facebook, for pointing out this column Orwell wrote for Tribune in 1943:

Reading Michael Roberts’s book on T. E. Hulme, I was reminded once again of the dangerous mistake that the Socialist movement makes in ignoring what one might call the neo-reactionary school of writers. There is a considerable number of these writers: they are intellectually distinguished, they are influential in a quiet way and their criticisms of the Left are much more damaging than anything that issues from the Individualist League or the Conservative Central Office.

T. E. Hulme was killed in the last war and left little completed work behind him, but the ideas that he had roughly formulated had great influence, especially on the numerous writers who were grouped round the Criterion in the twenties and thirties. Wyndham Lewis, T. S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, Malcolm Muggeridge, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene all probably owe something to him. But more important than the extent of his personal influence is the general intellectual movement to which he belonged, a movement which could fairly be described as the revival of pessimism. Perhaps its best-known living exponent is Marshal Pétain. But the new pessimism has queerer affiliations than that. It links up not only with Catholicism, Conservatism and Fascism, but also with Pacifism (California brand especially), and Anarchism. It is worth noting that T. E. Hulme, the upper-middle-class English Conservative in a bowler hat, was an admirer and to some extent a follower of the Anarcho-Syndicalist, Georges Sorel.

The thing that is common to all these people, whether it is Pétain mournfully preaching ‘the discipline of defeat’, or Sorel denouncing liberalism, or Berdyaev shaking his head over the Russian Revolution, or ‘Beachcomber’ delivering side-kicks at Beveridge in the Express, or Huxley advocating non-resistance behind the guns of the American Fleet, is their refusal to believe that human society can be fundamentally improved. Man is non-perfectible, merely political changes can effect nothing, progress is an illusion. The connexion between this belief and political reaction is, of course, obvious. Other-worldliness is the best alibi a rich man can have. ‘Men cannot be made better by act of Parliament; therefore I may as well go on drawing my dividends.’ No one puts it quite so coarsely as that, but the thought of all these people is along those lines: even of those who, like Michael Roberts and Hulme himself, admit that a little, just a little, improvement in earthly society may be thinkable.

The danger of ignoring the neo-pessimists lies in the fact that up to a point they are right.

Birzer has written a fair bit about Hulme.

Secession lagniappe

Reid Wilson passes on a map of the U.S. that could have been, by Andrew Shears:

USNeverWasBig

Mixed results in the Jefferson State referenda this week:

California voters in two northern rural counties split the difference Tuesday on 51st state ballot measures aimed at carving out a new state called Jefferson.

Measure A lost by 41 to 59 percent in Del Norte County, while Tehama County voters approved Measure A by 56 to 44 percent, according to figures from the county clerks.

… In Del Norte County, a union-backed group called Keep It California waged a battle against the measure, arguing that it would further impoverish the county by removing state funding for services like schools. The school board had also opposed the proposal.

Supposedly the AFL-CIO and SEIU-backed opposition spent more than 40k opposing the measure. More county boards are taking it up next week, so stay tuned. Mark Baird fires back at local officials regarding the unsuccessful Del Norte county vote:

We are not finished by a long shot. It took Maine three tries to break away from Massachusetts. The apathy from the Massachusetts legislature toward a distant corner of the state is a reflection of what is going on here.

Liars, lie. It is what they do. It is in David Finnigan’s nature to be a liar. He has violated county administrative procedures by denying the other Supervisors the opportunity to speak and to vote. He has denied the public their First Amendment rights in a public meeting. He has lied to his constituents regarding attempts to widen the highway, when he is a member of the group which wants to keep a dangerous road. Martha McClure is cut from the same cloth.

Isn’t Hendricks the guy responsible for the alleged missing funds from the waste management district?

He’s quoted in this Washington Times report too.

Here’s Keli’i Akina’s piece on why the Obama administration’s proposal for what amounts to tribal recognition for Native Hawaiians is unconstitutional and doesn’t address the aspirations of independence advocates.

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Sacred Harp 176b: ‘Blooming Youth’

Courtesy Dust to Digital:

In the bright season of thy youth, / In nature’s smiling bloom,
Ere age arrives, and trembling waits / It summons to the tomb.

Remember thy Creator, God; / For Him thy pow’rs employ;
Make Him thy fear, thy love, thy hope, / Thy portion and thy joy.

The Lord will safely guide thy course / O’er life’s uncertain seas.
And bring thee to the peaceful shore, / The heav’n prepared for thee.

george-rodger-10

Elliot Rodger’s OMG chronicles

We’re about two weeks out from the Isla Vista massacre, and salacious round-ups of available social media information have given way to thoughtful columns about what it all means.

One of the most striking things about Elliot Rodger’s mental state, in his manifesto and elsewhere, is his insistence that, despite all evidence to the contrary, he was “a drop-dead gorgeous, fabulous, stylish, exotic gem among thousands of rocks.”

As many have noted, this and other details seem to indicate a privileged cast of mind taken to the extreme, which is why his rampage made for the perfect ‘teachable moment’ to a media increasingly devoted to narratives about patriarchy and white supremacy — Rodger was simply a malignant version of the latent biases within all of us; his violence an individualized form of the structural oppression embedded in all corners of our society, and so on.

The truth seems somewhat more complicated — the boy really did have a pedigree; one that, like so many others, decayed. The image above is one of Elliot Rodger’s grandfather’s many famous photographs.

George Rodger’s definitive posthumous collection is called Humanity or Inhumanity, covering his many years of work, including most famously his photographs of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. If his work resides in the tension between those things, it seems to have been resolved in his grandson’s only artistic creation two generations later, with Elliot’s realization of “just how brutal and twisted humanity is as a species.”

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Sacred Harp 312b: ‘Restoration’

You’ll recognize the words, maybe not the tune. I picked this video because a kid is leading it:

Come, Thou Fount of ev’ry blessing, / Tune my heart to sing Thy grace.
Streams of mercy, never ceasing, / Call for songs of loudest praise.

I will rise and go to Jesus, / He’ll embrace me in His arms;
In the arms of my dear Savior; / Oh there are ten thousand charms.

Teach me some melodious sonnet, / Sung by flaming tongues above;
Praise the mount — O fix me on it — / Mount of Thy redeeming love!