Madness

The Butcher Doctrine

CONFIDENTIAL MEMORANDUM

To: The office of the President
Cc: The office of the Sec. of State; the office of the Sec. of Defense; the office of the Chief of Staff
Bcc: The office of the Sec. of the Interior; the office of the Sec. of Homeland Security
Re: The present discontents

Dear Mr. President:

It is a great disappointment to me that no one in your administration could have foreseen the development upon which you’ve called me to advise. But far be it from me to accuse anyone of being willfully misinformed of the present state of the country they are tasked with running, and far be it from me to set a distinguishing line between relevance of and distraction with expansion-friendly policies outside of its borders. They always tell us we never stop learning, I guess they just left it to us to find out just how hard the lessons get.

On the other hand, the striking subtlety of the development of the crisis is rather unique. It seems even residents of the states in question did not take notice when display of the stars and stripes was re-raised under or replaced with state flags on all public buildings, or that some of those state flags had been markedly redesigned. Nor, it seems, did they bat an eye at the third party waves that swelled in their midterm elections. And they practically shrugged off decrees “nationalizing” the pharmacies, flouting drug laws, FDA regulations, and any vestige of education reform in equal measure. I suppose it was when the tire road blocks went up on their sections of the interstate highways that things started to look off. Or perhaps it was that YouTube video of that cardboard cutout of you being dragged by a pickup truck, being shot at with crossbows, and then roasted on a spit. No one was taking over the post offices so no alarm bells—literally or figuratively—went off. If this is a phase, as some pundits are suggesting, it is looking to be a drawn out and expensive one.

But these things you already know. You ask for advice on dealing with them and you shall have it.

First let me dispel any anxiety you may have that I or anyone else question your confidence or abilities. Clearly this is not the case. Yes, I didn’t actually vote for you myself, but clearly many others did. Every four years American voters go into the ballot booths, their minds alight with fires consuming every corner of the nation, and look to determine which of the two most credible candidates will extinguish them most ably. A clear majority left it to you to be the extinguisher. And no doubt for your part were you imagining yourself extinguishing those very same fires, perhaps even practicing Rooseveltian turns on your iPhone on the campaign bus. This is natural for every American, whether candidate or voter. The overlap here is very rare and would be precious if it didn’t feed into this particular problem.

America’s history is chain-linked with destruction-redemption narratives. If it is not a trait unique to us it is certainly a habit. This puts pressure on a chief executive to distinguish him or herself in the pantheon of his or her predecessors. It sends Presidents off on hunting expeditions for the next great nation-defining existential crisis, or worse it attracts singularly obsessive sociopaths to the office. These Presidents, however, are a few and privileged sort. For the rest of them, crises come with the timing of their stays. There is a reason, for instance, why James Madison is chiefly remembered for fathering the Constitution and why James Buchanan is barely remembered for anything at all. Your administration is being defined on this line as I am writing. Since subversion of the union is your crisis, I suspect people have been directing you to look to Lincoln. I would advise that you look carefully.

Seeing as how you—and several other candidates you defeated—announced your candidacy on April 2015, amid the 150th anniversaries of the Confederate surrender and Lincoln’s assassination, that legacy could not have been far from your or any other hopeful’s mind. But in your position you’ll need to search within yourself to see if you’re able, and not just willing, to meet the demands of a Lincolnian situation. Lincoln was a remarkably self-aware dictator, but he was a dictator all the same. He stretched the role of the executive beyond previously accepted confines. Under his leadership, the side being rebelled against was more radical than the side rebelling. The self-inflicted cosmetic surgery of that war was almost Ballardian really. Beneath his soothing, merciful rhetoric lays the longstanding trauma of his victory. The federalized republic is no less fictive than Westeros compared to the centralized superstate that has since emerged. To modern Americans, the indivisibility of the country is fact; its continental contours are granted; executive power is enshrined; they themselves are willingly chained to its ground in binds of satin.

Lincoln’s America has been one with a ferocious hunger for changes social, cultural, ancestral, and material, held together by his sentiment and his war’s trauma. If those seem like unworkable contradictions for a country as vast as ours that’s because they are. Congratulations, Mr. President, the trauma has been overcome, and the darkness has fallen on your watch. At least you have some choice in whether it shall be followed by dawn or by pitch blackness.

The situation, then, calls for a solution of Lincolnian magnitude, and here you can be the first President to actually not make the error of confusing Lincolnianism for simply repeating what Lincoln did but on a larger scale. The Civil War was a transgressive act; your policy for wringing order out of disorder must be also.

Allowing for secession is out of the question. Forget the Supreme Court; the American people will not tolerate any state or region to leave the Union. There would surely be a new name for the panic to be felt by those Americans who still believe in the enforced neighborliness between the states. The armed forces will be stretched to their limits containing both your own citizens and the rebelling citizens.

Unilateral expulsion, on the other hand, is an untried but far worthier alternative. If there is nothing in American history on which to found its logic we, like some of our federal judges, can look to other nations for precedent. Many forget that Singapore came into existence by being expelled from Malaysia. The Czech Republic and Slovakia are the results of a bitter but amicable “divorce.” Even if the partition of Northern Ireland was almost entirely out of Ireland’s hands, lifting it through consent alone seems ever more remote. It can, and in this case, must be implemented here. You would do well not to expel all the conflicted states, perhaps one or two at first, maybe those with the least to be gained from you resource-wise if you’re not feeling too risky. This will send the message to the rest of them of your seriousness, and also prevent them from confederating. They will own their resources, they will own their social and economic conditions, they will own all the military equipment we gave their police departments that they would surely use against us if we came to blows.

Your authority grants this, and your resolve in doing so will decide how easily it can be questioned. The object of your conflict, if one has not yet been determined, is preservation of individual life and property. You yourself once tweeted that “America is the first power in history motivated by a desire to expand freedom rather than its own territory.”

A great President distinguishes him or herself from a caretaker President by being less concerned with reelection prospects and more concerned with being the last President, period. If this policy makes you just that, there’s little that can be done besides owning up to it. Encouraging and preserving harmony between current and former Americans is the task left to you, whether you want it or not. They will, in all likelihood, stand athwart you, and vanquish you, hopefully in just the polls. They will demonize you and try to erase your very being from its history. They will call you “America’s butcher,” though that is still a notch up from “American butcher”. If dealt with properly, with mercy and self-awareness, this will subside. Lincoln will have been overcome by a new New Birth of Freedom. And after a long line of American Churchill aspirants, an American Gorbachev is preferable to, say, an American Humungus.

[Author’s note: this piece was adapted from an entry of my newsletter, Black Ribbon Award, which you can subscribe to here, if you’re so inclined.]

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Fairfax County is leading America’s decline into a post-gender madhouse

What’s that T.S. Eliot line about the world ending without a bang but a whimper?

Since conservatives excel at Chicken Little-ism over social matters, let me be the one to say that American society is succumbing to the post-modern forces that believe gender is a mutable trait. There is nothing traditionalists, also known as plain, moderate people, can do to stop this inexorable finality. We’re doomed; doomed I tells ya! Labeling children boys and girls will soon be an anachronism, the equivalent of putting “colored only” signs over public water fountains.

The tipping point is occurring right in my neck of the woods: Fairfax County, Virginia.

Now, I wasn’t raised in Fairfax County. I can’t be blamed for its yuppie, liberal, high-income residents who use public schools as a crucible for a genderless society. I was lucky enough to snag an affordable apartment when I moved to the D.C. metropolitan area just over two years ago. So here I am, living amidst the next great battle in American culture wars.

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The only attacks worth listening to are the ones nobody hears

Last night I was checking out a #gamergate meetup where Milo Yiannopoulos and Christina Hoff Sommers were appearing at, taking place at a bar called Local 16. I walk up the stairs and see the crowd, and suddenly memories of Magic: the Gathering tournaments come rushing back to me. I leave early, only to find out that at 12:15 people are evacuated for a “fire drill” which turns out to be a bomb threat. The threat was made by a throwaway Twitter account and not by phone call.

A lot of people implicated Arthur Chu, who was making cryptic tweets beforehand:

He also sent a weird email to Local 16, trying to shame them for hosting what he calls “a right wing hate group.”

These are definitely the kinds of bizarre communications you’d expect from an ideological fanatic, but overheated rhetoric claiming that Arthur Chu made the bomb threat is ridiculous and everyone should know better. Almost as ridiculous is claiming that anyone would give their ideological opposition the much-coveted victim card to wear as a badge of martyrdom.

Someone who hates #gamergate making this bomb threat doesn’t make sense. Without specific knowledge, we can only deal with general knowledge of who has what kinds of incentives. I can see two possibilities. It was either a third-party prankster trying to stir up drama or a pro-gamergate figure trying to get a slice of his the victim pie for his comrades.

In either case, there is going to be a rude awakening. It’s going to be interesting to observe the complete asymmetry in mainstream coverage of this bomb threat. Even the least credible threats to anti-gamergate personalities get massive mainstream coverage. That just isn’t going to happen this time or any time that the ideologically misaligned are on the receiving end of such things. Bias isn’t always a conscious thing. It’s often expressed by what the editorial board isn’t thinking about. No amount of social media flailing is going to change that.

While everyone else on social media seem to take the most unfounded threats with the grace of a diving soccer player, what’s actually interesting are the quiet attacks. The website that I edit for, TechRaptor, has been DDoS’d four times. Nobody announced it. The only reason I know this is because the owner of the site told me privately. The perpetrators didn’t announce their evil intentions on social media. We also gets threats in the comments which are quickly and quietly removed. TechRaptor doesn’t malinger about it. That’s what it looks like when angry fanatics are genuinely trying to silence you. It looks like nothing.

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Put down your phone and stop and smell the flowers

How I admire Andy Crouch. The Christian author recently took a vacation from the hardest thing to escape: the digital realm. For two months, he eschewed the screens that keep us permanently attached to the internet. He didn’t succumb to the fear of “missing out.” Rather, he was able to live more fully in the moment, enjoy himself, and focus on much-neglected hobbies. He even experienced a real rarity in the hyper-connected world: “just quiet and an absence of hurry to get to the next thing.”

I thought about Crouch’s sojourn away from modernity while paying visit to D.C.’s annual blooming of the cherry blossoms. Situated around the Tidal Basin, the springtime event is a tradition that goes back over a century when Tokyo Mayor Yukio Ozaki gifted our country with prunus serrulata (Japanese cherry) trees to signify improving relations between the U.S. and Japan. Clearly, Franklin Roosevelt didn’t get the memo when he interned nearly 100,000 Japanese citizens and non-citizens following the Pearl Harbor attacks. But that’s neither here nor there.

Visiting the cherry blossoms trees is a pleasant experience if you can ignore one thing: rude, absentminded crowds. I can’t stand them. Running around without regard for rules, or basic decency, the typical tourist to the National Mall is the embodiment of modern America. Crude, self-centered, and wholly unconcerned with the well-being of everyone around them – this is the American ethos. Some call it a “me me me” pathology. I call it mass consumerism and individualism run amok.

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Ellen Pao walks to a courtroom in San Francisco Superior Court in San Francisco

No, the “real victims” of false narratives are not the ones the narratives were made to serve

Are police officers are the real victims of unarmed black men being shot dead by the police? Of course not – that would be an insane thing to believe. Even though police officers might be coming under more scrutiny as a result of recent incidents, that’s not the same thing as actually being a the victim of those incidents.

The problem is that these incidents are probably facilitated by a police narrative. In the wake of the killing of Walter Scott, a Fox legal analyst revealed that planting weapons used to be standard procedure for cops. Does this mean that cops are pure evil? No. It means that within police culture there exists have a narrative that isn’t necessarily backed up by evidence specific to the relevant incident. The argument would go that criminals exist, and sometimes criminals get lucky and can get away with it due to a lack of evidence. It’s up to the police officers to tilt the scales in the favor of justice by bending the truth. And since black men commit a disproportionate amount of the crime, there is a problem that has to be solved with evidence-agnostic action that may break a few eggs to make the omelet.

Women actually facing harassment aren’t the “real victims” of Ellen Pao’s failure to achieve her dishonest shakedown of Silicon Valley. Businesses targeted by ideological profiteers are. The ideology is based on the specious claim of the culture of Silicon Valley is a “boy’s club.” Because Silicon Valley is like this, any specific Silicon Valley company is guilty by association. This claim that Pao’s company must have been guilty of discriminating against women was made by the media before they even had the evidence. They made an evidence-agnostic claim that if Silicon Valley is sexist in general, any charge of sexism made against any tech company must true. Every narrative like this demands that we make examples of those who embody its fears.

When UVA rape story broke, the media was already waiting for it to happen. After all, fraternities as institutions of white male privilege, and therefore “rape culture,” are a mainstay of fashionable progressive demonology. When the hysteria died down and the story came under scrutiny, it unraveled. It turned out that Rolling Stone just didn’t really check their facts on the ever so narrative-friendly incident. But while the story was eventually skewered by the media, there was no real desire to adjust the narrative of a rape crisis on campus. The “real victims” of the fanciful hoax were actually women on campus, since their claims will now be more easily dismissed. It’s not the men or fraternities that were falsely accused of rape. It can’t be. When the narrative has such an embarrassing failure, the only victims of such a failure can be those who the narrative was built to serve.

Thankfully, the media doesn’t have the same narrative in favor of police officers. Just because black people are overrepresented in crime doesn’t mean that every instance of a black man being shot dead means that he deserved it. Discrimination happening doesn’t mean that any given company is guilty of it and should be made an example of. Rape being a crime that happens doesn’t mean that every overheated story about it must be taken gospel. Evidence needs to come first in these kinds of situations, and victims need to be properly identified as the villains of an agenda-driven mythology.

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Advice for conservatives: stop using liberal precrime narrative for your wars

War, the great American pastime.

Forget baseball; forget apple pie. Our country is no longer one that bonds over a shared language, religion, ethnicity, or tradition. No, what brings Americans together more than mass consumerism is a foreign hobgoblin that threatens our way of life.

How great is it then for the national spirit that many political figures in Washington are agitating for war with Iran? And how ironic is it that many of the bellicose voices are self-styled conservatives? I say ironic because the drumming for war is based not a direct threat but what Philip K. Dick called “precrime.” And the right-wingers imposing their precrime verdict of guilt on Iran are giving in to liberal ideology. If they continue, conservatives will only fuel the ambitious progressive agenda of eliminating free choice in everything from gun rights to health care. Oh, and they will lead us down the warpath in the Middle East again. Because we totally need another costly quagmire in the land where people can’t stop blowing each other up.

Let’s review. In the wake of a prospective deal with Iran over its nuclear program, Republicans are foaming at the mouth decrying the bargain. President Obama, they say, is unwittingly becoming the new Neville Chamberlain (there must be some variant of Godwin’s Law that that applies to Chamberlain references). They also allege Iran is a state run by full-fledged fanatics who want to commit suicide by threatening Israel and the West.

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