Hey, Did Someone Say 'Culture War'?

Crikey! Even the squishes are Guido Fawkes are talking about C****** W**. Yep, they've finally noticed that the average university campus is like that line from The Blues Brothers - they have both types of ideology: Blairite and Corbynista.

I'd give them a John McClane style 'welcome to the party, pal' but if you want to know the real reason why  Respectable Conservatives have suddenly decided to start referencing the huge gray thing in the room, take a look at what they posted later in the day.

Yes, indeed. Confidence in scientific advice is collapsing for some reason. We're just lucky that there are no big issues requiring scientific input in this country right now.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, normal people are starting to wonder if there's some kind of connection between the bias in Academia and the terrible quality of its output.

Consider our nation's (apparent) modeler in chief, Neil Ferguson. Looking at his track record, I'm not sure he could predict an uptick in the death rate for members of the avian community in December. More to the point though, his track record is not just bad, it's consistently bad. Basically, he's doing science, but not the sort you can use to predict things or where you need to update your theories if reality keeps letting you down.

You know, that type of science.

Needless to say, I think most of us had worked out the secret of his success even before we got introduced to his bit on the side, Helga von Wokenheit, Head of Globalism at the Global Institute for Globalism.

The point is not just that bias on campus leads to jobs for life for the suitably woke (though it does), or even that bright up and coming conservative academics need to either take a vow of silence or change careers (that's true too), it's that you can't have a healthy intellectual environment where everyone has to carefully walk the tightrope of approved ideology. It's hard to be innovative when out of the box can mean out of a job.

All this just leads to a bigger issue. The genius set at Tory HQ have refused to tackle issues like this on the grounds that they're too dangerous politically. Better just to kick the can down the road.

Hey, how's that working out for you guys?

As Trotsky would say - and he would know - you may not be interested in culture war, but culture war is interested in you. There are real world consequences to letting lunatics take over vital sectors of the country. Never mind whether or not taking on Professor Snootlington is really that high risk politically anyway, the choice is either to face the political risks of meaningful reform or face the political risks of dealing with the inevitable results of a dysfunctional and corrupted system.

Doctor Who The Hell Is Still Watching This Garbage?

Spoiler Alert: the next episode of Doctor Who will feature The Doctor investigating the disappearance of large numbers of people - specifically the audience.

Mind you, judging by the public review scores on Rotten Tomatoes, the less people who get to see it the better as far as the BBC's reputation goes.

Meanwhile, MSM reviewers have eaten this up with a shovel. Or, to put it another way, people whose job it is to tell the public what programs are likely to be worth watching have been caught lying like rugs. I mean, they may all just be tasteless morons, but I can't help noticing that this only ever seems to happen to shows that push the liberal agenda. Equally, if there's no underlying political agenda here, how come they're so sure all the people who hate Doctor Woke are, like, total Nazis? 

Aside from anything else, this proves we really need a snappy word or phrase to describe the huge, great difference in review scores between woker-than-thou MSM drones and actual, normal people in these cases. How about Wokorrection Factor? Shills Gap? Scorechasm?

At this point, Respectable Conservatives usually roll their eyes and explain how it's just a kids show and conservatives should be concentrating on real issues, like tax breaks for megacorps and concreting over Britain. 

Well, back at you snoots: if it's just a kids show why have the left circled wagons round it? There are plenty of awful shows out there, why defend this one?

If the rise of Jeremy Corbyn proves anything at all, it's that politics is downstream of culture. You can't let kids spend hours a week watching liberal heroes take on a bunch of evil conservative caricatures, then expect to win them over at age eighteen with a few facebook ads. The left gets this in a way that too many allegedly brilliant professional conservatives don't.

Equally, it's a perfect example of who the MSM are. There are many complex issues in the world, this show is not one of them: it's just awful. All they had to do was review a TV show fairly but even nominally conservative outlets like the Daily Mail drank the kool aid. When you see how cravenly the MSM pushed this dumpster fire, you have the perfect metric of how much they have sold out their journalistic integrity for woke points.

As I Was Saying...

The Tories are still trying to terrify the public with the Corbogyman. Lest you be tempted to choose them as the lesser of two evils, here's Mark Steyn with a reminder that eight years of Conservative Prime Minsters has done nothing to deal with the most important issue of the day: the remorseless transformation of Britain into Not Britain.

 Hence, why I can't get too excited about Gerard Batten appointing Tommy Robinson as an adviser. Personally, I think it's bad politics, but on the other hand, who would be the respectable alternative to Tommy Robinson? As Mark Steyn himself has pointed out, if respectable politicians won't deal with the elephant in the room, then the public will turn to non-respectable ones.

We already have three parties hiding behind ludicrous euphemisms, like 'grooming gangs'. Meanwhile, in so far as Tommy Robinson was banged up for contempt of court, that means we've had more people jailed for reporting on jihadist rape gangs, than for actually assisting them. Police officers and social workers have destroyed evidence, buried crime reports and intimidated witnesses, without facing so much as the ghost of a charge. Turning a blind eye to outright corruption: that's what counts as 'Respectable Conservatism' these days.

Certified Super Geniuses Search For Vegan Lion

The worst thing about Britain's professional right isn't so much their monumental arrogance, so much as the fact they have so little to back it up. They act like they're the Albert Einsteins of politics when it's blindingly obvious they're not even Albert Steptoe.

Hence why we end up with fiascoes like this.

Yes, indeed: the type of people who approve of an unaccountable, elitist, micro-managing super state tend not to vote conservative anyway, and vice versa. You may think that's kind of obvious but clearly these guys didn't. Then again, these chumps managed to blow an election against Evil Santa (he's got a beard, likes the colour red and comes into your house with his sack to seize your prezzies for redistribution to the workers).

I'm thinking their claims to genius status might be looking a little tenuous...

To the point: professional conservatives keep giving the base patronising lectures about the importance of 'electability', even while continually screwing up actual elections. No wonder they're Remainers, what else could they be?

So Now We Know Who Clicks On Those 'Get Ripped In 6 Weeks' Ads On YouTube...

I'm sensing a real frustration amongst Respectable Conservatives right about now. They're wondering how Jeremy Corbyn can still be in the race with all his baggage. If you are one of those guys, I have some good news: I can show you how to find one of the guilty parties right now. Just go into your bathroom and look at the mirror. There he is!

They're wondering how people can vote for an out and proud Marxist. Well, why not? What does the average person know about the Holodomor, the Great Leap Forward or the Year Zero? Nada. Not only have Respectable Conservatives allowed the left to whitewash their role in 100 million deaths, some of them have even tried to score extra Respectable points by joining the left in dismissing critics of Marxism as a bunch of paranoid hicks stuck in 1985.

Ditto, on terrorism. Yes, Corbyn's record has been despicable, but the Tories aren't much better. Apparently, Labour wants to hire 20,000 police officers to track down people who appear on national TV talking about jihad. But what can the Tories really say? We've had three terror attacks one after the other, all involving 'known wolves', but the police know who the real enemy are.

Respectable Conservatives are shocked that a guy who clearly hates Britain could be elected PM, but they've been as guilty as anyone in creating a culture where joining a hostile foreign army is just an alternative lifestyle choice. Say what you like about Corbyn, he only supports ISIS, he didn't actually join them. Meanwhile, actual ISIS members are welcomed back into the country and given directions to the 'all you can eat' welfare buffet.

To the point: being a Professional Conservative must be the best paid job in the world, at least in terms of the hourly rate. These guys are in hibernation most of the time, then they wake up each election campaign and complain that they have trouble making headway in a culture that the left spends 365 days a year poisoning.

More Butt$ex May Not Be The Answer

After last week's events, I just have one question: how many £250,000 dinners did it take for Shell to persuade the Tories to start this whole panic-buying thing?

Meanwhile, Francis Maude is the latest Tory to find out that you can go to bed with the left, but they won't respect you in the morning. The MSM would pretend to respect Maude as long as he was prepared to throw real conservatives under the bus, but as soon as he was no longer of use to them, he went from a courageous moderniser to Tim Nice-But-Dim's senile uncle.

All of which raises an obvious point: Maude and pals defended their purges as the unfortunate price the Tory Party had to pay for electoral credibility (and that was how the Tories got their 200 seat majority). Now it's Frankie who's exposed as a Toxic Toff the logic of the modernisers surely demands that he be given the 'no place in the modern conservative party' treatment. But, apparently, this is one triangulation too far. They do have to have some principles, and if the Conservative Party stands for anything at all, it stands for the right of privileged prats to behave like idiots without consequences.

You May Not Be Interested In War, But War Is Interested In You

It's a sad sign of the times when Trotsky makes more sense than a soi-dissant conservative home secretary, but here we are with our cities burning and Theresa May is still jabbering about policing by consent.

That will be some negotiation, all right: maybe she's hoping she can get them to agree to only loot one in every two shops?

Of course, this is par for the course for the Nu Tories. The essence of Cameronism is the belief that everything is negotiable and the shortest distance between two points is always straight down the middle.

The worst of it is that this isn't mere spinelessness. On the contrary, in the demented world of the Nu Dave Order, moral equivalence is not only a sign of sophistication, it's their sole raison d'etre. They might be awful at running the country, but look how nuanced and sophisticated are their positions!

The country's burning and silver-spoon degenerate fops are penning oestrogen-laden articles lamenting the incivility of those awful right-wing Mobophobes. Exhibit A here.

Hey, shoot looters, don't shoot looters. There's arguments either way, but nothing sums up the sheer fecklessness of Cameronism like a member of the demographic that's been busy complimenting each other on their fiddling while London burns suddenly start demanding the purging of anyone who says they can smell smoke.

'Modern Conservatism' is a sick, disgusting fraud. A incestuous dogpile of smug, elitist, no-marks looking down their noses at anyone with a proper job, even while they can't even pass the basic test of maintaining law and order.

Goldilocks Goes Fascist

Seems like only last week liberal artistocrats were whining and yammering about The Diversity!

Hang on... it was last week.

But a week's a long time in politics the completely non-partisan pursuit of truth and beauty, and so now they're shocked - shocked! - anyone could accuse them of being obsessed with The Diversity!

So for those of you keeping score at home, the Tories are bad for diverting money from the arts to dealing with real issues, but Queen Liz blowing the budget on hiring m'learned friends to harass journalists is just good sense.

But anyway, it turns out that the artistocrats pay neither too much or too little attention to diversity, they pay just the right amount, and you better believe it or else.

All of which shows why 'Respectable Conservatism' is such a waste of time. Last week liberals were sliming conservatives for not buying into their jibber-jabber about diversity, now they're attacking conservatives for calling their sliming what it is. In other words, if conservatives refuse to let liberals smear them as really huge raycists, then that proves they're even more raycist. There's literally no right answer.

As long as conservatives accept the right of liberals to set the terms of debate, there's no way to win. As it is, even a snooty uber-squelch like Letts has managed a more full throated condemnation of these liberal parasites than almost anyone in the Tory Party has managed for years.

Splattergate: First Parody Sighted

Fast work: I make it two days from the econuts going live with their murderous fantasies to the first parody emerging.

And no, Godwin doesn't apply where people really are laughing along about exterminating their opponents.

So, for those of you keeping score at home, that means some guys on the net have come up with a rebuttal video before our nation's Certified Conservatives have managed so much as a mild rebuttal of a mostly taxpayer funded body producing leftist snuff movies (guess that deficit isn't so bad after all).

Here's the definitive example of liberal tourettes and Cast Iron Dave's savvy political operators are all out of the office. Meanwhile, the base is having fun tearing the left apart. All of which is by way of saying, absent the snobbery, what exactly are Professional Conservatives contributing to the debate? If bar maids and janitors being taxed to indulge liberal Pol Pot fantasises doesn't strike any of these people as an outrage, in what sense are they conservative?

All the energy right now is with the grass roots - contra The Dave, it's not the conservative base that's the albatross round the neck of conservatism.

UPDATE

Don't be shocked, but it turns out the film makers were not crazed lone gunmen after all - EU Ref reminds us just how closely this all tracks with long-established Warmenist strategy.

Meanwhile, the inevitable connection made here (via Samizdata comments).

Oops - guess not on that last one.

Hey, nothing say sticking it to The Man like using fatuous legal manoeuvres to close down fair criticism.

Tea Parties Land Crucial Endorsment

The Dave doesn't dig the Tea Parties.

Well, that just about wraps it up for Sarah Palin then. If there's one thing The Dave knows about, it's drifting aimlessly.

The great thing about the Tea Parties is that they not only expose the snobbery of Professional Conservatives, they also expose the gaping hole at the heart of 'Respectable Conservatiosm'.

Even if The Dave's desire to throw cultural issues under the bus made political sense, it's also impossible. In reality culture war issues are at the heart of where we are today. Take the deficit. If nothing else, surrender in the culture war means accepting one hundred million diversity officers on the public payroll as a permanent feature of British life.

Long-term, you can't shrink the welfare state while remaining neutral between lifestyles that produce independence and those that reliably produce disaster. The distinction between culture war and economic policy is merely a matter of degree.

Weakest Palin Slam Evah?

Some days 'respectable conservatism' seems mightily like drinking the kool aid.

Yes, writing notes on your palm is exactly like being tied to a teleprompter, just like if she quotes the Declaration of Independence in a speech, that means she's a plagiarist. Huh?

Proof of concept: if Palin's notes had washed off on the way to the podium, would she have turned in to a babbling mess like....like.... this... uh... guy?

And then there's this.

Kabloooey! Suddenly I realise where I've seen this all before. Think of Sarah Palin as the Roadrunner and the 'respectable right' and all points left as Certified Super Genius Wile E Coyote. Every single time they think they've totally nailed her, they somehow end up under the boulder while Sarah disappears in the distance.

Race Hustling Pseudo-Con In Fraud Shocka!

Who'd have thunk it? Race hustling whiner and professional Tory turncoat St John of Taylor is facing fraud allegations. Financial fraud that is, not just the whole 'pretending to be conservative' thing.

As Laban says, the BBC will be heart-broken. Then again, what about that? Since at least 1992, when St John's elephantine sense of entitlement and sneery contempt for the bumpkins managed to single-handedly lose a safe Tory seat, the BBC has been promoting him as some kind of human litmus test. Any suggestion the Tories should move right, and particularly on culture war issues, and sure as night follows day, there would be St John to perform his party trick of reading Guardian editorials while prefacing every paragraph with the phrase 'as a conservative myself....'.

Now he's busted. Hey, in so far as the left seems to be pretty keen on Britain apologising for, well, just about anything, isn't it time for the BBC to apologise to the British right? We've had nearly two decades of our state broadcaster providing a platform for a fraudster to defame a huge chunk of the country.

If nothing else, what about the voters who had the good sense not to fall for the hype in 1992? The BBC has spent seventeen years implying that their criticism of Taylor was just a pathetic attempt to hide their raycist motivations. Now it turns out that the bumpkins had him bang to rights. It was the sofisticaytes at the BBC who were too plain prejudiced too see that the yokels had a point after all. If apologies are your bag, this would certainly seem an apologising matter, right?

'Respectable Conservatives': Still Wrong

Direct Hit.

But there's more to it than that. Who ever trusted the left's good faith anyway?

Well, most of the conservative face cards actually. The conservative base were always sceptical that importing Somali milita men and giving them free houses was the road to prosperity. It was the supposedly brilliant Nu Tory elite that got sold a dummy.

Not only that, but the allegedly unenlightened attitudes of the base were cited as proof positive that they were a bunch of Neanderthals who should sit down, shut up and accept the leadership of the Smartest People In The Room.

In so far as the Call Me Dave and pals whole claim to genius is based on their ability to get played for fools by the left, just what definition of 'smart' are we using here?

Steyn D'Jour

Actually, looking at those last two posts, I'm guessing we should start running a sweepstake on how soon it'll be before the Guardian/BBC Axis of Wibble starts running with the line that the Fiona Pilkington case is a really huge witch hunt (except, you know, with actual witches).

But wait....here come our PC PCs. Wouldcha'believe it? They claim the Clan Scumbag needs a police guard after receiving death threats. Dang! I guess we'll all have to stop talking about it rather than risk provoking one of those rampaging mobs of conservatives that are so much a feature of British life.

So for those of you keeping score at home, when it comes to defending vulnerable families, the police's resources fell down the stairs, guv, but political theatre meant to intimidate conservative critics into silence? Go, go, go!

I bet it's all the fault of the Daily Mail. But for any of our intestinally-challenged 'respectable conservative' friends out there who may be tempted to ease off, here's a post from the Great Steyn with a relevant point:

But, if we're talking about letting the Left "set the rules," Mr. Marcus's column reminded me of a larger point: Don't take your opponents at face value; listen to what they're really saying. What does the frenzy unleashed on Sarah Palin last fall tell us? What does Newsweek's "Mad Man" cover on Glenn Beck mean? Why have "civility" drones like Joe Klein so eagerly adopted Anderson Cooper's scrotal "teabagging" slur and characterized as "racists" and "terrorists" what are (certainly by comparison with the anti-G20 crowd) the best behaved and tidiest street agitators in modern history?

They're telling you who they really fear. Whom the media gods would destroy they first make into "mad men." Liz Cheney should be due for the treatment any day now...

The media would like the American Right to be represented by the likes of Bob Dole and John McCain, decent old sticks who know how to give dignified concession speeches. Last time round, we went along with their recommendation. If you want to get rave reviews for losing gracefully, that's the way to go. If you want to win, look at whom the Democrats and their media chums are so frantic to destroy: That's the better guide to what they're really worried about.

Exactly. The left's imminent whining about a backlash is nothing more than confirmation that they're caught bang to rights. If 'respectability' means turning a blind eye to the hideous results of leftist lunacy, we extreme extremists are better off without it.

Quote D'Jour

Via the Great Steyn, here's a perfect diagnosis of what ails conservatives:

The Tory story rarely varies. Whenever the centre-right wins an election, the centre-left allows that its opponents have the office, but denies they have the mandate. They can govern for a term, yes, but only by consensus, not according to their own lights. They may steer the bus to a mutually agreed destination. Driving it along a route of their choice is out of the question...

Some centre-right leaders in the United Kingdom and the United States haven't been as vulnerable to the syndrome of pussyfoot-conservatism as Canada's centre-right leaders. But even the least wobbly, Margaret Thatcher, say, and Ronald Reagan, weren't entirely impervious to it. With all their self-confidence and charisma, Thatcher and Reagan never radiated that cocksure, hubristic aura of self-righteous intellectual and moral conceit that's the hallmark of centre-left leaders from Pierre Elliott Trudeau to Barack Obama.

Quote D'Jour: Respectable Edition

As ever, Kathy Shaidle hits the nail on the head:

As long as there is such a thing as "class" (in the "hard hat" sense, not the Buckley one...) these disputes will continue within conservatism. The advantage we of the lower classes have is that we are not afraid to call it what it is, whereas Ruffini, Frum & Co. are forced to invent elaborate new theories to "explain" why their personal tastes represent "true" conservatism.

Felons Need A Voice Too!

Possibly sensing that day after day of posting variations on the theme of 'Ten thousand and sixty-SEVEN pounds, actually' wasn't really helping the MPs expenses scandal go away any faster, the Reverend Dale has decided on a new line of attack.

Yep, seeing a felon get a hard time might discourage women from standing for Parliament. Or possibly felons.

Hmmmm... I guess robbery is no excuse for rudeness. Still, I can't help thinking that back in the day, the Nu Tories thought colourful rhetoric was just part of the fun.

'Respectable Conservatism' Goes Down In Flames

Regular readers will know that I don't have any respect for those folks who keep claiming that conservatives should crave the good opinion of liberal thugs. I think it's a fools errand, and NNW demonstrates exactly why.

Hey, libs, there's your 'bread not bombs' right there. But no: even carrying food into a starving city is just a cunning ploy by the Anglosphere to hide its inherent evil. Heads we're evil, tails we toss again.

Seriously, why even bother trying to reach out to these loons? There's no middle ground we can reach with people who call everyone who supports school vouchers a Nazi, even as they borrow talking points from actual, real Nazis.