.
2/6/17, "Elites Protest a New Revolution," Daniel Greenfield, Front Page Mag
"It’s the self-important people and the beautiful people rising up
against the democratic oppression of the working class and proclaiming
courageously in one voice, “We deserve to be in in charge.”...
Facebook's top tier geniuses enjoy the services of an executive chef,
treadmill workstations and a bike repair shop, all walled off from East
Palo Alto's Latino population and its crime and gang violence. But who
works in Facebook's eleven restaurants or actually repairs the bikes in
the back room?...
If you live in the world of Facebook, Lyft, Netflix and Airbnb,
crowding into airports and shouting, "No Borders, No Nations, Stop The
Deportations" makes sense. You don't live in a country. You live in one
of a number of interchangeable megacities or their bedroom communities.
Patriotism is a foreign concept. You have no more attachment to America
than you do to Friendster or Myspace.
The nation state is an outdated
system of social organization that is being replaced by more efficient
systems of global governance. The only reasons anyone would cling to
nations and borders are ignorance or racism.
The demographic most opposed to President Trump is not a racial minority, but a cultural elite.
This isn't a revolution. The revolutions happened in June and November. Brexit and Trump were
revolutions. The protests against them are a reaction by the overthrown
establishment.
Somewhere along the way the political projects of the left ceased
to be revolutionary. The left won. It took control of nations and set
about dismantling them. Its social and economic agendas became law. It
ruled through a vast interconnected system of bureaucracy, media,
academia, non-profits and corporations. In Europe, democracy nearly
vanished. In America, there were still elections, but they didn't matter
very much. A Republican president could tinker a little, but he
couldn't change things. The left would throw its ritualistic tantrums if
he limited abortion funding or invaded Iraq. But around the isolated
controversies, everything else would go on moving further to the left.
The left had come to envision its victory as inevitable. Its leaders
enjoyed a secular right of kings bestowed on them by historical
materialism. And so they couldn't see the revolution coming.
The inevitable elites and their power were overthrown. The little people
they had been stepping on stormed the castle. All their pseudoscience
polls had failed to predict it. Suddenly the future no longer belonged
to the City or to Palo Alto. And its denizens poured out into the
streets to protest.
The protests are taking place in the name
of oppressed minorities, but like any dot com logo, that's branding.
They are actually an angry reaction by an overthrown elite to a people's
revolution.
This isn't really about Muslims. The angry
protesters know as little about Islam as they do about rural Iowa. But
borders and airports are an important metaphor. President Trump said, "A
nation without borders is not a nation." And that's exactly what the
left wanted. No borders and no nations.
If you make tangible
goods or have a mortgage, you are more likely to want borders and a
nation. If on the other hand you deal in intangibles, in strings of
numbers, in data on global servers, in movies and music, then borders
are an unreal abstraction. If you get your rides from Uber, your house
from Airbnb, your entertainment from Netflix and your dates from Tinder,
if you don't actually own anything, and have no plans for a family or
anything more permanent than a virtual existence, who needs a nation?
Nations are ideals grounded in real things. Our elites exist in an
unreal world filled with unreal things. Their system is based on using
communications technology to organize the world in new ways. They have
grown so dazzled by the potential of that organization that they ignore
what is underneath.
That metaphor became reality with Brexit
and Trump. The country rebelled against the city. People who were in the
business of making and doing real things rose up against a virtual
economy.
The elites are unable to understand the nationalistic
and territorial impulses of either their own citizens or Islamic
terrorists. Their strange social-plutocratic fusion of Marxism and
technocracy sees it as a problem of sharing the wealth. All the popular
uprisings can be put down with a bigger welfare state. Redistribute more
of the profits from Facebook to Muslims and Trump voters. Problem
solved.
But the problem can't be solved by enlarging the welfare class. It's a gaping cultural chasm.
People need meaning. It is meaning that gives them a sense of worth.
The angry leftist reactionaries find meaning in their post-everything
world. The shattering of this world has driven them into the streets.
And yet they can't grasp that it was the shattering of their world that
drove so many working people to vote for Brexit or Trump. They refuse to
comprehend that nations have meaning to more people than their
post-national world order of interchangeable multicultural megacities
does or that most people want something tangible to hold on to,
including land and family, even if it requires labor and sacrifice.
It was a war between Davos, Conde Nast, GQ, Soros, MSNBC, Hollywood, Facebook and America. And America won.
The "resistance" is a collection of elites, from actors at award shows
to fashion magazines to tech billionaires, decrying a popular revolt
against their rule. They are not the resistance. They are dictators in
exile. They had their chance to impose their vision on the people. And
they lost.
The protests aren’t a revolution. They’re a counterrevolutionary reaction by a fallen establishment.
The revolution will not be brought to you by BMW, by a Davos
conference, by $100 cologne that smells like nothing or by Facebook
lobbying. It will be brought to you by making America a free nation
again."
............................
Tuesday, February 7, 2017
Those who told us there was 'no debate' lost the 'debate.' These dictators in exile are mad that we threw them out. Incapable of competing on a level playing field, they resort to the bully pulpit: rioters, anarchists, Hollywood actors, magazine insiders, tech billionaires. With massive resources at their disposal, they had every chance to convince the country and failed. Davos, Conde Nast, GQ, Soros, MSNBC, Hollywood, and Facebook-see you around-Greenfield, Front Page
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