Of Weirdos And High Windows

What The Revolting Paris Olympics Ceremony Has To Do With Smearing JD Vance

Mrs. Frazz leads the Anti-Weirdo Brigades (see here, or below)

If you aren’t following social media, you might not be aware of how brazenly what Curtis Yarvin calls “the Cathedral” is operating to engineer a Kamala Harris victory. I just read on X that searching the term “Donald Trump” on Google News turns up Kamala Harris news. I checked it out myself, and it’s true:

Now, I understand that most news stories featuring the term “Donald Trump” these days would likely have Kamala Harris in them. But that’s not what’s going on here. Google specifically returned “News about Harris, Donald Trump” — including a story about White Dudes for Harris that was 100 percent about the Democrat. In fact, all three highlighted stories are Harris-positive.

Next, I typed in “Kamala Harris”. Here’s what came up:

Not “News about Trump, Kamala Harris” — just news about Harris.

Google, as you know, is by far the most used search engine in the world. If Google puts their thumb on the scale, that’s going to make a difference.

This is radicalizing me even more. The entire Machine (Paul Kingsnorth term) is working on us now without even trying to hide its operations, both mechanical and symbolic.

You’ve seen the new “J.D. Vance Is Weird” theme, right? It’s now become clear that it’s about turning the country against non-liberal white males. Look at this genuinely disturbing new ad from a Kamala-affiliated organization. It shows conservative white men as dirty sex freaks who are obsessed with sexualizing everything:

This may be the first time that being pro-masturbation has been invoked as a reason to vote for a presidential candidate, but okay. Keep in mind that the Democrats are the party that literally never met a fetish they didn’t celebrate, that fights hard to keep graphic, detailed pornographic books in school libraries, and to propagandize schoolchildren about gay sex and transgendered sexuality. I know that not all Democrats support this, but whenever it becomes a public issue, it’s liberals in politics, the media, academia, and activism who advocate this stuff.

I don’t think that accusing conservatives of being “weird” is going to work out well for the Democrats these days. But what’s really interesting is how they have decided flat-out to demonize white men. It has always been (barely) implicit in their rhetoric, but now it’s all out there — except, of course, for the tames, like the “White Dudes For Harris” man-bunner who actually uttered the phrase “masculinity as a trope”.

Liberal NYT columnist Thomas Friedman has a bad feeling about all this:

The Machine is now telling these people that they — and their husbands, fathers, brothers, and male friends — are sex freaks who are a menace to society. Part of what makes them dangerous is that they notice things like men wearing nail polish, and think something is off about that. You might have seen this Arielle Fodor woman, a former schoolteacher who is popular on TikTok as “Mrs. Frazz,” leading off the White Women For Harris Zoom cringefest the other day. Here’s a recent TikTok clip of her educating her “Uncle Norm” out of being a weirdo for not liking men in nail polish (click the link to watch it; screenshot is up above).

You, Uncle Norm, are a childish weirdo if you think there’s something weird about men wearing nail polish, and Mrs. Frazz is going to put you in your place.

There’s something very dark going on with all this. Wes Yang captures the hatecraft underway:

This is all part of the grand strategy of Queering The World. I mean “queering” not in strictly the LGBT sense, but in the broader sense in which the verb “to queer” is used in critical-theory/social justice discourse. James Lindsay explains:

In the Theory of Critical Social Justice, more specifically in the branch of applied postmodernism called queer Theory, the term “queer” is not merely used as a noun and an adjective but also as a verb, to queer. To queer is to make change or to act in a way that is disruptive of normativities, which is to say in ways that rejects both the normal and norms as a matter of principle, particularly but not entirely limited to matters of sex, gender, and sexuality.

The ultimate goal is to dismantle all social norms for the sake of producing chaos, out of which a new, supposedly more just world can be created. If these people can make J.D. Vance — an ordinary white male conservative from the American heartland, a military veteran with a wife and three kids — out to be a weirdo, they will have achieved far more than stigmatizing the GOP vice presidential nominee. They will have overturned a core societal norm. As Wes Yang shows, they want everyone to see the transgendered flibbertigibbet Dylan Mulvaney as normal, and Vance as the weirdo.

Thus does a presidential election come freighted with deep social, even metaphysical, weight. This is something the Left is pushing, and pushing hard. It has been widely noted that the swift emergence of groups like White Dudes For Harris, and the big white women for Harris Zoom call, is an example of the Democrats racializing politics in ways that Republicans would be called Nazis if they tried. This is hardly a novel observation. But what ought to concern all of us is that the Dems are forcing Americans to conceive of this election in racial terms, and to encourage whites to be dhimmis. That horrible Mrs. Frazz woman, on the white women for Harris Zoom call says in her opening that whites should never correct a “BIPOC” person. Seriously, watch (click there to go to this tweet):

I don’t know about you, but from where I sit, telling grown-up Americans that they must take a subordinate role in society because of their race is not just weird, but evil.

As you regular readers know, I’m not a fan of Donald Trump. Never had been. But watching how the Machine has worked to manufacture a new Kamala Harris in the past week, and how it is using mass disinformation, and the demonization of white men, to political advantage, has made me totally committed to voting for him — if only to stop these lunatics from tearing American society apart worse than they already have. Is Trump my ideal? Far from it. But these Harris fanatics are trying their very best to demonize people like me and most of the people I know.

They’re not just going after J.D. Vance. They’re going after half the damn country, at least. We had better not let them succeed. If that means we have to make our peace with Donald Trump, so be it. There is no other option.

More On The Paris Abomination Of Desolation

The phrase “abomination of desolation” is a Biblical one meant to describe the ultimate blasphemy. It is associated with Antichrist. I don’t really think the contemptible Paris Olympics opening ceremony qualifies as that, but it really does concentrate the desolation of post-Christian modernity. (“Just spectacular” was Jill Biden’s verdict on the ceremony.) One of you readers sent me this e-mail taking issue with yesterday’s commentary in this space about it. I post it here with his permission:

I have to disagree with your last post (which is along the lines of what many others are saying). The idea that satanic forces are trying to invert Christianity in favor of a Dionysian faith is a fig leaf and a cope. After Christianity is…nothing. Houellebecq's novel Serotonin, one of his more uneven works, is absolutely scathing on this point.

To the post-Christian anti-cultural nihilist not even hedonism is left. Nobody is having sex. People aren't even eating with gusto any more. Watch this video of Bourdain in Quebec: https:/ / www. youtube. com/ watch?v=-jbmWbol258 . Nobody can even eat like that anymore. Bourdain himself, that poor soul, offed himself on site in Strasbourg, one of the world's great food cities, on a trip with his friend the extraordinary gourmand and chef Eric Ripert. "Man is a creature who can get used to anything, and I believe that is the very best way of defining him." Dostoevsky wrote in The House of the Dead. You can be happy in the gulag, but with no meaning in one's life you can't even partake with Dionysius. He requires worship too. To those who cannot worship, there is ultimately nothing.

This letter stopped me in my tracks. Of course he’s right — who actually looked upon that pageant on the Seine and thought, “That’s life and how to live it”? They are rebelling against a standard that doesn’t exist anymore. They destroyed it. There’s nothing to do but further degrade themselves in a desperate attempt to avoid having to gaze into the abyss of their own lives, and the life their revolutionary forebears bequeathed to us. They want us to believe, because they have to believe for their miserable lives to make sense, that their Totentanz — death dance — is a manifestation of “queer joy,” or somesuch thing.

Men dressing as women. Jesus Christ as an obese butch lesbian. Dionysius, the god of wine and chaos, as Eucharist. And: children who believe their problems will be solved by castrating themselves or cutting off their breasts, and adults — even in government — who encourage them in this self-mutilation. Teaching schoolchildren about the ins and outs of sodomy. Hardcore porn, streaming 24/7 into the hands of billions. An “alarming increase” in young teenage girls being treated by doctors for anal prolapse and anal tears as “anal intercourse … has moved from the world of pornography to mainstream media. It is no longer considered an extreme behaviour but increasingly portrayed as a prized and pleasurable experience.” (Source)

Ah yes, this is the life.

The reader’s letter brought to my mind this bleak but truth-telling 1967 poem by the great English poet Philip Larkin. It’s called “High Windows,” and he penned it as the Sexual Revolution was busy decapitating all the authorities who said Thou Shalt Not. Larkin, though an atheist, wasn’t buying it. He wrote (the f-word is important to convey the desolation of sex after love, and after Christianity):

It’s important — it is extremely important — for us to recognize what’s happening here. It is the repudiation, both implicit and explicit, of sacred order. Carl Trueman, in writing about the prophetic insights of Philip Rieff, said that we are no longer disagreeing about culture. We have entered into what Rieff called a “Third World” (in Rieff’s model, the First and Second Worlds are built on different conceptions of sacred order). Carl writes:

Third Worlds are characterized by their repudiation of any sacred order. There is nothing in a Third World beyond this world by which culture can be justified. The implications of this are, according to Rieff, comprehensive and catastrophic. First, because of their rejection of a sacred order, Third World cultures face an unprecedented challenge: that of justifying themselves on the basis of themselves. No culture in history, Rieff notes, has ever done this successfully. It is a fool’s errand that ends in cultural collapse:

No culture in history has sustained itself merely as a culture, however attractive and authoritative. Cultures are dependent on their predicative sacred orders and break into mere residues whenever their predicates are broken. That is the main reason why our late second cultures and early thirds are increasingly unstable.

The effort to make a Midwestern white male family man like J.D. Vance into a symbol of the freakish outsider might seem like catty mean-girl politics, but it’s something much deeper, considered in broader cultural context. As with the trashy Paris spectacle, it’s about the repudiation of all remaining vestiges of sacred order.

Note well: everything about this degraded post-Christian culture we are in denies sacred order. Yet there is a sacred order, and we can know it, and exist in relationship to it. I’m beginning to see now why Living In Wonder ought to be considered the last of a trilogy that includes The Benedict Option and Live Not By Lies. In the book, I draw on the work of historian Robert Knapp, who said that the early church grew in large part because its “magic” was stronger than the magic of the pagans.

This autumn’s Touchstone Conference (September 26-28) in Chicago focuses on Aaron Renn’s concept of the Negative World. Renn will be there, and so will I, and other excellent speakers. I’m going to be talking about recovering Christian enchantment as a critical skill for surviving and thriving as Christians in the Negative World. What is unfolding now, though, is a greater clarification of just how negative the Negative World is going to be for faithful Christians and any others who refuse its commandments.