[Excerpted from the latest Radio Derb, now available exclusively through VDARE.com]

The news recently has featured a spate of people behaving badly. It reveals an increasingly prominent class issue: the widening rift between working-class and lower-middle-class people (manual workers, clerks, small business owners, low-level government staff) and their social superiors in the Ruling Class (billionaires, celebrities, politicians, college professors, corporate media Talking Heads, Human Resources directors, federal power-holders etc.)

This recent lack of respect has all been, as the French say, de haut en bas, “from the high to the low.”

• First case study: The flap at Smith College about a black student’s complaint that she was harassed for “eating while black.”

This is actually an old story from July of 2018. It’s come into the news again because a low-level white employee at Smith College resigned on February 19th complaining of an anti-white work environment. [ Resignation letter from Smith College employee describes hostile workplace, president responds , by Kate Wilkinson, WWLP, Feb 26, 2021]

Smith College is a tony liberal-arts college for women in Northampton, Massachusetts. A year at Smith will cost your parents a tad over $78,000. The only other thing I’ve heard about Smith is that is the world, if not Solar system, if not galactic, headquarters of lesbianism … but that’s just hearsay.

The story in short: A cafeteria and attached lounge was closed to students for the summer, so high-schoolers on a summer camp program could use it. A black student, Oumou Kanoute (right) raised in the U.S.A. by immigrant parents from Mali, ignored this and took her lunch there anyway, disregarding a reminder from one of the cafeteria workers, a white female.

While she was eating her lunch, a 60-year-old white male janitor—let’s call him Janitor One—saw her there and told campus security. A different janitor, 58 years old, call him Janitor Two, accompanied a campus cop back to the lounge to tell the student she wasn’t supposed to be there.

This janitor was also white, as was the cop. There are a lot of those durn white people in Western Massachusetts. When are we going to fix that?

The black student made a fuss on social media, the college authorities groveled and flagellated themselves, Janitor One was put on paid leave, and a law firm was hired to investigate the incident.

They found nothing, of course; but the college went on groveling regardless.

They offered no apologies for their behavior: no apology to the cafeteria lady, the janitors, or the cop, all of whom had been denounced all over social media—and even in some legacy media—for their cruel, arrogant white supremacy.

So the correlation of forces here is: In the Blue corner, a young black woman from a wealthy family attending a tony college with a huge endowment and $78,000 fees. In the Red corner, four white working-class Americans making minimum wage, or not much above it.

Last I heard, the cafeteria lady got furloughed last fall on account of the pandemic. She’s having trouble getting a new job because when prospective employers look her up, she’s flagged as RACIST.

Janitor One is back from paid leave but declines to be interviewed. Janitor Two left the college soon after the incident, fed up with all the compulsory training sessions in race and intersectionality.

Quote from him, which I think captures the deep truth of the incident: “I don’t know if I believe in white privilege. I believe in money privilege.” [Inside a Battle Over Race, Class and Power at Smith College, by Michael Powell, NYT, February 24, 2021]

I have no news of the cop.

• Second case study: the renegade Royals, Harry Windsor and his wife Meghan Markle.

Harry, formally the Duke of Sussex, is the younger son of Prince Charles, heir to the British throne. He married Meghan in 2018, and they had a son the following year. We were told a couple of weeks ago that Meghan is again enceinte. She is three years older than Harry, and a divorcee. She’s American and identifies as mixed-race. I’d judge her an octoroon by appearance.

Harry and Meghan’s relations with Harry’s grandparents—which is to say, the Queen and Prince Philip—are famously fraught. Meghan is plainly unsuited to the life of a royal: touring around the country performing ceremonial chores, making small talk with unimportant people, always smiling for the press, and keeping your opinions very strictly to yourself. It’s worse for Meghan because her sister-in-law Kate, William’s wife, is superbly good at it. And then, it’s double worse because Meghan’s head is stuffed up to the nose-holes with all the fashionable cant of racism, feminism, globalism, Trump Derangement Syndrome, and all the dreary rest, which to persons of Grandma and Grandad’s generation—or even to mine, the following generation—just seems weird and silly.

Harry himself is a dim bulb, and doggedly loyal to his wife. Again, to be fair, the first quality there is something he can’t help, and the second one is admirable.

So as you can see, I’m not totally out of sympathy with the Sussexes … Sussices, whatever. But even I’ve been wincing at these latest revelations about the way Meghan treated her royal servants through 2018 and 2019, when she was trying to be a working royal.

Politicians with courage (in Spain)

In the Senate impeachment trial of Donald Trump, February 9th-13th, video footage was shown of events in the Capitol building during the January 6th protests.

I had things to say about that video footage in my February 12th podcast. They were not very kind things. I spoke of the congressfolk “scampering off to safety under the guidance of armed Capitol Hill cops while an un-armed mob filled the corridors.”

I quoted a friend’s email from earlier in the year, one that had made such an impression on me, I’d posted it here on VDARE.com at the time. Here it is again.

Not a single person had the courage to go out and confront a man wearing buffalo horns flanked on either side with what looked like cast tryouts for Duck Dynasty. Had one person done so, he would now be the frontrunner for the presidency in 2024.

That February 12th podcast brought in an email from a different friend, reminding me of a real attempted coup forty years ago this month.

This was in Spain, February 23rd 1981. Francisco Franco had died five years previously after almost forty years of authoritarian rule. His chosen successor was Juan Carlos of the old Spanish royal family, who set about liberalizing Spain in the direction of a constitutional monarchy. Juan Carlos appointed 43-year-old Adolfo Suárez as Prime Minister in mid-1976.

A free election was held a year later, the first since the civil war of 1936-39. Adolfo Suárez’ party won a plurality and he continued as Prime Minister. The following year a new constitution was approved, fulfilling Juan Carlos’ goal: Spain had become a democratic state under constitutional monarchy. In the next election in 1979, Adolfo Suárez’ party again won a plurality and he again continued as Prime Minister.

It’s an uplifting story of an old, proud nation making the transition from authoritarian rule to representative, constitutional democracy in just four years, 1975-79. It was a rocky road, though, as I guess it was bound to be. There were some seriously disgruntled factions in the new Spain, especially on the political right.

In February 1981 one of those factions staged a coup: a real, armed coup, not just some comedians in buffalo horns committing trespass. Antonio Tejero of Spain’s Civil Guard (approximately a uniformed equivalent of the FBI) with armed colleagues entered the lower chamber of Spain’s parliament while it was in session.

What they were in session about was the swearing-in of a new Prime Minister. Adolfo Suárez had resigned a month earlier, facing a revolt in his party and plagued with health problems. The swearing-in roll call was being taken when Tejero and his pals stormed into the chamber.

Quote from Adolfo Suárez’ 2014 obituary in the London Guardian:

Suárez displayed remarkable physical courage, being one of only three parliamentarians who refused to obey Tejero’s order to lie on the floor.

One of the other two was Deputy Prime Minister and former army General Gutiérrez Mellado; the other was Communist Party leader Santiago Carrillo. Concerning the former, the coup’s Wikipedia page records that:

Undeterred, arms akimbo in defiance, 68-year-old General Gutiérrez Mellado refused to sit down, even after Tejero attempted, unsuccessfully, to wrestle him to the floor. Their face-off ended with Tejero returning to the rostrum and Gutiérrez Mellado returning to his seat.

From a review in the Irish Times of Javier Cercas’ 2011 book about the event:

For Cercas the iconic image of the 1981 coup is the refusal of Spain’s beleaguered prime minister, Adolfo Suárez, to obey Tejeros’ order to lie on the floor. Suárez sits resolutely in his seat while his deputy, Gen Manuel Gutiérrez Mellado, challenges Tejero’s men to put down their weapons. Out of camera shot, the leader of the Spanish Communist Party, Santiago Carrillo, also stays put, impassively smoking a cigarette.

There is video footage here.

I wonder, primero, which, if any, of our own federal legislators would display such fearless defiance in the face of a real coup?

And then, segunda: Was smoking still permitted in our own House of Representatives as late as 1981?

Antonio Tejero, by the way

the coup leader

is apparently still among us, now aged 88. At any rate, I have been unable to find any obituaries. He served fifteen years for his armed attempt to overthrow democracy, which is probably less than the capering clowns of January 6th will get for disturbing the solemn deliberations of our brave legislators.

Make America Ordinary Again

The friend who emailed in to remind me of that attempted coup in Spain forty years ago actually lives in Uruguay. His email stirred my longstanding but remote and possibly ill-informed infatuation with Uruguay, a country I have never actually been to.

That in turn got me thinking that I am really not on board with MAGA. I mean, I don’t particularly want to live in a country that’s great. I’d be happy to live in a country that is … ordinary, so long of course as it is well-governed and socially harmonious, with proper respect for personal liberty and a firm rule of law equally applied to all.

Are there any advantages to living in a country that is great? Certainly there are, although they tend to come with dis-advantages attached.

Being militarily great, for example, means you don’t have to worry that other countries will seize your territory. In the case of the U.S.A., however that hardly applies. Two wide oceans protect us; Canada and Mexico are not significant threats; and being militarily great is awfully expensive. We could probably be secure in our territorial integrity while reducing our military expenditures by ninety percent

perhaps ninety-nine percent if we’re willing to take chances with Hawaii and Alaska.

And then there is financial greatness, with everyone else in the world wanting to do business in our national currency. I’m on weak ground here, having no deep understanding of economics. Still, a lot of nations with non-reserve currencies seem to cope just fine; and who knows how things will shake out when currencies go digital, as they seem fated to do?

I grew up in a nation that stopped being great just about the time I was born, although the psychological adjustment to non-greatness took a couple of decades. The main downside of no-longer-greatness for Britain was the mass immigration of people from places the Brits had once practiced their greatness on.

[Excerpted from the latest Radio Derb, now available exclusively through VDARE.com]

Of the sixteen persons nominated for a cabinet position, as listed in the January 23rd issue of The Economist [After the chaos of the Trump era, what can Joe Biden hope to achieve?] nine have now been confirmed by the U.S. Senate and have assumed office. So we are better than halfway through the confirmation process.

You can’t help but notice the diversity. Not one of them—not one of the sixteen—is a non-Hispanic white Protestant heterosexual male. To put that another way: Not one of the sixteen comes from the same slice of the diversity pie as did every single one of our nation’s Founding Fathers.

(Am I still allowed to say “Founding Fathers“? “Founding persons,” whatever.)

That is the working definition of the word “diversity” in our benighted age: no non-Hispanic white Protestant heterosexual males! That’s true diversity!

Only one of the sixteen is a white male Protestant: Peter Buttigieg, the Transportation Secretary; and as an Episcopalian, his Protestantism is borderline. I used to be an Episcopalian, and I recall that bit in the liturgy where we prayed for the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.

Confessionwise I count eight Roman Catholics, four Jews, two Protestants, one Hindu, and one unknown. By sex they break down as ten guys and six gals. Cutting by race and ethnicity: ten white, three black or blackish, three Hispanic. By sexual preference: fourteen apparently heterosexual, one homosexual, one unknown.

Concerning the confirmation process itself: There is a customary understanding—a sensible one, I think—that a new President is entitled to his cabinet picks, and that the Senators should practice forbearance in challenging them, with due allowance for a bit of televised grandstanding on particular issues. Given that, and the present balance of parties in the Senate, these confirmation hearings are somewhat of a formality.

They can be instructive, though. Instruction this week came from Merrick Garland, picked by Biden—or whoever pulls Biden’s strings—to head the Justice Department.

Justice in the U.S.A. is in serious trouble. It has been politicized. Our Ruling Class has been seized by an ideology: the one loosely called “Wokeness,” although as a longtime fan of Professor Paul Gottfried, I prefer “Cultural Marxism.” This ideology has many facets, but its most central characteristics are 1) deep hostility to the founding stock of the U.S.A.—as illustrated by the statistics I just gave you on Biden’s cabinet picks—and 2) fierce intolerance of all dissent.

In the matter of justice, the effect of that ideology has been to give us a two-tiered system, a shameful double standard. Anarchist mobs who burned, looted, and murdered their way through our cities last year have been smiled on by the courts. The motley protestors who entered the Capitol on January 6th, by contrast, are being hunted down and crushed like bugs: no bail, no celebrity support, no GoFundMe pages, no allowance for personal circumstances.

Sample quote from my new journalistic heroine, Miranda Devine:

As for Portland, Oregon, charges were dropped for 90 percent of rioters arrested in September’s anti-cop violence. One 23-year-old charged with attempted murder, arson, possession of a destructive device, and rioting was released on a $1,000 bond.

Seattle was as bad. Mayor Jenny Durkan lauded the lawlessness that would lead to the fatal shooting of 19-year-old Horace Lorenzo Anderson in July as a “summer of love.”

These were the deadly protests Biden benignly described as “peaceful” and [Kamala] Harris said are “not going to stop … and they should not.”

Yet after a few hours of madness one day in January, every Trump supporter in the country is to be treated as if they flew a plane into the World Trade Center. They all are under suspicion for what Biden said last week was “the greatest threat … in America: domestic terror.”

[ There shouldn’t be a double standard for law & order: Devine , New York Post, February 21, 2021]

Plainly—it could not be more plain—there is one system of justice for persons who hold approved opinions, another for dissidents.

Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence has of course always allowed intent as a factor in the dispensing of justice: an unintended homicide is treated differently from an intended one.

But that principle has now been distorted to:

• If I burn down your store because of some grudge I bear, not towards you but towards society in general, I will not be punished so long as my grudge is a good fit for the Ruling Ideology.

But:

• If I enter some federal building unarmed with the vague intention of disrupting a parliamentary procedure—even if uniformed security personnel let me in—and then I put my feet up on a legislator’s desk, I shall be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, so long as my intention, or any of my personal connections, are at odds with Regime Ideology.

This gross and obvious double standard is Third World jurisprudence. It’s how things are done in Congo, Uzbekistan, China, or Guatemala.

No American jurist with any respect for our nation’s history or constitution should tolerate it.

Earlier: Biden’s Treasonous Immigration Bill Opportunity For GOP Leader To Say Two Words “Immigration Moratorium”

Thursday this week the Biden administration brought forth a bill on immigration. It comes in two versions, one for the Senate and one for the House, although the texts are well-nigh identical. Both versions are 353 pages long. [READ: Text of Biden-supported immigration bill, CNN, February 18, 2021]

My boss Peter Brimelow sent me the House version. I obediently settled down to read the thing.

By page 17 I was deep in the weeds.

SECTION 1102. ADJUSTMENT OF STATUS OF LAWFUL PROSPECTIVE IMMIGRANTS.

Subsection (a) IN GENERAL.—Chapter 5 of title II of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1255 et seq.), as amended by Section 1101, is further amended by inserting after Section 245B the following:

“SECTION 245C. ADJUSTMENT OF STATUS OF LAWFUL PROSPECTIVE IMMIGRANTS.

Subsection (a) REQUIREMENTS.—Notwithstanding any other provision of law, the Secretary may adjust the status of a lawful prospective immigrant to that of a lawful permanent resident if the lawful prospective immigrant —

Paragraph (1) subject to subsection (b), satisfies the eligibility requirements set forth in section 245G(b), including all criminal and national security background checks and the payment of all applicable fees;

Paragraph (2) submits an application pursuant to the procedures under section 245G(b)(1);

Paragraph (3) has been a lawful prospective immigrant for not less than 5 years …

At about this point, I lost the will to live. In my defense, I’ll wager that I had already read more of the bill than any of the congresscritters who’ll be called upon to vote on it.

I resolved to do the best I could from secondary sources—that is to say, by poaching from the commentary of other pundits more fluent in Congressperanto than I am.

My shame in this case was assuaged by seeing, as one of the first things these more knowledgeable commentators all said, that the bill stands no chance of becoming law.

Why is that? Well, here you have a conflict of strategies.

The Holy Grail for Open Borders lobbyists—which is to say, all of the well-funded business and ethnic lobbies—has always been “Comprehensive Immigration Reform.” That’s understood to mean a bait-and-switch model, a retread of Ronald Reagan’s 1986 law giving both sides what they want: mass Amnesty to please the lobbies, firm controls on employment and border security as boob-bait for the Bubbas. Once the law’s enacted, the Amnesty rolls ahead but the firm controls melt away quietly under judicial action and Executive Branch inaction.

That’s “Comprehensive Immigration Reform.” It was tried with Arlen Specter’s 2006 bill, again with the McCain-Kennedy bill in 2007, and yet again with the Gang of Eight bill in 2013.

All these efforts failed; but hope springs eternal in the Open-Borders breast. With majorities in both houses, Biden’s people—how naturally we say “Biden’s people,” as if the President were just a holographic image, which he might as well be—figured it was time for another try at “Comprehensive Immigration Reform.”

It actually isn’t, though. With the Covid pandemic, caravans of thousands assembling in Central America, and doubts about Mexico’s continuing fortitude in preventing those caravans crossing Mexican territory, a lot of Democratic congresscritters are getting spooked.

Here was Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, a Texas Democrat, talking this week to Politico.com:

Our party should be concerned. If we go off the rails, it’s going to be bad for us. Biden is going to be dealing with a minority in Congress if he continues down some of these paths.

‘Recipe for disaster’: Dem fears mount over immigration overhaul, by Sabrina Rodriguez and Marc Caputo, February 19, 2021

What to do, then? The lobbyists have to be appeased. And it would be really, really nice to have a big fat tranche of new Democrat voters in place before November 2024.

And I should say before proceeding that while I’ve been flinging around the time-honored expression “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” with gay abandon, this week’s bill is not actually a good fit for that term, as I have defined it. Most to this point: There does not seem to be any boob-bait for the Bubbas. Where are they, those clear promises to secure the border, punish employers of illegal aliens, and the rest?

The optimistic assumption must be that the Congressional drones who drafted this bill know that we know how bogus those promises were in past efforts at “Comprehensive Immigration Reform,” and decided that it wasn’t worth their time to go on lying.

I call this the optimistic assumption because it does at least signal a slight increase in honesty.

[Excerpted from the latest Radio Derb, now available exclusively through VDARE.com]

Reading my New York Post, I caught this little news item from the nearby metropolis: A 72-year-old guy just getting off a subway train in Midtown was knocked to the ground by an assailant unknown to him:

The suspect, described as a man in his 20s and about 5-foot-10 inches tall, was wearing a green jacket with the words “Anti Social” written on it.

Elderly straphanger attacked in Midtown subway station By Jorge Fitz-Gibbon, Larry Celona, Tina Moore and Amanda Woods, NY Post, February 11, 2021

The perp was of course black. As you have heard said several hundred times over the past thirty years, including a couple of times from me: “If it was a white guy they would have told us.”

In the art of rhetoric there are terms relating to omission—saying something by pointedly and deliberately not saying it.

I’m not sure precisely which term of rhetorical art applies here. I don’t think it’s apophasis: for that, you have to mention the fact that you won’t mention something. That’s a favorite of Donald Trump’s:

Why would Kim Jong-un insult me by calling me “old,” when I would never call him “short and fat”?

Trump sarcastically responds to Kim Jong Un insults, CNN, November 13, 2017

Strategic Silence—conveying information to the listener by omitting a key fact, as opposed to saying aloud that you’re not going to mention it—must be some other rhetorical figure, not apophasis. I leave it to your own researches.

Here I’m just going to observe that our elite Media have taken it to a new level. They tell us things by being silent about them, knowing that we know the significance of their silence.

The Officer Sicknick case comes under this heading. I passed comment last week on the strange media silence about cause of death.

This was the Capitol Hill cop who, we were told in a January 10th New York times headline, was killed by a Trump supporter—smacked on the head with a fire extinguisher, according to the story.

He Dreamed of Being a Police Officer, Then Was Killed by a Pro-Trump Mob, By Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Tracey Tully, January 8, 2021

Revolver.News just posted a fine report on the Sicknick case, concentrating on the complete lack of information we’ve been getting—i.e. the silence.

Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen says the DOJ will “spare no resources” in getting to the bottom of what happened to Sicknick. Yet well over a month after his death, precisely zero information has been disclosed by the DOJ, the FBI, the US Capitol Police, the DC medical examiner, the hospital that cared for him, or the treating physicians.

MAGA Blood Libel: Why Are They Hiding The Medical Report? , February 9, 2021

Now we hear that Officer Sicknick’s remains have been cremated. So, no more autopsy. May we have the medical examiner’s report, since it must now be final?

No, apparently, we may not. Why not?

Because it would contradict the story about Sicknick having been killed by Trump supporters,

Prosecutors now concede they have no evidence this happened, and no-one is under investigation. [Investigators struggle to build murder case in death of US Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick, CNN, February 2, 2021]

But the Ruling Class like this story. It works for them.

Strategic Silence has also been deployed in the Ashli Babbitt case, the shooting of the unarmed young white woman by a black Capitol Hill cop. Early this week we were told that

The shooting of the Capitol rioter, Ashli Babbitt, remains under investigation by the DC Metropolitan Police, the US Attorney’s Office in Washington, DC, and civil rights prosecutors, a routine process for shootings involving the Capitol Police. A final decision hasn’t been made, the people familiar with the probe told CNN.

Justice Department officials could make a final decision in the coming days.

A spokesperson for DC’s Metropolitan Police Department said in an email to CNN that “it is irresponsible to make an investigatory assumption or to jump to any conclusion without completing the thorough investigation.”

Investigators recommend no charges for US Capitol Police officer accused of killing pro-Trump rioter during insurrection, sources say By Evan Perez, Katelyn Polantz and Paul LeBlanc, CNN, February 2, 2021

Cop shoots lady at close range, all on video. How long does a “thorough investigation” take?

Just long enough until everyone’s forgotten about it, I guess.

The lesson here: The media arm of our Ruling Class golem are Masters Of Silence—of informative silence.

What sticks in my throat here is their arrogance. The message to us here in every case is:

We’re not going to give out any information. We’re going to stay silent until it’s Old News and faded into the cosmic microwave background.

Yes, this is informative all by itself: The fact of our silence tells you what the truth is.

You can figure it out. But we don’t care.