Megyn Kelly, Shooting Down Bill O'Reilly's Cowardly Stance on the Garland Shooting: "Should We Get Rid of All the Jews, Too?"

O'Reilly is a pretty thoughtless man, given to the sort of rantings of the Lunchbucket Philosopher, basing his philosophy not on Judeo-Christian teachings, as he never tired of cliche-ing, but on his visceral gut reactions.

Do I like this? Do I not like this? Does this bother me in my gut?

I knock Megyn Kelly for being part of the smug Upper Middle Class Consensus, which is essentially a center-left worldview, even among alleged conservatives, but she's also, unlike Bill O'Reilly, a smart and cutting thinker who is more than capable of thinking in terms of abstraction and cool reasoning, and here she takes heated exception to Bill O'Reily's cowardly carping about Ms. Gellar and how he wouldn't have made the point in quite that way.

Oh? We're criticizing Ms. Gellar, a woman who was just the subject of a jihadi assassination attempt and who may well be a marked woman for the rest of her life, on niggling matters of tone and style?

And we need to do this now? We need to trot out the smug and absolutely unexamined, absolutely thoughtless vanities of Upper Middle Class Respectability and attack Ms. Gellar for not doing it in quite the way we would have, even as, in all likelihood, she scrambles to find long-term security to protect her life?

For drawing a cartoon?

This has been stewing in me since yesterday. It's not just that the left is questioning Ms. Gellar in this; that much I expected.

It's that so much of the right is rushing to join them, and thereby Signal that they have Value per the norms established by the leftist politico-media consensus.

I do wish to not overly attack people I like and genuinely respect; but when I read, for example, Jamie Kirchick, a normally dependable guy and someone I've met slightly, and like well enough, spending 700 words of an 800 word column talking up how base he thinks Pam Gellar is in a column allegedly defending her right to free speech, instead of, you know, actually defending her right to free speech, I become despairing, because if this is all the defense the alleged defenders of Free Speech can muster, then we have no right to free speech.

This is about class. This is all about class.

This is about, specifically, the careerist, cowardly, go-along-to-get-along mores of the Upper Middle Class, the class of people whose parents were all college educated, and of course are college educated themselves; the class that dominates our thought-transmitting institutions (because non-college educated people are more of less shut out of this industry).

It is a class which is deathly afraid of social stigma, and lives in class-based fear being grouped with the wrong people, and which is more interested in Career, quite frankly, than in the actual tradecraft of that Career, which is clarity of thought and clarity of expression.

Thus, our institutions of thought propagation are dominated by the very people who can be easily cowed by the Social Justice Warriors, and who will, therefore, adjust their speech in order to not run afoul of the thoughtless -- and frequently lunatic -- thugs of the censorious left.

The very people we need to be most immune to the menaces of stigma, and the blandishments of career advancement, are, due to the absolute primacy of the Upper Middle Class imperative of advancing one's career and avoiding scandal, stigma, and controversy, the very people most sensitive to such distortions.

Here are the simple facts of the matter, with no need of maligning Ms. Gellar:

Ms. Gellar believes, as almost all on the right claim to believe, that free speech should in fact be free, but that speech is not in fact free, due to the intolerable threats of a determined and lunatic religious minority set on imposing their alien laws of blasphemy against us.

Ms. Gellar acts, as almost all on the right claim that we should act, in defiance of benighted, medieval religious zealots who would forbid her from acting by threat of violence.

Ms. Gellar was, along with all her fellow confreres, the target of an actual assassination plot by heavily-armed jihadists determined to murder her and others present for daring to act like Americans while within the borders of the state formerly called America.

These are the facts. We need not add more to these facts simply to Signal our continuing loyalty to the Upper Middle Class consensus that keeps us employed and welcome at DC functions.

But if we were to add something more personal about Ms. Gellar at this moment, this moment when the echoes of the bullets intended to kill her still ring in the air, we could say the following:

Ms. Gellar is fearless.

Ms. Gellar, for whatever reason, is utterly immune to the thuggish enforcements of conformity imposed by the Social Justice Warrior and their publicity department, which we know as the legacy media.

Ms. Gellar chose to remain adamant about beliefs she formed after 9/11 -- beliefs that most of us once had, at least for a time -- even as many of us walked away from such beliefs, whether because we believed our initial reactions to 9/11 were overreactions, or because, as in many of our cases, the social costs of keeping on with a 9/12 mentality proved too high, so it became easier to subsume ourselves into the warm, soporific bath of the leftist-dominated Politico-Media Consensus.

That is to say, when many of us -- and here I include myself -- chose to stop talking so much about the Islamist threat, not because the Islamist threat had receded, but because the social tolerance for talking about the Islamist threat receded into almost nothing, Pam Gellar soldiered on, unbowed.

Now, as a personal matter, I have had sharp differences with Ms. Gellar. We do not get along.

But this is entirely besides the point.

Americans, acting under the influence of America, were fucking shot at by crazed religious cultists seeking to impose a cancerous religious lunacy on America.

One does not "support" someone's right to free speech by name-calling them and advertising how far one believes they fall outside the smug Upper Middle Class (leftist-dominated) Consensus.

One supports free speech by supporting those who speak freely.

I am so disgusted by how so many alleged thinkers seem to care more about social positioning than actual thought.

I should not advertise any hostility I may have towards Ms. Gellar to prove I'm "among the acceptable ones."

Acceptable to whom? Who is making this list?

Perhaps I am like Ms. Gellar in this respect: I have long ago decided that I do not wish to be on the list of the Acceptable Ones, and will take no action whatsoever to secure my place upon it. Maybe I have an advantage here: I do not seek the approval of those who bestow Respectability, as I simply do not respect them.

People who make their trade by writing and, one should hope, thinking about ideas should perhaps follow Ms. Gellar's example, not on the particular positions she stakes out, but her example as to her complete indifference as to how any statement will advance or retard her position in the hierarchy of the stultifying, deliberately-obscuring vagueries of Upper Middle Class Consensus of Respectability.

Are we here to talk about ideas and principles, or are we here to secure position and advantage?

A woman spoke.

Men with guns shot at her for speaking.

Do we really need to take an "on the one hand, on the other hand" approach here.

And we need not talk about "tone" or whether Ms. Gellar speaks for us on all things.

One does not award Style Points on a battlefield.

This is why we have no actual conservative movement worth a damn: Because our political officers and our thought leaders are all drawn from, and aspire to advance in, the same Upper Middle Class Northeast-and-California cultural consensus of "respectability."

Some people are ideologues are are intensely and primarily interested in Ideas.

Most are not.

And thus most people's first loyalty is not to any abstract Idea, but the more tangible Class they come from, and which gives them Identity, which gives them Place in the world, and which is, for far too many thinkers, a major source of pride and, I dare say, egotistical joy.

The current dominant class, the class that controls the political-media establishment, is this Upper Middle Class, leftism-inflected consensus, and until people can begin seeing this and seeing past it, and until they can begin making their first loyalty to Idea and Principle, which are universal and eternal, rather than Class and Cult, which are nothing but happenstance and ego, we will continue having an "opposition" which continues genuflecting to leftist conformity rather than standing up for ideas.

To escape the Matrix, you must first see the Matrix -- something Andrew Breitbart was fond of observing.

To be a traitor to one's Class is to be a patriot towards humanity.

Maybe Marx said that. Maybe I did. I don't know. But I do believe it. I believe that far too many ideas we have are non-ideas, things we've never actually thought through, but are simply Class Assumptions, and that we are all too afraid to go against our herd, our tribe, and start questioning some goddamned Class Assumptions.

posted by Ace at 02:00 PM

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