I think the past two episodes are a great illustration that when it comes to fascism, whether or not you actually believe in the ideology doesn't matter as long you're still materially supporting it.

Roman likes Mencken's charisma and he wants power because he feels like he's been ignored/not taken seriously his whole life, and he doesn't care about the repercussions on anyone else.

Kendall's personal values directly oppose Mencken's, but he freezes with indecision between whether to do the right thing for Sophie's sake or do what he thinks will save the company and spite Shiv and ends up doing nothing at all.

Tom wants to keep his position at ATN, so he sticks to the company's party line and does what will get them in good with Mencken.

Shiv rails desperately against him on election night, but the next day she accepts it as a lost cause and butters him up.

None of them think of themselves as supporting fascism, but in the end that doesn't matter.

As a lover of Roman Roy I’m very upset by last episode, as a lover of drama and tragedy I am very excited

My compliments to Justin Kirk as an actor because I’m sure he’s a fine enough person but I’ve never wanted to hit someone with a car more than Jared Mencken

jeryd mencken more like jared mancum

mencken being a fascist isn't the worst thing about him, the fact that his name is spelled like jeryd instead of jared is

K Mencken's almost definitely a convert bc his name is Jeryd which a) wack spelling of Jared b) a Catholic wouldn't even name their kid Jared.

I’ve spent all evening thinking about the latest episode and the curvatures of Roman’s sexuality. Of course Roman, who is dizzily and dangerous attracted to displays of power, combined with his innate need to be subjugated (this is the man who liked being tied up and treated like a dog as a child; whose sessions with his personal trainer in the first season bordered on BDSM) would be attracted to a man like Jared Mencken, a neo-fascist who has to be the loudest and most provocative person in the room. 

It’s uncomfortable to see play out, but it makes sense. Roman’s sexuality hinges on the eradication of independence and dignity (he gets off on being scolded, humiliated, infantalised, and controlled by an older, powerful, authoritative figure: see his past encounters with Gerri) and this is everything that a far-right political figure like Mencken threatens to do on a much grander scale. But with Gerri busy playing CEO and putting a dampener on their relationship, Roman is probably craving that kind of dynamic again. The act of submission, of giving himself to someone much more powerful. So no wonder Roman meets Mencken and is immediately drawn to him. Everything inside him is sexually wired to want him. 

succession season 6: president jared mencken, after aggressively pushing anti gay legislation, exposed for torrid love affair with roman roy, third son of now-deceased media mogul logan roy

Well Tom, maybe if you hadn't snorted a bunch of cocaine mixed with dry erase marker dust you wouldn't have agreed to call Wisconsin for Mencken

The Forgotten Man: On Murray Rothbard, philosophical harbinger of Trump and the alt-right

 (John Ganz, The Baffler 12/15/2017)

JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES, TOWARD THE END of his 1936 The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, wrote,

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong are more powerful than is commonly understood. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.

This is not a theory of history likely to find many supporters today. Events seem to most people more probably to be governed by great social forces like globalization, or the largely unconscious predilections of the social classes, or the rapacious designs of a self-interested few. And surely, one would imagine, there’s no less philosophical figure than the current president. Trump, who it seems has never cracked a book, must distill his own frenzy and pull his ideas not from the air, but from somewhere else entirely. Trumpism, we are often told, represents the end of conservativism as a movement guided by ideas and intellectuals; this is supposed to be a revolt of what H.L. Mencken once called the “booboisie,” or the result of “economic anxiety” to use a favored euphemism.

True, Trump may not be a man of ideas, but his presidency and political style were imagined by one man: the libertarian economist and philosopher Murray N. Rothbard, who died in 1995. Not long before his death, Rothbard rejoiced when he saw in the emergence of David Duke and Pat Buchanan, in 1992, his long-held vision for America’s right and concluded that what was needed was more of the same:

And so the proper strategy for the right wing must be what we can call “right-wing populism”: exciting, dynamic, tough, and confrontational, rousing and inspiring not only the exploited masses, but the often-shell-shocked right-wing intellectual cadre as well. And in this era where the intellectual and media elites are all establishment liberal-conservatives, all in a deep sense one variety or another of social democrat, all bitterly hostile to a genuine Right, we need a dynamic, charismatic leader who has the ability to short-circuit the media elites, and to reach and rouse the masses directly. We need a leadership that can reach the masses and cut through the crippling and distorting hermeneutical fog spread by the media elites.

Despite the eerie accuracy of his vision and his prolific writing on every subject from contemporary cinema to the Federal Reserve system, Rothbard’s name is not widely known. It’s not likely to be found in bibliography of a contemporary economist’s paper, but you will find it scrawled on the seamy underbelly of the web, in the message boards of the alt-right, where fewer voices are more in the air than Rothbard’s. One can look at the recent profiles of neo-fascists to find the name Rothbard, and that of his favorite pupil and protégé, Hans Hermann-Hoppe, again and again. In The New Yorker’s piece on Mike Enoch, the founder of the “Daily Shoah” podcast, Enoch notes that his path to the alt-right began with reading Rothbard, Ayn Rand, and Ludwig von Mises. When asked how he began to move “so far right,” Tony Hovater, the Indiana Nazi from the infamous New York Times profile, “name-drops Murray Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe.” Chris Cantwell, the crying Nazi of Vice News notoriety, says he was a “big fan of Murray Rothbard” and then went on to “read Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s Democracy: The God that Failed.”  Trump backer Peter Thiel’s essay, “The Education of a Libertarian,” shows the clear influence of Rothbard’s apostle Hoppe, who invited Thiel to a conference that also hosted American Renaissance’s Jared Taylor and VDARE’s Peter Brimelow. For a time before his death, Rothbard had the ear of Pat Buchanan. Paul Gottfried, the erstwhile ally of Richard Spencer, who is sometimes credited with coining the term “alternative right,” was a friend and admirer of Rothbard, and he also delivered the Murray N. Rothbard Memorial lectures at the Mises Institute.

Inching more to the mainstream, Andrew Breitbart and Steve Bannon’s fusion of libertarianism and populism seems Rothbardian in inspiration. Indeed, Justin Raimondo, Rothbard’s disciple and the author of the biography Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard, pronounced in February 2017, “Bannonism is libertarianism.” A few days, later Bannon announced his fight for the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” a goal that would have garnered Rothbard’s enthusiastic applause. Rothbard and Bannon apparently also both share an appreciation for Vladimir Lenin as political sensei, but the latter’s familiarity with the Russian revolutionary’s ideas might very well have come from the former’s writings.

The literature about Rothbard tends to be hagiographic; at times, almost literally so. One biographer, right off the bat, compares him to Saint Augustine and Soren Kierkegaard. Raimondo, sounding like something that might have been written in the nineteenth century about Beethoven or Goethe, is taken by the man’s physiognomy: “The high forehead, the nose prominent but finely formed, the half-smile exuding an earnest intelligence.” The Mises Institute, named for Rothbard’s mentor, the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, which served his intellectual home for many years, is almost a personality cult dedicated to the memory of Rothbard the Great; its website is sprinkled with many fond reminiscences of his intellectual and personal virtues.

How did this Jewish libertarian from the Bronx, the child of immigrants from Eastern Europe, a self-professed anarchist (or anarcho-capitalist in his chosen term) whose entire life was dedicated to destroying the state, end up on the reading lists of so many would-be fascists? And how, as some of his followers protest, could any aspirant jackbooted thug be attracted to the thought of a man whose main contribution to discourse, as far as they are concerned, is the “Non-Aggression Principle,” where, it is thought, all political and ethical questions can be solved simply by reference to the axiom that one must never, ever violate the person or property of anyone else? (Violence can only be initiated in self-defense.) Well, with a man like Rothbard, the boundaries of the self tend to become mutable and expansive....

(read the rest at https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-forgotten-man-ganz)

Hey, Netflix! “The Crown” sucks!

Is there anyone in the world so pathetic as Elizabeth II? Aside from us 300 million-odd schmucks who will soon be under the thumb of El Hugo Chávez del Norte. But, seriously, one has to feel sympathy for a ninety-year-old broad condemned to wander the earth pretending that she’s important.

It wasn’t always that way, of course. Once Elizabeth was young and reasonably beautiful, and somehow taken “seriously” by millions of people. Netflix, in cooperation with someone or other, is taking us back to those years via The Crown, which, in its first season treated us to a near-granular take on Liz II’s early years on the throne, the “Churchill Years,” more or less, because Winston returned to the premiership in 1951 and managed to hang on until 1955, though he was really too old for the job in the first place.

I have a pretty strict rule against aristocratic shit—I have never watched a minute of Downton Abbey—but with Trump headed for the White House and Pretty Little Liars still on hiatus, I was desperate for distraction. Besides, an intelligent depiction/deconstruction of the decline and fall of an ancient and outmoded institution might have some dramatic possibilities.

Episode 1 gave some hope, though not a great deal. We begin with the old King, George VI (Jared Harris), getting pumped up and girded for battle—actually, Liz’s wedding—by swapping smutty limericks with the royal somebody—probably “Tommy” (Pip Torrens), his private secretary, who will gradually emerge as a major behind the scenes playa in Buckingham Palace intrigue.

But that’s all to come. Right now, Princess Liz (Claire Foy) is marrying Prince Phillip Mountbatten (Matt Smith). It’s 1947, so long ago that the British Empire still looked like the British Empire. India, though clearly departing, would not be gone for another two years. Western colonialism and “civilization” were still considered to be one and the same, and, just as American slave owners were actually surprised when their slaves ran away during the Civil War, Brits believed that everyone, except for a few ungrateful wretches, liked being subjects of the British Crown. Who wouldn’t? We’re so lucky!1

Later, things get a bit ugly when we’re shown George VI undergoing an operation, and a royal lung (the left one, I believe) drops horribly in a pail. George is operating on borrowed time, but nobody does the stiff upper lip thing like the King of England, or so we’re encouraged to believe. It’s time for him to start grooming Liz for the royal responsibilities that will soon be descending on her pretty little head—quite unobtrusively, of course, because no one does “unobtrusive” like a royal. In particular, he shows Liz the royal dispatch boxes, labeled simply, and proudly, “The King”, which the Cabinet carefully packs with royal reading matter. “They put the ones they want me to read on top,” he explains, “and the ones they don’t want me to read they hide on the bottom”, implying that he reads them all.

Well, not to put too fine a point on it, this is pure balderdash. George VI, again not to put too fine a point on it, was a dummy, pure and simple. He didn’t read the dispatch boxes. Queen Victoria was famous for it, but George VI was no Queen Victoria. He was, quite carefully but quite deliberately, kept out of the public eye for fear he might say something stupid—which he unquestionably would if allowed to speak at all.

Liz, at this point, has spent most of her time indulging in the most royal of prerogatives, horsing around—though mostly with a royal equerry rather than an actual horse—but the sight of the royal dispatch boxes seems to sober her—though I don’t remember her actually reading anything. Still, she comes through like a thoroughbred when she and Phillip are sent on a royal tour to Africa, wowing the locals, or so we are led to believe, who are of course thrilled to spend hours sweating in the sun in order to watch a young white woman ride around in a big car. The Mau Mau Uprising, the most recent in a long list of rebellions against British rule, was taking place at about the same time, suppressed by British in their traditional ruthless, racist manner, but we don’t get to hear about that.

We don’t get to hear about a lot of things. While The Crown purports to give us the inside story of life at Buckingham Palace2, it’s a gossip’s notion of the inside story, the notion of someone who takes all trappings of royalty seriously, who thinks that all this petty backbiting and maneuver are important because the people involved are “royalty”, or at least “close to the throne”.

To give us a break from all of this, The Crown throws in a good deal of “inside politics” as well, though sucking up pretty fiercely to Churchill, who was well past his prime—77 and half senile when he took office, and in his thinking about half a century out of date. For his service in rallying Britain in the early days of World War II Churchill did as much as any man ever did to “save” civilization, but by 1945 he was a man without a purpose, rather like the royals themselves. And, in the end, rather like The Crown itself. Funny how art imitates life, isn’t it?

Afterwords Frederick Engels, writing in the nineteenth century, predicted that in the event of a general European war, there would be “crowns by the dozen rolling in the gutter and no one to pick them up,” which is exactly what did happen after World War I all across Europe, and what should have happened in Great Britain as well. But, because Britain had been the richest nation in the world, and because she was on the winning side when the general war did come, the British crown “unnaturally” remained intact. And so, for a hundred years and counting, these people have been walking about, riding horses, waving at crowds, living in palaces, riding in yachts, shooting at grouse, as if their lives had an actual sense and purpose rather than constituting a grotesque dumb show—supported largely, I guess, by both the media and the “people” as a sort of sedative against the ennui of actual existence. Perhaps the saddest thing is, this “royalism” is almost as prevalent over here as it is over “there”.

Years ago, Ringo Starr endeared himself to me by saying “I don’t think we need kings and queens in this country any more.” Yo Nextflix! Why don’t you try being as smart as Ringo?

For still more bile, check out Christopher Hitchens, aka “Mr. Bile”, explaining just how big a prick George VI was. And don’t even get him started on Edward VIII! Don’t even get him started!3

This sort of thinking was standard in Britain’s “white” colonies like Canada and Australia, even though they functioned as independent nations. Memoirs of Canadians and Aussies who grew up in the fifties attest to the sense of shame and humiliation they experienced in the sixties when they finally realized how much they had been exploited by the “mother country”. ↩︎

Buckingham Palace doesn’t even look like a palace. There’s nothing extravagant or playful about it. Instead, it looks like the mausoleum of a particularly unpleasant Roman emperor. ↩︎

Eddie, Georgie’s older brother, had to resign the throne because he was determined to marry American slut charmer Wallis Simpson, becoming the Duke of Windsor. As Hitch is pleased to tell you, Winston Churchill made a complete ass of himself defending Edward. The Duke shows up in The Crown rather as the royal family’s acerbic gay uncle, making vaguely smutty wisecracks about this and that and “explaining” that royalty’s “magic” lies in its mystery. The Duke’s “abdication”, as it was called, was “the biggest story since the Resurrection” in the estimation of quintessential newsman H. L. Mencken. Mencken, a bit of an Anglophobe due to his German heritage, must have enjoyed the whole thing enormously. ↩︎

CNN’s KFile reached out to the White House last week about Darren Beattie, a policy aide and speechwriter, who was listed as speaking at the 2016 H.L. Mencken Club Conference.

The Mencken Club, which is named for the early 20th century journalist and satirist whose posthumously published diaries revealed racist views, is a small annual conference started in 2008 and regularly attended by well-known white nationalists such as Richard Spencer. The schedule for the 2016 conference listed panels and speeches by white nationalist Peter Brimelow and two writers, John Derbyshire and Robert Weissberg, who were both fired in 2012 from the conservative magazine National Review for espousing racist views.

Other speakers from the 2016 conference are regular contributors to the white nationalist website VDare. Jared Taylor, another leading white nationalist, can be heard at the conference in 2016 on Derbyshire’s radio show along with Brimelow.

The White House, which asked CNN to hold off on the story for several days last week declined to say when Beattie left the White House. Beattie’s email address at the White House, which worked until late Friday evening, was no longer active by Saturday.

“Mr. Beattie no longer works at the White House,” White House spokesman Hogan Gidley told CNN on Friday night. “We don’t comment on personnel matters.”

Beattie confirmed to CNN he spoke to the 2016 conference, saying his speech was not objectionable.

“In 2016 I attended the Mencken conference in question and delivered a stand-alone, academic talk titled ‘The Intelligentsia and the Right.’ I said nothing objectionable and stand by my remarks completely,” he told CNN’s KFile in an email on Saturday. “It was the honor of my life to serve in the Trump Administration. I love President Trump, who is a fearless American hero, and continue to support him one hundred percent. I have no further comment.”

Beattie gained prominence in 2016 when as a visiting instructor in Duke University’s political science department he signed on to a letter of academic scholars supporting Trump. He correctly predicted Trump would win the 2016 presidential election.

As a professor, Beattie wrote an editorial for Duke’s student newspaper in support of the travel ban and has said he supported Trump’s candidacy from the beginning, citing his position on immigration.

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