The Age of Mercenaries
Musk, Rogan and Maher are unexpected allies for conservatives in the ongoing and intensifying culture war.
Le Affaire de Musk is another interesting foray into the culture wars.
Prior to 2016, neither Donald Trump nor Elon Musk would have been on my radar as potential conservative saviors, mostly because neither of them fit any established definition of a "conservative".
Of Trump, I wrote that he was the conservative John Hawkwood, and Englishman and the commander of 14th Century Italy's most elite mercenary cadres, the White Company.
I said that conservatives supported Trump because he was FOR us, even if he was not OF us. I think the same is true for people like Musk - and even Joe Rogan and Bill Maher.
Perhaps this is an age of mercenaries.
These are people who generally have taken a truly liberal approach to life but now recognize the people who were once called liberals are now rabid authoritarians, hell bent on kicking every important leg out from under the American table.
Musk and Trump are conservative in that they see that, while there are things that can change to make America better, there are critically important aspects to American life that must be conserved if the nation hopes to survive.
And what about Rogan and Bill Maher?
Rogan has been seen as one of the “cool kids” until he went off script with his own experiences with Ivermectin when he contracted the Covid-19 virus. The spirit of the age chastised him as a heretic who was promoting “horse deworming paste”.
Bill Maher is certainly no conservative, having made a career of being a wild-eyed leftist provocateur, but even he gets it. He has stared into the crazy abyss that is the contemporary American left and seen it staring back.
90% of the time, there is nothing he and I could ever agree upon, but within the past year or so, he has been red pilled on several issues making up the other 10%. In a recent interview on Joe Rogan's podcast, Maher said:
“People say to me you know ‘don’t you think you’ve gotten more conservative?’ No, I haven’t, the left has gotten goofier. I seem more conservative maybe, but it’s not me who changed. Five years ago, we hadn’t spent 6 trillion dollars to stay home… no one was talking about abolishing the police, you know, there was no talk about pregnant men, looting was still illegal.”
Of the mandatory jabs, Maher said:
“I don’t trust them to tell me the truth about what they put in there. Most people are giving us too much credit for where we are medically. My point of view is we are still at the infancy of understanding how the human body works. So don’t tell me things like, ‘Just do what we say, don’t question it. When have we ever been wrong?’ A lot.”
Predictably, Maher was immediately attacked from the left for being a racist, a transphobe and a Covid vaccine denier.
The common thread is this: these are people who recognize the left sees themselves as righteous and sacrosanct and sees all others as heretics and evil. They understand how this view excuses anything and everything they do because there is nothing off the table in their fight against those they consider as evil.
And when anything is done to oppose them, that opposition makes them the real victims.
But that’s just what bullies do.
They abuse other kids until, one day, the mousey, shy, undersized victim mans up and punches the bully in the face. The bully runs to the teachers on the playground and tells on the little kid who finally had enough.
There is no better illustration of how this works than the story of Taylor Lorenz.
Lorenz is a reporter for the Washington Post, she was previously a technology reporter for The New York Times Business section, covering topics related to internet culture. She is one of the most dishonest reporters among a crowded field of dishonest reporters, gaining fame for going on to a private chat group and claiming tech entrepreneur Marc Andreessen used the "r-slur" (he used the word “retarded”).
Lorenz has made a career of doxxing and cancelling people. Her career is built upon stunts like this, gaining notoriety with each sensational report – even though she and her former bosses at the New York Times are being sued for defamation.
A couple of weeks ago, Lorenz went on MSNBC and claimed, in a tearful interview, to be a victim of online harassment, that a mean tweet or two gave her PTSD and caused her to contemplate suicide. The backlash came because people know who she is and what she does, saw the massive hypocrisy, and of course, Lorenz blamed MSNBC for the results.
Lorenz is now back to playing foot soldier by trying to doxx and destroy the person behind Libs of TikTok, largely because Libs of TikTok is embarrassing the left by highlighting progressive lunacy through their own video posts.
The American leftist ecosystem is filled with these people. They live for approval of others in the same bubble and could care less about anything else or what damage they leave in their wake, largely because their membership in these groups is always probationary. They know one deviation from the orthodoxy du jour and they will find themselves on the pointy end of their own spears.
They rape (sometimes literally), pillage and destroy in the name of their cause with no concern of right or wrong, or what comes next, their addiction to approval from upper east coast elites driving them forward to increasingly disturbing depravities. They exist in a world where failure is rewarded as long as it does damage to enemies of the lunatic left, but any failure that embarrasses the movement will result in being burned at the stake.
It is a toxic, ouroboros-like existence, a cannibalistic ethos that ultimately ends with self-immolation.
Players in this game are disposable and expendable – but like moths to a flame, the momentary high of approval from those they consider the “cool kids” is just too much to resist, no matter how much they must debase themselves to be in that clique.
And they expect that same debasement from you.
When you look back over the events of the past few years, it becomes clear that none of this is about the institutions and the state getting it right, it is about your obedience to those in power. It does not matter how often they were wrong, the only thing that matters is that you obey no matter what they say.
Trump saw it coming in 2015.
And now Musk, Maher and Rogan are getting it, too.
Trump, Rogan, and Maher all fit the definition of "classic" liberals. They are men capable of thinking for themselves and considering new ideas. The Progressive, sad-to-say, are no different than the CCP or the old Soviets (who had no qualms about putting their political enemies in gulags or insane asylums to control the masses). The Obama/Biden administration is doing the same thing with the political prisoners captured after January 6, 2021.
Good news for those who live in Tennessee! While it's not been covered by the MSM, Ivermectin is now available to those suffering from Fauci Fever.
When the only qualification to be in the group is adherence to orthodoxy then the way to advance in the group is to be ‘orthodoxier than thou’. The cult in which this happens always spirals into extremism. (By the way…if a leftie sees the light and he is outed could we say he has been ‘orthodoxxed’?)