Rodeo Drive, Beverly Hills

Source: Bigstock

Regular readers know how much I detest rightist “sleuths.” As I wrote in 2020 (in a column Tucker Carlson got in trouble for sharing), “sleuthing” is the opposite of noticing. Noticing means acknowledging reality; sleuthing means promoting fantasy.

As I said in the piece, “noticing assures voters ‘I see what you see.’ Sleuthing scolds them, ‘I see what you don’t.’”

VDARE recently went full “stollen election” with a Patrick Cleburne essay that was so out of place, Peter Brimelow took the unusual step of writing a preface essentially saying, “I know this isn’t what you expect from VDARE, but if Biden can flout immigration law, surely he can steal a national election.”

And if Reagan can give amnesty to illegals, surely he did the October Surprise.

To be clear, Peter’s a friend and VDARE’s an indispensable website. Its focus on (in Peter’s words) “immigration and the survival of the Historic American Nation” is vital, and along with AmRen it’s the best site of its kind. I love Peter and VDARE.

But…

That Cleburne piece. Dude literally claims that the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial race was a Kemp/Abrams conspiracy in which they secretly ran as allies—“a Georgia uniparty fix”—but then Abrams, because she’s “too stupid,” forgot it was pre-scripted and protested her loss even though she’d been in on the fix.

Cleburne also argues that the only reason Americans cast votes is “enthusiasm for a candidate.” He denies that sometimes people actually vote against one guy instead of for the other. But worst of all, he suggests that Trump’s 2020 Georgia loss cannot be explained by anything other than fraud.

In fact, Trump’s Georgia loss is completely explicable. Primarily via demographic shift…which is supposed to be VDARE’s entire raison d’être. Blacks are now 33 percent of Georgia’s population, Hispanics 10.5 percent, and whites are down to just 51 percent. Eligible black voters account for almost half of Georgia’s electoral growth over the past two decades; 43 percent of those new black voters were born out of state.

As CNN points out, “If black voters had made up the same percentage of presidential election voters they did in 2000, Trump would have won the state by 6 points.”

Math and race. I thought that’s what VDARE was all about.

Georgia’s not “blue,” but GOP losses are explainable without resorting to Alex Jonesism. Kemp vs. Abrams 2018 was a squeaker, but Kemp vs. Abrams 2022 was not, in part because Kemp benefited from being attacked by Trump.

Doesn’t that tell you something about Trump’s unpopularity in the state?

Racial demographics plus Trump’s negatives plus bad candidates easily account for Trump’s 2020 loss and the defeat of Perdue, Loeffler, and Walker.

Abrams, too. Bad candidate, sore “stollen” loser, running against a GOP incumbent who stood up to Trump.

So when VDARE, a site dedicated to demographic shift, jettisons it for MAGA fantasies, you gotta ask, what the hell?

A site about noticing should reject sleuthing. Because sleuthing is exactly what the right doesn’t need. Rightist sleuthers are a liability; they make rightists less, not more, effective.

So let’s get to that “Beverly Hills ghost town” video. About three weeks ago a video went super-viral on MAGA Twitter. It was initially posted by a small TikTok account (1,213 followers at the time). To the best of my figurin’, the “RIP Beverly Hills” video was first imported to Twitter by the MAGA account “Clownworld,” where it got a half-million views. It was then co-opted by TPUSA mega-tard Benny Johnson, who added the caption “Beverly Hills is now effectively a ghost town. What once was a thriving shopping mecca of LA is now a desolate wasteland.”

Johnson got 8.6 million views, 31k likes, plus 102k views on his YouTube channel. And within days, a thousand MAGA “influencers” tweeted their version of the “scoop” (Twitter-search “Beverly Hills” and “ghost town”; there are far too many idiots for me to individually link to). Soon enough, MAGA media picked up the story:

“RIP Beverly Hills: Startling video shows how once-thriving shopping mecca is now a desolate wasteland.” —Daily Mail

“RIP Beverly Hills: Video shows high-end retail stores now shuttered amid LA crime wave. Beverly Hills is becoming a ghost town” —NY Post

“Beverly Hills: High-End Retail Stores Shuttered amid Smash-and-Grab Epidemic.” —Breitbart (what, no “RIP”?)

No, I’m not going off on another Beverly Hills tangent; I’m making a point about rightist “sleuths.”

Even for people who don’t live here, even for people who don’t see on a daily basis that Beverly Hills is bustling, even for people who don’t know that we have 6,100 businesses and at any given time dozens will be in transition, even for people not bright enough to understand that in a city with business overhead as high as BH, there’s always a lot of turnover, there were obvious reasons to be skeptical of the video.

First, the video only shows close-ups of twelve—twelve—individual stores.

Actual “wastelands”—Detroit, East St. Louis, Baltimore—have boarded-up blocks. But the BH video never shows two closed stores side by side.

Second, the nature of the closed stores should’ve set off a few bells. A fabric store? So blacks are looting fabric stores now? Really? “Crochet” sounds more like a black name than a black pastime. Chipotle? How the hell do you loot a Chipotle? Jump over the counter and make your own burritos? Steal a giant bin of jalapeños?

Do looters just want food for their families? Maybe AOC was right!

In fact, F&S Fabrics opened two stores directly across the street from each other on Pico. They overextended, and closed one; looting had nothing to do with it. Chipotle also overextended (as Boston Market did twenty-plus years ago), opening one franchise north of Wilshire and one south. That turned out to be unprofitable, so the north one was closed (the south one is always packed).

The video shows the shuttered Barney’s department store. Barney’s New York filed for bankruptcy in 2019, before Covid, before George Floyd. It declared bankruptcy nationwide; nothing to do with Beverly Hills.

In its coverage of the video, the NY Post added “the Beverly Hills Barnes & Noble” as another business raided by looters. But there is no “Beverly Hills Barnes & Noble,” and even if there were, the Post thinks blacks are looting bookstores?

We should be so lucky; at least it would mean they read.

These fake claims trivialize black crime and give leftists ammo to deny the horrifying reality so many Americans face. But more to the point, you should be asking yourself how your favorite “sleuths” managed to miss all the clues that the video was a hoax: no two stores shown side by side; no skepticism of the idea that blacks were looting Chipotle, fabric stores, and nonexistent bookstores; no memory of Barney’s declaring bankruptcy in 2019.

These are the exact same sleuths who claim to have “proven” that the Paul Pelosi video is a hoax, and that Sandy Hook was a hoax, by studying every minuscule detail of the photographic evidence.

“Look at Pelosi’s eyes at frame 05:33:03. They dart slightly! Proof of a hoax!”

“Look at this photo from Sandy Hook. One ‘child’ is looking one way but the other ‘child’ is looking the other way. Hoax!!!”

These people who claim to be so brilliant, so perceptive, that they can uncover the “Deep State’s” darkest conspiracies didn’t display a whiff of skepticism regarding the Beverly Hills video. They study Paul Pelosi’s every pupillary dilation but don’t ask, “If BH is a wasteland, why are we only seeing twelve individually framed stores in a massive retail district?”

Some of this comes down to the fact that these “sleuths” are idiots. “Benny from L.A. Law” Johnson clearly has some level of retardation; in his viral YouTube video he calls BH “California’s wealthiest city,” when in fact it isn’t even in the top 50 (again and again I try to explain how the south part of BH, the “blue” part made up mostly of apartments, throws off the curve, but hell, what do I know? I’ve only lived here 55 years. Better to get your info from a guy whose knowledge comes from sitcoms).

But also, rightist sleuthers aren’t sleuths. Rightist sleutherism doesn’t emanate from a desire to solve mysteries. It comes from someplace darker. When a political/ideological demographic starts to lose faith in winning the normal way (elections)—and that certainly describes MAGA right now (five years of election losses due to incompetence combined with Trump and his cultists preaching that all elections are rigged)—that demographic seeks refuge in magic. Find the witch, kill her, break the spell that’s causing the losing streak. It’s the laziest screenwriter trope: “avoidance of hard work via mystical deus ex machina”…i.e., every Marvel/DC film climax.

“Fuckmanos the Conqueror is about to destroy Earth! He has 10,000,000,000 soldiers! We can’t beat them hand-to-hand!”

“Wait, the Crappymatterous Cubes can send Fuckmanos and his troops back to the Dickmunchious Dimension! We must gather them together and snap our fingers in unison!”

That’s rightist sleuthing in a nutshell. Instead of fighting “the evil one” hand to hand via elections, the sleuths doggedly search for a magic amulet (a “red pill,” like footage exposing the puppet masters’ trickery) that can “snap” the evil back to hell.

Nick Fuentes frequently repeats two talking points: (1) It was Holocaust denial that brought him into politics; if not for viewing a denial video when he was a teen (a video that, to my everlasting shame, cited my work), he would’ve never started the “Groyper” thing, and (2) if Hitler can be rehabilitated, if the Holocaust can be “debunked,” then every other problem facing the West will just…go away.

That’s what motivates his Nazism and Holocaust denial. It’s a shortcut. Forget the hard work of countering Soros’ multibillion-dollar electoral machine at the ballot box. Just say the magic incantation and Soros will vaporize.

“Here’s a David Cole video from 1992! Take THAT, demon!”

Soros crumbles to dust, as do all his DAs across the nation.

When Kari Lake says, “No need for new elections; just install Trump because this fake Dinesh D’Souza sleuthy video shows voter fraud,” same deal.

Losers look for shortcuts.

Sleuthing means the right’s lost; it’s given up on real-world efforts.

I’m saying this as a guy many credit with having turned them on to “sleuthing” in the first place.

Which of course proves that I’ve been co-opted by the demon and I’m “one of them” now (that’s literally what these nuts say when I critique them: “The Mossad got to you!”).

Hence why I bring up the Beverly Hills video. Maybe if you understand that your sleuths aren’t Sherlocks but shitheads, you’ll abandon the search for the magic amulet and return to earth.

The right’s only hope is to stay grounded. Leftists are already reality-detached; don’t force voters to choose between fantasists.

Be the alternative.

Be the noticer.

Voters live in the real world. You should too.