UFOs And The Right

I think the US right has lost the ability to think about UFOs, and that'a a problem. The History Channel has made a lot of money off them with Ancient Aliens, Project Blue Book, UFO Hunters, The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch, and more, but they're entertainment. I like Fringe and zombie apocalypses, too. The problem starts when people take them seriously.

The fact is that there's just too much in the way of seriously believing in space aliens, starting with Fermi's Paradox, that if extraterrestrial life is so likely, we must have seen evidence of it by now.

But just the other day, I ran into a piece by Jazz Shaw at Hot Air, One WSJ editor's war on UFOs. Note the subdivision we're beginning to see on the right: The Wall Street Journal was the intellectual sponsor of supply-side economics and neoconservative foreign policy that underpinned Reaganism, while more recently it's been never-Trump. Hot Air, on the other hand, has been both never-Trump but anti-establishment Republican as well, which means it's anti-Wall Street Journal. And now it's pro-UFOs, which the WSJ is anti:

A reader pointed me to one of the stranger articles to ever grace the pages of the Wall Street Journal last night. Holman W. Jenkins Jr. is a member of the WSJ’s editorial board who reports on business and financial matters. But the subject he weighed in on yesterday had little to do with those matters. The title was, “The UFO Crowd Wants an Alien Invasion for Christmas.” The even more curious subtitle reads, “The Pentagon discovers it’s not the flying saucers but their admirers who may be the real security threat.”

. . . It appears that Mr. Jenkins was upset about an email he received from a reader named Lex Fridman. Fridman apparently sent an insulting note criticizing a recent column that Jenkins had published, also on the subject of UFOs. It quickly became obvious that the WSJ editor is very much a skeptic (to put it mildly) when it comes to the idea that some UFOs may be of nonhuman or extraterrestrial origin.

It's hard to outline exactly what Jazz Shaw is for, but if the WSJ is agin' it, he's at least an agnostic:

Just as with the rest of us, Holman Jenkins is welcome to his own opinions and most of us have no way of proving him wrong. If anyone deep inside the government or the military-industrial complex actually does know the full truth behind the UFOs, they’re not bringing that information out for public consumption… at least not yet. I have no idea who, if anyone, is inside of those craft. And I say that as someone who has seen five of them myself over the past two years.

Well, maybe not even an agnostic if he's seen five of them in the last two years, huh?

[M]aybe it really is aliens from elsewhere. We just don’t know yet, but I’m not writing off the idea. When Jenkins speaks of the vastness of space being too great to cross, I agree that it’s too great for us to cross, at least for now. But if there’s a civilization out there that had a million-year head start on us, who knows what they might have cooked up?

But if nothing else, aren't we back to Fermi's Paradox? If we postulate there's a civilization out there with a million-year head start, then let's postualte they've come up with warp drives as well as light sabers and death stars, and flying across the width of the universe at warp speed is no more challenging than flying a B-52 to Guam. But if so, why haven't we seen them?

And this leaves aside the question Holman Jenkins himself raises, which is that even if such a civilization with a million-year head start exists, if it's more than a million light years away, there's no way we can know about it, and if Jazz Shaw objects that maybe they've found something faster than the speed of light, we've still got the retort that if so, why haven't we already heard from them, then?

To which Jazz Show can still answer he's seen five of them just within the last two years. How can anyone argue with that?

This is the US right in the wake of Ronald Reagan, William Buckley, and Rush Limbaugh (who we must recognize was a Buckley protégé). We've got to come up with people smarter than Jazz Shaw or Ben Shapiro, but the Wall Street Journal isn't what it used to be, either.