Maverick Philosopher

Doom and Gloom

America enters the doom loop.

But look on the bright side! We have but one night to spend in this bad inn.

How to Tell the Impostor RCC from the Real Thing

The Roman Catholic Church with Bergoglio at its head is an impostor church. So William Kilpatrick asks:

. . . how can one tell the imposter Church from the Church established by Christ?

Although there are several indicators, the main giveaway, I believe, can be found in differing attitudes toward sin. The true Church takes sin very seriously and warns about it constantly. Indeed, the main mission of the Church is to save us from our sins. On the other hand, one of the main goals of the Church which Francis and his followers are building is to diminish the importance of sin.

On several occasions, Francis has belittled sexual sins, referring to them as the “lightest of sins” or jokingly as “sins below the waist.” He reportedly told a group of Spanish seminarians that they must absolve all sins in the confessional, even if there is no sign of repentance. On one occasion, when asked about the exploits of a homosexual priest, Francis replied, “Who am I to judge?” But—with the exception of sins against the environment and “sins” of rigidity—he seems to take a “Who-am-I-to-judge” attitude toward almost all sins.

In a Substack article from a couple of years ago, I  explore the real root of the rot in the Roman church. See The Role of Concupiscence in the Decline of the Catholic Church. 

Related

Abortion and the Wages of Concupiscence Unrestrained: Why do the powerful arguments against abortion have such little effect?

9/11 Twenty-Two Years Later

Top o' the Stack.

Was 9/11 an 'inside job'? I take no position on this question. Here is a review of David Ray Griffin's latest.

To say it again: linkage does not constitute endorsement in whole or in part.

UPDATE

New York Tony writes:

Since I was a kid, I would annually see the demolition of public housing, buildings imploding and pancaking into their footprint in the last half-minute of a local news broadcast. So had millions of others. But in a macabre illustration of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, nearly everyone, including me, fell for it on 9/11: the Towers fell after the planes hit, therefore they fell because they hit, imploding and pancaking into their footprint, so geometrically conveniently.  And Tower 7 wasn't hit at all. (In Iran, a jet slammed into a smaller building which burned for three days but didn't collapse.) It was a controlled demolition (see videos here), so the only question, which I remember posing to you then as I do now, is who strategically placed and who detonated the explosives? And why did we not instinctively connect what we saw with what we remembered and so easily accept the official narrative? Someone did, even if we can't agree on who. 

If two different spatiotemporally contiguous events, E1 and E2, occur with E1 temporally prior to E2, one cannot validly infer that E1 caused E2. To think otherwise would be to commit the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. There has to be more to causation than spatiotemporal contiguity and temporal succession. To show that 9/11 was an 'inside job,' however, one has to do a lot more than avoid the fallacy in question. One has to work out the details of a plausible account of who placed the explosives without being detected and who detonated them, and why.

 

I suspect Tony will agree with what I just wrote. Twenty-two years ago I looked into the matter and was unconvinced of the 'truther' allegations. To mollify Tony, I will now make a major concession. We now have a mountain of evidence that Deep State apparatchiki are hard at work in nefarious and lawless ways destroying our republic and "fundamentally transforming" -- you know the origin of the phrase -- the U.S. into something like the S. U.  These undeniable facts make me more receptive to the 'truther' allegations.

 

The hard Left's takeover of the Democrat Party also explains why the events of 9/11/01 were not taken as an impetus to bring the southern border under control. Uncontrolled illegal immigration without assimilation is a most effective means of bringing a democratic, constitutionally-based republic to its knees. 

 

Orwellian globalists love the word 'democracy,' but please note that what they mean by it is oligarchy. As I have said more than once, the subversion of language is the mother of all subversion.

 

UPDATE 9/13)

 

1) Rod Dreher asks: Was 9/11 a metaphysical event?

I have never gone in my interpretation beyond the conclusion that in some real sense, God had removed His hand from America, and had given us over to our sins, as He had done in ages past with Biblical Israel. Of course I have no proof of that, but if you look at the trajectory of our country since that terrible September day, you will find ample evidence to confirm the thesis.

2) Hugh Murray on 9/11.

 

Are New Yorkers Getting What They Deserve?

Arguably, yes. If you vote leftism into power, then you are collectively responsible for the destruction and depredation that you ought to know follows leftist policies as night follows day. Here is just one example among hundreds of recent examples of what is happening on the mean streets of NYC.  The video is graphic, depicting as it does an elderly black lady being beaten by a black thug with her own cane. Shocking? Not to anyone who has been paying attention to the Democrat-driven destruction of once-great American cities.

No doubt there are some decent people in NYC. My advice to them is to 'git' while the 'gittin's' good. A vote with the feet is also a vote with the wallet. An excellent way to defund the Left.

Of course, some cannot leave for various reasons. Must they shoulder any of the blame? Yes, if they didn't do their bit in opposing the destructive Dems.

As for the leftists who are leaving, but with their leftist views intact, they ought to wallow in the shit they shat. You and your deleterious garbage are not wanted where the morally straight and mentally awake flourish. You may earn more than the proverbial cold shoulder.

UPDATE (9/9).

1) Another woke joke of a crap hole is Portland, Oregon where rampant crime  has driven Nike out. Go woke, go broke.

2) Another reason for the rotting of the Big Apple is the presence there of so many useful idiots. One such is NYC Assemblyman Ron Kim who on Cavuto's show on Fox this morning uncorked the asinine canard that "no person is illegal." Kim didn't come across as stupid, but surely he must know, first, that no one ever said that any person is illegal, and second, that an illegal alien is so-called because of the person's illegal action. I would be very surprised if Kim lacks the mental equipment to distinguish between agent and action, which in plain English is the distinction between the doer of a deed and the deed done. Since Kim is not inherently stupid, what we have here is another example of willful self-enstupidation which has the effect of promoting  social collapse even if Kim does not himself intend to promote social collapse.  What makes him a useful idiot is the fact that he is being used by evil people who do intend the destruction of our republic. 

3) Here is a mad NYC mommy who has had enough and is not afraid to tell leftist hate-America swine what she thinks of them.  Civility meets a limit when your civil space is allowed to be invaded by the very people charged with its protection.

4) Powerline: "Texas Gov. Greg Abbott came out swinging on Friday. Abbott, who has rightly been busing thousands of illegals to U.S. sanctuary cities such as New York City, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles, vowed to send even more migrants to Washington, D.C.

He wrote: “We will send Biden the same swift justice. And, we will add even more buses of migrants to Washington, D.C.”

UPDATE (9/10)

5) Let New York City Die. "So, let New York die. Let Chicago die. New Jersey, Massachusetts, everywhere these sanctuary leftists rule and are currently choking on what they’ve supported imposing on others, let them collapse. And enjoy the view as it happens." 

I don't agree with the Schadenfreude of the last line, but the only way leftist fools will learn is by experiencing in their own lives and at their own bodies the consequences of their actions. Probably the best form of resistance is by bussing all illegal aliens to so-called 'sanctuary' jurisdictions, whether cities or states, so that leftists can be brought to understand the consequences of their deliberate self-enstupidation.

6) The RCC needs to be condemned as well. In its current 'woke' form with Bergoglio the Termite at its head it is in dire need of defunding. Michelle Malkin:

Make no mistake: These are not desperate people suddenly seeking refuge from violence and harm. They are low-wage workers, pew-fillers and future ethnic-bloc voters being exploited by Big Business, the Vatican and the Democrat Party.

Pueblo Sin Fronteras may be the most recognizable name behind the caravans, but global Catholic elites play a central role in the coordination of this transnational human smuggling racket. Trump-bashing, American sovereignty-trashing Pope Francis donated $500,000 nine months ago from his Peter's Pence fund to assist illegal immigrant caravan participants. The subsidies cover "27 projects in 16 dioceses and Mexican religious congregations" for "housing, food and basic necessities," as well as "migrant" assistance programs "run by seven dioceses and three religious congregations: the Scalabrinians, the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary and the Hermanas Josefinas," according to the Catholic News Service.

UPDATE 9/12

7) Pope Francis to urge resignation of Bishop Strickland.  Figures. Defund the RCC! Send the cadre of termites into the desert for a long, long season of Besinnung. When the Archdiocese of Tucson sent us a contribution form, I sent it to the shredder. I should have written them back a nasty letter. Of course, many of the Protestant denominations are even worse. 

8) Corruption everywhere: FDA Gone Rogue.

Rod Dreher on the Ben Op and the Bon Op

One of the few free ones.

Excerpt:

“The Benedict Option is not available to us; it is either the Boniface Option or destruction,” he writes. “You cannot run and hide from Trashworld. Our only option is to despise it and to fight back.”

Leaving aside this inaccurate caricature of the Ben Op, what does Isker mean by despising it and fighting back? Though he doesn’t think so, that’s what we’re both after: rejecting what is evil in this post-Christian world, and devising a method of resistance. Having read Isker’s book, and sincerely appreciating what is good in it, my view is that his Bon Op is primarily about seeking worldly power as a means to impose Christianity — his kind of Christianity — on the people. (In this, the Calvinist Bon Op is a dwarfish parallel to the elvish proposals of the Catholic integralists.)

I like the parenthetical remark at the close of the quotation. Compare my Integralism in Three Sentences: Reasons Contra.

Wokery as Metastatic Managerialism

This article by the Swedish conservative Malcom Kyeyune from  2022 will enrich your understanding of wokery or wokeness.

But first I record an epiphany I recently experienced. I was puzzling over why Anheuser-Busch would so egregiously violate the sensibilities of their Bud Lite drinkers by using the effete and epicene Dylan Mulvaney as poster boy (girl?) for their product. It makes no bloody 'bottom line' sense! Isn't the company in business to make money? Why spit in the face of your consumer base? And don't the A-B execs have a fiduciary responsibility to do right by their shareholders? 

And then it dawned on me around the time of Tucker Carlson's defenestration. The very next day after our boy was booted out of the Overton window, an advertisement for the ESG outfit Blackrock appeared on Fox. 'ESG' abbreviates the ominous 'environmental social governance.' Blackrock promotes -- wait for it -- 'gender diversity.' What I came to see is that a vastly powerful and 'woke' managerial elite was calling the shots with respect to Anheuser-Busch and other companies. Pace The Who, "the new boss is not (8:02) the same as the old boss." The old rulers, the owners of capital, have been replaced by the new bosses, the managerial class.

James Burnham saw it coming in 1941. 

The core thesis of James Burnham’s 1941 The Managerial Revolution helps explain what is happening in the West today. A former Trotskyite who later became a leading figure in postwar American conservatism, Burnham argued in that book that Western society would not see the collapse of capitalism and its replacement by socialism. Instead, he maintained, America would likely see capitalism replaced by a nonsocialist successor—one dominated not by capitalists in the classical sense but by a class of managers that would come to control the real economy, regardless of formal ownership status.

This distinction—between ownership of, and control over, capital—was a topic of some discussion in the interwar years, with early analyses noting that apparatchiks in the Soviet Union had appropriated control over public resources. In the U.S., Burnham’s prophecy of a new managerial order came against the backdrop of the New Deal, which had coincided with a (somewhat understandable) loss of faith in capitalist ideas. The balance of power was shifting from property rights to a steadily increasing category of human rights, and Americans were becoming more accepting of state planning and control over larger parts of society.

Burnham saw America in the early 1940s as being in a somewhat transitory phase. The old, capitalist order was clearly ailing, and managers were steadily growing their power at the owners’ expense. Still, the process of forming a new rulership class was by no means complete. While “control over the instruments of production is everywhere undergoing a shift” toward managers, wrote Burnham, “the big bourgeoisie, the finance-capitalists, are still the ruling class in the United States.” New Dealism was not yet a “developed, systematized managerial ideology” that was capable of fully replacing capitalism.

But if Burnham were alive today, he might see wokeness as exactly that: a systematized, managerial ideology capable of standing on its own as a claim to rulership over society on behalf of the new class of managers. Indeed, many of the dynamics that worried or fascinated thinkers like Burnham during the interwar and New Deal era seem to reappear today in hypertrophied form.

Let us return to the question of ownership versus control. Here, wokeness serves to abrogate property rights, as seen in many controversies taking place in the business world. Consider the fate of the video-game behemoth Activision Blizzard, recently bought by Microsoft. After various ex-employees leveled allegations of workplace mistreatment and a frat-boy culture at its California offices, the company found itself under siege from multiple directions. First, the state of California sued it. Then, the media started covering the story with fervor. Various NGOs and activist organizations jumped into the fray, and the Securities and Exchange Commission launched an investigation. Though the original accusations against the company had to do only with sexual misconduct in the workplace, the list of demands made on Activision Blizzard quickly expanded beyond the original crime. Firing the offending workers or instituting mere workplace reform wasn’t good enough; rather, Activision Blizzard would need to open up its internal hiring and firing decisions to some sort of public review to ensure that it met various “diversity” targets. If one reads between the lines of the controversy, it becomes clear that the owners of a company now must subject their hiring process to review by other managerial institutions.

The main practical demand that wokeness places on society is a massive expansion of managerial intermediation in previously independent social and economic processes. With Activision Blizzard, a controversy regarding the workplace environment quickly metastasized into a struggle to implement new, alternative human-resources structures that corporate leadership would not control, and to which it would have to pay, in effect, a kind of ideological protection money. In real terms, this represents a nontrivial abrogation of property rights: you may still own your company, but don’t expect to be free to run it as you see fit without the “help” of outside commissars. Another example of creeping intermediation can be seen in the Hollywood trend to hire so-called racial equity consultants to ensure that characters from various minorities are sufficiently represented in movies and TV. Time was when a screenwriter would conceive of a plot and populate it with characters, drawing upon crude, inequitable instruments such as empathy and imagination; this is less and less permissible. Populating stories with various minority characters is not just encouraged but demanded—and one must do so only after employing intermediary consultants. Writing now requires intercession from a class of moral managers.

Seen in this light, wokeness is not a mere scholastic ideology. Indeed, the woke tend to be uninterested in any form of Socratic dialogue regarding their suppositions. In 2017, the feminist philosophy journal Hypatia descended into massive controversy after a writer, Rebecca Tuvel, published an argument that transracialism ought to enjoy the same sort of philosophical status as transgenderism. Tuvel appeared to make her argument sincerely, in an effort to explore the philosophical implications of people who transcend social categories, but the effort rendered her a pariah.

At this point, you may wish to take a break from Georgia 10-pt and really tax your analytic and reading comprehension skills by studying my 2021 Substack piece, Can One Change One's Race? in which I refute Rebecca Tuvel's Hypatia article. 

If woke ideology has little use for academic discussions, it is quite adept at asserting control over institutions. One cannot separate woke controversies from struggles over hiring and firing privileges inside institutions. What appears to be a fight over principles is simultaneously a fight over institutional prerogatives and access to resources.

Like the managerial ideology that Burnham anticipated, wokeness both asserts a wide variety of rights that supersede ownership and insists upon the creation of a permanent caste of managers to monitor the implementation of these rights. This tendency toward intermediation now extends to almost every facet of modern society, including in areas previously seen as foundational to the political system. Democracy, for instance, is now seen as needing various forms of intermediation so as to function properly. Without the input of managers, the thinking goes, the raw expression of the popular will can lead to aberrations, such as the election of Donald Trump or Britain’s decision to leave the European Union. Calls are increasingly being made to impose a layer of experts qualified to judge just what political questions and issues could be safely left to purportedly benighted voters to decide.

The 'Banana Metric' of Alan Dershowitz

The USA currently stands at four out of ten bananas as we transmogrify into a banana republic. Dersh in conversation with Steve Bannon.

Why Won't Leftists Enforce Existing Laws?

A reason, perhaps the main reason, may be gleaned from the following graphic:

The above stats are clearly in the ball park according to every study I have read. Heather Mac Donald has done outstanding work on this topic. I refer you to her.

One reason why leftists won't enforce existing laws is because (1) doing so would have a "disproportional impact on blacks," and (2) such disproportionality violates the value of 'equity' to which leftists subscribe.

Leftists (mis)use 'equity' to mean equality of outcome or result. 'Equity' is at or near the top of the Left's axiological hierarchy:  a high or the highest value to be striven for in our social and political arrangements. 

Someone who accepts both (1) and (2) will be loathe to enforce existing laws against homicide and other crimes. 

Now (1) is undoubtedly true. The reason is simple: blacks as a group commit more crimes than the other groups mentioned.  And so it follows that their incarceration rates are higher.  This is so even after we subtract off unjust convictions due to racial bias among jurors, and the malfeasance of corrupt judges, overzealous careerist prosecutors, and bad cops. 

(2), however, is undoubtedly false.  The reason is that 'equity' is a disvalue, not a value. The word as used by leftists is a neologism that conflates the distinction between equality in legitimate and attainable senses (equality of opportunity, equality before the law, treating like cases in a like manner, and such related ideas as due process which are the glory of the Anglo-American legal system) and, on the other hand, equality of outcome, which is unattainable except by police-state means, and even then not sustainable for long: life's  natural hierarchies will inevitably reassert themselves.

It might go like this: the USA under the yoke of 'woke' continues to weaken itself until it collapses under the  effect of its own decadence in synergy with  external attack and invasion by its geopolitical enemies. It is a good bet that this is in our near future, within ten years.  It is not inevitable, but there is no reason to be sanguine about the prospects of push-back. The oligarchic deep state will do everything and anything to crush Donald J. Trump and will of course if necessary attempt an 'Ecuadorean solution.' 

If the USA collapses, then the natural hierarchy of aptitude, ability, resoluteness, etc, will have reasserted itself.  We will then both collectively and individually face the Islamist-Sino-Russki trilemma: either embrace and affirm the new order, or accept political-cum-religious dhimmitude, or 'be put to the sword,' if not literally then by cancellation of livelihood and incarceration.

There will never be, and their cannot be, equality of outcome or result over the long haul because of the different aptitudes and abilities and interests of different peoples and groups of people.  

Asian Family Harrassed by Three Black Teens on NYC Subway

Leftists have something like the Midas touch. Everything  King Midas touched turned to gold; most of what leftists touch turns to crap. NYC and San Fran are prime examples. No surprise that these crapholes are bleeding population 'big time.' 

The Asians, bien-pensant 'liberals' apparently, blamc 'society' and not the racism of the black teens.  

More than a soupçon of absurdity is added to the story by the fact that "Cops are calling it a hate crime - something the Youngs say shouldn't be the case."

I rather doubt that the Youngs understand why it should not be a 'hate crime,' but Nat Hentoff does. 

Nat Hentoff on 'Hate Crime' Laws

An oldie but a goodie less than six minutes long by the late,  great civil libertarian.  We of the Coalition of the Sane and Reasonable need to punch back hard against the willfully self-enstupidated wokesters who promote 'hate crime' blather. As Hentoff points out, 'hate crime' is thought crime.

Here is a recent example of what we are up against:

“Under the proposed statute, ‘intimidate and harass’ can mean whatever the victim, or the authorities, want them to mean. The focus is on how the victim feels rather than on a clearly defined criminal act. This is a ridiculously vague and subjective standard,” he said.

“The absence of intent makes no difference under this law. You are still guilty of the crime because the victim felt uncomfortable.

“The bill will lead to the prosecution of conservatives, pastors, and parents attending a school board meeting for simply expressing their opposition to the liberal agenda,” Kallman said.

The proposed statute is obviously insane and anti-civilizational as any reasonable person will immediately discern. Like it or not we are now in the Age of Feeling.  

Let it be noted en passant that 'liberal agenda' is not quite the right phrase; 'hard' Left' and 'woke' are more fitting adjectives.  To say it again: don't confuse a classical with a contemporary liberal. The latter slouches toward the Gomorrah of wokery. A pox be upon all who so slouch.

Related: The Age of Feeling or the Age of Pussies?

The Asian family story here.

An oldie but a goodie less than six minutes long by the late,  great civil libertarian.  We of the Coalition of the Sane and Reasonable need to punch back hard against the willfully self-enstupidated wokesters who promote 'hate crime' blather. As Hentoff points out, 'hate crime' is thought crime.

Here is a recent example of what we are up against:

“Under the proposed statute, ‘intimidate and harass’ can mean whatever the victim, or the authorities, want them to mean. The focus is on how the victim feels rather than on a clearly defined criminal act. This is a ridiculously vague and subjective standard,” he said.

“The absence of intent makes no difference under this law. You are still guilty of the crime because the victim felt uncomfortable.

“The bill will lead to the prosecution of conservatives, pastors, and parents attending a school board meeting for simply expressing their opposition to the liberal agenda,” Kallman said.

The proposed statute is obviously insane and anti-civilizational as any reasonable person will immediately discern. Like it or not we are now in the Age of Feeling.  

Let it be noted en passant that 'liberal agenda' is not quite the right phrase; 'hard' Left' and 'woke' are more fitting adjectives.  To say it again: don't confuse a classical with a contemporary liberal. The latter slouches toward the Gomorrah of wokery. A pox be upon all who so slouch.

Related: The Age of Feeling or the Age of Pussies?

Pride?

What are you proud of? Your paraphilias? Is that what your 'pride flag' signifies? Does the plus sign at the end of LGBTQ+ signify the inclusion of every paraphilia? Might that be taking 'inclusion' too far? Is every focus of erotic interest legitimate?  Should every mode of (what has traditionally been considered to be) deviant behavior be normalized? Should every factual abnormality be viewed as normative?  

Are you really proud of your pedophilia, pedovestism, coprophilia, necrophilia and anthropophagy? 

Here: 

The parade that capped off June’s Pride events in New York City proclaimed the movement’s actual intentions quite clearly. The message was chanted all along the route, repeatedly and at high volume:

“We’re here, we’re queer, we’re coming for your children.”

Now, there’s a sentiment that should make your blood run cold. It gives the lie to all those innocent protestations you’ve heard for years: “Gee, all we want is to live our lives and love who we love.”

It’s well past time to wake up and recognize the truth. We are living in a very dangerous time filled with threats to our physical and mental health, and to our immortal souls.

The pedophilic words chanted by a corps of New York drag queens were as vivid a wake-up call as can be imagined. This was perversion on proud display. It was an assault on childhood innocence, on family life, on decency, on religion, on basic human reality. It was as vivid and unignorable as a declaration of war.

You might call it our “Gender Pearl Harbor.”

The time for kindness and tolerance has passed. These people must be opposed on every level in every way.

The problem, of course, is that the gender movement has secured alliances among the leadership of government, business, finance, media, the arts — virtually every institution of society. The country has been severely compromised by this pervasive and insidious gender ideology.

You may look away . . .

. . . but it won't make the madness go away. Still, "Out of sight, out of mind" is a way to peace of mind. But is such peace worth wanting if its price is ignorance of imminent threats to your life, liberty, and well-being? Can you afford to ignore the sheer suicidal insanity of the Left? Examples are legion.

Here is a recent one: Illinois law requires landlords to sell or rent to illegal aliens.

The Republic is on its last legs when law is used both to undermine the rule of law, and to punish productive citizens who accept the risk of buying properties, refurbishing them, and then putting them up for rent or sale. 

Separation Anxiety

I hope I don't consume half the day pondering this excellent but disturbing entry by Malcolm Pollack. Important internal linkage. Comments are good too.  A nasty, but welcome, time-sink. Thanks, Malcolm!

UPDATE:  Malcolm informs us here that Michael Anton has replied to Anonymous.

Leftism Exposed

The following statement is both well-written and accurate in every particular (emphasis added):

Leftism is a totalitarian force. Wherever leftism is in a position of power it tends to invade every private corner and force every thought into a leftist mold. In part this is because of the quasi-religious character of leftism: everything contrary to leftist beliefs represents Sin. More importantly, leftism is a totalitarian force because of the leftists’ drive for power. The leftist seeks to satisfy his need for power through identification with a social movement and he tries to go through the power process by helping to pursue and attain the goals of the movement. But no matter how far the movement has gone in attaining its goals the leftist is never satisfied, because his activism is a surrogate activity. That is, the leftist’s real motive is not to attain the ostensible goals of leftism; in reality he is motivated by the sense of power he gets from struggling for and then reaching a social goal. Consequently the leftist is never satisfied with the goals he has already attained; his need for the power process leads him always to pursue some new goal. The leftist wants equal opportunities for minorities. When that is attained he insists on statistical equality of achievement by minorities. And as long as anyone harbors in some corner of his mind a negative attitude toward some minority, the leftist has to re-educate him.

Let me add a second example to the one the author gives in illustration of the general point expressed in the italicized passage. His example is that equality of opportunity is not enough; a new goal must be posited by the 'progressive' who cannot rest content with anything, the goal of so-called 'equity' or equality of outcome, and this in defiance of the ineluctable reality of individual and group differences in attitudes and abilities.

My example is the one presently paraded before us by the so-called 'pride' contingent. Unsatisfied with being tolerated and left alone, they now demand to be accepted, affirmed, and celebrated for their depravity and corruption of children. But even this won't be enough for them: driven by a vicious intolerance at odds with the toleration they initially demanded,  they aim to replace the superior culture whose excesses spawned them and whose decadence is seemingly impotent to stop them. But it ain't over til it's over and we who are sane and reasonable have not yet begun to fight. Too many of us, lost in our private lives, have yet to wake up to the 'woke' madness. But wake up we will.  

But who made the statement quoted above?  You may be surprised.  I was. I now hasten to add that the truth of a statement and the soundness of an argument are logically  independent of the psychology of the one who makes the statement or gives the argument. To think otherwise is to commit the genetic fallacy.

Rod Dreher on (Loss of) Faith in Institutions

Here (emphases added)

I was pleased to see the all-Muslim city council in Hamtramck, Mich., stand up to the progressive sleazebags and say no, they are not going to fly Pride flags over city property. It’s against local moral standards, they say — and they’re right. More and more, we see Muslim parents standing up and doing the job of speaking out that Christians will not do. People who never read Michel Houellebecq’s controversial 2015 novel Submission think mistakenly that Muslims are the villains, because it’s about a democratic Islamist takeover of France. They’re not the heroes, but not villains either. The demoralized, secularized, gutless French are the villains. They are spiritually and morally exhausted, and surrender to Islamist government because they don’t know what else to do.

Me, I absolutely don’t want to live under Islamic government, but if I had to choose between living under the governance of the Hamtramck City Council or the Los Angeles city council (see below), that wouldn’t be a hard call. Twenty-two years after 9/11, I can hardly believe I typed that line, but here we are.

Why are we Christians so soft, and so uncaring about decadence? I don’t get it. I really did think that the Left going after kids to sexualize them was the bright red line that was going to make most people revolt against the sexual orientation/gender identity madness, but it hasn’t, not really. It may yet, but we’re going to have to sink even deeper into the filth before we hit bottom. We are still being lied to, constantly, by our government, by the medical establishment, and by the media about transitioning kids — and most people just chew their cuds and carry on. A federal judge in Arkansas just overturned the state’s ban on transing kids. Big Trans and its allies among elites are going to have their way — and most of us yawn and move on. It makes no sense. Do people ever think that their kids might end up on Pensacola beach, doing dildo ring toss with the dykes, or getting drunk and engaged in group masturbation?

Of the great religions, Islam is the worst, and Sharia law is antithetical to classical American values. BUT, if we need to make common cause with (moderate, non-terrorist) Muslims to defeat the utterly destructive, anti-civilizational Woke-Left and their globalist enablers, then so be it! I'll say it again: we need a broad coalition of the sane and the reasonable to defeat our enemies.  Hell, even the socialists over at The Militant are talking more sense than the wokesters!

Of Fox and Fellatio: A Fox News First?

This is the first time I have heard fellatio referred to on a major TV network. The sweet and wholesome Kayleigh McEnany reports. The fellatio reference is around 2:34.  Joey B, "devout Catholic" in journo lingo, stars as Porn Enforcer and takes a brave stand against book burning.

UPDATE (6/23)

Do you remember when our illustrious prez hung out with rapper Cardi B?  Click here to revisit the high-level discourse that flowed between these two cultural 'icons.' Birds of a feather . . . . Speaking of which, wouldn't John Fetterman, feeble and fettered in body and mind, make a good running mate for Uncle Joe in 2024? Our kakistocracy would be well-served by the dynamic Dementocratic duo. As for those of you who voted for Joe knowing all that you did or should have known, I am in too good a mood at the moment to tell you what I really think of you.

Consolation

There is some consolation in the thought that Rome did not fall in a day.  The older you are, the greater the consolation.

The Assault on Merit

Here:

In the case at issue, the leaders of Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, or TJ—a highly selective public magnet school in Fairfax County, Virginia—bemoaned the demographic imbalance that resulted from the school’s academics-focused admission policies. (The class of 2024, for example, is more than 70 percent Asian, and Hispanics and blacks fall far short of their general-population proportions in the overall school district.) The school board then switched TJ to a different system that, while not considering race directly, reduced Asian admissions by about a quarter. Among other changes, the new policy ditches standardized testing and guarantees admission to at least 1.5 percent of each middle school’s eighth-grade class.

For the record, I am not now and never have been Asian.

I will now pose a question to those of you who have taught high school or college classes, a question none of you will answer. Who were your best and worst students by race/ethnicity? Comments enabled.

'2A' a Terrorist Marker?

It emerged in the Congressional FBI whistleblower hearings that the abbreviation '2A' is a "terrorist marker." That came as news to me. (But see here.) I have been using '2A' from time to time as an innocuous abbreviation of 'Second Amendment.'  The context, of course, is the Bill of Rights which are the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution.

I have written sentences like this:

2A does not confer, but protects, the citizen's right to keep and bear arms.

My use of the harmless abbreviation makes me a terrorist, a white supremacist, and what all else in the eyes of the regime.  What does it make the regime? A police state.

So I suppose it is a good thing that it has been a very long time since I attended a Latin mass. These masses, as is now well-known, are notorious gathering points for insurrectionists, militiamen, and other violent extremists out to overthrow 'democracy.'  Much less known, however, is that these masses are conducted, not in old Church Latin, but in coded Latin.  Thus hoc est corpus meum is code for create mayhem. De mortuis resurrexit means: he rose up and committed insurrection.  There really are very few threats to the powers that be stronger and more insidious than the Latin mass, which is why Pope Francis, that faithful custodian of the depositum fidei, is such a staunch defender of the old mass against the forces of reform.

Sarcasm aside, part of understanding  the destructive Left is understanding their commitment to the hermeneutics of suspicion.  You can learn about said hermeneutics, and cognate topics, from my essay From Democrat to Dissident section 16.4. It is published in Hillman and Borland, eds., Dissident Philosophers: Voices Against the Political Current of the Academy, Rowman and Littlefield, 2021.  Available via Amazon where you can read some editorial reviews.

 

Negativity: The Spirit of the Left

Top o' the Stack.

Ann Coulter on Daniel Penny

A characteristic of leftists and so-called 'progressives'  is that in their typical knee-jerk (reflexive as opposed to reflective) style, they reliably take the side of criminals while attacking the decent and law-abiding. If you don't understand this, you will never understand the Left and how pernicious leftists are. Having infiltrated the Democrat Party, they are now in the process of destroying once-great American cities.

For a very recent example, I now hand off to Ann Coulter:

New York City seems like a gag that’s gone too far. “First, we’ll release all the criminals because too many black bodies are in prison! Then we’ll denounce the police as Nazis and refuse to prosecute any suspects they arrest. The city will be overrun with violent criminals — raping robbing, assaulting and killing at will… But if anyone steps up to protect the citizenry from the mayhem that’s been intentionally inflicted on them, well, gentleman, then we’ll prosecute the hell out of that douchebag.”

This exactly how things are playing out right now with twenty-four-year-old Daniel Penny, the Marine veteran who subdued a deranged lunatic on the F train at the Broadway-Lafayette Street station in Manhattan on May 1.

 

Ann Coulter and Heather Mac on the Anti-Civilizational Left

No Biggie, Just the End of Civilization

When Race Trumps Merit ...

Ann Coulter

May 10, 2023

Whatever you had planned to do for the rest of the day, please drop it and read this right now: Heather Mac Donald’s new book, “When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives.”

     It seems that in the hysteria that followed George Floyd's death in 2020, we agreed to destroy all of Western civilization -- law, music, art, education, policing, science and medicine -- to make up for black people not doing well on standardized tests.

     Mac Donald cites not hundreds but thousands of institutions that have flung aside standards in order to more fully dedicate themselves to the sole, driving purpose of our nation: boosting black people’s self-esteem.

[More below the fold.]

Trump the Only Way Forward

Conservatives Lost the Culture War and the Trump Agenda is the Only Path Forward

Refreshingly realistic but also deeply troubling. I fear the author is right. Conservatives lost the culture war and so now: 

Conservatives do not have a viable path to political power any other way. The issues of national survival are of primary importance. There is no point in fighting a culture war if we don’t have a country in which this war can take place. [. . .]

Trying to rehash these old battles in the present political moment, when institutional Christianity no longer has any meaningful political or cultural clout, is a waste of time—at least at the national level.

COVID-19 made the weakness of American Christianity painfully clear. Protestant and Catholic churches alike overwhelmingly declared themselves nonessential during the spring of 2020. That was, sadly, merely an acknowledgement of a longstanding reality.

Virtually no one today cares what the pope or any megachurch pastor, for that matter, has to say about political and cultural life. Their endorsements do not move the needle and their influence has had little to no bearing, even on their own flocks, when it comes to preserving the older standards of Christian morality and decency.  

[. . .]

We live in a country where the president says it is antisemitic to ban trans surgery for minors. And yet you will strain yourself trying to hear any priest or pastor say a word in response. Millions of Americans are hurting, desperately confused about their very identity and sexual impulses, and the leaders of the churches have almost nothing to say. Nonessential workers indeed.

[. . .]

One wonders what purpose, at this point, the differentiation between denominations even serves. Pope Francis, just like John MacArthur, agrees with the leftist view of racism. And Tim Keller, just like Pope Francis, lauds mass immigration. On the most prominent liberal issues of our day there is total agreement among the leaders of the West’s supposedly different Christian denominations. 

America has a moral majority, all right. It’s just liberal. The Left controls every institutional power center in America. Wall Street, the media, the universities, Hollywood, the military—you name it—everywhere the liberal consensus reigns supreme. There is not a single Fortune 500 company in America, not one, that would denounce transgender surgery for minors. 

Those institutions shape the public consciousness in a way social conservatives simply cannot. Manufactured consent is real and all around us. A large portion of Americans simply accept whatever their televisions and cellphones tell them to believe no matter how perverted, wrong, or harmful. Even many of those who do not agree with it, at least bow to the moral consensus. Think of all those many millions who got vaccinated, not because they wanted to, but because their “job required it” or because they couldn’t “travel without it.”

The idea that large numbers of Americans are going to “wake up” and “push back” is simply a cope. That’s not how popular opinion works. The idea that Americans are going to see transgenderism as a bridge too far is, I think, much overhyped. I remember the gay marriage “debates,” such as they were. I remember Prop 8 passing in 2008 in California. I also remember how none of these setbacks for the Left ultimately had any bearing in the end. By 2015, gay marriage was the law of the land. Today it is untouchable liberal orthodoxy supported by a majority of Americans, including large numbers of “conservatives.”

Deploying more 10,000-word essays on teleology and the new natural law isn’t going to solve the social issue problem either. Millions of Americans didn’t start shoving dildos in orifices, guzzling sex change hormones, and consuming billions of hours of pornography a year because they read an article or heard an argument. These sexual and social perversions spring from a much deeper source, one that isn’t going to be solved by policy wrangling in D.C. think tanks. 

The spiritual crisis that afflicts the West runs far deeper than most social conservatives want to admit. They don’t understand how bad things really are, which is why they stand around, mouths agape, as they try to figure out what a “furry” is or why U.S. military officers dress up in leather “pup play” fetish gear while they sodomize each other in uniform and then post photos to social media.

In light of our ongoing moral and spiritual crisis, I fully expect that the Bud Light/Dylan Mulvaney controversy is merely a blip that will soon pass. In the 1990s Ikea ran the world’s first commercial featuring a gay couple. In 2022, Ikea was valued at $17 billion. Go woke, go broke? 

Sure. 

The Matt Walsh’s of the world won’t want to hear this, but trying to fight the Left on gender with desiccated Socratic arguments (“What is a woman?”) is a losing battle. Owning liberals with facts and logic is mostly a waste of time.Political power doesn’t flow from scoring debate points in the “free marketplace of ideas.” It comes from the willingness to impose one’s beliefs on others and possessing the resources to do so. 

All morality requires enforcement. 

The Left implicitly understands that point. They are more than happy to crush their opponents. Just ask Donald Trump, John Eastman, Douglas Mackey, or any of the January 6 defendants. Strip away civilization and politics boils down to the distinction between friend and enemies. [You need a reference to Carl Schmitt here, son.] That’s why the White House hosted a trans day of visibility just two days after a transgender terrorist murdered six Christians in Tennessee. 

At some point, every political regime must put its foot down. Some people think cannibalism is wrong, others think that it is right. If the former are to prevail politically they must be willing to use force against the latter. In the end, this is what morality requires. This is what morality is. 

BV: The sound point here is that morality is just a lot of impotent prescriptions and proscriptions without an enforcement mechanism. But that is not to say that might makes right.  If the enforcer is to enforce good  and not evil, then the enforcer must either be God or, here below, godly men and governments.

Conservatives and Christians today simply lack the force of will to impose their social morality on the Left. That is why they lose cultural battles and the Left wins. Conservatives aren’t even willing to mock their enemies. If you want to make “respectable” social conservatives and Christians uncomfortable, call a prostitute a “whore” in their presence. Mock OnlyFans as a den of “sluts.” Express deep revulsion at sodomy. Watch them writhe in psychic pain. 

Such firm moral condemnation, I am frequently told, is “judge-y” and “un-Christian.” “We” need to “watch our tone” as “we” seek to “draw others to the faith.” As their flock comes under attack from wolves, the shepherds condemn those who would fight back. There are many such cases. 

The deep-rooted weakness of the American Christian Right is a serious problem. I wish it wasn’t this way. I wish my fellow Christians had more spirit. I wish our leaders would lead. That isn’t the reality we have, though, as much as I may wish otherwise.

Right now, conservatives in deep red areas can still fight cultural battles at the local and state levels. Even some purple states, at the local level, still provide a way to maneuver against the Left’s cultural hegemony. Everywhere else, and at the national level especially, conservatives must sideline the cultural battles in favor of the issues of national survival.  

Trump showed that even in our degraded moral culture, a huge percentage of Americans still want the nation to survive. They don’t hate themselves despite all the propaganda to which they’ve been subjected. The old pre-World War II conservative consensus in favor of protectionism, non-intervention, and immigration restrictions is still enormously popular. 

If we win on those fronts and secure a future for our country then, and only then, will we have a chance to fight once again for the family, for our faith, and for a return of moral decency. 

That day, however, is still a long way off. We have work to do. 

 

The Accelerationist Option

I wrote recently that the only way out is through, but Malcolm Pollack's most recent offering is much better; it is indeed brilliant.  It divides into three parts. There is first a litany of what ails us. The second part explains why the ills listed are upon us. The general answer is that

. . . an aggressive, secular pseudo-religion, which denies all transcendent order and natural categories, has seized control of the minds of scores of millions of Americans, and of the levers of political power and information dissemination. This ersatz religion holds as its highest principle the flattening of every natural distinction, and all social hierarchies, except of course the hierarchy that places itself in the position of commanding power over every institution, and over all of civil society.

This general answer is then fleshed out with a list of the specific truths that the secular pseudo-religion brands as heresy.

The third part of the essay raises the question of what we can do about the miasmic mess we are in. Pollack rejects as hopeless three ways out that quite naturally suggest themselves: voting, a return to federalism, and armed revolt.

And then comes the startling suggestion: 

Perhaps, then, it is best in the long run not to slow this process by incremental and ineffective political resistance. It may be that such an approach, by making the decay more gradual, will also make it somehow more bearable, day by day, and might turn it from an acute and intolerable affliction to a slow and chronic decline — a creeping Brazilification, a great national frog-boiling. Perhaps we would be wiser simply to let the cleansing fire of fever run its course, and burn itself out. It will be painful, and surely debilitating for a while, but then it will be over. And then, at last, we can awaken, blink our eyes, and get back on our feet.

Another term for the Big Guy might be all it takes. Four more years!!

In sum, the only way out is through, and the best way through is pedal-to-the-metal, balls-to-the-wall, lets-go-Brandon! Let Biden finish the job, as he intends to do, and thereby finish us off. After an ignominious death, resurrection, a new Phoenix from the old ashes. 

Might I suggest an historical parallel? Germany gone mad had to be destroyed before it could be rebuilt into sanity. It is perhaps a good thing that Hitler, drunk on his initial success, and consumed with hubris, overextended himself, thereby bringing to an end National Socialist totalitarianism. And so it may also be a good thing to allow the totalitarian-globalist-'woke'- race-delusional-culturally Marxist  scum now in control of our once-great Republic to bring her to her knees where she will repent, suffer, and die to be reborn.

The Demented Dems: Anti-Reality and Anti-Virtue

Anti-reality:

House Republicans voted Thursday to ban transgender female athletes from taking part in girls’ and women’s sports by amending Title IX protections to only apply to biologically female athletes.

The Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act passed 219-203, with no Democrats supporting the measure.

Anti-virtue:

Homebuyers with good credit scores will soon encounter a costly surprise: a new federal rule forcing them to pay higher mortgage rates and fees to subsidize people with riskier credit ratings who are also in the market to buy houses.

You see, self-control, self-reliance, deferral of gratification, financial responsibility and the like are 'white' virtues, and therefore 'racist.' 'Racists' whether white or black need to be punished with higher mortgage rates.  'Equity' demands it. In fact, credit ratings as such are 'racist' and 'white supremacist' and need to go the way of the SAT.

Amerika, the Police State

Have you been paying attention, or are you a useful idiot?

America, No Turning Back

The Catholic Case for Guns

A Maoist Cultural Revolution?

Why the English Department Died

A Quillette article. (HT: JIO)

'Institutional capture' by anti-civilizational wokesters is fait accompli and we are collapsing on all fronts. Imagine being a English professor facing the daunting task, not of Higher Education, but of Higher Remediation.

Anarcho-Tyranny in the USA

Here by Auron MacIntyre at The Total State (Substack):

The city of Philadelphia has announced an agreement to pay a $9.25 million settlement in connection with the police response to protests after the death of George Floyd in 2020. While dozens were killed and billions of dollars of damage were done during the riots that raged across America for weeks in the summer of 2020, it is the participants themselves who will be paid restitution by the government.

Law and order in the United States have now descended to a level of anarcho-tyranny in which the government funds rioters with the tax money of their victims. The slow death of the rule of law in America would be ugly enough, but what we are witnessing instead is the twisted, grimacing corpse of a system that was once designed to protect the safety of Americans now being used to punish us for disagreeing with our political elites.

UPDATE 3/24

This fellow and I so far appear to be 'on the same page.' Two days ago, before I had heard of him, I spoke of our time as 

. . . a time when those in control of the state apparatus have forgotten, or rather willfully ignore, the purposes that justify government in the first place, namely, the tasks of securing the life, liberty, and property of those governed. But the Orwellian wokesters now in charge invert these values in the Orwellian manner and aid and abet those who aim at the opposite.

As MacIntyre points out, what we are witnessing is "more than the slow death of the rule of law," but the inversion of our founding values. And yet brazen liars such as Nancy Pelosi yammer on about the rule of law while her shills in the media intone in unison the scripted mantra, "No one is above the law," as they pervert the law Soviet-style to destroy Donald J. Trump.  Thankfully, Nancy dear is no longer with us (nor against us) politically speaking; others, however, far worse and more dangerous because less stupid, will take her place.

And as usual the Left Coast leads the way. (Because it is closer to China?) Here is Substacker David Zweig on lockdown and surveillance Santa Clara-style.

Academentia in excelsis

DEI and the collapse of the universities.

Substack latest.

Naomi Wolf on the Return of the Demons

Over the last three years, many of us who are naturally and by training skeptical of supernatural explanations have wondered whether the astonishing upsurge of irrationality and outright evil society-wide and, most depressingly, in the institutions that ought to serve as bulwarks against this madness, may be due to demonic influence. For the scale of the evil wokery on all sides, and the speed of its spread, seems beyond the reach of naturalistic explanations. See, for example, my Does the Demonic Play a Role in the Politics of the Day?

Naomi Wolf, a former lefty who has seen the light, develops the theme in detail and in depth in her essay Have the Ancient Gods Returned?

Since 2020 the world, I feel, has been bathed, infused, bombarded even, with intensely powerful energies that are totally unfamiliar to us in this generation, but that may derive from a pre-Christian, pre-solidly-Jewish time, a time when early Judaism was struggling with the seductive and oppressive entities that always sought to seduce the Children of Israel away from the monotheistic truth, the One God. 

The ancient “shedim” are the only “principalities and powers” I can imagine that are capable of manifesting a national, and now a global, network of policy advocates, social workers, graphic designers, Members of Parliament, who are all on board with an escalating euthanasia death cult. The ancient “daimones” are the only entities I can imagine powerful enough in just two years and a bit, to destroy families, to ruin sexuality and fertility, to make a mockery of human rights, to celebrate the end of critical thinking, to march us all in lockstep to worship of technocrats and technocracy; medical cultism and an orgiastic cult of self- and other-annihilation.

And — I must notice — if these “shedim” or “daimones” are powerless — why are their symbols reappearing everywhere? I used to see fundamentalist Christians who warned of Satan lurking in rock and roll, as fanatics. But what I myself am seeing around me, I cannot unsee. 

A Temple of Baal archway was in fact expensively reconstructed from its original in Syria, and moved to a appear at a major thoroughfare in London, and was now unveiled in Washington, DC, and in New York.

Why? 

A bizarre opening ceremony in a new train site in Switzerland, at which European leaders were present, included a horned entity (“an Ibex”), the upholding of a symbolic lamb, the appearance of a terrifying angel, and the writhing of nearly naked men and women in S-and-M-themed and bondage postures.

How Low Can We Sink?

Seen at SOTU 2023 as worn by Senator Ed Markey, Massachusetts Democrat:

For a long time now, the Democrats have been the abortion party. But under the 'leadership' of the 'devout Catholic,' Joe Biden, they've 'evolved' to use the Hillary word which means    devolved: they now celebrate abortion by expressing 'love' for it.  And they are not above using rank Orwellianisms to express their 'love.' "Abortion is health care" is the most outrageous of them.  

Story here.

Down with Tobacco, Up with Marijuana

Why down with the first (I allude to the menthol cigarette ban) and up with the second?  Why the differential treatment and the misplaced moral enthusiasm? The locoweed I smoked with band members in the late '60s was tame stuff, poor in tetrahydrocannabinol as compared to the potent THC-rich product on the market today.  Since then, cigarettes have been wussified what with the addition of filters and lower nicotine levels.   

So why the differential treatment? The short answer is that it is not in the interest of a police state to promote alertness and attention, which is what nicotine does, while it is in such a state's interest to promote dopiness and lethargy and escapism and every manner of vice.  

It is the tried-and-true panem et circenses principle. Keep the masses fat and stupid, doped up on hooch and weed, distracted by mass sporting events such as the Stupor Bowl and pornography, expectant of regular initiative-inimical handouts and 'freebies,' and they will be easy to control. 

Sate the peoples' blood-lust with HollyWeird brutality and gun violence while at the same time stripping law-abiding citizens of their Second Amendment rights.   Alec Baldwin easily serves as poster-clown for this sort of thing: he make big bucks in movies that celebrate violence while knowing nothing himself about firearms and their safe handling. The nimrod is on record as opposing the National Rifle Association, an outfit that promotes gun safety and defends constitutionally-protected (not constitutionally-conferred) natural rights.  Baldwin is a contemptible fool whose willful self-enstupidation resulted in a young woman's death. He has been brought up on charges of involuntary manslaughter, which sounds just right to me. (It's a stronger charge than negligent homicide.) 

We saw the same panem-et-circenses pattern with the COVID-19 lockdown. The churches were targeted for closure while the liquor stores stayed open. Police states brook no critique or competition from organized religion, but a liquored-up citizenry is kept distracted and manipulable.

Similarly with Biden's wide-open border policy. It is not just to flood the nation with 'undocumented Democrats' so as to insure in perpetuity the hegemony of what is now a hard-Left party, but also to allow in as much fentanyl as possible to poison and kill off the native population, and in particular the poor white trash of Appalachia and elsewhere in fly-over country, the people Hillary spoke of as deplorables and Obama as clingers to guns and Bibles.

A government worth having promotes virtue in the people and in particular the virtues of self-reliance and self-control. A totalitarian state, however, works best by promoting vice. A reader sent me to this perceptive article portions of which I will now share:

Remember that the “government,” as I describe it, is much more than just the state. It includes schools, banks, and corporations, collaborating with the state to govern a population. This need not be a conspiracy — although it often is — it can simply occur because of a shared set of objectives and priorities. For the government to cooperate correctly with itself, it needs maximal data and predictability in the population.

That’s why modern governments exert an inverted form of pastoral power to promote vice. Greed, lust, and vainglory are very predictable: if you know that every merchant will do anything to maximize profit, then you can predict their trading patterns with precision. The “rational actor,” the utilitarian automaton, and the pleasure-maximizer are the ideal constituents of the modern population. This means we can expand Dr. E. Michael Jones’ well-known dictum that “sexual liberation is political control”⁴ by saying: manipulation of any vice is political control.

This is why the government is promoting Impossible burgers, even though the company loses money: they want to centralize all protein production. Impossible is a tool to nudge the population’s behavior through a desire for “meatiness” in food. The government seeks to steer the rudder of our vices until all protein comes from patented software and gene edits. They won’t even have to pass a law.

To summarize and expand upon three of the main points made in the above quotation:

1) The government is not just the State but the latter together with all its adjuncts and extensions including Big Tech and Big Pharma. But 'adjunct' might not be the best word given the regulatory capture of the former by the latter.

2) If the interests of different groups align and they move in the same direction, this need not be due to any  conspiracy among the groups. It follows that anyone who alleges a commonality of direction, towards increasing wokeness, say, is not automatically a conspiracy theorist.

3) ". . . modern governments exert an inverted form of pastoral power to promote vice." A genuine insight beautifully expressed.  I hope you won't take it amiss if I nominate that good Catholic, Joe Biden, for the annual Pastor of Vice award.

You may recall that in 2016, Joey B. received the University of  Notre Dame's Laetare Medal. Read this for a good laugh:

“We live in a toxic political environment where poisonous invective and partisan gamesmanship pass for political leadership,” said Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C., Notre Dame’s president. “Public confidence in government is at historic lows, and cynicism is high. It is a good time to remind ourselves what lives dedicated to genuine public service in politics look like. We find it in the lives of Vice President Biden and Speaker Boehner.

Might we call this the 'regulatory capture' of a once-great university by the WokeState and its puppets and pimps? (Or is that going too far?)  The (so-called) Catholic universities are the most corrupt of all, for they have fallen the farthest. They are in dire need of defunding by sane and reasonable alumni. Not a dime for those who support DEI.

The churches, the RCC in particular, the universities, the once-great ones especially, and the Fourth Estate should serve as checks on the State and its omnivorous appetite for power and control.  They should function as bulwarks against and critics of the government and its metastasizing octopus of grasping and sucking agencies and agents.

Reckless Reparations Reckoning

Another episode in Victor Davis Hanson's chronicling of our wanky descent into unhinged Unsinn.  Here is a choice morsel:

Current racial tribalization obsessions have descended into a nadir that makes Al Sharpton’s 1990s Tawana Brawley/Crown-Heights career start (“If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house.”/ “We taught philosophy and astrology and mathematics before Socrates and them Greek homos ever got around to it.”) look amateurish in comparison. In this context, new calls arise for ludicrous reparations simply because we have become a ludicrous society.

2024 and Trump sub specie aeternitatis

First-rate political analysis by DiploMad 2.0. (HT: Bill Keezer)

But there is little to be hopeful or happy about this New Year. 2023 is likely to be worse than the last three.  You are well-advised to seek your happiness within.  Not that one should withdraw from the fray entirely. Fight on, but not at the expense of your tranquillitas animi.  For the sake of sanity, dial back your intake of media dreck, 'legacy' and 'social.'  This world is a passing scene and a vanishing quantity. And you with it.  Take the current slide into the abyss as a warm invitation to seek out the really real (ὄντως ὄν) before it's too late.

Lousy Teachers

They unwittingly gave me the confidence that I could do what they do, and indeed do it better, but they also deprived me of the intellectual formation that I had to spend years developing on my own. They set me forward, and they set me back.

To cheat students is bad enough; to corrupt them is far worse. The latter is happening now in classrooms at all levels throughout the land.  To speak of a decline in standards would be an understatement: perversion of standards.

Civilizational Collapse: The Case of NYC

The Big Apple is now rotten to the core, thanks to 'progressives.' There is no wisdom on the Left, no common sense, no basic decency. Cal Thomas:

The exodus of New Yorkers for less expensive and safer climes has been well documented. In 2021, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that 300,000 residents left New York state. I suspect the number this year will match or exceed that. High taxes, crime, and the cost of housing and living are all contributing factors. Police are leaving, too: 831 so far this year. Who can blame them, given the way they are treated?

[. . .]

It gives a new meaning to the opening line of the Frank Sinatra song “Start spreading the news. I’m leaving today.” Except the leaving now is from, not to New York.   

One thing you need to know about 'progressives' is that the spirit that animates the leaders of their movement, if not every rank-and-file useful idiot and somnambulant fellow-traveller,  is the spirit of Mephistopheles. Goethe had his number:

I'll translate the first two lines. "I am the spirit that always negates! And rightly so. For the worth of all that comes to be is in its ceasing to be." This is the spirit of Mephisto and of Karl Marx, who quotes  it approvingly somewhere.  (Look it up! Why do I have to do all the work?)

'Progressive' nihilism is supposed to issue in utopia and the immanentization of the eschaton. But how do the destroyers know that it will? How do they know that burying the hard-won wisdom of the past and destroying what has taken centuries to build will clear the ground for the arisal of an earthly paradise? They don't know it. But we know that past attempts have failed disastrously.  We know that from history, the same history that the 'progressives' with their latter-day equivalents of book burning will not learn from but will attempt to erase.

You need to ask yourself whether you support the depredations of cultural Marxism which include ethno-masochistic wokery, 'critical' race-delusionality, reality-denying social constructivism, the celebration of grotesquerie, the canonization of worthless individuals, the destruction of monuments to the great and noble, the destruction of the family, the moral corruption of children, the excusing of brazen mendacity at the highest levels of government . . . and I'm just warming to my theme.

One more thing.

There are really only two effective ways of 'voting.' One is with your feet, as when, for example, New Yorkers head for DeSantisLand. The other is with your wallet.

If your alma mater supports the DEI agenda, politely inform their financial officers that they will not receive one red cent from you as long as they do. This is something you can do that is not merely 'performative' as this word is now being used. (For the record, I do not approve of this linguistic innovation.)  For, as Lee Iaococca said, "When money talks, ideology walks."  Even the most irrational among us begin to think straight when money is on the table and their financial survival is on the line.

Here is a letter you are free to take as a model.

For more on cultural collapse, take a gander at this seven-minute video featuring the inimitable Camille Paglia.

As We Slide into the Abyss . . .

. . . the thought that demonic agents are at work behind the scenes becomes ever more credible. Or do you think that the depth of human depravity has an adequate naturalistic explanation? 

Our moral trajectory is decidedly downward. Anyone who is not morally obtuse can see that.  Rod Dreher is a good source of lively commentary on the Decline of the West. Here is one of his latest on the demon question. 

...........................

Vito Caiati comments:

I appreciated yesterday’s brief post which affirms that “As We Slide into the Abyss” . . . “the thought that demonic agents are at work behind the scenes becomes ever more credible.” If you recall, we discussed this horrific possibility last May (Does the Demonic Play a Role in the Politics of the Day?), and I find that each day reinforces my conviction that something of this nature lies behind the depraved words and acts, now celebrated rather than condemned, that increasingly define our time. To better understand what is going on, I have turned to the writings and comments of several Roman Catholic exorcists, who, while noting the extraordinary powers of the Evil One, such as infestation, vexation, obsession, and possession, affirm that these are “far less to be feared. . . than in the underground influence he exerts in souls that are not sufficiently instructed or well-tempered.” It is this latter ordinary activity, the ceaseless implanting of temptation into human minds, so many of which have now abandoned the protections offered by faith in and worship of God that provides a vast open field of opportunity for Satan. In this regard, I recommend this short essay by the exorcist Fr. Vincent Lambert, The Devil's Lies are Subtle, which speaks suggestively of the means and ultimate ends of this assault on human reason and morality.

Rod Dreher

Dreher's right about a lot of things despite his TDS.  But who among us is wholly free of faults, foibles, and fatuities? Read on:

The United States is a country where we castrate young males and cut the breasts off of young females, and call it liberation. We are a country where it is considered moral progress to bring in deviant men who dress like women, and have them read to children modern fairy tales teaching them to question their bodies and their sexual identities. We are ruled by an elite class that treats LGBT culture as sacred, and that celebrates its way of life in commerce, in advertising, in education, and everywhere it can possibly be inculcated into the rhythms of daily life. Our ruling class and its dominant value system now celebrates racism, and calls it "diversity, equity, and inclusion." Our young people are suffering a horrible mental health crisis. Millions of our people, especially poor and working class people, are succumbing to "deaths of despair" via drug and alcohol addiction.

Our young are going to live with less material, social, and emotional security than their parents and grandparents, while our liberals are tearing down all sources of solidarity outside of radical politics, and our conservatives mostly don't care. The United States is busy destroying its higher education system, which used to be the envy of the world, all for the sake of ideologizing it. We are also destroying the capacity for excellence in science and nearly every other field of endeavor, for the sake of DEI ideology. The rich are getting richer, and the numbers of the economically precarious grow daily. And for the past two decades, Washington has not seen a war it didn't want to fight, even as the woke war machine understandably struggles to convince young Americans that serving in the armed forces is worth doing. Respect for God is in collapse among American youth. Violent crime is up. American pop culture celebrates what is most violent, sexual, and degraded in the human experience, and exports that baseness globally. Over and over, as I travel through Eastern Europe, I hear the same thing from beleaguered parents, teachers, and religious leaders: that there is no way to resist American pop culture and its effect on their young. A high school teacher in Poland once told me that there is nothing at all in his country remotely as powerful as Western pop culture in forming the moral sensibilities of young Poles. What we Americans have done and are doing to our country, we are training the next generation of young people abroad to do to theirs.

And on and on.

Try being a normal conservative outside of the US bubble, and you'll see how America, which used to be a beacon of hope to others, is now seen with ambivalence, and even hostility, by people who see how the United States is destroying its own society, and is also trying to export its corruption abroad. It's a challenge to love your country when you listen to older people in the former Soviet bloc ask you, one way or the other, what happened to the Shining City on a Hill that they used to love?

Excellent, Rod, excellent! But then why the hell do you attack Trump? Did you listen to his announcement speech? WTF is wrong with you?

Ethnomasochism

Rod Dreher on The Racial Masochism of the Left:

Where does the Left and all its institutional allies -- which is to say, every major institution in American life -- plan to go with this? Do they really believe that all whites, Asians, and Latinos can be trained to accept brutality from black criminals? Do they really think that America itself is Barnard College? So far, they haven't had any real pushback, so maybe they do.

This is what happens when you abandon classically liberal concepts of justice. This is what happens when you Kendify and DiAngelize policy and discourse. When the backlash comes, it's going to be quite ugly. Understand right now that it will be 100 percent the fault of the Left.

I spoke with a salesman at Sportsman's Warehouse the other day. He told me that before 11:00 am he had sold five AR-15s.

That's not a good sign, my friends.

.....................

Vito Caiati responds:

Regarding your short post “Ethnomasochism,” I was reminded of this observation by Machiavelli in I Principe (Chapter 14): “Molte sono le conseguenze negative che ti provoca il fatto di essere male armato, ma la più grave è che ti rende oggetto di disprezzo. . . .” (“There are many negative consequences brought to you by being badly armed, the most serious is that it makes you the object of contempt”). Your conversation with the gun salesman appears to indicate that many people have instinctively grasped the truth of the Florentine’s point.

To which pertinent observation I had the following. The natural contempt that many people have for the weak and vulnerable is at present aided, abetted, and exacerbated by a society in collapse, a society in which half of the population and most of those who run our institutions think it 'racist' to enforce laws and to enforce them equally. And so the weak and the vulnerable, the loving and the kind, are arming themselves for defense against depredatory elements of the sort that leftists used merely to coddle, but now positively promote.   At a recent CCW class I was surprised to see so many sweet old ladies fixin' to pack heat.   None of this would be necessary, of course, if government did its job. But it doesn't and anyone who votes Democrat is voting to insure that it doesn't, 'going forward' as journalists and pols like to say.

It is 410 A. D.

Alaric is sacking Rome. An obscure Roman philosopher  is penning an agenda for the salvation of the republic. His writings are lost to history. In any case, too little, too late. Will we share his fate?

Three years after the Visigoth invasion, a Christian Platonist and mystic in North Africa puts pen to paper. As Rome goes under, and night falls, the Owl of Minerva rises in the pages of The City of God.

If St. Augustine could see us now he might remark that while the pagan gods failed Rome, we failed the true God when we began worshipping idols.

Joseph-Nöel Sylvestre’s 1890 Painting Depicting the Sack of Rome by the Visigoths in AD 410.

 

The 'Equity' President

'Equity' is wokespeak for equality of outcome without regard for merit or qualifications. In Joe Biden, the demented have finally a representative at the highest level of government in the greatest nation the world has ever seen. Who can deny that this is progress? To question it would be discriminatory and ableist.

Why Tulsi Gabbard is Leaving the Democrat Party and Why You Should Too

Here at Substack. HT: Anthony Flood. Full text follows. Please propagate. Do your bit to restore some sanity to this country and to the world. 

Why I'm leaving the Democratic Party

Tulsi Gabbard

 

I love our country. Our God-given rights of freedom, life, and liberty enshrined in our Constitution and Bill of Rights are my inspiration. I answered the call to duty and took an oath, dedicating my life to supporting and defending those freedoms, both in uniform and in public office.

Growing up in Hawaii gave me a special appreciation of our home, water, and precious natural resources.  So when I was 21 years old I decided to run for Hawaii State House so that I could be in a position to protect our environment.  I wasn’t politically affiliated before that, but as I was about to file my election papers, I had to choose which party to affiliate with. 

As I did my research, I was inspired by Democrats who stood up against the war in Vietnam, and those who fought for Hawaii’s plantation workers who were being abused and exploited by wealthy landowners. I was inspired by leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy and drawn to the ideals of a big-tent Democratic Party that stood up for working men and women — the little guy.  In contrast, the Republican Party seemed like one that stood for the interests of big business and warmongering elites.  So I became a Democrat and remained one for over 20 years — an independent Democrat to be sure, but a Democrat nonetheless. 

I can no longer remain in today’s Democratic Party that is now under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness, who divide us by racializing every issue and stoke anti-white racism, actively work to undermine our God-given freedoms enshrined in our Constitution, are hostile to people of faith and spirituality, demonize the police and protect criminals at the expense of law-abiding Americans, believe in open borders, weaponize the national security state to go after political opponents, and above all, are dragging us ever closer to nuclear war.

Here are some of the main reasons I’m leaving the Democratic Party, in brief. I’ll be tackling each of these in more depth in the coming weeks.

The pro-war Democratic Party has led us to the brink of nuclear war. The party is led by warmongers who are firmly in the grip of the military industrial complex, and don’t know or care about the cost of war, or who pays the price. President Biden and Democratic Party elite have pushed us to the precipice of nuclear war, risking starting WWIII and destroying the world as we know it. This is the most urgent existential threat we face. I ran for President in 2020 because I knew that this is where we were headed. All the signs were there. I raised this issue every day during the campaign, and on the national debate stage. But politicians and the media ignored it. They didn’t care then, and they don’t care now. Obviously I didn’t win that election, and don’t have the power to do what is necessary to prevent it. President Biden and Congress do. But they irresponsibly refuse to use that power to protect the safety of our country, the American people, and the world from the devastation of a nuclear holocaust. To protect our loved ones, our children, our world, I’m calling upon the American people to join me in standing up to these cowardly politicians now. This may be our last chance to do so.

 

A Secret Plan to Destroy America

Malcolm Pollack recommends the following. I've reproduced it verbatim. It is that good. 

...............................

Democrat and former Colorado Governor Dick Lamm gave the following speech in Washington, DC in 2003. Originally published on CAIRCO in 2014.

I have a secret plan to destroy America. If you believe, as many do, that America is too smug, too white bread, too self-satisfied, too rich, let’s destroy America. It is not that hard to do. History shows that nations are more fragile than their citizens think. No nation in history has survived the ravages of time. Arnold Toynbee observed that all great civilizations rise and they all fall, and that “an autopsy of history would show that all great nations commit suicide.” Here is my plan:

1. We must first make America a bilingual-bicultural country. History shows, in my opinion, that no nation can survive the tension, conflict and antagonism of two competing languages and cultures. It is a blessing for an individual to be bilingual; it is a curse for a society to be bilingual. One scholar, Seymour Martin Lipset, put it this way: “The histories of bilingual and bicultural societies that do not assimilate are histories of turmoil, tension and tragedy. Canada, Belgium, Malaysia, Lebanon all face crises of national existence in which minorities press for autonomy, if not independence. Pakistan and Cyprus have divided. Nigeria suppressed an ethnic rebellion. France faces difficulties with its Basques, Bretons and Corsicans.”

2. I would then invent “multiculturalism” and encourage immigrants to maintain their own culture. I would make it an article of belief that all cultures are equal: that there are no cultural differences that are important. I would declare it an article of faith that the black and Hispanic dropout rate is only due to prejudice and discrimination by the majority. Every other explanation is out-of-bounds.

3. We can make the United States a “Hispanic Quebec” without much effort. The key is to celebrate diversity rather than unity. As Benjamin Schwarz said in the Atlantic Monthly recently, “The apparent success of our own multiethnic and multicultural experiment might have been achieved, not by tolerance, but by hegemony. Without the dominance that once dictated ethnocentrically, and what it meant to be an American, we are left with only tolerance and pluralism to hold us together.” I would encourage all immigrants to keep their own language and culture. I would replace the melting pot metaphor with a salad bowl metaphor. It is important to insure that we have various cultural sub-groups living in America reinforcing their differences, rather than Americans emphasizing their similarities.

4. Having done all this, I would make our fastest-growing demographic group the least educated. I would add a second underclass, unassimilated, undereducated and antagonistic to our population. I would have this second underclass have a 50 percent dropout rate from school.

5. I would then get the big foundations and big business to give these efforts lots of money. I would invest in ethnic identity, and I would establish the cult of victimology. I would get all minorities to think their lack of success was all the fault of the majority. I would start a grievance industry blaming all minority failure on the majority population.

6. I would establish dual citizenship and promote divided loyalties. I would “celebrate diversity.” “Diversity” is a wonderfully seductive word. It stresses differences rather than commonalities. Diverse people worldwide are mostly engaged in hating each other – that is, when they are not killing each other. A “diverse,” peaceful or stable society is against most historical precedent. People undervalue the unity it takes to keep a nation together, and we can take advantage of this myopia.

Look at the ancient Greeks. Dorf’s “World History” tells us: “The Greeks believed that they belonged to the same race; they possessed a common language and literature; and they worshiped the same gods. All Greece took part in the Olympic Games in honor of Zeus, and all Greeks venerated the shrine of Apollo at Delphi. A common enemy, Persia, threatened their liberty. Yet, all of these bonds together were not strong enough to overcome two factors … (local patriotism and geographical conditions that nurtured political divisions …)” If we can put the emphasis on the “pluribus,” instead of the “unum,” we can balkanize America as surely as Kosovo.

7. Then I would place all these subjects off-limits – make it taboo to talk about. I would find a word similar to “heretic” in the 16th century that stopped discussion and paralyzed thinking. Words like “racist”, “xenophobe” halt argument and conversation. Having made America a bilingual-bicultural country, having established multiculturalism, having the large foundations fund the doctrine of “victimology,” I would next make it impossible to enforce our immigration laws. I would develop a mantra – ”because immigration has been good for America, it must always be good.” I would make every individual immigrant sympatric and ignore the cumulative impact.

8. Lastly, I would censor Victor Davis Hanson’s book “Mexifornia” – this book is dangerous; it exposes my plan to destroy America. So please, please – if you feel that America deserves to be destroyed–please, please – don’t buy this book! This guy is on to my plan.

Moral Community and Civil War

Malcolm Pollack writes, and I respond in blue:

 

Visited your blog today . . . and saw this striking passage:

 

But also: haven't the barbarians forfeited their (normative) humanity to such an extent that they no longer deserve moral consideration? Do they form a moral community with us at all? 

 

I am just asking. Or is inquiry now verboten?

 

It's not verboten - I think it's pretty clear that the foe has already asked it of our side and found us fit for exclusion. (Joe Biden's "Red Speech" made that plain enough.)

BV: Yes. Biden's 'semi-fascist' is a weasel-word equivalent in meaning to 'fascist,' which itself is an abuse of a legitimate term.  The Left's favorite 'F' word is a toxic blend of psychological projection and Orwellian subversion of language. Leftists drain the term of its descriptive meaning so as to employ it as a semantic bludgeon.

But it is chilling, nevertheless, to be asking it in serious immediacy, rather than as a speculative, worst-case example of where we might get to if we aren't careful. It seems though, that now we really are pretty much there, and that is - even for folks like us who have been thinking so hard about the road ahead for so long - a grim mile-post.

 

BV: Yes, we appear to be reaching a critical juncture at which  we will either put the destructive Left in its place and start the long march back to comity, or else advance into hotter and hotter forms of civil war, thereby weakening ourselves over against our geopolitical adversaries who believe we are ripe for collapse if the right shocks are administered. (For example, what has the Biden administration done to protect the power grid? Nothing. The ChiComs could easily knock out most if not all of it. The Biden admin, however, thinks delusionally that the non-threat of 'white supremacy' and the very distant possible threat of 'climate change' are imminent existential threats.) 

 

What makes our predicament so dire is that the worst of the threats to the Republic are not external, but internal, emanating as they do from the extreme ('woke') Left which has infiltrated all of our institutions aided and abetted by a vast number of Useful Idiots  who do not understand what is happening.

 

I have read a great deal in recent years about the history of civil war, and when things get to this point - when large numbers of people begin seriously questioning whether their fellow-citizens have forfeited their claim to moral inclusion (which really is the same as saying they are no longer to be seen as fellow humans) - then a nation is approaching the final exit. 

 

BV: Yes, if you are using 'human' normatively and not merely biologically. I am reminded of someone who when asked how many men he had killed, replied in effect, "Not a one, I killed only communists."

 

What strikes me here is to look back over your own slow and cautious approach to this point over these many years: always thoughtful, always trying to hang on to the better angels of the American nature, and always wary of the most inflammatory and divisive voices on the Right. 

 

BV: You understand me, Malcolm, and I am deeply appreciative of that fact as well as of your gentlemanly conduct even when I was unduly harsh in my responses to you. You and 'Jacques' [a Canadian academic philosopher who must use a pseudonym to protect himself against the depredatory Left which is apparently even more vicious up there than down here] have had an influence on me.

 

But here you are. (And so am I.) When those who hate you have branded you as unpersons, and make clear that they want you dead and gone, to keep your own circle expansive enough to include them is just unilateral disarmament, and suicidal folly. Woe that we should have lived to see such times in America.

 

BV: I should make clear, though, that when I asked in the passage you quoted "whether the barbarians have forfeited their (normative) humanity to such an extent that they no longer deserve moral consideration," I was not asking rhetorically. I was not making a statement but genuinely  asking a question. And the same goes for the question whether they, the barbarians, form a moral community with us at all.  By barbarians I mean  the BLM and Antifa thugs and all who would erase our history and traditions together with the criminal element in which blacks are 'over-represented,' as well as all the civilized-looking enablers of the explicitly barbarous from Biden on down, and let's not leave out the hidden operatives who pull the strings of puppets such as Biden.

 

As a philosopher, my interest in these questions is not just here-and-now practical, although it is that inasmuch as I cannot do philosophy if I am dead or in prison. I am no Boethius.  My interest is also theoretical.  We are not just clever land mammals, bits of the Earth's fauna. We are also persons, rights-possessors, and as such equal regardless of race, sex, and other biological differences.  Here is a mighty bulwark against the biologism of the (true) fascists.   To the extent that the alt-Right moves in that direction I must oppose them.

 

This bring me to the topic of tribalism. I have been strenuously opposing it. Unfortunately, it appears to be the historical norm (statistically, not normatively).  If the reversion to the tribal is inevitable, then I fear that humanity is finished given the existence of WMDs.

 

Still and all, I have been considering that a pro tempore white tribalism might be necessary, though not in itself desirable, given the vicious assault on Western civilization that we are seeing.  We should discuss this, Malcolm, practically and theoretically. What is to be done by people like us who are not about to withdraw into the petty particulars of private life, but want to do our bit to preserve a civilization that has made it possible for us and so many around the world to live long and productive lives. You and I are not about to acquiesce in the suicide of the West or accept dhimmitude, whether of the Islamist, Communist, or 'woke' variety. And so it becomes quite the pressing question whether our political enemies have forfeited their normative humanity and can still be tolerated. Toleration, you have heard me say, is a great value of the classical liberalism of the Founders. But toleration has limits, as I have also repeatedly said. We are approaching those limits, and the patience of patriots is wearing thin.

 

If the USA, as she was founded to be, collapses, there will be nowhere left to escape to. The rest of the Anglosphere is shot.

'Democrats' Aping National Socialists

Excellent commentary here:

In two years, the Nazis went from being a fringe party to having a stranglehold on the German government and people. It was then that they unleashed their previously subdued anti-Semitism, from boycotts to book burnings to de facto discrimination to de jure separation (Nuremberg laws) and, finally, to the Final Solution.

We can be almost sure that, if we asked any German in 1932 whether it would be okay to enslave and murder Jews, he would most certainly have said no. But within two years, Jews would officially be defined as an inferior race and have their political and economic freedoms curtailed. Within a decade, millions would be murdered.

As Martin Niemöller suggests in his 1946 poem “First they came,” the Nazis were able to accomplish their goals by taking baby steps of oppression with little discernible pushback from a willfully gullible public.

So it is that we find ourselves in America in 2022 with fascism ascendant. And unlike what the media would want you to believe, it’s not Donald Trump who’s leading the parade. For just over two years, we’ve seen the evil of fascism take hold as it’s never held sway before. Consider the following:

In the summer of 2020, Democrats rained hell down on America by allowing, encouraging, and funding urban terrorists who destroyed property, attacked citizens and the police, and killed dozens of people.

In 2020 and beyond, despite years of watching Democrats assail election integrity, anyone who questioned the highly unlikely outcome of the 2020 election was branded as an anti-democratic conspiracy nut and accused of supporting insurrection.

The riot that occurred on January 6, 2021, was labeled an “insurrection” and hundreds of citizens who had been welcomed into the US Capital or standing on its grounds were arrested, labeled as terrorists, and thrown in solitary confinement for months without charge or bail. At the same time, among the crowd were provocateurs in whom the FBI was suspiciously uninterested.

By politicizing the Department of Justice, the Biden administration and other Democrats have used the “insurrection” pretense to harass, intimidate, arrest, and jail Trump’s supporters, members of his administration, and his legal team. This harassment eventually led to the unprecedented step of the Justice Department and the FBI raiding the home of the former president and future presidential contender.

Beginning in 2020, in response to COVID, primarily Democrat-run states and municipalities across the country instituted draconian lockdown edicts that eviscerated individual rights, destroyed small businesses, and ostracized or arrested individuals who resisted. Simultaneously teachers’ unions nationwide forced school shutdowns, leading to extraordinary declines in student learning and dramatic increases in youth depression. Those seen questioning the efficacy of or damage from such lockdowns and shutdowns were unconstitutionally muzzled when the administration covertly worked with social media companies to silence and de-platform them.

The Biden administration issued mandates for rapidly developed vaccines of dubious efficacy and unknown danger; then coerced private enterprises to enforce them. Questioning that policy or non-acquiescence with it was seen as a proxy for opposition to the regime, so the government and allied businesses threatened and destroyed livelihoods.

When Americans stood up to school boards, complaining about their children being exposed to sexualization in schools or being accused of being racists because of the color of their skin, Biden’s Justice Department branded them as terrorists.

The Biden administration’s threatening, intimidating, and jailing of its opposition set the backdrop for Joe Biden’s extraordinary speech on September 1, when he stated, “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic.” This was not a campaign speech; this was the President officially addressing American citizens…and calling 70 million of them terrorists.

Rod Dreher: Floating Above the Fray as Usual

Here:

We are somewhat insulated from this in America because we don't face the hideous energy crunch that Europeans do. Do you really think, though, that the US is going to be fine when one of our largest trading partners goes belly up? We are going to crash too, and crash hard. A word to my fellow conservatives: if you think the return of the buffoonish Donald Trump is going to be sufficient to deal with what is here, and what is coming, you are almost as deluded as the libs. You are as much a prisoner to emotionally satisfying Narrative as they are. We are in bad, bad trouble, and it's going to get far worse before it gets better. (Emphasis added)

What is your solution, Rod? I have just read your three most recent articles and all I get is more analysis, lamentation, and hand-wringing. What is to be done, my man? And which side are you on? Do you disagree with the policies Trump implemented? Calling the man a buffoon won't cut it; I want to hear a reasoned, fact-based case against Trump.

For some reason, Dreher, blinded by Trump Derangement Syndrome, and perhaps in the grip of the womanish side of his personality, cannot look past Trump's somewhat repellent style of self-presentation, his lack of gravitas, his alpha-male strut and stride, to see Trump's virtues.   (Please follow the hyperlink to Tom Klingenstein's sober and superb presentation.)  In consequence, Dreher cannot grasp that Trump is our only hope for turning things around.  This is a well-founded hope because of Trump's accomplishments while in office. He has proven himself as Dick Morris amply explains. De Santis has not proven himself to the same extent, and his being a career politician makes him more likely to cave under pressure. And yet Dreher does command a very clear view of the nasty predicament we are in:

Our leaders are liars and ideologues who are destroying the West. The ruling class -- the State, the media, the financial sector, woke capitalism, the universities, every institution -- is actively betraying the people they are meant to serve. This is not just crackpot Internet speculation. It is actually happening, right now -- and as far as I can tell, the American people are being kept in the dark, figuratively. It's about to become literal in Europe. Watch this clip from Tucker Carlson, one of the few major journalists who tell the truth. He's pointing out that Americans aren't being told that Europeans are teetering on the edge of catastrophe.

Very good, Rod. I couldn't agree more with your description of the present state of affairs. But it is just more talk. What do you propose we do?  

The other side of the argument, of course, is that Trump is so repellent to so many that the net effect of supporting him will hurt the conservative cause. And of course it is the cause that matters, not the man Trump.  But unless it can be shown that there is someone more likely to succeed in implementing the cause, we should support Trump.

A political cause that is not implemented is practically nothing. Politics, though informed by theory, is practical, not theoretical. Is that not blindingly evident?

 

Rod Dreher on Critics of the Benedict Option

A re-post from 20 July 2015.  Things are falling apart so fast that July 2015 seems  like a long time ago, even to an old man for whom tempus fugit is an understatement. The original posting occurred roughly four and a half years before the annus horribilis of 2020. And here we are more than half-way through 2022. The Amerikan police state is metastasizing as we speak. 87,000 new IRS agents armed with semi-automatic pistols and carbines to persuade the hyper-lawyered billionaire fat cats to 'pay their fair share' -- to ape the idiom of Fauxcahontas Warren? Think again you of the ovine and bovine and usefully-idiotic persuasion. It is one of the several modes of what I am now calling the Assault on the Middle. More on this, anon.

...................................

Excerpt:

You keep talking about the Benedict Option, but you never say what it is. Give us the formula.

I keep telling you that there is no formula! We are going to have to be experimental, because we have never faced a post-Christian culture. The first point is for Christians to wake up and face reality. There will be no “take back our country” moment, because we have lost, and lost decisively. We are rapidly de-Christianizing. True, we have a long way to go before we get to European rates of secularization and religious indifference, but the trajectory is the same. Rather than change the world, the world is changing the churches. The power of popular culture is overwhelming, and in ways that many Christians scarcely grasp — and this, as MacIntyre says, is part of our predicament.

Granted, there is no formula:  there are different ways of implementing the Benedict Option.  But there ought to be discussion -- not provided by Dreher in the above-referenced piece -- of a potential problem with one form of the Option's implementation.  

Suppose you and yours join a quasi-monastic community out in the middle of nowhere where you live more or less 'off the grid,' home-school your kids, try to keep alive and transmit our Judeo-Christian and Graeco-Roman traditions, all in keeping with that marvellous admonition of Goethe in Faust:

Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast,
erwirb es, um es zu besitzen!

 

What from your fathers you  received as heir,

Acquire if  you would possess it. (tr. W. Kaufmann)

So now you are out in the desert or the forest or in some isolated place free of the toxic influences of a society in collapse.  The problem is that you are now a very easy target for the fascists of the Left.  You and yours are all in one place, far away from the rest of society and its infrastructure.  All the fascists have to do is trump up some charges, of child-abuse, of gun violations, whatever.  The rest of society considers you kooks and benighted bigots and religious fanatics and won't be bothered if you are wiped off the face of the earth.  You might go the way of the Branch Davidians.

Is this an alarmist scenario?  I hope it is.  But the way things are going, one ought to give careful thought to one's various withdrawal options. 

It might be better to remain in diaspora in the cities and towns, spread out, in the midst of people and infrastructure the fascists of the Left will not target.  A sort of subversive engagement from within may in the long run be better than spatial withdrawal.  One can withdraw spiritually without withdrawing spatially.  One the other hand, we are spatial beings, and perhaps not merely accidentally, so the question is a serious one:  how well can one withdraw spiritually while in the midst of towns and cities and morally corrupt and spiritually dead people?

And then there is the vexed and vexing question of armed resistance.  This is especially vexing for Christians.  Should we meet violence with violence, or let ourselves and our culture be destroyed?  On Christian metaphysics, this world is not an illusion.  It is not a dream one can hope to wake up from.  On the other hand, it is not ultimately real: it, and we who sojourn through it, are in statu viae. What then should be the measure and mode of our defense of it?

If you think violence is to be met with violence, then I advise you to remain in diaspora in the cities and towns, spread out, in the midst of people and infrastructure the fascists of the Left will not target.

We are indeed living in very interesting times.  How can one be bored?

Adeimantus, Machiavelli, Bloom, and Strauss

Recent events make it clear that the West is on the wane. The sun is setting on the Land of Evening. As the West goes under, the philosopher, like the proverbial owl of Minerva, spreads his wings in the gathering dusk so as to attain an altitude from which to survey the passing scene.  He soars and he strains, to com-prehend and understand, and if he is of the tribe of Plato, he seeks to discern what might lie beyond the scene he surveys.  His flight is fueled by the thoughts of his great predecessors.

 

I found the following in Allan Bloom's interpretive essay on Plato's Republic which is appended to his translation thereof. (Allan Bloom, The Republic of Plato, Basic Books, 1968, p. 371, correction and emphasis added.)

Adeimantus' objection, then, is the same as Machiavelli's: the best regime is a mere dream, for a good city cannot avoid ruin if it does not do the things which will enable it to survive among vicious cities. It is foreign policy which makes the devotion to the good life within a city impossible [sic; read: possible]  One must be at least as powerful as one's neighbors and must adopt a way of life such as to make this possible. Poverty, smallness, and unchangingness cannot compete with wealth, greatness, and innovation. The true policy is outward-looking, and cities and men are radically dependent on others for what they must be. Without a response to this objection— which Machiavelli thought to be decisive for the rejection of classical political thought — the very attempt to elaborate a utopia is folly. (p. 371)

My gloss: An enlightened nationalism, while chary of intervention, cannot be isolationist.

And the following I found in Leo Strauss' essay "What is Political Philosophy?" in What is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies, University of Chicago Press, 1988, originally published by The Free Press, 1959, pp. 40-41, emphasis and hyperlink added.

The founder of modern political philosophy is Machiavelli. He tried to effect, and he did effect, a break with the whole tradition of political philosophy. He compared his achievement to that of men like Columbus. He claimed to have discovered a new moral continent. His claim is well founded; his political teaching is "wholly new." The only question is whether the new continent is fit for human habitation.

In his Florentine Histories he tells the following story: Cosimo de Medici once said that men cannot maintain power with pater-nosters in their hands. This gave occasion to Cosimo's enemies to slander him as a man who loved himself more than his fatherland and who loved this world more than the next. Cosimo was then said to be somewhat immoral and somewhat irreligious. Machiavelli himself is open to the same charge. His work is based on a critique of religion and a critique of morality.

His critique of religion, chiefly of Biblical religion, but also of paganism, is not original. It amounts to a restatement of the teaching of pagan philosophers, as well as of that medieval school which goes by the name of Averroism and which gave rise to the notion of the three impostors. Machiavelli's originality in this field is limited to the fact that he was a great master of blasphemy. The charm and gracefulness of his blasphemies will however be less strongly felt by us than their shocking character. Let us then keep them under the veil under which he has hidden them. I hasten to his critique of morality which is identical with his critique of classical political philosophy. One can state the main point as follows: there is something fundamentally wrong with an approach to politics which culminates in a Utopia, in the description of a best regime whose actualization is highly improbable. Let us then cease to take our bearings by virtue, the highest objective which a society might choose; let us begin to take our bearings by the objectives which are actually pursued by all societies. Machiavelli consciously lowers the standards of social action. His lowering of the standards is meant to lead to a higher probability of actualization of that scheme which is constructed in accordance with the lowered standards. Thus, the dependence on chance is reduced: chance will be conquered.

I will take a stab at a gloss of the italicized passage. It is a grave error to aim at a utopian resolution of our political predicament. To seek the unachievable best is to preclude the attainment of the achievable good. The pursuit of unrealizable ideals will make hypocrites of us and what is far worse, murderers who will be able to justify mass murder  to achieve perfection as if anything truly straight could ever be made by human effort from the crooked timber of humanity.

 

Jerking (and Twerking) toward Social Collapse

Thanks to 'progressives,' our 'progress' toward social and cultural collapse seems not to be proceeding at a constant speed, but to be accelerating. But perhaps a better metaphor from the lexicon of physics is jerking. After all, our 'progress' is jerk-driven. No need to name names. You know who they are.

 

From your college physics you may recall that the first derivative of position with respect to time is velocity, while the second derivative is acceleration. Lesser known is the third derivative: jerk. (I am not joking; look it up.) If acceleration is the rate of change of velocity, jerk, also known as jolt, is the rate of change of acceleration.

 

If you were studying something in college, and not majoring in, say, Grievance Studies, then you probably know that all three, velocity, acceleration, and jerk are vectors, not scalars. Each has a magnitude and a direction. This is why a satellite orbiting the earth is constantly changing its velocity despite its constant speed.

 

The 'progressive' jerk too has his direction: the end of civilization as we know it.