Maverick Philosopher

Live Not By Lies

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Related:

Trump is Going to Win.  I must add: only if we don't become complacent and we each do our bit.

Trump's Dobbs Strategy

I'd say it's the right one.  You are free to differ.

Related:

Abortion and the Wages of Concupiscence Unrestrained

and

Slavery, Abortion, and 'Skin in the Game'

 

The Charlottesville Lie

The only sure way to stop a leftist from lying would be by stopping him from talking. The Biden administration is one of the most, or the most, mendacious in our history. Copycat that he is, Biden saw the Clintons and Obama get away with it and resolved to go them one better. A brazen liar and serial plagiarist, truth decay has rotted his soul. Will Nancy Pelosi pray for him?   Dennis Prager:

Most people will tell that you that President Trump called Neo-Nazis “fine people” during his famous press conference following the Charlottesville riot. But he never did. So, why do so many believe it? CNN political analyst Steve Cortes explains how the Charlottesville lie happened and why it’s so dangerous. See the video here and then pass it on to family and friends. Then after they’ve seen it, ask them if they still believe “the lie”?

Under six minutes.

Resuming the "Never-Trump Mentality" Thread

Tom Tillett often leaves very good comments, but he is 'slow on the trigger.' As a result, his contributions often get buried and go unread. I get the impression that he is someone who actually works for a living [grin].  Today he left two long but very good comments on the Never-Trump Mentality post.  Here is the first, and here is the second which I now reproduce: 

Bill writes to Malcolm, >>are you prepared to endorse extra-political means to defeat our political enemies?<<

Malcolm writes, >>This is war, and we should do what we can to win, rather than do only what we may, and lose. <<

A difficult question for me, but I am on Malcolm's side on this. I think the question depends on what time you think it is. Attacking and boarding a ship under another nation's flag is an act of piracy and the crew of the attacking ship is subject to criminal prosecution. However, any crew that does the same in a declared war cannot be prosecuted because such actions are under a completely different set of rules and laws.

Likewise, what tactics we adopt from the Left's arsenal depends on whether you think the Left has declared all-out war on the rest of us. I think it's clear that they have, and I believe Malcolm agrees. If so, then this is not normal politics and different, more flexible rules apply as to how we should respond.

How flexible? I dunno. But the clearest case is the reprehensible lawfare the Democrats are engaged in. I think Republican state AGs need to crank up the lawfare against Democrats. How about Adam Schiff running for the Senate in California? Since the DC Courts have stripped Trump of his presidential immunity for acts taken as President, then Schiff has no immunity for his acts and outright lies to the American public while in Congress. Surely there is an obscure statute somewhere that can be misinterpreted to hold [place?] Schiff in the docket.

Bullies need to be punched in the mouth or they will continue to punch the rest of us in the mouth - or worse.

BV agrees with Malcolm and Tom that we are at war with the Left, and he agrees with Tom's use of the phrase, "declared all-out war." The war is over the soul of America.  The question concerns whether we should (i) preserve what remains of America as she was founded to be, and (ii) restore those good elements of the system bequeathed to us by the Founders, while (iii) preserving the legitimate progress that has been made (e.g. universal suffrage), OR whether we should replace the political system of the Founders with an incompatible system which can be described as culturally Marxist.

(This formulation of what the war is about may ignite some dissent among us friends. My approach is restorationist, not reactionary. There is the danger, however, of a merely semantic quibble. The combox is open.)

Tom implies that there are certain rules of engagement in the conduct of our war with our political enemies and that it is not the case that any and all means can be employed to defeat them.  Here is where it gets very interesting. 

I used to say, "You lie about us and we'll tell the truth about you." Now I am inclined to say, "You lie about us, and we'll lie about you." Slander us, we slander you. Smear us, we smear you. Shout us down, we shout you down. And so on.

So here is something we need to get clear about. Given that there are some rules of engagement with our political enemies, and that we cannot, or rather ought not, do just anything to win, what are the rules in this supersessionist (not secessionist, and not successionist) civil war in which we are now combatants? 

The Politics of Abortion

Ron Paul and the principle of subsidiarity.

Top o' the Stack.

Misplaced Moral Enthusiasm

I would have thought that stopping the influx of Fentanyl would have priority over banning menthol cigarettes.

Here is a curious argument:

If it sounds a bit nanny state-ish to ban an otherwise legal product used by consenting adults, consider this: In 2009, Congress gave the FDA authority to ban all other flavors in cigarettes, which it did in order to make these dangerous products less attractive to new smokers. But Congress stalled on menthols and asked for more study.

So the more the feds ban, the less nanny state-ish any particular ban becomes?

Political Opponents or Political Enemies?

If you are among the sane, reasonable, and morally decent, then you ought to consider leftists, and this includes today's Democrats, as political enemies. Here is one reason among many:

Earlier this year, RCP [RealClear Politics] learned that it was one of many news sites that appeared on an advertising blacklist put out by a group called Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a British NGO that advises advertisers and search engine companies. GDI labeled RealClear Politics as a high-risk news site for disinformation. All because we include voices they don’t like. That we pair such voices with those they agree with doesn’t seem to matter to them. 

Alles klar?

Robert Kaplan on Henry Kissinger

Robert Kaplan:

Kissinger’s beliefs, which emerge through his writing, are certainly not for the faint-hearted. They are emotionally unsatisfying, yet analytically timeless. They include:

• Disorder is worse than injustice, since injustice merely means the world is imperfect, while disorder tempts anarchy and the Hobbesian nightmare of war and conflict, of all against all.
• It follows, then, that order is more important than freedom, since without order there is no freedom for anybody.
• The fundamental issue in international and domestic affairs is not the control of wickedness, but the limitation of self-righteousness. For it is self-righteousness that often leads to war and the most extreme forms of repression, both at home and abroad.
• The aim of policy is to reconcile what is just with what is possible. Journalists and freedom fighters have it easy in life since they can concern themselves only with what is just. Policymakers, burdened with bureaucratic responsibility in order to advance a nation’s self-interest, have no such luxury.
• Pessimism can often be morally superior to misplaced optimism. Pessimism, therefore, is not necessarily to be disparaged.

It is true that much of the above is derivative of the great philosophers, especially Hobbes. But it is to Kissinger’s credit that he consciously activated it in the daily conduct of foreign policy.

[.  . .]

Kissinger was a “genuine statesman”, to use the German philosopher-historian Oswald Spengler’s definition: that is, he was not a reactionary who thought that history could be reversed, nor was he a militant-idealist, who thought that history marched in a certain direction. Kissinger’s conclusion was more grounded: he believed less in victory than in reconciliations.

How to Tell the Truth without being Truthful

Multiple are the modes of mendacity.  Obama, Biden, Hillary and their ilk are masters of these modes. May a pox, but no pax, be upon them. Over at Substack, a quick look at one of the modes.

The Politics of Abortion Again

Tony Flood writes and wants my response:

What if we gain the presidency and lose our soul?

I believe the conceptus (a fortiori, the embryo, the fetus) is an immature, but complete, human being with all the rights accruing thereto, including the right not to be wantonly destroyed. Most of the electorate, however, disagrees and will not extend protection to a human fetus younger than 15 weeks, or so Trump calculates. If Republicans insist on such protection, as I interpret his calculus, the majority will electorally complete America's descent into a one-party tyranny. In the American gulag we will reflect on the price of principle. Trump will not (because he cannot) provide the analytical rigor we need now to weigh life against liberty.

Our topic is not the morality of abortion, but the politics thereof. Tony and I agree that abortion is a grave moral evil, from conception on.  (For arguments, see my Abortion category.) But as Tony rightly points out, most of the electorate disagrees.  As for Trump's calculation, I will assume that it is correct.  And I suspect that Trump is right that if Republicans say the kind of stupid things that Mike Pence said in the first debate, the chances of a Republican return to the White House will be appreciably lessened.

I will now reproduce portions of something I wrote earlier which Tony may not have read.

The overturning of Roe v. Wade returned the abortion question to the states. That means that each state is now empowered to enact its own laws regulating abortion. Some states will permit abortion up to the moment of birth. Others will not. Different states, different laws.

What then are we to make of Mike Pence and Senator Tim Scott and their  call for a Federal law that bans abortion (apart from the usual exceptions) during the last 15 weeks of pregnancy? 

Am I missing something? [. . .] It strikes me as obvious that if the abortion issue is for the states to decide, then there cannot be any federal abortion laws. 

Nikki Haley and Pence danced around this issue but their heated tango  was irrelevant blather. [. . .]

The precise question is: How is a federal abortion restriction consistent with the states' right to decide the abortion laws? [. . .]

The answer to the precise question is that a federal restriction is not consistent with states' rights. It is unconstitutional.

This is not a very satisfying answer given that abortion is a moral abomination. (See my Abortion category for arguments.) But arguments, no matter how good, cut no ice in the teeth of our concupiscence. This is explained in my Substack article, Abortion and the Wages of Concupiscence Unrestrained.

Now Tony, you must respond directly to what I said above, in particular, to the third paragraph. Am I right or am I wrong? If you think I am wrong, explain why.

I now add a couple of further points that I consider very important.

1) Politics is a practical game. It is not about perfect versus imperfect. It is (almost) always about better or worse. If you sit on the sidelines waiting for the perfect candidate, you are a fool.  Trump is flawed, but he is far better than Biden or anyone else the Dems are likely to replace him with. So if Trump gets the nod, the conservative must vote for Trump; if De Santis, then De Santis. 

2) Abortion is just one issue of several. Here are some issues that are equally if not more important. Crime.  No doubt, unborn lives matter.  But then so do born lives.  A little old lady should be able to walk down the street to buy groceries without fear of being beaten to death with a tire iron. Democrat policies have led to an unprecedented upsurge in unspeakably vicious forms of violence against persons and property. National sovereignty. The Biden administration is guilty of utter dereliction of duty in intentionally allowing the invasion of the country by drug cartels, human traffickers, terrorists, people bearing sub-tropical diseases, etc.  Financial collapse.  Assaults on constitutionally-guaranteed liberties. I could go on. 

My suggestion is that presidential candidates should shut up about abortion. There is nothing that they can do about it at the the federal level. This issue has been returned to the states.  

Tony asked: "What if we gain the presidency and lose our soul?" 

My answer is that if we don't gain the presidency then we lose everything including our soul. Think about it. If the Left wins, then they will pack the Supreme Court and reinstate Roe v. Wade.

And Tony, haven't we already lost our collective soul? You admit that the majority of the electorate has no moral objection to abortion on demand at any stage of fetal development.  A soul that has already been lost cannot be lost a second time.

Where am I going wrong?

"He be Good for the Hood"

I have some mind-numbingly substantive posts in the works, but for now here are three items from the (non-fake) news you may want to opine about.

1) The mug shot heard or rather seen 'round the world and its appeal to blacks. "He be good for the hood." "The more they indict, the more we unite."

2) Gold Star dad to Biden: "It's two-fucking-thirty, asshole." (1:30 ff.) Civility is a good old conservative virtue. But anyone who calls for civility in the present political situation is simply not perceiving said situation. We need to condemn morally our political enemies, in blunt and brutal ways. Yes or no? Argue the pros and cons.

3) My man Victor Davis Hanson was on Sean Hannity's show tonight. I have been linking to him for years. But I got annoyed with him tonight when he kept repeating, in reference to Biden's disastrous border policy, "It makes no sense!"

But it makes perfect sense if you are a globalist like Traitor Joe out to destroy the USA as she was founded to be. Does my man  lack the cojones (testicular fortitude) to come right out and say what I suspect he believes, namely, that the whole point of the open border policy is destroy the republic? Could he really be confused or puzzled about what's going on? Is he tempering his remarks to keep from getting shit-canned like Tucker?  'Defenestrate' is a polite word, and I could have used it instead of 'shit- can,' but again what good is politeness? You will get nowhere being polite or civil with mendacious thugs. Around thugs you have to be able to  project danger credibly and elicit fear. Jordan Peterson is pretty good on this. 

A good man is not a weak man. A good man is a dangerous man who is in control of the animal in him. 

Abortion and Last Night's GOP Debate

The overturning of Roe v. Wade returned the abortion question to the states. That means that each state is empowered to enact its own laws regulating abortion. Some states will permit abortion up to the moment of birth. Others will not. Different states, different laws.

What then are we to make of Mike Pence and Senator Tim Scott and their  call for a Federal law that bans abortion (apart from the usual exceptions) during the last 15 weeks of pregnancy? 

Am I missing something? (When I write about political and legal issues, I write as a concerned citizen and not as an expert in these areas.) It strikes me as obvious that if the abortion issue is for the states to decide, then there cannot be any federal abortion laws. 

Nikki Haley and Pence danced around this issue but their heated tango  was irrelevant blather. Pence insisted that the abortion question was a moral one. No doubt, but that it is not to the point. Haley irrelevantly asserted that that an anti-abortion majority has not been seen in the Senate in “over 100 years.” and “Don’t make women feel like they have to decide on this issue when you know we don’t have 60 Senate votes.” 

The precise question is: How is a federal abortion restriction consistent with the states' right to decide the abortion laws? ND Governor Doug Burgum alone seemed to understand the problem, but his fleeting remark failed to set it forth clearly.

The answer to the precise question is that the federal restriction is not consistent with states' rights. It is unconstitutional.

This is not a very satisfying answer given that abortion is a moral abomination. (See my Abortion category for arguments.) But arguments, no matter how good, cut no ice in the teeth of our concupiscence. This is explained in my Substack article, Abortion and the Wages of Concupiscence Unrestrained.

A Short History of Slavery

Candace Owens, about five and a half minutes.  A crisp refutation of widespread leftist lies and omissions. Do your bit and propagate this video.

"Truth is not a leftist value." (Dennis Prager) Some of you think that I came up with the line. Not so. I got it from Prager. Always give credit where credit is due. Or are you a plagiarist like Joe Biden?

His plagiarism is a comparatively minor element given the depth of his moral corruption, as is becoming increasingly evident. The case against Biden 2024 is massive even if you don't agree with me that the hard-Left/'woke' policies this puppet promotes are destructive unto national suicide.

Political views aside, anyone can see that Biden is physically unfit for office and non compos mentis, not of sound mind. These two absolutely undeniable points disqualify him, especially as commander-in-chief. (Our geopolitical adversaries are licking their chops and testing the old fool with blatant provocations in preparation for events that few want to talk about.) Biden's supporters will deny his moral corruption; their denial, however, only serves to make evident their moral corruption and disregard for facts.

The Moral Depravity of the Democrat Party

David Horowitz:

“Woke” has become a term to describe the enemies of our country who have colonized our schools and taught our next generations to hate America, hate white people and trash our history and national pride. How to explain this travesty? It began fifty years ago when the anti-American, Marxist left set its sights on taking over our schools.

[. . .]

Many of you may have thought that the takeover of our educational system by anti-American Marxists happened overnight. It didn’t. It was five decades in the making. But conservatives and Republicans chose not to notice it. And when they did notice it, they were reluctant to fight.

If you want to understand the disasters that have befallen our country, you have to begin with the failure of Republicans and conservatives to aggressively wage the political war necessary to defend it.

The anti-American left attacks patriotic Americans as “white supremacists,” “racists” “domestic terrorists” and “insurrectionists.” And we respond by calling them “liberals.” There is nothing about them that is liberal. They are vindictive bigots, determined to demonize and destroy us.

[. . .]

The Democrat Party is no longer controlled by a liberal left but by Marxist zealots who willfully disregard the Marxist atrocities and failures of the past. Democrats no longer respect the sovereign individual, the rule of law, or the primary values of the Constitution –the equality of races, the spirit of compromise or the decentralization of power.

Instead, Democrats regard the Constitution as a white supremacist document written by rich white slaveowners, designed to oppress all other genders and races. Its mentality is that of European fascism and Soviet communism, and its immediate goal is a one-party state.

{. . .]

January 6th was the date set to certify the electors. On that day Trump gave his famous “Stop the Steal” speech, which has been maliciously described by Democrats as a criminal “incitement to insurrection.” This was absurd on its face, since Trump had offered the Capitol Police and Nancy Pelosi 10,000 national guardsmen to control the crowds. Trump’s offer was duly noted by the Inspector General who attended the meeting. Pelosi and the Democrat-controlled Capitol Police rejected the offer.

[. . .]

Biden’s inauguration was January 20. He began with a brazen lie that he would unify the country and represent both those who voted for him and those who did not.

Then he issued a series of executive orders that illegally and unconstitutionally nullified our immigration laws, and welcomed a flood of unvetted illegals from 200 countries to invade our country. This was the greatest crime ever committed by our government against its own people.

[. . .]

Read it all and propagate it. Do your bit. Vote with your feet and your wallet. Study the many works of David Horowitz to understand the depredations of communism and its latest incarnation as 'wokery.'

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. 

 

Naomi Wolf on Tucker Carlson's J6 Revelations

A rich Substack article that ends thusly:

The gatekeepers who lie to the public about the most consequential events of our time — and who thus damage our nation, distort our history, and deprive half of our citizenry of their right to speak, champion and choose, without being tarred as would-be violent traitors - deserve our disgust.

I am sorry the nation was damaged by so much untruth issued by those with whom I identified at the time.

I am sorry my former “tribe” is angry at a journalist for engaging in — journalism.

I am sorry I believed so much nonsense.

Though it is no doubt too little, too late —

Conservatives, Republicans, MAGA:

I am so sorry.

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.

The American Kakistocracy

A kakistocracy is a government run by the worst, least qualified, or most unscrupulous citizens. (Wikipedia) This is what we have under the current bunch of Dems.  The worst have risen to the top. 'President' Joe Biden should come to mind as leader of the pack. But can a puppet preside over anything? The question answers itself.

Biden is surely one of the worst in point of truthfulness. I used to say that Barack Obama was a master of the multiple modes of mendacity, but it appears that Joey B. has him beat. Here is a (partial) catalog of his sins against truth.  HT: Tony Flood.

And here is a stab at a typology of untruthfulness.

On the bright side, Speaker McCarthy here demonstrates the fine art of political demolition as he shuts down a PBS wonkette politely, but decisively. The C-SPAN video runs for 3:33.

Tulsi Gabbard Exposes George Santos

Would that Tulsi would and could lay  bare the brazen bullshit of every single swamp critter in the District of Columbia from the life-long liar Joey B. on down and not leaving out Alejandro Mayorkas, 'Director of Homeland Security' -- how is that for an Orwellian title! -- and Elizabeth 'Fauxcahontas' Warren, and do it with the style, grace, and integrity she demonstrates in this amazing video. 

Please watch it and propagate it. 

Tulsi Gabbard Defends Objective Truth . . .

. . . at a rally to end child mutilation. Gabbard's  three-minute address begins at 19:30 and runs until 22:42. "Without recognition that there is such a thing as truth, there are no boundaries in our society, which why we are where we are."

That something so obvious needs to be stated explicitly shows how far we have fallen.  But precisely because we have fallen so far, Tulsi Gabbard is to be applauded for having courageously stated it. That it should take courage to state something so obvious is yet another index of our social decline.

And now, if you can spare ten minutes, listen to Chloe Cole's story at 47:15-57:50. 

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.

 

Are We the Government?

"We the people are the government." (Joe Biden) Barack Obama used to spout that same falsehood. "The government is us."

 

It is a nice question whether they were lying or bullshitting.  The liar cares enough about the truth to want to hide it from us. The bullshitter doesn't care about the truth and will say anything. I borrow the distinction from Harry Frankfurt's On Bullshit, a book undoubtedly more purchased than read.  It is a fine piece of analysis, but probably beyond the grasp of those who have 'twitterized' their attention spans.

 

The government is not us. It is an entity distinct from most of us, and opposed to many if not most of us, run by a relatively small number of us. Among the latter are some decent people but also plenty of power-hungry individuals who may have started out with good intentions but who were soon suborned by the power, perquisites, and pelf of high office, people for whom a government position is a hustle like any hustle.

 

Government likes power and likes to expand its power, and can be counted on to come up with plenty of rationalizations for the maintenance and extension of its power. It must be kept in check by us, who are not part of the government, just as big corporations need to be kept in check by government regulators.  Not that proper regulation is likely now under 'woke' capitalism.  But this is a large and separate topic.

 

If you value liberty you must cultivate a healthy skepticism about government. To do so is not anti-government. Leftists love to slander us by saying that we are anti-government. It is a lie and they know it. They are not so stupid as not to know that to be for limited government is to be for government. But truth is not their concern; winning is. To their way of thinking the glorious end justifies the shabby means.

Bad Doctrines Make Bad People

The leftism of the leftist is seriously contributory to the appalling behavior of those leftists who, had they not been doctrinally malformed and misdirected, would have been more human in their faults and less diabolical. The same holds for the fascism of the fascist and the National Socialism of the Nazi.

A further and more difficult question is whether such good doctrines as Christianity which contribute to the goodness of those who live apart from the world among the like-minded in monasteries and convents and other communities of the isolated, so weaken people who must negotiate the world that they cannot effectively counter the evil of those who have been made bad by pernicious doctrines.

Malcolm Pollack on 'Mass Formation'

Our old friend Malcolm Pollack has an article in American Greatness entitled "'Mass Formation' is a Two-Headed Coin." Pollack offers the following characterization of mass formation:

“Mass formation” . . . is a newish term for an age-old and long-studied phenomenon: the occasional, and usually quite sudden, arising of passionate and sometimes completely irrational fixations of attention, desire, hatred, or other affinities and aversions in crowds of various sizes, from local mobs to entire societies.

What I will call the COVID Craze is an example of a mass formation. Not everyone who takes precautions is a victim of mass delusion, but surely many are. We see them everyday: people alone on windy beaches wearing face masks, for example. Such behavior is completely irrational and oftentimes issues in hateful displays against people who do not subscribe to the ovine lunacy of the hysterical whose fear has so addled them that they cannot distinguish between efficacious prophylaxis, misplaced moral enthusiasm, and virtue-signaling.

Under what conditions is a social phenomenon such as the COVID Craze usefully referred to as a mass formation? Pollack, citing Dr. Matthias Desmet of the University of Guelph, cites four: free-floating anxiety, social isolation, lack of meaning and purpose in one's life, and anger and frustration.

When all these conditions are met, the collective psyche becomes like a supercooled liquid: given the right nucleus around which to coalesce, a “phase transition” can propagate throughout the system in a very short time. That nucleus is some object that can be plausibly identified as a cause of everyone’s anxiety and frustration, and the allure of attacking and eliminating it through collective action becomes, for many people, irresistible. The reason for [cause of] this is sensible [understandable] enough, because it [the attack and attempted elimination]  addresses [alleviates] , in a single stroke, all of the stress-conditions listed above: it offers, at last, a concrete object to which free-floating anxiety can attach, about which something can be done; it provides a much-needed basis for the reconstruction of social bonds; it puts before the group a great purpose toward which everyone can direct their energy; and, perhaps most attractive of all, it creates a common enemy toward which the people can channel their anger. (I added the words in brackets to aid my understanding.)

Those who stand in the way of this collective purpose, as well as those who merely lack enthusiasm for the cause, have consciously excluded themselves from this new social bond, and so they are easily, and usually eagerly, seen as enemies who must be isolated or eliminated. This polarization in turn encourages increasingly conspicuous signaling of one’s fidelity to the group and its cause. The more costly those signals are at a personal level, the more they signify commitment to the new social bond, and the more respect they purchase from the in-group—even if (or, perhaps, especially if) they do nothing that is actually effective in solving the underlying problem.

Malcolm mentions COVID, but I would have liked to have seen other examples. I will suggest one of my own. The President of the United States has recently made a delusional statement to the effect that white supremacy is the greatest threat the nation faces.  Because Joseph Biden is non compos mentis,  there is a certain risk in attributing this thought to him as something he himself believes. It is however safe to say that he is serving as the mouthpiece of a large group of  people who either believe it, in which case they are delusional, or merely pretend to believe it for their own personal gain, in which case they are not delusional but immoral both in their mendacity and in their willingness to put personal profit over the good of the country that has made their success possible. The latter bunch include the 'woke' capitalists and all manner of 'woke' careerists in government, academia, the churches, and elsewhere who seek to promote themselves by spreading lies and slanders.

Malcolm tries to be even-handed in his piece, as witness:

It is also a dangerous conceit to imagine, as many on the Right seem to be doing with this viral idea, that it currently manifests itself only with regard to the COVID panic, and only on the Left. 

It’s important to keep in mind that the four conditions enumerated by Desmet are amply met throughout modern society, across political and ideological lines, and that as long as our various factions struggle to live together, any mass-formation on one side is likely to increase anger and stress on the other, in a destructive feedback loop.

Pollack is right on the first count: the COVID Craze (as I call it) is not the only manifestation of mass formation 'psychosis.' On the second, however, he may be giving aid and comfort to a false moral equivalentism.  Left and Right are not moral equivalents. The Left is far worse. I grant that there are some extremists among those on the Alternative Right. But they are few and far between, and of little consequence, in comparison to the extremists who dominate the Left. The Left is morally and indeed intellectually inferior to the Right by orders of magnitude. The contemporary 'woke' Left in the USA, which controls the Democrat Party, is mindlessly extremist and destructive in respect of almost all issues of importance. To name just a few mindlessly extreme and destructive ideas and policy proposals: the ethno-masochistic notion that mathematics is racist, which of course implies that hard science (physics, e.g.) is racist as well; the Pelosian idea that "borders are immoral" and the corresponding Democrat policy of allowing anyone from anywhere into the country without any control or vetting; the absurd notion that defunding the police and eliminating cash bail are 'reforms' that will reduce crime; the incessant Orwellian subversion of language as for example the misuse of 'insurrection' to refer to trespassing; the erection of monuments and memorials to the worthless while tearing down those that commemorate great and worthy Americans. I could cite another dozen examples with ease. 

I'll leave it here. The combox is open for Malcolm's response and for any comments of anyone.

 

Was Kyle Rittenhouse a Vigilante?

I have been known to refer to David French as a useful idiot in the sense usually attributed to V. I. Lenin, but I won't repeat that legitimate charge here. I'll just say that French is exasperating in the Trump-hating pseudo-conservative style of David Brooks, George F. Will, Bill Kristol, Mona Charen and the rest of the all-talk-and-no-action bow tie brigade.   Here is French in The Atlantic,  publication in which is a good tip-off as to one's political stance:

When Kyle Rittenhouse walked the streets of Kenosha in the midst of urban unrest following the police shooting of Jacob Blake holding a rifle in the “patrol carry” or “low ready” position, similar to the positions used by soldiers walking in towns and villages in war zones, without any meaningful training, he was engaged in remarkably dangerous and provocative conduct. But that dangerous and provocative conduct did not eliminate his right of self-defense, and that self-defense claim is the key issue of his trial, not the wisdom of his vigilante presence.

French fails to note that the police shooting of Blake was justified inasmuch as the black criminal with an impressive rap sheet refused to obey police commands and pulled a knife on the officer. French is undoubtedly aware of the lethality of knives and indeed that their lethality is in some circumstances in excess  of that of a 9mm semi-automatic pistol. But let that pass.

Note the phrase "vigilante presence." A vigilante is someone who takes the law into his own hands. But the authorities had abdicated and  Kenosha was at the time lawless. Someone who defends life, liberty, and property in a Hobbesian state of nature against armed barbarian arsonists, looters, and potential murderers is arguably not a vigilante. But of course it depends on how one defines 'vigilante.' 

If a citizen shoots a home invader who threatens death or grave bodily harm to the home's occupants, no one calls that a vigilante action even though the citizen has taken crime prevention and law enforcement into his own hands.   The law makes an entirely reasonable exception in a case like this thereby suspending in such circumstances its monopoly on the use of force in law enforcement and crime prevention. This exception allows for others. When the authorities abdicate, they no longer can claim to have a monopoly on the use of force since they have refused to employ force in the upholding of the law. So it falls to the citizen.  When the authorities are in dereliction of duty, their authority evaporates.

It is thus a cheap slander on the part of French to tar Rittenhouse with the pejorative 'vigilante.'   Later in the article,

But there is also an immense difference between quiet concealed carry and vigilante open carry . . . .

Two points. French is suggesting that open carry, as such, is a vigilante action. It is not, although it is inadvisable in most circumstances. If that is not what French wanted to imply, then he is a sloppy writer. Second, Rittenhouse was out to deter the thugs and concealing his weapon would not have had that effect! 

Can you appreciate why someone would consider French to be a useful idiot? Instead of standing up for the rule of law and condemning both the politicians who want to defund the police, and the leftist prosecutors who refuse to prosecute criminals, he wastes his energy attacking an idealistic. good-hearted  17- year-old  boy who bravely if unwisely stood up against the barbarians. The net effect is to give aid and comfort to those French ought to be opposing. Like Rod Dreher and others, he doesn't understand that he has to take a side here and that it is impossible to float above the fray as if he were a transcendental spectator with no stake in the outcome.

The question to put to French is: Which side are you on?

Related: David French, Christianity, and Politics

The Trial of Kyle

The Rittenhouse trial was not about the 17-year-old primarily, but about one's right to defend oneself with lethal force against a lethal threat. Hence the great significance of this case. An absolutely crucial moral and legal principle is at stake. The righteous Right won this time, but the fact that the pernicious Left tried to railroad and destroy the intelligent, decent, and well-meaning kid shows that they will stop at nothing to destroy our Anglo-American system of justice, the best the world has yet to see.  Leftists smeared him as a 'white supremacist' against all evidence, and against all sense: Kyle and his assailants are all white. The Democrat 'president' of the United States, Joseph Biden, joined in the smear.  Rittenhouse's defensive actions, and the ensuing show trial, had nothing directly to do with race. And given all the clear video evidence, Rittenhouse should not have been criminally charged in the first place. 

But again, it is not primarily about Rittenhouse.  As bad as the Left's policy of personal destruction is, far worse is their policy of political destruction: the hard Left, which now controls the Democrat Party, aims to "fundamentally transform" (Obama), i.e., destroy, the American polity and system of government by, among many other things, opening the borders to any and all, eliding the distinction between citizen and non-citizen, giving the franchise to non-citizens, conspiring to give the vote to felons while still in prison, defunding the police, emptying the prisons, eliminating cash bail, transforming the public schools and the universities into  culturally Marxist seminaries, erasing the historical record, putting up statues to criminals  . . . .

The battle lines have never been clearer. Get ready. 

The line, it is drawn, the curse, it is cast

The slow one now will later be fast

As the present now will later be past

The order is rapidly fading

And the first one now will later be last

For the times, they are a-changin'.

The Biblical Dylan in prophetic mode. The civil rights battles of the '60s were fought and won. Now a different civil rights struggle is upon us, and Dylan's words again resonate and apply.

 

Related: Victor Davis Hanson, Can the FBI be Salvaged?

'Equity' is Unjust

'Equity' in 'wokespeak' is a deliberately obfuscatory term for equality of outcome. There is no 'equity' in the natural order of things. So it must be enforced from above. Such enforcement, of course, is unjust. I will leave you to work out the details for yourself. Why do I have to do all the work?

Liberals Need to Preach What They Practice

Substack latest.

Against the racism of reduced expectations.

Dreher contra Buchanan on "All men are created equal."

Rod Dreher quotes Patrick J. Buchanan:

“All men are created equal” is an ideological statement. Where is the scientific or historic proof for it? Are we building our utopia on a sandpile of ideology and hope?

Dreher responds:

With that, Buchanan repudiates not only the founding principle of our Constitutional order, but also a core teaching of the Christian faith, which holds that all men are created in the image of God. 

I am with Dreher on this without sharing quite the level of high dudgeon that he expresses in his piece. 

I am always surprised when people do not grasp the plain sense of the "that all Men are created equal" clause embedded in the opening sentence of the second paragraph of the American Declaration of Independence. It cannot be charitably interpreted as a statement of empirical fact. If it were so interpreted, it would be false. For we all know, and certainly the Founders knew, that human beings are NOT equal as a matter of empirical fact either as individuals or as groups.

Suppose a statement can be interpreted in two ways. One way it comes out plainly false; the other way it comes out either true or plausible or not obviously untrue. Then what I understand the Principle of Charity to require is that we go the second way. 

For Buchanan to demand "scientific or historic proof" shows deep misunderstanding. For again, the claim is not empirical. Is it then a normative claim as Mona Charen (quoted by Dreher) seems to suggest? It implies normative propositions, but it is not itself a normative proposition. It is a metaphysical statement. It is like the statement that God exists or that the physical universe is a divine creation. Both of the latter statements are non-empirical. No natural science can either prove them or disprove them. But neither of them are normative.  They are factual statements, though not empirically factual.  (Observe also that a factual statement need not be true. 'BV has three cats' is a factual statement, indeed it is empirically factual. It is not a normative statement, and it is a statement that can be empirically confirmed or disconfirmed. But it is false.)

Note that the Declaration's claim is not that all men are equal but that all men are created equal. In such a carefully crafted document, the word 'created' must be doing some work. What might that be?

There cannot be creatures (created items) without a Creator. That's a conceptual truth, what Kant calls an analytic proposition. So if man is created equal, then he is created by a Creator. The Creator the founders had in mind was the Christian God, and these gentlemen had, of course, read the Book of Genesis wherein we read that God made man in his image and likeness. That implies that man is not a mere animal in nature, but a spiritual being, a god-like being, possessing free will and an eternal destiny. Essential to the Judeo-Christian worldview is the notion that man is toto caelo different from the rest of the animals. He is an animal all right, but a very special one. This idea is preserved even in Heidegger who speaks of an Abgrund zwischen Mensch und Tier. The difference between man and animal is abysmal or, if you prefer, abyssal. Man alone is Da-Sein, the 'There' of Being; man alone is endowed with Seinsverstaendnis, an understanding (of) Being.  But I digress onto a Black Forest path.  

Now if all men, whether male or female, black or white, are created equal by God, and this equality is a metaphysical determination (Bestimmung in the sense of both a distinctive determination and a vocation) then we have here the metaphysical basis for the normative claim that all men ought to be treated equally, that all men ought to enjoy equally the same  unalienable rights, among them, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.  (We note en passant that these are negative rights!)

All men are normatively equal because they are metaphysically equal. They are the latter because they are spiritual beings deriving from one and the same spiritual source.  Each one of us is a person just as God is a person. We are equal as persons even though we are highly unequal as animals.

Without this theological basis it is difficult to see how there could be any serious talk of equality of persons. As the alt-righties and the neo-reactionaries like to say, we are not (empirically) equal either as individuals or as groups. They are absolutely right about that.   

Dreher is also right that the theologically-grounded equality of persons is "the founding principle of our Constitutional order," and thus of our political order.  Repudiate it, as Buchanan seems to be doing, and you undermine our political order.

What then does our political order rest on if the equality of persons is denied? 

Related: Sullivan is Right: Universalism Hasn't Been Debunked

Weakness is No Justification: The Converse Callicles Principle

It needs to be said again at this time when Israel is under attack again due in no small measure to President Biden's weakness and senility. First posted 24 July 2014.

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

Might does not make right, but neither does impotence or relative weakness. That weakness does not justify strikes me as an important principle, but I have never seen it articulated. The Left tends to assume the opposite.  They tend to assume that mightlessness makes right.  I'll dub this the Converse Callicles Principle.

The power I have to kill you does not morally justify my killing you. In a slogan: Ability does not imply permissibility.  My ability to kill, rape, pillage and plunder does not confer moral justification on my doing these things.  But if you attack me with deadly force and I reply with deadly force of greater magnitude, your relative weakness does not supply one iota of moral justification for your attack, nor does it subtract one iota of moral justification from my defensive response.  If I am justified in using deadly force against you as aggressor, then the fact that my deadly force is greater than yours does not (a) diminish my justification in employing deadly force, nor does it (b) confer any justification on your aggression.

Suppose a knife-wielding thug commits a home invasion and attacks a man and his family. The man grabs a semi-automatic pistol and manages to plant several rounds in the assailant, killing him. It would surely be absurd to argue that the disparity in lethality of the weapons involved diminishes the right of the pater familias to defend himself and his family.  Weakness does not justify.

The principle that weakness does not justify can be applied to the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict from the summer of 2006 as well as to the current Israeli defensive operations against the terrorist entity, Hamas.  The principle ought to be borne in mind when one hears leftists, those knee-jerk supporters of any and every 'underdog,' start spouting off about 'asymmetry of power' and 'disproportionality.'  Impotence and incompetence are not virtues, nor do they confer moral justification or high moral status, any more than they confer the opposite.

The principle that mightlessness makes right seems to be one of the cardinal tenets of the Left.  It is operative in the present furor over the enforcement of reasonable immigration laws in Arizona.  To the south of the USA lies crime-ridden, corrupt, impoverished Mexico.  For millions and millions it is a place to escape from.  The USA, the most successful nation of all time, is the place to escape to.  But how does this disparity in wealth, success, and overall quality of life justify the violation of the reasonable laws and the rule of law that are a good part of the reason for the disparity of wealth, success, and overall quality of life?

Kierkegaard on the Power and the Powerlessness of Earthly Power

The following passage from Concluding Unscientific Postscript embodies a penetrating insight:

. . . the legal authority shows its impotence precisely when it shows its power: its power by giving permission, its impotence by not being able to make it permissible. (p. 460, tr. Swenson & Lowrie)

My permitting you to do X does not make X permissible.  My forbidding you to do X does not make X impermissible.  My permitting (forbidding) is justified only if what I permit (forbid) is in itself permissible (impermissible).  And the same goes for any finite agent or collection of finite agents. A finite agent may have the power to permit and forbid, but it cannot have the power to make permissible or impermissible.  Finite agency, then, betrays its impotence in exercising its power.

 

For example, the moral permissibility of killing in self-defense is what it is independently of the State's power to permit or forbid via its laws and their enforcement.  The State cannot make morally permissible what is morally permissible by passing and enforcing laws that permit it.  Nor can the State make morally impermissible what is morally permissible by passing and enforcing laws that proscribe it.

Here below Might and Right fall asunder: the powerful are not always just, and the just are not always powerful.  But it would be a mistake to think that the mighty cannot be right, or that the right cannot be mighty.  The falling asunder is consistent with a certain amount of overlap.  But the overlap will always only be partial.

Power does not confer moral justification, but neither does impotence.  (For example, the relative weakness of the Palestinians relative to the Israelis does not confer justification on the Palestinian cause or its methods.)  See The Converse Callicles Principle: Weakness Does Not Justify.

The State is practically necessary and morally justifiable.  Or so I would argue against the anarchists.  But fear of the State is rational: its power is awesome and often misused.  Communist governments murdered some 100 million during the twentieth century alone. This is why the State's power must be hedged round with limits.  The Founders of the United States of America understood this. It is an understanding that is approaching its nadir as 2020 fades.

We don't know whether God exists.  But we do know that nothing is worthy of being called God unless it is the perfect harmonization and coalescence of Might and Right, of Power and Justice, of Will and Reason. 

This coalescence is a mystical unity that cannot be achieved by human effort. The Eschaton cannot be immanentized. If this divine mystical unity exists, it does not exist in the here and now, or in the future of the here and now.  If this unity does not exist, it cannot be for us an ideal.  Only what is realizable by us can serve as an ideal for us.

Kierkegaard the Corrective is an anti-Hegel and an anti-Marx. Hegel held that the unity existed already, here below. Marx, recognizing the professorial bluster for what it was, turned Hegel upon his head, urging that it be brought about. "The philosophers have variously interpreted the world; the point, however, is to change it." (The Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach.)  But the conception itself was fatally flawed, already in Hegel.

We saw the sequel. It was a road to slavery and the gulag.

Horribile dictu, having learned nothing, we are about to repeat the same mistakes.

There is no heaven on earth and there cannot be. Because there cannot be, heaven on earth cannot without disaster be pursued as an ideal. If there is heaven, it is Elsewhere, beyond the human horizon. 

Believers and unbelievers can live in peace, or at least in the absence of war, if the unbelievers on the Left eschew their totalitarianism, which is a perversion of the dogmatic certainties of the Age of Belief.  But they cannot be reasonably expected to do so. It is  not 'who they are' in their silly way of speaking.

We who love liberty are in for the burden of a long twilight struggle against forces of darkness in the gloaming.

Morally Culpable Political Ignorance

Is there such a thing?

Is Sanders the Socialist morally culpable for being wrong? Or is he merely wrong? Perhaps he is neither. Perhaps he is mad. The mad do the same thing over and over again in the hope that next time it will be different.

David French, Donald Trump, Christianity, and Politics

David French maintains that Christians cannot, if they are to remain true to Christian teachings, support Donald Trump:

The proper way for Christians to engage in politics is a rich subject . . . but there are some rather simple foundational principles that apply before the questions get complex. For example, all but a tiny few believers would agree that a Christian should not violate the Ten Commandments or any other clear, biblical command while pursuing or exercising political power.

But of course we see such behavior all the time from hardcore Christian Trump supporters. They’ll echo Trump’s lies. They’ll defend Trump’s lies. They’ll adopt many of his same rhetorical tactics, including engaging in mocking and insulting behavior as a matter of course.

Farther down:

I fully recognize what I’m saying. I fully recognize that refusing to hire a hater and refusing to hire a liar carries costs. If we see politics through worldly eyes, it makes no sense at all. Why would you adopt moral standards that put you at a disadvantage in an existential political struggle? If we don’t stand by Trump we will lose, and losing is unacceptable. (Emphasis added.)

French has just touched upon the deepest issue in this debate.  He is right that it makes no sense for conservative Christians not to support Trump if politics is seen through worldly eyes. The question, however, is whether one can avoid doing so. Can one see politics and pursue it through unworldly eyes?  Can one participate in politics at any level, and especially at the higher levels, while adhering strictly and unwaveringly to Christian principles and precepts and while practicing Christian virtues?  Can one combine contemptus mundi with political action?

I don't believe that this is possible.

Christian precepts such as "Turn the other cheek" and "Welcome the stranger" make sense and are salutary only within communities of the like-minded and morally decent; they make no sense and are positively harmful in the public sphere, and, a fortiori, in the international sphere.  The monastery is not the wide world.  What is conducive unto salvation in the former will get you killed in the latter.  And we know what totalitarians, whether Communists or Islamists, do when they get power: they destroy the churches, synagogues, monasteries, ashrams, and zendos. And with them are destroyed the means of transmitting the dharma, the kerygma, the law and the prophets.  

An important but troubling thought is conveyed in a recent NYT op-ed (emphasis added):

Machiavelli teaches that in a world where so many are not good, you must learn to be able to not be good. The virtues taught in our secular and religious schools are incompatible with the virtues one must practice to safeguard those same institutions. The power of the lion and the cleverness of the fox: These are the qualities a leader must harness to preserve the republic.

The problem referenced in the bolded sentence is very serious but may have no solution.  That's the aporetician in me speaking. 

The problem as I see it is that (i) the pacific virtues the practice of which makes life worth living within families, between friends, and in such institutions of civil society as churches and fraternal organizations  are essentially private and cannot be extended outward as if we are all brothers and sisters belonging to a global community.  Talk of  global community is blather.  The institutions of civil society can survive and flourish only if protected by warriors and statesmen whose virtues are of the manly and martial, not of the womanish and pacific, sort. And yet (ii) if no  extension beyond the private of the pacific virtues is possible. then humanity would seem to be doomed  in an age of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.  Besides, it is unsatisfactory that there be two moralities, one private, the other public.

I say that we need to face the problem honestly.

Consider the Christian virtues preached by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount.  They include humility, meekness, love of righteousness, mercy, purity of heart, love of peace and of reconciliation.  Everyone who must live uncloistered in the world understands that these pacific and essentially womanish virtues have but limited application there.  Indeed, their practice can get you killed. (I am not using 'womanish' as a derogatory qualifier.)

You may love peace, but unless you are prepared to make war upon your enemies and show them no mercy, you may not be long for this world.  Turning the other cheek makes sense within a loving family, but no sense in the wider world.  (Would the Pope turn the other cheek if the Vatican came under attack by Muslim terrorists or would he call upon the armed might of the Italian state?)  My point is perfectly obvious in the case of states: they are in the state (condition) of nature with respect to each other. Each state secures by blood and iron a civilized space within which art and music and science and scholarship can flourish and wherein, ideally, blood does not flow; but these states and their civilizations battle each other in the state (condition) of nature red in tooth and claw.  Talk of world government or United Nations is globalist blather that hides the will to power of those who would seize control of the world government. United under which umbrella of values and principles and presuppositions?

What values do we share with the Muslim world? Do they accept the Enlightenment values enshrined in our founding documents? Obviously not.  Christianity has civilized us to some extent. Has Islam civilized them? Their penology is barbaric as is their attitude toward other cultures and religions. 

The Allies would not have been long for this world had they not been merciless in their treatment of the Axis Powers.  

Israel would have ceased to exist long ago had Israelis not been ruthless in their dealing with Muslim terrorists bent on her destruction.

This is also true of individuals once they move beyond their families and friends and genuine communities and sally forth into the wider world. 

The problem is well understood by Hannah Arendt ("Truth and Politics" in Between Past and Future, Penguin 1968, p. 245):

     The disastrous consequences for any community that began in all
     earnest to follow ethical precepts derived from man in the singular
     -- be they Socratic or Platonic or Christian -- have been
     frequently pointed out. Long before Machiavelli recommended
     protecting the political realm against the undiluted principles of
     the Christian faith (those who refuse to resist evil permit the
     wicked "to do as much evil as they please"), Aristotle warned
     against giving philosophers any say in political matters. (Men who
     for professional reasons must be so unconcerned with "what is good
     for themselves" cannot very well be trusted with what is good for
     others, and least of all with the "common good," the down-to-earth
     interests of the community.) [Arendt cites the Nicomachean Ethics,
     Book VI, and in particular 1140b9 and 1141b4.]

There is a tension  between man qua philosopher/Christian and man qua citizen.  As a philosopher raised in Christianity, I am concerned with my soul, with its integrity, purity, salvation. I take very seriously indeed the Socratic "Better to suffer wrong than to do it" and the Christian  "Resist not the evildoer." But as a citizen I must be concerned not only with my own well-being but also with the public welfare.

This is true a fortiori of public officials and people in a position to  influence public opinion, people like Catholic bishops many of whom are woefully ignorant of the simple points Arendt makes in the passage quoted. So, as Arendt points out, the Socratic and Christian admonitions are not applicable in the public sphere.

What is applicable to me in the singular, as this existing individual concerned with the welfare of his immortal soul over that of his  perishable body, is not applicable to me as citizen. As a citizen, I   cannot "welcome the stranger" who violates the laws of my country, a stranger who may be a terrorist or a drug smuggler or a human trafficker or a carrier of a deadly disease or a person who has no respect for the traditions of the country he invades; I cannot aid and abet his law breaking. I must be concerned with public order.  This order is among  the very conditions that make the philosophical and Christian life possible in the first place. If I were to aid and abet the stranger's law breaking, I would not be "rendering unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's" as the New Testament enjoins us to do.

Indeed, the Caesar verse provides a scriptural basis for Church-State separation and indirectly exposes the fallacy of the Catholic bishops  and others who confuse private and public morality. 

David French is such a one.

A Field Day for Authoritarians

Another example:

In Colorado, a man was playing with his six-year-old daughter in a park with no one else within a vast distance, when he was arrested by a group of police officers–wrongly, based on signs at the park–who themselves failed to follow guidelines as to use of masks, gloves, and social distancing.

It makes no sense. But an entity with sufficient power has no need to make sense.

Anthony Flood Reviews David Horowitz, Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America

Excerpts:

Cultural Marxism is but the latest form of the cultural cancer now metastasizing throughout the body politic. (Marxism-Leninism was only the deadliest form, not the first, but even today old-fashioned Communism does not lack adherents.) That the Democratic Party is now this malignancy’s host is the grim, but well-documented, conclusion of Horowitz’s long literary career.

In Dark Agenda’s last chapter, Horowitz puts forward the metaphor of civil war to define what might be in front of us. It’s a possible outcome of the divisions that beset us and which we’re all supposed to want to “heal.” One prosecutes a war, however, not to heal one’s enemies, but rather to incapacitate them.

For Americans only the Age of Lincoln offers the closest comparison to our parlous state. But shall Christians and their Jewish allies (agnostic and observant alike) prepare for military conflict and await—or initiate—our Fort Sumter? Is it not quixotic to put all our eggs in the electoral consensus-building basket? Are we restricted to chronicling our enemies’ crimes, as Horowitz has masterfully done in dozens of popular and scholarly tomes? Urgency calls forth a response, but if Horowitz has an idea of how Americans might defeat the Left’s dark agenda, he doesn’t share it here. No suggested plan of action follows the note of urgency he sounds.

In the third paragraph, Flood touches upon a point that troubles me as well. We have reams of incisive conservative commentary on what the Left has wrought but precious little by way of concrete proposals for ameliorative action by individuals. In  fairness to Horowitz, however, it needs noting that in the concluding chapters of Big Agenda (Humanix 2017), he lists various things the Republican party and President Trump can do. So he does outline a plan of action, and he is appropriately combative:

The movement galvanized by Trump can stop the progressive juggernaut and change the American future, but only if it emulates the strategy of the campaign: Be on the offense; take no prisoners; stay on the attack. To stop the Democrats and their societal transformation, Republicans must adhere to a strategy that begins with a punch in the mouth. That punch must pack an emotional wallop large enough to throw them off balance and neutralize their assaults. It must be framed as a moral indictment that stigmatizes them in the way their attacks stigmatize Republicans. It must expose them for their hypocrisy. It must hold them accountable for the divisions they sow and the suffering they cause. (Big Agenda, Humanix, 2017, p. 142)

Still and all, I would like to see a list of what individuals can do beyond voting and writing letters and blog posts.  Does Tony Flood have any suggestions?  I suppose I myself should put up or shut up while well aware of the dangers of saying anything that might incite violence among the unhinged. (But violence is being done every day by leftists to the unborn and to our Constitutional rights and sacred American values). So here are three suggestions, just to keep this post short. I invite Tony to e-mail me with any thoughts he may have.

• Buy guns and learn how to use them. The idea here is deterrence and not aggression. A well-armed populace is a mighty check against both the criminal element that leftists work to empower, and against leftists themselves and their agents. We can demoralize them without firing a shot. Call it winning through intimidation. They will never respect us, but they can be brought to fear us. (An analysis of respect might show that fear is is a large part of it.) Grandmaster Nimzowitsch's remark is apropos: "The threat is stronger than the execution."  2A is concrete back-up for 1A and all the rest of our rights. Leftists know this. This explains the mindlessness and mendacity of their confiscatory assault on our Second Amendment rights.  
• Vote with your feet and your wallet.  Leave blue localities and let them languish in the feculence their policies have birthed, and bring your money and tax dollars to healthy places. 
• Defund the Left. For example, refuse to support your leftist alma mater, to use a border-line pleonastic expression.      

Flood's review concludes:

Of course, Dark Agenda is no more an essay on spirituality than on political philosophy. The case it makes, however, cries out for at least a hint of the response that its author believes will meet this greatest of all challenges. If there’s no political way to overcome the darkness, only the spiritual route is left.

Yet David Horowitz leaves this tension unresolved. For him, the Christian Scriptures are not (as far as I know) a source of divinely revealed truth; Christianity is but the historically contingent arrangement that works for people who happen to love instead of hate Western civilization; things don’t go any deeper than that. Am I wrong about him?

Like all human arrangements, however, Western Civ will eventually pass away into the void out of which all things, including humans, allegedly emerged . . . unless the Christian worldview is overarchingly true. Maybe Horowitz has one more book in him in which he can address this question. But I’d prefer to be shown that something in his vast literary oeuvre already has.

Having read more Horowitz than Tony has, I believe he is right in the second paragraph lately quoted.

And I am sympathetic with the third paragraph, though not with Flood's enthusiasm for Van Til. See the entries in my Van Til and Presuppositionalism category. 

Finally, I have a deep-going analytic post on Horowitz' agnosticism as he presents it in Dark Agenda. See Five Grades of Agnosticism.  

Biden's (Lack Of) Cognitive Fitness: Dems Pull a 180.

An outstanding article by Glenn Greenwald.

But, as the Democratic establishment has united with creepy speed and obedience behind Biden in order to stop the Sanders candidacy, those who now raise these concerns instantly come under a withering assault of insults and attacks from Democratic Party operatives along with their crucial media allies: thinly disguised pro-Biden reporters who continue to insist on wearing the unconvincing and fraudulent costume of neutrality. They are invoking the classic Orwellian formulation from the novel 1984: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

Bloomberg Blames the Victim!

Here:

As the financial crisis first began to strangle American homeowners, Michael Bloomberg, then the mayor of New York, identified a scapegoat. Bloomberg didn’t blame the banks for handing out subprime mortgages; he blamed the consumers who’d applied for them.

On an August 2007 broadcast of “The John Gambling Show” on WABC, Bloomberg first aired a pronouncement that he would later repeat during the recession and after it. “What happened here is a bunch of people who didn’t really have the wherewithal to get mortgages, got mortgages,” Bloomberg told Gambling. “Now, if they didn’t have access to those mortgages, the elected officials would scream, you’re discriminating against them. Some of them lied about their incomes, some by a lot. Now they say, ‘Oh, well, the salesman convinced them to do it.’ But we live in a world where when you put your signature down, you’re supposed to know what you’re signing, and you have to take responsibility. Because every time there’s a victim, we’ve got to find somebody that’s responsible for it.”

Is it not obvious that some of the blame here must be borne by the consumers? It is obvious to me.

I go into some detail on this question of blaming the victim in the appropriately appellated On Blaming the Victim.

I do not support Bloomberg's candidacy. He is a fraud and a phony driven by personal ambition. That he reversed himself on "Stop and Frisk," a successful and justified law enforcement tactic that protected blacks as well as whites, not to mention other 'persons of color,'  shows that he is not rooted in principle. Did he come to see the 'racism' of the tactic? Of course not. He believes now what he believed when mayor, namely, that the tactic is a good one.  The reversal is fake, a sop thrown to the Left in an ill-starred attempt to curry favor with them. The old man has not only thrown away a half billion dollars of his own money (at the time of this writing); he has also thrown away his dignity.  All for nothing.

Are Fascist Antifa Thugs Blind to their Contradictory Behavior?

A re-titled and redacted version of an entry originally posted 1 September 2017. 

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

Yes, says Jonathan Turley:

At Berkeley and other universities, protesters have held up signs saying “F--k Free Speech” and have threatened to beat up anyone taking their pictures, including journalists. They seem blissfully ignorant of the contradiction in using fascistic tactics as anti-fascist protesters. After all, a leading definition of fascism is “a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control.”

If there is a 'contradiction' involved here it is not logical but practical/pragmatic. In the terminology of the preceding entry, it is not an instance of logical inconsistency, but of inconsistency in the application of a principle or standard.  If the principle is "It is wrong to employ fascist tactics," then the practical contradiction consists in the Antifa thugs' application of the principle to their enemies but not to themselves.   

But then it dawned on me (thanks to some comments by Malcolm Pollack and 'Jacques' who cannot go by his real name because of the leftist thugs in the academic world) that there is no practical/pragmatic contradiction or double standard here. The Antifa thugs and their ilk operate with a single standard: do whatever it takes to win.

They don't give a rat's ass about consistency of any kind or the related 'bourgeois' values that we conservatives cherish such as truth.  These values are nothing but bourgeois ideology the function of which is to legitimate the 'oppressive'  institutional structures that the Marxist punks battle against.

When Turley says that the thugs "seem blissfully ignorant of the contradiction" he assumes that they accept the principle but have somehow failed to realize that they are applying it inconsistently.  But that is not what is going on here. They don't accept the principle!  They have nothing against fascist tactics if they can be employed as means to their destructive ends.  But if the political authorities arrest them and punish them, as they must to maintain civil order,  then they scream Fascism! and dishonestly invoke the principle.

Besides, they don't accept the meta-principle that one ought to be consistent in the application of principles.

It is a mistake to think that one can reach these people by appealing to some values we all supposedly share. "Don't you see, you are doing the very thing you protest against!" You can't reach these evil-doers in this way. You reach them by enforcing the law. At some point you have to start breaking heads. But that is not 'fascism,' it is law enforcement.

If the authorities abdicate, if the police stand idly by while crimes against persons and property are committed, then they invite a vigilante response.  Is that what you want?

The "Fuck Free Speech" signs make it clear that the Antifa thugs do not value what we value. And because they do not share this classically liberal value, it is a mistake to say that they operate with a double standard: Free speech for me, but not for thee.  They don't value free speech at all; what they value is winning by any means. If there are times and places where upholding free speech is a means to their ends, then they uphold it. But at times and in places where shutting down free speech is instrumentally useful, then they will shut it down. 

It is right out of the Commie playbook. And just as a Nazi is not the cure for a Commie, a Commie is not the cure for a Nazi.  The cure for both is an American steeped in American values.

Why Did Trump Get the Religious Vote?

A re-post from two years ago. Cognate question: Why do leftists keep asking the title question?

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

Why did Donald J. Trump receive the support of evangelicals and other religious conservatives?

After all, no one would confuse Trump with a religious man.  Robert Tracinski's explanation strikes me as correct:

The strength of the religious vote for Trump initially mystified me, until I remembered the ferocity of the Left’s assault on religious believers in the past few years—the way they were hounded and vilified for continuing to hold traditional beliefs about marriage that were suddenly deemed backward and unacceptable (at least since 2012, when President Obama stopped pretending to share them). What else do you think drove all those religious voters to support a dissolute heathen?

Ironically, a pragmatic, Jacksonian populist worldling such as Donald J. Trump will probably do more for religion and religious liberty in the long run than a pious leftist such as Jimmy Carter.*  

Mr. Carter famously confessed the lust in his heart in an interview in -- wait for it -- Playboy magazine.  We should all do likewise, though in private, not in Playboy. While it is presumptuous to attempt to peer into another's soul, I would bet that Mr. Trump is not much bothered by the lust in his heart, and I don't expect to hear any public confessions from his direction.

But what doth it profit a man to confess his lust when he supports the destructive Democrats, the abortion party, a party the prominent members of which are so morally obtuse that they cannot even see the issue of the morality of abortion, dismissing it as a health issue or an issue of women's reproductive rights?  

______________________

*My prediction, made on 19 January 2017, proved correct. In response to Trump's speech at the March for Life the other day, Bernie Sanders tweeted the vicious Orwellianism, "Abortion is health care." Way to go, Bernie, you have further galvanized our opposition to you and what you stand for.

Note that at the present time no House Democrat is pro-life. The Dems have take a hard Left into the mephitic precincts of lunacy and evil. 

Subsidiarity as Bulwark against the Left's Assault on Civil Society

David A. Bosnich, The Principle of Subsidiarity:

One of the key principles of Catholic social thought is known as the principle of subsidiarity. This tenet holds that nothing should be done by a larger and more complex organization which can be done as well by a smaller and simpler organization. In other words, any activity which can be performed by a more decentralized entity should be. This principle is a bulwark of limited government and personal freedom. It conflicts with the passion for centralization and bureaucracy characteristic of the Welfare State.

The principle of subsidiarity strikes a reasonable balance between statism and collectivism as represented by the manifest left-ward drift of Democrat administrations such as President Obama's, on the one hand,  and the libertarianism of those who would take privatization to an extreme, on the other.  The Left is totalitarian by its very nature, and as the Democrat party drifts ever left-ward, it becomes ever more totalitarian and socialist and ever more a threat to individual liberty and the private property that is its foundation.  

Subsidiarity also fits well with federalism, a return to which is a prime desideratum and one more reason not to vote for Democrat candidates.  'Federalism' is another one of those words that does not wear its meaning on its sleeve, and is likely to mislead.  Federalism is not the view that all powers should be vested in the Federal or central government; it is the principle enshrined in the 10th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

Whether or not you are Catholic, if you accept the principle of subsidiarity, then you have yet another reason to oppose the Left.  The argument is this:

1) The Left encroaches upon civil society, weakening it and limiting it, and correspondingly expanding the power and the reach of the state.  (For example, the closure of Catholic Charities in Illinois because of an Obama administration adoption rule.)

2) Subsidiarity helps maintain civil society as a buffer zone and intermediate sector between the purely private (the individual and the familial) and the state.

Therefore

3) If you value the autonomy and robustness of civil society, then you ought to oppose Obama and the Left.

The truth of the second premise is self-evident.  If you wonder whether the Left does in fact encroach upon civil society, then see my post Obama's Assault on the Institutions of Civil Society.

Hitchens, Horowitz, Clinton, and Impeachment

Christopher Hitchens died on this date in 2011. The synergistic effects of his excessive consumption of smoke and spirits did him in at the tender age of 62.  By comparison, David Horowitz is still going strong at 81 churning out books, manning the ramparts, and fighting the good fight. May he live to be 100!

We who live the life of the mind celebrate the longevity of Horowitz while mourning the loss of Hitchens despite the latter's excesses and aberrations.  I will quote  David Horowitz on Hitchens on Bill Clinton. This is relevant to the current impeachment proceedings against Donald J. Trump. The case for impeaching Clinton was much stronger than the case that was actually brought against him.  There is no case at all against Trump.

In his mordantly incisive articles in both Vanity Fair and Salon, Hitchens has demonstrated that the nation's commander in chief cynically and mendaciously deployed the armed forces of the greatest power on earth to strike at three impoverished countries, with no clear military objective in mind. Using the most advanced weaponry the world has ever seen, Clinton launched missiles into the Sudan, Afghanistan and Iraq for only one tangible political purpose, to -- as Hitchens puts it -- "distract attention from his filthy lunge at a beret-wearing cupcake."

Hitchens' claim that Clinton's military actions are criminal and impeachable is surely spot-on. Republicans, it seems, were right about the character issue, and failed only to demonstrate how this mattered to the policy issues the public cares deeply about. Instead they got themselves entangled in legalistic disputes about perjury and obstruction, losing the electorate along the way. In making his own powerful case against Clinton, Hitchens has underscored how Republicans botched the process by focusing on criminality that flowed from minor abuses of power -- the sexual harassment of Paula Jones and its Monica Lewinsky subtext -- while ignoring a major abuse that involved corrupting the presidency, damaging the nation's security and killing innocents abroad.

[. . .]

Given the transparent morality of Hitchens' anti-Clinton crusade, it is all the more revealing that so many of his comrades on the left, who ought to share these concerns, have chosen instead to turn on him so viciously. In a brutal display of comradely betrayal, they have publicly shunned him in an attempt to cut him off socially from his own community. One after another, they have rushed into print to tell the world at large how repulsed they are by a man whom only yesterday they called "friend," yet whom they now apparently no
longer even wish to know.

Leading this pack was Hitchens' longtime colleague at the Nation, Alexander Cockburn, who denounced him as a "Judas" and "snitch." Cockburn was followed by a second Nation columnist, Katha Pollitt, who smeared Hitchens as a throwback to McCarthy-era informers ("Let's say the Communist Party was bad and wrong -- Why help the repressive powers of the state? Let the government do its own dirty work."). She was joined by a 30-year political comrade, Todd Gitlin, who warned anyone who cared to listen that Hitchens was a social "poison," in the same toxic league as Ken Starr and Linda Tripp.

Consider the remarkable nature of this spectacle. Could one imagine a similar ritual performed by journalists of the right? Bob Novak, say, flanked by Pat Buchanan and William F. Buckley, pronouncing an anathema on Bill Safire, because the columnist had called for the jailing of Ollie North during the Iran-contra hearings? Not even North felt the need to announce such a public divorce. When was the last time any conservative figure (let alone a gathering of conservatives) stepped forward to declare they were ending a private friendship over a political disagreement?

The curses rained on Hitchens' head are part of a ritual that has become familiar over generations of the left, in which dissidents are excommunicated and consigned to various Siberias for their political deviance. It is a phenomenon normal to religious cults, where purity of heart is maintained through avoiding contact with the unclean. To have caused the left to invoke so drastic a measure, Hitchens had to have violated some fundamental principles of its faith. So what were they?

Read it all.  An updated and extended version appears as "Defending Christopher," Chapter 23 of Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes (Spence 1999), pp. 240-248.

Third Parties: Discussion Societies in Political Drag

A so-called 'third party' is any party in U. S. politics other than the Democrats and the Republicans.  There are many third parties. My thesis is that third parties are discussion societies in political drag.  Corollary to that is my claim that anyone who has anything to do with a third party thereby demonstrates ignorance as to the nature of the political. (Recent possible exception: the Reform Party when it backed Ross Perot.)

Politics is not theoretical; it is practical. There is political theory, of course, and it divides into political science (empirical and non-normative) and political philosophy (normative). But politics is neither of the two. It is praxis, not theoria. The political life is a form of the vita activa, not of the vita contemplativa. Here is a working definition of 'political activity.'  

Political activity is human activity in concert with like-minded others in pursuit of governmental power for the purpose of implementing programs and policies contributory to the common worldly good or the worldly good of those the party represents.

Now the vast majority of third parties have no chance of coming to power. It follows that those who vote for third-party candidates are almost in every instance wasting their vote.  These voters don't understand the nature of the political as above defined.

Some vote third-party to 'make a statement' or to 'lodge a protest.' But these gestures are futile. No one gives a damn about Joe Blow's 'statement' or 'protest' or would even be aware of them.  Consider the American Solidarity Party: 

Writing for First Things in July 2016, David McPherson, assistant professor of philosophy at Creighton University, urged voting for the ASP ticket as “a protest vote against a system that presents us with such poor choices.” Moreover, by supporting the ASP, he argued, “‘a man [sets] an example,’ so that the idea of human solidarity, based on the equal dignity of all human beings, may not die away.”

The sentiment is noble, but the proposed course is impractical. Politics is a practical game! It is not about having the right views. That does no good unless one can implement them. And only a fool lets the best become the enemy of the good. Politics is a matter of better or worse, not perfect or imperfect.  It is about accomplishing something in the extant suboptimal circumstances.

So what should you do if you are a Libertarian, or rather 'Losertarian'?  Do what Ron Paul did: become a Republican and try to push that stodgy bunch in a more libertarian direction.  Similarly with ASP members. Stop wasting your time and become Republicans. Try to inject some subsidiarist ideas into the mix.

In 2020, ASP members ought to vote for Trump, and not abstain. It is folly to believe in 'political equivalentism' as between Left and Right in the present constellation of circumstances  here in the States.

Don't confuse a discussion society with a political party!

On Civility and a Concession to Hillary

Civility is a good old conservative virtue and I'm all for it.  But like toleration, civility has limits.  If you call me a racist because I argue against Obamacare, then not only do I have no reason to be civil in my response to you, I morally ought not be civil to you.  For by being civil I only encourage more bad behavior on your part.  By slandering me, you have removed yourself from the sphere of the civil.  The slanderer does not deserve to be treated with civility; he deserves to be treated with hostility and stiff-necked opposition.  He is deserving of moral condemnation.

If you call me a xenophobe because I insist that the federal government do what it is constitutionally mandated to do, namely, secure the nation's borders, then you slander me and forfeit whatever right you have to be treated civilly.  For if you slander me, then you are moral scum and deserve to be morally condemned.  In issuing my moral condemnation, I exercise my constitutionally-protected First Amendment right to free speech.  But not only do I have a right to condemn you, I am morally obliged to do so lest your sort of evil behavior become even more prevalent.

Examples can be multiplied, but the point is clear.  Civility has limits.  One ought to be civil to the civil.  But one ought not be civil to the uncivil.  What they need is a taste of their own medicine.

One must also realize that 'civility' is a prime candidate for linguistic hijacking.  And so we must be on our guard lest the promoters of 'civility' attach to this fine word a Leftward-tilting connotation.    We must not let them get away with any suggestion that one is civil if and only if one is an espouser of liberal/left positions. 

We now come to Hillary. “You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about,” she said.

I agree with this one sentence. The Dems have transmogrified into a destructive, hard-Left party. We cannot be civil with these extremely uncivil and vicious and violent and mob-stoking scumbags who want to destroy what we of the Coalition of the Sane stand for and care about.

Under the rude tutelage of President Trump, some Republicans are making the transition from pussycon to warrior. One surprising example is Lindsey Graham whose stones have finally descended, to put it crudely. Too bad it took the outrages against Kavanaugh to set the cojones in motion.

Donald J. Trump, as uncouth and flawed as he is, is a necessary corrective to the extremism of the Democrat Party. We are very lucky he came along at just the right time.

Now read this: Trump Against the Pussycons.

Commentary on the Kavanaugh Contretemps

Malcolm Pollack, A Roundup of Reaction from the Right.

Most interesting to me is the following quotation from Pollack which embeds a quotation from Michael Anton on the "Gillibrand Standard" which well exposes the twisted  viciousness of the contemporary Democrat Party (the bolding is mine, read it if you don't have the attention span for the whole thing):

Next, here’s Michael Anton, who as “Publius Decius Mus” wrote the critically important Flight 93 Election essay back in 2016. In this essay he writes about what he calls The Gillibrand Standard. Here are some longish excerpts, but you should read the whole thing.

The Left has created a new “standard” for American politics—indeed, new in the entire history of Anglo-American jurisprudence. Let us call it the Gillibrand Standard, after its most insistent advocate, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.).

According to the Gillibrand Standard, accusation suffices to destroy. Not only is no corroborating evidence necessary, to ask for such evidence makes one just as guilty as the accused. Especially monstrous is to ask questions of the accuser; that is to repeat or compound the alleged crime. The accusation, once stated, immediately takes on metaphysical certainty. To doubt is to blaspheme.

Actually, “accusation” is too generous. Machiavelli distinguishes between “accusation” and “calumny” in order to demonstrate that “as much as accusations are useful to republics, so much are calumnies pernicious.” The difference is that accusations are public, subject to critique and refutation, and a mendacious or even inaccurate accuser pays a price. Calumnies, by contrast, “have need neither of witnesses nor any other specific corroboration to prove them, so that everyone can be calumniated by everyone; but everyone cannot be accused, since accusations have need of true corroboration and of circumstances that show the truth of the accusation.” A more incisive summary of the Gillibrand Standard cannot be found.

… There is but one limiting principle to the Gillibrand Standard: It shalt be used only against the Right and Republicans. Credible accusations—with evidence, witnesses, contemporaneous police reports—against Democrats and liberals are not merely to be ignored but also stonewalled and attacked, alleged victims and witnesses alike smeared. That is, until this or that liberal is no longer useful in the moment and safely can be discarded. Throwing an expired liberal to the wolves now and then is useful to maintain the fiction of evenhandedness.

This is obviously outrageous, unjust, unfair, and offensive to any conceivable standard of decency. Just as obvious, the Democrats and Left not only do not care, they welcome the weaponization of accusation. Their only conceivable regret is that it might not work this time. But even if it doesn’t “work” in the sense that Kavanaugh is not confirmed, they know that it “works” in other ways. It rallies their base. It drives fundraising. It degrades public standards of decency and credibility, making its effective use more likely in the future. It delegitimizes institutions—in this case, the Supreme Court, which, with the addition of Justice Kavanaugh, may later rule constitutionally and correctly in ways the Left does not like. And, most important for the nihilistic Left, it delegitimizes and dehumanizes—makes a villain out of—Kavanaugh himself.

It is hard to say what is the most shamelessly disgusting aspect of this affair. I offer as a candidate the following tactic. First, smear your target with uncorroborated, unprovable and almost certainly false allegations. After you have—inevitably—failed to substantiate those charges, insist that your target withdraw since his reputation will now forever be under a cloud and his rulings will lack popular legitimacy. This is akin to breaking an opponent’s arm before a sporting event and then insisting that he forfeit.

A Powerful Condemnation of Feinstein and the Democrat Party

Issued by Roger Kimball:

As the spurious case against Brett Kavanaugh disintegrates, splinters, and re-forms into a cacophony of whiny, irrelevant expostulations, it is instructive to step back and survey the field upon which this battle took place.

The ground is littered with dead and wounded ideals: civility, dead; basic decency, dead; the presumption of innocence, gravely wounded, ditto for the idea of due process. And this disgusting carnage is all on you, O ancient one, Dianne Feinstein, and your self-important, preposterous colleagues. You were desperate to keep Brett Kavanaugh off the Supreme Court so you abandoned any semblance of decency and respect. You travestied the processes of the United States Senate for the sake of a cynical grab at power. I’d say that you should be ashamed of yourselves, but, like the thugs that you are, you have no shame. You believe the acquisition of power is a magical antidote to shame. You are wrong about that, and one can only hope that you will one day reap some portion of the obloquy you have sowed.

Read it all.

And you are still a Democrat? 

There was a time when it was respectable to be a Democrat. That time is long gone. You Dems need to note what is happening, how your party has betrayed its ideals, as has the ACLU, and examine your consciences. Assuming you have properly-formed consciences. Or are you as shamelessly thuggish as Feinstein?

Dennis Prager: The Charges Against Kavanaugh Should be Ignored

This piece by Dennis Prager is sure to outrage the Left.  Prager takes a step back and uncovers an assumption that almost everyone else is making. The assumption is that IF the young Kavanaugh had groped Dr. Ford in the manner she describes, THEN that would be good grounds for non-confirmation.

But is the assumption true?

Suppose it could be shown that Brett Kavanaugh, 36 years ago, did to Christine Blasey Ford what she claims he did. That cannot be shown, of course, due to a lack of evidence, but just suppose.  (And if there is no evidence, then it is absurd to call for an FBI investigation. What would they investigate?) How does a youthful peccadillo nullify the rest of an impeccable life and distinguished career?  To believe that it does one would have to assume the following:

a) What a middle-age adult did in high school is all we need to need to know to evaluate an individual’s character — even when his entire adult life has been impeccable.

b) No matter how good and moral a life one has led for ten, 20, 30, 40, or even 50 years, it is nullified by a sin committed as teenager.

Prager then comments: 

No decent — or rational — society has ever believed such nihilistic nonsense.

Now let ME take a further step back. 

What is this whole controversy really and fundamentally about? Is it about Kavanaugh's moral fitness to serve on the Supreme Court?

Obviously not. It is not about his moral fitness, but about his failure to meet an ideological litmus test.  The Left cannot abide the thought of an originalist/textualist taking over the Justice Anthony Kennedy SCOTUS swing slot. For with Kavanaugh the conservatives would have the upper hand. This also explains why Gorsuch, the Scalia replacement, was confirmed with relative ease.

Suppose Kavanaugh were a leftist who believed in an 'open' or 'living' constitution. Would the DEMS be troubled by the baseless allegation, 36 years after the alleged 'fact,' of a youthful bit of bad behavior?  Of course not! They would be protesting with the same sorts of arguments now being used by Republicans.

So let's all try to be honest for a change. What is really going here is an important  battle in the war for the soul of America. Will we allow her to be "fundamentally transformed" by the Left or will we preserve her as she was founded to be?

To achieve the latter, the Constitution must be honored and applied in its original meaning.  Kavanaugh's is not the originalism of original intent of the Founders, but the originalism of original public meaning. 

As for Christine Blasey Ford, she is being used as tool by the Dems for their ideological purpose.  

Democrats as Tribal Termites

Mendocino Joe writes,

Wow, I cannot believe what I am seeing in our country these days.

 

I think your blog post about the Left hating because they need a bogey man after winning the civil rights battle is way too kind. I think we are seeing, in the Left these days, radical Evil from the pit.  We are watching people who are unmoored from any traditional religion or morality, completely unmoored. It is very scary to me. 

 

A lot will depend on what happens today and the days following. If the Republicans cave, and Kavanaugh is quashed, then all hell might break loose.

 

The Democrats are now undeniably a hard-Left party. And as my old friend says, they are "unmoored from any traditional religion or morality."  To change the metaphor, they are termites working to undermine the foundations of our magnificent Anglo-American system of law.

 

A bedrock principle thereof is the presumption of innocence.  One is presumed innocent until proven guilty. The presumption of innocence puts the burden of proof where it belongs, on the accuser, not the accused. Contrary to what some leftist senators are now saying, this is a principle of morality that is antecedent to the positive law. Its application extends therefore beyond the positive law, criminal and civil.

 

But the Dems are leftists out for power any way they can get it. For them the end justifies the means no matter how shabby or absurd.  They ought to be denounced for the termites they are, or, to change the metaphor once more, the scum that they are. 

 

They are termites because they undermine the foundations of American greatness. But why tribal?  Because they vote as a bloc, walking the walking and talking the talk that their tribal leaders have drilled into them. Like good successor-commies, they toe the Party line and submit to Party discipline. There is not a maverick among them. They all will vote to oppose Kavanaugh's nomination.

 

Additional commentary. (HT: Bill Keezer)

 

Angelo Codevilla, Cowardly Republicans Grant a False Premise

 

Scott McKay, The Palpable Existential Danger Among Us

 

Mark Steyn, Hearing the Women, Then and Now

 

An Impending Shooting Civil War?

 

Victor Davis Hanson, Are We on the Verge of Civil War?

 

There follows an excerpt from the fourth hyperlinked item supra.  Would it not be great if there were Republicans who had the civil courage to say the following? (Emphases in original)

 

Let me be clear on this -- if you're bitter that there was no President Pantsuit that's fine.  Losses can be bitter, especially when you really think you should have won.  But no matter what you think by the rules of the contest Hillary lost to Trump -- period.

But if you go beyond being bitter, start up hashtags like "#Resist" and then put that into action both inside and outside the government to disregard and disrupt the results of a valid electoral process you are not only violating the law you are inciting a shooting civil war.

This sort of activity by people inside the government is treading right to if not over the line of insurrection.  The use of government force for unlawful purpose, intentionally, meets the definition; it is an attempt to overthrow the law of the United States by corrupting the monopoly on deadly force that the government has and directing it unlawfully against certain people for political purposes.  This is not a "petty offense"; it is a direct assault on and attempt to overthrow the result of a lawful elective process and according to the above link it's still going on today.

If you're aggrieved by an election's results you have every right to print up a sign and go picket on a public street or other public place.  You can take out all the political advertisements you wish and make your best effort to get a different result the next time around.  But you do not have the right to enter into a restaurant where someone is eating dinner, which is private property, and assault said person because they happen to be a member of that political party.  That is a violation of the law in that it constitutes assault and is begging for an immediate outbreak of violence in response.

Read the whole thing. It's very good.

More on the Hate-Filled Left

Jacques comments on yesterday's Shelby Steele entry:

Shelby Steele is clearly right about the Left's need for hate objects (as a source of power) but I think he is wrong to say this is "a death rattle".  Or at least I'm skeptical.  We've already been through so many phases of this same dynamic, and it hasn't yet killed the Left or even slowed it down.  On the contrary, it seems to me that as their stories of evil Republicans and evil white men (etc) become ever more absurd the fanaticism and power of Leftists grows.  For example, the Tawana Brawley story was utterly absurd even at the time.  Any reasonable person would have regarded the story as highly dubious, even before all the decisive evidence of lies was available.  And yet the absurdity of the story--even its demonstrable falsity--didn't do anything to convince Leftists that their campaign against "white supremacists" was mistaken.  As far as I can tell the absurdity of the story did nothing to harm Al Sharpton's career.  Similarly, it was obviously absurd to believe that Trayvon Martin was a victim of white racism, or a white supremacist, or whatever.  There was, at the very least, enough evidence from the very beginning for any reasonable person to suspend judgment--to doubt that Trayvon was just an innocent little child victim, to doubt that George Zimmerman had any racial motivation, etc.  But that also did nothing to stop the Left, and seems on the contrary to have emboldened them in their endless campaign against "racism" and "racists". 

I agree. Trayvon Martin was no victim of white racism. He was no Emmett Till. The boy brought about his own death. If Martin had been taught, or rather had learned, to control himself he would most likely be alive today.  But he wasn't or didn't.  He blew his cool when questioned about his trespassing in a gated community on a rainy night.  He was no child on the way to the candy store. By all appearances he was up to no good. He punched a man in the face and broke his nose, then jumped on him, pinned him down, did the 'ground and pound' and told him that he was going to die that night.  So, naturally, the man defended himself against the deadly attack with deadly force.  What Zimmerman did was both morally and legally permissible.  If some strapping youth is pounding your head into the pavement, you are about to suffer "grave bodily harm" if not death.  What we have here is clearly a case of self-defense. The verdict of acquittal for Zimmerman was clearly correct.  Only a blind ideologue could fail to understand this. 

Does race enter into this?  In one way it does. But not in the way leftists think say. Blacks as a group have a rather more emotional nature than whites as a group.  (If you deny this, you have never lived in a black neighborhood or worked with blacks, as I have.)  Martin's lack of self-control got him killed.  He couldn't keep a lid on his mindless hatred of the "creepy-assed cracker." White-on-black racism did not enter into it at all. So, while self-control is important for all, the early inculcation of self-control is even more important for blacks. I suspect Shelby Steele would agree.

And I think this is true of almost all their hate objects.  Remember when Ronald Reagan was supposed to be a neo-Nazi, a right-wing dictator, a woman-hater...?  Wasn't it obvious in the '80s that these ideas were false, indeed preposterous?  Or the idea that Richard Nixon was some kind of uniquely vile criminal--as opposed to Ted Kennedy, for example, or JFK or Bill Clinton?  Or the idea that Mitt Romney--Mitt Romney, that pathetic liberal squish--was some kind of hard-right authoritarian bent on destroying women and minorities?  Or what about the utterly absurd idea of "white privilege" or "microaggression" or "transgenderism"?  These things are demonstrably false or simply incoherent, but it only took a few years for all of them to be nailed down as the central principles of a new moral code that no one in human history had ever even imagined.  

Of course you are right about all of this.

In all of these cases, and a zillion others, the Left's hatred was totally divorced from any kind of realistic adult assessment of reality.  And yet it has never made any difference.  It's never set them back significantly, and instead what generally happens is that their deranged absurd demonstrably false narrative ends up being entrenched as the only mainstream reasonable opinion within a few years at most. 

 So I'd propose an additional hypothesis to explain this phenomenon:

The absurdity of the story is part of its appeal.  Leftists derive self-esteem from their (supposed) ability to understand problems that regular people can't understand, and their (supposed) deep concern for victims.  It makes them feel intellectually and morally superior to regular people, and they are addicted to that high.  The more seemingly absurd the theory, the more brilliant and sensitive and complicated you must be in order to really 'get' it--and, of course, the more it will repel the dumb rednecks and normies, who don't get it and can't be in the club.  And this in turn strengthens them as a mass movement.  They control the institutions and media, so they're able to reach an ever-growing audience of new people who also want to feel good about themselves, superior to the hated white male conservative Other.  By contrast, a more rational and realistic assessment of the world offers little to these people--no special social status and opportunities for preening and validation, no sense of being exalted above the dumb masses.

What needs explaining is the uncontrolled, largely inarticulate, animal rage of the Left. (e.g., Robert de Niro: Fuck Trump!) Steele's hypothesis is that the Left is raging because it is losing its power and moral authority due to  the drying up of sources of legitimate moral indignation. The civil wrongs were righted. And so leftists have traded in righteous anger for mindless hatred. In order to hold on to its power the Left is inventing bogus sources of moral outrage.

Jacques speak of an "additional hypothesis," but is he trying to explain the same phenomenon, the Left's hyperbolic rage?  Or a different phenomenon, the need leftists have to feel superior to Hillary's "deplorables"?

It looks like the explananda are different and so are the explanantia.  The rage and the need to feel superior, on the one hand, and the the lust for power and the concoction of pseudo-intellectual gobbledygook, on the other.

Finally, if this line of thought is reasonable, it makes me wonder whether Steele is perhaps being a bit naive about the Left's track record.  Did the Left really "rescue America" from "the great menace of racism"?  Is the story since the 60s really one of "the greatest moral evolutions ever"?  I suspect that this whole hallowed narrative might be not so different, ultimately, from the Left's current stories about Trayvon and Michael Brown "the gentle giant", or this ridiculous thing about Judge Kavanaugh's high school sins.  Maybe they've been telling absurd lies all along--just as they lied about the USSR, for example.  Maybe "racism" in the past was a far more ambiguous phenomenon--not something that needed to be simply eradicated using essentially totalitarian methods, but something that needed to be moderated, understood in its context and judged more realistically.  Take lynching, for example, one of their favorite mythologies.  Who was being lynched, and why?  Lots of blacks, but lots of whites too.  Maybe the reason was mainly that blacks were committing a disproportionate number of murders and rapes.  Maybe the reality of lynching was about as complex and ambiguous as the reality of so-called "racial profiling".  And the same goes for their other narratives--about women, immigrants, sex and so on.  I would expect that in 50 years people will have been trained to believe in the "great menace" of "heterosexism" or "microaggressions" or "hate speech" on the internet.  Maybe they've always been crazy.

"Lots of blacks, but lots of whites too."  Here I need some references.  Lot of whites were lynched? By whom?

It is true that blacks are disproportionately more criminally prone than whites. (And since it is true, this statement cannot be dismissed as racist.  A statement whose subject matter is race is not eo ipso a racist statement.)  I hope Jacques is not suggesting that the extra-judicial lynching of blacks was justified by their disproportionate engaging in rape and murder.

I differ from Jacques in that I hold that the original Civil Rights movement was basically on the right track, and that Steele, while he exaggerates, is right to point this out. We should not conflate that movement with the insane leftism of the present day.