Maverick Philosopher

The Battle is Just Beginning

Walk the line. Don't back down.  It's going to be a long twilight struggle against the forces of darkness, my friends. (Wo)Man up, gear up, but be of good cheer. Long live the Republic!

JFK Inaugural Speech, 1961:

Now the trumpet summons us again--not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need -- not as a call to battle, though embattled we are -- but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, 'rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation'--a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself.

Of the four, tyranny is greatest threat at the present time, the tyranny of the deep state operatives who control the Democrat Party and pull the strings of the puppet-in-chief, Joe Biden, and who desperately tried, but failed, to replace him with the puppet Kamala Harris.  Despite the stinging rebuke visited upon the anti-democratic Dem cadre, they will not give up. Their nihilism has deep and mephitic sources.

I was hoping to uncover an etymological connection between mephitic and Mephistopheles, but I found no evidence of one.

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

UPDATE (12/18).  Further political 'infusions' to 'get your blood up' in this season of peace and joy. Si vis pacem, para bellum.

Why They Hate Kash Patel.  They hate a 'person of color'? What racists  they are!

After Penny.  Excerpt:

Instead, the left and the weaponized government institutions under its control used Penny’s race, gender, and courage to try to make him a national pariah and a living symbol of its twisted ideas of “white privilege” and “systemic racism.” He had to entertain daily the possibility that he could spend up to 20 years in prison for protecting himself and others, and then live out the remainder of his life as an ex-con whose alleged crimes were rooted in purported racism. He had to live in the knowledge that the elected judicial authorities of our country’s largest and supposedly greatest city—with the unreserved support of many civic leaders, criminal justice theorists, and major leaders of one of our country’s two major political parties—did everything in their power to impose just that outcome on him. He likely realized that if they succeeded—and even if they failed, as they did—they would be emboldened to  punish others with the same process.

Tucker versus Pompeo

Trump's Vengeance Tour?  

Last week, I noted with alarm that House Republicans were shrugging off—or even approving of—Donald Trump wanting to jail some of their past and current colleagues who served on the January 6th Committee. As it turns out, I underestimated their bloodthirstiness.

Apparently these embittered losers are incapable of distinguishing between revenge/vengeance and retributive justice. Are these two-bit Bulwark journos unaware that 'retribution' has two importantly different senses in English? 

Whence drones?

I am not able [not able, Rod, or not willing?] to tell you where this idea comes from, but I can assure you that, from my sources, it’s not idle speculation. Thesis: the drones are from China.

China is taunting us, showing us how advanced its technology is, and that it can violate US airspace with impunity. We don’t have the ability to detect these things before they arrive, and they can cloak themselves from our radar. I had wondered why China or any nation would reveal its advanced technology in this silly way. A possible answer: it could be a display of power in advance of an invasion of Taiwan, as a kind of “Are you sure you want to mess with us, Yanks?” way. Doing this could be a shrewd way of firing a warning shot.

Is Dreher suggesting that Alejandro Mayorkas, Director of Homeland (In?)Security, has been lying to us, along with the rest of the Dementocrat regime about the provenience of drones? Dreher's thesis is the most plausible explanation I can think of.  

The Coalition of the Sane and the Reasonable

I have been using the title phrase for some time now to refer to Trump-supporting conservatives. But what makes us sane and reasonable? Victor Davis Hanson compiles a list in The Trump Counterrevolution is a Return to Sanity.

In an earlier post I referred to the take-back of our country as a National Sanitation Project, opining  that it might take a generation or two.  But what does sanity have to do with sanitation? The words are in fact connected etymologically, sharing as they do a common root in the Latin sanus,  meaning healthy or sane or sound, as in the Latin saying mens sana in corpore sano, "a sound mind in a sound body." We Trumpians are of sound mind, and some of us inhabit sound bodies.

We need to return the nation to health by draining swamps, enforcing laws, erecting barriers both territorial and  moral, and by fumigating institutions. Leftists want to tear down our institutions; we of sound mind want to fumigate them, removing therefrom the termites who presently infest them. 

You need to get with the program and do your bit. Don't be  slacker, a defeatist, an ingrate. But if you are on the wrong side of this struggle, understand that we consider you enemies.

A threat? No, a warning. Are you wise enough to heed a warning? I can't resist yet another reference to 'Biblical Bob':

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There’s a battle outside and it is ragin’
It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin’

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 fadin’
And the first one now will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’

Elections Have Consequences

Conservatives are hobbled by their virtues, one of which is civility: we are loathe to "give as good as we get." But now that our side has power, we must not hesitate to use it against our political enemies. The destructive swine will squeal but we should show them no mercy.  There must be no compromise with those out to overturn our very system of government and who lie brazenly about their intentions.

Roger Kimball puts the point very well:

“Elections,” Barack Obama told a group of cowering Republican lawmakers early in 2009, “have consequences.” He then drove the point home by reminding them, “I won.”

In truth, Democrats tend to understand this law of the political universe more clearly than do Republicans.

The usual rule is this: when Democrats win elections, they wield power. When Republicans win elections, they seek, or at least agree to, compromise.

In Suicide of the West, the political philosopher James Burnham quotes the nineteenth-century French writer Louis Veuillot, who summed up the essence of this political dialectic in one elegant sentence. Quand je suis le plus faible, je vous demande la liberté parce que tel est votre principe; mais quand je suis le plus fort, je vous l’ôte, parce que tel est le mien. “When I am the weaker, I ask you for my freedom, because that is your principle; but when I am the stronger, I take away your freedom, because that is my principle.”

For examples of the latter, I invite you to ponder the behavior of Joe Biden’s Department of Justice, especially the behavior of the despicable Merrick Garland, the Attorney General, these last three and a half years.

Had the Democrats won the 2024 election, we would have seen many more examples of this principle in action. Assuming the Dems had kept the Senate, we would have seen them dispense with the filibuster, thus turning that chamber into what outgoing West Virginian Senator Joe Manchin called “the House on steroids.” They would have packed the Supreme Court, adding a few new “progressive” members to the bench to counter the power of Justices like Clarence Thomas. They likely would have imposed term- or age-limits on the Justices as well.

Elsewhere, I endeavored to provide a brief inventory of the “consequences” of a Harris victory. Donald Trump would have been bankrupted and jailed. It is likely that the same thing would have happened to Elon Musk. Just as John Kerry promised, the First Amendment would have been gutted if not discarded altogether in order to further the censorship and surveillance regime of the woke, progressive elite. A virtual ban on fracking and the mining of coal would have been enacted, further depressing America’s prosperity. The trans insanity of the last decade would have been extended, destroying women’s sports and disfiguring, mentally as well as physically, many thousands of confused teenagers.

The country just dodged that fusillade. What now?

Read the rest and do your bit. We can beat the bums into the dirt if we work together. It's a noble fight and it's just beginning.  Beat back better!

Should Trump Use the DOJ Against his Enemies?

Would it be 'revenge' or would it be a wholly justifiable upholding of the rule of law?  Would success be 'revenge' enough, as Trump has suggested? His enemies accused him of violating 'norms' when they themselves violated the norms that matter, those rooted in the rule of law and the Constitution. Doing so, they engaged once again in their trademark psychological projection.  The 'norms' Trump violated were merely those of conventional civility. 

Here:

Over the last four years, regime lawyers and government officials have repeatedly ignored the constitution, stretched the meaning of federal and state statutes, and shredded legal norms. They have investigated, prosecuted, and persecuted their political opponents. They did this to suppress those who challenged their rule and to send a message to would-be challengers. 

With Donald Trump’s election and pending inauguration (assuming no shenanigans between now and then), unpleasant things will have to be done to hold these people to account. The regime’s aggressive lawlessness will require a response. 

The response must balance the immediate need for accountability with the ultimate need for reconciliation. On the one hand, we must hold responsible those whose criminal conduct subverted our constitutional order. On the other, we must prepare to reconcile with the millions of Americans who erred grievously in supporting the regime’s lawlessness — at least with those people who are humble enough to acknowledge their error. 

Equal justice under the law, an essential feature of the rule of law, means enforcing the law in an even-handed manner. Violators must be held responsible for their actions. This is not “retribution,” any more than arresting a thief or murderer constitutes retribution. All citizens are expected to obey the law. No one is above the law.

The Enemies of Liberty "Will not go Quietly into the Night"

On the morning of November 6th, I wrote, "But this is no time to gloat over the defeat  of our enemies. They will not give up or give in."  Here is how Peter Boghossian makes the point. (A little over six minutes.) 

Now that we of the Coalition of the Sane and the Reasonable (my title not Boghossian's) have gained momentum, we must not rest on our laurels, but fight even harder, as Boghossian puts it, "to drive the final nail into the coffin" of our enemies. One drives a nail with a hammer. But hammers have other uses as well. 

I am reminded of the subtitle to Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols: Wie man mit dem Hammer philosophiert, "How one philosophizes with a hammer." Nietzsche's hammer is an icon-buster. (There is a passage, however, in which he likens his hammer to a tuning-fork with which the sounds out the idols for their soundness, and finds them hollow. My way of putting it, not his.) 

We patriots have an iconoclastic task before us: the smashing of the idols of the leftist tribe.

Morning in America!

Hats off to all the patriots who did their civic duty.  But this is no time to gloat over the defeat  of our enemies. They will not give up or give in. For these totalitarian dogs, the political is everything.  They do not suffer, as we do, from The Conservative Disadvantage.

The war is just starting and the national sanitation project will take at least a generation to accomplish.  To give you a taste of what we are up against, here is David Frum writing in The Atlantic this morning:

Donald Trump has won, and will become president for the second time. Those who voted for him will now celebrate their victory. The rest of us need to prepare to live in a different America: a country where millions of our fellow citizens voted for a president who knowingly promotes hatred and division; who lies—blatantly, shamelessly—every time he appears in public; who plotted to overturn an election in 2020 and, had he not won, was planning to try again in 2024.

Above all, we must learn to live in an America where an overwhelming number of our fellow citizens have chosen a president who holds the most fundamental values and traditions of our democracy, our Constitution, even our military in contempt. Over the past decade, opinion polls showed Americans’ faith in their institutions waning. But no opinion poll could make this shift in values any clearer than this vote. As a result of this election, the United States will become a different kind of country.

In a post from January of this year, Dueling Articles, I arrange a confrontation between Frum and Steve Cortes. The comment thread is a very good one, featuring contributions by the most distinguished among the MavPhil commentariat.

World leaders congratulate Trump.

UPDATE 3:42 PM

Leftist incomprehension:

Jonathan Chait, Americans Didn’t Embrace Trump, They Rejected the Biden-Harris Administration

But Lanny Davis, remember him? displays some self-awareness:

The Morning After: Lessons to Learn -- and not to Learn

Three Lockean Reasons to Oppose the Destructive Dems

New, improved, updated.  Top o' the Stack.  A call to action. Get off your lazy butts and do something for the great Republic that has made it possible for you to live a good life. What are you, an ingrate? Do you have children, grandchildren? Don't you want them to have a good life?  Are you a defeatist? A fatalist who believes that nothing you do matters at all?

Related: In the Grip of Madness

Rights and Needs

You can have a right to a thing whether or not you have or will have a need for it. So the best response to the leftist who asks, "Why do you need a gun?" is wrong question! Stop the pointless conversation right there. "The question is not whether I need one; the question is whether I have a right to one."

Then explain that the right to appropriate means of self-defense follows from the right to self-defense which in turn follows from the right to life.

Depending on the sort of leftist you are dealing with you could then go on to explain why you do need a gun. But the wisest policy is not to debate leftists. Leftists need to be defeated not debated. 

Vote, vote early, and vote against the tyrants and the projectionist liars and language abusers of the Kamalist Left. I am assuming that you understand what is in your own long-term best self-interest. Go to GunVote.org to register.

No Complacency! All Hands on Deck!

The Republic hangs by a thread. We must defeat the Kamalists* and do so decisively.  They need not just defeat but demoralization. Unfortunately, too many 'influencers' are predicting a Trump victory.  Not wise.  We must not wax complacent. Our political enemies will do anything to win. No moral or legal considerations constrain them. We know a priori (in Kant's relative sense of the term) that they will cheat their posteriors  off -- get the pun? --and then lie their heads off about their cheating. Why shouldn't they lie and cheat? We let them get away with it. Like Bret Baier, we conservatives are hobbled by our virtues, our civility for example. 

Roger Kimball the other day, and now Piers Morgan may be doing more harm than good. 

Morgan:

“Even if you flippin’ fries at McDonald’s,” Oprah Winfrey once said, “if you are excellent, everybody wants to be in your line.”

I thought of this quote when Donald Trump turned up yesterday at a McDonald’s restaurant in suburban Philadelphia to work a shift making French fries, then handing bags of food to drive-through customers.

As political stunts go, this might have been the best I’ve ever seen, because it served two very powerful purposes in the presidential race.

First, it reminded voters that his rival, Kamala Harris, has repeatedly boasted about having a summer job at McDonald’s to make her sound more relatable to her fellow Americans, but to date, not a single person has been able to verify this.

This is quite extraordinary given how specific she has been, with her campaign team stating that she worked at McDonald’s on Central Avenue in Alameda, Calif., in 1983 after her freshman year at Howard University, working on the cash register, french fries station and ice cream machine.

Read it all.

_____________

*My astute readers of course know not to confuse Kamalism (a coinage I borrow from Thomas Klingenstein) and Kemalism.

Bumper Stickers and Yard Signs

As November 5th approaches, I am seeing a lot of them, especially yard signs. I myself prefer to 'go gray' inasmuch as such signage will reliably trigger emotions, but never persuade anyone to change his position.  Suppose you have good relations with your neighbor across the street. You share some interests, but have never talked politics.  You display a Trump-Vance sign. He sees it, and thinks to himself, "I thought Ron was a nice guy, but what sort of person would vote for Hitler?"  What did you accomplish by putting up the yard sign?  Nothing, and you've made things slightly worse.

"But shouldn't you stand up for what you believe in?"

Generally speaking, yes. But there are more effective and prudent ways of proceeding.  Vote, encourage your like-minded friends to vote, try to persuade open-minded fence-sitters, make a campaign contribution.

There are also safety considerations, especially if you have a family to protect.  Take a gander at this, seeing once again  just how vicious, vile, and dangerous our political enemies can be.

Trump supporters in Pennsylvania are reportedly being targeted with threatening letters from radical leftists, warning them that their visible support for the former President could lead to dire consequences.

Residents with Trump signs in their yards, particularly in Philadelphia, have reported receiving disturbing letters through the U.S. Postal Service, complete with fake Trump campaign letterheads, Post Millenial first reported.

The threatening letters, which start off as a seemingly benign “thank you” note for being engaged in the electoral process, quickly devolve into dark, ominous threats.

One Trump voter, Janet from Penn Valley, shared her harrowing experience to Post Millenial.

After proudly displaying Trump signs in her yard, she received one of these letters, filled with hateful rhetoric and explicit threats to her family and property.

The unsettling message was far from an isolated incident. Janet, who reported the matter to the Lower Merion Police, revealed that other Trump supporters in her area had received similar letters.

Local law enforcement, however, has been unable to pursue the matter further, as the letters were delivered through the mail without any available video evidence.

Despite this, Trump supporters in the area have confirmed that this intimidation campaign is widespread, with reports of the same threatening letter being delivered both by mail and without postage directly into mailboxes.

The letter, which opens with pleasantries, swiftly transitions into a vitriolic condemnation of Trump supporters, labeling the former President a “felon, rapist, desecrator,” and blaming him for political violence in the country.

Read it all.

Political Enemies and Political Tactics

I had an interesting exchange with Dr. Caiati about political tactics in the comment thread to Haitians, Cats, and Red Herrings. Here are some further thoughts.

When our political enemies use our virtues against us, we should use their vices against them. Call it the Converse Alinskyite Tactic (CAT).

I used to say to them: Lie about us, and we will tell the truth about you. Now I say: Lie about us and we'll lie about you.  Along the same lines, and given that Kamalism Will Destroy America, as it surely will, Tom Klingenstein writes:

In wartime, as Churchill famously observed, “truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” We are told, by Republicans almost as frequently as by Democrats, that Trump lost the recent debate. But even if this were true, to say so merely gives aid and comfort to the enemy. Like Trump, we must stand up and proclaim victory. Assert it: He won. These are wartime rules. The other side already plays by such rules. We do not. 

Likewise, we fight Kamalism with facts and arguments, but today these are no more effective than using a straw to penetrate the shell of tortoise, as Lincoln  put it. For example, our best historians, liberals and conservatives, thoroughly debunked the 1619 project, the official history of Kamalism. But to what avail? War is not a battle of facts. 

The point here is that we conservatives will always lose so long as we fail to grasp that our political opponents are enemies who see politics as warfare.  If that is the way they see it, and it is, then that is the way we must see it.  Taking the high ground does no good. You might think that taking the high ground would shame our enemies and inspire them to play fair and speak the truth. But this ignores the fact that our opponents are enemies who are out to win by any means. They cannot be shamed.  

See my Politics as Polemics: The Converse Clausewitz Principle. I quote David Horowitz, a former leftist, who understands how these people operate.

I also refer you to recent posts by Malcolm Pollack who draws upon Carl Schmitt.

It is time to gird our loins and enter the fray. The fate of the Republic hangs in the balance.

See also: Rod Dreher: Floating Above the Fray as Usual. In the last couple of years, however, Dreher has 'evolved' somewhat.

The New Politics: A Battle of Billionaires

Some cynics (Moldbug?) will say that it has always been like that: the essence of the political is captured in the Golden Rule: Those with the gold, rule.  If that is so, let the battle proceed. I am glad we have Trump and Musk on our side.

You don't defeat transgender Unsinn with calm arguments and appeals to reason, but by Musk-et.  

Tucker Carlson on What is to be Done

We have been discussing how to proceed against our anti-civilizational political enemies. This essay by Carlson is not all that good, but it is worth a quick read-through. His points about truth and death are spot on.

Nicole Gelinas in Regressives explains how a healthy progressivism transmogrified into regressivism rendering Gotham the shithole it now is.

The beauty of blog is that the blogger is under no editor who might take umbrage at the occurrence of 'transmogrified' and 'shithole' in one and the same sentence.

2024: The Last Year of the Republic?

A New York friend of mine writes,

When I settled in Jackson Heights after leaving Mom's Bronx nest almost a half-century ago, I thought I had died and gone to heaven. Great architecture, uncongested sidewalks, a police presence, and elderly ladies taking a stroll in the early evening were among the first things that struck me. It's now, to coin a  cliché, a third-world shithole run into the ground by "progressives." Few of its current denizens remember when it was otherwise.

The same friend thinks we won't make it to November.  When he so opined some months back, I thought that this might just be perspectival distortion due to his perch in Jackson Heights.  But he may well be right.  Another friend sends me here where we read some concrete suggestions of the sort that I have been asking for, but Victor Davis Hanson, Mark Levin,  and so many other astute commentators fail to make, content as they are merely to analyze and report:

. . . the next eight months should be spent getting prepared.

So, yes, I want you to vote in November — and, yes, I want you to prepare for the communist takeover of America when your vote won’t matter anymore. That might seem contradictory or incoherent but it’s basic strategy: you plan to win the battle, but you also plan for an orderly retreat so that you can survive to fight another day.

No, I’m not being gloomy or hopeless. I’m not telling you to quit. I’m not encouraging you to stop voting. I’m telling you to get prepared. What does that really mean? It means you should get a satellite phone. You should buy more guns and ammo. You should stockpile medicine and water and food. Hold cash. Hold gold and silver. Have an emergency plan with your friends and family.

It’s time to get serious.

{. . .]

You do realize that you’re in the middle of a global conspiracy to end the democratic West, right? You’ve heard about The Great Reset haven’t you? You don’t want to believe it’s true — of course. That’s why you keep ignoring the obvious signs.

That’s called: magical thinking.

We’re already at the stage of the communist revolution in which 320,000 illegal aliens have been flown into the United States by the Biden regime to occupy your country and to eventually serve as soldiers and police who are loyal to the communists.

We’re already at the stage when the agents of the Biden regime are openly admitting that they will not allow Trump to hold the office again if he’s elected. They’re telling you he should be denied classified briefings right now. They’re telling you that it’s time to dissolve the Bill of Rights and the Constitution and order American soldiers to disarm the people. They will not allow a peaceful transfer of power.

I hope that I’m wrong — butwhat happens to you if I’m right?

This is good advice. We don't despair or give up, we fight on "in the gloaming" to use my poetic phrase. We vote and we prep. Both. It's twilight time for the West, and while it is true that the Owl of Minerva spreads its wings at dusk (as per the Hegelian trope), and we philosophers rejoice at the wisdom gained when the bird takes flight, we philosophers still attached to gross-material bodies  endeavor to push that final denoument as far into the future as possible. After all, no one KNOWS whether or not there is anything beyond this scene of strife, this miserably mundane mundus sensibilis. (Am I sending a coded message that only white-supremacist dogs can hear?)

We fight on. We vote and we prep. And when we vote we do so not only with ballots but with our feet and our wallets.  Buy  a satphone. I hadn't thought of recommending that. Excellent suggestion for something you can do.  Take the rest of Emerald Robinson's advice.

But don't expect any help from the Judas Iscariots and con artists of the pseudo-con Right. David French is a prime example as are Mike Pence, Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney,  Chris Christie, and so many others. Turncoats, quislings, yap-and-scribble lapdogs of the Left, cuckservative clowns, worse than useless, worse even than the cadre-commie anti-civilizational woke-joke leftards.

French and Pence are justly pilloried here.

UPDATE (3/16)

That well-fed, miserably misguided matron Liz Cheney is torn to pieces by Kash Patel here.

The greatest con job ever to happen in American politics is the false Jan. 6 “insurrection” narrative. The singular mission of this narrative is to stop Donald Trump from ever setting foot in the Oval Office again. 

A key pillar of the left’s propaganda about insurrection is to distort the truth surrounding whether Trump authorized, prior to Jan. 6, the deployment of National Guard troops to keep order on that day. The main architect of this disinformation campaign is former Congresswoman Liz Cheney.  

Issues and Insights is another good source of anti-totalitarian punch-back. This article, for example:

Democrats don’t support open borders for humanitarian reasons. They want the lines erased because they see every illegal alien as a likely Democratic voter crucial to their political power grab. But there’s another reason: They want to increase the populations of Democratic states to boost their representation in Congress and the Electoral College.

Apparently it’s not enough for Democrats to have become authoritarians, they have to be corrupt, too.

Of course this is no surprise. Only the corrupt become authoritarians. Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek showed in chapter 10 of “The Road to Serfdom” why socialist systems never have decent people in charge.

“Bad men,” Hayek explained in Why the Worst Get on Top, have no inhibitions about running other peoples’ lives. It is “the unscrupulous and uninhibited,” he wrote in 1944, who “are likely to be more successful in a society tending toward totalitarianism.”

Put another way, by Dune author Frank Herbert, “​​Absolute power does not corrupt absolutely, absolute power attracts the corruptible.”

And thus we understand why the Democratic Party is overflowing with the most wretched people imaginable. It’s a party that draws in the worst among us in much the same way communism attracted the Lenins, Stalins, Maos and Castros.

The kakistocrats that captain the Democratic Party are so lacking in principle and so filled with villainy that they are using illegal aliens as pawns in their scheme to establish unopposed, unchallengeable power.

How can we know this? Because not a single Democrat voted last week in favor of an amendment from Tennessee Republican Sen. Bill Hagerty that would allow only citizens to be “counted for the purposes of allocating congressional districts and electoral votes.”

When Hagerty offered the amendment, “the Democrats just went nuts,” he said. New York Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer “threatened to shut the government down.”

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? 

What's Wrong with Illegal Immigration?

I present a number of arguments, some 'liberal,' atop the Stack.

I am well aware of the infirmity of reason, and of the stupidity and suggestibility of people, especially in this Age of Feeling and Xed-out attention spans.  And so I am well aware of just how little is accomplished by calm and careful argumentation in these dark times. But we need to have arguments at the ready for those fence-sitters, many of them decent young people, who are open to reason and have not yet been hopelessly corrupted by our decadent culture.

Reason is for the reasonable, just as civility is for the civil.

But it is not reasonable to be reasonable in all things or in relation to all persons. We live among enemies. The enemy needs sometimes to experience the hard fist of unreason, the brute rejection, the blind refusal, the lethal blow. Or at least he must be made to fear this response, and you must be capable of making it. 

The good are not the weak, but those capable of  violence while remaining the masters of its exercise.

Otherwise, are you fit for this world?

On the other hand, it might be better not to be fit for this world. What sort of world is it in which the good must be brutal to preserve the reign of the Good?

More grist for the mill. We blog on.

Third Parties

Stack man is against them. 

Third parties are discussion societies in political drag.

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?

A Lefty Sees the Light

Sasha Stone, An Ex-Democrat's Case for Trump

Good advice:

What the Democrats and Never Trumpers want now is to push Trump and MAGA back into the danger zone. They want more violence. They want riots. They want an uprising [so] that they can then bring in the military, weaponize dissent, speech, and ideology, and have the full backing of the American public. We’re almost there now.

But don’t take the bait, MAGA. You can defeat them by being the calm, reasonable side. Make them the crazy ones. They are just waiting for any chance to exploit the law more than they already have. Don’t give them that chance.

That's right. Stay calm. Speak out but don't overreact. No violence! No threats!  Don't fuel the fascism of our political enemies. You must  realize that they are not good people.* They hate you and they will crush you if they can. Step on their toes and you will get a jackboot to the face.  Anyone who will cancel your livelihood will cancel your life. Quietly prepare.  Hope and pray for the best, but prepare for the worst. Be ready should SHTF. These are very dangerous times. The fate of the Republic hangs in the balance.  Cf. Civil Courage and Practical Dissidence.

The case for Trump is simple, four words on a red hat: Make America Great Again.

Make America able to take a joke again. Make America understand basic biology again. Make America the land of the free and home of the brave again. Make it okay to be white, a Christian, a male, a Jew, a woman, a mother, an American again. Make Thomas Jefferson a hero again. Make movies watchable again.

Make America a country where we can still say what we think without fear of banishment, public humiliation, or the loss of our jobs. Make America tolerant again. Make reality cool again. Make it okay to reward merit. Make it okay to be friends with people you don’t agree with.

---------------------

*That's a generic a statement.  Of course there some good people on the wrong side, but they are useful idiots.

Civil Courage and Practical Dissidence

This just over the transom from Malcolm Pollack:

The problem, Bill, with your call for prudence is that courage is what encourages courage in others, and vice versa. 

But it's true also, as both you and Moldbug remind us, that in a predatory environment we should remember that we are prey. I agree with you about the confrontational folly of open carry, and the value of ketman. Genuine martyrdom is hard to achieve: most are simply destroyed and forgotten, and what good does that do anyone (least of all, oneself)?

 

These are difficult times. We live under exactly the soft, smothering power that Tocqueville saw coming, so long ago.

Malcolm has the dialectical savvy to realize that his first point, with which I agree, is balanced by his second. I thank him for the reference to Moldbug's idea-rich article.  As for martyrdom, perhaps we should distinguish between secular and religious martyrdom, and within both between effective and ineffective. Malcolm is right: most martyrs for a secular cause simply throw their lives away, are soon encairned in oblivion, and accomplish nothing.  But suppose Christianity is true and that the Christian martyrs who went to their deaths in the Coliseum and elsewhere won the eternal crown.    Whether they achieved anything for Christianity in this world, they achieved the ultimate for themselves in the other. If Christianity is false, however, then they too threw away their lives.  The problematic here is a lot deeper and trickier than I am making it out to be, but I want to get on to Moldbug's warnings, insights and tactical suggestions.

 

He warns again confronting the powers that be. "When the weak step on the toes of the strong, the strong step on their face." Don't fancy yourself an enemy of the state. "Dissidents are prey of the state." The regime should be thought of as a predator rather than as an enemy. In the wild I do nothing that might attract bears such as sleep with my food in the tent, nor do I bait them; if one shows up I will try to evade him, and shoot him only if absolutely necessary. Given what we are up against, "the immediate tactical goal of the dissident is to maximize the product of independence and security." So: don't react in a threatening or violent manner. Your impotent reaction will provoke Power's potent action. (Have you learned anything from J6?) That's what they want you to do so that they can justify their jackboot tactics and middle-of-the-night full-auto intimidation. Quietly prepare, and bide your time.

 

I'll leave you to read for yourself the rest of his article. An excess of cleverness impairs its readability, but there is a lot of fresh thinking here. And do bang on the Tocqueville link which  features an astonishingly prescient passage from Alexis as well as an impressive defense of Donald Trump by Malcolm.

 

If you are interested in the origin of my dissidence, take a gander at my  From Democrat to Dissident in T. Allan Hillman & Tully Borland (eds.), Dissident Philosophers: Voices Against the Political Current of the Academy. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield. pp. 261-277.

 

 

When the Exercise of Rights Contributes to their Loss

Civil courage and prudence are competing virtues. At times competition become collision.

Top o' the Stack.

The Second Amendment and the Origin of Rights

Over at Substack.

Don't Vote for ANY Democrat

That may sound extreme, but it is not extreme at all.

The Dems vote as a bloc. They are under party discipline. They are made to toe the party line and punished if they don't. To understand the contemporary Democrat party you need to study communism.  Frank S. Meyer's The Moulding of Communists is one of the best works with which to begin your education. 

The CPUSA couldn't win under the banner of the Hammer and Sickle, but they are winning under the sign of the Jackass. So don't be a jackass. Don't vote for any Dem at any level, federal, state, local.

Vote the party, not the person. 

Harvard Will Pay a Price . . .

. . . when its super-wealthy Jewish benefactors withhold their support. Mark my words.

The most effective way to combat the preternaturally destructive Left is by refusing to fund them. For the common currency of human-all-too-human understanding is the lean green, the filthy lucre, money. Everyone, no matter how twisted, nihilistic, or demon-driven, understands it.

Meanwhile, prepare quietly, you know how, for you know what. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.

UPDATE (1o/14). I was right. Now the billionaire punch-back begins. CEOs want the names of students who blame Israel for the Hamas attacks. 

 

Ever Hear of Gene Sharp?

A symposium on Gene Sharp's The Politics of Nonviolent Action.

Conservative or Counter-Revolutionary?

Christopher Rufo made an excellent contribution to Mark Levin's "Life, Liberty, and Levin" last night. I will put one of his points in my own way with my own additions and 'flourishes.'

One can conserve only what one has, not what one has lost. We conservatives have lost control of our institutions including the universities, the schools, the churches, and the Fourth Estate. The Left's "long march through the institutions" has been successful thanks to their energy and our inattention. Since there is little or nothing left to conserve, we must take back what has been stolen. While we may continue to call ourselves conservatives, we must think of ourselves as counter-revolutionaries.  Counter-revolutionaries, not reactionaries. 'Reactionary Right' is a phrase to avoid. He who reacts is defined by that against which he reacts. We need action, not reaction. 

As for the 'post-liberals,' it is not clear what they are about.  But to the extent that they support a 'throne and altar' response to the Left's depredations, in the form, say, of integralism, then they are but another impotent form of reaction.

Political Action

Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien

The French saying is attributed to Voltaire. "The best is the enemy of the good."  The idea is that one should not allow the pursuit of an unattainable perfection to impede progress toward an attainable goal which, while not perfect, is better than the outcome that is likely to result if one seeks the unattainable.

Here is another formulation, not as accurate, but pithier and replete with trademark alliteration:  Permit not the pursuit of the perfect to preempt the possible.

Read more at Substack.

We Need a Broad Coalition to Defeat the Left

Substack latest.

Tony Flood comments, with characteristic erudition:

A good case, Bill. I wouldn't say I'm looking for atheists to work with, but a conservative's atheism would be no barrier to my doing so. While reading, I thought of Antony Flew (not to be confused with Anthony Flood), once a target of academia's cancel culture. In 2001, the Mises Institute, then run by trad Catholic Lew Rockwell, awarded him its Schlarbaum Prize. His 1981 The Politics of Procrustes tore into Rawls's Theory of Justice. This was all before he went deistic, as was his 1995 "The Terrors of Islam." My friend David Gordon's brief notice of Flew's death credits the influence of David Conway to his abandonment of his long-held atheism.

I have the Politics of Procrustes in my library and drew upon it when I taught political philosophy at Case Western Reserve University. Flew had a salutary influence on my thinking in those days, as did Robert Nozick, although I find libertarians too 'economic' in their thinking and insufficiently appreciative of cultural considerations. 

If Tony has Conway's book and is willing to part with it, he can contact me. By the way, if you are bookman looking to get hitched, make sure you marry a woman who won't mind living in a library. 

And a bookman these days is well-advised to develop some ancillary skills.

Political Tactics: Downplay the Culture War Pro Tempore?

I tend to side with Kari Lake on the wisdom of a pro tem tactical downplay as we head for 2024. But here is the other side of the argument. 

Put simply, the big mistake in thinking the culture war isn’t the most critical issue heading into 2024 is that all of American politics is now one big culture war. The culture war is the only issue because the cultural war is everything now. When one side stakes its claim to political power on offering abortion up until birth and transgender operations for 8-year-olds, and holds out these policies as proof of its moral authority, we’re way past arguing over how to get the economy back on track. There’s no going back to that kind of politics.

Tucker Carlson hit on this at the end of his big speech at Heritage recently. He compared the values of the political left to the values of the Aztecs, who sacrificed children to their bloodthirsty gods — and he wasn’t wrong. Our politics, he argued, have shifted profoundly in a relatively short period of time. Instead of arguing over the best means to bring about an agreed-upon common good, we no longer agree about what the common good is.

As for Tucker Carlson, his defenestration, and what our boy is fixing to do about it, see Megan Kelly. 

The level of political polarization in this country is astonishing. An article at The Nation begins like this: "The horrific murder of Jordan Neely on a New York subway spoke volumes about the tolerance of racial violence in the American social order."  What planet does the author live on? The planet Unsinn. 

See our earlier discussion on the tactical question. 

How the Dems Will Win in 2024

Victor Davis Hanson explains.

Here's an alternative scenario from Paul Kengor.

"If RFK [Jr.] goes third party, it would be doomsday for Democrats. It could bring Donald Trump back to the White House. And if that happens, Democrats [will] have only themselves to blame for their idiotic, authoritarian policies on everything from vaccine mandates to drag queen story hours to transgender athletes bullying girls."

Comments now enabled.

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. 

 

DEI and Crash Dummies

DIVERSITY demands that crash dummies be of all sizes, shapes, races, ethnicities, animal species including trans-species hybrids such as the Cat Man, and also 'genders' including trans-dummies, and let's not exclude living humans who 'identify' as crash dummies the better to facilitate their exit from life's freeway. 

EQUITY will then be served: an equal outcome will be achieved by all dummies including the dumb-assed Dems who 'identify' as inanimate dummies when they are 'merely' transgressive leftards.

INCLUSION rules out, or excludes, all conservatives from serving as crash dummies, and rules in all fat, ugly, 'vertically challenged,' and 'differently abled' persons especially such politicians as Lori Lightfoot and John Fetterman.

What am I mocking?

The Only Way Out is Through

The urge to retreat is tempting, but the only way out is through. To float above the fray in the manner of a Rod Dreher is not the way; the only way out is through.

Minervic flights and the consolations of philosophy cannot be enjoyed when the barbarians are at the gates of one's stoa. 

Now you know why I mix the abstruse and theoretical with the political and practical.

Conservatives, especially those of them given to contemplative pursuits, need to make their peace with activism in order to secure and defend the spaces of their quietism.  And this with blood and iron if need be. 

The owl of Minerva is a tough old bird, but no phoenix capable of rising from its ashes.

When the world and its hopelessness are too much with us, one can and must beat a retreat into the private life and the pleasures and pursuits thereof:  body culture, mind culture, hobbies, family life, the various escapes (which are not necessarily escapes from reality) into chess, fiction, prayer, meditation, history, pure mathematics and science, one's own biography and the pleasant particulars of one's past, music, gardening, homemaking . . . . But all this by way of recuperation for the battle.

I pity the poor activist for whom the real is exhausted by the political.  But I detest these totalitarians as well since they seek to elide the boundary between the private and the public.

So we need to battle the bastards in the very sphere they think exhausts the real.  But it is and must be a part-time fight, lest we become like them.  Most of life for us conservatives must be given over to the enjoyment and appreciation, in private, of the apolitical:  nature, for example, and nature's God.

The only way out is through.

Trump, Adultery, Morality, and the Alinskyite Left

Substack latest

Climate 'Theology'

Tucker Carlson has a bad habit of referring to climate alarmism as climate 'theology.'  I know what he is trying to say, but it is unseemly for a conservative to misuse a perfectly good word and denigrate that to which it refers. Natural theology, which is a branch of philosophy, is a legitimate inquiry, as is theology proper, which is not a branch of philosophy. A second example:

In the left-wing rag of record, the NYT, we find:

“When you buy gold you’re saying nothing is going to work and everything is going to stay ridiculous,” said Mackin Pulsifer, vice chairman and chief investment officer of Fiduciary Trust International in New York. “There is a fair cohort who believes this in a theological sense, but I believe it’s unreasonable given the history of the United States.”

So to believe something 'in a theological sense' is to believe it unreasonably.  It follows that liberals have plenty of 'theological' beliefs.  In the 'theology' of a liberal, theology can be dismissed unread as irrational.

And then there is the misuse of 'metaphysics.' I'll save that rant for later.

The wider pattern is the secularization of religious language.

Take ‘retreat.’ Time was, when one went on a retreat to get away from the world to re-collect oneself, to meditate on the state of one's soul and on first and last things. But now one retreats from the world to become even more worldly, to gear up for greater exertions in the realms of business or academe. One retreats from ordinary busy-ness to prepare for even greater busy- ness. 

Another perfectly good word has been destroyed. 

As I have said more than once, if you are a conservative, don't talk like a damned 'liberal.' Why the sneer quotes? Because there is nothing classically liberal about contemporary liberals who are ever on the slouch toward leftism, and its most noxious variant, 'wokery.' 

Realize that we are in a war, and in a war one does not give ammo to the enemy. Do not validate, by employing, the Left's obfuscatory terminology. Never use 'woke' without sneer quotes. Never use words like 'homophobic' or 'transphobic.' Never use 'Islamophobia' as I once caught the great Victor Davis Hanson doing. A phobia is an irrational fear, and there is nothing irrational about fear of radical Islam. 

Language matters. Some battles are won and lost on linguistic ground. Leftists understand this. They understand that he who controls the language controls the debate. This explains the Left's unremitting  Orwellian abuse of language and their asinine question-begging and question-burying neologisms.

Expressive Individualism

Is Trump an example?

Substack latest.

DIE: 'Equity' Can Get You Killed

Here:

America’s top medical schools, worried [that] they have too few minority students, are doing something about it. They are lowering academic standards for admission and trying to hide the evidence. Columbia, Harvard, the University of Chicago, Stanford, Mount Sinai, and the University of Pennsylvania have already done so. The list already tops forty, and more are sure to follow.

A 'progressive' would call that progress. I suggest that you never use 'equity' or 'progressive' without the sneer quotes. 

Question for the syntactically punctilious: In the sentence immediately preceding, are the inverted commas being used to mention, to sneer, or both?

'Equity' is an obfuscatory woke-left coinage the purpose of which is to elide the distinction between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome.  The tactic is to promote the confusion of equality of opportunity -- which everyone is for -- with equality of outcome. The latter would be good if it naturally came about. Unfortunately, the various hierarchies of life make that impossible without massive governmental interference.  For it is a plain fact that individuals and groups are not equal by any empirical measure. (People are loathe to admit this because the admission sounds 'racist,' 'sexist,' 'ageist,' 'ableist,' etc., and being fearful, they fear being tagged with these pejoratives. But in a contest between a smear word and Reality, the latter wins in the end.) 

The achievement of equality of outcome requires equalizing agencies with vast power centered in a Sino-styled Sicherheitsstaat, a security or police state with social credit scores and omni-intrusive surveillance. But note that even then you would not have 'equity,' i.e., equality of outcome, because the equalizers would not be equal in power, position, pelf, and perquisites to the equalized. Would-be socializers, equalizers, and top-down planners typically imagine themselves ending up among the socializers, equalizers, and planners and not among the socialized, equalized, and planned.  More importantly, history shows that outcome-equalization from the top down leads to inanition as in the good old USSR the menus of whose restaurants listed many a dish only one of which was available: borscht. Yum!

Leftists are semantic smugglers. They are trying in this instance and in others to pass off something destructive under cover of something appealing.  Equality of opportunity, equality of political rights, equality before the law, etc. appeal to almost all of us. So what the stealth-ideological leftist does is to use this attractive wrapping to smuggle into uncritical heads the pseud0-value, or disvalue, 'equity,' understood as governmentally enforced equality of outcome or result.

Now my dear friends: if we we don't punch back hard against this destructive nonsense we are 'screwed,' all of us, even the wokesters themselves, and their usefully-idiotic fellow travellers, though their evil and cooperation with evil disallows their cognizance of the fact.  

If you haven't had enough of this delightful topic, here is an exchange between Bill Maher and Bernie Sanders in which B. S. demonstrates what a clueless and/or mendacious specimen he is.

Lifestyle Rightism

Sohrab Ahmari is against it. Clean living and self-improvement are no substitute for political action. One form of Lifestyle Rightism is Rod Dreher's Benedict Option which Ahmari dubs "the New Frontierism" and criticizes for its ahistoricity.

Ahmari's article rehearses  one aspect of the old problem of activism versus quietism. Can one productively blend the two? I am pulled in both directions. I expose my inner conflict over at Substack.  

And that brings me to the topic of inner conflict. One of the reasons I am so fascinated by Tom Merton is because he was one conflicted hombre caught between contemptus mundi and love of the world and its blandishments. He couldn't keep quiet about The Silent Life (the title of one of his better books) and was quite obviously driven by a desire for literary fame. The guy is lovable because so human unlike, perhaps, the man referred to in The Sacred Monster of Thomism, which details the life and legacy of Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, that most paleo of the neo-Thomists. (Richard Peddicord, O. P., St. Augustine's Press, 2005) But when it comes to intellectual penetration, Garrigou-Lagrange far surpasses the loose, literary, and liberal Merton. I read both, respect both, and am grateful for both.

Depredatory Wokery: Resist and Refuse

The good Baron over at Gates of Vienna has some worthwhile suggestions. (HT: Bill Keezer)

My main suggestion is that you vote with your wallet. For example, if your alma mater requests money, tell them, politely but firmly, no dice as long as they support DIE. 

('Die' is the singular of 'dice.' Surely DIE is more fitting an acronym that DEI, which, technically speaking, is not an acronym at all, but a mere abbreviation.)

In other news: no self-defense allowed in Canada.  

Steel Yourselves, Conservatives

This is a good article. Read it. Not just analysis. The author makes some suggestions for action.

And I learned a new word from it, polycule.

The Musket Canard, its F-15 Counterpart, the Need Canard, and 2A

Tony Flood commenting on my Substack entry ARs and Cattle Cars:

Excellent all around, Bill. Pithy opener and rises from there, especially the fixed meaning/variable application distinction. (Good biblical hermeneutics, too.) Will propagate. 

Besides the musket canard, there's its F-15 counterpart, which recently came out of Biden's mouth (I wonder who put it there): to take on the US government, you'd need fighter jets and maybe some nukes, not measly AR-15s. This invites patriots to rhetorically ask Brandon whether they should put such items on their wish list, if that's what it would take to neutralize a tyranny's threat (2A's raison d'être). Does might, after all, make right? Given a nuclear-armed George III, should Washington have thrown in the towel? I'm sure you could make the point I'm cornering more convincingly.

Thank you, Tony. Your comment raises a number of issues. I'll mention two here. I solicit your response.

 

1) I agree that the Second Amendment's raison d'être is to keep tyranny at bay.  Historically, that was why it came to be.  (If there is an historian in the house, I am open to correction.) Tactically, however, it might not be wise to harp on this point lest you provoke a Biden-type response.  There are other reasons for 2A.  One has to do with defense of self and of certain others (spouse, children, et al.)

 

I argue as follows. If I have the right to life, then I have the right to defend my life, and you (plural) have the correlative duty not to take my life. But if I have the right to life, then I have the right to acquire, keep, and bear instruments appropriate for the defense of my life.  What count as appropriate instruments will depend on circumstances, and circumstances change.  If the criminal element is armed with semi-automatic 9-mm pistols with 13-round magazines, then surely the law-abiding citizen must be allowed  to own such firearms. A fortiori given that the government, which is charged with the protection of life, liberty, and property, is in many (not all) places refusing to do its job and is instead empowering criminals by defunding the police, eliminating cash bail, emptying the prisons, opening the borders, and similar 'reforms.' (Note the woke-left's Orwellian use of 'reform.')

 

Besides keeping the government and the criminal element in check, there are two further reasons why the citizen's "right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." One is that guns are needed by some in pursuit of their legitimate occupations. Ranchers use AR-15s to thin out the predatory coyote population. (By 'coyote' I mean a species of canine.) A fourth reason is that firearms have legitimate sporting applications such as marksmanship competitions.

 

2) This brings me to the Need Canard. 

You can have a right to a thing whether or not you now have or will ever have a need for it. So the best response to the leftist who asks, "Why do you need a semi-automatic firearm?" is wrong question! Stop the pointless conversation right there. "The question is not whether I need one; the question is whether I have a right to one." Then explain that the right to appropriate means of self-defense follows from the right to self-defense which in turn follows from the right to life.

Depending on the sort of leftist you are dealing with you could then go on to explain why you do need a gun. But the wisest policy is not to debate leftists. Generally speaking and admitting exceptions, leftists need to be defeated, not debated. Debate is worthwhile only with open-minded truth seekers. Truth, however, is not a leftist value. At the apex of the leftist's value hierarchy stands POWER. That is not to say that a leftist will never speak the truth; he will sometimes, but only if it serves his agenda. 

Related: Floridians do not welcome home invaders.

Four Ways to Vote

1) There is voting proper, with a ballot at the polling place. It won't do much if any good except at the local level. And even there it won't do any good if proper procedures are not followed, something that cannot be taken for granted these days.

2) There is 'voting with your feet.' Sick of crime in New York? Sick of the fools with power whose policies insure that there will be crime and ever more crime? Move to Florida.

3) There is 'voting by social cancellation.' Have any of your friends 'gone woke'? Politely inform them that their willful self-enstupidation deprives them of the privilege of your friendship. Why should they get the benefit of interaction with someone sane, reasonable, mentally awake, and morally straight?

4) There is 'voting with your wallet.' This alone is most effective and for reasons I needn't state. In second place comes (2), and in third (3). (1) comes in last.

"The first shall be last and the last shall be first" to adapt a scriptural saying.

1984 Bumpersticker

It read: 1984 is not an instruction manual.

True, but it may be that some of the novel's dystopian ideas can be turned against the Left.

Losertarian Update

A tip of the hat to Dmitri Dain for sending us here where we read:

Libertarian Marc Victor dropped out of Arizona’s closely watched Senate race on Tuesday, encouraging voters to cast their ballots for Republican Blake Masters in his challenge to Sen. Mark Kelly (D).

Polls had shown Victor garnering support in the low single digits, but his small bloc of supporters could provide a critical boost to Masters, as surveys show the Republican only trailing Kelly by a few percentage points.

“Don’t vote for Marc Victor for Senate, vote for Blake Masters,” Victor said on Tuesday. “Blake’s in a very tight race here with Mark Kelly, and I want to see him win.”

Victor met virtually with Masters prior to dropping out of the race and posted a video of their roughly 20-minute conversation.

Hats off to Marc Victor for his good sense. To vote for him would have been utter folly since it is (a) certain that he would not have been elected and (b) certain that he would have siphoned off votes needed by the impressive Blake Masters to defeat the disgusting Mark Kelly.

Once more: politics is a practical game. Without the power to implement your policies, they are nothing but hot air and paper. Don't throw away your vote on unelectables. Don't confuse a political party with a discussion society. 

Marc  Victor is a local gun guy. Here is one of his videos. Here is another. He talks sense! 

Third Parties as Discussion Societies in Political Drag

Substack latest.

 

 

The Losertarian Party

The Libertarian Party is for losers. If you are a conservative who votes Libertarian, you are a damned fool. You say you stand on 'principles'? Principles are great. And some of the Libertarian ones are salutary. But principles without power are just paper.  Politics is a practical game. Wise up and get with the program. Don't throw away your vote on unelectables.

You have heard me say many times that politics is a practical game. I don't mean that it is unserious. Some games are serious; chess is one, life is another. Life is as serious as cancer, and the wrong people in power can put a serious dent in your living of your life. 

Hot LInks

Facebook blocked my page because of my refusal to sign up for Facebook Protect. They wanted me to set up two-factor authentication 'for my protection.' I decided not to go along on their phishing expedition.  Not that I have any objection to 2FA as such. You ought to use it for all your sensitive sites financial and otherwise.  

Blocked from FB,  I opened an account at Twitter. I'll use it mainly to advertise my Substack articles.  

I was using FB mainly for linkage, so some of that will be brought back here.

Reasons to be vaccine-hesitant. 

Something to consider: Do you think that a government that lies repeatedly and brazenly about things that can be easily checked, such as the security of the border, will hesitate to lie about things not so easily checked such as the efficacy of vaccines?

Murray Rothbard on How We Can Win

If I started quoting it, I'd quote the whole thing. Please read it for your own good.

Moral Community and Civil War

Malcolm Pollack writes, and I respond in blue:

 

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

 

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

 

I am just asking. Or is inquiry now verboten?

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

'Democrats' Aping National Socialists

Excellent commentary here:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rights and Needs

You can have a right to a thing whether or not you have or will have a need for it. So the best response to the leftist who asks, "Why do you need a gun?" is wrong question! Stop the pointless conversation right there. "The question is not whether I need one; the question is whether I have a right to one." Then explain that the right to appropriate means of self-defense follows from the right to self-defense which in turn follows from the right to life.

Depending on the sort of leftist you are dealing with you could then go on to explain why you do need a gun. But the wisest policy is not to debate leftists. Leftists need to be defeated not debated.