Maverick Philosopher

Dershowitz on Durham

Forbes:

The basic conclusions reached by the Durham report mirror the thesis of my book Get Trump: namely that good people have been willing to do bad things in order to prevent Donald Trump from being elected (or reelected) as president. These good people honestly believe that the noble (at least in their view) end in “getting” Trump and preventing him from being president justifies ignoble means, including mendacity and violation of long-established principles.

There can be no doubt that the Durham report is correct in having concluded that government officials – from the top down – viewed the evidence (or lack thereof) through the prism of resolving all doubts against Trump and in favor of his opponents. This was not so much a partisan bias, favoring Democrats over Republicans, because some of the worst offenders are Republicans who honestly believe that the Trump presidency endangered the national security of the United States.

An Interview with RFK, Jr.

Here

He won't get the Dem nod, and I wouldn't vote for him if he did. But he is an anomaly in his party: a decent Dem. He has more in common with us than with the Biden bunch. I'd like to see him run third-party.

Here is the video. 'Equity' comes up around 16:49. 

One Dem who is not a Demented Puppet, a Brazen Liar, A Cackling Clown, etc.

The RFK [Jr.] Potential for Political Disruption

His main target was the corrupt relationship between large corporations and captured administrative bureaucracies. He has spent his career battling such corruption in the realm of environmental regulation and wants to use his knowledge and experience to expand that battle to the whole of the administrative state. In what might have been the biggest applause line of the night, he said as president he would never be muscled or manipulated by any bureaucrat or lobbyist.

[. . .]

To be sure, he has been on record in being among the climate-change alarmists in even recent history. Have his views on this topic shifted in light of the fake COVID science of the last three years and the lockdown experience? Perhaps so. Many people on the left have begun to rethink this topic and perhaps RFK is among them. He certainly seems to have zero interest in anything like a “great reset” and he is not a member of the World Economic Forum.

[. . .]

His next area was the most satisfying to me personally. He broke the public silence on the critical issue of COVID lockdowns. He chronicled the astonishing expense for which we gained nothing, and blasted companies like Amazon that censored contrary views while driving the competition out of business. He spoke with fire about the shutting down of small business and the violation of people’s property rights and religious liberties and illustrated a profound command of the facts, being how the lockdowns created an even worst public-health crisis.

[. . . ]

Finally, he called for a national conversation about this proxy war that is developing with Russia. The first excuse for U.S. involvement was purely humanitarian but it is mutating into yet another disaster along lines of the Iraq war. He demanded an immediate end to U.S. funding and a push for a diplomatic solution before it is too late. He further called for closing military bases around the world and bringing the troops home, plus a revival of U.S. economic strength. In the course of this discussion, he explained with great competence the threat to the U.S. dollar from the recent moves by BRICS to abandon trade in the dollar.

UPDATE (4/24) RFK, Jr. on why Tucker got the boot.

 

Political Polarization

Polarization in a physical body has to have a limit lest the polarized body break apart. (Imagine the distance between Earth's North and South poles -- 8595.35 miles -- increasing indefinitely.) It is no different with the body politic.  We will eventually break apart or be broken apart by an external force (how about the ChiComs in cahoots with the Russkis?) if our political polarization continues.  United we stand, divided we fall; come on now people, let's get on the ball.  We won't of course.

Time was, when I read Mona Charen and George F. Will with quite a bit of approval. But then Trump came along and both lost their minds.  Here is Will over at The Washington [Com]Post. Take a gander at the comments to gauge the level of present political polarization.

Dear old Mona's latest outburst anent Trump is such that I cannot bring myself to sully my site by linking to it.

Do you want to hear some sane and characteristically brilliant commentary by a lion of the law?  Here is Alan Dershowitz on the Trump indictment. (HT: Vito Caiati)

Trump, Adultery, Morality, and the Alinskyite Left

Substack latest

Are There Any Decent Democrats?

There is at least one. His name is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. I recommend his A Letter to Liberals: Censorship and COVID: An Attack on Science and American Ideals (Skyhorse Publishing, 2022). It is mercifully short,  x + 110 pages long, and well worth your time. It is extremely well-documented. The text itself runs to x + 87 pp. with 239 endnotes, most of them with hyperlink info.  Here is something I didn't know:

At the outset of the pandemic, most of the world's leading news organizations -- BBC, Reuters, AP, AFD, CBC, CNN, CBS, ABC, Washington Post, Financial Times, Facebook, Google/YouTube, Microsoft, Twitter, and others -- organized themselves into a collusive antidemocratic and anticompetitive cartel known as the Trusted News Initiative (TNI) -- pledged to squelch and censor all reports about government COVID countermeasures that challenged official proclamations. (p. 52 f; endnote 153 points us to the BBC, December 10, 2020.)

I don't believe that there is any chance that  RFK Jr. will 'pull a Tulsi' and quit the Democrat Party, although he should. He won't because he's  a Kennedy, and I am guessing that he  already has enough trouble with his extended family.  (See here.) Like many old-time Dems, he fancies he will wrest the leadership of his party away from the 'woke'-left totalitarians who now control it. If that's what he thinks, he's fooling himself.  

The irony is that RFK fils, despite his speech impediment and lack of charisma, has a better chance of beating either Trump or DeSantis in 2024 than any other Dem I can think of.

The Toxic Racialist Obsessions of Joe Biden

Victor Davis Hanson makes many fine points, but fails to lay bare the root of Biden's racist flip-flopping, namely that the man is an utter phony and fraud who is rooted in no principle except that of self-promotion at all costs. 

Is it Still Tweedledum and Tweedledee?

The good Baron proffers a depressing Yes.  Gates of Vienna and MavPhil have been sphere-mates for a good long time, going on 20 years. The Baron's wife Dymphna was a regular reader of MavPhil back in the early days and an e-mail correspondent of mine. It has been some years since she quit the sublunary. My very belated condolences to the Baron.

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. 

Who Killed JFK?

Here: 

In a remarkable television broadcast on December 15, 2022, Tucker Carlson made an explosive charge. He pointed out that, contrary to law, the White House was refusing to release thousands of pages of documents about the assassination of John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. Carlson said that these documents proved CIA involvement in the assassination and that someone within the government who had looked at these documents made a direct statement to this effect.

Here is what Carlson said: “Not long after Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald on camera in the basement of Dallas police headquarters, a lot of Americans started to have some questions about the Kennedy assassination. It was, you’d have to admit, a pretty extraordinary sequence of events. A lone gunman murders the president of the United States. And then, less than 48 hours later, that lone gunman is himself murdered by another lone gunman.

What are the odds of that?

And here is the Tucker Carlson broadcast that RFK, Jr. called "the most courageous newscast in 60 years."

Tucker Carlson on the Tulsi Gabbard Show

Long, but good.  

Tony Flood comments:

Their occasional descent into verbal coarseness was as disappointing as it was unexpected. It seems that even for some people I most admire, the effort to resist that cultural pull downward is no longer worth the bother.  

Our society-wide descent into verbal and other forms of coarseness and crudity outside of locker-room-type contexts can with justice be laid at the doorstep of the Boomer cohort (1946-1964). Tucker and Tulsi are Gen-Xers, and their generation followed ours in the downward direction.  I myself, on Facebook and also here a few times, have employed harsh invective against our political enemies using such words as 'shithead,' 'crapweasel' (which I picked up from Michelle Malkin), and 'chucklephuck.' I may also have used 'asshole.'  Much less offensive is 'p.c.-whipped,' which I got from Ed Feser. I don't need to explain the allusion.

There are two words, however, that I never use in any context. These are words I never even mention let alone use, except via oblique mention.  The one is the c-word when used as a synecdoche. So used, it is not merely crude but vile. The other is the mf-word, which is unspeakably vile for reasons only the morally obtuse will not understand.

One attempt at justification goes like this. "You attack me verbally or physically and I will reply in kind to give you a taste of your own medicine in the hope that this will dissuade you from future bad behavior." For when bad behavior goes unpunished, more bad behavior inevitably follows. As one of my aphorisms has it:

Be kind, but be prepared to reply in kind.

The problem, however, is that our enemies won't be dissuaded in this way, except in a few instances. They feel themselves to be fully justified in their attacks on us. And so the downward spiral continues. Cruder and cruder. I call it 'crudification,' to give an ugly word to an ugly thing.

Tony Flood is a Christian and he knows that charity is demanded of Christians. But is it prudent in this time of civilizational collapse to be a Christian and walk the walk? It all depends on whether the underlying metaphysics is true.

And so once again we see that all roads lead to metaphysical Rome.

Democrat Election Skulduggery

The Dems are now a hard-Left party. For a leftist, the end justifies the means. If you have to cheat to win, then you cheat. And so they cheat.  Case in point: Arizona election fraud. See here, here, and here. 

When caught, leftists lie about their cheating and about their lying. Do leftists ever tell the truth? Yes, of course -- when it serves their purpose. Truth is not a leftist value. Their highest value is power, its gaining and maintaining. 

Rod Dreher

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

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

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

And on and on.

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

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

So Long, Nancy

I bid Madame Speaker a fond adieu on Substack.

The Militant Defends Trump and Our Civil Liberties

I never thought I'd be quoting from The Militant! A tip of the hat to Tony Flood who writes,

I could consider making a tactical alliance with one who signs off with "The fight to defend constitutional liberties is at the center of the class struggle today." This is classic Marxism, not Antifa terrorism.

Populist democracy makes for strange bedfellows. This is true democracy, not Orwellian 'democracy' which is the wokester's name for oligarchy. Why then am I not a socialist? Two reasons. First, socialism does not work economically. Second, because socialism runs counter to human nature and will not be freely adopted, socialism must be enforced. Enforcement  requires a massive state apparatus inimical to individual liberty. It would be interesting to do a comparison between totalitarian state socialism and 'woke' capitalism. Both are totalitarian, anti-populist, and suppressive of individual freedoms such as freedom of speech and thought. (See fourth quotation below.) How then do they differ? Excerpts:

Throughout the final days of the 2022 campaign, Democrats centered their fire on former President Donald Trump. They claim “democracy itself” is threatened if he ever holds office again. Before Trump was even elected in 2016, Democrats unleashed the FBI against him — and against constitutional freedoms working people have won in blood and sorely need. They’ve used congressional witch hunts and launched a cascade of legal cases against him, his family members and political allies.

Speeches by prominent Democrats make abundantly clear they will continue on this course whoever wins control of Congress. The real culprits responsible for Trump, they insist, are the millions of working people President Joseph Biden calls “semi-fascists” and believes can’t be trusted to make political decisions.

The entirety of Biden’s prime-time Nov. 2 speech — his main address prior to the election — was to attack so-called MAGA Republicans as a “threat to democracy.”

[. . .]

Then in the Nov. 2 speech, Biden said Trump supporters threaten the rule of law, not because of what they do, but because of what they think and say. This is an attack on freedom of speech itself.

[. . .]

The only other issue Democrats campaigned around is abortion, built on false claims that the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling this summer outlawed it. But that isn’t true. It held abortion had no basis in the Constitution and returned the debate over the issue to the people and their elected representatives.

[. . .]

Smear opponents as ‘foreign agents’

From the beginning, one key theme of the Democrats’ assault on Trump and his administration was the utterly disproven charge that they were hooked up with Russian President Vladimir Putin. They got the FBI to put forward the Steele Dossier, a collection of gossip and smears paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign, to try and impeach Trump.

Another Useful Idiot Crosses My Path

I'm the chess guy hereabouts. A year ago I got a call from an 86-year-old retired chemist with an interest in the game. A meeting was arranged, a game was played, and then the talk turned to politics. The old man told us that he had voted for Biden out of revulsion at Trump. He said he had been a Republican all his life but lately became a Democrat. Brian and I were gentle with him, drawing him out to see how deep he'd dig his hole. It was deep enough for us to write him off as an utterly clueless old man living in the past.

Part of the problem with such people is that they live by a code of civility that will get you killed in the present-day political world should you dare to enter it.  They don't understand that the Left is at war with us, and leftists no longer hide the fact. Their stealth ideologues of, say, 10-15 years ago are now out in the open and brazen in their plans and proclamations. Leftists see politics as  war, and if we don't, we lose.  

Brian and I are a couple of patzers, which is not to say that we won't clean your clock at the local coffee house. We are 'B' players (1600-1800) in the USCF hierarchy. The game with the old man turned into a training session. He acquitted himself so poorly we never heard from him again despite our welcoming manner. 

That is another fault of old men. Their outsized egos make them impermeable to instruction. They cannot stand to lose. But life is hierarchical and you will lose again and again and again. Wokesters with their promotion of 'equity' (equality of outcome) and their assault on merit rail against life's natural hierarchy, but to no ultimate avail. In the end, reality wins. With apologies to Ron DeSantis, reality is where 'woke' goes to die.

Fetterman Unfettered: Against Ableism

In the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, John Fetterman is currently competing with Dr. Mehmet Oz for a seat in the U. S. Senate. Any objective person who observes both men in action can see that Fetterman is mentally, morally, and politically unfit for office.  (I won't comment on the 'hoodie,' the ugly forearm tattoos, the neck bulge, the man's lack of a career outside of politics, or his 'anti-gravitas': the man's overall thuggish appearance.)

Mentally, he has trouble formulating clear sentences.  A recent stroke has left him impaired. Morally, he is a brazen liar: he recently stated in a debate with Dr. Oz that he supports fracking when it is obvious from his previous assertions and his overall position that he does not. Politically, he supports destructive hard-Left positions with respect to drugs and crime and everything else.

But let's say you believe in 'equity' as wokesters use the word. You believe in equality of outcome and proportional representation regardless of merit and qualifications.  If 'equity' is your concern why shouldn't a stroke-impaired man be a U. S. senator? After all, if dementia is no bar to high office, why should stroke-impairment be?  Fetterman's fit with the Biden bunch couldn't be tighter. To demand qualifications for high office or for any job at all is to discriminate against the unqualified, and we now know that discrimination is among the worst of sins. We are all equal and the supposed accomplishments and talents of Dr. Oz the heart surgeon really ought to count for nothing in an equitable society. We have made progress in the 'progressive' sense of the term. And we are better people for it. 

The disabled are just as qualified as the rest of us. For they are not really disabled at all; they are differently abled.  I myself was born with only one functioning ear. But this birth defect gives me the ability to block out sound in bed by putting my good ear down on the pillow. Clearly, this wonderful ability of mine compensates for all of the drawbacks of monaural hearing such as the inability to tell from which direction a sound is coming. The point generalizes: all disabilities are really abilities in disguise. No one should ever be evaluated in any way on the basis of supposed 'talents' or 'qualifications' or 'abilities' or 'accomplishments.' What I said in my first paragraph convicts me of the thought crime of 'ableism.'  I ought to check myself into the nearest 'progressive' re-education camp.

Tulsi Gabbard Endorses Kari Lake for Arizona Governorship

Here

Three Axes of Conflict

Antony Beevor in The Spanish Civil War (Orbis 1982, Penguin 2001, p. 279) writes that in the aftermath of the war both sides engaged in gross simplifications for propaganda purposes:

As a result, the three axes of conflict (left-right, centralist-regionalist, and authoritarian-libertarian) have often been crudely amalgamated, leaving the ferocity of the war partly unexplained.

Philosophers do well to study history to offset their penchant for the bird's-eye view.  They need to come to ground from time to time if only to fuel themselves for further flight. Feasting on the carrion of fact, however, is not particularly nutritious. So what caught this philosopher's eye was the three-axes schema. Philosophers love schemata.  They love the synoptic and panoptic survey. 'Spectators of all time and existence . . . ."

The three-axes schema strikes me as relevant to the current political war in the USA as we teeter on the brink of World War Three thanks to the stupidity and criminality of the Democrat Party and the useful idiots who support it.

1) Left-Right. It might be useful to distinguish between the Old Left, the New Left, and the 'Woke' Left. (Having sneered, I now drop the sneer quotes, at least for the space of this paragraph.) What distinguishes the Woke Left is corporate capitalism, the globalist capitalism of mega-corporations with the economic, and in consequence thereof political, clout to bend both government and the Fourth Estate to their collective will, thereby destroying the independence of both of the latter and eliminating checks on their unbalanced power.

2) Centralism-Regionalism. Liberty versus tyranny defines the battle for the soul of America.  Tyranny emanates from the central government which, while endlessly mouthing 'democracy' and 'rule of law' respects neither. Liberty, if it can survive, will be defended locally and regionally by citizens with the civil courage to speak out and face 'cancellation' and worse. (I am thinking, among other things, of ordinary citizens who attend school board meetings and protest being labelled 'domestic terrorists' for rejecting the indoctrination of their children in Critical Race Theory, in 1619-type historical revisionism, in transgender ideology, and in anti-Caucasian ethno-masochism.) Regionalism is or is closely related to federalism. (The overturning of Roe v. Wade scored a point for the latter; the Left's febrile outrage clearly demonstrates its anti-federalism and anti-democratic spirit. )

3) Authoritarian-Libertarian. American conservatism is not authoritarian but classically liberal. But while classically liberal, and thus opposed to throne-and-altar paleo-conservatism, it also opposes the anti-religionism and anti-traditionalism of the Left, especially that of the 'woke' Left, which is a particularly virulent and lethal strain of leftism. It thus treads the via media avoiding both the Road to Serfdom (you get the allusion, of course) and the road to anarchy as lately instantiated by Atifa black shirts and BLM Marxist thugs.

Citizenry, Government, and Firearms

You say you don't trust the citizenry with firearms, but you do trust the government with them?  If "the government is us" as Barack Obama and Joe Biden have said, what you say makes no sense.  For if that were so, there would no difference in point of trustworthiness between the governors and the governed.  But of course, Barry and Joey were bullshitting in Harry Frankfurt's sense, that is, shooting their mouths off with no concern for the truth, not even the concern the liar must have for the truth given his intention to hide it from us.

The government is most assuredly not us, but it is composed of people like us. And what are we like? 

We are a mixed bag of a few saints, many scamps, and a broad mass of moral and intellectual mediocrities. And the same holds for those in government except that in government, scamps, fools, clowns, know-nothings, liars, bullshitters, quislings and the incompetent rise to high posts in a way that is impossible in the private sector. 

The current (mal)administration is one of the worst if not the worst in the nation's history. The names say it all: Biden, Harris,  Garland,  Mayorkas, Granholm, Yellen, Buttigieg, Jean-Pierre, Pelosi, Schumer, and I'm just warming up. 

And you are still a Democrat?

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.

 

Leftist Omni-Politicization

For the Left, everything is either political or to be politicized, including that which is non-political. Take this to its logical extreme and you end up with 'woke' mathematics. This reductio ad absurdum will cause a sane person to reject the premise. The sane will point out that some things, by their very nature, cannot be politicized. There is nothing political about the Poisson distribution or Rolle's theorem.

 

Will the leftist back off? Hell no, he will deny that anything has a nature, and affirm that everything is subject to social construction. For example, a typical leftist will state that a conservative black is a traitor to his race. Now that makes no sense. 'Traitor' is a political notion; 'race' is not. Race is not like political affiliation. You can quit your party, and if you are a Democrat you should; you can't, however, quit your race. Not even Rachel Dolezal could pull it off.

 

Being a leftist, however, means that you don't have to make sense. Herewith, a case of 'leftist privilege,' to give it a name.

 

You say you've forgotten who Rachel Dolezal is is? Too much Twitter! A weapon of mass distraction. Soon you'll be a tweeting twit with a mind fit only to flit.  The Left is all about the erasure of memory, collective and individual, except for what serves their agenda. To refresh your memory, see Rachel Dolezal, The Black White Woman.

 

I make a mistake at the end that I will now correct. I represent Elizabeth Warren as the author of Pow Wow Chow when in fact she is merely a contributor to that by-now-famous recipe book. Her contribution, however, a recipe for lobster bisque — Cherokees were into haute cuisine? — was plagiarized!

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.

What is Fascism? Are MAGA Republicans Fascists?

The Left's favorite 'F' word is of course 'fascist.' But of course they don't define it, the better to use it as a verbal cudgel.  But we know that responsible discussion of a topic begins with a definition of terms.

What is a fascist? More to the point, what is fascism? The term expresses what philosophers call a 'thick' concept. Such concepts combine evaluative and descriptive content.  Examples include cruel and cowardly. If I describe an action as cowardly, I am both describing it and expressing a negative moral evaluation of it. Right and wrong, by contrast, are 'thin' concepts inasmuch as they contain no descriptive content.  If I commend you for doing the right thing, my commendation includes no descriptive content. Fascist is clearly thick. If we are called fascists, or 'semi-fascists' in the parlance of our illustrious president Joe Biden, at least some slight descriptive content is implied, even if the lion's share of the semantic load is expressive, not of sober moral judgment, but of blind hatred and contempt.  I now unpack the descriptive content of fascist and fascism, and then go on to argue that no Republican, MAGA or not, can be fairly accused of being a fascist.

Main marks of fascism

According to Anthony Quinton,

It [Fascism] combines an intense nationalism, which is both militarily aggressive and resolved to subdue all aspects of public and private life to the pursuit of national greatness. It asserts that a supreme leader is indispensable, a heroic figure in whom the national spirit is incarnated. It seeks to organize society along military lines, conceiving war as the fullest expression of the national will as brought to consciousness in the leader. It sees the nation not primarily as a cultural entity, defined by a common language, traditional customs, perhaps a shared religion, a history of heroes and great events, but also in questionably biological terms. (Anthony Quinton, "Conservatism," in A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, eds. Goodin and Pettit, Blackwell, 1995, p. 264.)

Quinton tells us that there are anticipations of fascism in Fichte, Carlyle, and Nietzsche, and that its main exponents are Mussolini and Hitler. Fascism is further described as "aggressive," "militant," and "totalitarian without qualification." The masses are to have no say in their governance; they are to obey. There are no rules for the orderly transfer of power. "Leaders are presumably to emerge as victors in the struggle for power within the ruling party." (264) Quinton also mentions the 'organicism' of fascism whereby it appeals to those "ready to submerge their individuality" in the national life and to find thereby their whole raison d'etre in "the service of the state," in the way that the function of a particular organ is to contribute to the well-being of the body of which it is a part." (264-265)

Are MAGA Republicans fascists?

I can be brief. Of course they are not.

Start with nationalism. Trump's is an enlightened nationalism and it is certainly not "militarily aggressive." America First does not mean that that the USA ought to be first over other countries, dominating them. It means that every country has the right to prefer itself and its own interests over the interests of other countries. The general principle is that every country has a right to grant preference to itself and its interests over the interests of other countries while respecting their interests and right to self-determination. America First is but an instance of the general principle. The principle, then, is Country First.

And of course enlightened nationalism has nothing to do with white nationalism. We must resist this race-baiting leftist smear.  There is no 'biologism' in Trump's nationalism.

Is Trump at the center of a 'cult of personality'? No more than Obama was. Trump supporters are drawn to the ideas he espouses, which are all classically American; they are in fact most of them critical of the man himself. 

To understand how destructive the Left is, you must understand that they feel no compunction at the Orwellian subversion of language, the brazen telling of lies, and psychological projection: what they accuse us of doing is almost always what they themselves are doing. They project in order to deflect attention from their own malfeasance and dereliction of duty.

Once again, TRUTH IS NOT A LEFTIST VALUE. Part of their trick is to say something so manifestly in conflict with reality that people will think: no one would have the chutzpah to say that unless it were true. That is the psychology of the big lie. And notice the smile. This is part of the psychological ploy. You look into the camera as Joey B did during one of the debates with Trump and you smile -- and the pearl-clutching old ladies (of all ages and sexes) melt, and think, "He's such a nice man!"

Would a Fascist Want an Originalist on the Supreme Court?

First posted on 4 July 2018.

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

Donald Trump is called many things including racist, misogynist, xenophobe, and fascist. Suppose he is a fascist. Then he is not a very good one. For he is about to nominate an originalist to the high court. A fascist, however, would not want an originalist on the court but someone who views the Constitution as a 'living' or 'open' document, one into which and out of which fascist ideas could be read.

Should we conclude that Trump is  a fascist who does not understand what fascism entails?  Or should we conclude that Trump is not a fascist?

Some will say that he is a proto-fascist, not one quite yet but soon to be one. No worries! If originalists dominate the court then fascism doesn't have a chance.

One could go on like this. If Trump is Hitler, why did he move the U. S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and why is he for Second Amendment rights?

If he is the devil himself, why is he for religious liberty?

If he is the personification of all evil, then why . . . .

I am pretty sure the Dems' hyperbolic slanders will hurt them come November. So I warmly encourage them to keep 'em coming.

American Fascism?

Originally posted on 23 September 2016, and thus before Trump's trouncing of Hillary. It was true then and truer now. I was right not to worry about Trump's getting in touch with his inner Benito. As for Joe Biden's recent scurrilous accusation of 'semi-fascism,' I urge you to read Joe Biden: American Fascist which exposes the Big Guy's toxic blend of psychological projection and Orwellian abuse of language.  Biden and his handlers are "sowing the wind" seemingly oblivious to the danger of "reaping the whirlwind." 

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

I am not worried about American fascism.  We Americans are not a bunch of Germans about to start goose-stepping behind some dictator.  Our traditions of liberty and self-reliance are long-standing and deep-running.  A sizeable contingent of Trump supporters are gun rights activists who would be open to an extra-political remedy should anyone seek to instantiate the role of Der Fuehrer or Il Duce.  True, Trump enjoys some appeal among those having an authoritarian personality structure.   But his supporters are also cussedly individualistic and liberty-loving.  I expect the latter characteristic to mitigate the former. 

There is also the following interesting question wanting our attention:  why is it better to have the personality structure of the typical leftist?  Why is it better to be a rebellious, adolescent, alienated, destructive, irreverent, tradition-despising, anti-authoritarian, ungrateful, utopian, dweller in Cloud Cuckoo Land?

As you may know, Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals is dedicated to Lucifer.  Lucifer, not Lucifer Schwarz of Poughkeepsie, New York.  Makes perfect sense.

Addendum (9/24/16):  While the dominant press, the liberal press, is 'in the tank'  for Hillary and her ilk, this won't be the case should the Orange Man make it to the White House.  The lamestream media will be at his throat from Day One.  This will serve as a brake on any incipient fascismo.

Rod Dreher: Floating Above the Fray as Usual

Here:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The Latest from Michael Anton

Thorough, penetrating analysis of the . . . what? state of the Union? No, the state of the dismal disarray, unstable and pregnant with disaster, in which we find ourselves.  

They Can't Let Him In

 

Thomas Klingenstein on Trump's Virtues

Outstanding! Memorize it and propagate it.

I am very happy to have discovered Klingenstein. He is right on target. Here is a short (4:28) explanation of the war we are in. This is the truth. Face it!

Which Side Are You On?

Substack latest.

Pete Seeger was a commie populist. I prefer the anti-commie variety.

When Politics Comes to be Like Philosophy

Trouble is on the way.

Substack latest. Short, incisive, 'on target.' To the range tomorrow!

For the Left, the Issue is Never the Issue

I unpack the saying in my latest Substack article.

Mark Granza Interviews Blake Masters: 'Woke' Capitalism and Kyle Rittenhouse

(Related: my Substack article, The Trial of Kyle.)

Here is the interview.  A couple of excerpts:

Mark Granza: A decade ago most people would have considered ‘Woke Capitalism’ a contradiction, and probably laughed at the idea. Today, nobody questions its existence. Do you think there are there inherent characteristics within Capitalism that transform it into a progressive machine, or are corporations simply responding to the ideological demands of the political class?

Blake Masters: Capitalism works. It’s a really good system for generating wealth. The problem with capitalism is that can work too well in a sense, it can create the conditions for people to grow complacent, which ultimately, as Ross Douthat has written, contributes to the sort of decadence we’re experiencing today. Capitalism’s an incredible engine of material progress, but it’s not a self-contained moral system. It has its own incentives, but those incentives aren’t always necessarily correlated with a conception of the good. Companies under capitalism just respond to profit incentives. If you act on them you’ll generate a lot of wealth, but it won’t tell you what to do with that wealth, which is why a parasite like Wokeness can basically spread and take over. An example is offshoring. Maybe it’s good for GDP, but if you have too much of it, that’s clearly really bad for the country and most people living in it. It crushes the middle class by sending jobs overseas by the millions. But such are the incentives that the capital owners are responding to. So I think problems like Woke Capitalism, or ‘globalization’, are actually much older and bigger problems than people think. Because you can’t just be a capitalist country, because a country is not just an economy. You also need a conception of yourself as a nation, as a people, and as a culture. And that’s what America is increasingly lacking today.

BV: The last three sentence are very important. A country is not just an economy. Do libertarians understand this? Not to my knowledge. They want to reduce everything to economics when it is the history, heritage, and culture of a nation that provides the framework within which a successful economy can operate. Or is the rule of law an economic concept?  How about the concept of citizen?

Mark Granza: I’d like to move from here to the issue of Justice in America. You were a vocal supporter of Kyle Rittenhouse before and during the trial. What do you think the fact that Kyle (as opposed to someone like Gaige Grosskreutz) was the one being prosecuted says about the US justice system?

Blake Masters: I think we’re very close to a two-tier justice system, if we’re not there already. Look how differently loyalists and dissidents are punished today. The Kyle Rittenhouse case was simple. The ruling class hated that a young man defended himself with an AR-15 because it contradicts their official narrative. And so they did everything they could to punish Kyle. The FBI literally withheld high-resolution version of the footage from Kyle’s lawyers, because it basically clearly exonerated Kyle and they found that inconvenient. Now I think the jury’s decision to acquit Kyle of all charges showed that you can still get sort of a fair trial in America, that there’s hope. But again, that only happened because in this case, there happened to be extremely clear video evidence in his favor. If there weren’t, Kyle would be in jail for life. So this case is a wake-up call. It’s crazy that Rittenhouse, and not his attackers, was on trial at all. Contrast that to how the BLM and Antifa looters and rioters who committed violent mayhem during the summer of 2020 – nothing happened to them! And on the off-chance one of them did get arrested, then-Senator and Vice Presidential candidate Kamala Harris was there with her bail fund, just waiting to bail them out. Meanwhile, the January 6 protestors, many of whom were not violent at all, are treated like terrorists, with some being held without trial in solitary confinement and others getting sentenced to many years in prison. If we don’t do something now, the rule of law will soon be gone forever. Anyone who questions the left’s narrative is going to be hunted down. I truly believe that. That’s what we’re fighting against.

BV: Again I say that the last three sentences are very important. 

^{Blake Masters gives a speech next to Donald Trump, December 2021.}

Institutions and Credibility

Key institutions appear to be working very hard to destroy their own credibility. The Roman Catholic Church, the Center for Disease Control, the fourth estate, the military, the business 'community,' academe, the entertainment industry, and the government in all three branches, the executive, the legislative, and the judicial have very little credibility left.  Each of these institutions has 'earned' our disrespect as could easily be shown. To name some names: Bergoglio, Fauci, Milley, Biden, Harris, Pelosi, Schumer, McConnell.  My esteemed readers will have no trouble adding to the list.

For now I refer you to Steven Hayward:

• A few days ago I remarked that the Biden Administration would have to appeal the district court ruling striking down the mask mandate despite the political unpopularity of masks because preserving the power of the administrative state is a core principle of the left today. I just didn’t expect The New Republic to come right out and admit this point:

Biden had no choice but to appeal. That’s because Mizelle—a former Clarence Thomas clerk whom the American Bar Association rated “not qualified” based on insufficient experience when she was nominated in 2020—wasn’t repealing only a mask mandate. She was also advancing a slow-motion conservative assault on the post–New Deal regulatory state. . .

As I’ve written before, the right’s big brass ring is to overturn the Supreme Court’s 1984 decision in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, which seemed at the time, believe it or not, to be a conservative ruling, but now stands as the only bulwark against virtually closing down regulatory agencies entirely.

Which Side Are You On?

I have criticized Rod Dreher and others for "floating above the fray," for trying to be objective and impartial in those practical situations in which immediate action is required and in which the requisite action is impeded by the otherwise laudable attempt to arrive at the objective truth of the situation. 

"Can't you see that failing to support Donald J. Trump, the only one on our side willing and able to achieve results, aids and abets the political enemy?" "Can't you grasp that politics is a practical enterprise?" "Are you incapable of distinguishing between political theory and political practice?" "The very survival of the Republic is at stake and you want to wait around for the perfect  conservative candidate?" "You are letting the unattainable best become the enemy of the achievable good!" "What is wrong with you, man, which side are you on?"

But now I need to examine whether I myself am being consistent on the Ukraine question. I have criticized those who attack and indeed smear Tucker Carlson and others as 'Putin supporters.'  Am I not "floating above the fray" when I try to understand the current Ukraine horror and how it came about and how it could have been avoided?  Am I not aiding and  abetting a vicious aggressor  when I credit Carlson et al. with insights worth pondering? Which side am I on here? Does not my attempt at being fair and balanced have the effect of aiding Vlad the Aggressor? Should I take the Dick Morris line against Tucker Carlson? 

When we examine our consciences -- a salutary practice to be enacted on a daily basis -- we sometimes in all justice must acquit ourselves of the charges we bring against ourselves. And so it seems to me in this case.  There is an important difference.  

As an American citizen I have a strong interest in the preservation of the Republic and the defense of all that makes it what it is, including its borders.  Threats to it are threats to me and my way of life, the life of the philosopher who is committed to free speech, open inquiry, and the pursuit of truth   I do not have the same interest in the defense of  Ukraine and its borders.  This is not to say that the USA should not help Ukraine defend itself. It is to insist on the principle, Country First.  A special case thereof is America First. Let us review what this means.

It does not mean that the USA ought to be first over other countries, dominating them.  It means that every country has the right to prefer itself and its own interests over the interests of other countries. We say 'America first' because we are Americans; the Czechs say or ought to say 'Czech Republic first.'  The general principle is that every country has a right to grant preference to itself and its interests over the interests of other countries while respecting their interests and right to self-determination. America First is but an instance of the general principle. The principle, then, is Country First.  If I revert to America First, that is to be understood as an instance of Country First.

So America First has nothing to do with chauvinism which could be characterized as a blind and intemperate patriotism, a belligerent and unjustified belief in the superiority of one's own country. America First expresses an enlightened nationalism which is obviously compatible with a sober recognition of national failings. Germany has a rather sordid history; but Germany First is compatible with a recognition of the wrong turn that great nation took during  a well-known twelve-year period (1933-1945) in her history.

An enlightened nationalism is distinct from nativism inasmuch as the former does not rule out immigration. By definition, an immigrant is not a native; but an enlightened American nationalism accepts immigrants who accept American values, which of course are not the values of the Left or of political Islam.

An enlightened nationalism is not isolationist. What it eschews is a fruitless meddling and over-eager interventionism. It does not rule out certain necessary interventions when they are in our interests and in the interests of our allies.

So America First is not to be confused with chauvinism or nativism or isolationism.

America First is as sound an idea as that each family has the right to prefer its interests over the interests of other families.  If my wife becomes ill, then my obligation is to care for her and expend such financial resources as are necessary to see to her welfare.  If this means reducing my charitable contributions to the local food bank, then so be it. Whatever obligations I have to help others 'ripple out' from myself as center, losing claim to my attention the farther out they go, much like the amplitude of waves caused by a rock's falling into a pond diminishes the farther from the point of impact. Spouse and/or children first, then other family members, then old friends, then new friends, then neighbors, and so on.

The details are disputable, but not the general principle.  The general principle is that we are justified in looking to our own first. 

The main obligation of a government is to protect and serve the citizens of the country of which it is the government. It is a further question whether it has obligations to protect and benefit the citizens of other countries.  That is debatable. But if it does, those obligations are trumped by the main obligation just mentioned.  I should think that a great nation such as the USA does well to engage in purely humanitarian efforts such as famine relief. Such efforts are arguably supererogatory.

One implication of Country First is  that an immigration policy must be to the benefit of the host country.  The interests of the members of the host country supersede the interests of the immigrants.  Obviously, there is no blanket right to immigrate. Obviously, potential immigrants must be vetted and must meet certain standards. Obviously, no country is under any obligation to accept subversive elements or elements who would work to undermine the nation's culture.  Obviously, obviously, obviously -- but not to the destructive leftists who have hijacked the Democrat Party and have installed a puppet to do their bidding.

Suppose you disagree with the enlightened nationalism I am sketching. What will you put in its place? If you are not a nationalist, what are you? Some sort of internationalist or cosmopolitan.  But the notion of being a citizen of the world is empty since there is no world government and never will be. What could hold it together except the hegemony of one of the nations or a coalition of nations ganging up on the others?

The neocons tried to press America and it values and ways upon the world or upon the Middle Eastern portion thereof. The neocon mistake was to imagine that our superior system of government could be imposed on benighted and backward peoples riven by tribal hatreds and depressed by an inferior religion. The folly of that should now be evident. One cannot bomb the benighted into Enlightenment. 

Leftist internationalists want to bring the world to America thereby diluting and ultimately destroying our values. The mistake of the multi-culti cultural Marxists is to imagine that comity is possible without commonality, that wildly diverse sorts of people can live together in peace and harmony. Or at least that is one mistake of the politically correct multi-cultis.

So the way forward is enlightened nationalism. Trump understands this in his intuitive and inarticulate way. The Never-Trumpers do not. Their brand of  yap-and-scribble, inside-the-Beltway, bow-tied, pseudo-conservatism puts a premium on courtly behavior and gentlemanly debate that is an end in itself and rarely  issues in ameliorative action.  The people, however, demand action. 

Which side are you on?

Biden as Fitting Symbol of our Nation's Decline

Some of Joe Biden's personal attributes have national analogues in our general moral malaise, our infrastructural breakdown, our lunatic embrace of race-delusional 'critical' race theories and their noxious, anti-civilizational outgrowths such as 'ethno-mathematics,' our economic dependence on geopolitical adversaries for essentials . . . .

Biden is corrupt morally, a brazen liar, a serial plagiarist, a grifter, and a political opportunist rooted in no discernible principle except that of self-promotion. Physically decrepit, he is also quite obviously  non compos mentis, not of sound mind. Even his supporters now admit his cognitive decline. Manipulated by others, he is a puppet on a string, many strings, pulled by unseen deep state operatives. Told what to say, he is more one dictated to than a dictator. But from time to time the puppet comes alive, goes off script, and blurts out something both stupid and dangerous, as when he recently spoke what is left of his mind: "Putin cannot remain in power!"

This senile outburst has exacerbated the grave danger we and the whole world are now in. I shake my head as did Sean Hannity and Dan Bongino last night when Geraldo Rivera came to the fool's defense.

Politics and Ridicule in a Post-Consensus Age

Substack latest.

 

A Response to Liccione on Border Enforcement

From my Facebook page, 22 March 2019

 

Michael Liccione writes,

 

Totally open borders would be a surrender of sovereignty. Totally closed borders would be inhumane. There must surely be a via media that would be neither. But Washington seems unable to define it, because both Capitol Hill and the White House see more to be gained by political posturing than by working together on finding it. And that, my friends, is the problem--in this area as in so many others.

 

1. Who is for totally closed borders? No conservative of note. Certainly not Trump. Conservatives oppose illegal immigration, but not legal immigration. Nor do they oppose asylum provisions. They oppose the misuse thereof.

 

2. You can't look for a *via media* where there is a false alternative.

 

3. There is no moral equivalence between Capitol Hill and the White House. The House Dems and the the anti-Trump Republicans are pursuing a dangerous and morally irresponsible course. Trump is not posturing. He is doing what must be done under the circumstances.

 

4. Work together? Come on Michael Liccione. I don't mean this personally. I like you and I respect you. But, with all due respect, you are not thinking clearly. You can't work together with a Speaker of the House who incoherently babbles about walls being immoral and her colleagues who wax Orwellian in their advocacy of border security without border barriers. You can't work together with political opponents whose transparent motive is to win demographically by flooding the country with 'undocumented Democrats.'

 

5. One last shot. Some 58,000 Americans died in Vietnam over a 20 year period. Some 70,000 American died of drugs last year alone due in large part to a porous border. Does that concern you? And that is JUST ONE problem with lax border enforcement.

 

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

 

And now, three years later, it is easy to see just how right Trump was on all the issues Biden is wrong on. Biden has proven to be a disaster on all fronts, foreign and domestic.  The United States and the world are incalculably worse off now than they were when Donald J. Trump was president.  In particular, had he been reelected, Putin would not have invaded Ukraine.

 

Weakness invites aggression, especially when amalgamated with senility and leftist nonsense.

The Biden Inflation Octopus

He looks like a farmer because he is one.  He invariably talks sense.  No deracinated globalist, he is rooted, grounded, and  'based' -- to stoop to an unnecessary innovation in current lingo.  He's my man, Hanson:

The Democrats will suffer historic losses in the November midterms. 

This disaster for their party will come about not just because of the Afghanistan debacle, an appeased Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the destruction of the southern border, the supply chain mess, or their support for critical race theory demagoguery.  

The culprit for the political wipeout will be out-of-control inflation—and for several reasons.  

One quibble. Tactically, it is not a good idea to predict loss for our enemies. It makes our side complacent. It is better to assume that the fight is tooth and nail, bite and scratch, right up to the end.   

Leftists are not likely to be intimidated or demoralized by our bold predictions. They live for the political. That is their sphere and for them it exhausts the real.  That's all they've got and so they fight to the end by any and all means.  We are at a disadvantage.  I call it the Conservative Disadvantage. Not only are we hobbled by our virtues, we cannot bring to the fight the full measure of our enthusiasm  precisely because we understand that the political does not exhaust the real.

And seriously, do you think the Dems are likely to abjure the electoral chicanery that contributed to their win in 2020?

Now go read the article.  Excerpt:

Fifth, Americans know that our current inflation is self-induced, not a product of a war abroad, an earthquake, or the exhaustion of gas and oil deposits. 

Biden ignored the natural inflationary buying spree of consumers who were released from being locked down for nearly two years unable to spend. 

Instead, he encouraged gorging that huge demand by printing trillions of dollars of funny money for all sorts of new redistributionist entitlements, green projects, and pet congressional programs. 

The Biden Administration eroded the work ethic. It kept labor non-participation rates high by subsidizing with federal checks those staying at home. 

It nihilistically slashed gas and oil production by canceling federal leases, oilfields, and pipelines while pressuring banks not to lend for fracking. 

In just a year, Biden reduced America from the greatest producer of gas and oil in the history of civilization to an energy panhandler begging the Saudis and Russians to pump more of the oil that America needs but will not tap for itself. 

From Democrat to Dissident

This partially autobiographical essay is available here at PhilPapers in pdf format.  It is a contribution to the collection, Dissident Philosophers, edited by T. Allan Hillman and Tully Borland. The essay recounts the experiences and reasons that led me to reject the Democratic Party and become a conservative.

On the same page you will find a link to Neven Sesardić's contribution to the same volume. 

Other contributors are advised to update their PhilPapers pages. The contributors are a distinguished lot. I am honored to be among them.

It is important that we who have not succumbed to 'woke' groupthink do our best to impede the decline, if not save, the universities. Failing that, we must build alternative institutions.

Extreme to Extremists

Moderate views are extreme to extremists. Our moderate views must appear as extreme to the hard-leftists who have hijacked the once respectable Democrat Party, so-called by us because it can no longer be  referred to truthfully as democratic.

A Sane Populism is not an Anti-Intellectualism

Here is a statement that is not only extreme but also manifestly false:

In fact, you could wipe society’s table clear of every writer, artist, actor, musician, professor, dancer, reporter, tastemaker, producer, influencer, teacher, lobbyist, politician, everyone on TV, everyone who doesn’t get their hands dirty, and our world would keep turning just fine. 

If there were no trucks, there would be no truckers. If there were no automotive technology, there would be no trucks. If there were no engineering (applied physical science), there would be no automotive technology.  If there were no theoretical physics, there would be no applied science. If there were no pure mathematics, there would be no theoretical physics (in the technologically implemental, post-Galilean sense of the term).  If there were no people who never got their hands dirty, there would be no pure mathematics. And there would be none of this if there were no philosophers.

It all began with philosophy, the attempt to know man and world by the use of reason applied to the data of experience.  If there were no philosophers, we would still be retailing cosmogonic myths.

And if there were no philosophers like me, there would be no one to explain all of this to you, something I have just done, in an admittedly inadequate bloggity-blog sort of way, without getting my hands dirty.

That being said, I fully support the peaceful and eminently democratic  protests of the Canadian truckers and their American confreres.

And I heartily condemn the anti-democratic fascists of the Left, both here and to the North, who use the power of the State to suppress individual liberty, and then engage in the Orwellian subversion  of language to cover their tracks and gaslight the citizenry.

For example, the foolish Justin Trudeau, prime minister of Canada, claims that the trucker protests are racist. But what does race have to do with them? Nothing. When he's done misusing 'racist,' he will go on to misuse 'domestic terrorist' and 'insurrectionist.'   What sort of person is terrorized by the blaring of horns? What does terrorism and insurrection have to do with these legitimate and eminently democratic peaceful protests? Nothing.

And isn't Trudeau famous for his asseveration that "Diversity is our strength"?  One who dissents from fascist clamp-down is holding a view diverse from that of the fascists.

Comments on President Trump's SOTU #3

From my Facebook page, 5 February 2020.  Joe Biden is a disaster except for one thing: he is making DJT look very good indeed.

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Donald J. Trump did a great job with his third State of the Union address last night. (4 February 2020) He took the high ground and demonstrated that he can rise to the occasion when necessary. He made no mention of his impeachment by the House or his expected acquittal by the Senate which will be fait accompli by the end of today. There was also no mention of the Democrats, their witch hunts, or their obstructionism. He cleaved to the positive the whole time, listing his many accomplishments, both domestic and foreign. Promises made; promises kept; Nancy [Pelosi] wept. Or rather grimaced.

 

45 sounded all the right notes on the rule of law, sanctuary jurisdictions, illegal immigration, socialism, abortion, religious liberty, and Second Amendment rights. He said the things that need saying, the very things that Milquetoast Mitt [Romney] and the rest of the go-along-to-get-along Republican pseudo-cons are afraid to say. He offended all the right people, including Speaker Pelosi behind him and, to his right, the pouting and sullen girly-girl House Democrats all in white as they were last year, putting their female tribalism on display.

 

The Orange Man continued in the tradition inaugurated by the great Ronald Reagan in 1982 by honoring ordinary citizens. (Do you remember Lenny Skutnick, who plunged into the icy Potomac to rescue an Air Florida flight victim, and was honored in 1982 by Reagan?)

 

But the high point of the accolades was President Trump's bestowal of the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Rush Limbaugh who was recently diagnosed with stage four lung cancer. Limbaugh is the prime mover behind conservative talk radio which intellectually obtuse and morally defective 'liberals' insist on calling 'hate radio' thereby demonstrating their failure to grasp the distinction between hate and dissent and the important role dissent plays in a healthy republic.

 

This blogger enjoyed the 70 or so minute speech immensely. His enjoyment was marred only by his having to look at Nancy Pelosi making faces, chewing her dentures, and looking like the dingbat she is.

 

And did you notice how, at the end of the speech, Pelosi tore her copy of the speech transcript in half in front of the whole country? What a nasty, passive-aggressive joke she is! She will end her career on a very sad note. And it will be quite a moral struggle for this blogger to contain his schadenfreude.

Three Lockean Reasons to Oppose the Democrats

The main purposes of government are to protect life, liberty, and property. Subsidiary purposes are subordinate to the Lockean triad. This is lost on the present-day  Democrat party which has been hijacked by the hard Left.  Despite what they say, they are anti-life, anti-liberty, and anti-property. So if you value life, liberty, and property, then you must not vote for any Democrat.  Why 'any'? Because Democrat politicians are under party discipline and toe the party line. The one or two exceptions prove the rule. Because these exceptions are few and not reliably exceptional, my rule stands.

 

The Republicans in their timid way do stand for life, liberty, and property. Or at least some of them do. And they have become less timid under Trump's tutelage. Lindsey Graham, for one,  located his manly virtue and put it to work during the Kavanaugh confirmation. His recent behavior is less inspiring. In any case, the choice is clear. Vote Republican, never vote for any Democrat, and don't throw away your vote on unelectable third-party candidates.  As for the third point, you must never forget that politics is praxis, not theoria. What matters is not to have the best theory, but the best implementable theory.  No implementation of policy without power. No power without winning. Win, gain power, implement ameliorative policies.  If you don't have your hands on the levers of power, you are just another talker like me.  Two other related maxims.

 

First, it is folly to let the best become the enemy of the good. Second, politics is never about perfect versus imperfect, but about better versus worse. You find Trump deficient in gravitas? Well, so do I and defective in other ways to boot. But he was better than the alternative in 2016 and he will be better than the alternative in 2024. (And thank you, Sleepy Joe, for making Trump's virtues and accomplishments stand out so clearly.)

 

I will now briefly list some, but not all, of the reasons why the Democrats are anti-life, anti-liberty, and anti-property despite any mendacious protests to the contrary.

 

ANTI-LIFE. The Dems are the abortion party. They support abortion on demand at every stage of fetal development. They are blind to the moral issues that abortion raises. They absurdly think that abortion is merely about women's health and reproductive rights. They are not ashamed to embrace such Orwellian absurdities as that abortion is health care. To make matters worse, they violate the sincerely held and cogently argued beliefs of fellow taxpayers by their support of taxpayer funding for abortion.  You will recall that the 'devout Catholic' Joe Biden reversed himself on the Hyde Amendment. He showed once again who and what he is, a political opportunist grounded in no discernible principles, not to mention a brazen liar whose mendacity is now compounded by being  non compos mentis, not of sound mind.  

 

ANTI-LIBERTY. The Dems are opposed to free speech, religious liberty, and self-defense rights. They regularly conflate free speech with 'hate speech' and religious liberty with 'theocracy.' And this while going soft on genuine theocratic regimes such as Iran's. All of this puts them at odds with the First and Second Amendments to the Constitution. And in general we can say that contemporary Democrats are anti-Constitutional inasmuch as an open or living constitution, which they advocate, is no constitution at all, but a mere tabula rasa they hope to deface with their anti-American leftist ideology.

 

ANTI-PROPERTY. Today's Democrats, as hard leftists, are ever on the slouch toward socialism, which, in full flower (to put it euphemistically) requires central planning and government ownership of the means of production. That is where they want to go even though, as stealth ideologues, they won't admit it.

 

But let's assume that the statement I just made is exaggerated and that Dems really don't want socialism as it is classically defined. Still, they are anti-property in various ways. They think that we the people have to justify our keeping whereas government doesn't have to justify its taking. That is precisely backwards. They don't appreciate that the government exists for us; we don't exist for the government. They confuse taxation with wealth redistribution. And by the way, the government is not us, as Barack Obama has said. 'The government is us' is as perversely knuckle-headed as 'Diversity is our strength.' The latter stupidity is plainly Orwellian. What about the former? Pre-Orwellian? 

 

Finally, you need to understand that private property is the foundation of individual liberty.

Vito Caiati on David Brooks

I solicited Dr Caiati's comments on David Brooks' Atlantic piece, What Happened to American Conservatism?  The lede reads: "The rich philosophical tradition I fell in love with has been reduced to Fox News and voter suppression." That is a good tip-off to the quality of the article. Here is what Vito said, and I agree:

I am not the right person to write a response, since I have nothing but contempt for Brooks, whom I regard as a miserable opportunist at the service of the Left. (He is precisely the sort of creature that makes an ad hominem attack, usually best avoided, entirely appropriate.)  Any man who writes,

I’m content, as my hero Isaiah Berlin put it, to plant myself instead on the rightward edge of the leftward tendency—in the more promising soil of the moderate wing of the Democratic Party. If its progressive wing sometimes seems to have learned nothing from the failures of government and to promote cultural stances that divide Americans, at least the party as a whole knows what year it is

is either delusional for thinking that such a “moderate wing” actually exists and that “the party as a whole” is an entity that fosters national comity and is actually concerned for the welfare of the citizenry or, in my view, is simply acting in bad faith.  No true conservative of whatever stripe can have anything to do with this intellectually and morally bankrupt party, which is entirely dominated by the Left and which wages an unceasing war against the very traditions, customs, and legal system that Brooks supposedly values so highly. 

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Now for my two cents. Useful idiots such as Brooks are worse than hard leftists. They live in the past, blind to the present, and unwittingly advance the very causes that they, as conservatives, are supposed to be opposing.   Here is what I had to say four years ago. The passage of time has only reinforced my points:

The Op-Ed pages of The New York Times are plenty poor to be sure, but Ross Douthat and David Brooks are sometimes worth reading.  But the following from Brooks (28 October 2016) is singularly boneheaded although the opening sentence is exactly right:

The very essence of conservatism is the belief that politics is a limited activity, and that the most important realms are pre-­political: conscience, faith, culture, family and community. But recently conservatism has become more the talking arm of the Republican Party. Among social conservatives, for example, faith sometimes seems to come in second behind politics, Scripture behind voting guides. Today, most white evangelicals are willing to put aside the Christian virtues of humility, charity and grace for the sake of a Trump political victory.

Come on, man.  Don't be stupid.  The Left is out to suppress religious liberty.  This didn't start yesterday.  You yourself mention conscience, but you must be aware that bakers and florists have been forced by the state to violate their consciences by catering homosexual 'marriage' ceremonies.  Is that a legitimate use of state power?  And if the wielders of state power can get away with that outrage, where will they stop? Plenty of other examples can be adduced, e.g., the Obama administration's assault on the Little Sisters of the Poor.

The reason evangelicals and other Christians support Trump is that they know what that destructive and deeply mendacious stealth ideologue  Hillary will do if she gets power. It is not because they think the Gotham sybarite lives the Christian life, but despite his not living it.  They understand that ideas and policies trump character issues especially when Trump's opponent is even worse on the character plane.  What's worse: compromising national security, using high public office to enrich oneself, and then endlessly lying about it all, or forcing oneself on a handful of women?

The practice of the Christian virtues and the living of the Christian life require freedom of religion. Our freedoms are under vicious assault by leftists  like Hillary. This is why Trump garners the support of Christians.  

The threat from the Left is very real indeed.  See here and read the chilling remarks of Martin Castro of the U. S. Commission on Civil Rights.  Given Castro's comments the name of the commission counts as Orwellian. 

Nancy Pelosi and the Divine Spark

Posted on my Facebook page, two years ago. I nailed it then, and it stays nailed down. Nancy has declined in the last two years. She seems on the verge of  joining Sleepy Joe in the land of non compos mentis.

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Donald Trump famously referred to MS-13 gangsters as "animals." That's not the way I would put it inasmuch as it is an insult to animals who, unlike the gangbangers, are beneath good and evil. But Trump talks like a working stiff and we all know what he meant. Pelosi, however, took umbrage, protesting that the murderous bunch possesses "the divine spark" (her phrase) along with the rest of us. I don't disagree, but I do have a couple of questions for Madame Speaker.

 

First, Nancy dear, do you think the pre-natal also have the divine spark? If not, why not? Isn't that what your Catholic religion, bits of which you regularly inject into your speeches, teaches? And if the horrific rapes, murders, beheadings, etc. of the MS-13 do not cause them to forfeit the "divine spark," then how it it that a human fetus' lack of development prevents it from having said spark?

 

Second, as a leftist committed to driving every vestige of religion, or rather Christianity, from the public square, can't you see that it is inconsistent of you to use themes from your Catholic girlhood when it suits you and your obstructionist purposes? You come across as a silly goose of a dingbat. Or is that just an airhead act to mask your mendacity and subversiveness and Alinskyite disregard for double standards?

Military Service and 'Skin in the Game'

There is something to be said in favor of an all-voluntary military, but on the debit side there is this: only those with 'skin in the game' -- either their own or that of their loved ones -- properly appreciate the costs of foreign military interventions.  I say that as a conservative, not a libertarian.

There is also this to consider:  In the bad old days of the draft, people of different stations -- to use a good old word that will not be allowed to fall into desuetude, leastways not on my watch -- were forced to associate with one another -- with some good effects.  It is 'broadening' to mingle  and have to get along with different sorts of people.  And when the veteran of foreign wars returns and takes up a profession in, say, academe, he brings with him precious hard-won experience of all sorts of people in different  lands in trying circumstances.  He is then more likely to exhibit the sense of a Winston Churchill as opposed to the nonsense of a Ward Churchill.

At the moment, Vladimir Putin is threatening to send his troops into the Ukraine. There are those with no skin in the game who are willing to expend American blood and treasure should the Ukraine be invaded. I humbly suggest that we secure our own borders before we worry about the borders of foreign countries.  I have no skin in this game, but also no prospect of profiting from yet another foreign adventure.

Donald Trump has it right: America first!

Click on the link to learn what the slogan means.

What does Populism Threaten?

First posted on my Facebook page on this date three years ago.

 

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POPULISM is a threat to a leftist internationalism that rejects national borders and denies to nations the right to preserve their cultures, the right to stop illegal immigration, and the right to select those immigrants who are most likely to prove to be a net asset to the host country, and most likely to assimilate. There needn't be anything white supremacist or white nationalist about populism. (By the way, white supremacism and white nationalism are plainly different: a white nationalist needn't be a white supremacist.) And of course there needn't be anything racist or xenophobic or bigoted about either nationalism or populism. It is a mistake to confuse nationalism with white nationalism, a mistake deliberately promoted by leftists.

 

Populism in the style of Trump is not a threat to liberal democracy as the Founders envisioned it, but a threat to the leftist internationalism I have just limned and which contemporary 'liberals' confuse with the classically liberal democracy of the Founders. It is also quite telling that these 'liberals' constantly use the word 'democracy' as if it is something wonderful indeed, but they almost never mention that the USA is a democratic republic. Our republic has a stiff backbone of core principles and meta-principles that are not up for democratic grabs, or at least are not up for easy grabs: the Constitution can be amended but it is not easy, nor should it be.

 

Those who think that democracy is a wonderful thing ought to realize that Sharia can be installed democratically. This is underway in Belgium. Brussels could be Muslim within 20 years. Let enough Muslims infiltrate and then they will decide who 'the people' are and who are not 'the people.' The native Belgians will then have been displaced. Ain't democracy wonderful?

 

Let enough illegal aliens flood in, give them the vote, and they may or more likely will decide to do away with the distinction between legal and illegal immigration as well as the one between immigration and emigration. Ever wonder why lefties like the word 'migrant?' It manages to elide both distinctions in one fell swoop.

 

A sane and defensible populism rests on an appreciation of an insight I have aphoristically expressed as follows:

No comity without commonality.

There cannot be social harmony without a raft of shared assumptions and values, not to mention a shared language. There is need of cultural coherence. A felicitous phrase, that. Our open, tolerant, Enlightenment culture cannot cohere and survive if Sharia-supporting Muslims are allowed to immigrate. For their ultimate goal is not to assimilate to our ways, but to impose their ways on us, eventually replacing us.

 

Can you show I'm wrong?

Opponents or Enemies?

If you shrink back from regarding your political opponents as enemies, you do not appreciate the threat they pose. You are not taking them seriously enough. They pose an existential threat. Such a threat is not merely a threat to one's physical existence; it is a threat to one's way of life, to one's cultural and spiritual traditions and heritage.   Human life is not merely biological.