Where are We Going, and Why are We in This Basket?

Here’s hoping this post makes it past the Google censors.  

“Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good. In area after area – crime, education, housing, race relations – the situation has gotten worse after the bright new theories were put into operation. The amazing thing is that this history of failure and disaster has neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them.” ~Thomas Sowell, Is Reality Optional?, 1993

Add nearly three more decades to that record.  

(C)onservatism is not so much based on ideas, but on simply observing what works, and then generalizing from there. – Dr. Robert Godwin

After the preceding sixty years, I am now an almost perfect “enemy of the Left.”  I’m an old(er) white cisgendered heterosexual male who drives a pickup truck and owns guns.  The only checkbox I don’t tick is that I’m not a Christian, but then I am not an “anti-theist” either.  Because I’m in favor of maximum individual liberty and minimum government power – what used to be called a “liberal” – I am now labeled a member of the “Alt-Right,” which (deliberately) carries with it ominous implications of “White Supremacy.” And I’m a Donald Trump voter, so I am Evil Incarnate.

If not for my heresy of voting for Trump, I might be redeemed – but I would never be trusted.

I started blogging in May of 2003 after spending time in the trenches of Usenet, on bulletin boards, and as a contributor to a failed experiment known as Themestream.  Why?  Because I was pissed.  I forgot to mention that in my CV.  I’m a pissed off old(er) white cisgendered heterosexual male. 

If you’ve read this blog for any length of time, you know that this pissed-off white cisgendered heterosexual male is also a Debbie Downer.  I’m a pessimist by nature.  I’ve said that being a pessimist is generally a pretty good way to go through life – you’re seldom disappointed and occasionally pleasantly surprised.  I’ve had very few pleasant surprises recently.

This post is no different.  You’ve been warned.  Logorrhea to follow.

I’ve spent the last twenty-six years figuring out how this nation got to this point.  I’ve read dozens of books, hundreds of court cases, and gigabytes of essays, news stories, op-eds (but I repeat myself), white papers and blog posts.  I’ve engaged in probably a hundred online arguments, and written the better part of a million words of my own (and quoted a lot of others.)  

I said in my 2005 essay Other People’s Ideas:

Reasonable People is not a stand-alone essay (though it does stand quite well on its own). It’s the third (at least) in a series, beginning with True Believers, followed by March of the Lemmings. Hell, it’s part of a long ongoing theme here – coming conflict due to the the dichotomy between what works and how we’d like it to be. Eric Hoffer’s ideas simply reinforced a concept from an angle I hadn’t considered – a new rising mass-movement. But as soon as I processed his ideas it became pretty obvious what “Bush Derangement Syndrome” represents – the attraction of the “average person on the street” to the early stages of the movement. It is a movement capable, as Dr. Santy said, of “being able to convince normally sane people that the source of all evil in the world is George W. Bush.”

And that idea scares the shit out of me.

So please, pardon me for babbling.

If you’ve got an hour or six, you might want to skip this short piece and read those three links.  After all these years I’m (largely) done repeating myself.  However, I did babble on considerably since then.  If you’ve got a couple more hours, read Metastasized Marxism and Endgame from last July.  Nothing I’ve come across in the interim has changed my mind on that coming conflict though, only the villains have changed.  

I concluded in 2012 that the United States as established under the Constitution in 1790 as Prof. Randy Barnett put it in his 2004 book Restoring the Lost Constitution, “a sea of liberty surrounding islands of government power,” was well and truly over.  The majority of that part of the population engaged in voting had re-elected Barack Obama to the Presidency.  Not that the Republican Party had done much of anything to stop him, but the damage was complete and irreparable.  There was no way to fix it, and anyway, too few thought anything was broken. I decided, as the saying goes, to “embrace the suck” and ride this thing down to its eventual, inevitable crash.

Then 2016 rolled around.  Hillary controlled the DNC to the point that she was finally the shoo-in nominee (after all, it was HER TURN!!), but Bernie’s popularity surprised everyone – except me.  One hundred-plus years of public education made that predictable.  What wasn’t predictable was the campaign of Donald J. Trump.  While the Democrats have an iron-fisted grasp on their party apparatus, the Republicans are a bunch of fumble-fingered imbeciles by comparison.  Trump destroyed his opposition, and from the Left it looked like they couldn’t possibly lose.  The Most Qualified Woman in the World was running against an orangutan!

And then he won.  The Left was so convinced of Hillary’s inevitability, they neglected to turn on the fraud machinery, and Trump’s team gamed the system expertly.

Against all logic I felt a little hope.  The system wasn’t completely rigged.  Since Trump was equally despised by the Democrats, the media (but I repeat myself) and the Republicans,  the most I hoped for was four years of gridlock.  As George Will once said “Gridlock is not an American problem, it is an American achievement!”  Instead, against four years of unprecedented and steady attacks – spying, leaks, overwhelmingly negative media coverage and three years of “investigation,” Trump was actually able to accomplish things, many that his predecessors had labeled impossible or unwise.  Except under Trump, they were possible, and the predicted negative consequences didn’t occur.  A guy with zero prior political experience proved that career politicians were either incompetent or malign.  After all, if you’re not part of the solution there’s a lot of opportunity in prolonging the problem.

Here’s just a very short list:

  • The U.S. Embassy to Israel was relocated from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in 2018.  The “Experts” warned it would cause instability in the Middle East.  Instead, at the end of 2020 we have three Middle Eastern nations signing treaties recognizing Israel’s existence, the UAE, Bahrain and Sudan, with apparently more to follow.
  • He pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement.  That was supposed to be a disaster, too, but we’re the only nation that met the targets of that agreement.
  • He withdrew the U.S. from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and NAFTA agreements and renegotiated to get us better terms.  That was supposed to be impossible.
  • He finally treated the People’s Republic of China as a nation hostile to the U.S. (which it is) and got at least a few more people to realize it.  The Experts were aghast.
  • He got the leader of North Korea to a negotiating table, something no President since Truman had done, and he did so by threatening his life – which all the Experts said would cause WWIII.  We’re all still here.
  • He wrote a 2017 executive order requiring that for each new regulation promulgated on the nation, two existing regulations have to be removed.  (Very few people know about that one.)  Deregulation is to Experts as holy water is to vampires.
  • Under his leadership the U.S. military effectively destroyed ISIS, and he didn’t start a single new conflict during the four years of his administration.  In fact, he has actively tried to draw down our presence in the Middle East while facing severe pushback from the Experts.
  • His tax cuts and deregulation boosted the economy in 2017, 2018 and 2019 far and away above the previous eight years of Obama.  The “new normal” proved not to be.

No wonder they hate him.

So I felt some hope.

Bless your heart you poor sweet summer child.

For four years every media outlet save Fox News and talk radio demonized – and I use that word literally – Donald Trump and anyone who supported him.  True, he didn’t help much with his Tweets, but all right-thinking people were told to despise the man.  It was effective.  We got “two minutes hate” against a modern Emmanuel Goldstein and his followers multiple times per day.  It was obviously effective, spreading seeds on an already fertilized field.  I’m not going to go into the 2020 election except to quote myself from the aforementioned Endgame,:

Trump has for the last four years shrugged off every attack as if he was dressed in Teflon coated Chobham armor, but now he’s up for reelection.  Another four years of Trump will further damage the advancements that the Progressive Postmodernists have made over the last thirty years.  So here’s the point (finally) of this essay:

The wheels come off the train and the train comes off the track in 2021, one way or the other.

The End of America has been predicted by many people for quite some time.  The Progressive Postmodernists appear to have decided that the time is ripe.  The national debt cannot be ignored forever.  The projected entitlement spending is unsupportable.  All their preparation of the battle space through balkanization has brought us to this point.  Black Lives Matter, itself organized and run by self-proclaimed Marxists, is the hinge on which the lid is swinging, but Pandora’s Box is certainly opening.  I don’t think we’re going to stop the greed, envy, hatred, pain, disease, hunger, poverty, war, and death that will come flooding out of it, and there most likely won’t be much around afterward to put them back in.

Here’s my prediction:  The 2020 election is going to be a clusterfuck.  The Left does not intend to lose, and will do everything in its power to ensure that.

If the Democrats win, and they probably will since they’ll be cheating as hard as possible, they’ll take it as a mandate to really crank up the Progressive agenda, and the millions of us who haven’t swallowed that ideology will be their sworn deadly enemies.  They have already weaponized the IRS and the Justice Department against Trump supporters, expect that to be cranked to 11 because the Deep State is deeply Progressive Postmodernist.  There will be a breaking point.  It might not be in 2021, but it won’t be long thereafter.

Things are “progressing” even faster than I had imagined.  

As I illustrated in Endgame “politics” as “the art of compromise” is essentially over.  We no longer have “the loyal opposition,” we have opposing enemy camps.  The two sides have competing, mutually exclusive views of the way the world should work, and one side is convinced that anyone who opposes their agenda isn’t just wrong, but EVIL.  The conflict is now religious in nature.

And I’ve repeatedly said, you don’t debate with Evil.  You don’t negotiate with Evil.  You don’t compromise with Evil.  You pat it on the head until you can find a rock big enough to bash its skull in.

And full control of the government, they believe, is that rock.

This promises physical conflict.  We’ve seen the beginnings of it with the riots last summer, and with the protest in Washington last week.  It’s not going to go away, it’s going to get worse.

I’d like you to take a moment and read the quotes at the masthead of this blog.  Re-read that last one.  That’s Billy Beck’s 15 minutes of fame quote from 2009.  It made the national news, as I recall.  But Billy’s not promoting, he’s predictingHe’s stated plainly that a civil war would be an unmitigated disaster:

Here is the central problem surrounding what you people are talking about:

There is no coherent and cohesive philosophy underpinning it.

I don’t think he’s wrong.  I do think there will be a “winner” though, and it won’t be the forces of liberty.  “Coherent” has two definitions:

Coherent: (adj.) logically connected; consistent.

Neither side has that.  Ours once did, but the public education system put paid to that early on.  The other definition?

Sticking together; cohering.

Through the magic of identity politics the Left has produced coherence of a sort.  It identified victim groups and one victimizer group, recruited victims, and got all them all to hate their victimizer.  Eric Hoffer noted in his book The True Believer:  Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements that

Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying agents. It pulls and whirls the individual away from his own self, makes him oblivious of his weal and future, frees him of jealousies and self-seeking. He becomes an anonymous particle quivering with a craving to fuse and coalesce with his like into one flaming mass. (Heinrich) Heine suggests that what Christian love cannot do is effected by a common hatred.

Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil. Usually the strength of a mass movement is proportionate to the vividness and tangibility of its devil.

For eight years the Left had Ronald Reagan, then eight of G.W. Bush.  For four years the Left had Donald Trump.  Now they have his supporters, all 72 million of us, and possession of The Rock.  That hate gives them coherence in the “sticking together” meaning, though they’re pretty incoherent otherwise.

Our side, as Billy noted, has no logically consistent underlying philosophy, and we’re not organized.  This week we watched the Deep State, the media and Big Tech effectively silence a big chunk of their opposition.  THAT’S organization.  They don’t have a logically consistent underlying philosophy either, but THOSE cats are marching in formation.  Liberté!  Égalité!  Fraternité! (Et sororité!) Amen and awomen!

And it will end as the French Revolution ended, with a sea of blood followed by that tyranny everyone’s shouting about.  As James Lileks said, “Personally, I’m interested in keeping other people from building Utopia, because the more you believe you can create heaven on earth the more likely you are to set up guillotines in the public square to hasten the process., but that option seems off the table, now.

I said a few years ago that we needed a new version of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense – the book that united a bunch of British colonists into a nation of Americans.  I tagged Bill Whittle as the obvious author.  He declined.  No one else has stepped in, either, though Angelo Codevilla took a decent shot at it.  I’ve concluded, though, that this never really had a chance to succeed.  The public education system and Big Tech have guaranteed that the majority of the populace has the attention span of a flea (as illustrated by the acronym TL;DR), and is not interested in thinking.  FEELING is the word of the day!

So I’m back to embracing the suck.  Hold on tight, it’s REALLY gonna suck.  I wonder what zoo animals taste like?  I just hope to live long enough to find out.

Election Fraud? What Election Fraud?

Larry Correia posted on Facebook an observation that the absurdly high election turnouts reported in heavily blue states are, at the least, suspect.  He was chided to “do better” by the first respondent in the comments.  Here’s Larry’s reply:

CJ Nygaard, the massive turn out alone is a red flag.
 
But as for doing better…
 
The late night spikes that were enough to close all the Trump leads are a red flag.
 
The statistically impossible breakdown of the ratios of these vote dumps is a red flag.
 
The ratios of these dumps being far better than the percentages in the bluest of blue cities, even though the historical data does not match, red flag.
 
The ratios of these vote dumps favoring Biden more in these few battlegrounds than the ratio for the rest of the country (even the bluest of the blue) red flag.
 
Biden outperforming Obama among these few urban vote dumps, even though Trump picked up points in every demographic group in the rest of the country, red flag.
 
The poll observers being removed. Red flag.
 
The counters cheering as GOP observers are removed, red flag.
 
The fact that the dem observers outnumber the GOP observers 3 to 1, red flag (and basis of the first lawsuit filed)
 
The electioneering at the polls (on video), red flag.
 
The willful violation of the court order requiring the separation of ballots by type, red flag.
USPS whistleblower reporting to the Inspector General that today they were ordered to backdate ballots to yesterday, red flag.
 
The video of 2 AM deliveries of what appear to be boxes of ballots with no chain of custody or other observers right before the late night miracle spikes, red flag.
 
Any of those things would be enough to trigger an audit in the normal world. This many flags and I’d be giggling in anticipation of catching some thieves.
 
And it isn’t that I have to do better. I’m just an gen pop observer who happens to be a retired auditor with a finely tuned bullshit detector. This is going to the courts.

As I’ve said elsewhere, don’t expect a resolution before early December, if then.  States are legally required to certify their polls by December 8.  Who thinks we won’t be there yet?

 

Don’t #WalkAway.

A recent piece at The American Conservative by Rod Dreher, Joe Rogan World vs. NPR World contains these two quotes:

…NPR sounds like Vatican Radio from the Church of Secular Progressivism, …The New York Times reads like L’Osservatore Romano of the same pseudo-religion.

Do read the whole thing.  This is not surprising to me, but it is beautifully expressed.

Back in 2008 I wrote The Church of the MSM and the New Reformation, a review of media bias as seen through the lens of Professor of Communication Brian Anse Patrick’s (PBUH) book The National Rifle Association and the Media:  The Motivating Force of Negative Coverage.  That the media has a bias is undeniable.  Both sides of the current political conflict believe that.  But what Professor Patrick exposed was that the bias is both Left and Right (one more than the other), but it is exclusively about control:

That elite media may be biased for or against a particular issue or topic is interesting, and this knowledge may help an interest group rally indignation or manage its public relations; however it tells little about the overall functioning of media in society. This latter concern is the broader and more important idea, with larger implications.

The larger concept that lies behind the consistent ranking is a broad cultural level phenomenon that I will label an administrative control bias. It has profound implications. Administrative control in this usage means rational, scientific, objective social management by elite, symbol-manipulating classes, and subclasses, i.e., professionalized administrators or bureaucratic functionaries. The thing administered is often democracy itself, or a version of it at least. Here and throughout this chapter terms such as “rational,” “objective,” “professional,” and “scientific” should be read in the sense of the belief systems that they represent, i.e. rationalism, objectivism, professionalism, and scientism. Scientism is not the same as being scientific; the first is a matter of faith and ritualistic observance, the other is difficult creative work. William James made a similar distinction between institutional religion and being religious, the first being a smug and thoughtless undertaking on the part of most people, the second, a difficult undertaking affecting every aspect of a life. The term scientistic administration would pertain here. Note that we move here well beyond the notion of mere gun control and into the realm of general social control, management and regulation.

He explained that people who migrate into journalism believe that problems should be solved by the people already exercising the power.  That journalists see themselves as the clergy of the Church of State, acting as intermediaries between the High Church of government – Federal, state and local –  and the laypeople who make up the rest of the nation.  Which is why I found Mr. Dreher’s description of NPR and the NYT to be so poetic.

As the political divide comes to a crashing head in this country on Tuesday, November 3, I thought I’d try to pull together the various threads that have been gathering in my head and try to weave together something coherent before (maybe) this whole thing gets ripped apart.

Why are we at this point?  I have pointed at public education as the great enabler, but it goes deeper than that.  John Taylor Gatto illustrated convincingly that the public education system was initially established by the Great Industrialists (aka “Robber Barons”) of the 19th Century to create a two-tiered system: A lower tier for the workers who would labor, do what they’re told without question, and buy the products they themselves manufactured, and an upper tier for the children of the Great Men and any who showed exceptional promise.  It was, after all, only natural – “Social Darwinism” was the phrase associated with it, except that philosophy quite easily slides into racism and eugenics (which it did.)  

No, a kinder, gentler philosophy was needed, and that was Marxism – the promise that all men (they were sexists in the late 19th century) would eventually be equal, would suffer no privation, would have all they needed, but never any more or less than their neighbors.  It was a beautiful dream, but Marx insisted that it was an historical inevitability!  So a lot of people adopted that dream and began working towards achieving it, hopefully in their lifetime.

These people were better than the average Joe or Jane.  They cared more.  They took jobs in government, in education, in media, because Utopia could not be consummated with the average prole!  Regular people cared only about themselves and a few people in their close circles.  For Marxism to work, people had to care about everyone else, and that required that they be trained, (nudged in the modern vernacular) into becoming a human being that can care more for a stranger than they do for themselves.  

I believe my readers can see the flaw here.

Instead of schools churning out capitalists, they started churning out sort-of-Socialists, and among them the Scientistic Administrators referred to by Prof. Patrick.  Part of that change was the secularization of the Western world, but the human mind seems to require some sort of spirituality.  There appears to be a portion of the brain pre-wired for a belief in some higher power.  In the face of a growing secularism, that inherent need for “spirituality” still needs to be filled.

Socialism, its accompanying Scientism and the promise of Marx’s utopian vision seems to do so nicely, and generation after generation has been infected and affected by exposure to that horribly flawed idea.

From a now-banned 2017 Reddit essay:

Blue Team Progressivism is a church, offering you moral superiority and a path to spiritual enlightenment. As a church it’s got a lot going for it. It runs religious programming on television, all day every day. Every modern primetime program is like a left-wing Andy Griffith show, reinforcing lessons of inclusion, tolerance, feminism, and anti-racism.

Watching a 90-pound Sci-Fi heroine beat up a room full of giant evil men is as satisfying to the left as John Wayne westerns were for the right.

The Blue Church controls the HR department, so even if you don’t go to church, you have to act like a loyal churchgoer in every way that matters while you’re on the clock. And off the clock, on any kind of public social media platform.

Jon Stewart and John Oliver are basically TV preachers. Watching them gives the same sense of quiet superiority your grandma gets from watching The 700 Club. The messages are constantly reinforced, providing that lovely dopamine hit, like an angel’s voice whispering, “You’re right, you’re better, you’re winning.”

Hollywood award shows are like church talent shows – the skits and jokes aren’t really funny, but it’s fun to look at the pretty girls, and you’re all on the same team.

If you oppose the ideas of the Left, as I have said in this forum repeatedly, you aren’t merely wrong, misinformed, misled, ignorant or in error, you’re evil.  As Eric Hoffer explained in his 1951 book The True Believer:  Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements:

Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying agents. It pulls and whirls the individual away from his own self, makes him oblivious of his weal and future, frees him of jealosies and self-seeking. He becomes an anonymous particle quivering with a craving to fuse and coalesce with his like into one flaming mass. (Heinrich) Heine suggests that what Christian love cannot do is effected by a common hatred.

Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil. Usually the strength of a mass movement is proportionate to the vividness and tangibility of its devil. When Hitler was asked whether he thought the Jew must be destroyed, he answered: “No…. We should have then to invent him. It is essential to have a tangible enemy, not merely an abstract one.” F.A. Voigt tells of a Japanese mission that arrived in Berlin in 1932 to study the National Socialist movement. Voigt asked a member of the mission what he thought of the movement. He replied: “It is magnificent. I wish we could have something like it in Japan, only we can’t, because we haven’t got any Jews.”

But we have had Ronald Reagan, George Bush, and now Donald Trump, each one inspiring greater and greater derangement to the point where it’s actually been called that – [fill in the blank] Derangement Syndrome, each new mutation more virulent than the last. 

Of course, we’ve still got Jews, too

Those Presidents, and the people who voted for them, have been called deplorables, bitter clingers, racists, sexists, misogynists, homophobes, Islamophobes,  pretty much every -ist and -phobe you can think of.  But what they’re really saying is “heretic.”  Note how viciously they go after the apostates – the former members of the Left who #WalkAway.   They know better.  They’re better educated, better informed, more intelligent, and therefore should be in charge of everything.  As the quote on the masthead of this blog from Sultan Knish explains:

The cult of the left believes that it is engaged in a great apocalyptic battle with corporations and industrialists for the ownership of the unthinking masses. Its acolytes see themselves as the individuals who have been “liberated” to think for themselves. They make choices. You however are just a member of the unthinking masses. You are not really a person, but only respond to the agendas of your corporate overlords. If you eat too much, it’s because corporations make you eat. If you kill, it’s because corporations encourage you to buy guns. You are not an individual. You are a social problem.

Hoffer, in a 1967 television interview with Eric Sevareid, was asked about the Intellectuals – our “betters” in society and (most importantly today) government.  He responded:

Hoffer:  I talk of a specific type of person when I talk about an intellectual. […] To me an intellectual is a man of some education who considers himself a member of the educated elite, who thinks he has a God-given right to direct affairs. To me an intellectual doesn’t even have to be intelligent in order to be an intellectual. He looked down upon the masses as if they were dirt.

Sevareid: It’s their attitude toward ordinary people that is the dividing line in your mind?

Hoffer: That’s right.

Hoffer: In this country the intellectuals aren’t in power. Mass movement hasn’t a chance for the simple reason that they aren’t started by the masses. They’re started by intellectuals.

In America the intellectual has neither status, nor prestige, nor influence. We, the common people, are not impressed by intellectuals. We have a disdain for pencil-pushers. We actually define efficiency by the small number of pencil-pushers. If you asked me what I consider an efficient society I’d say the ratio between the office personnel and the producing personnel.

The smaller the amount of supervision the better, the healthier, the more vigorous a society. The highest supervisory personnel is where the intellectuals are in power – in Communist countries. There half the population is supervising the other half. The intellectuals have a tremendous contempt for the masses. Intellectuals can’t operate unless they’re convinced that the masses are lazy, incompetent, dishonest; that you have to breathe down their necks, and you have to watch them all the time. We in America are sitting pretty because the masses perform only if we leave them alone. That’s where we are at our best.

Eric Sevareid: You seem to have a fear about the rise of intellectuals in political life and power. Why are you so frightened of them?

Eric Hoffer: First of all, I ought to tell you that I have no grievance against intellectuals. All that I know about them is what I read in history books and what I’ve observed in our time. I’m convinced that the intellectuals as a type, as a group, are more corrupted by power than any other human type. It’s disconcerting to realize that businessmen, generals, soldiers, men of action are less corrupted by power than intellectuals.

In my new book I elaborate on this and I offer an explanation why. You take a conventional man of action, and he’s satisfied if you obey, eh? But not the intellectual. He doesn’t want you just to obey. He wants you to get down on your knees and praise the one who makes you love what you hate and hate what you love. In other words, whenever the intellectuals are in power, there’s soul-raping going on.

And here we are, 53 years later with a society full of three more generations of college-educated intellectuals.  We have a mass movement started by those intellectuals on college campuses where they teach and are taught to loathe their nation and their fellow citizens.  We’re in not a civil war over control of the government, but a RELIGIOUS war over the control of our souls.  

57 genders. Free speech is violence, but violence is speech, but silence is violence.  There should be an equal number of female Fortune 500 CEOs but not an equal number of female brick layers, roofers, plumbers, or auto mechanics.  Tear down all the statues.  Rename all the streets, schools and other public buildings.  Burn down Federal buildings, preferably with Federal agents inside.  Raise your hand and say “Black Lives Matter” or we’ll beat you.  Defund the police, but call the highway patrol when a Joe Biden campaign bus is surrounded by Trump supporters in pickup trucks, and on, and on, and on.

And so far we deplorables have acquiesced, gone along, kept our mouths shut and tried to stay out of it.

That choice is not going to be viable much longer.  The Left is like the Terminator – it doesn’t sleep, doesn’t eat, and absolutely will not stop unless it is stopped.  It’s time to stop them.  This election is only the first step.  If we don’t take it, we may not get another.  It’s time to #StandUpandFaceThem, and damn the backlash.

 

Too Little, Too Late Most Probably

This is interesting.  Quoting from Instapundit:

REPORT ON BIDEN’S ACTIVITIES WITH CHINA. “First, it is almost exclusively taken from public sources and documentation. Everything from Chinese news reports to corporate records. The report is immaculately cited so that anyone who wishes to replicate where a specific piece of information was found or see the underlying documentation can do so.”

The full report is here. Looks like lots of stuff for investigative journalists to run with, if there are any of those left.

Redstate picked it up, but you can bet nobody in major media will touch it, and Facebook and Twitter will do everything they can to suppress it.

Endgame

This blog has been, for me, a seventeen-year exploration of other people’s ideas.  If you’ve been here long, you’ll know that I use short quotes and long excerpts from other people’s writings to make the points I write about.  Like most people, I am not an “original thinker.”  I try to expose myself to as much as I can, and weigh it against my experience and reason to determine truth.  Then I put it down in pixels to help me get my head around it.
Over these past seventeen years (hell, over the last 25), I have slowly come to some conclusions that I’m not happy about.

Remember that last nearly 10,000-word überpost?  I told you that so I could tell you this.  Hopefully I won’t be as long-winded this time.

In that last essay I (hopefully) illustrated that the Progressive movement was made up of people who fervently believed in the inevitable coming Utopia promised by Marx where everyone would be equal and no one would want for anything.  They were the Modernists.  Religion was mysticism.  Logic, reason, and Science! would take us there because Marx said so.  It was logically, factually inevitable.  Progressive Modernists worked hard in the early 20th Century to accelerate its arrival.  Of course, their interpretations were affected by the culture at the time, so in addition to universal public education and ending child labor they also promoted segregation and eugenics, but hey!  They meant well! 
In earlier essays I’ve written about the public education system and how it was initially set up by Progressive Modernists working with industrialists to create a two-tiered system designed to produce a lot of reliable industrial workers out of one path, and the people who were to manage them out of the other.  For the Progressive Modernists this was just part of the path to Utopia.  For the industrialists who were obviously the most fit of all it was just another part of Darwin’s Survival of the Fittest, which somehow merged with that Utopianism without conflict.  It was shortly suborned to become a factory itself whose output was activists.
The Progressive Modernists zealously moved into the industries that mold culture – education, entertainment, and media – to proselytize, and by the 1940’s were firmly embedded and doing their best to crank out new adherents.  By the early 1960’s they’d done their jobs well.  But by the early 1960’s it was apparent that something was wrong with Marx’s philosophy.
Exposed to the real world, Marxist economies failed.  Marxist governments were murderous.  Marxism didn’t work anywhere it was tried.  Capitalist economies were successful, and democratic governments protected individual rights not perfectly, but they weren’t committing genocide on their own people.  Marx was factually, demonstrably, unmistakably wrong.
What do you do?  You’ve invested 20, 30, 40, 50 years of your life working towards giving your children or your children’s children that Utopia, and the promise is false?  This is the definition of cognitive dissonance

When someone tries to use a strategy which is dictated by their ideology, and that strategy doesn’t seem to work, then they are caught in something of a cognitive bind. If they acknowledge the failure of the strategy, then they would be forced to question their ideology. If questioning the ideology is unthinkable, then the only possible conclusion is that the strategy failed because it wasn’t executed sufficiently well. They respond by turning up the power, rather than by considering alternatives. (This is sometimes referred to as “escalation of failure”.)

Or, as I’ve put it, “Do it again, only harder!”  For many of them the philosophy could not be wrong.  Its promise was too beautiful to abandon.  Facts?  Irrelevant!  Logic and reason?  Meaningless!  And so the Progressive Modernists became the Postmodernists:  Nothing can really be proven.  Everything is relative, subjective.  Feelings are more important that facts.  Everything has hidden meanings because of the inherent conscious and unconscious biases of their creators, you just have to deconstruct them to find those real meanings.  The curtains are never just blueTwo plus two doesn’t necessarily equal four.  In other words, “My mind is made up.  Don’t confuse me with the facts.”  Or, “I reject your reality and substitute my own equally valid one!”  Or “That wasn’t REAL Communism!”

They turned their belief into a faith, a religion, with a garden of Eden (pre-civilization Earth), an original sin (either capitalism or slavery, depending on who you ask), a savior (Karl Marx), and a path to righteousness that would lead back to Heaven.  They didn’t seem dangerous, after all they were college professors, teachers, journalists, managing editors, writers, producers, entertainers, et cetera, but they were in the driver’s seat when it came to affecting culture and they were by Marx going to proselytize.
And so they passed that irrational, dangerous faith on to the next generation, and that generation passed on an even more virulent version, and the current generation born near the turn of the 21st Century is the recipient of two generations of Progressive Postmodernist evangelism, expanded exponentially.  When the Soviet Union finally collapsed in 1989, it didn’t matter to the Progressive Postmodernists.  That wasn’t REAL Socialism.  They’d made that decision over twenty-five years previously.  Nicaragua!  It was going to work there!  Failure.  Venezuela!  THAT was going to be Real Socialism!  But it failed horribly too.  Nobody changed their minds.  It could work HERE.  It was too beautiful not to.
There were other factions.  These were the Progressive Postmodernists who rather than going into journalism, education or entertainment, instead went into politics because that’s where real change could be implemented. Finally, those who did not go into any of those careers but still absorbed the catechism became the Faithful.  A lot of Union organizers, a lot of everyday workers, a lot of businessmen, and recently a lot of unemployed college graduates up to their eyeballs in student loan debt.  Those who rejected the teachings became The Enemy.  It took less than two generations for the two major parties to stop being “the loyal opposition” and become “the other side.” 

via Gfycat

And it wasn’t that the Right went more Right (though they did slightly), it’s that the Left has been moving WAY Left:

Author Frank Herbert wrote in his Dune novels some ideas that I think are as accurate as anything I’ve ever read:

All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.

And:

Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class – whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy.

Which is basically a slightly different take on Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy.  And finally:

When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. Their movements become headlong – faster and faster and faster. They put aside all thoughts of obstacles and forget the precipice does not show itself to the man in a blind rush until it’s too late.

That elected group is what I will call the Politburo.  These are the people who believe that they are the ones who can personally lead us to Utopia – or at least lead themselves to unlimited power by manipulating the Faithful. 

There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.  — Daniel Webster.

Men and all the other genders, too.  That latter group is who ends up in charge of “Socialist” governments once the Revolution has taken place.  The True Believers in the Politburo are purged to their shock, horror and amazement.  The pragmatists are the ones who order the mass murders which are then carried out by their Red Guards who have been taught since birth of their own righteousness and the wickedness of their class enemies.  The pragmatists are the ones who have private dachas and servants because they do the crucial and difficult work of deciding who can do what, who needs what and when, and how much to skim off the top.  The pragmatists are the ones who can see the coming collapse of the Entitlement Ponzi scheme and intend to be around to sift through the wreckage for the choice bits.

These people ran for office, won, and kept moving up, elected by other Progressive Postmodernists,  their Faithful and anyone else they could convince they could benefit. 

The portion that was ideologically more pure pursued the dream of eventual Utopia – in which, of course, they would be in charge.  The less ideologically pure pushed harder for that inevitable necessary Worker’s Revolution where they could seize the reins.  Both were mostly unopposed.  In 1960 John F. Kennedy was their King Arthur.  LBJ with his Great Society was the greatest thing to happen to Progressivism since FDR.  In 1964 Ronald Reagan gave a speech at the Republican National Convention, A Time for Choosing.  You should give that a listen.  Nobody then apparently did.  The people chose LBJ.  Richard Nixon was a sterling example of the faults of Conservatism and the Republican Party.  Jimmy Carter’s malaise worked greatly in their favor.  They suffered a bit of a setback with the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, but George H.W. Bush wasn’t even a bump in the road.  Bill Clinton was a disappointment to them. He still pushed the Progressive Postmodernist agenda, just not as far or as fast as desired.  Bush 43 was a speed bump, but Barack Obama was their shining star.  Utopia was just over the horizon.  (I knew the end was near when Obama won his second term with a majority of the vote.)  Hillary might not bring it to fruition, but she would be another Great Leap Forward.
And then Donald Trump won the election.
Already mentally fragile, the Faithful went clinically insane.
That insanity was fed and nurtured by the Politburo. The media, entertainers, and other Faithful stoked it.  I’m not going to list all the examples, but you’d have had to be in a coma to have missed the last four years of increasing insanity.  It’s been a positive feedback loop.  Everything not explicitly Progressive Postmodernist is racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic, et cetera, et cetera, ad infinitum.  Why?  Because Marx says that a revolution of the Proletariat is a necessary step for the overthrow of the Bourgeoisie, but capitalism makes people comfortable and comfortable people do not revolt.  Everyone must be made a victim, miserable and righteously angry.  The effort over the last sixty years has been to balkanize the United States.  “Strength through Diversity” has become “Tribalism.” 
Diversity” Thomas Sowell once commented, “is not strength.  The ability to deal with the problems caused by diversity is.  America’s ability to deal with these problems has been America’s greatest strength.”  “United We Stand, Divided We Fall” has never been more apparent.
The Progressive Postmodernists have identified the Bourgeoisie as anyone not explicitly a Progressive Postmodernist, but most explicitly Caucasians and mostly males.  If you are a white Progressive Postmodernist, you’re still suspect because of your inherent racism and privilege.  We’ve gone from Two Minutes Hate to non-stop hate.  The inherent contradictions in the Progressive Postmodernist platform are starting to show as they are beginning to Cancel each other, but through it all, Donald John Trump has been the catalyst to this particular reaction.
Trump has for the last four years shrugged off every attack as if he was dressed in Teflon coated Chobham armor, but now he’s up for reelection.  Another four years of Trump will further damage the advancements that the Progressive Postmodernists have made over the last thirty years.  So here’s the point (finally) of this essay:

The wheels come off the train and the train comes off the track in 2021, one way or the other.

The End of America has been predicted by many people for quite some time.  The Progressive Postmodernists appear to have decided that the time is ripe.  The national debt cannot be ignored forever.  The projected entitlement spending is unsupportable.  All their preparation of the battle space through balkanization has brought us to this point.  Black Lives Matter, itself organized and run by self-proclaimed Marxists, is the hinge on which the lid is swinging, but Pandora’s Box is certainly opening.  I don’t think we’re going to stop the greed, envy, hatred, pain, disease, hunger, poverty, war, and death that will come flooding out of it, and there most likely won’t be much around afterward to put them back in.
Here’s my prediction:  The 2020 election is going to be a clusterfuck.  The Left does not intend to lose, and will do everything in its power to ensure that. As I said in March, I don’t think Creepy Uncle Joe will be the nominee, but I could be wrong.  Honestly, I expect the October Surprise to be an accusation of Donald Trump carousing with Jeffery Epstein and underage girls.  Why else would Ghislane Maxwell  have turned up now?  She might cost them a few low-profile Faithful, maybe a Politburo member or two, but if they lose, the “peaceful protests” we’ve seen recently will seem like a walk in the park.  All those “defunded” demoralized police who are now terrified of doing their jobs, won’t.  And the Left will discover to their horror that the police aren’t there to protect the citizens from them, but to protect them from the citizens.  All those guns and all that ammunition that has been purchased since 2000?  Well, when Americans get to fuckery, it will be fuckery unlike anything seen before.  The question is, will that shock return them to sanity, or will it be all-out war?  I wouldn’t bet on sanity.  I’d bet on them doubling-down.

If the Democrats win, and they probably will since they’ll be cheating as hard as possible, they’ll take it as a mandate to really crank up the Progressive agenda, and the millions of us who haven’t swallowed that ideology will be their sworn deadly enemies.  They have already weaponized the IRS and the Justice Department against Trump supporters, expect that to be cranked to 11 because the Deep State is deeply Progressive Postmodernist.  There will be a breaking point.  It might not be in 2021, but it won’t be long thereafter.  In the mean time, our position as a World power will be greatly diminished, and other hostile nations will be taking full advantage.  China will most probably annex Taiwan.  Russia will take over Ukraine and as many of its other former satellites as it can.  China and India may exchange nukes.  Iran might nuke Israel and/or set one off in the continental U.S.  And who the fuck knows what L’il Kim in North Korea is going to do?  In short, the 2020 election could be the match that lights off the next World War.  

Either way, the United States of America as we know it will no longer exist, and I see no way to stop it.  We could have a few decades ago, but we didn’t.  We didn’t realize the opposition had gone crazy.  Well, Ayn Rand and a few others did, but nobody in a position to do anything listened.  By the time Ronald Reagan won the Presidency I think it was already too late.  He was too concentrated on defeating the Soviet Union to look into his own back yard.

As Robert Heinlein wrote some time back in the 1960’s, “The worst thing about living in the declining era of a great civilization is knowing that you are.”  As on most things, he was right.

Somebody cheer me the fuck up with cat videos.  At least this one was only 2,400 words.

Update, 8/3/2020:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kN9pdj3GHWk]

Quote of the Day – Victor Davis Hanson Edition

From his recent piece Year Zero at NRO, but do read the whole thing:

Gun sales are at record levels. I supposed the revolutionaries never investigated the original idea of a police force and the concept of the government’s legal monopoly on violence? It was not just to protect the law-abiding from the criminal, but to protect the criminal from the outraged vigilante.

Only police can stop blood feuds such as the ones we see in Chicago or like the medieval ones of Iceland’s Njáls saga, or the postbellum slaughtering of the Hatfields and McCoys. We are already seeing a counterrevolution — as the Left goes ballistic that anyone would appear on his lawn pointing a semiautomatic rifle to protect mere “brick and mortar.”

Without a functioning police force, do we really believe that the stockbroker is going to walk home in the evening in New York City without a firearm, or that the suburbanite in Minneapolis in an expansive home will not have a semiautomatic rifle, or that the couple who drives to Los Angeles with the kids to visit Disneyland will not have a 9mm automatic in their car console? The Left has energized the Second Amendment in a way the NRA never could, and for the next decade, there will be more guns in pockets, cars, and homes than at any time in history.

Truth

Quote of the Day – GeekWithA.45 Edition

From the Wayback Machine:

Societies Gone Mad

To the people of my parent’s generation, World War II was a reality that they had lived through, and not a bunch of black and white movies starring John Wayne.

Books upon books were written on the subject, to help them digest and understand just how it was that something of that magnitude could actually happen, how it was that an entire European society could go insane and do what it did. (As for the Japanese society, it was insane to begin with, and thus more easily understood)

Yes, as politically incorrect as it is, I stand by what I just said:

“Entire Societies Can and Have Gone Stark Raving Batshit Fucking Insane.”

The Practical Result of “Gun Control”

Just over 17 years ago I wrote a two-part post, Is the Government Responsible for Your Protection?  In it, I discussed a couple of cases that proved that there is no “Duty to protect” on the part of the government — municipal, county, state or federal.  The second example was of Linda Riss, a New York City resident who was stalked by a jilted lover.  She tried to get police protection, but could not.  Until an attacker hired by her ex threw lye in her face, scarring and blinding her.  THEN she got round-the-clock protection.  She sued the NYPD – and lost. 
The dissenting judge in the case wrote this:
Linda has turned to the courts of this State for redress, asking that the city be held liable in damages for its negligent failure to protect her from harm. With compelling logic, she can point out that, if a stranger, who had absolutely no obligation to aid her, had offered her assistance, and thereafter Burton Pugach was able to injure her as a result of the negligence of the volunteer, the courts would certainly require him to pay damages. (Restatement, 2d, Torts, § 323.) Why then should the city, whose duties are imposed by law and include the prevention of crime (New York City Charter, § 435) and, consequently, extend far beyond that of the Good Samaritan, not be responsible? If a private detective acts carelessly, no one would deny that a jury could find such conduct unacceptable. Why then is the city not required to live up to at least the same minimal standards of professional competence which would be demanded of a private detective?
Linda’s reasoning seems so eminently sensible that surely it must come as a shock to her and to every citizen to hear the city argue and to learn that this court decides that the city has no duty to provide police protection to any given individual. What makes the city’s position particularly difficult to understand is that, in conformity to the dictates of the law, Linda did not carry any weapon for self-defense (former Penal Law, § 1897). Thus, by a rather bitter irony she was required to rely for protection on the City of New York which now denies all responsibility to her.” (My emphasis)
As I wrote at that time, this is the practical result of “gun control.” Denial of the means to defend yourself, while not providing any other layer of real protection.

This situation has raised its head again in many places, but New York in particular.  Read the New York Post piece Worse than War:  My Night Besieged by Looters and Thugs in New York.  Excerpt:

Every minute brought some new shock and a fresh surge of adrenaline: more and more of those roving gangs, some sticking around for minutes. Squad cars racing down in convoy, sirens blaring. The smashing of windows (a hair salon on the block, I learned in the morning, had been smashed in). The screeching of tires. The shouting of men: “Stop, you motherf–ker!”
Why won’t the men in blue stay in front of our house?
At two in the morning, it couldn’t be denied that one particular roving gang was roving no more; its members were obviously staking out our building. Now cackling, now going ominously silent. Should I race upstairs and bring a kitchen knife? How would this scenario play out? Would they just smash our lobby and leave? What could stop them if they wanted to take the elevators up to our homes?

Not a damned thing.  It’s a meme, but it’s a fact:

See also Joe Huffman’s Quote of the Day.