Despair and Utter Hopelessness

Welcome to today’s dose of Extremist Content. You’ve been warned.

In August of 1979, actor/director/writer/comedian/pedophile Woody Allen had a piece published in the New York Times entitled My Speech to the Graduates. For those old enough to remember, this was immediately before the election that year and Ronald Reagan was running against incumbent Jimmy Carter. The piece began with these lines:

“More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”

Yes, it’s a funny line but remember what was being shown on TV campaign ads. Ronald Regan was going to get us into nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Carter might lead to despair and utter hopelessness, but a Regan Presidency meant total extinction. Choose well.

Flash forward to 2016. Once again we were told we had that same choice. Hillary Clinton might lead us to despair and utter hopelessness, but Trump promised total extinction.

Odd that in both cases the dire predictions did not come true but regardless, in the long run neither the election of Regan in 1979 nor the election of Trump in 2016 stopped or significantly slowed the Long March towards despair and utter hopelessness.

The end of that march seems to be approaching ever more rapidly.

Earlier this month a Twitter contributor and podcaster named Darryl Cooper writing as @MartyrMade on Twitter published a 35-Tweet long examination of why Trump supporters believe that the 2020 election was stolen. It’s worth reading if you haven’t already. I’m only going to quote two of the Tweets here:

“The reaction of Trump ppl to all this was not, “no fair!” That’s how they felt about Romney’s “binders of women” in 2012.

(Or the deliberate lie that he hadn’t paid income taxes. – Ed.)

This is different. Now they see, correctly, that every institution is captured by ppl who will use any means to exclude them from the political process.”

“They were led down some rabbit holes, but they are absolutely right that their gov’t is monopolized by a Regime that believes they are beneath representation, and will observe no limits to keep them getting it. Trump fans should be happy he lost; it might’ve kept him alive.”

After the shock of the election and for the better part of five years that Regime did everything in its power – short of assassination – to prevent Trump from being sworn in, and afterwards to restrict his ability to do his job and to keep him from completing his first term.

There was no way on Earth they were going to allow him to have a second.

The Regime isn’t exclusively the Democratic Party, or even just the Progressive Left. It’s an amalgamation of oligarchs and useful idiots on both sides of the political aisle, both in and out of government.

Professor Angelo Codevilla is professor emeritus of international relations at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, a former U.S. Navy officer, foreign service officer, and professional staff member of the Select Committee on Intelligence of the United States Senate and has written extensively about the political changes in the United States over the last few decades. I strongly recommend you read his 2010 essay America’s Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution. However in a 2013 interview he gave an interesting explanation of just who “the Ruling Class” actually includes:

(T)he Democrats (are) the senior partners in the ruling class. The Republicans are the junior partners. The reason being that the American ruling class was built by or under the Democratic Party. First, under Woodrow Wilson and then later under Franklin Roosevelt. It was a ruling class that prized above all its intellectual superiority over the ruled. And that saw itself as the natural carriers of scientific knowledge, as the class that was naturally best able to run society and was therefore entitled to run society. The Republican members of the ruling class aspire to that sort of intellectual status or reputation. And they have shared a taste of this ruling class. But they are not part of the same party, and as such, are constantly trying to get closer to the senior partners. As the junior members of the ruling class, they are not nearly as tied to government as the Democrats are. And therefore, their elite prerogatives are not safe.

In the aforementioned “America’s Ruling Class” essay, Codevilla says, in relation to the bank bailouts resulting after the 2008 housing market crash:

When this majority discovered that virtually no one in a position of power in either party or with a national voice would take their objections seriously, that decisions about their money were being made in bipartisan backroom deals with interested parties, and that the laws on these matters were being voted by people who had not read them, the term “political class” came into use. Then, after those in power changed their plans from buying toxic assets to buying up equity in banks and major industries but refused to explain why, when they reasserted their right to decide ad hoc on these and so many other matters, supposing them to be beyond the general public’s understanding, the American people started referring to those in and around government as the “ruling class.” And in fact Republican and Democratic office holders and their retinues show a similar presumption to dominate and fewer differences in tastes, habits, opinions, and sources of income among one another than between both and the rest of the country. They think, look, and act as a class.

In his Twitter thread Cooper speaks, 280 characters or fewer at a time, of the unconstitutional election law changes, the media’s coverup of the Hunter Biden laptop story, the Department of Justice’s illegal spying on a Presidential candidate using fabricated evidence and lies to get warrants, of public officials claiming in public that they’d seen incontrovertible evidence, then under sworn testimony that they in fact did not, and of Time Magazine crowing about the “conspiracy” to “fortify the election” by government, media and private sector individuals using both private and government funds. The end result being that a significant portion of the American public no longer trusts the government – legislatures both State and federal, the President, governors or mayors, the three-letter Federal agencies, the Courts or the election process. Nor do they trust what was once known as “the Fourth Estate,” the media, now considered a Fifth Column and with good reason.

Victor Davis Hanson, former Professor of Classics for the University of California, current Senor Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, historian, author and columnist, has a thorough understanding of history, both ancient and modern, and a gimlet eye towards modern trends. Professor Hanson has been keeping tabs on the decaying social structure of the US and the world for years in op-eds, books and speeches. Generally he tries to explain what is happening today with reference to history, in a “we’ve been here before, here we are again” kind of way, but one of his most recent pieces is a dark departure. The American Descent into Madness is a disturbing read, but I can’t refute any of his points. The subtitle of the piece is “America went from the freest country in the world in December of 2019 to a repressive and frightening place by July 2021. How did that happen?” It’s a good question. The answer should have you nodding your head and loading your firearms. Excerpt:

“In the last six months, we have seen absurdities never quite witnessed in modern America. Madness, not politics, defines it. There are three characteristics of all these upheavals. One, the events are unsustainable. They will either cease or they will destroy the nation, at least as we know it. Two, the law has largely been rendered meaningless. Three, left-wing political agendas justify any means necessary to achieve them.”

Which is precisely the same language as Darryl Cooper’s reference to a government “monopolized by a Regime that believes they are beneath representation, and will observe no limits to keep them getting it,” and Codevilla’s explanation of the “Ruling Class.”

He refers to the mass influx of illegal aliens (yes, I said the verboten phrase) across our Southern border and contrasts it to the strong COVID restrictions laid upon American citizens and legal residents: “Note how the administration applies standards to its own citizens that it does not apply to foreign nationals illegally entering the country.”

He talks about skyrocketing crime – and how it is concentrated in Democratically-ruled urban enclaves, places that haven’t seen a Republican governor, mayor or city council member in decades (it would appear that at least the Junior Partners manage things a bit better):

“Scarier still is the realization that if one is robbed, assaulted, or finds one’s car vandalized, it is near certain the miscreant will never be held to account. Either the police have pulled back and find arrests of criminals a lose-lose situation, or radical big-city district attorneys see the law as a critical legal theory construct, and thus will not enforce it. Or the criminal will be arrested and released within hours.”

This is not sustainable either.

That paragraph though reminded me of something from a while back:

Professor Hanson, July 2021:

“So a subculture has developed among Americans, of passing information about where in the country it is safe, where it is not, and where one can go, where one cannot. This is clearly not America, but something bizarre out of Sao Paulo, Durban, or Caracas.”

In 2003/04 blogger TheGeekWithA.45 wrote some insightful things now being illustrated daily. From November of 2003:

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.”

For some, it was brief and temporary, and for others, it was more or less a permanent state of affairs.

You can quote your moral relativism and chide me for my white male euro/christo/judeo centrism, but I will never, ever, ever, ever accept that it’s perfectly OK for a society to commit genocide, mass rape, enslave and/or execute conquered military and civilian people, as a matter of that society’s normal operating procedure. That is the very definition of a high end insane society.

I don’t think so much that the shock was such that savagery in a society could exist, for the people of my parents generation recognized that savagery did exist. I’ll admit, they may have passed out the label too injudiciously in cases, but at least they didn’t deny its reality. What shocked them was that an allegedly “civilized” society could go south so quickly.

“People are moving away from certain states: not because they’ve got a job offer, not because they want to be closer to family, but because the state they are living in doesn’t measure up to the level of freedom they believe is appropriate for Americans. We are internal refugees.”

The fact that things have gone so far south in some places that people actually feel compelled to move the fuck out should frighten the almighty piss out of you.

Ten or fifteen years ago, I would’ve dismissed that notion, that people were relocating themselves for freedom within America as the wild rantings of a fringe lunatic, but today, I’m looking for a real estate agent.

It is a symptom of a deep schism in the American scene, one that has been building bit by bit for at least fifty, and probably more like seventy years, and whose effects are now visibly bubbling to the surface.

Just open your eyes and take a long look around you.”

I would say the parallels are chilling if only they were unexpected.

From a January 2004 post by TheGeek I managed to save some of:

We, who studied the shape and form of the machines of freedom and oppression, have looked around us, and are utterly dumbfounded by what we see.

We see first that the machinery of freedom and Liberty is badly broken. Parts that are supposed to govern and limit each other no longer do so with any reliability.

We examine the creaking and groaning structure, and note that critical timbers have been moved from one place to another, that some parts are entirely missing, and others are no longer recognizable under the wadded layers of spit and duct tape. Other, entirely new subsystems, foreign to the original design, have been added on, bolted at awkward angles.

We know the tools and mechanisms of oppression when we see them. We’ve studied them in depth, and their existence on our shores, in our times, offends us deeply. We can see the stirrings of malevolence, and we take stock of the damage they’ve caused over so much time.

Others pass by without a second look, with no alarm or hue and cry, as if they are blind, as if they don’t understand what they see before their very eyes. We want to shake them, to grasp their heads and turn their faces, shouting, “LOOK! Do you see what this thing is? Do you see how it might be put to use? Do you know what can happen if this thing becomes fully assembled and activated?”

I used those excerpts in a post I titled “While Evils are Sufferable” from September of 2004. The paragraph immediately preceding that excerpt I wrote:

We’re headed toward tyranny because we won’t look at it. The signs are all there, but we won’t admit to ourselves that it’s possible. I have to agree with the Left on one thing: bloody oppression of our rights is coming, eventually. I just think it’s equally likely to be at their hands as at the hands of the Right. For decades now our government has been constructing the individual mechanisms of it, as the Geek with a .45 once wrote eloquently about.”

And I’m still quoting him today. But we can’t not look at it anymore, as Prof. Hanson shows. It’s being shoved in our faces on a daily basis with the message “Nothing to see here, move along. Conform. Obey.” The tools and mechanisms of oppression are now nearly fully assembled, and are being ever more rapidly activated.

The Regime has been spending money we cannot ever pay back – the bank bailouts weren’t the first example – and the rate of spending is accelerating. The current National Debt is $28.5 trillion dollars and climbing. That’s $28,500,000,000,000, more than $85,000 per man, woman and child in the nation (not including the aforementioned illegal aliens). And they’re planning on spending another what, six trillion this year alone? This is unsustainable and everyone knows it, but federal spending is how votes get bought, and as Thomas Sowell observed, the #1 problem of politicians is getting elected. Problem #2 is getting re-elected, and whatever is #3 is WAY down the list, but this reckoning cannot be put off forever. You can deny reality for a while, but you can’t deny the consequences.

The Regime made up the “Russian Collusion” narrative and used it to spy on an opposition candidate, and afterward an opposition President. They used that excuse to vilify anyone associated with the Administration in order to limit that administration’s ability to carry out its agenda.

The Regime made up a narrative of drunken teenage sexual assault to prevent a Supreme Court nominee from being confirmed, and the media spread the lies to the point that a significant portion of the population believes it. It’s not like that was a new thing. They’d done something similar to Clarence Thomas.

The Regime exploited a false narrative that police officers deliberately hunt and murder black men. They encouraged the “mostly peaceful” protests that burned sections of cities to the ground after they were first looted. They discouraged law enforcement and refused to prosecute the perpetrators. The “Defund the Police” movement and subsequent changes to laws relating to use of force have caused many good officers to quit or retire, leaving behind…?

Oh, and mass protests without masks was OK during the Pandemic because the cause was just. But if you want to kayak off the shore in California by yourself, you’re going to get arrested and thrown in close proximity with others in a holding cell. But that’s OK. If you’re convicted they’ll probably let you go home because of the risk of contracting COVID in incarceration.

Five governors put COVID-infected elderly into retirement homes, resulting in tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths. Gov. Cuomo wrote a book about what a good job he did handling COVID and won an Emmy, but we’re supposed to ignore all those deaths on his watch and by his orders.

Meanwhile, Gov. Ron DeSantis, governing a state with comparable population to New York and a similar if not greater number of elderly didn’t enforce draconian restrictions and didn’t put infected elderly into nursing homes. Now the media treat him as An Enemy of the State, though Florida’s outcome was far better than New York’s.

The Regime worked with industry and media to spread their narratives and gaslight the American public, and they’re not at all apologetic over it. They’re shocked that it didn’t work as expected. As CNN talking head Mika Brzezinski has pointed out, controlling what people think is the media’s job. They’ve lost control of The Narrative and it frightens them.

And now The Regime has declared that basically anyone who supported Donald Trump, anyone who waves an American flag without trampling and burning it, anyone who objects to .gov action on Constitutional grounds, basically anyone who drives or would drive a pickup truck, own an AR-15 or object to the status quo is a “Right-wing extremist.” And it has declared that Right-wing extremists – all of them by definition racist, misogynist, xenophobic homophobes – are the “greatest threat” to “American democracy,” especially as they support making a repeat of 2020 as difficult as possible.

As Stalin said when he channeled Joe Biden, “I don’t care who votes, I only care who counts the votes.” When you can control who counts the votes, you don’t have to buy them anymore. This is important when you no longer CAN buy them anymore.

To this end, they have done everything in their power to silence Donald Trump, and are now experimenting with ways to silence anyone opposed to the The Regime’s aims. Effective online opponents are demonetized and/or deplatformed. One of the most popular Reddit boards was terminated because it was explicitly pro-Trump. An entire social media platform was booted off the Internet for daring to allow opposition speech. They want desperately to disarm their opposition and are looking for any excuse to seize the power necessary to do so that won’t cause too much public backlash, because when the shit finally hits the fan they want to control the guns AND the people who wield them. There are, by many estimates, 500 million to nearly a billion firearms in private hands, most of which aren’t registered anywhere. Good luck with that, but then again, reality hasn’t meant much to them for quite a while.

They have purged the officer ranks of our military of warfighters in favor of the reliably Politically Correct, and are now doing the same thing to the enlisted ranks. As a result, our Navy is a public shambles, and who knows about the other branches? They put fences, razor wire and ideologically-vetted National Guardsmen around the Capitol after the January 6 protest they INSIST was an “Insurrection,” but their weapons were empty. As someone noted, had that ACTUALLY been an insurrection, you would have been able to tell by the astonishing number of Special Elections that followed it.

They’re playing with a powder keg.

In May of 2009 I asked Bill Whittle to pen a modern version of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. To my shock he responded, but unfortunately in the negative. Why did I do that? Because as someone once noted, There is no coherent and cohesive philosophy behind the opposition to the Progressive Left or the Regime. At the beginning of 1776 the thirteen colonies of Britain were populated with British citizens, subjects of the Crown and of the belief that the current unpleasantness could be worked out. After Common Sense hit the stands, selling some hundred thousand copies to a population of perhaps three million people, they were British no more. They were Americans. They shared a philosophy of freedom.

We don’t have that today, and without it we run the risk of chaos and slaughter unlike anything seen before, with only dictatorship to follow. One more link: On July 20 Lindell Denham, a writer at Global Liberty Media, published an interesting piece entitled “Mad Max” and the Thin Veneer of Civilization. I recommend the whole essay, but this is the point of it: “Civilization may be miles wide, but its depth is measured in inches.” AKA: “Entire societies can and have gone stark raving batshit fucking insane.”

“Civilization” isn’t buildings and farmland and infrastructure. Civilization is the rules people follow to live together without killing one another too often, and those rules are being ignored, bent, shattered – all around the world but disturbingly here at home. The Progressive Left has been hard at work since at least the 1920’s making sure that the structures of Western Civ were destroyed from within. They’ve succeeded. A new “Common Sense” wouldn’t have the same effect now and for several reasons, the first being:

First, the colonists were overwhelmingly farmers and in jobs that supported farming. They all knew how hard it was to eke out a living, and how close to the edge they all lived. Prof. Hanson notes the insanity of the modern Left, and he notes that this insanity is tolerated. We have the luxury to tolerate insanity. Look at Los Angeles and San Francisco. The colonists did not. Second, the colonists were overwhelmingly literate. Estimates of between 70% to nearly 100% literacy in the colonies as opposed to England where the rates were estimated at 48-74%. This indicates that these people were not ignorant dirt-diggers. On the other hand, the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy determined that as much as 14% of the adult English-speaking American population was unable to know “more than the most simple and concrete literacy skills.” Another 29% can only “perform simple and everyday literacy activities.” To comprehend something like Common Sense requires performing “moderately challenging literacy activities” or more. That’s 43% of the population who can’t (or won’t) get it.

No wonder they keep saying “nobody reads anymore.”

Second, the Colonists overwhelmingly had a uniform ideology – they were almost all practicing Christians of one flavor or another. A lot of noise is made about the Founders being “Deists,” but they had a belief and they followed it. The population read the Bible (no pun intended) religiously. The Founders read Greek and Roman histories and modern philosophers like Locke.

That’s not so much the case these days.

That population was primed for it. Our population is primed against it. I would argue deliberately so.

A few days ago writer Michael Smith published on his Substack “An Open Letter to Joseph Robinette Biden, President of the United States of America,” interestingly subtitled “But when a long train of abuses and usurpations…” It is, as you can imagine, a modern rewriting of the Declaration of Independence, with a long list of abuses and usurpations pretty much mirroring and expanding upon what Prof. Hanson detailed in his piece. He concludes his Open Letter thus:

Well, sir, we have rapidly come to a point where we find we are no longer disposed to suffer insufferable evils. We believe we have made the case that you, sir, your administration, and your party have no moral authority to govern the right and righteous people of this nation.

“Regrettably, we the people find we must withdraw our consent to be governed by you, your Vice President, and your entire administration and in the true spirit of the founding of this great nation, we do so assert it is our right, it is our duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for our future security and to assure the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Unfortunately, the outcome of such throwing off will not be the outcome of the 1776 Declaration. The thin veneer of civilization will crack and shatter, and an attempt to seize dictatorial power will be made by someone (or several someones). They may be successful. Someone usually ultimately is. But in the interim the destruction of the United States will be thorough. They will rule over an ash heap. A heavily-armed ash heap not too interested in being ruled.

We live in the greatest time to be alive in human history. Fewer people live in abject poverty. Most “poor” people today live better than royalty did 300 years ago. Electricity, running water, hot water, personal transportation, access to the sum total of all the knowledge collected since written history began. I could go on. And we’re on the cusp of becoming a spacefaring species.

Of course it’s time to tear it all down. Human beings are a disease on the planet and it’s time to trim them back we’re told. For the planet, you know.

No, it’s not going to turn out well at all if we finally reach that point of despair and utter hopelessness. Let us pray we don’t achieve total extinction.

Choose wisely.

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.

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]

President Trump Starts to Drain the Swamp

J. Christian Adams weighs in on the weaponization of the Justice Department.

Justice is no longer blind. Investigations, charges, and even prison terms depend on the ideological views of the targets.

If you are a friend of the president, the Justice Department “career lawyers” will do all they can to find a venue in the District of Columbia where they know a rabid population of Democrat jurors will do all they can to send you to Big Sandy.

If you doubt me, you haven’t heard of Tomeka Hart, the nasty partisan jury foreman in Stone’s trial who should have never been on the jury in the first place.

The Scales of Justice come in two versions, one for Democrats and one for Trump.

Let’s examine those Justice Department “career lawyers.”

It is now plain that “career lawyer” isn’t a euphemism for unbiased and impartial. It’s exactly the opposite. It usually means Democrat, leftist, elitist, culturally hostile to middle America and feverishly anti-Trump.

Read the whole thing.

Quote of the Day – Wolves and Sheep

I don’t know who came up with this, but I cannot disagree with it:

Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding on what to have for dinner.

A representative republic is 5000 wolves and 4000 sheep voting 5 wolves and 4 sheep into office to decide what to have for dinner.

A constitutional republic is a similar situation but with a constitution saying that lamb cannot be for dinner, with a Supreme Court of 5 wolves voting against 4 sheep to determine that mutton is not lamb.

Government has no real restraints in reality.

Quote of the Day: Larry Corriea Edition

From his Monster Nation post The 2nd Amendment is Obsolete, Says Congressman Who Wants To Nuke Omaha:

In something that I find profoundly troubling when I’ve had this discussion before, I’ve had a Caring Liberal tell me that the example of Iraq doesn’t apply because “we kept the gloves on”, whereas fighting America’s gun nuts would be a righteous total war with nothing held back… Holy shit, I’ve got to wonder about the mentality of people who demand rigorous ROEs to prevent civilian casualties in a foreign country, are blood thirsty enough to carpet bomb Texas.

You really hate us, and then act confused why we want to keep our guns? But I don’t think unrelenting total war against everyone who has ever disagreed with you on Facebook is going to be quite as clean as you expect.

RTWT.