Immanentize the Eschaton!

In political theory and theology, to immanentize the eschaton means trying to bring about the eschaton (the final, heaven-like stage of history) in the immanent world. In all these contexts, it means “trying to make that which belongs to the afterlife happen here and now (on Earth).” –

Wikipedia

There were plotters, there was no doubt about it. Some had been ordinary people who’d had enough. Some were young people with no money who objected to the fact that the world was run by old people who were rich. Some were in it to get girls. And some had been idiots as mad as Swing, with a view of the world just as rigid and unreal, who were on the side of what they called “The People.” Vimes had spent his life on the streets and had met decent men, and fools, and people who’d steal a penny from a blind beggar, and people who performed silent miracles or desperate crimes every day behind the grubby windows of little houses, but he’d never met The People.

People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so, the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn’t that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people.

As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn’t measure up.

Terry Pratchett – Night Watch

I’m hardly the first blogger to use “Immanetize the Eschaton” as the title to a post, but it seems remarkably apt given the events of the last few – very few – months. Whether you agree or not, a LOT of people believe that the 2020 Presidential election was not won by legitimate means, and the behavior of the Ruling Party doesn’t lend any credence to their “popular victory,” or their mantra of “healing” and “unity.” I am on record as saying that Donald Trump was despised by both sides of the aisle for not being one of the Anointed who believe that they have the mandate to rule. As you know, I like quotes, and I’m inordinately fond of this one:

The central fact to appreciate about Donald Trump is that he was elected without the permission, and over the incredulous objections, of the woke oligarchy that governs us. 

Roger Kimball – “A Party of Faction and Fantasy,” American Greatness

Well, the Ruling Party of the Ruling Class is making up for it now.

I’m also on record saying that we no longer live in a Constitutional Republic. We live, as Roger Kimball states, in an oligarchy disguised as a democracy, run by the most powerful members of the government and the people who pay to put and keep them there. I’ve quoted Prof. Angelo Codevilla before, but this is an appropriate place to put this again:

(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.

Angelo Codevilla interviewed for Tablet Magazine October 23, 2019

Donald Trump was a shocking “Fuck You” to the ruling class from what Codevilla terms the “Country Class” – that is, all those people in flyover country who won’t vote how they’re told.

I’m far from alone in my assessment. I’m of the firm opinion that the Progressive Left believed that once Obama won his second term they were set. The eschaton night not be immanent, but it was imminent. Hillary was going to be another “great leap forward” towards the heaven on Earth promised by Karl Marx. Another repeat quotation:

The rise and fall of the Marxist ideal is rather neatly contained in the Twentieth Century, and comprises its central political phenomenon. Fascism and democratic defeatism are its sun-dogs. The common theme is politics as a theology of salvation, with a heroic transformation of the human condition (nothing less) promised to those who will agitate for it. Political activity becomes the highest human vocation. The various socialisms are only the most prominent manifestation of this delusion, which our future historian calls “politicism”. In all its forms, it defines human beings as exclusively political animals, based on characteristics which are largely or entirely beyond human control: ethnicity, nationality, gender, and social class. It claims universal relevance, and so divides the entire human race into heroes and enemies. To be on the correct side of this equation is considered full moral justification in and of itself, while no courtesy or concession can be afforded to those on the other. Therefore, politicism has no conscience whatsoever, no charity, and no mercy. (Emphasis in original.)

Glenn Wishard, “A Thumbnail History of the Twentieth Century”Canus Iratus blog.

Except for the premature obituary for “the Marxist ideal,” that paragraph is spot-on. Progressive Leftism is a religion, with all the attendant characteristics: Dogma, the treatment of heathens, heretics, and apostates, indulgences, all of it. Government is God, legislators are the angels (remember, Satan and his demons were once angels), the “news” media are the clergy, and we proles are the laypeople, the heathens, the apostates and the heretics. And they will drag us, kicking and screaming if necessary, into their promised Utopia.

Or kill us, if they deem us too deplorable to save.

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.”

“New Jersey Voters, Redux” – Musings of the GeekWithA.45, November 11, 2003

The Progressive Left has gone stark raving batshit fucking insane. It wouldn’t be so frightening if they didn’t have control of the news, the schools, the entertainment media, and now the government:

The 2016 election was stolen by Trump with the aid of Putin, but the 2020 election was unquestionably fair and even-handed, and there’s something wrong with you if you do not accept that.

Violence is speech, but silence is violence, but free speech is violence. Rioting is “mostly peaceful.” Two plus two equals racism and racism is bad, and all white people are racists, so President* Biden believes that minorities somehow can’t figure out how to use the Internet. Segregation is cool again as is discrimination in hiring. Defunding police departments is anti-racism. People who were never slaves should get reparations from people who never owned a slave, but the children brought illegally in to the country should not suffer for their parent’s crime. Genocide is bad, except in China where it’s just a different cultural norm.

Someone who was biologically male for most of his life can “identify as female” and defeat biologically female women in sex-segregated sports, and they’re brave for doing so. Dr. Rachel Levin, Biden’s transgender nominee for assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services refuses to answer questions regarding gender reassignment performed on minor children during approval hearings. (There are, at present, apparently 112 genders.) If you’re heterosexual and don’t date trans you’re a transphobe, but if you’re homosexual and won’t date outside your gender (whichever of the 112 you are) you’re OK.

“Equity” now means “Equality.” All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others. Cows, pigs and sheep are among the greatest threats to the environment. We need to go to all electric cars, but we’re going to charge them using wind power on distribution systems that can’t support the load. Those clean electric vehicles run on batteries, but the Left seems to have no concern of where the materials for those come from. Mining is bad, but electric vehicles will require a massive increase in mining, not to mention the expansion of the power distribution infrastructure necessary to charge them. But math is racist, and I’m sure everything will work out fine.

And people who own guns are murderers just waiting for the opportunity, but insulting them in public is perfectly safe.

If you dare to point out the insanity, you’re a racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic deplorable who must be CANCELLED. You’re a heretic, or worse, apostate. Oh, and Ben Shapiro is a Nazi.

I wrote many years ago that both liberals and conservatives were necessary for a healthy society, but the Left is no longer interested in debate and compromise. Cancelled philosopher Stephan Molyneaux has postulated that “Cancel culture is a dress rehearsal for mass murder.” It’s not that far a reach. As soon as you see people as things to be measured, they don’t measure up. But the Progressive Left goes one step further – they don’t see people, they only see groups. And there are only two groups – those of the Blue Church, and those who are not – and we have a long history of bloody religious warfare to reflect on.

“Longshoreman Philosopher” Eric Hoffer wrote in his 1951 seminal 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 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.

There is an abundance of hatred, and Satan is currently Trump. His supporters are demons. Example (one of millions):

Mr. (Did I just assume zir gender?) Pound deleted the post, but not before there were screenshots. Can’t you smell the love, the tolerance, the healing?

Smells like burning flesh to me.

Some of the things Progressive Leftists have written in the wake of the Left’s Beelzebub, Rush Limbaugh’s passing are as bad or worse. Love trumps hate, don’t you know.

Another Tablet magazine piece much more recent makes this point:

There’s no “Democratic Party” that may have a few radical kooks like Ilhan Omar but is really a solid bastion for good liberals. There’s no “Republican Party” that may have been hijacked by bad man Trump but is really a fortress of principled conservatism. We no longer have institutions—like television networks or newspapers or universities or political parties—that respond to anything approximating reasonable persuasion. There’s no point in trying to argue with, apply pressure on, or rebuke the likes of Michael Che, because the likes of Michael Che actually do hate you, and they’ve been telling you they hate you for quite some time now.

“Thank You, Michael Che!” – Tablet Mag, 2/22/21

“Politics” it is said, “is the art of compromise.” “War,” said von Clausewitz, “is politics by other means.” I have repeated and repeated the observation that has made itself manifest in the nearly 18 years I’ve been writing this blog: Charles Krauthammer noted in 2002 that “To understand the workings of American politics you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.

You don’t debate with evil. You don’t negotiate with evil. You don’t compromise with evil. You don’t tolerate evil. You DESTROY evil. You pat it on the head until you can find a rock big enough to bash its skull in.

And control of the culture, education, and the government makes for a big damned rock.

Here’s the tinfoil yarmulke part of this essay: The preparations are underway. When debate and compromise are no longer possible, then force is the only thing left. They know it, and they’re projecting it on their enemy, us.

The Progressive Left has created and exercised its Sturmabteilung (yes, I know I risk Godwinization, and they loathe such comparisons, but this one’s apt. Their outfits are black instead of brown, but the actions are the same.) They’ve been set loose in the Pacific Northwest and some other cities and have been allowed to riot, commit arson, loot and occasionally murder with little to no legal consequence (violence, after all, being free speech you know.) Andy Ngo has studied Antifa, itself with roots in radical Socialism, in depth, and says that they are preparing for war, generously supported by the more mainstream Progressive Left. Black Lives Matter, an organization founded by two open Marxists, is also part of the preparations, but these are in my opinion just the Progressive Left’s “useful idiot” shock troops – the first to go against the wall after the Revolution.

This was, in my opinion, a calculated political move. Create widespread unrest and destruction and dare the Trump administration to respond. If he sends in the National Guard, it proves he’s a tyrant. If he doesn’t respond, he appears weak in the eyes of his supporters and the general public. It was an effective tactic, especially combined with the total lack of support that local police departments received from their Democrat superiors.

That was effective, too. A lot of police resigned or retired early when it became apparent that doing their jobs would mean arrest and prosecution. Many have since been replaced by new hires. Who wants to bet that these new hires have been screened for Wrongthink? More troubling is the ideological cleansing of the United States military – the Officer class under Obama, and the enlisted ranks now under Biden/Harris.

Have no doubt, “extremism” means “Wrongthink.”

As I said previously, nothing says “incipient civil war” better than loyalty checks for your military.

Good question.

The tradition of the Progressive Left is to use psychological projection, to accuse the right of what they’re already doing. This piece, for example:

If Trump wins, these unofficial paramilitaries, the Proud Boys, the Boogaloo Boys, the state militias, all these other groups, are essentially going to become semi-official Brownshirts [the original paramilitary of Germany’s Nazi Party] of the Trump campaign,” he said. “If Trump loses, these people are going to become the Iraq insurgents. They’re going to go underground. They’re going to be furious and, over time, with the Trump campaign leading as the political wing of this insurgency. With a president in exile, those people will resort to armed violence, political standoffs, and terrorism.

“Democrats Are Stuck With a Republican Party Rife With Conspiracy Theorists, Anarchists and Terrorist Sympathizers” – Terrell Jermain Star, The Root, Feb. 18, 2021

Do read that whole thing. It’s projection in 70mm IMAX. But here’s the killer quote:

Democrats introduced a resolution calling for an investigation into white supremacy earlier this month. This week, the NAACP, civil rights law firm Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll and Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss) are suing Trump, his lawyer Rudy Giuliani and two white nationalist groups over the coup. While these are promising steps, Democrats have few options to get to the heart of white terrorism because their Republican colleagues in Congress benefit from it politically. We have to view the GOP as enemy combatants because, for years, they have proven that Democrats are theirs.

(My emphasis.) James T. Hodgkinson got the memo, apparently.

Look at this chart of things that most concern GOP voters:

Image
Kristen Soltice Anderson, Twitter

Now look at this one:

Image
Same source

The Progressive Left is absolutely convinced that racist White Nationalist Trump supporters are going to revolt against their enlightened, Progressive society. They are the reasonable ones, it’s the RIGHT that won’t compromise (that is, give up half of what is demanded of them, and keep doing it until they lose it all.)

And what are they going to do about it? Silence them. Disarm them. And if that isn’t enough, kill them.

Calling today’s Leftists hypocrites requires endless contortions. It is simpler and scarier to see that the Left has rejected the standards of common citizenship. The Left is rejecting equal protection, equal treatment of the laws, and the rule of equal laws and opportunities for all. Its principle of justice is to help friends and relatives while harming enemies.

Double standards sown into law enforcement and culture, with the rulers defining the boundaries between the two standards, is the hallmark of oligarchy. Oligarchy is not just the rule of the rich, though that is part of it. Oligarchy is the rule of the few for their own interest. Oligarchic justice demands that unequals be treated unequally, as Aristotle writes, and it extends the idea of human inequality way beyond its legitimate scope. Friends of the oligarchy are treated one way because they are presumed better. Enemies or non-friends of the oligarchy are treated another way because they are presumed worse.

The Left is not hypocritical to its standards: help friends, harm enemies, unequal justice. So, the Left can practice what was hypocrisy openly and without shame. What, from the standpoint of common citizenship, amounts to hypocrisy is, for today’s Left, an edge of their attempt to transform the regime from a republic of equal citizenship to a woke oligarchy.

“The Left’s ranks are full of revolutionaries, not hypocrites” – Scott Yenor, The Washington Examiner, 1/28/21

No, they aren’t hypocrites. They’re engaged in a war and there are two sets of rules. Yes, they’re revolutionaries. They’re running a revolution to immanentize the eschaton, and that has driven them insane, but even the insane know that blowback will eventually come. They must do everything in their (extensive) power to delay, deflect, diminish that blowback. The attempt to control the flow of information is critical component. (Can you imagine the outrage if, under the Trump administration, a similar letter had been issued pointing out the lies and falsehoods put forth by the “mainstream” media, asking why they were still being carried?)

After more than a decade of record gun sales, the U.S. population has accumulated a huge number of firearms:

Data Source FBI.gov

That’s over three hundred million background checks in thirteen years. A check does not mean a sale, and a sale does not mean a new gun, but we were told in 2007 that the number of guns in private hands here was between 250,000,000 and 290,000,000:

UN Small Arms Survey, 2007 Chapter 2, Completing the Count, Civilian Firearms (PDF)

I’ll leave it to you to estimate the new total, but the UN put it at 393 million in 2018. I think that’s light. Very light. We’re told we’re paranoid about “the government taking our guns away,” but H.R. 127 is a gun-grabber’s wet-dream. Apparently whoever wrote it for Congresswoman (did I assume zer gender?) Sheila Jackson Lee read Donald Trump’s book Art of the Deal. Demand the ridiculous, settle for 80% of it. One percent is unacceptable. But we’ll be pilloried in the establishment media for “not compromising” and “being unreasonable,” and arming up for revolution. Just another step along the path. But:

Do not be fooled by a belief that progressives, leftists hate guns. Oh, no, they do not. What they hate is guns in the hands of those who are not marching in lock step of their ideology. They hate guns in the hands of those who think for themselves and do not obey without question. They hate guns in those whom they have slated for a barrel to the back of the ear.

Stanislav Misin, A Russian View on Gun Ownership

Indeed.

First we’re “The Other.” Then we’re “Deplorables.” Finally, we’re DANGEROUS. Have you noticed how the Left is treating the events of January 6? It was called “1000 times worse than 9/11” and “it became clear that the United States is involved in a generational struggle to save our democracy.” Not our Republic, our Democracy. The “mostly peaceful” riot in the Capital has been called an “armed insurrection,” except nobody apparently was armed. We were told that the plan was to “capture and kill” members of Congress. Apparently not. We were told that a Capitol Hill police officer died after being “hit in the head with a fire extinguisher.” Apparently not. But there’s going to be a witch-hun… an independent investigation of the events of that day, events that by all evidence were made possible by the (in)action of certain members of the Ruling Party.

The Progressive Left has made the January 6 Capitol “mostly peaceful” riot into the equivalent of, well, a reader of Instapundit explained it:

And why not? The oligarchy thinks that the CCP is doing it right. Senior Biden advisor Anita Dunn once said that Mao was among “her favorite philosophers” and that the Wuhan virus was the “best thing that ever happened” to Biden, largely responsible for his election. How long before China’s “Social Ranking” system is implemented by Big Tech here, no legislation required?

Anyone not of the Blue Church, especially gun owners, are dangerous reactionary maniacs waiting for the right time to rise up in counter-revolution! AND MANY OF THE LEFT BELIEVE IT. When you’re asked how you could believe the election was stolen, they’re asking you how crazy you are:

(Q)uite a few people I know who don’t ordinarily discuss politics with me – or, in the case of one, much of anything with me – have interrogated me (there really is no other word for it) as to whether I believe the election was fraudulent. I have given essentially the same answer as Anton, which in its summary form goes like this: the rules were changed so that we can never know; there was reason to think in advance that the results would be suspect, and then things are reported to have actually happened that do make them suspect, and the courts have never ruled on the merits and almost certainly never will.

Here’s is my own theory as to why my own interrogators and those of Anton are asking – nay, demanding – that we agree with them on the fairness of the 2020 election: they see our answers to the question as a test of our sanity as well as our judgment. The question they’re really asking is: how far gone are you? Have you lost your mind? Do you not see what’s obvious to every thinking and decent person who hasn’t been taken over by QAnon fantasies: that Joe Biden won fair and square and everything else is a baldfaced and pernicious lie?

They’re not looking for reassurance about the fairness of the vote; they feel they know for certain that it was fair. They’re not looking for Anton’s opinion because they plan to respect it, although they obviously respect his intellect. They are asking in order to test his opinion: has this previously intelligent person (whom they used to somewhat respect despite the political differences they have with him) gone stupid as well as mad? Is he that gullible and disordered in his thinking?

They start with the premise that they are correct in their beliefs, and work backwards to see whether he will come up with the right answer. No other answer will do.

“Michael Anton has a question: Why Do the Election’s Defenders Require My Agreement?”Neo blog, 2/25/21

So how crazy, how dangerous, are you?

In a previous Quote of the Day, a commenter on Facebook put it this way: “…if we wanted to really be violent, there would have been special elections.

They want us to be violent. They need us to be violent. They have to have an excuse to crack down and violate the Second Amendment with the blessings of the populace and the full cooperation of the police and the military. They actually think they can pull it off.

Keep fucking around and they’ll find out.

Updated to add:

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.

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.

 

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]

When and How Did I Turn Right Wing?

Another Quora question.  Lots of post inspiration over there.  Here’s my answer:

I’m 58 years old. That means that in 1974 I was 12. I vividly remember Watergate, and Nixon’s resignation. I also remember Jimmy Carter’s “American Malaise” period. I think Jimmy Carter is a nice man who was a lousy President. I turned 18 in 1980. I cast my first vote for President for Ronald Reagan. I watched as he, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II rapidly accelerated the downfall of the Soviet Union. It was literally inspiring.

Then George H.W. Bush won the office. He was not Ronald Reagan. He was Establishment Northeastern Country Club Republican. When he ran for reelection I voted for Perot in that one. Perot tried to warn us, and he was right.

Bill Clinton became President. Honestly, Bill (except for being a rapist) wasn’t that bad as President, but his wife gave me the heebie-jeebies. Dead people, cattle futures, sexual abuse, etc. etc. etc. and everything rolled off the pair of them like they were Scotchguarded.

It was about this time that I figured out that the Democrats were no longer “The Loyal Opposition,” they were The Other Side™ and they were out to WIN, no holds barred. And they cared not a whit about what the law said, they just had to find an accommodating judge. The Constitution? P’shaw, merely an outdated guidline. Appoint enough Judges to the Federal courts and especially the Supreme Court and you can make the law mean whatever you want. “Social Justice,” you see. Which is the opposite of actual justice.

Then Bush v. Gore cemented that for me. I watched the press conference where, as I noted at the time:

With the continuing legal maneuvers in the Florida election debacle, I have been forced to a conclusion that I may have been unconsciously fending off. The Democratic party thinks we’re stupid. Not “amiable uncle Joe” stupid, but DANGEROUSLY stupid.

Lead-by-the-hand-no-sharp-objects-don’t-put-that-in-your-mouth stupid.

And they don’t think that just Republicans and independents are stupid, no no! They think ANYBODY not in the Democratic power elite is, by definition, a drooling idiot. A muttering moron. Pinheads barely capable of dressing ourselves.

Take, for example, the position under which the Gore election machine petitioned for a recount – that only supporters of the Democratic candidate for President lacked the skills necessary to vote properly, and that through a manual recount those erroneously marked ballots could be “properly” counted in Mr. Gore’s favor. They did this in open court and on national television, and with a straight face.

So, it is with some regret that I can no longer hold that uncomfortable conclusion at bay:

They’re right. We are.

And I started seriously wondering how we got to that point.

I could go into vast (and hyperlinked) detail here, but I’ll instead just use one word:

Progressivism.

I’m not really a Conservative. Steven Den Beste (PBUH) said it best, and I’m in complete agreement with him. So I invite you to read his explanation. But I’m not a Progressive.

More Quora Tolerance

I was asked to answer the question “Is it accurate to say that the left is intolerant of the right’s ideas while the right is intolerant of the left’s behaviors?

One of the first answers I saw to the question was by a Scott MacDonald that went like this:

The left is intolerant of intolerance.

The right is intolerant of…

Religions that are not Christianity
Skin colors that are not white.
Political views that are not modern Republican
Sexuality that isn’t hetero
and so forth.

Put it to you this way.

If the left were tolerant, of the right’s intolerance we would be allowing them to walk all over actual minority groups who need protecting, not majority religious groups who want to act like persecuted minorities, just because after a few thousand years people are finally evolving past their ideas.

So I responded in kind:

The Left is intolerant of anyone who does not toe their (ever-changing) ideological line. If you oppose any part of their incoherent philosophy, you must be a:

Racist
Sexist
Gun-hugger
Bible-thumper
Cousin-lover
Homophobe
Islamophobe
Misogynist
Science-denier
Etc.

Oh, and “You want (X-group) to DIE!” (Where X is: old people, brown people, children, homosexuals, etc., etc., etc. depending on the outrage-of-the-day.)

THAT is the “Party of Tolerance and Inclusion.”

Why do I say “incoherent”? Well, consider this “logic” train:

Gender is a social construct, but “I am woman, hear me roar,” but anyone can be a woman, but no uterus – no opinion, but transwomen are women, but “I demand women’s rights!”, but men are women, but men are scum, but drag queens are beautiful, but appropriation is evil. – Matt Walsh.

Note that the people trying to end Freedom of Speech, who protest speakers, who bang drums and fire off air horns to drown out the words of people they don’t “tolerate,” are the Left, not the Right. The Right likes it when the Left runs their mouths. It exposes their hypocrisy and vacuity. And far too often it exposes the schisms between the various victim-groups that make up the Left.

So yes, I think it’s fair to say that the Right does not like the behavior of the Left, and the Left hates the ideas of the Right. Pundit Charles Krauthammer explained it in 2002 – “To understand the workings of American politics you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.

You do not debate with evil. You do not compromise with evil. You do not tolerate evil. You destroy evil. It’s a religious crusade. They are the Chosen People who will drag us, kicking and screaming if necessary, into their Promised Land. As evangelists, it is not unusual for them to enter careers in education, journalism, and the entertainment media. How better for them to proselytize? And, of course, politics, because how else can they drag us into Utopia unless by force of government? After all, their ideas are so wonderful, they must be mandatory!

My answer was collapsed for violating Quora’s “Be Nice, Be Respectful” policy. Mr. MacDonald’s is still up.

May Victims of Communism Day

Today is the 13th annual Victims of Communism Day, a day to remember the people murdered by their own governments in their quest to achieve a “worker’s paradise” where everyone is equal, where “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” is the beautiful dream lie.  R.J. Rummel, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Hawaii, calculated that the total number of victims of Communism – that is, the domestic victims of their own governments – in the USSR, China, Vietnam, North Korea and Cambodia is 98.4 million people.  For all Communist governments during the 20th Century, he puts the estimate at approximately 110 million.  And this wasn’t in warfare against other nations, this was what these governments did to their own people – “breaking eggs” for their utopian omelette that never gets made.

Six million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, and another six million people the Nazis decided were “undesirable” went with them.  “Never again” is the motto of the modern Jew, and many others just as dedicated.  But “again and again and again” seems to be the rebuke of history.

The Communists are hardly alone in these crimes.  Rummel estimates that the total number of people murdered by their own governments during the 20th Century is on the close order of 262 million, but the single biggest chunk of that truly frightening number is directly due to one pernicious idea:  That we can make people better.

Why do I own guns?  For a number of reasons, but one of them is this:

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?  —  Alexandr Solzhenitzyn, The Gulag Archipelago

The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed – where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.Judge Alex Kozinski, dissenting, Silveira v. Lockyer, denial to re-hear en banc, 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, 2003.

I intend to repeat this post each May 1 that I continue to run this blog. 

Several years ago, Sipsey Street Irregulars had a post to go along with this one.  STRONGLY RECOMMENDED.

In 2013 Not Clausewitz also made a worthy addition.

And for those who insist that “That wasn’t real Communism” –

Quote of the day – Not Real Socialism Edition

I just recently had a “discussion” with someone on FB on the topic of “democratic socialism.”  He indignantly left the conversation when I posted this cartoon:

But that’s not the QotD.  This explanation – in its entirety – by Larry Corriea is:

I keep seeing this idiotic thing where “socialism” is used as a synonym for “government”. So if you like fire departments or roads, you’re a socialist…

BULLSHIT. These people drive me insane.

Government and its many programs all existed before Karl Marx. Socialism has an actual definition, and it isn’t this mealy mouthed, wishy-washy, nebulous, feel good, gibberish people use today. It actually means something.

Going back to the men who created the philosophy, socialism means that regular “value” isn’t what drives economics, instead production is coordinated through central government planning. That’s the key element. Duh.

In other words, you take decisions away from the people/the market who would normally make them based upon what they value, and instead put those decisions in the hands of government. This is why Bernie is offended by there being too many brands of deodorant.

It isn’t social programs. It isn’t roads. It isn’t fire departments. Or any other project governments have spent tax money on for thousands of years. If it was just that stuff they’d call themselves democrats/republicans in the US and this wouldn’t be an issue.

But Bernie calls himself a socialist for a reason, and words mean things. Socialism isn’t a blank slate for you to scribe your dreams on.

Which is why almost everybody who has actually studied history at all thinks actual socialism (as opposed to your fluffy magic unicorn version) is evil, while those who have studied history and still want it are wannabe totalitarians and statists who think it sounds awesome, because they assume they’re going to be the ones in charge. Then they sell the fluffy unicorn version of socialism to the useful idiots. They tell you it’s social programs and fairness, when actual reality is bread lines, inefficiency, and eventually gulags and firing squads.

Chris Matthews and James Carville are flaming liberals, but they’ve studied enough history to know that socialism is a terrifying evil. That should be a clue to all of you who normally identify as liberal, but who’ve been snookered into thinking socialism is innocuous.

And no, Denmark isn’t socialist, when even the PM of Denmark has to come out and say, Hey Bernie Bros, quit using us as an example of socialism, because we’re actually a traditionally capitalist nation with a lot of social programs.

Because again, socialism isn’t a synonym for government. Whenever you treat it as such, you’re being a useful idiot. When you say you prefer socialism, it’s actually you saying you want the government to be in charge of everyone’s business, because you think freedom is icky. (which is also why that declaration gets such a strong reaction from everyone who actually knows what socialism is)

This ignorance is partly the right’s fault for knee jerk reaction calling every government program socialist. However, they are right to do so if the program is designed to take freedom/decisions away from people/business, and instead have the government make those decisions for them. That would be socialist.

This is also why polls show young people prefer “socialism”, because they’re thinking of the fluffy unicorn version they’ve been sold. When you narrow it down and ask about specific policies, it turns out they don’t want the government telling them where/how/what they can do with their lives, while some unaccountable faceless bureaucrat decides what their time/labor/effort is worth.

If you’re just in favor of social programs and safety nets, the democrat party is thataway (and don’t blame me that they suck! That’s on them!). But don’t let the DNC’s suckiness confuse you into supporting a system which has been one of the greatest, actual evils in human history.

There are No “Solutions” – Only “Trade-offs”

Today’s Electric Car Batteries Will Be Tomorrow’s E-Waste Crisis, Scientists Warn

Wind turbines kill endangered bird species, electric cars require toxic batteries and run off of coal-fired power plants, The infrastructure necessary to provide charging stations for plug-in EV’s will cost billions and require even more power generation, but no one wants a nuclear power plant in their back yard.

Engineering isn’t about “solutions,” it’s about picking the best options and minimizing the costs of the trade-offs.

Politics is only about getting elected and re-elected. Politicians can promise the moon without any concern about the costs – monetary, environmental, social. And they depend on a public ignorant to the realities. Shouts of “Consensus!” are used to ensure that no one opposed gets listened to.

That’s not how science – or engineering – work. Reality is what remains even if you don’t believe in it.

Quote of the Day – Oren Litwin Edition

From the comments here many many moons ago when he was still a PhD candidate in Political Science, (and followed this blog) Oren Litwin wrote this:

If the non-socialist end of the political spectrum cannot create a political philosophy that is both good theory and emotionally appealing, we’re doomed.

Any political philosophy that is not self-reinforcing is by definition not the best political philosophy. Libertarianism (with a small “l”) features a stoic acceptance of individual risk (i.e. the lack of government intervention) for the sake of long-term freedom and prosperity–yet takes no measures to ensure that the society educates its young to maintain that acceptance of risk. The equilibrium, if it ever exists in the first place, is unstable and will collapse.

This aside from the fact that libertarianism is emotionally cold and unfulfilling to most people, who have not trained themselves to consider lack of outside restraint to be worth cherishing.

 Yup.  We’re doomed.