Category: Current Affairs

A Question about Donald Trump

Things are getting interesting. How long until we collapse into hot civil war? The replacement of the rule of law with the rule of lawfare is a bad sign. The following repost, slightly redacted, is from January 2022, and more relevant that ever.

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This from a reader:

It would be very interesting to hear your take on Trump — why do you think that his leadership of the country, despite obvious personality flaws, is less risky for the US and the world than a reasonable alternative? Yes, the ideological, thoughtless, and totalitarian far-left is dangerous, but isn't unprincipled, pugilistic and me-and-my-family first leadership any better? Is your thinking driven by "the lesser of two (or three) evils"?
1) I avoid talk of the lesser or least of evils. I prefer to speak of the better or the worse. 
 
2) Politics is not theoretical; it is practical. There is political theory, of course, and it divides into political science (empirical and non-normative) and political philosophy (normative). But politics is neither of the two, despite the fact that politics is informed by political theory. Politics is a practical game! It is not mainly about having the right views. That does no good unless one can implement them. And no one with practical sense lets the best become the enemy of the good. Politics is a matter of better or worse, not perfect or imperfect.  Politics is about accomplishing something in the extant suboptimal circumstances with the best implementable ideas.
 
3) And which ideas are those? The ideas, values, and principles of the Founders. They arrived as close as anyone ever has to a sound and viable political theory. 
 
4) Now if you accept (2) and (3), then the choice is clear: you support Trump over Hillary, and Trump over Biden. For Trump, unlike Hillary and Biden,  supports those values and not just with words. He proved his support for them in the teeth of vicious opposition by pseudo-cons and leftists alike  in his four years as POTUS.  A long list of his accomplishments could be inserted here. To mention just one, and a very important one: the SCOTUS appointments.
 
5) If you complain about Trump's character, I will agree that he is flawed but go on to point out that the same is true of Hillary and Biden.  Character-wise, either the three are on a par, or the two Democrats are worse. This fact is invisible to many because Hillary and Biden are professional politicians deeply practiced in the arts of deception: mendacious to the core, they know how to hide their flaws, faults, and foibles.  But anyone with life-experience and knowledge of human nature can see that Biden is a fraud and a phony rooted in no principle except that of  the promotion of himself and his family's interests. The same goes for Hillary to a lesser extent. But as I said, they know how to don masks and play the game. Trump, on the other hand, crudely lets it all hang out. He tells you what he thinks. He is blunt, brusque, boorish, and sometimes pointlessly brutal. (I am thinking of that nasty slur he hurled against Carly Fiorina.) He probably knows that his alpha-male strut and swagger is off-putting to many, but he refuses to play the game.
 
6) What decides the question for me is that Trump alone supports the American system of government whereas this is plainly not the case with Hillary or with Biden who is the puppet of puppet masters out to undermine the American system.  That should be blindingly evident to anyone who has been paying attention.
 
7) There comes a time when a corrective is needed, an outsider self-powered, un-owned, and unafraid to kick the asses of the Dementocrats to his Left and expose the fecklessness of the cuckservatives to his Right.  A corrective and a clarifier. No more of the usual Left versus Right. The battle for the soul of America is now a contest between the borderless globalism of the greedy elites and an enlightened nationalism, populist and patriotic.  Hillary/Biden versus The Donald, to personify it.
 
But 'the virtuous'  and the upholders of 'norms' are too scrupulous to rouse the people against their tyrants.

Here:

Describing Wilkes and two of his allies, Walpole wrote, “This triumvirate has made me often reflect that nations are most commonly saved by the worst men in [them].” Why? Because, he concluded, “The virtuous are too scrupulous to go the lengths that are necessary to rouse the people against their tyrants.”

Until the coming of The Donald, that had certainly become the case in recent American politics. Until the Orange Menace loosed the fearful lightning of his terrible swift tweets, the “virtuous,” rather battle-fatigued traditional conservative movement—even when controlling both houses of the Congress—had been out-shouted and outmaneuvered by the unholy alliance of a Left-dominated, morally nihilist pop culture and educational establishment, and what is laughably referred to as the “mainstream” media, all nudging an increasingly radicalized Democratic Party further and further to the left.

 

Trump and the ‘Losertarians’

The Libertarian Party is for losers. If you are a conservative who votes Libertarian, you are behaving foolishly. You say you stand on 'principles'? Principles are great. And some of the Libertarian ones are salutary. But principles without power are just paper.  Politics is a practical game. Wise up and get with the program. Don't throw away your vote on unelectables. If it comes down to Trump versus Biden, you must vote for Trump.  Nikki Haley gets it. To paraphrase her recent  endorsement: Trump is  not perfect, but Biden is a catastrophe.

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

Politics is not about perfect versus  imperfect, but about better versus worse in the concrete circumstances in which we find ourselves.  That's what I mean when I say that politics is practical. I'm a theoretician myself, and unlikely to do much in the political sphere beyond vote and exercise my free speech rights.  But you must understand the political if you are to have any chance of ameliorative action within the political sphere.  Ameliorative praxis presupposes true theory. Libertarians, standing on 'principle,' have as little understanding of the nature of the political as do integralists. (See my Substack entries on integralism, here and here.) Their respective candidates are unelectable.   

Practically, you are a fool if you let the best become the enemy of the good by supporting candidates the probability of whose election is near zero.  Don't waste your time with third parties, which are nothing more than discussion societies in political drag.

Old Karl said that whereas the philosophers have variously interpreted the world, the point is to change it. He got it backwards. Job One is to understand the world; only then will you have any chance of changing it for the better. I hope you all agree that the commies changed things all right, but for the worse. Pace Barack Hussein Obama, progress is not change; progress is change for the better.  And to repeat myself, in the realm of praxis the realizable better is to be preferred over the unattainable best.

Politico reports here on foolish 'losertarian' opposition to Trump.  

“The vast majority of Libertarian Party members are not happy with this invitation,” said Bill Redpath, a 40-year veteran of the Libertarian Party and a former national party chair who’s helped organize their presidential ballot access for decades. “There are some people who call Trump the most Libertarian president of our lifetimes. That’s utterly ridiculous.”

What is Redpath's point? That Reagan was more libertarian than Trump? Maybe so. But Reagan is long gone. What is practically relevant is that Trump is more libertarian than any other electable candidate at present.   Who will stand up for 2A? Joey B.? RFK Jr.? Gavin Newsom?  2A is the lead that backs up the paper of the other ten. Catch my drift?

Do libertarians really value liberty? Or do they just like to talk?  In his address at the Libertarian National Convention, Trump said that if the libertarians are not happy with their usual 3% of the vote, they should nominate or at least vote for him. They nominated some unknown by the name of Chase something.  Oh yes, Chase Oliver. I'm already having trouble remembering a name I first heard two days ago.

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*Bobby Fisher famously said, "Chess is life." But we needn't go that far!

UPDATE (5/29) Walter E. Block: Libertarians should vote for Trump. https://www.wsj.com/articles/libertarians-should-vote-for-trump-4ef84994?mod=opinion_lead_pos8 But of course! Block has his head screwed on Right even if he is a libertarian.

If we pull the lever for Mr. Trump in these swing states, we may get a slightly more libertarian president and help free Mr. Ulbricht. If we vote Libertarian everywhere else, we make a statement and help preserve our ballot access.

Some Libertarians find Mr. Trump unacceptable on grounds of principle. True, he is no libertarian, but Mr. Biden—the wokester, the socialist, the interventionist—is much further from us on the political-economic spectrum than Mr. Trump.

Others are put off by Mr. Trump’s obnoxious behavior. He engages in name-calling. He puts ketchup on filet mignon.

Mr. Trump grew up in Queens. I’m roughly his contemporary and come from Brooklyn. I assure you that everyone in New York City is personally unbearable (except Staten Islanders). It is a geographical-genetic disposition. Ignore it. This act of his is mostly tongue-in-cheek. New Yorkers actually have contests to see who is the most insufferable. Prizes are given out.

On the ‘Congressional Catfight’

Some friends to my Right think women have no place in politics. I strongly disagree. But there's no denying that the recent 'catfight' in Congress supplies these extreme Righties with ammo.  

Tulsi Gabbard is one member of the distaff contingent who has more right to be in politics than a lot of men I could mention. Here she takes on the stupidest bunch of women on TV. 

Who Are These Hamas Supporters?

This just in from Tony Flood:

"From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” chant the useful idiots at elite institutions and parades in the West. Who are these people? Atheists who support theocratic lunatics, democrats who endorse medieval tyrants, feminists who defend misogynists who parade with the desecrated corpses of women, gays who defend maniacs who would joyfully hang them or toss them off the roof of a tall building. They talk of a secular, democratic and socialist Palestine. As George Orwell observed: “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.” 

Walter E. Block, "The Moral Duty to Destroy Hamas." (Emphasis added.) This is the text of the 927-word WSJ op-ed, published October 11, 2023, behind their paywall; Block posted it the next day on his Substack. 

Austrian School economist and first-generation Rothbardian (i.e., anarcho-capitalist libertarian), Block is a co-author of the 962-page The Classical Liberal Case for Israel (Springer 2021). For me, this book is prohibitively expensive; its argument, however, can be read for free in a documented-to-the-hilt article that the authors had published five years earlier in a peer-reviewed journal: Block WE, Futerman AG, and Farber R, The Legal Status of the State of Israel: A Libertarian Approach, Indonesian Journal of International & Comparative Law, No. 11, July 2016, 435-554. This link will open a 119-page pdf. 
I reiterate my stock disclaimer: Linkage does not constitute plenary endorsement.  I stand for free speech and open inquiry, and thus against those leftists, and in particular those leftists in cahoots with Islamists, who dishonor these classically liberal and traditionally American values. That being said, I fully endorse the material from Block quoted by Flood supra.
 
Addendum. Here is Hans-Hermann Hoppe's reply to Walter E. Block's "The Moral Duty to Destroy Hamas," above cited.  I am not qualified to enter this debate, but I will repeat the following from my partially autobiographical essay From Democrat to Dissident:
We were friends for a time, but friendship is fragile among those for whom ideas matter. Unlike the ordinary nonintellectual person, the intellectual lives for and sometimes from ideas. They are his oxygen and sometimes his bread and butter. He takes them very seriously indeed and with them differences in ideas. So, the tendency is for one intellectual to view another whose ideas differ as not merely holding incorrect views but as being morally defective in so doing. Why? Because ideas matter to the intellectual. They matter in the way doctrines and dogmas mattered to old-time religionists. If one’s eternal happiness is at stake, it matters infinitely whether one “gets it right” doctrinally. If there is no salvation outside the church, you had better belong to the right church. It matters so much that one may feel entirely justified in forcing the heterodox to recant “for their own good.”
 
Related (5/11):  Douglas Murray, Choose Life, not the Death Cults.  If, like me, you have no time to spend during working hours listening to slow-moving speeches, Murray provides an article adaptation of his speech before the Manhattan Institute, which adaptation is accessible via an internal link. 
 
 
Finally, I see that Malcolm and 'Jacques' are debating, civilly but trenchantly, over at Pollack's place.

Jubilant over Trump’s Win, Let Us not Forget the Colorado Baker

You and I are more like the baker than like The Donald.

Rod Dreher:

Jack Phillips is the Colorado cake baker who is constantly hauled in and out of court by lawsuits, and by actions by state officials, against him for refusing to bake specialized cakes that offend his conscience.

In 2018, one of the Christian baker’s antagonists went after him like this:

"I'm thinking a three-tiered white cake. Cheesecake frosting," the customer wrote in the June 4 email, according to Phillips' lawsuit filed in Denver's federal court on Tuesday. "And the topper should be a large figure of Satan, licking a 9" black Dildo. I would like the dildo to be an actual working model, that can be turned on before we unveil the cake."

Poor Phillips is now going to be hauled before the state Supreme Court again, in connection with this case, and his refusal to bake a cake meant to celebrate a gender transition. Guess who is now on the record backing the persecution via lawfare of this man?

Continue reading “Jubilant over Trump’s Win, Let Us not Forget the Colorado Baker”

Jubilant over Trump’s Win, Let Us not Forget the Colorado Baker

You and I are more like the baker than like The Donald.

Rod Dreher:

Jack Phillips is the Colorado cake baker who is constantly hauled in and out of court by lawsuits, and by actions by state officials, against him for refusing to bake specialized cakes that offend his conscience.

In 2018, one of the Christian baker’s antagonists went after him like this:

"I'm thinking a three-tiered white cake. Cheesecake frosting," the customer wrote in the June 4 email, according to Phillips' lawsuit filed in Denver's federal court on Tuesday. "And the topper should be a large figure of Satan, licking a 9" black Dildo. I would like the dildo to be an actual working model, that can be turned on before we unveil the cake."

Poor Phillips is now going to be hauled before the state Supreme Court again, in connection with this case, and his refusal to bake a cake meant to celebrate a gender transition. Guess who is now on the record backing the persecution via lawfare of this man?

Continue reading “Jubilant over Trump’s Win, Let Us not Forget the Colorado Baker”

Jubilant over Trump’s Win, Let Us not Forget the Colorado Baker

You and I are more like the baker than like The Donald.

Rod Dreher:

Jack Phillips is the Colorado cake baker who is constantly hauled in and out of court by lawsuits, and by actions by state officials, against him for refusing to bake specialized cakes that offend his conscience.

In 2018, one of the Christian baker’s antagonists went after him like this:

"I'm thinking a three-tiered white cake. Cheesecake frosting," the customer wrote in the June 4 email, according to Phillips' lawsuit filed in Denver's federal court on Tuesday. "And the topper should be a large figure of Satan, licking a 9" black Dildo. I would like the dildo to be an actual working model, that can be turned on before we unveil the cake."

Poor Phillips is now going to be hauled before the state Supreme Court again, in connection with this case, and his refusal to bake a cake meant to celebrate a gender transition. Guess who is now on the record backing the persecution via lawfare of this man?

Continue reading “Jubilant over Trump’s Win, Let Us not Forget the Colorado Baker”

Jubilant over Trump’s Win, Let Us not Forget the Colorado Baker

You and I are more like the baker than like The Donald.

Rod Dreher:

Jack Phillips is the Colorado cake baker who is constantly hauled in and out of court by lawsuits, and by actions by state officials, against him for refusing to bake specialized cakes that offend his conscience.

In 2018, one of the Christian baker’s antagonists went after him like this:

"I'm thinking a three-tiered white cake. Cheesecake frosting," the customer wrote in the June 4 email, according to Phillips' lawsuit filed in Denver's federal court on Tuesday. "And the topper should be a large figure of Satan, licking a 9" black Dildo. I would like the dildo to be an actual working model, that can be turned on before we unveil the cake."

Poor Phillips is now going to be hauled before the state Supreme Court again, in connection with this case, and his refusal to bake a cake meant to celebrate a gender transition. Guess who is now on the record backing the persecution via lawfare of this man?

Continue reading “Jubilant over Trump’s Win, Let Us not Forget the Colorado Baker”

Jubilant over Trump’s Win, Let Us not Forget the Colorado Baker

You and I are more like the baker than like The Donald.

Rod Dreher:

Jack Phillips is the Colorado cake baker who is constantly hauled in and out of court by lawsuits, and by actions by state officials, against him for refusing to bake specialized cakes that offend his conscience.

In 2018, one of the Christian baker’s antagonists went after him like this:

"I'm thinking a three-tiered white cake. Cheesecake frosting," the customer wrote in the June 4 email, according to Phillips' lawsuit filed in Denver's federal court on Tuesday. "And the topper should be a large figure of Satan, licking a 9" black Dildo. I would like the dildo to be an actual working model, that can be turned on before we unveil the cake."

Poor Phillips is now going to be hauled before the state Supreme Court again, in connection with this case, and his refusal to bake a cake meant to celebrate a gender transition. Guess who is now on the record backing the persecution via lawfare of this man?

Continue reading “Jubilant over Trump’s Win, Let Us not Forget the Colorado Baker”

Trump’s ‘Bloodbath’ Remark

Outdoing themselves in hyper-ventilatory TDS-fueled rage, Joe Scarborough and the rest of the mendacious insanos at MSDNC (aka MSNBC) and at other lamestream media outlets have seized upon Trump's bloodbath remark as if to illustrate Ayn Rand's point about context-dropping. Although I am no fan of Rand or her acolyte Peikoff as you can readily discern from my Rand category, this term from her lexicon does earn a non-plenary MavPhil endorsement.

Context matters!

A ‘Deplorable’ Straight from Central Casting . . .

. . . 'calls out' the lying leftist scumbag mayor of Athens, Georgia. James Lee takes on Kelly Gertz.  Was this staged? No, but it certainly looks that way. One of Hillary's 'deplorables' with a redneck hat, poor English, and missing a tooth rightly attacks a mendacious SOB whose first name is 'Kelly.' 

Fire the Bastards!

Here:

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said that federal employees who take part in a planned walkout in protest of the Biden administration’s Israel policy should be fired.

Well of course. But don't expect the Biden admin to do so since their talk of the rule of law is just talk. If the Biden bums took the rule of law seriously, they would enforce the nation's borders.

Andrew McCarthy: a walkout would be a crime.

Never Nikki

Rand Paul explains. 

And if the well-fed Chris Christie, who has wisely 'suspended' his campaign, is to be believed, Nikki Haley is "going to get smoked."

Going to get (Christie), and ought to get (Paul).

I admire Nikki: she's "in the arena, bloodied but unbowed," slugging it out with the big boys, standing her ground, maintaining her cool. She's an inspiration to all of us, women especially. But we don't need another damned neo-con.

Trump's the man. If you don't support him, I pronounce you a fool. Or if not a fool, then evil. If he is defeated or kept off the ballot, and you live in Democrat-run cities, you will get what you deserve, and suffer the wages of your political 'sin.'

And we who have sane political views will have a hard time resisting schadenfreude. 

You might enjoy a different view of Governor Christie:

Christie was the last high-profile GOP contender who was fighting for whatever remains of the soul of a Republican Party that, for all intents and purposes, has evolved into an authoritarian cult of personality with Trump as its center—posing what the former governor described as a real and present threat to democracy and national security.

The three claims being made about Trump are exactly the opposite of the truth. And yet there are those who say we should seek common ground with our political opponents. But these opponents, as enemies of truth, are our political enemies.  We share no common ground with them. They are an existential threat to us, and we to them. It's a war. Face the fact and get ready.

Claudine Gay Resigns

Good riddance: 

Gay, Magill and Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Sally Kornbluth testified before a U.S. House of Representatives committee on Dec. 5 about a rise in antisemitism on college campuses following the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war in October.

The trio declined to give a definitive "yes" or "no" answer to Republican Representative Elise Stefanik's question as to whether calling for the genocide of Jews would violate their schools' codes of conduct regarding bullying and harassment, saying they had to balance it against free speech protections.

Elise Stefanik is the hero here, a profile in civil courage. Anyone who thinks that the right to free speech includes the right to incite violence is a moral defective.

More than 70 U.S. lawmakers signed onto a letter demanding that the governing boards of the three universities remove the presidents, citing dissatisfaction with their testimony.

However, Gay received support from some of her colleagues at Harvard. Several hundred faculty members last month signed a petition asking school administrators to not bend to political pressure to fire the school's president over her testimony.

Gay has also been hit with accusations of plagiarism. She planned to submit three corrections to her 1997 dissertation after a committee investigating plagiarism allegations against her found that she had made citation errors, a university spokesperson said.
 
Is it surprising that faculty at Harvard have such low academic standards and consider plagiarism a peccadillo, if even that, when POTUS is a brazen and proven plagiarist and his wife 'Dr.' Jill Biden's dissertation is garbage? As the saying goes "The fish stinks from the head." 
 
Joey B really does set the tone, or rather the odor, of his entire malodorous mal-administration and the rest of the nation. Another prime mover of mendacity is the brazen liar and Orwellian truth-twister, Alejandro "The border is secure" Mayorkas, Director of — wait for it — Homeland Security. 

And You Call for a Cease-Fire?

Take a look at the massacre map. Then read this:

The world is yet again staring at the near inevitability of another global conflagration.   The flashpoint is in the Middle East and the Hitler of our time: the Mullahs of Iran.   The West, led by Barack Obama and Joe Biden, have chosen to follow in the footsteps of the self-absorbed European leaders of the 1930’s in dealing with Iran and their terrorist legions of Hamas, Hezb’allah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Ansar Allah (Houthis) among others.

The Obama/Biden policy in dealing with Iran has been to facilitate Iran in becoming a dominant player in the region in the naïve belief that if the West, and in particular the United States, treats the Mullahs of Iran as equals, they will evolve into non-belligerent leaders who can be trusted.  Even if that means the acquisition of nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles and sacrificing America’s only resolute ally in the region, Israel.

But is the disastrous Obama-Biden policy naïve, or is it something worse: a deliberate attempt to "fundamentally transform" (in Obama's words), and thus destroy the USA?  For example, why are no steps being taken by the Biden administration to control the southern (and northern) borders when it is a known fact that jihadis are entering the homeland?

Before 7 October it was clear enough that the purpose of the open border policy was to change the demographics of the USA in such a way as to make possible the permanent ascendancy of the Democrat Party. But now it can be seen that more nefarious motives were and are at work: to increase the likelihood of terrorist attacks within the homeland.  And what would they accomplish? They would give the current regime the excuse it needs for an even more draconian assault on the middle class and traditional American liberties.

UPDATE 1 (11/1)

Senator Hawley in a Congressional hearing hammers Alejandro Mayorkas who bears the Orwellian appellation "Director of Homeland Security." Is there anyone in the Biden administration more emblematic of the abysmal mendacity of said administration? 

These are very dangerous times. You'd best prepare for the immediate here and the possibly soon-to-arrive hereafter.

UPDATE 2 (11/1)

Pope Francis has called for a cease-fire:

"Ceasefire," he said, mentioning a recent television appeal by Father Ibrahim Faltas, one of the Vatican's representatives in the Holy Land.

He then added in his own words: "We say 'ceasefire, ceasefire'. Brothers and sisters, stop! War is always a defeat, always".
What he means, presumably, is that war is always a defeat for humanity. Is Bergoglio ignorant of recent European history and in particular the Second World War? If the Allies had not defeated the Axis powers, humanity (in the normative sense) and the high civilization of the Judeo-Christian type that the good pope supposedly represents, would have ceased to exist.
 
John Lennon famously if foolishly sang, "Give peace a chance." What he and Bergoglio the Benighted fail to understand is that sometimes we have to give war a chance.
 
Si vis pacem, para bellum. If you want peace, prepare for war. The price of peace is a credible deterrent. Weakness and appeasement invite attack. Joe Biden is weak on multiple fronts; no surprise then that the upshot is war on multiple fronts.  
 
Conciliation is obviously a very high value. But how conciliate those who are religiously committed to your extermination? How conciliate those who would rather die than permit you to live?