Category: Decline of the West

Leftism Exposed

The following statement is both well-written and accurate in every particular (emphasis added):

Leftism is a totalitarian force. Wherever leftism is in a position of power it tends to invade every private corner and force every thought into a leftist mold. In part this is because of the quasi-religious character of leftism: everything contrary to leftist beliefs represents Sin. More importantly, leftism is a totalitarian force because of the leftists’ drive for power. The leftist seeks to satisfy his need for power through identification with a social movement and he tries to go through the power process by helping to pursue and attain the goals of the movement. But no matter how far the movement has gone in attaining its goals the leftist is never satisfied, because his activism is a surrogate activity. That is, the leftist’s real motive is not to attain the ostensible goals of leftism; in reality he is motivated by the sense of power he gets from struggling for and then reaching a social goal. Consequently the leftist is never satisfied with the goals he has already attained; his need for the power process leads him always to pursue some new goal. The leftist wants equal opportunities for minorities. When that is attained he insists on statistical equality of achievement by minorities. And as long as anyone harbors in some corner of his mind a negative attitude toward some minority, the leftist has to re-educate him.

Let me add a second example to the one the author gives in illustration of the general point expressed in the italicized passage. His example is that equality of opportunity is not enough; a new goal must be posited by the 'progressive' who cannot rest content with anything, the goal of so-called 'equity' or equality of outcome, and this in defiance of the ineluctable reality of individual and group differences in attitudes and abilities.

My example is the one presently paraded before us by the so-called 'pride' contingent. Unsatisfied with being tolerated and left alone, they now demand to be accepted, affirmed, and celebrated for their depravity and corruption of children. But even this won't be enough for them: driven by a vicious intolerance at odds with the toleration they initially demanded,  they aim to replace the superior culture whose excesses spawned them and whose decadence is seemingly impotent to stop them. But it ain't over til it's over and we who are sane and reasonable have not yet begun to fight. Too many of us, lost in our private lives, have yet to wake up to the 'woke' madness. But wake up we will.  

But who made the statement quoted above?  You may be surprised.  I was. I now hasten to add that the truth of a statement and the soundness of an argument are logically  independent of the psychology of the one who makes the statement or gives the argument. To think otherwise is to commit the genetic fallacy.

Rod Dreher on (Loss of) Faith in Institutions

Here (emphases added)

I was pleased to see the all-Muslim city council in Hamtramck, Mich., stand up to the progressive sleazebags and say no, they are not going to fly Pride flags over city property. It’s against local moral standards, they say — and they’re right. More and more, we see Muslim parents standing up and doing the job of speaking out that Christians will not do. People who never read Michel Houellebecq’s controversial 2015 novel Submission think mistakenly that Muslims are the villains, because it’s about a democratic Islamist takeover of France. They’re not the heroes, but not villains either. The demoralized, secularized, gutless French are the villains. They are spiritually and morally exhausted, and surrender to Islamist government because they don’t know what else to do.

Me, I absolutely don’t want to live under Islamic government, but if I had to choose between living under the governance of the Hamtramck City Council or the Los Angeles city council (see below), that wouldn’t be a hard call. Twenty-two years after 9/11, I can hardly believe I typed that line, but here we are.

Why are we Christians so soft, and so uncaring about decadence? I don’t get it. I really did think that the Left going after kids to sexualize them was the bright red line that was going to make most people revolt against the sexual orientation/gender identity madness, but it hasn’t, not really. It may yet, but we’re going to have to sink even deeper into the filth before we hit bottom. We are still being lied to, constantly, by our government, by the medical establishment, and by the media about transitioning kids — and most people just chew their cuds and carry on. A federal judge in Arkansas just overturned the state’s ban on transing kids. Big Trans and its allies among elites are going to have their way — and most of us yawn and move on. It makes no sense. Do people ever think that their kids might end up on Pensacola beach, doing dildo ring toss with the dykes, or getting drunk and engaged in group masturbation?

Of the great religions, Islam is the worst, and Sharia law is antithetical to classical American values. BUT, if we need to make common cause with (moderate, non-terrorist) Muslims to defeat the utterly destructive, anti-civilizational Woke-Left and their globalist enablers, then so be it! I'll say it again: we need a broad coalition of the sane and the reasonable to defeat our enemies.  Hell, even the socialists over at The Militant are talking more sense than the wokesters!

Of Fox and Fellatio: A Fox News First?

This is the first time I have heard fellatio referred to on a major TV network. The sweet and wholesome Kayleigh McEnany reports. The fellatio reference is around 2:34.  Joey B, "devout Catholic" in journo lingo, stars as Porn Enforcer and takes a brave stand against book burning.

UPDATE (6/23)

Do you remember when our illustrious prez hung out with rapper Cardi B?  Click here to revisit the high-level discourse that flowed between these two cultural 'icons.' Birds of a feather . . . . Speaking of which, wouldn't John Fetterman, feeble and fettered in body and mind, make a good running mate for Uncle Joe in 2024? Our kakistocracy would be well-served by the dynamic Dementocratic duo. As for those of you who voted for Joe knowing all that you did or should have known, I am in too good a mood at the moment to tell you what I really think of you.

Biden-Fetterman 24

The Assault on Merit

Here:

In the case at issue, the leaders of Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, or TJ—a highly selective public magnet school in Fairfax County, Virginia—bemoaned the demographic imbalance that resulted from the school’s academics-focused admission policies. (The class of 2024, for example, is more than 70 percent Asian, and Hispanics and blacks fall far short of their general-population proportions in the overall school district.) The school board then switched TJ to a different system that, while not considering race directly, reduced Asian admissions by about a quarter. Among other changes, the new policy ditches standardized testing and guarantees admission to at least 1.5 percent of each middle school’s eighth-grade class.

For the record, I am not now and never have been Asian.

I will now pose a question to those of you who have taught high school or college classes, a question none of you will answer. Who were your best and worst students by race/ethnicity? Comments enabled.

‘2A’ a Terrorist Marker?

It emerged in the Congressional FBI whistleblower hearings that the abbreviation '2A' is a "terrorist marker." That came as news to me. (But see here.) I have been using '2A' from time to time as an innocuous abbreviation of 'Second Amendment.'  The context, of course, is the Bill of Rights which are the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution.

I have written sentences like this:

2A does not confer, but protects, the citizen's right to keep and bear arms.

My use of the harmless abbreviation makes me a terrorist, a white supremacist, and what all else in the eyes of the regime.  What does it make the regime? A police state.

So I suppose it is a good thing that it has been a very long time since I attended a Latin mass. These masses, as is now well-known, are notorious gathering points for insurrectionists, militiamen, and other violent extremists out to overthrow 'democracy.'  Much less known, however, is that these masses are conducted, not in old Church Latin, but in coded Latin.  Thus hoc est corpus meum is code for create mayhem. De mortuis resurrexit means: he rose up and committed insurrection.  There really are very few threats to the powers that be stronger and more insidious than the Latin mass, which is why Pope Francis, that faithful custodian of the depositum fidei, is such a staunch defender of the old mass against the forces of reform.

Sarcasm aside, part of understanding  the destructive Left is understanding their commitment to the hermeneutics of suspicion.  You can learn about said hermeneutics, and cognate topics, from my essay From Democrat to Dissident section 16.4. It is published in Hillman and Borland, eds., Dissident Philosophers: Voices Against the Political Current of the Academy, Rowman and Littlefield, 2021.  Available via Amazon where you can read some editorial reviews.

 

Ann Coulter on Daniel Penny

A characteristic of leftists and so-called 'progressives'  is that in their typical knee-jerk (reflexive as opposed to reflective) style, they reliably take the side of criminals while attacking the decent and law-abiding. If you don't understand this, you will never understand the Left and how pernicious leftists are. Having infiltrated the Democrat Party, they are now in the process of destroying once-great American cities.

For a very recent example, I now hand off to Ann Coulter:

New York City seems like a gag that’s gone too far. “First, we’ll release all the criminals because too many black bodies are in prison! Then we’ll denounce the police as Nazis and refuse to prosecute any suspects they arrest. The city will be overrun with violent criminals — raping robbing, assaulting and killing at will… But if anyone steps up to protect the citizenry from the mayhem that’s been intentionally inflicted on them, well, gentleman, then we’ll prosecute the hell out of that douchebag.”

This exactly how things are playing out right now with twenty-four-year-old Daniel Penny, the Marine veteran who subdued a deranged lunatic on the F train at the Broadway-Lafayette Street station in Manhattan on May 1.

 

Ann Coulter and Heather Mac on the Anti-Civilizational Left

No Biggie, Just the End of Civilization

When Race Trumps Merit …

Ann Coulter

May 10, 2023

Whatever you had planned to do for the rest of the day, please drop it and read this right now: Heather Mac Donald’s new book, “When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives.”

     It seems that in the hysteria that followed George Floyd's death in 2020, we agreed to destroy all of Western civilization — law, music, art, education, policing, science and medicine — to make up for black people not doing well on standardized tests.

     Mac Donald cites not hundreds but thousands of institutions that have flung aside standards in order to more fully dedicate themselves to the sole, driving purpose of our nation: boosting black people’s self-esteem.

[More below the fold.]

Continue reading “Ann Coulter and Heather Mac on the Anti-Civilizational Left”

Trump the Only Way Forward

Conservatives Lost the Culture War and the Trump Agenda is the Only Path Forward

Refreshingly realistic but also deeply troubling. I fear the author is right. Conservatives lost the culture war and so now: 

Conservatives do not have a viable path to political power any other way. The issues of national survival are of primary importance. There is no point in fighting a culture war if we don’t have a country in which this war can take place. [. . .]

Trying to rehash these old battles in the present political moment, when institutional Christianity no longer has any meaningful political or cultural clout, is a waste of time—at least at the national level.

COVID-19 made the weakness of American Christianity painfully clear. Protestant and Catholic churches alike overwhelmingly declared themselves nonessential during the spring of 2020. That was, sadly, merely an acknowledgement of a longstanding reality.

Virtually no one today cares what the pope or any megachurch pastor, for that matter, has to say about political and cultural life. Their endorsements do not move the needle and their influence has had little to no bearing, even on their own flocks, when it comes to preserving the older standards of Christian morality and decency.  

[. . .]

We live in a country where the president says it is antisemitic to ban trans surgery for minors. And yet you will strain yourself trying to hear any priest or pastor say a word in response. Millions of Americans are hurting, desperately confused about their very identity and sexual impulses, and the leaders of the churches have almost nothing to say. Nonessential workers indeed.

[. . .]

One wonders what purpose, at this point, the differentiation between denominations even serves. Pope Francis, just like John MacArthur, agrees with the leftist view of racism. And Tim Keller, just like Pope Francis, lauds mass immigration. On the most prominent liberal issues of our day there is total agreement among the leaders of the West’s supposedly different Christian denominations. 

America has a moral majority, all right. It’s just liberal. The Left controls every institutional power center in America. Wall Street, the media, the universities, Hollywood, the military—you name it—everywhere the liberal consensus reigns supreme. There is not a single Fortune 500 company in America, not one, that would denounce transgender surgery for minors. 

Those institutions shape the public consciousness in a way social conservatives simply cannot. Manufactured consent is real and all around us. A large portion of Americans simply accept whatever their televisions and cellphones tell them to believe no matter how perverted, wrong, or harmful. Even many of those who do not agree with it, at least bow to the moral consensus. Think of all those many millions who got vaccinated, not because they wanted to, but because their “job required it” or because they couldn’t “travel without it.”

The idea that large numbers of Americans are going to “wake up” and “push back” is simply a cope. That’s not how popular opinion works. The idea that Americans are going to see transgenderism as a bridge too far is, I think, much overhyped. I remember the gay marriage “debates,” such as they were. I remember Prop 8 passing in 2008 in California. I also remember how none of these setbacks for the Left ultimately had any bearing in the end. By 2015, gay marriage was the law of the land. Today it is untouchable liberal orthodoxy supported by a majority of Americans, including large numbers of “conservatives.”

Deploying more 10,000-word essays on teleology and the new natural law isn’t going to solve the social issue problem either. Millions of Americans didn’t start shoving dildos in orifices, guzzling sex change hormones, and consuming billions of hours of pornography a year because they read an article or heard an argument. These sexual and social perversions spring from a much deeper source, one that isn’t going to be solved by policy wrangling in D.C. think tanks. 

The spiritual crisis that afflicts the West runs far deeper than most social conservatives want to admit. They don’t understand how bad things really are, which is why they stand around, mouths agape, as they try to figure out what a “furry” is or why U.S. military officers dress up in leather “pup play” fetish gear while they sodomize each other in uniform and then post photos to social media.

In light of our ongoing moral and spiritual crisis, I fully expect that the Bud Light/Dylan Mulvaney controversy is merely a blip that will soon pass. In the 1990s Ikea ran the world’s first commercial featuring a gay couple. In 2022, Ikea was valued at $17 billion. Go woke, go broke? 

Sure. 

The Matt Walsh’s of the world won’t want to hear this, but trying to fight the Left on gender with desiccated Socratic arguments (“What is a woman?”) is a losing battle. Owning liberals with facts and logic is mostly a waste of time.Political power doesn’t flow from scoring debate points in the “free marketplace of ideas.” It comes from the willingness to impose one’s beliefs on others and possessing the resources to do so. 

All morality requires enforcement. 

The Left implicitly understands that point. They are more than happy to crush their opponents. Just ask Donald Trump, John Eastman, Douglas Mackey, or any of the January 6 defendants. Strip away civilization and politics boils down to the distinction between friend and enemies. [You need a reference to Carl Schmitt here, son.] That’s why the White House hosted a trans day of visibility just two days after a transgender terrorist murdered six Christians in Tennessee. 

At some point, every political regime must put its foot down. Some people think cannibalism is wrong, others think that it is right. If the former are to prevail politically they must be willing to use force against the latter. In the end, this is what morality requires. This is what morality is. 

BV: The sound point here is that morality is just a lot of impotent prescriptions and proscriptions without an enforcement mechanism. But that is not to say that might makes right.  If the enforcer is to enforce good  and not evil, then the enforcer must either be God or, here below, godly men and governments.

Conservatives and Christians today simply lack the force of will to impose their social morality on the Left. That is why they lose cultural battles and the Left wins. Conservatives aren’t even willing to mock their enemies. If you want to make “respectable” social conservatives and Christians uncomfortable, call a prostitute a “whore” in their presence. Mock OnlyFans as a den of “sluts.” Express deep revulsion at sodomy. Watch them writhe in psychic pain. 

Such firm moral condemnation, I am frequently told, is “judge-y” and “un-Christian.” “We” need to “watch our tone” as “we” seek to “draw others to the faith.” As their flock comes under attack from wolves, the shepherds condemn those who would fight back. There are many such cases. 

The deep-rooted weakness of the American Christian Right is a serious problem. I wish it wasn’t this way. I wish my fellow Christians had more spirit. I wish our leaders would lead. That isn’t the reality we have, though, as much as I may wish otherwise.

Right now, conservatives in deep red areas can still fight cultural battles at the local and state levels. Even some purple states, at the local level, still provide a way to maneuver against the Left’s cultural hegemony. Everywhere else, and at the national level especially, conservatives must sideline the cultural battles in favor of the issues of national survival.  

Trump showed that even in our degraded moral culture, a huge percentage of Americans still want the nation to survive. They don’t hate themselves despite all the propaganda to which they’ve been subjected. The old pre-World War II conservative consensus in favor of protectionism, non-intervention, and immigration restrictions is still enormously popular. 

If we win on those fronts and secure a future for our country then, and only then, will we have a chance to fight once again for the family, for our faith, and for a return of moral decency. 

That day, however, is still a long way off. We have work to do. 

 

The Accelerationist Option

I wrote recently that the only way out is through, but Malcolm Pollack's most recent offering is much better; it is indeed brilliant.  It divides into three parts. There is first a litany of what ails us. The second part explains why the ills listed are upon us. The general answer is that

. . . an aggressive, secular pseudo-religion, which denies all transcendent order and natural categories, has seized control of the minds of scores of millions of Americans, and of the levers of political power and information dissemination. This ersatz religion holds as its highest principle the flattening of every natural distinction, and all social hierarchies, except of course the hierarchy that places itself in the position of commanding power over every institution, and over all of civil society.

This general answer is then fleshed out with a list of the specific truths that the secular pseudo-religion brands as heresy.

The third part of the essay raises the question of what we can do about the miasmic mess we are in. Pollack rejects as hopeless three ways out that quite naturally suggest themselves: voting, a return to federalism, and armed revolt.

And then comes the startling suggestion: 

Perhaps, then, it is best in the long run not to slow this process by incremental and ineffective political resistance. It may be that such an approach, by making the decay more gradual, will also make it somehow more bearable, day by day, and might turn it from an acute and intolerable affliction to a slow and chronic decline — a creeping Brazilification, a great national frog-boiling. Perhaps we would be wiser simply to let the cleansing fire of fever run its course, and burn itself out. It will be painful, and surely debilitating for a while, but then it will be over. And then, at last, we can awaken, blink our eyes, and get back on our feet.

Another term for the Big Guy might be all it takes. Four more years!!

In sum, the only way out is through, and the best way through is pedal-to-the-metal, balls-to-the-wall, lets-go-Brandon! Let Biden finish the job, as he intends to do, and thereby finish us off. After an ignominious death, resurrection, a new Phoenix from the old ashes. 

Might I suggest an historical parallel? Germany gone mad had to be destroyed before it could be rebuilt into sanity. It is perhaps a good thing that Hitler, drunk on his initial success, and consumed with hubris, overextended himself, thereby bringing to an end National Socialist totalitarianism. And so it may also be a good thing to allow the totalitarian-globalist-'woke'- race-delusional-culturally Marxist  scum now in control of our once-great Republic to bring her to her knees where she will repent, suffer, and die to be reborn.

The Demented Dems: Anti-Reality and Anti-Virtue

Anti-reality:

House Republicans voted Thursday to ban transgender female athletes from taking part in girls’ and women’s sports by amending Title IX protections to only apply to biologically female athletes.

The Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act passed 219-203, with no Democrats supporting the measure.

Anti-virtue:

Homebuyers with good credit scores will soon encounter a costly surprise: a new federal rule forcing them to pay higher mortgage rates and fees to subsidize people with riskier credit ratings who are also in the market to buy houses.

You see, self-control, self-reliance, deferral of gratification, financial responsibility and the like are 'white' virtues, and therefore 'racist.' 'Racists' whether white or black need to be punished with higher mortgage rates.  'Equity' demands it. In fact, credit ratings as such are 'racist' and 'white supremacist' and need to go the way of the SAT.

Anarcho-Tyranny in the USA

Here by Auron MacIntyre at The Total State (Substack):

The city of Philadelphia has announced an agreement to pay a $9.25 million settlement in connection with the police response to protests after the death of George Floyd in 2020. While dozens were killed and billions of dollars of damage were done during the riots that raged across America for weeks in the summer of 2020, it is the participants themselves who will be paid restitution by the government.

Law and order in the United States have now descended to a level of anarcho-tyranny in which the government funds rioters with the tax money of their victims. The slow death of the rule of law in America would be ugly enough, but what we are witnessing instead is the twisted, grimacing corpse of a system that was once designed to protect the safety of Americans now being used to punish us for disagreeing with our political elites.

UPDATE 3/24

This fellow and I so far appear to be 'on the same page.' Two days ago, before I had heard of him, I spoke of our time as 

. . . a time when those in control of the state apparatus have forgotten, or rather willfully ignore, the purposes that justify government in the first place, namely, the tasks of securing the life, liberty, and property of those governed. But the Orwellian wokesters now in charge invert these values in the Orwellian manner and aid and abet those who aim at the opposite.

As MacIntyre points out, what we are witnessing is "more than the slow death of the rule of law," but the inversion of our founding values. And yet brazen liars such as Nancy Pelosi yammer on about the rule of law while her shills in the media intone in unison the scripted mantra, "No one is above the law," as they pervert the law Soviet-style to destroy Donald J. Trump.  Thankfully, Nancy dear is no longer with us (nor against us) politically speaking; others, however, far worse and more dangerous because less stupid, will take her place.

And as usual the Left Coast leads the way. (Because it is closer to China?) Here is Substacker David Zweig on lockdown and surveillance Santa Clara-style.