Category: Political Nihilism

Soriano Summarizes Dreher’s Take on the ‘Groyper’ Phenomenon

The following is by James Soriano who does an excellent job of summarizing important points made by Dreher who, though prolix, is turning out good content on this and related topics.

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I link below a rambling essay by Rod Dreher on his visit to Washington, where he had a long conversation with VP Vance in the company of Hungary’s Viktor Orban on the future of Christianity in Europe and other things.

It is a nightmare about the state of American conservatism.  Despite Trump’s victory, conservatives are being subverted by radical Generation Z newcomers.  Many are so-called Christians conservatives and impoverished policy activists.  As a group, they have clustered around a white-supremacist ideology in which anti-Semitism is in the foreground.  They look to Tucker and this gent, Nick Fuentes, for inspiration.  They’re called “Groypers.”

The essay goes into a long digression about the prevalence of Jews in certain walks of life, but at the end Dreher recapitulates the main points of his findings during his Washington visit. 

I’ve shortened them and I would like to pass them along because they summarize the state of the civil war now raging in the ranks of conservatives.  There is much to be pessimistic about.

1.  The Groyper thing is real. It is not a fringe movement.  It really has infiltrated young conservative networks.

2.  Irrational hatred of Jews (and other races, but especially Jews) is a central core of it.  

3.  It cannot be negotiated with, because it doesn’t have traditional demands. It wants to burn the whole system down.

4.  The gatekeepers of the Right can’t make it go away.  They have less power than ever.  Dealing with this is going to require great skill and subtlety, and courage.

5.  This malign movement didn’t just appear from nowhere. There are within it legitimate grievances.  It is primed to believe totalitarian things.

6.  The Left got there first.  Left-wing radicals have marched through institutions and imposed illiberal, race-based leftist policies.   You cannot understand the rise of the Groypers without understanding this first.

7.  Conservatives hoped Trump’s anti-woke pushback would restore the meritocratic status quo.  The Zoomercons don’t want that.  They want revenge.

8.  This has the potential to destroy conservatism politically. 

9.  It poses the risk of wrecking the new, post-MAGA conservatism, whose natural heir is JD Vance. 

10.  Anti-Semitism is spreading like a virus among religious conservatives of the Zoomer generation.  They’re getting it through online influencers.  Their pastors and parents are not fighting back; they have lost authority.  Some Zoomer trad Catholics are making antisemitism part of their spirituality — this, despite the fact that the Catholic Church explicitly condemns it.  The same phenomenon exists among Zoomercon Orthodox and Protestants.  This is spiritual poison.

11. The liberal media is going to have a field day with this to distract from the fact that antisemitism is triumphant among progressives.  The new face of the Democratic Party is Zohran Mamdani.

12.  Conservatives — Jewish, Christian, and agnostic — who support Israel are going to have to think very hard about how to proceed.  Support for Israel has collapsed among the young, and it’s not coming back anytime soon. 

13.  The intra-conservative fight is here, and we can’t avoid it.

What I Saw And Heard In Washington

Related:

Culpably Ignorant Dems

Is a soupçon of Schadenfreude justifiable? He who lives by DEI can expect to die by it.  Michael Shellenberger at X:

I’m not suggesting that Democrats consciously sought to destroy Los Angeles. The entertainment industry professionals in Malibu, Topanga Canyon, and Pacific Palisades, who voted overwhelmingly for California’s progressive Governor, Gavin Newsom, and LA’s radical Left mayor, Karen Bass, thought they were voting for social justice and sustainability. They didn’t imagine their vote would result in their homes burning down.

And yet that’s what their votes resulted in.

Too tepid for my taste. The Dems in question are not inherently stupid, but they deserve to be condemned for their culpable ignorance. They should have known better than to support the likes of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, Karen "Go to the URL" Bass, Kristin Crowley, George Gascon, Adam Schiff, Nancy Pelosi, and the rest of the reprobates that populate their once-respectable party. They should have by now seen through the scam called 'social justice.'

The trouble with these people is that you cannot reason with them no matter how calm, fact-based, and rigorous your arguments. These Hollyweirdos do not inhabit the plane of reason and common sense.  They need to experience at their bodies and in their lives the consequences of their willful self-enstupidation.  Only then will some of them see the light.

Does the current LaLaLand conflagration have an upside? It does: it came at just the right time to galvanize the MAGA forces so that they can hit the ground running, take back the country, restore the republic, and defeat the depredatory Dems. May the Winds of Woke not prevail against them.

 

Kamala and Moria/Witzelsucht

Joe Biden, suffering from dementia, was finally and 'democratically' kicked to the curb only to be replaced with Kamala Harris who may be suffering from her own neuropsychiatric malady, moria. How else explain her giddiness,  uncontrolled childish euphoria, inappropriate laughter, inability to be serious about matters of grave importance, hyper-joyous inanity, and the like? This very short video (1:33) displays her astonishing unseriousness about a very serious matter.

It is not for me to decide whether there is anything pathological here, let alone suggest a treatment protocol, but this article may shed light on this strangest of all presidential candidates in the history of the Republic.

Having pointed to a possible psychiatric cause of the 60-year-old's laughing-gas vacuity, let me now suggest a sociological cause: we live in an Age of Feeling. Like a superannuated AOC — the overgrown adolescent narcissist of the occasional cortex — Kameradin Kamalita can feel, but not think. 

"It's an unfortunate reality that millions of Americans lack convictions founded in logic, reason, and history, instead relying on feelings as their primary touchstone."  That nails it.

Trotsky’s (Misplaced) Faith in Man

On 20 August 1940, 84 years ago today, the long arm of Joseph Stalin finally reached Leon Trotsky in exile in Mexico City where an agent of Stalin drove an ice axe into Trotsky's skull. He died the next day. Yet another proof of how the Left eats its own.

The last days of Lev Davidovich Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky, prime mover of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, are the subject of Bertrand M. Patenaude's Trotsky: The Downfall of a Revolutionary (HarperCollins, 2009).  It held my interest from the first page to the last, skillfully telling the story of Trotsky's Mexican exile, those who guarded him, and their failure ultimately to protect him from an agent of the GPU/NKVD sent by Stalin to murder him.  Contrary to some accounts, it was not an ice pick that Ramon Mercader drove into Trotsky's skull, but an ice axe, a mountaineering implement far more deadly than an ice pick when used as a weapon.   Here is how Trotsky ends his last testament, written in 1940, the year of his death:

Read the rest over at my Substack site.

Among those who guarded Trotsky in exile was a fascinating character in his own right, Jean van Heijenoort. I have two Substack entries about him: Thomas Merton and Jean van Hejenoort: A Tale of Two Idealists and Like a Moth to the Flame: A Sermon of Sorts on Romantic Folly.  The latter begins:

Jean van Heijenoort was drawn to Anne-Marie Zamora like a moth to the flame. He firmly believed she wanted to kill him and yet he travelled thousands of miles to Mexico City to visit her where kill him she did by pumping three rounds from her Colt .38 Special into his head while he slept.  She then turned the gun on herself. There is no little irony in the fact that van Heijenoort met his end in the same city as Lev Davidovich Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky. For van Heijenoort was Trotsky's secretary, body guard, and translator from 1932 to 1939.

In these days when Comrade Kamala threatens to preside over a once-great nation, I offer a salutary reflection on the horrors of communism with the help of Lev Kopelev. It begins:

While completing an invited essay for a collection of essays by dissident philosophers, I pulled down from the shelf many a volume on Marx and Marxism, including Steven Lukes, Marxism and Morality (Oxford UP, 1987). In the front matter of that very good book I found the following quotation from the hitherto unknown to me Lev Kopelev (emphases added):

Finally, a question for Tony Flood, one-time card-carrying member of the CPUSA, who knows more about communism than I ever will.  Trotsky says somewhere something along the lines of: You may attempt to distance yourself from politics, but politics won't distance itself from you.  What exactly did he say? And where did he say it?

I fear that old Trotsky is right, which is why we of the Coalition of the Sane and the Reasonable must fight, Fight, FIGHT!

Sohrab Ahmari on ‘Lawfare’

An exercise in naïveté:

Reacting to Donald Trump’s hush-money conviction in Manhattan on 30 May, the French writer Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry asked on X: “Has there been a single left-of-centre person… who has said: ‘Hey, nakedly partisan prosecutions of your political opponents goes against the values of liberal democracy, rule of law, justice, and everything my side claims to support?’”

A number of progressive figures have, in fact, decried lawfare against Trump and the Trumpians.

[. . .]

But the honour roll of the principled anti-lawfare left is all too short. That’s a shame, because right-wing populists won’t be the only victims.

[. . .]

Such partiality in the application of law and institutional norms should alarm progressives. 

Sohrabi comes across as naïve. Since when is the Left in any classical sense liberal? Since when are these 'progressives' in any sense progressive.    They are more aptly described as regressive, anti-civilizational nihilists.

Leftists are so far gone that they are willing to protract their nihilism unto the destruction of the very secular values that they supposedly champion. Pascal Bruckner:

Generations of leftists saw the working class as the messianic leaven of a radiant humanity; now, willing to flirt with the most obscurantist bigotry and to betray their own principles, they [have] transferred their hopes to the Islamists.

The Muslim as the new proletarian.

The worst of the great religions, "the saddest and poorest form of theism," (Schopenhauer) is defended when a defining project of the Left was the cleansing of the earth of the "opium of the people." (Karl Marx, full quotation here.)

Add to that the absurdity that the Left, whose own secular values are secularizations of Christian notions, attacks Christianity viciously while cozying up to Islamists.

It's insane, but then the Left is insane in any case.

Know the enemy and show him no quarter.

I know. You don't want to believe it is a war. It's a war. Which side are you on?

Kathy Hochul, Leftist Idiot

Head over to Malcolm Pollack's place for some sensible commentary. Meat quote:

Political thinkers from Hobbes to Schmitt have understood that the fundamental principle that legitimizes the power of the State is the reciprocal obligation of obedience and protection. We cede to the State the awesome power of coercion by threat of violence, and in return we expect a guarantee of our public and personal security. This means that when the State abandons its side of that obligation, it is the right, and the duty, of the citizenry to secure their own protection.

That's right. It follows that citizens have the right to keep and bear arms.  The rate of exercise of that right stands in inverse relation to the failure of the State to guarantee our public and personal security.  The more the government fails to do what it is supposed to do, chiefly, protect life, liberty, and property, the more citizens will arm themselves.

From this you can see just how preternaturally stupid (or deliberately self-enstupidated) libs, lefties, and wokesters are. Presumably, they want fewer guns in civilian hands.* Their policies, however,  incentivize gun ownership by Joe and Jane Citizen. 

In a piece defending Viktor Orban against the mindless charge of being a 'fascist dictator,' Rod Dreher writes,

Unlike London, Paris, Washington, New York, Brussels, and elsewhere, street crime is very low in the Hungarian capital — and that’s not because the police are everywhere.

Think about it: just this week, the governor of New York [Kathy Hochul] ordered the state’s National Guard troops to patrol New York City’s subways to crack down on violent crime there. This never, ever happens in Budapest. Ever. A British friend traveling this week in New York said the scene outside his lodgings in Manhattan is appalling, with scores of African men — illegal aliens who came through Mexico — loitering on the street and urinating in public. That doesn’t happen in Budapest either, because Hungary is a country that controls its borders.

Read it all.

__________

*And so do I. It can't be good to have all sorts of untrained people packing heat.  I defend 2A rights, but I would never try to persuade people to arm themselves. Gun ownership is a grave responsibility. You have to get training, you have to practice, and you have to know the law.  Before you even think about buying a gun, you need to develop situational awareness. As the noted trainer Steve Tarani says, "If you have to go to guns, there has been a failure in situational awareness." That is a very slight exaggeration, but not by much. Another trainer, retired Navy SEAL Chris Sajnog here discusses ten ways to improve your SA.

What is the worst enemy of SA? The smartphone. Don't be a dumbass with a smartphone. Don't walk around with your head up your app!  

Civilization Versus the New Nihilists

 Victor Davis Hanson

Put the question to your friends and acquaintances: Which side are you on? If they are not on the side of civilization, cut them off.  Make them pay a price for their willful self-enstupidation. Why should they get the benefit of your friendship? If enough of us ostracize enough of them, this will have an effect.  (The usual ceteris paribus qualifications apply.)

Here's my take from 2017:

The Nihilism of the Left

Leftists are so far gone that they are willing to protract their nihilism unto the destruction of the very secular values that they supposedly champion. Pascal Bruckner:

Generations of leftists saw the working class as the messianic leaven of a radiant humanity; now, willing to flirt with the most obscurantist bigotry and to betray their own principles, they [have] transferred their hopes to the Islamists.

The Muslim as the new proletarian.

The worst of the great religions, "the saddest and poorest form of theism," (Schopenhauer) is defended when a defining project of the Left was the cleansing of the earth of the "opium of the people." (Karl Marx, full quotation here.)

Add to that the absurdity that the Left, whose own secular values are secularizations of Christian notions, attacks Christianity viciously while cozying up to Islamists.

It's insane, but then the Left is insane in any case.

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And here is another by my man Hanson, the writing machine, on the insanity of leftists.  It's on the russia, Russia, RUSSIA! hoax. To hell with these TDS-ers and their self-induced lunacy.  They don't seem to grasp that they have a moral obligation to exercise due diligence in the formation of their beliefs. That is an obligation that they regularly flout. 

There is just no moral or intellectual equivalence between Right and Left. 

Radical Islam’s Threat to the Left

Substack latest.

Why don't leftists — who obviously do not share the characteristic values and beliefs of Islamists — grant what is spectacularly obvious to everyone else, namely, that radical Islam poses a grave threat to what we in the West cherish as civilization, which includes commitments to free speech, open inquiry, separation of church and state, freedom of religion, freedom to reject religion, universal suffrage, the emancipation of women, opposition to cruel and unusual penal practices, and so on?   In particular, why don't leftists recognize the grave threat radical Islam poses to them?  Why do leftists either deny the threat or downplay its gravity? Given their atheism and pronounced libertine ‘wobble,’ they would be among the first to lose their heads under Islamic law (Sharia).

Here is a quickly-composed  list of twelve related reasons based on my own thinking and reading and on discussions with friends. 

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?
 
 
 
 

Diplomad 2.0 on the Biden ‘Special’ Counsel

We all know it's a joke, a joke worthy of that all-time jokester and comedian, Lavrenti Beria.

Beria would have appreciated AG Garland's "sudden" naming of a Special Counsel to look into Hunter Biden, this after years of saying no SC was needed. He also would have appreciated that the Special Counsel (SC) named is none other than US Attorney David Weiss (another miserable Trump appointment), who "investigated" Hunter for the past three three years: remember the laptop? On top of it, Beria would have appreciated how Garland has violated the law by picking Weiss; the law requires that the SC come from outside of the government, certainly not be a DOJ Attorney and the one, on top of it all, who has protected the Biden Crime Family (BCF) for these past three years. Let us not forget that Weiss masterminded that other joke: the "plea deal" for Hunter which would have allowed that crackhead to skate on serious tax fraud and gun charges that would have put any of us in the slammer for years.

Well, of course, it turned out some honest judge threw out the plea deal as it contained promises of, in essence, permanent immunity for Hunter from any other prosecutions. 

Read it all.  Garland & Co. see themselves and their 'president' as above the law while piously intoning, "No man is above the law, not even the president of the United States."  

‘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.

 

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.

How Low Can We Sink?

Seen at SOTU 2023 as worn by Senator Ed Markey, Massachusetts Democrat:

Sen. Ed Markey shows off the cool 'I Heart Abortion' pin Planned ...

For a long time now, the Democrats have been the abortion party. But under the 'leadership' of the 'devout Catholic,' Joe Biden, they've 'evolved' to use the Hillary word which means    devolved: they now celebrate abortion by expressing 'love' for it.  And they are not above using rank Orwellianisms to express their 'love.' "Abortion is health care" is the most outrageous of them.  

Story here.