This article covers many of the essential points.
Category: Political Nihilism
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.
__________
*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
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.
………………..
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".
Is There No Limit to Biden’s Vicious Mendacity?
Apparently not. And you voted for him? What were you thinking? Were you thinking?
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:
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.
A Secret Plan to Destroy America
Malcolm Pollack recommends the following. I've reproduced it verbatim. It is that good.
………………………….
Democrat and former Colorado Governor Dick Lamm gave the following speech in Washington, DC in 2003. Originally published on CAIRCO in 2014.
I have a secret plan to destroy America. If you believe, as many do, that America is too smug, too white bread, too self-satisfied, too rich, let’s destroy America. It is not that hard to do. History shows that nations are more fragile than their citizens think. No nation in history has survived the ravages of time. Arnold Toynbee observed that all great civilizations rise and they all fall, and that “an autopsy of history would show that all great nations commit suicide.” Here is my plan:
1. We must first make America a bilingual-bicultural country. History shows, in my opinion, that no nation can survive the tension, conflict and antagonism of two competing languages and cultures. It is a blessing for an individual to be bilingual; it is a curse for a society to be bilingual. One scholar, Seymour Martin Lipset, put it this way: “The histories of bilingual and bicultural societies that do not assimilate are histories of turmoil, tension and tragedy. Canada, Belgium, Malaysia, Lebanon all face crises of national existence in which minorities press for autonomy, if not independence. Pakistan and Cyprus have divided. Nigeria suppressed an ethnic rebellion. France faces difficulties with its Basques, Bretons and Corsicans.”
2. I would then invent “multiculturalism” and encourage immigrants to maintain their own culture. I would make it an article of belief that all cultures are equal: that there are no cultural differences that are important. I would declare it an article of faith that the black and Hispanic dropout rate is only due to prejudice and discrimination by the majority. Every other explanation is out-of-bounds.
3. We can make the United States a “Hispanic Quebec” without much effort. The key is to celebrate diversity rather than unity. As Benjamin Schwarz said in the Atlantic Monthly recently, “The apparent success of our own multiethnic and multicultural experiment might have been achieved, not by tolerance, but by hegemony. Without the dominance that once dictated ethnocentrically, and what it meant to be an American, we are left with only tolerance and pluralism to hold us together.” I would encourage all immigrants to keep their own language and culture. I would replace the melting pot metaphor with a salad bowl metaphor. It is important to insure that we have various cultural sub-groups living in America reinforcing their differences, rather than Americans emphasizing their similarities.
4. Having done all this, I would make our fastest-growing demographic group the least educated. I would add a second underclass, unassimilated, undereducated and antagonistic to our population. I would have this second underclass have a 50 percent dropout rate from school.
5. I would then get the big foundations and big business to give these efforts lots of money. I would invest in ethnic identity, and I would establish the cult of victimology. I would get all minorities to think their lack of success was all the fault of the majority. I would start a grievance industry blaming all minority failure on the majority population.
6. I would establish dual citizenship and promote divided loyalties. I would “celebrate diversity.” “Diversity” is a wonderfully seductive word. It stresses differences rather than commonalities. Diverse people worldwide are mostly engaged in hating each other – that is, when they are not killing each other. A “diverse,” peaceful or stable society is against most historical precedent. People undervalue the unity it takes to keep a nation together, and we can take advantage of this myopia.
Look at the ancient Greeks. Dorf’s “World History” tells us: “The Greeks believed that they belonged to the same race; they possessed a common language and literature; and they worshiped the same gods. All Greece took part in the Olympic Games in honor of Zeus, and all Greeks venerated the shrine of Apollo at Delphi. A common enemy, Persia, threatened their liberty. Yet, all of these bonds together were not strong enough to overcome two factors … (local patriotism and geographical conditions that nurtured political divisions …)” If we can put the emphasis on the “pluribus,” instead of the “unum,” we can balkanize America as surely as Kosovo.
7. Then I would place all these subjects off-limits – make it taboo to talk about. I would find a word similar to “heretic” in the 16th century that stopped discussion and paralyzed thinking. Words like “racist”, “xenophobe” halt argument and conversation. Having made America a bilingual-bicultural country, having established multiculturalism, having the large foundations fund the doctrine of “victimology,” I would next make it impossible to enforce our immigration laws. I would develop a mantra – ”because immigration has been good for America, it must always be good.” I would make every individual immigrant sympatric and ignore the cumulative impact.
8. Lastly, I would censor Victor Davis Hanson’s book “Mexifornia” – this book is dangerous; it exposes my plan to destroy America. So please, please – if you feel that America deserves to be destroyed–please, please – don’t buy this book! This guy is on to my plan.