Category: Political Ponerology

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.

Extremism and Leftist Projection: The Border

Mainstream leftists promote extreme ideas and policies; mainstream conservatives do not. But this fact does not stop leftists from projecting their extremism into us. They call us extremists! Uncomfortable with their extremism, and not wanting to admit it, they suppress their awareness of  their extremism by projecting it into us. There are numerous examples of this political-psychological projection. This entry will discuss just one. 

Consider the question of national borders. My thesis is that conservatives at the present time in the USA are moderates on all or most questions pertaining to national borders and their enforcement.

A moderate position is one that is more or less midway  between two extremes. One extreme is the de facto if not de jure open borders  view according to which anyone at any time may immigrate  without being in any way vetted as to health status, criminal status, or in any other way. The opposite extreme is the closed border view according to which no immigration of anyone at any time is permitted by law and the law is strictly enforced. 

Now no one is for the second extreme. No one in the USA holds that all immigration should be illegal, than no one should ever be granted political asylum, etc.

But the Biden administration's position is very close to the first extreme. That cannot be denied by anyone who is  both well-informed and intellectually honest.

The conservative position is commonsensical and moderate, lying as it does between the extremes. Conservatives, to harp on the obvious, are not opposed to immigration; they are opposed to illegal immigration. Among conservatives there are debates as to how latitudinarian immigration policy ought to be. But that is a further question.

I could go on from here and show that on every or almost every issue that divides the nation, mainstream conservatives are moderates. I solicit your help. Tell me in the ComBox what those further issues are and how the mainstream conservative treads the via media.

Anti-‘Woke’ Parents versus Antifa ‘Wokesters’

Here:

Antifa members who showed up outside a public meeting for the Glendale, California school system on Tuesday got beat down by the Armenian parents who showed up to voice their opposition to LGBTQ+ curriculum in the classroom.

Andy Ngo comments:

Local sources tell me it was this use of Armenian colors/symbols mixed with LGBTQI+, pup play pride in the shape of a Christian cross that incensed Armenian-American families in Los Angeles & caused them to mobilize against the school boards.

Historical comparisons are tricky and in any case I'm no historian. Are we in something like a Weimar period? You know what came after that.  Or are we in something like the waning days of the imperium romanum? You know what came after that too. 

Is there an historian in the house? 

One thing is clear: we have a government that gives aid and comfort to anti-civilizational elements.  At the head of this government we have a man who is not only morally corrupt personally, but also in dereliction of his constitutional duties. A little south of this entry I quoted David Horowitz on Joe Biden:

He began with a brazen lie that he would unify the country and represent both those who voted for him and those who did not.

Then he issued a series of executive orders that illegally and unconstitutionally nullified our immigration laws, and welcomed a flood of unvetted illegals from 200 countries to invade our country. This was the greatest crime ever committed by our government against its own people.

The fish stinks from the head as the proverb has it, and in this case it stinks to high heaven.

More footage.

The Moral Depravity of the Democrat Party

David Horowitz:

“Woke” has become a term to describe the enemies of our country who have colonized our schools and taught our next generations to hate America, hate white people and trash our history and national pride. How to explain this travesty? It began fifty years ago when the anti-American, Marxist left set its sights on taking over our schools.

[. . .]

Many of you may have thought that the takeover of our educational system by anti-American Marxists happened overnight. It didn’t. It was five decades in the making. But conservatives and Republicans chose not to notice it. And when they did notice it, they were reluctant to fight.

If you want to understand the disasters that have befallen our country, you have to begin with the failure of Republicans and conservatives to aggressively wage the political war necessary to defend it.

The anti-American left attacks patriotic Americans as “white supremacists,” “racists” “domestic terrorists” and “insurrectionists.” And we respond by calling them “liberals.” There is nothing about them that is liberal. They are vindictive bigots, determined to demonize and destroy us.

[. . .]

The Democrat Party is no longer controlled by a liberal left but by Marxist zealots who willfully disregard the Marxist atrocities and failures of the past. Democrats no longer respect the sovereign individual, the rule of law, or the primary values of the Constitution –the equality of races, the spirit of compromise or the decentralization of power.

Instead, Democrats regard the Constitution as a white supremacist document written by rich white slaveowners, designed to oppress all other genders and races. Its mentality is that of European fascism and Soviet communism, and its immediate goal is a one-party state.

{. . .]

January 6th was the date set to certify the electors. On that day Trump gave his famous “Stop the Steal” speech, which has been maliciously described by Democrats as a criminal “incitement to insurrection.” This was absurd on its face, since Trump had offered the Capitol Police and Nancy Pelosi 10,000 national guardsmen to control the crowds. Trump’s offer was duly noted by the Inspector General who attended the meeting. Pelosi and the Democrat-controlled Capitol Police rejected the offer.

[. . .]

Biden’s inauguration was January 20. He began with a brazen lie that he would unify the country and represent both those who voted for him and those who did not.

Then he issued a series of executive orders that illegally and unconstitutionally nullified our immigration laws, and welcomed a flood of unvetted illegals from 200 countries to invade our country. This was the greatest crime ever committed by our government against its own people.

[. . .]

Read it all and propagate it. Do your bit. Vote with your feet and your wallet. Study the many works of David Horowitz to understand the depredations of communism and its latest incarnation as 'wokery.'

‘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.

American Restoration

Substack articles by Bruce Abramson. From his About page:

Suppose you think that it’s wrong to discriminate based on race. To the Woke, you’re a racist.

Suppose you say that humans are either male or female. To the Woke, that’s dehumanizing.

Suppose you champion free speech. To the Woke, you’re promoting hatred.

Suppose you think that the ends don’t justify the means. To the Woke, you’re impeding justice.

Suppose you believe in God. To the Woke, you’re an unstable superstitious bigot.

The list of such absurd defamations is long, and it grows longer every day. But it’s no joke. Once the woke have labeled you a hateful, dehumanizing, unstable racist whose mere existence stands in the way of justice, they will treat you as if that’s who you really are. They will work to destroy you—terminate your personal relationships, professional aspirations, and financial possibilities.

Worst of all, the Woke are winning. The United States is mired in a Second Civil War. The country no longer functions as either a free society or a constitutional republic. Every single one of our major institutions has been corrupted: Academia, K-12 education, the media, the civil service, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, the legal and medical professions, and nearly every important professional society. Recent years have even uncovered deep Woke rot running corporate boardrooms, the IRS, FBI, CIA, NSA, and the military.

Leaders and organizations that are not Woke themselves cower in fear and fall in line. More than 60% of American report being afraid to voice their opinions; they fear woke reprisal.

This situation is neither tolerable nor sustainable. If we don’t move quickly to restore the free society America was born to be, we will slide irretrievably into an autocratic, elitist oligarchy.

We are beyond the time of timidity and prudence. We have become both the counterculture and counterrevolutionaries. Very little of what we have done in the past is suited to those roles. If we are to restore America, we will need new lessons, strategies, tactics, and priorities.

This essay series is for those who want to master the techniques we need.

Is Abramson exaggerating? I'd say he isn't. What say you?

Naomi Wolf on Tucker Carlson’s J6 Revelations

A rich Substack article that ends thusly:

The gatekeepers who lie to the public about the most consequential events of our time — and who thus damage our nation, distort our history, and deprive half of our citizenry of their right to speak, champion and choose, without being tarred as would-be violent traitors – deserve our disgust.

I am sorry the nation was damaged by so much untruth issued by those with whom I identified at the time.

I am sorry my former “tribe” is angry at a journalist for engaging in — journalism.

I am sorry I believed so much nonsense.

Though it is no doubt too little, too late —

Conservatives, Republicans, MAGA:

I am so sorry.

DIE: ‘Equity’ Can Get You Killed

Here:

America’s top medical schools, worried [that] they have too few minority students, are doing something about it. They are lowering academic standards for admission and trying to hide the evidence. Columbia, Harvard, the University of Chicago, Stanford, Mount Sinai, and the University of Pennsylvania have already done so. The list already tops forty, and more are sure to follow.

A 'progressive' would call that progress. I suggest that you never use 'equity' or 'progressive' without the sneer quotes. 

Question for the syntactically punctilious: In the sentence immediately preceding, are the inverted commas being used to mention, to sneer, or both?

'Equity' is an obfuscatory woke-left coinage the purpose of which is to elide the distinction between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome.  The tactic is to promote the confusion of equality of opportunity — which everyone is for — with equality of outcome. The latter would be good if it naturally came about. Unfortunately, the various hierarchies of life make that impossible without massive governmental interference.  For it is a plain fact that individuals and groups are not equal by any empirical measure. (People are loathe to admit this because the admission sounds 'racist,' 'sexist,' 'ageist,' 'ableist,' etc., and being fearful, they fear being tagged with these pejoratives. But in a contest between a smear word and Reality, the latter wins in the end.) 

The achievement of equality of outcome requires equalizing agencies with vast power centered in a Sino-styled Sicherheitsstaat, a security or police state with social credit scores and omni-intrusive surveillance. But note that even then you would not have 'equity,' i.e., equality of outcome, because the equalizers would not be equal in power, position, pelf, and perquisites to the equalized. Would-be socializers, equalizers, and top-down planners typically imagine themselves ending up among the socializers, equalizers, and planners and not among the socialized, equalized, and planned.  More importantly, history shows that outcome-equalization from the top down leads to inanition as in the good old USSR the menus of whose restaurants listed many a dish only one of which was available: borscht. Yum!

Leftists are semantic smugglers. They are trying in this instance and in others to pass off something destructive under cover of something appealing.  Equality of opportunity, equality of political rights, equality before the law, etc. appeal to almost all of us. So what the stealth-ideological leftist does is to use this attractive wrapping to smuggle into uncritical heads the pseud0-value, or disvalue, 'equity,' understood as governmentally enforced equality of outcome or result.

Now my dear friends: if we we don't punch back hard against this destructive nonsense we are 'screwed,' all of us, even the wokesters themselves, and their usefully-idiotic fellow travellers, though their evil and cooperation with evil disallows their cognizance of the fact.  

If you haven't had enough of this delightful topic, here is an exchange between Bill Maher and Bernie Sanders in which B. S. demonstrates what a clueless and/or mendacious specimen he is.

Naomi Wolf on the Return of the Demons

Over the last three years, many of us who are naturally and by training skeptical of supernatural explanations have wondered whether the astonishing upsurge of irrationality and outright evil society-wide and, most depressingly, in the institutions that ought to serve as bulwarks against this madness, may be due to demonic influence. For the scale of the evil wokery on all sides, and the speed of its spread, seems beyond the reach of naturalistic explanations. See, for example, my Does the Demonic Play a Role in the Politics of the Day?

Naomi Wolf, a former lefty who has seen the light, develops the theme in detail and in depth in her essay Have the Ancient Gods Returned?

Since 2020 the world, I feel, has been bathed, infused, bombarded even, with intensely powerful energies that are totally unfamiliar to us in this generation, but that may derive from a pre-Christian, pre-solidly-Jewish time, a time when early Judaism was struggling with the seductive and oppressive entities that always sought to seduce the Children of Israel away from the monotheistic truth, the One God. 

The ancient “shedim” are the only “principalities and powers” I can imagine that are capable of manifesting a national, and now a global, network of policy advocates, social workers, graphic designers, Members of Parliament, who are all on board with an escalating euthanasia death cult. The ancient “daimones” are the only entities I can imagine powerful enough in just two years and a bit, to destroy families, to ruin sexuality and fertility, to make a mockery of human rights, to celebrate the end of critical thinking, to march us all in lockstep to worship of technocrats and technocracy; medical cultism and an orgiastic cult of self- and other-annihilation.

And — I must notice — if these “shedim” or “daimones” are powerless — why are their symbols reappearing everywhere? I used to see fundamentalist Christians who warned of Satan lurking in rock and roll, as fanatics. But what I myself am seeing around me, I cannot unsee. 

A Temple of Baal archway was in fact expensively reconstructed from its original in Syria, and moved to a appear at a major thoroughfare in London, and was now unveiled in Washington, DC, and in New York.

Why? 

A bizarre opening ceremony in a new train site in Switzerland, at which European leaders were present, included a horned entity (“an Ibex”), the upholding of a symbolic lamb, the appearance of a terrifying angel, and the writhing of nearly naked men and women in S-and-M-themed and bondage postures.

Tucker Carlson Exposes the Malevolent Lies of the Biden Admin re: Jan 6th ‘Insurrection’

Neither  deadly nor an insurrection.

Trump's take.

Diana West's commentary.

Tucker Carlson Tonight – Wednesday, 08 March 2023

Surveillance Video Dismantles January 6th Narrative

Narratives and the Left

Leftists love narratives because a narrative needn't be true to be a narrative. Their assessment criteria are identity-tribal rather than logical.  A good narrative is a coherent  story that enhances the tribe's power. Whether true or false is not to the point, the point being power. Truth is not a leftist value. It is not a norm that constrains their speaking and thinking.   That is not to say that leftists don't sometimes speak the truth; they do when it serves their purposes. They don't when it doesn't.  Truth for a leftist has a merely instrumental value, not an absolute value.

Addendum (3/9).  I wrote to Tony Flood anent Tucker's exposure of our government's police-state tactics:

I think that the U.S. has finally completed its transmogrification into the S.U.

And Tony reined me in a bit with this response:

Analogies with trajectories to totalitarianism (total statism) lose in precision what they may offer in rhetorical bite. We have our near-equivalents of Pravda and Izvestiya. (You know the old joke: Pravda has no news; Izvestiya, no truth.) But we also still have Tucker, Diana [West], et al. When the transmogrification is complete, we won't, and the result won't be Sovietization or Nazification, but probably given the technological means something even worse. I cannot measure the distance yet to be traveled, and hope we never do. I hope we're at a turning point and we'll turn the right way in light of the recent exposures.

Yes. Here's hoping that Carlson's display of serious testicular fortitude will have some positive effect on his journalistic colleagues who, most of them, have utterly forgotten the important role of the Fourth Estate in a democratic but constitutionally-based republic and are now shills for the ruling power-hungry, greedy, anti-democratic, globalist elites.  To gauge just how far we have sunk in this country, give a listen to this exercise in mendacity and misdirection by Senator Charles Schumer.

So Carlson invited Schumer to come on TV and talk about it.

But Schumer said he will appear on Carlson’s show only if Carlson takes back everything he has said.

The rest of the good senator's crapweaselry here.

Addendum II (3/9) Tony Flood adds:

Bill, a thought about your suggestion: Lysenko, the Stalin-era Lamarckian biologist who denied the reality of genes, was a poster boy for political interference in science. The current popular denial of the reality of chromosomal distinction (as though xx can "transition" to xy or vice versa) puts me in mind of this episode. Unlike the imposition of Lysenkoism, however, the ascendancy of the latter denial (and other, equally insane denials of reality) cannot be explained as a top-down affair. Contemporary ideologues conspired outside the corridors of political power until they wormed their way inside whence they can put finishing touches. We're living through something like Bolsheviks patiently working their way through generations of Romanovs and Russian nobility, undermining traditional institutions and beliefs one by one until society falls into their laps. No need to storm the Winter Palace if you already control the institutions that maintain it. Over time, one cultural hegemony replaces another. At least that's what I think they've been trying to do, but reality hasn't been cooperating.

I think you are on the right track, Tony. The capture of our culture and our institutions is not top-down, but bottom-up. It is akin to the "long march through the institutions" that David Horowitz often refers to. The student radicals of the '60s wormed their way into the professoriat, the entertainment and news media,  the churches, the schools, the judiciary, etc. and now — horribile dictu — into such precincts as before they were not to be found: the military and corporate business worlds. Thus the bizarre phenomena of 'woke' capitalism  and a 'woke' and therefore weak  military as promoted by the likes of 'General' Milley under the 'control' of the demento-puppet, Joey B. What's next? Bespoke pacifist generals?

Sorting through this socio-cultural garbage is a challenging intellectual exercise. We shall continue. But now I am going to take Bro Jackass out for a hard ride.