To be accurate, “belief” is distinguished from knowledge. What I know for sure does not need to be believed, because in that case belief is superfluous. I see belief and knowledge to be incompatible states of mind. When the pen is dropped from the hand in normal gravity, I know it falls towards the centre of the earth. I might believe it as well but that belief is superfluous.
I believe:
There is spiritual wickedness in high places.
Recent global warming is real and not significant in the long record of climate change on earth, though we should keep an eye on it.
There exists an immaterial force for goodness that is called God and by many other names. It is benign and intelligent, and occasionally directs those open to his insights and revelations to better outcomes.
We have received revelations.
I do not have an accurate, comprehensive, and correct picture of all that is going on. No one else does either.
Tolerance is required because of the preceding point.
Measures to control COVID were a foretaste of future totalitarian social controls that will be needed for a meatless future where we shiver in the cold, cold designed by globalists to immiserate us. See first bullet.
Gain of function research associated with COVID was paid for by American sources.
I do not believe:
That the governments and ruling classes of this world give a damn for the fate of the average person.
I do not believe in the benign intentions of those forces associated with the World Economic Forum, the Davos crowd, or the global warming climate emergency.
That the government of Canada is in good hands. (The first three bullets here are the same thing said in different ways).
That all people are equal in many significant senses of the word equal. Inevitably this includes peoples as well as people.
That though evolution is true, that natural selection or sexual selection as Darwin has explained them are sufficient explanations. Good try though!
That materialism is a sufficient explanation. The world is far more and greater than matter and its motions.
COVID was not a natural event but was an engineered plague that was either deliberately or accidentally released from the Wuhan Institute for Virology.
Most of what I blog is a commentary on the above. And with that, I will call it a day.
Michael Anton discusses the question which pervades Washington: who is the sovereign? My observation of Washington, which is the same as that of the deep insiders, is that “doctrine” is the sovereign. Everyone has the same ideas.
I came across this socialist rant against the monarchy and the idea of monarchy, which stimulated the creative juices. I thought it was worth responding to. First the case against monarchy, from the World Socialist Website, which I am sure you will enjoy for its over-the-top-ness..
“The capitalist class buried the ghosts of its republican ancestors long ago. Confronting social and political crises of unprecedented magnitude, they turn to autocracy and authoritarianism as bulwarks in defense of their privileges and recognize in monarchy an institutional form of their class aspirations.
Monarchy is an institution of colossal stupidity, a barbarous vestige of the feudal past; its persistence is an embarrassment to humanity. Founded on heredity, shored up with inbreeding, intermarriage and claims of divine right, the monarchic principle enshrines inequality as the fundamental and unalterable lot of humanity and maintains this lot with the force of autocratic power.
The kings and queens enthroned by this principle are stunted by more than just hemophilia and the Habsburg jaw. Their social function distills in their lineage the most concentrated reaction. Elizabeth II was cousin to the Tsarist Romanovs; her Nazi-sympathizing uncle, King Edward VIII, abdicated in 1936 and headed off to Germany with his Nazi-sympathizing wife to salute Adolf Hitler.
The royal family is marked by the sorts of scandals that develop among those with a great deal of unearned money and unspent time. Her son, Prince Andrew, sold arms to autocratic regimes and paid £12 million to cover up his role in sex trafficking underaged girls with Jeffrey Epstein. Her grandson, Prince Harry, used to dress up in full Nazi regalia.
It was in defiance of the monarchic principle that the American Declaration of Independence stated, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
This conception fueled the American Revolution. Thomas Paine’s pamphlet, Common Sense, which historian Gordon Wood termed “the most incendiary and popular pamphlet of the entire revolutionary era,” directly attacked not just George III but the very existence of monarchy, writing:
In England a king hath little more to do than to make war and give away places; which in plain terms, is to impoverish the nation and set it together by the ears. A pretty business indeed for a man to be allowed eight hundred thousand sterling a year for, and worshiped into the bargain! Of more worth is one honest man to society and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.
Article I, Section 9, Clause 8 of the US Constitution codified this principle for the new nation: “No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States.”
Immense concentrated private wealth, founded on exploitation and inequality, and the unending expansion of empire have stamped out any trace of such democratic sentiments in the American ruling elite. They no longer, in the phrase of Milton, prefer “hard liberty before the easy yoke of servile pomp.” They seek to defend their interests through autocratic rule and look with welcome upon the principle of monarchy.
On the order of President Biden, US flags were deferentially lowered for the dead queen, placed at half-staff for 12 days. Elizabeth II is separated from George III by generations; Biden is separated from Jefferson by an unbridgeable historical chasm.
Over the past six years we have witnessed a turn among the ruling elite around the globe to openly autocratic and dictatorial forms of rule as social and political crisis have sharpened and turned deadly. It is this that fuels the unrestrained adulation in the American media for the dead queen and the crown she wore. An unprecedented political crisis grips the United States. The idea of a monarchical system, of an autocratic head of state who stands above the conflict, has a powerful appeal to the embattled bourgeoisie.
The media give voice to these longings and package them for popular consumption. The phrase of J.A. Hobson, writing of imperialism at the opening of the 20th century, is apt: “snobbish subservience, the admiration of wealth and rank, the corrupt survivals of the inequalities of feudalism.” The deferential and servile talking heads of television news cultivate these traits. Often dressed up as progressive by identity politics, the monarchic principle is everywhere glorified, from Wakanda to Beyoncé to Downton Abbey.
The relentless adulation for the dead queen is mind-numbing. It is tempting to hunker down and weather the storm of stupidity. It must, however, be taken seriously, for it is a warning.”
To which I responded as follows:
I always love these rants against constitutional monarchies. The same way I enjoy Richard Dawkins railing against God with his materialist conception of reality. Both conflate a shallow form of instrumental reasoning with great depth of insight. Both misunderstand critically what makes people tick. Both are suffused with an obvious condescension to the large proportion of humanity that believes in the institution of constitutional monarchy and believes in God. Both think that an atheistic republic of means and ends would be better (by what criteria I ask?) for humans. Both fail to understand that God and kings are adaptive, in a Darwinian sense, in that they promote group cohesion and cooperation.
When we say ‘God save our gracious King’, we ask one imaginary friend, power and ruler of the universe to help another imagined ruler fulfil his much less important earthly-scale job. Otherwise we have to swear allegiance to an abstraction like the Constitution and the flag. You do not escape imaginary political and emotional constructs by de-feudalizing them.
Quote: “the monarchic principle enshrines inequality as the fundamental and unalterable lot of humanity -yes it does, and suck it up, because it is the truth of the human condition – and maintains this lot with the force of autocratic power.” No, but by the force of allegiance to something greater than ourselves and the persons who embody that greatness. The Crown is all of us. We participate ina greatness which is not ours. We have elected politicians for the actual exercise of power, but they are in a real way restrained by having to be polite and subordinate to the monarch.
None of which prevents me from thinking Charles III is an eco-babbler, and saying so.
In short, my God is greater than your god, and much more powerful than your rational association of self interested actors seeking maximum personal autonomy, or whatever it is that socialists do in their miserable little lives.
Someone should read Peter Turchin’s War and Peace and War, on the subject of asabiya, the power of societies to cooperate for collective purposes. The term is taken from the Arabic philosopher of history, Ibn Khaldun. Then we might have a meaningful exchange about monarchies that dealt with what they actually do, rather than what socialists think they do.
A better anti-monarchical argument is presented by the barbarian Ygritte presenting the casefor equality in this excerpt from Game of Thrones: “You know nothing, John Snow”.
We went away this past weekend to a fishing camp which was located at the end of a fifty minute drive along a rough track over Laurentian rock. We drove at somewhat better than a walking pace. I recommend the periodic withdrawal from wider society, and the fishing camp was the perfect retreat: no yoga, no periods of silence, no meditation. Just reasonable people conversing on a dock and occasionally going boating on paddle boards and canoes. No fish were caught or harmed, it being the wrong season for trout on the surface . Plentiful food, wine and booze, though less than we did in our forties.
In the time away, Her Majesty the Queen died, the Russians suffered a large defeat in Ukraine, and Pierre Poilievre was decisively affirmed as Conservative leader.
I don’t think that it is possible to exaggerate the immense stabilizing influence of Queen Elizabeth on the United Kingdom or the world. For seventy years she maintained a discreet and effective role as advisor and occasional admonisher to the great. She lived a life of unimpeachable dignity while still showing that she was not deceived by earthly pomps and quarrels. She was a devoted Christian and I think some of her annual Christmas messages were in fact sermons of profound relevance.
When we got the news we were in a restaurant in the village of St Jean de Matha, surrounded by French Canadians having lunch, who treated the matter, as I suppose legions of other nations would have, with courtesy and respect. The Queen had earned the respect of people of many nations, including republicans of the breakaway United States. I think everyone naturally measures life ‘s events in terms of the life and death of Sovereigns, however powerless they may be in constitutional terms. Like the passing of Queen Victoria, the death of Queen Elizabeth will be marker between one era and the next.
Then we left the village to go to the the fishing camp. We drove along an atrocious rock- strewn path at 10 kilometers an hour. An hour and a quarter later, we unloaded cars and went by pontoon boat to the ancient fishing camp, an artifact of the era of lumber barons picking out choice lakes for their buddies to fish in. Huge beams, gas mantle lamps, and low to non existent internet connectivity, coupled with copious quantities of alcohol and food.
We heard the news of Poilievre’s decisive victory on Saturday night, by which I was greatly gladdened. Unfortunately I was surrounded by five devotees of the milquetoast conservatism – if that is what it is – of Jean Charest, who are persuaded that Poilievre is the sure path of defeat for the Conservative Party. You know the type, I am sure: all reform is acceptable short of actual change. In terms that a western Conservative would be happy with, they were perfect exemplars of the Laurentian consensus. Highly intelligent people of good faith, the lot of them, but politically clueless, as far as I am concerned. If Poilievre fails, they will be sure to crow about my so called radicalism in leaving the sure path of Jean Charest. 68.15% of my fellow conservatives agreed that Poilievre was the better candidate, which should be enough to silence the whining of advocates of the losing candidates, even in a party that romanticizes losing.
Predictions are difficult, especially about the future. Nevertheless I think that the abhorrence I feel for the current Liberal government in Ottawa is shared by a possible electoral majority. We will either succumb to the Woke shit of Trudeau the Lesser, after we go down fighting it, or we will rescue the country. The Liberals and their media allies are asking us to acquiesce in the ruin of Canada, and I for one will not abide it.
As to the Russian defeats in Ukraine, I am as surprised as I am pleased. I had thought that the Russians would take over Ukraine in six weeks. The fact that large piles of equipment are being abandoned, so much so that this offensive marks the largest weapons transfer by far since Lend Lease, indicates that Russian morale is collapsing. In World War 2 , Allied soldiers noticed that the German soldier began to abandon usable equipment only in the Falaise Pocket in July-August of 1944, six years into the war. The Russians may rebound; the war is by no means over, but I think the recent defeats of Russian arms show that the era of Russia as a great power is over.
It is evident that the drone has come to be decisive. In many case the drone is substituting for an air force at a small percentage of the cost. Russians are abandoning equipment because, if they flee in their trucks and armored vehicles, they will be killed by drones. So they flee on foot. Drones are still not cheap enough to waste on individuals. They are however, sufficiently cheap to offer the less powerful an air force at a price they can afford. Much as I loved them, the tank has become too cheap to destroy relative to its utility as an offensive weapon. They talked of the foolish bravery of Polish cavalry attacking columns of German tanks; they will soon talk of the folly of tanks attacking across open fields against anti-tank missiles and drones.
Jordan Peterson is the most important public intellectual today. His only rival for pertinence and importance is Douglas Murray. By chance I was listening to Dr. Peterson’s podcast this afternoon in the car for quite a while and I had to turn him off. The ostensible subject was a Jungian interpretation of Disney’s the Lion King. But the tone of voice, the breathlessness, the apparent shouting (though he was not raising his voice): it was all wrong. It was all wrong for an enclosed space. It might have been effective in the presence of the large audience he was addressing, yet as a podcast, he entirely violated the basic rule of the radio: that you are talking into someone’s living room, that you are talking into someone’s ear.
My wife said he sounded extremely anxious. We spoke about his health problems. He seems to be a candle burning at both ends.
Peterson, by contrast, is exhasuting to listen to. He is like a man juggling chainsaws trying to recite the Iliad. All you hear is the ragged voice reciting the Iliad, and you cannot see him juggling the invisible chainsaws, but you can hear the effort. Jordan, please breathe deeply and do some enthogenic drugs and come to grips with your demons in a safe space. I wish you all the best and I do not want you to flame out. See Blade Runner for guidance.
George Will has not endeared himself to me for his opposition to Trump, but he is a fine thinker, an elegant writer and profoundly knowledgeable about the US Constitution and its various schools of interpretation. I came across this review of The Conservative Sensibility this morning, and I recommend it for those who might be tempted by a big book of American constitutional thought.
The review itself is found here. It is fair, and it is favourable in the main to Will’s outlook.
As to whether George Will is properly called a conservative, we encounter another of those vexed questions of definition. James Piereson of the Manhattan Institute writes:
“Finally, on the evidence of this book, can we say that Will really is a conservative, as he has described himself over these many decades? When the reader adds up the author’s case—his defense of markets, limited government, the Madisonian constitution, modern science, and natural rights, along with his reservations about religion and his criticisms of Burke, progressivism, and the welfare state—he is apt to conclude that these are more the thoughts of a classical liberal than those of a modern conservative. His book contains many favorable references to Adam Smith, the first of that line of thinkers, but also to Friedrich Hayek, the great twentieth-century proponent of classical liberalism. Will promotes a free society, with ordered liberty as its foundation, much as Smith and Hayek did, in contrast to conservatives who stress the importance of religion, consensus, and community morals and mores. Hayek inserted into The Constitution of Liberty a chapter titled “Why I Am Not a Conservative,” where he wrote that
“Conservatism by its very nature cannot offer an alternative to the direction in which we are moving. It may succeed by its resistance to current tendencies in slowing down undesirable developments, but, since it does not indicate another direction, it cannot prevent their continuance. It has, for this reason, invariably been the fate of conservatism to be dragged along a path not of its own choosing.
“In order to reverse the direction of events, someone must formulate an alternative to it—which George Will has done in this fine book.
“Will writes much as Hayek did in calling for a restoration of Madison’s Constitution and a politics that emphasizes liberty, rather than like the conservatives who want to slow down the general direction of affairs. In this, Will’s advice may seem impractical or even utopian, but it has the virtue of being principled—and entirely honest about our situation.”
The Coronavirus pandemic has brought certain things into relief. One of them is the importance of people who do not work from home: the workers, truckers, cops, paramedics and others who have kept food stores open and food being produced while we have sat on couches or chairs before computers.
“For decades, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) has been charting wages and wealth in this country.For example, here are nine charts EPI released about American wages and income inequality back in 2015, well before Donald Trump’s election; as we can see, they make two key points about conditions under Trump’s predecessors:
“First, productivity has soared much faster than median wages, which is to say, American workers are no longer gaining the benefit of their own hard work as a factor in rising productivity and wealth; the benefits are being captured by others.And that leads us to …
“Second, the income of the top one percent has risen nine times faster than the income of the bottom 90 percent.And much of the reason, of course, is that the one percent typically gets its income from capital and investments, and so one percenters make their money from the stock market.And big corporations have found it easy, and profitable, to outsource production overseas, especially after China opened up in the ’90s.
“We might add that EPI admits there’s been some improvement in the years since 2015, which is to say, Trump’s policies have made a positive difference.And yet still, it’s obvious that the gap between labor and capital has widened vastly.”
The upshot of the article’s proposals is that the Republican Party needs to become the first home of the American worker. This is not as strange as it may appear. The Republican Party emerged from the northern and north western state of the United States in 1860 to combat the forces of the Democrats, which were preponderantly the slave owning wealthy of the South and their northern peace at any price allies. They were primarily the party of the independent farmer and Northern working man. The Republicans were for a long time (1880-1980) the party of the WASPy centre, the higher income earners, big business, and the suburbs. Once again the respective bases of the two American parties are shifting, leaving some groups aside wondering which way to jump (Catholics, gays, and national security voters) and causing others to reconsider whose interests are best served by the Democrats and Republicans. These shifts in party support occur periodically. Another such shift is now underway.
People have rediscovered or are rediscovering that they are a nation first, and an economy second. That is why the transition of the Republicans to a nationalist party is underway, and it scares the intelligentsia because the baddies of Wall Street and Silicon Valley are primarily rich, Democrat and, to a considerable extent, Jewish. All that the Democrats are selling is cultural fragmentation (endless nonsense about race and sexuality) with a visibly senile Joe Biden as its standard bearer, packaged in proposals for open immigration and anti-whiteness. It is not an attractive proposition if you are white or working class.
A great deal of shouting about Trump will seek to prevent people from these realizations.
He goes further, of course, because our former Prime Minister has bought into the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) scam in its entirety. By which I mean he assumes that human energy production is warming the climate, that this warming is potentially catastrophic, unless we do something, and that something can be done at an acceptable political price. I deny two of the three premises of the argument, if you ask me about the politics of it. Though, as regards the first premise, I would hold it quite possible that human energy production of late has had a minor warming effect, and that this is good for the planet.
I observe the the depression in Alberta and the hardships in Saskatchewan are caused in great part by federal energy policy, and that federal policy has been to tax the industry more heavily, to block its exports by obstructing pipelines, and to tax consumers on their projected CO2 emissions.
We are already experiencing the drop in economic activity that green energy policy would have us endure. It is always easy to contemplate the economic woes of the Canadian West from the comfortable perch of Laurentian Canada, and even easier when you are a federal Liberal. You can combine the derision of the enlightened with the assurance of the woke, and say “they deserve it because they are pulling those nasty hydrocarbons from the ground”.
Let me propose an alternative and less popular view. The green energy delusion – for it is a delusion – is the equivalent of Mulroney’s effort to “bring Quebec into the constitution”. Instead of splitting us along linguistic lines, as the Meech Lake Accord did, this one will split us according to whether we produce more energy than we consume, or something like from the east of the Selkirks in BC to the Manitoba border. I think significant parts of British Columbia and Manitoba will side with Alberta and Saskatchewan. I say it will split us because it is already doing so. Look at the results of the last election. The West has given the Liberals not a seat west of Manitoba.
Mulroney proposes that the Conservatives will not attain power unless they cave in on green energy scams and the AGW panic. I shall boldly predict the contrary. Their path to power lies in assembling a coalition that, while concerned with the environment, is skeptical of the pain of higher energy prices and bad technologies, such as wind and solar, and is ready to say so.
While it is necessary and proper to show concern with the environment, the Conservatives will not get back into power until they start shedding some of their forced reverence for the “science” of global warming. In a choice between those who really believe the bullshit of AGW, and those who only half believe, or pretend to believe, the electorate will choose the true believers, until such time as the full implications of the doctrine are borne by the public generally. Then the turn around will begin.
When I have discussed politics with some Conservatives (of the partisan kind) I have been struck by the gap between how they talk among themselves (realistically) with how the media force them to talk , which is out of both sides of their mouths. The average Conservative is not a green, though he or she is concerned with the environment. The leader of the Conservatives in Canada must be able to endure the howls of outrage from the green mobs, the CBC – the voice of the establishment – the Liberals, the NDP and the latest instantiation of the Quebec nationalists, and say, right out loud, the climate scam is a scam. The emperor has no clothes.
Of course, Brian Mulroney won two majority elections, but he also drove the party into near oblivion with his signature policy of appeasing Quebec.
I also want to draw attention to something that Matthew Goodwin said in a recent interview on Triggernometry. After dissecting the recent loss by the Labour Party, which was roughly speaking the dissociation of the concerns of the well educated intelligentsia from the concerns of working class Eng;and, he was asked at the end of the interview “What is the one thing we are not talking about that we ought to be talking about”, at 1:03:45. Hear him: “The politics of climate change is going to be the next huge big disruptive moment in our political world”.
I agree that thinking about environmentalism in a reasonable way is the most sensible thing you can do as a conservative. I do not believe that acting on global warming, to the extent it is occurring, by central planning, predicated on bad science, is the way to go about it.
I tried to read a book this summer called Bronze Age Mindset by a man calling himself Bronze Age Pervert. The book was intensely annoying. Not because I thought it wrong in substance, though I have some arguments with it, but that I thought the tone to be insufferable and its lack of coherent structure to be tedious. As in Nietzsche: a series of discoordinated apercus, from a mind that had ceased to care for discourse or coherent argument. My alarm needle goes into the red when any author adopts the pose of Jove sending thunderbolts to lighten the darkness of my mind. Yes I recognize you are a plenty smart fellow, Mr. Pervert, Sir, but that does not excuse bad writing. You are not the only clever young man to have rebelled against the feminist/Bolshevik/PC/you-name-it hydra, so cool your attitude. But such is the arrogance of youth and the wisdom of having been young and arrogant once myself.
But the times call for a more militant response when society’s dominant issue is no longer voting rights for black people, but rights for white people to exist at all in freedom. I will let the Pervert speak for himself:
“What is going on now is a widespread rejection of the ruling authorities and their beliefs, on the part primarily, but not only, of the American youth at large. This is similar to the rejection of communism by dissidents and youth in the Soviet bloc in the 1970’s and 80’s, and driven by similar causes….”
“Insofar as my book is representative of this phenomenon, it is only in the sense that unvarnished, unedited Nietzscheanism, “right wing nihilism,” has been one of the opinions absolutely forbidden by the postwar liberal world order. It has resurfaced in the space of freedom provided recently by the internet, and has spread there with some speed, the way it always will when it is not repressed. But it is hardly the only view present in this world, or even the dominant view. Nor, as I keep repeating, is this phenomenon—I lack a better word to call it—reducible to any view or set of views, but it represents rather a youth counterculture that has rejected the controlled, staged, edited and therefore mendacious form of public discourse that dominates America and the West right now….
“The failure of the conservative establishment to address the insanity of the new left is the chief negative cause of the phenomenon or movement in question. …
“The anti-male and anti-White rhetoric of the new left is extreme. The racial attacks on whites in particular approaches exterminationist propaganda seen only in, e.g., the Hutu against the Tutsi in 1990’s Rwanda. [examples are cited.]
“Whether out of loyalty to the generally leftist social sphere in which the conservative intellectual establishment lives, or out of simple fear, mainstream and traditional conservatives have completely discredited themselves by failing to oppose the violent racial hatred and other forms of unprecedented insanity coming from the new left.
“I haven’t even yet touched the conservative powerlessness when it came to stopping the destruction of the family; or the new push for the sexualization and grooming of children on behalf of transsexualism and other supposed “sexual identities.”
“If we listen to the rhetoric of the left, we can only guess that further restrictions of speech and life, both de facto and de jure, are coming. What is the conservative plan to deal with any of this?…. “
What is the conservative plan to deal with any of this? Nothing. In Canada, for example, the leader of the opposition dares not say he thinks abortion is a sin, and the press questions him upon because they are heresy hunting, Scheer is weak. He could say that it is not the function of the press to be looking into men’s souls, but that would be an actual attack on the press. Too strong!
The question is far more important than my trivial example. The Pervert correctly points out that the Republican party has held power for longer than the Democratic for the last sixty years, and yet has been unable to do anything about the corruption of the culture.
Bronze Age Pervert again:
“The problem Anton or other conservatives must face isn’t that my audience, or the “youth” in question doesn’t accept the principles of the American Founding, but that the left and thereby a large part of the establishment rejected these principles long ago. The left has been saying exactly what they plan to do for decades. They want to destroy your country, instill a death wish in the white population, set majorities against market-dominant minorities, atomize everyone: the British plan in Malaysia and a few other places but now applied domestically within a country.
“But the conservatives didn’t do anything, or anything effective, to counter the left—this is the problem. Many conservatives would rather blame people who point out the left’s explicit intentions. If Hillary Clinton says that Merkel is her role model a year after Merkel made the youth of Germany a minority in their own country, and if we point this out and support any candidate who might prevent this unprecedented madness, it is mainstream conservatives who call us Nazis and worse simply for pointing out the left’s stated goals.
” The left completely abandoned Americanism in the 1960’s; at this point they’ve also abandoned biological reality. Vitalism is all that is left against their demented biological Leninism. Encouraging health, normality, and physical nobility against their celebration of deformity, obesity, and sexual catamitism must be one of the basic functions of conservatism in our time. It is one of the reasons my message is powerful among many who are fed up with the left’s gospel of wretchedness: what is your plan to take that on? ….
“We are now faced with a left that has embraced a dialectic of racial and class destruction in a context where belief in absolute human equality is professed at the same time that no one believes in it anymore. I don’t see how the vision of the Founders, widely dismissed as white nationalism even by “conservatives” when presented with its reality, has more political potential in our situation than Bronze Age perversion would…..
” If you fail to see that you live in the Soviet Union of the 1970’s or 1980’s, or rather something slightly even more repressive than the Eastern Bloc of that time, it may be you don’t know about the threats, financial ruin, and mob violence that Trump supporters and anyone really who steps out of line has been subject to since at least 2016—but actually since some time before that. “
What we need right now is glasnost and perestroika. Opening and restructuring. For me, however imperfectly, Trump is the ice breaker setting free the trapped ships. The larger cultural struggle has yet to be undertaken by conservatives. In this regard, students of the US Constitution such as George Will, who rail against Trump, are not even wrong. They are, in the deepest sense of the word, irrelevant – to either side of the culture wars. Arguing that the US Constitution has strayed from its Madisonian intentions is up there with support for the restoration of the Stuart Kings. It might be true, but the issues of our time do not concern Presidential overreach, the weakness of the Congress in the face of the Presidency and the Courts, or the abandonment of free trade. They concern the eliminationist and exterminationist tendency directed towards me and you as white people. It is that simple. And most conservatives have not woken up to this, or refuse to see it, yet. I predict they will.
