The Virtual Theater Returns

Posted on April 26, 2022 by thezman

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One of the great truths of American politics is that for the last few generations one side has been motivated by dreams of destroying their enemies, while the other side dreams of befriending the enemy. The people we call the Left in America are the former case and this is their primary definition. Their ideology changes, but the one constant is their desire to clear the field of their enemies. The other side is the Right, which exists to find some sort of accommodation with their friends on the Left.

This impulse to seek a compromise is why American politics has followed a familiar pattern since the Civil War. The Left proposes some novelty and the Right resists, always trying to reason with them. In the end they always cave. As Robert Lewis Dabney observed a century ago, “it (conservatism) demurs to each aggression of the progressive party and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation.”

In the main, this is a good way to describe the political dynamic, but this relationship has had a strange effect on people. The selection pressure for both camps has molded generations of Americans. On the Left, of course, the pressure had been in favor of a feminine histrionics. On the Right, the pressure has been in favor of those who are sure there is some right answer to every trouble. They just need the right guy to say the right words so the kingdom of heaven will open.

We are seeing this with the Twitter story. In the early days of the internet, there was little moderation as no one wanted it. Early adopters liked that it was a place where they could experience heterodox opinion. This openness drove technological innovation and helped make the internet a part of civic life. This is why the Left felt it needed to take control of it. They saw the internet as another institution that they must control in their war on normal society.

As the harpies gained control of Twitter, the so-called conservatives demurred to each new aggression, making angry noises while acquiescing. They supported free speech but demanded the end of anonymity. They supported free speech, but not hate speech, whatever that means. Every “defense” of principle included an important concession to the other side, in the hope of finding a middle ground. Conservative principles are always just a retreat from those principles.

Now we have Elon Musk buying Twitter. Musk has claimed to be a free speech absolutist who is buying the company to open it up again. He has closed on the company and will take it private. It is unclear as to what he intends to do with it in terms of censorship, but he clearly wants his fans to think he will throw open the doors of the platform so it can be what it was ten years ago. Time will tell if he is willing to do what is required to make that happen, but that is the dream.

Here we see those conservative attributes that have been carefully evolved over the last century or so. The first of which is the savior complex. Conservative people have been sure that what they need is a great man who not only has the ability to make conservative arguments, but the courage to do so. The same enthusiasm that put Trump in the White House is what will flood Twitter with new signups. Elon Musk is here to save us from the Twitter mobs.

Another attribute, the most destructive, in fact, is the conservative desire to mix it up with the Left. The reason Twitter exists is otherwise normal people are compelled to interact with people who hate them and want them dead. To be a conservative is to lie awake at night dreaming of left-wing approval. The right argument from the right guy will cause lefty to throw down his arms and embrace you as a brother. Twitter exists so conservatives can beg the Left for forgiveness.

This is obviously true, but conservatives cannot accept it. Gab has been up and running since 2016 and it offers what conservatives claim they want in a platform. Even better, it is free from the deranged lunatics that have ruined other platforms. Conservatives dismiss it because they say it is an echo chamber, by which they mean it lacks the people they claim to hate. They avoid alternatives to Twitter because they want to beg lefty for forgiveness and those platforms do not provide it.

The other conservative quality on display with the Twitter story is the desire to win the approval of the mobs. The same lack of self-worth that drives the conservative to beg lefty for attention is there in their love of the mob. Conservatives are sure if they can get a clear shot on stage, the crowd will reward them with flowers and applause. In a prior age, they would crawl on their belly to be on left-wing television or land a speaking gig at a university. Now they just want to be on Twitter.

Back in the old days, conservatives would argue that they had to be on far-left television shows in order to reach an audience. Today they claim they have to be on far-left internet platforms in order to reach an audience. In Dabney’s time, northern conservatives said they needed to speak with progressive newspapers in order to reach the broader audience. In reality, what the conservative wants is the approval of the Left and there is no limit in how far he will degrade himself to get it.

Twitter is American politics at is most basic. Since Gettysburg, politics in American has been a theater show. The Left hustles everyone inside the theater and puts on a show about a victim or a villain. Sometimes they combine the two. The crowd is told about the plight of some victim group and is supposed to sympathize. Maybe they are warned about some villain, which is always the same villain. Old Scratch takes many forms and the producers of American theater use all of them.

At some point conservatives are brought onto the stage. They shuffle out in their comfort fit slacks and polo shirts. Their job is to dismiss the warnings about the villain or tell the victim to “pull yourself up by your bootstraps.” The crowd is supposed to boo and hiss, but that does not always happen. Often the villain is so ridiculous that the crowd just laughs about it. Other times the victim is too creepy and weird for the crowd to muster anything other than contempt.

Often, the Left brings out their secret weapon, the Hitler costume. The spotlight focuses on the right of the stage and there it is. Then the Left asks if anyone in the crowd will play that role. Sure enough, an idiot runs up, puts on the costume and does the Hitler act. The crowd then starts throwing cabbages and tomatoes at Richard Spencer as he prances around on stage. The conservatives freak out, run behind lefty looking for safety and the curtain falls. The show is over.

This was Twitter from its inception through the 2020 election. The problem is the producers went bonkers and burned down the theater. In that meeting with the board of directors, everyone realized they needed to rebuild the theater. Despite some moaning from the blue checks, the truth is they want the conservatives back in the theater as much as they want to perform for them. The privatization of Twitter is going to be the rebuilding of the virtual stage of political theater.

Time will tell with regards to Musk and Twitter. He will quickly learn that he must obey the rules of Apple and Google with regards to speech. Maybe he has had some sort of conversion and he will go to war over it. Most likely he will compromise in order to get their approval. This will titivate the conservatives, who will see in his capitulation the stamp of approval for their capitulation. Twitter will go from a woke site to a woke site full of conservatives begging the woke for acceptance.

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Opposite Rule Revisited

Posted on April 25, 2022 by thezman

Note #1: The Monday Taki post is up. The topic is somewhat related to the post today, but using the war as a jumping off point. Because I was traveling over the weekend, no Sunday Thoughts behind the green door, but I have a write up of the VDare event posted there instead. Later this week I will have a longer post on the event at the castle and the issues discussed there.

Note #2: If you are a law student or know a law student, there is a competition around the legal difficulties of the J6 victims. It is an essay contest. If you are interested, here is their website. The principles behind it are listed on the site. Scroll down.

The Opposite Rule of Liberalism states that whatever the Left is saying about its political opponents, assume the opposite and you will get close to the truth. This should not be confused with contradiction. If the Left says “X”, it does not follow that the literal opposite of “X” is the truth. All this rule tells us is that what the Left is saying is not the truth and that the truth is going to be completely different from what they are saying, often the complete opposite.

The classic example of this is ten years ago when the Tea Party was a thing. This purely grassroots movement in reaction to the radicalism of the Obama administration was called “AstroTurf” by the Left. The Left claimed their activism was organic while the Right was manufacturing activism. The Tea Party was a creation of the Republican Party and their corporate masters. The reality was the opposite. Left-wing activism was controlled by the party and financed by corporate America.

The opposite rule can also work as a warning. In fact, this is the best application of the rule as it helps prepare for left-wing shenanigans. The way this works is that once you hear warnings from left-wing people about some threat, you can assume they are planning it or they are actively engaged in it. The last bit is the way to bet when the Left is overly excited about the claim. In other words, they have a habit of accusing their opponents of crimes the are committing.

A good example of this is when the neocons were organizing the police state during the Bush years. The Bush people said these new weapons of the state would only be used against Muslims. Most of them were probably sincere about this. Neocons hate Arabs more than they hate Europeans. The Left said these tools would be used against normal Americans. Of course, as soon as the Left gained power they started using these tools to spy on Americans.

This behavior of the Left, where they accuse their enemies of what they are plotting or doing, is used by conservatives as proof of the Left’s cynicism. For conservatives, hypocrisy is the most powerful abracadabra word. Despite all the evidence, they are sure that uttering this word will destroy their enemies. When the Left accuses their enemies of something they are doing, the conservatives scream about hypocrisy, believing is does something magical for them.

This never has the desired effect because being accused of hypocrisy only works if you care about factual accuracy. For conservatives, being factual correct is important, so they would rather lose than be accused of contradiction. This is mostly why they lose every fight. They like losing while being right. For the Left, advancing their goals is what matters, so they can live with contradiction. For them, facts are just another tool that can be used as a weapon against the opposition.

It also helps that left-wing politics attracts a specific type. Eric Hoffer observed that people often join mass movements out of self-loathing. They wish to swap their hated sense of self with the identity of the group, which they view positively. This is almost always true with left-wing politics. The people in it are looking for a form of salvation, where they are saved from thinking about their hated sense of self. Instead, they get to focus on an enemy they can enthusiastically hate.

Of course, hating an enemy that has the qualities you hate about yourself is pretty much the ideal enemy for this sort of person. Their self-loathing is transformed into a virtue while they express their hatred for qualities they fear they possess. Collectively, this transforms the Left into a mob driven by what looks like moral indignation and a desire to purge the world of corruption. This is what makes a relatively small number of people into a powerful force in American society.

This shameless ability to project onto others the sins of the Left has been the primary reason the Left has denominated American politics. They claim the moral high ground, accuse anyone that resists of doing something bad and then they do that bad thing to the people they are accusing. After all, they have created the justification for the bad thing they are doing. Conservatives spent the last half century trying to prove they are not the villains while the Left marched from triumph to triumph.

The opposite rule has been so effective, in fact, that there is no longer an effective opposition to the Left in America. Conservatism has collapsed and the political divide in America is the Cloud People, who populate and control the managerial class, and the Dirt People, who suffer under the rule of the managerial class. The Cloud People now accuse the Dirt People are various things, like the insurrection business, which is used to justify heavy handed tactics against the Dirt People.

This self-referential indignation that grows from self-loathing has become a religion for the managerial class. In fact, it has helped them become class aware. It is why they find bizarre things to impose on society. They are in support of child molesters in the schools, for example, because it gives them people to hate. Those normal parents showing up to fight against groomers and bigots in the schools provide the needed foil for the Left. Their religion demands a devil.

This bizarre religion that animates the ruling class is effective at walling them off from society and preserving their position. It is why any questioning of official policy is labeled one of the abracadabra phases that mean “outsider.” Ask about food bills doubling and you are spreading misinformation. Question the war in Ukraine and you are a Putin shill. Notice that crime is rising at rates not seen since the 1970’s and you are a violent white supremacist.

This is where that opposite rule becomes so effective. The need to accuse an outsider of the worst crimes the Left can imagine becomes a justification for committing those crimes against the alleged enemy. It is how America so quickly moved from defending the liberal order and individual rights to celebrating corporate censorship and the persecution of political prisoners. The bad guys get worse, so the means to defeat them must get worse as well. This is the terror escalator.

This is a parasitic and corrosive ruling ethos. The sharp decline in the quality of life for most Americans over the last generation is one result. The collapse in social trust is another consequence. Like the desperate person eating the seed corn, what we call liberal democracy is consuming the social capital of society in order to fuel the hate-machine that props up the managerial class. At some point, maybe soon, they run out of things to burn and the system becomes unstable.

Alternative Authority

Posted on April 21, 2022 by thezman

Starting in the 1990’s the neocons started to talk about conservatism as a process, a means justifies the ends approach to politics. This was not a change in how conservatism defined itself but it was a change in how it sold itself. You were supposed to support conservatives in order to achieve certain ends, like rolling back abortion laws and curtailing the welfare state. By the Bush years, this means justifies the end claim was front and center in the pitch from neoconservatives.

The reason for this, of course, is millions of conservatives had voted for Bush and the Republicans thinking they would do what they promised. The GOP had both house of Congress and the White House. They expected conservative governance. Instead, they got Lyndon Johnson. They had to accept this result, you see, because conservatism is a process, not a set of end results. As long as conservatives were defending the process, people needed to shut up and be happy.

The main reason for this rhetorical sleight of hand was to trick rank and file conservatives into supporting a president that was the opposite of what conservatives expected from a conservative president. The neocons wanted to continue their bloody war against Islam and they needed a second term from Bush. In the 2000’s, they had started to infest the other side of the political class but the take over of the foreign policy establishment was not complete.

This was possible because of a flaw within conservatism. From the beginning, the Buckley people focused on defending the constitutional order. They were the guys talking about interpreting the Constitution as written. They were defending the system against both distortions and changes from the Left. They magnanimously accepted adverse results as long as the constitutional order was followed. This fetish for defending process is what the neocons exploited.

This points to a much larger problem with conservatism. They were never willing to appeal to authority to justify their claims. The closest they got was originalism in the law, which claimed the written constitution as authority. This has two problems. One was that the Left rejected this claim in favor of a living constitution. The other is the Left kept tinkering with document through judicial rulings which became precedents. The result of originalism was a defense of left-wing gains in court.

This is why conservatism is in collapse. In fact, it is fair to say that conservatism is dead as hardly anyone bothers with the term. The only people using the term are those still working the hustle on their aging donor class. Otherwise, the only people considered to be on the Right use the term is when criticizing the old conservative movement for not having conserved anything. It turns out that winning the process war meant nothing to those conservative constituencies.

The elephant in the room is authority. Fundamental to any human organization is a clear understanding as to who decides. Iran is an Islamic state with laws based in the sect of the ruling class. It is the religious elite that is the ultimate decider. The Russian people are the leaders of the Russian Federation and Vladimir Putin is the leader of the Russian people, so he is the final authority in the Russian Federation. This is clear to everyone who lives within the Russian Federation.

In the case of Iran, authority for this arrangement, the thing that legitimizes it in the minds of the people, is the Koran and their religious traditions. The text of their holy book, the traditions of their people and the moral hierarchy is the authority for their political arrangements. In the Russian Federation, it is the long history of these people and their relationship to one another that forms the basis of authority. Its perseverance through communism is proof of this natural order.

This is where we see “common good conservatism” trying to fill the void left by the collapse of Buckley conservatism and the departure of neoconservatism. They want to move away from individual rights as the center piece of conservatism toward a vague sense of collective interests. Instead of focusing on what provides the individual with the least amount of government coercion, they want to focus on what provides the most amount of common good.

In simple terms, disputes over rights will be decided in favor of the interests of society as a whole, rather than abstract principles about individual liberty. If someone complains about prayer in school, the courts should ignore their complaint because prayer in school provides more social benefit than that one person’s desire to be free of the religious sentiments of the community. Homosexual marriage would be banned, because it harms marriage, which harms society.

This may sound good and feel like a step in the dissident direction, but it suffers from the same defect as Buckley conservatism. That is, there is little mention of who decides and upon what authority they make these decisions. Some talk about the Church providing authority and others mention the administrative state. Mostly this is just a way to avoid speaking directly to the issue of authority. It is just assumed that once people think in terms of the common good, everything falls into place.

This is the same error conservatives have always made. Their chanting of the phrase “ideas have consequences” was mostly about the belief that all they had to do was win the argument and the rest would take care of itself. History makes clear that force and determination can conquer the soundest logic. The Bolshevik program was nonsensical and dangerous, but they wanted it more so they carried the day and controlled Russia for three quarters of a century.

Human society is based around a series of questions. Who we are? What are the rules that define us? Who decides? What is the process for enforcing the rules? It is only the last question that conservatives bothered to answer, which left the other questions to whoever wanted to answer them. This is why conservatism failed and any alternative will fail if it refuses to address the questions that come before debating the process by which rules are enforced.

The great trick of liberal democracy is in convincing people it exists. The narrow elite that controls Western societies decides because they control the managerial class, which in turn controls the administrative state. Their authority rests on their will to power and the delusions of the people, who steadfastly insist they decide public policy through the ballot box. It is a devilish trick by a devilish people, but until an alternative questions this arrangement directly, it will persist.

The Latest Thing

Posted on April 19, 2022 by thezman

Yesterday a federal judge struck down the CDC mandate requiring passengers to wear ceremonial face coverings on public transport. For the last two years airplane passengers have been required to wear masks at the airport and on the plane, unless they were eating or drinking. Of course, this has allowed the petty dictators to harass people while traveling. The mask-marms have been looking for reasons to fly just so they could harass people. Now that is over.

The CDC appears to have conceded the point and will not appeal. They tried to front run the news by announcing the mandate has ended. The media has made sure to put the name and picture of the judge on all of their attack channels probably hoping that one of their lunatics goes bonkers over it. The public reaction has been celebratory, based on what has been posted on-line. Normal people are sick of the ridiculous charade over Covid and just want to be done with it.

To the dismay of the Covidians, the public is ready to close the books on the whole thing and just forget about it. Most normal people are a bit angry at having gone along with this lunacy. There is certainly some shame involved. This is to be expected as everyone feels shame after having been taken for a fool and not having said anything against this stuff. That is why this will be memory-holed by the summer, so people can just move on.

It is a little hint as to why the sociopaths in the media keep getting away with these mass hoaxes that have become a feature of life. People wake up and see that everyone is now into the latest thing. Maybe that thing is outrage over a police shooting or maybe it is some new abstract concern. All of the right people are on their soapboxes and all of the best people are following along with them. It is only normal for people to want to do the right thing and support the latest thing.

Of course, the latest thing always turns out to be the latest fraud. Some go longer than others, depending upon the agenda. The crusade against Islam launched by Republicans and cheered by conservatives ran for a long time. It is not easy building out a police state so they needed that fraud to run for years. Covid was part of the color revolution launched against Trump and quickly became a convenient tool of control by the petty tyrants that terrorize daily life.

The facts are becoming clear at this point. The lockdowns had no impact on the course of the virus or its impact on the public. There was never any data to support the policies and now we know it caused more harm than good. Similarly, idiotic things like social distancing and mask wearing were useless. In the fullness of time, we will learn that the vaccine was a massive boondoggle. It was just a money transfer to Big Pharma and the health care rackets.

There is another angle here. The courts have struck down almost all of the Covid polices by now. The ceremonial mask wearing on planes was the last big item to be cancelled by the courts. All of these could have been knocked down by the courts when they were enacted, but it took two years for judges to remember that we have this thing called the law. It is a reminder that the courts are just another ruling class institution run by the maniacs of the new religion.

Notice that even dissidents struggle to remember the Bush years. That was a fraud on the public of epic proportions. Millions of people voted for it and supported it, but now they have stashed it in the shadows of their mind. The reason is none of us want to be reminded of our blunders. Failure, no matter how instructive, brings a sense of shame so we put our failures out of minds. Just as the Bush years have faded from our minds the Covid fiasco will soon fade too.

This is how these frauds keep working. It is the Gell-Man amnesia effect scaled up to the whole of society. This is the phenomenon where you read something in the media and see it is total nonsense. You know the subject of the article and you quickly see that the article is full of falsehoods and mistakes. You then go to the next article about which you know little and accept what is presented. You completely forget that the previous article was all nonsense.

This is what is happening in America. People see the latest thing trending on Twitter and start learning about it through the media. When they see the latest thing is a fraud, they get mad about it. Then they see the next thing trending and forget all about the fraud of the previous thing. The Covid fraud is now the previous thing while Ukraine is now the latest thing. People are accepting the latest thing from the same people they know sold them the previous thing.

This pattern works as long as the vast bulk of people are supplied with plenty of food, safety and entertainments. You may not be able to lift your arm due to a reaction to the vaccine your employer mandated, but you do not want to be that guy who goes against the grain. After all, you look around and see that everyone is enjoying the current thing. As long as everyone is excited for the next thing, why be that guy who mentioned what happened with the previous thing?

The lesson of Covid is that reason is of no use on the public. Abductive reasoning will always triumph over deductive and inductive reasoning. The only thing that can break this cycle of madness is when the latest thing is a bad thing that cannot be jawboned away by the media. At that point, their efforts to sell a new distraction turns around on them and becomes a liability. When the current thing is real suffering, people will remember all the previous things were lies.

Willing Victims

Posted on April 18, 2022 by thezman

Note: The regular Taki post is up. The subject is related to the post here. There was no Sunday Thoughts due to Easter. There is a post about what is happening with the conduct of the war for those interested.

Word has begun to trickle out of Ukrainian and Russian channels on-line that the Zelensky government has ordered the remaining holdouts in the city of Mariupol to fight to the last man. Many have surrendered but there is a remnant that has refused to give into the reality of their position. On Sunday, the Russians gave them one last chance to walk away alive. The word from both sides of the information war is that the Zelensky government instructed them to die with honor.

The Russians have been slow to take the necessary steps to clear this part of the city of the remaining militants. One reason is pointless slaughter is not something any professional military enjoys. The other reason is they were hoping to minimize damage to the steel works. The slow progress of the war has been due to the Russian desire to minimize infrastructure damage. Given that the Russians will have to rebuild these territories after the war, this makes sense.

The other reason is that the remaining group of fighters is composed of elite Azov soldiers, including some high level leaders. It also has a group of foreign mercenaries trained by NATO. The Russians say they have detected seven European languages in the radio traffic. There is a strong possibility there are high ranking NATO advisors in this group. The Ukrainians have made several attempts to extract people from this site, so the Russians would like that prize if possible.

This is one of those glimpses into the heart of the issue. The Ukrainian government does not care at all about the Ukrainian people. These nationalists, like the civilian population, are just low value pieces on the board. The real issue is the long running proxy war against Russia. Zelensky is just a cat’s paw for the neocons in Washington who are running this war. They back him because he does what he is told and he does what he is told because he will retire an extraordinarily rich man.

Of course, the nationalist who rushed to back the Zelensky regime now find themselves supporting a craven lunatic. This is the trouble with living in the world of abstractions and theoretical concepts. You can easily find yourself on the same side as the people who want you dead. That is where many nationalists now find themselves. They are backing Ukraine against Russia, which means they are supporting the Global America Empire, which would like to exterminate them.

This is part of the greater lesson of Ukraine. A sense of identity that is built around old grievances or opposition to some externality usually leads to disaster. The obvious lesson is Irish nationalism during The Troubles. The IRA and Sinn Féin were defined entirely by their opposition to Britain. That has led Irish nationalists to let Ireland be consumed by the EU and globalism. The Irish are now free to important as many Africans as can make it to their island.

You see the difference between positive and negative identity in the reactions of Poland and Hungary. Polish identity is strongly linked to hatred of Russians. Hungarian identity is about the uniqueness of the Hungarian people. The Polish government is going overboard to support Ukraine against Russia, while the Hungarians have chosen to stay out of the fight. The result is Poland is being used as a flophouse and launching pad by NATO, paying the cost for all of it.

The deadliest example is in Ukraine itself. If the people calling themselves nationalists actually cared about the welfare of the Ukrainian people, their history, language and culture, they would not be acting this way. Their zeal for Russian blood is destroying the things they claim to defend. Tens of thousand of Ukrainian men will die and millions of Ukrainian people will be displaced because the so-called nationalist care more about their hatreds than the Ukrainian people.

The example they should have followed was the Finns. At the start of the Second World War the Finns found themselves invaded by the Soviets. The Finns staged a heroic defense of their homeland in the Winter War. Finnish leaders, however, actually cared about the survival of the Finnish people so they struck a deal with the Soviets that cost them land and some dignity. Finnish nationalists put their people before abstract concepts and arrived at the proper decision.

This is the fundamental problem with modern nationalism. It is nothing more than a bundle of hatreds and complaints tarted up with aspirational language that has no practical application. This is why nationalist parties in Europe do poorly. They are great on the high minded concepts and critiques against globalism, but they are short on a practical agenda that promotes a positive sense of identity. Note that Le Pen has been buoyed by her focus on bread and butter issues in France.

It is why nationalists movements have done so poorly in America. The critiques against global trade and open borders go back to the 1970’s when the paleo-conservatives started making them. The fact that Pat Buchanan was right about everything thirty years ago has made no difference. Cheap consumer goods, on-demand degeneracy and powerful pharmaceuticals are not much of a culture, but they beat the lack of a positive alternative vision of life.

Of course, the main reason for this is nationalism has been defined by the enemies of it and that definition has been accepted by the nationalists. The negative identity is defined by what the enemy opposes. Therefore, nationalism has been defined by the people who oppose it, which means it is a cartoon version of the real thing. Until nationalists start with a clean sheet of paper, put their enemies out of their head and sort out what they offer, they will remain the willing victims of their enemies.

The Dissident and the Christian

Posted on April 15, 2022 by thezman

It is fair to say that this is the worst time for Christians and Christianity in the West since the Roman empire. In order to promote equality, liberal democracy has created protected classes of people who cannot be criticized. The other side of this are people who must me mocked and ridiculed. Christians were the first group placed in this category and remain the popular object of ridicule in the West. There is no prohibition against overt hatred of Christians in most Western countries.

We are not feeding Christian to lions in gladiatorial pits, but you can be sure some elements of the ruling class have thought about it. Back in the Obama years, much of the health care bill was designed to torment Christians. For example, forcing Catholic groups to pay for abortions and prophylactics. There was no public health reason for these provisions. They simply satisfied the demented and sadistic impulses of the people who put together the program.

In some Western countries, practicing your faith is close to illegal. Päivi Räsänen is a Finnish politician. She was charged with crimes against democracy for tweeting out a picture of a Bible and quoting it in public. She was eventually acquitted by the courts, but that was not the point. Persecution is about the process. This was true under communism and is even more true under liberal democracy. Hell is being in the control of ideological fanatics staffing a bureaucracy.

The fact is the managerial elites of the West are not irreligious. Ideology is just religion that replaces God with man. Our elites are fanatics for liberal democracy and they will murder anyone who questions it. Christianity has always been their primary target because the Christian’s first loyalty can never be to man or the institutions and ideologies he creates. Liberal democracy, of course, demands absolute obedience to the state and the people who run the state.

It is not just the secular elites that make war on the Christian. The big churches have been taken over by the ideologues. Anywhere you see a rainbow flag it is either a gay bathhouse, a public school or a Protestant church. The Pope cares more about climate change than the Catholic faith. Even the Baptists have seen their organizations taken over by far-left radicals. The great challenge for most Christians is in finding a church that is not run by a far-left lunatic.

Culture is to a great degree a trickle down affair. The hostility toward Christianity among the Cloud People has infected the Dirt People. Church attendance has been in decline for a few generations. Close to 30% of Americans have no religious identity. This means they have no experience with religion. About 40% of people who still identify as Christian no longer attend church. Overall, about 40% of Americans still belong to a church and attend services on a regular basis.

In Europe, Christianity is just about dead. Only 1.4 percent of the population of England attends Anglican services every Sunday. Fewer than one-in-ten Germans say they believe in God. For most Europeans, Christianity is as alien as Islam. They know nothing about it, other than what is taught in history class. Given the entrenched self-loathing that has been imposed by America, Christianity is part of the hated past where evil Europeans tried to enslave black bodies.

It is not all bad news for Christianity. The faithful are slowly realizing that for their faith to survive this age, it must live outside this age. Christians are reverting to what all persecuted minorities must do. They are learning to live in the shadows and think of themselves as the outsider. Traditional Catholics seek one another out and form up shadow communities. Bible study in America is becoming a private affair organized by small local communities of believers.

These defensive measures are what will form the basis of a revival. Anything that is open to everyone is valuable to no one. Christianity was at its most powerful when it was exclusive and required sacrifice from the believers. One of the main reasons for the decline of the Western churches is their success. Once it was easy to be a Christian, it stopped being a powerful force in society. Its return to a persecuted, underground movement is the only path to renewal.

This presents a challenge and an opportunity in dissident politics. Many people waving the dissident banner have yet to shed their liberal disdain for Christianity. Some have manufactured bizarre conspiracy theories about the Church. On the other hand, many sober minded dissidents have soured on their faith, due to the take over of the churches by liberal democratic fanatics. One reason many dissidents have soured on the world is they have seen what happened to their churches.

In America, this is compounded by the problem of evangelical politics. In the 1970’s, in reaction to the cultural revolution, evangelicals decided to engage directly with politics in order to get their guys in office. This was a disaster. Many of the evangelical activist groups became profitable grifts for the leaders. The pols who took advantage of the evangelical vote sold out those voters. They convinced believers that their faith required them to accept liberal degeneracy.

The debacle of Christian political activism cannot be overstated. The neocons were able to take over largely with the support of evangelicals. Even now, after the disaster of the Bush years, many of these groups still care more about Israel than the condition of their own people. When the typical dissident sees stuff like this, he wants to hoist the back flag and start slitting throats. It is a reminder of just how easily these people were turned into weapons against the West.

That said, there is a slow rapprochement between the secular dissidents and the growing number of dissident Christians. The former is coming to understand the defining role not just of belief but of structured rational belief. The latter is coming to terms with the reality of their situation. For the West to survive and resurrect itself after the horrors of liberal democracy, it will need a new set of core beliefs, based in the old ways shaped by the experience of the crisis.

This is where dissident Christians can contribute the most to the cause. The sin of despair is one of the worst, because it is deliberate. One deliberately decides that salvation is impossible. It is the state immediately before suicide. The only reason to be a dissident it to maintain hope that through the struggle, reason and decency can be restored in the West. Without hope, the dissident has no reason to exist, which is why despair must become a mortal sin for dissidents.

You see more and more dissidents and dissident Christians willing to circulate in the same platforms. Gab has become the social media exchange for both dissidents and dissident Christians. Nick Fuentes and his groypers blend dissident political critiques with overt Christian beliefs. For the first time in a long time church attendance has ticked up in America. These are grim times for the defenders of civilization, but we still have hope because that is what must carry us through.

Happy Easter.

The Worst Generation

Posted on April 5, 2022 by thezman

For the most part, generational politics are a self-defeating enterprise, because you end up attacking your allies. It is hard to attack people about whom you know little, but it is easy to find fault with those you know well. Every generation strains against its parents and every generation strains to teach its children. This is why it has been encouraged among the majority populations in the West. It is an effective way of keeping a natural majority from forming up in opposition to the ruling elite.

That said, there is something useful to thinking generationally. Oswald Spengler relied upon a form of generational politics to put forth his theory of history. Of course, we have the old adage, “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations”. This describes the inability of grandchildren to manage the wealth passed down to them from their grandparents and parents. This is Spengler’s argument in a nutshell. A civilization rises, accomplishes what it can and then falls into decline.

We are witnessing the end phase with the Global American Empire. It is not exactly a three generation cycle, but the basics are right. One theory of American history says the empire was founded at Gettysburg. That would mean the current generation of rulers is the fifth or sixth generation. On the other hand, some argue the Second World War is the founding of the empire, so that mean the third generation is in charge. The concept still works and is closer to the old adage.

Even if we place the start of the empire in the middle of that last century, the men who founded it were men of the prior age. Roosevelt was born in 1882 so he was an old man during the war. His Secretary of State during the war was born in 1871 so he was even older than his boss. Roosevelt’s Secretary of War was Henry Stimson and he was born in 1867. The point here is the generation that created the American empire were not the “greatest generation”, but their grandparents.

The best example of the distance between the generation that created the empire and the present is in the biography of Cordell Hull, FDR’s Secretary of State. He was born in a log cabin in Tennessee. He was a rising man of his community at 16, when he gave his first political speech. He fought in the Spanish-American War. His father killed a man in a blood feud. Hull is a bit of an outlier, but most of the people in that regime were tough guys who earned their position.

When the next generation took over for the founding generation of the empire, they were mostly men who fought in the war. Then as now, avoiding war was the instinct of the politically inclined, but they needed to have at least worn the uniform. JFK was in the Navy during the war. Johnson was in the war as was Nixon. Of course, Eisenhower was the last man of the founding generation to serve as President. Reagan was the first leader of the empire who had not worn the uniform.

The point here is that when we put aside the pedantry of the generational lines, we see the old adage comes into focus. Spengler’s observation about the life cycle of a civilization becomes clear. That founding period was made by tough men who had to endure great hardship while forging the empire. Their children inherited the empire, but many paid a price while it was being forged. They at least understood the enormous cost to their ancestors and appreciated it.

It is the third generation that is in charge now. This is incredible, given that their grandparents were born in the 19th century. Nancy Pelosi’s father, Thomas D’Alesandro Jr. was born in 1903. He dodged both wars, by the way. Joe Biden’s parents were a bit younger, born during the Great War. Senator Mitch McConnell’s parents were the same generation as Biden’s parents. In other words, the geezers of the gerontocracy are the third generation and their staff is the fourth.

It is the third generation that followed the type we see in both Spengler’s formulation and that old adage about business. When the Boomer politicians took over in the 1980’s and 1990’s they started to auction off their inheritance. The first step was the financialization of politics. The old “coalition of interest groups” system was replaced with naked graft. Wealthy interests bought the political system because the new generation of leaders had no emotional attachment to it.

That last bit is what distinguishes the third imperial generation. They have no attachment to the system they inherited. It is just something that they were born into so they take it for granted. Their parents at least knew people who had to shed blood for it and they had their grandparents around to contextualize their position. The current rulers of the empire are the spoiled grandchildren of the patriarch. They just want what they want because they feel entitled to it.

We see this in the increasingly reckless management of the empire. Hundreds of millions had to suffer because the spoiled rulers saw Covid as a chance to remake society in their image. Their parents and certainly their grandparents would have been ashamed of this behavior. Those prior generations were capable of shame because they understood the cost of being wrong. They paid it. This generation has never had to suffer so much as a hangnail in their lives.

This reckless and childish behavior is on full display with Ukraine. They are throwing a tantrum because their scheme to dissolve Russia has failed. The Russians finally had enough of the meddling on her border and invaded Ukraine. The whole thing could be resolved peacefully, but the spoiled American ruling class must have its way. While they bang their rattles on their highchairs, millions of Ukrainians suffer. The collective West is getting poorer and more dangerous as a result.

The arc of family dynasties usually leads to the final generations declaring bankruptcy and selling off what they can to earn some money. For civilizations, it means some period of crisis while the rotten generations in the final phase make their mistakes and bring the epoch to a close. The Global American Empire is coming to an end but the West is not going away. A new generation of builders will rise up, create a new civilization and the cycle will begin anew.

The Crisis

Posted on March 29, 2022 by thezman

Broadly speaking, a crisis comes in two forms. There is the internal crisis driven by irreconcilable contradictions. Then there is the external crisis that is driven by some unusual occurrence like a natural disaster. The latter tests mostly the ability of the system to weather the storm and recover. The former tests the ability of the system to radically alter itself in order to address the contradiction. This is the most dangerous crisis and the one that few systems survive.

Of course, the internal crisis can be papered over for a long time until some external crisis comes along and makes that impossible. The external crisis puts pressure on the system, forcing it to respond under duress. The internal problems are then made obvious as the system responds poorly. Efforts to quickly resolve those issues in order to address the immediate problems just create new problems. This was the process that led to the French Revolution.

It is also where the Global American Empire finds itself. In theory, the system relies on the trust of the people. The citizens of America trust that the way they choose leaders, while never perfect, eventually gets them leaders who address the needs of the people by respecting the will of the people. It may require a few elections, but the politicians eventually figure out what they need to do to make things right. This belief rests on the additional belief that the politicians want this result.

That is not reality and people are clearly beginning to understand this. Most Americans have no genuine representation in Congress. The Democrats represent abstract identity groups that get plenty of airtime but are a tiny minority. Most people, for example, only know crossdressers through the media, not in real life. Most black people can easily describe a woman. Of course, the GOP represents no one. White voters are well outside the ideological orbit of the Republicans.

After the 2020 election, it was generally assumed that Joe Biden would not finish out his first term in office. His physical condition was the main reason. During the campaign he was mostly kept out of the public eye. When he was in public, he looked like a man struggling with the ravages of time. There was also the fact that his second was clearly picked to be his successor. The Left has developed an obsession with elevating black females and Kamala Harris is supposedly one of them.

The betting initially was that Biden would make it through the midterms and then announce that he was stepping down for health reasons. This would allow Harris to finish Biden’s term and then run for two terms on her own. This was a left-wing talking point that was echoed by mainstream conservatives. It was mostly about depressing the populist opposition. That plan assumed every other part of their grand strategy would go according to theory.

Here we are seven months out from the November elections and it is clear that Joe Biden needs to be removed from office now. His insane rantings in Europe about Russia have terrified the rest of the world. More important, the world is adjusting to the fact that the Global American Empire has an incoherent figure head. The Russians call him grandfather, not out of respect but from pity. The world sees Biden as a doddering old man who is not in charge of his administration.

This is an untenable situation. Every political system requires energy in the executive, even if it is just symbolic. The North Korean public is regularly treated to images of Kim Jong-un looking vigorous and in charge. The Chinese make sure Xi Jinping looks like a CEO of a successful firm. American presidents have often been shown doing cool outdoor things like chopping wood or playing sports. Society needs a leader and one who looks like he is fit and ready to lead. That is not Joe Biden.

Of course, the times need a fit leader. The crisis in Europe has now become a global crisis because no one has a hand on the tiller. The inmates are running the asylum in the Biden Administration. In prior generations, this crisis would have featured one-on-one meetings between the ruler of the Global American Empire and the parties at the center of the dispute. In this case, it would have meant a summit between Russia, China and the Global American Empire.

Ukraine is not the only issue. The fallout from two years of Covid mismanagement are creating serious trouble for normal people. Food prices have been climbing for a year and are now rising at an alarming rate. Retail and wholesale inflation are at levels not seen since the 1970’s. Labor markets are now showing the first signs of crisis as the deliberate demographic changes turnup in hiring. This is the unsaid basis of the commercial pilot shortage in America.

In other words, the Global American Empire is facing both serious external crises and irreconcilable internal crises. The lack of energy in the executive is allowing these problems to spiral out of control. Compounding it is the fact that the plan to install Kamala Harris looks unworkable. She is mentally and emotionally unfit for the ceremonial position she has now. The weird cackling and general ineptitude say she can never be permitted to hold power.

Of course, the coming elections mean a blowout of historic proportions for the ruling half of the uniparty. Professionals who study these things suggest this may be the worst election conditions for either party in American history. As a practical matter, that means the Republican half of the uniparty will play a major role in selecting the person to fill the remainder of Biden’s term. They may be tasked with removing Biden and Harris in order to save the system from total ruin.

That sounds like good news for the system, but the Republican half of the uniparty is every bit as inept and morally bankrupt as the other half. Again, this is a party without a genuine constituency. Their voters are just choosing the least bad option. That option is built to deny those voters real power. In other words, leadership of the system will go from people obsessed over esoteric identity groupings to people focused on denying the majority any influence over the system.

For normal people, this means a system that becomes increasingly erratic and paranoid about the general public. The things that matter like employment conditions, food prices and energy costs will continue to get worse. The standard of living is about to drop precipitously for most people. The quality of life is also going to decline. This is the cycle that the aristocracy faced in 18th century France. It is also what the party faced in the waning years of the Soviet Union.

Elite Dysfunction

Posted on March 23, 2022 by thezman

It is popular in some circles to compare the current crisis to that which gripped America at the end of the 1960’s cultural revolution. Then as now, the white middle-class was disenchanted with government. The nation also faced maddening economic problems like stagflation. Similarly, the issue of race was center stage, largely driven by the political Left. We even have a version of the Nixon years in Donald Trump having been impeached twice for vexing the Washington elite.

This comparison is natural as the dominant demographic in American is the Baby Boomer generation who came of age in this period. It often feels like the current political elite is nostalgic for that time and is trying to recreate it. The cargo cult vibe was most evident in the Trump years. This comparison is also reassuring as what followed the turmoil and ugliness of the 1970’s was the reforms of the Reagan years and a long period of economic stability and prosperity.

It is a comforting narrative, but the comparison is superficial. For example, in the 1970’s, before Reagan was a realistic option, a consensus was forming among the various elites of society around important reforms. Business and banking elites had concluded that the regulatory code needed drastic reform in order for the economy to adjust to the changing economic realities. Those FDR era regulations designed to limit the accumulation of capital had to be rewritten

Reforms to the regulatory regime actually started under Jimmy Carter. The Airline Deregulation Act was passed in 1978. This begun three years earlier when Ted Kennedy took credit for launching the initiative. The monetarist revolution in finance began in the 1970’s and culminated in the appointment of Paul Volcker as chairman of the Federal Reserve in 1979. He famously began the process of takling inflation by tightening the money supply.

The point is that long before Reagan was an option, the elites in America were coalescing around a reform agenda. Business, finance, the military and the political class were thinking about a reform agenda. The public was hungry for reform, as they were suffering directly from the excesses of the cultural revolution and the recklessness of left-wing economic policy. Of course, the country was demographically stable with a majority population of close to 90%.

Critics of the comparison to the 1970’s start with that last bit. America is now a balkanized land of strangers. Thirty years of open borders has brought tens of millions of alien people into the country. Thirty years of policies aimed at busting up families and communities have hit their mark. The United States will be a majority-minority society within the next twenty years. Recreating the 1980’s consensus with a population that looks nothing like that of the 1980’s seems impossible.

That may be true, but the bigger problem is at the other end. The truth is no one voted for the tax reform agenda in the 1980’s. No one voted for regulatory reform or even the reforms of the military. These items were never on the agenda in an explicate way, but rather in the form of personalities. People vote for people. The pleasant people on the side of the elite agenda won national elections and the boring and often weird people opposed to that agenda lost those elections.

Fast forward to the present crisis and it is hard to tease out a reform agenda from the current ruling elites. Wall Street is operating like they are planning to swallow the family jewels, pack a suitcase and head for the border. It is a massive bust out of what is left of the American economy. Global business is more interested in currying favor with China and India than in what is happening in America. In both cases, the viewpoint is post-nationalism and even post-American.

The military industrial complex, which was essential to the reform efforts of the 70’s and 80’s, is locked in a defensive crouch. Its singular focus is on maintaining its budget, even at the expense of its effectiveness. They have embraced the dangerous antiwhite politics of the academy, just to please the budget makers in Washington. We have seen men claiming to be generals sobbing about their whiteness, all so they can please the deranged people on the appropriations committee.

Washington, of course, is a disaster. The old conservative side of the political class is trapped in the 1980’s. It is nothing but old men sentimental for their long dead heroes and young men flattering them for a paycheck. The old progressive side is a museum exhibit that talks. For them it is either 1968 or 1938. Then you have the new generation of radicals who are a toxic blend narcissism and ignorance. The few populist voices in the political class have no agenda to offer.

People like to talk about how “polarized” the public is on the various issues, but in reality, it is the ruling elite that is shattered. The only thing holding them together is the growing fear that the tide will go out and the world will see that they have been swimming naked. The impulse to surround themselves with razor wire and armed soldiers is the one thing they have in common. For them, reform is simply how to get better tools to keep the rabble at bay.

The biggest disparity between the crisis of the 1970’s and the crisis of today is in the intellectual class. The reformers of the 70’s and 80’s had a massive library of thought and analysis to draw from while debating reform. Conservatism was brimming with critiques and proposals. Monetary reform, for example, was the result of decades of debate on the topic. Even on the Left there was active debate about what comes after the cultural revolution of the 1960’s.

Today, intellectual life is barren within the mainstream. On the Left there is no debate, just a collection of bizarre theories from post-Marx radicalism. Their answer to inflation is a protest in favor of crossdressers playing girls’ sports. Conservatism is a dead space now and the debate over how to reform it is sentimental revanchism. No one in elite intellectual circles is capable of starting from present reality and talking about how to change the institutions to adapt to the new reality.

The reform era we associate with Reagan and the conservative movement was largely the result of a ruling elite seeking to revitalize itself. This was obvious if you read elite journals of the time. Reform was a serious topic debated by serious people. Today we see the opposite. The elites show no interest in revitalizing themselves and they actively discourage debates to the contrary. The current crisis looks more like 1970’s Soviet Union than 1970’s America.

Now, this is where dissidents will chime in with two corrections. One is that the claim that elites are plotting to reform the world. The Build Back Better stuff was a plan to reorganize society in their image. The World Economic Forum is an effort to reform the management of the West. Biden’s animators are now having him mouth the words “new world order” in speeches. In other words, the elite are trying to reform the world, just not in a way that serves the public interest.

The other claim is that these debates are no longer happening in elite publications or in elite forums. Instead, they are happening at private confabs like Davos or maybe at the Bohemian Club’s annual retreat. The global over-class now conducts its business far away from public view. Further, it aims are not expressed in legislation but in global regulation through international organizations. Non-governmental organization now do the hard work that used to be done by national legislatures.

The problem with the first critique is that what is being sold as a new world order shows no signs of being a reform movement. Instead, it looks like a lagging indicator of civilizational collapse. Like the American elite, the Western elite is held together by the fear the system will not hold. Guys like Klaus Schwab, the comical head of the World Economic Forum, are just monorail salesman exploiting the angst of the Western managerial elites. He is running a long con.

As to the second critique, there is no evidence that the people driving elite policy are operating from anything by avarice. You do not see deep thinkers invited to their soirées at Davos or other elite confabs. Maybe there are secret gatherings of the elites where their big-brained advisors layout their plans for global domination. Without any evidence to support this claim, there is no reason to think it is true. Instead, the chaos we are seeing probably reflects the chaos of the elites.

Now, it is possible that there is an elite consensus forming up, but it needs a bit more pain to whip it into existence. The coming economic disorder, which will show up in the streets and the voting booth, may be the remedy to elite dysfunction. On the other hand, we may have reached a point where elite consensus is no more likely than a popular consensus in a majority-minority society. Elite dysfunction may be a sign of a looming crackup of the old order.

The Hive Mind

Posted on March 22, 2022 by thezman

One of the transcendent features of left-wing people, regardless of time and place, is their complete lack of self-awareness. The great blind spot for all left-wing people is the reflection in the mirror. They are incapable of seeing themselves other than as the hero in a great struggle. This story out of Canada about the correlation between Covid-loving and Putin-hating is a great example. The Left thinks it confirms their righteous hatred of their enemy, but it merely confirms their lack of self-awareness.

According to the story, “Unvaccinated Canadians are about 12 times more likely than those who received three doses to believe Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was justified, according to a new survey by national polling firm EKOS.” Now, polling is a dodgy business, so this could be a fake poll designed to titillate the far-left. The fact that such a scenario is possible, however, is more proof of the general thesis about the far-left’s lack of self-awareness.

There are two ideas advanced in the coverage of this poll. One is that the unvaccinated are immoral, so it stands to reason that they support the evil Hitler guy. The Left all over the West has been fixated on the vaccine as a moral signifier. They rushed to be the first to prove their piety within the Covid cult and they rushed to condemn the vaccine skeptics as ignorant hooligans. The Left would have embraced face tattoos for the vaccinated if it was an option.

That was something else that turned up in places with vaccine mandates. There was some suggestion that the unvaccinated be forced to wear armbands, but there were two problems with that plan. One is the obvious link to some unfortunate events that occurred in the last century. The other is the Left instinctively feared the armband would become a moral signifier for their enemies. The unvaccinated would use it to show they are the star-bellied sneetches of this age.

The other idea advanced in the story is the claim that the people who did not want the vaccine are now pushing “Russian disinformation” about the war. The whole disinformation meme has two aspects for the hive-minded. One is the moral claim, but the other is ignorance. You see, those who are not repeating the latest talking points from the hive leaders are stupid and ignorant, which is why they succumb to the disinformation campaigns from the current devils.

Again, the poll and the media coverage have that just-so-story feel that is popular with the far-left, so skepticism is the right position here. The polling companies are extremely cynical, as befits people who make a living serving sociopaths. They are perfectly willing and able to feed nonsense to the true believers, because that is how they make a lot of money. The customer is always right and their customers are the weird identity cult that has gripped the managerial class. Here is an example.

“I saw it almost immediately, within days of the invasion, people supporting it and some quite stridently,” said Timothy Caulfield, a Canada Research Chair in health law and policy at the University of Alberta who has studied the rise and spread of conspiracy theories. “It was pro-Russia, pro-Putin, it was the same kind of dogmatic language you heard from the anti-vaxxers about the alleged harms associated with vaccines. And it was almost immediate and it was from the same crowd.”

This is a guy who rushed to get the Ukraine lapel pin and immediately started saying “Keev” instead of “Kiev” while not being able to locate Ukraine on a map. One day, normal people are seeing their favorite news presenters discussing the latest pop stars and the next day those news presenters are part of a chorus singing the praises of a place called Ukraine. What we have seen from the managerial class over Ukraine is the definition of dogmatic.

Of course, this is that lack of self-awareness we expect from the Left. People engage in left-wing politics for the same reason they join UFO cults. They hate themselves so they look to swap their hated sense of self for the identity of a group. The primary driver is self-loathing. In the case of the managerial class, the perceived status that is awarded to the believer is an important bonus. The true believer loses herself in the identity of the group and gets likes from higher status people.

There is another factor to the appeal of this stuff. People attracted to left-wing politics tend to have disorderly minds and the simplicity of left-wing political framing provides needed structure. It is why it is not unusual to see a highly-credentialed left-wing person who is useless independently. They took to the structure of school, because they needed it. They did not learn anything they could apply on their own, because that was never the point of education for them.

Now as far as the unvaccinated, the unclean and the pro-Putin stuff, this is a lot like other bogeymen that have haunted the Left. Few people in the West are genuinely pro-Putin or pro-Russian with regards to the war in Ukraine. There are those prudently skeptical of the chanting from the usual suspects and those opposed to getting involved in the war. Some on-line are mocking the dogmatism of the Left with over-the-top, cartoonish Russia support.

This is reflected in the poll. Seventy percent of the unvaccinated were honest enough to say they do not have an opinion on Ukraine. Only five percent of the true believers offered no opinion. These are the same people who thought ornamental face gear scared away Covid spirits. They still think closing bars and restaurants magically prevents Covid. They are the people who believe what they are told and faithfully point and hiss at those who are not easily convinced.

Note that the poll compares the self-described unvaccinated with those who are maximally vaccinated. The fact that they left out the reluctantly vaccinated and the compulsory vaccinated is telling. Most likely those results did not fit the narrative the poll is intended to support. Most people took the vaccine out of necessity, their doctor recommended it or they hoped it would put the charade to an end. The genuinely enthusiastic for vaccines are a small subset of the population.

The reaction by the Left to the war in Ukraine is another reminder that it is impossible to constructively engage with true believers. Deeply religious people can usually understand why you do not share their faith. They are faithful, but they are not unaware of themselves. The Left is a different breed of believer. They do no seek salvation from the world. They seek salvation from themselves. This is why they obsess over the latest enemies of their cause. That is their salvation.

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