Category Archives: Progressives

The Past Is Always Uncertain

Posted on by

Progressives are often, and correctly, accused of re-writing the past in order to endorse their current claims about the present. It is a necessary habit that has been incorporated as a feature of the movement. Since most of what they currently believe about humanity and human organization is contrary to observable reality, they have to no choice but to reinvent the past. Something similar seems to be happening with the Buckleyites as they fall into obscurity. They are creating alternative realities to explain the present.

This piece by Henry Olsen is a good example. He makes the point that what so-called conservatives consider to be “conservative” has not been a winning formula for them in Republican elections. He then picks some representative examples of liberty-conservatives, presumably the sort championed by the Buckleyites, who went nowhere in the GOP presidential primaries. The main point Olsen is trying to make is that what he calls the liberty-conservatives have not had a lot of success in elections.

The subtle normalization of Rand Paul is interesting, given that NR types savaged Ron Paul when he was a real candidate. I will also note that National Review was prone to calling the utterances of George W. Bush “Reaganesque” and they praised “compassionate conservatism” as some sort of advanced form of Buckley conservatism. It is what makes their current fetish for timeless principles so comically bizarre. The definition of timeless conservatism is a set of goal posts on wheels that they push around to fit the moment.

That is the thing about re-imagining the past. You have to cherry pick and time shift in order to make it work. Barry Goldwater, for example, has not been salient in American politics for going on 40 years now. The youngest person to have voted for him is now seventy-four. On the other hand, the “liberty conservatives” were ebullient when George W. Bush won in 2000 and the GOP controlled both houses of Congress. Of course, there is no mention of Reagan, who was a Goldwater conservative, and the GOP’s most successful President.

The general point that Olsen is making is that today, the constituency for libertarian-conservatism is small, even within the Republican base. This is probably true, but the question is why? All of the megaphones of Conservative Inc. have been tuned to blast out the message of libertarian-conservatism. Talk radio, websites, Fox News, the commentariat, all of the organs of the so-called Right have been preaching about shrinking size and scope government for as long as anyone reading this has been alive.

So, why is that position a loser within Republican circles?

One obvious reason is no one believes it. When the GOP had opportunities to shrink government, they grew government. When they had chances to normalize our foreign policy, they went empire building. When they had the chance to defend the domestic economy, they threw in with open borders and globalist trade policies. The most egregious sin off all, however, has been their liberal use of Progressive rhetoric to denounce dissenters as racists, excluded from acceptable public discourse.

There is one exception and that is immigration. The one big win for liberty-conservatives was the 1986 immigration reform act. This made it possible for tens of millions of foreigners to flood into the country. Ann Coulter the other day noted that one in eight Virginia residents is foreign born. That means there are more foreigners in Virginia right now than the liberty-conservatives said they needed to amnesty in 1986. The one thing these guys were good at doing has been a disaster for their alleged love of liberty.

You see that in a post from J’Onquarious. The sort of civic minded libertarianism, which is popular with Conservative Inc., is really unpopular with the sorts of people they are hellbent on importing by the millions. The reason their favorite bugman was trounced in the Virginia election is that the sort of people liberty conservatives are fond of championing, are not interested in supporting liberty conservatives. It turns out that a policy of wishing death on your voters and their culture, is not a good way to win elections.

That is not a reality these so-called liberty-conservatives can face. Olsen does not bother to address this, as there is no way to explain away the mathematical and demographic realities. His only mention of immigration is to be gobsmacked at a Cato-backed study that shows Trump voters are not in favor of their wholesale demographic replacement. The fact that their one success has been a disaster for them, never registers. Instead, it is ignored. Olsen’s suggestion is more of the same, just even more of it.

This is where you see that all forms of mainstream conservatism share the same assumptions as Progressives about the nature of man and human organization. It is also why they have developed the habit of rewriting history, especially their own history, in order to explain the present. When you start from the premise that biology is unimportant, that all people everywhere are essentially the same, you are condemned to a life of disappointment, unless you can endlessly redraft the narrative to avoid facing reality.

The one major difference between the retconning of so-called conservatives and what we see from Progressives, is that the latter controls the institutions. Rewriting and replaying old fights is a proven way to distract people from current failures. When you control the levers of power, an unpredictable past becomes a useful tool in maintaining control. When you are allegedly challenging the status quo, an inability to clearly remember yesterday undermines your credibility. No one believes these guys and they keep reminding us why.

The American Alawites

Posted on by

Minority populations in any society tend to nurse a grudge against the majority. It’s perfectly reasonable, as a sane society of any design will abide by and cater to the desires of the majority population. Therefore, the minority group will find themselves on the fringes or under constant pressure to assimilate. This natural friction also results in a bidirectional animosity between the majority and the majority.

It’s why a sane society avoids letting the minority population gain control of the levers of power. While there is some chance it works out just fine, there is a greater chance that the minority will try to exact revenge on the majority. Alternatively, it will appear they are favoring their group over the majority. To paraphrase Lee Kuan Yew, in a multi-ethnic state, people are loyal to their tribe first, so it is assumed.

In modern America, this gets squirrely because the ruling cult we call Progressives, have turned minorities, particularly blacks, into objects of worship. It’s why we have been saddled with the jug-eared clodhopper, Barak Obama, for the last seven years. Progressives truly believed he was the fulfillment of prophecy and would cleanse the soul of the nation.

As a result, the tendency is to focus on Obama’s racial animosity toward whites, because like most black people in America, Obama nurses a grudge against white people. That was fairly clear when he was running for president. His comment about rural white guys being bitter clingers was largely viewed as one of the good white/bad white signals. Bad whites go to church, own guns and are racists because they are losers.

It is why it is tempting to think Obama’s bizarre executive actions on firearms is just a way to spite the honkies. His policies will do nothing to abate violent crime. Black guys will keep shooting black guys for sneakers, respect and other dumbass reasons. Birds gotta fly, fish gotta swim. The only people who will notice these changes are law abiding crackers, who like hunting and shooting paper targets.

But that’s the thing. Obama is about as black as Ned Flanders. His tribe is the cult into which he was born and raised, the Cult of Modern Liberalism. Like the Alawites fighting the Sunni majority in Syria, he looks at the majority with contempt, believing they choose to live outside of grace. This is not a black thing. It is a Progressive thing. He thinks he is on the winning side of history, so that means his opponents are losers.

Alawites are Twelvers, an eschatological brand of Islam. They believe in twelve divinely ordained leaders, known as the Twelve Imams, and they believe that the last Imam, Muhammad al-Mahdi, lives in occultation and will reappear as the promised Mahdi. That will mark the end of ordinary reality and begin a reunion with the Divine. The faithful organize their lives around bringing about this final event.

Progressives are a similar cult. All their talk about being on the right side of history is just another way of saying they are the elect, the people who will enter the promised land in the end times. The proof of that is they organize their lives around bringing about those end times. Once they build their city on the hill, they can move in, lock the doors and leave the losers in flyover country to their own hell.

In the meantime, like their Calvinist ancestors, Progressives invest a lot of their energy in public acts of piety. Obama just got a most everything he ever dreamed of from his rent boy Paul Ryan so he should be happy with his legislative success. Instead, he is going out of his way to let everyone know he is on the side of the angels with regards to guns. To the fanatic, there’s always room for one more mass, one more hymn, one more sacrifice.

The trouble is, like we see in Syria, Obama’s ruling sect is wildly out of touch with the majority. Since he took office, 100 million guns have been sold to Americans. This is in a country that probably had three times that number in circulation when he was elected. As we see with the Alawites in Syria, mathematics does not yield to wishful thinking. Eventually, the majority decides to impose its will on the minority.

The vast majority of Americans are waking up to the reality of their position and beginning the process of sloughing off the current ruling class. America is a peaceful and prosperous country so there’s no need for a violent revolution. But if the fanatics do not yield, well, the people are heavily armed so the revolution, if it comes, will be brief. Just in case, you may want to stock up.

The Cult of Magic

Posted on by

Over the last decade or so, I’ve lost interest in debating my Progressive friends on most everything. I’ll torment them when the opportunity arises or subtly mock them by appearing to go along with their latest crackpottery, but I avoid getting into anything resembling a serious debate with them. There’s simply no point. I’d have more luck debating an astrologer.

The astrologer, at least, understands that their thing is bullshit. People into the black arts willingly admit to being into magic and they never pretend otherwise. Some astrologers, I suppose, come close to making claims to science, but they never hide the magical bits at the core. Instead, they believe the stars determine our fate in some magical way that can be discovered. It’s kooky, but they don’t pretend it is real science and it is basically harmless.

Hang around Lefty for any length of time and you inevitably bump up against what can only be labeled as magical thinking. There’s an old gag in engineering where you have a flow chart describing all the inputs pointing to a box labeled “something magical happens” which then leads to the desired output. The modern Progressive orthodoxy is shot through with some version of this, usually dressed up with “studies” that read like astrological charts.

I’ve visited this topic in the past, but it seems like a good time to catalog the various forms of magic floating around the Cult. As the load bearing walls of the ruling class show signs of distress, magical thinking is breaking out all over so keeping up on the latest spells and incantations is probably a good idea. That and it allows me to let my hair down and say horrible things about Progressives.

And I’ve started drinking earlier than usual.

The most obvious example of magical thinking is gun control. The Cult is out shaking their staffs at the heavens now, demanding special ceremonies to make the guns stop shooting people. The way to do that, they claim, is to go hassle some white guys in the suburbs who like to hunt and shoot paper targets. Somehow, that’s going to stop Farouk and Jamal from shooting up their neighborhood.

The thing about gun control is that ultimately it is based on the belief that shaping a piece of metal or plastic in a certain way imbues it with magical powers. The “studies” they wave about claim that the mere presence of a gun shaped object causes otherwise sane people to commit suicide, shoot their old lady, rob a liquor store and now, go on Jihad at the local municipal building.

Magic Shape Theory is just one facet of the Progressive amulet. The guy holding the amulet right now is the world’s greatest example of Magic Negro Theory. Back in 2008, the Cult of Modern Liberalism assured us that the sins of the past could be washed from the soul of the nation by putting a black guy in charge. Even though he spoke mostly in gibberish and had yet to show he could run anything more complicated than his yap, he was our savior.

Sadly, we did not have a Pontius Pilate handy (or a Sirhan Sirhan) so we got Barak the Magic Negro who promised:

“I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth.”

There’s political rhetoric and then there are incantations and prophesies. Promising two cars in every garage and a chicken in every pot is standard political rhetoric. Promising to alter physical reality is the sort of thing people claiming to be warlocks say just before they are carried off to the asylum or, preferably, thrown off a cliff. Not only did the people voting for this ninny believe he was magic; Obama believed he was magic.

The most famous form of magic floating around today is Magic Dirt Theory. Put that phrase in a google machine and out comes 496,000 references. In the whole wide web, that’s not a lot, relatively speaking, but it is not a little either. The fact that the phrase alone could enter the mainstream so easily makes clear it is not just a throwaway line. It’s a real thing, at least in the minds of the believers.

For the unaware, Magic Dirt Theory claims that the soil alters behavior. Place a bunch of Bantus in Paris and they magically transform into Frenchmen. Round up residents of your typical inner city, set them up in suburbia and they become the Cleavers, just without all the honky-ism and white privilege. They will quit gang-banging, get jobs, pay taxes and join the Rotary Club.

In the ongoing crisis, it’s tempting to think that belief in magic is new or just a last gasp, but magic has always been a central part of the Cult of Modern Liberalism. Decades ago, moonbats were convinced that if they affixed a Darwin Fish to their Subaru, it would turn the vehicle’s occupants into scientists. Back in the day, the surest way to spot the innumerate was to look for the Darwin Fish.

At the time, people who should have known better dismissed it as mere signaling. The people displaying these things were letting us know they were in the cult of secular humanism. Remember that one? People used to wear shirts claiming they were secular humanists.

Anyway, that’s exactly the point of a magic talisman. It is a signal to the evil spirits that the wearer is protected by strong juju. Instead of warding off Satan, the Darwin Fish people were using magic symbols to ward off Christians.

Today, the hip and groovy thing to do is to let everyone know you love Gaia by carrying grimy canvas sacks with you to the grocery store. The people doing this believe the grimy sacks create a force field around them repelling deniers who want to kill Mother Earth with their lawnmower. If enough believers carry the grimy sacks with them, Mother Earth will be protected from the bad men.

You can’t have a decent cult without a collection of abracadabra words, the incantations that expose the evil doers in your ranks, give strength to the faithful and diminish the power of the enemies. In modern America, there’s no word more potent than “racist” and its use has the power to slay dragons. Theodore Dalrymple wrote a nice column on how even non-believers can use the power of the R-word to destroy the wicked.

Anti-racism has become the philosopher’s stone of the Cult of Modern Liberalism. It’s not just a weapon, used to melt the faces off of enemies like the Arc in Raiders. The faithful truly believe that once they purge society of racism, the skies will open up and bliss will rain down on mankind, bringing about the eschaton. This is no different from the Puritans believing their purpose in life was to rid their communities of sin and sinners.

One way to purge the world of sinners is through the magic of diversity. Filling up your neighborhood with people not like you is the one sure way bring about the eschaton. If you doubt this, well, you’re probably related to Hitler. Everyone believes diversity is good, because science! and because it is. It just is and if you disagree, well, maybe you should find somewhere else to live.

Before we had the wonderfulness of diversity, we had tolerance, which was this thing that drove away the people the tolerant simply could not tolerate. Similarly, diversity is this thing where everyone is welcome to celebrate their culture, unless they are white and from a culture that has something to celebrate. Diversity promises to magically lift us all to the heavens by pulling the roof down on Western Civilization.

But who doesn’t believe in magic?

The Hive

Posted on by

The late great Joe Sobran argued that modern American liberalism embraced abnormality as a replacement for the allegiance to international communism. The Soviet Empire was a murderous and nullifying creation, but the American Left simply ignored its reality and instead pretended it was the path to some glorious future. When reality made that impossible. The Hive was left without a queen and found a variety of causes like gay rights around which to organize.

Sobran was mostly right in his description of the post-Soviet Progressives, but I don’t think he truly appreciated the nature of the American Left. As he wrote in one of his columns, for him the Left was an odor, something he could sense, but not fully describe. He was not alone. The Right was just as warped as the Left by the defeat of Nazism and the subsequent Cold War. It was the lens through which everything was viewed for half a century.

The big mistake, I think, is to assume the American Left is just a traveling partner of the European Left. The Right has turned “socialist” into an epithet that has no meaning. Calling Obama a socialist or his health care scheme socialism is just a way to lodge a protest. The Right and the Left have embraced the basics of socialism for close to a century now. The debate is over how far to go with it. The last serious politician to advocate the end of Social Security, for example, was Barry Goldwater.

When Christianity failed as a unifying force for Europe, nationalism filled the void. “If all of us can’t be God’s people, well, maybe some of us can be God’s people” was what bound the people to each other and their rulers. When nationalism failed, various forms of socialism filled the void. Fascism, socialism and communism are European heresies, with communism as the first serious effort to unify Europe under a single religion since the Thirty Years War.

In America, what emerged after the Civil War was Public Protestantism mainly in New England and Private Protestantism in the rest of the country. The old Puritans had always believed that each person’s salvation was predetermined. What mattered was carrying out God’s work on earth. Put another way, you signaled your salvation status through public piety and working toward the perfection of society. That’s why New England has always been the hotbed of utopian lunacy.

Private Protestantism is the mirror opposite, starting with the status of one’s soul. Your garden variety Evangelical thinks the point of your life is to get right with Jesus in order to gain salvation. Since heaven on earth is not just an impossibility, but against the will of God, efforts to perfect society are pointless and possible evil. It’s why populism, individualism and a fetish for individual rights is dominant in the South, Appalachia and the Southwest.

Now, it is certainly true that Jews and European immigrants of the 19th and 20th century brought socialism, fascism and communism with them. These ideas found a home in the Yankee culture of Public Protestantism. The philosophy of Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler, for example, turns up in the Social Gospel movement of the early 20th century. Similarly, Reform Judaism of Abraham Geiger folded neatly into the American Progressive Movement, which has always been the technocratic arm of Public Protestantism.

The central defect the Puritans faced, the one they were never able to resolve, was that the human condition is immutable. They could kill as many Indians as they liked, but the nature of man was not going to change. Worse yet, Christianity was often at odds with utopian efforts to fix the world. In the 19th century Christianity, began to take a back seat to saving the world, but that created a new problem. If the purpose of God’s anointed is to save the world, what’s the point if there is no longer a God to do the anointing?

In the 20th century, Progressivism became Public Protestantism with a void at the core where God used to exist. Into that void first rushed an imaginary interpretation of Soviet Bolshevism that needed constant tending to avoid exposing the humanity crushing reality of it. Once that became impossible, what has rushed into the void is a series of vulgarities that serve no purpose other than to offend common sense. The God of the Left is now just the outrage of the decent.

It’s why the Left appears to be racing to the abyss. Today they clamor for what was unimaginable twenty years ago. That means twenty years from now they will be clamoring for what commonsense today says is beyond absurd. In 1995 gay marriage was a joke and today it is required. Today pedophilia is a monstrous taboo, but already the Left is clamoring to normalize it. The debate amongst Progressives is never about limits. It is about how far beyond the limits they can go.

The race to pile on society every imaginable indignity has its limits. Pop music performers, for example, tried to replace talent with outrageous behavior. Finally, there was no one left to outrage. The logic of the Progressive faith will follow the same path, but the end is the obliteration of society. Open borders fanaticism, for example, is just passing out the Kool-Aid at a national scale. One can’t help but wonder if Obama’s urge to give Iran the bomb does not include the hope that they use it.

It will not end well.

Diluting the Stock

Posted on by

Imagine this blog is a business and you are a stock holder who got in early when I was starting up. The blog is booming and that means the value of the stock is booming. I figure I can capitalize on the boom and start issuing more stock. That’s good for me, but there’s one problem. That dilutes the value of your stock. That would be a crappy thing for me to do to my stock holders, which is why companies tend to avoid doing this.

But, let’s assume I don’t care about my stock holders and I start issuing new stock. One thing that will happen is current stock holders will begin dumping the stock. After all, the value of the stock will most likely decline and the point of buying the stock in the first place is to get something for it, as in a return on the investment. If I keep issuing stock, the price will collapse and the stock will be worthless.

The same logic applies to citizenship. Being a Canadian has value. You get cheap maple syrup, high alcohol beer and good hockey. There’s also the protection of the Canadian government, law enforcement, economic benefits and social welfare benefits. In return, the citizen serves on juries, pays taxes and serves in the military when required. A country is a lot like a company and the citizens are stock holders. It’s not a perfect analogy, but a useful one.

What our rulers seek to do is dilute the value of citizenship by offering it to whoever staggers along.

Rep Luis V. Gutiérrez, one of Congress’ most outspoken advocates for immigrants, on Wednesday called for expanding the Affordable Care Act to cover all of the estimated 11 million undocumented migrants in the United States.

“The goal is to make integration and inclusion real for millions of families that are locked out under current law,” the Illinois Democrat said in a floor speech introducing his proposed legislation.

“As it stands right now, undocumented immigrants are not subject to the individual mandate and cannot buy into health insurance exchanges even if they use their own money.  My legislation will change that.  It says that we stand for inclusion.”

Citing last week’s papal address to Congress (the pope repeatedly urged U.S. lawmakers to follow “the Golden Rule”), Gutiérrez said: “Doing unto others as you would have them do unto you means moving forward with no restrictions on which brother and sister and neighbor we think of as ‘eligible’ or ‘deserving.’”

The Gutiérrez legislation faces long odds in the House, where proposals to overhaul immigration have been stymied by Republicans who insist the federal government must first address holes in border security.

If everyone on earth is eligible for the benefits of citizenship, as long as they get to America, what point is there in being a citizen? More important, why would anyone try to make the country better? The whole point of investing in a company or a country is to make it better. In the case of a country, better for your descendants. If the children of foreigners are going to take from your kids the fruit of your labor, why bother?

That would obviously spill into voting, as doing what’s best for the country would lose all value. Instead, factions would vote in blocks, at war with other factions, for the right to take what they can from whomever they can. That’s assuming people both voting. The only solution to that is authoritarianism where the national government uses force to compel cooperation from and among the people.

That’s what our betters have failed to understand. At some point, people will simply not respond to patriotic appeals or moral suasion. After all, loyalty to the state will have no basis as there is no benefit to citizenship. The relationship becomes purely transactional as both sides try to beat the other in their dealings. The only result of open borders is a Hobbesian world that looks more like the Middle East than Western Civilization.

Fear the Brown Tide

Posted on by

The Left is a religion, a secular version of Public Protestantism. The adherents deeply believe that the promised land is over the next hill. All that is necessary is to eliminate the sins of society so that the elect can be freed to reach the Utopia that has been promised. They are not much different from the Muslims who believe the hidden Imam will return when the righteous have the final showdown with the infidels.

To the true believer, everything passes through the filters of their belief. Anything that contradicts the faith is either filtered out or re-imagined so that it fits the narrative. Extraneous data is worked into the narrative to give it weight, so that the believer can believer harder. All of it, so to speak, points to the day when the Great Pumpkin rises out of his pumpkin patch and flies through the air with his bag of toys for all the children.

A great example of this is the Latin King. Since the Reagan years, it seems, the Left has been telling us that the Latin King is coming and he is going to be pissed unless we get our bleep together. That means lifting up his little brown children on our shoulders and carrying them to the top of American society. Otherwise, when the Latin King arrives, the tide of brown will wash all the gringos out to sea or something.

This column in Politico is a good example.

Hispanic activists have two words for Donald Trump — thank you.

“I think the greatest thing to ever happen to the Hispanic electorate is a gentleman named Donald Trump, he has crystalized the angst and anger of the Hispanic community,” U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce President & CEO Javier Palomarez told POLITICO in an interview. “I think that we can all rest assured that Hispanics can turn out in record numbers.”

Trump has rankled the Hispanic community from Day One of his presidential run when he called many illegal Mexican immigrants “rapists” and drug peddlers during his rambling announcement speech in June. Since then, he’s driven the GOP field further right on immigration issues, in part with his aggressive proposal to have Mexico pay for a wall along the border with the U.S. and to deport 11.3 million undocumented immigrants in short order.

While many activists find his comments downright offensive, they also see an opportunity. Trump has managed to get Latinos engaged with the 2016 race, and activists plan to exploit that to the fullest extent possible.

“He really is just outrageous, he’s built his entire campaign on attacking our community and really playing to the worst element of American society,” said José Calderón, president of the Hispanic Federation, a nonprofit membership organization. “In some ways, he’s helping us out, the base is energized —I think people are really eager to stand up and say this is not who we are and show that through our electoral process.”

Calderón said in nonelection years, the Federation, which represents 100 community-based organizations across the country and is leading voter outreach efforts, can register about 25,000 Hispanics and on election years it’s about 60,000. But with Trump’s comments driving people to the polls, Calderón believes they can register even more.

“It’s become easier, right, to do it now. The community is very mobilized, there is this anger,” Calderón said. “We will respond in kind, through our votes.”

One of the stock features of this form of Progressive fairy tale is to have a super-white WASP lady do the reporting. There’s nothing more compelling than a lecture about diversity from a girl who makes Eva Braun look like a mulatto. But, from her end of the telescope, those little brown people look threatening so she’s scared that the mean old Trump guy is getting them worked into a frenzy.

There’s also the suicidal impulse on display. The choice presented is either resist the brown tide flowing north from below the equator and incur the wrath of that brown tide or lie back and enjoy the brown tide washing away your culture and people. This does not occur to the nice white people as they can only focus on one thing at a time. Their focus is on the bad whites whose sinful ways are keeping everyone else from grace.

This is what has always perplexed conservatives about their Progressive antagonists. Rational people see the suicidal implications, but they can’t believe it is intentional so they try everything to talk the moonbats out of it. There’s no convincing a fanatic and these fanatics think burning the village in order to save it is rational, even when it is their own village. The elimination of the sinner is all that matters.

Opposite Land

Posted on by

If you Google the phrase “opposite rule of liberalism” you will arrive upon the world bestriding post from my favorite blogger. The rule described is not really a rule, more like a general observation, like Moore’s Law or the Peter Principle. These are useful guides to understanding some phenomenon, but are not iron laws of nature, like the speed of light.

The simple version of the “opposite rule of liberalism” is to take whatever Progressives are saying about a subject, conjure the opposite and you are at a good starting point for understanding the topic at hand. It’s not always simple as many things don’t have an obvious opposite, but it gets you at a good starting point. It is also a good way to clear the mind of the Progressive cant that defines our age.

A good example of what I mean by “clearing the mind” is in the Iran deal Obama is pushing through Congress. Everyone has been conditioned to think that “conservatives” are motivated by money and “liberals” are motivated by idealism. Bush invades Iraq and it is about oil. Obama makes a deal with Iran and it is about foolishly trusting the mullahs. The debate then ensues within what is an entirely backward framework.

The Bush people did not invade Iraq for oil. They talked endlessly about their Freedom Agenda and how Iraq could be a model for other Arab countries. The plan was to topple Saddam, install a representative democracy and watch an Athenian democracy take root and bloom in the birth place of civilization. The people pushing the invasion of Iraq were not in it for money; they were true believers.

Yet from about 2002 through the end of the Bush years, fanatics were in the streets chanting “no blood for oil.” If you took the opposite of that and assumed the invasion was not for cynical reasons and instead went looking for ideological motivations, you would have quickly discovered that neo-cons had been championing democracy as a palliative to Arab fanaticism since the first Gulf War.

Similarly, that’s what’s happening with Iran. This deal has nothing to do with idealism or naivete. It is a money grab. Iran has massive untapped energy reserves. It also has other natural resources in high demand on world markets. It’s location is also valuable as it can be a stable transport link between the massive oil and gas fields in the south and the European markets to the north.

For over a year, US energy companies have been negotiating with Iran over development deals. I have friends in the region and they have been watching CEO’s from US energy and logistics firms come through Dubai, where negotiations take place. The initial batch of deals is estimated to be $185 billion and that’s just the starting point. The revenues from oil and gas will be pumped into infrastructure and military projects, on contracts to Western firms.

It’s not just oil and gas. Firms like Halliburton will get contracts to build roads, dams, electric plants, you name it. They will, of course, hire people who have the diplomatic connections to help smooth the way to making these deals happen. This is going to be the greatest jobs program for the political class since the fall of the Berlin Wall. That’s not even counting the armaments deals that will follow on in the coming decades.

In opposite land, no one bothers to make this argument. Instead the GOP field carps about how this deal is bad for Israel or terrorism. The Democrats and the media celebrate it as “diplomacy over war.” Executives from ExxonMobile could be walking out of the White House with bags of cash and no one would notice. Everyone is trapped in the opposite land narrative.

It’s tempting to think it is deliberate, but it’s just a byproduct of being ruled by a religious minority. Progressives have been in charge of America for as long as anyone has been alive, so their narrative transcends all public debate. They frame all pubic discussion and define all the terms. Their version of reality is everyone’s version of reality, whether they like it or not.

That’s why we live in opposite land. Progressives, unlike Christians or Jews, have no self-awareness. Instead, they focus entirely on their enemies, real or imagined, as that’s how the Progressive defines himself. They project onto the undifferentiated other all of the things they hate about themselves. After all, one does not join a mass movement or cult to be self-absorbed and independent.

That means extreme right-wing extremists of the most extreme kind are greedy, selfish and callous, even though Progressives are the least charitable people on earth, according to people who track these things. It means normal people are intolerant bigots that must be sued into penury for not following party orders with regards to homosexuals, all in the name of tolerance.

Another Wickerman

Posted on by

One of the aspects of our neo-Puritan age is that being right is never enough if the Cult decides you have to be an example. Apologizing only confirms to them that you are the right guy to burn at the stake. The lesson here from the most recent public sacrifice is to never apologize and don’t bother defending yourself with facts.

Radio host Colin Cowherd no longer will appear on ESPN following comments he made questioning the intelligence of Dominican Republic players related to baseball one day earlier, the company said in a statement Friday.

“Colin Cowherd’s comments over the past two days do not reflect the values of ESPN or our employees,” ESPN said in a statement. “Colin will no longer appear on ESPN.”

Cowherd issued an apology later Friday via Twitter.

Cowherd had said Thursday that he didn’t believe baseball was complex, saying a third of the sport was from the Dominican Republic, which had “not been known, in my lifetime, as having, you know, world-class academic abilities.”

Major League Baseball on Friday said Cowherd owes Dominican players an apology for the remarks, and the MLB Players Association also condemned his comments.

Earlier Friday, Cowherd addressed his remarks from Thursday during The Herd.

“I could’ve made the point without using one country, and there’s all sorts of smart people from the Dominican Republic,” Cowherd said. “I could’ve said a third of baseball’s talent is being furnished from countries with economic hardships, therefore educational hurdles. For the record, I used the Dominican Republic because they’ve furnished baseball with so many great players.”

Cowherd on Friday also cited reports and statistics to back up what he said about the country’s ranking when it comes to primary education.

The median IQ of the Dominican Republic is 82 according to Richard Lynn. According to the people who study these things, the DR has one of the worst education systems on earth, which is quite an accomplishment. But, it is a mix of Latin corruption and African incompetence. The result is what you would expect. Of course, if you have ever experienced the Caribbean, you know this.

ESPN has been dominated by unhinged fanatics for years. They recently were promoting the mentally disturbed drag queen, for example. Every crackpot fad bubbling up from the fever swamps of the Cult of Modern Liberalism has been promoted enthusiastically by ESPN. A non-believer like Cowerd had always been on their list of potential wickermen.

At some point, people will figure out that there is no accommodating these nuts. The answer when they come after you is to go right back at them. Never apologize, never explain. Attack attack attack. You have nothing to lose as there is no reasoning with lunatics. Cowerd should have said he was the victim of a lynching by liberal crazies in ESPN. That puts the focus on them. You’re getting fired anyway. Go out with a bang.

Obama’s To Do List

Posted on by

Watching the hooting and hollering about Obama’s Iran deal, I’m reminded of something I thought I noticed about this administration from the start. It is two things actually, but both related. The first thing is Obama seems to work from a checklist of action items. An item on the list is lined out after a law is passed, an executive order is issued or, in some cases, he gives a speech about. Once it is marked as completed, he is done with it. It becomes old news.

That does not sound odd until you think about how the world works. A problem is identified then a solution is proposed. The solution is applied and it is a process to make sure the solution is working and the problem has been addressed. In a business, management does not write a memo and consider the matter closed. They follow up to make sure their policies are being implemented successfully.

In politics, an administration will judge itself and be judged by the success of its policies. If they make a deal with another country, they don’t throw it down the memory hole once the deal is signed. They keep talking about it and bringing it up if it is successful. If it is a failure then they spend time claiming to have fixed it. With Obama, once the law is passed or the order given, they have a press conference and forget about it. If someone brings it up later, we hear that the administration is not willing to “re-litigate” the matter.

That’s a strange tick, but what’s even odder is what’s on the list. I’ve written before about the Progressive timeline. Instead of viewing time as a linear thing, they see events on an emotional timeline. Events with great significance are close while those with lower emotional pull are further away. The Civil Rights Movement was yesterday, while their total control of American cities may as well have never happened it was so long ago.

With that in mind, Obama’s to-do list reads like a laundry list of slights and wounds to the liberal narrative. The deal with Iran and the deal with Cuba came out of nowhere. No American cared about either issue. The political class had no interest in Cuba and only cared about Iran in so far as whether Israel was going to nuke them. Out of the blue Obama does a deal with Cuba and then makes a comically bad deal with Iran, just to get a deal.

To Progressives, both Cuba and Iran have emotional resonance, because they are black marks on the narrative. Kennedy lost Cuba to the Soviets and was embarrassed by the Bay of Pigs. Therefore, finishing the job and bringing Cuba back into the fold was on Obama’s list. Similarly, Iran was Carter’s great failure. Progressives have always believed it is why the evil Ron Reagan became president. Proving once and for all that making a deal with Iran was the right policy, therefore, became an agenda item for Obama.

Early in the Obama administration, the big thing was resetting relations with Russia. It was always a strange thing as no one could quite explain what it meant. They had a big ceremony with the Russian ambassador and gave him a red button for some reason. In the minds of the Obama people it was “fixing” the Reagan legacy. To Progressives, the “belligerence” of the Reagan years was a big black mark on the narrative. Obama fixed it by giving Putin big red reset button.

That circles back to the first point. Fixing relations between two counties is a process. You have the breakthrough and then build on it over time to find common interests on which both sides can benefit by cooperating. For Team Obama, they ticked it off the list after the presser and then forgot all about it. The fact that relations with Russia are worse now than in the Cold War is irrelevant. All that matters is they ticked “reset relations with Russia” off their list and they forget about it.

The big one, of course, is health care. Obama spent all his good will with the public pushing through a bill that was nothing like he ran on as a candidate. In fact, it was pretty much what he said would never work when Hillary Clinton proposed it as a candidate. That’s not what mattered. What mattered was fixing the mistake of 1993 when Clinton failed to get health care done. Team Obama ticked it off the list and popped the champagne. All of the complaints and challenges ever since have been met with “we’re not re-litigating the issue.”

I suspect much of this is due to the fact that this is one of the least talented administrations in a long time. There’s not a lot of talent. Their best people are technocrats from the academy who see the world as a series of exams. Take the test, get a good score and move onto the next semester. That’s a strange aspect of the new meritocracy. They tend to think like college kids filling up their transcripts with grades, rather than as adults solving problems.

I also wonder if there’s not something else at work. Progressives have won all the big battles and most of the small ones. They have run out of bogeyman to rally the faithful. Forty years ago they could get the blacks so angry they burned down major cities. Today they can only rip up a few blocks in nowhere-ville and burn a few Confederate flags. There’s simply no one else left to fight that’s worth fighting so they going back and tidying up the past to fix the narrative.

David Brooks and the Long War

Posted on by

One of the ways you tell who is winning and who is losing is to look at which way the advice is flowing. Losers never give advice because no one takes advice from a loser so even if they have something to offer, no one pays much attention. Winners, on the other hand, love talking about how they won and will offer anyone and everyone tips as to how to be a winner.

There’s also something else. Winners are confident. They are willing to offer help to the loser because they are sure they are better than the other guy and have no fear he will use the advice to turn the tables. In other words, it is safe for the winner to be magnanimous as he perceives he has little to lose and will gain much by looking magnanimous. The loser, in contrast, must play close to the vest in the hope of scoring an upset.

That’s why we see in American public debate, a flow of advice and suggestions from Progressives to their alleged opponents. Democrats are always brimming with tips for Republicans. Progressives are always out lecturing extreme right-wing extremists about the folly of their extreme right-wing extremism. Here’s an example from David Brooks the other day.

These conservatives are enmeshed in a decades-long culture war that has been fought over issues arising from the sexual revolution. Most of the conservative commentators I’ve read over the past few days are resolved to keep fighting that war.

I am to the left of the people I have been describing on almost all of these social issues. But I hope they regard me as a friend and admirer. And from that vantage point, I would just ask them to consider a change in course.

Consider putting aside, in the current climate, the culture war oriented around the sexual revolution.

Put aside a culture war that has alienated large parts of three generations from any consideration of religion or belief. Put aside an effort that has been a communications disaster, reducing a rich, complex and beautiful faith into a public obsession with sex. Put aside a culture war that, at least over the near term, you are destined to lose.

You get that? David Brooks is generously offering you his sage advice , which is you need to give up and join the winning team. He wastes a lot of time tarting it up, while casting himself as something other than a conventional Progressive. That’s just part of the act. William Safire perfected this a half century ago and now it has become a feature of Progressive agit-prop.

Of course, this is not advice offered in the spirit of fellowship. David Brooks thinks social conservatives are sub-human and he would gladly sign up to slam the oven door on them. This is mostly gloating. Brooks is taking a victory lap. He also hopes that social conservatives will keep fighting. His cult is reactionary and they need bogeymen. When the day comes that the Left clears the field of enemies, it is the day it collapses.

It’s why the Left is so good at inventing monsters. Its identity is based on struggle, something they inherited from Continental communists. Despite the fact Brooks has never known a time when he and his coreligionists have not been in control of the culture, they still believe they are struggling to set things right and break the spine of the WASP oppressors.

After every battle, the Left celebrates, but then says there is much left to be done. This Brooks column always turns up in the transition phase, They partied and now they are sobering up, being reminded that “those evil social conservatives are still out there, plotting and scheming to take back our victory. If only they would just give up!”

In one of life’s great ironies, America is being cleared of Christians by a religious cult that habitually nails itself to the cross and then blames the Christians.