Former President Donald Trump gestures during a rally in Conroe, Texas, January 29, 2022. (photo: Go Nakamura/Reuters)
To say that we are a divided country down to our most fundamental beliefs is an understatement. Blue bubbles exist in a sea of red – the crimson color referring to people more well-grounded in our civilization’s norms of common sense. As the Left becomes more provocative, some on the right have responded in kind, almost to the point of laying themselves open to demagogues. For me, the repulsiveness of the Left is not an excuse to hitch my “wagon” to a narcissistic and hubristic “horse”, giving a special meaning to a horse’s a**.
Trump’s comments at a January 29 rally in Texas brings me to this point. He’s still peddling the line that he’s a victim of a cabal depriving him of an election that he constantly professes to have won. He goes as far to say that Vice President Pence had the power to throw out the electors of selected states to give the election back to him. He yelped, “Unfortunately, he [Pence] didn’t exercise that power, he could have overturned the Election!” That’s poppycock.
Mike Pence announces Joe Biden’s victory after Congress completes electoral count, Jan. 7, 2021.
Why poppycock? There’s nothing in law or legal scholarship to support such a claim. Law professor and Trump lawyer John Eastman tried to establish the assertion but on later clarification said that he raised the theory for internal discussions only and called the idea “crazy” and not “viable”.
When it comes down to it, the silliness lies in a logical fallacy and affront to long-established principles of law that are written down in the Federal Rules of Evidence. Eastman’s theory (for “internal discussions” only) is based on proposals to reform the aged Electoral Count Act of 1887. Suggestions by some of Trump’s critics in the Congressional debate to clarify the vice president’s role in the law are assumed by Trump to be evidence that Pence had the power. It’s a real head-scratcher. As legal counsel, you couldn’t get this line of argument past a judge in a trial. If you persisted, you might be spending a night or two in the hoosegow.
And this is the thin reed that Trump uses to lambast Pence. This doesn’t mean that we should ever again conduct elections like we did in 2020. The panic of COVID was used to conduct a host of dubious election ploys: shot-gunning ballots through the mail, legalizing previously illegal practices like ballot harvesting, fungible ballot verification procedures, the repeal of the precinct system in anywhere-voting, unsupervised drop boxes, voting deadlines that varied with the conscience of a judge, etc. But that’s how some states decided to conduct their elections, something that’ll be hard to overturn in a federal court.
Shame on states for allowing this to happen. Shame on the hubristic and narcissistic Trump for peddling lies to his followers. Shame on his followers for allowing themselves to be manipulated so Trump can avoid the moniker of “loser”. The country deserves better.
RogerG
*Thanks to the work of Andrew C. McCarthy and Philip Klein in National Review Online.
The U.S. Constitution, Article II, Section 3:
“. . . he [President] shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed . . . .”
The U.S. Constitution, Article II, Section 4:
“The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”
Presidential Oath of Office:
“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
Drone photo of crowds of illegal immigrants at the International Bridge on the southern border in Texas, Sept. 16, 2021.President Biden after signing a stack of executive orders shortly after taking office to reverse many of Trump’s actions.
Yes, but he won’t be.
How to rein in the President when occupants from both parties, but particularly the donkey party, have overstepped and shirked their legal responsibilities? Do we have to wait four years to correct the abuse?
Well, no. Impeachment stands at the ready. The Democrats tried it twice in Trump’s one term. They may have debased its utility by frivolous and failed overuse. Yet, it has become commonplace for federal officers throughout the three branches to egregiously overstep their powers while flagrantly ignoring their clear constitutional responsibilities. Most recently, President Biden refuses to enforce the immigration laws. He has, by execute order(s), simply repealed enforcement of the border. That’s a dereliction of a clear compulsory-in-law duty.
Could it qualify as a “high crime” when an elected officer grievously neglects his or her lawfully required responsibility? Biden’s executive orders are a clear violation of the oath of office to “faithfully execute” the constitutional position. You can’t “faithfully execute” if you refuse to do your job. You’re willfully derelict. Willful, persistent dereliction is a willful, persistent violation of the Constitution. “High crime” anyone?
The scenes at the southern border are gut-wrenching for all the people allured by illegal presidential promises to not enforce the law. The human tidal waves passing through without paying heed to legal strictures, while enabling passage throughout the country of said violators, is tantamount to presidential complicity in crimes. This isn’t an indictment based on a phone call or overheated rhetoric at a rally. It is a shredding of the oath and Constitution. What can be a more serious “high crime” than to blatantly violate the highest law?
The donkey party’s abettors of the behavior will try to hang their hat on “prosecutorial discretion”. Where’s the discretion? Is it “discretion” to take an entire class of law and pretend it doesn’t exist? Not only that, but to assist in the violation of the laws? Hardly. It’s the practice of euphemism to provide cover for criminal conduct. “Prosecutorial discretion” turns a bank robbery into an “unauthorized withdrawal”.
It’s time to rethink our obese federal Leviathan. The level of government headquartered in DC has been unhinged from Constitutional moorings for quite some time. Impeachment might be one useful tool to once again align the branches within the bounds of our charter – i.e., return them to legal status.
However, I’m under no illusion that anybody in either party has the stomach for such medicine. We’ll, as before, muddle along and be content with the results of an electorate equally as unhinged as the people they elect. And surveys will continue, as before, to show deep disenchantment with the people they choose.
Pogo in Walt Kelly’s comic strip famously said in 1970, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Kelly meant the statement for the plague of pollution. He’d probably be surprised to learn that Pogo’s quip has a much more robust application.
Biden and his announced cabinet, January 2021.“Ship of Fools”, A. N. Mironov
It’s August 31, September 1 in Afghanistan, and we’re gone, lock, stock and barrel. Biden, Trump, and the primetime lineup of Fox News got what they wanted.
The “Ship of Fools” allegory is from Plato’s “The Republic” in which a ship is run by a dysfunctional crew. Democracy can magnify the “fools” presence among the personnel. But so do the other forms of governance: the “fools” can be a subservient peasant class and their overseers born into privilege, or a group of belligerent oafs, fired up by half-witted utopian visions, and gaining power through the barrel of a gun. Such has been the lot of mankind. We should know this oft-repeated story well.
Look at what democracy gave us in November 2020. A majority rejected the man-of-many-mean-tweets and narcissistic demagogue (a tautology?), and chose a doddering old fool, obsequious to the ruling radical left of his party. The result is the ruination that the radical left has always given the people who sadly have to live under their edicts. Prime example: the Afgan bugout.
I turn to H.L. Mencken for sarcastic aphorisms on democracy. Here’s some for your edification (courtesy of Mark J. Perry of AEI). Enjoy.
H. L. Mencken. (Henry L. Mencken.), a writer for the Baltimore Sun from 1905 to 1948. (Baltimore Sun Staff File Photo by Robert F. Kniesche). (Baltimore Examiner and Washington Examiner OUT ORG XMIT: BAL0909101149453148)
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
Democracy, too, is a religion. It is the worship of jackals by jackasses.
Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. (my personal favorite)
If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.
As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
All government, of course, is against liberty.
That about sums it up. Elections are just as able to hand command of the rudder to fools as any other method.
PolitiFact staff at the 2012 RNC in Tampa (submitted photo).
At the top of Politifact’s website lies the banner “Stand up for the Facts”. Hogwash! It is just another preening part of the progressive (meaning left-wing) blob.
Check this out: Politifact conjures a distinction without a distinction in an attempt to distance Biden and Harris from their 2020 campaign rhetoric. In 2020 Biden and Harris were in full campaign mode throwing aspersions on Trump and his administration’s efforts to develop a vaccine. The apparatchiks at Politifact tried to run interference for the Dem politicos by claiming that they weren’t vaccine deniers in the run up to the vote. According to the young techno-demigods at Politifact, Biden/Harris were merely smearing Trump, not the vaccine. Hogwash!
Harris trumpeted, with Biden rapping in similar words, “If Donald Trump tells us to take it, I’m not taking it.” With invective, she went after the medical scientists in Operation Warp Speed (OWS) by dismissing them as weak-kneed shills for Trump, saying they “will be muzzled, they will be suppressed, they will be sidelined, because he’s looking at an election coming up in less than 60 days. . . .”
Kamala Harris in September of 2020 declaring that she doesn’t trust Trump’s vaccine.
The lead OWS scientist was Moncef Slaoui and he countered her bombast by saying “the approach is 100 percent based on facts and data and nothing else.”
And to say, as Politifact does, that Biden/Harris weren’t disparaging the vaccine? How do you avoid smearing the vaccine when you go after the credibility of the people who produced it? Why else would Harris declare “I’m not taking it”?
The buffoonery of Politifact is amazing beyond belief. Now, our new potentates are trying to stampede the reluctant into taking the jabs by imposing many of the old lockdown measures. The bunglers running the show in DC want to take away our lives in order to achieve perfect compliance with a vaccine that 8 months before they were ridiculing.
And to think that this duo got 81 million votes. Now I see why. The usual suspects, like Politifact, were in the tank for them. You can read Politifact’s twaddle here.
Something is in the ether or water. Call it a moment of flux. The Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English defines “flux” as “a situation in which things are changing a lot and you cannot be sure what will happen.” Also call it a our totalitarian moment. Do we really understand the gravity?
It happened so sudden. Race vengeance is taught in the schools under the call sign of “equity”. SecDef Austin is conducting a political cleansing of the ranks. Fortune 500 boardrooms have joined the pogrom. A virus is the catalyst for suspending the Bill of Rights and making America look more like Communist China, literally. The primary function of government to ensure public safety is forfeited in “reimagining policing” campaigns at the same time that sweeping controls on the private ownership of the means of self-protection are seriously considered. Under the banner of hyper-politicized “climate change”, government will confer upon itself the power to control nearly every aspect of our lives. To keep the revolutionary commissars in power, elections are to be rigged ala Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela. Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) or George Orwell (1984, Animal Farm) can’t compete with this emerging reality.
SecDef Austin announces campaign to politically cleanse the ranks of “extremists”.
Pres. Biden announces more gun control measures, 2021.Radical congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey announce their Green New Deal in February 2019.Visitors at California’s Universal Studios theme park following the state’s universal masking mandate.Mailed ballots lying on the floor of a Paterson, NJ, apartment building during the 2020 election.
John Adams in 1775 once quipped, “Liberty once lost is lost forever”. I think that he was drawing upon the words of William Penn, the founder of the Pennsylvania Colony. In 1687, Penn ordered the printing of the Magna Carta and other English constitutional documents to remind generations of their English rights and liberties. He advised them:
“not to give up anything of liberty that at present they do enjoy, but take up the good example of our ancestors, and understand that it is easy to part with or give away great privileges [rights and liberties], but hard to be gained if lost.” *
In 1701, Penn issued the Charter of Privileges, and in 1751, in commemoration of it, the Assembly of Pennsylvania commissioned a great bell to be installed in Assembly Hall. Today, we call the building Independence Hall and the bell the Liberty Bell.
Oh, how are we quickly forgetting.
RogerG
*From “Albion’s Seed” by David Hackett Fischer, Oxford University Press.
Pres. Biden’s first speech to Congress, May 28, 2021.
Dr. Now in TLC’s “My 600-Pound Life” is confronted with morbidly obese patients. The show reveals the gross flaws of human nature when people are advised to stop destroying themselves in gluttony. They lie, cheat – sneak pizza into their hospital room – and wallow in atrocious self-pity. Well, the first two of those behaviors were on full display last night before a joint session of Congress by President Biden, with the addition of demagoguery and an LSD-inspired disconnect from reality. To be sure, Biden isn’t the doctor; he’s the troubled patient.
And this on the heels of President Trump’s previous 4-year litany of “best ever”. He exaggerated. Biden out-and-out mangled the truth, probably intentionally lied, and presented all the integrity of a used car salesman. He out-Trumped Trump, and every other politician since Tammany Hall.
Let’s face it, last night’s spiel was a “Welcome America to Your New Soviet Future”. Where to start? Start where he started. He shamelessly claimed credit for the good news on the virus. The guy’s been above room temperature while in office for only 100 days, and he struts around taking credit for other people’s accomplishments. The vaccine came out of Trump’s Operation Warp Speed; the distribution and jabs began under the orange man; and the decline in the death rate began before a pandemic-mutilated election put Biden in the oval office. Of course, the contributions of the man from Mira Lago were erased from history. Welcome to Biden’s Bizzarro world.
Biden’s unwitting comic routine continued under the ages-old political tactic of distorting a crisis to stampede the public into the Leviathan. We should have known that we’re in trouble when “the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression” came off his lips. Funny thing that “worst economic crisis”: it was an overt government act to euthanize society in response to the virus. More accurately, it was a government-induced coma, and one that blue state governors want to extend beyond the horizon. Let’s get this straight: they engineer a deadening of life; work to continue the suffocation; and then exploit these outcomes to bring the Soviet’s Gosplan (Soviet central planning agency) to America. The hutzpah is off the charts.
A portion of Times Square, NYC, a ghost town, during its lockdown order in 2020.
Speaking of Gosplan, Biden’s 26-minute prattle was Soviet central planning galore. He plans to flood the country with tidal waves of fiat, paper money – 4 trillions of it on top of his already-passed 2 trillion – for Democratic Party constituencies and hangers-on. He wants to buy off blue-collars with coerced unionization for everybody as he works to destroy their jobs in order to pander to Environmentalism’s zealots among aloof, semi-literate white-collars and uber-wealthy. Oh, he says, not to worry. The working stiffs will be drafted as laboring foot soldiers in the Great Leader’s greenie transformation of all of life, which is reminiscent of Stalin’s Industrialization campaign of the 1930’s, a scheme that had the unhappy consequences of massive official maldistribution of resources and stunning brutality: 10 million starvation deaths in the Ukraine (the Holodomor), ill-suited and untrained peasants herded into factories and new cities, and the production of a lot of crap. Wild imaginations of the powerful can kill you and your livelihoods.
Peasants on a collective farm receiving indoctrination during Stalin’s collectivization/industrialization campaign of the 1930’s.The confiscation of peasant grain to be sold on international markets to fund industrialization. The result is one of the worst famines in history. It’s a direct consequence of government policy.Starving children at an Ukrainian orphanage during the Holodomor (Ukrainian famine of the 1930’s)
The suicide pill of a $15 minimum wage was childishly asserted. Who’ll be forced to take it? The pill will be swallowed by the hundreds of thousands who’ll lose their jobs as employers shed folks who can’t produce $15 worth of product. It’ll be a boon to automation . . . as if we need any more reasons to hand over wads of cash to techie lefties.
A robot as a french fry tender at a Los Angeles White Castle. Those workers should be worried.
Be warned, the rest of this account depicts Biden’s and the entire Dem firmament’s rampant abuse of the Oxford English Dictionary.
Playing loose with the language is a hallmark of the blinkered ambitious. It was on full display last night. Take the word “infrastructure”. If you thought that it meant roads, bridges, water projects, the grid, oh how you misjudged the creative duplicity of ambitious people with too much power. “Infrastructure” means The Squad-economy. Say goodbye to your fuel-efficient sedan; say hello to a $50,000 electric cart, made affordable by making somebody else share the cost without their consent. Say goodbye to affordable and consistently available energy; say hello to blackouts, vast stretches of the landscape blanketed in solar panel plantations and artificial forests of huge steel-towered propellers, and utility bills that’ll force you into a hippie lifestyle. Greenie energy isn’t cheap energy, never has been.
White Water windmill farm in Palm Springs, Riverside County, CaliforniaUS solar plantation
“Clean energy” is another one of those abortions to clear thinking. Cut the crap; it’s code for the destruction of reliable energy – “managed decline” (?) – and its replacement with the kind that’ll be foisted on us after upending our entire way of life at humongous cost to us. See, our politicians only produce words, words that satisfy their unhinged imaginations but make a mockery of good sense.
Here’s more words. All this talk about the “21st century economy” isn’t the “economy of the future”. It’s the economy of the whimsical imaginations of people who are divorced from the mundane task of making and selling stuff in the real world, of people who live a Beltway existence, have the lifetime sinecure of a safe district, and a steady six-figure paycheck. Their whimsies become our nightmares.
Biden was not finished making a shambles of the Oxford Dictionary. He introduced “The American Families Plan” which has little to do with families, and more to do with padding the bank account of the NEA. The centerpiece turns “free” K-12 into “free” pre-K-to-senior thesis. 13 years at taxpayer expense quickly became 17, as if the “21st century economy” requires more sociology and grievance/identity majors. Once they get done with your child’s schooling, your kid will be ready for a job behind a Starbucks counter and primed to head to Portland in a black hood, ready for the ongoing fight against “white privilege”.
Antifa in Portland
As for “free”, nothing is “free”. We all know that, or do we? Don’t expect four more years in an ideological hothouse to enlighten the kids. “Free” is another one of those words to go through the etymological shredder.
The word “free” is frequently attached to “investment” in the steel trap of Biden’s mind. “Investment” is a nicer word for “spending”. Mind you, he’s not talking about “investment” to defend us and our way of life with a 350-ship navy. He’s talking about pumping money into more social programs. “Investment” actually means an expense in the reasonable hope of a profit. What is the reasonable result from many of the earlier “investment” boondoggles? Remember FDR’s New Deal that turned a market correction into a decade-long castration of national wealth and personal fortunes? Remember urban renewal? Remember AFDC? Remember public housing, Section 8? Remember the additional trillions pumped into public education over the past three decades with embarrassing results? Yes, remember Head Start? It’s proof that entrenched lefties still try to put lipstick on that pig. If you want a glimpse into Biden’s future for us, look at California.
California’s version of affordable housing: view of a homeless encampment on 17th Street between Wood and Campbell streets in Oakland, Calif., on Thursday, May 18, 2017. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)Affordable housing in once-beautiful Santa Cruz.Affordable housing in California: a homeless man (center) sleeps at a homeless encampment along the Santa Ana River in Anaheim, California, on January 23. January 22 reports said authorities planned to clear out Orange County’s largest homeless encampment, with some 500 people living in tents.Skid row, LA, in sight of the downtown.San Francisco’s poop patrol cleaning up needles and poop from the sidewalks and streets.The smoldering ruins of Paradise, Ca. after the Camp Fire swept through the town.Poor maintenance of California’s Oroville Dam led to to serious spillway damage in 2017.According to the nonpartisan Transportation for America, California has the second worst roads in the country.A recent photo of Christmas in Skid Row, LA. Trash and filth in the shadow of tarnished glitterati,
He’s not done with saddling us and future generations with more debt. He plans to lard up the bill with more “free” (meaning somebody else pays) stuff: day care, family leave, etc. The only ray of light is the child tax credit which gives working families a voucher, in essence, to escape his Education Department’s and DOJ Civil Rights commissars. It might be worth Biden’s gift for parents to have the option of getting their kids out of Biden’s public schools, the ones that are riddled with the mayhem of “restorative justice” discipline, school boards under the thumb of the teacher unions and the mentally bankrupt Schools of Education, and the racist indoctrination of critical race theory and other mind-numbing ideologies. How long will it be before Biden discovers that he unleashed a form of choice that he hates: school choice? Parents, take the checks before the teachers’ unions wake up and put the kibosh to it.
The flood gates for more government are further thrown open when the word “right” is promiscuously tossed around as Biden did by attaching it to healthcare. If something is declared a “right”, then it must be guaranteed, guaranteed equally to all. The 13th Amendment prohibits enslaving providers to give it up, but no such protection applies to the taxpayer. A “right” in this context means that taxpayers, now and in the future, must pony up.
Just think about it: how can a product or service, scarce by definition, be guaranteed to everyone in the amount that they demand? Scarcity means a limit to the number of doctors and nurses, medical facilities, money for same, equipment and supplies, and the rest of the supply chain inputs. To pretend it to be a “right” – and that’s all it is, a pretension – is to eventually reach the reality of resources being sucked away from the other necessary components of life. You’ve got healthcare, but the cost of housing, food, and heating goes through the roof. In the end, your healthcare will be limited by quality and some form of rationing. That’s the real world, but it’s not where we find the minds of the donkey party and our president at the dais last night.
Crowds in a medical practice’s waiting room. Crowds will be commonplace when healthcare is made into “right” and “free”.
How will the giver-in-chief pay for these additional trillions and trillions? “Pay” goes into the same meat grinder of meaning with the rest of the relevant vocabulary. It’s a flight of fancy away from the real capital flight. You see, if he succeeds in raising your employer’s taxes, he or she adjusts. Some flee the jaws of Biden’s IRS, and they take a few jobs with them, maybe yours. In the end, a hike in taxes always disappoints. The money coming in doesn’t match the lofty expectations, but the spending certainly continues as before. As for those that head for the tax haven of Ireland, Lizzy Warren (D., Mass.) wants to man the exit points with agents to corral the flight to freedom. Sounds like East German guards at the Berlin Wall.
East German guards at the Brandenburg Gate, Berlin. A harbinger of Lizzy Warren’s agents to capture people trying to flee her party’s fleecing of the American entrepreneurial class?
It’s interesting to note that Biden’s threshold for tax hikes is $400,000. 400,000 bucks encompasses a well-paid techie lefty and places the bar high enough to protect another valuable constituency: dues-paying members of the teachers’ unions, an essential constituency if you running for office with a “D” after your name. Comfortable suburban white-collars can’t be irritated with tax increases at a time when the Dems need their support to replace other lost constituencies. No need in angering a demographic that you rely upon to continue the revolution down the road.
Biden then gets to another one of those tactless monikers: “fair share”. He throws it out there as if he said something profound. He didn’t; he demagogued it. He should know, as does Pelosi’s CBO, the top 20% pay 69% of all federal taxes. What’s “fair share”? A 100%? This is pure malicious demagoguery. It’s either a lie or Biden is absolutely clueless. You choose.
The speech then mashed together two huge self-negations: his fascination for the rigid ideology of climate change and his promise to protect America’s national interests. Tell me, how does that work? He acts to run down the country with massive regulations, taxes, and life-degrading mandates as he promises to put China in a box. The Paris accord, which he demands that we re-enter, exempts China and India from most of its most deleterious edicts while they fully fall on the U.S. It’s a plan to chop off one of the U.S.’s legs in the race with Red China. Strangulation of the domestic economy makes mute the promise to make Red China play fair. Biden is doing to us what the Red Chinese would do if they could.
Is Biden an unwitting Manchurian candidate?
The whole speech was a combination of how-to-be-Argentina and government-by-leftist-junta. Calm, soothing tones are meaningless if you’re rampaging the train of the country off the rails. “Sleepless in Seattle” became “Shameless in DC” last night.
Coach John Mosley of the East Los Angeles Community College basketball team, and a focus of Netflix’s “Last Chance U: Basketball” (highly recommended), stated, “Rules without relationships are rebellion.” When you think about it, he’s onto something. Rules in the absence of an interpersonal connection can easily be received as a cold and blind force, and frequently are. In a related fashion, I remember counseling young teachers against angling a troubled kid into a corner with no escape because he or she might violently lash out. When rules box people into corners without escape, expect rebellion.
Coach John Mosley of East Los Angeles Community College’s basketball team
The makings of a serious national rupture are happening as I write. The near complete monopoly by the Left in our society’s centers of power and influence is forcing an unpalatable choice upon the many dissenters. Right now, the safety valves of free speech and thought are being closed by the Big Tech oligarchy as the Democratic Party pursues a redesign of elections to keep themselves in power for generations, emasculation of our borders to chronically expand the critical mass of their supporters, redesign of our schools into their indoctrination centers, and removal of the last symbol of citizen self-reliance in the neutering of the Second Amendment. What will the loyal opposition do if this new Borg leaves the people with no recourse? My guess is that it’ll no longer be loyal. Don’t box people into corners.
In a relatively brief span of time, the hegemony of a narrow set of beliefs has descended upon us. For some, the deplatforming of Trump “for life” by the tech oligarchs was the omen of a new Dark Age of absolutist control of thought and conscience. The contradictions are glaring and instructive. Twitter bumps Trump but must be forced by a to Department of Homeland Security to take down a video of her son’s sexual assault. Amazing.
Hardly does Trump deserve much of a defense for some of his actions. I’m not in the Hannity world of Trump-worship. But neither am I in the habit of blinding myself to the first real exercise of raw power to erase a prominent figure from the world stage; though, it’s been happening for quite some time to the less notable. It’s raw power and used in a brazen manner.
Mark Zuckerberg famously stated before Congress that Silicon Valley is an “extremely left-leaning place”. He’s got that right. “Left-leaning” means a techno-utopian ideal of gauzy socialist-egalitarian, libertine, and greenie bliss brought into existence by universal techno-connectivity. It’s certainly a way for them to feel good about themselves by the self-elevation of the importance of their work. For the people who aren’t caught up in this romper room of the mind, they get cancelled.
Brandon Eich
It’s unapologetic censorship, like what happened to Brandon Eich, the brief (for 11 days in 2014) CEO of Mozilla. He was “forced” out by something loosely called the “Mozilla community” – a more accurate term would be “mob” – for daring to support traditional marriage (2008’s Prop 8 in California). Key to any mob’s “cancellation” is the recognition that there aren’t other legitimate points of view to be tolerated.
An excursion into the functioning of tech central’s totalitarian mind was provided by Forbes magazine in 2014 when it republished a Quora piece by Ian McCullough, “consumer tech”, of San Francisco, on the forced resignation of Eich. McCullough’s defense of the disposal of Eich pivoted on two claims: Eich’s opinion is beyond the pale and an extremely odd notion of freedom of speech.
Unbeknownst to McCullough, the unpopularity of opinions frequently depends on location. Eich’s opinions on marriage aren’t fashionable in Zuckerberg’s “left-leaning place”, and in McCullough’s San Francisco – thus, beyond the pale – but neither are McCullough’s and those of Zuckerberg’s left-leaning place as popular in the vast stretches of flyover country. There is a difference, though: McCullough’s support for gay marriage won’t by itself result in his forced resignation if he stated his views in Arkansas, at least as far as I can determine. If it does happen, there’d be a groundswell of opposition for making a person’s employment status contingent on rectitude with an area’s popular slant on a contentious issue. No, that kind of thing is routinely reserved for Zuckerberg’s “left-leaning place”.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, testifying before the Senate on April 10, 2018.
In that “left-leaning place”, fundamental rights such as freedom of speech is contorted out of all recognition. In McCullough’s twisted mind, the freedom of speech of a mass can be used to intimidate a single person’s exercise of free speech. In a way, ironically, he’s right. Every single person in the mob has freedom of speech individually, but the bigger question involves self-control. Ought we to practice it in that manner? Arkansas is much more into “ought” and Zuckerberg’s “left-leaning place” is all into gang-style suppression; that’s the difference.
And even more importantly, does the First Amendment have any practical relevance if an opinion is more popular in other locales but is unpopular in the little node where we find the oligarchic power of Big Tech to blot it out everywhere? By what legitimate right should one locale and their nest of opinions have the power to censor the opinions about traditional institutions in the communities that hold these traditions dear? McCullough, no one should have that power. No one, not you nor anyone like you, or me for that matter.
Today, Big Tech has the power and they use it. It does so by banning information that doesn’t comport with their socio-political prejudices. Look at what happened to The New York Post’s Biden family corruption story just before the election. In an informal, or formal (?), alliance of interest, Big Media and Big Tech shut out the story. No such forbearance was granted Trump regarding the grand smear that went by the name of “Russia collusion”. The fiction had a 3-year lease on life despite the fact that it was predicated on a demonstrably proven pack of Democrat-funded lies.
Another alliance member – the upper echelons of DC’s permanent Fed Administrative State – were giddy at the possibility of dragging Trump through the mud and only ended up with a two-year $40 million probe that was led by a doddering Robert Mueller and his band of partisan hacks who produced . . . nothing.
What did we get for $40 million? We got 3 years of hair-on-fire, a perpetuation of the smear, unsuccessful impeachments, and conservative websites hidden on page 5 of a Google search. Like the Biden corruption story, uncooperative sites go down the memory hole. Of course, initially, Google feigns that it’s due to their software “protocols” or “algorythms”. Then they dropped all pretense by calling it “misinformation”. It’s still a crock.
Big Tech’s “misinformation” campaign targeted the pesky Breitbart media operation. Breitbart News noticed clicks on Google dropped 99% from 2016 to 2020. Their entire website was given the NYPost treatment.
And if that’s not enough, complete platforms were deplatformed. Parler, the social media competitor to Twitter, was destroyed by Big Tech’s near-Gang of Eight. Like Trump and Breitbart, it was steamrolled by the big wheels of Big Tech. Read this quackery of a write-up on Wikipedia:
“Parler is an American alt-tech microblogging and social networking service. It has a significant user base of Donald Trump supporters, conservatives, conspiracy theorists, and right-wing extremists. Posts on the service often contain far-right content, antisemitism, and conspiracy theories such as QAnon.”
Not a word about the charlatanism of the Green New Deal and the buffoonery of its eco-apocalypse and the 30-something adolescent mind from New York’s 14th congressional district behind much of it. Not a word about the potential for descent into Venezuela-land from socialism’s new found popularity. Not a word about the buffoonery of “settled science” since real science means a real scientific method that is operative all the time. Not a word about the provable unsustainability of “sustainable energy”. Not a word about the scientific backlash to the “settled science” of Fauci and World Health Organization. The paradox is that the most frequent purveyors of “misinformation” are the people combatting “misinformation”. Franz Kafka looking at our time would see abundant evidence of life imitating art, his art.
What will people do if they come to conclude that there is no recourse to submission? If the Democrats have their way, elections will have the legitimacy of loan sharking and only keep the Socialist Revolutionary Party (Democratic Party) cemented in power for the foreseeable future, thereby proving the Marxist revolutionary’s maxim: one man, one vote, one time. Voices are to be silenced by a formal unity of purpose among entrenched elites at the commanding heights of our society. The kids are to receive no respite in the assault on their minds from every quarter in entertainment and the schools. Traditional institutions and the morality of self-defense are systematically upended. For those standing aghast at this turn of events, some may sadly seek redress in more violent means, no other option having been left open to them. Boxing people into corners has dangerous consequences.
Friedrich Hayek had many reasons for the failure of socialism, but one was the “knowledge problem”. Big government’s attempt to manage the many affairs of its people requires a level of knowledge that no one person or small group of individuals can possess. Crap happens and human existence enters a dark place.
Coach Mosley and his team experienced the consequences in the state whose governing elites are infatuated with government’s top-down management of its residents, but aren’t, and can’t be, as knowledgeable and wise as they think themselves to be. After completing a 29-1 season and surviving the first round of the state championship tournament, and after loading on the bus to travel to West Hills College in Lemoore for the Final Four championship round, Coach Mosley received a phone call to announce the cancellation of the tournament due to COVID. It was part of a state of California lockdown that proved to be no more efficacious than states who left their residents free to live a more normal life. A season of hard work, trials, and tribulations was ended just as the prize for going through all the trouble was near at hand. And it was all for naught.
The spirit of resistance in California, April 2020. Protesters to the lockdown blocked traffic around the state’s capitol in Sacramento.
Coach Mosley properly acceded to the state’s decision. What else could he do? But what’ll happen when the one-party state of California is transferred to DC and the one party blocks all avenues of civil opposition to the ruling ideology? The Democrats are playing with fire.
CULVER CITY, CALIFORNIA – MARCH 15: A man walks with a stroller as people stand in line outside the Martin B. Retting, Inc. guns store on March 15, 2020 in Culver City, California. The spread of Coronavirus (COVID-19) has prompted some Americans to line up for supplies in a variety of stores. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)
In a phone conversation with a friend from the Golden State, he mentioned a remark from an acquaintance justifying the COVID restrictions. According to him, his interlocutor quoted a line from Jesus (Matt. 22:21): “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.” I responded by saying, “When you engage in the battle of the verses, you’d better make sure that the arrows in your quiver are more numerous than the number in the other person’s.” And there are other arrows to be found in her opponent’s quiver. In fact, many, many, many of them.
I suspect that the arrows dealing with idolatry alone would be sufficient to overwhelm her fusillade. One source identifies 30 including the famous Exodus 20:4: “You shall not make for yourself an idol, or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water under the earth.” It’s the main reason that Christians endured three centuries of persecution. They wouldn’t bend a knee to the altar of Caesar. For the ambitious Progressives of our time, government is the resurrected Cult of Caesar for which all must bend a knee. This is no longer simply “rendering unto Caesar” but bowing before the altar of a new set of god-kings, a new Cult of Caesar.
Christian persecutions in the Coliseum, Rome, 2nd or 3rd centuries CE.
I look around and see the Cult of Caesar nearly everywhere. “Follow the science” is one of the mystic chants of the cult, even as they ignore the real thing. The priesthood of politicized “experts” is just one group of high initiates to guard the Cult’s Inner Sanctum. There are other sources for the Cult’s men of the cloth. Many cut their teeth on the Cult’s lefty politics in the bowels of the Democratic Party and rose to power in the Cult’s geographic strongholds: namely blue states and municipalities, and in DC with the ascension of a new High Priest in the Oval Office that now serves as the seat of the Vicar of the Cult.
Let’s not leave out the numerous seminaries, our colleges, who germinate the Cult’s zealots, the militant Jesuits (Antifa, BLM, etc.) whose duty is to proselytize the faith and do battle with the small pockets of unbelievers. These militia of the faithful were groomed in very comfortable surroundings and received elite training in elite institutions, which are now almost solely devoted to the key tenets of the Cult. They spread out as rampaging mobs (Minneapolis watch out), dominate the commanding heights of the culture, fill the ranks of the Cult’s chief evangelists in seats of power (Pelosi, Maxine Waters, The Squad, and true-believers in the Senate, and staffs), and into corporate boardrooms that have been remarkably receptive to the Cult’s ministrations.
Progressivism is the modern manifestation of the Cult of Caesar. One of its early prophets from the turn into the 20th century was Herbert Croly, not exactly a household name.
Herbert Croly
He went up to the proverbial Mt. Sinai of his mind and brought down his great epistle, The Promise of American Life (1909). It, and his voluminous other writings in the journal that he co-founded, The New Republic, were all into “give unto Caesar”. Why? Because Croly’s Caesar has two qualities of a true god: the powers of heaven and the concomitant power to make perfect. And I quote from him, “[T]he sincere democrat is obliged to assume the power of heaven.” And again, “Democracy must stand or fall on a platform of human perfectibility.” The quotes aren’t taken out of context. They form the core of his theology – or theology disguised as ideology.
It’s interesting that he intermingled the idea of the state “assum[ing] the power of heaven” with democracy. Croly like all Democrats profess a love for democracy, but only so long as it produces the right outcomes, their outcomes. If it doesn’t, democracy must be reengineered to fit the desired ends.
Thus, the Democrats’ demand for HR1, the omnibus bill that seeks to enshrine the electoral practices of Tammany Hall. Want unaccountable voting? Scatter ballots to the wind (i.e., mail), institute automatic registration when you have any interaction with the state (get a driver’s license, pay a fine, get a business license, make a lunch date with the clerk, etc.), eliminate election day by voting before and after “election day”, allow the zealots to sow and reap ballots, and forbid voter verification will do the trick.
Boss Tweed of Tammany Hall, NYC
The Cult’s high priesthood claim to expand democracy, but do it by destroying it. Why vote, knowing that your vote will be canceled by a mysterious downpour of ballots from the ether that nobody can or is willing to validate? Even the minimal qualification of consciousness can be ignored . . . since really nobody is checking. Breathing on a respirator while flatlining is no disqualifier.
I can’t think of a greater downer for voter turnout than this monstrosity. The whole contraption requires nothing of the disinterested voter. The ballot is delivered to you and will be picked up for return by somebody else. Nothing will be expected of the voter. The only thing missing is somebody to direct your hand as you vote – or maybe that is next. No hassles and no civic responsibility are the order of the day. Thus, for the voter with a brain, why vote? After all, the result may be preordained, and as honest as a mob-run casino.
The Cult’s newly installed High Priest recently gave a speech on one of the Cult’s chief challenges: the pandemic. The talk took the form of a papal bull and was replete with the assumed powers of heaven in the body of our latest Caesar. The Heavenly Leader’s proclamation was part plea to follow His injunctions – get vaccinated, wear masks, practice social distancing, etc. – and if we bow to His wishes, He offers a return of our normal lives by Independence Day. If we don’t, or nature throws us a curve ball, He will exercise the powers of heaven to smash our dreams and livelihoods. This isn’t a citizen republic. It’s a theocracy with a god-man/woman/it and a College of Cardinals in charge.
Watch out! They’re not done. The High Priesthood is looking to disarm the unbelievers. The Second Amendment is about to become as much of a dead letter as the Mosaic Dietary Laws in the Book of Leviticus. That’s next for the reigning Cult of Caesar.
I feel like Cicero – hopefully without the same end (execution) – who witnessed, and resisted, the rise of Julius Caesar and the end of the Roman Republic. The new imperium was established with the old institutions kept alive in empty form only. Rome achieved the revolution through civil war. We may have reached the same end by passive acquiescence to a new faith: the Progressive Cult of Caesar.
Biden, wife, Harris, and transition team, January 2021
The Democrats are in power, and that means the ideology of progressivism will be in the cockpit. Progressivism is a form of authoritarianism with the rulers being an elite among the clerisy (“a distinct class of learned or literary people”) under the honorific title of “expert”. “Experts” rule, elite colleges coronate the rulers with spurious certificates of competence, elite coastal social networks in exclusive nodes confer status, and the common people are shunted into the increasingly meaningless debating societies called legislatures in the states and Congress.
Jeff Zients, White House coronavirus response coordinator, speaks with the rest of Biden’s COVID-19 Response Team, January 27, 2021.
This mongrel is the malignant dream of “progressives”, since at least the late 19th century, to unseat the Constitutional mechanisms – separation of powers and checks and balances – that were established to protect the public well-being from inherently flawed human beings in the possession of great power. The “science” of the expert is forever on their tongues. But we aren’t getting dispassionate men of “science” to rule over us, as per the progressive dream. We’re getting the same mediocrity, or worse, but with the gloss of a college resume’.
Portrait of Thomas Jefferson, 1805
The Founders tried to warn us against placing too much power in the hands any small group of apparatchiks. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams fleshed out the danger in their correspondence. Jefferson, as the golden jubilee of the nation (50-year) approached, denied the request for his attendance at the festivities due to “ill health”. But he had some weighty words that our aggrandizing progressives would be wise to heed:
“. . . the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”
A sheepskin with “science” on it does not bestow boots and spurs for one person to ride another. The flaws of humanity remain in spite of a commencement exercise. Wisdom and moral character are not automatically conferred by a curriculum riddled with lefty bromides, or any other litany of coursework for that matter. Ambition, avarice, vanity, egotism, etc., remain in spite of acquiring a six-figure student loan debt.
John Adams, c. 1800/1815, oil on canvas by Gilbert Stuart.
John Adams would make sure everyone at his time understood the menace that is posed by our defective nature. He maintained to the end of his life that “human Reason and human Conscience [are] not a Match, for human Passions, human Imaginations and human Enthusiasm.” He went further when he wrote that the passions “insinuate themselves into the Understanding and the Conscience and convert both to their Party”. Our politicians’ favorite bromides of “follow the science” or “scientific consensus” is jargon to cover their poorly reasoned ideological prejudices.
Some of Adams’s words would send many of our snowflakes into thumb-sucking safe spaces. The priesthood of critical race theory would rush to their political allies in the Democratic Party to have him air-brushed from history like the old Bolsheviks who were erased from the pictorial record in all Soviet publications after their execution by Stalin.
Nikolai Yezhov, pictured right of Stalin, was later removed from this photograph at the Moscow Canal. (Credit: Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images & AFP/GettyImages)
Adams had no patience for equality of result, and thus no need for an “equity” crusade. He would say that equality in law and soul is not the same as equality in material effects and natural endowments. The former is proper and fitting, the latter isn’t. People aren’t born with equal capacities.
Yes, he would agree that being born into an elite family is an advantage, obviously, but it isn’t determinative. Look at him. He was the son of a cobbler and farmer. As he wrote at the end of his life to drive the point home,
“To teach that all men are born with equal powers and faculties, to equal influence in society, to equal property and advantages through life is as great a fraud, as glaring an imposition on the credulity of the people, as ever was practiced by monks, by Druids, by Brahmins, by priests of the immortal Lama, or by the self-styled philosophers of the French Revolution.”
Inequality of status and wealth is the natural condition of humanity according to Adams. A jihad against inequality can’t eliminate it, only replace one group of barons for another. The equity commissars will be every bit an aristocracy as those inhabiting the grounds of 18th-century Versailles.
Orwell captured the rise of the new privileged ruling class in Animal Farm: “All animals are equal / but some animals are more equal than others.” Guess who will be “more equal than others”? They’ll be the legions of venal consultants leading the charge against the wreckers of the “systemic racism” conspiracy, or the armies of activists who shifted employment from the likes of the Southern Poverty Law Center to the Justice Department. It’s the rule of powerful apparatchiks with their secret police and army of sycophantic informers in corporate boardrooms and in all other areas of life.
The progressives’ dream seems to be an echo of CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping’s surveillance state and social credit system. Censorship is rampant. It’s lurking underneath the jargon of “misinformation” and “hate”. External control of thought, speech, conscience, and action is everywhere. We were sold on free trade with China in the hope that they would become more like us. Instead, we are beginning to look a lot like them.
In a nutshell, we are living at a time of the near completion of the progressives’ campaign against the Founding. And it sucks.
A British cartoon from the days of the French Revolution that portrayed the Sans-Culottes, “relaxing after the fatigues of their day”.The day after one of the Minneapolis riots, May 2020.
Right now, the Left from their newly acquired bastions in the executive branch and Congress are empowered to embark on their long-desired jihad against inequality. These campaigns seldom go well. Indulging in fantasies of the kind that seriously ignore reality leave a path of desolation. How many times must we embark on the same crusade with the same excuses using the same means (government) and producing the same disastrous results?
Weaponizing language is the real and last refuge of the scoundrel, not patriotism. The revolutionaries utilize rhetorically useful euphemisms and creative pejoratives to hide their intentions and provide cover for their actions, thus the Bolsheviks’ widespread application of the word “kulak” (Russian for “fist”) to landowning peasants before they enunciated their war on the peasants, or today’s demagogues who employ “rich”, “top one percent”, “pay their fair share”, “white privilege”, “systemic racism”, or just plain “racism”. Our modern scoundrels don’t a take a back seat to the Bolshevik rabble rousers stirring up Petrograd factory workers or the thousands of reservists milling around the capital in the months before the 1917 coup.
Russian army reserve conscripts, heavily influenced by Bolshevik agitators, march in Petrograd in opposition to the Provisional Government, October 1917.
Add to the euphemism list “equity”. “Equity” is resplendent in the proclamations coming out of the Biden administration in its first few weeks. It’s a classic example of word as sword. What are they really up to? “Equity” simply means “impartial” or “fair”. No, no, no, not for this crowd! That isn’t good enough for our Jacobins. “Equity” is the veneer for racial vengeance. Throughout the Biden Leviathan, “equity” will provide cover for a return of Jim Crow with a different cast for the winners and losers. Race and the rest of the fashionably oppressed labels will make their return as the basis for distributing public goodies. Of course, what goes to one group is withheld from another. They make no bones about it. Their rhetorical repertoire includes “patriarchy”, “social justice”, “white privilege”, “systemic racism”, “white fragility”, and “Uncle Tom/Tío Taco” to dismiss complaints.
Without a doubt, this isn’t your normal lofty aspiration for “equality”. If it is, it is of a form that seeks to repeal nature. People are born with so many different gifts and qualities that divergent outcomes can only be suppressed by force, thus the holy war for “equity”. The long arm of the state is employed to forcibly flatten things. Who gets hurt, for many will be? How will the public good be advanced, for in many ways it will be retarded? What happens to the personality of a people raised on a steady diet of envy and the receipt of earnings that once belonged to others, for there will be an inflation in the numbers of the entitled? Think of it; it won’t be pretty.
Biden sits with the executive orders that he signed to repeal the Trump era and set the U.S. on a path to a reverse racism called “equity”, January 26, 2021.
Edmund Burke in England and John Adams in America saw its vile corruptions in the late 18th-century streets of Paris with its rampaging mobs and their vicious agitators in the seats of power. For Adams and Burke, physical inequality was in the nature of things. Inequality resulted and quickly became the political whipping boy for the demagogue. A moral equality – as in the equality of all souls – gave way to an equality in all things material, or Adams’s “false Notions of equality”. As Adams correctly predicted at the beginning, it would end in despotism.
John Adams , 1785 Mather Brown Portrait
It’s the same idea that animates Antifa and its cousin, Black Lives Matter, lest we forget. The abyss that consumes us is evident in the burned-out hulks in the business district, the flight of refugees from the “paradise”, the occasional beatings and killings (47 killings in June, July, and August), and the escalation of violence as permissiveness for one side’s rampages leads to complimentary fury from the other side. It is happening before our eyes.
Get prepared for a hurricane. Jacobinism, whether in the streets of 1789 Paris or 1917 Petrograd or downtown Portland or Biden’s “equity” crusade, isn’t a recipe for paradise. It’s a calamity. Lest we forget.
