Neurotic (adj.), neurosis (noun): mental, emotional, or physical reactions that are drastic and irrational. At its root, a neurotic behavior is an automatic, unconscious effort to manage deep anxiety. (From WebMD)
We (wife, son, sister-in-law, myself) were in a Denny’s in Grand Junction, Colorado, and I couldn’t help but notice the greater prevalence of mask-wearing in the state. Sitting across from me while waiting for our table were two gentlemen in masks, one double-masked. At our table, looking out the window, I watched a solitary woman on her morning walk wearing a mask . . . outdoors! The scene struck me as odd since few, if any, wear masks in Idaho and Montana. Passing through my home state of Montana and Idaho on our way to Grand Junction, even at major venues like Walmart, I could count on one hand the number of people wearing masks. Not so in blue-state Colorado, at least as evident in Grand Junction. Could blue-state/red-state socio-political dynamics account for the behavior? After all, politics is downstream of culture.
Watch this scene from North Hollywood, California.
By all accounts, left-coast culture has come to dominate Denver and Aspen which has come to dominate Colorado. Blue culture equals blue state.
We were in Grand Junction for a wedding. To be honest, nobody at the night-before social, nor at the wedding and reception, could give a rip about Fauci’s pronouncements, and all were thankfully unmasked. Anyway, it wasn’t a crowd receptive to the dictates of the federal authoritarians. Beyond the perimeter of the festivities, however, life seemed to be more corseted.
Red states seem to want to get back to normal, and “normal” doesn’t mean getting used to soul-destroying mandates for us and our kids. Blue states push for the “new normal”. They follow in lock-step with blue-media, which happen to be headquartered in blue states. CNN, the flagship of blue-media, on Sunday and Monday went on a rant about maskless crowds at football stadiums after the first weekend of college football in 2021 (see below).
*PS: As an aside, take a look at this reaction to Pres. Biden by some in various stadium crowds.
Bigtime college football – the major D1A schools are in red states – is a “red” sport. The values of most folks in red states don’t coincide with government acting like our forever-helicopter parents. Perhaps those of us in the red states have had it with the micro-controls. Maybe we’ve noticed that all the masking, vaccines orders, social distancing, euthanizing the restaurant industry, and school closures didn’t make a lick of difference. The bug did what bugs do: they evolve! So, we’re back to authoritarianism – or totalitarianism if you will.
It’s not that the vaccines didn’t work. It’s that the bug became something different, and the jabs become less relevant since the bug changed the ground rules by changing. Our wannabe nannies now have the excuse to slide back into their preferred habit of authoritarianism. What was once “bend the curve” turned into COVID-forever. We’re going onto two years of ginned-up hysteria, almost to the point of generating a permanent social neurosis, particularly in blue states.
The obvious answer would be to get back to a real normal, not a “new” one. You know, life like it was before China foisted the bug on the world. Open the schools, open the restaurants, open the downtowns, open the stadiums, get back to work and church, and rely on therapeutics. Take the vaccine if you wish, but, regardless, have plenty of therapies on hand to treat the vast, vast majority of the infected who will have a bad case of the flu. Each year’s flu season doesn’t shut down society. Why should this?
We are twisting ourselves into knots to avoid what is clear as a bell. We’re going to have to gut our way through it. To me, it’s been clear for quite some time that the straitjacketing has only delayed the spread of the virus, thus leaving it to erupt again, again, and again.
We have plenty of therapeutics, something unavailable in 1918. It won’t be Fauci who’ll lead us out of this. It will be nature, and our own therapies that’ll allow us to weather the storm. It increasingly looks like natural immunity will have a bigger role to play than the jabs.
It’s better to recognize the obvious reality than to hang onto Fauci’s and Walensky’s feelings-of-the-moment. They’re only succeeding at making hordes of neurotics, and making blue the color of statewide neurosis. Is that what they mean by a “new normal”?
CNN anchors with Brian Williams of MSNBC (l)MSNBC anchorsFox News anchors
Let me be clear, I’m not tarring everyone in our punditry and governing classes. Not everyone is this stone cold stupid. But much of the chatter is hooey, and the hooey is only getting worse.
First on the list of buffoons are the folks in legacy media and all those swirling in their social circles. You know, the people at CNN, MSNBC, the networks, and the big metro newspapers and magazines. They’re hooked on soiling themselves daily, and have for quite a few years. They are the PR department of the left-wing revolution.
Next, we’re confronted by the primetime lineup on Fox News who, along with certain elements in the Republican Party, have resuscitated the Charles Lindbergh wing of foreign policy. If you’ll recall, Lindbergh was the mouth of isolationism before the Fall of France and Pearl Harbor put the kibosh to the whole smear.
Charles Lindbergh speaking at America First Rally in 1941.
Tucker Carlson is an out-and-out isolationist. In a quip during one of his recent shows, he said, “Oceans matter”, or something to that effect. Yes, they do if you have to cross them. No, they aren’t if you want to kill Americans. Why do you think North Korea and Iran want ICBM’s? Why do you think the Russians and the CCP have them? Even if you can’t get your hands on one, box cutters at the throats of airline flight attendants and flight crews will suffice. Voilà, you’ve got a mammoth cruise missile that has the range of an ICBM. Bin-Laden showed the way. Oceans only become another geographic feature on the way to killing Americans.
If the fanatics are more interested in a hands-on approach to the mass killing of Americans – and since I don’t think Tucker is willing to drive the airlines, cruise lines, and shipping companies into the ether by cutting us off from the outside world – trying to keep out the goons at passport/visa checkpoints won’t guarantee anything. More overpaid TSA government workers aren’t reassuring. We’ve already experienced the government efficiency that resulted in flight training for foreign nationals not interested in landing.
After Tucker, Sean Hannity jumps in with his program of Trump-love. Nearly everything Biden does – agreed, most of it is horrible – is condemned with the follow-up, “Trump wouldn’t have done that.” It’s not just that Biden is dreadfully wrong. He is! It’s that Trump is a god to Hannity. Biden bad, Trump good. It’s that simple to the man from New York City, and soon to be living in a Florida seaside estate maybe next to Trump.
Batting third is Laura Ingraham. She was once a Reaganite in foreign policy but now has enlisted in the Lindbergh brigade. In her on-air confessional, she’s on the Trump train to paint “forever war” on any foreign engagement that might get sticky.
All of this buffoonery came to light in the days since our screens were awash in the abominable scenes in Kabul. Yep, this disaster is 100% Biden’s. No doubt. He carried out a Buster Keaton pullout. But don’t forget, they all wanted a pullout: Biden, Trump, and the telegenic celebrities in primetime Fox News. The left was preconditioned to be a booster of the bugout from W’s Bush-lied-people-died wars. This is something for which there is kumbaya between Code Pink and the Lindbergh wing at Fox News.
Biden concocted a dastardly bugout. Trump and his Trumpkin brigades, aping Trump’s “forever wars” lingo, wanted a nicer bugout. Either way, the timetable and the smoothness of the bugout will end in the same place: mass-casualty events.
In the end, as we’ll soon learn, the Taliban and Al-Qaeda are a revolving door. Regardless of Bush’s asinine and airy rhetoric about the universal aspirations of mankind and our efforts to export wokeness, we were in Afghanistan to kill terrorists, the kind that’ll cry “Allah Akbar” as they spray bullets in a night club.
Omar Mateen, the Orlando Pulse Nightclub killer.
The mission demands 10,000 troops on the ground, bases in-country and outside, roving special forces, Afghan allies, intelligence operations par excellence, and an Afghan government that won’t stand in the way. That indigenous government doesn’t have to be Switzerland, just functioning enough to stay out of the way.
Yes, kill ‘em before they get a ticket to the Iowa State Fair. That’s a real America First strategy.
If you’re worried about our sons and daughters in harm’s way, well, any place is in “harm’s way” if these fanatics get a haven to slaughter us. If we can tolerate 35,000 troops in Germany, we sure as hell can put up with 15,000 to kill those who would kill us, and have done so.
Taliban soldiers killed in a fire fight with US troops.
How’s that for speaking truth to power, media power?
“Before you become too entranced with gorgeous gadgets and mesmerizing video displays, let me remind you that information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, and wisdom is not foresight. Each grows out of the other, and we need them all.” — Sir Arthur C. Clarke and in the prologue of the documentary film, “The Creepy Line”
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I’m of a mixed mind on whether to post this. It’s about the whole gaggle of social media biggies and Google. They might flag it for “misinformation” and I’ll end up like Dennis Praeger or Jordan Peterson taking a timeout in the mass emptiness of internet cancellation.
Today’s film recommendation: “The Creepy Line” on Amazon Prime. The trailer is below. The title refers to the red line, once coined by Eric Schmidt of Google, that demarcates truly neutral internet platforms – like Facebook, Twitter, and Google profess to be – and censorship and manipulation of the mind. Have they crossed it? What’s happened post-2016 makes me wonder . . . a lot.
The film answers the question with a resounding “Yes”. The film proclaims that the internet giants engage in monstrous abuse of their legal immunity in Section 230c of the Communications Decency Act. Are they really “neutral” platforms or do they systematically engage in censorship and mind control through their algorithms, the biases of their staffs, and so-called policies? The film is a deep dive into Google and Facebook’s surveillance of our internet use for profit and, now, the direction of our preferences.
Their snooping, or surveillance, advances them far beyond the old Pinkerton Detective Agency, whose logo was the all-seeing eye, putting the “private” in private eye.
An even more troubling occurrence is the emerging alliance between their potential regulators, the federal government with its huge administrative state, and these tech monoliths. Press Secretary Jen Psaki let the cat out of the bag in a July 16 presser. She proclaimed, “… we work to engage with them to better understand the enforcement of social media platform policies [against “misinformation” about the vaccines] . . . . and of course promoting quality information algorithms”. Combine these comments with Mark Zuckerberg’s 2018 admission before Congress that Silicon Valley is an “extremely left-leaning place”. A deep bias at the service of the federal Leviathan should send shivers down the spine of any thoughtful person.
Many of us are so wedded to our devices that we blindly accept what Google, Facebook, and Twitter are flashing before our eyes. When their algorithms and interventions work both to reinforce a left-wing bias and obedience to the state, we have crossed over the red line and past the borders into Orwell’s Oceania.
Last night, I was informed that the NFL will perform “Lift Every Voice and Sing”, the so-called black national anthem, before every game next year. The newest federal holiday is Juneteenth (June 19), officially dubbed the “Juneteenth National Independence Day” – close enough in the calendar to compete with July 4. With all the kneeling and disrespect to the flag and national anthem, statue toppling, and renaming of schools to shame the once-revered, we are substituting symbols of national unity and meaning with ethnic and racial anthems and independence days. We are heading to a frightful place.
Where did all this come from? It seemed to happen nearly overnight. There was no groundswell for it. All of a sudden, we’ve got players, coaches, and team owners kneeling at the national anthem. NBA players, living the lifestyle of King Midas (think Lebron James, Stephen Curry, et al), are lecturing the rest of us on our moral failings. MLB got into the act with both feet.
That’s just professional sports. The uber-rich are now linking arms with the uber-left. The Fortune 500 are routinely running shaming and indoctrination sessions for their employees. If you’re a Republican who’ll blast Trump – think Liz Chaney (R, Wy.) – your reelection coffers will be brimming with cash. Most commonly, the money spigot from the Sorors types will be turned wide open for lefties in local DA races to the top of the political food chain, Dem candidates for the presidency. Mediocrities like “Beto” O’Rourke can quickly become a player.
Big Money, Big Sports, Big Business, Big Media, Big Entertainment, and Big Government are lining up to shove down our throats an extremist ideology, one that only yesterday was relegated to the rantings of college snowflakes. America as we knew her is quickly disappearing, to be replaced by a gaggle of warring tribes.
Don’t blame the George Floyd incident for it. There’s no evidence that Chauvin was a racist; he’s just a bad cop, an equal-opportunity abuser. Blame the ubiquitous connectivity of the ever-present cell phone and its instant feed into the digestive tract of our cultural big-everythings.
But ultimately, the culpability lies with the ignorance, perfidy, status-groveling nature, and extreme social isolation of many of our cultural heavies, ensconced as they are in their gated villas and penthouses in swank, bi-coastal bastions. They’ve abandoned America, and now they are force-feeding the hot mess to the rest of us. Sad, oh so very sad.
Politico-speak on the stump is a crock. Not always, but it happens often enough for many to avoid politician interviews like an evasive maneuver to escape an encounter with one of the many homeless madmen wondering the streets of downtown Los Angeles. Trump prattles on about the Chinese paying “paying billions and billions of dollars” in US tariffs, apparently not knowing, or not caring, that businesses don’t pay business taxes – of which tariffs are. We do! Biden and his Democratic Party coterie babble on about the “rich paying their fair share”. It’s all just stupendous nonsense. But, apparently, a block of the public eats it up.
No more accurate indictment of the current state of journalism, the schools, and media can be found than the popular currency of pure tripe. Since Biden, Pelosi, and Schumer currently possess the lion’s share of power, their balderdash takes center stage, because they now have the reins to foist it on us. Conversely, the job of the Republicans is to stand athwart history and say “Stop!”
So, what of this “fair share” blabbering? Simply put, it ain’t true. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) numbers don’t support the popular fiction of the rich escaping the taxman while the little guy and gal gets punched in the gut by the tax code. It’s class pandering reminiscent of the kind perpetrated by Marxists – or in its newest incarnation in the race-pandering of Kendi’s or Deangelo’s Systemic Racism.
Let’s take a look at the numbers. Fact: U.S. income taxes in terms of who pays what are the most progressive in the world (Thank you, Marian Tupy of the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity). I don’t see how they can be made more progressive without the targets turning over their entire income receipts to the U.S. Treasury. The top 1 percent of wage earners account for 40.1 percent of all federal income tax receipts in 2018, and this after Trump’s so-called “gift to the rich” in the Republican tax reform bill. The Tax Foundation found that the richest of the rich – the top 1 percent – paid a greater share (40.1) than the bottom 90 percent (25.4). Average paid tax rates tell a similar story. The Dems are engaging in the old gambit of the Big Lie, and it’s that simple.
Why do they lie? Well, they share with Marxists the same hate for the rich – and like Kendi and Deangelo of CRT fame grovel in a hate of “whiteness”. The hate is tied to the Marxist flimflammery of systemic class oppression. Marx called it Scientific Socialism in the same manner of all demagogues who seek to monopolize the word “science” to magically turn their dictums into imperial truths. But if the well-to-do are in the catbird seat according to the hucksters, who are the uber-rich politically supporting? You’d be forgiven for assuming that the greater the wealth, the greater the propensity and power to bend the state to further the material interests of those who own the greatest share of the national wealth. Oh, how shocked you’d be when the reality is uncovered.
Three of the Dems’ big underwriters: Tom Steyer, Michael Bloomberg, George Soros
Point of fact, it was disclosed in various reports. In 2020, The eat-the-rich crowd under Biden overwhelmingly got the backing of the billionaire class. According to Forbes, Trump got 133 billionaires to throw some cash his way. Biden benefitted from 230. In raw numbers from the Federal Election Commission, Biden was drowning in $1.074 billion in his basement as Trump garnered $812 million.
What’s with the super-rich? Why invest in your own demise? Many answers are possible. Certainly, Trump is a lightning rod who instills profound love in some and manifest hate in others, in equal measure. Trump-hate played a role. Also, it could be that these people are so well-heeled that they’re insulated from the consequences of their beliefs to such an extent that fantasies can be seriously entertained. But I think that something more profound is afoot.
Somehow, it’s gotten into the heads of the Zuckerberg-to-Bloomberg crowd that to be considered well-rounded smart and sophisticated means to be a lefty. Lefty is fashionable. Esteem within the group won’t be acquired if you’re driving into the parking lot of your effete soirée in a pickup truck flying the Gadsden flag. A chauffeur-driven Jaguar and the spouting of lefty drivel will earn the necessary style points.
But in the end, it’s all pure poppycock. The Marxism-without-saying-so is still ruinous. Systematized envy, the very essence socialism, is never a path to prosperity. Similarly, the never-ending hunt for white racism will never be a path to social peace any more than it was when Jim Crow was a popular socio-political menu choice. The real Jim Crow 2.0 isn’t the Georgia election law. It’s what is arising out of the growing CRT industry.
Once again, it comes down to pure poppycock, but this poppycock isn’t some knock-off little innocent thing. This time, it’s got the backing of some very deep pockets. Watch out, America.
Defense attorney Eric Nelson, left, and defendant former Minneapolis police Officer Derek Chauvin listen as Assistant Minnesota Attorney General Matthew Frank, questions witness Christopher Martin during the Chauvin trial.
If you think that the conviction of Derek Chauvin is the end of it, you’re a fool. Winston Churchill said it best in 1942: “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” There was a ring of hope in Churchill’s words for Brits after the Battle of Britain; not so for us. Now, America, we are really going to be in for it.
This is more than about Chauvin. The Chauvin trial should have been about a police officer’s abuse of his power. Instead, it was taken along in a flood of revolutionary fervor to change America beyond recognition. The verdict only fed the beast, the beast being the organized hustle of “systemic racism”; and the beast needs more feeding. Like everything else, the Chauvin/Floyd incident was thrown into this mythical-racism maelstrom. These radicals won’t be satisfied with a single conviction. Their goal is to make America unrecognizable and, hence, unlivable for the rest of us.
BLM protesters in Minneapolis.
After reading the press reports this morning, a common reaction to the verdict is a collective “sigh of relief” with calls to “reimagine” policing and continue the fight against the spectral “systemic racism”. In both cases, we’re going to be screwed with more violent streets, an epidemic of resisting arrest, riots, and a bloated federal monster rooting around in nearly all aspects of our lives. Yes, we’re going to be in for it.
The oft-quoted “sigh” concerns the relief that the mob got what it wanted and we’re safe from them torching our cities . . . for now. That’s the ticket: public tranquility guaranteed by indulging the mob. You don’t have to look very far to see what we’re in store for. Kids will tell you what it’s like in a playground with a few bullies and no adults. Make no mistake about it, we are entering a time of public policy and justice under the gun of mob intimidation. The collective “sigh” is worrisome in the extreme.
The trial was organized at the outset to be exposed to the mob. The judge amazingly refused to grant a change of venue or even sequester the jury. The jury during the trial could have been pummeled by media stories of the mayhem 10 miles up the interstate from the courtroom (and home to one of the jurors), the Maxine Waters flame-thrower inciting more violence, the intimidation of a defense witness, the general turmoil outside the courtroom, and the year-long mayhem across blue-America. We won’t know if they were affected by the intense rancor till many moons later, but nonetheless the judge’s decisions will forever taint the trial.
The tactic of intimidation to further the ends of the revolution isn’t limited to the miscreants of Black Lives Matter on the streets of Minneapolis. The tactic of court-packing by the Jacobins of the donkey party isn’t solely meant to land four new lefties on the Supreme Court. It serves the function of intimidating the court. Justice, the cement of a civilized society, could be compromised by justices, like the institutionalist John Roberts, constantly looking over their shoulders at the threats coming from the mob soldiers running the show in Congress and the senescent Biden administration. They will have won without seating more radicals if the Court caves. Remember, in the end, back in the thirties, FDR won without successfully packing it.
Evil winds are blowing. Given all that has happened, and likely to happen, this is not a time to go into law enforcement. It’s a perilous profession that will be “reimagined” into more peril for those in its ranks. If you’re already in it, and of a ripe age, fill out the retirement papers. If you’re younger than that, you have a big decision to make: stay or leave. If you’re a young whippersnapper looking to join, consider becoming an astronaut. I hear that a mission to Mars is in the offing.
For the regular Joe and Judy six-pack, don’t expect 911 to matter anymore. We’re on our own.
“Curator” is commonly used today to refer to the arbiters of contemporary culture. They emanate out of our metropolises and are increasingly homogenous in outlook and taste. It’s an accurate word, but doesn’t go far enough because it doesn’t address pedigree. Where and how did this outlook originate and grow to dominate the culture? It was slow in coming, gradually birthed in the late 19th century and spread throughout the high priesthood of the high church of art and academia. A verb, “incubate”, serves this purpose better.
Ken Burns’ “Hemingway” unknowingly highlights the process of a person’s conversion (Hemingway) to the pervasive ethos of the chattering classes, the self-appointed curators who incubated “higher” culture. In Burns’ reckoning, Hemingway was a fiercely independent, small government guy in the twenties, but he obviously changed. By the time of the Great Depression, he’s covering the Spanish Civil War as a journalist puffing up the socialist-loyalist faction, the same side that became a puppet of Stalin’s Comintern (international communist organization headquartered in Moscow) and therefore an adjunct of the Soviet state, going so far as to pressure his colleagues not to include left-loyalist atrocities in their dispatches. He would repeat the error in quietly favoring Castro’s takeover of Cuba. Everywhere he looked in his artistic, literary universe were leftists.
New York University students in the Lincoln battalion (American volunteers fighting in support of socialist-loyalist side), in April, 1938. (Photograph from AP)Ernest Hemingway (second from left) and Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens (left.) visit socialist-loyalist troops during the Spanish Civil War. Notice the loyalist officer leading the way in NKVD (Soviet secret police) uniform.
It’s easy to be of two minds in that situation since, on the one hand, he harbored deep-seated beliefs in masculine self-reliance while being pulled to the left by everyone in his social sphere, resulting in an incoherent amalgam of the head. If his mind was a car facing a fork in the road, it would rematerialize into two and take both roads at once.
Probably adding to his leftward lurch was the left-wing heft generated by the Great Depression. The Depression was more than an economic watershed; it was an intellectual one as well. An already left-leaning faculty lounge and literary world became tilted so far left that it would fall over. Sound familiar? The trend was echoed in Hemingway’s social circles. Not surprisingly, he probably was pulled along by the current.
Burns, himself, reflects the ruling zeitgeist that can be traced back to those bad times. His abbreviated rendition of the Depression in “Hemingway” repeats the unchallenged interpretative cliché: capitalism failed; big government is necessary. Burns caught the preexisting thought-virus, like so many today who accept it as a given, and so did Hemingway long before Burns.
The explanation never made any sense at the time, and still doesn’t today. Just think about it. A market correction turned into decade-long affair with seven-tenths of the time under FDR’s tutelage. For all of the New Deal’s feverish activity with its taxes, regulations, humongous bureaucracies, slaughters of “overproduction”, and a new centralized dole, the thing lingered right up to Pearl Harbor . . . and beyond.
Yes, beyond. World War II didn’t end the nightmare. It was only a timeout – unemployment was sent to boot camp and slack factories made bombers not refrigerators – and was set to resume its familiar hold after the War. Thank goodness that God called FDR home, and the appearance of the immediate post-War Republican Congresses with their loosening of the straitjacket that ultimately led to the economic monster following the forever-president to the grave, and the 50’s boom erupted.
Burns didn’t get the message, repeats the slander, and, looking back on it, the real Hemingway seems to have floated along in the same stream later occupied by our cultural arbiters.
Moving forward to the present, the bias incubated in the thirties would eventually spread to all social groups who absorbed the same cultural groupthink. Think of the occupants of today’s corporate boardrooms tripping all over themselves to condemn Georgia’s new election law. The Walmart of Sam Walton and ol’ Roy is no more. The corporate world is woke, functioning as subcommittees of the Democratic Party. They act as if they see themselves as world citizens, their companies as institutions-without-borders, and increasingly seek the affirmation of a “higher” seriousness in the manner of a Hollywood mega-star desiring accolades in lefty activism.
Patriotism? National loyalty? That’s for the ignorant rubes and not something for our sophisticates in corporate suites aspiring to a higher consciousness.
There you have it: our self-appointed cultural curators of what we ought to believe were incubated in a fiction that is evident in Burns, his “Hemingway”, and in the flesh-and-blood Hemingway. Something about repeated lies, they take on a life of their own in a public made unaware of an unreality that is sold as gospel.
Josef Goebbels, Reich Propaganda MinisterMSNBC, a chief purveyor of our new Big Lie.Photos of Robert Long, the accused shooter in the Atlanta murder spree.
Preamble: I’m going to suspend my normal rule against making reference to the Nazis when drawing a historical comparison to make a point. The parallels with our current mania are too obvious to avoid.
The Big Lie has long been identified with the Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels, and has been used thereafter as a political weapon against opponents. Goebbels’s deceit is much more than the lie. Here’s the fuller Josef Goebbels’ statement on the tactic:
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” [my emphasis]
Most of his rendition concerns maintaining the lie, not making it. In short, the success of the lie requires suppression of dissent and control of information and thought. You see, the politically useful lie demands censorship and more than that, a controlling narrative, an imposed foundational story for which no one can evade.
Sound familiar? If not, it should. Today’s Big Lie is “White Supremacy”. The supporting superstructure of the story is sheathed in overwrought jargon like “critical race theory”, “systemic racism”, “white privilege”, and “white fragility”, and unceasingly propagated everywhere in an unholy alliance among our increasingly uniform political, economic, media, and cultural leviathans. You can’t escape the Big Lie and its supporting story – and that’s Goebbels’s point – even more so than the lie itself.
Everything is crammed into our modish Big Lie of the burgeoning threat of “White Supremacy” whose existence no one can prove. The secret of the Big Lie is to simply repeat it, not prove it, because it can’t be proven. Our Big Lie’s oft-repeated “statistical disparities” aren’t proof of racism, and the “White Supremacy” that undergirds it, because causation for the dubious claim faces the reality of many potential fathers, absent a paternity test, i.e., proof. It’s quite easy to cite more cogent factors to explain the disparity without ever turning to the gibberish coming out of the mouths of VP Harris, Robin DiAngelo, or Ibram X. Kendi. How about the desolation of family life in poor neighborhoods, for instance?
DiAngelo (l), Kendi
No better example of the modern Big Lie can be found than in the treatment accorded the horror in Atlanta on March 16. The actions of a disturbed and confessed “sex addict” are shoe-horned into the Big Lie of “White Supremacy”. Once the culprit’s picture hit the net, off to the land of “White Supremacy” they (the legacy media, our demagogues in high office) went. Violence against Asians began to be spun by our official and unofficial propaganda ministries as an outgrowth of the racial angst of MAGA supporters and angry white males, and an assortment of other illusory villains (QAnon). Traditionalist Christians were slimed. Ironically, the facts about violence against Asians, though, don’t make a neat fit with the propaganda story.
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Watch the video below. The web of propaganda ministries want to make it difficult for you to see the contradicting reality. Jump through YouTube’s hoops to see it. You’ll see that it is no more violent than most of the other stuff on the site. It is relevant to the next paragraph.
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Before we began the frenzied hunt for “White Supremacy”, it was well-known that 85% of assaults against Asian-Americans were perpetrated by African-Americans. The fact was too embarrassing for our web of propaganda ministers so the ministries went into overdrive to repudiate it, and a grand erasure took place. Look up the original reportage today and you’ll find of a Reddit Warning like this:
“Sorry, this post was deleted by the person who originally posted it. It doesn’t appear in any feeds, and anyone with a direct link to it will see a message like this one.”
SFGate, an online news service affiliated with the San Francisco Chronicle, the original source for the factoid, came out with this bit of cancellation through distancing:
“Editor’s note: This 2010 column originally appeared in print in the San Francisco Chronicle. As of 2019, the Chronicle and SFGATE have been separate editorial operations.”
Maintaining the narrative and Big Lie of “White Supremacy” overrides all other concerns, like honesty. It’s a very familiar story to the one that took shape in the decades before and after the National Socialists’ rise to power. Eugenics by then had seeped into the minds of European elites, and it mingled with atavistic notions of racial hierarchies and the persistent undercurrent of anti-Semitism. Academics like Germany’s H.K. Gunther crystalized a previously existent story of racial superiority into a functioning “science” and belief system. From there, the story is a blood stain on history.
But everything was funneled through the narrow lens of race, just like today. And if the facts don’t fit the story, make the facts fit, or erase them. The shadowy “systemic racism” has much in common with the shadowy “Jewish conspiracy”. Proving the sketchy theory is made easy by simply citing the presence of a white male – or in the case of an enthusiast of Aryan race theory, a person of Jewish ancestry – in the incident. It’s a mental tick familiar to anyone in the SS Race and Settlement Main Office. All other inconvenient facts get weeded out.
We are in a dangerous time. Facts no longer matter, the story does. All competing explanations, even logic itself, are shunned or worse. As such, if history is any guide, a much more appalling injustice is waiting in the wings.
Armenian village leaders executed by Turkish troops during the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire, 1915.
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)
*Today’s short comment is mostly based on the work of Nicholas Eberstadt, the Henry Wendt Chair of Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute.
Our “experts”, the ones that grab the attention of the mathematically and scientifically illiterate in Big Media, are essentially bureaucrats in Big Government’s agencies of public health, corporate Big Pharma, and the university schools of public health. And all of them were asleep at the switch, the switch to throw the alarm on the catastrophic jump in working class “deaths of despair”: drug overdoses, cirrhosis of the liver, and suicides. Putting a number on it would be over 300,000 premature deaths from 1999 to 2015. And these are our gurus on all matters public health. With friends like these, do we need any enemies?
The disaster occurred under the noses of Clinton, Dubya, and the first term-and-a-half of Obama. Obama didn’t notice it, and maybe didn’t care. The alarm was tripped by Princeton’s Anne Case and Angus Deacon during Obama’s second term. Don’t forget that at this time, Obama was too busy lambasting the blue collars of western Pennsylvania as “bitter clingers” to their sky god and guns.
These same bureaucrats were the ones who fed the prejudices of the Big Government Left in the Democratic Party and the Party’s allies in Big Media during COVID. Fauci and company were elevated to sainthood. Behind the scenes, as our social and economic lives were castrated on the advice of these very same desk-jockeys, the death toll in “deaths of despair” accelerated.
Ryan Halligan, age 13, committed suicide by hanging on Oct. 7, 2013.Picture of Jo’Vianni. age 15, in the hand of her mother. She committed suicide in April of 2020.Bethany Palmer, age 17, of Greater Manchester, UK, committed suicide in April of 2020.Rally to raise awareness of deaths of despair in 2017.
These “experts” are said to be public servants. But which public are they serving? I can’t avoid the insights of James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock in their famous work in public choice theory. They start with the simple premise of self-interest: it applies to everyone. It’s true every bit as much among GS-level employees and their politicized head honchos as it does for any budding entrepreneur. The cloistered ecosystem of the bureau, combined with occupational self-absorption, make for a unique animal who misses a whole lot.
Just think, with the Green New Deal and the jihads against “systemic racism” and for genderism, these same fools will be put in charge of nearly every aspect of our lives. If that doesn’t startle you, I don’t know what will.
