It Was Always Only About Power With the Left

 Why do so many liberal climate-activist grandees fly on private jets? Or why do those who profited from Black Lives Matter have a propensity for estate living? Or why do the community-activist Obamas prefer to live in not one, but three mansions? 

The answer is that calls for radical equity, “power for the people,” and mandated equality are usually mostly sloganeering for those who enjoy power and the lucre it brings, and their wish is to augment both for themselves. The result is that the issue du jour of mandated equality often becomes secondary if not irrelevant. There is neither fear of inconstancy nor hypocrisy, given the central theme that governs a leftist party line is political utility—or the ends of power always more than justify the hypocritical means used to obtain it. 

Read the whole thing. 

Reject the Normalcy Bias

 

One of the most powerful tactics in the left’s arsenal is leveraging the reluctance of conservatives to accept that the foundational reality of our society has changed. We are not a free country in the sense we were just a decade ago – hell, the Durham Report just showed our ruling caste collectively framing a president they disliked and we all know there will be zero consequences. But part of the reason is human nature. The left exploits our normalcy bias, the tendency to assume that things right now are the same as they have always been. Yet, this is not normal. This whole political/cultural morass that America has fallen into is the opposite of normal. And some of us just can’t handle the truth. 

They will not accept that this is not the society we grew up in. Hell, it’s not even the society our kids grew up in. It is something wholly other, a society where the norms and rules and guidelines that we thought existed, and that had existed right up until the left took over all of the institutions, no longer exist at all. And the fact is that many conservatives refuse to acknowledge the obvious, because to acknowledge it will require them to take action – radical action, like what Ron DeSantis is doing in Florida to the howling horror of the commies. 

This normalcy bias, the assumption that things still work as they used to, is what allows the left to get away with its shenanigans. But nothing works like it used to. It is beyond reasonable argument that the left has infiltrated almost all of our major institutions. Like a virus infecting a healthy cell, leftism takes over our institutions and uses the institutions’ structure to manufacture even more leftism, and that spawn goes and infects more institutions. It has taken over Hollywood, the colleges, the big corporations, and much of the government. It’s got the military, the NFL and, of course, the regime media. The left has shamelessly politicized every single one of them. They now focus not just on their jobs, but on pumping out more leftism. Yet all these institutions still demand the respect that they had back when they were non-political and were dedicated to their actual purposes. The military was about fighting our enemies. The justice system was about prosecuting criminals. The NFL was about football. The beer companies were about providing refreshment to dudes who did not pretend to be chicks. 

But none of that is true now....It’s all a lie. It’s all a scam.  ...We have got to wake up and look at the world as it is. We have a normalcy bias, and that’s got to get fixed. This is abnormal. This is not right. And we totally need to admit that to ourselves, because it can’t get any better until we do.

Read the whole thing ...

Leftism

 The Left suffers from social psychophysiology – the proclivity of people to get tangled up in ideologies that are like crippled religions.  They operate on faith, disassociated from reality.  And if they run up against reality, they dismiss reality and cling to their religion.

Drop your victim card and open your eyes to the possibilities that await you. pic.twitter.com/HxINvYn8E1

— PragerU (@prageru) June 5, 2022

Dennis Prager | The Left is Destroying Western Civilization | Reclaiming Conservatism Conference

I was not a big fan of colored sugar water that dissolved your teeth even in 1971.

 

A Bureaucracy for Life - Mark Steyn

One of the striking features of America's alleged "peaceful transition" is that senior figures in the departments of Defense, Justice, Homeland Security and others are happy to undermine him in public, and indeed openly defy him. When the media report on this phenomenon, the roles mysteriously get reversed: Donald J Trump is openly defying the All-Knowing Fauci on public health, is openly defying his Cyber-Security guys by undermining confidence in the election, is openly defying his chiefs of staff by wanting to bring troops home from Hoogivsastan...

In the American system, the President is head of the executive branch. For four years, the branch has regarded Trump's efforts to head them as a kind of impertinence. He was impeached because the briefly famous Vindman and those Foggy Bottom striped-pants panjandrums believe that America has a permanent Ukrainian policy that it is an unconstitutional abomination for mere transient politicians to attempt to change.....

Child Regicide And Jacobin

 

You would be surprised where really bizarre and dangerous ideas come from.  Ideas that you would think come so far out of Left Field that no one would take them seriously.  And, all of a sudden, they're here, like Antifa - or the Russian Revolution. 

This is Jacobin, promoted by Bernie Sanders 

Jacobin has in the past five years become the leading intellectual voice of the American left, the most vibrant and relevant socialist publication in a very long time

Forget about the secret police and people getting shot as they tried to escape, here's a love letter to the Belin Wall.

The Wall was ugly, menacing, and, for many citizens, no doubt heartbreaking. But the economic and geopolitical stability it ensured also gave the GDR the chance to build a society that was broadly characterized by modest prosperity and social equality between classes and genders. Workers were guaranteed employment, housing, and all-day childcare, while basic foodstuffs and other goods were heavily subsidized. Though wages were only half of what they were in the West, adjusted for prices in relation to earnings, GDR workers’ actual purchasing power was more or less the same. This fact, combined with the chronic lack of certain consumer goods, taught citizens to rely on each other and help each other out in times of need — a reality that still resonates today in polls showing that Easterners are considerably more sensitive to social inequality and the importance of solidarity.

 We are going to find out around the middle part of the 21st century, in general unpleasantly, that our fate will have been influenced directly by essays in obscure and extreme magazines read by power elites.

The riots and “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”

 The general idea of Goethe’s version of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice is not especially about lies. The message is that we are not wise enough to know what the result of our efforts will ultimately be. When we call forth any powerful forces—inventions, weaponry, politics, laws, theories, artistic creations – they can be used for good or evil and everything in between, and we don’t necessarily have any say in the matter. The same is true if we call forth powerful destructive forces such as mobs, for ends we think we are achieving.

Right now, the “we” is the left (books, the press, the education system, the Democratic Party), and the force that’s been called forth is the Antifa BLM mob. Elected politicians such as a mayor like Ted Wheeler of Portland or Jenny Durkan of Seattle have already glimpsed the army of broomsticks coming towards them to trample them. But this is no cartoon.

In Iran in 1979, the left played footsie with the Ayatollahs, thinking it could use them and that the left would win in the end. History tells us they were wrong. Right now in the US it’s left vs. left – the political, elected left (and the “useful idiot” liberals) versus the more anarchist/nihilist/sociopathic left such as Antifa. The first group is Mickey Mouse (in more ways than one) and the second group the broomsticks.

And the elected left may find that the spirits it has summoned cannot be banished.

Former Fairfax police officer murdered in Wisconsin in alleged hate crime, police say

Daniel Navarro, 27, is accused of intentionally ramming his truck in Phillip Thiessen's motorcycle. Police say Navarro believed that all Harley riders are "white racists." (Image: Fond du Lac County, WI Sheriff's Office)

Phillip A. Thiessen, 55, was riding his motorcycle in Fond du Lac County, Wisconsin when investigators say a man intentionally swerved his truck into the motorcycle because he believed all Harley riders to be “white racists.”

Daniel Navarro, 27, is held on a $1 million bond and is facing charges of first-degree intentional homicide – hate crime, use of a dangerous weapon, and first-degree recklessly endangering safety – hate crime.

Thiessen was a former Marine and served as a police officer in the City of Fairfax from 1990 until his retirement in 2016, and later worked for the Wisconsin Department of Justice Internet Crimes Against Children unit.

It’s unsurprising that so much loud hate from the left leads to crimes of violence against the innocent.

We are all Brett Kavanaugh now.

Ace of Spades

The coup to take out candidate Trump and then President Trump is exactly the same as this, or more to the point, this is merely an extension of it. On the granular level, the courts since perhaps the time of Marbury and most definitely since the FDR administration were where the Left went to ram down our collective throat all of their insane policies that never stood a chance at the ballot box. And once ruled the law of the land, it was forever etched in stone. So now that the courts are gradually realigning themselves back towards justices who swear loyalty to the Constitution and not the Communist Manifesto, plus a detectable undercurrent of popular revulsion for the purveyors of same, there can only be one recourse for the Left: De-legitimization. And that goes hand in hand with the ongoing de-legitimization of American history, western civilization, the Scottish Enlightenment, Judeo-Christian morals and values and all that goes with it.

Whether the Left's leaders see and understand their 100-plus year slow motion hijacking of the nation is possibly slipping through their grasp or truly believe their own agitprop about the evil of America is irrelevant. The end result is still the same; a growing threat of lawlessness up to and including the use of violence to maintain the power they have and perhaps attempt a grand coup.

From shooting unarmed lawmakers at a softball field and nearly beating them to death on their front lawns to confronting them in restaurants, threatening their families and children or smearing them to such an extent as to virtually ruining their careers and livelihoods, the Left has declared war on us. And, gentle reader, they are coming for you. Masterpiece Cake Shop, Memories Pizza and now "social credit scoring" are the tip of the iceberg. They will not leave us alone. We will be made to cheer them on and woe to anyone who stops applauding first. We are all Brett Kavanaugh now. High time we wake up to that fact.

Read the whole thing.

America Is Drowning in the Left's Lies About Trump

Dennis Prager is too defensive about what the Left is doing.  The Right has been denying the charge of racism for decades and losing the culture war as a result.  The Left knows exactly what it's doing: tearing the country apart because it hates the country, it's founders, it's history and it's success. 


The Left hates Christianity, freedom and conventional morality.  Denying their accusations doesn't work because they don't care that they're lying.  They know they are.  It's like mass marketing: repetition works.  It can make you think that cigarettes are not only cool but good for you. 

Normal people have to stop denying the accusations.  There must be a counter-attack.  This is an existential war against principalities and powers.

Gramscian Damage

Today's Leftists are not brave transgressive forward-thinkers but pathetic memebots running the program of a dead tyrant.  Read the whole thing.

... the Soviet espionage apparat actually ran two different kinds of network: one of spies, and one of agents of influence. The agents of influence had the minor function of recruiting spies (as, for example, when Kim Philby was brought in by one of his tutors at Cambridge), but their major function was to spread dezinformatsiya, to launch memetic weapons that would damage and weaken the West.

In a previous post on Suicidalism, I identified some of the most important of the Soviet Union’s memetic weapons. Here is that list again:

• There is no truth, only competing agendas.
• All Western (and especially American) claims to moral superiority over Communism/Fascism/Islam are vitiated by the West’s history of racism and colonialism.
• There are no objective standards by which we may judge one culture to be better than another. Anyone who claims that there are such standards is an evil oppressor.
• The prosperity of the West is built on ruthless exploitation of the Third World; therefore Westerners actually deserve to be impoverished and miserable.
• Crime is the fault of society, not the individual criminal. Poor criminals are entitled to what they take. Submitting to criminal predation is more virtuous than resisting it.
• The poor are victims. Criminals are victims. And only victims are virtuous. Therefore only the poor and criminals are virtuous. (Rich people can borrow some virtue by identifying with poor people and criminals.)
• For a virtuous person, violence and war are never justified. It is always better to be a victim than to fight, or even to defend oneself. But ‘oppressed’ people are allowed to use violence anyway; they are merely reflecting the evil of their oppressors.
• When confronted with terror, the only moral course for a Westerner is to apologize for past sins, understand the terrorist’s point of view, and make concessions.

As I previously observed, if you trace any of these back far enough, you’ll find a Stalinist intellectual at the bottom. (The last two items on the list, for example, came to us courtesy of Frantz Fanon. The fourth item is the Baran-Wallerstein “world system” thesis.) Most were staples of Soviet propaganda at the same time they were being promoted by “progressives” (read: Marxists and the dupes of Marxists) within the Western intelligentsia.

The Soviets consciously followed the Gramscian prescription; they pursued a war of position, subverting the “leading elements” of society through their agents of influence. (See, for example, Stephen Koch’s Double Lives: Stalin, Willi Munzenberg and the Seduction of the Intellectuals; summary by Koch here) This worked exactly as expected; their memes seeped into Western popular culture and are repeated endlessly in (for example) the products of Hollywood.

Indeed, the index of Soviet success is that most of us no longer think of these memes as Communist propaganda. It takes a significant amount of digging and rethinking and remembering, even for a lifelong anti-Communist like myself, to realize that there was a time (within the lifetime of my parents) when all of these ideas would have seemed alien, absurd, and repulsive to most people — at best, the beliefs of a nutty left-wing fringe, and at worst instruments of deliberate subversion intended to destroy the American way of life....

The most paranoid and xenophobic conservatives of the Cold War were, painful though this is to admit, the closest to the truth in estimating the magnitude and subtlety of Soviet subversion. Liberal anticommunists (like myself in the 1970s) thought we were being judicious and fair-minded when we dismissed half of the Right’s complaint as crude blather. We were wrong; the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss really were guilty, the Hollywood Ten really were Stalinist tools, and all of Joseph McCarthy’s rants about “Communists in the State Department” were essentially true. The Venona transcripts and other new material leave no room for reasonable doubt on this score.

Another consequence of Stalin’s meme war is that today’s left-wing antiwar demonstrators wear kaffiyehs without any sense of how grotesque it is for ostensible Marxists to cuddle up to religious absolutists who want to restore the power relations of the 7th century CE. In Stalin’s hands, even Marxism itself was hollowed out to serve as a memetic weapon — it became increasingly nihilist, hatred-focused and destructive. The postmodern left is now defined not by what it’s for but by what it’s against: classical-liberal individualism, free markets, dead white males, America, and the idea of objective reality itself.

The first step to recovery is understanding the problem. Knowing that suicidalist memes were launched at us as war weapons by the espionage apparatus of the most evil despotism in human history is in itself liberating. Liberating, too, it is to realize that the Noam Chomskys and Michael Moores and Robert Fisks of the world (and their thousands of lesser imitators in faculty lounges everywhere) are not brave transgressive forward-thinkers but pathetic memebots running the program of a dead tyrant.

Hey Leftists: get out of my face.

The LEFT/MSM/Democrats have been calling the President of the United States a Nazi, a fascist, a Russian agent, a white supremacist, a Traitor etc for 3 years because that's what they "think and feel" he is? I don't need anymore lectures from them. Not one.

— Ryan Van Sickle ⭐⭐⭐ (@Ryan_VanSickle) July 18, 2019

"The left does not care about America" .... Correction: The Left Hates America, and anyone who likes America.

The left does not care about America.

It's a fact! https://t.co/pBhpPoaf4t

— Buddy Belk (@LessGovMoreFun) July 13, 2019

Oberlin's insane defense of trying to destroy a local bakery

David Bernstein -

Here’s Oberlin’s litigation position, from its court filings: “Gibson bakery’s archaic chase-and-detain policy regarding suspected shoplifters was the catalyst for the protests. The guilt or innocence of the students is irrelevant to both the root cause of the protests and this litigation.” Get that? Whether the students accused of shoplifting had actually been shoplifting or not was irrelevant to whether it was fair to accuse the store of racism etc for detaining the students as shoplifters. The fault lay with the bakery owners for daring to actually stop and prosecute shoplifters!

This is the kind of b.s. that gets you A’s at Oberlin with a certain type of SJW professor, but that normal people rightly think defies common sense.

Long Read of the Week: “We’re Not Going to Talk Our Way out of This” by Titus Quinctius Cincinnatus“

It’s certainly wonderful to think that “all we need to do is find ways to constructively disagree with each other,” and think that this would solve most, if not all, of our problems. But there’s a tremendous difficulty with applying this to the modern ideological divide between Right and Left, the “reactionary” (true or otherwise) and the progressive. The difficulties lie in that this line of thinking implies that there are two sides which actually want rational discussion and a settling of differences rationally. Yet, there are not.

Indeed, what the Left wants is precisely the opposite of this. The progressive Left has not, does not, and never will seek some sort of accommodation with its ideological enemies. Instead, the Left seeks to acquire for itself the institutional and social power to silence its enemies. Ultimately, this proclivity stems from the very nature of what drives the “progressive idea,” which is that the “arc of history” is always bending towards the advancement of what the Left believes is “progress.” Since this trend is inexorable, there is no need, ultimately, to compromise with the Right, merely find various ways to outlast them and hasten their demise. This sort of thinking is responsible for everything from doxxing to the gulags and explains why progressivism is the single greatest evil that this world has ever seen.

Amherst College Language Guide

This is neither a joke ... nor a parody.

Random examples:

BUTCHAn identity term often used to by queer women, particularly by lesbians, who express themselves in masculine ways. Some consider butch to be its own gender identity. While an identity term to some, it can be used as a pejorative.  

CISGENDERAn identity term for individuals whose gender identity matches their birth-assigned sex. Cisgender people receive benefits that trans and nonbinary people don’t have. 

CISHETERO-A pervasive system of belief that centers, and naturalizes,  

NORMATIVITY heterosexuality and a binary system of assigned sex and gender where there are two rigid, distinct ways of being: assigned-male-at-birth masculine man and assigned-female-at-birth feminine woman.  

CISSEXISMThe system of oppression that values and privileges cisgender people, upholds the gender binary and marginalizes, oppresses and makes invisible the lives and experiences of transgender and nonbinary people. 

MALE PRIVILEGE A group of unearned cultural, legal, social and institutional rights extended to cisgender men based on their assigned-sex and gender. Cisgender men have access to institutional power, make the rules, control the resources and are assumed capable. Masculinity, as enacted by cisgender men, is universalized and viewed as the normative gender. Cisgender men are often unaware of their differential treatment (see Fragile Masculinity). While trans men, masculine-of-center women and nonbinary folks have access to benefits based on their proximity to hegemonic masculinity (see above definition), male privilege is reserved for cisgender men. This is particularly true for white cisgender men.

The Covington incident: activism, and how to provoke and shape a story

The Left's ambush technique.

Two Reporters Ejected from Newsom Inauguration

One appeared to have done absolutely nothing to merit exclusion

The second fellow hadn’t said a single word or disrupted the proceedings in any way. He was just sitting there with his iPhone stabilizer and headset. His ejection appeared to be entirely based on some kind of association with the first fellow.

That’s not a good look for the capital press people.

Another interesting element is that not a single one of the 20 or so reporters in the immediate area spoke up in defense of the second ejectee. Myself included. Speaking only for myself, the reason I failed to speak up is that I was so startled by the turn of events. When you cover enough of these things you’re used to seeing ordinary protesters stand up and sometimes get ejected but never journalists.

As the second man was being led out—we’ll surely learn his identity soon enough—he began shouting “What did I do wrong?” and referring to Jim Acosta and the way the CNN reporter’s chastisement by the president is treated as a cause célèbre. Why weren’t other journalists standing up to protest this poor guy’s no-cause ejection?

It’s hard not to conclude that at least part of it has to do with the perception that a journalist who is tough on Trump is somehow more righteous than one who is tough on a progressive leader like Newsom.

After the ceremony, the second fellow was standing on the Capital grounds when someone who had seen the ruckus came up to him and scolded him: “Build bridges not walls.” The aggravated blogger let loose a string of invective against the unsolicited advice giver and said “Where were you when they were throwing me out and depriving me of my First Amendment rights for no reason?” He has a point.

A few minutes later a panhandler—a white guy in his 30s—approached the crowd that was gathering near N Street. He loudly berated everyone, “You fucking liberals won’t help me out.” A well-dressed black man told the panhandler to “get a job and stop criticizing liberals.” The panhandler yelled, “How do you know this isn’t my day off, asshole? Were you an affirmative action hire?”

The seams are starting to show in America today. It’s hard to know how much longer we can keep it together.

Nazis are always Left Wing.