Here a link, there a link, everywhere a link link!

A Taxonomy of Fear

There is a pattern in the way speech is silenced. Understanding it can help us stand up to the illiberalism of this moment.

Once you get through the pro-forma but irrelevant up-front Trump dumping, the article seems right on target. And obviously related:

Survey: Majority of Americans Afraid of Expressing Political Beliefs

Too Many Jobs Feel Meaningless Because They Are

If work that is of no real value has proliferated, no wonder productivity is stagnant.

Overall, many good points, but I wish it had explained the influence of government in rendering so many American jobs meaningless. And speaking of jobs, look at what Seattle;s leftist leaders have done - on purpose - to job creation there:

Seattle’s Tarnished Dream
A generous safety net doesn’t mean much if you can’t find jobs or afford housing.

What went wrong?

Lots. Social benefits for the poor aren’t worth much if the poor can’t afford housing in the city that offers them. A family looking to find a place to live in Seattle must navigate a market where the median two-bedroom apartment lists for more than $2,600 per month. Lower-income families have been priced out into the suburbs. Drive south from Seattle into neighboring Tukwila, and you’ll see the child-poverty rate nearly triple, from 10 percent to almost 30 percent.

Remember - this was done to Seattle on purpose.

If Joe Biden is elected, the effort to remove him by those now supporting him will begin the day after the election and it will not be as crude as rounding up a Yale psychiatrist to testify to his dementia in Congress or shaming the White House physician to give him the Montreal Cognitive Assessment Test in the manner that the Left went after Donald Trump. It will be far more insidious and successful: leaked stories to the New York Times and Washington Post from empathetic White House insiders will speak of how  “heroically” Biden is fighting his inevitable decline –and how gamely he tries to marshal his progressive forces even as his faculties desert him. We would read about why Biden is a national treasure by sacrificing his health to get elected and then nobly bowing out as he realized the cost of his sacrifice on his person and family.

Democratic National Committee platform mentions ‘whites’ 15 times, all damning

They hate half the country. 

Now let's look at the American media:

The Media and the Virus
American press coverage of Covid-19 was first dismissive, then alarmist—but always condescending.

As it unfolded in the media, the story of the pandemic was initially that of a nonevent. On January 31, Vox ran a supposedly comprehensive “explainer” about the coronavirus. There was no need for Americans to wear protective face masks, Vox said, and “really no reason to worry.” On Twitter, Vox was still more blunt: “Is this going to be a deadly pandemic? No.” The hectoring tone and sham certitude are Vox specialties. But Vox wasn’t alone in dismissing the virus. USA Today, the Washington Post, Canada’s National Post, and many other outlets treated the Wuhan virus (as it was then known) less as a matter of objective concern than an instance of mass hysteria.

Their cardinal error, in almost every case, was to rely on the WHO, an organization at best egregiously mistaken and at worst politically compromised, carrying water for the Chinese Communist Party and President Xi Jinping.

If a video is viral, who cares if it’s fake?

Welcome to the age of unreality

Remember, for the Left, which includes almost all the media, truth means the Leninist concept of Revolutionary Truth, and that is how they speak and act and write and broadcast. All the time. 

Like this:

New FBI Notes Re-Debunk Major NYT Story, Highlight Media Collusion To Produce Russia Hoax

The New York Times in 2017 falsely reported that the Trump campaign had 'repeated' contacts with Russian intelligence officials during the 2016 campaign, and instead of being held accountable for publishing lies, the story's authors received Pulitzer prizes.

Deepfake Journalist Is a Terrifying Sign of Things to Come

We have entered a time when there is not merely fake news, but fake journalists. That is, byines and images of a writer who does not exist in the real world. We are entering the time of Matrix reality, where material and virtual reality are merging.

Nets’ Portland Coverage Evaporates After Antifa Attempted to MURDER Agents

Wednesday night saw a major escalation in the conflict at the federal courthouse in Portland, Oregon as Antifa terrorists and rioters barricaded federal agents inside the building and tried to set the building ablaze. It was a provocation that could have killed the untold number of agents in the building. Luckily, Antifa failed. But during the Thursday evening newscasts of ABC, CBS, and NBC, the Portland coverage largely evaporated, with only NBC Nightly News daring to downplay the attempted murder.

Fox Sports to add virtual crowds to MLB ballparks

Fox Sports announced Thursday it will include computer-generated fans in otherwise empty stadiums for its telecasts this season, starting on Saturday.

“We believe that what we’re doing is creating a natural viewing experience,” said Fox Sports Vice President Brad Zager. “Sports is supposed to be an escape and when people have that escape we want it to feel as normal as possible when there’s very little normalcy, like a crowd at a baseball game on a Saturday."

"We’re not looking to fool everyone. We know it is a virtual crowd. But we also know how jarring watching a game in an empty stadium is on TV," Zager added. 

And that's a wrap.

Linky Linky Linky

I am pasting the links separately because Blogger's upgrade interface is junk and often will not publish them embedded. 

1.
How the Democrats collude to enable voter fraud, at Powerline
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/06/how-the-democrats-collude-to-enable-voter-fraud.php

One of the most pernicious phenomena of modern times is the collusive lawsuit. This is how it works: a left-wing organization sues a government agency that is also controlled by the left. The lawsuit alleges that the agency is obliged to do something that the agency would like to do, but the Democrats can’t get it passed. Then the parties–supposedly adverse, but actually in collusion–“settle” the case by having the agency agree to do what it wanted to do all along. If all goes well, a court enters an order enforcing the settlement. So the net effect is that a policy that the Democrats couldn’t get passed is now a court-ordered mandate. This happens often.

Read the whole thing, but take your blood pressure meds first. It is absolutely in the Dem playbook for November.

2.
Black Lives Matter Is A Radical Marxist Organization. Who says so? Well, its founders.
https://www.battleswarmblog.com/?p=44832 and on camera here: https://youtu.be/5J9l6VOxYeE

3.
The sanctification of George Floyd, which is really much less about Floyd than the aftermath.
https://thecritic.co.uk/the-sanctification-of-george-floyd/

Another example of the relation between sentimentality and brutality has been the use of very young children in demonstrations. There are videos of two girls, nine and seven, one making a speech at a demonstration and the other marching in a demonstration, her pretty little face contorted with hatred, chanting a horrible slogan, ‘No justice, no peace’ (a justification in advance of further looting, or worse), and making aggressive gestures.

Clearly they had been put up to all this by their parents. If they had been born in Nazi Germany, they would have rushed up to the Fuhrer to present him with flowers. And no doubt the parents of the little girls, in the pride of their self-righteousness, will continue to indoctrinate them into becoming mental clones of themselves, in the belief that decerebrate rage and resentment are really a manifestation of generosity of spirit.

The little girls themselves, deeply unattractive as they have been made, are of course not themselves to blame. But what kind of fathomless sentimentalism is it that believes that a cause is justified or strengthened by the use of parroting children of nine and seven? It is not what the children parrot that counts, horrible as it might be, but that the children parrot it, that they have been turned (presumably by their parents) into mere instruments.

4.
The New Truth - When the moral imperative trumps the rational evidence, there’s no arguing.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/new-truth-rationalism-religion

Or as Stalin's abject apologist, the NYT's Walter Duranty, said of Joseph Stalin:

But – to put it brutally – you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs, and the Bolshevist leaders are just as indifferent to the casualties that may be involved in their drive toward socialization as any General during the World War who ordered a costly attack in order to show his superiors that he and his division possessed the proper soldierly spirit. In fact, the Bolsheviki are more indifferent because they are animated by fanatical conviction. (The New York Times, March 31, 1933, page 13)

5.
Member of an ethnic minority tells a white BLM supporter that he is oppressed and wants reparations. As in right now, from the white guy's wallet. Pop some popcorn before watching!


And a companion video:


6.
What Happens When the Madness Ends? Since it is by VDH, no excerpt is necessary.
https://amgreatness.com/2020/06/21/what-happens-when-the-madness-ends/

7.
What is your woke breaking point?
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/statues-woke-breaking-point-law-of-merited-impossibility/

In progressivism, only some black lives matter

All the links herein are corrected and will work. No thanks to Blogger.

If you call Planned Parenthood and offer to make a donation to fund abortions specifically for aborting black unborn children, they will accept it. If you tell them the reason you will donate is because there are too many black people in the country today, they will still accept it without protest. 
https://www.facebook.com/liveaction/videos/3140269152701373/

But of course, because Planned Parenthood was formed for that very reason, to kill black people. Just google Margaret Sanger, its founder. Or you can just read why Margaret Sanger's Fans Work to Clean Up Her Racist Past.  
https://www1.cbn.com/cbnnews/us/2020/may/they-have-to-reinvent-her-margaret-sangers-fans-work-to-clean-up-her-racist-past

Then there are these mostly white BLM activists who consent to the claim made to them that some black lives matter and the rest do not. Namely, black people murdered by other black people do not matter. And like Planned parenthood, black persons killed in the womb do not matter.
https://twitter.com/OntWtf/status/1273760666365710338
  

And there is Niger Innis, spokesman for the Congress of Racial Equality, who says that Black Lives Matter  doesn't have a 'd*** thing to do' with saving black lives.  
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/niger-innis-black-lives-matter-agenda-doesnt-have-a-damn-thing-to-do-with-saving-black-lives

More and more black Americans are no longer afraid to speak out publicly against the  real oppressors of black people in America today.  

"These Democrats, and I'm sorry to say this, they hate black people," she continued. "These are the same people who fought to keep slavery in. These are the same people who built the KKK. The Republican Party is the party of the blacks."

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/they-hate-black-people-street-preachers-decry-democrats-outside-seattles-chaz 

Once again:

Rioters don't care about George Floyd

FB post here.

Buzzfeed article here.

Link this, sucker!

What is NATO good for? Well, pretty much nothing, at least right now. As I wrote in 2008,  "What has NATO ever done for us?" The answer is also pretty much nothing (since the fall of the USSR) and I do not take back a word of it.

America is moving rapidly to tribalism, pushed hard on purpose by the Marxist, America-hating revolutionary vanguard. And the very concept of "citizen" is vanishing. Because "Pre- & post-citizens" was written by VDH, you automatically should read it. My own relevant essays are here.

With Soleimani blown to smithereens, what to make of Iran's threats to retaliate? Oh, they will do something, but if they were capable of doing worse, they would have already done it. And with Soleimani dead, they have a huge blank in their murderous-imagination planning because, "Top commander's assassination leaves Iran with very few options to retaliate."

Then read Hussain Abdul-Hussain's thread on why "reporting in the main news outlets NYT and Wash Post is so misinformed (either on purpose or because of incompetence)... ."

Oh, when Trump blew up Soleimani, the Left was unanimous that it was an act of war that was going to start World War 3! Oh, how we long for the good old days when Obama launched 2,800 strikes on Iraq, Syria without congressional approval. And how fondly we remember "Obama's Breathtaking Expansion of a President's Power To Make War." Good times, eh? Good times!

Speaking of war, why was this an act of war:

Remains of the car Qassem Soleimani was riding it. 

... but this was not?

Smoke rises from the reception room of the U.S. embassy that was burned by Pro-Iranian militiamen and their supporters, in Baghdad, Iraq, Wednesday, Jan. 1, 2020 (Link)

But the chickens come home to roost, even if to a new coop: "Obama official thinks Trump's strategy worked."

The darkness revealed

Ukraine: Nazism equals Communism

Radio Free Europe reports what is basically a "Duh!" headline: "Ukraine's Constitutional Court Upholds Law Equating Communism To Nazism."

Ukraine's Constitutional Court has upheld a law that equates communism to Nazism and bans the dissemination of its symbols, a law that has prompted angry protests from Moscow.

In the July 16 ruling published on its website, the court said the "communist and Nazi regimes" used similar methods of "implementing repressive state policies."

"The communist regime, like the Nazi regime, inflicted irreparable damages to human rights because during its existence, it had total control over society and politically motivated persecutions and repressions, violated its international obligations, and its own constitutions and laws," it said.

The Russians have, of course, protested.

That Nazism and Communism were inherently contradictory is an invented, deliberate lie of the American and British Left of the 1940s and after. Before Germany actually started using its rebuilt military in 1939, no one thought that Nazism and Communism were much different - or for that matter, were either much distinguished from Italian Fascism under Mussolini, who was a devoted, active Marxist until he figured out that Russia wanted to dominate Communism both in Russia and internationally. Mussolini was the original national socialist who broke with the Russian Communist movement to keep Italy politically independent of internationalist socialism. Mussolini was in fact the original national socialist and founded the Fascisti party to implement a kind of "soft" Communism in Italy.

As for German Nazism, Adolf Hitler and other high Nazi leaders said from the beginning that Nazism was socialism; Hitler said explicitly that Nazism was Marxist. ("Nazi" is only an acronym for the Germans words of the full title of the party, National Workers Socialist Party.)

I wrote about that at length two years ago in, "Nazism's Marxist Roots," with many links to other analyses.

The anti-Left Leftists

It turns out that there is a type of Leftist that is fed up with what the American political Left has become. They are called anti-woke Leftists. They strike me as old-line Marxists, though I do not mean they are old people. Meet the anti-woke left, who make more sense than every 2020 Democrat candidate combined.

The left is in crisis across the West. It is out of power in most countries and out of touch with its historical working-class base. Class politics has given way to identity politics. And noble causes like anti-racism, anti-sexism and anti-discrimination have congealed into a stifling morass of political correctness and competitive victimhood.

Thankfully, there are some pockets on the left who recognise this predicament. I’m in New York to try to understand the thinking behind the ‘dirtbag left’. The phrase was coined by Amber A’Lee Frost, a writer, commentator and activist, to describe a loose constellation of American leftists who reject the civility, piety and PC that has come to characterise much of the left. ...

...  identitarian divisions based on gender, race and sexuality are ‘a distraction at best, an active detriment at worst’. ‘The biggest divide in American society is class and that’s it. I’m a class-first person’, she tells me.

Read the whole thing, very interesting., especially when they observe that social media's "call-out culture has no Marxist explanation." After all, the solidarity of the Masses is vaporware when social media by its nature, and identitarian politics by design, keep carving the Masses into smaller and more tightly-defined tribal groups.

Leftist thugs have Second Amendment rights, too, ya know

The New Republic: "Antifa Is Arming Itself Against a Trump Crackdown"

... many leftists and even some liberals are beginning to reconsider their feelings about firearms, joining a loose amalgamation of gun groups, from John Brown Gun Clubs (which take their name from the abolitionist) to the Pink Pistols (an LGBTQ group), Liberal Gun Club, and Socialist Rifle Association. Some of these organizations are moderate and traditionalist, others radical and revolutionary. But all share one implicit goal: to normalize firearms ownership and training among liberals. Some of their members hope such efforts will at least make Republicans think twice before attempting a massacre.

At least one organizer understands the paradox:

“We’ve got liberal folks, politicians and people in the media, saying, ‘the government is becoming a fascist regime,’ and then turning around and saying, ‘You can’t have your guns, we can only have guns in the hands of people we’re calling fascists,’” said Alex Tackett, the SRA’s 22-year-old president.

Second Amendment advocates have been saying for many year, even decades, "If guns are outlawed, only the government will have guns." So is the Left coming around? It reminds me of what Robert Heinlein wrote many years ago: "Pacifists" do not really exist, when the wind changes, everyone will hoist the Jolly Roger. So no wonder that The Left Escalates Violence as Antifa Arms Themselves.

It is, of course, Trump's fault. After all, Leftists are men and women of peace and love -- you know, like the ones who commit more than two-thirds of all firearms murders in the United States.

And these men of peace and love and tolerance:

Ft.Hood shooter Nidal Hasan – Democrat
Adam Lanza – Liberal, hated Christians
Columbine High School freaks – too young to vote but came from very liberal families
Virginia Tech shooter, Seung-Hui Cho – liberal
Virginia Tech decapitater – liberal
Colorado Theater shooter James Holmes – liberal
Live on air Roanoke VA TV station shooter Vester Lee Flanagan – liberal
Navy shipyard shooter Aaron Alexis – liberal
Arizona Gabby Giffords shooter Jared Loughner – Liberal, hated Bush
The DC snipers back in 2003 – Liberals
Chattanooga TN Marine Recruiting center shooter – Democrat
Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber) – Leftist
Occupy Wall Street – over 8,000 arrests, 3 murders, 2 arson, 10 plus reported rapes – a hardcore leftist movement

But remember: it is Republicans who are fascists.

Why the Left hates you

Why the Left Is Consumed With Hate, by Shelby Steele

How did the American left—conceived to bring more compassion and justice to the world—become so given to hate? It began in the 1960s, when America finally accepted that slavery and segregation were profound moral failings. That acceptance changed America forever. It imposed a new moral imperative: America would have to show itself redeemed of these immoralities in order to stand as a legitimate democracy.

The genius of the left in the ’60s was simply to perceive the new moral imperative, and then to identify itself with it. Thus the labor of redeeming the nation from its immoral past would fall on the left. This is how the left put itself in charge of America’s moral legitimacy. The left, not the right—not conservatism—would set the terms of this legitimacy and deliver America from shame to decency.

This bestowed enormous political and cultural power on the American left, and led to the greatest array of government-sponsored social programs in history—at an expense, by some estimates, of more than $22 trillion. But for the left to wield this power, there had to be a great menace to fight against—a tenacious menace that kept America uncertain of its legitimacy, afraid for its good name.

This amounted to a formula for power: The greater the menace to the nation’s moral legitimacy, the more power redounded to the left. And the ’60s handed the left a laundry list of menaces to be defeated. If racism was necessarily at the top of the list, it was quickly followed by a litany of bigotries ending in “ism” and “phobia.”

Now, however, the hatred is self-sustaining. Any opposition to what has morphed into a Totalist agenda becomes a target. Read the whole thing.

Into nightmare night from liberty's day

In December 2003 I wrote,

When my children are my age, they will not be free in any recognizably traditional American meaning of the word. I’d tell them to emigrate, but there’s nowhere left to go. I am left with nauseating near-conviction that I am a member of the last generation in the history of the world that is minimally truly free.

I still say that with even greater assertion and deeper sorrow than 15 years ago, but now for amplified and multiplied reasons. Then I referred to the ever-expanding maw of government:

Because the present-day Republicans and Democrats are both big-government activists, they have a foundational philosophy that is the same: 

America is a problem to be fixed, and Americans are a people to be managed. ...

Big government is itself apolitical. It cares not whose party is in power. It simply continues to grow. Its nourishment is the people’s money. Its excrement is more and more regulations and laws. Like the Terminator, "that’s what it does, that’s all it does."

That trend only accelerated during Presidents Bush's second term and of course, Obama's two terms.

That President Trump has managed to turn back that tide, however minimally, in his first two years is the real reason he is the target of fury from the Democrats and the Republican Establishment, which I have seen referred to as the Permanent Unified Fusion Party, or more handily, the Political Class, which includes the media, and which are desperate to reverse the vote of 2016 because,

... the primordial fact [is] that, in today’s America, those in power basically do what they please. Executive orders, phone calls, and the right judge mean a lot more than laws. They even trump state referenda. Over the past half-century, presidents have ruled not by enforcing laws but increasingly through agencies that write their own rules, interpret them, and punish unaccountably—the administrative state. As for the Supreme Court, the American people have seen it invent rights where there were none—e.g., abortion—while trammeling ones that had been the republic’s spine, such as the free exercise of religion and freedom of speech. The Court taught Americans that the word “public” can mean “private” (Kelo v. City of New London), that “penalty” can mean “tax” (King v. Burwell), and that holding an opinion contrary to its own can only be due to an “irrational animus” (Obergefell v. Hodges).

I  addition, we now have the rise of the Militant Left, whose current figurehead is US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and whose enforcement arm is Antifa (though they have been strangely dormant for the past few months). With them, the Left has gone Full Marxist, as I explained here.

American politics have become only contests of power. No one on either side even attempts to appeal to transcendent authority or principle. As the Left's recent unbridled fury over the hapless Covington Kids proved, social media is leading the political and media decline of the country deeper and deeper into The Abyss of Hate Versus Hate.

I will turn 64 this year. I hope that this country can hold together for the maybe 30 years I have left and for the 10 years or so my wife has beyond that. But my three children? For what they will endure, I have only nightmares.

Ocasio-Cortez's Revolutionary Truth

Earlier this week, frosh US Representative and self-described socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D.-Fantasyland) tweeted this:

Let me be blunt: This is a bald-faced lie. It is totally false. AOC tweeted this knowing that it never happened.

But in her mind that does not matter because it is true. Remember, she went on 60 Minutes on Jan. 6 and said, “There's a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right" (video at the link).

Welcome, comrades, to the Leftist, socialist world of Revolutionary Truth!

Revolutionary Truth is a Marxist-Leninist doctrine that rests on this foundation:

According to Marx, the coming supremacy of the proletariat over the ownership of the means of production is a scientific inevitability. That is, Marx maintained that he was not offering merely one more historical treatise of human affairs, but an actual scientific proof that the proletariat would overthrow the bourgeoisie.

Because Marxism is a totalist system of belief, its devotees,

... want to impose a new order based on an “all-or-nothing claim to truth.” They operate within distinctive parameters of a “theology of Armageddon — a final battle between good and evil” –  in which the stakes are nothing less than universal salvation. As outlined in Eric Hoffer’s classic, The True Believer, such movements have mastered the art of “religiofication,” that is, converting political grievances into messianic aspirations and “practical purposes into holy causes.”

"Truth" is therefore whatever brings the Revolution closer to reality. This was a world view fully adopted by Leninists and their successors. Truth is only accidentally connected to objective facts, wbich is exactly what AOC meant when she dismissed any connection between morality and facts. In her view, the supreme morality of her politics overwhelms any superficial claim that something she relates did not happen, such as a HUD worker telling her to stay her course even though he has not been paid for three weeks.

How do we know that claim is false? Because not one federal worker has missed a paycheck yet. The first check to be missed is the mid-month  January one, and that check is due out today, Jan. 11. But AOC tweeted her lie on Jan. 6.

George Orwell foresaw these politics in his novel 1984:

"We are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power." 

Get used to it, comrades, because that is what will be coming in tidal waves for at least the next two years.

Update: Heh: Exasperated Democrats try to rein in Ocasio-Cortez

Quote of the day on SJWs

The pursuit of abstract social justice goes hand-in-hand with the view that power struggles and relations of domination express the truth of our social condition … . The goal is to seize power and to use it to liberate the oppressed… .

Intellectuals who think that way are already ruling out the possibility of compromise. Their totalitarian language does not set out a path of negotiation but instead divides human beings into innocent and guilty groups. Behind the impassioned rhetoric of the Communist Manifesto, behind the pseudo-science of Marx’s labour theory of value, and behind the class analysis of human history, lies a single emotional source resentment of those who control things [Italics added]. This resentment is both rationalized and amplified by the proof that property owners form a ‘class’. According to the theory, the ‘bourgeois’ class has … systematic access to the levers of power, and a shared body of privileges. Moreover all those good things are acquired and retained through the ‘exploitation’ of the proletariat, which has nothing to part with except its labour, and which will therefore always be cheated of its just deserts.

 Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands — Thinkers of the New Left, in chapter 1

And Fredrik deBoer in "bingo cards go both ways," 2014:

I meet and interact with a lot of young lefties who are just stunning rhetorically weak; they feel all of their politics very intensely but can’t articulate them to anyone who doesn’t share the same vocabulary, the same set of cultural and social signifiers that are used to demonstrate you’re one of the “right sort of people.” These kids are often great, they’re smart and passionate, I agree with them on most things, but they have no ability at all to express themselves to those who are not already in their tribe. They say terms like “privilege” or “mansplain” or “tone policing” and expect the conversation to somehow just stop, that if you say the magic words, you have won that round and the world is supposed to roll over to what you want. 

Elections are still rigged

In 1980 a Marxist writer explained how elections work - and are supposed to work - in a bourgeoisie country (and the USA is definitely that). After delineating the tedium and manufactured excitement of the primaries and delegate counting and national political conventions and all the rest of American politics, writer Paul Saba explained how the elections were "Reaffirming the Marxist Theory of the State":

What is the purpose of this elaborate extravaganza? Marxists have long noted that insofar as its stated purpose is concerned–determining the question of political power in modern society–it is no more than a charade, a political sleight of hand in which the more things seem to change, the more do they remain the same. But Marxists do not deserve any special credit for making such an observation. One hardly has to be a Marxist to grasp the fact that bourgeois elections do not, in any way, impinge upon or alter questions of power. The general cynicism among the masses toward politics and politicians–a cynicism which runs far deeper than can be measured solely by noting the large numbers of people who do not bother to vote in elections–is itself proof that the futility and corruption of bourgeois politics has become a part of U.S. folklore.

In Marxist theory the whole point of elections is to give the proles the illusion that they have a say in the outcome and how the country is run. But they don't and they shouldn't. At least, not by the bourgeois world view.

What Marxists should do about this was debated quite a bit before the Russian Revolution. On the one hand, a faction believed that once the workers had cast off their chains and appropriated the means of production (the industrial plant), then the proletariat would be able to vote truly and well because the capitalist bourgeoisie would not be allowed or able to blinker them and the natural purity of their proletariat hearts. Hence, right away elections could continue to be held and this time, dadgummit, they actually would mean something.

But in American Democrat party theory, that day is still a long time off.

Levi Tillemann, an author, inventor, and former official with the Obama administration’s Energy Department, moved back home [to Colorado] to make a run against Coffman. He focused his campaign on clean elections, combatting climate change, “Medicare for All,” free community college, and confronting economic inequality and monopoly power. Another candidate for the nomination, Jason Crow, a corporate lawyer at the powerhouse Colorado firm Holland & Hart and an Army veteran, meanwhile, appeared to have the backing of the Democratic establishment, though it wasn’t explicit.

But that was about to change. Steny Hoyer, the No. 2 Democrat in the House of Representatives, went to Denver and met with Tilleman.

Tillemann met the minority whip at the Hilton Denver Downtown to make the case that the party should stay neutral in the primary and that he had a more plausible path to victory than the same centrism that Coffman had already beaten repeatedly. Hoyer, however, had his own message he wanted to convey: Tillemann should drop out. In a frank and wide-ranging conversation, Hoyer laid down the law for Tillemann. The decision, Tillemann was told, had been made long ago. It wasn’t personal, Hoyer insisted, and there was nothing uniquely unfair being done to Tillemann, he explained: This is how the party does it everywhere.

Tilleman recorded the conversation, though, and you can hear it at the link. 

The establishment Democrat party has become the Revolutionary Vanguard of Marxism-Leninism. The Russian Bolsheviks, seeing themselves as the Vanguard, took to heart Marx's instruction that a temporary dictatorship of the proletariat - meaning by Lenin and his gang, not the general proletariat - was the key to bringing forth True Communism.

The vanguard revolutionaries understood that to leap from workers in chains, unaware of how deluded and ignorant they really were, and in political infancy, to the status of the True Communist Man was stupidly unrealistic. So their own dictatorship was a deplorable but critically-important step to bring the long-oppressed and unenlightened proles to political maturity and understanding. Truly fair, honest and meaningful elections certainly would be held - eventually. Just not yet. But trust us, it's right around the corner, any day now. Forever.

Understand that the only time the Vanguard actually seized power was in the aftermath of the Russian civil war that followed the Russian revolution. And the Vanguard were all of the privileged classes of Russia. In fact, the Vanguard must be of the privileged classes of the society that is overturned, because only the well educated men and women of the non-working classes have the leisure time to study how Marxism works. (Well, it doesn't work, but you get what I mean, I hope).

Remember, the point of Marxist revolutions is not to empower the people, it is to brings the reins of state power to the Marxist revolutionaries. Which always means the Vanguard because for the proles' own good the vanguard of the revolution (maybe in its fifth generation by now!) must also be the conservators of the revolution. As it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be, world without end, amen.

And that is the state of the political establishment in America today. 

The Campus Commands Us

We All Live on Campus Now in New York magazine is by Andrew Sullivan, who has also written for The Atlantic. He is a gay, gay-rights activist who wrote from a very definitely left-of-center perspective, though not far left. Back in the "oughts," I enjoyed a lively and always-collegial email correspondence with him, but have not been in touch for several years.

The tagline (but read the whole thing):

The goal of our culture now is not the emancipation of the individual from the group, but the permanent definition of the individual by the group. We used to call this bigotry. Now we call it being woke. You see: We are all on campus now.

Why do Millennials love death?

Millennials would rather live in socialist or communist nation than under capitalism

A majority of millennials would prefer to live in a socialist, communist or fascist nation rather than a capitalistic one, according to a new poll.

In the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation’s “Annual Report on US Attitudes toward Socialism,” 58 percent of the up-and-coming generation opted for one of the three systems, compared to 42 percent who said they were in favor of capitalism.
The most popular socioeconomic order was socialism with 44 percent support. Communism and fascism received 7 percent support each.

Marion Smith, executive director of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, said the report shows millennials are “increasingly turning away from capitalism and toward socialism and even communism as a viable alternative.”

“This troubling turn highlights widespread historical illiteracy in American society regarding socialism and the systemic failure of our education system to teach students about the genocide, destruction, and misery caused by communism since the Bolshevik Revolution one hundred years ago,” Mr. Smith said in a statement.

Millennials are more likely to prefer socialism and communism than the rest of the country. Fifty-nine percent of all respondents chose capitalism as their preferred arrangement, compared to 34 percent who said socialism, 4 percent fascism and 3 percent communism.

What is socialism, and what is the difference between it and Communism?  "The goal of socialism is communism," said Vladimir Lenin, and he certainly knew. So the 44 percent of those surveyed who said they wanted a socialist society were really say, though they aren't educated enough to know it, that they want a Communist society. At least seven percent were honest, though it's highly unlikely that they they actually know what Communism is.

What is Communism? It is this, and really, nothing but this:

Trudging through mud in sub-zero temperatures, digging the earth with their bare hands and heaving huge rocks with the most primitive of tools, these horrifying photos have revealed life inside Joseph Stalin's gulag prisons, where people were worked to death in Soviet labour camps through the mid-1900s.

This year marks 100 years since the 1917 Russian Revolution, which led to Vladimir Lenin taking control of the Soviet Union. When Lenin died in 1924, Stalin rose to power and became the state's authoritarian leader.

Between 1929 and the year of Stalin's death in 1953, 18million men and women were transported to Soviet slave labour camps in Siberia and other outposts of the Red empire - many of them never to return.

Prisoners worked in the most extreme climates, facing temperatures of -20C (-4F), as they cut down trees with handsaws and dug at frozen ground with primitive pickaxes.

Others mined coal or copper by hand, often suffering painful or fatal lung diseases from inhaling ore dust while on the job.

Labourers in the prisons worked up to 14 hours a day on massive projects, including the Moscow-Volga Canal, the White Sea-Baltic Canal, and the Kolyma Highway.

By the time the last Soviet gulag closed its gates, millions had died. Starvation was not uncommon, as prisoners were barely fed enough to sustain such difficult labour. Other prisoners were simply dragged out to the woods and shot by guards.

Because equality, comrades!

What does "anti-Fascist" really mean?

Why you should never use the term 'anti-fascist'

The term "anti-fascist" is of Soviet origin, and it was used before and during World War II to make the aggressive, murderous, war-criminal regime of Joseph Stalin seem more palatable. The entire point then, as now, was to make it seem like the U.S.S.R. had a lot in common with normal, decent people's views, even as millions were being shipped off to die in the archipelago of slave-labor camps that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn experienced for eight years. (His crime? An irreverent reference, in a letter, to Stalin's moustache.) ...

We may not take today's anarcho-communists as seriously as we did back when they had the power, the weapons, and the infrastructure to murder tens of millions of people. But their goals are no different. As they put it, they don't want a "U.S.A. at all." The country they want to occupy the center of North America has no First Amendment, no freedom of expression, and people with opposing views (of any views, not just Nazis) are beaten, imprisoned or murdered for intellectual dissent. They may run the gamut from anarchism to revolutionary socialism in their views, but they have far more in common with fascists than they do with the people they seek to attract with the sweet-sounding "anti-fascist" label.

Read the whole thing.

Antifa and neo-Nazis? It is a distinction without a difference.

A beating in Berkeley - and guess who the beaters were? Here is a hint:

The merciless enforcement of orthodoxy

Keri Smith explains why she left the "SJW Cult,"  meaning the Social Justice Warrior, just to be clear. SJW's in America are the militant arm of the prog-Left and it was mainly they who attacked (and were attacked by) the alt-right demonstrators last week in Charlottesville.

I see increasing numbers of so-called liberals cheering censorship and defending violence as a response to speech. I see seemingly reasonable people wishing death on others and laughing at escalating suicide and addiction rates of the white working class. I see liberal think pieces written in opposition to expressing empathy or civility in interactions with those with whom we disagree. I see 63 million Trump voters written off as “nazis” who are okay to target with physical violence. I see concepts like equality and justice being used as a mask for resentful, murderous rage.

The most pernicious aspect of this evolution of the left, is how it seems to be changing people, and how rapidly since the election. I have been dwelling on this Nietzsche quote for almost six months now, “He who fights with monsters, should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.” How easy is it for ordinary humans to commit atrocious acts? History teaches us it’s pretty easy when you are blinded to your own hypocrisy. When you believe you are morally superior, when you have dehumanized those you disagree with, you can justify almost anything. In a particularly vocal part of the left, justification for dehumanizing and committing violence against those on the right has already begun.

I have been wondering why more people on the left are not speaking up against violence, in favor of free exchange of ideas and dialogue, in favor of compassion. But I know why. I was in the cult. Part of it is that you are a true believer, and part of it is that you are fearful of being called an apostate — in being trashed as a sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic, xenophobic, fascist, white supremacist nazi. A friend recently wrote to me privately to say they find my latest posts “refreshing,” and that they believe in free speech, but as someone who works in entertainment, they can’t say anything that might cause them to lose their job. As someone who has gone through and is still going through a change in my underlying systems of belief, I can say this: when you finally get past fear, it is so liberating. After a lot of self-reflection, I eventually came to the opinion that if I lose friends or jobs over trying to speak and find the truth in situations, and to do so in a way that reflects my belief in compassion, then perhaps those were not friends or jobs that were healthy for my growth. [emphasis original]

Freedom and liberty always have a price to pay. I fear the day is coming when we are all going to find out whether we will pay it. I posted last November that the United States is already in a low-intensity civil war. I am very fearful that the intensity will only get higher.

Endnote: Well, when you've lost The Atlantic ... "The Rise of the Violent Left."

Goodbye to all that - "How Left Idiocies Drove Me to Flee"

Here is a short series of former Leftists explaining why they ran away from it. Not that they became Republicans or even conservatives, neo- or otherwise. But they utterly, completely abandoned the Left, mainly for one core reason: The Left is morally blind, feeds on rage, and is utterly un-self-critical. Read all of each piece.

From 1986, "Why I Am No Longer a Leftist By David Horowitz" edited transcript at the link, or just watch the full interview on Youtube here.



From 2004, Ron Rosenbaum, "Goodbye, All That: How Left Idiocies Drove Me to Flee"

From 2014, female activist Danusha V. Goskagives, "Ten Reasons Why I Am No Longer a Leftist"

These are not casual reads and can't be effectively excerpted.

See also, "The Fascist Roots of the American Left"

Update: "Scratch a lefty, and a Stasi informant bleeds."

And remember:

The Onion nails it: College Encourages Lively Exchange Of Idea -- Students, Faculty Invited To Freely Express Single Viewpoint

BOSTON—Saying that such a dialogue was essential to the college’s academic mission, Trescott University president Kevin Abrams confirmed Monday that the school encourages a lively exchange of one idea. “As an institution of higher learning, we recognize that it’s inevitable that certain contentious topics will come up from time to time, and when they do, we want to create an atmosphere where both students and faculty feel comfortable voicing a single homogeneous opinion,” said Abrams, adding that no matter the subject, anyone on campus is always welcome to add their support to the accepted consensus. 

Marxists and headlines you can't make up

Nope, not fake news:

They obviously do not understand the idea of the "Revolutionary Vanguard." Speaking of which, "Eric Holder: ‘Elections are Officially Rigged’ by Republicans, Not Voter Fraud."

These two headlines are linked if you are conversant in Marxist theory. As for Holder's accusation, I will say about him what I said about Bernie Sanders while he was running against Hillary during the 2016 primaries: "Elections are supposed to be rigged." So why was Sander apparently surprised that the DNC and the Clinton campaign were actively colluding to deliver the nomination to her? 

The intersection between the two stories is the Marxist concept of the Revolutionary Vanguard. Here is what I posted then:

In 1980 a Marxist writer explained how elections work - and are supposed to work - in a bourgeoisie country (and the USA is definitely that). After delineating the tedium and manufactured excitement of the primaries and delegate counting and national political conventions and all the rest of American politics, writer Paul Saba explains how the elections were "Reaffirming the Marxist Theory of the State":

What is the purpose of this elaborate extravaganza? Marxists have long noted that insofar as its stated purpose is concerned–determining the question of political power in modern society–it is no more than a charade, a political sleight of hand in which the more things seem to change, the more do they remain the same. But Marxists do not deserve any special credit for making such an observation. One hardly has to be a Marxist to grasp the fact that bourgeois elections do not, in any way, impinge upon or alter questions of power. The general cynicism among the masses toward politics and politicians–a cynicism which runs far deeper than can be measured solely by noting the large numbers of people who do not bother to vote in elections–is itself proof that the futility and corruption of bourgeois politics has become a part of U.S. folklore.

In Marxist theory the whole point of elections is to give the proles the illusion that they have a say in the outcome and how the country is run. But they don't and they shouldn't. At least, not by the bourgeois world view.

What Marxists should do about this was debated quite a bit before the Russian Revolution. On the one hand, a faction believed that once the workers had cast off their chains and appropriated the means of production (the industrial plant), then the proletariat would be able to vote truly and well because the capitalist bourgeoisie would not be allowed or able to blinker them and the natural purity of their proletariat hearts. Hence, right away elections could continue to be held and this time, dadgummit, they actually would mean something.

The competing view, held by the Russian Bolsheviks, was that they were the "vanguard of the revolution" and that therefore Marx's instruction of the necessity of a temporary dictatorship of the proletariat -- meaning by Lenin and his gang, not the general proletariat - was the key to bringing forth True Communism.

In Marxism-Leninism, true communism was a state in which material production was so great that all human needs were met without shortage. Greed would therefore disappear and the inherent but capitalist-suppressed natural nobility of men and women would emerge. They would be transformed into true communists - altruists who worked each day for the good of the people, not for crass, selfish profit. 

The vanguard revolutionaries understood that to leap from workers in chains, unaware of how deluded and ignorant they really were, and in political infancy, to the status of the True Communist Man was stupidly unrealistic. So their own dictatorship was a deplorable but critically-important step to bring the long-oppressed and unenlightened proles to political maturity and understanding. Truly fair, honest and meaningful elections certainly would be held - eventually. Just not yet. But trust us, it's right around the corner, any day now. Forever.

Understand that the only time the Vanguard actually seized power was in the aftermath of the Russian civil war that followed the Russian revolution. And the Vanguard were all of the privileged classes of Russia. In fact, the Vanguard must be of the privileged classes of the society that is overturned, because only the well educated men and women of the non-working classes have the leisure time to study how Marxism works. (Well, it doesn't work, but you get what I mean, I hope).

Remember, the point of Marxist revolutions is not to empower the people, it is to brings the reins of state power to the Marxist revolutionaries. Which always means the Vanguard because for the proles' own good the vanguard of the revolution (maybe in its fifth generation by now!) must also be the conservators of the revolution. As it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be, world without end, amen.

So it's just as well the Swarthmore College Marxist club disbanded because they sure were lousy Marxists.