It is possible that the horrible year 2021 will turn out to have done good.

The Left, by coming to power (through cheating and chicanery) and proceeding to impose its oppressive policies, may have destroyed itself.

It has taught America a lesson in practice, proving how fearful, dreary, insecure, costly, humiliating, lonely, brutal, sorrowful and sickly is life under Leftist rule. If the electorate has learned the lesson, it may not need to be taught again this century.

The misery is not yet over. But 2022 is an election year and may end with the defeat of the Left.

That is the nearest we can come to a cheerful message for our readers. It is a hope, and with that in mind, we wish you all a

Happy New Year!

We wish all our readers and commenters, regular and occasional visitors, applauders and denigrators, atheists and believers, optimists and pessimists, vaccinated and unvaccinated,

a very merry holiday season

despite the pandemic, loss of liberty, high prices, shortages, rough weather, Communist China, the House January 6 committee, rising crime, and the decline of the West.

There is a danger to democracy in democracy itself: majorities can vote against it.

Two recent articles express, in deep pessimism, the conviction that America has chosen its own irreversible doom.

Mark Steyn thinks it may be all over for America. Its system has brought in forces of self-destruction driven by trivial concerns over climate, race, and sex.

He writes:

Is America past the point of no return? The more lavishly funded any activity is, the more it’s a racket. Fresh from taking two decades to lose a war to goatherds and reducing itself to a global laughingstock to allies and enemies alike, the Government of the United States decided that what a six-star joke really needed was the first four-star transgender admiral.

Now we have an incoming vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff telling the world that what a bloated lavishly funded military that can’t win a war needs to prioritize is “gender advisors”. …

Chairman Xi was a no-show at COP-26, because he has no intention of joining the west in committing economic suicide. But, if Joe and Justin and Boris are so eager to tank what remains of their livelihoods, he’s happy to sell them expensive ineffective “green solutions”. In other words, having annexed American manufacturing and American high-tech and American intellectual property, Beijing is happy to annex American virtue-signaling and profit from that, too.

There is no equivalent (not even Rome’s) to America’s form of great-power suicide. Britain lost global dominance because, for eighteen critical months , London and the British Dominions stood alone among the great democratic powers in resisting the Third Reich. It was a sacrifice that exhausted and bankrupted a mighty empire, but it was at least for something recognizable as a great cause. America is exiting the world stage because it’s hot for trannies and MS-13 cartels: has there ever been anything more pathetic?

Paul Gottfried points out at American Greatness that many an oppressive regime is in power not because their power was seized illegitimately, but because they were voted for.

Regimes that embattled minorities are on the streets protesting are not there by accident. Voters made choices.

And even when they do their worst, they can safely submit themselves for re-election:

Majorities, and often overwhelming ones, voted for the ruling class; and if an election were held tomorrow, the same rulers would likely win. …

He gives examples of popular authoritarian rulers in America:

Bill de Blasio won a second term as New York City’s mayor in 2017 with 65.4 percent of the tabulated vote. On November 4, 2020, Kim Klacik, an earnest young black woman, ran against Kweisi Mfume, the longtime incumbent in Maryland’s seventh congressional district, which includes Baltimore’s inner city. Klacik promised to fight for more police protection, and, unlike Mfume, she pledged to bring the races together. Against a notoriously philandering politician who gave up his birth name to assume an African one, Klacik lost the congressional race by 40 points, although remarkably enough, she amassed a large war chest. Politicians such as Mfume, Lori Lightfoot in Chicago, Maxine Waters in Los Angeles, Gavin Newsom in California, and Bill de Blasio in New York have all reached high political positions for the same reason: they attract lots of votes. …

If it is argued that almost as many Americans have voted for freedom as voted for dictatorship, the inherent danger in democracy is only emphasized: the will of many can be frustrated by the will of a few more. The choice of democracy itself is the hazard.

In which case, since all other systems are worse than democracy, there is no way that a free republic such as the Founders tried to establish can be secured.

If the “Biden” administration came in by cheating, it means that cheating is not just possible but practicable in a democracy.

How likely is it that after this turn to oppression, with another election another day America can go back to being the free nation it has been in the past?

Even if it can, even if it does, what will preserve it?

Britain’s great conservative Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, said: “Britain was created by history, America was created by philosophy.”

What were the principles of America’s foundational philosophy?

• Freedom: freedom of the individual, and so, logically, freedom of conscience, speech, publication,  assembly; property ownership and a free market.
• The rule of law under which all are equal.
• Government by the people themselves to protect their freedom with the rule of law, and with military strength against foreign enemies.

All those principles are now being abandoned by usurping powers, to be replaced with contrary ideals.

The systems and institutions that proceeded from them are being corrupted and turned from their intended purposes to serve opposite ends.

Victor Davis Hanson writes at Townhall:

Conservatives now have lost their former traditional confidence in the administration of justice, in the intelligence and investigatory agencies, in the nation’s military leadership, in the media, and the criminal justice system.

Freedom is much diminished, especially with the forced quarantine and masking of the healthy in an epidemic of Covid flu, and threatened penalties for those who refuse vaccination.

The rule of law is scoffed at by those who should enforce it.

As Victor Davis Hanson says:

The American criminal justice system also used to earn the respect of conservatives. Prosecuting attorneys, police chiefs, and big-city mayors were seen as custodians of the public order. They were entrusted to keep the peace, to prevent and investigate crime, and to arrest and prosecute criminals.

Again, not so much now.

After 120 days of mostly unchecked riot, arson, looting, and violent protests during the summer of 2020, the public lost confidence in their public safety agencies.

District attorneys in several major cities – Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and St. Louis – have often predicated prosecuting crimes on the basis of ideology, race, and careerism.

In the current crime wave, brazen lawbreakers enjoy de facto immunity. Mass looting goes unpunished. Indictments are often aimed as much against those who defend themselves as against criminals who attack the innocent.

Government by the people has been corrupted by electoral fraud. And the military cannot be relied on to protect the nation:

Mention the military to conservative Americans these days, and they unfortunately associate its leadership with the disastrous flight from Afghanistan. Few, if any, high-ranking officers have yet taken responsibility – much less resigned – for the worst military fiasco of the last half-century.

Instead, President Joe Biden and the top generals traded charges that the other was responsible for the calamity. Or both insisted the abject flight was a logistical masterpiece.

Never in U.S. history have so many retired four-star admirals and generals disparaged their president with charges of being either a traitor, a liar, a fascist, or a virtual Nazi, as occurred during the last administration.

Never has the proper advisory role of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff been so brazenly usurped and contorted.

Never has the secretary of defense promised he would ferret out alleged “white supremacists” without providing any evidence whatsoever of their supposedly ubiquitous presence and dangerous conspiracies.

Worse, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff informed the hostile Communists who govern China that he would warn them if President Trump decided to attack their country with nuclear weapons.

Victor Davis Hanson concludes:

No one yet knows what the effect will be of half the country losing faith in the very pillars of American civilization.

Does it mean that the experiment of creating a nation from a benign philosophy has failed?

Some of the most recent topics under discussion:

Lament for the West – Cancel the Woke Before It’s Too Late

Event 201 – Pandemic or Scamdemic?

Now the Left – Whining, Racist, Spiteful – Urges the Use of Witchcraft

Klaus Schwab’s School For Covid Dictators, Plan for ‘Great Reset’

Tens of Thousands protest in Brussels against government anti-Covid measures youtube.com

YouTube Dislikes You

Mentally Fragile State Department Officials Broke Down Over Disastrous Afghanistan Withdrawal.

Please join us! We would like to know your opinion.

The splendidly clear-sighted researcher and writer and defender of reason Heather Mac Donald wrote this in a City Journal article, Spring 2020. Its truth abides.

The feminization of the university and the prominence of therapeutic culture [both of which she amply demonstrates to be facts] have created a perfect storm directed at free speech and reason. In a recent survey of college students, females were twice as likely as males to say that a controversial speaker should be canceled if the majority of students “feel emotionally unsafe or uncomfortable with the speaker’s content.” Males, by contrast, were more likely to support a controversial invitation in the name of academic freedom and the advancement of knowledge. …

The real crisis in academia is not mental health; it is the breakdown of universities’ understanding of their core mission. All other alleged crises follow from this one. Education exists for one main purpose: to pass on an inheritance of human achievement …  Yet faculty have lost the language for celebrating that inheritance; they have gone mute, or worse, when it comes to articulating the splendors of Western civilization.

College is not even about the promotion of happiness. That is too utilitarian a goal; knowledge is an end in itself. But even were student happiness a legitimate matter for colleges to concern themselves with, a therapeutic approach is the wrong way to cultivate it. The surest route to happiness is a passion for something outside the self. The only thing that kept Bertrand Russell from committing suicide during his adolescence was his desire to learn more math, he recounts in his 1930 book, The Pursuit of Happiness. As an adult, his “diminishing preoccupation” with himself led to growing contentment: “Every external interest inspires some activity which, so long as the interest remains alive, is a complete preventive of ennui,” he wrote. J. S. Mill, who also grappled with depression, agreed. “The only chance [for happiness] is to treat, not happiness, but some end external to it, as the purpose of life,” Mill wrote in his autobiography. …

Away with Women’s Studies (and Black Studies, Chicano Studies …)!

Our civilization is engaged in an unprecedented experiment: turning on its own accomplishments with shame and contempt. American students growing up today are given reason to be proud of their heritage only if they have had that rare nonconforming teacher who still honors the past. Otherwise, students are taught to see in the monuments of Western thought and imagination a thinly veiled power grab. They themselves are either oppressors or the oppressed, either category spirit-killing. …

The university’s comparative advantage over all other institutions should be the promise of real knowledge. But as the therapeutic culture has spread throughout the university, the language of reason and evidence has been replaced by claims of emotional hurt. In any controversy, the person who can express the deepest outrage or injury wins the day …  “I feel like” substitutes for rational argument.

Of course women are the emotional sex. Their feelings rule them because their physiology torments them. Their temperatures go up and down as the moon waxes and wanes.

Dear Patriarchs,

Thank you for still being there.

Please don’t put women at the helm of the ship of state. Do not put their fingers on “the nuclear button”. Do not seat them in a passenger-jet cockpit. Do not send them to the battle front. Do not give them the job of defending the innocent or prosecuting the guilty in a court of law, or judging guilt and innocence.

Do not give them power.

There are exceptions among them who are capable of reason. Those few will make themselves known. As a general rule –  be nice to women but remind them that there are only two sexes, and they’re the sex that’s destined by biological evolution to feel the tragedy of life, while you can laugh at its comedy.

Let them weep and wail. Out of earshot.

You? Discover and invent.