The point of no return 4
James Hankins and Allen C. Guelzo … noted in the first chapter of Where Next?: Civilization at the Crossroads that “Civilization is always threatened by barbarism, and the greater threat often comes more from within than from without.”
The political philosopher James Burnham made a similar point when he argued that “Suicide is probably more frequent than murder as the end phase of a civilization.” …
The historian Arnold Toynbee spoke in this context of the “barbarization of the dominant minority.” When a society is robust and self-confident, Toynbee suggested, cultural influence travels largely from the elites to the proletariats. The elites furnish social models to be emulated. The proletariats are “softened,” Toynbee said, by their imitation of the manners and morals of a dominant elite. But when a society begins to falter, the imitation proceeds largely in the opposite direction: the dominant elite is coarsened by its imitation of proletarian manners. Toynbee spoke in this context of a growing “sense of drift,” “truancy,” “promiscuity,” and general “vulgarization” of manners, morals, and the arts. The elites, instead of holding fast to their own standards, suddenly begin to “go native” and adopt the dress, attitudes, and behavior of the lower classes. Flip on your television, scroll through social media, look at the teens and pre-teens in your middle-class neighborhood. You will see what Toynbee meant by “barbarization of the dominant [or, rather ‘once-dominant’] minority.” One part of the impulse is summed up in the French phrase nostalgie de la boue. But it is not “mud” that is sought so much as repudiation. …
What we are talking about is the drift, the tendency of our culture. And that is to be measured not so much by what we permit or forbid as by what we unthinkingly accept as normal. This crossroads, that is to say, is part of a process, one of whose markers is the normalization of the outré. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan described this development as “defining deviancy down.” It is, as the late columnist Charles Krauthammer observed, a two-way process. “As part of the vast social project of moral leveling,” he wrote, it is not enough for the deviant to be normalized. The normal must be found to be deviant. . . . Large areas of ordinary behavior hitherto considered benign have had their threshold radically redefined up, so that once innocent behavior now stands condemned as deviant. Normal middle-class life then stands exposed as the true home of violence and abuse and a whole catalog of aberrant acting and thinking.”
Hilaire Belloc espied the culmination of this process in Survivals and New Arrivals (1929):
“When it is mature we shall have, not the present isolated, self-conscious insults to beauty and right living, but a positive coordination and organized affirmation of the repulsive and the vile.” …
Jean Raspail’s Camp of the Saints (1973) … imagines a world in which Western Civilization is overrun and destroyed by unfettered Third-World immigration. It describes an instance of wholesale cultural suicide … Conspicuous in that apocalypse is the feckless collusion of white Europeans and Americans in their own supersession. They faced an existential crossroads. They chose extinction, laced with the emotion of higher virtue, rather than survival. …
In 1994, Irving Kristol wrote an important essay called Countercultures. In it, he noted that “‘Sexual liberation’ is always near the top of a countercultural agenda—though just what form the liberation takes can and does vary, sometimes quite widely.” The costumes and rhetoric change, but the end is always the same: an assault on the defining institutions of our civilization. “Women’s liberation,” Kristol continues, “is another consistent feature of all countercultural movements—liberation from husbands, liberation from children, liberation from family. Indeed, the real object of these various sexual heterodoxies is to disestablish the family as the central institution of human society, the citadel of orthodoxy.”
In Eros and Civilization (1966), the Marxist countercultural guru Herbert Marcuse provided an illustration of Kristol’s thesis avant la lettre. Railing against “the tyranny of procreative sexuality,” Marcuse urged his followers to return to a state of “primary narcissism” and extolled the joys of “polymorphous perversity.” Are we there yet? … Marcuse sought to enlist a programmatically unfruitful sexuality in his campaign against “capitalism” and the cultural establishment: barrenness as a revolutionary desideratum. Back then, the diktat seemed radical but self-contained, another crackpot effusion from the academy. Today, it is a widespread mental health problem, accepted gospel preached by teachers, the media, and legislators across the country. As I write, the National Women’s Law Center has just taken to Twitter to declare that “People of all genders need abortions.” How many things had to go wrong for someone, presumably female, to issue that bulletin? “All genders,” indeed. I recall the observation, attributed to Voltaire, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
In The Catholic Tradition and the Modern State”(1916), the historian Christopher Dawson wrote, “It is not liberty, but power which is the true note of our modern civilization. Man has gained infinitely in his control over Nature, but he has lost control over his own individual life.” I think this is true. And there is a political as well as a technical or scientific dimension to the phenomenon Dawson describes.
[It may be true, but the underlined sentence is annoyingly badly written. When “Man” is used as a generic term, “he” cannot be said to have an “individual life”. A better formulation of the idea Dawson is trying to express: Humankind has gained greatly in control over Nature, but individuals have lost control over their own lives.]
In the West, what we have witnessed since the so-called “Progressive” movement of the 1910s and 1920s is the rise of a bureaucratic elite that has increasingly absorbed the prerogatives of power from legislative bodies. In the United States, for example, Article I of the Constitution vests all legislative power in Congress. For many decades, however, Americans have been ruled less by laws duly enacted by their representatives in Congress and more by an alphabet soup of regulatory agencies. The members of these bodies are elected by no one; they typically work outside the purview of public scrutiny; and yet their diktats have the force of law. Already in the 1940s, James Burnham was warning about the prospect of a “managerial revolution” that would accomplish by bureaucracy what traditional politics had failed to produce. Succeeding decades have seen the extraordinary growth of this leviathan, the unchecked multiplication of its offices and powers, and the encroaching reach of its tentacles into the interstices of everyday life. We are now, to an extent difficult to calculate, ruled by this “administrative state”, the “deep state”, the “regulatory state”. …
When in September 2020 the World Economic Forum at Davos announced its blueprint for a “Great Reset” in the wake of the worldwide panic over COVID-19, a new crossroads had been uncovered. Never letting a crisis go to waste, the Davos initiative was an extensive menu of progressive, i.e., socialistic imperatives. Here at last was an opportunity to enact a worldwide tax on wealth, a far-reaching (and deeply impoverishing) “green energy” agenda, rules that would dilute national sovereignty, and various schemes to insinuate politically correct attitudes into the fabric of everyday life. All this was being promulgated for our own good, of course. But it was difficult to overlook the fact that the WEF plan involved nothing less than the absorption of liberty by the extension of bureaucratic power.
Kimball’s idea is that we are now at a point – a “crossroads”, or a fork in the road – where we have a choice to make: restore and preserve Western civilization, OR let it die.
I do not think we have that choice. “The drift, the tendency of our culture” has gone too far in the direction of “the repulsive and the vile” to be stemmed and diverted back to “right living”. Western Civilization has been “overrun and destroyed by unfettered [unobstructed] Third-World immigration”.
We are at – we have have passed the point of no return.
Jillian Becker December 12, 2022
The sudden decline and fall of America 99
… from triumph to abasement.
“So, the Left won its Pyrrhic victory,” Victor Davis Hanson writes at American Greatness.
Having control of the White House and both Houses of Congress, what have the Democrats accomplished with all that power?
Their priority was to undo what President Trump had done.
What followed was a concerted effort to destroy the Trump record.
What had Trump achieved? Most importantly –
The greatest level of combined annual natural gas and oil production in any nation’s history, record low minority unemployment and near record peacetime, general unemployment, a border secure and illegal immigration finally under control, and a New Middle East in which Israel and its Arab enemies concluded neutrality pacts. China was put on notice for its past mockery of global norms. Inflation was low, growth was good. “Stagflation” was still a rarely remembered word from the past. …
Then came the rule of the Left and –
Within eight months the following was finalized [by the Democrats]:
Joe Biden utterly destroyed the idea of a border. Some 2 million were scheduled to cross illegally in the current fiscal year. The sheer inhumanity of deplorable conditions at the border surpassed any notion of the “cages” Donald Trump, in fact, had inherited from the humanitarian Barack Obama.
A war almost immediately broke out in the Middle East, once Biden distanced the United States from Israel and rebooted the radical Palestinian cause.
The Taliban defeated the 20-year effort of the United States in Afghanistan, in the most humiliating withdrawal of the American military in over 45 years. Tens of billions of dollars of abandoned military equipment now arm the Taliban and have turned Afghanistan into a world arms mart for terrorists.
Whereupon –
Iran is emboldened and speeds up its nuclear proliferation efforts.
China brags that the United States has been Afghanistanized and will not defend its allies, Taiwan in particular.
At home, gas prices have soared.
Prior trillion-dollar deficits now seem financially prudent in comparison to multitrillion-dollar red ink.
The nation is more racially polarized than at any time in the last half-century.
A bleak and venomous woke creed has outdone the hate and fear of the McCarthyism of the 1950s, as it wages war on half the nation for various thought crimes …
With Biden came not just woke polarization, stagflation, a subsidized ennui that erodes the work ethic, and selective non-enforcement of existing laws: wors, still, we got a bankrupt ideological defense of these insanities. Critical legal theory, critical race theory, and a new monetary theory were all dreamed up by parlor academics to justify the nihilism.
And among the shocks administered to Americans as their country fails and falls, acts of treachery and deeds of corruption:
Did America ever believe that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff would trash his commander in chief as Hitlerian to journalist hitmen, or allegedly denounce news organizations as “terrorists”, or interrupt the chain of command on a prompt by the Speaker of the House, or warn the Chinese military that he believed there was enough instability in the White House to justify a promise to warn of any impending U.S. military action against Beijing deemed offensive? …
With Biden, China is now omnipresent in the halls of power. A task of our chief COVID advisor, Anthony Fauci, seems to be to deny repeatedly that his stealthy funding of gain-of-function research at the Wuhan virology lab in China had anything to do with the likely accidental release of a likely human engineered and energized coronavirus. Americans still cannot even imagine that their government might have helped subsidize the plague germ that has wrought such havoc upon them.
Meanwhile the president’s son still owns a 10 percent cut in a communist Chinese government-affiliated financial venture, apparently due to his prior drug-addled record of financial mismanagement. The media still insists Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation”, while his paint-by-numbers art is auctioned off to foreign lobbyists expecting a return of the old days when Hunter and Joe grandly arrived on Air Force Two to do their bidding.
All who voted for Trump are declared to be “white-supremacists’ and “terrorists”. Peaceful protestors are labeled “insurrectionists” and locked up without charge as political prisoners, while violent protestors are called “peaceful”. The “peaceful” rioters, arsonists, and killers are alone exempted from having to wear masks in obedience to the absurd restrictions imposed on the rest of the nation in the time of pestilence, on the grounds that their ideological correctness sanitizes and immunizes them.
Our esteemed retired military and civil libertarians who had damned the mere thought of using federal troops to quell the prior four summer months of continuous rioting were suddenly happy to see 25,000 federal soldiers patrol Washington to hound out fantasy second-wave insurrectionists. …. There were now to be good federal troops deterring mythical violent domestic extremists, but bad federal troops who should never stop real, ongoing mayhem in the streets.
When there were –
120 days of continuous rioting, looting, and arson. In the election-year summer 2020, federal courthouses and iconic buildings were torched. Nearly $2 billion worth of property was destroyed and 28 were killed. Yet Vice President Kamala Harris rallied the public to help bail out the arrested. … The weeks of “spontaneous” mayhem magically vanished after November 3, 2020 [when Biden “won” the election]. Note that esteemed medical professionals argued that BLM protestors who flooded the streets were exempt from quarantine, social distancing, and mask requirements, given their higher morality.
Convicted criminals have been let out of prison by the thousands. The innocent are punished. The guilty go free – and are rewarded.
America’s undoing has taken less than a year.
Feel the collapse 7
Resist not evil (Matthew 5:39 KJV)
In humility count others more significant than yourselves (Philippians 2:3 English Standard Version)
Victor Davis Hanson writes at American Greatness:
Americans are growing angrier by the day in a way different from prior sagebrush revolts such as the 1960s Silent Majority or Tea Party furor of over a decade ago.
The rage at the current status quo this time is not just fueled by conservatives. For the first time in their lives, all Americans of all classes and races are starting to fear a self-created apocalypse that threatens their families’ safety and the American way of life.
The border is not just porous as in the pre-Trump past. It is nonexistent. Some 2 million people may cross illegally in the current fiscal year—with complete impunity.
There is zero effort to stop them. Officials daily hector Americans to get vaccinated and tested for COVID. But they are mute about illegal entrants, some of them infected with the virus.
Joe Biden has conceded that his hold on housing evictions deliberately defied a Supreme Court ruling. He added that he probably did not have the legal authority to ignore the court, but did not really care.
As in the case of demolishing immigration law, the president seems either unaware or proud that he is insidiously dismantling the Constitution.
America has never quite seen such overt and multifaceted efforts to undermine the foundations of free-market capitalism.
At a time of resurging GDP, low unemployment, and record worker shortages [thanks to Trump – ed.], Biden has announced that renters can continue to avoid paying what they owe their landlords—even after a prior year of such free housing.
In a rebounding economy amid record debt, the government is still sending workers unemployment benefits that are more remunerative than the paychecks they would earn if employed.
Such insanity means not only that labor-short employers cannot provide goods and services to American consumers. The new ethos also institutionalizes the pernicious idea that it is smarter to stay home and idle than to get a job and be productive.
Biden is also considering further extending exemptions for the repayment of $1.7 trillion in student loans. That amnesty will only further mainstream this growing notion that borrowing money entails no legal or moral obligation to pay it back.
No one seems to acknowledge that both students and the universities—which lured them to borrow—knew exactly the risks they were taking. Meanwhile, millions of American youth, the working classes who choose not to attend college, and those who paid their loans off or whose parents saved enough over the years to cover their tuition obligations, will subsidize those who renege of their debts by paying higher taxes.
Inflation is roaring back as the administration is printing trillions of new dollars that do not reflect commensurate gains in productivity or population.
Soaring prices are a direct result of incentivizing the unemployed not to work, while discouraging manufacturers and producers of food, gas, oil, timber, mineral, and metals.
The crime wave likewise is not accidental. It is the logical result of deliberate nihilistic policies of releasing thousands of criminals from jails and prisons, defunding and defaming the police, and empowering woke mayors and prosecutors to contextualize crime as the fault of society, not of the criminal.
In response, millions of Americans now simply avoid the mayhem and chaos of blue-state big cities.
Race relations have regressed 50 years. Under the fad of critical race theory, the color of our skins is now deemed essential to who we are.
The current woke revolution is an elite, top-down effort to smear the nation as some sort of contemporary racist hellhole.
All this multifaceted chaos is not just faculty lounge stuff. We are beginning to see the collective craziness filter down to disruptions in our everyday lives.
Airliners cannot take off due to fuel shortages. Automobiles, houses, gas, and lumber are in short supply.
Consumers can’t get their roofs fixed or their houses painted or the trees trimmed as employers plead to their idle government-subsidized employees to come back to work.
No one knows whether our laws even still exist—or at least exist haphazardly depending on who breaks them.
Thieves steal with brazen impunity.
Scared Americans have lost faith in the FBI, the CIA, the Pentagon, the CDC, and most of the federal bureaucracies that are as politicized as they are increasingly incompetent.
What started out as elite woke nonsense now warps everyone’s daily life. If we don’t wake up from wokeness, we will continue on our sure trajectory to self-inflicted, systemic paralysis—followed by civilizational collapse.
Accused by the ruling elite, many Americans are doing penance for actions they never took, words they never spoke, ideas they never thought. They plead guilty to being oppressors. In penance they hand power to their destroyers and abase themselves.
Why do millions of Americans accept the accusation that they are guilty of oppressing minorities when they are doing no such thing?
Could it be because a religion, still common to millions of Americans, taught self-abasement to generation after generation? Taught that you were born guilty? That you must always put the wants of others above your own?
That you must not resist evil?
All they need is hope (giggle giggle) 3
The problem of the mass migration of Central Americans into the United States at “President” Biden’s invitation, is too big for him to handle.
President Donald Trump had put in place an array of disincentives to discourage would-be migrants from making the journey north. Biden removed Trump’s disincentives and suspended the construction of his border wall.
The Biden gang running this administration …
… has opened the door wide to illegal immigrants and encouraged mass migration to this country on the way to achieving their utopian vision of “No borders. No nations”. In the process, they are destroying piece by piece the rule of law that undergirds America’s constitutional republic.
Now there is a crisis at the border of Biden’s making, and he has no idea how to deal with it.
So he’s handed it off to his chosen “Vice President”, Kamala Harris.
In an article at Front Page, Joseph Klein includes this information:
Vice President Kamala Harris is Biden’s choice to work on stemming the flow of migrants from Central America.
She has neither visited the U.S.-Mexico border nor gone down to the Central American countries to study for herself the situation on the ground.
But she has a solution for the problem:
Harris recommended focusing on –
“An important four-letter word, which I hope always inspires us to do the work we do, and that word is ‘hope’. And in this regard, in – in our focus on the Northern Triangle, looking at the fact that we have an opportunity — as the United States of America, with the resources and with the will that we have — to provide the people with some hope that if they stay at home, help is on the way and they can have some hope that the opportunities and the needs that they have will be met in some way.”
Then she giggled.
She would like to hand the problem off, in her turn, to “our allies” [?] through that just and effective organization, the UN. That would be “some way“. Perhaps.
Harris did suggest internationalizing the effort to encourage economic development. “That includes reaching out to our allies, through the U.N.,” she said [and giggled].
Joseph Klein points out:
The United Nations is the wrong organization to rely upon, given its own corruption problems and its encouragement of more open borders.
When Harris was asked if she was planning a visit to the southern border, she replied that her job was to “lead the issue of dealing with root causes in the Northern Triangle”.
She was able to say which countries form “the Northern Triangle”! On that she had been briefed. She named them as Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador.
And she has a plan for them [she said, giggling].
Her plan is to give their people hope. Hope that they can survive in their homelands. Then they will not want to come to [what used to be] the United States.
Problem solved. Or will be. Perhaps. In some way.
Guffaw!
Joe Biden aids the human-traffickers 1
Last night (Tuesday April 7, 2021), Mark Steyn hosted Fox News Primetime. Fox reports:
“Under the laughably misnamed Department of Homeland Security there’s now an express check-in — Just get a human trafficker to throw you into the country,” [Mark Steyn] said, pointing to video of Mexican traffickers dropping toddlers off of a 14-foot section of border wall constructed under President Donald Trump.
“It’s time for your toddler to start crawling — through the desert,” he said.
Steyn said that for some reason, people on the left see a lax immigration system like the one being instituted as “compassionate”.
“[They] think the government being industrial-scale enablers of some of the most evil people on the planet is progressive and compassionate. It’s not,” he said.
“There is nothing kind about incentivizing human trafficking, which, by the way, is merely a synonym for slavery and the same people who want to tear down the statue if the guy’s family had a plantation 300 years ago are all cool with the global trade in human beings of the 21st century.”
“So, Joe Biden or whoever has got his hand waggling that moth-eaten sock-puppet is consciously enriching these cartels and ensuring that they can expand their operations including more fentanyl to kill Americans and some would-be jihadists now and then.”
Steyn said the U.S. is witnessing what is becoming a “lopsided business partnership between America and coyotes at a time of global pandemic — when almost every national border on the planet, including the northern U.S. Border is closed down”.
The once and future president? 8
Will Donald Trump return to lead America and the world?
Conrad Black thinks that he could.
He writes at American Greatness:
It is a tainted election, with a poor result and a disquietingly unprepossessing presumptive president-elect.
A tainted election it is. And the [probable] president-elect Joe Biden is certainly unprepossessing, but the pejorative is too weak. More to the point, he is senile and corrupt.
The writer goes on:
The current president did great damage to himself by his frequent lapses into boorish self-obsession.
Conrad Black has often criticized President Trump in those terms, lending strength to the unjustified contumely flung at him by his enemies. (Too many commentators who generally support him, feel compelled to ritually note something about him they disapprove of, as if to cover themselves from accusations of poor taste or weak discernment.) Donald Trump is not obsessed with himself, but with the desire to make America more prosperous, more happy, more great. He has a great talent for the comic riposte, with a perfect sense of timing, and often laughs at himself.
Example:
His haters call him “Orange Man”; so he finds fault with the lightbulbs Obama wanted to make state-approved and compulsory by saying, “They make me look orange – has anyone noticed that?”
And when insults are flung at him, as they constantly are in the most vulgar, filthy, vicious, murderous terms, he can and does retort, chiefly by applying apt tags to their names – never vicious, never cruel, never obscene, never outright lies as are those they apply to him.
Examples:
They say he is disrespectful of women (which he is not), so he retorts, truthfully – naming his most persistent female denigrator – “Only Rosie O’Donnell.”
They say he is a misogynist – and yet, with puritan tight lips, they also accuse him of adultery and prurience. True, he indulged in locker-room boasting about his prowess at sexual conquest – as men do. His haters wail that it is an immense stain on his character, making him a threat to all women. Thousands of the loathsome army of feminists put on pink hats and took to the public square to pretend they had been deeply insulted. They are the same sort of women who defended Bill Clinton against justified accusations of actual sexual exploitation and even rape.
They pretend to be appalled that he called Kim Jong-un “Rocket Man”. Considering that no name would be bad enough for that murdering communist dictator, “Rocket Man” was mild enough, and more importantly it stigmatized him for the menace that he was, firing off rockets that could carry nuclear warheads.
The president stood unflinching and unshaken as insults were flung at him continuously as hailstones, and they made not a visible dent in his composure – yet they call him “thin-skinned”! Battalions of haters with powerful means to do him harm hampered and undermined him in every way they could dream up, accusing him of absurd crimes and disgraceful actions which they knew to be pure fiction, yet he steadily proceeded to do great good for his country, and to spread peace in the world at large.
They say he is a racist. But he has worked all his adult life with and among people of many races and has never shown the least trace of race prejudice. To justify this accusation they say he called Mexican aliens entering the US illegally “rapists” – which too many of them, whatever their number, were and are.
They say he is anti-Semitic. But not only are members of his own family including some of his grandchildren Jewish, no American president has ever done as much for the Jews as he has done. No leader of any country has done as much. His amazing achievement of brokering peace between the Israelis and the Arabs alone has earned him a place among the great leaders of history.
They say he called neo-Nazis “good people”, which is a flat lie. That he encourages “right-wing extremism” though he never has and never would. That he welcomes the support of the KKK. He does not. The KKK was founded and manned wholly by his enemies, the Democrats.
Even some of his friends and supporters blame him for habitually writing short messages to his followers on Twitter. How else should he communicate with the millions of them when the media refuse to report the truth of what he says or what he does? Conrad Black grants him that, saying: “In a pioneering way, he used social media to communicate directly with the public and successfully countered the traditional political media.”
Some of those friends speak of him as being “flawed”, as if a there could ever be a human being – even that revered Jew who they say lived in the age of Augustus – who is not “flawed”.
Conrad Black is one of those friends. But his admiration for Donald Trump is nevertheless strong. He writes:
He also had an outstanding term of achievement in the face of unprecedented obstruction and illegal harassment, as well as the almost unanimous and hysterical antagonism of a totalitarian opposition media. And so he’s being evicted.
The new administration comes in for serious censure:
Taking his place is a ramshackle coalition of big media, big money, big tech, big league sports, Hollywood, most of Wall Street, and an odious ragtag of urban guerrillas masquerading as civil rights crusaders. … The Democrats … have been effectively taken over by socialist, self-hating whites, white-hating blacks, and guilt-ridden renunciators of any recognizable version of American history and values. …
The political atmosphere is so charged, it is intolerable.
Donald Trump narrowly won his campaign in 2016 against the bipartisan post-Reagan political class that he and an adequate number of his countrymen believed, with a plenitude of evidence, had thoroughly misgoverned the country. The previous 20 years under administrations and congresses of both parties had been an unsatisfactory time of endless, fruitless war in the Middle East and an immense humanitarian refugee disaster, the worst economic crisis since the 1930s, millions of unskilled immigrants pouring illegally across the Mexican-U.S. border, unfavorable trade arrangements, and China advancing by leaps and bounds at America’s expense. Trump effectively ended almost all of that and eliminated unemployment and oil imports as well.
Much, probably all, of the good that President Trump did will likely be undone by the corruptocracy coming to power.
Conrad Black, consolingly, declares that the incoming administration will fail:
The celebration of Trump’s enemies will soon bore the public and the media will soon cease to lionize the ungalvanizing Biden and his entourage of political manipulators and faction-heads. There will be little leadership, little unity, and they will be to the left of the country, stalled by the Congress, and generally tedious and ineffectual. The times will not be gentle and the attempt of Anthony Blinken and John Kerry and the other quavering Obamans to sanitize the world and collegialize the Western Alliance will be an almost total failure.
He conjectures that Donald Trump could return triumphantly to power :
If he holds his fire for a year and allows the mediocrity and ineptitude of Bidenism … to be exposed in its infirmity, Trump will make the greatest American political comeback since FDR came out of his convalescence from polio and rolled his wheelchair into the White House, which would be his home for the remaining 12 years of his life.
A return of the great president is deeply to be desired. But the ramshackle coalition of Leftist forces that Conrad Black describes is united in one thing – a passionate determination to take away every existing and imaginable means and opportunity the Right could make use of to regain power.
As our commenter Cogito has several time pointed out, the reign (so to speak) of Donald Trump can be likened to that of the Emperor Julian (361-363 C.E.). Emperor after emperor had allowed the dark tide of intolerant Christianity to spread over the Roman Empire. Julian tried to stop it. But he was killed in battle before he had succeeded. For a little while there was light, but when he was gone the darkness came back and Europe remained stagnant for a thousand years.
We would liken it also to the decade of Margaret Thatcher’s leadership in Britain. She tried, against ferocious resistance, to stop the advance of socialism. For a time the British people were free and prosperous, share-owning and property-owning. Then swamp creatures in her own party and the opposition defeated her and the decay of the kingdom resumed.
While Donald Trump has been in the White House, America has enjoyed prosperity and freedom. Was it nothing more than a brief bright interval in a time of Western decay that is now again gathering pace?
Or will President Trump return?
What European union? 2
It seems more than probable that the rickety, corrupt, gynocratic, dictatorial European Union is being finally destroyed by the Chinese Virus.
Its ultimate test came with the pandemic. The country worst affected – even worse perhaps than China itself where the pestilence originated – is the EU member-state, Italy.
In an article published today (March 21, 2020) by Gatestone, titled European Union: The End?, Judith Bergman writes:
Italy appealed [to the EU] for help at the beginning of its coronavirus crisis – and received in return exactly nothing. …
In addition, Germany and France, leading EU member states, even imposed bans or limitations on the export [sic] of facemasks and protective equipment.
The very idea that the countries of Europe, with their different characters, temperaments, languages, histories, traditions, capabilities and cultures, could form a union like the United States of America, was farcical. The attempt to implement it has been a prolonged pretense, a staged sham, a parody doomed to the ugly failure it is now proving to be.
Reality is exposing the make-believe, breaking up the theatrical performance:
When an entire continent is in the midst of a highly contagious virus epidemic, solidarity becomes a more complex issue. Every state inevitably considers whether it can afford to send facemasks and protective equipment that might be needed for its own citizens. In other words, every state considers its own national interest first. In the case of Italy’s appeal for help, EU member states made their own interests their highest priority. This is classic state behavior and would not have caused any outrage prior to the establishment of the European Union.
What the coronavirus crisis reveals is that the member states of the European Union will revert to national interests when extreme circumstances call for it. While such revelations may not spell the immediate end of the European Union, they certainly raise questions about the point of an organization that pledges solidarity as a founding principle, but abandons that principle the moment it is most called for.
And it’s not only the awful reality of a highly infectious disease that is forcing the diverse nations to admit and attend to necessary self interest. There is also the Islamic invasion, now reaching a climax as Turkey threatens to pour a million Muslim immigrants – aka “refugees” – into Europe through the poor EU member-state Greece. Greece found itself standing alone against an incoming human tide. Greek soldiers guarded the border, shot live ammunition into the invading hordes, and even exchanged fire with a Turkish tank or two.
As Judith Bergman says –
Coronavirus, however, is not the only recent issue to put into question the viability of the European Union.
The current crisis on the Greek-Turkish border has shown the EU not only as unhelpful, but an actual liability: The EU left an already overwhelmed Greece to deal with the migrant crisis — manufactured by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan for political gain – on its own, despite the apparent rhetorical support by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who called Greece Europe’s “shield”.
President Erdoğan wants Turkey’s admittance to the EU, and billions of Euros in aid. Angela Merkel, still de facto leader of the wealthiest member-state Germany and therefore also of the EU, pays again and again.
Turkey’s migrant blackmail worked surprisingly well and surprisingly fast. …
Erdoğan got what he wanted.
The money, anyway. Five billion euros already given is only a start.
Consequently, on March 18, Erdoğan announced that the migrant crisis that he had orchestrated was officially over: Turkey was closing its borders with Greece and Bulgaria, ostensibly due to the coronavirus. The Telegraph cited reports from Turkish news website Medyascope that around 150 buses had been readied to collect migrants from the border and ferry them back to Istanbul and refugee camps.
Erdoğan can use the same threat as often as he chooses. And it will continue to work for him. Until Angela Merkel goes. Or the EU itself has gone with the infected wind of change.
The EU may not formalize its disbandment for a while yet, but who can continue to believe in its viability now?
Revolution? 4
Is America in the throes of a revolution? Are we sliding unstoppably into totalitarian communism?
Angelo Codevilla writes at American Greatness:
Some conservatives, rejoicing that impeachment turned into yet another of #TheResistance’s political train wrecks and that President Trump is likely to be reelected by a bigger margin than in 2016, expect that a chastened ruling class will return to respecting the rest of us. They are mistaken.
Trump’s reelection, by itself, cannot protect us. The ruling class’s intolerance of the 2016 election’s results was intolerance of us.
Nor was their intolerance so much a choice as it was the expression of its growing sense of its own separate identity, of power and of entitlement to power. The halfhearted defenses with which the offensives of the ruling class have been met already advertise the fact that it need not and will not accept the outcome of any presidential election it does not win. Trump notwithstanding, this class will rule henceforth as it has in the past three years. So long as its hold on American institutions continues to grow, and they retain millions of clients, elections won’t really matter.
Our country is in a state of revolution, irreversibly, because society’s most influential people have retreated into moral autarchy, …
Autarchy, or autocracy, is rule by a dictator. Has any Democrat proclaimed a desire for a dictator, or to be a dictator? If so, we missed it. The Democrats want absolute power in their own hands, but have’t yet wished up a Stalin or a Mao. It’s highly likely that Bernie Sanders would like to be an American Stalin, but has he admitted it?
Besides which, there is not a single Democratic candidate for the presidency of the United States who could run a poll in Iowa, let alone the country.
Moral autarchy? Not sure what that means. But okay, let’s accept the term in order to follow the writer’s argument.
… have seceded from America’s constitutional order, and because they browbeat their socio-political adversaries instead of trying to persuade them. Theirs is not a choice that can be reversed. It is a change in the character of millions of people.
Does character change? Does the character of a people – a nation – change? What characterizes any nation must by definition be what does not change about it. For a country to change its character it would have to have its population replaced by a different population – as is happening rapidly in Sweden, France, Spain, and Germany. The Democrats seem to like the idea of America becoming more “Hispanic” than “Anglo”, but it hasn’t happened yet, and might never happen.
There has been a change in America over the last 70 years or so. It is not a change of character. In all their variety, Americans are recognizably the same as they were 100 years ago. What has changed in America are ideas about values and morals, about what matters and what doesn’t.
And that is what the article under discussion is really about.
The sooner conservatives realize that the Republic established between 1776 and 1789—the America we knew and loved—cannot return, the more fruitfully we will be able to manage the revolution’s clear and present challenges to ourselves. How are we to deal with a ruling class that insists on ruling—elections and generally applicable rules notwithstanding—because it regards us as lesser beings?
The resistance that reached its public peaks in the Brett Kavanaugh hearings and the impeachment imbroglio should have left no doubt about the socio-political arbitrariness that flows from the ruling class’s moral autarchy, about the socio-political power of the ruling class we’re forced to confront, or of its immediate threat to our freedom of speech.
Chief Justice John Roberts, presiding over the Senate’s impeachment trial, was as clear an example as any of that moral autarchy and its grip on institutions.
Pursuant to Senate rules, Senator Rand Paul sent a written question through Roberts to House Manager Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) regarding the extent of collaboration between Schiff’s staffer Sean Misko and his longtime fellow partisan, CIA officer Eric Ciaramella in starting the charges that led to impeachment. Roberts, having read the question to himself, declared: “The presiding officer declines to read the question as submitted.”
The chief justice of the United States, freedom of speech’s guardian-in-chief, gave no reason for declining to read Paul’s question. The question was relevant to the proceedings. It violated no laws, no regulations. The names of the two persons were known to every member of the House and Senate, as well as to everyone around the globe who had followed news reports over the previous months. But the Democratic Party had been campaigning to drive from public discussion that this impeachment stemmed from the partisan collaboration between a CIA officer and a Democratic staffer.
“Collaboration” is the polite term for it; “conspiracy” the more accurate one.
Accordingly, the mainstream media had informally but totally banned discussion of this fact, supremely relevant but supremely embarrassing to Schiff in particular and to Democrats in general. Now, Paul was asking Schiff officially to comment on the relationship. Schiff could have explained it, or refused to explain it. But Roberts saved him the embarrassment and trouble—and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) spared senators the problem of voting on a challenge to Roberts’s ruling. The curtain of official concealment, what the Mafia calls the omertà, remained intact. Why no reason?
Just as no dog wags his tail without a reason, neither did Roberts wag his without reason. Neither the laws of the United States nor the rules of the Senate told the presiding officer to suppress the senator’s question. Why was Roberts pleased to please those he pleased and to displease those he displeased? In short, why did this impartial presiding officer act as a man partial to one side against the other?
This professional judge could hardly have been impressed by the ruling class’s chosen instrument, Adam Schiff, or by Schiff’s superior regard for legal procedure. Since Schiff’s prosecution featured hiding the identity of the original accuser—after promising to feature his testimony—and since it featured secret depositions, blocked any cross-examination of its own witnesses, and prevented the defense from calling any of their own, it would have been strange if Chief Justice Roberts’s bias was a professional one.
Is it possible that Roberts favored the substance of the ruling class claim that neither President Trump nor any of his defenders have any right to focus public attention on the Biden family’s use of public office to obtain money in exchange for influence? That, after all, is what Washington is largely about. Could Roberts also love corruption so much as to help conceal it? No.
Roberts’s professional and ethical instincts incline him the other way. Nevertheless, he sustained the ruling class’s arbitrariness. Whose side did he take? His dinner companions’ side? The media’s? His wife’s? Roberts’s behavior—contrary as it was to his profession, to his morals, and to his political provenance—shows how great is the ruling class’s centripetal force.
The sad but inescapable consequence of this force is that conservatives have no choice but to follow the partisan logic of revolution—fully conscious of the danger that partisanship can make us as ridiculously dishonest as Adam Schiff or CNN’s talking heads, into rank-pullers like John Roberts, and into profiteers as much as any member of the Biden family.
Do conservatives have no choice but to go along with “the revolution”, with the abandonment of the values that inspired the Constitution, with corruption as a matter of indisputable but unchangeable fact?
The writer then seems to change his mind. He suggests there is a choice:
And yet, revolution is war, the proximate objective of which is to hurt the other side until it loses the capacity and the will to do us harm. That means treating institutions and people from the standpoint of our own adversarial interest: controlling what we can either for our own use or for bargaining purposes, discrediting and abandoning what we cannot take from our enemies.
Opposing them by the means they choose, the weapons they use? That – so the writer suggests – is our best recourse?
Unlike our enemies, our ultimate objective is, as Lincoln said, “peace among ourselves and with all nations”. But what kind of peace we may get depends on the extent to which we may compel our enemies to leave us in peace. And for that, we must do unto them more and before they do unto us.
Which is true? Do we have no choice but to join “the revolution” – a change from a free open society of self-reliant individuals into a government-controlled, race and sex obsessed, doom prophesying, totally organized community? Or are we still in control of our destiny? And if we fight our revolutionary enemy, must it be with their weapons, or ours? On their terms, or ours?
We do not see that there has been a revolution – though the Obama administration tried to make one. We do not think the only way to save America from totalitarian one-party rule is by following the rules laid down by the Gramsci-Alinsky school of sedition and the Cloward-Piven blueprint for chaos. (See here and here and here and here.)
By great good luck we have President Trump leading us in another direction, showing us another way, prioritizing better (characteristic) values: freedom, individual enterprise, innovation, industry, competence, patriotism, strength, ambition, self-confidence, prosperity. For a few more years at least. During which the Left revolutionaries may, in the fury of their frustration, stamp themselves into the ground.
Retreat from the Enlightenment 15
France is submitting to Islam.
“Voltaire fades before Muhammad, the Enlightenment before Submission.”
– Giulio Meotti quotes and comments in his article at Gatestone:
“Five years after the killings at Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher, France has learned to live with the Islamist threat,” wrote Yves Thréard, deputy editor at the daily newspaper Le Figaro.
Not a month goes by… without a murderous attack with the cry of “Allahu Akbar” taking place on our soil…. But what is the point of fighting the effects of Islamism if we do not tackle the origins of this ideology of death? On that front, however, denial continues to compete with naiveté. Nothing has changed in the last five years. On the contrary.
In the name of diversity, non-discrimination and human rights, France has accepted a number of blows to its culture and history… Islamists are a hot-button issue. They continue the fight which, even without weapons, has all the allure of a war of civilizations. Is the famous “Charlie spirit”, which some people thought was blowing after the January 2015 attacks, just an illusion?
France has been marking the fifth anniversary of the deadly jihadist attack on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which took place on January 7, 2015. Last month, French Senator Nathalie Goulet warned that more attacks were likely. “In France we have a serious problem and we need to do more to prevent extremists from acting. As it stands, there will be more attacks,” Goulet said. There are believed to be 12,000 radical Islamists on France’s terror watch-list, “however only a dozen are thought to be under 24-hour surveillance”.
This week was marked by yet a new string of Islamist terror attacks: police injured a knife-wielding man on a street in the northeastern city of Metz, two days after a suspected Islamist radical in the Paris suburb of Villejuif stabbed a man to death, an act that prosecutors are treating as a terror attack. In both incidents, the assailants shouted “Allahu Akbar.” This type of attack was dubbed “ordinary jihad” in a Le Figaro editorial this week.
On January 7, 2015, the cartoonists and journalists Cabu, Charb, Honoré, Tignous and Wolinski, the psychoanalyst Elsa Cayat, the economist Bernard Maris and the policeman Franck Brinsolaro fell under the bullets of the jihadist brothers Chérif and Saïd Kouachi. Charlie Hebdo‘s 2020 anniversary issue commemorated the massacre and slammed the “new gurus of monolithic thinking” who are trying to impose politically correct censorship.
The outburst of indignation of the French people, gathered in Paris for a massive demonstration on January 11, 2015, was not enough to awaken the spirit of resistance of the French leaders and elites against Islamism and its collaborators. “The seriousness of the Islamist political fact in France is strongly underestimated,” says the lawyer Thibault de Montbrial, president France’s Center for Internal Security Studies.
In a country that used to stand for freedom of expression, self-censorship is soaring. “For the humorists in France, it’s always easy to make fun of the Pope and the Catholics, it’s always easy to make fun of Jews, it’s always easy to make fun of Protestants,” confesses a long-time Charlie Hebdo columnist, Patrick Pelloux. For Islam, it is not easy. “We feel that this religion is scary. The word Islam is scary, and on that, the terrorists have won.”
While French prisons have become a breeding ground for jihadists, the Islamization of the cities’ suburbs, the banlieues, is proceeding full tilt. The weekly Le Point recently devoted a cover story to the “territories conquered by the Islamists”. In many of these areas, violence rages; 1,500 cars were torched there on New Year’s Eve. In recently published book, “Les territoires conquis de l’islamisme” (“The Territories Conquered by Islamism”), by Bernard Rougier, a professor at the University Sorbonne-Nouvelle and director of the Center for Arab and Oriental Studies, he explains that Islamism is an “hegemonic project”, splintering working-class neighborhoods. These “ecosystems”, he states, work on a “logic of rupture” of the French society, its values and institutions, and are built on mosques, bookstores, sport clubs and halal restaurants. …
“Today,” said the president of the Ministry of Education’s Conseil supérieur des programmes, Souâd Ayada, “the visibility of Islam in France is saturated by the veil and the jihad.”
Souad Ayada is a Muslim, a spécialiste de la spiritualité et de philosophie islamiques, so it’s doubtful that she was complaining. (If those in charge of education in France all think so badly, no wonder the nation is fading away. “Visibility” cannot be”saturated”. Veils cannot saturate anything. Nor can “the jihad”. )
While Islamist preachers and recruiters are out on the streets, seeking out the weak minds that will form the first line of their holy war, political Islam also forms electoral lists in France’s suburbs.
French President Emmanuel Macron opposed banning these political groups.
“France is a budding Islamic republic,” noted the Algerian novelist Boualem Sansal. In those “territories”, he said, live many of the terrorists who attack France, from the Kouachi brothers of Charlie Hebdo to the jihadists who murdered [and tortured – ed] scores of people at the Bataclan Theater. …
Islamists have, in addition, recruited dozens of French soldiers and ex-servicemen who have converted to Islam. Many have come from commando units with expertise in handling weapons and explosives.
France is turning into a “society of vigilance” in its fight against the “Hydra” of Islamist militancy, as Macron said. …
He said that? But will do nothing to stop the influx of Muslims whose holy duty it is to wage jihad? Or even ban known “political groups”? “Vigilance” may not be quite enough.
Last October, an Islamist struck in one of France’s most secure buildings: the monumental Paris Police headquarters near Notre Dame cathedral, where he murdered four of his colleagues. … “It is hard to believe that the police on which we rely to protect us and which is supposed to be our last rampart against terrorism, can itself be the victim of terrorism, with throats slit in the holy of holies of the Police Prefecture.”
In the wake of the attack, seven police officers, “suspected of radicalization”, had their guns confiscated.
And without their guns they can do no harm? Their brother jihadists in London could teach them how to use knives and mechetes to inflict death and injury. But come to think of it, they know how. They used knives in the Bataclan Theater. “The French Parliamentary report contains details of how victims’ bodies had been mutilated, such as by eye-gouging, disemboweling, castration, and beheading,” Wikipedia reports.
“I have the impression that our immune defenses have collapsed and that Islamism is winning,” says the French writer Pascal Bruckner.
There’s an observant citizen!
He is quoted further:
[Islam’s] main demands have been met: nobody dares to publish caricatures of Mohammed anymore. Self-censorship prevails…. Hate is directed against those who resist obscuring information rather than against those who obscure it. Not to mention the psychiatrization of terrorism, in order better to exonerate Islam. If we had been told in the early 2000s that in 2020, around 20 French cartoonists and intellectuals would be under police protection, no one would have believed it. The threshold of servitude has increased.
“Sunk” is what he means: the threshold has been lowered, made easier to get over. To enter into servitude. The easy choice for the French now is to submit to Islam.
Five years after the terrorist murders at Charlie Hebdo, free speech is less free [read “gone” – ed] in France. “No one today would publish the cartoons of Muhammad,” said Philippe Val, the former editor of Charlie Hebdo, recently.
“For the past five years, I’ve been going to the police station every month or so to file a complaint about death threats, not insults, death threats,” says Marika Bret, a journalist at Charlie Hebdo today.
In Paris, five years after the murders at Charlie Hebdo, there was a big march to protest not terrorism, but “Islamophobia”.
“Voltaire fades before Muhammad, and the Enlightenment before the Submission,” wrote the author Éric Zemmour. …
In 2017 … a Jewish woman, Sarah Halimi, was tortured and murdered in her Paris apartment by her neighbor, Kobili Traoré, who was yelling “Allahu Akbar”. A court of appeals recently ruled that Traoré, because he had smoked cannabis, was “not criminally responsible” for his actions.
And so he was acquitted.
Which means that anti-Semitism, even when it results in murder, is licensed in France.
Actually, anti-Semitism is a grand old French tradition. But now it is not merely tolerated and quietly practiced in the land of “liberty, equality and fraternity”, it is an aim, a cause, a duty. Because it was commanded – and an example of the mass murder of Jews set – by Muhammad himself.
France has capitulated to Islam. The EU has capitulated to Islam. In all the countries of western Europe, the peoples are condemning themselves to live in fear. In subjection. And in sorrow. For in Islam there is no laughter, and no singing and dancing. And no wine, mon frère, no wine. No beer, mein Bruder, no beer.
Standing almost alone in the Western World against this retreat from the Enlightenment is America. At least for as long as Donald Trump is president.
Diversity, disparity, fatuity 1
There are NO benefits to Europe (or America, or Canada, or anywhere) from mass Muslim immigration.
Mass Muslim immigration brings terrorism, death, destruction, decay, injustice and despair.
“Diversity is our strength” is a fatuous slogan.
Paul Joseph Watson dares to say so:
