Democrats in power – a carnival in a sty 3
Since the purloined election of 2020, there has been NO ONE in charge of the country.
How then does the executive carry on? Easily. The agencies keep running on a fuel that is free and in inexhaustible supply – habit.
The White House is Liberty Hall. Clowning is what goes on in it. Adolescent pranks. Giggling. Everybody on the staff knows that the putative head, “Joe” Biden, is senile and unaware of what’s happening – and that he wouldn’t care anyway. He does what clowning he can himself, when he musters enough energy. Blood-red lighting, soldiers on guard, as a background to a rant of his, was his own idea.
The Cabinet and their highest offices are “manned” by freaks. Preferably women and weirdos and perverts. Preferably not white. A Health Secretary, “Admiral” Richard Levine, the biological father of two children, calls himself Rachel and wears long blond hair, frocks and jewellery. A couple of ministerial transvestites with mustaches, and make-up caked on their faces, wear showy dresses. (One of them steals women’s luggage at airports).
Those “trannies” who disported themselves in the spring on the White House lawn with an “LGBTQ” rainbow flag draped across the front of the grand building (intended originally to be a visible sign of its exalted purpose – to house the headship of the United States’ executive branch of government, the Head of State, representative of the nation), were enjoying a puerile iconoclasm, men showing off bare breasts artificially created to help them pretend they are women.
More freaks in huge wigs, clownish make-up, glittering dresses and high heels – blatantly mocking women – read to small children, in schools and libraries, graphic descriptions of perverse sexual acts. And children are encouraged to demand that their bodies be abused and mutilated with chemicals and surgical operations so that they too can pretend to be the sex they are not. The fact of biological sex is denied. Human beings, the “Democrats” say, are “assigned” a sex at birth and they can change it if they want to. It is another lie. They traffic in lies. The Transport Secretary, “Pete” Buttigieg, son of a devout Communist, had himself photographed sitting up in bed with a gadget strapped onto his chest which is filled with milk or baby formula so his adopted child can suck at a “nipple” and “Pete” can feel like a real mother.* To the same ridiculous end he probably has tampons prominently displayed in his bathroom. He is “married” to another man.
Young visitors to the Oval Office turn up in crumpled jeans and sweaty T-shirts. No “bourgeois formality” for them! And as the mood of the White House – turned into a carnival palace at the same time as a sty – spreads wherever “Democrats” are performing, the Senate too has become a playground. Why not – thought one young man – use the Senate building for sexual adventures? He stripped naked, knelt on all fours in a chamber used for solemn meetings and enjoyed a sodomy session which his partner filmed so that it could be – and was – shown to the nation, to the world. (Still the young pervert insists that he would “never disrespect” his workplace. Democrats not only work by habit, they lie by habit too.) Such fun! No stuffy old inhibitions allowed to restrain their liberty. To them liberty is license. Let license ring!
A packet of cocaine was found in the White House. “Joe” Biden’s son Hunter, the depraved addict, was living there at the time. But dosing himself with illegal substances is the least of his criminal activity. The criminal corruption of the Biden family is public knowledge. Hunter did the hunting; his father the President and other relations shared the catch.
“Joe”, bribed by China, allowed its spy balloon to float all over the USA, sending pictures of military facilities, roads, railways, fields and farms, back to Beijing. Dear old Joe! He sent billions of dollars to the tyrants of Iran while they screamed “Death to America!” He invited teeming masses from anywhere in the world to walk into the USA from Mexico, and they do. He and his Secretary of Homeland Security continue to assure the nation that the southern border is “secure” while enemies, petty criminals, slavers, drug dealers, human traffickers, lunatics, blood-thirsty gangs, mass murderers, kidnappers, rapists, from every inhabited continent, pour unhindered into the southern states and thence into every state. Not one of them “vetted”. Millions of them must have infectious diseases, but pour in they may – and did even when US citizens were forced to distance from each other, wear masks, stop going to clinics, churches, school, rallies, sports , restaurants, theaters, shops, hairdressers, clubs … for fear of catching a “new” flu launched across the world by Communist China.
The United States is again a country of slavery. Hundreds of thousands of kidnapped alien children, brought over the “secure” southern border by slave traffickers, are exploited as forced laborers and sex slaves.**
“Joe” said it was okay for Russia to make a small invasion of Ukraine, so Russia invaded Ukraine. “Joe” sends Ukraine enormous sums of taxpayers’ money so it can keep the war going. At the same time, while he assures Israel that his backing of its security is “iron-clad”, he goes on directly and indirectly paying Muslim terrorists to capture, torture, and kill as many Israelis as they can.
To save the world from burning up (but knowing that it will not) as a result of human beings “polluting the air” by simply carrying on with their lives, “Joe” gave notice of coming bans on gas-powered vehicles, gas stoves, oil-fired heating and cooling systems …
Everyone with any common sense knows that these decisions and actions are not really President Biden’s; they come out of the utopian dreams of his ever more demonic Democratic Party. Its aim is to reduce the population of the world from some 8 billion to 1 billion, by means of abortion, infanticide, “transgendering” treatments including mutilating surgery, homosexual marriage, euthanasia, murderous riot, extortionist taxation, surging national debt.
The outlook is dire, but roughly half the electorate votes for it. Shrinking police forces; permitting theft from stores; releasing prisoners convicted of – or deliberately not charged with – murder, rape, assault, shop-lifting, abduction, torture; tolerating encampments of lunatics and addicts on city streets – even supplying the addicts with free drugs – this is the “Democratic” program to make life for normal citizens intolerable.
The same gleeful destroyers, envious and cruel, run campaigns of anti-Semitism. They label conservatives as terrorists, peaceful protest as insurrection. Real insurrection by their own hordes of arsonists, rapists, murderers, torturers, kidnappers, thieves, they call “peaceful protest”.
Everything they touch, they ruin: education, the media, the arts, the family, childhood, health care, even the military … At least Secretary of Defense Austin did not join in the danse macabre of ruination. When in this summer of 2024 a gang of lawyers promised the Muslim organizers of mass-murder (some 3,000 killed by Muslim plane hijackers flying into New York buildings and the Pentagon and crashing in a field in Pennsylvania on 9/11/2001) that in return for confessions of guilt they would be spared the death penalty, Austin asserted his authority and cancelled the deal. Appointed all too probably because he is black, he had been ignored and discounted by the (no doubt passionately “anti-racist”) lawyers who did not even consult him about the deal; but he refused to be overlooked. (Will he abide by that decision? Can he redeem the military from “woke” impotence? Does he want to?)
The “Democrats” don’t give a fig for democracy. They suddenly threw away millions of primary votes cast for Biden to be their nominee in the coming election and arbitrarily appointed a black woman, his Vice-President, instead of him. She’s a person of low intelligence, loose morals, alarming ignorance, and a hideous wide-open-mouthed cackle that even they formerly deplored but now – since she’s become their candidate – praise as an expression of “joy”. While they insist that they don’t know what a “woman” is (except as the correct term for “transgered “ men) they like to appoint women – preferably black – as figureheads: cabinet members, directors of agencies, prosecutors, police chiefs, ambassadors, military top brass, presidents of universities, principals of schools … so why not now one of them – the more ill-informed and incompetent the better since she mustn’t actually make decisions or do anything – as Head of State, Commander-in-Chief, Keeper of the Nuclear Codes?
Will the People let that happen? As former President Trump often says, “We must wait and see.”
And we must vote for him to be our 47th. president.
Notes:
*I’ve been told that this photograph was a fake. Okay, but I maintain it told the truth about Buttigieg the way fiction can tell the truth about reality.
**From the New York Post, August 21, 2024: “The Biden-Harris administration has lost track of more than 320,000 migrant children who crossed the border without parents, according to a shocking new report.”
Jillian Becker August 26, 2024
So will the election of Trump save us or not? 275
Will Donald Trump’s re-election to the presidency of the United States save us? Save America? Save the world? Or not?
Mark Steyn – in our judgment the best contemporary journalist – makes a case for no, but concludes with a sort of yes.
We quote him in part:
A governing party of a serious nation so indifferent to elementary maxims of prudence that it’s prepared to invent out of whole cloth crimes with which to convict the leader of the opposition is not one you’d want to bank on to keep us from stumbling into, say, a third world war.
The ruinous Democrats invented a crime-without-a-name to charge Donald Trump with, and then declared him guilty of it.
True, “there is a great deal of ruin in a nation”. But not this much.
So … right now there is no law in America, and, in consequence, no politics. So there is no point in pretending you enjoy benefit of either, and in doing so you’re just part of the problem. …
Oh, and I see that “former federal prosecutor” William Otis has just filed a column headlined “Why a Trump Conviction Will Be Reversed”. … [H]is legal reasoning would be fine if America were a land of laws, but unfortunately it’s a land of men …
Meanwhile, back in what passes for reality in the courts of New York, the exciting bit having concluded, we are now back to the leisurely proceduralist folderol: The corrupt Judge Méchant [sic – Steyn deliberately mis-spells Merchan’s name to make the point with the French word that he is wicked – ed] has scheduled sentencing for July 11th. … Let me see now, July 11th is, oh, a mere six weeks away, which torpor is also very familiar to me: my own verdict came down in February,* but the various post-trial motions keep getting kicked down that endless road.
July 11th is also, as it happens, four days before the GOP convention is due to start in Milwaukee. So, at a time when the presidential nominee should be practising his acceptance speech in front of his bedroom mirror, he will be a thousand miles away waiting to hear whether he is to be belatedly taken down.
Thus, Judge Méchant will have once again subordinated the election calendar to the caprices of his filthy courtroom.
In theory, Trump has been convicted of a crime and could be headed to gaol. Also in theory, his term of confinement could be put on hold pending the outcome of his appeal. But they didn’t do that with Peter Navarro, did they? And it seems highly unlikely to me that they would have gone to all this trouble for a fine and a suspended sentence. They want him dead. …
How will the people react to whatever happens on July 11th? Riots in Milwaukee? One can’t help noticing that, since the brutal January 6th prosecutions to the fullest extent of the law and then bulked up with “terrorism” charges by DC judges just as bad as this New York guy, there is little appetite for what Orwell called “turbulence”.
But, either way, Democrats figure that, however Trump supporters react, they can make this work for them …
So, right now, they’re making their plans for July 11th. Is anyone on the other side?
I will add one final thought born of my own experience. I am about to begin my thirteenth year in the foetid septic tank of the District of Columbia courts. My finances are ruined, and so is my constitution. By the latter, I mean my health, not the United States Constitution, which is already dead. By contrast, I’m just about hanging on, although I very much doubt I will live long enough to be vindicated at the Supreme Court. Which is bad news for my heirs and relicts. As one of the lawyers taunted me last year, “This doesn’t end with your death.”
I’m sad about that, and would much prefer to devote the time that remains to playing music and enjoying the sunsets. I am worn out, and bitter about the books I’ll never get to write because of the way American litigation has consumed what should have been my most productive years. I have a theological objection to suicide, but would not be averse to dying in my sleep.
And that’s just with two rinky-dink cases on the go.
Trump, on the other hand, is barraged at all turns – here, there, state, federal, civil, criminal. He has been subjected to all manner of indignities – such as, just this week, having to sit in the crappy courtroom while the jury deliberates, which Judge Irving did not force me to do in DC. …
Yet [the treatment of Trump by the court and the verdict] have … made him noble and heroic.
The mega-rich guy from Mar-a-Lago and Miss Universe and Trump Tower and The Apprentice decided to dedicate his final years to doing something for all those forgotten men in towns no one knows where all the factories got shipped to China and replaced by meth labs. And in return the worthless US establishment – the guys who took America’s post-war dominance and gave it away to the Politburo in return for “ten per cent for the big guy” [Joe Biden] – set about destroying him: a half-billion appeal bond in New York, an eviction from the ballot in Maine, a lawyer forced to cop a plea and turn state’s evidence in Georgia…
As I said, I’ve got just two lousy cases, and I’m ruined by it – because utter ruination is the difference between the American legal system and the rest of the west. I have no idea how Trump withstands the assault – a Gulliver besieged by litigious Lilliputians on all sides.
Much of the United States – certainly the bits that matter – is now institutionally evil, and I am not sure that evil can be reversed, whether we’re talking about the bodily mutilation of middle-school girls or the sacrifice of a generation of a distant nation’s men in the meat-grinder of the Ukraine war. On America’s watch, the entirety of western civilisation is sliding off the cliff, and very fast – which is all anyone will remember about it.
And yet any alternative to the Uniparty consensus is not to be permitted, and must be hunted down and crushed. There is no future in the post-constitutional polity the Democrats are constructing. “Decline” is a choice … America’s death will be bloodier and more convulsive than anything seen in post-imperial Europe. Check back with me in ten years, and see who’s right.
For the moment, the Dems are, as always, three steps ahead. A lot can happen between now and July 11th, and much of it is undoubtedly already underway.
So … It is now absolutely essential that Trump be elected president.
***
*The case of Michael Mann versus Mark Steyn can easily be found on the internet.
Civilization’s sickness unto death 454
The Sickness Unto Death is the title of a book by the nineteenth century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855).* He diagnosed the sickness as despair – the despair of individuals. An individual despairing of himself is sick with a psychological disease. “Psychological” is the author’s word for it. Kierkegaard was a Protestant Christian – but opposed to the established Lutheran church of Denmark – and the cure he prescribed was Christian faith.
In the twentieth century the French writer Jean Raspail (1925-2020) published a novel titled The Camp of the Saints. The story diagnoses guilt as the lethal sickness of the pan-European community called the West. Its guilt is a political disease, making it impotent and moribund. Raspail was a Catholic – but angry with the Catholic Church – and the cure he prescribed was Christian faith.
In May 2023, First Things published an article by Nathan Pinkoski on The Camp of the Saints. These are extracts from it:
The most important dystopian novel of the second half of the [20th] century is Jean Raspail’s Le Camp des Saints (The Camp of the Saints, 1973). Its central plotline concerns an armada that transports one million migrants from India to the shores of France. It’s an invasion, an occupation of the Global North by the Global South. As the migrants land, France is thrown into chaos, along with the rest of Europe, and Western civilization dies.
Yet The Camp of the Saints is not a disaster novel. The book’s significance does not hinge on whether Raspail was correct to predict mass immigration or describe it in catastrophic terms. Rather, the novel’s genius lies in the depiction of an apocalypse in the original sense of that term. Properly translated, apocalypse is rendered as revelation, disclosure, literally an “uncovering.” The Camp of the Saints unveils the perverse logic that pervades late Western civilization, and throws into sharp relief the nihilism of guilt whereby the West welcomes its own destruction. …
Raspail will not allow the migrants to be idealized. Throughout the novel, he emphasizes their vulgarity by providing lengthy descriptions of their crudeness, sexual promiscuity, and repellent hygiene. … [T]he migrants are materially and culturally destitute. That is why they find the West attractive. They do not have a mission to redeem sinful Europe; they are seeking deliverance from poverty and from the sometimes-brutal oppression and inequalities of non-Western cultures.
They will not obtain what they seek. In discussing what to do about the armada, the French authorities persuade themselves of their own illegitimacy. At the climax of the novel, the French president delivers an emergency speech meant to authorize the use of military force against the migrants and prevent them from landing. But he cannot bring himself to deliver the order. France will not defend itself. When the migrants alight from their boats and wade ashore, the West has already capitulated.
European governments fall as the migrants arrive, and European citizens withdraw from public life. Civil society collapses; as a result, the migrants enjoy no real improvement in their condition. They bring their bad rulers with them, replacing European regimes with the very regimes they have fled. Dictator-generals and Brahmins take up positions in French government, ruling as they did in their own lands. The migrants and their supporters do not “include” the Rest into the West. They expand the scope of the Third World, and wretchedness goes global. The purported blessing of the arrival of the wretched, so cherished by progressive voices in the novel, does not come about. What emerges is not a particularly harsh despotism—there is only the occasional boot stomping on the human face—but the pain of the survivors is great, because of their vivid memories of what they have lost. …
The left-wing intelligentsia herald the coming of the migrants as the dawn of a new age of multiculturalism, but they stoke a media frenzy and deploy the tools of cancel culture against those who demur, ostracizing or punishing them. …
Raspail is unsparing in his depiction of the betrayals urged by left-wing intellectuals, but he reserves his most scathing passages for the treason of the Catholic Church. In the novel, the previous pope has sold the treasures of the Vatican in a failed bid to win the approval of the Third World. The sitting pope, a Latin American, spends his time flying around on humanitarian missions and selling off whatever Vatican assets remain. He sees himself as a champion of the Third World. As the migrants arrive and the native French abandon their lands, priests go down to the beaches to cry, “Thank God!” They turn their backs on their countrymen, imagining they see Christ in the migrants.
In Raspail’s telling, Catholic Christianity has for some time been in thrall to humanitarian universalism. The novel satirizes a left-liberal Catholicism that disdains national and civilizational particularity and renders the faith indistinguishable from the moral universalism of non-believers. Under the banner of “charity, solidarity, and universal conscience”, progressive clerics abandon their neighbors for the sake of the stranger. They practice the religion of humanity, a Christian heresy …
The First World must be taught to be ashamed of itself, to believe that its death will be its greatest gift to the future of humanity. The new civic liturgy of Western nations must express submission to the morally superior non-Western “other”. Those in the West need to be trained to take the knee …
Again and again in the novel, cowardice and self-hatred are masked and moderated by the conviction that mass immigration into Europe and the deconstruction of European identity will somehow take away the sins of the West. But Raspail knows the truth: Third World immigrants do not have the power to deliver Europeans from their sense of worthlessness. Once one embraces the logic of civilizational repudiation, the endpoint is nihilism and cultural death. …
The West is responsible for its own fate. Raspail is right. God will not deliver us from the consequences of our guilty self-hatred. It is up to us to decide whether we will reject […] atonement through occupation and turn instead to the Lord.
Contrary to Pinkoski’s opinion, ours is that the really interesting thing about The Camp 0f the Saints is the accuracy of its prediction of what is happening in the 21st century: the non-violent invasion of the First World by a vast number of immigrants from the Third World; the failure of First World Governments to prevent it or turn it back; the sabotaging reaction to it of leftist intellectuals; clerics of the great churches – the Catholic priests following the lead of a Latin American pope – passionately encouraging the shattering, the befouling, the abandonment of Western civilization.
What accounts for the capitulation of the rich and mighty law-governed civilized West to poor, weak, ignorant hordes from (in our case) the dark continent of Africa, corrupt republics of Latin America, cruel khanates of the Middle and Far East, hellholes of vicious Communist dictators?
Pinkoski declares, in apparent agreement with Raspail, that the big mistake which allows such a fatal tragedy to happen, is the embrace by Western political, intellectual, and religious leaders of a “perverse logic” that “throws into sharp relief the nihilism of guilt”. The guilt is for Europe’s erstwhile imperialism, its colonizing and alleged oppressive exploitation of Third World countries. It arises, even in “Catholic Christianity”, out of an enchantment with “humanitarian universalism”. That, Pinkoski tells us, is a “religion of humanity” and “a Christian heresy”.
The expression “humanitarian universalism” is no doubt intended to imply Marxism, but also more than that: global brotherhood, the family of man, humanism; an ideology of moral values, but essentially secular, and so “heretical” because it omits God. To the Christian mind, such an ideology is invalid because morals can only be decreed by God.
In reality, humanism, which purports to be concerned with individuals, is a very unlikely source of guilt and shame for a communal “sin”. The “sin” in this story is so bad that it calls for extreme punishment – nothing less than the destruction of our entire civilization, the peak achievement of humankind. The notion that humanism, or “humanitarianism”, is the source of such a shame could only arise in the religious mind – a mind furnished with inherited antiques: sin, guilt, atonement, penance, redemption through suffering, subordination of one’s own interests, apocalypse. And only one Western religion demands atonement by self-abasement, self-sacrifice, annihilation of achievement, willing submission to suffering.
Humanism began its resurrection with the anthropocentrism of the Renaissance, and rose to its full height when Reason dethroned Faith at last in the Enlightenment. After a millennium of Christian oppression, Reason set Western man free to think, explore, experiment, discover, invent, hypothesize, be right and wrong; and be free to choose law instead of mystic revelation as a setter of ethical rules. (It is unfortunate – worse, it is disastrous – that most humanists have by now embraced the secular religion of socialism which again is inimical to freedom.)
The Enlightenment broke the power of the churches to terrify and oppress, but it did not change the essence of Christianity, which is masochistic. Doctrinally self-accusing. An ideology of guilt, shame, abasement, and morbid reverence for martyrdom. For as long as its institutions were powerful enough, it was an oppressive, torturing, property-confiscating, murdering tyranny; as totalitarian as it could be in the ages in which it ruled – no matter whether in the name of Catholicism or Protestantism. The secular heir to its tyranny is Marxism-Leninism-Maoism-Wokeism – no matter which of those labels it wears.
Christian faith, far from being the cure for the West’s sickness unto death, is its cause.
***
*Kierkegaard’s works are fascinating and often intentionally funny. He was witty and dryly humorous. His wit and humor are on fullest display in his book Either/Or.
A great deal of ruin 437
“There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.” – Adam Smith
Portrait of urban America 2023:
They wander among the stinking ruins of a once great civilization, along the cracked streets, over the perilous bridges, past looted abandoned stores, hundreds of thousands of filthy sick drugged demented criminal vagabonds, naked or clothed in excrement- and vomit-stained rags, young and old, masculine feminine or neutered, pausing in the midst of the crowd to copulate sodomize fellate urinate defecate and inject their bleeding bodies with heroin cocaine fentanyl, finally slumping down on the foul bed of their own detritus to die.
City councils supply the syringes needles and drugs. And collect the corpses.
Since the election of the black vengeful far-left president, Barack Obama, and – after a four year interval of good government under President Donald Trump – increasingly under the nominal leadership of Joe Biden, the population has been subjected to incremental impoverishment, shortages of food and fuel and other essentials, migrant invasion, encouragement of violent crime by black and anarchic gangs, the sexual mutilation of children, the persecution of dissidents, the imprisonment of political opponents and protestors, discrimination against Whites, the abandonment of impartial justice and the rule of law, the forced closure of small businesses by government on the the pretext of protecting people from infection during a flu epidemic, the falsifying of election results, the substitution of indoctrination for education, the punishing of dissent despite the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech, the national humiliation of military capitulation to Islamic extremists in Afghanistan and the courting of them in Iran …
And the decay of our cities into zombie-haunted ruins.
Victor Davis Hanson lists and gives examples of disasters that have befallen us. He writes at American Greatness, asking and suggesting an answer to the question we most want answered:
This litany of disasters could be vastly expanded, but more interesting is the why of it all?
What we are witnessing seems to be utter nihilism. The border is not porous but nonexistent. Mass looting and carjackings are not poorly punished, but simply exempt from all and any consequences. Our downtowns are reduced to a Hobbesian “war of all against all,” where the strong dictate to the weak and the latter adjust as they must. The streets of our major cities in just a few years have become precivilizational—there are more human feces on the sidewalks of San Francisco than were in the gutters of Medieval London.
The FBI and DOJ are not simply wayward and weaponized, but corrupt and renegade. Apparently the perquisite now for an FBI director is the ability either to lie while under oath or better to mask such lying by claiming amnesia or ignorance.
Immigration is akin to the vast unchecked influxes of the late Roman Empire across the Danube and Rhine that helped to finish off a millennium-old civilization that had lost all confidence in its culture and thus had no need for borders.
In other words, the revolution is not so much political as anarchist. Nothing escapes it—not ceiling fans, not natural gas cooktops, not parents at school board meetings, not Christian bakeries, not champion female swimmers, not dutiful policemen, not hard-working oil drillers, not privates and corporals in the armed forces, not teens applying on their merits to college, not anyone, anywhere, anytime.
The operating principle is either to allow or to engineer things to become so atrocious in everyday American life—the inability to afford food and fuel, the inability to walk safely in daylight in our major cities, the inability to afford to drive as one pleases, the inability to obtain or pay back a high interest loan—that the government can absorb the private sector and begin regimenting the masses along elite dictates. The more the people tire of the leftist agenda, the more its architects furiously seek to implement it, hoping that their institutional and cultural control can do what ballots cannot.
We could variously characterize their efforts as destroying the nation to save it, or burning it down to start over, or fundamentally transforming America into something never envisioned by the Founders.
Will their upheaval succeed? All the levers of the power and money are on the side of the revolutionaries. The people are not. And they are starting to wake to the notion if they do not stop the madness in their midst they very soon won’t have a country.
The fools, freaks, crooks and traitors who tyrannically rule over us are destroying the nation to save it? They envision something new and better than the constitutional republic established by the Founders?
Are the derelict cities and their sick inhabitants a necessary phase in a process the tyrants are pursuing towards a great end?
If so, what is that great end?
Victor Davis Hanson indicates that he does not believe they have any vision of anything. Nihilism and anarchism are what he sees.
What if they are ruining the nation for no reason but their delight in ruining it?
Lost, the constitutional republic of the USA 249
Asked “What do we have, a monarchy or a republic?”, Benjamin Franklin replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.”
President Lincoln spoke of “government of the people by the people for the people.”
There was to be equality under the law.
But the law in the United States no longer protects all it citizens.
It protects only some people, not from crime but from legal retribution for committing crime.
Federal law enforcement, including the Department of Justice itself under the Biden junta, is a menace to all who do not support the profoundly immoral dictatorship or refuse to submit to its oppressive rules.
“President” Biden is guilty of bribery and worse – actual treason. His son is guilty of extorting enormous sums of money from foreign and enemy states by selling access to him to ask and be granted treasonous favors. Neither of them is subjected to legal investigation and punishment.
Thieves and murderers are allowed and even encouraged to continue their criminal activities if they are non-white and/or supporters of the illegitimate regime. Citizens who risk their own lives to save others from the criminal violence of the tolerated criminals are imprisoned for long periods without trial; when eventually tried, they are brought before dishonest partisan judges and juries charged with crimes they certainly did not commit and then punished with extreme severity.
Political opponents of this vicious regime are relentlessly persecuted.
Americans have failed to keep the free constitutional republic that the founders of the United States gave the nation.
The martyrdom of Donald Trump 0
President Trump has been indicted on federal charges – all of them absurd – in the U.S. District Court, Southern District of Florida.
Read the indictment here.
It happened on the same day that the Republican-controlled House of Representatives announced they have incontrovertible proof that when “President” Biden was Obama’s vice president he accepted a $5million bribe from Ukraine. A single instance of his many treasonous crimes.
But innocent Trump is indicted, not corrupt, crooked, evil Biden – or his deeply guilty son Hunter.
Robert Spencer writes at FrontPage:
Donald Trump is the principal opponent of the Biden regime, and the individual who at this point is most likely to be elected president in 2024.
And that is why –
He has been indicted on federal criminal charges related to the mishandling of classified documents, and is scheduled to be arrested on Tuesday. Not too long ago, when Trump was arrested by the Manhattan DA on bogus felony charges, critics of the Biden regime began to say that America had become a banana republic. We’re racing past that stage now. America is heading toward becoming a new Stalinist regime in which critics of those in power are arrested by the regime itself, tried on false and fabricated charges, and executed. The Left may not plan to murder Trump, but they’re certainly trying to execute him politically.
They might “suicide” him. The “Democrat” panjandrums are adept at that.
[Attorney General] Merrick Garland and his henchmen [at the “Department of Justice” and FBI] think they’ve found something they can use to destroy the principal foe of the regime, and so fairness, decency, common sense and impartial justice are out the window. Biden’s handlers are treating Trump the way Stalin treated the Old Bolsheviks whom he saw as rivals: he had them falsely accused, imprisoned, and executed. But Garland and the rest should take careful note: Bolshevik pioneers such as Nikolai Bukharin, Gregory Zinoviev, and Lev Kamenev had never actually been opponents of Stalin the way Trump is Biden’s opponent. They had been his friends, whom he turned against in his paranoia and destroyed in his quest for absolute power. They had helped install the authoritarian Communist regime in the Soviet Union, only to find themselves becoming its victims. It likely never occurred to them that someone could subject them to the same treatment they had meted out to so many others.
But it could happen here, just as everything else we used to think couldn’t happen here is happening now. Now that the Justice Department has become a weapon of political vengeance, it could turn one day against the very people who are using it so ruthlessly today against Donald Trump. But right now, firmly ensconced in power, they can’t even envision a day when someone might displace them. This gang of criminals aims to be in power forever.
And so this is yet another dark day for the United States. Once again we see how few people with integrity there really are among today’s political movers and shakers. A notable exception was Ron DeSantis, who tweeted Thursday: “The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society. We have for years witnessed an uneven application of the law depending upon political affiliation. Why so zealous in pursuing Trump yet so passive about Hillary or Hunter?
And what of all the perpetrators – including Hillary Clinton – of the “Russia collusion” hoax which was aimed at destroying Trump’s presidency, whose guilt in the conspiracy is authoritatively confirmed by the Durham report? They are all free and gloating over the martyrdom of Donald Trump.
Powerful “Democrats” are above the law.
The free constitutional Republic of the United States is lost.
We are living in one of the most tragic eras of history. The Enlightenment is being undone.
Another Dark Age is descending on the world.
Black supremacy 0
If every member of the House and Senate, and the president of the US and every member of his/her cabinet, and all nine justice in the Supreme Court were black, that fact would be of no importance whatsoever if each had qualified for his/her position by fair competitive achievement and was competently performing his/her official responsibilities. But if their only “qualification” is their blackness, it is cause for alarm.
A revolution is in progress in America, an uprising against the country’s established form of republican government, with the aim of destroying it as a nation state and turning it into a black-ruled territory in which whites are subjugated to blacks. In the new dispensation, all whites are to be punished with humiliation and impoverishment because the ancestors of some of them enslaved blacks.
The revolutionaries – with whites their most visible prominent leaders – are succeeding, even though they are encountering some set-backs: a temporarily Republican-majority House of Representatives, certain states effectively frustrating their ploys. White Joe Biden, a crooked and senile fool, has been maneuvered into the presidency and does what he’s told. Black clothed and masked Antifa thugs riot when ordered to, and beat, burn, shoot, bomb, kill. Schools teach children to be ashamed of themselves as oppressors if they are white and sorry for themselves as victims if they are black. Prosecutors get law-abiding but critical citizens jailed and career criminals released. The mass media toe the line.
The aim is black supremacy.
Who lays down the line? Is there a living mastermind? A chief plotter? An oracle, a guru, a lord of the danse macabre?
Who tells the “president” what to do? He says “they” do, that he will be in trouble of he disobeys – but who are “they”? Or “he” or “she”?
Is it white George Soros? He’s the chief financier of the revolution, but is he the conductor?
Is it black Barack Obama, who promised to “fundamentally transform” America?
Is it vindictive, cruel, white Nancy Pelosi whom uncountable numbers of police officers and tens of thousands of soldiers obeyed until she stopped being Speaker of the House just recently?
Is it not a single person but a cabal that plots the way, makes the decisions, issues the orders? If so, how did its members get into it, and how do they keep themselves secret?
Why do the whites join in the caper? In the hope of saving themselves?
Tides of Africans and Asians are sweeping into Europe, tides of Latin Americans into the United States.
The white race is dwindling. Our civilization is in its twilight.
The point of no return 454
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
Do you remember the American Republic? 334
Do you remember the USA, the nation that was established by a constitution?
Perhaps you imagine it is still in existence?
It is not.
Glenn Ellmers describes the post-constitutional republic that America has become. He writes at American Greatness:
The constitutional republic created by our founders no longer exists. Most everyone on the Right seems to agree with that—though we differ about how deep the rot is, and whether we are now living under a new regime that is essentially different in kind, not merely degree.
Most of us also agree that we want to restore the American founders’ principles and institutions. …
But how exactly we recover the founders’ constitutionalism is a question no one has been able to answer with any specificity. …
Elections—and therefore consent and popular sovereignty—are no longer meaningful.
This is the big one, and in a way, everything flows from it. It is helpful to break it down into two discrete pieces.
First, even if conducted legitimately, elections no longer reflect the will of the people.
Set aside for the moment any concerns about outright fraud and ballot tampering. The steady growth of the administrative state since the 1960s means that bureaucracy has become increasingly indifferent to—even openly hostile to—the will of the people over the last half-century. A clear majority of Americans, including Democrats (at least until recently), has been demanding and voting for comprehensive immigration reform, including strict control of the border, for decades. The Republican establishment in Congress—which made its peace with the deep state some time ago—has made numerous promises to fix this problem, and broken them all, always finding a reason for “amnesty now, enforcement later.” The decision about who gets to be part of the political community was the basic principle of popular sovereignty in the founders’ social compact theory. To the degree that the elites have simply ignored the American people on this point, neither the United States as a nation nor its citizens can still be considered a sovereign people.
Of course, that is only one obvious example. In thousands of other ways, the federal bureaucracy ignores the deliberate wishes of the American people. The regulators, administrators, and policymakers in the alphabet soup of federal agencies set the rules and impose their collective will as they see fit. Regardless of who the people repeatedly elect to reform the system, those politicians and their agendas come and go; the permanent government persists.
Yet even this has not been enough for the leftist oligarchy. Trump’s election in 2016 scared the establishment into taking even more extreme measures to prevent “unacceptable” electoral outcomes. Which leads to the latest antidemocratic development.
Second, elections now represent “manufactured consent”.
Mollie Hemingway showed in her excellent book, Rigged, that the technically legal though unscrupulous maneuvers undertaken by the Left—including legacy and social media propaganda and censorship, last-minute changes to election laws, and private money poured into partisan “voter education” efforts—were more than enough to alter the outcome of the 2020 election.
This new reality became even clearer this month. The highly manipulative practice of ballot harvesting—which reached new lows of cynicism in the recent midterms—makes a mockery of elections as an expression of popular deliberation and rational will. … The Democrats didn’t beat back the red wave because the voters chose them; they won by choosing their voters. It is hard to see how elections under these circumstances are substantially different from the artificial voting rituals practiced by the “people’s republics”, i.e., communist regimes of the 20th century.
The idea that the founders’ institutional arrangements still obtain is a nostalgic fiction today—especially the idea of checks and balances based on federalism and the separation of powers.
As a treatise on constitutional government, The Federalist is and will always be a classic work of political science, with many enduring insights. … [But] what Publius describes about the functions of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches—as well as the countervailing powers of the states—has almost no connection with current reality.
Congress doesn’t write, the executive does not enforce, and the judiciary does not interpret the laws. Power and wealth have become massively centralized in Washington, D.C. Federalism, judicial review, executive authority, the legislative process, appropriations—none of this remains operational in a way James Madison would recognize. And now, the country’s most powerful corporations are in active collusion with the federal security apparatus to enforce the regime’s authority. That’s practically the definition of fascism. …
Political competence, in the traditional sense, is becoming irrelevant.
Ignore the current spat between Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis. A bitter nomination fight would only benefit the opposition. What’s important to note is that any attempt by a Republican president to control his own (nominal) employees in the executive branch would require talents that neither Trump nor DeSantis has demonstrated. In fact, if confronting today’s administrative state, it isn’t clear how even a Lincoln or a Churchill would have exercised effective statesmanship. We are in a post-constitutional, even a post-political, environment.
For all his flaws, Donald Trump at least recognized that defending the sovereignty of the people (the most fundamental and meaningful definition of Americanism) meant striking at the legitimacy of the administrative state, especially its assumptions of rational expert knowledge. Trump correctly perceived that mockery and derision were effective, if indelicate, tools for challenging this hubris.
But Trump erred grievously in thinking he could accomplish everything he wanted on his own. The art of the deal doesn’t work when the other side holds almost all the cards. Trump underestimated this situation. And he was simply foolish and vain in thinking he could overcome it on the strength of his abilities alone and ignoring his duty to fill every available appointment with people loyal to—and willing to fight for—his agenda.
A DeSantis presidency, meanwhile, would have to recognize that while executive experience as a governor was once the ideal training ground for the Oval Office, this is much less true today. To whatever degree overweening bureaucracy has infiltrated the states, the governor of Florida does not have to deal with a national security machine that sets its own foreign policy, abuses classification rules, and engages in shameless leaking to a compliant national press; a Justice Department that weaponizes the resources and capacities of the FBI to undermine an elected president; and a veritable nation of unfireable (for now) subordinates long habituated to regarding themselves as the true representatives of the public will.
Yet DeSantis has shown better instincts than Trump in backing up his words with actions, especially in his willingness to punish powerful opponents, like Disney, when they needed it.
It remains to be seen how either man could translate his virtues, and overcome his shortcomings, to exercise the power of the presidency creatively, with cunning, subtlety, and ruthless determination, in ways that pursue the goals of constitutionalism even while understanding that the old forms no longer apply.
Moreover, any president seeking to restore constitutional government would need large majorities in both houses of Congress committed to reform far more seriously than the current Republican leadership seems to be. This partnership would not involve traditional legislative log-rolling, but would require an alliance in a quasi-political street fight, probably leading to a constitutional crisis, to bring the bureaucracy to heel. It is a big ask to expect congressional leaders who would even understand how this would occur, let alone have the will actually to do it. Massive challenges await at every turn. …
By carrying on with retail politics and accepting the current situation as normal, people on the Right are now legitimizing and strengthening their enemies.
This may be the hardest pill to swallow.
Our current woke oligarchy becomes more fanatical every month, yet instead of getting weaker or provoking a popular backlash, it seems to grow ever stronger. In part, this is because the elites have maintained a semblance of institutional normalcy. No matter how extreme its policies—COVID lockdowns, chemical or surgical castration of children, open borders—the ruling class carries on with a kind of constitutional kabuki theater. Citizens (or rather “people”) vote, Congress meets and passes “laws”, the president pontificates and signs documents. It is largely just a performance; it certainly doesn’t resemble government functioning as the founders intended. But it looks close enough to the real thing to persuade many people that the situation, if not perfect, is at least tolerable. There is just enough veneer of Our Democracy™ to keep most citizens from acting on their dissatisfactions and justified fears.
But the longer this goes on, and the more phoniness people are willing to tolerate, the more the whole rotten edifice becomes accepted as legitimate. At some point, the people will have consented, by their acquiescence, to anything the regime decides to do. Soon, one suspects, our left-wing masters won’t find it necessary to keep up the charade.
That’s why I disagree with those who say we should simply go tit-for-tat with the Democrats. Julie Kelly and Scott McKay, among others, believe that Republicans need to adopt the Democrats’ ballot harvesting techniques in order to beat them at their own game. In the same vein, Ned Ryun argues, “If conservatives and Republicans want to win again, we had better adopt the only-ballots-matter approach at least in the short term or die. . . . This is now the modern-day political battlefield in America, the rules of the game. One can either howl at the moon about it or beat the Left at it.”
Look, I get it. Nevertheless, this strikes me as a bad idea—practically, theoretically, and morally.
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- Practically, we can never hope to match the maniacal zeal of the Left, which invests millenarian expectations in politics, and is thus always driven to do whatever it takes to win. Acknowledging this does not mean giving up and letting them win. But it does mean recognizing that in a race to the bottom, the Left will always get there first. And having fought tooth and nail to see who can go lower, what do we do when we reach the bottom?
- Theoretically, this means we will be participating in altering the essential meaning and purpose of elections. Representative, deliberative democracy will become the technocratic accumulation of votes—a clickbait contest that rewards whichever side can best wage computerized demographic warfare.
- Morally, we will then lose any claim that we are trying to recover genuine self-government. If the argument is that we need to descend to the Democrats’ level in order to gain power, one might ask, “Why not just cut to the chase and skip the empty, meaningless process?” If power really becomes the only object, and neither side really believes in consent, then the entire pretense will fade away soon enough anyway.
Accepting, even “in the short term”, the regime’s authority to perpetually rewrite the rules of the game is the true surrender. They will always win if we repeatedly acquiesce to their legitimacy, chasing after what they define as normal on their terms. Worse, there won’t be a republic in the long term worth having.
I know that what I am painting here is a pretty bleak picture. But while it reveals a rough road in the short term, I don’t think it necessarily dictates long-term despair, in part because there are certain truths about political life that the Left cannot change.
Ellmers then “offer[s] some ideas about what has not changed, which might provide some grounds for optimism”, including “human nature”! But with that section of his article I disagree. I don’t think human nature or anything else he points to provides grounds for optimism. Quite the contrary.
Spokesman of our ruin 335
(From New English Review, November 2022)
It is not easy to make out what Slavoj Zizek means to say. While he comments interminably on everything under the sun, he is barely intelligible. Yet, paradoxically, it is he who makes plain what we urgently need to know about our bewildering and frightening world: that our world is meant to be bewildering and frightening.
At home in Slovenia, where he lives on state welfare support, he is no more than a senior researcher at the University of Ljubljana’s Institute of Sociology, but further west he is more highly valued. He is a professor at the European Graduate School and international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London. Despite the extreme hostility he expresses towards the United States—or because of it—he is Global Distinguished Professor of German at New York University and has been a visiting professor at Princeton and numerous other American universities including Chicago, Columbia, Minnesota, Michigan, and UC Irvine. His many prestigious appointments, TV and speaker engagements must bring him a respectable income, but it is apparently not enough for quality replacements of the slovenly T-shirts he habitually wears and continually tweaks and plucks as if for relief from discomfort.
He ran for the presidency of Slovenia in 1990, unsuccessfully. He does not, however, need to be active as a politician to have a political effect. He is one of those intellectuals whose pernicious influence on fellow academics, and consequently on rising generations of students, do profound harm by denigrating freedom and commending tyranny. Typically, he derives pleasure from rebelling and shocking, in the irresponsible spirit of adolescence, though he is now seventy-three years old. His fans applaud him with the hideous glee of spoilt children. He is the darling of television chat shows and organs of the left such as The Guardian newspaper and the New Yorker. A characteristic “look at me how daring I am” statement he made on TV in New York was: “Everybody in the world except US citizens should be allowed to elect the American government.”
In the style of the enfant terrible, he likes to shock by inverting conventional values. What to most of us is good he denounces as bad, what is abhorred he praises as good. This, to his admirers, proves him witty, brave, original and profound. What he really is, is an intellectual clown, partly by intention (he does have a sense of humor) but compulsively anyway because that is his nature. He is uncouth, uncivil—again most likely by both will and character. “Do you want some f*cking fruit-juice?” he asks an interviewer in a video.
When he appears personally before an audience or a camera he is entertaining, even fascinating. He creates an atmosphere of excitement and drama, which makes him a popular participant in panel discussions. He waffles and rambles with magisterial conviction. The word “precisely” crops up repeatedly in his imprecise statements like a decorative motif. He gestures, he snuffles; he swipes and pulls his nose again and again as if it is from there that he derives his ideas and it is his nose that is the paradigmatic philosopher of the age. Audiences are charmed, so they allow him his arrogance, his show-off iconoclasm.
When he is read rather than watched and heard, his reckless assertions are less likely to be indulged—if they can be deciphered. He writes in the customary opaque language of the left. For example: “To put it simply [sic]: If we make an abstraction, if we subtract all the richness of the different modes of subjectivization, all the fullness of experience present in the way individuals are ‘living’ their subject-positions, what remains is an empty place which was filled with this richness; this original void, this lack of symbolic structure, is the subject.” [1]
The only meaning I can extract from this is that if you take everything out of something, it will be empty. For this we need a philosopher?
He declares himself to be a communist. His heroes are Marx, Hegel, and Lenin. He acknowledges the intellectual influence of Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault. Their repulsive ideas, enthusiastically endorsed and handed on by academics in America, were given a new lease of life by late-comer Zizek, whose country had been sleeping for decades under the spell of communism. Most East Europeans woke happily in the dawn of freedom after the fall of the Soviet Union, and many of them brought new vigor to the decadent spirit of the West. But here comes one who lived under the oppression of communism and yet is nostalgic for it; who idealizes cruelty and suffering; who abominates freedom—while making use of it to build a lucrative reputation as its implacable enemy.
His stardom among leftist academic peers is due to his wishing even worse evils upon us than did Lacan, whose psychoanalytic therapy consisted of trying to drive his patients insane; or Foucault, who wrote of “the joy of torture,” longed to carry out human sacrifice, and taught that cruelty should be a perpetual condition of existence, so that life would be the experience of unmitigated pain, hate and aggression. Zizek praises extreme sadism, terrorism, motiveless murder, and delights in crime. Only crime, he declares, is “authentically ethical” because it subverts the coercion of law. He revels in the suffering of other people, so the more horrific the crime is, the more pleasure it gives him. He adores suicide bombing. He loved the planes crashing into the Twin Towers on 9/11; they gave him an aesthetic thrill. America he calls “the enemy.” Anyone—any state, any terrorist, any traitor—who acts against America is laudable. (While he maintains that torture is good, he reviles the American soldiers who—he says—tortured Iraqi military prisoners at Abu Ghraib.) He wants all people everywhere to live in fearful obedience to totalitarian despotism. Voluntary subordination to an “authentic Leader,” he preaches, is “the highest act of freedom.” [2] So if you are free, the best use you can make of your freedom is to choose to be unfree.
Most political philosophers on the left now perceive Western civilization not as a protector of liberty but as a patriarchal tyranny. They want us to believe that they are humane revolutionaries; that the subversion they applaud, the insurrection they encourage, the injustice they excuse, are to liberate the wretched of the earth: the enslaved, the oppressed, the poor, the colonized, the dispossessed, the persecuted; slaves, workers, women, lunatics, prisoners, aborigines … They want us to trust that they are striving for the eventual freedom, prosperity and happiness of the entire human race; that their apparent heartlessness is disguised compassion. Schools and universities teach their ideology with its utopian claim, and generations grow up believing in it. So Europe lets itself be invaded by Islam; the Biden administration permits black racists and their white abettors to riot and burn and murder in American cities for months on end; the Greens impose impoverishing conditions; universities oppose free speech.
Slavoj Zizek neither offers nor predicts utopia. He is volubly against freedom, prosperity, and happiness. He wants us all to be in perpetual anguish. He wants us to be in chains. He propounds atrocious ideals of subjugation and suffering without end. And the universities embrace him for it.
“Don’t take him seriously. You know he is a clown. He doesn’t really mean it,” his apologists may say. But we must take him seriously, because Zizek the Clown is the spokesman of our ruin.
Notes
[1] The Sublime Object of Ideology by Slavoj Zizek, Verso, London 1989, pp.174-175
[2] Did Somebody say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions on the (Mis)use of a Notion by Slavoj Zizek, Verso, London 2001, pp.246-247
Jillian Becker