The fatal sickness, a pandemic in this age, is not Covid, though Covid may be a symptom of it. Definite symptoms are “Marxism, “progressivism”, climate alarmism, and – most fashionably – “wokeism”.

What is it?

The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard called it despair in his book The Sickness Unto Death.*

We think he is right about that.

Despair is the giving up of all hope: the total loss of reasons to go on existing.

Is collective despair possible? Global collective despair?

Has a time come when the human race is willing to destroy itself because it can see no reason to continue to exist? 

Out of innumerable examples of published statements calling for the end of the human species, we select three:

Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental. … The optimum human population of earth is zero.– Dave Foreman, founder of Earth First

The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable but a good thing….This is not to say that the rise of human civilization is insignificant, but there is no way of showing that it will be much help to the world in the long run. – From an editorial in The Economist

We should not have children.  – From Better Never To Have Been by David Benatar

In fairness to Benatar it needs to be said that his ardent advocacy for human extinction arises not from disgust with human beings as in the case of the other would-be terminators, but from the sincerest pity for their inevitable suffering. Still –  and therefore – in his opinion, go they should.

A group of Jewish Marxists known  as the “Frankfurt School”, doubly infected with intellectual despair by European nihilism and self-hatred, fled from the killer dictator of Germany and brought their own killing misanthropy to America.

In the fetor of their hubris

It was borne across the sea

With a cruelty in their bosoms

That’s destroying you and me.

They were haters of civilization, and what they advocated is destructive of it to such an extent that human survival would be unlikely. Examples by quotation from the (arguably) most extreme of them – Herbert Marcuse – may be found here.

Their philosophy, reinforced by their intellectual epigones, now dominates the universities and public education in America and emanates from there.

It is the only true human pollution of the planet.

It informs the agenda of the Democratic Party, and so of the “Biden” administration and the majority of both houses of Congress.

Out of a fair number of articles whose authors notice the anti-human tenor of contemporary nihilistic Leftism and condemn it, here are three, all found recently at American Greatness:

No society that has stopped believing in its right to exist and the majesty of its laws can deter lawlessness. – Christopher Roach

Statements calling for human extermination come easily to the woke Left’s lips …  Paul Gottfried

Best of all:

Few have described wokeism as the cruel creed that it is. Wokeism’s natural logic is to destroy the lives of people of both genders, of all races, and—if need be—those of every age, all to leverage an otherwise unworkable ideological agenda. It is nihilist and destroys everything it touches. – Victor Davis Hanson

Nihilism is the philosophy of despair.

Is there a case to be made for the continuation of our species?

What is the value of human life?

We say it is impossible to measure, because human life is itself the only measure of value. No human life, no human consciousness – no such thing as value.

 

Footnote:

* Kierkegaard, though an ironist, considered himself a Christian, sole member of his own singular denomination, so he prescribes an esoteric remedy unavailable to anyone else.

The plan is to empower a new, hyperpolitical, easily manipulated domestic security agency. 

A national police force?

An American Stasi?

When President Trump was in power the Democrats were against it:

When the Left was worried about Trump’s use of Department of Homeland Security officers to protect federal buildings during last summer’s riots, the Atlantic noted, “One common tool for an interior ministry is a national police force. That can be a dangerous tool because an armed national police force at the disposal of the central government has a tendency to be misused. A repressive regime that is in danger, or simply faced with protests it finds troublesome, can use the national police to crack down, turning the force into an agency that protects the rulers, rather than one that defends the rule of law.”

Then the Democrats cheated Trump of his victory in the November 2020 election and fraudulently seized the presidency. So now they are for a national police force. It was surely to be expected.

As a general matter, whatever the Left has warned the Right might do, they do when they have the power.

We quote Christopher Roach writing at American Greatness:

We recently saw the first phase of the January 6 show trial. The congressional hearing, which the House Republican leadership has boycotted, always threatened to be a farce, prolonging and exaggerating a one-time event for partisan political gain. It lived down to expectations.

The assembled U.S. Capitol Police jerked tears and repeated popular lies, including the now-disproven claim that officer Brian Sicknick was killed during the riots. [He died days later of natural causes.] One of the policemen exposed himself as highly ideological after his tweets praising Black Lives Matter violence surfaced soon after his testimony. All of the witnesses used highly charged language, referring to their fellow Americans as “terrorists” and the event as an attempted “coup”.

In other words, the Capitol Police leadership supported the Democrats’ bleak view of the moment: that the country is beset by dangerous, violent, right-wing extremism … namely, those who supported President Trump and have doubts about the 2020 election.

Defining Trump supporters (some 75 thousand voters in 2020) as “extremists” and terrorists” …

… permits extreme measures to defend “Our Democracy”.

The most ominous development is the plan to deploy the Capitol Police in the nation’s interior, with the first field offices located in California and Florida.

The Capital Police is now being purposely remade as a political police force, aimed not at real subversives and dangerous violent criminals, but at critics and opponents of the congressional members of the ruling class.

We perceive the plan to be the brainchild, specifically, of the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. The Capitol Police are the security guards of Congress, so she apparently regards them as her personal Praetorian Guard, subject to her will. Her will now is that the force must expand over the whole country and spy on us all.

But can it be used for that?

The Capitol Police have very limited jurisdiction by statute. Even in Washington D.C., they’re only allowed to arrest for crimes within the Capitol building and grounds. In other words, they are highly paid security guards.

So what gives Pelosi’s Congress the right to turn them into a secret national police force?

While the Capitol Police have no nationwide arrest authority, they do have a right to work outside the Capitol grounds for “intelligence gathering”.  The scope of this authority is entirely undefined by the statute and related regulations.

Which means that the nationwide force can be secretive, accountable only to Congress.

It is not subject to presidential control. It is not limited by executive orders on intelligence gathering. It is not limited to the investigation of crimes. And it does not have to respond to FOIA [the Freedom of Information Act]. By way of example, the Capitol Police has concealed the identity of the officer who shot Ashli Babbitt.

[Since] oversight of the Capitol Police is exclusively within a single branch, the Congress, in a case of divided government some future Republican president would have no ability to reign them in.

The USA is no longer a free country. 

The Left has consolidated the power of the media, corporate America, the scientific establishment, the military, and now an obscure federal agency to push its agenda and to punish those who refuse to recognize their authority.

The acquisition and use of such power by a government over the people it governs is the making of a tyranny.  

Can it be denied that America is now a tyranny?

Is it not being taken in the direction of totalitarianism?

China is preparing for war, so America needs to do the same.

Dan Gelernter warns at American Greatness:

We should prepare for war. Churchill called preparation for war “the sole guarantee of peace”. Instead, Biden touts maternity flight suits. We indulge in ludicrous fantasies of a “fair” military based on the premise that real wars don’t happen anymore. What message does that send enemies who plan to use their armies for actual fighting?

We are headed to war again. We are pointed at war right now. America’s weakness will bring us there. The hour is already late—we have allowed the Chinese navy to grow larger than our own.

But there is still time. We can strengthen ourselves. We can confront Russian and Chinese encroachments on international rights and territories now. Or we can immolate and destroy another generation, as a sacrifice to our own self-serving short-sightedness.

Or we can put President Trump back in the White House.

Christopher Roach warns even more strongly – also at American Greatness:

China is not our friend. Since the Clinton Administration, and through the Bush and Obama years, American policy proceeded as if trade and cultural ties would work automatically to liberalize the Chinese. Instead, these ties have enriched and strengthened China, allowing it to build first-class infrastructure, a robust economy, and a substantially more capable military in a mere 30 years’ time.

Simultaneously, these policies have hollowed out our own industrial base, rendering most of our industries, including the tech sector, dependent on Chinese inputs. In the name of efficiency, we have lost resilience, jobs, and independence.

The prospect of a military confrontation with China is now closer than it was at the beginning of this process. Along with its rising confidence and capability, China has advanced a self-serving and novel view of its authority, asserting sovereignty and rights of exclusion deep into the South China Sea.

The United States, for over 100 years, has viewed itself as a maritime power, enforcing freedom of navigation so that the world may benefit from trade and secure sea lanes. China’s expansive view of its rights threatens these expectations and sows the seeds of a potential military conflict.

Just as trade wars can become real ones, conventional military victories threaten to escalate into nuclear wars, not out of ruthlessness, but out of fear and confusion about an adversary’s intent.

In dealing with China, America would do well to ensure no conflict with China goes nuclear. There seems no reliable way to guarantee this under the conditions of conventional war. Under these circumstances, the United States should reconceive its regional objectives to avoid such conflict altogether.

One way of avoiding such conflict is to continue the focus on economic matters. Ideally, this would mean continuing the Trump-era policy of disconnecting our fortunes from China as much as possible.

Unfortunately, the Biden Administration’s watchword appears to be reversing every Trump policy reflexively.

As more and more information emerges on how wide and deep and zealous the opposition to President Trump was throughout his four years in office, it becomes more and more astonishing that he was able to accomplish anything at all, let alone the enormous amount that he did.

He was still president and head of the executive branch of government when agents provocateurs led a few of his supporters in a raid on the Capitol on January 6, 2021 – so that the Democrats could accuse him of inciting an insurrection. Yet none of the officials who worked under him and in theory for him did anything at all to counter the resulting onslaught against him by the legislative branch, including his second impeachment by the House and the farce of a trial by the Senate.

Even his vice president, Mike Pence, who seemed exceptionally loyal, has been exposed as a Swamp denizen.

William B. Allen writes at American Greatness:

Where was Trump’s national security team, and what counsel did they provide? The gravity of this obvious lacuna should instantly appear to anyone who considers this was a national security event of the greatest significance …

That it was a national security event is apparent from the immediate and since daily repeated descriptions of the riot as an attempted “insurrection” or “coup’. It is also apparent what protocols prevail in such an event: a national security team exists precisely to appraise and respond to such threats.

But where was FBI Director Christopher Wray? Where was the director of national intelligence? Where was the director of homeland security? Where was the attorney general? Where was the secretary of defense? Where was the director of central intelligence? Were they gathered in the White House within 30 minutes of the development of an event that lasted for hours? What counsel did they give? Were they rebuffed by the president? If the president were guilty of criminal negligence (a “high misdemeanor”), here would be the irrefutable proof of the fact.

At no point … since the events of January 6 has this question been raised in a publicly visible forum. It stands to reason that it should have been raised by virtue of the clear fact that the president’s conduct has been repeatedly described as “criminally negligent”. This would have been a credible charge of misconduct that could have supported impeachment. That such a charge was not filed, and such questions not posed, indicates the high likelihood that to pursue the inquiry on that line would have proved embarrassing—and even condemning—for the officials involved and for those pursuing the impeachment on the weak and inappropriate grounds of “inciting an insurrection”. 

One is forced to think that an obvious path to secure conviction was not pursued solely because it could not be sustained. If that is so, however, it also means that something far more significant happened. Namely, the president was not in control of the government.

The Democrats’ enormous exaggeration of the danger in the raid, their determination to make it seem that Donald Trump had tried to overthrow the legislative branch of government and that he is the leader of some 74 million “white supremacist terrorists” actively threatening American “democracy” – and therefore equivalent, they imply, to an alien enemy – gives them the pretext to take every step they can think of to make it impossible for him, or anyone like him, ever to come to power again. They will destroy him personally by any means  they can, and make it criminal to be on his side.

And they are destroying all his accomplishments. Every problem, domestic and foreign, that he solved, they are returning to its problematic condition. Everything he saved from ruin, they are ruining.

William Levin writes at American Thinker:

The Democrats are pursuing a multi-prong strategy to cement a permanent majority.  To accomplish the goal requires upending the constitutional design.  Until the scope of this effort is seen in its entirety, it can proceed in the shadows.

It has six astonishing elements:

1. 1. Enable Congress to determine who can run for President,
   2. Eliminate the Electoral College without amending the Constitution,
   3. Override the states’ constitutionally mandated authority to determine presidential election rules,
   4. Grant statehood to the District of Columbia by statute,
   5. Rewrite the First Amendment to limit political speech, and
   6. Enable open border immigration through executive agreement instead of Congressional action.

Taken together, the program represents a comprehensive challenge to representative democracy. …

Right. It is they who want to end democracy in America. As usual, they accuse their opponents of the wickedness they themselves really are plotting and doing.

Two more articles at American Greatness explain what is happening.

Christopher Roach writes:

Trump thought if he was a loyal American running for president, it would not be possible the CIA and FBI would wiretap him and destroy his supporters’ lives in the process. Similarly, he thought he could talk to foreign leaders or make changes to executive branch policy, and those subordinate to him would do what they were told.

His supporters thought elections mattered, and that they had a right to protest when those elections appeared fraudulent.

But he and they were wrong. Those expectations were aroused by advertisement. They are advertised in the Constitution and its Amendments. But the reality is, as always, different:

The rules, procedures, and priorities of the bureaucrats determine which laws get enforced and which ones don’t … [and] which companies, donors, and groups are entirely exempt from the rules that apply to everyone else.

In other words, these are the real laws, determining what is permitted and what is forbidden. … The mandarin class that writes and interprets them, decides when a riot is “mostly peaceful” or a dangerous “insurrection”. They determine when democracy means the opposite of democracy.

Dan Gelernter writes:

The Left’s hatred of Trump is merely a symptom of their guiding philosophy, which is … gradually to exclude people from government. The Left is in favor of any action that will expand the authority of bureaucrats by taking decisions out of the hands of citizens.

With the coronavirus, the Left is beside itself with glee: This is the first crisis since 9/11 broad enough to make possible a fundamental transformation of American society. …

The reason coronavirus so delights today’s Left is that the public response to their power grab has been overwhelmingly docile: The numbers of deaths are vastly below historic health panics, even with generous inflation via guidelines encouraging doctors to record anyone who previously had the virus as having died from it.

Even so, the government was able to lock people in their homes for a “two-week period” that turned out to be roughly a year, destroy much of the hospitality sector of the economy, force people to cover their faces in public as though living under a secular sharia, and, perhaps best of all, they got neighbors to snitch on neighbors and children to report their parents when these edicts weren’t followed.

It has been a bonanza. The everyday American citizen will always remember 2020 as a painful, terrible, soul-crushing year. For the Left, that makes it one of the best years on record. It is one of those great years in which they changed how Americans live….

They need only to cement this victory by making those changes permanent. …

The Left wouldn’t want you to think that the danger has lessened. This is why the Biden Administration suggested that social distancing and mask-wearing will continue to be vital, even once the entire population is inoculated. They don’t want the pandemic to go away: A successful Biden Administration is not one in which coronavirus disappears, it is one in which Americans accept wearing masks for the rest of their lives. …

These are incremental steps on the road to tyranny: They don’t necessarily increase public safety—they may harm it. But they do give the government more power, and that is the important thing, the operative goal. Europe is a few steps ahead of America in its gradual dissolution of democracy, but America will follow just as fast as the public is willing to tolerate.

Tolerate the process of decline and fall?

Is there a choice?

Hasn’t resistance proved futile?