About fifteen minutes ago, Trump just toddled offstage in Grand Rapids with a sharply satisfied look in his eye. It was his last appearance in a presidential campaign, and almost reminiscent of a fulfilled craftsman. His pace is steady and he seems content with where he has put every nail.

It’s a political frame that might just weather the most dire storms until Inauguration Day, when work toward freedom in America might begin with resolve unprecedented in my lifetime. An uncanny team has come together around the man, with an almost intriguing variety of personal outlooks and angles on the crises of the day. The prospects for entertaining confusements are considerable. Even so, the whole thing has a basically American sort of rollicking initiative which tends to confound and simply outrun communists and other primitive mobs.

The idea of “coalition politics” bored me fifty years ago, already, on reading stuff like Hunter Thompson’s encomiums to Pat Caddell (an earnest enough mutt, it might be said). To be able to see through to the principle of mashing & tossing principles like septic confetti is a scourge: let me tell you. It’s hurtful to the brain; to listen to abject contempt for the language and everything it means, all for the sake of elbowing-up with mutual-contemptuals when it comes time to wrench another kink in the spine of America, with deadly malice and conspiracy aforethought.

All of this began at The Beginning, of course. Shall I reel it out for for you? Or; can we take the long history of winks & nods in the dealings of U.S. power (in the name of America) as implicitly understood?

I’m not here to curse the Constitution — again.

It’s just that the habit, the convention — the institution — of compromise is now tested in a desperate crucible: it now forms a ragged line not only in defense but on something of active attack against Amsoc; American Socialism.

Amsoc — that strutting feral beast-child of the twenty-first century, conceived over a century ago in feeble, presumptuous, and downright evil minds without moral foundations of their own but borne on stilts of Euro-envy; crawling through the twentieth century beneath the feet of people unsuspecting that everything they loved was being used against them in “The New Deal”; erecting itself on bent legs fashioned by Lyndon Baines Johnson and trampling America ever since, with ever greater ferocity.

And now, it has all come to the decade-long punch-up with a New York lout whose heart (yes, I am convinced) is in the right place, and whose greatest strength is some hair-fine and mysteriously powerful cord with which he has gathered the outraged aspirations of at least half a nation, because they now appear to have some intimation of the danger at their throats.

The statues won’t look like they used to. It won’t be equestrian pylons with drawn swords. This guy ain’t any of that.

I point that out because the moment feels just about that heavy. Ruby-red velvet drapes and solemn candelabra in the middle of a dark night; that sort of thing. Gold braid on uniforms and striking poses.

On serious reflection, neither Vivek Ramiswami or RFK Jr. attract a classical eye. One is a philosophical lark enjoying a political groove, and the other a spastic lover of cause. It’s profoundly rueful to consider such adventurers on the ramparts of freedom (a word and concept still quite rarely served in any of this) — they don’t even have the nerve to put bounties on jobholders’ heads, like some honorable pirates of old.

It’s a proper disgrace before all the remainder of human history that any of this — America — sank to the remotest possibility that a specimen like Kamala Harris might actually accede to the office of United State Executive Puppet. What else would it be? The slightest review of video clips of that unspeakably retarded (see Michael Malice) person can illustrate the fraud to the commonest of sense. She can’t do anything of value, certainly not for a nation in crisis. She can only be valuable in the cause of crisis, therefore naturally inviting the question; “valuable, to whom?”

Soros? Schwab? You pick ‘em. It’s not so greatly important to me as the idea, the instant fact, that the fangs are now deeply in the throat of this country. It’s a wretched, grotesque, shame and everyone knows it, including the communists.

Why would I care who, exactly, are the barbarians in the living room when I know that proper exertions of American mind, body, heart, and soul could vanquish them all?

That’s a long fight, now. The old joke, “Rome wasn’t burned in a day,” goes hard for this country. Half its history has seen it under siege by every collectivist sect that ever festered out of Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Lenin. They have boiled the children’s brains, generation-by-generation, until the march of stark, malicious morons resounds in every university and legislature, with general approval abroad the public for decades. (This is manifest in the plain Look-Around-You fact of the current straits. Voting is how we all got here, and the communists have been winning, on their premises: certainly not mine.)

Comes the New York Lout, and he’s been making noises about ridding America of one of its worse scourges; the Department of Education. Well, then. That’s a thrilling thing to imagine.

The implications are enormous. I do not imagine that Trump is able, or even much inclined, to work them out. I can’t conceive that he has the same thing in mind that I do: to get all government out of all education in the same way as a separation of church and state, and for all the same reasons. No; it’ll be a terrific fight to devolve government education to the states, and he might prevail. There would be nothing like the produce-or-die imperatives driving all education to the qualities that freedom would produce.

Here is what that example means: Trump cannot save America.

In four years, he can put on a tactical political defense against the mother of all politics, now gone bad: ethics. To wrestle even mightily with the political machine, the administratum, of the federal government is not to contend with the morals upon which it was raised. Elon Musk’s “Government Efficiency” gag (I can’t help it) is an adorable naivete of a sort that causes bureau-dwellers and congressional committees to slap their crummy flippers in glee at the prospects for more work.

It’s the evil of government force, you see, that prevails in all of this. That’s what wrecks morals to the extents we now see.

Trump cannot analyze this (very few can), and he’ll be busy as hell, if he lives through it as he seems to intend. A great question to me is in how much he learned on his first lap around the mulberry bush. (e.g. — how quickly impressionable will he be around the last person in the room with him?)

It’s Election Day, 2024: in almost shameful suspense at having held lifelong moral convictions against voting, and sensing a creep of banal hope that Trump will win this thing in thundering style. It’s a really sordid matter, to grub around with polls and listen to every hopeful commissar and viddie-star hacking-out his rote pitch every time she gets a minute on camera. It’s sorrowful to watch respectable people have to make late-hour nail-bite ‘endorsements’ in their posts, knowing how desperate it all is.

I’m convinced that it really is: desperate. It’s almost enough to drive a man to the ballot.

For weeks and months, I have rolled in mind the political satisfactions (and their moral implications) of seeing Amsoc checked from an angle that its century-long technocracy never calculated: a New York Lout with his heart in the right place.

No matter what I cannot have of what I require of American politics and might never live to see, that would still be a lovely day, today.

Subscribe now

I’ll explain it live on Rumble at 6:00pm Eastern time.

https://rumble.com/v2z9pok-twitter-the-chaff-cutter.html

When the margin between reason and force gets that narrow, it can be crossed at the speed of thought, or just emotion if the capacity for thought is exhausted. An unresolved dispute between two people can lapse into force even when one of them is still grasping the reality of events (words and actions), integrating percepts into concepts, and concluding that he is acting morally while the other hasn’t even thought about any of it and might not even know what morals are. Just because one person is reasoning does not mean that it can’t come to force and violence, when the other one isn’t.

Once the matter crosses from reason to force, the deadliness of the encounter depends a lot on the combatants’ commitments to their values at stake. Sometimes (often, I would wager), they even mistake what’s at stake. The personal video age is rife with examples of deaths or life-changing injuries in street fights over things that make no sense to me, but that only illustrates one complicating factor in all this: subjective values. Is it worthwhile to risk that over an insult on the street? I don’t think so, but if you do, then it’ll be easy to get into a fight over it.

If you’re really committed to it, then you might or might not have to kill someone while you’re at it, and that’s where skill works with commitment. Your opponent might be smart enough to see that in you and try to get away with his own life if he doesn’t think that he could kill you, first. If you can flex force that hard, then you’ll probably get an apology on the street. Some people of naturally evil bent would even take up the idea of making a living at it.

Lots of people do try that. Like anything else in human life, some are better at it than others. And, a thing about combat is that it can instantly turn on all kinds of known and unknown variables. What sometimes looks like commanding control of a situation by force can conceal an instant reversal of fortunes.

Combat, in action, knows no real limits except the self-determination of each individual (often only dimly grasped). Although street fights can be deadly, it’s hard to imagine that most people who get into them do it with the intent to kill. If the casual hand-to-hand contest is determined enough, it’s usually to the point of just dominating a threat of attack; to knock an opponent out of consciousness. (It’s true, however, that even casual viewing of available videos shows a rotten tendency, now, to continue beating on unconscious people. This constitutes a separate ethical study, I think.)

There is another class of force in violation of reason that shows determination beyond the trivialities concerning most street fights, and that’s armed robbery.

It’s an age in which the word “threat” has been (like lots of words, so far, and more all the time) so washed-away from reality that it now includes things like saying mean things to people on the internet. What’s been diffused in that washy soup is consideration of facts and what they mean. At the same time when people are “threatened” by distasteful language, rising social tensions and their vastly increased visibility present boundless opportunity for public comment on incidents of deadly violence. With facts visible in countless videos of indisputable credibility, it’s not difficult to find the same dissolution of the word, “threat,” and the concept that it denotes.

In cases of deadly defenses against armed robbery, social media comments will almost always include questions of or protest against “the level of force” (or some similar mushy compound) that caused the death of a robber. The poor “Can’t You Just Shoot Them In The Leg?” trope is familiar with most interested in this subject. Sociologists can trace its origins if they care. The ethic of its longing to preserve human life is admirable enough, to me, to grant it an honorable chair at the argument, but it must be honest.

If people who say things like that can be brought to the facts of how handgun combat really works, then they’ll give up the “Shoot ‘Em In The Leg” argument before they even take the chair. My handgun experience is what many would fairly call “limited,” with certainly never any sort of a shot (pistol, shotgun, or rifle) fired in anger. I can, however, figure out the implications of handgun combat, and understand that SEITL is literally fantastic, which is why they write it into movies.

Part of it comes from bits of handgun fighting history distilled for fictional accounts of men facing each other with hipshots and paragons of the practice able to place bullets like that. Believe it or not, it was not a small account of honor that was often attached to gunfights in the traditions from which the SEITL ethic is derived. Various bushwhackers and backshooters are not accounted in this but the “honor” among men who faced each-other with guns really consisted in last-margin attempts at reason, with agreement to settle matters in deadly combat.

This is an important contrast with a time in which the “drive-by shooting” has been a notable style for decades, already. That whole style of gunfighting was once the outrageous domain of the mad mob killer, memorialized in films. Now, it’s virtually daily and certainly weekly across America; a coward’s style of attack against unwitting victims and often taking random ones.

There are certainly honest people who implore “SEITL!”, I’m sure, but these are some of the implications that they have to face, from principles, with honest logic. Gunfighting ain’t what they think it is, when they think about it at all. I don’t mean to condescend unduly. I mean it: I wonder how deeply they think about it. By now, here, I might have someone thinking about the concrete idea of a “drive-by shooting,” and they might start to work out a “scenario” (effectively; a script) of what that might look like. It would be informed by what they might know about firearms, but no more, which is crucial to how their thinking might conclude. In any case, it would probably be vivid in imagination, as it is today with such preponderance of imagery — real and fictional — on which to draw.

Someone really thinking hard about a drive-by shooting might come away with a conclusion at such great effort — possibly even giving-up a general appeal to SEITL — that they might not ever realize that they had not thought the matter deeply enough to reach principles equipping them to analyze this:

I begin with the idea that this was a political event.

I take “politics” as the branch of philosophy that studies human social organization, and this event is obvious to me as a glaring problem of human social organization. In their most general dimensions, the immediate political questions are something a lot like: “How to organize human life around people who can’t produce the values to sustain it but, instead, attempt to steal the sustenance of other people’s lives? How long can that go on before all their prey are dead? Who has to tolerate that, and why?”

Human history runs from one end (as far back as we know) to the other (right now) with exactly this sort of thing as rationale for government. Here is an example of a politics — a demonstration of human social organization — beyond the ethical scope of government. That seems, at least (although I take it as given fact), evident in reports that local “authorities” are curious about the taqueria shooter’s motive when he killed the armed robber.

“One of the reasons that law enforcement is seeking out this individual is to find out whether he was in fear for his life or the lives of the people around him because that’s absolutely essential to a self-defense claim under the law," KHOU Legal Analyst Carmen Roe said.

Understanding what politics is and what this ex post facto interest of the state has to do with the event, it’s not unduly simplified or complicated for me to score the thing:

1. Ethically: strictly none of my business, but interesting as a matter of values in action.

2. Practically: adept at dealing with the combat challenge.

3. Politically: admirably self-organized.

In the first category, I merely observe from a distance that the two main characters in the event are acting for values. I am not doing that, except in valuing my own judgments of the event. That’s very different: it’s not the ultimate value of my life at stake as I do that at my leisure. More: who prevails in a combat like that is of no real concern to me, beyond moral contemplation of its resolution. This is of great political importance to me when the state titles its criminal indictments as, “The People vs …” It has no right to arbitrarily include me in something like that without knowledge of my interest, which I always implicitly disclaim.

On the evidence available, which I take as immutable: even if lived in Houston, or even if I had been in the same room when this happened, I would not regard the man who shot that robber as a general threat at-large. Everything reported about this demands my opposite judgement. He even returned the robbed money to the other victims before he left the scene. It’s a crabbed view of any proceeding toward “justice” that would want to question an ethic like that, and I reserve my right to stay out of it.

In the second category, the shooter demonstrated aptitude with his pistol and the mental fortitude required for its intended use in that situation.

Right away: I dismiss the fact that the robber brandished a “fake” weapon. Certainly, this cannot be known to prospective victims. That’s the whole point of the deceit: if they know it’s not real, then they just won’t do what he’s trying to force them to do. Nobody would. To anyone with intent and ability to defend against a handgun threat, that threat is absolutely real at the instant it appears, and then: the narrow margin between reason and force can be crossed at the speed of thought.

In close-quarters handgun combat, this can happen with a flick-of-the-wrist and about 800 feet-per-second when the shot goes off. I bear in mind that we’re not talking about any of the “honor” images of two men squaring-off for a gunfight, now. It’s explosive flashing mayhem possible as fast as a barrel can line-up from any angle at any instant, with every possibility of deception with motion or words to conceal it. This robber was manifestly in mental distress, evidence by his frantic and aimless course around the room, fumbling with cash and — most important — casual & reckless handling of his weapon. (Yes; that’s what it was.)

Given these facts, the only rational conclusion (certainly to me and that’s good enough for me), is that whatever is wrong with the robber is bad enough that he can’t be trusted with any doubt that he’ll just start shooting with full intent, nevermind negligent discharge. The Taqueria Defender (yes, that’s what he was) showed admirable grasp of this principle. He can been seen constantly observing tactical facts and implications and preparing to exploit an opportunity to attack the robber with force equal to the deadliness of the threat. I understand that there can be no, “Hey! Stop!” or even “Shoot ‘Em In The Leg” about it. That’s because the flick-of-a-wrist, split-second dynamics of this kind of fight just don’t safely permit that. The concealed weapon must be brought to bear with full commitment to its purpose: to compound the application of force toward success, with surprise.

With all these facts in mind (the “context”), I must applaud The Defender’s actions to save lives from an obvious deadly threat, with clear thinking and commitment.

In the third category, my political considerations rest on my ethics, nothing of which that’s mine is at stake in this event. Over a thousand miles away, I handily managed to avoid harm in the affair. This is where I’ll put The Matter of The Final Shot.

The Defender is seen firing a final shot into (apparently) the head of the robber lying on the floor. Contentions that he may or may not have been a continuing threat at that point do not interest me, principally because I don’t think that’s what was at stake for The Defender, at that moment. I’ll risk conjecture, from available observation and reports of his actions and what certain of those facts must necesarily mean, that The Defender’s stake in that last shot was just good versus evil. It was the difference between a man who could reason-out what’s good for human life and one who could or would not, brought to deadly conflict.

When I consider that ethical complex of premises, I require no further political aspect of the story than that The Defender rides away in his pickup truck. Politics is the branch of philosophy that studies human social organization, and I find this episode of self-organization of good against evil eminently satisfying and conclusive.

James had asked —

Two Lenin biographies virtually at arm’s-reach seemed to help settle the question of who hipped Lenin to Marx, if not why it happened. 1) Victor Sebestyen (2017, p. 64) and 2) Dmitri Volkogonov (1994, p. 23) —

Lenin was eighteen years old when he “got hold of” his first Marx, with “Capital”. This was the year after his brother was hanged as an assassination plotter against Tsar Alexander III.

It set-off a flurry of books around here. Because of the economics angle on the Lenin/Marx paper, I was looking into Marxist action in various universities around the turn of the 20th century. Reviewing Vol. 10 of “The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek” (“Socialism And War” edited by Bruce Caldwell, 1977, University of Chicago), I noted:

In 1910, Eugen Böhm-Bawerk returned to teaching at the University of Vienna, and conducted something of a seminar class, including Otto Bauer, Emil Lederer, Otto Neurath, and Rudolf Hilferding, all of whom were arguing Marxist economics. That year, Hilferding produced his “Finance Capital” and only about thirty years ago people were saying that it was “the most influential text in the entire history of Marxian political economy, excepting only [Marx’s] ‘Capital’ itself.” (Caldwell’s “Introduction”, p. 4, note 9.) This was seven years before the Bolshevik Revolution. Lenin was still getting his feet under him that long after the failure of 1905.

It’s certainly not a conclusive or even probative point of history, but I do consider how “relatively” (to pick a word) Marx was dismissed (and by whom) until Lenin.

On the principle that “evil never goes away” I conclude that Marx propounded evil ideas that will always have to be fought. That’s why I don’t think that the degree of those ideas in the universities matters very much over the long-term on which communists fight their ideological fights. It’s essentially the same reason why Lenin so often invoked 1789: the basic ideas that run from Marx to Lenin were born in the French Revolution, and that current of evil has been constant since the day it sprung.

Without benefit of a coded “Synthetic Control,” but merely concepts and logic, I might run my own little counterfactual to arrive at a question:

I might suppose that Lenin had found the nerve to lead the assault on the Winter Palace that October night, and a horse had kicked his head clean off. I might imagine that Trotsky or even Zinoviev had inherited the Revolution and carried it through. My question, then:

Would Marx would somehow have been relegated to third-rate footnotes in a few obscure economics texts?

I would have a hard time imagining that.

Of course; the Bolshevik “victory” (if we should call it that) would burnish Marx’s reputation. To begin with, every politician knows that a high-rolling bandwagon is a spectacle beyond price for its ability to attract crowds, and everybody knew who built the chassis under this one. Lenin certainly wasn’t going to lie about his ideological inspirations — but none of them would have. Their True Belief of this moral scheme wasn’t entirely cynical (not like claiming they were the majority, when they weren’t). To a great deal of their hearts and minds, they really thought that they had “scientific” answers to ideological plagues of human existence, and all of their theoretical nurturing was the afterbirth of Karl Marx.

Even if Lenin had failed (as the German Revolution did, later), it would still make sense if some floaty professor were touting “alienation” in North Carolina today, on the way to “queer theory” tomorrow; all along the course-litany of failed but bold revolutions in the century-long interim.

That’s because evil never goes away, and this is a good one. It’s too good for the certain human archetype to which it appeals to give it up.

It was remarkable enough last Friday evening when Elon Musk ran his Twitter poll on whether to restore Donald Trump’s account. It’s a natural manifestation of the age: the computing power to conduct instant democracy is here, and the only real questions are in who puts it to that work, where, and under what auspices & authority. There is nothing politically binding about Musk’s poll, but it was a rousing technical demonstration of possibilities. More than fifteen million people throwing votes is not a sample to be ignored:

Musk’s announced principle of “Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” prevailed for Trump’s account by nearly four percentage points, and it was restored. Over eighty-seven million followers now await his ensuing silence.

The meantime has been entertained with indignant clamor on the left. Reports are that the exodus to Mastodon hasn’t been completely commodious on every quarter. The technical nature of the thing leaves lots of room for swastikas, distinctly un-rhythmic hard-’R’s, and other severe pains to the inclusive ethic.

It was Friday evening when CBS News solemnly announced that they were “pausing their activity” at Twitter out of “an abundance of caution,” but would “continue to monitor the situation”. Only forty hours later, the world’s heartbeat re-started when they gave the all-clear: "After pausing for much of the weekend to assess the security concerns, CBS News and Stations is resuming its activity on Twitter as we continue to monitor the situation.” You can imagine; there was much rejoicing.

The pinnacle of panic was gained by “clinical professor of marketing at the New York University Stern School of Business, and a public speaker, author, podcast host, and entrepreneur” Scott Galloway. Barely an hour after CBS News was back on the Twitter ramparts, Galloway appeared on “Face The Nation” to alert everyone to the recrudescent Russian menace.

Galloway can’t prove that there were Russian bots crowding Musk’s poll, but it would be hard for you to prove that they didn’t. That should make your hair stand up, but not for why he thinks it should.

It’s Time To Wash-Up: Biden

CBS News was still in the news this morning when they finally arrived at the Hunter Biden laptop party after two years. Catherine Herridge’s report came on like a paper fan in a hurricane since the Republicans have taken the House of Representatives with every promise to dig political graves in this story.

I hearken back to Lesley Stahl’s October 2020 "60 Minutes” session with Trump. Almost like an earnest relative, she took every care to let him in on the thing that every respectable person knew: the laptop “can’t be verified”.

She, along with everyone of her nervously herd-instinct species, got what they wanted out of that deal. With ends justifying all means, honorable work of their profession was postponed until more important values had been secured: suppression of the Biden laptop story was crucial to mal-informing American voters and therefore preventing Turmp’s re-election. Everyone knew this, and that’s what had to be done. It worked. It must have worked: that’s how narrow the vote was, and that’s why they did it.

And now, here’s CBS News joining the slinky back-alley crawl headed by the New York Times back in March. (Yes: they copped to it while Jen Psaki was still beaming her freckles at the White House Press Corps.) They claim to “verify” the laptop.

It must be hard: watching a lifelong dingbat fail his way into the highest political office in the land, all while he carries your party’s hopes and dreams, and then finally go to mental pieces in a time of strains and pressures that will occupy historians for decades. Now, the Great Wind Vane of mid-term elections must have blown the last crumbs of political value out of Biden’s pockets. Nobody needs him anymore, and all Democratic Party needs will swiftly be running the other way.

Nobody was going to be able to just brazen-out their denials of the laptop story, or its fullest implications, forever. In this case, it was only necessary for the right people to do it for two years. That sordid fact should also be flagged for honest historians.

It’s the socialists who are naturally inclined, when not driven, to their benefits of mass. Those benefits consist mainly in power for the political “organizers” (not “herders” or anything like that) and the sick hope that somehow sustains the souls of the politically organized, in lieu of just about everything else in life. This congregation has rung with cries of unity from Tammany to TV, on every half-plausible pretext for generations, of course. I would contend that I saw the pace and intensity of the drive accelerate indiscreetly in my lifetime.

It may be only my sensibility, but two years of this Democrat politburo and their put-on, Biden, have given me the biles & winds every time I hear the word, “unity,” any variation, or even an implication or insinuation. Recent strains of “national divorce” heard in some quarters can leave me bored and irritable for their thin Balkan eagerness, but when when the commies start that song of their polyp-people, I reach for my contempt.

In the annals of unity-hopery, it’s hard to cite a more hopelessly pathetic note than the one published by Emily Oster (PhD) from her safe space at The Atlantic.

The word, “we” wafts through the piece with far more aroma than its (ample) frequency. The effect is imaginable as some tunic-testy schoolmarm idly racking the slide on her rifle, with occasional eye on the baby’s cradle next to her desk. You know; for the care. What brings this to my mind is the sheer attitude that goes beyond assumption, past presumption, and right through audacity. It’s out to the limits of reason, which must make a reasonable person wonder what’s next.

It’s not that Dr. Oster would command an army or even a street-blocking protest over anything at all. She’s an economist, you see, and the data are as unlikely as a sky-blue elephant to drive her to that. That’s not her place in the world, which is: to calculate the probabilities and externalities of everybody else’s existence and then guide the truly, scientifically, organized through the chaos. That specially busybody aspiration has a very notable record for its results in human death and misery.

It’s not, of course, as if Dr. Oster is interested in that. All that interests her is “amnesty” for all the “complicated choices” during the entire Covid pall on togetherness.

“We need to forgive one another,” she heaves.

“We need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID.”

This woman must think that she’s talking to a 1957 Cub Scout den that got in a fight when someone mis-counted the marbles, or something a lot like that. A person in that situation could afford the authority of using that royal “we” without having to explain it to the children. It becomes a mystery with nearly sinister undertones when this person is talking about the scope and scale of militant destruction put upon America in the past three years.

Let’s note how Dr. Oster confesses that the ones who were in the dark are the ones who said and did what they did. They commanded people’s lives into virtual cages with orders against doing the business to sustain them. They ordered administration of ostensible medicines (“vaccines”) to as many people as they possibly could, under the plain extortion of threatening all other aspects of life — jobs, educations, transport services, medical services, for instance — as penalty for refusal. Honest medical analyses of these drugs are now revealing effects catastrophic to and horribly conclusive of human lives around the world. They smashed the souls and intellects of an entire generation of children, including all imaginable and unimaginable implications ranging from toddlers to adolescents and beyond, with scientifically laughable nonsense applied to schools: the very sorts of schools that once taught me enough to know how plainly psychotic the whole thing was

Dr. Oster: “But the thing is: We didn’t know.”

That is, indeed, “the thing”. It’s the very thing that the commissars and research-fetishist should have been thinking, before they might have had to say it out-loud, after they’d done what they did, but if only they hadn’t done it.

It’s the thing that countless Americans were shouting as hard as they could into the gas-blast from “experts” and “authorities” who never stopped telling them how stupid and evil they were. They were viciously betrayed by the insidious promise of “public square” opportunity for “voice” in social media and then “canceled” (a word of marvelous facility, now) for dissent, with monstrous digital precision, by faceless corporations selling “community”.

And now, these people — this heathen caste — are professorially instructed that “dwelling on the mistakes of history can lead to a repetitive doom loop”.

There’s a phrase fit to Balkanize, for you.

By an unexpected turn of our history, a bit of the truth, an insignificant part of the whole, was allowed out in the open. But those same hands which once screwed tight our handcuffs now hold out their palms in reconciliation: "No, don't! Don't dig up the past! Dwell on the past and you'll lose an eye."

But the proverb goes on to say: "Forget the past and you'll lose both eyes."

(Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn — “The Gulag Archipelago”, vol. I, “Preface”, p. X)

At the lowest, most basic, level of principle, this caste of dissent is called upon to dismiss and dispose of the experienced reality which is the the material of morality itself. The harm that they’ve suffered, and the outrage of having it at the hands of obvious incompetents and malevolents, has shown them more than enough about how to live as human beings instead of despised subjects. Wholesale demolition of society is what they’ve seen and lived on every quarter, and that’s what they’re being told to forgive and forget, on the now plainly hollowed pretext of “the good of society”. This goes beyond contradiction and hypocrisy to psychological assault, with the added insult that it comes from a self-preened “unapologetically data-driven” economist. Nobody who has had to hear — remotely — of a dear loved one’s death because their presence was forbidden by “data-driven authority” should have to think about something like this for one stolen heartbeat before dismissing it with contempt or hatred or whatever the current research says about the completely sensible and righteous human response.

People who are morals-driven, even at their most charitable, are simply not now disposed to stand for this.

How well or whether the Dr. Osters of America might conceive an understanding of that fact, and why it exists as a fact, would tell a lot about whether the almost maniacal demand for “unity” is as flatly cynical as it seems. There can be nothing like that between people who think that the agonies of the past three years are to be understood and condemned, and people who cannot and will not see that demand as a matter of moral principles: applied studies in how to live, versus how let it all go to massive deathly mayhem.

"It wants to stand out as a great power. Its problem has always been not this sense of self or identity but the fact that its capabilities have never matched its aspirations. It’s always in a struggle to live up to these aspirations, but it can’t, because the West has always been more powerful."

This, of course, is because it does not produce on anything like the scale of its potential or requirements, and there are countless reasons for it, spanning centuries of culture and political convolutions. In Russia, the human mind has never approached freedoms to apply reason to problems of preserving and enhancing life that have been exercised in the West for hundreds of years. Since Peter The Great, applied science, technology, and industry existed mainly at the indulgence of the imperial throne, to include foreign investments in Russia. The Bolsheviks and Soviets spent millions of lives aping the West, promising space travel to whole generations who waited for electricity and cars; all while the slave camps raged.

Connotations of the word, "power" in this context often conflate the power to destroy and the power to produce, which are two different applications of human will and ethics. The military element of the thing should always be emphasized in considering Russia. For centuries of the Empire, its rulers paid court to formal relations with Europeans, and even familial relations with their royals. All this, through various wars & skirmishes. Napoleon's adventure to the heart of the Motherland, however, was a thunderbolt that ratified ages-old suspicions and fears of that rumbling smoke on the western horizon; what powers of destruction ranged along those two thousand miles of border in the Industrial Age?

The Soviets' brutal practice of the very idea of communism was so naturally offensive to rational human ethics that it could only be maintained by military force, with the principle beginning against Russians themselves. The borders were enforced against escape attempts at least as much as against invasion, but that had nothing to do with the self-avowed communist intent to -- yes -- take over the world. The names of Prague and Budapest should suffice to illustrate determination in their intent, if not complete fulfillment of the dream.

It was not only world response to the observed ferocity of communism in the mid-20th century that made Soviet Russians sullen and mean. It was also a feral cunning which brought within their mental reach the sense that decent people didn't like them, and might try to do something about them.

Vladimir Putin was as born to sit the seat of 21st-century Russian power as anyone else who would want that job, now. He would have been formed in the character-press of a certain sense of a world-orphan; always looking-in at the fires of the West, but consigned to the cold by geography, centuries of ethical and political domination without the Enlightenment touch of individualism, and steeled as a machine in all the Soviet rationales and skills of brute force.

Aspirations to world power on these principles, combined with economic desperations at play in Russian affairs, represent the central engine of currents in international affairs since WW II. Mid-century U.S. diplomats were already practiced in the conduct of empire; practically since the invasion of North Africa in 1942, if not theoretically since Alfred Thayer Mahan and Theodore Roosevelt. The predatory nature of communism was starkly evident in the Soviet strangling of eastern Europe along nearly its entire military front in 1945, and every national foreign policy had to account for it.

That the United States assumed the international power that it did is a matter of doing the wrong thing for throbbings of the heart and not reasonings of the mind according to the principles that first set America down its course in history. Great whoops for "Democracy!" in the late throes of WW I drove U.S. military action as soon as a Lusitania could be exploited, and new principles of large-scale international responsibility were laid in blood. Not counting the interim of the 1920s-30s, the rest of the century would see constant increase of U.S. military interest in foreign affairs, augmented (not diminished) by sporadic attempts at international peace through super-bureaucratic efforts engineered in Washington D.C.

In their various memoirs, these people argue, essentially, that they meant well. Acheson and Rusk, Kennan and Henderson will all tell you of the struggles of managing what Russia had become. When the U.K. gave up its ill-advised attempt to save Greece from communism in 1946, it was an ad-hoc State Department committee working over the weekend that lashed-up what became the Truman Doctrine.

Presumably, somebody had to do it, and these people presumed.

Just about anyone can pore through history and look back at all the branches of roads taken, so that it’s all arrived at wide astonishment that the best efforts of seven decades of experts now teeter on the bloody edge of Ukraine. To anyone seriously thinking about America, the United Nations and NATO must finally be taken as dangerous delusions, down to their roots. They are the centers of power against which deranged aspirations like Putin’s are arranged; exploiting the moral and political confusions of their members with a criminal’s feel for an open window or a lawyer’s eye for the disputable clause.

The net effects of NATO throughout its existence have been to convince European countries that they could afford the fashions of socialism at the cost of their own defense, and Russia that all its worst fears for centuries became nuclear-true. Mere decency demands a word for countless unknown dreams of individual Americans who were forced to pay for all this: go ahead; you tell me what those dollars and cents were worth to them, if you dare.

World War I happened for reasons awfully similar to what The Bloodlands (in Timothy Snyder’s ringing appellation) are coming to right now. States forcibly binding their citizens to international agreements with all the intentions and dress of honor take enormous risks of having to live-up to them, and will ordinarily do so on stupid and venal impulses.

There is no telling what lies at the bottom of the real Western interest in the Ukrainian crisis. Pretenses to “honor” in today’s worldwide criminal politics still work as cynical cover for any & all interested to not know: through it all, people still trust their governments enough to write the checks and vote.

What should be obvious enough is that the gross arrangements of foreign relations in eighty years, since the best moral impulses of Americans took the torch of empire from Britain in 1942, have now run to unique dissipation of their country’s “power,” in either connotation of the word. Incalculable productive effort was devoted to worldwide maintenance of war conditions on demand, and no one will ever know how it might have shown the world better way to live, as America always had. At the same time and in result, the greatest military force in history is constrained and driven by thickets of various treaties, agreements, and mere implications, to the point where it is more frequently useless all the time. Kabul 2021 should have made the final case.

Only history will demonstrate whether most of a century’s folly can ever be peacefully regressed toward a foreign policy on moral principles that an American could endorse. All argument of the subject would be heavily laced with appeal to anachronism: “The times have changed!” This line brings the convenience of not having to causally analyze the principles at work today, as well as dismissing principles in general. It is to deny, in general, the idea that nations could benefit from moral leadership as well as people do and that, in particular, America could ever do it.

Certainly, it could not, today. If the statesmen of the mid-20th century were earnestly misgiven, they were serious about their work. We can only wonder at what they would make of Kamala Harris at a press conference with the president of Poland, giggling over a question about refugees in a context of deadly invasive combat as cause of the whole thing. Joe Biden must be widely understood as practically derelict by friend & foe alike, with the latter surely stimulated at the prospect. None of this is beneficial leadership to anyone, America least of all.

From where would the morals of a proper moral leadership come?

It’s a heavy complex of conditions that result in the question. Present political leadership is an expression of practice of government and preaching from academia, amplified by media, for more than a century: a concurrence of ideas so complete that it is constantly analyzed as conspiracies now. That’s not really what it is. It’s just that the steady culture of government, because of its basic nature, has wrought a society in which morals are subordinate to the expedience of force and its natural companion: lies.

The most fundamental lie in all of it is that government is better than freedom. That’s what most people have been raised to believe.

What America first demonstrated to the world was the moral and practical value of freedom. To say that “the times” or “the world” has changed and that there is no place now for what that means, is to ignore how America changed the world when it did, in defiance of thousands of years of human bondage. Even in the face of hourly horrible news, there could never be a better time to argue for precise analysis of what this country has been, is, and should be.

It’s possible that, after their centuries of confused misery, even the Russians might figure it out.

In his January 20, 2022 show, Tucker Carlson traced the events of Ruby Ridge, Waco, and Oklahoma City along a line of logic consistent with well known facts of those cases. That line eventually ran to hideous slaughter, pitched as warfare in some certain primitive and desperate turns of mind. He was observing how the vessel of polity can explode at any seam where values conflict with the state.

Ethical measurements along Carlson’s line need not be too fine before we can point out that there are reasons why some people should never have to come to the conflicts with government that they do. The cases that he cited are full of context, each and together. Ruby Ridge and Waco occurred in only six months’ succession, and it should be easy to understand that it would have been far better to have left those people alone. When I think about America, I don’t flinch at the idea of what anybody else thinks are unsavory characters, as long as nobody’s getting hurt.

Even if they are; it’s none of my business unless they’re hurting me.

With intense media attention, these cases concentrated the emotions and thinking of millions of Americans (and as many worldwide) essentially because their violence was manifestly political: they weren’t robbery or drug-war shootouts; they were the conclusive logic of the state brought to bear on individual Americans’ values. Public debate was strident, with always implicit but rarely explicit understanding that the most basic dispute was about the value of government.

It took only two years for the bomber’s witness of Waco to fester up at Oklahoma City, so horribly memorable that the name itself is enough here. Even accounting for resorts to anti-collectivist ideas in the rationale, the 1995 bombing is singularly distinctive for its initiative and enormous ferocity. It came from no personal animus, but that delicate membrane of reason in a madman’s head so susceptible to social pressures that it ruptured, with violence very competitive in all the annals of human savagery.

What drives men mad? Are they really driven, or do they just give up?

To what degrees do they each lose their powers of reason, and in what ways?

These are old questions, but as pertinent now as any observant person can see by looking out the window or taking-in the news at one’s media of choice.

The thing about “terror” now is that it’s very common in American life. It’s also a general contradiction of the basic idea of American life and everything that implies. This only compounds the moral disorientation of the whole culture, including the values of people who don’t even reason through what values are, why they’re needed, or which ones to choose in order to live fully human lives.

Generally, I expect terrorized people to act terribly, on all sides.

There is an over-arching component to all of this that colors the politics of an observation like Carlson’s. It’s in the fact that, in the progress of their political program, collectivists are incapable of accounting for any of this. For all their avowed care and concern for humanity, they will not be brought into contact with any facts concerning the effects of their armed-busybody oppression of dissenters from their whole idea.

They're not interested in reason and there's only one other alternative available in all of human affairs.

None of it had to come to any of this, but the socialists have played their various hands for over a century with deft patience, implacable determination, and unshakable fidelity to their principles, amid a catalog of attributes found in virtually none of their victims.

Their program has been swimming dimly into view for some Americans for several decades, but the crises are becoming deeply explicit and more clear to all, now.

In its nature, socialism is always prepared for "intensification of struggle". (This accounts for a great deal of the panic over Trump. They understood the threat and rose to meet it with entomological virtuosity.)

Everyone can see the government power-plays over the past two years, at least, ranged against a president who didn't understand the nature of the fight and then America itself -- the very idea -- once the foremost socialist party came to full triple-branch power of its constitution, augmented by the perennial power of the administratum. (The "deep state".)

Socialists are far better prepared, morally, than any authentic constituency of American ideals having to confront their constant ideological aggression, now becoming explicitly and practically political. (Observers of the 1/6 prisoners case understand the latter clause.) They are long practiced at the charade of provocation turned to outrage upon morally confused victims, who more & more sense mortal threats to their very existence.

Americans' bare sensations of impending (indeed; in-"progress") disaster are not sufficient for reasoning through what to do about any of it.

It's been said that his country cannot be ruled, but: it can explode. It's never been more true, for countless reasons now, but the paucity of honest, able & earnest thought is high among them. All values are becoming more subject to sheer power; conditions that bode direly for hope of peace on any quarter.

I know anger. I know why. I, for one, was never born for the yoke of any commissar's murderous dream. I hold that no one ever was. With the evil device coming more clearly into sight every hour, I more than ever long for peace. This is not the dank quiet of the cell, or endless accommodation of The People's Will. I would be a man free among all those able and willing to produce values as a way of life, and I take sole personal outrage at any who would presume to command us.

There can be no peace with them, but only questions on the nature and conduct of the battle dream that they have in their evil hearts. It cannot be ignored, but must be taken up with scrupulously reasoning mind and met first on moral premises, even in these times of mounting political crisis.

To impress these ideas now upon a populace woefully equipped in mind & heart to understand, is nearly to dream of "utopia" often sneered by those unable to even imagine (much less conceive) any way but democracy. Everybody's at the lip of the cannibal pot now, you see, spoon in hand for what they can get before they're thrown in, too. (Recall: "At the table or on the menu".)

Still: the socialists have the cultural initiative (no matter the 2022 elections), and they will not stop.

It's more important than ever that assertive reason prevails in any resistance to their now obviously worldwide program. Americans should lead the way with characteristically insouciant panache, laced with a dash of danger, but always aimed at proof of moral rectitude against domination.

Be cool. Smash their ideas with furious, integrated logic. Find their hidden premises and ruthlessly demolish them, that their superstructures collapse in thunder. Laugh loudly at their stark nonsense, and never stipulate to assertions of guilt or any other personal infirmity that is not truly yours; these and countless other rational strictures. Bring war upon their *minds*, not their bodies, nor any of their rote puppets. These are only expressions of their evil, and expendable to it.

You, are not.

Live: right in their faces.

Throughout its ages since ancient Greece, democracy has been sold as "the rule of the people" in various practical forms such as the direct democracies of small polities in which there are no legislative representatives, and the specialized democracy erected on the United States Constitution. It's a plaintive atavism that offers the "constitutional republic" objection against the facts of how the offices of all three branches of the U.S. government are filled (two by election voting, and the other by appointment of the elected). The Constitution does not essentially denature democracy; it re-orders it according to the outlook of the 18th-century men who assumed to design a government for a loose number of local polities that had assembled in battle against the world’s most powerful monarchy.

The United States Constitution predates the French Revolution by mere months on the calendar, years in concept, and at least a generation in philosophy. In their varied strikes against the millennia-long rule of kings, however, both resorted to basic a theme of “the people”. The unprecedented demonstrations of individual productive ability that began with the Industrial Revolution were exploits of such freedom as could be conceived amid the vast natural resources of the continent, before the basic design of the government was wrought-out to full integral conclusion two centuries later.

Now, in the Age of Envy, all aspirants to elective office understand as well as their constituents that government itself is the principal value of all political activity. Their assertion of “our democracy” is also a politically legitimate claim to what U.S. government is, in both current practice and logical integrity of constitutional theory.

The United States Supreme Court is the conceptual arena in which a principle most notably at work in democratic theory is essential: the rule of the majority. It comes to bear with nearly legendary acuity in the court because of the socially momentous nature of the rulings, together with the micro-focus of the principle in nine human beings.

It’s a virtually unspoken premise that those nine people elevated to a “supreme court” are learned and wise beyond the hope of anyone who hasn’t made the requisite devotions of study and experience; almost as if what it takes to achieve a SCOTUS seat is comparable to similar achievement in any other field, and that pinnacle of profession is the proof. That premise is morally defunct because of how the court uniquely presumes to direct the use of government force for or against people’s lives. In an age when generally perverse ethics makes government – not freedom -- the principal value for which all politics acts, it is idle to hope for intellectual ability and integrity throughout the full range of matters that can be brought before the court.

The premise of Elevated Wisdom relies on attributes of enormous intellectual capacity brought honestly to bear on increasingly absurd demands from pressure groups spawned and trained by mad proliferation of law & regulation, as well as democracy in the specific traditions of the constitution. It’s a questionable-enough premise when merely taking advice among friends. When it comes to dictating how anyone must live, it becomes downright oppressive because of how it disposes of our own judgment and the reason why that exists: in order to conduct our own lives.

Even before a decision in National Federation of Independent Business v. Department of Labor, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Justice Sonia Sotomayor is a spectacular example of how the principles of democracy can go wrong: when decisions of such importance are submitted to anyone so badly informed.

~~~~~

The political action that becomes micro-focused on the Supreme Court swells from the premise of “the people”. It is always put as the concern of power-players who can sell that premise mainly because no one steps up to them to refute it. In general, most people are too busy producing the values necessary to living their lives to notice when all of it is being claimed by others who don’t know or care about them, and have never even asked their view of the matter.

Nonetheless, the demand for expanding the number of seats on the court rests on the implicit claim of popular representation (“our movement” and “Equal Justice”) in order to modify its constitutional structure. The suggestion is temporal, of course, cued to the current facts of a Democratic presidency and congressional majorities (no matter how thin) on the idea that this would be the opportunity to effect such a thing, with lasting consequence for the prospects of socialism.

Why shouldn’t the composition of the court be the object of democratic gang-warfare?

It is well understood that the court must be taken under ideological campaign because of its importance as the last stop of majority rule in the line of political authority in America. Dating at least as far back as the school playgrounds of old, the Supreme Court is also its highest expression, in the most concentrated form, with all the well-known defects but also incomparable power to rule with their very own opinions.

To begin at the political level of philosophy, the practice of force as a way of dealing with each-other is rampant at every turn, right down to the street-level. This, of course, should not be surprising because of how the force of government has been coloring every aspect of life in America for the entire 20th century: Americans have taken the lessons. The senseless brutality of police enforcing arbitrary laws (a single example, among countless: the War on Drugs) has taught more than two generations that appeals to reason are futile and dangerously naive. Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" and its relentless metastases wrought destruction of families so deep and wide that countless millions were left as ethical orphans without a moral outlook that would inform a proper way of human life. All of it has been positively accelerated by government education, which could only-ever have served the purpose of acclimation to slavery.

Descending a hierarchy of philosophy to the more principled level ethics (which necessarily informs and conditions politics), we can see the nearly complete ex-valuation of values (paraphrasing Friedrich Nietzsche) with the sole exception of collective values: almost every reason for human action presumed by government to be disposable for "the common good". This has resulted in the gang-warfare of democracy finally distilled in the very apt adage that, "If you're not at the table, then you're on the menu". Even intellectual derelicts can sense this viscerally, with the cunning perception of hunted animals.

The harrowing lapse of thought itself (also bound-up in ethical travesties: truth is no longer a value) in widespread inability to maintain even simple contexts for purposes of abstracting necessary implications of facts, or even what facts are. This constitutes a wholesale overthrow of the power and purpose of the human mind, which is the sinking of humanity below its own nature to genuine sub-humanism: an existential crisis that would never have dawned on the puny racist discrimination of Nazis, among the worst beasts of all history.

Arriving at the very bottom; metaphysics has been the banished domain of philosophy for over a hundred years: reality itself is long dismissed as an objective fact. (Students of Pragmatism will understand this.) A working recent example is the case of Alexandra Souverneva, the woman accused of wildfire arson in California who calls herself a "shaman": a person who professes contact with a "spirit world" for the purpose of "healing". The general consequences of a genuine disregard for reality (no mere novel wisecrack, but actual un-caring that existence exists and what that means) are video-observable at any hour in myriad examples; people don’t even know how to live, never mind letting others do it.

The sum of these defects is the general sum of American (indeed: Western) culture with the consequence of general working psychosis at every level from the street to so-called "business" to "the Ivory Towers" and all political institutions. People mal-trained to conduct life as human beings have little way to regard any of it as more than a bestial combat, except for superficial vestiges of ancestral behavior once civilized and now reduced to quaintly observed habit without understanding, and instantly perishable at the least conflict.

The entire crisis of American politics is now taken as exclusively political, without much deeper cause or understanding, and open to exclusively political solution. A more and more common joke that people should "vote harder" refers to this fact. What's actually true is that mounting frenzy to compete at electoral politics is the most informative metric of social disintegration available to anyone with eyes to see it, a mind to think about it, and a will to know the truth of it all.

Understanding reality (the fact of existence itself), reason (application of the essentially-identifying attribute of humanity), and discrimination of values from their myriad opposites are all indispensable to conduct of human life, to include the institution of a rational and peaceful politics. The entire edifice of philosophy, painfully erected over centuries and which only began to serve proper human habitation in the past four hundred years or so, must be effectively rebuilt in order to restore a righteous hope in what mankind can, and should, be.

Until American philosophy is recovered from whole decades and generations of neglect and outright sabotage, no strains at politics will avail anything but intensifying conflict and no way to find peace and prosperity.

This will be an enormous project of thought, contravailing everything that pretends to that, today.

Sober and genuinely thoughtful analysts will be the heroes: not "first responders" or their cynical sponsors, or the whole species of demagogues calling themselves "educators," or the virtual-battlefield marshals known as "politicians".

Only the American mind, to any extent that it can be resurrected, will suffice. A way of thinking that properly apprehends what reality is, exploiting physical senses that saw our ancestors through countless millennia and knowing now how to integrate percepts into concepts according to abstract principles -- and discriminate principles; refined to identify and practice the best ways that any individual human being could live a better life. The singular power of the human mind is the solely prevailing device of human survival, unlike all other species, which are principally physically adapted to their environments. We live by our conceptual capacity, the first task of which is to identify the nature of existence; not for idle speculation but as a matter of life and death.

Throughout the entire human ascent through the ages, Americans have thus far been the highest expression of this way of life. It must be stressed that no matter how badly the idea of all this has been treated in American history, with infamous atrocities in the records of those who stole the premise in the name of the "United Sates," the truest identity politics of all is that which understands the moral necessity of the freedom of every individual human mind, and the political freedom to pursue its own judgments.

It was America, situated as it was in both history and geography, where the idea could be put to practice through the unique energy of New World discovery coupled with Industrial Age productive power. To the extent the they were free from government restriction, Americans demonstrated possibilities open to human achievement as have never been shown in the history of the nation-state.

The highest potential of human achievement cannot be coerced. No rule of force can inspire its own contradiction: the distinctly unruly reach of the human mind toward what the world really is, and how to use that for profit. How to live profitably at peace among countless other judging and discriminating moral beings is an entire ethics that must now be socially reconstituted among generations taught all the opposite premises and whose general world-view demands the thoughtless savagery daily on parade now.

The premise to set is that freedom is a necessary value to human life. This is to distinguish freedom from all forms of collectivism ("communism," "fascism," "social democracy," etc.), which necessarily demand violation of a human being's most crucial attribute: individual judgement; the ability to apprehend reality with his own senses. All socialisms demand intellectual conformity, regardless of individual judgment, contrary to what a human being is, and the basic principle here is that no entity can survive in violation of its own nature. Human beings are no exception to this, no matter the pretenses of all reformers.

If the American mind can be drawn along a course like this, to demonstrate its own heritage and all the reasons for it, then it will be possible to refute and prevail over the variety of socialist impulses rampaging now through ethics and politics. Cries for "union!" ring across the land without seriously asking about principles upon which anyone should unite. The original American ethics of freedom (no matter how badly practiced in U.S. politics) is the fundamental value that struck the word, "union!" into the spiritual chords of the nation long before anyone saw fit to go to civil war over it, and it must be distilled to explicit philosophy again in order to guide anything like an American restoration.

That's where that all is, now.

The second video clip on the page is among the most harrowing that I've seen in the whole catastrophe, so far. I can see everything implicit in a scene of illiterate Southwest Asian peasants running alongside and climbing, where they can, onto a C-17 heavy-lift jet airplane, cheering it along a taxiway like some uncanny burden-beast in an appearance in the village festival parade.

We're talking about the pre-scientific mind. Their leaders have for generations suppressed and overthrown every approach to modern life, all of which is born and borne in the West. Everything they have that's modern, came from the minds and work of people the like of which they have never raised.

Now, they have fallen to the ravages of this murderously anti-human scourge, the Taliban, among whose stated intents is to bring the whole world under their blade. It's awful to see anyone driven to such abject mortal terror. Among the recurring attractions of my eye in watching various Kabul videos is the children, almost always holding tightly to an adult hand, illustrating the last shred of trust that someone is going to do something to make everyone stop running and screaming.

This is a very old culture of faith and force, virtually untouched by the attributes of reason which are an essential characteristic of the Western mind, except in various expedient mimicries: they can machine an AK-47 right there in front of their hut, but they're not interested to work-up what it takes to invent something like that and everything that goes into genuine industry of anything on a national scale.

Their sketch of "government" is Victorian, at best, foggily-lensed as a sort-of cargo-cult apprehension of form and baksheesh in practice -- at worst, it's plainly medieval and it's about to get medievaler.

For now, the world is just going to have to suffer this one. This; on top of twenty years of America doing its own suffering at just living with a constant state of war so sublime that it takes something like the past forty-eight hours of Afghanistan for even CENTCOM to finally take it seriously as it really is. The imaginable horrors awaiting that place harrow up the soul.

The horrors for the whole world, now, take even more ruthless dimensions. If reasonable people can plot axes of evil, which I count as a very valid concept, then a new and heavy Bezier point has been laid on a curve that runs roughly: Beijing, Islamabad, Kabul, Tehran. (Other influential points: Pyongyang, Baghdad, Ankara, Moscow.)

It's important to bear in mind the blazing guerrilla technique executed by the Taliban in this episode. In a campaign that must surely go down in the annals with Vo Nguyen Giap, they exploited every device of irregular warfare, to include the entire psychological aspect of the fight. They always knew what they were doing, with conviction so profoundly animated (and well-armed) that thousands of government troops enlisted themselves and their weapons to the subhuman cause.

There is no good reason to believe that such bestial passions will be restricted by any national boundary. This far into the twenty-first century, technology and a wholly prevalent ethics (mostly by default in the West) that holds human life in less value every day present ample opportunity for irregular murder for the most regular cause of all: sheer primitive evil. Its insinuations into civilized life have never been met successfully by negotiation: that's impossible with an enemy that can, and does, walk right up next to you with the intent to die in destroying you.

Taliban will teach countless peasants, uncultured with reason, how to do this. I take them at their stated intent to bring Islam to the whole world. As a new dot on the axes of evil, they can now deal with greater powers in the work of destroying what they say they want to destroy, all of them working at their own interests toward the same end.

Nor do I see reason to believe that the United States is in any shape to seriously manage any of it. The widely-expressed shock (not to say, "awe") at the Taliban victory should go far past mere military intelligence failures, all the way down to honestly grasping basic foreign policy doctrine for three-quarters of a century since Greece in 1947. This examination would course the whole lifetimes of historians, never mind the politicians (including the Pentagon) and academics inclined to litigate that fight to any reasonably useful conclusion on the basic presumptions of "nation building".

The American question of the day is: how many of us understand where we really stand with these savages from halfway around the world, who can be here before dawn?

Well, no; I'm not going to take much in ethical lessons from the stark irrationality of tribal and religious feuds never touched by Western reason which, by the way, is the genuine essence of all political dispute in America, today.

Western reason, for and toward Western man: the understanding of metaphysical distinction of his conceptual capacity; each individual's way, method, and device of making his life, which is naturally compelled as his very own. From this; distillation of a politics in which every individual human being is free, compelled by nothing but every sunrise to live the day to his own best among his equals in freedom to live their best at expense to no one but them.

This Western idea was the founding concept and intellectual motive of America, and no matter how badly it was ever treated since it first dawned, it is nonetheless the finest and most productive way of life ever abstracted in human history. It should be the aim of everyone who loves human life, "the people," "the American People," or any other presumptive grouping beloved by the advocate.

The plainly-grasped idea of freedom is well-enough understood by tens of millions of Americans who also understand that government is its opposite. It's no mere "conversation" to people who know that the root element of government is force. More and more, they take the principle to heart and mind: if they cannot reason their way to freedom, and if force is the ruling principle of dealing with each-other, then, in the ringing admonition of Nancy Pelosi, "People are going to do what they're going to do."

So, the real question isn't so much whether people will fight, but whether anyone should, and why. It wouldn't occur to me to compare American politics with "the modern Middle East" (a crashing non sequitur) for the reasons outlined above. The vast cultural differences in basic philosophy make it a pointless diversion. An honest concern with America must take up the irreconcilable conflict of individualism (the basic American idea) vs. collectivism.

Individualism is politically manifest as freedom. Without a great deal of honest and effective philosophical guidance (certainly not as much as it requires or deserves), the very idea of freedom yet survives as a sort of gut-level apprehension in enough Americans that it frightens people who are not opposed to violence in principle. It's just that their own offensive violence (by the state) is rationalized by presuming other people's values (e.g.; "the common good").

They don't mind using force for what they want, and it outrages them when they're threatened with opposition on that principle. (They don't consider whether it would come to any of this if only they would leave people to their own lives on their own powers.)

Sooner or later, all socialisms grind down to individual life at levels where every human mind understands the violations of its own function. It always comes to moments when the self-conscience takes a sideways glance at itself with a question like, "Is this really for real?" More: the explicit socialist grind of the question is in how it occurs with inescapable press. It's not about a favorite sports team or motorcycle and the force of the state cannot simply be agreed to disagree.

Americans are coming to the grind with unprecedented press, now. It will do no good to snarl at them in rote partisan tones over shibboleths like "Trump" almost as if they haven't watched obviously socialist mobs laying waste to cities everywhere with virtually official impunity and certain ideological imprimatur of academia and media.

Americans, being convinced that freedom is the best way for all humans to live, must necessarily by basic nature and their ethics deny all socialist authority over anyone's life. In a politics more evidently resorting to force at every turn, all serious discussions of violence must account for the essential values at stake that would even bring the matter to such attention.

To the extent of obsessions with violent rhetoric and fantasies (not to mention "sheer pornographic sadism") located exclusively on the "right-wing"; they may be regrettably unpleasant. I certainly think so. It's terrible that American life should come to this for any of us, and it's my earnest hope that the basic conflict of our time could be resolved without the catastrophe of which everyone is afraid, now.

Ugly as they are, they certainly reflect a defensible moral outlook of defense of real, live, individual people against the force of government and most certainly; the outlook of people constantly more politically aware of the long socialist dream of subjugating America. All this is available to all common sense, and undeniably important to understanding American politics now, what could happen, and why.

(Victor Davis Hanson, earning a lovely grin from Laura Ingraham)

Take a good long look at that second sentence of Professor Hanson's. Those are the "institutions" to which Antonio Gramsci referred in his concept of "the long march," which would subvert and transform an entire culture's values and politics without firing a shot.

If we add elements like finance and industry, as well, then we're talking about what Lenin called the "commanding heights" of the culture.

Both ideas (mere slogans, in fact) turn on the basic principle of gaining values (of unprecedented enormity, now) without producing them.

The generational success of the "Long March" through America is now becoming obvious even to people who have never even heard of Gramsci, although equally few would know how to attribute it or analyze it in American history. I, myself, never tire of observing the exemplary nationalization of American education in 1979 with Jimmy Carter's institution of the United States Department of Education (not ever, dear reader, to be confused by way of principles with Anatoly Lunacharsky's Commissariat of Enlightenment because that can't happen here). If we can't look back at forty-two years of DoE and its "progress" and call it a "long march" with Gramsci's approval, then the language has finally sunk to complete dereliction.

Professor Hanson speaks of "they". The context of that referent is the Digitalnacht purges of social media, and who did it. (I'll get to a bit of the "why they did it" in a moment.) We all (including them) know who they are. By accurate logical extension of principles, a full panorama of the present "commanding heights" can be taken into conceptual view. As if by some mysterious command authority radiating from Seattle, San Francisco, and Mountain View, various industrial, financial, educational, and social institutions across America now clamor for admission among The Righteous and offer their own summary proscriptions for qualification.

It will not be long before a man can't get a coat dry-cleaned without wearing his Blue Check on his sleeve.

At this point, the point is to ask people like Professor Hanson how it may have happened that this happened. As well; what are the actual implications of that happening?

"History Is A List of Consequences"

It should not be difficult in tracing effect back toward cause in all this. (This point has its own implications in the matter of what human beings can do about causes.) Just let me present one fairly reasonable tracing:

We might posit an American college graduate in 1980. This person would stand a plausible chance of having parents of, perhaps, a certain...flowery persuasion. Not necessarily certifiably anointed in patchouli, you understand, but perhaps a bit wafty in its passing breeze. Even if our 1959-er were born to rock-ribbed Nose-Holders for Goldwater '64, he (or she, in their bustlings by 1980) might have at least entertained post-graduate discussion of whether Ronald Reagan might go off his nut and nuke Brezhnev.

Cynical trimmers can have the whole style of argument that would protest Carter's responsibility for the flexibility of an open mind only the year after his big idea. It's far too true that the whole primitive impulse to government had long gained this crucial commanding height of the culture. Jimmy Carter planted a cabinet-level flag on that hill, however, and anyone can go ahead and shrug it off, but I sure do like to point it out.

The class of 1984 freshmen were already only more steeped in the ethics of the state. If we look back to their graduating year, we can see them marching around with crappy evil U.S. stars painted in tempura on cardboard rockets and generally raising hell for "PEACE!!!" I'm pretty sure that their parents hadn't taught them such fine details of politics, although Mom & Dad had likely been -- at some point in their lives and at least -- flushy at the idea of hoisting a Mao-fist: that would have been fun to them, and everybody's education would have relieved them of the duty to think that through.

If our thoroughly rough trace brings us to the mid-to-late 1980s or so, then that might be near enough that our present readery can begin to directly recall how these man-haters... no, wait; Haters of The Man began to take sights on the commanding heights. The giant matrix of government command was not only a superstructural fact of American life, but it was also festooned with opportunity for budding jobholders and breast-beaters of every recruitable sort. They would learn to incline their labors toward the commanding heights, because that's where the power was, and the dogma of force (distinct from the power to produce) had been living loudly within them at least since Mario Savio climbed on top of a police car with his bullhorn in 1964.

And now, their children have risen into the Digital Information Age, pulsing the dogma with their sensational grasp of technology and the ethics of savages. Again; I'm pretty sure that their parents didn't teach them these delicate elements of ethics applied with politics, although we certainly might conject possibilities along the lines of, say, the 'rents defense of the very idea of Oval Office blow jobs instead of perjury before a grand jury, because: free health care!

"...whatever."

History is a list of consequences. This goes for ideas more importantly than events, and these savage children did not simply come sailing over the western horizon on a slow boat from China. Before they were born, they were surrendered on the commanding height of American education where the flag of government was planted in their bones.

Today, they stand on the heights and survey Professor Hanson's "the people". To be sure, I don't think he's talking about people who might, perhaps, pay for their daughter's tattoo or their son's blue hair job, or bottle-necks in anybody's ear lobes. I mean; I suppose lots of people's kids could grow up and host, worldwide, an authentic maniac's stated desire to destroy America with all kinds of medieval hellfire and still mute a rich New York lout who's actually turned-in an objectively honorable chapter in his life, for graciously decent reasons, even if he's still a New York lout. But, you know, I'm just guessing, and I doubt whether many of those parents ended-up voting for Donald J. Trump.

“The people" of Professor Hanson's referral are fearfully and angrily behind in this crisis now coming to crucial straits. Someone among them is going to have to come up with foundational moral refutations of the ethics of force and all of its politics as now practiced, and even a positive recovery of sound language useful to the exchange of ideas among human beings.

Someone is going to have to assert the plainly reasonable idea that nobody gets to just make-up whims as they go along and claim it as "common sense" or "SCIENCE!" without being taken as elementarily confused, at least, or bearing evil intent in the extremity.

In brief, all of the philosophical premises on which these savage children were born and bred must be plainly exposed for their cynical depredations on the very "people" to whom Professor Hanson prays for, well... wokeness.

I'm not here to come-off like some postmoderny, too dumb to attribute Hegel at a 2:00 AM margarita-session in Manhattan, but the dialectics sometimes give me the winds, you see.

It's going to take a lot more than preacher-quality metaphors. It'll require exquisite distillation of premises for analysis to the depths that honest thinkers can reach, and then integral abstraction of implications toward ethical conclusions of (yes) good or evil, in order to...

Live like human beings should.

We all could live without, for instance; being accused of "hate" by resentful little snots, of whom almost none ever build a damned thing of any human value. Everybody could use that; even the resentful little snots would live manifestly better lives if they weren't that, and the whole point of thinking about it right now is in understanding what sorts of ideas it takes to sink whole generations to that.

Right this moment, in practical terms that stem from all the same basic morals:

What's needed right now in the "big tech" arena is an actual John Galt, and not atavistic moon-howling for Teddy Roosevelt risen from the grave and into a scale of government of which he surely never dreamed but of which he surely would have made the heights-topping most.

Now, I'm not rich, so I have no immediately useful advice on meeting the competition in this arena comprising the requisite digi-tech skills, or the sheer industrial implications of requisite hardware. All I'm saying is that somebody had better troll roadsides across the land for deposit-bottles, save their pennies, and get in this game as if they're really serious about producing values and not just a different breed of all the cheaters who think that reality works the way they want it to.

If, in Professor Hanson's "people," there are enough producers who know why (or even that) they're producing instead of destroying, then this American project (not "experiment" -- to me, the data are conclusive) stands something of a chance, even at this dismal hour.

If they're not "the people" to whom he's praying, then I wouldn't say that the prayers are exactly feckless or anything, but I could see why some people might want to watch market prices on Blue Checks.

The other day on the phone, we spoke about massed passive civil disobedience.

There is one show-stopping problem with it that I did not discuss.

To review:

In my politics, I cleave to three ethical giants in this matter:

*** Henry David Thoreau -- his essay "On The Right And Duty of Civil Disobedience" (1849) is the earliest prominent statement of the philosophy in American history, apart from the implications of the Declaration of Independence, itself. It's that Thoreau makes explicit what the Declaration only implied. (Aside: I regard the Declaration as the highest refinement of politics in human history. I regard the Constitution as a counter-revolutionary act.)

*** Mahatma Gandhi -- his passive resistance campaign against the British in India was the most prominent practical application of the idea, to-date. A crucial difference between him and Thoreau is that the latter wasn't interested in leading a national campaign of liberation. Gandhi was, and he did. It worked.

*** Martin Luther King -- He was driven by a different imperative. He wasn't interested in destroying a government. He wanted black integration in American culture. He wanted to be an American. It's just that simple. Nonetheless, he applied the basic ideas of Gandhi and Thoreau to his particular problem. His campaign in Albany, Georgia led children into jail cells. This completely horrified the black clergy (along with nearly everyone else, and that was the point). They began to condemn him, and this resulted in his statement of cool defiance in the "Letter From Birmingham Jail," which is essential reading.

What's important to understand is this:

None of this would have worked against Hitler, Stalin, or Mao.

Can you think why?

It's because the very idea of passive disobedience of unjust law, and submitting one's own life to it, requires a moral conscience in the enemy, to which to make the appeal. One cannot stand in front of a criminal without moral conscience and appeal for a rational mercy. He simply will not care. In Nazi Germany, the USSR, or Communist China (to this very day), all three of these men and their followers would have been summarily crushed.

And this brings us to America in the 21st century.

The central question in all of this, in our current context is:

Is there enough of a moral conscience remaining in American culture to which to appeal by "flooding the courts and embracing the prisons," as I said?

I asked this question in Usenet (alt.politics.militia), about 1996. That year, I believed that there was. The essay (which I still have in archive) sank out of sight like a rock, with almost no response. People in that group were really angry about the first Clinton administration, and they weren't in any mood to consider the question, which is exactly why I brought it up.

I knew better than to take no-response in a group like that as dispositive, because of the specially pressurized context. I still think the question is valid, but I am less certain of the answer than ever before.

The reason why is this:

It's the socialists who are driving ethics and politics in America, now. Anything resembling anti-socialist politics (of any variant) has been fighting a rear-guard action since the end of the Reagan administration. (Their intellectual and moral cowardice, however, goes back to their betrayal of Barry Goldwater in 1964, and this is actually a very good analogy to Trump, today. John McCain is a great example.) Culturally, the socialists have possessed the political and ethical initiative beginning with Clinton in 1993.

This is a great deal of why Trump was so shocking and -- yes -- terrifying, to them, and it accounts for their entire practical response. The Russia Hoax illustrates this: there was no lie that they would not tell about him, and maintain it, no matter how manifestly wrong it was.

It was a demonstration of the basic socialist ethic:

"The ends justify the means."

There is no price that they would not pay -- in your money or blood -- in order to establish their utopia. The notorious communist historian Eric Hobsbawm said that twenty million lives would be worth it. He said this in 1994. He meant what he said, and all socialists hold the same basic conviction.

Of course, most Americans never think it through to that sort of conclusion. All they're interested in is their Free Stuff. (Elementary training in life teaches us that there is no such thing as "Free Stuff," but most Americans have now forgotten that this rule applies to whole cultures as much as to individuals.)

So;

Of course, they lie. They lie to people of innocent intent who don't know any better.

Of course; they steal. They do it myriad ways; like legislatively maneuvering a man like Trump into shipping countless billions of dollars overseas in omnibus spending bills (which, by the way, are specially crafted to prohibit analysis: nobody reads them before they vote). Yes; they do it with the complicity of Republican cowards like Dennis Hastert and Mitch McConnell, but those types are just apologist cowards. They would not even exist without the real revolutionaries in Congress driving the fight. (My friend Martin McPhillips calls them "janitorial socialists": they follow along after the parade and sweep-up the elephant droppings.)

And, yes, of course; they would kill whole masses if they had the power and thought it were necessary to their program. If you listen carefully, you can hear them inclining toward that very thing, right now.

What's obvious is the basic fight between collectivists and individualists.

What's at question here is the nature of the fight.

Thoreau, Gandhi, and King were spiritual soldiers. The difference is that they didn't fight with guns. They fought with ideas, in action.

The socialists have no serious regard for dissent of any sort, and they reject ideas, especially. They do not value human morality: theirs is the morality (if we call it that) of predatory animals.

Most Americans are not philosophers: they do not grasp the matter in conceptual detail. About half the country, however, does sense all of this viscerally. They have a gut-level apprehension of what's happening, and -- being Americans -- they are not inclined to simply take it without some kind of a fight. (This is unlike Europeans or Asians who are culturally bred to chains.)

This is the entire reason for the ghastly display that we saw at the Capitol last Wednesday and, as I said to you, anyone who blames Trump for that is simply not understanding that he is a symptom. What I'm talking about is why he was elected in the first place, in the wake of Obama (who had been the greatest advance of socialism in American history, to-date).

These people are desperate, now.

If I had my way, I would sternly admonish them against shooting, but I will certainly understand it if they do. This is important and worth the emphasis: endorsing armed combat and understanding it are two categorically different things.

And, in summation: if my admonishment were met with a factual argument that, "They're going to destroy us anyway, so what difference does it make?" -- I would not know how to dispute it honestly.

This is a hell of a book. To really understand the essence and scale of this requires enough of a grasp of human history to be furiously outraged that anyone ever wrote like this in the second half of the twentieth century.

In the very first sentence of his "Preface," De George flatly asserts that "Marxist-Leninist ethics and communist morality stem from and are part of the Western tradition." From that, and in the next sentence of the same paragraph, he sashays directly into explaining how the Soviets suddenly awoke in the 1950s to the idea that what they had done and were still doing demanded some sort of moral rationalization. The man presents no awareness that "the Western tradition" is well over two thousand years in widely available history books, but that the two most perverted theorists of robbery and murder of all time could not even mark two centuries, at De George's writing, since the Enlightenment first pointed mankind toward individual liberty. The very idea of breaking the eons-long grip of monarchy -- in no small part a general conveyance of "the Western tradition" -- was refined by people who, for the first time, stood on an entire continent without a king: this was the culmination of "the Western tradition".

It is cool, owl-eyed fraud to include Marx or Lenin in any of this. Their flagrant ignorance and rejection of it is proven in their adolescent infatuations with the likes of Maximilien Robespierre and Nikolai Chernyshevsky, where men like Samuel Adams and Ethan Allen had already shown the way for every single individual of our species. To the robbers and murderers, it was enough to smash down a throne and erect a state with the wreckage, on sheer materialist sensations of destruction and death. To the Westerners, it was better to cast off the most powerful king on Earth like a louse, and then actually produce a new world where they stood, with the human mind as the principal and most crucial tool.

State robbery and murder reached unprecedented heights under the philosophical authority of Marx and Lenin. There is no flourish of rhetoric or temperature of passion that can conceal this fact from any honest and thoughtful person. The plain facts of statecraft alone separate their adherents from the worst efforts of ancient savages: not Caligula or Genghis Khan could match the monstrous power and implacability of the Cheka. It (the Soviet state-security police) had been grinding human bones for nearly forty years before it dawned on them that they should start to work out the ethics of it, and for over half a century when this professor, De George, picked up his pen to explain to us why they had suddenly felt that they had to explain themselves.

There had never been a Marxist ethics (explicitly stated, although it was plainly implicit to any individualist) for the simple reason that he had dismissed individual human agency from human affairs. His big idea was that morality was a "form of social conscience" malleable under the press of economics. (Understand this to all its implications, and you will be well along the way to understanding Portland, Oregon, c. 2020.) He would have no way of accounting for, say, Jobs and Wozniak changing the world on their own powers. Therefore, there was no need to even take up the question why they would set out to do that and why they should be free to.

There had never been a Leninist ethics for the same reason. This cynical neglect continued through Stalin's conclusive performance of the entire logic, and then a curious thing was noticed. As De George retails the confession: "The new Soviet man had not yet emerged. Crime was still prevalent, as was drunkenness, parasitism, and rowdiness, and such 'bourgeois' traits as acquisitiveness and jealousy were all too obviously present. The new man had not appeared. He was still to be formed."

The issue was taken up six years before Stalin's death, when Andrei Zhdanov conducted a conference by order of the Central Committee CPSU. He "criticized Soviet philosophers for their lack of productivity".

Zhdanov was long-practiced at administrative murder. He could strike a human being -- or thousands of them -- out of existence from the comfort of his desk, and did. He was projected to succeed Stalin but drank himself out of the competition, dying two years after he'd lashed the state philosophers in 1947. A reader stops at considering the brutal and ignorant audacity of that: a drunken mass-murderer ordering philosophers to their work at producing a moral rationale for mass-murder.

A journal ("Voprosy filosofi") was founded! There was a significant increase in philosophical activity! Production soared after Stalin died in 1953.

De George points out two important "needs and demands of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union".

The first task at hand was to refute "bourgeois ethical theories". In brief; they had to find a way to halt sensible people from observing that they were robbers and murderers. De George grants that "its objective was primarily negative," but insists on "positive by-products".

"By attempting to refute bourgeois theories Soviet theoreticians were also forced to find answers to questions neither they, nor Marx, nor Engels had previously considered."

You see; they had to actually think-through what they had done. This is a resounding indictment in itself, fit for inscription on all the locks of the White Sea Canal and the mines of Vorkuta.

Attempting analysis of their past did not, however, stop them. The most important demand of Soviet ethics was continued construction of The New Soviet Man: "inculcation of communist values in the Soviet people".

This is where our real lesson unfolds.

Dr. Richard T. De George tells us:

"More of the Soviet ethical literature is devoted to the teaching and spreading of Communist morality than to any other theme. This trend has, if anything, increased since the 1961 Party Program and the announcement that the Soviet Union had entered the stage of the building of communism, with its achievement predicted 'in the main' by 1980. While force and terror had been used as instruments of social control in the Soviet Union during most of the reign of Stalin, it became evident by the 1950's and especially since Stalin's denunciation in 1956, that if communism is to be built it must not stand on a basis of terror but on a more tolerable popularly acceptable basis."

This man is offered here as a moral example, himself. The fact that in 1969 -- the very year after Leonid Brezhnev crushed Czechoslovakia with tanks and a half-million troops -- an American philosopher set out to illustrate Soviet ethics is a fireable offense of bloody stupid incompetence. "The Brezhnev Doctrine" was all we needed to know in order to understand.

Sign up now so you don’t miss the first issue.

Subscribe now

In the meantime, tell your friends!