Can We Fire This Deep State Hack Already?

This is beyond ridiculous.  Rosenstein, after Comey’s firing, wanted to wear a wire and get some other Cabinet buddies to invoke the 25th Amendment to deep six Trump.  Absolutely ridiculous, and they say we are a threat to democracy.

Democracy is, fundamentally, about elections, about the people picking their rulers, and about the rule of law.  It’s not about shit-tier managerial class bureaucrats having their way, rain or shine, as they have forever approximately.  Everything today means its opposite.  Diversity means as few whites as possible.  Equality of opportunity means a leg up for preferred groups.  Peace means bombing Syria when it’s about to wipe out al Qaeda.  And democracy means a cabal of insiders deciding what we do and elections that do not matter.

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They Hate Trump Because They Hate You

A great little vignette by the Kakistocracy Blogger, Porter, reminding us that Trump and Trump hatred are not isolated phenomena, but rather metaphors for the simmering tension between legacy America and the emerging (and imported) majority:

The human toggle between war and peace is rarely well lubricated. Most people suffer enormous dissonance and discontent in the transition. It’s just not easy to relinquish old comforts—or conflicts. By virtue of their more stolid dispositions, conservatives tend to be the most stationary of all. That tendency to remain firm while in flux certainly has adaptive elements. Though resolutely baking pies while your enemies are beating swords isn’t one of them.

I was lamenting this trait while reading a description of jury deliberations in the recent Paul Manafort trial. I don’t care about Mr. Manafort aside from his role as a sacrifice in the conspiracy against Trump. Trump being only a foil himself in the larger tribal conflict between legacy America and the color/prog coalition that prematurely assumed its demise.

Thus the proper perspective of Trump is as a proxy for the man in your mirror. The left hates Trump, it is true. But they don’t hate him for any intrinsic reasons. For all his moral frailties the man is Martin Luther compared to the left’s degenerate menagerie. Instead, they hate him because they see you in him. He is the leader of the left’s Other. And the Other, not merely its masthead, is what they want destroyed. That’s why I wish nice, solid conservatives could see the battlefield beyond their nose.

Some Essays on First Principles

There’s so many amazing, unsung writers out there.  It’s really a shame the media-industrial complex promotes mediocrities like Kristol, Tanehsi Coates, and the rest.  They’re so boring ultimately, and their are better people doing what they do for free all over the internets, often anonymously.

The Z Man has some great essays on social change, what it takes, and why it fails here and here.  An excerpt:

Ideological nations have two problems. One is they must endlessly whip the citizens into a fervor in order to keep them loyal to the state. Religions have the same challenge, which is why the preacher is always warning about some imminent threat to your soul or reminding everyone about God’s wrath. Piety is a full-time commitment and that applies to civic piety, as well. It’s why communist countries are drenched in patriotic symbols, songs and public performances, designed to keep everyone in a heightened state of ideological frenzy.

The other problem, a consequence of the demands of piety, is they become ruthlessly intolerant of dissent. “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state” becomes the mantra of every nation built on ideology. If people are allowed to question the ideology that organizes the state, they are doubting the project itself and this must be viewed as a threat to the state. Therefore, civic religions must always become increasingly intolerant and narrow, in order to defend the state against challenges.

I also discovered this long essay on Biological Leninism by someone called “Bloody Shovel.”  I had never heard of him before, but it’s pretty interesting stuff.  The essay is pretty ambitious, but his thesis is that the left consists, basically, of a coalition of losers.  And these losers, employing the government to rise far above whatever station they would otherwise assume, are fanatically loyal to the order they create, because they are downgraded significantly in its absence.  This is why Trump promised to “drain the swamp.”  He knows it, we know it, and his enemies know it too, viz.:

In Communist countries pedigree was very important. You couldn’t get far in the party if you had any little kulak, noble or landowner ancestry. Only peasants and workers were trusted. Why? Because only peasants and workers could be trusted to be loyal. Rich people, or people with the inborn traits which lead to being rich, will always have status in any natural society. They will always do alright. That’s why they can’t be trusted; the stakes are never high for them. If anything they’d rather have more freedom to realize their talents. People of peasant stock though, they came from the dregs of society. They know very well that all they have was given to them by the party. And so they will be loyal to the death, because they know it, if the Communist regime falls, their status will fall as fast as a hammer in a well. And the same goes for everyone else, especially those ethnic minorities.

Finally, there is just a lot of interesting data out there.  For example, we learned in spite of the media’s hell storm on Trump, that he remains about as popular as ever.

This suggests to me his supporters are now wise to the game; their opponents are not reasonable people who disagree (though some are that), but their essence is that they are revolutionaries who aim, as they have already done in part, to destroy everything Trump supporters believe in, benefit from, and care about, as well as ultimately to destroy them as a coherent people.

All the big culture war issues, gay marriage, gun control, immigration, free trade, are about one thing:  replacing the people with another group, further solidifying the hostile managerial elite, and making this a country totally different from what it was before.

Gun owners, for example, are incredibly ideological voters, and I suspect this will quell the “blue wave” the media hopes to meme into existence. Trump won by locking up the white vote, and their overlap with the cohort of (lawful) gun owners has a lot to with his success, including his inroads to places like the Midwest (which like the West and South is becoming a GOP block).

Audacious Episone has a good essay with some great charts (printed below):

Anyway, there is a lot of useful writing out there, and it’s best to look around.  The hostile mainstream media works as a gatekeeper to suppress facts, ideas, and writers who deviate from their line, and this is why they are working so hard to turn Google, Facebook, Twitter and other platforms into ideological gatekeepers.  They let the horse out of the barn when the internet came on the scene, and they’re working feverishly to put their house back together.

Summit Meltdown

The Deep State media freakout about has honestly been appalling.  Diplomacy requires some maneuver room.  A few diplomatic words in diplomacy are nothing to get exorcised about, and it’s pretty obvious certain people want to foment needless conflict with Russia. Trump’s skepticism of our intelligence agencies is well warranted, not least because they tried to sabotage this summit with their politicized and useless indictments of Russian operatives operating in Russia immediately before the summit, and have worked actively to undermine him since before he was sworn into office.

As for the underlying interference and leaks, everyone seems to forget Julian Assange said the documents didn’t come from Russia.  Maybe they did.  The very specific allegations of Mueller’s indictment are not proof; just very specific statements that may or may not be true.

There are other perspectives, including this long article from the left-leaning Nation, that make at least some of the hacking likely to have been either an internal leak or an untraceable use of TOR or VPN contacts from hackers whose identities are not known.

That said, I do think a fairly low rent interference operation was undertaken by Russia, which had zero impact on the election and is of apiece with what other nations do and what we do all the time. It is not a “digital Pearl Harbor” or whatever nonsense we’ve been told in recent weeks.

I also think the focus on Russia is a massive distraction from what these hacks and leaks exposed:  corruption within the DNC designed to help one candidate in the primaries and that showed ill will towards voters.  It’s shooting the messenger.  Media reveal leaks like this all the time, and did in this case, and usually sources are sketchy, i.e., Deep Throat (a Deep State lying convicted felon FBI hack).

I genuinely want us to have better relations with Russia, and I have a certain sympathy for their position, because I don’t believe US “unipolarity” is good for them or us or the world.  Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ossetia, Serbia/Kosovo, Ukraine’s Maidan Coup etc. are all situations that we made worse, picked the wrong side, or fomented trouble that does not benefit peace or our own security.

So Trump’s big picture desire to shake up this habitual interventionism and anti-Russian approach of our foreign policy is a good one.  We have a bigger common enemy in radical Islam, and we have good reasons to try not to force China and Russia to cleave together more closely.  And it’s pretty clear a lot of people want to keep things at a high level of tension, particularly in the media (for low partisan reasons) and the Deep State (for ideological reasons, job-security reasons, habitual reasons, or general hostility to a strong Christian nationalist Russia).

Elections should matter.  The President, unlike the Intelligence Community, is elected.  And respect for the American people requires the unelected part of the government mostly to do what he tells them to do.

The Pundit and Voter Divide

This article from American Spectator is surprisingly woke, in discussing why most Republicans are with Trump, even while a pundit class–which bears little in common with Republican voters–has defected from him and the party under the rubric of “Never Trump”:

This myopia has several causes. The first is a kind of cultural “capture” that occurs when conservatives live in blue districts and big cities too long. They become, in other words, clueless (RINOS). The second reason is more obvious: many of these people are paid to be openly hostile to Trump’s agenda. The free trade absolutists at AEI and Cato are on salary to oppose any protectionist trade policies. Likewise, hawkish interventionists such as Max Boot knew they had no professional future once Trump’s isolationist instincts became policy.

There is also a low-testosterone, dilettantish strain of conservatism that has overdeveloped in the “mainstream” media to create such sterile hybrids as Michael Gerson and George Will and David Brooks. Nothing sunk these so-called wise men lower in the estimation of their fellow conservatives than their blithe indifference to the Clintons’ gangsterism. While Trump threw wild verbal haymakers at Hillary at campaign rallies, these intellectuals were basically on TV announcing they would be accommodationists for the Clinton Machine’s inevitable victory. Trump’s base was fighting a war; these guys were sipping tea. The contrast in styles of conservatism was stark: it was the pugnacious billionaire against the stuffy wimps.

The greatest disconnect is religious and cultural: the Republican Party is overwhelmingly Caucasian and Christian and traditional on social issues, while its pundits skew Jewish and agnostic and libertarian. Krauthammer wanted to have it both ways, which is not unlike the hedging that Brooks and Goldberg have displayed. George Will went so far as to say: “I’m an atheist. An agnostic is someone who is not sure. I’m pretty sure. I see no evidence of God.” Meanwhile, Gerson is a liberal Episcopalian who took to the pages of the Atlantic to attack evangelicals for supporting Trump. In sum, the conservative intellectuals didn’t understand the base’s concerns about religious liberty because they hardly cared for religion — which should have disqualified them long ago.

Freakout Culture

We’ve heard stories and personally seen a level of political and cultural friction in recent months that is remarkable.  A congressional intern screaming “f**k you” to the President.  FBI agents talking on official workplace computers about “Viva le Resistance.”  Career customs agents being threatened and having their personal information distributed by otherwise respectable college professors.

Why is this happening?   I think the reason is the different life experiences of conservatives and liberals.   Right wingers, even extreme ones, mostly have limited goals.  They want to be left alone, and they don’t want their country deliberately changed.  I’m one of the more far right people I know, but I can’t imagine getting angry or in the face of a liberal.  They do their thing, I do mine.

I think liberals especially younger ones are coddled and entitled.  They assume things are moving in a certain direction and that all decent people agree with them.  This is the implicit assumption of their adoption of the term “progressive.”

So Trump has caused them all to lose it.  Whereas conservatives, especially those not from super-conservative places like the Deep South, are used to lots of people disagreeing with them, the culture being hostile to them, and the fact that other smart people, such as their teachers and relatives who move to the “big city,” disagree with them.  It’s just something they’ve adjusted to.

I don’t think these liberals realize it or have encountered it as much, and they’re completely convinced of their righteousness.  Conservatives learn to argue and debate; it’s one of the reasons why talk radio is so popular.  Liberals, by contrast, say things like “wow, just wow” and “that’s racist” and feel as if they are saying something.  They’re in the same position as conservatives were when the 60s rolled along:  they are the establishment, the world around them is changing, and they’re confused and angry.

Periodic Roundup (During Twitter Purgatory)

I’ve been doing writing elsewhere (and also got into a little brouhaha with the authorities at Twitter), so I’m giving a little attention to the blog with a roundup.

Great article on the criminality at the FBI–at least at the top–and how it’s increasingly on display, particularly with McCabe seeking immunity.  I can’t recommend enough the various takes at The Conservative Treehouse.

A powerful description of the wages of the Sex in the City lifestyle (hint: it doesn’t end happily).

Good piece on the impossibility of freedom and diversity, as evidenced by the recent Supreme Court cake decision. When you have a homogeneous and democratic society, the laws fall lightly and mostly on the margins.  They represent a preexisting consensus.  When you have dissensus about the most basic issues of how to live and what government should do, the laws will make a much larger fraction of society unhappy, as Christians who bake cakes have learned.

A book I recently bought: Bronze Age Mindset.  And you thought I was reactionary!  This twitter account is interesting, and his take on Darwinism, teleology, and science more generally, so far, seems profound and insightful.

Brett Stephens makes a modest proposal on immigration:  Ban Jews.  He’s joking; he’s Jewish.  And he thinks on balance the massive Jewish immigration of the early 20th Century was good.  But was that wave of immigration so good for the people already here?  Were we better off for the contributions of the Rosenbergs, Abbie Hoffmans, and Mark Ruuds of the world. Less dramatically, what about people like Chuck Schumer? No one misses the nonexistent wave of immigrants who didn’t come here back then, e.g., the Third World immigrants who dominate today.  And the immigrants, even then, created a lot of problems at the time, as I wrote about here. Would we be so worse off if the native stock were more dominant?  Places like Nashville, Dallas, and Omaha suggest it wouldn’t be so bad.  Dan Rather made this point recently on Twitter, and the comments are hilarious.   My point is simple: immigration is not the heart of America’s identity, it’s had costs as well as benefits, and it has changed our culture and political life mostly for the worse.

The recent news about Kate Spade, who I didn’t know or follow, left me kind of sad.  She is an impressive person who built a business empire through a quality, elegant product.  She was married, wealthy, and had a young daughter.  She had a great many things that others aspire to and envy.  And she killed herself.  How terrible.  While the focus will be on depression and her mental health, one wonders how much cases like this are emblematic of a broader sickness in our society.  One can say the same of nihilistic rages like school shootings.  The founder of modern sociology, Emile Durkheim, rose to fame, in part, by tracking suicides by various demographic characteristics, and attributed the rise of suicide to social atomism and the pressures of modern life.  In the age of social media and diversity, maybe the story is the same . . . and it’s worse.