As a child of the 70s and 80s, I remember being incredibly skeptical of the government (but alas, raised as a democrat). When I went to college, I learned all about the New Deal and the Great Society and how important and critical it was to the development of American society. For years, I held those two opposing concepts in my brain at the same time, thinking they were both true (without really questioning it). Then came 2020 and the aftermath of that. Which radicalized me in ways I still can’t properly communicate and exposed the ridiculous dichotomy of these concepts. I suspect this is way more common then the enemy media will ever understand.
You have described exactly what has happened to me. I'm a bit older, grew up in the 60s, marched in a huge anti-war demonstration in San Francisco when I was teen. More recently I was a Bernie Sanders / Medicare For All supporter. The last 2.5 years have completely upended my world and I don't know where I stand now, except to say that I'm opposed to authoritarianism and totalitarianism, no matter whether it looks like Mussolini or Dr. Fauci.
No. After seeing what the NHS did during the last 2.5 years, I have serious doubts about the idea. I can see now how this can result in a unified medical tyranny that does not allow for any differences of opinion.
Not medicare for all - no. Fuck no. And not because I don't think/wish/want everyone to have medical care, but simply because of the danger inherent in everyone being part of the SAME system, the SAME power structure, being subject to the SAME AB2098 "medical misinformation" crackdowners -- all this is manifest in the past few years. Medicare for all could achieve some good but at the price of making us more vulnerable to unspeakable collective oppression.
I was also a Bernie and Medicare-for-all supporter. I still think socialism sounds good in theory, but human nature will prevent it from ever working as designed. Possibly because of the percentage of psychopaths in the population.
Now you're learning! I was talking with an ex progressive friend last year. She stated she wants to end Human nature. These are real people who have jobs and vote.
I should also add that Bernie has turned out to a huge disappointment, to say the least. He's shown that he's part of the Covidian Democrat cult and I just can't forgive him for that,.
I take the viewpoint that the entire system is compromised, and will not reform itself nor let anyone with true intentions of reforming in the club. If someone gets elected i'll wait to see results before putting any faith in them (AOC and others that people get excited about). We live under a corporate government synthasis that has existed since the early 20th century and now finds itself on its last legs because everything has a life cycle. I think all of the pointing at identity issues is recognition by the system that its on its last legs so it tries to distract and keep people divided so that when the time comes they'll fight instead of coming together to create a better system.
The FBI is an “institution to hold power accountable”? Right... and war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength. I’d also add: fear is virtue, and obedience is courage.
My dad was an adult immigrant to America, a European Jew whose family left Paris in 1935( most of the rest of his non-immediate family was subsequently massacred by the Nazis or Stalin), who grew up in South America before coming here in the 1950’s. He was drafted while a resident alien under the Berry plan , served overseas, and the settled down in Arizona. Despite his background, or perhaps because of it, he was a lifelong conservative. But he had friends across the political spectrum. He played golf every weekend for decades with the longtime head of the AFL-CIO in this state, and a lawyer who at one time was head of the Democrat party here. These people were close family friends and politics never interfered with that dynamic. Every four years he held an election party and Republicans and Democrats came and everybody had a good time. Suffice it to say those days are long gone.
I have family members and ex-friends who won’t talk to me because of politics, and it’s pathetic. This isn’t because of me. I haven’t changed all that much. What has happened is that the liberals in the mainstream Left have gotten radicalized and are far less civil to those who they deem deplorable. You’re not simply a Republican these days. To the majority of Democrats you’re a fascist, a bigot, and an all around undesirable. The hard Left has always been extreme. The hard right as well, but there are very few on the hard right, as in tens of thousands, not millions. Even the Southern Poverty Law Center ( a Leftist bastion of corruption featuring slander for sale) recently estimated that there are fewer than 10,000 white supremacists in the USA . Paradoxically as mainstream liberals gave gotten more radical, they’ve retained their bourgeois lifestyles and patina of middle class normalcy. They are now magically ok with the unholy alliance of multinational corporations and government power. They are ok with censorship, political gulags for “ insurrectionists” AKA patriotic Republicans who trespassed ( maybe) at the Capitol for a few hours on J6. They are apparently ok with racial attacks on Asians and Jews and burning down cities, as long as the elites tell them it’s ok. Well if Harvard wants to put a quota on high achieving Asians, disaster relief is apportioned by race, and Jews can’t talk to Berkeley law students, that seems ok, right? The government is killing us with engineered viruses and toxic vaccines. They want a vaccine passport for everybody. And that’s great according to our cultural hegemons. The God of Irony is most entertained.
What’s mostly happened is that Americans have gotten lazy and really dumb. Civics is not a thing. And yet you have to be “well educated” to be this stupid. Apparently the more educated you are, the dumber you get. It’s fantastic really. Most of us on the “right”haven’t changed with the times. The country has drifted Left.
The Government is not your friend. The Constitution is not a fascist document. We are living in the political equivalent of a Salvador Dali painting.
This will not persist. It’s too dumb. It’s too unrealistic. Reality is about to slap our betters across the face with a chain mail glove. The problem is that nobody is going to avoid the pain that’s coming. How bad it’s going to be is TBD.
The more educated you are, the dumber you get. I love that.
I have listened to some MIT lectures recently, and they frequently begin a lecture with acknowledging the “ancestral lands” the school occupies, and recognizing the “natives who never ceded their autonomy”. It’s strange. Kind of like, oh, a pledge of allegiance? This is MIT. The smart kids go there. Right?
The universities are owned lock stock and barrel by the fascists. The whole of it is to train workers for their corporations and servient to the government..
I'll be alright. or at least, will have better odds than those who are dependent on the system, which I suppose is close enough to everybody that one can type everybody. I'd wish you luck but a long time ago I decided to save luck for myself! Ha!
Start a garden now to begin the process of taking care of yourself. Hurry!
Sad. I was once a proud anti-government liberal but now I know my beliefs are more aligned with the constitutionalists. The left has gone marxist and whenever they say there is a threat to "our democracy" they actually mean a threat to "our party". Time for a cool change!
What confuses me on both supposedly "lefts", is the hatred of tradition, traditional cultures, family, community, agroegology, regenerative agriculture, co-opts, farmers, farmers markets , artisans, small + local business ... the left fetishises these but actively attacks and undermines them in practice. Anywhere where traditional community begins to flourish, where individuality and group values co-exist, the left vilifies and regulates against it.
Since one generation of Men has been able to communicate to succeeding generations of Men the most fundamental human societal behavioral pattern communicated is Evil feeds on Good. The Left destroys everything it touches except Evil. There you have it. The Left can't touch Evil because it is the manifestation of Evil.
Hmmm..."Libertarian" is not exactly the term that comes to mind for people obeying nonsensical orders and sitting by so quietly as their chosen leaders were mandating totalitarian death jabs and masks. Or cheering the cancellation of people who they might disagree with, but are freely speaking their minds, naively believing the Constitution still matters.
The progressive left always was a tool for powerful people to control those they thought were beneath them. There was an arrogance of the educated who just knew they were smarter and better than everyone else.
Woodrow Wilson was a prime example of this. As president he censored the media and forced them to adopt the official narrative of pro Allies. He imprisoned those of the real left, such as Eugene V. Debs. And Wilson was the tool of the bankers.
Nothing much has changed.
The real left is the anti authoritarian Left, which opposes concentration of power, be in business, government, or rich individuals.
The problem has always been that it is easily co-opted by the progressive neoliberal left, our would be rulers.
Thomas Frank's "For the People, No!" was his understanding that most progressives hate the peons that exploit for power.
The Republicans are about the same. Most just give lip service to the base and work their deals and ignore the people. They are about power and hate when the people wake up to the reality they are being sold out.
Your average "real leftist" still thinks he is against the powerful by opposing Republicans, no matter that he is on the same team with the Wall Street, the Deep State and the War Party. He has been deceived and manipulated.
What's more galling about Justin freezing the accounts (along with Chrystia Freeland who was giddy proud about it) is he then turns around and talks about needing to protect 'freedom and democracy'. He does it with Ukraine and now Iran. He's an insufferable emotional gaslighting cockwomble.
"opposes the power of the state when it opposes him, and embraces it if he thinks his side has come to control it"
This. Seems like the world is bifurcating into the "obey me/us!" crowd ... and the "leave me alone" crowd.
Seems like lots of people want other people to behave they way they want them to... and the government looks like a good tool for achieving that. I suspect most haven't thought it about it very far (or studied history).
[I apologize for the following detailed answer's length].
POWER: There is an inherent tension between competing powers and tensions between local and national powers - Example critically now "local policing is racist". This is an ongoing power grab by the jealous National Power of the local plenary [broad] police powers.
The FBI can't write a speeding ticket and so on.
Well, that won't do.
This is one example of power simply doing what it does - seek more power.
Now if there was an overriding moral code and agreed upon political contract that checked and divided powers invested with legitimacy and respect ....it was called the Constitution and it's gone.
A cynic would say the Left was simply advancing on two pincers to envelop the powers to themselves, both serve the same goal of power to the state as long as it is Left.
One pincer sows chaos the other imposes order - their order.
In any case the Left can thank itself Janus head or not for destroying the existing political and moral order that made laws other than brute force and self-government possible.
The most dangerous part of New Jersey is and was Camden. A small city that usually won murder capital per capita for decades. The local police department was eventually dissolved and replaced by the State Police. Who then preceded in good time to seal off the bad areas and roll in with the Iron Fist and harsh tactics ....that strangely didn't make the news in all the Leftist adoration of the banning of the local police. You see NJ wisely bent the knee to a Federal Consent decree in 1997 and in exchange [no, this isn't in writing lol] NJ has a free hand more or less to deal directly with criminals.
First movers on bending the knee do get some privileges - like a better measure of public safety.
The dirty work done there's now a new Camden County PD.
You'd be wise and better informed to study the consent decrees Mr. Bray, you'll find them all over our government's actual administration and the actual point of conflict in several of the Police Brutality riots and struggles of the last decade such as Baltimore and New Orleans. You see with the consent decree you waive your rights to due process AND you have to fund it - as there are no Federal Funds required by DOJ to fund this there is no Congressional oversight or appeal.
Very clever way around due process.
The FCC loves consent decrees as well, in particular when applied to small radio stations in rural areas that might carry conservative content and can't afford lawyers or courts. Large media concerns can and aren't subject to consent decrees. Our government loves power, not due process.
Politics is power and we are living through a power struggle between a centralization largely already affected by the New Deal, WW2 and the Cold War and our natural decentralized Federated tendencies that are returning. The National government - Feudal arrangement in Federal skin in its own Right - is cracking down on what is decentralization. The Federal government has amassed and accrued great powers and is jealously fighting to keep those powers, nothing could be more human.
The price of the New Deal was administrative government, this Deal was an exchange of loss of democracy having any power in exchange for benefits.
Elected government surrendered most of their powers - and so the voters vote mattering - in exchange for a great deal of insulation from consequences and vastly more powers to the government overall.
The relevant decisions and statutes:
Federal Reserve Act 1913- Congress surrenders control of money.
Federal Register Act of 1934: Congress delegates broad powers to apply and interpret laws to the regulatory departments [this has the effect of making the courts the recourse for bad laws and not your legislature. If a law written by a bureaucrat causes harm, you must be harmed then win in suit.
This has the effect of making the Federal Register our actual Constitution.
Supreme Court decision on the Federal Register 1935: it upheld the Constitutionality [!!] of the Federal Register and pronounced said Register [now at more than 72,000 pages] as having the properties of Judicial and Constructive notice - the courts must acknowledge every jot as law, and Constructive notice means ignorance of the laws therein are no excuse.
Humphrey's Executors 1937: The President can't fire civil servants for disobeying his orders.
Also, the FTC [and by common law all Federal agencies] can levy fines and fees [that's like taxes folks] upon those they regulate. Home Run.
This is a sweet deal for regulators - can make own laws, levy own taxes, can't be fired.
This is why I refer to DC as Feudalism in Federal Skin.
APA/Administrative Procedures Act of 1946: Now by law the President can't fire people.
Then we have the CIA, NRLB, FCC and other agencies who are you see rather like the Federal Reserve- they're Independent Agencies. Of those pesky politicians, and their ignorant voters.
We have the 1947 Defense Acts which establish DOD.
In 1950 strangely Truman finds himself in a war, but his advisers say we can't declare war, so let's have the [State Department cough cough] UN declare it a police action.
So, as you can see the Article 1 powers of Congress concerning money, laws and war are gone.
The Article 2 powers of the Presidency are gutted, this is why no one gets fired - they can't be fired.
Article 3 for all the abuse the Courts take is mostly the courts being the means of legislative redress, don't trouble your congressman please, hire a lawyer.
As for the President he can't do anything anyway, not legally. Ask Trump.
He can sign Executive Orders and he can watch Drone Strikes. Whee.
You and the readers might want to look at how the Federal Register actually gets written, you see they'll send out a RFC - Request for Comments - on a proposed rule and based on Feedback and Pushback and of course lobbying it will or will not become law.
Now of course this arrangement rested on obscurity and deceit and the self interest in the millions of participants in this scheme of governance, along with a lot of money. And more money.
And since Clinton reinvented government wide open contracting, the government is actually a contracting brokerage except for a few special functions.
But laws that are against the Constitution are laws undermining the very basis of laws in America.
And of course, something that rests on deceit must take care not to be noticed.... The New Dealers and following generations were careful and mostly sober, responsible people.
Their grandchildren not so.
It stood to reason that like any other wild carnival this would someday come to an end.
The end of fraud and deceit come faster when you draw attention to your er, progressive enterprise.
This is the end of the 20th Century government of "Progress".
What follows will be worse before it gets better.
Indeed, no matter what many will miss the petty tyrants and their rambling and mostly ineffective repressions. What follows will NOT be ineffective....and my fellow Americans it's not just your rulers that have developed a taste for repression, you have developed a need yourselves to be repressed.
A wicked and wild, selfish people CANNOT self-govern. We can thank the Janus faced Left for their crusades for personal immorality on this front as well.
We'll miss these clowns when they are replaced by proper tyrants, mark my words.
Correct. And unfortunately this new hard-left has us going in completely the wrong direction.
When people began realizing that Monarchy was evil, that controlling thieving evil disguised itself, quite insidiously and effectively, as Democracy. Instead of being ruled by one we are now ruled by a group for whom we have supposedly chosen, ourselves, by vote. It is a clever deception plain and simple. The End of all Evil by Jeremy Locke (pdf is online), in approximately 90 pages, quite clearly lays evil bare for all to see.
It feels more like Mao's Cultural Revolution, where chaos and upheaval were the essential elements. The government fostered one kind of upheaval in its attempt to further its control of China.
Read about Germany in the 20's and 30's. The part of WW2 history they quickly skim over, almost like they don't want you to know about it. Lots of the same crap as now, Culture was being turned into Babylon and the left and right were fighting in the streets.
Yes! Exactly the same dynamic at play in Russia 100 years ago after the revolution. Trotskyites and similar factions methodically purged by the Bolsheviks once they were no longer useful.
The "cult of the individual" is alive and thriving on the left in all of these instances:
1. Individuals can change their gender and pronouns at will, with no questions
2. Individuals from foreign countries can enter the US at will and do whatever they want, with no restrictions (outside the Martha's Vineyard Exclusion Zone)
3. Individuals can dose themselves with whatever substances they want (and some they don't want, like mRNA), excepting menthol cigarettes and vapes and ivermectin, without limitation
4. Individuals can buy as many electric vehicles as they want
5. Individual children can consent to hormones, puberty blockers, "top surgery" and "bottom surgery" without the threat of older, wiser voices offering them advice and guidance (and by older, wiser voices, I mean the voices of people in their 20s who regret the use of hormones, puberty blockers, "top surgery" and "bottom surgery")
That's about it. that's all I can think of. On second thought, maybe you're right. Individual freedom is dead on the left.
I agree that there's definitely a logical tension between the left's embrace of authoritarianism (I wrote about the Canadian truckers here: https://leightonwoodhouse.substack.com/p/god-mode) and its libertarian nihilism. I don't have the answer either, but I would note that the libertarian side tend to see themselves more as left radicals, whereas the authoritarians are more your standard MSNBC liberals. That's not to say it's a clean split: last year we saw the absurd scene of antifa rioters fist fighting protestors *on behalf of state vaccine mandates.* But I do think that there's a bit of a factional split there.
I wrote once for Tablet about two of the political philosophies the American colonists brought over from Europe — the Puritan tradition, which represented a sort of top-down liberalism, and the Scotch-Irish tradition, which was militantly libertarian. Those two traditions fused on the West Coast. You can actually track the migratory patterns that brought the two ethnic group-based doctrines to a common location. https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/history/articles/cold-civil-war
Anyway, we should talk and see if we can puzzle it out!
I'd also point out that nobody ever accused the left of being logically consistent, and really what we're seeing today is a fusion of the libertarian and authoritarian strains of leftism in a philosophically incoherent nihilism. Both the radical libertarian left and the liberal authoritarian left stand for crushing and dismantling what they perceive as unjust, with no vision for building anything up in its place. So at this point it might even be a moot exercise to try to reconcile the contradictions in the left.
Please do not play into Caroline Orr Bueno and similar fascists' accusations of fascism. They can try to boast "antifa" all they want. But the so-called left betrays their own fascism by their support of industry / government alliance, forced medical treatments, censorship, racial discrimination, and other civil liberties violations. Fascists' like Orr take their mentor Goebbels ' advice. 'Accuse the other side of what you are doing.'
This article presents the best evidence I've seen that SIDS is caused by vaccines. I already suspected that it was. Vaccines are evil. They started as evil and they are still evil. Rockefeller was interested in killing off the population, and his interest took the form of vaccine research. We've got to get our minds around this idea. It's key to understanding who our enemy is.
As a child of the 70s and 80s, I remember being incredibly skeptical of the government (but alas, raised as a democrat). When I went to college, I learned all about the New Deal and the Great Society and how important and critical it was to the development of American society. For years, I held those two opposing concepts in my brain at the same time, thinking they were both true (without really questioning it). Then came 2020 and the aftermath of that. Which radicalized me in ways I still can’t properly communicate and exposed the ridiculous dichotomy of these concepts. I suspect this is way more common then the enemy media will ever understand.
You have described exactly what has happened to me. I'm a bit older, grew up in the 60s, marched in a huge anti-war demonstration in San Francisco when I was teen. More recently I was a Bernie Sanders / Medicare For All supporter. The last 2.5 years have completely upended my world and I don't know where I stand now, except to say that I'm opposed to authoritarianism and totalitarianism, no matter whether it looks like Mussolini or Dr. Fauci.
"More recently I was a Bernie Sanders / Medicare For All supporter."
Do you still believe in these two things after the past two years? Would you even want them after the past two years?
https://consentfactory.org/2019/02/25/the-magic-socialist/
No. After seeing what the NHS did during the last 2.5 years, I have serious doubts about the idea. I can see now how this can result in a unified medical tyranny that does not allow for any differences of opinion.
Not medicare for all - no. Fuck no. And not because I don't think/wish/want everyone to have medical care, but simply because of the danger inherent in everyone being part of the SAME system, the SAME power structure, being subject to the SAME AB2098 "medical misinformation" crackdowners -- all this is manifest in the past few years. Medicare for all could achieve some good but at the price of making us more vulnerable to unspeakable collective oppression.
I was also a Bernie and Medicare-for-all supporter. I still think socialism sounds good in theory, but human nature will prevent it from ever working as designed. Possibly because of the percentage of psychopaths in the population.
Now you're learning! I was talking with an ex progressive friend last year. She stated she wants to end Human nature. These are real people who have jobs and vote.
I should also add that Bernie has turned out to a huge disappointment, to say the least. He's shown that he's part of the Covidian Democrat cult and I just can't forgive him for that,.
I take the viewpoint that the entire system is compromised, and will not reform itself nor let anyone with true intentions of reforming in the club. If someone gets elected i'll wait to see results before putting any faith in them (AOC and others that people get excited about). We live under a corporate government synthasis that has existed since the early 20th century and now finds itself on its last legs because everything has a life cycle. I think all of the pointing at identity issues is recognition by the system that its on its last legs so it tries to distract and keep people divided so that when the time comes they'll fight instead of coming together to create a better system.
I feel exactly the same way!
The FBI is an “institution to hold power accountable”? Right... and war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength. I’d also add: fear is virtue, and obedience is courage.
My dad was an adult immigrant to America, a European Jew whose family left Paris in 1935( most of the rest of his non-immediate family was subsequently massacred by the Nazis or Stalin), who grew up in South America before coming here in the 1950’s. He was drafted while a resident alien under the Berry plan , served overseas, and the settled down in Arizona. Despite his background, or perhaps because of it, he was a lifelong conservative. But he had friends across the political spectrum. He played golf every weekend for decades with the longtime head of the AFL-CIO in this state, and a lawyer who at one time was head of the Democrat party here. These people were close family friends and politics never interfered with that dynamic. Every four years he held an election party and Republicans and Democrats came and everybody had a good time. Suffice it to say those days are long gone.
I have family members and ex-friends who won’t talk to me because of politics, and it’s pathetic. This isn’t because of me. I haven’t changed all that much. What has happened is that the liberals in the mainstream Left have gotten radicalized and are far less civil to those who they deem deplorable. You’re not simply a Republican these days. To the majority of Democrats you’re a fascist, a bigot, and an all around undesirable. The hard Left has always been extreme. The hard right as well, but there are very few on the hard right, as in tens of thousands, not millions. Even the Southern Poverty Law Center ( a Leftist bastion of corruption featuring slander for sale) recently estimated that there are fewer than 10,000 white supremacists in the USA . Paradoxically as mainstream liberals gave gotten more radical, they’ve retained their bourgeois lifestyles and patina of middle class normalcy. They are now magically ok with the unholy alliance of multinational corporations and government power. They are ok with censorship, political gulags for “ insurrectionists” AKA patriotic Republicans who trespassed ( maybe) at the Capitol for a few hours on J6. They are apparently ok with racial attacks on Asians and Jews and burning down cities, as long as the elites tell them it’s ok. Well if Harvard wants to put a quota on high achieving Asians, disaster relief is apportioned by race, and Jews can’t talk to Berkeley law students, that seems ok, right? The government is killing us with engineered viruses and toxic vaccines. They want a vaccine passport for everybody. And that’s great according to our cultural hegemons. The God of Irony is most entertained.
What’s mostly happened is that Americans have gotten lazy and really dumb. Civics is not a thing. And yet you have to be “well educated” to be this stupid. Apparently the more educated you are, the dumber you get. It’s fantastic really. Most of us on the “right”haven’t changed with the times. The country has drifted Left.
The Government is not your friend. The Constitution is not a fascist document. We are living in the political equivalent of a Salvador Dali painting.
This will not persist. It’s too dumb. It’s too unrealistic. Reality is about to slap our betters across the face with a chain mail glove. The problem is that nobody is going to avoid the pain that’s coming. How bad it’s going to be is TBD.
How bad it's going to be is TBD, and how much it's going to be possible to insulate and shelter from how bad it is.
The more educated you are, the dumber you get. I love that.
I have listened to some MIT lectures recently, and they frequently begin a lecture with acknowledging the “ancestral lands” the school occupies, and recognizing the “natives who never ceded their autonomy”. It’s strange. Kind of like, oh, a pledge of allegiance? This is MIT. The smart kids go there. Right?
The universities are owned lock stock and barrel by the fascists. The whole of it is to train workers for their corporations and servient to the government..
Not “well educated,” miseducated or indoctrinated.
I like this comment, full of reality.
I'll be alright. or at least, will have better odds than those who are dependent on the system, which I suppose is close enough to everybody that one can type everybody. I'd wish you luck but a long time ago I decided to save luck for myself! Ha!
Start a garden now to begin the process of taking care of yourself. Hurry!
Sad. I was once a proud anti-government liberal but now I know my beliefs are more aligned with the constitutionalists. The left has gone marxist and whenever they say there is a threat to "our democracy" they actually mean a threat to "our party". Time for a cool change!
What confuses me on both supposedly "lefts", is the hatred of tradition, traditional cultures, family, community, agroegology, regenerative agriculture, co-opts, farmers, farmers markets , artisans, small + local business ... the left fetishises these but actively attacks and undermines them in practice. Anywhere where traditional community begins to flourish, where individuality and group values co-exist, the left vilifies and regulates against it.
Since one generation of Men has been able to communicate to succeeding generations of Men the most fundamental human societal behavioral pattern communicated is Evil feeds on Good. The Left destroys everything it touches except Evil. There you have it. The Left can't touch Evil because it is the manifestation of Evil.
Hmmm..."Libertarian" is not exactly the term that comes to mind for people obeying nonsensical orders and sitting by so quietly as their chosen leaders were mandating totalitarian death jabs and masks. Or cheering the cancellation of people who they might disagree with, but are freely speaking their minds, naively believing the Constitution still matters.
Yeah, it seems like a very strange moment to worry about too much libertarian sentiment. Libertarian lockdowns, begin!
The progressive left always was a tool for powerful people to control those they thought were beneath them. There was an arrogance of the educated who just knew they were smarter and better than everyone else.
Woodrow Wilson was a prime example of this. As president he censored the media and forced them to adopt the official narrative of pro Allies. He imprisoned those of the real left, such as Eugene V. Debs. And Wilson was the tool of the bankers.
Nothing much has changed.
The real left is the anti authoritarian Left, which opposes concentration of power, be in business, government, or rich individuals.
The problem has always been that it is easily co-opted by the progressive neoliberal left, our would be rulers.
Thomas Frank's "For the People, No!" was his understanding that most progressives hate the peons that exploit for power.
The Republicans are about the same. Most just give lip service to the base and work their deals and ignore the people. They are about power and hate when the people wake up to the reality they are being sold out.
Your average "real leftist" still thinks he is against the powerful by opposing Republicans, no matter that he is on the same team with the Wall Street, the Deep State and the War Party. He has been deceived and manipulated.
What's more galling about Justin freezing the accounts (along with Chrystia Freeland who was giddy proud about it) is he then turns around and talks about needing to protect 'freedom and democracy'. He does it with Ukraine and now Iran. He's an insufferable emotional gaslighting cockwomble.
"opposes the power of the state when it opposes him, and embraces it if he thinks his side has come to control it"
This. Seems like the world is bifurcating into the "obey me/us!" crowd ... and the "leave me alone" crowd.
Seems like lots of people want other people to behave they way they want them to... and the government looks like a good tool for achieving that. I suspect most haven't thought it about it very far (or studied history).
Politics is Power.
[I apologize for the following detailed answer's length].
POWER: There is an inherent tension between competing powers and tensions between local and national powers - Example critically now "local policing is racist". This is an ongoing power grab by the jealous National Power of the local plenary [broad] police powers.
The FBI can't write a speeding ticket and so on.
Well, that won't do.
This is one example of power simply doing what it does - seek more power.
Now if there was an overriding moral code and agreed upon political contract that checked and divided powers invested with legitimacy and respect ....it was called the Constitution and it's gone.
A cynic would say the Left was simply advancing on two pincers to envelop the powers to themselves, both serve the same goal of power to the state as long as it is Left.
One pincer sows chaos the other imposes order - their order.
In any case the Left can thank itself Janus head or not for destroying the existing political and moral order that made laws other than brute force and self-government possible.
The most dangerous part of New Jersey is and was Camden. A small city that usually won murder capital per capita for decades. The local police department was eventually dissolved and replaced by the State Police. Who then preceded in good time to seal off the bad areas and roll in with the Iron Fist and harsh tactics ....that strangely didn't make the news in all the Leftist adoration of the banning of the local police. You see NJ wisely bent the knee to a Federal Consent decree in 1997 and in exchange [no, this isn't in writing lol] NJ has a free hand more or less to deal directly with criminals.
First movers on bending the knee do get some privileges - like a better measure of public safety.
The dirty work done there's now a new Camden County PD.
You'd be wise and better informed to study the consent decrees Mr. Bray, you'll find them all over our government's actual administration and the actual point of conflict in several of the Police Brutality riots and struggles of the last decade such as Baltimore and New Orleans. You see with the consent decree you waive your rights to due process AND you have to fund it - as there are no Federal Funds required by DOJ to fund this there is no Congressional oversight or appeal.
Very clever way around due process.
The FCC loves consent decrees as well, in particular when applied to small radio stations in rural areas that might carry conservative content and can't afford lawyers or courts. Large media concerns can and aren't subject to consent decrees. Our government loves power, not due process.
Politics is power and we are living through a power struggle between a centralization largely already affected by the New Deal, WW2 and the Cold War and our natural decentralized Federated tendencies that are returning. The National government - Feudal arrangement in Federal skin in its own Right - is cracking down on what is decentralization. The Federal government has amassed and accrued great powers and is jealously fighting to keep those powers, nothing could be more human.
The price of the New Deal was administrative government, this Deal was an exchange of loss of democracy having any power in exchange for benefits.
Elected government surrendered most of their powers - and so the voters vote mattering - in exchange for a great deal of insulation from consequences and vastly more powers to the government overall.
The relevant decisions and statutes:
Federal Reserve Act 1913- Congress surrenders control of money.
Federal Register Act of 1934: Congress delegates broad powers to apply and interpret laws to the regulatory departments [this has the effect of making the courts the recourse for bad laws and not your legislature. If a law written by a bureaucrat causes harm, you must be harmed then win in suit.
This has the effect of making the Federal Register our actual Constitution.
Supreme Court decision on the Federal Register 1935: it upheld the Constitutionality [!!] of the Federal Register and pronounced said Register [now at more than 72,000 pages] as having the properties of Judicial and Constructive notice - the courts must acknowledge every jot as law, and Constructive notice means ignorance of the laws therein are no excuse.
Humphrey's Executors 1937: The President can't fire civil servants for disobeying his orders.
Also, the FTC [and by common law all Federal agencies] can levy fines and fees [that's like taxes folks] upon those they regulate. Home Run.
This is a sweet deal for regulators - can make own laws, levy own taxes, can't be fired.
This is why I refer to DC as Feudalism in Federal Skin.
APA/Administrative Procedures Act of 1946: Now by law the President can't fire people.
Then we have the CIA, NRLB, FCC and other agencies who are you see rather like the Federal Reserve- they're Independent Agencies. Of those pesky politicians, and their ignorant voters.
We have the 1947 Defense Acts which establish DOD.
In 1950 strangely Truman finds himself in a war, but his advisers say we can't declare war, so let's have the [State Department cough cough] UN declare it a police action.
So, as you can see the Article 1 powers of Congress concerning money, laws and war are gone.
The Article 2 powers of the Presidency are gutted, this is why no one gets fired - they can't be fired.
Article 3 for all the abuse the Courts take is mostly the courts being the means of legislative redress, don't trouble your congressman please, hire a lawyer.
As for the President he can't do anything anyway, not legally. Ask Trump.
He can sign Executive Orders and he can watch Drone Strikes. Whee.
You and the readers might want to look at how the Federal Register actually gets written, you see they'll send out a RFC - Request for Comments - on a proposed rule and based on Feedback and Pushback and of course lobbying it will or will not become law.
Now of course this arrangement rested on obscurity and deceit and the self interest in the millions of participants in this scheme of governance, along with a lot of money. And more money.
And since Clinton reinvented government wide open contracting, the government is actually a contracting brokerage except for a few special functions.
But laws that are against the Constitution are laws undermining the very basis of laws in America.
And of course, something that rests on deceit must take care not to be noticed.... The New Dealers and following generations were careful and mostly sober, responsible people.
Their grandchildren not so.
It stood to reason that like any other wild carnival this would someday come to an end.
The end of fraud and deceit come faster when you draw attention to your er, progressive enterprise.
This is the end of the 20th Century government of "Progress".
What follows will be worse before it gets better.
Indeed, no matter what many will miss the petty tyrants and their rambling and mostly ineffective repressions. What follows will NOT be ineffective....and my fellow Americans it's not just your rulers that have developed a taste for repression, you have developed a need yourselves to be repressed.
A wicked and wild, selfish people CANNOT self-govern. We can thank the Janus faced Left for their crusades for personal immorality on this front as well.
We'll miss these clowns when they are replaced by proper tyrants, mark my words.
Thank you for this.
Correct. And unfortunately this new hard-left has us going in completely the wrong direction.
When people began realizing that Monarchy was evil, that controlling thieving evil disguised itself, quite insidiously and effectively, as Democracy. Instead of being ruled by one we are now ruled by a group for whom we have supposedly chosen, ourselves, by vote. It is a clever deception plain and simple. The End of all Evil by Jeremy Locke (pdf is online), in approximately 90 pages, quite clearly lays evil bare for all to see.
monarchy isn't evil
It feels more like Mao's Cultural Revolution, where chaos and upheaval were the essential elements. The government fostered one kind of upheaval in its attempt to further its control of China.
Read about Germany in the 20's and 30's. The part of WW2 history they quickly skim over, almost like they don't want you to know about it. Lots of the same crap as now, Culture was being turned into Babylon and the left and right were fighting in the streets.
Fritz Lang's movies are all about that situation, aren't they? The Mabuse series in particular.
Yes! Exactly the same dynamic at play in Russia 100 years ago after the revolution. Trotskyites and similar factions methodically purged by the Bolsheviks once they were no longer useful.
The "cult of the individual" is alive and thriving on the left in all of these instances:
1. Individuals can change their gender and pronouns at will, with no questions
2. Individuals from foreign countries can enter the US at will and do whatever they want, with no restrictions (outside the Martha's Vineyard Exclusion Zone)
3. Individuals can dose themselves with whatever substances they want (and some they don't want, like mRNA), excepting menthol cigarettes and vapes and ivermectin, without limitation
4. Individuals can buy as many electric vehicles as they want
5. Individual children can consent to hormones, puberty blockers, "top surgery" and "bottom surgery" without the threat of older, wiser voices offering them advice and guidance (and by older, wiser voices, I mean the voices of people in their 20s who regret the use of hormones, puberty blockers, "top surgery" and "bottom surgery")
That's about it. that's all I can think of. On second thought, maybe you're right. Individual freedom is dead on the left.
I agree that there's definitely a logical tension between the left's embrace of authoritarianism (I wrote about the Canadian truckers here: https://leightonwoodhouse.substack.com/p/god-mode) and its libertarian nihilism. I don't have the answer either, but I would note that the libertarian side tend to see themselves more as left radicals, whereas the authoritarians are more your standard MSNBC liberals. That's not to say it's a clean split: last year we saw the absurd scene of antifa rioters fist fighting protestors *on behalf of state vaccine mandates.* But I do think that there's a bit of a factional split there.
I wrote once for Tablet about two of the political philosophies the American colonists brought over from Europe — the Puritan tradition, which represented a sort of top-down liberalism, and the Scotch-Irish tradition, which was militantly libertarian. Those two traditions fused on the West Coast. You can actually track the migratory patterns that brought the two ethnic group-based doctrines to a common location. https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/history/articles/cold-civil-war
Anyway, we should talk and see if we can puzzle it out!
Nothing has ever been stranger than Antifa brawling for vaccine mandates. Very much agree with the "no vision for building anything up in its place."
Would be very interested to discuss!
I'd also point out that nobody ever accused the left of being logically consistent, and really what we're seeing today is a fusion of the libertarian and authoritarian strains of leftism in a philosophically incoherent nihilism. Both the radical libertarian left and the liberal authoritarian left stand for crushing and dismantling what they perceive as unjust, with no vision for building anything up in its place. So at this point it might even be a moot exercise to try to reconcile the contradictions in the left.
Please do not play into Caroline Orr Bueno and similar fascists' accusations of fascism. They can try to boast "antifa" all they want. But the so-called left betrays their own fascism by their support of industry / government alliance, forced medical treatments, censorship, racial discrimination, and other civil liberties violations. Fascists' like Orr take their mentor Goebbels ' advice. 'Accuse the other side of what you are doing.'
This article presents the best evidence I've seen that SIDS is caused by vaccines. I already suspected that it was. Vaccines are evil. They started as evil and they are still evil. Rockefeller was interested in killing off the population, and his interest took the form of vaccine research. We've got to get our minds around this idea. It's key to understanding who our enemy is.