As a prisoner of Mussolini’s fascist regime, the Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci used his prison notebooks to describe the importance of hegemony as a reinforcement of power.
I have lots of slurs when it comes to the New Left—as a 1980s Lit major at a snooty college I hated them wayyy before it was cool, as they turned the study of books into a playpen for radical grievance and a stage for the same eternally recurring narcissistic psychodrama we've been living through now for decades—but in this case I'd like to describe them as the termites of civilization.
The termites dined well when they first started gnawing through our cultural and educational institutions, no one much minded or noticed when they chewed through books and museums and faculties and not even when they chewed through our cultural patrimony and ways of knowing our history, society, culture, social norms etc. But eventually they got to a load-bearing wall—the sex binary and how it's taught to children—and they imagined they could destroy this one as easily as all the prior ones and they would achieve their weird utopia of sexless children who hate themselves and their parents but pledge their souls to the Permanent Revolution.
But there's a big problem with termites: they can never create, but only destroy. That's why the New Left, despite being in power this entire century, have created no great works, no great novel or film or art movement, they are not only destructive but sterile. The best they can do is craft new jargon for ponderous "theories" that they feed each other and then dribble into the mouths of their blue-haired baby birds on campus.
But now they've reached this load-bearing wall and seem to have bit off more than they can chew. The sooner they choke and die the better it will be for the rest of us, but people don't devote their whole lives to a sacred cause and just surrender at the first sign of trouble. We will have to break out the fumigation tent and drape it over every school and college in the country. Hopefully the house will still be standing if and when these termites are finally killed off.
The savior may not necessarily be a "perpetrator, abuser and victimiser" but their paramount goal is always to parade their own virtue. Probably the best examples are the Trans Munchausen Mama who sterilizes her child to feel stunning and brave or the Free Palestine! cult, who love marching for distant dark-skinned strangers and want a front-row seat for when the blood of Justice aka revenge flows, but who in the process have created the world's only fourth-generation refugees.
Lord help you if you ever become a sacred victim of the savior class!
It all feels like some evil fairy-tale come to life. The good qualities of womanhood taken and twisted into some awful monstrous form that ends up devouring and thus destroying what they purport to love.
The men involved in this charade are just as bad. Who is the Greek god who devoured his own offspring? Cronus is tickling my brain.
Cronus castrated Uranus and threw his father’s testicles into the sea. They caused the sea to foam and out of that white foam rose Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty.
But if we're looking for mortals who castrated their children, I guess we'd have to go with Nero or Sardanapalus.
Nero loved a nice castrated boy, they'd been cured of toxic masculinity! :)
"Half the sky aflame with balefire makes it hard to be a cynic through and through."
Well... shame on you for having a balanced outlook. ;-)
Reminds me of a country song (because of course it does,) called "Old Dogs, Children and Watermelon Wine." The song is about a world-weary, cynical old man. Balancing out his accurate assessment of life in general, are a sincere appreciation for the three things comprising the song's title.
If you ain't allergic to vintage country music, give a listen to that song sometime. Here's a one-line spoiler:
"Old dogs care about you even when you make mistakes;
God bless little children while they're still too young to hate."
Enjoy God's light show, Rikard, and all the best to ya.
But are they being set up? Used? Infiltrated? I get that it's the "left" doing this but am I naive in thinking they are being taken advantage of for someone else's nefarious purposes?
But I think that they have gone at least one bridge too far: Trans is collapsing, Trump survived their assassination attempts, & the assassination of Charlie Kirk and the left’s response to it as well as their embrace of Hamas has awakened much of the electorate outside of NYC. It will be a contentious several years, because the left are not good losers.
I like your optimism. I do think that "things" will eventually self correct. History swings back and forth.
But this is more than just right vs left. Censorship and digital ID is being unrolled around the world. De-banking for your beliefs is world wide. Covid authoritarian measures were coordinated and worldwide. Mass immigration is occurring in all western democracies.
The No Kings protests are coordinated and funded. These are just some of the more obvious examples.
My point is I don't think this is simply left/right although that is certainly how it mostly plays out in the USA.
The agenda is deeper. I don't know the "who"but the global patterns cannot be ignored.
Is it just the deep state, so used to fomenting rebellion and destroying countries that they've now turned inward?
Is it the international bankers and technocrats pushing digital ID to mask the distressed over leveraged financial system? With digital ID and social credit they can then usher in digital money and bail themselves out.
Is it the socialists? Soros, et. al, tearing every social structure apart so people will welcome anyone who can keep social order?
I just don't think the left/right framework is sufficient to explain all that is happening.
I also think this process will take more than a few years to settle out. I just hope we can get through it (whatever "it" is) without a global war.
Read Revelation. Things will get worse before they get better in the end. If you aren’t right with the Lord, now is as good a time as any. Read the Gospel of John for starters if you haven’t. Listen to some Charlie Kirk.
It isn’t like censorship or developing a caste system for categorizing people hasn’t happened before. It is truly a Biblical pattern as to the times we are living. I guess you could add the old trite phrase, there is nothing new under the sun.
You bible-thumpers are so off-putting with your higher-than-thou certainty. Even though I quite avidly listen to and respect the likes of Bishop Barron and at least a dozen other Christian YouTubers, (Orthodox mostly) I still don't buy it. Not out of obstinacy but simply a quietly perennial disbelief. God, yes. Biblical supremacy? Nah.
Usually, it is the New Generation of radical trying to garner status and ascend to power by one-upping their predecessors that act as the infiltrators of the left. In effect it infiltrates itself again and again until it collapses due to running into an existential problem it cannot mitigate by way of rhetorics (or force, should it be available).
Typically, after such an event, the left fractures into miniscule autonomous cells from which it then re-grows over the course of one to three decades.
Obviously, it's not as clear-cut as I make it out to be, but that is the mechanism by which it keeps coming back, and self-destruct.
It's just that nowadays, everyone puts the apostrophe in the wrong place (when denoting the plural) and leaves it out when it's supposed to be there. Drives me nuts.
Americans need to take a hard long look at timber framing. People pay 2 million dollars for 3500 square feet of matchsticks and cardboard. Along comes a F-1 tornado and the whole stupid thing is smeared across the neighborhood. Either that or it burns down in five minutes. Americans reject concrete and re-bar because its very HEAVY PERMANENCE intimidates. That's my theory. But I'm just an idiot.
Well said. One mantra I try to live by is "Create, don't consume." I think such a mindset helps nudge the world toward a better/ happier place. In that context your termite analogy is most apt.
I agree with both comments. I think it’s telling that the “termites” ran out of fuel when they ran into the brick wall of sex. Procreation is the ultimate creative human action. Debase, destroy, disrupt the basic human biological gift at one’s peril. Even those who may not see below the surface to understand the value of life react to its threat. Which is total collapse.
Yes, consumption is critical to creation! It influences creativity and why and how we build. We cut down trees to make family homes and we carbon sequester with wood furniture that can be useful for a hundred or more years. If there is no consumption there is no purpose to creation.
I loved your initial comment. The only problem I had with it is that my own house had a termite problem in the past that got "fixed". You know what the worse thing about termites is? They are really hard to detect - no termite company will guarentee you don't have termites if you use their product, because they know they can't always detect them. And they tell you that up front.
Kind of like the damage done by gender (etc.) studies.
And can confirm empirically that this is what "leftist" movements and groups always do when they start to run out of influence, power or resources: cannibalism resulting in fracturing down to cells of just a handful of individuals.
From this state they re-emerge again and again.
If anything, I'd say Giger's "Xenomorph" fit even better than termites.
Ha! Like when they make yet another cherished character a “POC” or insert LGBTQ themes into old stories. Not because it makes a good story, but so they can have “representation”. Thats nothing but a tranny/alien bursting through the chest of the corpse of the previously good piece of art it’s now killed.
I'll never forget when I was first exposed to the Theory Cult, I knew it was foul bullshit but never imagined it would conquer the globe.
Reading theory instead of literature is like buying a TV, throwing it in the garbage, and then spending years arguing over the instruction manual. Both its texts and its practitioners are dull, preachy and dreary.
I always felt like my theory class - also endured while a Lit major at a fancy college - was akin to being forced to read one movie review after another by a tut-tutting aunt who insisted that I "see the film" the way she did. Kicker: I was only allowed to see 4 clips from the movie, each about 20 seconds long. And I was never asked for my opinion; my donation to ACTup would be appreciated, however (and possibly incorporated into my grade).
It's helped me to view the Theory termites as a cult who apply cult dynamics wherever they establish a foothold. Belief in their divine election, gnostic wisdom, Manichean morality, everyone on our team is Good and everyone not is either Evil or brainwashed, loyalty rituals and therapeutic struggle sessions, plus whoever disputes your newfound identity as radical sage blessed with critical consciousness needs to be denounced and cut off, even if it's your parents—it's all there.
The miserable people unable to enjoy the rich banquet of Literature in itself but who need to instrumentalize it for their social, career and psychological needs are like eunuchs in a harem. They can't experience and enjoy the act of creation, so they want to befoul and kill it.
It wasn't until I got a bit older that I learned that most of their theories were just reheated Marxist tropes—power-knowledge, positionality, the vanguard class, materialist fundamentalism etc—and in retrospect I realize that it didn't work on me because I've never been rich enough to be a socialist! (Only half joking.)
At my fancy college I was among the few with a working-class background, thus I didn't have the intense status anxiety of the haute bourgeoisie. It also wasn't till years later that I figured out that the most radical kids often came from the wealthiest families. But this was in the late 80s, I'm sure things are much different—and much more insufferable—now.
Sadly, our theory prof - maybe yours? "Jeff" - was explicitly blending the Marxism into the classwork, via readings of Dickens. I'm embarrassed to admit that I was so enthused by the mental gymnastics of the class (taken junior year) that I peppered my senior thesis with Foucault like a good cult member should. My 2 readers, unsurprisingly, loved it!
I scrolled down to comment, but I read this and said "damn, no point".
I decided to comment anyway...
What I fear is that these termites (narcissists) are 20% of the population and they cannot function in a course corrected world. They will foment, rage and tantrum until their last breath. Look at the geriatric protesters! We have a sizable cohort of non functional narcissistic agitants who will never learn, never tire, and ceaselessly seek to destroy in avoidance of facing their own psychological dysfunction.
Also, their work might already be done. I've seen many trees that looked healthy until a storm knocks them over, and you realize it's been eaten from the inside out.
The sex binary IS the load-bearing wall of our ... I can't think of a big enough word. Our species. The childlessness of the youngest generation of my family haunts me; two young women soon to be 30 and 28 who show every sign of having decided by sheer indecision never to have children. I'm 78. What gives me a comforting feeling of having done some good in my life? These memories of my kids when they were little. My wife and I plunged in, married BECAUSE we wanted to have our children; she was 18, I was 21...
It's even worse for them than you and CB are saying... After Bush got us into Iraq, it took years for the right to turn on the neocons. Then we got Trump.
How is the left going to do anything like that when they still control the "sensemaking" institutions, especially academia?
Course correction is going to *require* left-wing cannibalization, which will occur after the cannibalization leftists do to each other when they lose, anyway... And the victors of the first wave of emotionally driven fratricide will *not* be the as those required to course correct.
I think they are going to be in the wilderness for a very long time. I could be wrong, but it doesn't look great for them or the institutions they control.
3 consecutive terms of Republicans in the WH may be the only possible path toward cleaning out the Augean Stables of our Leftist universities, schools and other institutions. The Dems will have to be where they were in 1992, finally forced to reform when there was no other path back to power.
"The Dems will have to be where they were in 1992, finally forced to reform when there was no other path back to power."
I don't disagree, not really, but God save us all from the manner in which they "reformed" in '92. Their embrace of oligarchy has been one of the most destructive economic forces in American history.
says every blue collar worker whose job was shipped off to Mexico, China, Malaysia... I remember getting the creeps over Clinton's NAFTA cheerleading even though I wasn't political at all then. Maybe I shoulda been...
"I wasn't political at all then. Maybe I shoulda been..."
You and me both, Rick.
I'd been political in the 70's, stupidly so. By that, I mean adopting an ideology before really taking the time to read the canon and understand the long-term ramifications of what I was advocating. I learned, left that organization and then hit the job market right smack dab in the middle of the Carter stagnation years. I focused on keeping food on the table.
In '91, I began what has been my career to this day. Those early years were physically and mentally demanding, so all I had left for Clinton was utter contempt and a forlorn wish for him to be impeached (but not by asking him to expose his marital problems to the world,) and removed from office.
Thing was, NAFTA had zero benefit for America; only for rent-seekers foreign and domestic. I knew it, you knew it and so did absolutely everyone else. Middle class and prosperous working class folks saw their retirement accounts get bigger, and that's all that mattered to them, both Liberals and Conservatives alike. They were the cohorts that might have made a difference, people like me were spending every waking hour trying to make ends meet.
Even so, you and I should have made the effort to get more politically active, and maybe if enough of us did that, some of today's worst outcomes might have been avoided.
Still and all, remember that Clinton was also right in the heart of getting Glass-Steagall repealed, and along with it, turning antitrust enforcement into an irrelevant series of minor wrist-slaps. The biggest problems we face now, stemmed from those two failures.
I agree with all of this but just want to add the role of the MSM at that time. When one person with power stood up against the outsourcing of our middle class, Ross Perot (sort of the proto-Trump), he was mercilessly mocked for his ears, his height and various other eccentricites. He was of course right in his debate against Gore, but the media painted Gore as more serious and respectable, ie more establishment. They weren't letting anyone get in the way of the Roaring 90s and the so-called "miracle of the market" or whatever phrases they were using then—the money was just too good for them and their bosses.
If Bubba had tried to run as an economic populist, they would have kneecapped him with all his bimbo issues and painted him as some sort of danger. Not that this excuses his greed...
And then what? Instead of millions of left-wing sociology majors, you then produce millions of right-wing sociology majors. What will have been achieved? Families preserved, unborn fetuses saved, renunciation of buggery? No dicks in female toilets?
Awesome write up! In my University’s engineering school we didn’t have the time for such silliness but I saw it happening around me. I just stepped around the liberal arts zombies and soldiered on to class or the library to study. The sad, and ironic part is many of them went on to get their participation awards in law, management or teaching.
"Narcissistic psychodrama" is about the best term I've heard for what they produce in every single instance - writing, movies, music - it's all just melodramatic, overly personal psychodrama garbage. Thank you for that. They need to go.
As the Helen Andrews article Chris linked points out - we either need to make it illegal to discriminate against everyone...or make it legal to discriminate against anyone. Level the playing field and these termites will be removed quickly and easily. The feminization and critical theory crowd is only winning b/c the rules have been stacked in their favor for 50+ years, making it legal to discriminate against (white) men only. Which, of course, (re)shapes the institutions according to the rules of those not actively discriminated against.
The Andrews article is making the rounds. It’s spot on and explains a lot.
After reading it I fully understand the full force feminism brought to bear on the societal landscape. Especially noticeable in media of all forms especially TV drama, news and even weather reports.
It’s a ghost town for men now. They’ve all walked off into the sunset.
Great description of the problem and I heartily agree with you, but how does the "fumigation" take place?
It's one thing to talk about fighting back, the trick is having a plan to do it. Normies are like a herd of cats while the Left is well organized. Just look at the thousands of "No Kings" events occurring all across the Country today. Do you think the Normies could pull off anything similar? For that matter, where are the counter protests to today's rallies? You know that if it was normal folks holding nationwide rallies the Left would be out in the 100's of thousands to counter protest and disrupt them.
A fumigation will be exceeding hard to accomplish when our side lacks organization and motivation. Now that the Left controls so many institutions such as local governments and the police, they use their positions of authority to squelch any attempt to take away their power.
I wish I could be more sanguine about being able to reverse the rot.
My little corner of the world still remains books, writing, culture and this is where the rot is total and every possible lever of power is controlled by a New Left commissar. Just about everyone I know, whether in film, TV, documentaries, books and art and editing and theater etc has been injured by the Social Justice Cultural Revolution, whether being chased out of work for the crime of being a white male or forced to kiss the ring of DEI race quotas etc. (Not to mention that they spend their entire lives walking on eggshells, terrified of saying one word that will destroy them and their careers.)
Like I said before, my only hope in this realm is that political zealots can't create but can only bully, destroy, and get their way through viciousness. I think of the current generation of people in culture or education in the same way I think of the Soviets—there is zero hope of changing any minds and zero hope of them ceding power. They will have to implode a la Chernobyl and then whoever succeeds them will have to build anew from the rubble.
America slept for multiple generations while its cultural and educational institutions were conquered by the postmodern post-Marxists of Left academia. There's simply no easy way to fix something this deeply embedded. Moral to the story: don't let your kids be educated by people who hate you, your country and culture and history—oops!
I am hopeful. Now I live in Lancaster County , PA, not exactly a hotbed of woke, but we do have a NPR captured local paper—that is slowly sinking thankfully, and an active LBGTQ??? community that has infiltrated one of our quaint tourist destinations (LITITZ), but I found a lot of people out & about & ignoring the No Kings nonsense. Let’s see how many people watch the Turning Point alternative Super Bowl Halftime Show.
From a certain squinted angle, they are undergoing the comic ordeals in the movie Bedazzled (and Faust, and...), in which a recovered manuscript of The Art of the Deal with The Devil itemizes certain conditions precedent, necessary to make the scheme work, which are mysteriously missing from the contract.
"In the new order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches and the media ..." -- Antonio Gramsci
And we have seen this come to pass. Our first objective should be to re-take the public schools and universities.
💯 I concur. Hopefully the current administration will be able to make progress on this. Here in Seattle, they keep getting rid of more and more accelerated learning opportunities in K-12 because they say it’s white supremacy. Their solution to the achievement gap is to just get rid of the top. Toppling the Marxist monolith that is public schools today is priority 1 for me.
At this point, I think the losses America would incur are an acceptable price for destroying wokeness. Civilization cannot afford to lose this war. In any event, genuine education is harder to find than it once was.
Or simply close the department of education completely to remove the single point of control mechanism that all the federal agencies are designed to provide. Federalize (read: “atomize”) education back to the states. And let each state’s performance speak for itself. People with children will vote with their feet.
I see male veterans by the tens of thousands applying for cool jobs as middle/high school history, science, and math teachers. A legion of positive male role models, if you will. How do we make this legion appear?
One approach would be with merit-based pay. And by reversing the current public school payroll priorities. Instead of administrators being paid more than teachers, pay teachers more than administrators.
"They captured everything, and everything they captured is turning to ashes." That's kind of their true objective. Tear it all down, isolate people to make them helpless, take control of what's left, and rebuild society in the reflection of the New Soviet Man.
Cluster B for sure. That's ONE big reason why we should insist on subsidiarity, all decisions pushed down to the lowest most & local place for them to be made. Devolve the power out of DC, and make the President and the Executive "not matter anymore".
Good point. . . . I have a problem, though, with the whole “Long March” theory.
Something like that doesn’t happen spontaneously - think of the planning, planners, and resources needed to do such a thing; where are the “Masterminds” and master plans?
. . Of course, this leaves open the question of the how and the why, what we now have in academia, Hollywood, etc. is so similar to that which was called for by the proverbial Long March theory. Was this just prophecy or successful wishful thinking on Gramsci’s part?
I can only comment about my experiences in the early 70's. Many of my friends morphed from anti-war to anti-America/Maoist. They wouldn't dream of going joining the "corporate world" and being party to "The Man." So they got graduate degrees and then tenure, or went into public education, or joined non-profits, or (actually) went to work for the government in some bureau or another. Not a few were either red diaper or pink diaper nepo kids. By the time Obama acceded to his throne many of these folks were approaching retirement. It was now or never.
I think you underestimate the level to which humans are mimetic. When high-status people do “thing X”, it spreads far and wide among the sheeple, who bask in the reflected glory of “the cool kids”. It doesn’t have to be “controlled” by a leader or organization. When the “cool” group at a prominent university starts promoting a particular theory, others will enthusiastically follow (believing that they, too, are high status “rebels”). Give this model decades to replicate, and you’ll see where we are now.
The left benefited from historical circumstances that amplified the effects of individual leftists and leftist groups. The 1930s and 40s saw a number of European academics, including some with leftist sympathies, immigrate to the United States. Then the GI Bill, born of the Roosevelt administration’s fear that millions of demobilized, jobless young men would cause civil unrest, opened up higher education to many Americans who had lacked the opportunity in the pre-war years. University enrollment grew, a college education became normalized, elementary school teaching and many other occupations came to require college degrees, and several generations of Americans grew up learning their lessons from first, professors, and later teachers and professors who themselves had received left-leaning professional educations. Finally, the leftism-fueled societal rot took some time to happen, more time to become an obvious problem, and still more time before genuine disgust and alarm began to set in. All the while, leftism kept marching on.
Not entirely spontaneously, but as a general trend. Social trends are rarely well planned (and if they are, tend to not necessarily work out according to plan) even though some will take credit afterwards for having engineered the whole thing.
Wwhaatt? Are you insinuating that socialism has never worked when it’s been tried? Just give us one more chance! We’ll make it work this time, I promise.
It always comes down to the same fundamental problem. Socialism, Marxism, and every other imaginable ism, are only championed by fervent religious believers. For all others must be coerced. Mao Zedong put it best, "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." Ultimately, the long march through the institutions will only succeed when they become willing to apply force. We are currently witnessing the use of coercive force in Great Britain, Canada, and other Western "democracies." Hopefully, their demise is a stark wakeup call to the United States to stay firmly affixed to our country's founding documents.
"Politics is war without the shooting". Mao said that too. This war is a culture war that the neocons and fake conservatives fight by the Marquis Of Queensbury rules. The left conducts the fight by early MMA rules- there are none. Know your enemy- I said that.
What a wonderfully positive read this Saturday morning! Thank you. Often I need to be reminded of the good, it is so easy to follow my negativity bias towards a dark, hopeless place that I ‘tap-out’ via ignoring the world.
While media fasts are good for my mental health, this is even better. It is engaging my mind to truly see the world accurately.
Years ago I went through the Army’s ‘Master Resilience Training’, a mash-up of positive psychology, sports psychology, CBT, and behavioral psychology. It was great.
Part of the curriculum was to do daily gratitude lists. The reasoning behind this is that it stretches our brains, literally. Our negativity bias limits our ability to think—call it a 90° view—but after doing gratitude lists and thinking more positively—we can see 180° and make better decisions.
This article was a ‘big ole dish’ of gratitude for me today. Thank you very much!
It's not negativity bias. It's familiarity bias. As individuals we naturally prefer the familiar, while as a civilization we depend on innovations. In terms of the ARMY, we as low-ranks prefer the familiarity of staying alive, while the top brass want to introduce to us the innovation of getting ourselves killed, for whatever reason suits their purposes. That's the reason for all those tabs and badges and ribbons.
One thing about Communism, it plays the long game and like a parasite lives well off the body of its host until it causes the host to sicken and die. Drastic measures must be taken to eliminate the parasite, perhaps deeply wounding the host to kill it and remove all traces from the body. We have tried this before, but always too gently. As history shows the gentle persuasion technique never works , the parasite is embedded too greatly. Strong medicine must be used, constantly and consistently. I would start with education , then the NGO’s and advocacy organizations. Eliminate the tax breaks for everything. Eliminate all government subsidies and grants. The parasites have grown and continue to live on this largesse.
Communism, or socialism or whatever you wanna call it, is a natural outgrowth of the cultural contradictions of our modern era. For instance, "The family is the foundation of civilization!", will shout the anti-communist. Oh really? Which family: Extended or nuclear? "Extended!", might thunder the anti-communist. Oh really? So kids should be encouraged to never leave home? "No!" screams the anti-communist. "Kids must venture forth into the world and buy TV's and cars and fridges and make careers for themselves!"
The screaming rarely comes from the anti side because the facts of the matter seem clear and have generally worked. If I represent a political philosophy that has never worked I must scream to prove my false claims.
Institutions are built from the ground up. Top down control of anything always fails eventually. It collapses under the weight of its own incompetence. Incompetence by its nature is repellant and impossible to hide. Hence the loss of prestige.
Just passed by the Embadero Plaza site of No Kings demo in downtown SF. It's a beautiful warm sunny day. Maybe 300 people, probably far less. More people were at the Farmer's Market across the street
I saw that Richard Hanania took issue with the Andrews feminization piece on grounds of oversimplification (but then again he seems to take issue with everything.) I've lately come to the conclusion that Hanania is just another David French with a greater IQ and a vastly larger vocabulary.
Oh yeah? Well, think about this: Long before women started taking over the boardroom, the boardroom itself was NOT a place for manly work: No sweating in the boardroom, no heavy lifting or physical danger in the boardroom (well, maybe SOME nervous sweating).
The point is this: Have women turned the boardroom into a feminized space, or has the feminine rightly taken over the feminized space?
Hey, Chris Bray! IS WRITING A MASCULINE OR A FEMININE THING?
It could be argued using picked historical examples that those leaders who had to fight - not necessarily violent or on a battlefield - to attain their rulership made for better rulers. To use a more pop-cultural example:
Caligula was given, what Gaius Julius fought to attain.
Leftism since the Enlightenment, in its truest and most undistilled form, is always at war with reality. Their problem since Rousseau is that they are simply wrong about human nature and the human condition. They have staked everything on a fantasy of how humans should behave rather than acknowledge the truth of how humans do behave. Leftism of this sort is, in its essence, pre-adolescent projection, no different from believing in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. It therefore naturally appeals to the young and it is why Leftists everywhere want to lower the voting age whenever they have the opportunity to do so.
The problem is it’s not real. That means it is always doomed to fail. The trick, since the French Revolution, is to avoid total societal collapse and the death of millions when that inevitable failure occurs.
I have lots of slurs when it comes to the New Left—as a 1980s Lit major at a snooty college I hated them wayyy before it was cool, as they turned the study of books into a playpen for radical grievance and a stage for the same eternally recurring narcissistic psychodrama we've been living through now for decades—but in this case I'd like to describe them as the termites of civilization.
The termites dined well when they first started gnawing through our cultural and educational institutions, no one much minded or noticed when they chewed through books and museums and faculties and not even when they chewed through our cultural patrimony and ways of knowing our history, society, culture, social norms etc. But eventually they got to a load-bearing wall—the sex binary and how it's taught to children—and they imagined they could destroy this one as easily as all the prior ones and they would achieve their weird utopia of sexless children who hate themselves and their parents but pledge their souls to the Permanent Revolution.
But there's a big problem with termites: they can never create, but only destroy. That's why the New Left, despite being in power this entire century, have created no great works, no great novel or film or art movement, they are not only destructive but sterile. The best they can do is craft new jargon for ponderous "theories" that they feed each other and then dribble into the mouths of their blue-haired baby birds on campus.
But now they've reached this load-bearing wall and seem to have bit off more than they can chew. The sooner they choke and die the better it will be for the rest of us, but people don't devote their whole lives to a sacred cause and just surrender at the first sign of trouble. We will have to break out the fumigation tent and drape it over every school and college in the country. Hopefully the house will still be standing if and when these termites are finally killed off.
Very well said.
In other words they have run out of victims. There's nothing left to "eat", except each other.
Thanks!
Now they have "migrants" and Palestinians. If all you see are victims, you can always find one somewhere.
Ha!
"If all you see are victims" struck a chord and shook loose a thought:
Following the quoted bit, then that means the one seeing all as victims must be the perpetrator, abuser and victimiser.
Or am I overly cynical?
The savior may not necessarily be a "perpetrator, abuser and victimiser" but their paramount goal is always to parade their own virtue. Probably the best examples are the Trans Munchausen Mama who sterilizes her child to feel stunning and brave or the Free Palestine! cult, who love marching for distant dark-skinned strangers and want a front-row seat for when the blood of Justice aka revenge flows, but who in the process have created the world's only fourth-generation refugees.
Lord help you if you ever become a sacred victim of the savior class!
It all feels like some evil fairy-tale come to life. The good qualities of womanhood taken and twisted into some awful monstrous form that ends up devouring and thus destroying what they purport to love.
The men involved in this charade are just as bad. Who is the Greek god who devoured his own offspring? Cronus is tickling my brain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_Devouring_His_Son
Cronus/Saturn.
Then there's the birth of Aphrodite:
https://www.princeton.edu/~graphicarts/2012/03/the_birth_of_aphrodite.html
Cronus castrated Uranus and threw his father’s testicles into the sea. They caused the sea to foam and out of that white foam rose Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty.
But if we're looking for mortals who castrated their children, I guess we'd have to go with Nero or Sardanapalus.
Nero loved a nice castrated boy, they'd been cured of toxic masculinity! :)
"am I overly cynical?"
Is it even possible to be "overly" cynical, Rikard?
Apologies, I tried to come up with some witty and cynical quip in response but watching the Aurora Borealis has made me too chipper and optimistic:
Philosophically speaking, there's a practical limit - we must eat, sleep and keep warm or we die.
Of course, a more cynical take would be that we die anyway, so why bother.
On the other hand, why hasten it would be the equally cynical response.
Half the sky aflame with balefire makes it hard to be a cynic through and through.
"Half the sky aflame with balefire makes it hard to be a cynic through and through."
Well... shame on you for having a balanced outlook. ;-)
Reminds me of a country song (because of course it does,) called "Old Dogs, Children and Watermelon Wine." The song is about a world-weary, cynical old man. Balancing out his accurate assessment of life in general, are a sincere appreciation for the three things comprising the song's title.
If you ain't allergic to vintage country music, give a listen to that song sometime. Here's a one-line spoiler:
"Old dogs care about you even when you make mistakes;
God bless little children while they're still too young to hate."
Enjoy God's light show, Rikard, and all the best to ya.
The purity spiral is engaged. AOC is devouring Schumer in real time, Weiner doing the same to Pelosi.
Wow... yes indeed. I see it.
But are they being set up? Used? Infiltrated? I get that it's the "left" doing this but am I naive in thinking they are being taken advantage of for someone else's nefarious purposes?
But I think that they have gone at least one bridge too far: Trans is collapsing, Trump survived their assassination attempts, & the assassination of Charlie Kirk and the left’s response to it as well as their embrace of Hamas has awakened much of the electorate outside of NYC. It will be a contentious several years, because the left are not good losers.
I like your optimism. I do think that "things" will eventually self correct. History swings back and forth.
But this is more than just right vs left. Censorship and digital ID is being unrolled around the world. De-banking for your beliefs is world wide. Covid authoritarian measures were coordinated and worldwide. Mass immigration is occurring in all western democracies.
The No Kings protests are coordinated and funded. These are just some of the more obvious examples.
My point is I don't think this is simply left/right although that is certainly how it mostly plays out in the USA.
The agenda is deeper. I don't know the "who"but the global patterns cannot be ignored.
Is it just the deep state, so used to fomenting rebellion and destroying countries that they've now turned inward?
Is it the international bankers and technocrats pushing digital ID to mask the distressed over leveraged financial system? With digital ID and social credit they can then usher in digital money and bail themselves out.
Is it the socialists? Soros, et. al, tearing every social structure apart so people will welcome anyone who can keep social order?
I just don't think the left/right framework is sufficient to explain all that is happening.
I also think this process will take more than a few years to settle out. I just hope we can get through it (whatever "it" is) without a global war.
Read Revelation. Things will get worse before they get better in the end. If you aren’t right with the Lord, now is as good a time as any. Read the Gospel of John for starters if you haven’t. Listen to some Charlie Kirk.
It isn’t like censorship or developing a caste system for categorizing people hasn’t happened before. It is truly a Biblical pattern as to the times we are living. I guess you could add the old trite phrase, there is nothing new under the sun.
You bible-thumpers are so off-putting with your higher-than-thou certainty. Even though I quite avidly listen to and respect the likes of Bishop Barron and at least a dozen other Christian YouTubers, (Orthodox mostly) I still don't buy it. Not out of obstinacy but simply a quietly perennial disbelief. God, yes. Biblical supremacy? Nah.
I've been looking through photos of the 'No Kings' protests.
You know how the Left always takes overrepresentation of White people at right wing protests as evidence of racism?
Guess what? There were hardly any non-white faces in the crowds for the 'No Kings' protest.
I guess they must be racist!
I'm sure Google will 'fix it' through the algorithm in the next few hours.
Interesting
AWLFs
Satan.
Also, perhaps China is enjoying the show. At a minimum.
Don’t forget Soros — or are they the same person?
Yes.
Usually, it is the New Generation of radical trying to garner status and ascend to power by one-upping their predecessors that act as the infiltrators of the left. In effect it infiltrates itself again and again until it collapses due to running into an existential problem it cannot mitigate by way of rhetorics (or force, should it be available).
Typically, after such an event, the left fractures into miniscule autonomous cells from which it then re-grows over the course of one to three decades.
Obviously, it's not as clear-cut as I make it out to be, but that is the mechanism by which it keeps coming back, and self-destruct.
Their own nefarious purposes.
It's simply the changing of the guard. The incoming team is even more venal than the outgoing.
I’ll gladly give them the knives and forks.
Termites turn dead wood into compost. The analogy is lame.
Termites were the other fellas analogy.
But thanks for the lame comment patrolling.
fella's (smile)
It's just that nowadays, everyone puts the apostrophe in the wrong place (when denoting the plural) and leaves it out when it's supposed to be there. Drives me nuts.
Americans need to take a hard long look at timber framing. People pay 2 million dollars for 3500 square feet of matchsticks and cardboard. Along comes a F-1 tornado and the whole stupid thing is smeared across the neighborhood. Either that or it burns down in five minutes. Americans reject concrete and re-bar because its very HEAVY PERMANENCE intimidates. That's my theory. But I'm just an idiot.
Well said. One mantra I try to live by is "Create, don't consume." I think such a mindset helps nudge the world toward a better/ happier place. In that context your termite analogy is most apt.
I agree with both comments. I think it’s telling that the “termites” ran out of fuel when they ran into the brick wall of sex. Procreation is the ultimate creative human action. Debase, destroy, disrupt the basic human biological gift at one’s peril. Even those who may not see below the surface to understand the value of life react to its threat. Which is total collapse.
Consumption is what drives production in our modern societies. The issue is a very complex one.
Yes, consumption is critical to creation! It influences creativity and why and how we build. We cut down trees to make family homes and we carbon sequester with wood furniture that can be useful for a hundred or more years. If there is no consumption there is no purpose to creation.
Thanks
I loved your initial comment. The only problem I had with it is that my own house had a termite problem in the past that got "fixed". You know what the worse thing about termites is? They are really hard to detect - no termite company will guarentee you don't have termites if you use their product, because they know they can't always detect them. And they tell you that up front.
Kind of like the damage done by gender (etc.) studies.
lol thanks
it was just a metaphor! i wouldnt wish termites on anyone—except maybe Judith Butler.
I second Ryan Gardner's sentiment.
And can confirm empirically that this is what "leftist" movements and groups always do when they start to run out of influence, power or resources: cannibalism resulting in fracturing down to cells of just a handful of individuals.
From this state they re-emerge again and again.
If anything, I'd say Giger's "Xenomorph" fit even better than termites.
Ha! Like when they make yet another cherished character a “POC” or insert LGBTQ themes into old stories. Not because it makes a good story, but so they can have “representation”. Thats nothing but a tranny/alien bursting through the chest of the corpse of the previously good piece of art it’s now killed.
I am waiting for Alec Baldwin to portray MLK Jr. Then I will know that we have achieved true diversity.
I was a decade ahead of you, so I wasn't exposed to the full rot, but certainly sniffed it coming downwind.
Very nice comment.
Thanks!
I'll never forget when I was first exposed to the Theory Cult, I knew it was foul bullshit but never imagined it would conquer the globe.
Reading theory instead of literature is like buying a TV, throwing it in the garbage, and then spending years arguing over the instruction manual. Both its texts and its practitioners are dull, preachy and dreary.
Agreed; I'm afraid that I give people more credit for common sense than they deserve.
LOL! CP you're the best. "arguing over the instruction manual" ;-)
lol thanks!
I always felt like my theory class - also endured while a Lit major at a fancy college - was akin to being forced to read one movie review after another by a tut-tutting aunt who insisted that I "see the film" the way she did. Kicker: I was only allowed to see 4 clips from the movie, each about 20 seconds long. And I was never asked for my opinion; my donation to ACTup would be appreciated, however (and possibly incorporated into my grade).
It's helped me to view the Theory termites as a cult who apply cult dynamics wherever they establish a foothold. Belief in their divine election, gnostic wisdom, Manichean morality, everyone on our team is Good and everyone not is either Evil or brainwashed, loyalty rituals and therapeutic struggle sessions, plus whoever disputes your newfound identity as radical sage blessed with critical consciousness needs to be denounced and cut off, even if it's your parents—it's all there.
The miserable people unable to enjoy the rich banquet of Literature in itself but who need to instrumentalize it for their social, career and psychological needs are like eunuchs in a harem. They can't experience and enjoy the act of creation, so they want to befoul and kill it.
It wasn't until I got a bit older that I learned that most of their theories were just reheated Marxist tropes—power-knowledge, positionality, the vanguard class, materialist fundamentalism etc—and in retrospect I realize that it didn't work on me because I've never been rich enough to be a socialist! (Only half joking.)
At my fancy college I was among the few with a working-class background, thus I didn't have the intense status anxiety of the haute bourgeoisie. It also wasn't till years later that I figured out that the most radical kids often came from the wealthiest families. But this was in the late 80s, I'm sure things are much different—and much more insufferable—now.
Cheers
Sadly, our theory prof - maybe yours? "Jeff" - was explicitly blending the Marxism into the classwork, via readings of Dickens. I'm embarrassed to admit that I was so enthused by the mental gymnastics of the class (taken junior year) that I peppered my senior thesis with Foucault like a good cult member should. My 2 readers, unsurprisingly, loved it!
I scrolled down to comment, but I read this and said "damn, no point".
I decided to comment anyway...
What I fear is that these termites (narcissists) are 20% of the population and they cannot function in a course corrected world. They will foment, rage and tantrum until their last breath. Look at the geriatric protesters! We have a sizable cohort of non functional narcissistic agitants who will never learn, never tire, and ceaselessly seek to destroy in avoidance of facing their own psychological dysfunction.
Also, their work might already be done. I've seen many trees that looked healthy until a storm knocks them over, and you realize it's been eaten from the inside out.
The sex binary IS the load-bearing wall of our ... I can't think of a big enough word. Our species. The childlessness of the youngest generation of my family haunts me; two young women soon to be 30 and 28 who show every sign of having decided by sheer indecision never to have children. I'm 78. What gives me a comforting feeling of having done some good in my life? These memories of my kids when they were little. My wife and I plunged in, married BECAUSE we wanted to have our children; she was 18, I was 21...
It's even worse for them than you and CB are saying... After Bush got us into Iraq, it took years for the right to turn on the neocons. Then we got Trump.
How is the left going to do anything like that when they still control the "sensemaking" institutions, especially academia?
Course correction is going to *require* left-wing cannibalization, which will occur after the cannibalization leftists do to each other when they lose, anyway... And the victors of the first wave of emotionally driven fratricide will *not* be the as those required to course correct.
I think they are going to be in the wilderness for a very long time. I could be wrong, but it doesn't look great for them or the institutions they control.
3 consecutive terms of Republicans in the WH may be the only possible path toward cleaning out the Augean Stables of our Leftist universities, schools and other institutions. The Dems will have to be where they were in 1992, finally forced to reform when there was no other path back to power.
"The Dems will have to be where they were in 1992, finally forced to reform when there was no other path back to power."
I don't disagree, not really, but God save us all from the manner in which they "reformed" in '92. Their embrace of oligarchy has been one of the most destructive economic forces in American history.
says every blue collar worker whose job was shipped off to Mexico, China, Malaysia... I remember getting the creeps over Clinton's NAFTA cheerleading even though I wasn't political at all then. Maybe I shoulda been...
"I wasn't political at all then. Maybe I shoulda been..."
You and me both, Rick.
I'd been political in the 70's, stupidly so. By that, I mean adopting an ideology before really taking the time to read the canon and understand the long-term ramifications of what I was advocating. I learned, left that organization and then hit the job market right smack dab in the middle of the Carter stagnation years. I focused on keeping food on the table.
In '91, I began what has been my career to this day. Those early years were physically and mentally demanding, so all I had left for Clinton was utter contempt and a forlorn wish for him to be impeached (but not by asking him to expose his marital problems to the world,) and removed from office.
Thing was, NAFTA had zero benefit for America; only for rent-seekers foreign and domestic. I knew it, you knew it and so did absolutely everyone else. Middle class and prosperous working class folks saw their retirement accounts get bigger, and that's all that mattered to them, both Liberals and Conservatives alike. They were the cohorts that might have made a difference, people like me were spending every waking hour trying to make ends meet.
Even so, you and I should have made the effort to get more politically active, and maybe if enough of us did that, some of today's worst outcomes might have been avoided.
Still and all, remember that Clinton was also right in the heart of getting Glass-Steagall repealed, and along with it, turning antitrust enforcement into an irrelevant series of minor wrist-slaps. The biggest problems we face now, stemmed from those two failures.
I agree with all of this but just want to add the role of the MSM at that time. When one person with power stood up against the outsourcing of our middle class, Ross Perot (sort of the proto-Trump), he was mercilessly mocked for his ears, his height and various other eccentricites. He was of course right in his debate against Gore, but the media painted Gore as more serious and respectable, ie more establishment. They weren't letting anyone get in the way of the Roaring 90s and the so-called "miracle of the market" or whatever phrases they were using then—the money was just too good for them and their bosses.
If Bubba had tried to run as an economic populist, they would have kneecapped him with all his bimbo issues and painted him as some sort of danger. Not that this excuses his greed...
The banksters have been at this game of theft for decades (perhaps centuries) as Glass-Steagall clearly showed. Here’s an informative article.
https://www.history.com/articles/glass-steagall-act
I used to be a blue collar worker. Which is why my heart don't bleed for the blue collar worker.
And then what? Instead of millions of left-wing sociology majors, you then produce millions of right-wing sociology majors. What will have been achieved? Families preserved, unborn fetuses saved, renunciation of buggery? No dicks in female toilets?
For some insect infestations you literally have to burn the structure to the ground.
exactly!
Awesome write up! In my University’s engineering school we didn’t have the time for such silliness but I saw it happening around me. I just stepped around the liberal arts zombies and soldiered on to class or the library to study. The sad, and ironic part is many of them went on to get their participation awards in law, management or teaching.
"Narcissistic psychodrama" is about the best term I've heard for what they produce in every single instance - writing, movies, music - it's all just melodramatic, overly personal psychodrama garbage. Thank you for that. They need to go.
As the Helen Andrews article Chris linked points out - we either need to make it illegal to discriminate against everyone...or make it legal to discriminate against anyone. Level the playing field and these termites will be removed quickly and easily. The feminization and critical theory crowd is only winning b/c the rules have been stacked in their favor for 50+ years, making it legal to discriminate against (white) men only. Which, of course, (re)shapes the institutions according to the rules of those not actively discriminated against.
The Andrews article is making the rounds. It’s spot on and explains a lot.
After reading it I fully understand the full force feminism brought to bear on the societal landscape. Especially noticeable in media of all forms especially TV drama, news and even weather reports.
It’s a ghost town for men now. They’ve all walked off into the sunset.
Yeah, they’re not going to go quietly, and that’s unfortunate, but they have dedicated too much to this belief system to turn on it now.
Perfect analogy!
Great description of the problem and I heartily agree with you, but how does the "fumigation" take place?
It's one thing to talk about fighting back, the trick is having a plan to do it. Normies are like a herd of cats while the Left is well organized. Just look at the thousands of "No Kings" events occurring all across the Country today. Do you think the Normies could pull off anything similar? For that matter, where are the counter protests to today's rallies? You know that if it was normal folks holding nationwide rallies the Left would be out in the 100's of thousands to counter protest and disrupt them.
A fumigation will be exceeding hard to accomplish when our side lacks organization and motivation. Now that the Left controls so many institutions such as local governments and the police, they use their positions of authority to squelch any attempt to take away their power.
I wish I could be more sanguine about being able to reverse the rot.
Oh I'm far from sanguine.
My little corner of the world still remains books, writing, culture and this is where the rot is total and every possible lever of power is controlled by a New Left commissar. Just about everyone I know, whether in film, TV, documentaries, books and art and editing and theater etc has been injured by the Social Justice Cultural Revolution, whether being chased out of work for the crime of being a white male or forced to kiss the ring of DEI race quotas etc. (Not to mention that they spend their entire lives walking on eggshells, terrified of saying one word that will destroy them and their careers.)
Like I said before, my only hope in this realm is that political zealots can't create but can only bully, destroy, and get their way through viciousness. I think of the current generation of people in culture or education in the same way I think of the Soviets—there is zero hope of changing any minds and zero hope of them ceding power. They will have to implode a la Chernobyl and then whoever succeeds them will have to build anew from the rubble.
America slept for multiple generations while its cultural and educational institutions were conquered by the postmodern post-Marxists of Left academia. There's simply no easy way to fix something this deeply embedded. Moral to the story: don't let your kids be educated by people who hate you, your country and culture and history—oops!
Thanks
I am hopeful. Now I live in Lancaster County , PA, not exactly a hotbed of woke, but we do have a NPR captured local paper—that is slowly sinking thankfully, and an active LBGTQ??? community that has infiltrated one of our quaint tourist destinations (LITITZ), but I found a lot of people out & about & ignoring the No Kings nonsense. Let’s see how many people watch the Turning Point alternative Super Bowl Halftime Show.
Brilliant comment. Thank you.
Thanks!
From a certain squinted angle, they are undergoing the comic ordeals in the movie Bedazzled (and Faust, and...), in which a recovered manuscript of The Art of the Deal with The Devil itemizes certain conditions precedent, necessary to make the scheme work, which are mysteriously missing from the contract.
I want to hear the slurs!
"In the new order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches and the media ..." -- Antonio Gramsci
And we have seen this come to pass. Our first objective should be to re-take the public schools and universities.
💯 I concur. Hopefully the current administration will be able to make progress on this. Here in Seattle, they keep getting rid of more and more accelerated learning opportunities in K-12 because they say it’s white supremacy. Their solution to the achievement gap is to just get rid of the top. Toppling the Marxist monolith that is public schools today is priority 1 for me.
Or move on from them, as they are in fact zombie anachronisms of a pre-information age
Better to reform them or starve them with school choice because the kids who can't get out will be the indoctrinated.
This ignores the vital STEM research and education function of the universities.
At this point, I think the losses America would incur are an acceptable price for destroying wokeness. Civilization cannot afford to lose this war. In any event, genuine education is harder to find than it once was.
Genuine education in STEM is easy to find in the US. That's why there are so many Chinese students here now.
Also captured.
Easier to move on than to retake.
Or simply close the department of education completely to remove the single point of control mechanism that all the federal agencies are designed to provide. Federalize (read: “atomize”) education back to the states. And let each state’s performance speak for itself. People with children will vote with their feet.
great succinct analysis of Eric Dubay’s “Schools = Forced Government Indoctrination Camps,” and the work of John Taylor Gatto and Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt on mandatory American public "education" https://unbekoming.substack.com/p/the-architecture-of-forced-indoctrination
I see male veterans by the tens of thousands applying for cool jobs as middle/high school history, science, and math teachers. A legion of positive male role models, if you will. How do we make this legion appear?
One approach would be with merit-based pay. And by reversing the current public school payroll priorities. Instead of administrators being paid more than teachers, pay teachers more than administrators.
"They captured everything, and everything they captured is turning to ashes." That's kind of their true objective. Tear it all down, isolate people to make them helpless, take control of what's left, and rebuild society in the reflection of the New Soviet Man.
It takes a psychopath to pursue the objective of being in power at all costs, being on top even if it's atop a pile of shit.
But enough about Gavin Newsom
"An evil man will burn his own nation to the ground to rule over the ashes.” Sun Tsu. (A very wise man)
Cluster B for sure. That's ONE big reason why we should insist on subsidiarity, all decisions pushed down to the lowest most & local place for them to be made. Devolve the power out of DC, and make the President and the Executive "not matter anymore".
Good point. . . . I have a problem, though, with the whole “Long March” theory.
Something like that doesn’t happen spontaneously - think of the planning, planners, and resources needed to do such a thing; where are the “Masterminds” and master plans?
. . Of course, this leaves open the question of the how and the why, what we now have in academia, Hollywood, etc. is so similar to that which was called for by the proverbial Long March theory. Was this just prophecy or successful wishful thinking on Gramsci’s part?
I can only comment about my experiences in the early 70's. Many of my friends morphed from anti-war to anti-America/Maoist. They wouldn't dream of going joining the "corporate world" and being party to "The Man." So they got graduate degrees and then tenure, or went into public education, or joined non-profits, or (actually) went to work for the government in some bureau or another. Not a few were either red diaper or pink diaper nepo kids. By the time Obama acceded to his throne many of these folks were approaching retirement. It was now or never.
I think you underestimate the level to which humans are mimetic. When high-status people do “thing X”, it spreads far and wide among the sheeple, who bask in the reflected glory of “the cool kids”. It doesn’t have to be “controlled” by a leader or organization. When the “cool” group at a prominent university starts promoting a particular theory, others will enthusiastically follow (believing that they, too, are high status “rebels”). Give this model decades to replicate, and you’ll see where we are now.
The left benefited from historical circumstances that amplified the effects of individual leftists and leftist groups. The 1930s and 40s saw a number of European academics, including some with leftist sympathies, immigrate to the United States. Then the GI Bill, born of the Roosevelt administration’s fear that millions of demobilized, jobless young men would cause civil unrest, opened up higher education to many Americans who had lacked the opportunity in the pre-war years. University enrollment grew, a college education became normalized, elementary school teaching and many other occupations came to require college degrees, and several generations of Americans grew up learning their lessons from first, professors, and later teachers and professors who themselves had received left-leaning professional educations. Finally, the leftism-fueled societal rot took some time to happen, more time to become an obvious problem, and still more time before genuine disgust and alarm began to set in. All the while, leftism kept marching on.
Not entirely spontaneously, but as a general trend. Social trends are rarely well planned (and if they are, tend to not necessarily work out according to plan) even though some will take credit afterwards for having engineered the whole thing.
Though the rebuilding part never seems to work out as planned.
Wwhaatt? Are you insinuating that socialism has never worked when it’s been tried? Just give us one more chance! We’ll make it work this time, I promise.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9dsm7K1Xkn4
For the Dear Leader and their acolytes, it sure does.
A short video on who writes our history books.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1_i9TMvfs0
The Duke Report has recently made lots of pithy history videos.
It always comes down to the same fundamental problem. Socialism, Marxism, and every other imaginable ism, are only championed by fervent religious believers. For all others must be coerced. Mao Zedong put it best, "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." Ultimately, the long march through the institutions will only succeed when they become willing to apply force. We are currently witnessing the use of coercive force in Great Britain, Canada, and other Western "democracies." Hopefully, their demise is a stark wakeup call to the United States to stay firmly affixed to our country's founding documents.
"Politics is war without the shooting". Mao said that too. This war is a culture war that the neocons and fake conservatives fight by the Marquis Of Queensbury rules. The left conducts the fight by early MMA rules- there are none. Know your enemy- I said that.
More good work, thank you,
Chris.
What a wonderfully positive read this Saturday morning! Thank you. Often I need to be reminded of the good, it is so easy to follow my negativity bias towards a dark, hopeless place that I ‘tap-out’ via ignoring the world.
While media fasts are good for my mental health, this is even better. It is engaging my mind to truly see the world accurately.
Years ago I went through the Army’s ‘Master Resilience Training’, a mash-up of positive psychology, sports psychology, CBT, and behavioral psychology. It was great.
Part of the curriculum was to do daily gratitude lists. The reasoning behind this is that it stretches our brains, literally. Our negativity bias limits our ability to think—call it a 90° view—but after doing gratitude lists and thinking more positively—we can see 180° and make better decisions.
This article was a ‘big ole dish’ of gratitude for me today. Thank you very much!
bsn
It's not negativity bias. It's familiarity bias. As individuals we naturally prefer the familiar, while as a civilization we depend on innovations. In terms of the ARMY, we as low-ranks prefer the familiarity of staying alive, while the top brass want to introduce to us the innovation of getting ourselves killed, for whatever reason suits their purposes. That's the reason for all those tabs and badges and ribbons.
They didn’t figure that by winning it all with nonsense they would in fact have won nothing.
And today they coronated King Donald I.
The fight is honorable. The fight is real. Keep up the fight.
God always wins!
One thing about Communism, it plays the long game and like a parasite lives well off the body of its host until it causes the host to sicken and die. Drastic measures must be taken to eliminate the parasite, perhaps deeply wounding the host to kill it and remove all traces from the body. We have tried this before, but always too gently. As history shows the gentle persuasion technique never works , the parasite is embedded too greatly. Strong medicine must be used, constantly and consistently. I would start with education , then the NGO’s and advocacy organizations. Eliminate the tax breaks for everything. Eliminate all government subsidies and grants. The parasites have grown and continue to live on this largesse.
Communism, or socialism or whatever you wanna call it, is a natural outgrowth of the cultural contradictions of our modern era. For instance, "The family is the foundation of civilization!", will shout the anti-communist. Oh really? Which family: Extended or nuclear? "Extended!", might thunder the anti-communist. Oh really? So kids should be encouraged to never leave home? "No!" screams the anti-communist. "Kids must venture forth into the world and buy TV's and cars and fridges and make careers for themselves!"
Oh, I see. Makes perfect sense.
The screaming rarely comes from the anti side because the facts of the matter seem clear and have generally worked. If I represent a political philosophy that has never worked I must scream to prove my false claims.
Well, you got me there!
Always good to have a conversation on substack. Much better than dueling poo throwing contests that seem to pervade the internet.
Institutions are built from the ground up. Top down control of anything always fails eventually. It collapses under the weight of its own incompetence. Incompetence by its nature is repellant and impossible to hide. Hence the loss of prestige.
Unless the others in control are incompetent too. Then the foolishness builds on itself and is never noticed.
Very well done. Thought-provoking. Thank you for the work.
Between you and C&C today has been awesome. Where there’s common sense there’s hope.
Just a note on another topic. --
Just passed by the Embadero Plaza site of No Kings demo in downtown SF. It's a beautiful warm sunny day. Maybe 300 people, probably far less. More people were at the Farmer's Market across the street
I like John Carter’s concept of “self limiting”.
Seems like I’ve been watching the decline of Civilization for decades but now, at last, the pendulum hesitates.
Yes, it was a big week for the HR department but we've grown wise to their ways!
https://aynsrants.substack.com/p/locker-room-vs-longhouse-who-wins
I saw that Richard Hanania took issue with the Andrews feminization piece on grounds of oversimplification (but then again he seems to take issue with everything.) I've lately come to the conclusion that Hanania is just another David French with a greater IQ and a vastly larger vocabulary.
Oh yeah? Well, think about this: Long before women started taking over the boardroom, the boardroom itself was NOT a place for manly work: No sweating in the boardroom, no heavy lifting or physical danger in the boardroom (well, maybe SOME nervous sweating).
The point is this: Have women turned the boardroom into a feminized space, or has the feminine rightly taken over the feminized space?
Hey, Chris Bray! IS WRITING A MASCULINE OR A FEMININE THING?
Very good point, and very good question.
It could be argued using picked historical examples that those leaders who had to fight - not necessarily violent or on a battlefield - to attain their rulership made for better rulers. To use a more pop-cultural example:
Caligula was given, what Gaius Julius fought to attain.
Leftism since the Enlightenment, in its truest and most undistilled form, is always at war with reality. Their problem since Rousseau is that they are simply wrong about human nature and the human condition. They have staked everything on a fantasy of how humans should behave rather than acknowledge the truth of how humans do behave. Leftism of this sort is, in its essence, pre-adolescent projection, no different from believing in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. It therefore naturally appeals to the young and it is why Leftists everywhere want to lower the voting age whenever they have the opportunity to do so.
The problem is it’s not real. That means it is always doomed to fail. The trick, since the French Revolution, is to avoid total societal collapse and the death of millions when that inevitable failure occurs.