I belive this to be true, but we're up against more than I think this guy allows for.
The whole problem with these people is they are more willing to blindly trust each other in the tribe than to judge themselves. If you can not judge your SELF, you can not judge FOR yourself because the tribe itself is the "judge" of "self"; it IS self.
IMO, the trap we've fallen in is all those techniques the Left uses, but most importantly they've made dissent look somehow improbable.
their hubris is that they think the majority of the world (or at least the ones who "matter") share their shrieking points. and that those shrieking points are organic rather than carefully crafted by deloitte or mckinsey or tavistock
People who lie all the time lose their conscious relation to the truth. It's a pathetic state to be in, when you literally can't tell the truth from a lie.
Yeah, but what they lack in brains, they make up for in fakeness!
In all seriousness, all the things that made America Great, Faith, Family, meritocracy, hard work, education, affordable energy, are all under attack from the left - so their plan to destroy America is to destroy what made it great in the first place.
They're despots, just like all other Leftist movements through history. They all (communism, socialism, etc. )present its ideology as the repairer of all the ills suffered, the support of just rights, defender of the oppressed, and founder of order.
If you haven't read "A Confederacy of Dunces" by John Kennedy Toole it's definitely worth the read. He called it 45 years ago. He had a quote that went something like this:
"The liberals can understand everything but people who don’t understand them"
I live in the UK. I have a friend who is lodging with me after his boat sunk in storms. He was convinced that it's all about race. I've had to show him that it's really all about the underlying Leftist ideology, which is ever keen to recruit new clients to patronise, as well as the taxpayer funded welfare industrial complexes with attendant bureaucracies which gives them an edge in elections. I've been telling my American conservative friends that Black people have been ready to shift to the Right since the 2016 election cycle and have been happy to have been proven somewhat right, at least with Black men, particularly in the blue collar class. About the only group Kamala gained with is AWFLs. I read Profstonge on substack- he's great for cutting through the legacy media lies on Trump's economy.
Here's a story from the UK which will blow your mind. Guy owns 'Camelot Castle Hotel', a luxury hotel with four poster beds. The government contacts him. Wants to hire the hotel on a long-term contract to house illegal immigrants. It's a lucrative contract. He would have had to sack all bar two of his staff, most of whom are local villagers and many of whom have been with him for decades. He refused and went public. A deeply admirable man.
I think what we're seeing from the Left across the West is pure Cloward-Piven strategy.
I have a friend called Matt who is in the British Civil Service. He’s a genuinely good guy with some strange ideas, but very able at putting his point across. I enjoy our occasional debates. He’s more the old school type- unions, stronger worker protections, welfare capitalism- big fan of the Nordic Model without openly admitting all are simply free market economies (and score high on the Index of Economic Freedom) which are very friendly to capital, whilst imposing a heavy tax burden on the more successful elements of the middle class and through VAT taxes on most non-essential goods to pay for those larger social safety nets.
He’s one of the 90% who believes in attracting the best to the public sector. I’ve tried explaining the discovery process of the market- how running more experiments can produce better results than a room full of the smartest people in the world. The ones I really loathe are the 10%- the ones who know all about market mechanisms, but prefer the planned approach anyway. They really do want to be Adam Smith’s ‘Man of Systems’.
It would be Single Malt Whisky in my case, but I’m definitely up for it, if the occasion ever arises! There is a particularly nice Welsh Whisky kicking about Amazon UK at the moment. It’s not to everyone’s tastes as it lacks the smokiness of some of the favoured distilleries, but it’s incredibly smooth and light going down, and very reasonably priced for a single malt. It’s called Penderyn. I’m also a diehard Talisker fan.
People who lie all the time-- and boy, there are no small number of them -- can always hide behind post-modern constructivism. "It's my lived experience!" "My felt truth!"
I say we must heed Ms. Manners. Following any stultifying diatribe, simply nod and say, "How nice for you." And leave. Quickly and unapologetically.
Let's not mince words. What Trump did today was legendary. You can love him or hate him but you have to admit that what he did was incredibly ballsy and impressive.
I was just about to say this exact thing. No other leader would dare attempt something so brash but this is exactly what was needed. Trump didn't need to make an accusatory speech, he let the evidence speak for itself.
Exactly my initial and lasting impression. No matter what you think, fair play to him. This is what it must be like to have been pilloried day after day only to survive to resume power, if only briefly. Having survived it all, Trump appears to be embracing his new life, much of which may, we can hope, prove to be of benefit to us.
Not because he did what he did, but because him doing it is something special, when it ought to be standard practice.
"The airports you have? The planes themselves? The ships and the harbours and the highways and the railroads and all the modern technology that you have? Every idea of yours beyond the purely tribal level?"
...
"Thank the 'white colonists' for all that!"
/That/ is what ought be said whenever someone from "the global South" pipes up. And I say that as someone from a nation that had to import people to help us improve our iron and steel-works (1600s, Walloons), our shipbuilding (1700s, Englishmen mainly), our humanities and such (1600s onwards, René Descartes who died from pneumonia, something the French have yet to forgive us for), statecraft (1500s, sending noble sprogs off to Rome and such for study), and so on.
But ask an Arab or African or Indian or whatever to own up that 99% of all modernity-stuff they've got, they've gotten courtesy of Europeans and Europeans-in-exile (colonials), and they just throw a hissy.
I hope Trump amps it up to 11 on them, on such issues.
You can’t relate to my elation over what Trump did after watching SOS Rubio spar with Tim Kaine when Kaine attempted to deny what was happening in South Africa. Rubio held strong but if he had this video he would’ve got Kaine to STFU.
"The mystery now is how we’ve let such deeply unimpressive people inculcate so much idiocy and emptiness over the last twenty years."
I might be guilty of oversimplifying, but I have a simple answer: Liberal societies entrust their cultural and civilizational patrimony to (for lack of a better term) a liberal class of teachers, professors, writers/thinkers, historians, journalists, politicians etc and the various bureaucracies that control and connect these professions—and the story of the Western liberal class in the past two generations has been one of abject failure, abject cowardice, and a total inability and/or refusal to stand up and defend foundational liberal principles—free thought, expression, dialogue, and the culture and history all of these are founded on.
I think there are 2 reasons for this:
First, careerism: There is no better way to neuter and de-fang someone than to give them a gilded career with a nice salary, benefits and chance of advancement—if you look at every conflict and controversy of the past 2 decades where we just needed one well-compensated thinker, leader and bureaucrat to stand up for liberal principles and order, not one member of our well-compensated liberal class had the guts to face the mob—whether the mob was the entitled children of Yale or the deranged Hamasniks of Columbia or the Antifa fools affiliated w BLM. All hid behind their 401(ks) as our social rot became gangrenous;
And second after careerism comes our liberal class' inability to publicly disagree with anyone to their Left, anyone who claims to be a sacred victim or their ally, letting ridiculous things like The 1619 Project or the ghastly crimes of Gender Theory become institutionalized with nary a peep of rebuttal. Liberals have displayed over and over again that they don't have the ability or vocabulary to reject any Left premise or project, no matter how absurd or malevolent—and thus with no member of our liberal class willing to fight for liberalism, America has degenerated into a postmodern post-truth post-reality food fight where whoever cries loudest wins.
Or really, as CS Lewis put it much more succinctly:
"We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful."
I suppose it requires a thought experiment of "What if I lose everything?" to stand up as Dr. Haim has done, and tell the compelling concealed truth.
Advantage, relative ease, canned self-regard, and fashion will prevail unless from the unknown depths by grace or destiny or revulsion there bubbles up "Here I stand, I can do no other." Or, like the Hebrew Queen Esther, "If I perish, I perish."
Otherwise, we humans clutch familiar fantasies, trinkets, and tokens, until they decay into dust in our hands. Or the ship founders and the whale goes through the net.
There are no liberal societies. Not any more. The liberal character of the US began to die with Wilson and the suppression of dissenting opinion during WW1.
Since then the system has evolved along corporatist lines. Over time the selection for conformism has compounded, intensified. A slowly-matured form of something subtler and vastly more successful than the cartoonish fascism of the Old World.
Furthermore, the annihilation of tradtional forms of social life (above all the family) has created conditions of chronic insecurity in which people must seek assurance from others. Instead of seeking affirmatiion fromm friends and family the atomised seek recognitiion of their sexuality or other identity from emplyers, governments etc.
The careerists are driven by necessity. The disappearance of stable emplyment guarantees that people need to maintain their emplyability by sopporting the Current Thing lest they end up on the scrap heap. Accelerated obsolescence fosters desperation from wage slaves and debt peons.
The overall mediocrity is also downstream from the lack of interstate competition. A global hegemon siphoning off rent from the planet is a contrast with Renaissance city-states in a state of perpetual rivalry.
Term limits is the only thing I can see that would fix this. If there is no way for them to become career criminals, ah excuse me, politicians then maybe we would get leaders that are there to help the country and not a career path.
Not sure how that would happen though without a Convention of States, article 5 of the Constitution. The founders gave us a way out of this mess if we would just be brave enough to use it.
The techniques identified and listed are pretty much the ones that Norwegian psychologist Ingjald Nissen defined in 1945, analysing how national socialism came to power over (or came to over-power) the minds of the people in Germany.
In the 1970s, Norwegian feminist social psychologist Berit Ås rephrased them and redefined them as instead being how men oppresses and puts down women in academia. During the 1980s and 1990s Ås' political hijacking of Nissen's work came to be the standard underlying framework for feminist academia not only here but all over the West; I'm willing to claim that if you look through early 1990s feminist work in academia on the US, you will find references to Ås and what she called "Master suppression techniques".
I'm not mentioning this to belittle anyone nor am I claiming plagiarism has occurred; i'm mentioning this to highlight that the phenomenon has been thoroughly studied long ago, and has come to become a weaponised method for domination instead of knowledge safeguarding against that very thing. The works of Hannah Arendt have met the same fate in Western academia, as have the works of Solzhenitsyn and Weil.
It doesn't take much tinfoil to understand why political wolves in the sheepskins of academia have striven to remove from reading lists and curriculums what used to be mandatory texts up until the 1990s.
This is an excellent point and thanks for the earlier reference. I’m pretty sure a lot of this political behavior is innate to humans and I suspect I could identify much of these behaviors in the political plays of Shakespeare. That’s only to say that while we must remain vigilant against those we already mistrust, there is ample reason to also be vigilant as to what those we place in power do.
In a way (and this was a hobby-horse of mine when I was still teaching) it is akin to writing a book listing dangerous mushrooms and toadstools.
While your intention may have been to warn and help others, someone with nefarious purposes can just as easily use it as "how to"-manual for poisoning someone.
Also, at least here, in the 1990s they no longer required students at university-level to actually read "The State" by Plato (to pick one title); instead, doctors and professors and such would create compendiums (to be bought by students) in which they explained what "The Stae" was about, and what Plato "actually meant".
I had, and still have, some choice slurs and pejoratives for that practice.
> the ones that Norwegian psychologist Ingjald Nissen defined in 1945, analysing how national socialism came to power over (or came to over-power) the minds of the people in Germany.
I'm sure Versailles, repeated blockades leading to starvation, a literal Communist revolution, and Weimar degeneracy had nothing do with it, right?
We in this Chris Bray realm are part of the few trying to open windows to expose the dust and cobwebs. I am told when I speak up about matters to those around me to shush, this is too boring and depressing, lets live in the dark.
I saw Trumps' hosting of this "leader" earlier today and the "ambush" was very well done. Ramaphosa showed not the least bit of embarrassment or regret, excusing the deadly violence in his country as constitutional rights. He wants technology and investments for South Africa, good luck.
The media framing of this as two "world leaders" meeting for diplomacy displays one of the leftist elite class' slipperier lying techniques: lies by the omission of crucial context. The two are not equals. S. Africa is a failed state in the terminal stages of communism (insolvency >> scapegoating >> confiscation >> murder). Economically, it's less relevant than the state of WI. If they were honest, the media would provide this context. They'd also point out it's an insult to the US and its people that this "leader" sat in the Oval Office and lied about murder while begging for financial aid.
I really enjoy the masculine-coded manner in which Trump solves conflicts with direct confrontation.
Politics has become aggressively feminine-coded, seeking to force us all to use strategies like passive aggression, social shaming, false piety and confected hysteria for all conflict resolution.
Given the important role of politics (we fight with ideas so that we don't have to fight with swords), I vastly prefer the honest and direct style of a Trump or an RFK. One doesn't have to like all the policies or implementations, but at least you feel like you know where you stand. If you oppose it you can do so clearly, because the target isn't moving in front of you (or hiding behind crocodile tears).
Eithan Haim also makes an interesting point re the dissolving power of truth. He's right, truth itself is actually quite disarming. Perhaps half the battle is just developing the cojones to say true things out loud, even (or especially) in the face of cry-bullies and chancers.
I watched Ramiphosa's hypocrite, self-flattering then President Trump's well prepared and incontrovertible reply [absolutely the best thing I've seen him do so far, pure virtue and truth and defence of people under the deadly threat. So thank you Mr Trump!] and I watched Malema and the others on the video spewing their arrogant hate. I watched the YouTube of Malema. Then I clicked onto Louis Armstrong singing "What a Wonderful World" and before he was finished I was bawling like a baby. How did we get to this terrible place!!?? I'm 78 years old. I have no words right now...
Kill the Boer is a Political slogan. It isn’t as simple as ‘killing the Boer’. It is a concept more than what we hear. It means ‘kill the Boer, rape his wife and daughters, kill his children, and steal his land’.
I’ve seen video of the refugee camps that some of the Boer families are living in. This has been going on for awhile. Thank God Trump is bringing attention to it before it turns into a Rwanda. He must also demand the new leadership in Syria stop persecuting Christians before he’ll deal with them as a legitimate government.
Patty f-in Murray. This must be one of the dumbest white wimmin in
history. Just looking at her blank face strips away 10 IQ points from the viewer. The fact that she is STILL a sitting congresscreature is an enormous indictment of Democracy as a means of bestowing political power.
their entire worldview is a mile wide and an inch deep.
for instance, I recently visited some of my old friends in Austin. all successful professional types. as I listened to them drunkenly screech about Elon, Abbot, racist Texas etc, I gently asked them why they believed something so strong about basic issues. almost immediately they began to backpedal. “well, no..I mean, not totally” or “my kids were home schooled for a while but…”.
it became readily apparent that they had never had someone interrogate their beliefs. ever. it was like playing basketball against a 3rd grader. no intellectual depth or consistency. everything was sound and fury. all emotion, no reason.
as Dr. Haim experienced, the strategy isn’t special. this shit is a layup. it would all be over in a week if there were an open public forum. yet here we are.
but the bubble has been popped, and the ship is taking on water.
I noticed this too with the professionals in my life. The sigh, "Orange man is bad!" is almost equivalent to,"Boy, it's really hot out today." In most cases no real thought is involved. Just something to say in polite society.
Nani Lani— lol, so very true. What I find continually amazing is how so many people start in with the TDS (yes, just like a conversation about the weather) assuming that I 100% agree with them because of course, in their mind, what decent person wouldn't?
And as you say, what they say is just thoughtless— usually an exact parroting of what the last person said, and that person got it from the TV.
I long to say, um, excuse me, but are you aware that you've taken multiple doses of poison and the truth of that matter has been consistently hidden from you by a mainstream news media and Big Tech (other than Musk's Twitter) that are also consistently and baldly lying to you about the "Bad Orange Man" (and, by the way, RFK, Jr.)?
But I have better things to do with my time and energy than deal with the resulting fluster— and possible extreme hostility— so I just say something like, mmm, uh, so— and I change the subject.
I'm not passive, though. I do a lot of work for medical freedom. But the jabbed up wokies in my world, I just—can't.
Hollis Brown— Yes, as you say, their entire worldview is a mile wide and an inch deep. And it seems to me that the reason for this is that they're not thinking for themselves but aligning with whatever consensus protects their own status— in their family, among their friends, at work, and in their own minds. When that consensus changes, what they say and do will change, and instantly. That said, I'm prepared for a long wait.
Telling the truth is only a start, it doesn't slay the beast. Many who told the truth were silenced and unpersoned, such as James Watson the co-discoverer of DNA. All the truth-telling that is going on now re: Covid, Epstein, Ukraine, etc. etc. will be useless if we don't also get the ability to act. Power is what is needed, not more people repeating the obvious in the vain hope that those who benefit from believing the opposite will see the Truth.
WA native now living in UT. It pains me every time I see Murray and every other politician from WA. Such fleshvats of vice. The fire that RFK, Musk, et al, brought to DC is being smothered by the blob. I knew it was bad. I didn't know it was this bad.
When we moved from California to Minnesota in 1990 the governor, both US senators, our congressman and state representatives were all republicans. All have flipped blue, all are national embarrassments.
These politicians serve the Chinese Communist Party, and the Tech Broligarchs. Their job is to ensure that Washingtonians are increasingly converted into resource extraction slaves for Asia.
Look up the powerhouse law firm Foster Garvey. Responsible for turning WA over to Chyna (they used to brag about it on their Web site back when they were GSB Law) by greasing the skids to make Chyna the #1 trading partner--which is to say feudal overlord--of WA state.
They also represented (through their DC office) Bernie 2016 and Bernie 2020.
Do you remember how Murray got installed in the US Senate? The proto-Me-Too media hit operation against Brock Adams?
we moved to WA state 13 yrs ago after living in the great state of Texas for 55 years. for the life of me, i can’t understand how patty murray keeps getting elected. I can only assume it is our completely bogus election system of ONLY mail in ballots & drop boxes & ballot harvesters - there is NO in person voting. with the Dems controlling the electoral process… they can continue to insure that this “big dumb tub full of uselessness” stays in office. How embarrassing!
Nicely pulled together. As the commenter below notes. understanding an aggressor's armature is not the same as disarming him. People have been browbeaten and threatened for so long that paralysis has sunk in. With minor victories in hand, it is time to start living as if at ease in the world. Being intimidation-proof will floor any prowling leftist that comes your way.
Excellent article, Chris.
I belive this to be true, but we're up against more than I think this guy allows for.
The whole problem with these people is they are more willing to blindly trust each other in the tribe than to judge themselves. If you can not judge your SELF, you can not judge FOR yourself because the tribe itself is the "judge" of "self"; it IS self.
IMO, the trap we've fallen in is all those techniques the Left uses, but most importantly they've made dissent look somehow improbable.
their hubris is that they think the majority of the world (or at least the ones who "matter") share their shrieking points. and that those shrieking points are organic rather than carefully crafted by deloitte or mckinsey or tavistock
"Shrieking point" is genius.
Amen
You’ve got have smidgen of morals and so many of the people have less than a dog in heat. Jamie Raskin being the poster child for no morals.
Dan Goldman being an understudy for Raskin. These assholes propagate like cockroaches.
Yes they must breed like rats.
People who lie all the time lose their conscious relation to the truth. It's a pathetic state to be in, when you literally can't tell the truth from a lie.
Yeah, but what they lack in brains, they make up for in fakeness!
In all seriousness, all the things that made America Great, Faith, Family, meritocracy, hard work, education, affordable energy, are all under attack from the left - so their plan to destroy America is to destroy what made it great in the first place.
They're despots, just like all other Leftist movements through history. They all (communism, socialism, etc. )present its ideology as the repairer of all the ills suffered, the support of just rights, defender of the oppressed, and founder of order.
If you haven't read "A Confederacy of Dunces" by John Kennedy Toole it's definitely worth the read. He called it 45 years ago. He had a quote that went something like this:
"The liberals can understand everything but people who don’t understand them"
I think that sums up where we're at.
Wow, I forgot all about that book, read long ago, before my brains came in! Thanks for reminding me to re-read it.
I live in the UK. I have a friend who is lodging with me after his boat sunk in storms. He was convinced that it's all about race. I've had to show him that it's really all about the underlying Leftist ideology, which is ever keen to recruit new clients to patronise, as well as the taxpayer funded welfare industrial complexes with attendant bureaucracies which gives them an edge in elections. I've been telling my American conservative friends that Black people have been ready to shift to the Right since the 2016 election cycle and have been happy to have been proven somewhat right, at least with Black men, particularly in the blue collar class. About the only group Kamala gained with is AWFLs. I read Profstonge on substack- he's great for cutting through the legacy media lies on Trump's economy.
Here's a story from the UK which will blow your mind. Guy owns 'Camelot Castle Hotel', a luxury hotel with four poster beds. The government contacts him. Wants to hire the hotel on a long-term contract to house illegal immigrants. It's a lucrative contract. He would have had to sack all bar two of his staff, most of whom are local villagers and many of whom have been with him for decades. He refused and went public. A deeply admirable man.
I think what we're seeing from the Left across the West is pure Cloward-Piven strategy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoE6hRqcaOg&t=1217s
wow. thank you for sharing, Geary!
good stuff.
and i totally agree about the Cloward-Piven strategy. in fact, i believe it was on this stack i made a long comment about that not too long ago.
I have a friend called Matt who is in the British Civil Service. He’s a genuinely good guy with some strange ideas, but very able at putting his point across. I enjoy our occasional debates. He’s more the old school type- unions, stronger worker protections, welfare capitalism- big fan of the Nordic Model without openly admitting all are simply free market economies (and score high on the Index of Economic Freedom) which are very friendly to capital, whilst imposing a heavy tax burden on the more successful elements of the middle class and through VAT taxes on most non-essential goods to pay for those larger social safety nets.
He’s one of the 90% who believes in attracting the best to the public sector. I’ve tried explaining the discovery process of the market- how running more experiments can produce better results than a room full of the smartest people in the world. The ones I really loathe are the 10%- the ones who know all about market mechanisms, but prefer the planned approach anyway. They really do want to be Adam Smith’s ‘Man of Systems’.
Ever hear of Sir John Cowperthwaite?
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1508696/Sir-John-Cowperthwaite.html
No, but now I do!
Boy, would i like to sit down a share a beer with you.
It would be Single Malt Whisky in my case, but I’m definitely up for it, if the occasion ever arises! There is a particularly nice Welsh Whisky kicking about Amazon UK at the moment. It’s not to everyone’s tastes as it lacks the smokiness of some of the favoured distilleries, but it’s incredibly smooth and light going down, and very reasonably priced for a single malt. It’s called Penderyn. I’m also a diehard Talisker fan.
a great read, a funny as heck.
Yes. Definitely funny. Making it humorous was actually a good "vehicle" for making his points
People who lie all the time-- and boy, there are no small number of them -- can always hide behind post-modern constructivism. "It's my lived experience!" "My felt truth!"
I say we must heed Ms. Manners. Following any stultifying diatribe, simply nod and say, "How nice for you." And leave. Quickly and unapologetically.
I had a father like that.....he figured out what it was everybody wanted to hear, and that's what he told them.
Pathetic, but alas, the only - and quite comforting - option, once discernment has been forsaken.
(BTW Chris, I never knew Patty Murray's middle name.)
Let's not mince words. What Trump did today was legendary. You can love him or hate him but you have to admit that what he did was incredibly ballsy and impressive.
I was just about to say this exact thing. No other leader would dare attempt something so brash but this is exactly what was needed. Trump didn't need to make an accusatory speech, he let the evidence speak for itself.
And this is why they hate him. Well, one of the reasons
they use being civil and polite against you and Trump takes that power away from them.
Exactly my initial and lasting impression. No matter what you think, fair play to him. This is what it must be like to have been pilloried day after day only to survive to resume power, if only briefly. Having survived it all, Trump appears to be embracing his new life, much of which may, we can hope, prove to be of benefit to us.
In one scale, I'm happy he did it.
In the other, I'm sad.
Not because he did what he did, but because him doing it is something special, when it ought to be standard practice.
"The airports you have? The planes themselves? The ships and the harbours and the highways and the railroads and all the modern technology that you have? Every idea of yours beyond the purely tribal level?"
...
"Thank the 'white colonists' for all that!"
/That/ is what ought be said whenever someone from "the global South" pipes up. And I say that as someone from a nation that had to import people to help us improve our iron and steel-works (1600s, Walloons), our shipbuilding (1700s, Englishmen mainly), our humanities and such (1600s onwards, René Descartes who died from pneumonia, something the French have yet to forgive us for), statecraft (1500s, sending noble sprogs off to Rome and such for study), and so on.
But ask an Arab or African or Indian or whatever to own up that 99% of all modernity-stuff they've got, they've gotten courtesy of Europeans and Europeans-in-exile (colonials), and they just throw a hissy.
I hope Trump amps it up to 11 on them, on such issues.
You can’t relate to my elation over what Trump did after watching SOS Rubio spar with Tim Kaine when Kaine attempted to deny what was happening in South Africa. Rubio held strong but if he had this video he would’ve got Kaine to STFU.
"The mystery now is how we’ve let such deeply unimpressive people inculcate so much idiocy and emptiness over the last twenty years."
I might be guilty of oversimplifying, but I have a simple answer: Liberal societies entrust their cultural and civilizational patrimony to (for lack of a better term) a liberal class of teachers, professors, writers/thinkers, historians, journalists, politicians etc and the various bureaucracies that control and connect these professions—and the story of the Western liberal class in the past two generations has been one of abject failure, abject cowardice, and a total inability and/or refusal to stand up and defend foundational liberal principles—free thought, expression, dialogue, and the culture and history all of these are founded on.
I think there are 2 reasons for this:
First, careerism: There is no better way to neuter and de-fang someone than to give them a gilded career with a nice salary, benefits and chance of advancement—if you look at every conflict and controversy of the past 2 decades where we just needed one well-compensated thinker, leader and bureaucrat to stand up for liberal principles and order, not one member of our well-compensated liberal class had the guts to face the mob—whether the mob was the entitled children of Yale or the deranged Hamasniks of Columbia or the Antifa fools affiliated w BLM. All hid behind their 401(ks) as our social rot became gangrenous;
And second after careerism comes our liberal class' inability to publicly disagree with anyone to their Left, anyone who claims to be a sacred victim or their ally, letting ridiculous things like The 1619 Project or the ghastly crimes of Gender Theory become institutionalized with nary a peep of rebuttal. Liberals have displayed over and over again that they don't have the ability or vocabulary to reject any Left premise or project, no matter how absurd or malevolent—and thus with no member of our liberal class willing to fight for liberalism, America has degenerated into a postmodern post-truth post-reality food fight where whoever cries loudest wins.
Or really, as CS Lewis put it much more succinctly:
"We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful."
"but 40% of the country works for brawndo!"
Idiocracy was a documentary!
Judge got only one thing wrong. He set Idiocracy 500 years in the future.
I suppose it requires a thought experiment of "What if I lose everything?" to stand up as Dr. Haim has done, and tell the compelling concealed truth.
Advantage, relative ease, canned self-regard, and fashion will prevail unless from the unknown depths by grace or destiny or revulsion there bubbles up "Here I stand, I can do no other." Or, like the Hebrew Queen Esther, "If I perish, I perish."
Otherwise, we humans clutch familiar fantasies, trinkets, and tokens, until they decay into dust in our hands. Or the ship founders and the whale goes through the net.
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-3102
There are no liberal societies. Not any more. The liberal character of the US began to die with Wilson and the suppression of dissenting opinion during WW1.
Since then the system has evolved along corporatist lines. Over time the selection for conformism has compounded, intensified. A slowly-matured form of something subtler and vastly more successful than the cartoonish fascism of the Old World.
Furthermore, the annihilation of tradtional forms of social life (above all the family) has created conditions of chronic insecurity in which people must seek assurance from others. Instead of seeking affirmatiion fromm friends and family the atomised seek recognitiion of their sexuality or other identity from emplyers, governments etc.
The careerists are driven by necessity. The disappearance of stable emplyment guarantees that people need to maintain their emplyability by sopporting the Current Thing lest they end up on the scrap heap. Accelerated obsolescence fosters desperation from wage slaves and debt peons.
The overall mediocrity is also downstream from the lack of interstate competition. A global hegemon siphoning off rent from the planet is a contrast with Renaissance city-states in a state of perpetual rivalry.
Term limits is the only thing I can see that would fix this. If there is no way for them to become career criminals, ah excuse me, politicians then maybe we would get leaders that are there to help the country and not a career path.
Not sure how that would happen though without a Convention of States, article 5 of the Constitution. The founders gave us a way out of this mess if we would just be brave enough to use it.
The techniques identified and listed are pretty much the ones that Norwegian psychologist Ingjald Nissen defined in 1945, analysing how national socialism came to power over (or came to over-power) the minds of the people in Germany.
In the 1970s, Norwegian feminist social psychologist Berit Ås rephrased them and redefined them as instead being how men oppresses and puts down women in academia. During the 1980s and 1990s Ås' political hijacking of Nissen's work came to be the standard underlying framework for feminist academia not only here but all over the West; I'm willing to claim that if you look through early 1990s feminist work in academia on the US, you will find references to Ås and what she called "Master suppression techniques".
I'm not mentioning this to belittle anyone nor am I claiming plagiarism has occurred; i'm mentioning this to highlight that the phenomenon has been thoroughly studied long ago, and has come to become a weaponised method for domination instead of knowledge safeguarding against that very thing. The works of Hannah Arendt have met the same fate in Western academia, as have the works of Solzhenitsyn and Weil.
It doesn't take much tinfoil to understand why political wolves in the sheepskins of academia have striven to remove from reading lists and curriculums what used to be mandatory texts up until the 1990s.
This is an excellent point and thanks for the earlier reference. I’m pretty sure a lot of this political behavior is innate to humans and I suspect I could identify much of these behaviors in the political plays of Shakespeare. That’s only to say that while we must remain vigilant against those we already mistrust, there is ample reason to also be vigilant as to what those we place in power do.
Thank you.
In a way (and this was a hobby-horse of mine when I was still teaching) it is akin to writing a book listing dangerous mushrooms and toadstools.
While your intention may have been to warn and help others, someone with nefarious purposes can just as easily use it as "how to"-manual for poisoning someone.
Also, at least here, in the 1990s they no longer required students at university-level to actually read "The State" by Plato (to pick one title); instead, doctors and professors and such would create compendiums (to be bought by students) in which they explained what "The Stae" was about, and what Plato "actually meant".
I had, and still have, some choice slurs and pejoratives for that practice.
“I had, and still have, some choice slurs and pejoratives for that practice.”
Thanks for the chuckle. I was getting caught up in a doom loop and that broke the spell.
I think I’ll do something useful and take out the trash.
> the ones that Norwegian psychologist Ingjald Nissen defined in 1945, analysing how national socialism came to power over (or came to over-power) the minds of the people in Germany.
I'm sure Versailles, repeated blockades leading to starvation, a literal Communist revolution, and Weimar degeneracy had nothing do with it, right?
Not what I meant to imply; I am aware what state Germany was in after 1918, and that its people had very real grievances with the victors of WW1.
We in this Chris Bray realm are part of the few trying to open windows to expose the dust and cobwebs. I am told when I speak up about matters to those around me to shush, this is too boring and depressing, lets live in the dark.
I saw Trumps' hosting of this "leader" earlier today and the "ambush" was very well done. Ramaphosa showed not the least bit of embarrassment or regret, excusing the deadly violence in his country as constitutional rights. He wants technology and investments for South Africa, good luck.
The media framing of this as two "world leaders" meeting for diplomacy displays one of the leftist elite class' slipperier lying techniques: lies by the omission of crucial context. The two are not equals. S. Africa is a failed state in the terminal stages of communism (insolvency >> scapegoating >> confiscation >> murder). Economically, it's less relevant than the state of WI. If they were honest, the media would provide this context. They'd also point out it's an insult to the US and its people that this "leader" sat in the Oval Office and lied about murder while begging for financial aid.
The failed state of S. Africa May starve in misery as they murder & cause good white farmers to flee. Who will farm in their place? Classic.
I really enjoy the masculine-coded manner in which Trump solves conflicts with direct confrontation.
Politics has become aggressively feminine-coded, seeking to force us all to use strategies like passive aggression, social shaming, false piety and confected hysteria for all conflict resolution.
Given the important role of politics (we fight with ideas so that we don't have to fight with swords), I vastly prefer the honest and direct style of a Trump or an RFK. One doesn't have to like all the policies or implementations, but at least you feel like you know where you stand. If you oppose it you can do so clearly, because the target isn't moving in front of you (or hiding behind crocodile tears).
Eithan Haim also makes an interesting point re the dissolving power of truth. He's right, truth itself is actually quite disarming. Perhaps half the battle is just developing the cojones to say true things out loud, even (or especially) in the face of cry-bullies and chancers.
Yes. 100%
I watched Ramiphosa's hypocrite, self-flattering then President Trump's well prepared and incontrovertible reply [absolutely the best thing I've seen him do so far, pure virtue and truth and defence of people under the deadly threat. So thank you Mr Trump!] and I watched Malema and the others on the video spewing their arrogant hate. I watched the YouTube of Malema. Then I clicked onto Louis Armstrong singing "What a Wonderful World" and before he was finished I was bawling like a baby. How did we get to this terrible place!!?? I'm 78 years old. I have no words right now...
Kill the Boer is a Political slogan. It isn’t as simple as ‘killing the Boer’. It is a concept more than what we hear. It means ‘kill the Boer, rape his wife and daughters, kill his children, and steal his land’.
I’ve seen video of the refugee camps that some of the Boer families are living in. This has been going on for awhile. Thank God Trump is bringing attention to it before it turns into a Rwanda. He must also demand the new leadership in Syria stop persecuting Christians before he’ll deal with them as a legitimate government.
He is bold. Bringing Cyril R in to DC and playing that video is so in your face. He is saying ‘Cyril, you are a liar and we aren’t playing here.’
Patty f-in Murray. This must be one of the dumbest white wimmin in
history. Just looking at her blank face strips away 10 IQ points from the viewer. The fact that she is STILL a sitting congresscreature is an enormous indictment of Democracy as a means of bestowing political power.
An indictment of Western Washington voters. Mainly blame King County voters. Eastern WA looking for ways to become Idaho.
Shut your bot mouth.
https://x.com/BevHarrisWrites/status/1854408541957972081
their entire worldview is a mile wide and an inch deep.
for instance, I recently visited some of my old friends in Austin. all successful professional types. as I listened to them drunkenly screech about Elon, Abbot, racist Texas etc, I gently asked them why they believed something so strong about basic issues. almost immediately they began to backpedal. “well, no..I mean, not totally” or “my kids were home schooled for a while but…”.
it became readily apparent that they had never had someone interrogate their beliefs. ever. it was like playing basketball against a 3rd grader. no intellectual depth or consistency. everything was sound and fury. all emotion, no reason.
as Dr. Haim experienced, the strategy isn’t special. this shit is a layup. it would all be over in a week if there were an open public forum. yet here we are.
but the bubble has been popped, and the ship is taking on water.
what a hell of a time to be alive indeed!
I noticed this too with the professionals in my life. The sigh, "Orange man is bad!" is almost equivalent to,"Boy, it's really hot out today." In most cases no real thought is involved. Just something to say in polite society.
Nani Lani— lol, so very true. What I find continually amazing is how so many people start in with the TDS (yes, just like a conversation about the weather) assuming that I 100% agree with them because of course, in their mind, what decent person wouldn't?
And as you say, what they say is just thoughtless— usually an exact parroting of what the last person said, and that person got it from the TV.
I long to say, um, excuse me, but are you aware that you've taken multiple doses of poison and the truth of that matter has been consistently hidden from you by a mainstream news media and Big Tech (other than Musk's Twitter) that are also consistently and baldly lying to you about the "Bad Orange Man" (and, by the way, RFK, Jr.)?
But I have better things to do with my time and energy than deal with the resulting fluster— and possible extreme hostility— so I just say something like, mmm, uh, so— and I change the subject.
I'm not passive, though. I do a lot of work for medical freedom. But the jabbed up wokies in my world, I just—can't.
Hollis Brown— Yes, as you say, their entire worldview is a mile wide and an inch deep. And it seems to me that the reason for this is that they're not thinking for themselves but aligning with whatever consensus protects their own status— in their family, among their friends, at work, and in their own minds. When that consensus changes, what they say and do will change, and instantly. That said, I'm prepared for a long wait.
Telling the truth is only a start, it doesn't slay the beast. Many who told the truth were silenced and unpersoned, such as James Watson the co-discoverer of DNA. All the truth-telling that is going on now re: Covid, Epstein, Ukraine, etc. etc. will be useless if we don't also get the ability to act. Power is what is needed, not more people repeating the obvious in the vain hope that those who benefit from believing the opposite will see the Truth.
WA native now living in UT. It pains me every time I see Murray and every other politician from WA. Such fleshvats of vice. The fire that RFK, Musk, et al, brought to DC is being smothered by the blob. I knew it was bad. I didn't know it was this bad.
When we moved from California to Minnesota in 1990 the governor, both US senators, our congressman and state representatives were all republicans. All have flipped blue, all are national embarrassments.
These politicians serve the Chinese Communist Party, and the Tech Broligarchs. Their job is to ensure that Washingtonians are increasingly converted into resource extraction slaves for Asia.
Look up the powerhouse law firm Foster Garvey. Responsible for turning WA over to Chyna (they used to brag about it on their Web site back when they were GSB Law) by greasing the skids to make Chyna the #1 trading partner--which is to say feudal overlord--of WA state.
They also represented (through their DC office) Bernie 2016 and Bernie 2020.
Do you remember how Murray got installed in the US Senate? The proto-Me-Too media hit operation against Brock Adams?
Not totally fair. We've been losing for such a long time because:
1) For decades the NYT and the big 3 networks controlled the flow of information and conditioned many brains to think liberally.
2) Republican politicians have been selling us out for money and money.
The second item there appears to be a great eternal reality, like gravity.
we moved to WA state 13 yrs ago after living in the great state of Texas for 55 years. for the life of me, i can’t understand how patty murray keeps getting elected. I can only assume it is our completely bogus election system of ONLY mail in ballots & drop boxes & ballot harvesters - there is NO in person voting. with the Dems controlling the electoral process… they can continue to insure that this “big dumb tub full of uselessness” stays in office. How embarrassing!
Nicely pulled together. As the commenter below notes. understanding an aggressor's armature is not the same as disarming him. People have been browbeaten and threatened for so long that paralysis has sunk in. With minor victories in hand, it is time to start living as if at ease in the world. Being intimidation-proof will floor any prowling leftist that comes your way.