The Real Corruption in FISA-Russiagate

What are the fundamental factors that have led to the folly of Russia-gate and the foolish Special Prosecutor investigation of "Russian Collusion" in the 2016 election?

I'd say it is a combination of Clinton corruption of the Democratic Party, President Obama's weakness, and Hillary Clinton's strategic blindness and incompetence.

Let's work backwards, starting with the decision at Clinton HQ not to concede the election.

It really was very stupid of the Clinton people to raise the Russia collusion narrative. Why? Because it has put the Clinton e-mail issue back in play.

Look, if Hillary Clinton had simply conceded the election and gone home to Chappaquiddick then the Trump administration would never have reopened the Clinton e-mail scandal. It would have left sleeping dogs lie.

There are always hot-heads in the tent of the general telling him to keep up the fight even after the war is lost. But it is the job of a wise general to know when the game is over and tell his hot-heads to cool it. Hillary Clinton didn't do that, because she is a fool that doesn't have a strategic mind.

Instead she did the one thing that could end up causing her real harm. By raising the Russia collusion issue she allowed the whole question of the use of the FISA court to spy on the Trump campaign to be opened up and the whole question of the corruption of federal law-enforcement agencies.

So now there is the question of just what the Clinton campaign was trying to do with the Steele Dossier and the FISA spying on the Trump campaign. I suppose that the campaign -- and the Obama administration -- needed to know what the Trump people "had" on them.

Of course they did, because the Clinton operation is a profoundly corrupt operation that has infected the whole Democratic Party. Let us leave aside the petty corruptions of the Clintons when they were back in Arkansas: Whitewater, cattle futures and all. The problem the Clintons had when Bill Clinton stepped down in 2001 was how to keep the Clinton political operation running at full steam so that it could elect Hillary Clinton president in 2008. And then with the failure in 2008, where Hillary was beaten by a political neophyte, the Clinton political operation needed to keep going for another 8 years before the next presidential opportunity. That costs money.

So the Clintons set up a pay-for-play operation with the Clinton Foundation. They needed a fair amount of money to keep all their operatives on-side, and they did that, during the 2010s, using Hillary Clinton's influence as Secretary of State. That meant, among other things, that Hillary Clinton needed a private e-mail system that she could control.

Then we come to the weakness of President Obama. I think that, as the years go by, we will come to understand President Obama as a profoundly weak man. Benghazi, Syrian "red lines," the Iran deal. These are the actions of a man afraid to wade into the messy struggles of power. So he allowed Hillary Clinton to have her e-mail server and compromise national security, big time. Really, how weak can you get?

Do you see how the president's weakness plays out in the whole mess? In 2015 the Clinton e-mail server issue comes out because the private e-mail arrangements were exposed by the House investigation of Benghazi. That ended up putting the FBI in an impossible position. Obama could hardly allow his heir-apparent to get mewed up in a prosecution for violation of classification regulations. So his administration got the FBI to pass on the whole affair. The president got the FBI and the Justice Department tangled up in shenanigans to let Clinton off the hook.

And in an administration characterized by a weak leader at the top you would expect weak and malleable functionaries all the way down. So there was nobody with the cojones to stick up for the law. You would expect to find, in such an organization, a foolish couple like Strzok and Page texting each other as though their indiscretions would never see the light of day.

"Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive."

They said that Bill Clinton was an extraordinarily good liar. But most of the rest of us are not. That is why it is best, wherever you are, not to lie, not to duck your responsibility, not to engage in corruption. Probably you are not up to the challenge of dealing with the tangled web you create.

I am beginning to think that the corruption of the Clintons, the weakness of Barack Obama, and the stupidity of Hillary Clinton is turning into the perfect storm that is going to create enormous damage to the Democratic Party through the rest of the Trump administration.

The problem for all political parties is that the base always wants to take you into the weeds. And this is certainly true of the Democratic Party with its identity politics and its extreme position on immigration, and its fantasy on climate change and its faith in the wonders of the administrative state. The lesson of the 20th century is that the secret of politics is to occupy the middle, and represent the nation. That is why even the socialists and communists have always practiced "socialism in one country." But our present ruling class believes in anything-but-nationalism, because Hitler. So it keeps running off into the ditch of globalism or sub-national tribalism, until sternly brought back to reality by the election returns.

I'd say that by 2024 we will see the mainstream media bringing us the New Democrats that are as patriotic and pro-American as any damn Republican ever was.

Meanwhile, it's going to be a struggle for the Democrats to clean up the corruption that Clinton and Obama and identity politics have created. That's because every woke activist and Good Little Girl raised to ideological idiocy by our university finishing school system is absolutely blind to the mess that their leaders and teachers have created.

Women's Marches, Cathy Newman, and the Culture of Complaint

This morning my sister sent me a photo of a woman in a woman's march wearing a t-shirt and tights covered with glam shots of Hillary Clinton.

You know what I think? I think that women's marches are all about: what clothes do we wear? Pink pussy hats? Oh no, that is so last year.

And then we get Cathy Newman, the BBC Channel 4 slasher presenter who got all frightened when on-line trolls started reacting to her "So you say that women are less intelligent than men" journalism. Which is to say that even for the pugnacious Cathy Newman, Women Need Protection. They just are not programmed to be reckless about their physical safety.

My gal Sarah Hoyt has a piece out on women's marches, answering the question of why? Why are all these women out marching when we really don't even know what they want? Sarah says that's just the way women are.

You see, just like testosterone boosts your self confidence and your ability to feel good about yourself, female hormones boost your ability to bond, your desire for group cohesion, and your not-perfectly-rational wish to belong.

So you get a group of women, and it’s easy to get them all to march out for no particular reason and with no end in sight.

You’re invited by friends, because “we’re all doing it.”  And you go, because your children or your mom or stuff.  Because your friend told you “we have to do it so the children don’t have to” or because “isn’t your mom homeless.”

And unless you’re rock bottom stupid (some people, male and female, are) you know it doesn’t make a wit of sense.  But your friend is so sure.  And if you ask questions or point out it makes no sense, they’re not going to talk to you again.  There’s going to be a rift, and who are your kids going to play with?

OK, now let's blend this in with my notion that men have a Culture of Insult, and women have a Culture of Complaint.

The male Culture of Insult is a sham fight that is communicating the possibility of something much worse, a real fight, in which the men involved will not be throwing insults but actual blows against each other. This is why, for instance, legislatures have rules that forbid the members to insult each other on the floor of the House. In the House of Commons they have to refer to the "member from Barsetshire" and in the House of Representatives they have to refer to the "gentleman" or "gentle lady." Members are not allowed to refer to each other by name and they are not allowed to insult each other. It is understood that insults can easily become fighting words and that the whole point of legislatures is to conduct civil war by other means, jaw-jaw intstead of war-war, in Churchill's felicitous phrase.

The female Culture of Complaint is a sham fight of a different kind. The threat in a woman's complaint is that down the road there lies the withdrawal of affection or the expulsion from the mean-girls clique. I like to say that the typical complaint is the complaint made to a woman in a one-on-one chat about a third woman not present: "I can't believe she said that."

The problem comes, I believe when we advance the two cultures from the bar-room brawl or the kaffee-klatsch to politics. To men politics is the Culture of Insult writ large; to women politics is the Culture of Complaint writ large.

But there is a problem. Politics is the division of the people in a community into two sides for a sham fight that always threatens to escalate into real civil war. That's because government is force; every Act of a legislature is an act to force some people to pay money to other people, and the people of the receiving end of government force don't like it. Politics is in fact an instantiation of the male Culture of Insult.

But now we have women voters and women live in the Culture of Complaint. When a woman complains about something she expects her best friend or her husband to do something about it. And woe betide the person that pushes back against the complaint. As Sarah Hoyt says:

And if you ask questions or point out it makes no sense, they’re not going to talk to you again.  There’s going to be a rift, and who are your kids going to play with?

But hey girls, government is not the same as your husband that responding to your complaint because he wants a quiet life, and government is not the same as you and your neighborhood friends that accommodate each other to keep the neighborhood content. Government is force; government is men with guns.

Now scientists have noted that the big expansion of government in our era commenced, pretty well, upon women getting the vote. And indeed, beyond government pensions, which certainly issue from the time when government was exclusively a man's thing, the great sweep of modern government is providing things that women want, most notably health care, welfare, and education.

But you see, I think it is one thing for a woman to complain to her husband that he needs to get another job so she and the kids can go to the doctor. It is another thing to force everyone to fund government-run health care.

And in my view most women don't get this. Perhaps this is because of the eternal situation of women. It doesn't matter whether you have a patriarchy or the final glorious destination of the arc of history fully bended towards justice. Women Need Protection. Yes, even mad-dog presenter Cathy Newman. And as soon as a woman has a baby on the ground she needs help. This means that women are eternally subject to whoever provides protection. Despite all the talk about the patriarchy, women expect men to protect them, and that makes women subordinate to men -- or to the government of men with guns.

And what do women do when they want something? They complain. Women don't earn as much as men? Complain. Women aren't getting all the cool tech jobs? Complain.

Now I believe that we should limit the use of government force to situations where force is the only option. I do not think that government should Do Something in response to peoples' complaints.

But how do we get out of the present situation where the ruling class is glad to have women complaining and identity politics victims complaining and poor helpless crony capitalists complaining,  all so that government can force the rest of us to pay up and hope that the complainer just shut up for a month or two?

As the song "The Panic is On" goes,

How could he?
What is the reason?
I don't know.

Yes, it's a very sad situation about a woman whose lover has left her. And a really great song.

I don't know how we solve the problem of women's marches, Cathy Newman's need for protection from internet trolls, and most of all the escalation of the women's Culture of Complaint into ruling class ideology.

The only thing to do is to believe in Jung's "collective unconscious" and hope that One Fine Day a political ground-swell of deplorables will arise out of the bowels of the Earth and solve all our problems. 

Suppose It's the Democrats That are Behind the 8-Ball

One of the stumbling blocks to an undistorted understanding of US politics is the default elite conventional wisdom that Republicans and conservatives are barely legitimate. Thus our liberal friends and their willing accomplices in the media are always just one step away from saying: Now those GOP yahoos have done it! This latest screw-up should finish them!

But now that Trump has won the government shutdown another possibility emerges. It is the Democrats that are the ones in a tight spot.

Take the fabled DACA issue. It has been the focus of the immigration debate for over a year, ever since President Obama issued an illegal edict to suspend deportation of the foreign-born children of illegal aliens. We have been told, again and again, that these young people are veritable American "Dreamers" and their legal uncertainty is monstrous and unjust.

But the situation right now is that Congress has until March to "do something" about the Dreamers; otherwise normal law respecting illegal aliens resumes. It is the Democrats that have raised the Dreamer issue, and it is they that are the targets of Dreamer rage now that the shutdown failed, and it is they that are in a weak position; they must do anything to get their beloved Dreamers safe to shore.

In other words, Democrats have been promising something to the Dreamers and it is starting to look as if the Democrats can't deliver on their promise. Not good. It's the reason why the Republican base has been so angry for the last several years: they elected a Republican Congress and nothing changed. Democrats promised the Dreamers the moon and stars, and they haven't delivered.

Now, in my view, elite liberals have a basic world view that they are the world. They are in charge; their faith is the faith that should guide us; their agenda is the one that matters. For the last 15 months they have been, as the liberal psychologists say, in "denial." It can't be true that the deplorables actually elected Donald Trump! Look under the sofa cushions! There must be some skulduggery there, or at least Russians under the bed.

But in the last couple of months it is starting to look as if Trump is getting his stride. He has won a notable tax-cut victory; he has won a government shutdown fight. And now Democrats are going to be under the gun to ink a deal with Trump that will pacify their left-wing activist base. Remember. On DACA, Trump has the whip hand. He doesn't care if the suspension of actual law-enforcement action on the children of illegal aliens in March expires without Congressional legislation to replace it. It is the Democrats that care.

Democrats are running around chanting "we are the lions, we are the chosen," when it is starting to look as if the opposite is true.

The left has always insisted that its "activism" of the last 200 years is the Voice of the People, and that the left represents the Forgotten Man, the exploited, the marginalized. In reality, a lot of left-wing activism is AstroTurf, well-born youths financed by billionaires that are in fact the running dogs of the ruling class. They are organizing the lower orders in fake grass-roots movements in order to bolster the power of the progressive ruling class.

On this view the unexpected rise of the Tea Party in 2009, the extraordinary emergence of Donald Trump in the Republican presidential nomination process in 2016, the rise of nationalist political parties in Europe, are something like the Jungian "collective unconscious," of something happening politically beneath the level of human consciousness, and beyond the horizon of ruling-class understanding: a sort of hive mind that is responding to an existential peril.

There is a profound change in our western culture a-building, and we ain't seen nothing yet.

Here's another thing that I want to blend into this: the phenomenon of Canadian clinical psychologist Jordan B. Peterson. Of course, he is in the middle of his 15 minutes of fame because of a stunning interview on BBC Channel 4 with mainstream feminist journalist Cathy Newman. Almost more interesting is his take on the interview, where he marvels that 80 percent of the on-line reaction was anti-Newman. This, he says is almost unheard-of.

Now the thing about Jordan B. Peterson is that he is a Jungian. That means that he views the issue of good and evil through the lens of Jung's persona and Shadow. And he sees the good life for a man as the Hero's Journey, including the journey through the underworld. He says that maybe the point of evil is that it creates a reason to be good. Peterson has also produced a series on the Christian Bible, available on YouTube, which answers Jung's desire to reconcile modern psychology with ancient myth and the Axial Age religions in a unified faith and worldview that would reset Christianity on a new foundation. Then, as Cathy Newman complained, Peterson is having an extraordinary impact on young men in the West. I wonder why. Could his Jungian hero-myth approach be exactly what young men need and want in order to become strong and worthy and good?

But back to the surly bonds of Earth. We are starting to see a veritable Hegelian antithesis:  FBI corruption and collusion with the Clinton campaign that is starting to compete with the ruling-class thesis of Russia collusion in the Trump campaign. Who knows what the synthesis will be? We deplorables would like to see the scandal brought out into the light of day right now, but I am starting to wonder if Trump and the Congressional investigators are smarter than we are. If you were a political pro, you would want the scandals of gross Obama administration malfeasance in the intelligence community to come out when they would have maximum influence on the mid-term elections.

And if that happens, then Ronald Reagan might be right, that you ain't seen nothing yet.

Lefty Activist Groups are Really, Really Angry About #ChuckUp

I think that the only appropriate reaction to the Donald latest #Winning on the failure of the Democrats' ploy to shut down the federal government over the DACA immigration issue is the Instapundit post.

WHAT IS BEST IN LIFE, DONALD? “To pass a tax bill, to stop a shutdown, to see the Schumers driven before you, and hear the lamentation of their women.” link

That Glenn Reynolds sure has talent.

But it appears that all the lefty activist groups are really, really angry that Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) threw in the towel. Of course, conservative activists were livid after the GOP lost the last two (or was it three) government shutdowns.

Look, fellahs: Chuck did what you wanted: he took your pet issue (which does not have broad support among average people) and bet the whole Democratic Party on a government shutdown. Then, presumably, he looked at the polls and decided to break off the battle before his troops suffered a rout.

Let's admit it. Immigration is a huge issue, and it is one on which the ruling class and average people are divided.

The ruling class wants immigration, because it is doing the right thing, because nationalism leads to Hitler, because it's a global economy, because we need to keep US wages from increasing enough to make US products non-competitive, because American women aren't having enough babies, because Democrats understand that they need  to import more Democratic voters to keep it fair.

But the fact is that the immigration wave of the last half century has been pretty rough on below-average American workers, in particular I suspect, African Americans. Also, recently arrived immigrants tend to separate themselves into ethnic ghettoes for a generation or two, which increases the divisions in society.

So immigration is a big issue, and it needs to be resolved in a way that gives the broad majority of the American people what it wants and what it voted for. That is the meaning of democracy: the people get to choose their rulers, and the rulers accommodate the views of the voters as far as possible. The American people in 2016 elected a candidate that promised to "build a wall" to keep illegal aliens south of the border.

In other words, we have come to a point in American history where "something must be done" about immigration. But what?

I will tell you. We apply the Moynihan Rule. Here it is, according to David Frum:

In 1993, Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned President Clinton against trying to ram his healthcare proposals through Congress on a party-line vote. "Anything that big and important," Moynihan predicted, "will pass the Senate 70-30 - or not at all."

Let me propose a corollary. If your issue can't get a 70-30 vote in the Senate then it isn't "big and important" enough.

In other words, it is not a good idea to try to cram through an issue like DACA on an ordinary funding bill and then hold up the whole country. DACA is a big thing only for lefty immigration activist groups.

If you want to pass a Big Thing then you must assemble enough bipartisan support that the measure passes 70-30 in the Senate.

Why is that? It's because the point of democracy is that it is not just civil war by other means, but a method of avoiding civil war. That means that democracy should not be winner-takes-all -- hello Obamacare -- but that when you pass legislation you try to sweeten it enough so that the losers do not pick up their dollies and go home in a huff.

On this theory you pass an immigration bill that stops chain migration, that mandates E-verify, that restricts immigration to well-educated people that are not going to form a new underclass, and then, at the last minute, you throw in a few sweeteners like giving residency to "Dreamers," kids brought to the US by their illegal alien parents. Hopefully, that gets you to 70-30 in the Senate.

And, need I remind my liberal friends, Donald Trump was elected on a platform of restricting immigration. To block his mandate by procedural shenanigans is to nullify the votes of the people, to spit in their faces, and to set up a shop of horrors.

So why did we get to this pass, and why are the lefty activist groups besides themselves?

Naturally, I can explain the whole procedure with my critique of lefty "activism culture." You can get the full story here in "A General Theory of Leftist Politics." The point is that the left's activism culture is young well-born kids looking  for an excuse for revolution, and the only excuse for revolution is the injustice experienced by people "outside the system." In 1850 the schtick was to riot for the unfranchised working class. But  pretty soon the bourgeoisie gave the working class the vote, and  the workers were inside the system. So now what? Votes for Women! Civil Rights for blacks! Marriage for gays! And now legalization of illegal aliens. See, once people have the vote and are inside the system then their concerns are naturally and inevitably accounted for in the two-and-fro of elections and legislation. Thus,  if you want to be an activist then you must find a group "outside the system" and be their shining knight fighting against the system for Justice. Otherwise  you are nothing.

Lefty activism culture is a conceit, the conceit of well-born sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie that want to put some relevance into their hum-drum little lives -- starting with the well-born Marx and Engels. It is the fantasy that in this age, which attempts to look after ordinary people and redress their grievances like never before in history, we need the extreme resort to force, to riots in the streets, and the silly rhetoric of Skip Marley:

We are the lions, we are the chosen
We gonna shine out the dark
We are the movement, this generation
You better know who we are, who we are

Yeah, yeah. Except the truth is that after 1850 the dreaded bourgeoisie did not keep the working class  in the dark, but let it into the system where its grievances could be redressed. Ditto African Americans after 1965.

I wonder if it is part of God's plan to use Donald Trump as His instrument to deflate the conceit of the lefty activism culture, and to drive the Schumers before him, and hear the lamentation of the pussy-hat women? 

Stranger things have happened.

Real Critical Theory: How About a Critique of Leftism

In a review of Jordan B. Peterson's interview with Cathy Newman on BBC Channel 4, Uri Harris makes a point that drove home with me.

We need a Critical Theory of leftism, he proposes, on the same principle as the left's Critical Theory of the bourgeoisie. Following Marx, the left has conducted a nearly two-century critique of capitalism's claim to universalism.

Critical Theory draws heavily on Karl Marx’s notion of ideology. Because the bourgeoisie controlled the means of production, Marx suggested, they controlled the culture. Consequently, the laws, beliefs, and morality of society reflected the interests of the bourgeoisie. And importantly, people were unaware that this was the case. In other words, capitalism created a situation where the interests of a particular group of people—those who controlled society—were made to appear to be universal truths and values, when in fact they were not.

I think that this is an excellent point. It's all very well for the comfortable middle class to think that everyone should be like them, hard-working, responsible, assuming that the market economy that is so good to the bourgeoisie is also good for, e.g., the working class. The argument at the center of Marxism and now identity politics is that the market economy and "middle-class morality" is not good for the traditionally marginalized, and not good for creative types that want to live a live higher and better than mere responsibility and service. The market exploits the working class and constricts the creative class.

So I say, go for it, lefties. Critique capitalism and the middle class all you like.

But there is this. It turned out that the market economy, that Marx said would "immiserate" the working class, did nothing of the kind. The capitalistic economy, in the event, lifted all boats, and lifted the working class into the middle class. So maybe the claim of universal truth was not far off the mark. Nor was the market economy the enemy of traditionally marginalized groups. There is no doubt that white males have done best with the market economy; but everyone else has benefited too. If you wanted to keep blacks and women down you had to write laws to do so, because the market economy doesn't care who you are, it just cares what you can produce. And there is the bottom line to the market economy, the Great Enrichment. Per-capita income in the capitalist countries has risen by 3,000 percent in the last 200 years.

But now let us do a bit of Critical Theory on the left. Let's call it Real Critical Theory, and let us rephrase Uri Harris's words quoted above.

Real Critical Theory turns Karl Marx’s notion of ideology on its head. The problem is no longer the ideological superstructure of the capitalistic productive forces, but the ideological structure of the educated ruling class that not surprisingly privileges the creative pursuits and the power project of the educated class, from the arts to sexual experimentation to identity politics, as the highest and best form of life. Because the educated class controls the arts, the media, and education, we propose that they unjustly control the culture and marginalize all voices that might oppose their agenda. Consequently, the laws, beliefs, and morality of society reflects the class interests of the educated class. Increasingly, people are becoming profoundly aware that this is the case. In other words, progressivism creates a situation where the interests of a particular group of people—those who control the public square of ideas and approved thought—represent their selfish and unjust class interests as universal truths and values, when in fact they are not.

Of course my entire work and world view are intended as a critique of the left's world view and its selfish and unjust power project.

My reductive Three Peoples theory is intended to show how the educated class, the People of the Creative Self, stand in relation to the other main experiential groups in society, the People of the Responsible Self, and the People of the Subordinate Self, and how their whole project is designed to oppress and exploit the People of the Responsible Self.

My critique of the left's activism culture is intended to show the bankruptcy of activism, always searching for a reason to apply political force and "peaceful protest" to a society that really does not enforce injustice and can be easily persuaded to reduce injustice by the ordinary political process of elections and legislation and a peaceful discussion of the issues.

My notion of "little darlings" is intended to publicize the dead end in store for those that are today's beneficiaries of progressive identity politics. Like the white working class, the educated ruling class may loove you today. But the day will come when the ruling class casts you aside, like wounded soldiers have ever been cast aside by armies on the march.

My "left's errors" is a catalog of the errors and the human misery that left-wing and progressive ideas have caused in the last 200 years. 

My Perfect Plan is a solution to the murrain of leftism, for it proposes solutions to the two main evils of leftism. Against the policy of encouraging pre-urban cultural norms in its little darlings -- first the working class and now women and minorities -- I propose that our society should encourage, by all kind and gentle means, the traditionally marginalized to acquire the middle class culture of individual responsibility that is the key to a productive and meaningful life in the exchange economy and the urban society. Against he left's culture war on the middle class I propose a culture of compassion and tolerance in the People of the Creative Self towards the People of the Responsible Self lately anathematized as "deplorables."

And failing all else, there is always my Communism Week, a blow by blow critique of the left and everything it stands for.

The big thing is this. You can criticize capitalism and the mean and narrow-minded bourgeoisie all you like. But the middle-class culture has produced the Great Enrichment, a 3,000 percent increase in real individual income in the last 200 years. The fact is that leftism, communism, socialism, progressivism has failed every time it was tried. Most tragically it was tried and it failed in Russia, in China, and in India, by educated elites that thought that Marx's ideas were the secret ingredient to the west's dominance. Over a hundred million human deaths later, each of these great nations has realized that the opposite is true. Communism, Marxism, socialism, progressivism is the fastest route to national ruin ever devised by a canting intellectual. Hello Venezuela.

The reason that capitalism has worked is this. It extends the truth of social cooperation one step further. In the old days, animals and humans learned that social cooperation is beneficial, indeed, necessary for successful life on Earth, because it reduces the incidence and crippling costs of violence. In both animal and human society this social cooperation was achieved by a status and hierarchy culture that reduced the incidence of costly and destructive violence substituting force with shows of force. But we moderns have discovered another dimension to social cooperation: private property and the price system. These remarkable inventions allow social cooperation to proceed without the cost and pain of hierarchy systems, but simply through the daily fluctuations of prices in the exchange economy that tell everyone what to do, and more particularly, what not to do. It is the most astonishing discovery ever.

And yet our educated ruling class wants to return to the good old days: a neo-tribalism with identity politics, and neo-feudalism with the welfare state.

What is wrong with these people that a Real Critical Theory that exposes their errors and self-satisfied assumptions won't set right?

What Do #MeToo Want?

The eternal plaint of men is "what do women want?" I think the answer is easy. Women want to be protected so that they can do their work of caring.

But in the last half century or so women have entertained a fantasy of something different, the notion of "the independent woman" advocated by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex. Look, everyone does stupid stuff, and imagines things that can never be. So Simone de Beauvoir was a fool. So are we all.

There is no such thing as an "independent woman." Not no how.

But women believe what they have been carefully taught, more so than men, in my sexist imaginings. An example is the BBC interview of BadThinker Jordan B. Peterson by Cathy Newman, where she castigates him for 40 minutes for not having received opinions on women and transgenders as approved by North London luvvies.

Right through the interview, I felt that Cathy Newman never deviated a millimeter from the received left-wing party line on men and women and women in the workplace and transphobia and Uncle Tom Cobbley and all. I thought to myself, this woman has never read a book. Because if she had, she would deviate, somehow, somewhere, from the narrative. Her natural conceit as a Someone who reads books would lead her willy-nilly to parade that in front the eevil transphobic interviewee Jordan B. Peterson. But she did not. So I assume that she is an idiot that knows nothing: only what she picks up from the lefty mean girls clique at the BBC.

But women are troubled. Because they are Good Little Girls that learn their lessons well they get to college, or into their careers, or into the twenty-something dating scene and it doesn't compute. Or rather, it feels all wrong.

Well, yes, it would, girls. Because what we -- or rather I should say you lefties -- have cooked up is your fantasy of the "independent woman," who maybe does not get married, maybe does not have children, lives as though she were a man battling through life as a sexual and/or economic predator.

But women are not like that, or at least the vast majority of them. And so that is why poor "Grace" feels shame and distress that when she signed up for a date with comic Aziz Ansari and found out that all he wanted was sex, and that he didn't want a relationship etc. So nothing has changed since Monica Lewinsky wanted Bill Clinton to tell her that their dalliances were about something more than sex. Or since Hollywood invented the casting couch.

People-that-don't-read-books like Cathy Newman may believe that the "patriarchy" has kept women barefoot and pregnant since the dawn of time, and they may be right. But I rather prefer to learn from the haunting message of A Woman in Berlin by Anonymous about the two months in Berlin in the spring of 1945 when Berlin was occupied by Soviet troops of the Red Army and there were no German men to protect German women from the sexual aggressions of the Red Army soldiers. Or there's the message from The Year 1000 by Lacey and Danziger. Back then the Vikings would sail up the rivers of Britain every autumn, kill all the men, take all the grain and the women and children and sell the women and children at the main slave market in northwest Europe in Dublin.

Women need to be protected from sexual aggression: indeed they expect it. And a society has failed that fails to protect its women from sexual aggression. And that is why Good Little Girls like "Grace" are feeling betrayed and abandoned that nasty cruel men out there seem to regard them as booty.

Obviously the solution to the current problem is to reassemble a culture from the ruins of bourgeois culture trashed over the last century by the left. In this culture it will be accepted once more that the default answer from women is No. In this culture cads and bounders and the like will once more be marginalized and named and shamed.

But the solution is not to write more laws. The criminal law is a very blunt instrument. Of course it is, because government is force, men with guns. The whole point of humans as social animals is to resolve 99 percent of problems by cultural norms that every young person learns as a child rather than by police action.

So we have to build a new culture around sex. Unfortunately the social and cultural world is dominated right now by lefty never-read-a-book people spouting lefty talking points as though they know what they are talking about. What is needed is for a gentle, thoughtful culture of the middle to arise that gently revises the common culture of America to revive courtship and respect and banish the sexual revolution's assumption that women are just like men when it comes to sex, that there can ever be such a thing as "just sex."

Oh and we need to revise the notion that the highest and best course for a woman's life is a career. No. The center of a woman's life is her relationships, her marriage, her children, her role as the center of social life, and above all her devotion to caring for those nearest and dearest to her.

I like to remind my readers that "career" comes from the French "carrière" or racetrack. It's a perfectly sensible way to socialize men away from war and loot and plunder and into the harmless work of business. But women don't need to be run around a racetrack. They are already socialized to the work of daily life, and it is an insult to treat women as though they are aggressive, testosterone infused men.

Honestly, I don't know how we get to the sunlit uplands of the new culture. Because if there is one thing obvious to me it is that the left-wing cultural elite, the present ruling class, are the last people on Earth that should have anything to do with this project.

What I hope for is that a spontaneous movement will arise among women to move towards this sadder, wiser culture. But I do not expect it in my lifetime.

Politics is Not About Issues, But Status

Why have Republicans and conservatives failed to reverse the tide of leftism? The answer is simple, according to Joe Katzman. Politics is not about ideas, or issues, or justice. Politics is about status.

Analysis: Leftism is a status machine. A very, very successful status machine. Conservatives have lost status battle after status battle, often because they fought it as a policy battle. It rarely is.

In other words, if you parrot left-wing talking points you gain status. If you try to argue the merits of an issue, you lose status. But if you are sensible you read The New York Times or any women's magazine. These are all about communicating status clues to the status conscious.

That brings us immediately to Donald Trump. Trump's whole shtick is to humiliate "Chuck and Nancy" and the Fake News media. In other words, his game is to lower their status in the eyes of his supporters and possible supporters.

Status and hierarchy are chemical and go all the way back to lobsters, or rather the common ancestor of humans and lobsters. You could say it is part of the basic equipment of social animals, the reduction of conflict by status and hierarchy negotiation.

So that means that status is upstream of religion is upstream of culture is upstream of politics.

Now do you understand why Donald Trump won the support of the white working class and other deplorables? He proposed to raise their/our status by attacking the status of liberals, lefties, Democrats, and the mainstream media.

Yes, I suppose that's a corollary of the lobster status argument. You may not be able to play the status game yourself, but you sure can vote for a guy that does, or at least support the lobster that has high status.

This forthright argument, put forward by Joe Katzman, helps me understand what I am trying to do with my writing. I want to put everything lefty and liberal in a bad light by insulting it, i.e., reducing its status.

(Hmm. So the male Culture of Insult is really a status game, reducing the other guys status by a sham fight of words. And is Trump good at insults. But, of course, women hate it, because their status game is the woman's Culture of Complaint.)

So when I deploy my catchphrases, from Government is Force, to Politics is Division, to System is Domination, to Identity Politics is Neo-Tribalism, to the Welfare State is Neo-Feudalism, all I am trying to do is to reduce the status of government, politics, and lefties on all the ships at sea, by insulting their ideas and their sacred objects as cheap tricks and second-rate rubbish: false idols.

But to get to the bottom line: is Trump's campaign working? Well, according to Katzman,

American belief in the credibility of their news media is now at about 32 percent. That’s the lowest ever polled, and an 8 percent drop from the lowest point of the 2008-2015 period. The media has lost audience, and a lot of power. 

And even noble Facebook has taken note.

Facebook has tried to fight these trend lines by flagging items as “fake news.” Recently, the social media giant decided to stop. Too many people sought out flagged articles. 

Notice an interesting thing here? Back in the day, liberals were the spunky outsiders speaking truth to the establishment. But now that they own the media, the universities, the schools, the culture, they are the establishment, and so plucky outsiders are now the ones that speak truth to liberals.

And they don't like it.

OK, so why didn't anyone think of this before? Well, they did.

In fairness, Newt Gingrich had some success in the 2012 primaries, and Ted Cruz has also tried. But they lacked the full array of tools. Worse, they didn’t understand how to make the media their enemy.

In other words, they weren't good enough at the game of insult.

And that leads directly back to my catchphrase Politics is Division. The art of politics is to find your enemy, and rally the people behind you to attack the enemy and reduce their status by beating them in an election. Hey, you could use a Rule or two from Saul Alinsky.

Rule 5. "Ridicule is man's most potent weapon."
Rule 13. "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." 

Just saying.