Now Holman Jenkins Says They Are Idiots

Over the last year or so I have been developing the idea that the people that govern us are idiots. I mean by that merely that, after the establishment of a dynasty -- which requires at the very least ruthlessness, and probably genius combined with that gift of the gods, luck -- the sons and adepts of the founders are not so bright. Hey, they don't have to be.

This is not that hard. It stands to reason, for instance, that the American Founders had to be extraordinary men. Start with Washington, the military leader that kept the Revolutionary army in the field for six long years in strategic retreat until the opportunity came to defeat the fever-ridden Brits and their allies at the Battle of Yorktown. Then Madison, the man that wrote most of the Constitution. Hamilton, the guy that helped persuade New York to vote for the Constitution and then founded the US National Debt.

The point is that if these men were not extraordinary then we wouldn't be here today as the last best hope of man on Earth.

But after the founding generation, the need for genius and perseverance eases off. And the great offices of state get to be occupied by men of lesser quality. There is nothing wrong with that, it is just the way the world works. But when the need for great men appears again, then "cometh the hour, cometh the man." We hope.

Only, of course, the men that can't rise to the occasion must first be flushed away, as McClellan was flushed away in favor of Grant.

Now at last I am reading Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. say in the Wall Street Journal that all these deep state actors are idiots. In "Clapper Disinformation Campaign" Jenkins proposes that the Deep State actors we have grown to know and love in their ongoing series "Trump Collusion" -- now in Season 2 on Netflix, or is it Amazon Prime? -- are really not that bright.

Jenkins looks back at the Intelligence Community's actions in 2016: Comey's intervention in the Hillary emails, surveilling low-level Trump nobodies, the reopening of the Clinton email business in the last week of the campaign.

There is a term for how this all looks in retrospect: colossally stupid.

Yeah, really. What in the world did the FBI think it was doing? And the Brennans and the Clappers too? Getting into the middle of an election? Trying to compromise low-level campaign hangers-on? Faking up applications to the FISA Court? What man of weight would get into that kind of shenanigans? Your really big men would regard it as below their dignity to play penny-ante political poker.

What is clear is that the Brennans and the Clappers and the Comeys and the rest of them are pretty good at playing bureaucratic pinochle with leaks and smears and tame journalists. Only that sort of thing is, or should be, beneath the dignity of major bureaucratic nabobs.

It is a conceit of mine that I can tell the good men from the fakes. Bill Clinton: a truly brilliant politician. Hillary Clinton: a prisoner of conventional wisdom and her female rage. Barack Obama: a weak man that compensated by cutting corners. Trump: a man who plays an idiot on TV.

Likewise, I have really tried in conversation to tune my antennas to determine whether my opposite is just reciting conventional wisdom that anyone would possess from a college education and exposure to mainstream media, or whether he has actually formulated an original idea.

To me, everything we know about Trump Russia and the counter-intelligence spying on the Trump campaign reeks of mediocrity: dull mediocre place-servers allowing themselves to be sucked into folly and political malpractice, mostly because they were too weak to tell their superiors to go take a hike. Everything about the Deep Staters reeked of weakness: getting old war-horse Stefan Halper to try and compromise low-level Trump hangers-on; queering the pitch of the Hillary private server investigation.

Back in the day Archibald Cox refused to compromise the Department of Justice to please the Nixon people. Not any more, not in today's Department of Justice and today's Federal Bureau  of Investigation.

The only thing to hope for is the God still looks after drunks, children and the good old US of A, and will help us replace the current weak and feeble Deep Staters with men of firmer mettle.

On the other hand, it is really fortunate that the Obama crowd were such weak and feeble yes-men, and didn't really abuse their powers too much. Otherwise they could have really done some damage to the nation.

Of Course President Trump Lies

One of the excuses our beloved mainstream media offers for their 24-7 negative coverage of President Trump is that they are bound by their oath of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.

Yes. And the most comfortable people in America? Those would be urban liberals with nice sinecures in government and education and it would be the politicians that represent them.

So why were President Obama's lies nothing to our liberal friends? The wafted-aloft First Black President is probably the most comfortable man in America. Whatever he says or does is accepted without demur by the entire mainstream media and all the faithful readers of The New York Times and faithful listeners of NPR. If there could be one man in America that a media truly devoted to afflicting the comfortable would afflict, then that man would be President Obama.

The truth is, of course, that nobody observes that old chestnut about comfort and affliction, not in families, not in politics, not in culture, and certainly not in war. We comfort our side and we afflict the other side, and that is all about it.

So if President Obama told a fib or two about Obamacare it was all in a good cause to bring affordable healthcare to every American -- and non American -- in the USA. After all, to hold the president to the truth might have imperiled the passage of his landmark health legislation, and that would never do.

As Winston Churchill said: "In war-time, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies."

Since politics is civil war by other means, it makes complete sense that politicians lie all the time to protect the truth, or more exactly, The Narrative. That is why there is also the tag: "you can tell a politician is lying because his lips are moving."

What people hate is not the bodyguard of lies protecting their own truth, but the bodyguard of lies protecting the truth, the Narrative, of the Other Party.

Thus liberal mainstream media figures -- all the way down to the humble makeup-artist on an interview show -- are outraged when a President Trump tells his deplorables what they want to hear at one of his notorious rallies. Of course they are. President Trump is telling his deplorables what they want to hear, and what deplorables want to hear from their president is not what liberal mainstream media figures want to hear. When people hear stuff from a politician that they do not want to hear they usually call it "lies."

The problem of "lies" is particularly acute for liberals right now because for decades they have successfully bullied into silence any politician or cultural figure that dared to dissent from their version of "truth." You know the form: disagree with a liberal and you are a racist, sexist, homophobe.

Until President Trump. The whole point about Donald Trump's campaign and his presidency thus far is that Trump dares to say things that you are not allowed to say. For instance, only yesterday the actress Roseanne Barr was kicked off ABC for making a racist taunt against a public figure, Valerie Jarrett, who was President Obama's consigliere in the White House. And the Disney CEO, Bob Iger, personally phoned Valerie Jarrett to apologize. Hey, tweeted Donald Trump:  When am I getting my phone call from Bob Iger when people on ABC insult me?

No kidding. Right now The Rules say that it is intolerable for a white person to make a racist comment about a black person, because slavery, but it is not intolerable for a black person to make a racist comment about whites. And President Trump just violated The Rules.

Now for me, there is no question that President Trump lies. I would say that one of the biggest of his lies is that he has declared an end to Free Trade in favor of Fair Trade. Yet, if you look at his actions, he has seemed to be raising tariffs on China to bring it to the bargaining table to force China to lower its trade barriers against the US. He talked about building a wall, but has not exactly made wall-building the centerpiece of his administration.

If you are a conservative like me you feel yourself belabored by liberal lies all the time: about racism, about the homeless, about climate change, about gays, about education, about entitlements. To me, liberals are always lying about the facts, and also lying about their political goals. Now, for the first time in decades, liberals are getting to experience what it feels like to hear the opposing party tell its truth to its supporters without worrying too much about offending liberals.

So, for me, it is a glorious thing for President Trump to have the cojones to go up against the liberal narrative and live to tell the tale. And I dare say that I am merely one among the millions that feel that way.

This  is absolutely basic. If you are a political leader you must be able to speak The Narrative to your supporters, to tell them what they want to hear. To the extent that the opposition party intimidates you into silence, so far are they preventing you from committing politics, and so far are they forcing you to retreat in the Battle of Ideas and enforce their Narrative on your supporters.

The reason that Donald Trump won the nomination of the Republican Party is that he seemed to be a candidate that would not cringe before the liberal verbal-assassination squad. That has been the complaint of the conservative and Republican faithful for decades. Our leaders are always trying to make nice with the liberals when the liberals never hesitate to call us racists and sexists.

Until Trump.

And of course liberals are beside themselves that President Trump would counter Bob Iger's apology to Valerie Jarrett with a wise-guy retort: hey, when am I getting my call! Liberals have never experienced this sort of a challenge to their world view in their lifetimes. It is just not part of the way things are supposed to be, if you are a liberal.

No wonder liberals are in a complete conniption fit over President Trump. He is daring to speak truth to liberal power.

Why Aren't Conservatives Any Good at Beautiful Phrases?

How come liberals get all the good lines? "Net Neutrality," which means that Google and Netflix get to ride free on the wires of the internet bandwidth providers? Or "Affordable Care" which means that health care is force fed and rationed through an administrative-state regulatory apparatus? Or "common-sense gun laws" which means that liberals get to make guns illegal?

A friend complained about that to me, and I answered my standard line:  conservatives are not that interested in power. That means, of course that conservatives are not that invested in coming up with catchy slogans to persuade people to vote for us so we can give them more government. We reckon that, by and large, the market economy should be left to itself and that if there is anything wrong it will get worked out in the law courts with judges figuring out how to deal with accidental injustices that emerge from the ceaseless innovation of the market system. It is, you might say, a reactive approach.

But our liberal friends are different. Their very meaning of life, the universe, and everything is bound up in their political faith. And you will notice that religion, down the ages, has been pretty good at the compelling phrase. In fact, given that religion is about finding meaning where meaning may not exist, it stands to reason that good phrase-making, conjuring up an answer to the age-old question of the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, is central to its purpose. Let us state this again. It may be true -- hey, it probably is -- that the universe is a meaningless void with the odd particle or two coalescing into something more. But we humans insist on living as though our lives do have meaning. I reckon this is because the definition of a living entity is something that acts as if it has meaning and purpose. And that goes for your average worm and even your average virus as well. Otherwise what's the point?

You can see here the genius of the notion of the separation of church and state. It may be that the latest evolution of religion is the final truth about Meaning. But maybe not. If the former is true, then let the priests should set forth the final glorious phrases about the glorious and heavenly world promised to us. If the latter is true then it is probably a good idea not to link religion, the map of meaning, to the state, which is the apparatus of force.

It may be, again, that the current manifestation of government is the highest and best that can ever be imagined. But maybe not. If the former is true then let the governors and the judges and the bureaucrats have all the scope for the application of government power that they have in mind. If the latter is true then the power of government leaders and functionaries should be strictly limited so that they do not do too much damage before the world is liberated from their imperfect rule by new improved notions of government.

The same thing applies to the economy.

It may be that the present ideas about the market economy and the framework of commercial law is the highest and best that can ever be imagined. But maybe not. If the former is true then we must hold it solid, and not change it, or suffer it to be changed. If the latter is true then we must adapt our thoughts and actions to the truth that the market economy and its institutions are bound to evolve and change, and the arrangements of the market economy should be allowed to develop as new technologies, new innovations, and new forms of corporate organization appear.

I have, of course, just outlined the justification for the Greater Separation of Powers that I have obtained from Michael Novak's The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. He argues that the three forms of social power, the political, the economic, the moral/cultural, should not be combined into a totalitarian single entity, but should be kept separate from one another, and any two of them should be prevented from ganging up on the other one.

You may notice that the whole point of most religion down the ages, and most politics, is that extraordinary power is needed, either military or priestly, in order to prevent the world from descending into Chaos and Disorder or Sin and Death. And certainly the modern political/religious movement we call the left believes that it has found the answer to the meaning of life, the universe and everything and that this meaning -- that mainly involves liberation and emancipation of traditionally marginalized peoples by political activists acting in accordance with Lefty Writ -- can be instantiated through the agency of political power and political movements.

It is the faith of people like me that the lefty faith has been shown by clear and convincing events -- from the fact of the Soviet Union to the fact of Venezuela -- to be one of the most appalling disasters of human social cooperation. Take China. Back in 1800 the per-capita income in China was about $3 per day in today's dollars. In 1960 it was about $0.50 per person per day when in the US it was north of $50.00 per day. It wasn't until China adopted capitalism in 1978 that its income started heading North from the human disaster of $0.50 per day. And this is why we insist that political and moral/cultural power should be limited and should be separated from each other.

More, we free spirits insist that the lesson of the last two hundred years, called by some the Miracle and by others the Great Enrichment, demonstrates that we cannot set up a rigid framework for anything political, economic, and moral/cultural, because the world is changing all the time, and we humans respond to the world's changes by changing ourselves.

But we humans still come up with beautiful words to symbolize our deepest hopes and yearnings, and would be political and moral/cultural leaders indefatigably coin new phrases to capture a vision of what might be.

If only most of these phrase-makers were not liberals and lefties in thrall to vile superstitions that has visited the most foul injustices and disasters upon the human race.

Newt's Five Scandal Theory of Spygate

Perhaps the biggest need surrounding the Gathering Storm of Obama era scandals, the ones that have coalesced into the Russia Collusion scandal, is to craft them into an overarching narrative.

Why? Because as long as they stay fragmented the guilty will get away free and we will not be able to refer back to something like "SpyGate" and know that every living American will know what we mean.

Dear old Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House, has come up with a 5-part explanation for the SpyGate scandals, and that effort is a start. Newt says that there are five reasons for the scandals, as follows:

1. 40 years of Clinton Corruption, starting with the fabled cattle futures.
2. The deep state defense of Clinton, instead of dealing with her manifold crimes and misdemeanors.
3. The campaign to undermine and discredit Donald Trump, particularly in the anti-Republican Department of Justice.
4. Deep state resistance to accountability and transparency.
5. Panic breaking out among people that might "find themselves in danger of criminal charges."

You can see how all these explanations are cascading. Without the Clinton corruption, the deep state would not have been forced to defend the Clintons; and the deep-state defense wouldn't have been possible without the DOJ's anti-Republican bias,  and without anti-Republican bias the folly of DOJ Clinton defense would not have led to hiding the ball, and without Clinton defense the deep state operatives would not be panicking about exposure.

But really, it all issues from the Clinton private e-mail system. Without the Clinton e-mail system the DOJ would not have been put in the position of pressuring the FBI to go easy on Clinton, and I suspect that would have reduced the need to know what the Trump campaign knew about them.

In fact I would go so far  as to propose that illegal use of government surveillance and police powers tends always to issue from some petty illegal government action precipitated by a rules-don't-apply-to-me corrupt leader. Once a government cabal starts down this road it tends to get ensnared in its own illegality, as in the Shakepearean tag "oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive."

Or, as they said in the Watergate era, "it's not the crime, it's the cover-up."

May I make a small request of our noble political elite? Would you please stop your corrupt and vile behavior? Because, as in real war, it is the buck privates, the low-level political operatives that get chewed up in the meat-grinder. So if you are in politics to represent the little people -- and what politician isn't -- then the first thing you should be thinking about is the little guy in your campaign  or your administration that is going to be taking the enemy fire rather than you, the political general well behind the front lines.

But still, while Newt's five-scandal theory is a good idea, I am still drawn to Verdi's demand of his librettist, Piave, in the TV series The Life of Verdi. Verdi demanded that Piave stop pouring out so many useless words. He wanted them all to be boiled down into just a few, or even the One Word that he would set to music.

That is the challenge of the Obama-Clinton-Deep-State scandals. They need to be reduced to "one word," the one word that every American will henceforth know and associate with something foul, something unclean, "something rotten in the State of Denmark."

I'd say that the One Word should help symbolize what every ordinary American knows. If he or she had been caught mishandling classified government information, they would now be in jail.

Peterson and Jung and Nietzsche, Oh My!

If you've dabbled in cultural sensation Jordan B. Peterson as I have, and got through his Maps of Meaning, and if you are not mad at him, like the New York Times set and alt-right Vox Day, you want to check the backup. Because Peterson owes a lot to Nietzsche and Jung.

Nietzsche is a problem, because Nazism and Nationalism and Anti-Semitism. And Jung--

Also, Jordan Peterson is proposing the primacy of instinct and affect, rather than reason. And that is a problem for most of us moderns, because whether you are on the left or the right, you believe that your side is based on reason and the other side is based on emotion, or worse. Because science.

But Peterson is saying that humans are basically instinctive creatures, and that the great issues of life are not reducible to reason. Moreover in his system, if it is a system, the highest and best is the sacrificial hero, the one that dares to live on the border between the known and the unknown, between order and chaos, the man that surrenders his life to the exploration of this dangerous territory, and bringing it into our understanding and consciousness, and sharing that understanding with the rest of humanity.

From Jung Peterson brings the notion that the unconscious mind is primary, both in its manifestation of the personal unconscious, our personal instinctive response to day-to-day life, and also in the manifestation of the collective unconscious, the ways in which humans as a whole symbolize and experience the larger meaning of life in spirits and gods and the like.

You can see how foreign this is to the official narrative, which is that we are rational creatures. In the right-wing version we are rationally seeking a way from serfdom and subordination to freedom and liberty. In the left-wing version we are rationally seeking a way from slavery and oppression to liberation along the arc of history bending towards justice.

And yet I propose that the right-wing version of reason has brought us to the neo-serfdom of the welfare state, and the left-wing version of reason has brought us to the über-slavery of the communist state. So maybe there is a problem.

What if this is all wrong, and reason is not the means to anything in particular? What if, as settled science is starting to discover, reason evolved out of humans rationalizing their social behavior, and just accidentally happened to be a good basis for math and physics?

In many ways, the whole story of the last 200 years of western culture is the realization, beginning with Romanticism at the turn of the 19th century, that reason cannot be the whole story. How can it be when humans are overwhelmingly consumed by "affect" or passion?

It really changes things when you decide that the meaning of life, the universe, and everything is not the construction of the best rational system but something else.

Then comes Nietzsche with the scandalous notion that the Christian framework of the last 2000 years is outta here, and the only reality is the will to power, and that morality is a cheap trick.

Now I have been slowly trudging through the Germans in the last few years, from Kant to Hegel to Schopenhauer and now Nietzsche.

The thing about Nietzsche is that you are never sure when he is being serious and when he is just trying to nudge you off dead center and make you think. For instance, in Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche praises the Jews for their amazing survival down the ages through all travails and hardships -- "the strongest, toughest, and purest race now living in Europe"-- and sneers at German anti-Semitism. Later on he develops his notorious "master morality and slave morality." But by The Genealogy of Morals he divides the noble masters into the "warrior caste" and the "priestly caste," and while the warriors are simple and forthright, the priests are the most appalling haters. And guess what: the most obvious instantiation of a priestly people is the Jews, and Christianity is a 2000 year cunning plot to dethrone the warrior caste. And the Jews are therefore the world-historic leaders of a slave revolt that has demolished the old aristocratic masters.

Hey Fritzi! Doesn't your division of the masters into warriors and priests rather chip away at your initial notion of the masters as true unselfconscious aristocrats?

I know! Why not divide the human race in three, according to my reductive Three Peoples theory. Then we still have the slaves, the People of the Subordinate Self, we still have the masters, divided into the natural aristocracy of the business world and the priestly haters of the politically correct. In between are the People of the Responsible Self that are neither leaders nor followers, but partaking of something in-between: neither groveling slaves sucking up to their liege lord in return for handouts, nor ego-maniac masters, either business masters-of-the-universe or priestly left-wing haters. What's not to like?

Notice that your business masters-of-the-universe can be the sacrificial heroes of Jordan Peterson's narrative, for in business many are called but few are chosen. Here is how the natural aristocrat lives, from Nietzsche:

To be incapable of taking one's enemies, one's accidents, even one's misdeeds seriously for very long -- that is the sign of strong full natures is whom there is a excess of the power to form, to mold, to recuperate, and to forget{.]

He has a point. If you are a man of action you really don't have time for worrying about enemies, mistakes, because it is always time to get on with the next thing.

But as for the lefty priestly haters.-- Yeah. Hating, remembering accidents and misdeeds, forgetting nothing. And doing nothing. That is where they live and breathe. For the whole point of a lefty activist is to live in the festering wound of a grievance, and make it bigger.

The thing about reason is its one-dimensionality, its uni-directionality. But life, the universe, and everything is contingent, uncertain. Oh, and hidden. Could it be that the means that living things have appropriated for life in this world, instinct, passion, archetypes, "affect," are necessary and flexible ways of getting on the world whereas reason, with its path to freedom and its arc bending towards justice, is not?

The Problem with Politics

Here's a poll result to tell you something about America. About 54 percent of White Democrats now think that racial inequality is caused by discrimination, up from about 42 percent in 2006.

So. After half a century of race politics, repeatedly "doing something" about civil rights and racial discrimination, White Democrats think that nothing has changed. Even that things are getting worse. So we need legislation to bend the arc of history towards justice.

What planet do these people live on?

Well, we know. They live on a planet where the stories are written and told by lefty adepts of the Frankfurt School and Herbert "intolerant tolerance" Marcuse. They live in a left-wing culture that believes that the way to get to justice is with political power. They relentlessly blame and divide, because that is how you motivate people to get out and vote.

But I think that this just shows the utter folly of ideological politics. Because it never knows when to stop.

The point about racial discrimination is that it is only a problem when government actively enforces discrimination, as in the Jim Crow South. The Southern Democrats wrote Jim Crow laws because the railroads really didn't want to have segregated railroad cars. Bus companies didn't want to divide up the bus and put their black passengers at the back. So the segregationists had to write a law.

OK. So you write a Civil Rights Law to sweep away all those Jim Crow laws. Then what?

What happens is that the activists that built the political movement that passed the Civil Rights laws aren't satisfied. You can see why. As with any army after you storm the citadel of your enemy, the question is what to do next? Unfortunately, the usual response to victory is to double down and build an empire. It is not enough to defeat the racists: they must be hunted down and the last vestige of their evil spawn eliminated from the world.

And so, in the wake of the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s the victorious liberals could not just declare victory and go home. They had to enact Affirmative Action -- a  program of flat-out racism -- through their power in the administrative state. The feminists could not rest with equal pay laws; they had to amp up the pressure with the notion of comparable worth. And then they noted all the areas in which women were "underrepresented" as in the executive suite and STEM and demand inclusion and diversity.

Now we have gays that cannot be satisfied with gay marriage. They have to go after bakers that don't want to bake cakes for gay weddings.

Meanwhile, what are the evil corporations and entrepreneurs doing now? They are trying to defeat the new segregation. You see, all nation states have laws against foreigners migrating to and working in the homeland. So the big corporations are busy figuring out how to get around laws limiting the employment of foreigners. The corporate suits get people here to the United States on various visa programs, people that cost them less than Americans born in the USA. And the  cool thing is that employees on temporary visas that do not have green cards are in a position similar to the indentured servants of old. They cannot leave their employment without risking their visa, and so are tied to their employers and the lower wages.

It's interesting. What is the difference between the Jim Crow laws of the South and the normal laws of any nation state that limit immigration? They both discriminate against people that have not yet enjoyed the bounty of the Great Enrichment.

Actually, our liberal friends are not shy about criticizing people that want to limit the access of foreigners to the US labor market. Those evil Southerners were racists. The immigration restrictionists are xenophobes. No skin off the liberal noses, of course. They figure that what with their education and their Deep State connections they are in with the in-crowd. Conservatives and deplorables need not apply.

So maybe the next glorious movement is to lower all national barriers and make the workplace open to all. Or maybe, on the notion that immigration is invasion -- ask the Native Americans -- we should keep the nation state and its borders until something better comes up.

The point remains. Once you have struck down the legal discriminatory barriers, then if there exists residual discrimination there exists a market opportunity for any canny entrepreneur. Hey, if minority  and female and transgender workers are not getting their fair whack, then an entrepreneur can hire them and make money. Until the day comes when the previously discriminated against are no longer underpaid, and there is not longer an opportunity to make money.

That is the whole point of the market economy. In fact that is what the left complains about. The market doesn't think of people as people. The only thing the market understands is  produces and prices and service. And this is supposed to be soulless. Well, so it is. It means that the market doesn't select people because of their gender or their race or their national origin. It only asks: can they get the job done, or, if they can't, can I train them up to get the job done.

Of course, the market does appreciate that beauty in newsreaders on TV is a plus. And in actresses in movies. And this is wrong. Maybe it is time for a a political movement to promote ugly people to the  screen.

And what about nerds? How come nerds don't get their fair share of jobs in the executive suite and all the plum jobs go to alpha males and sweet talkers?

Mind you, there is another way to look at this. Nietzsche does it with his analysis of Master and Slave morality. There is, he suggests, a need for hardness.

What if we resolve all our inequalities with a complete and total administrative program that litigates every possible inequality so that everything is fair and just? Nietzsche's argument is that this will lead to a flabby, weakened society that will topple over the day that the next Attila or Genghis Khan appears on the scene.

And maybe this is a flaw in capitalism. Maybe we are all getting too soft in the online smartphone world where everything is at our beck and call and we never have to sweat. Maybe we will all be swept away, to be replaced by --.

Maybe we need the storm and stress of politics and people forever fighting over the political spoils, and arguing about whether discrimination is getting worse. Otherwise we might all go to sleep watching youTube videos, and wake up one morning finding that humans are finished, over, departed.

On Political Insults and Worse

In the last week the MSM cabal has been chiding President Trump for calling immigrants "animals." Actually, as far as I can  see, the president was  referring to members of MS-13 the Salvadorean criminal gang.

Hey Donny, what's the big deal? The US has had criminal immigrant gangs since whenever.

But really, lefties. Have you looked in a mirror lately? Your whole cultural and political operation right now is about insulting people that don't agree with you as "racists, sexists, homophobes." Not to mention liberal use of "alt-right hate groups" and the very worst thing in the world, apart from Nazis, "hate speech."

Now I would say that, compared with the lefty insults, President Trump's use of "animal" is mild and humane. After all, he is merely demoting the human crooks at MS-13 to the status of the non-self-conscious denizens of the animals kingdom: beasts and monsters. But our Democratic friends are declaring their opponents to be evil, not merely bestial. Of course, I realize that our lefty friends are generally not believers in God, so they cannot believe in the Devil. Or can they?

Of course they can. According to settled science, like the psychological school that descends from Carl Jung, all our religious and cultural memes are manifestations of our unconscious minds. On this view, it doesn't matter whether you call it Satan or monster, everyone still has a hatred and a fear of the threatening Unknown and Chaos. And they are not shy about pointing it out.

So liberals are frightened to death of President Trump. Of course they are. President Trump is threatening to upset their nice comfortable world of nice comfortable sinecures for liberals and activists as far as the eye can see. I mean! It is possible that the great research universities of North America might have to retrench just a teeny bit! Oh no! What will the tenure-track associate professors do then poor things?

Why, President Trump is even hacking away at the administrative state, the notion that all liberals should have a job telling middle-class deplorables to get lost and damn well bake that cake for a gay wedding or else.

And it doesn't hurt to call all these people haters and deplorables. Not if it saves just one liberal administrative state job.

What our liberal friends do not understand is that, according to German philosophy, for every thesis there is an antithesis, for every magnetic north pole there is a magnetic south pole. If liberals are moving the arc of history towards their notion of justice, sure as heck there will be people out there that experience the arc of history bending towards injustice. If the government and the culture are making life more comfortable for liberals then chances are they are making life less comfortable and more frightening for deplorables.

They do not understand that if liberals politicize everything with their noble and righteous political activism to promote justice and equality, which seeks to make political issues of anything and everything, and then use insults and pejoratives to demean and marginalize the opposition, then there is likely to arise a counter-political movement composed of people that experience the political activism of liberals as a direct attack on them and everything they hold dear. These people will find themselves a political champion to say and do the things that they are afraid to do on their own.

Really, this isn't that hard.

Really, the only thing we don't know is whether SpyGate, the incompetent deep state effort to trip up the Trump campaign in 2016 and cover up its illegal activities in 2017, will be the biggest political scandal in US history or whether it will all get covered up and smothered in a blanket.

Oh, silly me. Of course it will all get covered up and smothered in a blanket. If you want the biggest scandal in US history then you need MSM news-anchors day after day with eyebrows descending like thunder on the evil miscreants. And that ain't gonna happen.

And anyway, any criticism of the Obama administration and its minions is racism, straight up.