LGBTQ is a Bigger Problem Than I Thought

Up until yesterday I had thought that the LGBT cult was marginal, with about 3% of adults "identifying" as gay or lesbian, and 0.5 percent identifying as transgender.

But now the Audacious Epigone says that the numbers for millennials, Americans under 30 from a Reuters-Ipsos poll, are much higher. As in:

	Ident. LBGTQ+
White men	12.0%
Black men	11.4%
Hispanic men	15.0%
Asian men	12.4%
Jewish men	18.3%
White women	16.9%
Black women	20.4%
Hispanic women	20.0%
Asian women	13.9%
Jewish women	25.2%

All I can say is Oy. This is foolishness on an intergalactic scale.

Oh, I get it. These youngsters are doing what they have been carefully taught. Just as my baby-boom generation was carefully fed a menu of drugs, sex, and rock-and-roll, today's young'uns are being carefully taught the ins and outs of non-binary heterosexual genderology.

And I get why. Getting creative about sex is the easiest way to get creative, if you self-identify as a Person of the Creative Self according to my reductive Three Peoples theory.

And non-binary genderology fits the left's desire to re-classify the human experience as one of oppression-marginalization. Therefore supposed minorities -- or those counted as The Wretched of the Earth -- are to be honored and celebrated, and used as a weapon against the white married-with-children middle class.

Thus, the college-educated urban white LBGTQ people -- the upper class if anyone is -- are to be considered helpless victims and given license to lord it over Christians and the white working class, among others.

Can you spell injustice?

Of course, but don't forget that the nice educated liberals you know have absolutely no idea about how their world view is a monstrous blight upon our society.

It is not just the 100 million dead as a result of socialism. It is the millions of the working class that were taught to hate their middle-class bosses, and to stay becalmed in the subordinate working class instead of learning the culture of the middle class and responsibility.

And it is the left that has taught the working class to hate the middle class.

Then there are the black Americans that have been taught to wallow in victimhood, imagining a racist white cabal determined to do them down. Forgetting that the whole point of the Jim Crow South was to force the private sector to discriminate against blacks. Oh and the Davis-Bacon Act. The dirty little secret? Eevil capitalists don't really care much about race; they just want to buy low and sell high.

And it is the left that has taught black Americans to hate white Americans.

Then there are women that are taught that abortion and careers are the very summit of feminine liberation, and that the confusion they feel about sex and marriage and children is an artifact of the eevil patriarchy. Alas, this is going to get worse before it gets better.

And it is the left that has taught women to hate men.

And what about LGBT? In my youth in Britain I understood completely that gays were upper-class poofters. That is what the enlightened left taught the young skulls full of mush back in the day. Thus Brideshead Revisited. Now, gays are not corrupted upper-class twits, any more, but helpless victims! Who knew? And who cared?

And it is the left that teaches LBGTQ+ to hate straights.

Look, I get it. Politics is division, and that means that every politician is trying to line up 51% of the voters on his side and use the remaining 49% as a punching bag. When you are a white-guy conservative like me you understand the need of our lefty friends to cover us with hate. When you are a politician you gin up hate wherever you can find it. And doubtless the reason that liberals are beside themselves about Trump is that Trump is dog-whistling that liberals are not your friend, America: how dare he!

But to me the overriding truth about life, the universe, and everything, apart from the importance of grandchildren, is that you never want to become the Little Darling of the ruling class.

Here's a piece in The Intercept mourning how blacks in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, have had their community blown to bits by the closing of the A.O. Smith factory on West Hopkins Street. And how Democrats have done nothing about it.

Well, in my view, the problem starts with the whole idea of lifetime union jobs. Because nothing lasts forever. Thus, the more you prop up some class of voters with special privileges -- like pro-union legislation that legitimizes restraints against trade and pushes wages above the market -- then the nastier the crash will be when the market changes and the world moves on.

Trump is promising to Make America Great Again. But whatever folks in the old Rust Belt think, Trump is not going to bring back lifetime union jobs at good wages and guaranteed pensions. That whole promise of union jobs as good wages was a lie, and gave workers a false sense of security.

Just as much a lie as the notion that Affirmative Action would raise blacks out of their marginalized state. Or that diversity and inclusion will transform the lives of women. Or that gay marriage will transform the lives of gays.

I like to say, at the ripe old age of 72, that the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, is: grandchildren.

If that statement does not bring forth a chuckle in you, dear Reader, then you don't get it. Not at all.

And if you don't think that 25% of Jewish women millennials identifying as LGBTQ+ is a problem, I gotta bridge to sell you. Cheap.

So, Are the Jews Now "Us" or "Them"?

With the resolution passed in the House of Representatives Thursday opposing all "hate" (except hate on white nationalists) -- but not censoring the anti-semitism of Rep. Ihlan Omar -- the question for conservatives is whether Jews in America are for us or against us.

If you read alt-right chappies like Christopher DeGroot and Vox Day, the answer is no. Jewish Americans want the US tied to defense of Israel; Jews will never assimilate into one-hundred-percent Americans.

No doubt. Or maybe in politics there are no permanent friends or permanent enemies: only permanent interests. If Jews have been chucked out of the Democratic Party, because black and Muslim anti-semitism, do we deplorables refuse to give them succor when they show up as refugees at our camp of the "haters"?

All I can say is that I am a sucker for a chap like the American Spectator's Dov Fischer, an orthodox Jewish laywer who 'splains it all by tribalism: It takes a trauma for people to abandon the political party -- or the sports team -- of their ancestors.

Anyway, people in politics are looking for protection, and when you first arrive in America that protection is your ethnic group, and the left has made book out of that going back to Marx offering protection to the working class.

Back in the day Jews in America felt threatened by the WASP elite, so they naturally voted for Democrats, that represented all the groups that felt threatened by the established middle class.

Just like the white working class that back in the day was Irish, Italian, Polish, even German ethnics that felt threatened by the snobs that came over on the Mayflower.

It took 50 years for the white working class to realize that the Democrats did not care for people like them and for a presidential candidate to connect with them.

Now it's the turn of the Jews. I know some young Jews that were implying to me that they would vote Republican if it weren't for the Bible-thumpers. Hey, I don't know: if it comes to a choice between the Bible-thumpers and the Koran-thumpers -- not to mention the Torah-thumpers -- what's a girl to do?

Yes, but won't the Jews turn on "us" like they did when they helped power the left from 1850 to 1950? Maybe. But right now it looks like it is whites against the Democratic Coalition of the Fringes, and the Fringes are making it perfectly clear in Congress, from the Black Caucus to the Muslims and the young progressives, that Jews are not welcome in today's Democratic Party. Nor, Nance my dear, are white Italian Catholics.

So I'd say that when Vox Day writes that, in due course, the Jews will find themselves unwelcome in both the US and UK and will have to emigrate, I say it doesn't matter. Right now Jews are going to be making common cause with middle-class whites in the US and UK, and that is good enough for me.

Look, I'm not that enamored of the politics of the white working class, because, for my taste, the white working class has far too much faith in big-government entitlements. But the fact is that middle-class conservatives like me are, willy-nilly, in the same boat with the white working class. So it makes sense that we should all pull our oars together.

Look, I feel the pain of the white working class. My Little Darlings notion says that if you become the Little Darling of the ruling class, you are like any draftee in an army. You don't get to decide when to demobilize and go home. The way the world works is that, at some point, the power interest of the ruling class no longer includes you. So the ruling class just abandons you. Sorry Doreen, the sex was great, but now...

So the white working class Little Darlings got left by the side of the road and reviled as deplorables, and now it looks like Jewish Little Darlings get left by the side of the road as well.

OK. So let's all us deplorables get together and see if we can't make a little political music together. You never know, it could end up as a beautiful friendship.

Why Government Can't Be Trusted With Entitlements

The iconic job of governments is to fight wars of national defense. It's a short term thing, and the government commandeers all the resources of the nation, by taxation, inflation, debt to fight the war.

Then the war is over and the nation is saddled with the debt and the taxes and the inflated money supply. Time, as they used to say, for retrenchment.

But now government uses the tools of national mobilization to give seniors pensions and health care, to educate youngsters, and to relieve the poor.

I say this is wrong: morally, epistemologically, and logically. It is especially wrong to inflate the currency and increase the debt to pay for current programs.

First, the moral objection. The care of ageing parents is the responsibility of children. It is a moral horror to shift the burden of caring for the aged onto other peoples' children. It is a moral horror for middle-class people to shift the relief of the poor onto government functionaries. We should be relieving the poor and making the age-old distinction between the deserving poor and the undeserving poor as iconically represented by the drunkard dustman Alfred P. Doolittle. It is a moral horror to have government functionaries educating children in government child-custodial facilities. Instead, children should be educated by their parents in a collective effort among all the neighborhood parents -- and that usually means the neighborhood mothers.

OK, maybe we could have a government program to educate the children of illiterate parents, although I would much prefer the approach of the Catholic Church, and other voluntary approaches that might even include the assistance of billionaires.

Government is force. Are we moderns so depraved that we will not look after our ageing parents or relieve the poor or educate our children unless under the lash of government compulsion? I hope not.

Then there is the mal-appropriation of financial instruments for use by government. For instance, debt in the private sector is the loan of money usually backed by the commitment of collateral in case of failure to pay. Thus a car loan or a home mortgage is guaranteed by the use of the car or home as collateral. The car or home is seized by the creditor in case of non-payment. In the case of corporate debt, the bondholders have the power, specified in the bond covenant, to seize corporate assets in the case of failure to service the loan.

But this is impossible in the case of a government. For government is sovereign; it pays what it chooses, and the devil take the hindmost. Of course, it is usually foolish of a government not to pay on its obligations. But plenty of governments get away with it.

The basic situation of government is that it bets the nation as collateral when it runs up government debt. This makes sense in the case of a war, except that the government should really issue equity rather than debt to finance wars. But if you look at the US's federal debt, now north of $22 trillion, it is really playing poker with our money. Hey, I got your money, sucker! What yer goin' to do about it?

All these entitlement programs are also wrong from a logical standpoint. Governments cannot legally bind themselves -- or the entitlement beneficiaries -- the way that the law allows for private pensions and health care. In other words, if I sign up for a private pension scheme I have a contractual obligation with the corporation offering the scheme, and that puts burdens both on me and the corporation. What happens if I can't make the payments in the future? What happens if there is a great recession? What happens if the climate changes? What happens is that my pension provider and I make prudent adjustments to our mutual obligations. And the one thing that cannot be guaranteed is a fixed pension thirty years into the future. But government? It can change the law any time it wants. Thus every government entitlement program is not what it advertises, a "social insurance" program. It is simply government paying off its supporters with the cover of decent draperies. And, of course, with future pensions and health care "guaranteed" to the voters, the whole thing depends on the ability of the government to apply force in future years to make good its promises.

It really is astonishing how much faith people have in government. I suppose it is a faith in force, a natural human instinct to solve intractable problems by the magic of binding other people to obligations to look after us, and to punish them if they offend us.

I just want us to be better than that.

Solving the National Debt Problem

What are we going to do about the National Debt? Right now, the US Federal Debt is about 100 percent of GDP. Back before the Crash of 2008 it was about 60 percent of GDP.

And that's not really the whole story, because Social Security and Medicare have unfunded liabilities estimated at $50 trillion on up. $50 trillion is about 250 percent of GDP right now.

And then, bless her heart, AOC wants to spend $90 trillion on the Green New Deal; that's 450 percent of GDP.

Actually, national debt at over 100 percent of GDP is not that scandalous. US Federal Debt went up to 120 percent in World War II.

And then it went down.

The Brits took their national debt above 250 percent of GDP twice. The first time was at the end of the Napoleonic Wars; the second time was at the end of World War II. No problem -- if you win the war!

Running the federal debt up to 120 percent of GDP in World War II worked because the US ruling class of the the 1940s decided to go fight the war, and then after the war inflated and/or ran surpluses until they got the debt down. The ruling class was more or less united on all this, so The People didn't really have a voice as to whether they wanted to go to war, or whether in the aftermath they wanted more spending on programs or to drive down the debt as a percent of GDP. The ruling class decided for them.

But, in the 1970s, the ruling class split. The lefty side had started the Great Society in the 1960s to use government spending on programs and wanted that to continue, and the righty side wanted to cut tax rates but knew they could never persuade the American people to cut spending. It's been that way ever since.

Then we had the generational financial Crash of 2008, when the federal debt doubled as a percent of GDP. If you read books like This Time is Different by Reinhart and Rogoff they will tell you that this doubling of national debt in in the aftermath of an economic meltdown is typical.

But what do we do about the debt? I argue that if the ruling class is united it will pay down the national debt. If it is divided then it won't.

This makes sense, because if a united ruling class keeps the debt down then they keep the people fat and happy. But if the ruling class is divided and things start to go wrong, as they might when the state's finances are stressed by high levels of government debt, then there is always the possibility of revolution and riots in the streets.

Not good. For the ruling class or anyone else.

But why is the ruling class divided today? It is divided because one part of the ruling class has supporters that expect rewards in the form of government spending, and because another part of the ruling class has supporters that expect rewards in the form of tax cuts. And right now there is a standoff.

So really, the debt problem is really a symptom of a bigger problem, that the American people are divided on the question of spending and taxes. And really there is no solution until the rubber hits the road in inflation and/or debt default. That's because no red-blooded American right now is about to agree to cuts in spending on his Social Security or her Medicare. And no Republican can run for president without promising tax cuts.

So it will have to get worse, so that people have bigger things to worry about than their government checks or their tax bill.

Only then will our ruling class "do something" about the debt.

But note this: The Canadian Liberal government Did Something about the debt in the 1990s -- and got shut out of power for a couple of decades. The German Social Democratic government liberalized labor-market rules in the 2000s, and the SDP is now close to being the third largest party in Germany.

If you do the right thing, the voters will probably punish you at the ballot box. But at least you did the right thing.

Lefty Politics is One Way Politics

Apart from its out-of-this-world foolishness, the thing that strikes me about the Green New Deal is its simple-minded focus on The Future.

But what about life in the present, greenies? How about we fix a few things right here in the Present before we blunder into the Future?

Let's see. The latest guesstimate on the cost of the Green New Deal is something north of $90 trillion. With 2018 GDP at $20 trillion, that means that the Green New Deal is going to cost almost 5 times the current GDP.

Hey, GNDers, before we spend 5x GDPs on the Green New Deal, how about we fix a few programs here at home?

I mean, Social Security and Medicare have a $50 trillion unfunded liability. At least. Then there is the wasteland of K-12 government education. How about we Do Something about that before saving the planet? For the Children.

But that is the curious nature of millennial cults. They do not give a thought for life down here on Earth. They direct the attention of their members to the Heavenly Future. Indeed, anyone that dares take a backward glance better watch out.

It seems to me that this Accentuate the Positive, Eliminate the Negative approach to life is necessary when you are sending people out to get killed, as just before a battle. You need this if you are Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt. You need it if you are preaching to the dullards on the Sawdust Trail. You need it when you are Gen. Patton giving a pep talk to the troops before the race to the Rhine.

You need it when you back is up against the wall. And obviously, if we humans are programmed to respond to the Call to Arms, the instinct is there for a reason.

That is why the climate change movement presents the issue of climate in apocalyptic terms. Because if our backs are not against the wall, if a degree or two of warming is not catastrophic, then we can all go about our business, and what will the climate-istas do then poor things?

OK. I know. They will gin up some other crisis for which We Must Act Now!

Every generation of the left is selling some version of the existential crisis for which We Must Act Now and for which we must give up our freedom, because The Cause.

But most of life is not the Do or Die breakout of a cornered rat. Most of life is social, dealing with other people, and the key thing about that, as Kevin Williamson writes, is trust.

Who do you trust? Even if you are just, like Kevin, looking for a dog-sitter for your dachshund. I mean, you are not just giving up your house keys to anyone!

One of the key developments of the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years is the expansion of trust beyond "people who are related to us, who are known to us, and who are demographically similar to us." In fact today we are perfectly happy to trust strangers as long as they pay with a credit card, or have a high star rating on Ebay or Uber.

This expansion of trust, that we all take for granted, is astonishing and miraculous.

Notice that our politician friends are in the business of drawing lines where trust is concerned. You can't trust the Commies, for one side, and you can't trust Trump, on the other side. You need to teach people not to trust Commies if you are going to wage a Cold War; you need to paint Donald Trump as a racist hater if you want to keep your liberal base all riled up.

So I look upon lefty activists that want to enlist us in their eternal moral equivalents of war as One Way people. There is only One Truth. One Way: Our Way. And anyone that thinks different is evil, a racist sexist homophobe and a hater.

I get it, that in the old days, when each human community was a tribe or a village of the kindred, the only people to trust were close blood relatives. And the community had to be ready to arm up in an instant to repel the young men from the neighboring tribe or village if they decided on a dawn raid on our village.

But if you can expand trust, and teach everyone that trust can work for them, then you can get to USA today, where people routinely trust strangers and deal pleasantly with everyone they meet, and we are all rich beyond the dreams of avarice of kings and emperors.

But the activists can still teach us to hate each other on election day. And they probably always will.

We Must Understand that the Left is a Group of Religious Cults

Back in the day the Founders made it clear that their constitutional framework was designed to deal with "faction," the natural and tribal instinct for humans to divide into factions and squabble with each other. Says Jay Cost:

As Madison argued, the purpose of a “well constructed Union” is to “break and control the violence of faction.” Our political system is currently less capable of this than Madison wanted.

Of course this implies that chaps like Madison get to make the rules and have the moral stature to preside over the factions and setting the rules so that their ability to cause damage is reduced to a dull roar.

Madison & Co. were living in the aftermath of the "religious wars" between Protestantism and Catholicism that were suspended by the spirit of the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. We could say, I suppose, that the ruling class of the time had developed some sort of a gentleman's agreement that they would not rile up their factions with the nuclear fuel of religious fanaticism, and instead would act together to soften the hard edges of factional conflict.

But then the whole thing blew up in the fanaticism of the French Revolution. This was a new departure, because the New Fanaticism was not strictly religious, a battle between religious sects, but the fanaticism of a secular political faction, the Jacobins, that was battling against:_ what exactly? The ancien régime? the Girondist moderates? You tell me. And, at the height of the Reign of Terror, the Jacobins had turned the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris into a Temple of Reason. So, was the Jacobin terror the eruption of a religious cult devoted to the worship of Reason?

And then, with Marx and Engels a new secular religion was born, Socialism. What has to be understood is that socialism was not then and is not now merely a "faction." It is a religion, whose devotees are committed to bringing heaven on earth with the creation of the society of true equality.

So when former Vice President Joe Biden called Vice President Mike Pence "a good guy," Jay Cost gets to mourn that he was quickly corrected by an LGBT activist, actress Cynthia Nixon, of the TV show Sex and the City.

Of course he was, because the left's various groups are not "factions" in the sense understood by Madison and the founders but secular religious cults. Each of them professes a "true religion" in the sense that Voltaire took apart in his critique of Pascal's Pensées in his Letters on England. Obviously, if the gay movement is a "true religion" then there can be no compromise with a faithful Christian like Mike Pence, the guy famous for never dining with a woman alone.

Or rather, the fact that gay activists treat practical politician Mike Pence as Satan himself tells us that gays are not a political faction but a religious cult.

This point is crucial. If the post-WWII conservative movement has failed, and I think it has, the reason is that it treated the left as an opposing political faction and not a religious movement pursuing a saving truth.

It doesn't end there. In "Pigs on Two Legs Turn on Each Other" Victor Davis Hanson comments on lesbian tennis great Martina Navratilova getting reamed for objecting to transgenders competing in women's sports.

Navratilova had the temerity to suggest that one’s sex is biologically determined. In other words, transgenderism, even with the imprimatur of the social and biological sciences, cannot trump our innate genetic codes.

That is the way with religious cults. When each is possessed of the saving truth, it stands to reason that the cult next door is flat-out wrong, and should be damned to hell when its error-riddled orthodoxy conflicts with my saving truth.

The reason that the Progressives of a century ago advanced their notion of a "living Constitution" was that the Founders' notion of "faction" as the playground fights of schoolchildren to be judiciously put down by the adults in the room was no longer accepted by the new ruling class.

The ruling class of the Progressive era, like our ruling class today, believed in the ability of politics to bring on a just society, not just to legislate against injustice when and if it reared its ugly head. Politics was not just a necessary evil, but a vehicle for a better society. As William James proposed in his landmark essay announcing the end of war in 1906, we would now need to base our politics on "The Moral Equivalent of War."

Well, Bill old chap, the moral equivalent of war is the mashup of religion and politics. That's what the Thirty Years War was all about, and that is what the Jacobins were all about, and that is what the Bolshevik Revolution was all about. One hundred million dead, old chap.

The fundamental thing that we normals must understand is that the Left is not a political faction. It is a congeries of secular religious sects, for each of whom their secular religious faith is a matter of life and death.

Wouldn't it be fun if the reprobate Donald Trump is the guy to puncture the left's hot-air balloon of secular religious bigotry and hate.

Everyone Wants to Legislate Morality

Back in the day, liberals opposed middle-class morality by opposing the notion of legislators "legislating morality." Today they are busily legislating their own morality, as in born-alive abortion bills in the liberal states, and non-gendered bathrooms, and diversity and inclusion.

The truth is that all government and all legislation amounts to "legislating morality," even laws against murder. The whole point of morality, and of laws, and of human society, is to replace the rule of power with the rule of law. And law inevitably borrows from somebody's notion of good and evil.

Back in the day, the Roman paterfamilias, the patriarch of the Roman family, had the right to rule all members of his family and his slaves, up to and including the death penalty. And in the feudal era the feudal lord dispensed justice to his serfs. A real feudal potentate could dispense all three of the high, middle, and low justice. But as time went by the state interposed itself between the family and the individual family members, and between feudal lord and the individual, and took away the powers of the patriarch. You will notice that the state today does not permit family members to imprison another member they consider to have committed a crime against the family. Only the state can do that.

The question is not whether we legislate morality but who gets to do it. The American idea of no establishment of religion is a modest attempt to avoid having one agent, the state church, with the sole power defining the morality to be used in legislation. But that is not the worst case. The worst case is what we call totalitarianism, where all power, religious and political, is concentrated in the government.

Many people in our society think they have risen above a narrow view of legislating morality by opposing gender roles and strict rules about sexual activity and imagine that they are therefore enlightened and liberated.

But, in fact, the removal of rules creates a danger that power will rule. Did the sexual revolution liberate the sexes, or does it pressure young women to agree to sex and submit to sexual harassment in the workplace? I would argue that the current #MeToo movement is a movement of women that want society to reimpose rules about sex and punish men that violate the rules. Do abortion laws liberate women from unwanted children, or do they help men pressure women into submitting to sex in the first place and "getting rid of it" later?

Does the abolition of gender roles liberate women to work in the workplace, or does it force women out of the home into the workplace who would prefer to live as wives and mothers? I would argue from my reductive Three Peoples theory that while People of the Creative Self want a world in which individuals can chart their own life courses the People of the Responsible Self want clear rules about what to do and what not to do. So who gets to set the rules? And can rules be set so that both people can choose which philosophy to follow?

There is a way, that if you are a creative person you join the church of creativity, a community of people that believe that people should choose their roles and not be forced into rigid gender and life roles. If you are a rules person then you join a modestly strict Christian church where the members all believe in following Biblical morality. But you will notice that there is always a temptation for liberals to enforce their world view on the deplorables, and a similar temptation for Christians to anathematize non-Christian world views. This would require the state to relax its rules and allow intermediary institutions to enforce rules upon their members.

Liberals luridly imagine a dystopia where everyone is forced into fundamentalist Christian morality in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Deplorables imagine a dystopia where everyone lives in a liberal arts college and is named and shamed for any discouraging word about race, gender, and LGBT.

Everyone lives in fear of being bullied around by someone else legislating morality and lives in anticipation of people like them living free as air when their own true morality is universally accepted and applied.  But the fact is that the whole point of human society is to soften the hardness of power into the softness of rules that even the powerful have to observe.

There is a name for this taming of the powerful: the legislation of morality.