Saying the Unsayable on Race and Slavery and Police

As the Zman writes this week, “The thing that white people never quite get about black people is black people, especially the talented tenth, obsess over their blackness.” Especially if they work for The New York Times.

See, white people don’t usually get paid to write about their whiteness, don’t really think too much about their whiteness. But blacks… You get the point.

Now, I just take it as given that the lefty obsession with race as well as the black obsession with blackness must be part of the whole lefty program of the Great Reaction, the lurch back to the primitive. Or rather, now I think about it, a staged re-enactment of the primitive: LARPing the good old days.

That, I think, is my takeaway from the classic -- and mostly indigestible-- Autumn of the Middle Ages by John Huizinga. The elite upper-class were in the middle of converting from root’n toot’n medieval warlords into good, well-behaved courtiers to the emerging absolute monarchs. So they really loved the tournaments and medieval romances that gave them a nostalgic look back to the good old days when knights were bold and damsels were in distress.

But now I am in the middle of The Broken Spell by Pieter Spierenburg, another Dutch historian, and he seems to get the modern age completely. First of all, in the old days, a thousand years ago, almost all people in Europe lived in a "household" of masters, servants, and slaves, in which both production and consumption were combined; people lived almost entirely within the boundaries of their household. Today, households are merely units of joint consumption. Production takes place elsewhere, so people have to go out into the larger world, away from the protection of their household and deal with the world out there.

Secondly, there is the question of security. A thousand years ago Europe was “stateless.” That means that safety and security of individuals were managed by the patriarchs, heads of households and kinship groups. A wrong was righted by vengeance and vendetta. But with the formation of states in the pre-industrial period, “pacification” occurred.

Violence and supreme rule were monopolized [by the state], which generally facilitated an increase in restraints upon the violent inclinations and the emotions of individual persons… Eventually this resulted to a certain extent in a society free from violence, except for the relations among states.

Notice that when security is enforced by the household or the kinship group people tend to confine their economic and social activity within the household. But when it becomes society-wide then people interact economically and socially with a much broader range of people, as white people do in America. Because they feel safe. Why, it’s so safe that people can elect a woman to be their mayor and appoint a woman to be police chief, as in nice safe Seattle.

But that chap who’s the capo di tutti capi in Seattle’s CHAZ. He is a man.

We see this safety and pacification process work itself out after the industrial revolution in the story of the American city. Ethnic groups arrive in the US and settle in ethnic ghettos, often protected by an ethnic criminal gang. Only after they learn the ropes of life in the good old USA do they emerge from under the protection of their ethnic “household” into the wider world.

Now, I propose that it is shameful to be an ethnic group locked up in its ghetto; it means they are not yet up to snuff. When people are screaming “racism” and “discrimination” they are admitting that they are inferior, afraid to submit themselves to the judgement of the rest of society. And the problem is compounded when well-born liberal activists advocate for them with convenient insults, like the meme-of-the-week, “systemic racism.”

And that, I think, is the meaning of Candace Owen’s recent George Floyd video. As an American, she is ashamed of her fellow blacks that are afraid to come out into the broader society.

Hey, let’s have a slavery minute! Back in the jolly old Roman Empire, Spierenburg writes, when slaves were plentiful, the Roman patriarchs kept them in barracks and wouldn’t allow them to marry. But when the slave supply dried up, the Romans started to think it was OK for slaves to marry and have families. Hey, they even started to let them live in individual housing rather than barracks. 

Now, my take on the end of slavery in the industrial world is that the eevil capitalists decided that free labor is more profitable than slave labor. I wonder if even Stalin might now agree about that.

But here's the point. If the "pacified" societies of state regimes reduce the need for patriarchs managing the safety of the women and children, then isn't the city police a Good Thing? Because it permits women, especially, to venture out beyond the protection of their lords and masters and husbands into the public square, confident that the police are out there to make them safe.

Of course, the police are a problem if you are an unpacified minority young man that has not yet acquired the skills to thrive in the city economy and if you are a young man that still adheres to the old pre-city culture of vendetta and vengeance. For instance, the notion of "dissing" in black male culture is obviously a pre-city cultural thing, of men whose reputation in the world is not what they can do for you -- which is what a man in the city is all about -- but what they can do to you -- as a warrior on the border of the household's territory.

Are you thinking right now about the contradiction in the world view of our lefty friends? On the one hand they are utterly against eevil patriarchs and toxic masculinity, the culture of the the pre-state world when the patriarch protected you from the baddies. On the other hand they are against the police forces that pacify the city and make it safe for women and soy boys to live and work and move about the city.

So which is it, lefties?

Yes, Let's Have a Talk about Slavery

Since we are all in the middle of being carefully taught to hate the 400 years of slavery and oppression suffered by African Americans, let us just review a curious tale of slavery, in the naval novel, The Privateersman, by Captain Marryat.

Captain Marryat, all you wokies will know because you are all so well-read, is the chap that invented the naval novel genre, that we now enjoy with Patrick O'Brien and a host of others. Marryat was an actual naval officer during the Napoleonic Wars and served under Lord Cochrane, the inspiration for all the heroes of O'Brien and the others.

In The Privateersman, our hero works for a shipowner in Liverpool -- a port that you scholars will know was a notorious slave port. The shipowner, father of the most perfect girl in the world, used to make lots of money in the slaving line, but now prefers the less abominable trade of privateering.

Privateering, all you scholars will know, was a second-tier thing in the Napoleonic Wars, where ship captains with "letters of marque" were licensed to prey on the King's enemies for loot and plunder.

Our hero is the captain on a couple of privateering voyages but then, partly influenced by the daughter, he tells his boss that he's not going to go a-privateering again.

One thing leads to another, and he goes down to West Africa and gets captured by West Africans and made a slave -- to the lovely concubine of a West African chief. But eventually the Brits come and free him.

Then he makes another trip to West Africa, this time to trade goods -- for gold dust and elephant tusks -- but one thing leads to another and his ship gets taken over by a villainous Portuguese who puts him in irons and exchanges the tusks for slaves. When the ship arrives in Brazil with its African slaves, our hero gets imprisoned and sent as a white slave for life to the Brazilian diamond mines.

Hmm. I wonder what Captain Marryat means by that.

One thing leads to another and our hero gets freed after a couple of years, and sets sail in a xebeque for North America, on the way home to Britain and the most perfect girl in the world. But the ship gets wrecked on the coast of North America and our hero gets captured by Indians and forced to marry an ugly old Indian squaw.

One thing leads to another and our hero escapes and presents himself at a small tobacco plantation in the wilderness run by a six-foot woman and two indentured servants, criminals branded on their hands, and forced to work as virtual slaves. She decides she wants to marry him and puts him in chains until he agrees. Well, but soon enough the Indians attack their log cabin and set fire to it. But our hero manages to escape in all the smoke.

One thing leads to another and our hero climbs on board a pirate ship, and is more or less forced to become a crew member because if he didn't agree to become a pirate the crew would kill him.

But one thing leads to another and the pirate ship gets captured by a Royal Navy ship, that just happens to be commanded by our hero´s younger brother. Everything ends happily ever after, including getting the most perfect girl in the world.

Now I don't know exactly what Captain Marryat was trying to say, but I'd guess that he was trying to make the point, in 1846, that there was a whole lot of slavery going on back in the day. And just about everyone was doing it, from Liverpool merchants to West African chiefs to Portuguese colonial regimes to native Americans to white women running tobacco farms in tidewater America. And anyone could be taken into slavery. For the rest of their natural life.

Now, I'm bound to admit that the slavery of African slaves on North American plantations was a particularly villainous kind of slavery, because the capitalist plantation owners made it pay, as capitalists are wont to do. Usually, slavery was a muddle, a sign of status, rather than profit, for you either were a slave or you owned slaves. Back in the day.

But soon enough lots of people, including many of the most perfect girls in the world, got to feeling that slavery wasn't really Christian. Even William Wilberforce, the son of a merchant in Hull, England, agreed.

Well, one thing led to another, and the Americans of 1860 decided to have a war over it.

Then one thing led to another and the socialists of the world decided to give slavery another try in the two biggest slave states in history. Guess which states I am talking about.

Then our progressive friends decided to go half way to slavery with neo-feudal welfare states in which about 40 percent of peoples' incomes are extracted from them by force for the ruling class to give out as free stuff to the supporters of the progressive regime.

I wonder what our progressive friends will come up with next. In the slavery and feudal line.

To Be Continued.

Insurrection in Seattle

Well, well, well. The AntiFas and wokies have taken over a six block area of wokey Capitol Hill in Seattle, the place where all the 20-somethings in artistical black live.

And the first thing that happens is they erect barricades. Otherwise known as a border wall. Imagine if Trump...

And the first thing their police force does is rough up a guy doing an unapproved "tag." Imagine if the Seattle Police Department...

Well. 

I called my Seattle city councilman this morning, axing what his 5-point Plan was to end the insurrection. I suggested to his voice mail, as an example of tough action, the Clinton-era attack on the Branch Davidian compound that, I believe, resulted in the whole compound of the religious cult being burned to the ground and several Branch Davidians and federales being killed. It all started when the Bureau of Tobacco and firearms came to get the guns of the cultists.

So. They came for their guns and the followers of David Koresh said, out of my cold dead hands. Thank goodness there wasn't a Republican president at the time or everyone would have thrown themselves on the ground wailing and gnashing their teeth at the end of "our democracy."

Since I'm a mere 5 miles from the center of insurrection, you might think I am concerned, and I am, of course, because you never know.

But maybe we need this, because, as Edmund Burke said, "Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other." Borders. No kidding. Police doing a bit of the rough stuff. No kidding.

This is the sort of thing that President Trump is rather good at addressing, and I dare say he will when he addresses the Republican National Convention and gets on the road again with his Trump rallies.

The point is that the educated left in this country are ignorant idiots. They, in the words of Ben Rhodes, literally know nothing.

Here they are returning the nation back to vigilante justice, justice by vengeance rather than bureaucratic law and order and police restrained by actual laws and rules.

Here they are returning to naming and shaming and shunning, as practiced down the ages by the women, and latterly in church communities and their "dis-fellowshipping." Oh and by the Kidz in Mao's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

Here they are, proposing to "defund the police" and spend the money on social programs. Oh please. Don't you idiots realize that the social programs are the problem?

The problem, dear liberals, is that you are trying to combine your religion, the religion of woke equality and justice, with the prosaic system of law and order, which tries not to take a position on the question of "the meaning of life" but merely to remove some of the primitive cultural practices like outgroup hate and vengeance with police and law courts.

The point about police and law is not that they are morally superior, but that they remove the older practices that we colloquially refer to as "the Hatfields and the McCoys."

The point about the separation of church and state is the idea to separate the search for meaning from the prosaic question of keeping the peace in the city.

And there's another question, that appears in black and white to me, as a profound sexist. A lot of the naming and shaming and canceling is being done by women. I believe this is because naming and shaming is part of the women's instinctive community culture, the way that women have interacted since the dawn of women living close to their mother-in-laws.

I am here to say that I don't think this women's cancel culture works in the so-called "public square" of the modern world.

Put it this way. Just as men have had to modify their instinctive male honor code from vengeance and the duel to merely insulting each other in public forums -- limited in places like the House of Commons and Congress by rules against insult -- so women need to civilize their culture of name and shame, of "I can't believe she said that" and getting the other women on your side against the neighborhood woman that offended you.

Right now our wokie women and the nice liberal ladies have No Idea that their Culture of Complaint is a problem. No Idea.

And I don't know how we are going to educate them and the SJW kidz educated in our lefty seminaries, except by the Burkean concept of the School of Example.

The whole purpose of knowledge, of course, is to limit, at least in part, the brutal lessons of the School of Example.

Meanwhile Long Live the Revolution of the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone!

Dennis Prager Itemizes My Great Reaction

Dennis Prager recently put out a piece "The Four Horsemen of America's Apocalypse." That is:

1. Victimhood: "People who think of themselves as victims feel that, having been victimized, they are no longer bound by normal moral conventions -- especially the moral conventions of their alleged or real oppressors.
2. Demonization: "demonizing a group as inherently evil."
3. A Cause to Believe In: "The need for meaning is the greatest human need after the need for food. Leftism, with all its offshoots -- feminism, environmentalism, Black Lives Matter, antifa -- has filled that vacuum."
4. Lies: "Lies are the root of evil."

Of course, I interpret this through the lens of my Great Reaction idea. That the left is a lurch back to the primitive.

Thus, of course the left deals in victimhood. As I keep quoting, from Mircea Eliade in The Myth of the Eternal Return.

The primitive... cannot conceive of an unprovoked suffering; it arises from a personal fault... or from his neighbor's malevolence... but there is always a fault at the bottom of it[.]

Right. So the troubles of the poor are all the fault of the corporations, or the whites, or something. For Hitler, the poor suffering Germans were the victims of the Jews. "There is always a fault at the bottom of it."

Thus, of course the left deals in demonization. This goes back to the notion of the scapegoat that was given a recent push by René Girard. The point of the scapegoat is to unite the community and put all of its divisions and arguments on a single person or group and then banish them from the community.

Thus, of course the left comes up with a succession of causes, socialism, feminism, climate change: a cause to believe in. We all are tormented by the need to know the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything." That is what religion -- and science -- are all about. They are an effort to try and figure out what the heck is going on in this town, this world, this solar system, this galaxy, this universe.

Notice how the boundary of the Will to Know keeps expanding. Used to be that people were really concerned about the spirits in the local trees. Then they started worrying about the moon and the sun and the stars that revolved across the sky. Then they started worrying about the Sun as the center of the solar system. Then the Sun as just a medium star in the galaxy. Then galaxies in a universe of galaxies.

I predict that one day we will be worrying about a universe, or multiverse, or something, bigger than our current Big Bang created universe.

Thus, of course the left deals in lies. Because the lie is the shortcut to the truth. In truth, the truth is unknowable, or at least unfathomable. And all religions, philosophies, cultures, narratives are a shortcut to the truth. All of them, therefore, are lies. The only response is the classic line of Oliver Cromwell: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken," that all knowledge, all ideas, all everything is incomplete, less than the truth. And that the beginning of wisdom is to understand that, deep in your bowels.

Now I maintain that the modern age is an astonishing miracle, that has repressed -- in the sense of Schopenhauer and Freud -- the basic primitive instincts that Dennis Prager listed. The point is that we can't have our larger society, our market economy, our multicultural cities, unless people repress their basic human instincts, to think that "someone is to blame," to want to punish the scapegoat, to believe, to jump to a cheap explanation that justifies your action.

But, you would expect, our ascent from the dusty plain to the current heights would not be without incident and setback. And, as new-age philosopher Ken Wilber has written, when things go wrong we regress to our old ways and consciousness. Of course we do. If our new ideas seem to falter we go back to what is old and familiar.

And that is why we have the left. Because there is a constant nagging feeling that in all our progress and modernity we have lost something, something that we imagine we used to have in the old community. Thus the left's nostalgia for the solidarity of olden days. Only, of course, life then was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

And you tell me why the left, that imagines itself a movement of rebellion against the injustices and repressions and intolerance of the modern age, is so devoted to political power and fault and vengeance.

It could be because they are idiots.

Gee, Why Would These Folks Be Rebelling, Liberals?

Yesterday I was bemoaning how politicians only know politics, and politics is always about loot and plunder: vote for me and you will get free stuff.

But then I read this Joel Kotkin piece in American Mind: "The Rebellion of America's New Underclass," and it nicely illustrates the problem.

I mean the problem of the "unanticipated consequences" of political loot and plunder.

Kotkin notes that the young are the particular victims of the current economic lockdown:

• "Many young people, including college graduates, are now often employed in these low-wage ['personal contact'] industries.
• "privileged...  radicals... putting into action the political indoctrination they imbibed in college and, increasingly, even earlier."
• "the end of a remarkable period which saw, first, the ascendency of the middle class and then, particularly after World War II, the steady improvement of conditions for the working class."
• "urban renaissance... at the cost of 'the deprivation, frustration and anger of those who are becoming the new urban serfs.΅
• "Particularly impacted, first by lockdowns and then by the riots, have been urban small business owners."
• "Particularly vulnerable are the two thirds between 25 and 32 who lack a 4-year college degree."
• "Yet even educated youth now suffer consistently lower wages than their counterparts from previous generations"

And of course what these young people want is loot. As offered by Bernie Sanders and so forth.

Gosh! Now this couldn't be the fault of our ruling class, could it?

It couldn't be that college has become ridiculously expensive, powered by student loans that have absolutely no connection with marketable skills?

It couldn't be that a lot of kids are kept in school when maybe they could be doing better by working in apprenticeships at low wages building up skills.

It couldn't be that the importation of low-wage furriners has the double effect of pricing student-debt-loaded Americans out of the job market while providing serf labor for big business, because H1B-type workers cannot easily change jobs, like the agricultural serfs of old.

It couldn't be because of tons of occupational licensing that serves to prop up the old guys and keep out the young competitors.

It couldn't be because of the substantial taxation on labor with various payroll taxes that can add 30 percent to the lost of labor.

It couldn't be because of minimum-wage laws that prevent youngsters without connections from getting a start in the labor market (while rich kids get to do unpaid internships).

It couldn't be because of complicated zoning laws and the expensive development process that obviously privileges existing developers against new entrants.

It couldn't be because the whole education system is a government loot-and-plunder operation privileging government workers and resistant to change and reform.

It couldn't be because energy is getting more expensive as electric utilities are forced to load up on expensive and unreliable and subsidized "renewable"energy.

It couldn't be because the current welfare system discourages the two-parent family and encourages young lower-class women to have children without benefit of father, so that in the white underclass, at least, the men don't work much and the women don't marry much.

It couldn't be because liberals have been teaching the lower classes for over a century to believe in themselves as victims rather than get on the Road to the Middle Class and learn the ways and the skills of the city.

"Only by restoring broad upward mobility can we hope to maintain a healthy democratic society", writes Joel Kotkin.

But he really doesn't have a clue. The way to restore upward mobility is to prevent the established -- government union workers to licensed physicians to Social Security recipients -- from taxing and looting the youngsters.

And all the "it couldn't be"s that I have listed above, or almost all, derive from the left and its religious faith in the power of government programs to "bend the arc of history towards justice."

No! The great lesson of the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years is that it was always a surprise. Nobody saw it coming, not machine textiles, not steam power from coal, not oil from under the ground, not even Amazon and its on-line marketplace.

I mean. Who among us bought Amazon stock the day it went public in 1997 at $1.97 per share (in today's shares)? Today Amazon is at $2,618 per share. So, suppose you bought $5,000 of Amazon on a flyer in 1997? Today it would be worth $6.6 million.

But who among us ever imagined Amazon would end up like this? I certainly didn't. Hey, I bought books on Amazon, but never imagined what it could become, now with a fleet of 80 aircraft delivering goods!

But that's my point. The whole of the last 200 years of astonishing economic growth has been on the backs of the Amazon of the day, that nobody saw coming.

And that means that, Rule One is: nobody has a clue. 

Especially politicians. Especially activists. Especially journalists. Especially professors. Especially nice liberal ladies with social moralizing yard-signs out front.

Now. Who amongst us is going to go first and tell the liberal Emperor he has no clothes?

The Only Thing That Politics Knows is Loot and Plunder

Back in the riots of the 1960s and 1970s guess what the radicals demanded? Less money on police and more money on school lunches and social services.

So now what do the radicals want? To defund the police and spend the money of social services and minority communities.

What is going on here?

I will tell you. If you are in politics the only thing you know is loot and plunder. That is what politics is about and what it has always been about since the dawn of dawn raids.

So the politician cannot see further than selling the notion that the other guys are screwing us and now we are going to screw them back.

By the way, in the City of Seattle, for 2017, the last year with data from the Census Bureau, police cost $200 million out of a total $3.75 billion in spending. Guess what the biggest item is? It is $1.1 billion for "Fuel and Energy" which comes mainly from the municipal Seattle City Light. 

Hey, I know wokies! Why not privatize and sell off City Light! Think of the proceeds that you can spend on lefty wish lists! But of course, that would never occur to you.

Back in the Sixties, as now, the residents of the inner cities resented that the rich folks looked down on them.

This has been the story of big city politics since the middle of the 19th century. The Irish were looked down upon as "shanty Irish" until they made their way into the middle class as "lace-curtain Irish." Jews that started immigrating after the 1905 pogroms were considered dumb, until they started knocking on the doors of Harvard, and the gentlemen at Harvard decided that the pushy smart Jewish kids weren't gentlemanly enough. Italians were notorious gangsters, until they got into the middle class and Frank Rizzo became mayor of Philadelphia on a law-and-order platform.

When an ethnic group first arrives in the city it feels like the whole world is out to get it. But then, slowly, inch by inch, it claws its way into the middle class, getting education and skills and learning how to interface and live with the market economy, which doesn't care about your ethnicity, not much, as long as you are trustworthy and deliver.

But there is a way to slow this process down. You can give a group of workers monopoly privileges working in a labor union in a large corporation. Then they'll think it's their bargaining power that has given them prosperity, rather than their skills and the innovation of their employer. You can give them welfare and free lunches and funnel money to them through community activist groups. Then they'll think that political power is the name of the game. And, as happened after the Great Society, the men won't work much and the women won't marry much.

Wrong idea. What gets people to be accepted as ordinary citizens is that they submit to the city's market economy and learn how to wive and thrive according to its rules. Then they find that it doesn't matter who looks down on them. They got their job, they got their family, they got their savings, and they got their respect.

Now, my notion with the Great Reaction is that liberal and lefty politics is a lurch back to the primitive, replacing market trust with fear, law with vengeance, and so on.

And I believe that the left's encouragement of resentment and class politics is one of the great crimes of the age. Because the one thing to learn, when you get to the city, is to forget your tribal resentments and your fear of the tribe next door, but to plunge into the market culture of trust and service.

And I believe, with my Little Darlings theory, that leftist politics is all about leftist power, not about helping the downtrodden. Leftist politics is all about finding the latest oppressed group and enticing that group into political followership with the prospect of loot and plunder. Because lefties understand only political power; they are utterly ignorant of the settled science that shows how and why we live in the Great Enrichment that has raised real per-capita income by 30 times in the last two hundred years.

But, I always say, to make the cultural adjustment to the market economy culture is the hardest thing in the world to do, because humans are programmed to mistrust the tribe next door, because the tribe next door represents a competitor for their food growing territory. Who knew that the way to prosper was to offer your services on the open market and to trust anyone that acts trustworthy?

But alas for the folks in the looted areas, their businesses destroyed, their hopes dashed. Because the lesson of the Sixties Riot era is that the riot areas never come back. See Detroit and Newark.

Riots and Mayhem: Be of Good Cheer

As Crane Brinton writes in Anatomy of Revolution, the normal cycle of a revolution is that the moderates get ejected by the extremists -- because revolution fails to realize the hopes of the extremists -- and then the extremists get ejected by the Thermidorean Reaction. That's because humans can't live forever in the white heat of religious frenzy.

As Festinger et al write in When Prophecy Fails, the failure of the prophecy (in this case abduction of the faithful by UFO aliens) does not end the religious cult that has formed around a religious prophecy. The cultists go for broke when the prophecy fails, looking for ways in which they failed to interpret the prophecy properly. Only later does the prophetic cult disintegrate as members start to fall away.

As Nietzsche writes, particularly in The Will to Power, when a god dies, as in his God is Dead notion, what follows is a period of decadence -- of cultural dying -- followed by nihilism, meaning that people experience life as meaningless, followed by the eternal recurrence, where life seems to be a constant recycling of meaninglessness, as in the movie Groundhog Day. But then a new age dawns with the revaluation of values, where a new god arises to comfort the believers.

As new age philosopher Ken Wilber relates, using his multi-level theory of consciousness, when things fall apart people regress from their current level of consciousness to the next lower level of consciousness. E.g., fascism, where people regress, when things aren't working, from a citizen consciousness appropriate for the city to a tribal consciousness appropriate for a people under siege.

And right now I am reading the classic Autumn of the Middle Ages by Johan Huizinga. It's about the thuggish lords and princes in love with tales of knightly derring do as soldiers for Christ saving damsels in distress. And elaborate court ritual. And the semi-polytheistic cults of the saints. Things weren't working, and people -- that is to say the ruling class -- really didn't have a clue.

Well, imagine you are a good educated Gentry liberal living in a good Gentry liberal city like Minneapolis or Seattle. How is it possible for racist sexist white policemen to be kneeing the necks of helpless victim minorities? It must be a malevolent influence. Maybe white supremacists!

Or, you might ask, how come a 48-year-old career criminal with fentanyl and methamphetamine in his blood gets to cash a fake $20 bill in today's America? What's wrong with us? (Yeah, I know, who's this "us" Kemosabe?)

Or, you might ask, how come that "peaceful protests" attended by earnest young Gentry liberal students become the occasion for organized gangs of looters driving SUVs up to high-end stores selling name-brand luxury goods?

Would you believe me when I say that all this mayhem represents the "failure of prophecy" of the Gentry liberal cult that believes in the saving of society by educated experts and/or activists that will assuredly bend the arc of history towards justice?

That the idea of beneficial legislation handing out loot, first to the working class, then to blacks and minorities -- and even gentry women and gays! -- does not solve any problems? Because the problem of the working class in the 19th century and the former slaves in the 20th century was that they had not yet learned the code of the city, how to become responsible citizens with marketable skills and a reputation for trustworthiness.

That the idea of the administrative and regulatory state, staffed by educated experts in the latest settled science, is a non-starter because life is much more complicated and conditional than is possible for administrative experts to direct from government offices.

That the idea of educated Gentry imposing their woke religious beliefs on the bigoted deplorables and firing them from their jobs for Badthink is a non-starter because, as the Founders declared in their wisdom, there should be no state establishment of religion. Yes, and in our modern era, dear Gentry liberals, that includes so-called "secular religions" like social justice. Do you know why the Founders put the thingy about no establishment of religion into the constitution, liberals? It's because they were still smarting from the religious wars of the 17th century, and figured that the government should confine itself to basic questions of life and death and mayhem in the streets and not arcane questions of morality.

So I am saying that we are in a Reign of Terror and Virtue, rather like the French Revolution, because the arc of history isn't bending fast enough for our liberal masters.

I am saying that liberals are experiencing a "failure of prophecy" right now and are reaching desperately to make the prophecy come true before it crashes to the ground in failure.

I am saying that we are about to experience the moment when the liberal god dies and a period of decadence and nihilism takes over as the former believers blunder around looking for a new god.

I am saying that liberals are going backwards, in a Great Reaction, trying to find meaning in the jumble of archetypes in the basement, now that their exalted higher consciousness seems to be failing them.

I am saying that the liberal Activism Culture is a dead end, because we do not need revolution, or a stage version, because the problem is liberals themselves, not some imagined patriarchy or white supremacy.

I am saying that liberals are leading their helpless victims up a blind canyon and the victims will crash into the canyon wall as other Little Darlings of the liberals have already done.

And the best thing that can happen in America is for liberals to become demoralized by their manifest failures and take their hands off the controls of the ship of state!

And then we can all get back to work and working together and building trust in reciprocal trusting relationships.