Direct Censorship, Reign of Terror

So, we've officially entered the Woke Reign of Terror, where you are not allowed to disagree with the regime. Curtis Yarvin:

As a student of history, I know what burden the System has taken on by this step. Such an escalation is a ratchet. Once you enter the mindset of the Eastern bloc and declare the revolution as a permanent axiom, which makes anyone who opposes or even doubts the revolution into a potentially violent criminal, there is no way back.

This "mode of direct censorship... works." But there is a problem. It takes a lot of energy. You gotta have your two minutes hate every day. Of course, you have to amp it up, as the French did, and the Bolsheviks did. The Jacobins guillotined their tens of thousands, the Bolsheviks executed and starved their tens of millions. And then the whole thing dies of exhaustion. I suppose that our Wok-eviks will just deplatform the top conservatives and Qanon guys and get thousands named and shamed and fired. And then one day it will die. Because, as Crane Brinton says in Anatomy of Revolution, people cannot live forever in the fever of revolution. And then comes the Thermidorean Reaction.

Because, you see, any regime that has to break the glass and go for direct censorship has admitted that their revolution has already failed. If things were really copacetic, and heaven on Earth were just around the corner, the regime wouldn't need censorship. The facts would speak for themselves with just a little nudge from regime supporters.

The whole thing also reminds us -- as if we need telling -- that the regime is actually scared of the Trump voters and the Commoners in general. Which means that, deep down, they know instinctively that they have visited monstrous injustice on the ordinary Commoners of America.

For the truth is that the Commoners, like the bourgeoisie, are not that interested in power. They just want to get on with their lives. Only, as Trotsky said, "you may not be interested in power, but power is interested in you." 

Now I would say that this is new. Back in the agricultural age there were more like just two classes: the landlords and the peasants; landlords had the power and peasants sucked up to power. The idea of people just going about their business, trusting trustworthy people, is new and revolutionary and utterly confusing to the people interested in power.

The question for our time is whether the Commoners that are not that interested in power can ever get a ruling class that respects them and lets them get on with their lives.

We know at least that the current ruling class down not respect us, and is damned if it will let us just live our lives in peace.

Democrats Shocked: Blair Kid to Intern with GOP

When Tony Blair’s kid Euan decided to try for an internship with Congress, where do you think he applied?
Like any ambitious kid, he applied to the “powerful” House Rules Committee. But why oh why
did the chip off the old New Labour block sign up with the eevil Republican majority committee staff?
Apparently the news has “stunned Democrats in Washington.”

But don’’t worry Dems.
Young Euan
is planning a stint on your side of the aisle in due course, before
he goes on to get an MBA at Harvard. Pop quiz. Who was the first US president to get an MBA from Harvard?

Why are Liberal Journalists like Muslims?

You’d expect that political philosopher
Mark Steyn
would have the answer and you would be right.

[Both] the U.S. media and
those wacky rioters in the Afghan-Pakistani hinterlands are very similar,
two highly parochial and monumentally self-absorbed tribes living in isolation from the rest of
the world and prone to fanatical irrational indestructible beliefs.

He is talking about the Koran flushing incident, of course. Did you know that it was a Pakistani
cricketer, the best bowler in the world, that started the flushing frenzy in Pakistan? Mark has more, much more.

The Democrats' Daunting Task

It's been great fun for the Democrats to spend the last four years damning President Trump and everything he stands for, but now they've caught the car they were chasing. And here's the problem. Well, here are a bunch of problems.

We need to boost the economy from the COVID depression. But we already spent all the money. Tax increases? Hmm. Back in 2009, after the Great Recession, President Obama passed a "stimulus" that mainly handed loot to Democratic constituencies. So I expect very slow growth for the next few years. Voters won't like that.

We need to reform the welfare state -- 30 years ago! I mean pensions, health care. Oh and welfare. I suspect Democrats have No Idea of the social cost of the administrative welfare state; all the conservative critiques have been brushed aside.

We need to put climate change on hold. Leave aside whether climate change really is a problem: all the plans to phase out fossil fuels will cause untold damage to the economy. Think Five Year Plan.

We need to stop the "systemic racism" canard. I get it: Democrats need to rile up their minority supporters to get them to the polls. And I get that politics is division. But in the end division ends in civil war.

We need to make the economy and the culture more "commoner friendly." That means making it easy for people to start businesses, with less regulations, and to revalue the commoner life of wiving, thriving, and childing over elite feminism and LGBT.

 Then there's education. The COVID time has taught us the eternal lesson of government bureaucracy: in the end the bureaucrats do nothing except pick up their pay and pensions. I say that politics must not define how people educate their children. We need a lot more informal education, from home schools to apprenticeships and internships, and a lot less supercalifragilistic-tenured-for-life-ism. What should education do? I don't know; I just think that most education reformers, from Horace Mann on down to James Conant, are fools and knaves.

Democrats think it is first-and-ten, with the opposing team ordered off the field for penalties. As John Hinderaker notes, Democrats think that both Trump and his policies are discredited:

Tax cuts? Discredited! An America-First foreign policy? Discredited! Enforcing the immigration laws, which is the president’s constitutional duty? Discredited! Stopping the China sellout? Discredited! Standing up to Russia? Discredited! Supporting the Israelis? Discredited! Cutting back on unproductive federal regulations? Discredited! Encouraging U.S. energy production and independence? Discredited! Objecting to political correctness and cancel culture? Discredited! Standing up for America as a positive force in world history? Discredited!

All the "discredited" policies are meat-and-drink to the globalist educated gentry: it's in the air they breathe. My judgement is that all those policies lead to trouble, and if the Democrats return to them they will create misery and mayhem -- for the American people and for themselves at the ballot box. 

Problem is that the elite, the educated gentry, don't pay for their mistakes: their errors, their crimes, their conceits. It's the ordinary schmuck that pays. That will never change, but it sure would be nice if ruling classes thought a bit about who-whom -- and not the way Lenin thought about it.

But why should I care? Even though I identify as a Commoner, I am really educated Gentry. And I'm sure the Democrats will take care of people like me.

Great Rebellion: It's All Wind... Or Is It?

Normally, when the peasants storm the palace, or the MAGAs storm the Capitol, the ruling class responds with repression, and I expect that our ruling class will do the same. Because the first rule of power is to use it.

Don't the peasants know that their only role in Capitol politics is to perform for The Hunger Games?

Curtis Yarvin is up before dawn to call the whole thing "pure wind," as in George Orwell:

Political language—and with variations, this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

Of course, I utterly deplore violence, including "mostly peaceful protests," but I have to say I enjoy the photo of the guy in Nancy Pelosi's office. It's telling, isn't it, that the two pieces that Google sent to my smartphone were the photo guy and a Slate piece saying that "Ted Cruz and his Pals" are to blame.

I must say that I appreciate the "tells." 

• That pretty well all the Republicans in Congress said, OK, that's it: we are done with Trump. 
• That Facebook has banned Trump until the end of his term. 
• That the MSM was outraged by the desecration of the nation's monument. Er, did you know that the Capitol was built, in part, with slave labor? (And did you know that the website of the Architect of the Capitol is "aoc.gov?" I kid you not.) 
• That everyone in the White House is resigning after the "attempted coup."

Reading between the lines it seems perfectly obvious to me that Trump is done. The ruling class is expelling the foreign object, and by January 20, it will all be over.

Except, I believe, the Great Rebellion is just getting started. It's odd, isn't it, that I should have wanted to start a new meme just two days ago, and that I would have decided on "Great Rebellion." And that the first thing I found was that Joel Kotkin had coined the meme four years ago. Yes, and the five "causes" of the Great Rebellion were "class conflict", "race and ethnicity", "geographic disparities", "nationalism and cultural identity", and "governance and localism."

And why? Because our ruling class has built its moral justification on the notion that it protects the lower classes against the "white oppressors," that it is the noble defender of the "traditionally marginalized" races and ethnicities, that its urbanist enclaves are the "Capitol" and the suburbs are the "Districts," that nationalism is bad but globalism and identity politics are good, that credentialed administrative governance is good but local yokels are bigoted hayseeds. 

And it's all "wind."

Because it is a lie is that the ordinary commoner middle class is a cabal of "white oppressors," that the ruling class has helped the traditionally marginalized rather than deracinate them into "human rubble," that urbanist enclaves work for anyone but the rich and the connected, that nationalism is evil, rather than the best "fake tribalism" going, and that centralized administrative government cannot work because experts.

I agree with Yarvin that storming the Capitol is an empty gesture, because of course the Capitol is not the real fortress of the ruling class. And I do not believe that a violent revolution is likely or that it would work. I say that the Age of Revolution is over, meaning that changing one ruling class for another solves nothing. And I also believe that the Age of Politics is over, meaning that we are not going to make things better with plundering the economy and divvying up the loot.

The Biden agenda is a "tell" on this. Climate Change and "systemic racism" are both ruling-class grifts, that give power and authority and perks to the ruling clique and the larger educated gentry. But what's in it for the ordinary American? Nothing. Indeed, less than nothing.

Honestly, I don't know where this is going, and what will come together after the whole thing is over and there is nothing left to do but compute the butcher's bill.

I just think there is an instinctive and unconscious Great Rebellion brewing. And our ruling class has literally No Idea what is coming next. Nor do you; nor do I.

Great Rebellion: Dems Have Actually Reversed Conservative Reforms

I was moving my old blog posts from 2005 - 2008 onto Google over the last few days, and one thing I noticed: since whenever, we conservatives had all kinds of good ideas for reforming the welfare state, from welfare to choice in education to making Social Security into a real savings program. 

Yeah. Good luck with all that. I saw an earnest piece by a young fellow from the Reason Foundation, Satya Marar, advocating for school choice. Yeah. Where has that gone in the last 15 years? Hey, today, union teachers don't think they have to teach -- while partying in the Caribbean -- because COVID.

Which is the point of all government bureaucracies, reducing the workload until all the bureaucrats are doing is having meetings to decide when the next meeting will be.

You would think that black voters in the non-functional inner-cities would be fit to be tied about the lousy schools. You would think. But actually, black voters look at the schools as a jobs program.

Remember how Obama reversed the conservative welfare reform of the Nineties? Thanks, Barack.

You would think that black voters would be fit to be tied about how welfare has devastated their communities over the last 50 years. You would think. But with the end of marriage, what's a single mom gonna do?

And now the Soros prosecutors and Defund the Police movements are reversing the "broken windows" policing that pulled New York City murders down from about 2,000 a year to 600 a year.

You would think that black voters in the inner cities would be fit to be tied about lawlessness and murders, since they are predominantly black-on-black. You would think. But they don't dare, because "snitches get stitches."

Actually, I classify liberal programs into three categories:

Left's Crimes. I'd say race politics is the top of the list. Defund the Police.

Left's Errors. I'd say Social Security. Imagine if ordinary Americans saved their own money for retirement.

Left's Conceits. That's recycling, electric cars, bike paths, organic food. 

So here's the Biden plan. We are going to keep all the entitlement programs, which can't be afforded. And then we are going to pile extra spending on climate change, including no doubt mandatory electric cars and sky-high fuel prices.

Oh, and after 50 years of quotas, Affirmative Action, and "diversity" now we are going to indict the entire white working class as "white oppressors" and go full steam ahead on "systemic racism."

You would think that our liberal friends, with their passion for equality -- and "equality hurts no-one" according to a yard-sign at the top of liberal Phinney Ridge here in Seattle -- would hate and despise all gubmint programs that treat people unequally, especially since race is a social construction.

What with the Democrats winning the two Georgia Senate seats in the runoff, I think it is fair to say that whatever we racists-sexists-homophobes have been doing over the last 50 years, it hasn't been working.

Well, whatever the road back to equality and respect -- because if there is one thing that is absolutely clear, it is that Democrats don't think they need to respect Republicans and white working-class whites -- it has to start with the average deplorable refusing to cower before the race card.

I don't know how to do that, but I am sure that there are thousands of political geniuses that do.

And it all has to start with the idea that, to coin a phrase, we are mad as hell and we are not going to take it any more.

In other words, a Great Rebellion.

The "Great Rebellion" of the Ordinary Commoners

Joel Kotkin called it four and a half years ago in The Daily Beast: "Why The World Is Rebelling Against 'Experts'." Said he, in July 2016:

The Great Rebellion is on and where it leads nobody knows.

Its expressions range from Brexit to the Trump phenomena and includes neo-nationalist and unconventional insurgent movement around the world. It shares no single leader, party or ideology. Its very incoherence, combined with the blindness of its elite opposition, has made it hard for the established parties across what’s left of the democratic world to contain it.

Kotkin identified five different causes feeding the Great Rebellion:

Class Conflict: as in, upper class for Remain, everyone else for Brexit.

Race and Ethnicity: as in, "Ethnic minorities and immigrants have now become core constituents of progressive parties in many countries."

Geographic Disparities: as in "a chasm between the metropolitan core and the rest of the country."

Nationalism and Cultural Identity: as in, "historic values are also being undermined, as universities and even grade schools seek to replace cherished values with post-modernist, politically correct formulations." 

Governance and Localism: as in, the upper class "increasingly see themselves as rightful rulers, the benighted masses be damned."

 Does he nail it, or does he nail it?

In the US, it seems to me, the Great Rebellion started with the stolen election of 1960, when the commoner-born Richard Nixon was defeated by the shenanigans of Richard Daley in Chicago and Lyndon Johnson in Texas.

It continued with the election of Richard Nixon in 1968 and the identification of the "Silent Majority" by Vice President Agnew and the campaign against the "nattering nabobs of negativism." But Nixon was put down in 1974 for lèse majesté -- against the special people.

Then we had the election of the commoner-born Ronald Reagan in 1980. Reagan was so successful that the establishment George Bush inherited his crown, and the liberal Bill Clinton had to run as a New Democrat in 1992. And when Clinton governed as an Old Democrat he lost Congress to the Republicans for the first time in 40 years.

But Bill Clinton only won because Ross Perot, running as a populist, divided the Republican presidential vote.

Things were quiet for a while, especially when George W. Bush rallied Americans to the "nation" after 9/11. So the Great Rebellion was quiet until the radical-liberal Barack Obama was elected. His election catalyzed the Tea Party that flourished in 2009-10 and gave the Republicans the House in 2010. But Obama saw the Tea Party as a threat to reelection and so Little Lois Lerner at the IRS worked diligently to prevent Tea Party entities from registering as non-profit organizations. 

Starting in 2015 we have the Trump phenomenon, first taken as a joke by the ruling class, and then as an insult. So the ruling class has spent the last four years discrediting and obstructing President Trump and his championing of the nation and the commoner.

For now, the ruling class has beaten back the populist-nationalist rebellion. To Be Continued.

Joel Kotkin also had a piece on "The Middle-Class Rebellion" in late 2019. He identifies "energy and housing prices, which threaten to “proletarianize” the living standards of the not long ago decently comfortable."

In the United States, among children born in 1940, about 90 percent grew up to experience higher incomes than their parents, according to researchers at the Equality of Opportunity Project; that dropped to only 50 percent among those born in the 1980s.

Housing prices are notably excessive in Hong Kong, and urbanist locations like "Sydney, Vancouver, London, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles." The upper-class urbanist movement thinks, erroneously, that higher urban density will lower carbon emissions. It makes it hard for ordinary commoners to buy houses on the urban periphery.

And then the ordinary commoners get hit by the climate change grift.

The high energy costs derive from zealous climate change politics claiming that any energy source outside solar and wind are inherently dangerous to the health of the planet... This dogmatism underlies efforts by government planners to raise the price of fuel in order to reduce consumption and force people onto transit.

Kotkin reckons that middle-income unrest -- the Great Rebellion -- "will continue worsen as long as policy makers, and the private sector, ignore the basic needs and aspirations of the majority population."

When you look at the Five Causes up above, and the effect on ordinary people, of sky-high housing and energy prices, you would think that some enterprising politician would be able to build a movement, a Great Rebellion against an unjust ruling class that believes the "benighted masses be damned."

Stay tuned.