Charles Murray's Last Broadside "Facing Reality"

Way back in the 1990s Charles Murray was the second tier in Herrnstein and Murray on The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life.

The point of any Bell Curve is that if you measure anything about humans in a human community, most people will cluster towards the average, with less and less people as you get away from the average. Thus, there are a ton of people with average intelligence, a few with above-average and below intelligence, and only one or two complete geniuses and one or two complete idiots.

Herrnstein and Murray "noticed" that humans are not all alike. In particular different "races" have different "bell curves" where intelligence is concerned. And, given that, as we now say, "experts agreed" that jobs in the modern economy were increasingly requiring cognitive skills rather than manual skills, that could result in a bit of a cock-up on the race front, because blacks present a bell curve on intelligence shifted quite a bit to the left -- i.e. lower -- when compared to whites.

La Wik: "Murray's work has been and remains highly controversial."

Er, no, Wikkie. His work is only controversial to liberals and lefties, because it drives a stake into the heart of their belief system, and they can't deal with that. Because safetyism.

You can see why liberals jumped all over The Bell Curve at the time. Their religion said that humans were equal, and that any inequalities between person and person and between black and white were due to discrimination. But if Herrnstein and Murray were right then we would never get to a perfect world where the racial breakdown of everyone from CEOs to garbage workers would match the racial percentages in the nation.

So Charles Murray had to be racist-racist-racist and sent to the academic equivalent of Outer Slobbovia.

Murray's response, ten years later in Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, was to show that if you purged race out of his Bell Curve prophecy -- and racistly only racistly analyzed racist whites -- the argument about cognitive skills still applied. In today's America the white cognitive elite, with degrees and credentials and careers up the ying-yang, are doing fine. The white commoners in the middle are doing so-so, and the white underclass, the bottom 30 percent, are really sucking air: the men don't work much and the women don't marry much.

The liberal response to Coming Apart was basically not to respond.

But you will notice that liberals today are basically conceding Murray's point. Today's liberals say that IQ tests are racist. And they say that whites do better in school and life because of "white privilege" or, failing that, because of "systemic racism." Rather than admit that, not surprisingly, people with different backgrounds, different origins, different genetic inheritances (i.e., race) have different capabilities, as common sense would suggest, they say that it's all a conspiracy of white males since the dawn of time.

So why do East Asians have the highest IQs in America? Huh? White privilege? Mandarin classism?

So now lefties are saying that teaching the classics of Greece and Rome is racist. And getting coverage in The New York Times. Mind you, I am all in favor of increasing the teaching of the classics of South and East Asia. We systemic racists might learn something from them.

Anyway, Charles Murray, now age 78, is publishing one last broadside, Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America. It looks like he is taking the bull by the horns. Or double-shotting his guns, etc. From the blurb at Amazon:

The charges of white privilege and systemic racism that are tearing the country apart fIoat free of reality. Two known facts, long since documented beyond reasonable doubt, need to be brought into the open and incorporated into the way we think about public policy: American whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians have different violent crime rates and different means and distributions of cognitive ability.

I.e., The Bell Curve, dummy.

You did know, didn't you, that East Asians have a higher average IQ than Jews have a higher average IQ than "whites" have a higher average IQ than "Blacks." But race is a social construct.

My theory is that average IQ is a measure of the time that a particular cultural group has been literate. And, of course, literacy parallels involvement in Axial Age religion and commerce. I suspect that East Asian elites -- mandarins -- and South Asian elites -- Brahmins -- have the longest experience of literacy. So they are the most intelligent. Not exactly rocket science.

Only, recent immigrants from Ghana and Nigeria apparently have higher IQs that native American Blacks. Could that be a benefit of Brit colonialism compared to All-American plantation slavery and Jim Crow and unionized public education? You tell me.

I tell you what I really think. I think that our liberal friends are half way into an intellectual collapse. They don't study history and philosophy and politics and economics any more, because if they did they would face irreconcilable differences with their lefty secular religion. Case in point, Jan Psaki challenging a reporter's question on the $15 an hour minimum wage. But the CBO says that increasing the minimum wage would cost up to 1.4 million jobs. This is not rocket science. But I'll bet that a whole generation of Democratic political activists have just steered away from ever dealing with the question. So that they literally know nothing.

The reason that elite scions went to college back in the day, and studied the classics, was because the ruling class wanted their young sprouts to know how the political power game was played back in the day. They figured the young'uns would learn something. When young scions of the ruling class don't learn all that hard stuff they remain ignorant of the nuts and bolts of ruling.

Here is something from Ben Stein about recently deceased George Schultz that I didn't know.

When he was secretary of State under the great Ronald Reagan, Eretz Israel was struggling with intense inflation. Secretary of State [Schultz] sent my father [Herb Stein], along with a super smart economist named Stanley Fischer, to Israel to help.

After many meetings with top Israeli officials, Pop and Dr. Fischer created a plan (kindly called the Stein Plan), to reestablish a new Israeli Shekel backed by the United States. The plan worked like a charm. Even now Israelis — thanks to Secretary Shultz — consider the Stein Plan salvation.

See what I mean? Those clueless lefties running Israel back then Literally Had No Clue about a functioning monetary policy. But the knowledge of How to Do It was right there, if only someone had opened an economic textbook. Only, if your entire leadership had been to activism school rather than economics school, well, then you need to send Herb Stein over there to teach 'em how to do it. You get the point.

And I suspect that the same is true about all the swamp creatures in the Biden administration. Only, the lefty geniuses that rule us would rather die than take advice from a conservative economist.

Dueling Three Layers: Allyism vs. Americanism

I was doing an American Thinker piece about my brilliant notion of "fake tribalism," that all tribes and tribalisms are fake because humans didn't develop tribes until they started living in villages/towns of 2,500+ inhabitants.

One of my present obsessions is the Allyism notion of "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors." It comes from a piece by Matt Taibbi "On White Fragility" where he takes down Robin DiAngelo's megahit On White Fragility. He writes, of progressive ideology:

It sees the human being as locked into one of three categories: members of oppressed groups, allies, and white oppressors.

You can see that this is all about the epidemic of virtue-signaling in our ruling class. We rulers are the Allies, les chevaliers sans peur et sans reproche. We are so special it makes your head spin. But, of course, it is all a lie. Let us count the ways.

Members of oppressed groups. Yes but just how oppressed are the oppressed groups? Compared to conquest slaves captured in West Africa? Compared to Brits captured by Vikings in 1000AD and sold in the slave market in Dublin? Just what are the roadblocks to any human in America that sticks around for an average public school education and gets some sort of a skill? Oh yeah! Credential laws that discriminate against new entrants; high payroll taxes on wages; mortgage subsidies that benefit existing homeowners and boost house prices for aspiring oppressed groups; minimum wage laws; anti-gig economy laws. I could go on.

Allies. Just who are the allies helping? Are they really helping oppressed groups by encouraging them to gather in identity politics enclaves? My line is that the best thing you can do for minorities is to teach them the skills and the culture of middle-class life, as per my Road to the Middle Class. But, in fact, the policy of our ruling class for the last century has been to lure the "oppressed groups" off the road to the middle class and into the brambles of free stuff and subordination. And how much of being an Ally means getting Jobs for Gentry in government regulating business and doing climate change?

White Oppressors. Just who are these white oppressors? Tech billionaires? Heavens no! @jack and the Zuck are Allies, censoring "far-right" conservatives on social media and donating hundreds of billions towards getting out the Democratic vote. Good old Jeff Bezos has rescued the liberal Washington Post from oblivion. Are they Trump Car Parade enthusiasts? Really? And how much power does a Ford F-150 driver have to oppress oppressed groups? OK, not much. So how about Ford F-350 drivers. Boy, there are guys with more money than sense!

Pretty obviously the whole Allyism thing is a fake doctrine intended to make ruling-class activists feel good about themselves. But, let us not forget Nassim Nicholas Taleb's dictum enshrined in my Maxims:

Never virtue-signal; never rent-seek; you must start a business.

Hey Allies! Allies? Anybody there?

Now my Americanism retort to the Allyism is short and sweet. There are Americans, known to each other as 'Muricans; there are Emerging Americans, not quite ready to fly the Trump flag. Then there are Anti-Americans, who are above the commoner culture of Americanism. Shall we go into more detail? I think we should.

Americans. Today’s America is the greatest country in the world, and the American people are the best people in the world. Most of us are straight-up Americans: we go to work, we obey the law, we follow the rules. And we thrive in the best country in the world. Go ’Muricans! 

Emerging Americans. Some Americans, the “Emerging Americans,” are not so sure about America. They have heard tell that the suburbs of America are teeming with racists and sexists, human werewolves and the like, that wish them harm. But we Americans say to the Emerging Americans: come on in: the water’s fine and the membership is open to all that came here legally.

Anti-Americans. Hoo boy. They Anti-Americans hate America; they despise ordinary Americans -- on a good day -- as “bitter-clingers” and “deplorables.” On an average day they are inventing corrupt Jobs for Gentry programs like climate change, the great reset, critical race theory and 1619 Projects. On a bad day they hate ordinary Americans as racist-sexist-homophobes. And they lie to Emerging Americans, telling them that they are doomed unless they hunker down in their identity-politics enclaves. So there you have it: the Anti-American politics of Hate and The Big Lie. Why, that is Literally Hitler!

Of course all these Three Layer theories are absurdly simplified rubbish. Or are they?

I would just say that Three Layer theories -- my prize collection is here -- are the minimum social theory that makes any sense. If you say that all humans are alike, you learn nothing. If you advance to a two layer theory, then it becomes Us vs. Them, which has use only for the War of All Against All. If you go beyond three layers to multi-layer theories like Piaget and Wilber, you lose your general audience and appeal only to obsessional people like me.

Yep. Good old Americanism. What's not to like?

We Can't Go Away and Hide in our Little Platoons

We humans naturally prefer our own kind, for "man is by nature a tribal creature," writes Robert Stacy McCain, approving of Burke's "little platoons."

How, then, has this principle of group loyalty become so wickedly warped, and turned into a weapon destructive of all social order, by the contemporary practice of progressive identity politics? Why is tribalism in America now asserting itself in such toxic and ferocious ways?

Actually, I would say that all group loyalty has been "wickedly warped" since, well, since humans started to live in communities bigger than "Dunbar's number" of about 150 people. La Wik:

Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships—relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person.

I am relying on the anthropological writings of C.R. Hallpike. In his How We Got Here he argues that hunter-gatherers were pretty relaxed about tribe. They were pretty individualistic, except about sharing food. And they would change from one "band" to another without much fuss.

According to Hallpike, humans didn't start getting really tribal until they started living in village of 2,500+ people.

I take Hallpike's ideas and propose that all modern tribes are "fake tribes," gussied up to unite people against a real or perceived threat. Read La Wik on "Clans" and tell me what you think about clans, bands, and tribes.

So I say that all modern tribalism is "fake tribalism," whether tribalism of religion, of class, of nation, of race, of tribe or clan or band, of occupation, of level of education. All fake. All tribes, all identities, all groups are artificial, using the natural groupishness of humans for a political purpose.

Here is an example of what I mean. America's "Blacks" -- once "black" and then "African American" -- are descended from a whole bunch of tribes in western Africa. Each individual Black got enslaved by some tribal incident of conquest slavery and then sold to a white European slave trader. Yet now, we are told by our betters, all Blacks belong to one race -- except that race is a social construction. Anyway, if you disagree with any American liberal on race you are a "racist." Barack Obama, son of a white mother and a well-born East African, is America's First Black President.

Obviously the invention of "fake tribalism" is the most important thing since sliced bread. Or before sliced bread.

But when McCain proposes that we check out of the crazy world of "victims" and "oppressors" and "get through the week, pay our bills... by clinging to those 'little platoons,'" and when Jackie Gingrich Cushman says our problems must be "conquered in a bipartisan way," I say fuggetaboutit.

All politics is "fake tribalism." All religion is "fake tribalism." All culture is "fake tribalism." There is no checking out of the game and going back to your "little platoon." If you want to be a "man in the arena" then you are a player in the "fake tribalism" game.

There is only one way forward: to create a "fake tribalism" that is better and nobler and more popular than the left's "fake tribalism" of race, of gender, of identity politics, of "allyism." And let it be said right here that Donald Trump's MAGA movement, based on the idea of America as a nation and the American people as one American people, was the first shot fired in developing this new -- better, nobler, popular -- "fake tribalism," No wonder our liberal friends want to kill it in its cradle.

The question is: on what principle do we raise our banner? Our liberal friends have based everything on the concept of victimhood. Whether it was the industrial workers of the nineteenth century or the unemployed of the 1930s, or blacks suffering under Jim Crow, or women from an eternity of patriarchy, or gays suffering from ages of homophobia -- did you know that Edward II of England was gay? -- or oppressed peoples in general suffering under white oppressors but for the heroic "allies:" it's all about the victims.

And about the "fake victims." I buy slaves as victims; I buy blacks under Jim Crow as victims. But post 1965 Civil Rights Act? Well-born educated feminists as innocent victims? Well-born gays as innocent victims? Ahem.

There is, I think, an eternal temptation to don the mantle of "innocence." I say that it is almost universal that small minorities use a "culture of innocence" to maintain tribal unity. But that is not for us; innocence is for the Garden of Eden, not for life in this vale of tears.

I don't think the victims narrative works for us. And the reason is quite simple. We middle-class Americans are Commoners, what I call, in my reductive Three Peoples theory: People of the Responsible Self. Responsible people cannot be victims.

I think it is pretty obvious what works. We need to base our politics on the "fake tribe" of nation, and the "fake tribe" of the middle-class Commoner, responsibly getting a job, getting married, raising a family, and providing for our own.

And we must stop apologizing. A good start would be Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). Every Republican and every American Commoner should be saying: "hey Dems: come and talk to us when you have dealt with the poisonous racists and sexists and anti-semites in your own party. Period."

President Trump fired the first shot heard across America. It is up to us and to a new generation of politicians and culture warriors to continue the fight.

And that means having the zingers ready when the liberals come with their pejoratives. Such as this on the accusation of systemic racism.

So, pal, what is it about the Civil Rights Acts you don't understand? It is illegal in the United States to discriminate on the basis of race. So, if you see discrimination, report it to the police. Don't complain to me. I ain't the system. You are.

And so on. I was talking to a nice liberal lady the other day and she talked about race as a social construction. So what is 23andme.com all about, I asked? Profits, she said. Oh yeah, I said, of course. Silly me.

What is about America as the best country in the history of the world, and the American people as the best people in the history of the world that our liberal friends don't get?

What a Surprise: EU Flunks Vaccine Rollout

Even the ruling-class media are "shocked" about the EU's failure to get COVD vaccine out to the plebs. Says Breitbart:

The European Union appears to be haemorrhaging goodwill over its botched handling of coronavirus vaccine procurement, as reliably pro-Brussels outlets line up to criticise the leadership of the bloc in the strongest terms.

Or, as they would have said on the Reginald Perrin show, "a bit of a cock-up on the vaccination front."

The point is that when you have any bureaucracy you are going to get cascading incompetence. Because.

Because a bureaucracy is a top-down thing; like a modern army, it is designed to execute the will of the leader, all the way down the chain of command to the young chaps on the front line who will likely lose their lives executing on the power agenda of the chappie up at the top.

The only way a bureaucracy -- or an army -- can correct itself is in the aftermath of a big cock-up or defeat in battle. It's the only time that the leader gets feedback from the front line. Indeed, the whole point of an army or a bureaucracy is to limit feedback. After all, the general of the army can't exactly be too sensitive to the complaints of the squaddies on the front line saying that "hey, general, if we do that we are all going to get killed."

My line is that, apart from the existential response to barbarians on the border, the bureaucratic method is not a very good idea, exactly because it is purpose-designed to be non-responsive.

Compare bureaucracy to the market. The market is responding to new information all the time. Most of the information is true, and acting in response to the information will serve the consumers and increase profits. Some of the information is false, and acting in response to the false information will not serve the consumers.

The point is that nobody knows, in advance, which information is true, and which is false. But it all comes out in the wash.

But a bureaucracy -- or a clerical oligarchy -- is top-down all the way, and so it finds it almost impossible to correct errors until after a disaster. And, as Curtis Yarvin writes, the whole point of being a clerk in a bureaucracy is to avoid making decisions, because any decision might end up as a mistake that goes into your record and prevents any further promotions. As Yarvin says:

The universal principle of bureaucracy is that everyone follows the rules at all times; there is a rule for everything; no one makes or gets to change the rules they follow; and anyone who succeeds understands how to respect the rules, and how to bend them. The career objective of a bureaucrat is to always be relevant, and never be responsible.

But notice this:

So long as the employee has followed the procedure, the concept of accountability is not relevant. If following the rules produces a bad result, the rulebook may need to be updated. The failure does not reflect poorly on either the employee or the rule-writers. They both did their best. 

So, obviously the "rulebook" at the EU needs to be updated. But it's not the fault of the chaps in the EU bureaucratic chain of command. Oh no. They were just following the process.

Did you know that after World War I the German General Staff did a top-to-bottom review of the total cock-up on the Eastern and the Western Front? The staffers came to understand that the army of the future could not operate on classical bureaucratic principles. That's because the general could not know the details of the war at the front. Somehow the top-down chain of command had to be more flexible so that people lower down the chain of command had the authority to adapt the orders to local conditions. So the German generals came up with a new doctrine, of which Gen. Hans von Seeckt was the lead author:

[To make] of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier.

Hmm: "responsibility." Doesn't sound much like a modern EU bureaucrat. And in World War II, the average German soldier was reckoned to be worth 1.5 to 2 times better than the average allied soldier. 

I wonder. Do you think that the EU bureaucracy runs on those principles? Or the CDC bureaucracy in the US? Or the various health department bureaucracies in each state?

Of course not. The health bureaucracies all across the world are organized on the correct procedure and rulebook culture described by Yarvin. And, as the Brits say, such an organization is "not fit for purpose" when the problem at hand is not routine and normal and day-to-day.

That's why I think that our present clerical oligarchy, of "experts agree" and so on, is heading for the trash can. Because what we need is a flexible, responsive politics and culture. Just like the market.

Problem is that in such a system there is a reduced scope for power.

The Day After: "Groundhog Day"

A couple of years ago I determined to observe our sacred national festival of Groundhog Day by watching -- what else? -- Harold Ramis' Groundhog Day about a pompous twerp of a TV weatherman caught in a Nietzschean "eternal recurrence," reliving February 2 at Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, and suffering the local yokels pulling the groundhog out of his den and announcing to the world that Phil the groundhog -- seer of seers, prognosticator of prognosticators -- has forecast another six weeks of winter. Again and again.

Nietzsche's line is that, when God dies, what you get is decadence, nihilism, and the eternal recurrence, over and over, until a new God is born.

In the case of Phil Connors the weatherman played by Bill Murray, he tries out all the sins of the world -- in particular manipulating women to get them into bed -- before he surrenders and just tries to do the right thing by little old ladies with a flat tire, performing the Heimlich maneuver on a local yokel choking on his breakfast, making his music teacher proud, being a nice guy, and finally winning the love of producer Rita Hanson played by Andie MacDowell.

This year, I particularly noted that the neurologist played in a cameo role by Harold Ramis is practically blind. Hmm. I wonder what he meant by that!

Also, I liked the moment where Rita is skeptical that Phil the weatherman knows the business of every local yokel in town. Phil replies, with a kind of existential resignation of a man that has perhaps relived February 2 three thousand times -- given that it takes ten years to become an accomplished musician -- that he knows all about everyone in Punxsutawney. And there is a kind of divine wisdom peeking through in that. We ought to know more about the lives and the needs of our neighbors, not because of prurient or curtain-twitching interest, but because of human concern.

Of course, one major theme in Groundhog Day is the same as America's Big Problem today, the cult among the elite -- even including TV weathermen -- that they are above the ordinary local yokels, the kind of people that dress up in top hats on Groundhog Day, or the fading beauty that makes it to Groundhog Day every year, or the bumbling armored car workers dropping coins on the ground. (Those armored car workers have nothing in common with health bureaucracy professionals making a mess of COVID vaccine distribution.) And, of course, there is the quintessential all-American "sure-as-heckfire" insurance agent, Ned Ryerson.

But ordinary people have a right to live their ordinary lives, and until our best and brightest acquire the wisdom to understand that -- and inwardly digest it -- then they, and America, are going to be living Groundhog Day for ever and ever, until they finally get that teeny-weeny bit of wisdom and release us all from our present Eternal Recurrence.

Meanwhile, like Phil Connors in the early part of the movie, the members of our ruling class, both the ruling clique and the broader educated elite, are in denial.

The Intersection of Innocence, Victims, Chastity, and Complaint

Yesterday I had a brainwave while categorizing a bunch of blog posts into my Culture of Innocence category.

I said to myself: but aren't helpless victims and innocent virgins and Little Darlings and women resisting the public square with their "safetyism" all the same?

They are all humans in the pre-responsibility culture. They are Adam and Eve before that nasty serpent in the Garden of Eden tempted the innocent Eve into tasting the apple from the Tree of Knowledge.

So let's rehearse all this:

Three Peoples: The People of the Subordinate Self are people that attach themselves to a lord -- a feudal lord or a political boss -- and they are saying, thanks very much but responsibility is not for me. Of course, the Subordinate has no problem complaining if his loving lord goofs up and fails to protect him.

Little Darlings: If you are a Little Darling of the ruling class, given loot and plunder in return for your vote, you are like the rich man's mistress. One fine day, when your prettiness is not quite what it was, your Sugar Daddy will dump you for a newer model. In politics this is the fate of the white working class. I say that it will also be the fate of the feminists as the ruling class favors transgenders over whiny women. And blacks too as the ruling class pivots to illegal immigrants.

Women in the Public Square: I maintain that women don't want to be responsible people in the public square. That is what #MeToo and "safetyism" is about. Women expect to be protected, and rightly so. But that means that women are never going to accept the proposition of the public square, that you take the good with the bad, the ups with the downs. The very difference between the male Culture of Courage and the female Culture of Chastity that issues from the different conceptions of honor experienced by each sex mandates this. Women are not into courage. Their job is to stay alive and keep the kids alive. That does not include dying in a Forlorn Hope after King Henry V bellows "once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more."

Culture of Innocence: I maintain that it is the natural and physical imperative for small minorities to develop a culture of innocence. Small minorities always feel embattled and vulnerable. They never know when they will need to join together as one to defend themselves from the cold cruel world outside. To maintain the necessary unity the small minority has to develop a culture of innocence, that all the world is against us and the only way we can survive is if we all hang together. And when did we do anything to deserve this? Obviously in our own time this Culture of Innocence is most obvious in Jews and Blacks. But I believe that all ethnic immigrants to the United States have gone through this stage. We will probably see it grab hold of the white commoners in the next few years as the implacable acts of the educated elite make life more precarious for them.

 Notice that this Culture of Innocence is mandatory for anyone fighting a war. The leader must unite the country to fight the war if he is to have a hope of winning and he always does this by representing the enemy as a guilty monster and we the people as innocents. If the leader fails to unite his people in this declaration of innocence then he will fail to mobilize the necessary will to win. In fact, if you are the anti-war party you will always try to insist that, hey, we aren't so great. Whatabout such and such... Our liberal friends did a bang-up job on this front during the Vietnam War and also in the the Iraq War after a decent interval to mourn the dead of the 9/11 attacks.

I say that the beginning of wisdom is to get beyond the Culture of Innocence. And that is the meaning of the Garden of Eden story. Once Eve had eaten of the Tree of Knowledge she was no longer an innocent, and Adam and Eve had to leave the pre-conscious Paradise and "eat the herb of the field" and "eat bread." Sounds like the Dawn of Agriculture.

Then there is the human guilt from putting Christ on the Cross. Admitting guilt and getting beyond the Culture of Innocence is the beginning of responsibility, admitting that you are not perfect, and that, here and there, you may have done things of which you are ashamed, and for which you are sorry.

Notice that our liberal friends have a peculiar version of this with their BLM signs and their #WeBelieve yardsigns and their "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors" narrative. They are saying "we are the good guys" because we help oppressed peoples and the other guys are the haters. There is not a whisper of doubt, that we think that, on the margin, we are doing the right thing, but you never know. No. We activists are the good guys, and don't you forget it.

To live successfully in the city you have to get rid of all this innocence. You have to accept personal responsibility for your life and surrender to the will of the market. If something goes wrong you pick yourself up and get back in the game. There is a big upside to this: you get to be a happy camper. You ditch the Culture of Complaint for the Culture of Courage and Responsibility. Even if it's not always your fault.

The Trump Lawyers Flap

According to the CNN five lawyers have left the Trump impeachment defense team because the former president wants to highlight vote rigging in his defense. They think he should concentrate on proving his innocence in respect of inciting the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

A person familiar with the departures told CNN that Trump wanted the attorneys to argue there was mass election fraud and that the election was stolen from him rather than focus on the legality of convicting a president after he's left office. Trump was not receptive to the discussions about how they should proceed in that regard.

Well.

If I were Trump I would not be making my defense defensively, by saying: "who me" in respect of the Qanon attack on the Capitol. What's the point? Either the Senate will convict him because 17 Republicans decide to convict on purely political grounds that it will aid reelection. Or it will be a meaningless circus act.

No. If I were Trump I would grab the opportunity to advance my Narrative, that the election was stolen. Oh, maybe not actually by manufactured votes, but by manipulation of the mail-in voting system by "vote harvesting" and other techniques. Right now, You Are Not Allowed to Say That the Election was Stolen. But that would not apply in an impeachment trial in the US Senate. Although, I wouldn't be surprised if the Dems rule any argument about stealing the election out of order.

The whole point about Trump, from the escalator ride in 2015 to the present, is to fight back against the Deep State and its domination and hegemony. As I wrote in an American Thinker piece in November 2020, "Donald Trump, the Sacrificial Hero,"

Win or lose, Donald Trump has become a national Sacrificial Hero. If he wins, he is the conquering hero that vanquished the cowardly foe not once, but twice. If he loses, he might enter legend and myth as a demi-god, as others before him that gave their all in ancient times.

If I were the Democrats I would be executing on a strategy to make sure that Trump does not become a great Sacrificial Hero, because that would work against the Democratic Party domination. But I don't think our Democratic friends understand that. All they know is their Activism Culture of cancel and deplatform and censor.

But it looks like Trump understands that the issue in his impeachment trial is not whether he "incited" an "insurrection." Who cares? He is out of office and the Deep State is back in the saddle. The question is how the Great Rebellion proceeds now and into the future.

So if Trump gets his Narrative of a stolen election into the impeachment trial, he wins. If he is acquitted, he wins. If he is convicted, he wins. If his conviction is overturned in the Supreme Court, he wins.

If I can see this, why can't Speaker Nancy Pelosi see it? Or Sen Chuck E. Schumer?

I tell you Dems. You really do not want Donald Trump made into a Sacrificial Hero. It is just about the most powerful archetypal symbol known to mankind.