The Next Three Years...

Here's a fearless prediction. The next three years will be the most consequential, politically, in my lifetime. And probably yours.

Let's start with Point One, in a New Criterion piece by Conrad Black.

The United States was at a unique political crossroads when a man who had never served in any public office nor held a high military command, elected or unelected, astounded the country by winning the presidency—the only such candidate to do so, ever—on a campaign to reverse bipartisan agreed policy and to reorient or dismiss almost the entire community of senior government personnel.

Do you see the staggering implications of Donald Trump's achievement in 2016? "Never served in any public office." But he won the presidency.

Obviously, such an event means that something is wrong with the rulers of America. Because the voters don't do things like that in normal times. Andrew Jackson got elected president without serving in a previous political office. But he won the Battle of New Orleans. Abraham Lincoln became president at a time of national crisis. But he had served in the Illinois state legislature and the US House of Representatives. Franklin Roosevelt became president at the bottom of the Great Depression. But he had been state senator, assistant Secretary of the Navy, and Governor of New York. Dwight Eisenhower never served in political office before being elected president. But he was the general that invaded Europe in World War II. Etcetera.

Then, after Donald Trump got elected the Democrats and the media hounded him every moment he was in office and beat him in 2020 under conditions that, while not exactly "stealing the election" certainly gave rise to understandable suspicion among his supporters. OK. So the combined efforts of the Democrats and the media and the Zuck bucks and the BLM/AntiFa riots and the "mean tweets" combined to defeat President Trump.

But obviously, that's all ancient history, what with the singular incompetence of President Biden, the absurd spending agenda of the Progressives, the rising inflation, the problems on the COVID vaccination front, the anti-CRT movement among parents of school children, and the recent off-off-year elections.

The reason I say that the next three years will be consequential is that I believe that our ruling class will make several efforts to head the organic movement of the Great Rebellion of the ordinary middle class off at the pass.

I suspect there will be a number of ugly incidents in the next three years as the ruling class and Democrats and media and the NGO activism community get more and more desperate, as they see their power slipping away.

They may succeed, but my guess is that they won't. Why? Because I don't think they are very bright. And I don't think they are ruthless enough and courageous enough to behave like a Lenin or a Hitler.

And the basic problem is that the American people are going to be hurting economically for the next three years. We are going to have inflation, number one. Then the Fed is going to have to jack up interest rates, and that will hurt the housing market and all the people with mortgages and very little equity. Then there is going to be a recession, maybe before 2024. Ordinary Americans hate it when gas prices go up. They hate it when food prices go up. They are terrified when their mortgages go "under water." And when they lose their jobs...

So we are looking for a real wipeout for Democrats in the 2022 midterms. And then we are looking for the mother of all Time for a Change elections in 2024.

That's the overview. But in the details and the day-to-day events it's going to get ugly. You can see that with Democrats already blaming oil companies for the increase in gasoline prices. It looks to me as though oil production is having a problem returning to its 2019 high after the sharp drop in production at the beginning of he COVID crisis, and things will repair themselves soon. But you don't clamp down on pipeline construction and oil exploration before everything gets back to normal.

You see, a competent government, whatever its ideological framework, needs to keep the lights on, keep the oil flowing, keep people content in their homes, their jobs, their hopes. And, with its appetite for reelection, a new administration makes sure to take all the tough decisions right away so that in four years, when it is time for reelection, the economy looks great and Americans are optimistic about the future.

I would say that an administration that fails on these real simple responsibilities does not deserve the confidence of the voters and does not get it.

But you never know.

A Short Discourse on Vigilantism. While We Wait.

As we wait for the jury to decide the fate of vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse, let's talk about vigilantism, dear liberals.

Because, as with most things, I suspect that your literally know nothing when it comes to vigilantism, except of course that it is always and everywhere racist because lynchings of Negroes in the South.

I last wrote about vigilantism back in July 2021, descanting upon the "real simple" fact that if you "defund the police" you get vigilantism.

The classic case of vigilantism is San Francisco in 1856 in the middle of the Gold Rush of the '49ers. The population of San Francisco had exploded from about 500 to 20,000 and the police were overwhelmed. So leading citizens formed a Committee of Vigilance, and got banker William T. Sherman to help out. Sherman had gone to West Point and served in the US Army until 1853.

That's what citizens do when the po-lice can't or won't do its job.

As I re-read my July piece I was surprised that I had also written about a recent vigilante incident in South Africa arising out of riots and looting that were clearly started by real insurrectionists. It started on a Monday with 

small groups of saboteurs entered the malls... [then] literally tens of thousands of otherwise quite ordinary, peaceful people poured into the malls on foot and by car and completed the looting and firing of the shops. 

Then the vigilantes kicked in.

My community’s Whatsapp groups and local news channels kept pace with the mayhem and at mid-afternoon on Monday the expected call went out for all armed citizens to gather at designated points... The State had gone AWOL.

Within 24 hours, a functioning operational command had been set up, barricades were erected at six access points and stickers issued to emergency workers to speed progress. 

Whoa. I mean whoa. Did you read about this, all you liberals, lefties and all the ships at sea? Because this could easily happen here. The men of America would just love the chance to swing into action and Whatsapp and reestablish the peace that the government is supposed to provide, but increasingly doesn't. Because racism, or police brutality or whatever.

I would say that if this happens, you lefties are done. Toast. History. So, if you want to remain the noble and educated ruling class that is master of all it surveys I suggest that you reverse course on "defund the police" and put the po-lice back to work.

Kyle Rittenhouse, that Dov Fischer calls "a bit of a fool," was just doing what comes naturally to every young primate male. His job, his only job, is to protect the territory of the primate band from enemies. By the way, it sounds like Kyle is a German American. Did you know that in World War II it was reckoned that a German soldier was worth up to two US soldiers? Part of that is that German society is a high-trust society as indicated in Trust by Francis Fukuyama.

And the more that you lefties trash the police and the military and make the men that protect us into scapegoats the more that young men will instinctively start to form themselves into vigilante groups to keep the peace.

Scapegoating the Unvaccinated

The wolves are after Dennis Prager. He made a comparison between the scapegoating of gays around the time of the AIDS epidemic with the current scapegoating of the unvaccinated at the present moment. His unforgivable crime is that he noted that the ruling class came out and protected gays from being the pariahs to blame for it all. But today, of course, the ruling class is all-in on blaming the unvaxxed. Said he:

During the AIDS crisis, can you imagine if gay men and intravenous drug users, who were the vast majority of the people with AIDS, had they been pariahs the way the non-vaccinated are? But it would have been inconceivable.

Only, of course, IT WAS gays that were to blame. It was their unprotected anal sex that was the prime vector of AIDS.

But hey, gays are the Little Darlings of the ruling class, so don't you dare blame them, bigot.

But the scapegoat is as old as humanity. René Girard is the chap that has done most to point this out in his Violence and the Sacred. And I have been writing about this since 2008. My first scapegoating article was about blaming bankers for the Crash of 2008.

But this week I have been reading Girard's The Scapegoat. Which is more of the same, but more focused. And what I am getting is that, when a human community experiences a disaster that it can't explain then it unites and turns on some convenient scapegoat. He uses the example of the Black Death, in which about one third of humans in Europe died.

We now think we know what the Black Death was all about. It was a disease that originated in the port of Kaffa in the Crimea and was transmitted by rats. But people back then didn't know that. So they blamed the Jews for poisoning the water.

You can see that when any disaster occurs the cause is, at least initially, uncertain. So it is natural and physical to, e.g., blame gays for AIDS. But fortunately there was St. Fauci at hand who said that "AIDS may be transmittable through casual household contact." Blessed be his name.

We have a similar situation with COVID. We have a vaccine that is turning out to be rather less effective than originally promised by the ruling class. We really don't know why. Looks like "Houston we have a problem." So what is the obvious thing for politicians to do? Find a scapegoat.

Now, the art of scapegoating is to find some small minority, such as Jews or gays, without good contacts in the ruling class, and blame it all on them. You accuse them of being ignorant or malevolent, and whip up the mob to deal with them. And now we have Twitter mobs that can be mobilized in a moment.

Girard points out that "mob" and "mobilize" come from the same Latin "mobile."

I'd say that the unvaxxed are a good, but not ideal, scapegoat to blame for the continuance of the COVID epidemic. In fact, blaming the unvaxxed may turn out to be a strategic error, for a variety of reasons, from the fact that the unvaxxed are not a helpless marginalized minority to the uncertainty about the ultimate effectiveness of COVID immunity from vaccination versus immunity from actually contracting the disease and surviving.

I get why the Biden administration went all-in on vaccination and mandating vaccination through OSHA. And a political leader needs to appear to be leading us -- for the men -- and protecting us -- for the women.

Reality is that politicians can't really do that much to help us on anything. But we don't want to hear that, especially when people are dying: "if we can just save one life!"

Of course, scapegoating the unvaxxed is just one of the scapegoating operations that our liberal friends in the ruling class are conducting right now. The most obvious one is blaming the problems of blacks on "white supremacists" and "white oppressors." Otherwise, how could it be that blacks lag in almost all the good things and lead in all the bad things like murder? It could not be -- it could not be -- that the problems of blacks all lead back to liberal programs like welfare and Affirmative Action / Diversity / Equity.

Actually, that's a good point. It cannot be, it can never be that the ruling class is to blame, because we rulers are the good guys, the educated evolved people who care. It must be some racist / deplorable / bitter clinger that's to blame.

Of course, the opposite is true.

I say that almost always, every ruling class in history Makes Things Worse. And do you know why? It is because government is force, and "Justice is the Absence of Force." (I just thought of that in the middle of last night). So you can't really do anything useful with government except defend the borders from the invaders. Everything else that government does Makes Things Worse. Even when there's a hurricane the Cajun Navy is out well before the gubmint folks. 

Men Say "Lead Me"; Women Say "Protect Me"

My constant challenge is to follow the maxim of Einstein: make things as simple as possible, but no simpler. If Einstein is too hoity-toity for you, there is good old Sen. Iselin in The Manchurian Candidate begging his wife to make the number of Communists in the State Department "real simple."

How to make politics as simple as possible -- after Nazi Carl Schmitt's notion that the political is the friend / enemy distinction. Or, if you want it "real simple" Curtis Yarvin's maxim that "there is no politics without an enemy."

But, of course it isn't quite that simple. Because of the difference between honor among men and honor among women and my maxims that "women expect to be protected" and "men know they are expendable."

So I say that politics reduces to men saying "lead me to fight the enemy" and women saying "protect me from the enemy."  And that is all.

Now, I am not saying this just to be pompous and knowledgeable. I am saying this on the off-chance that some aspiring politician will read it and use it as his "real simple" guide to getting elected and rising through the ranks to the very pinnacle of politics.

Don't forget, Mr. Aspiring Politician, that when you are appealing to men, you are pressing the button that triggers the "lead me" instinct. And when you are appealing to women, you are pressing the button that triggers the "protect me" instinct.

Now, how you combine the two is frankly beyond me, because I am not a practical politician or a noble aide or a rising staffer.

Of course, whenever you are appealing to men with the "lead me" line or to women with the "protect me" line any practical politician has to think about what to do when the wind changes.

For instance, with regard to the current COVID matter, what should the noble President Biden do which presses the "lead me" button for men?

I tell you what I think. I think that the president declares victory and hands out medals to all the "heroes" and "essential workers" of which we've heard tell. The current policy of mandating vaccinations for a vaccine that is not very effective is not "lead me." It is dumb.

So that takes care of men. Whatabout women?

Actually, I think the women side of this is more tricky. Because right now we are heading like an express train towards the moment where women realize -- and tell each other -- that they have been conned; that all the masks and lockdowns and vaccinations and boosters and vaxx mandates did not protect them.

And women don't like men cheating on them.

Hey there President Biden, Ron Klain and all the ships at sea! You don't want to get to the point where the women of America sit down at coffee and say to each other "I can't believe the president did that."

Because the next thing they will say to each other is "I'm so exhausted with all this."

And let me tell you, Joey and Ronnie, you don't want to be anywhere in the United States when the women of America start telling each other that they are "exhausted" by COVID.

So what to do? Hey you guys are the political professionals. You know what to do.

Still want my advice, geniuses? OK here it is.

You declare that America is now safe. You declare that because of President Biden's leadership that hundreds of thousands of lives have been saved, which would never have happened on President Trump's watch, because mean tweets. You congratulate Commissioner Fauci and Keystone Kop Kamala for their magnificent leadership. You condemn the anti-vaxxers to bottomless perdition because, but for them, we wold have been safe months ago.

But, but! Suppose we get another surge of cases with a new variant? No problem, the MSM will know what to do and condemn all reports of new cases as "disinformation." And Social Media will properly and responsibly cancel all vile racist-sexist-homophobic "disinformation" as violent extremism.

No, don't thank me for getting you out of a jam, Joey and Ronnie. I'm a patriotic American and I love my country and I believe in helping my country even -- especially -- when it is led by morons in "The Autumn of the Liberal Ages."

The Next Organic Movement on the Right

Our lefty friends like to think that their "activism" is all organic, the voice of the oppressed rising up from the wastelands of eternal oppression. But, in fact, the story of lefty politics of the last two hundred years is always top-down. It always involves well-born educated youth deciding what is best for the lower classes and then beating up on the middle class in order to prove that the middle class was beating up on the poor.

In fact, the only time the middle class beats up on the poor is when the poor start striking and food-rioting during some economic downturn, usually involving post-war deflation.

Of course, the lefty activism gig started out as a pretty cool concept, because the lower classes were easily the most numerous, and he that could lead them could easily overcome the less numerous middle class if it came to a battle. Mostly, however, the middle class was willing to help the lower class with free education and various pro-worker handouts.

But now, of course, we have the educated class on the last legs of the good old over-under political formula, and the only problem is that the ordinary middle class of yeomen and commoners is the biggest sector of society. And the middle class doesn't like being the scapegoat for everything that goes wrong with the noble plans of the ruling educated class.

The thing about the middle class is that it is the responsible class. If there is a job to do, then the middle class does not wait for a leader. It organizes itself. It starts businesses; it runs clubs. Back in the day every middle class family belonged to some fraternal association or mutual-aid society.

So when the Tea Party emerged in 2009-10, it was par for the course. We'd elected our First Black President: been there, done that. Now let's push back on the uber-progressive big spending plans of the hoity-toity educated-class progressives.

Famously, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi accused the Tea Party of being AstroTurf, a fake movement gussied up by conservative billionaires.

To give Our Nance her due, the billionaires did get involved. But it was after the ordinary Tea Partiers got the whole thing going.

Now, we can say that it was Trump that got the Trump Train going. Only, I'd say, the GOP voters were clearly waiting for him. We were for Ted Cruz until it appeared that Donald Trump would be Ted Cruz on steroids.

What surprised me during the Trump era is how much the Trump voters self-organized to show their support for him, in Trump Car Parades and Trump Boat Parades, with flags and paraphernalia bought on the Internet. I once witnessed a Trump Car Parade at at La Conner, Washington, which is a town about 90 minutes drive out of Seattle where ladies like to go for lunch and a bit of shopping. The cars in the parade were mostly driven by white ladies of a certain age.

Now, of course, we have the organic, er, Let's Go Brandon chants at college football games and NASCAR races, to the consternation of the Best and Brightest.

And we have the parents showing up at school-board meetings and objecting to lefty indoctrination and CRT curricula. And, we find out, school boards are maintaining personal databanks on the parent "activists."

Actually, I feel sorry for the school-board chappies. They did not imagine they would be getting into a political hurricane. They are ordinary folks that are frightened by the fierce winds of real politics.

Listen, I just have a feeling that you ain't seen nothin' yet.

Do I know what will be coming up in 2022, the inflation midterm? No, I don't. But I bet you a nickel that some sort of organic movement emerges that has nothing to do with the official GOP or right-wing billionaires.

And as for 2024! You know what I think. I think that 2024 will be the presidential election for the ages. But I have no idea how or why. Because whatever it is, it will be organic, emerging unbidden from the great American middle class.

And, as usual, the ruling class and the media and the Twitterati and the rest of the Cathedral won't have a clue.

Hey Ron (Klain) We're Not in Kansas Anymore

 Yesterday, Ron Klain, Biden's White House Chief of Staff, blamed Trump for the inflation mess. Said he

President Joe Biden’s administration “inherited a mess from Donald Trump.”

Well, Ron. That means that the smart guys knew from January 20 that your No.1 job would be to get the economy back on track. So how come you didn't have policy ready to go on Day One that would have prevented the present inflation and supply-chain crisis?

And, trust me on this, you don't get the economy on track with mega-spending bills handing out loot and plunder to your supporters. So what do you tell Nicolle Wallace?

So I think we voted for saying on Tuesday was you know what, not enough yet, and we need to do more, and that’s what we’re doing. again, starting next Monday, signing the infrastructure bill, working with the House to pass the Build Back Better Plan which will help bring down inflation, bring down the cost of living, bring down people’s expenses. 

I hope you don't really think that, Ron. I hope you are not really that dumb, and that you are just filling media space with empty rhetoric.

Because, let me tell you Ron Klain. If you don't get inflation under control by tomorrow, and you don't get normal economic growth re-established by the day after tomorrow, then the mid-terms will look like a demolition derby for Democrats.

And that will just be the start.

And you should know that, Ron Klain. You should know that the job of the President and his staff is to keep all the loot and plunder down to a dull roar, because loot and plunder -- amazingly! -- is a net minus to the economy. Of course it is, because instead of the market working its magic, we have dull political supporters getting money for nothing.

If you only had a brain, you should know that President Trump applied just about all the "stimulus" the economy could handle back in 2020.

You would know that the Republican governors that ended lockdowns reopened their economies to the universal disapprobation of ruling-class elitists everywhere made the right decision and the Democrat governors that maintained economic restrictions made the wrong decision, and the quicker that the Biden administration corrects this error the better for Democrats.

If you only had a heart you would know that the lockdowns and restrictions have caused untold social and psychic damage on ordinary Americans -- and especially marginalized Americans, the women and minorities hardest hit -- so you would have been working like mad to end the lockdown hysteria that you guys pushed in 2020 in an effort to hurt Trump.

If you only had the nerve you and the president would be out there cooling the jets of your activists and supporters to allow you to get the economy back on track before handing out the loot.

But I get it, Ron Klain. You Democrats do not represent what we might call "market-facing" Americans, the people that need the economy to work every day in order to buy their groceries and make their house payments.

You Democrats represent on the one hand the Cathedral of secular clerics and other credentialed people in education and media and activism who do not make their income from offering goods and services on the market. And on the other hand your represent people that just get entitlement handouts. And throw in salaried tech workers in Big Tech and nice liberal women in corporate HR and you guys are saddled with supporters that really don't know how the world works outside their privileged precincts.

I'd say that's a problem, both for you and for America.

You know what I think, Ron? I think that we ain't seen nothing yet. I think that in the next couple of years we are going to see an organic movement of Americans that will make the Tea Party look like a tea party, that will make the Trump Car Parades and Trump Boat Parades look like kiddie parties. I think we will see organic shouts in stadiums that will make the Let's Go Brandon chants of the present year as feeble chirpings.

Yes, I dare say you should get on the phone to Attorney General Merrick Garland and sicc the FBI on these new organic popular upwellings. Except, of course, that we really don't yet know how they will appear and how they will evolve. That's because politics on the right is not fake AstroTurf politics financed by George Soros and the Tides Foundation that are nod-nod-wink-wink sort-of encouraged by the ruling class. They are organic, upwellings from the great human ocean of America.

But by all means, Ron, send the FBI to my place to interview me. Show the world that you have hair on your chest. I'll put the coffee on.

Biden's Dems: Evil Geniuses or Stupid Idiots?

The question that has to occur to an average racist-sexist-homophobe like me is whether our Democratic and progressive friends are executing on a strategic plan for the ages, or merely stumbling from one stupidity to another?

For instance, Scott McKay shows us a Soviet defector that was part of the four-step Soviet plan to destroy America, with

Demoralization, Destabilization, Crisis, Normalization.

Yuri Bezmenov defected to Canada in 1984. And the Soviet Union "normalized" in 1989.

And of course there are other lefty plans to abolish America, from the Frankfurt School's critical theory that replaced the workers at the point of the revolutionary spear with women and minorities. And "the long march through the institutions" from Gramsci. And there is the Cloward-Piven strategy. And Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals. 

Sometimes I wonder if these are brilliant strategies or Baldrick's Cunning Plans.

On the other hand you have to wonder whether there is anyone at home in the White House as the Biden administration seems to be on automatic with all the various activist groups pursuing their sacred narratives at full-speed ahead without anyone in charge telling the crazier ones to cool their jets.

And, is there nobody in charge saying that, look, we needed to have taken action on inflation on the first day of the new administration to make sure that everything would be coming up roses in May 2024?

I suppose the most obvious middle ground is to assume that the ranks of the Democrats are full of people that are good at getting re-elected, but not much more. That would concur with Joseph Schumpeter's line that it is amazing that politicians can govern at all, since their profession is getting elected.

Of course, there is the bigger question that hovers over the entire progressive project of the last two centuries. After you geniuses have created the perfect state that integrates religion, politics, and economics into one perfectly oiled and lubricated totality, then what?

Epecially, geniuses, when you consider that every lefty state since the French Revolution has been an economic disaster. Oh, and the butcher's bill.

Oh, I know. But this time!

Then there is Donald Trump. He got elected by appealing directly to the ordinary middle-class Commoner, with tax cuts, a frank appeal to nationalism -- the polite word is "patriotism" -- and policies to raise wages with import tariffs and immigration restrictions.

Now comes Ron DeSantis, Governor of Florida, and my liberal neighbors already hate him. He gave a speech on October 23 at the Claremont Institute. Said he:

Over the last year and a half, we’ve stood up to entrenched bureaucrats and the partisan corporate press to keep Florida open and to protect individual Floridians’ right to work to own and operate their own businesses and to make sure that every single child had the right to be in school in person. We don’t lock people down in the state of Florida, we lift people up.

And he's just getting started. He mentions:

• Eisenhower's farewell address, where he warns not just about the military-industrial complex but the science research complex.
• Florida has more people than New York State, but New York's state budget is twice Florida's.
• In September, the US added 194,000 jobs, of which Florida added 84,500. 
• He's banned sanctuary cities, protected women's sports and whacked Big Tech censorship.
• He called out the National Guard to discourage BLM and AntiFa.
• He's banned Critical Race Theory in Florida's schools.

And so on.

I'd say that someone at DeSantis HQ has been doing a little strategic thinking, about what the ordinary Commoners of America want and deserve.

You know, I'm really a pretty snooty guy, with educated ideas and thoughts that I think are up in the stratosphere. But I think that politicians should be thinking much more about the ordinary Commoners and their ordinary lives. And ease up on bribing their pet victims and spreading loot and plunder to their financial supporters.

Because when gubmint spending is north of 40 percent of GDP, that means that about half of the economy is decided not by negotiation and market transaction but by government force.

So, if you are OK with that, and even want a trillion or two more in additional gubmint spending, I am right here to say: really? So you are down with government forcing ordinary people to spend half of their income on government projects? Or even more? I can't believe you think that.

I don't think that government as half the economy is a good idea. Not in the short term, not in the medium term, and certainly not in the long term.

But what do I know.