The 'Uncanny Valley' President

And: Tory Party Mass Suicide; Chris Koncz's Adventure In The Underworld

New York magazine’s Olivia Nuzzi has a blockbuster story about how wrecked Joe Biden is by senility — and how the people around him have known this for a long time, have told it to reporters, but … well, read on:

When they discussed what they knew, what they had seen, what they had heard, they literally whispered. They were scared and horrified. But they were also burdened. They needed to talk about it (though not on the record). They needed to know that they were not alone and not crazy. Things were bad, and they knew things were bad, and they knew others must also know things were bad, and yet they would need to pretend, outwardly, that things were fine. The president was fine. The election would be fine. They would be fine. To admit otherwise would mean jeopardizing the future of the country and, well, nobody wanted to be responsible personally or socially for that.

Nuzzi writes of seeing Biden in a photo line at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner this past April:

I followed the First Lady’s gaze and found the president. Now I understood her panicked expression.

Up close, the president does not look quite plausible. It’s not that he’s old. We all know what old looks like. Bernie Sanders is old. Mitch McConnell is old. Most of the ruling class is old. The president was something stranger, something not of this earth.

This was true even in 2020. His face had then an uncanny valley quality that injectable aficionados call “low trust” — if only by millimeters, his cosmetically altered proportions knocked his overall facial harmony into the realm of the improbable. His thin skin, long a figurative problem and now a literal one, was pulled tightly over cheeks that seemed to vary month to month in volume. Under artificial light and in the sunshine, he took on an unnatural gleam. He looked, well, inflated. His eyes were half-shut or open very wide. They appeared darker than they once had, his pupils dilated. He did not blink at regular intervals. The White House often did not engage when questioned about the president’s stare, which sometimes raised alarm on social media when documented in official videos produced by the White House. The administration was above conspiratorial chitchat that entertained seriously scenarios in which the president was suffering from a shocking decline most Americans were not seeing. If the president was being portrayed that way, it was by his political enemies on the right, who promoted through what the press office termed “cheap fakes” a caricature of an addled creature unfit to serve. They would not dignify those people, or people doing the bidding of those people, with a response.

I find it absolutely impossible to believe that the White House reporters really thought everything was fine, until Biden went onstage with Trump and it couldn’t be hidden any longer. Remember what I tell you about how the prime directive of most American journalism is to Defend The Narrative? You cannot get a better example than this. Well, how is that working out?

Tory Party Destroyed. It Was A Mass Suicide

Sam Ashworth-Hayes writes the obituary for the Tory Party. Excerpts:

I come to bury the Conservative Party, not to praise it. The Tories did not just deserve to lose this election. They deserved to be annihilated, reduced to a smoking hole in the ground by a vengeful electorate in the manner of Sodom and Gomorrah as a warning to generations of politicians to come.

In the distant mists of time, all the way back in 2010, David Cameron and his party were elected with a simple mandate: cut immigration, fix the public finances, and get Britain growing again. How did that go?

In the 14 years since, despite promising in 2010, 2015, 2017 and 2019 to bring numbers down, they have sent net migration soaring to unprecedented levels, with more people added to the population last year than in the whole of the 1990s. The tax burden is at a postwar high, debt is soaring, the country has lost its AAA credit rating, and we’ve just had the worst 15 years for living standards in generations.

More:

If you’re a young person, voting Conservative meant national service for a country which seems to hate you, bleeding you dry with taxes and tuition fees, with a housing market set to destroy your life prospects. If you’re an old person, it meant an NHS that doesn’t function, a social care system falling apart at the seams, and fortnightly displays of Islamist fervour going unchecked, while schoolchildren are referred to counter-extremism experts for refusing to identify as “queer”.

Here is Peter Hitchens’s obit for Conservatism. Excerpt:

Conservatism has died, not from an assassin’s bullet, or even from old age or because it was run over by a bus. It has died because there is no call for it anymore. This isn’t to say that nobody wants it, but that nobody cares that we want it. The same thing has happened to most of the things I like, from the forgotten Aztec chocolate bar to railway restaurant cars, from woodland peace to proper funerals.

In fact, conservatism — not to be mistaken for its loud, overdressed cousin, the Conservative Party, which somehow lives on — will probably not even get a proper funeral. Its passing will not be marked by sonorous gloom and penitence, and stern dark poetry borne away on the wind at the muddy edge of a deep, sad grave. Nobody can stand that sort of thing now. It will get a cheerful informal send-off with jokes and applause. After all, it won’t be there to hate it. I shan’t be there either. There will be no call for me.

The past few weeks have totally liberated me from a last and lingering temporal duty. I thought I had it, but it turns out to have been illusory. I thought that there were still quite a few people who actually wanted and liked conservatism. But in fact, there are hardly any. The other day I was asked to define the word, on Twitter, and came up with something like “Love of God, love of country, love of family, love of beauty, love of liberty and the rule of law, suspicion of needless change”. Given more room I’d have added all kinds of preferences for poetry and sylvan beauty over noise and concrete, for twilight over noonday, for autumn over summer and wind over calm, for the deep gleam of iron polished in use over the flashy sparkle of precious metal.

But you probably know what I mean. And all my life these things have been slipping away from me. I am using them as metaphors for conservatism in politics, in education, literature and music as well. My problems arise from the fact that I missed the last train of the old life. But I saw it go. I arrived, out of breath, on the station platform just in time to see it depart.

America was never conservative in the way Britain was, but we were conservative, and I’m telling you, there is an American version of what Hitchens is saying here. The Republican Party as it once was, was wrecked by Donald Trump, who is many things, but “conservative” is not one of them. The GOP was wrecked by its failures, which opened a door for Trump. But it was also wrecked because, as Hitchens says in relation to his own country, there is no real appetite for actual conservatism anymore.

Britain is going to get Labour rule, and it’s going to get it good and hard. All the things that have been bad under Tory rule are going to get much worse, most likely. But I understand the point of conservatives like Ashworth-Hayes: this had to happen to purge the rottenness out of the Tory party. Maybe UK conservatives can build an actual conservative party now. More frightening, maybe Peter Hitchens and Ed West are right: actual conservatism in Britain scarcely exists any longer. Excerpt from West:

My basic premise is that the 1960s was a second reformation, a cultural shift as seismic as the 1520s, and the Tories represent the old religion. Like with the Christianisation of Rome, the other obvious historical parallel, this meant that British conservatism was a creed as much in demographic decline as the Christianity from which it once emerged, and the degree to which it had become disliked by anyone born after around 1975 was intense and perhaps irreversible. 

This began to occur to me when I noticed that friends were not becoming more Right-wing as they hit their 30s, even those who had become parents; indeed in many cases the opposite was true, and they were growing more sensitive to breaking taboos, and far more progressive on issues to do with identity. Much of this was social desirability, but then social desirability drives norms in every society; even if people fake it, their children will believe it.

This was accelerated by Brexit, which saw a large number of people turn to a sort of James O’Brien view of the world in which Right-wing extremists had captured the Conservatives - even if, by almost any measure, the Tory party has become way more liberal. Indeed, to the point that it accepts pretty much every progressive assumption and even makes arguments starting from their opponent’s premises.

Despite long-held Conservative assumptions that people will continue growing into it, surveys showed that those born between 1965 and 1980 were actually moving to the Left as they got older, and in the US the proportion identifying as liberal had increased from 29 per cent in the mid-1990s to almost half today. The same thing was happening with the cohort after us, who were not showing any signs of becoming more Right-wing as they aged. The daunting realisation was that this cultural shift was permanent. Faiths abandoned by grandparents and forgotten by parents will not be retained by the children. 

A conservative-but-Tory-hating British friend this morning was rather more blunt in his assessment of his country’s future: “Britain is f—ked.”

Adventures In The Underworld With Chris Koncz

Sumerian gods, returning to us today?

You who read the comments section will recognize Chris Koncz as one of our best regular commenters. He is a Hungarian who is not a Christian, but who is also not a materialist. Some of you encouraged him to set up his own Substack, and he did it. Boy oh boy, y’all, you gotta subscribe! His new essay is about an adventure he had in the underworld. I’m going to quote it selectively, but trust me, you really, really need to read the whole thing. Stories like this are happening more and more. Let’s go:

It is now time to regale you with some personal stories of direct experience with spiritual realms. This may be a bit dark, so be warned, proceed with caution and at your own risk. I am taking every precaution to protect you from negative influences that can come with delving into this topic, but there never are any guarantees when it comes to this area of discussion.

This is an important warning. I was surprised to see it here, from someone who isn’t a Christian, but Chris understands well that there are serious spiritual dangers here. This is not something to mess around with casually, just because it seems cool or fun. Notice:

I was largely self-taught on the path of meditation, though I attended hatha yoga classes as a teenager, where I learnt the basics of correct breathing and posture as well. Due to the fact, that I was largely self-taught, I did not know, that one is supposed to take precautions, when meditating or engaging in any sort of spiritual practice, especially when alone. Though I had visions of the divine and had exited my body on several occasions, I was naïve to the dangers the spiritual realm can hold and did not take proper protective measures.

I noticed a different energy to what I had previously experienced, as pure divine light, that had started to visit me, usually when I was in meditation. I did not pay much attention to it at first, but it felt like some sort of disembodied entity that wanted to communicate with me. Its energy was not the pure light of God, that I have seen before, rather it felt like it was perhaps made of fire, or in any case a sort of orange-reddish glowing spiritual light. When around me, it attempted to make contact and by then, I had developed a very rudimentary ability to communicate with disembodied beings, which at that time was very ineffective, mostly involving the exchange of a few words and images, usually highly symbolic. Due to this, I cannot be entirely certain what the entity wanted from me and what it had actually tried to communicate, I had to infer it mostly through symbolic images and a few words that were flashed in my mind’s eye. I have some ideas, mostly in hindsight, but there’s a high degree of uncertainty around it.

So, the entity in question tried to connect to me and was semi-successful. I was curious, as I had heard of the idea of spirit guides before and I thought it may be one of those. The entity certainly presented itself as benevolent and wanting to help and guide me. Since I saw no indications to the contrary, I accepted that its intentions were genuine and had a few halting conversations with it (as I later found out, actually a him).

I found out its name, one that I may have come across before, but wasn’t that familiar with. This was done by flashing the name written down in my mind’s eye, like a thought bubble, you see in cartoons. I should have been more careful and sent the uninvited visitor away, but I was far too curious and being a recovering antitheist at the time, I did not take the threat of non-physical entities, that might wish one harm, seriously.

I’m not going to repeat the entity’s name here, for your protection, but subsequent research has revealed it to be prominent in the apocryphal Book of Enoch, where it is classified as a Watcher.

Chris is very careful not to mention this entity’s name. As he learns later, one shouldn’t do this. I know enough about this world that I could guess which demon he’s talking about, from context clues, but really and truly, don’t go there. One striking thing I’ve learned from my Living In Wonder research is that so many people now, especially those using DMT, keep encountering the same entities, ones that look the same. This is unlikely to be because people have been prepared by reading and watching other things, to see such entities. It seems to me more likely that they are encountering beings that are truly there, and that inhabit a different dimension.

More Chris Koncz below. He goes on to describe a time in meditation when he left his body, and actually encountered the entity. After seeing the thing in its “natural” form, and knowing its name, he researched it when he got back, and discovered that this is a demon well-known to ancient Semitic peoples. Chris goes on:

This goes back to the theme of my two earlier spiritual essays on this substack, that there are entire realms out there, far vaster than our own, which influence events in our own realm in ways we cannot even begin to comprehend. I’m not going to speculate any further on what spiritual force or group is behind various events, movements, people, parties, countries, institutions, etc… That is something that cannot be proven in any case, so you will have to use your own discernment, intuition and spiritual sight and come to your own conclusions.

That being said, all of us suspect, that there is something sinister behind world events and certain trends, movements, laws, people and so on. There are players behind the scenes, who must manipulate events from the unseen, this is a belief, that goes back to ancient times. Our ancestors believed, that powerful, invisible beings were behind the fate of each individual, that the gods, as they called them, were the weavers of fate and that our lives on this earth were part of a lattice or matrix, which was woven by these gods, according to their own grand design or whims. Magic, and later religion, astrology and many other spiritual arts or technologies, as I prefer to call them, arose out of the desire to apply to the gods to change the fate of mortals. People hoped that through prayer, sacrifice, rituals and so on, they can earn the favour of gods and other spiritual beings, therefore changing the course of their lives and societies.

I won’t quote further — read the whole thing. It’s important. I was communicating yesterday with some expert I talked to doing Living In Wonder research, who was one of the people who helped me understand what’s happening with the UFO/AI world. This person told me that we are seeing more and more people high up in the tech world coming out and speaking of their personal contacts with “higher intelligences.” These are post-Christian people who have no categories for “demons.” Ergo, they see these entities as benign or even beneficial.

In my book, I quote Diana Pasulka reporting in her books the same thing: that there are people very high up in this world saying that AI is a vector of communication with these entities. How does it work? It’s not clear, though there are theories. Materialists claim, reasonably, that AI is a closed system that works by sorting and sifting available information. Usually, yes — but if these AI visionaries, like Pasulka’s “Moon Girl” — Simone — in her book Encounters (I know Simone/Moon Girl’s real name, and she is a big deal in the tech world), are right, AI is also, in some mysterious way, a means through which some of these entities interact with us. Knowing from my discussions with exorcists that there is something that demons love about energy (electric energy), my sense is that this has something to do with how they interact with AI. Marshall McLuhan held the view that the age of the electric media was made for Lucifer, for this reason.

From the Simone chapter in Encounters:

Another clip:

This is techno-gnosticism of the sort that is opening us up, collectively, to a more direct influence of demons in the lives of humans, at a massive level. This might sound crazy to you, and I wouldn’t blame you. But it is happening. The person I was communicating with yesterday, a Christian who moves in this world, recognized my distress, but said that this is happening “whether we like it or not.” The only way Christians — the only way any of us — are going to get through this without losing our minds and our souls to the deception is with a very tight and visceral relationship with God. I’m not the one saying that (though I agree with it); this person is.

A good book to read is Jacques Vallée’s 1969 Passport To Magonia. Vallée, the eminence grise of UFO studies, theorized back then that UFOs and “aliens” are only contemporary manifestations of paranormal entities that have manifested and interacted with humanity in all ages, under different forms that are captured in the folklore and sacred writings of many different cultures. In this passage from Living In Wonder, I write that Vallée — who is not a Christian! — speculates that these entities are coming to us with

We are all going to be talking about this stuff a lot — a lot — in the near future. Christians (and others) absolutely have to be prepared for it. The existential shock that will overtake us all will be massive, especially for those who aren’t ready for it. Readers of Living In Wonder (pre-order your signed copy exclusively here) will be.

Have a good weekend. I’ll write you next from Paris, where I will be for the election.